i’ve been writing this essay about kim kardashian for so long that it feels like i have never not been writing this essay about kim kardashian.

and that’s saying a lot coming from someone who’s been writing a book about jackie onassis for the last 20 years.

i’ve such a vivid memory of being at the HOTCUS conference in june 2015 and talking to someone about how amazingly wild it would be to write biographically about kim kardashian. in large part, because i couldn’t imagine how it might be done.

i couldn’t imagine how you could bring in the game and the bacardi adverts and the show and all of the paratexts and all of the transmedia.

it seemed impossible.

we were in some concrete structure at the university of east anglia, maybe a roller rink? though that seems unlikely. what college has a roller rink?

but saying that, commenting upon the impossibility, i thought fucking hell. god, do not let me be the one anointed to write this thing.

but then, i’m convinced i only ever operate in a john the baptist capacity. i am here to light the way, yo. i am here to herald whoever is coming next, the one who’s going to do the thing i want to do so much better than i ever could.

the messiah complex is a thing. is it possible to have a john the baptist complex? and can i have that without sacrificing my head?

i’m writing about jane seymour’s guide to romantic living and i’m all like, OMG THIS IS JUST LIKE SELFISH.

a book of which i have two copies—the original and then the “MORE ME!” 2016 reprint.

writing-wise, i’ve a firm belief that the road best taken is the one that seems most impossible. the one where you’re like, no, i’ll never be able to do that. that’s the one. dear people, you know you want to go to there.

do it.

but then my relationship with writing has always been pretty abusive. so maybe you’d do better not to listen to me.

how hilarious that my career is teaching people to develop a writing process rooted in self-care and passion. and i’m over here like what is the thing that will most hurt me to think about? i’mma write that. i’mma go live there for six years.  

in writing about kim kardashian, i’m writing about kim kardashian and myself and sexual violence and american media and the inadequacies of language.

this is the thing about writing women’s lives. you are never just writing about a woman’s life. you are trying to find the language to describe a lived experience for which language does not adequately exist.

increasingly, i believe this is the thing that is different in writing women’s lives—you are never just talking about the details of the life. for the language that is used to construct the story of that life is inadequate, full of failures.

this is why i increasingly feel it is a violent thing for men to write the lives of women. (just as it is an act of racial violence for white people to write the lives of people of color. because everything i am saying here in relation to gender also applies to race.)

because an assault becomes a robbery, abuse becomes a bad relationship, a rape becomes a surprising first sexual encounter in an elevator.

a person in my life the other day was telling me how his instructors in grad school told him he had to get more immediately to the point. he needn’t show his thinking.

i tell my students this, when i’m teaching persuasive writing. because such writing—where you take the audience on the journey of your own discovery—isn’t persuasive. but it is illuminating.

there was a task i was asked to complete some months ago. i’ve reneged on so many things this year, i don’t even remember, specifically, which one this was. but they forbade the word “illuminates.” because it is trite, overused.

and, seeing that, i thought, THIS IS UNJUST I CANNOT BE INHIBITED IN SUCH WAYS!!!  

whatever it was they were asking me to do, i declined. i pled “compassionate leave.” which isn’t even a thing that exists in the US but i am here for it, because what i need this year is loads of compassion, because i am trying, but also i am barely even here and i am, accordingly, failing in all kinds of ways.

but back to the matter at hand. (clearly, i am paying homage here to the person in my life who wants to wander in their writing…)

the other thing i tell my students is that some of us—quite possibly, the cursed among us—use writing as thinking. so we are thinking through the writing, which is why we must be amazing editors of ourselves, which is where the abuse comes in.

i can cut my own words with more wild abandon than i can do most anything else in life.

as a writer, that’s a necessary thing.

as a human being, i remain unconvinced.

i am writing about kim kardashian.

ostensibly, that is what i am writing about here.

but really i am writing here because i want the first post my students see not to be “men have raped me.”

that really sets a mood.  

ditto for the men who want to date me.

ditto for the people who run the organizations i am trying to hold accountable for the sexual violence in their own ranks.

i’d rather prefer it if no one ever again say “well, i know you’re dealing with a lot personally right now” when i’m trying to get them to take the matter of sexual violence seriously.

i’d rather not be diminished in that way.

i’d rather not have my own experience of violence used against me in that way again.

i have my students write weekly rants. this semester, i instituted a new rule: that they have to, at least, start with something related to class. and then they can spin off into whatever.

this is a means of helping those who have a hard time getting started and also of saving myself. the former seems effective, the latter less so. they will bring it to me and i will take it all in.

my therapist and i have come up with a new strategy. when students disclose upsetting material, i’m now to journal about it.

i’ve, somewhat incongruously, put these writings in a separate notebook from the one where i write about my own life and my own feelings.

it’s a small notebook, a gift from a friend, with FEMINIST printed on the cover in gold.

it seems somehow appropriate that the early pages of this notebook are dedicated to agendas for 2017 brunch discussions with an american friend in london.

and then… and then… it is who has a relative who just died of covid and who is in the hospital and who has disclosed something that made me cry upon reading it. something i need to extract from my brain asap.

i’ve struggled with endings during the pandemic.

i’ve struggled with endings always, in life and in writing.

in airports, i have, historically, physically pushed away the people who love me.  

in writing, during the pandemic, i’ve been embracing mic-drops. on blogs and in conference presentations.

i’ve yet to do this in a submitted article but i can feel it coming. people, that moment is brewing within me. i just don’t know how to transfer the sequin vibe to the page. the screen, i’ve got. but not yet the page. i do not know how to glitter there.

i’ve written here before about the john berger quote (multiple times, it seems), about how the mouse is caged in an experiment, and it takes him a certain number of hours to realize he is trapped and then, after that realization, even after his release, there is something in him that never stops trembling.

i read that passage on the tube in london, at the height of my immigration insecurity, so i always associate it with the threat of my forthcoming self-deportation and the resulting total implosion of my life.

but i’ve been thinking about that passage a lot in recent weeks, what with the doom that has been the pervasive emotional climate of teaching in fall 2021 and in coping with the fallout of sexual violence in my own life, the fallout of attempting to hold people and organizations accountable for the sexual violence that they have enabled or, if not enabled, NOT MADE BETTER.

bad things do happen, i have been told. we cannot prevent all of the bad things, they’ve said.

and, hi, i am not an idiot. i may be crying as you tell me this, but i know this. i know it, but i am not content with it. i refuse to accept it. i refuse to be content. i fundamentally cannot understand how you are ok with this.

what an illuminating conversation.

i am illuminated.

are you not illuminated? are we not all illuminated?

this is a post about kim kardashian.

i am being sour.

you are put off by my tone, are you not?

but when i write about kim kardashian, i am almost always writing about language. it’s angering imprecision, its infuriating boundaries and inadequacies and allegiances and violence.

so i’m being sour, but also on brand.

last semester, i asked my students to describe their anger in 300 words. here i am using 1400+ and i’ve not even begun to scratch the surface of mine.

i am a horrible hypocrite. you mustn’t take your audience on the journey of how you arrived to the idea. you just need to tell them where you wound up, i say. even though i rarely ever write that way.

because i never know where i’m going. but also, do we any of us, ever?

i started writing about kim kardashian in 2016.

on pearl harbor day, 7 december 2016. i was sitting in the middlesex south reading room of senate house library, at one of the big tables in the middle, and i wrote an abstract for the IABA conference that would be taking place that june.  

“Because hers is a story still developing in real time,” i wrote, right before lunch, “its liquidity is extreme— a state which makes it an especially challenging (and, therefore, compelling) case study for life-writing in the digital age.”

all the way back then, obviously, i had no idea that i would spend the entirety of the trump presidency working on this same stupid piece.

we never know what will happen next. which is the premise of all of my scholarship while also being so hilariously obvious as to be a completely ludicrous thing around which to have built an academic career.

but then there’s a solidity to life that it seems other people feel, which i never have. which it’s maybe important to point out.

the mouse never stops trembling.

the word “illuminate” is forbidden.

i would like to illuminate the fact that i am always over here, quaking in my beautiful clothes and boots.

in order to be persuasive, you have to start by telling your audience what it is you want them to believe.

i want you to believe that kim kardashian matters.

for reasons i cannot fully express beyond the fact that writing about her has been there for me in the midst of all the trembling.

when i interviewed gloria steinem for the jackie book, she described a theory of celebrity in which there is a human being tethered to a balloon. and no matter how much the human tries to guide the balloon, the balloon floats free.

as a biographer, i recognize the value of the human.

as a human, i really, really need the balloon.

the balloon helps. the trembling, it never stops, but the balloon helps.

the balloon makes clear we are not alone.

the balloon makes clear we are legion. or, at the very least, two.

i’m a humanities person, but i respect that there is value in numbers. there is value in not being the only one.

there is value in having a community in which to forge the language. there is a value in having a community.

a community in which to forge a future in which the violence is unacceptable, where we are free to illuminate all the injustices, a future in which the language, it bends, like a plant, towards the light of our experience, our hurt, and we build something new out of this devastated world we’ve been gifted.  

[CW: assault, gun violence, rape]

for someone who’s all about cultivating A Sense of Occasion IRL, i always struggle to write when the occasion calls for it.

but i am aware that on this day, five years ago, a group of french criminals assaulted and robbed kim kardashian.

a circumstance which seems to demand some words.

having just yesterday been introduced to a new acquaintance as someone who “writes about kim kardashian,” i’m suddenly aware that in, having spent those five years since the assault/robbery working on an… essay?… book?… journal article?… thing that will only ever be 20 versions in microsoft word?… item of as yet to be determined form about the assault, i am now someone who quasi-officially writes about kim kardashian.

or at the very least, when people who know me and/or my work see kim kardashian, they now think of me.

i’m not actually sure that i do write about kim kardashian though.

which may sound stupid given that i obviously have and am. but that doesn’t seem to capture what is happening here.

because the relationship doesn’t feel so much like writing about a person as peering deep into cultural miasma and trying to wrench forth something for which language has not yet been invented.

i told you last time i have a john the baptist complex. i’m aware, that sentence right there probably makes it sound more like a god-complex. but, no, really. we’re working with what marilyn frye calls “the phallocratic semantic systems of language.”

people, there is no room for us there.

for me, the experience of writing about kim kardashian has been entirely unlike the experience of writing about jackie. there was/is a relationship there, with jackie. deeply one-sided given jackie’s dead and never knew me and has only ever like four times deigned to appear in my dreams, but a valuable parasocial relationship nonetheless. so powerful in its shaping of my life that i have excavated it again and again and again and again.

reading about jackie helped me navigate my own life through college. writing about jackie has freed me to live as i want—or, perhaps, more truthfully, as i am wont to. roving through ambiently unstable circumstances, ruthlessly alone, trying to locate some approximation of feeling through words.

i am not unaware that jackie’s is a story of trauma.

i don’t think i came to it for that… though maybe i did? i’ve written about this already, so let’s not go there now.

as i recalled last time i wrote here, i vividly remember the moment when i posited how hard it would be to write a biography of kim kardashian. which was not to say, at the time, that i particularly wanted that challenge. just that i noted it.

originally, this was just a conference paper on kardashian’s absence from social media after the assault.

then there was a paper on her jackie-themed photoshoot in W. then some years went by and i was bored of a tuesday afternoon and revisited some of that material and found a cfp for a journal issue on the theme of time and, for whatever reason, god help me, i linked the two and spent the fall of 2019 writing about kim kardashian and lost time.

and then and then and then and then, and now i am someone who is introduced to new people as someone who “also writes about kim kardashian.”

the thing is though, there is a similarity between the two.

in the early days of jackie, at conferences—back when it felt deeply political to say “jackie onassis” instead of “jackie kennedy”!—  when i was introduced as someone who writes about jackie onassis, people would legit ROLL THEIR EYES.

and then they’d see my writing and see what i was doing and be like “oh, ok, maybe this woman’s life matters.”

writing that i realize this is my job description: i write about time and trauma and language and lives and the women we roll our eyes at.

when i was introduced as someone who “also writes about kim kardashian,” the person who i was being introduced to—who seems perfectly lovely, mind you—made a point of saying the kardshians are something she never got into.

which is well and good, and not to say that she’s not very often problematic, but what worries me is how, so often, that is worn as a badge of honor. because why?

dear people, i ask this as gently as possible. look into your heart: what cultural and identity work is disparaging her doing for you?

this post is going nowhere.

everything i write these days goes nowhere or, at least, lacks an ending.

i am without ending. i cannot conclude. because the words and the story are inconclusive. because we have literally and temporally not yet arrived at an ending. because i use my writing for working through.

here is what i know:

kim kardashian was assaulted and robbed in a hotel in paris, five years ago today, in the early morning hours of october 3^rd, 2016.

in conversation with david letterman in 2020, here is what she said about that experience:

KK: … they grabbed me and I was wearing a robe and I wasn’t wearing anything under it… [whispers] I don’t wanna cry.

DL: Oh, no, no, no, no… We alright?

KK: [through tears] I don’t wanna ruin my makeup.

[audience laughing]

DL: It’s fine. The makeup is fine.

KK: Okay. [sniffs] And, um, he grabbed me and pulled me towards him. But I wasn’t wearing anything underneath, so I was like ‘Okay, this is like the time I’m gonna get raped. Like, just deal, like, it’s—This is—it’s gonna happen. You know, like. Just prepare yourself.’ So, I did, and then… I don’t know why I’m crying. I’ve talked about this before… Um… But then he tied me up with handcuffs, and then zip ties, and then duct tape. And then duct-taped my mouth and my eyes. And before he had my eyes, he had—I saw—I mean, before he duct-taped my eyes, ‘cause that was the last thing, he um… I saw he found my whole jewelry box, and, like held it up, like, ‘Aha!’ Like, ‘We got it.’ […] And then, um… [pause]… And then, I saw him have a gun out to me, and I was like, ‘Ok, this is it’” (“Kim Kardashian”).

here is an actual halloween costume that was advertised that same month:

yes, it was pulled in the face of general outcry.

but presumably it was internally vetted.

some people somewhere thought this was ok.

this is one thing but the things add up. if you’re a nobody watching the somebodies’ experiences of violence publicly demeaned, it doesn’t exactly embolden the heart.

i am deeply disheartened by how many things in american public life make me feel justified in my decision to never report to the authorities any of the harm done to me by men.

a few days ago, a friend asked me about the word “survivor” and whether i knew of any alternative. because, we were in agreement, the word “survivor” is awful. the word “survivor” does not work for us.

i’mma ask my therapist about this, but, currently, i have no alternatives, beyond the extremely clunky “people who have experienced sexual violence.”

in that conversation, i wondered aloud if my own rejection of the word lay in not wanting to be seen as a victim. but, later, i pondered the matter of accuracy.

i do not feel as though i have survived yet.

the story is not over.

it is still in the midst of becoming.

oline, be more concise!

it is ongoing…

on 3 october 2016, kim kardashian was assaulted and robbed in her hotel suite in paris. due to some invisible cultural compact that arose with astonishing haste, this incident was almost only ever after referred to as a robbery. or, lol, “the paris incident.”

full disclosure: i do not know kim kardashian. i am also not in her head. but, based on her own public statements, i don’t think kardashian sees this as an assault. she and letterman agreed that the word “robbery” didn’t do justice to what happened, but in public she has mostly expressed gratitude that it wasn’t rape. she is aware others have been through so much worse.

donald trump raped e. jean carroll in a dressing room at bergdorf’s in the 90s. on cnn, in june 2019, carroll described the rape and then refused to use that word for what she had described, expressing an awareness that others have been through so much worse.

for the longest time, i didn’t call what was done to me rape, in large part because it just felt like dating, but in other part because, as i knew, others had been through so much worse.

i was not held at gunpoint at the age of 20. i was not forced. i did not scream because i was afraid of waking his mother.

these are two photographs of my family at my college graduation two years later.

they were taken by that man. they were taken by him a month and a half after i managed to get myself away from him. and still he showed up at my graduation. still, he found me and said hello to my family.

i’m talking about different degrees of violation here as though they were one, compressing trump’s rape of carroll, two men’s raping of me, and the assault of kardashian in the hotel room. i’m not sure the separation of the degrees of violation even matters. it’s all violation. it’s all physical harm done by men.

but i also see them all as being part of the same story, existing on a spectrum where so many of us do not feel at home with where we are, not because we deny what has been done to us but because what was done did not occur at the most extreme end.

and because we fear the laughter.

indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. the uproarious laughter…

and not just the laughter, but also the dismissal.

it was a woman who, in a discussion of a sexual harassment claim i tried and failed to file, told me she knew i was going through a lot personally. it was a woman who, with the very best of intentions, used a man raping me against me in my effort to hold another man accountable for asking to borrow my uterus.

it was a woman who did that, who said that out loud, but the awareness of that dynamic sits with me always.

i am quite certain the men in my professional life have no idea that every time i speak out critically, every time i say we need to include more women or we need to be aware of a toxic aggression that has entered the chat, i do so with the awareness of how easily i can be dismissed, how easily whatever i say can be brushed off as my oversensitivity resulting from my having been fairly open in the last year about men having raped me.  

imagine for a moment, if you will, the threat of having the violence you experience wielded against you—consciously or unconsciously, out loud or internally— as a reason you shouldn’t be taken seriously in all other areas of your life.  

it sits like a hand against the throat.

and yet, still, somehow, because it matters, we do speak.

i reject the word brave.

and yes, yes, i’ve been told it’s unrealistic– to expect people to be putting in the work of doing better, to demand change beyond the meager offering of sympathy and good intentions. the woman who held my own rapes against me also reminded me we have to be realistic.

but i’m a writer. i write other people’s lives. i dwell in possibility. how bleak—to be incapable of imagining a world with, if not no violence, at the very least, LESS.

what was done to kardashian was extreme, but it wasn’t rape. what was done to me was rape, but it didn’t feel extreme.

the language does not allow for those complexities. the language shuts out our lived realities.

the language cannot capture the feeling, the unceasing psychic trembling, the sensation that some ghostly part of your body is in constant, unrelenting preparation to run at any given moment.  

“I don’t wanna cry,” kardashian told david letterman.

i hate that watching this interview on netflix, i cried at his response. for the fact that, in a room full of people, on camera, he demonstrated something approaching care.

“Oh, no, no, no, no…” letterman said, asking, “We alright?”

kardashian makes a joke and deflects with worry about her makeup. she seems genuinely surprised to be so impacted by the telling of this story of how she was recently tied up and held at gunpoint and thought she might die.  

“I don’t know why I’m crying. I’ve talked about this before,” she says.

later in the interview, she says: “Besides that little cry session, I’m totally fine.”

when my therapist asks me how i am, at the times i don’t feel that i’m actively falling apart, i say, “pretty ok.” and she seems pleased by this. i’m not convinced that i’m pleased, whilst also not being sure i’ve ever inhabited a better state.

maybe this is it. maybe, at long last, i have arrived at the descriptor that is appropriate for how i actually am. pretty ok it is.

i am someone who writes about kim kardashian.

in doing that, i am writing about language and trauma and life and celebrity and grief and violence.

doing that hurts a hell of a lot, let’s be honest. but it’s helpful too.

writing being a way of inhabiting life, a way of putting your brain into life in a way that i’ve never quite been able to do in the actual living. and/or a way i have always preferred/found more bearable.

i do not feel like a survivor.

i am not grateful for what has been done to me.

what i am always grateful for is that i was born with a love of stories and that i was encouraged to tell them by all of my english teachers. so that, when i have needed the writing—at once a practice and a craft and a profession— to save me and reconstitute me as a human being, it has been there, at the ready.  

i write about language and trauma and life and celebrity and grief and violence. in doing that, i write about kim kardashian.

all i ask is: please do not roll your eyes. please do not laugh at us.

this is such a clunky piece of writing and i’m displeased with it.

but points were made?

tl/dr: kim kardashian was assaulted and robbed five years ago today. violence is awful and trauma is real and the language was built for neither. be kind.

typical, i’ve a strong sense of occasion and nothing really to say. 

today is 22nd november. 

58 years ago, the woman i’ve spent the last 18 years writing about was sitting beside her husband when he was shot by a man using a mail order rifle (retail = $19.95).

on thursday, i’m going to be giving a talk about the pink suit she wore that day. which seems like a terribly stupid thing to be putting words to right now, at a time when words are so hard to come by. 

i always think this is the part of her life that least interests me but then, it’s also the part of her life from which everything after flows. 

i’ve spent a lot of the last year thinking about PTSD and time and language and grief and violence. i’ve spent a lot of the last year thinking about the challenge of living in spaces, experiences, for which the language does not yet exist. 

i’ve written about how i met her, of how she came into my life. again and again, over the years, i’ve written as a way of trying to figure out what the hell happened here. 

all the while, often still lacking the language to shape any understanding of my own experiences of time and grief and violence. always, i think, using her story, in some ways, to sort my own out. 

it’s a cliché that the biography is more about the biographer than the biographical subject. 

it’s probably true that our para-social relationships with celebrities actually tell us nothing about them or who they are, and a whole hell of a lot about ourselves. 

the thing that worries me, the thing that i cannot stop thinking about, is how the telling of a life shapes lives. 

a biographer sexually harassed me. he has a book about a Black woman coming out on january 18th. 

i am so very, very tired. 

this post is supposed to be about jackie. it is still about jackie.

because, it was in writing about jackie that i met this man.

it was as a biographer of jackie that he expressed interest in me.

it was as a biographer that i was professionally impacted by the harm he did.

it was as a biographer in a professional organizational of biographers that i have been, now, twice harmed, as someone attempting to hold him accountable.

it is as a human being that i am currently ignoring an email about measures that might be taken within that organization to hold him accountable now.  

i am so very, very tired because it has been a long semester. i have not yet lost a student but my students have lost so many moms and grandparents and friends. 

i do not have words because my words are all spent on documents that go behind paywalls and/or are filed for the sake of “institutional knowledge.” 

this started out being a post on the pathos of jackie kennedy dolls on etsy. then it was on 11/22, because i’ve such a sense of occasion and i really wanted to come through. 

“prof really came through in the clutch” a student wrote in a rant last spring, as, off-stage, i was quietly, privately, losing my mind. 

i am so very, very tired that, the other day, i had the thought that’d it really just be easier to wake up in february. to obliterate these next two months altogether. which isn’t fair at all, nor really even wanted. 

but there are these moments when, in writing and life, it feels we’re asked to set ourselves on fire, and that is what i’m thinking about when i think of jackie today. 

how gutsy to have gone on living. how fucking bold to have lived that life after living through that. to have married the dubious man, moved to greece, wandered round europe barefoot and braless.

i do not know that she was happy. i do not particularly know that she was emotionally engaged with life, during the period of her life that most interests me. which is maybe why it does interest me. 

what i know is that when stephen spender asked her, at a dinner party, years later, what her greatest accomplishment was, she said it was that she weathered some difficult stuff and stayed sane. 

i’d argue it’s also that she busted out of the world she was born into, the america she grew up in, and went on, in the words of winnie the pooh, an explore.

i’d argue that’s probably why she caught my eye as a teenager. 

because i wanted to know (1) how you live through that, and (2) how you get out. 

jackie was a way out. 

the thing that is horrifying about experiencing harassment within your profession is that it is connected to the thing that you love, the thing that makes you you, the thing that helps you constitute yourself. 

a writer friend remarked upon this the other day. how grateful she was that all of her experiences of harassment and violence occurred in dating, not in relation to her writing, her work. 

he used his grief and my work against me. 

i had a colleague who told me she and her college girlfriends always used to ask themselves what would jackie do?

this colleague wore amazing earrings. 

often, when considering which earrings to wear, i’ll ask myself: what would gail wear? 

typical, this post is weird and it has no point and no end. 

so let’s leave it here, with jackie quoting henri cartier-bresson in her new yorker “talk of the town” column on an exhibition of his work… let us move forward remembering:

It’s ‘yes, yes, yes.’ And there’s no maybe . . . . It’s a presence. It’s a moment. It’s there!

it is like a nesting doll, all of it. my life with jackie, my writing about jackie. so that when i read the pages i have written about jackie, the whole book i have written on her life, it unpacks a whole series of memories of my own.

where i was when i wrote that sentence.

who i was sitting next to at the british library when i found that quote. (invariably, always, obviously, nanette.)

what i didn’t know was about to happen when i was in that archive.

the feeling of the wind in my hair and the blue blue sky above as i walked home after wandering round the yacht.

it is her life and it is mine.

they are, by this point, so braided up.

*

after reading the full draft of my book for the first time in two years, i complain to a friend that i was so briefly content before being consumed by exhaustion. as though the door to every single thing that has happened in the last five years that i would really rather not think about had been flung open and they all pressed against me, demanding attention, the whole lot of them requiring a working through, the energy for which i do not have.

omg, she sagely tells me, it’s like you just looked at a decade of old facebook photos. like you just watched everyone age in a blur. of course you would now need time to mourn.

*

i think about how young i was when all of this started.

twelve.

TWELVE.

i vividly remember the shame associated with it.

of caring that much.

never mind that, when i made my announcement to my parents and their friend who was visiting from out of town, during a dinner at the taco bell, that i had decided to collect vintage jackie LIFE magazines, they were all 100% on board.

(in my memory, if i’m being entirely honest, they clapped. but that sounds a bit much, even for my family’s ambient level of ostentatiously excessive enthusiasm so, even though i remember it clearly, i imagine this is probably not true.)

it was nonetheless embarrassing, to care that much.

it has always, always been embarrassing to care this much.

*

vivid memory: somewhere around ’95-’96, my father picked up me and a friend with whom i rode the school bus from the dollar theater where we’d seen some charlie sheen film. when we were driving her home, she sat in the front seat and i was in the back. they were talking about something and garebear, bragging on me, mentioned how i had this cool magazine collection, AND I DIED.

i don’t think i actually told my dad to shut up but i shut that shit down real fast.

because it was 1995/1996. we were teenagers.

it was not cool to care.

i’m aware now of how i have always worked to inhibit and conceal how much i care. and how it has always, always felt mildly violent to have to do that. 

*

i wrote all of the above in july 2019, but it’s held up. 

*

i write about real lives, because i think real lives hit different. 

maybe this is just because, my whole life, they’ve hit different for me.

it’s been maybe ten or fifteen years since i first characterized my relationship with biography as one of self-medicating. it is no accident that my academic research is all about how people use stories of real lives to navigate their own. 

i write about this because i have done this. and i want to understand why. 

i was twelve and i read about her and saw something i needed and i took it. 

she was a way of being, but also a way out. of whatever it was i was in– girlhood, depression, grief, violence, america.

*

i’ve dreamed about her very few times. i wrote about the original one awhile back. 

i don’t think i’ve written about the last one.

in the dream, the man i was romantically entangled with at the time and i were leaving an evangelical church. (god knows what we were doing there.) we were walking through what i assumed to be new york city and, suddenly, at the end of the street, bracketed between two buildings, there she was. 

wearing these red pants.

dear reader, i take absolutely no pride in the fact that my first thought upon seeing jackie onassis in this dream was that her butt was bigger than i had imagined.

and somehow we (or i- i should say- because from this point on i was no longer aware of the man i was romantically entangled with; i had an awareness only of her), though we were walking down a parallel street, wound up in her path, and she came striding up to me.

not aggressively, not all HOW DARE YOU WRITE THAT BOOK, but just in the manner that you would approach someone on the street, someone you knew and had been expecting.

she was in her 50s. a cigarette was in her hand. her lipstick was hot pink.

she was getting into politics, she told me. and desperate to read consuela’s memoir. 

i told her i was nobody and i couldn’t get it for her. 

because this was a reference, i recognized within this dream, to suzanne sugarbaker’s maid on the 80s tv classic designing women. who has apparently written a memoir that jackie onassis desperately needs to read. 

this is a thing we historically have done so i’mma just dive right on in.

if you’re like DOCTOR ONLINE WUT EVEN IS THIS, i refer you to my rich seam of informal, doctoral-level scholarship on emotions and dolls: HERE.

ya’ll.

do you ever just feel like….

IT ME.

LOOK AT HER!!!! LOOK AT HER EFFORT AT SURVIVAL!!!! the extremity of her labor in attempting to telegraph to us all that EVERYTHING IS OK.

that is a face of EVERYTHING IS FINE (EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE).

something nice: i am not appalled by her doll feet. and yes, i’m aware that says everything and nothing all at once, while also maybe being entirely irrelevant.

why is her neck so long? is the cardboard apparatus that has her pinned in there elongating it or is this an unusually pronounced doll neck? comment below.

i feel like, previously in our existential jackiedoll meanderings, we’ve sometimes had themes. like– and, quite honestly, i am not even going to check– in the past, i seem to vaguely remember a post dedicated to the madame alexander jackiedolls.

quite possibly surprising no one, the theme here is CHAOS. like the eye of sauron, i have gazed upon the vast expanse of jackiedolls on etsy. no. that metaphor’s wrong…

like a cat to its person, i have gone forth into the dark dark wood and returned to lay my broken, murdered finds at your feet.

yeah, that’s not quite right either, much like jackie’s wrists here. [transition = A+]

OOOOOOOOUCH.

girl needs to relax.

but who could, with this business involved?

poor jackie. poor us.

do you ever just have one of those days?

i mean, mostly, right?

who among us has not felt like this at least once in the last two years?

one of the yoga instructors i see on zoom said this thing in october about imagining you are the earth and blossoms are emerging from the top of your head.

i’ve butchered what she said. but, whatever it was, i liked it at the time. jackie’s head here looks like a tulip, non? maybe she’s imagining her whole body is the earth and her head is the bloom.

writing that i’m reminded of phyllis lindstrom’s weird free movement interpretative dance of “the birth of a flower” and that makes me miss cloris leachman and ed asner and betty white and the whole lot of them.

let’s assume this plastic flower preserved in a ziplock bag is in their honor.

i know elvis loved the mary tyler moore show. i do not know about jackie. the historical record would suggest she only ever watched the moon landing and bill moyers.

i like this one.

because she’s, comparatively, so much less constrained. cushioned, yes, but not aggressively constrained.

there is a lack of netting and zip ties here, so let’s just take that as a win.

ok, this photograph is the lone piece of evidence that would suggest that joanne whalley’s casting in that horrible made-for-tv adaptation of donald spoto’s biography made some kind of sense. which, i mean, if a franklin mint representation of someone is the only evidence you have, fyi, that is not a lot.

i feel this:

but why are they children?

and why do they look like a wedding cake topper?

question: you ever wondered what madame alexander might look like? voilá!

WONDER NO MORE.

i do not know why she has marie antoinette at triannon hair, but that seems about right, doesn’t it? i do so love when people meet one’s expectations.

what is this?

i appreciate the accuracy even as the price point is COMPLETELY BONKERS.

but though….

dear people, would it shock you to hear that jackie was not wearing white cotton mittens at her husband’s murder? is this entirely new news? am i being too harsh, to expect this level of historical accuracy?

i just feel like, at that price point, when you’ve gone to the effort of approximating the nub of the bouclé, you can throw in those eight extra fingers, you know?

we’re just gonna go right on sailing by this but i do want to note, this jackiedoll is taking the air.

bully for her.

sidebar: have you breathed today? i know i basically created a moment above where you maybe joined me in imagining you’ve blossoms coming out of the top of your head, but also, have you breathed?

i might be going through it, but i’mma get through it.

ya’ll. i’m torn. because i always seem to end these posts with the jackiedoll who best represents our human condition in the moment of writing. but, honestly, i’m not all that sure where we are.

i’ve– surprise!– written quite a fair bit about the pandemic, about the dislocation involved in not knowing where we are in the broader historical story. it’s not the beginning, clearly, and maybe we’re beyond the middle, but also there’ve been a hell of a lot ‘o “you can relax now” false ends, in the united states at least.

so this jackiedoll speaks to me:

because she is missing the finger those mittens would’ve taken care of.

because she inexplicably has a tiny pink parasol that i do not remember being a part of jackie’s wedding costume.

because, in her bloomers, she is vulnerable, fragile, exposed, as we all are as human beings.

because her hardware is laid bare.

lord bless you, if you are still with me and reading this. because, existentially, autoenthographically, we are on the road to nowhere here.

though also not really.

i’ve written elsewhere– maybe (?) only on the personal blog that only pre-2017 people know about (if you are a post-2017 person, and you love me and feel you need 15 years of my past writing in your life, lmk)– about how my family went through a whole phase of ironing mary engelbreit illustrations onto sweatshirts and one of those was an illustration with the phrase “wherever you go, there you are.”

i’ve also written elsewhere about one of the most profound things i’ve ever read on the internet, which was a quote from one of the a.v. club’s buffy recaps:

All of that’s waiting in the wings, though. “The Freshman” is mainly about Buffy going through the painful process of self-discovery that so many do when arriving at college (or getting their first salaried job, or getting married, or buying a house, or having kids). It’s the process of realizing that while circumstances have changed, you’re still you. Whatever weaknesses you’ve always had, they’re still there. But the strengths are there too.

you are always you. wherever you go, there you are.

we have been here before. we have ended here before. different seller, same doll.

try not to laugh when you encounter my december 2019 optimism for the year 2020:

i know. i know. LOLOLOLOLOLOL. o young oline, you were so so so naïve, as were we all.

but i looked deeply into the abyss of that doll, and i do not want to claim to be any kind of prophet, as made evident by my deep failure to predict the trauma and havoc 2020- ???? would bring to us all. but what i will say is that this is the doll i have returned to this year.

i appreciate that she is cheaper. (despite inflation, are not we all?)

i appreciate that she brings her own box whilst being liberated from it.

(and confession: this is the point in my analysis of jackiedolls where i become deeply insecure and imagine you all are thinking i am a terrible fool for having, currently produced, 2,000 words on this nonsense.

i am ridiculous.

but also you care, right? you are, after all, still reading…)

but back to this girl:

nope! not having it. this is not allowed. jackiedoll must be free.

dunno about shaking hands.

but i appreciate the shrewdness, as she assesses us all, head a tilt.

and i appreciate that strut. who knew fur cuffs and extensive bouclé could breed such confidence.

may we all walk into this new year, this new semester, this new part of the pandemic with such vigor, such confidence.

i hope to god i’m not prying the hellmouth further open, but i think this blessing still applies…

again, and again and again and again, for all of the precious time we have left to us, moving on forward, pitching our selves forward in love and joy and hope and possibility, with feelings and dolls and stories and memories, of all the people we’ve lost, all the worlds we’ve left behind, and imaginings of the wonders still ahead and all that might yet be.

what i remember is all of the adults in my life going into the den and shutting the door.

that’s not actually an accurate memory, as it was my mother and ann, our cleaner, and then, later, my dad. but that’s the memory. the adults in a room with the door shut and me, age 4 1/2, on the other side of it.

this was the year after The Year Everyone Died– my friend from next door, my mother’s grandfather, my father’s boss– so we were already, then, somewhat a house in mourning. or, at the very least, a house that had spent a lot of the previous year avoiding discussion of grief and death whilst living submerged within it.

please know: this is a post with no judgment. because the thing with grief and loss and death is you do your best in navigating them, from within a culture that is perhaps uniquely hostile towards all of those things.

this was, not perhaps coincidentally, a winter my mother spent most of in quite ill health, fighting an unending bout with bronchitis turned pneumonia. so she was home from work that day.

when i ask her, she remembers she was lying on the couch in the den watching tv when my father called her from work to tell her the news about challenger, unfolding on another channel, and she called ann into the room to watch.

at some point, someone closed the door.

so what i remember of that particular day isn’t so much the historical event as the feeling of being shut out of it. its inaccessibility.

clearly, something was going on, something too adult for me, so adult, apparently, that– in memory– i put all the adults i knew in that room. in memory, my aunt and grandparents came over and were in the room too. the reality was that, with my father’s return home upon his lunch break, there were only three.

i don’t remember talking about challenger at all in nursery school, though surely we must’ve. this was The Teacher in Space. it was a huge big deal for schools around the country and, even in nursery schools, i imagine there must have been some talk about how a teacher was going to space.

but i remember none of that.

what i remember is the photograph of christa macauliffe that hung behind the receptionist’s desk in the school office at balmoral elementary.

i entered elementary school in fall 1986, months after the disaster.

i don’t remember spending much time in the principal’s office until the following year, when my first grade teacher seemed to settle upon me as her nemesis and focused all her energies on dismantling my confidence, exuberance, and love of learning.

on multiple occasions, when i would raise my hand to ask a question, she would tell me to lower it and– i kid you not– tell me not to ask so many questions because it was more important for the boys to learn.

admittedly, i was maybe a little high strung and not the calmest, most lady-like kid…

but when jimmy luke asked to borrow my pencil and i said no, it was i who was taken to the principal’s office and told to call my grandmother and told to tell her to tell me to behave in class.

what i remember about waiting in the lobby of the school office, waiting for the room in which i would place this phone call to become available, was that the receptionist’s phone had this literally bananas shape to it, that i’d never before seen on a phone.

and this completely blew my young mind, because i couldn’t figure out how it could be a phone when it didn’t look like the phones i knew.

i’ve also a very vivid memory of a fellow student being taken into another room for corporal punishment once while i was waiting there. like, they called the coach in to come and administer the strap and the probably 5th or 6th grade Black kid (because this elementary school was K-6) walked in, head down, and then the white coach walked in behind him, belt in hand, and quietly pulling the door closed.

i remember knowing what that coach was going to do to that kid and knowing it was bad. i, apparently, clocked the racial dynamics, and i remember i sat outside awaiting sounds, bracing for the pain this child was undoubtedly experiencing, but i don’t remember hearing any.

the last thing i remember is that, over that receptionist’s desk (and i should say i found her to be a very lovely, kind woman during my many visits to the principal’s office that year), there was this portrait of christa mcauliffe.

i don’t remember asking who she was. if my memory is correct– and it may well not be– i already knew who she was. if only in that way that you know things just because they’re out there in the ether and you encounter them through repetition and, gradually, you gain some sense of what or who they are though you don’t really know the story.

so, my feeling is that by the time i was a first grader in the principal’s office waiting for the phone room to become free so i could call my grandmother and tell her to tell me to stop misbehaving because it was very important for the boys to learn, i already knew about christa mcauliffe.

i don’t think there’s any real significance to all those things being jumbled together in that way. i write about them because it’s the jumble that interests me.

the way the (young) mind clamps down on certain parts of historical experience. what it keeps versus what it lets go, and how what is kept weaves in with lived experience so that the two are inseparable.

but also how invisibly these dynamics– so vital to our experience of what it is to be alive– persist.

you would not know nor would you have any reason to think i was so affected by challenger as a child if i’d not written about it here.

you would not know i’ve talked about it on multiple occasions in therapy, particularly when trying to untangle experiences of death and grief in my own life since.

you could be my biographer and think you know everything about me and write the whole story of my life and know things my family and closest friends don’t even know while still entirely leaving out this bit.

though i do wonder if this bit is quite crucial.

because, in retrospect, this bit captures so many of the things that my research and writing and thinking have spent the last two decades (or, arguably, my whole life) circling around.

historical disaster and trauma. american death, grief, and feeling. and stories of lives– those of others and our own– and the intersections of all of that in memory.

it’s a story of grief and loss and coping and midi skirts is how i described the jackie book to my editor a week or so ago, and i stand by that. because all those things do actually awkwardly sit all together, not just in my book but in life.

there was a cruel tweet the other day about how extra jackie was because, after her husband’s murder, at the air force base back in the DMV, before the return to the white house, she was already planning the funeral.

this is such a ghastly take. the improvisations of grief and the effort to regain control amid trauma by focusing on a funeral are not “extra.” no way this standard would ever be applied to a man. she was doing her fucking job as first lady. https://t.co/3Z76JbMUi8

— oh!-‘lighn (@oline_eaton) January 22, 2022

reading that tweet, i was struck by the sexism evident in it. and the cruelty, but also how unforgiving we as a culture are of the ways in which people attempt to cope in traumatic circumstances. and i thought about how, when my grandfather died, both my grandmother and i immediately dyed our hair.

i don’t know that we wanted to be resplendent for the funeral (though hair is armor and funerals are public performances, so that’s legit if so) so much as we want to take control of something and our hair color was what presented itself most immediately.

thinking about jackie after her husband’s murder, after she experienced looking into her husband’s face as he was murdered, her shocking proximity to this violence (which i think we often, as a culture, choose to collectively ignore), it makes total sense that funeral planning and administrative tasks would serve in a similar capacity.

after a traumatic loss of control, exerting control somewhere, anywhere, in your life lends comfort.

when you read about children’s impressions of john kennedy’s murder, the thing that comes up often is that, for many of them, it was the first time they saw the adults around them cry.

when i think about challenger, i have one or two other memories of my own aloneness that i choose to leave out of the story i’m telling here, but what i mostly remember is all of the adults being behind a closed door.

the thing about history is it just happens. and we all navigate it as best we can as it does.

that’s not anything original, what i’m saying, because we’re all in the midst of it in a possibly heightened way now. but we’ve been in it all along, whether we were aware of it or not.

life is fragile and we are uncomfortably tethered to others and events, reliant upon people and things inherently unreliable.

things happen, history happens, and we don’t always know what it means when it does. we just pick up the pieces of story we’ve got and try to put them together and maybe we realize it’s going to be too much for young minds so we shut the door, and that’s an entirely valid response.

but there’s prices to be paid for all of this– for the doors we shut, the stories we put together, the stories we tell, the portraits we put on walls, the people we let ask questions in class. small prices sometimes but bigger ones too.

the thing is: it’s entirely possible this is just the story i’ve told myself and nothing like how it happened.

a story i’ve made up from bits and pieces of my childhood daily life and stitched together in a way that feels authentic to how it felt whilst still maybe capturing very little of what really happened.

a story, in turn, that i’m kind of arguing here is somehow crucial to who i am now and what i write about.

my mother wondered yesterday who i would be if they’d pulled me out of college after that first awful semester, after my grandmother died– something that, in retrospect i can see, likely re-ignited much of the unprocessed grief and trauma and loneliness from The Year Everyone Died.

and i do not know.

probably nowhere near as good a writer, since that first awful year in college was one in which i submerged my pain in reading and tore through every book i could find.

the things that happen are the things that make us. take away one and we’re a whole other person.

which is wild, but also maybe encouraging. and not necessarily an argument that i would be a whole other person if the door had been left open or the portrait had been dolly parton instead of christa mcauliff or if i’d been 19 or 9 when jackie died rather than nearly 13. but also maybe kind of it is?

i was torn between whether to title this “scattered thoughts…” or “scattered memories…” and maybe they are actually, to me, rather one in the same. memory informing thoughts, thoughts shaped through memory– however unintentionally false or riddled with inaccuracies– all taken forward, propelling us on into whoever we are becoming, in the face of all that has already happened and all that will, disastrous, yes, but also the unexpected and joyful turns of event, all of it, that still lay ahead.

we do not know, nor will we ever, what will happen next– which can read as a threat but also as a promise. the promise of writing and teaching and learning and exploration and going and returning and becoming.

where you’re holding on, clinging to the edge with all your exhausted might and the stubs of your nails, and yet still you keep going, keep throwing words on the page and love into the universe, because it’s exciting and also it’s what you’re supposed to do but equally also because there’s always the hope it could be wonderful, always– no matter how awful, how disastrous, how ruinous it gets– still there’s the possibility of more, which means there’s the possibility of it getting better, which means there’s hope. and hope is the fuel, and also the glue.

that sounds so irredeemably cheesy, but it’s where this piece has landed. so there you go.

i would like to pause.

because things have happened so slow and then so quick– slowly careening is how i’ve characterized it– and the book sold but there was no paperwork and it seemed like things were happening and there were public announcements shared publicly, but mostly i spent the last month wanting to feel excitement and waiting for everything to fall apart.

then, i had to read my own book multiple times. which, if you’ve never done this, it’s fun up to a point. for, like, maybe the first decade. and then. AND THEN. it is like not fun. like, really really not.

remember how my friend said it was like looking at a decade of facebook photos? that. times actually more when you’re shifting into the mode of “this will be put onto the page as it is for people to read for all of the rest of time.”

there’s a little more pressure involved in that scenario than in the hundreds of other times i’ve read this manuscript over the last 15 years.

come, let us pause within that broader pause and acknowledge that 15 years is a hell of a long time.

by now, every sentence has it’s own substratum of memories and autobiographical details. every sentence is full of ghosts.

there are words that have fallen away over the years that i’m shocked to see gone. whole scenes that have been deleted somewhere along the way and i’ve maybe not thought about them in five years, but now, with the threat of the whole thing attaining some level of permanence, all those murdered darlings have come flooding back.

where did that go? wasn’t that there? didn’t i say that? where are we going? what is happening? who even am i?!!!

i’m pretty sure the word for this would be mourning. which seems rather premature as my life with jackie is hardly over. it will, no doubt, continue through publication, at least! but we’re moving into a new phase– jackie and i, as tethered through this book.

*

the contract arrives, at long last, five days before my manuscript is due (lol). and there i am: Oline Eaton (“Author”).

that’s the thing that does it, actually. this:

that’s the thing that sends me reeling into one of my wobbles, one of my blue moods where my brain makes a nest in a zone best characterized as LIFE IS SO FRAGILE I HAVE NO WORDS I JUST WANT TO CRY AND KISS AND DANCE AND FUCK AND FLIRT.

*

this is more historical detail than you are likely wanting so feel free to skip to the end…

i remember i was wearing a suit, when i met melvin jones (RIP) for the first time. (i always signed his name in email as MJ and, consequently, only ever wrote about him as MJ so let’s roll with that here.) he’d brought me in to discuss a job. we met at the starbucks at the corner of kirby and poplar (RIP).

i wore a black suit my parents had bought me at dillards for interviews, after grad school. it cost something ridiculous, like $80 at half off in 2004 money. it had a four button blazer and what i guess can be generously described as a peplum pleated skirt.

i remember there was a conversation at dillards (RIP?), where we as a family agreed that those pleats would show i had some personality; that i wasn’t a drone. a hell of a lot of responsibility to put on some pleats, but oh well. it was the early 2000s.

i remember my parents and i discussed the types of blouses i might wear with this garment in order to lighten it up. i was 22, wearing a four-button blazered, black suit. there was no lightening that thing up. it looked funereal no matter what we did. and that is what i wore to the starbucks.

i remember i arrived early. (typical, because my whole life i’ve preferred to be the waiting person rather than the person waited on.) and, while i waited, i sat there, at a rounded table, on the side facing the window, and i edited my own book.

i don’t remember if this was before or after the saturday morning i came downstairs and announced to my parents that i’d finished the jackie book. (this is summer 2004, mind you, so big time LOL.) my best guess is it was probably a month or two before.

in my unhappiness and dislocation– having been driven from chicago after grad school by the fact i had literally $16.26 to my name– i was writing like it was my job. because writing was and is and has always, will likely always be, the only place i can ______. (<- this word does not yet exist.)

i remember MJ came in, in that highly caffeinated, zingy way he had. somehow there was always a patter to his movements; he was a man who, even seated and ostensibly still, nonetheless vibrated with ideas and unexpressed feeling and caffeine.

he asked what i was working on and i told him i was writing a book about jackie onassis.

i think he hired me because i’d spent a summer at cornell, and he was an alum. but i like to think that he was also impressed that i was working, even then, even while waiting for an interview to start.

i don’t know. maybe i made that up. i find it hard to know how much other people are paying attention.

the thing is, for all i talk about the people who rolled their eyes, there’ve been so many people along the way who didn’t, and who also didn’t laugh.

my parents didn’t laugh me out of the taco bell when i told them i wanted to collect jackie magazines. in grad school, croftie sighed oooooh that’s so cool, when i off-handedly mentioned that collection.

for all the rolled eyes, always, there were other people who took me seriously as a 22, 23, 30, 40-year-old strangely emotionally and intellectually invested in a thing.

people who have believed, all along, that this is a thing worth doing and that i can do it. people without whom i could not’ve.

heavens, this is cheesy, but let’s push on…

(also, on a superficial note: i’d like to observe that few things are quite so humbling as seeing how you’ve fucked with your eyebrows over the years.)

the job interview lasted forever. MJ had me drive back to the office and meet some white dude who had some role in the company that i do not remember. when he eventually called me with a job offer a month later and brought me in, that guy was gone, so apologies to that man, whoever he was.

i remember i was eager to get away because i was supposed to be doing…. something. helping donovan (RIP) set up his classroom, maybe. something else, anyway, something not this three hour long interview. and i thought this place was very weird.

i was 22. hell, yes, i wanted to work at a magazine but not necessarily in such close proximity to platinum plus (RIP).

*

this calls to mind another memory… in college. i’d won some award, and we were all invited over to some professor’s home for tiny sandwiches and sparkling water. and my parents were there. and we got talking, maybe to the medievalist– whose class i’d take the next spring, solely on the basis of this encounter and my father’s evaluation of him as “a real professor”– about my career path, and my father told him that i wanted to be an editor, like jackie onassis.

i always wanted to be an editor. because i couldn’t imagine a world in which i could write. honestly, even today, i prefer to be an editor. which is why i’m any sort of writer– because i can tear myself apart.

which is, come to think of it, maybe why i’m struggling to revisit this manuscript. it is, in some ways, a site of considerable violence. because life is violent. words are violent. and to tell someone else’s life seems an act of such extraordinary cheek, and gumption, and violence too.

when my father said that to the person i’m assuming was the medievalist, i was still with the man who was abusing me.

*

another memory: donovan– the man who rescued me from the abusive man– is in chicago.

when he dumped me in memphis, he’d mentioned the whole jackie thing. said it was weird to care about something that much. obsessive. strange. true story, he said i was like the jimmy fallon character in fever pitch.

this was like fourth or fifth in the list of things prompting our breakup, but it was there. the fact that i was writing a book about this woman.

that was 7 december 2005.

he was in chicago some time in 2006, spring or summer, and he asked to meet. we were not yet friends again and wouldn’t be for several years.

i don’t remember if we went to the zoo or were just wandering around lincoln park (my memory is that we were in a cave, but how can that even be?!!) when he apologized for having said that.

when he acknowledged that it was kind of a really impressive thing to have done, to have written this book.

this was 2006, mind you. i thought i was done. LOL, i was not.

this is the copy i had printed at office depot for everyone that christmas:

*

when he died, i was hyper aware of the fact i’d not told him i was planning to move to london, planning to get a phd.

this was THE big news! when we met before donovan’s memorial service, this is the first thing i told one of our mutual friends. everyone knew but him.

i didn’t tell him because i was acutely aware he was dying, and my moving to london was life. i was living. his life was ending, and mine was going to go right on happening. 

i don’t know that it was guilt so much as kindness, that prevented me from telling him. i, honestly, didn’t want to be seen to be bragging about being alive. 

*

the breakup with donovan prompted a move to chicago, but i continued to work for MJ remotely and continued to edit the magazine.

before i left– and my memory is hazy here… i know it was before i left because i know i took it with me, but i can’t remember if he took me out to lunch or how he gave me this gift.

i think my brain wants to blend two memories: one a lunch at a fancy french restaurant– probably paulette’s (still kicking!!)– in overton square, where MJ made some comment to the whole staff that they’d someday all be reading my writing in TIME magazine. and then some other moment when he must have given me this. that moment i do not remember.

what i know is that he gave me a marble nameplate that has followed me everywhere since that day sometime in winter 2006.

*

donovan died in september 2012. MJ died in november 2020.

this is the thing about reading my own book. it is so many moments, so many people, so many stray thoughts and feelings and smells and memories and hurts and hopes, twenty whole years of my life.

it actually physically hurts to read it right now.

which, again, is mourning. and grief and loss, all of which are elements of life we don’t talk nearly enough about. (which is maybe why they are the focus of nearly all my research.)

i want to be excited so terribly much. i want to feel joy. there it is, on my to do list. right between “printing” and “post office.” “sign contract.”

but i feel very little. it’s just me in my apartment alone, digitally signing a pdf on something called HelloSign.

i want parties and sequins and champagne and hope and hugs and cake and joy, and yes, yes, yes, that’ll come. it will come in due time.

but the thing i feel no one’s told me is that this is hella lonely. like, severely lonely.

the writing, yeah. writers know and accept that. it’s a solitary business.

but the bookselling, the business of putting out into the world the thing we’ve wrenched from our brains, it’s painful. and terribly lonely.

or maybe it’s just me, maybe i’m just overly sensitive and morose. (i do rather like the idea that the rest of you lot are just flippantly thrusting books out into the public sphere with jubilation and wild abandon and pure, undiluted joy.)

and, absolutely, a whole bunch of people are about to join this whole affair, probably to propose edits and titles and covers i loathe, so soon enough i’ll be all complainy about how crowded an experience this has become. but, for now, it’s pretty lonely.

which is ok.

it’s been me and jackie for a long, long time, but truly, i feel ready to move along and write about someone else. ready for this to be a book on my shelf that maybe every ten years or so i pull down and read.

because i’ve written the book i wanted to read but which did not yet exist. so, on one level, it is enjoyable.

just not right now. (this is a stunning sales pitch is it not?! my publisher will be so pleased!) because i am too close to it. to the story, its losses and rhythms.

*

a dear, dear friend– the only person currently alive allowed to call me by my dread first name– must’ve divined i would, inevitably, have a struggle, because she mailed me a torn out page from a book. a torn out page on the emotion involved in completing a book, complete with her marginalia.

and i don’t know when i was last so grateful for a thing. nor when i felt so cared for.

i’ve read it every night for the last five, like a prayer. often, i’ll be honest, i’ve found it bleeding into prayer.

*

the name my parents gave me is faith. 

up until maybe first grade, hand on heart, i thought the F in FCE stood for favorite.

so faith has always felt both like a shock and a come down. and also quite a bit of pressure for a random little person. 

*

i am reminded: MJ always signed his emails and texts with this: KEEP THE FAITH. which meant that, as the person who did his writing and sent his email, working for him i was constantly reminded of the same.

*

i do not care for endings, because the story is not yet over. the story goes on and on and on, beyond us, into whenever you are reading this, still, as i hope i’ve demonstrated here, even after we are done and gone, still the story unfurls into words on a page, a book on a shelf, a memory, a ghost, a feeling, a ……………..

*

this is the cheesiest thing ever but i realize it maybe actually is the ending:

my therapist said i need to trust that, as a writer, i’ve done my best and taken good care of jackie.

and without even thinking, my voice cracking, i add, and she’s taken good care of me.

because i *am* writing about kim kardashian but i’m at that stage of the writing process where the writing is being actively avoided, not because it isn’t going to happen but because i’m waiting for it to become MAXIMALLY UNCOMFORTABLE so that i will have no choice, mental-health-wise, but to do it, no matter how hard it hurts.

i am waiting for the pressure to become unbearable, so that i might dive in with my whole heart and cerebellum and dig around in the blood and guts and brain matter and pick at all of the wounds. until they reveal the thing they are there for.

fun times!!! (this is the part about writing that i do not tell my students. the reality that the thing you most want to avoid is, inevitably, the thing towards which you are running at full speed and also the thing you are fated to do AND ALSO the thing that will most extensively shatter your being.)

the writing i am not doing is about victim-blaming.

i’m not doing it because i’m aware that writing about victim-blaming and doing the deep dive required to write about victim-blaming is going to really fucking hurt.

because i’m aware of how i blame myself. i’m aware of how, on dates, even now, i think about how i dress. how, for dates, even now, i take care in how i dress. because i have internalized all of the awful things told me and, despite all of my efforts and chutzpah and love of fashion, still, i am not yet free.

in my london life (which feels like so many worlds ago), i used to go to these quiet days at an abbey. the vicar– who was apparently the inspo for the title character in rev— used to insist we put both our feet on the ground, that we not cross our legs. i do not know why this was, but simply assumed it was so that we might be more firmly rooted in god’s creation.

i mention this because i have inexplicably put on shoes to write this. though my legs are crossed. for i’m never rooted so much as loosely tethered, flailing about, beholding, in equal parts awe and dread.

i am always out there, well dressed but lurching, analyzing, albeit elegantly, forward, into the whatever of where we are right now.

i write about celebrity and precarity and feelings and feminism.

i write about how people write about life when they are in the middle of it, when they do not know what will happen to them, when the outcomes remain radically unknown.

the choices they make, the reactions, all of the stuff that, in retrospect, looks inevitable but which, in the living, is improvised.

that is how i started writing about kim kardashian. when she was assaulted in paris. because i proposed a conference paper on her silence, back when we did not know how it would end.

that is why i am not writing about kim kardashian now. because i cannot handle the uncertainty unfolding.

not because it’s new, but because it isn’t.

confession: i am actively avoiding this story. so i cannot write about it in any sort of educated way. i am deliberately ignorant, intentionally ignorant, actively cultivating ignorance.

because anyone who’s lived in fear of an ex (hi, it me!), anyone who’s lived in fear for their own safety or the safety of those they love (hi, again, it me again!), knows this story.

and, relatedly, anyone who’s lived in that fear can anticipate the reaction to such violence.

even if.

if ever you had any doubt, let us be real: we are, all of us, only ever just a joke.

know it, learn it, live it.

indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.

i have nothing really to say here except that the abuse of this woman and her current boyfriend by her ex-husband is horrific.

because it’s happening at all, but also because it’s happening to her and still, STILL it’s treated as entertainment and not news. still, it is a joke.

she is exceptional and still she is treated in this way.

still, one of the most public women in the world can be bullied and threatened and harassed, PUBLICLY. and people who write supportive editorials have to leaven them with the fact that it’s still not ok despite it being her.

like there is a world in which this is ok for anyone.

what hope does that give everyone else, all of the rest of us, with exes who harmed us and hate us and want to harm us and the people we love? if even she is not safe…….

do you know about silent lunch? did you have silent lunch???

silent lunch. a punitive measure i’ve not even thought to remember in decades. something so stupid (or traumatic?), i’d apparently erased it from both my experience and my brain. 

but then a student mentioned it and it was like WOW. and now i’ve spent the last week asking everyone i know if they know about silent lunch and it’s like WOW.

what a bunch of boisterous troublemakers we must’ve been, to have had to be silenced, all us little kids.

*

elementary school is such a strange time.

the brain is still forming, the memories are wired in weird. 

and yet, somehow, the maybe not-so-great coping mechanisms are already firmly in place.

a friend and i were talking about this the other day– the sandwiching of time in a kid-mind.

how things that maybe only lasted a day or a week loom so fucking large when you’re a kid, they feel like they must’ve lasted a whole year at least.

for example, some representative of her majesty’s government came to visit my american school at some point in the mid-80s. i can only assume this was because it was called balmoral.

and so the adults painted a castle on the cafeteria wall and, every morning, we kids sang “god save the queen” after the “star spangled banner” and the pledge.

there is no way this could have lasted more than two weeks, i’m nearly certain. and yet i’m equally certain that we sang “god save the queen” every single day for the rest of elementary school.

*

there is evidence to suggest that i was, let us say, perhaps not the calmest child?

be real though: you want to be friends with that kid, right?

odds are high that kid is, at least once, going to make you really, really laugh.

that kid did well in school, mostly, which maybe isn’t a surprise given how much time i’ve spent in school subsequently. but it wasn’t all fashionz and jazz handz.

most of what i remember of kindergarten is that they didn’t have enough classroom space and so my class was literally on the stage. (how bizarre my elementary school experience is upon reflection!)

the stage being in the cafeteria, memories of nap time involve the rhythm of lunch chatter and the dinging of dropped forks flowing beneath the lullabyes (lullabies?!) on the boom box.

then as now i needed TOTAL SILENCE to sleep, so i didn’t sleep much. mostly i lay there, in the dark, listening to the cacophony, counting sheep as my teacher’d told me, waiting for the lights to come back on.

*

kindergarten was lovely.

first grade was a nightmare unparalleled until my first year of college. 

*

it does not even involve going out on a limb to say that my teacher hated me with the fire of a thousand suns. 

early in the year, she told me to stop asking so many questions, saying it was more important for the boys to learn. 

at least once, if not twice, she took me to the office to call my grandmother, instructing me to tell burvil to tell me to behave. 

(that is how i came to be in the principal’s office of balmoral elementary school contemplating that picture of christa macauliffe.)

at the end of the year, when a classmate flicked me in the eyeball, that teacher accused me of doing it to myself (as though self-harm wouldn’t have also been worrying) and forbid me from seeing the school nurse or calling my mom. 

of that afternoon, i remember weeping in the bathroom at school.

(this was my first school, it was open classroom style, and i’ve bizarrely vivid memories of the building layout– all of which could be entirely wrong. but i recall it was the bathroom in the middle, left of the building and the ceilings were impossibly high, like 19 feet. though probably it’s just that i felt terribly small, standing there at the sink, unjustly accused.)

i remember being whisked off to the eye doctor the minute burvil heard what’d happened, meeting my mom there, the darkness of the doctor’s office and his breath on my face as he stared deep into my eyeball through his lenses.

*

if the exclamation point i started putting at the end of my name is any indication, my spirit was not broken.

but it wasn’t a pleasant year.

*

i’m guessing my memories of silent lunch are from this year, but they could also be from 6th and 7th grade– when i engaged in bizarre acts of bus seat destruction for which i, along with a few of my friends and my primary nemesis, were all reprimanded.

but i think then we were made to clean the bus seats. i don’t think silent lunch was in middle school. 

i think i was this kid when i had silent lunch:

there’s a general consensus among the people i’ve polled that silent lunch was something that happens/ed in elementary school.

in middle school, they just gave you detention.

the thing about silent lunch was that you had to sit there, for the whole of lunch, at the silent lunch table, along with all the other kids similarly punished.

your very presence at the silent lunch table marked you as punished. 

i don’t remember much about this. but what i do remember, what came flooding back upon the mention of the concept of “silent lunch,” was the shame of being at that table. of being separated out as someone who talked too much. someone who deserved to be silenced. 

i was a six year old girl and already i was too loud. already i’d said too much.

*

my report card from that year is…. interesting.

she does need to practice self control…

still talking a bit too much…

she needs to improve in self control.

please talk to her…

her behavior is much better!

benign enough sounding maybe, but that shit sticks.

*

later, in college, i’d tell the boy sitting next to me the answers to the prof’s questions.

because i knew them. because i knew the prof knew i knew them. and because it was easier to tell him than to open my mouth and project and say the answers aloud. 

*

*

it’s maybe a stretch to say i became a writer because of this one teacher who told me to shut up in first grade. (from the list of musts above, the effects of the white evangelical christianity, purity culture, feminist backlash stew in which we were all submerged are evident.)

but also, i did find, very early, that– just as reading was a way out of all the restrictions– writing was a place one could be loud. a place to break rules. a place where i had control and could say whatever i wanted, however i wanted, could be whoever i wanted. a place to feel. a place where feeling was allowed.

a german i dated once a long while ago remarked on the contrast between how quiet and measured i appeared in conversation versus how confident in emails, on the page. he said it was like two different people.

good god, can you imagine all the effort that went into being that other person? i did it for years, and still i cannot.

it’s not like that anymore (or at least not nearly to the same degree), but the split that existed is not inconsequential. a reaction to perceived violence (for to silence someone constitutes a sort of violence), a survival tactic.

it got me through school. it likely, also, severely hindered the quality of my education and learning, but it got me through.

*

still, vividly i recall the physical sensations– the warming of my face, the shaking of my hands– when, as a 32-year-old doctoral student, i asked my first question of a speaker at a workshop.

well aware that it was one of the first times in my life i could remember voluntarily speaking in an educational context. (i do that every freaking day now, so lol #progress. but also NOTE: it would have been a complete impossibility even just 8 years ago.)

*

back at balmoral, i was lucky the following year to have a teacher who adored me and whom i adored in return. a teacher who was patient and supportive and kind.

and i was lucky in the years after to have had a high number of amazing teachers– particularly english teachers, without whom i would not be doing what i do.

they encouraged me to read everything and write everything and pursue whatever i wanted to do in the work i did for them.

they were teachers who loved teaching. my first grade teacher, alas, did not. and the long legacy of that has, i suspect, been pretty profound.

*

i’ve critiqued the posthumous discourse around jackie, the emphasis on her silence and establishment of her as a “silent goddess.”

that was a bunch of bullshit, and i’ve called it out. but there’s a teeny part of me that, in contemplating silent lunch now, wonders if, amongst all of the things that drew me into her story then, one of the details was that she was, ostensibly silent.

and yet still she had all that power, still she got out of musty old newport and did all that she did. 

i’m intrigued by how silence is wielded punitively by those in power.

jackie– whilst also having power– is however also in some ways kept in her place, culturally, by being portrayed as silent… her unruliness controlled as a result.

but silence can be a useful communicative tool for the silenced.

in my writing on kim kardashian, i return to her social media silence, the gaps, the things left out and unsaid. silence as trauma response, silence as artistic act, silence as language failure.

in my writing on melania trump, i repeatedly returned to the reality that what was characterized as her silence was actually a collective media failure to take seriously what she said.

it seems quite obvious that the silences i’m examining sit at the intersection of gender and race.

*

silent lunch likely also sat at the intersection of gender and race.

i went to elementary school in memphis, at a time when measures of desegregation were still actively in place. 

my family moved across town specifically so that i could attend this school rather than be bussed to another from our old home in midtown. this meant that i was conveniently located to the school whereas other students had to be bussed in.

when i tell my students there was busing at my elementary school, they’re always astounded. probably both because they didn’t realize such experiences were so near to us in time nor that i am so old as to have had them.

*

i’ve recently been astounded to discover that silent lunch is an educational experience i still share with my students.

because this is apparently a thing that’s still done?!

*

one of the words of the day last week was “lacuna.” as i told my students about it, we noted that it reminded us of “tuna” and i made a point of saying you’re probably never going to use this in normal conversation.

then, like five minutes later, i was talking to a student about gaps and realized oh, lacuna would be appropriate here.  

every word has its moment, i suppose. as does silence. 

there are these gaps, in our memories, our histories, our lives, and our paragraphs. sometimes they get filled in. sometimes they go missing. sometimes the brain scratches them out.

when i was first beginning to actually pay attention to how to do what i now know to be Academic Writing, the teachers i had then (was this grad school, maybe?) were always telling us to look for the gaps, fill in the gaps, find the thing no one has previously found.

if that sounds hard, it’s actually harder in practice, because there really is nothing new under the sun. what there are is different ways of looking, ways of seeing and being.

wherever you go, there you are. but also…

no one else will ever see like you, feel like you, or be you.

*

they won’t let me title my book an alarming life. it’s going to be finding jackie. which, marketing-wise, makes sense. people, perhaps, not hoping to be further alarmed by what they read. people, also, loving to find things. (damn, if we’d called it freeing jackie, it’d probably sell a bazillion copies, because people really, really love free.)

but the thing is: life is really fucking alarming, in the living. and that’s not a bad thing, just the truth.

i will never find jackie. i’ve been looking for years so i can say that with some authority. she is not there.

i will never find her just as i may never find all of myself nor fill in all the gaps that persist in my own life and experiences, much less hers.

*

i’ve gotten so bad at endings. i mean, i was never good at them, but it’s definitely gotten worse. to the extent that i’ve tended to just abstain.

but i’m intrigued by that early effort at editing in the diary entry.

i have no clue who fillup was.

i’m guessing his name was phillip, but i have no clue who he was.

did i ever tell him? odds seem high i did not.

did i love him? or was like really the more appropriate word?

did i go back and change the love to like to more accurately reflect the current situation or did i edit it because, even within the confines of my diary, i rejected my own feelings and struggled to be emotionally honest with childhood myself?

it’s weird, analyzing this now, in tripartite as an adult, as myself, and as a biographer.

because, honestly, the part of the quote that seems most true, the part of the quote that, reading it as a biographer, makes it seem most likely that the characterization of love was, in fact, accurate, isn’t the edit so much as that i said i would not tell him.

the edit is provocative and flashy.

that i said i wouldn’t tell him how i felt, that even as i expressed the feeling, i silenced myself– in life, if not writing– that is the biographically revealing thing.

that this dynamic was in place at the age of seven?

an alarming life indeed.

i inherited a zz plant in may 2020. like all plants, so it seems, this one is billed by everyone on the internet as “indestructible.” and, like so many of the “indestructible” plants i have encountered in my life, it is clearly my unconscious desire to take that as a dare and kill this thing.

***

i went down a rabbit hole the other day looking for viktor petrenko’s mid-90s exhibition routine choreographed to salt ‘n’ peppa’s “whatta man.”

this does not, apparently, exist on the internet. still. i have been looking for nigh on a decade and the internet has yet to provide.

i did however, through this, stumble across bechke and petrov’s silver medal winning performance in albertville. which i remember, for some reason AS THOUGH IT WERE YESTERDAY.

whycome?!? some combo of the tchaikovsky, excessive VHS re-watching, scott hamilton’s singular focus on bechke and almost total indifference to petrov, plus the moment in the middle, in the voiceover, where verne (? what was that dude’s name?) says “these are difficult times in the former Soviet Union” (troyer? verne troyer? NO. that was mini-me.) and waxes on about hard russian times while totally ignoring the ongoing gorgeous performance (LUNDQUIST. VERNE LUNDQUIST, ladies and gentlemen).

still, all these years later, when i hear tchaikovsky’s “pax de deux” from the nutcracker, i think of this performance and how sad it is that bechke and petrov came in second, and so they did not win the house.

***

according to the internet, zz plants hate sun. and they love sun.

the internet is confusing.

nothing is true and everything is possible!

why is no one making the argument that zz plants are in love/hate with the sun?

***

one of my students finished out their rant of the week (because the only thing i insist on in this assignment is that they take up ALL OF THE SPACE THEY HAVE BEEN GIVEN) with seven lines on the redness of strawberries.

as in, strawberries are red strawberries are red strawberries are red over and over and over for seven lines.

this afternoon [by which i mean an afternoon in september 2020, because that is when this was written], i went to the market and the strawberries were on sale, two for one.

tomorrow, i already know, in every class (because, 95% likely, this person is in the last class of the day), i’ll give a shout-out to whoever used strawberries to take up all of the space, and thank them for this small kindness.

[update: i did this all day and i still do not know. the strawberry person, they remain a mystery but i thank them nonetheless.]

***

THIS AIN’T DETECTIVE FICTION 101, i tell my students. (i throw in the “ain’t” there so they’ll think i’m relatable.)

we are not writing mysteries, i remind them. i am not jessica fletcher, i am not matlock. (i say that and, immediately, they know i am 4,000 years old. [they are too young to know that what i actually am is someone whose grandparents liked to watch a lot of TBS in the 90’s.])

BE SPECIFIC.

***

would i respond to this tchaikovsky piece were it not connected, in my brain, my heart, to that bechke and petrov routine?

i’m trying to remember back to when a friend and i went to see the nutcracker on horseback, back when i lived in chicago. i don’t remember weeping when this song played. i do not even recall it being played. (though maybe, maybe, i kind of do? the horseback rider looked like delta burke. i remember that. i remember feeling a kinship with her. is it because she rode to this song? or is it because she looked like delta burke and that is all it takes for me to feel a bond with another human being?)

the thing is, whenever i have heard it before, this song– because i spent a decade forgetting and being surprised whenever i was reminded where it’s from– and especially when i hear it now, i know that with that crescendo at 3:00, he is lifting her in the air for that one handed thing.

and at 3:12, she is landing that triple salcow (fuck you, scott hamilton for negging her by pointing out the “slight hesitation.” i would hesitate. you would hesitate. she landed it as it is meant to be landed and it is GLORIOUS, sir, sit down.)

and when she lands it her mouth flies open and SHE BEAMS.

***

i am always torn between tchaikovsky and beethoven (though but also, liszt and mozart and rachmaninoff are my true loves [fucking white dudes {please imagine a surly emoji here}]). tchaikovsky because i took/failed ballet and played the piano. beethoven because i’ve a hearing impairment and played the piano.

whenever i had ear surgery, when all the packing was still in it, my piano practicing was lit. because i fancied it felt different.

whether it actually did or if this was just a story i told myself, i’m not sure. but i’d sit there in my pajamas, ear full of packing and stitches and bandages, and feel like the notes felt different.

the piano of my childhood still sits at my parents’. i think, without saying it aloud, we have reached a consensus to let it die. [i am publishing this 18 months after it was written. the piano of my childhood has left us.]

the hammers and strings, they are tired.

aren’t we all.

***

the zz plant, allegedly, doesn’t need direct light.

but in lieu of it, it drops its leaves and grows upwards. it grows in search of the light. “your plant is reaching out, trying to find the sun,” says someone on the internet in response to a photograph that captures the state of my own zz plant.

your plant is reaching out, trying to find the sun.

aren’t we all.

***

this is my new habit. my new, pandemic-related verbal tic.

aren’t we all. 

my mother says something desperate about, i don’t know… truly, i have no example. but she makes some remark about something totally unrelated to the pandemic or our stuckness, and i say “don’t we all” or “aren’t we all.”

and, always, always she laughs. it is a reliable laugh. like whenever i use the word madcap. she laughs then too.

i do this more often now, though it’s lost its seriousness and is pure joke, because i love her laugh.

***

online teaching is exhausting because no one ever laughs. they are all muted.

no one is going to unmute to laugh. that would be weird. i know this. the random delayed cackling would be far worse than the silence. [i was wrong. may blessings forever rain upon the student who unmuted to laugh in february 2021.]

and i’m not going to make them turn on their cameras so i can see them laugh. that would be unfair, selfish. i know that too.

and so there are these days where i just throw laugh lines down the empty alley.

and i know they’re connecting, i know they’re out there and they know i’m on their side, because i am the receiver of their rants and their thoughts on strawberries. i know, all evidence to the contrary, this is not a one way street. they tell me strawberries are red and we have established such a relationship that i am then moved to go out and buy a carton and also to tell them that i did so and to thank them in all of my classes even if they don’t show up to whatever class they’re enrolled in, whoever they are.

that’s capitalism, but it’s also connection.

***

god, this sounds so stupid.

i feel so stupid writing it.

but, true story, it feels like it matters so fucking much.

***

the zz plant, from what i can gather, love/hates the sun. don’t we all

denied the light, it reaches out to find it.

i’m aware that, now my publisher has stolen the title of my blog for my book [this is 2022, hi, hello.], i’m working to make this a different space. trying to reclaim it. (HILARIOUS that their first title suggestion was reclaiming jackie. and, lo, we have come full circle.)

hence the new name is the rejected book title. rejected because the word “alarming,” it was off-putting, too negative. the word “alarming,” ya’ll, it will not sell.

ok, fine, but life is really fucking alarming, non? i am not wrong. gore vidal or gay talese or whoever said of jackie “that woman has had an alarming life” at a dinner party my former agent’s boss attended, sorry to that man, i don’t remember who you were, but you were not wrong.

***

[back to 2020…] they won the silver medal, bechke and petrov.

SILVER?! for this tchaikovsky masterpiece. but then, suraya bonaly is a rockstar and she didn’t even medal that year, so clearly the system is broken.

***

i love it when the women smile, when their blade hits the ice and their mouth blows open in this just irrepressible grin.

when i wrote that sentence, it was september 2020. i’d just finished teaching a unit on description. i’d just asked a student to make 100% sure there were no sensations of taste involved in their experience of the gathering at the supreme court for RBG’s wake, so i’m aware of the inadequacy of that image above, as well as the unnecessary repetition of the word “just.” (the thing about teaching is it really highlights all of the ways in which you, personally, fail.)

i wonder if they say anything, the figure skaters, the women. if there’s an exclamation of “YES!!!!” that we can’t hear because of the music over the PA.

like, if the music weren’t playing, would figure skating sound like tennis?

no, really, i want to know. would it?

have they been shouting and grunting and screaming all along and we’ve just not heard their cries because the music is pumped out too loud so as to emphasize the delicacy of their white femininity?

(for me, the men in figure skating– bless– have always been ancillary. it is, for me, a sport through which women find a way out. [you know me. or maybe you don’t! hi, hello, nice to meet you, love, fyi, i am always looking for the exit.])

***

my zz plant is approximately 3 feet tall. the original one. i’ve recently procured another and, god go with it, i will do my best.

they both live in the window now, under the light of the sequined curtains.

***

my students tell me they love my “background.”

which is my home.

the only room i have. after years of displacement and instability.

the room in which i eat and binge watch and read and teach and grade and do yoga and sleep.

the room i borrow from some faceless corporate agency for $1175 every month (+$35 for claude). [this is 2020.]

thank god i had the foresight to buy a convertible couch! [this is the couch on which the man would rape me on january 16, 2021, three days before the start of the spring semester.]

in their rants they write: i love your background. [i moved in march. my background is different but it is still my life and, still, they it.]

in my replies, i tell them to watch out for my musical chairs-ing of the plants and books. because i want them to be there, to be present, to be entertained. and in this weird world we live in i somehow imagine my rotating new plants onstage will be the thing that brings them in at 9:40 am.

but i so want them to be clear on the fact that i am 100% here for them, that we are all of us here, that this is real. it really, really, is. i assure you, it really is real.

i cannot stress that enough.

this is real. this is really happening.

when we were in a classroom, it was intense.

i said this in april 2020. already, ALREADY, before all of this, it felt like life and death.

now.

NOW.

people.

PEOPLE.

dear people.

before, way way back in the way back of last april, we teachers were the band on titanic.

there were memes. maybe you saw them. (interjection from 2022: a friend was in town a few weeks ago and we laid up in the bed together, in our pajamas, drinking champagne, and watching titanic on the laptop balanced on a pillow between us. [no doubt exactly how james cameron imagined the ideal viewing experience.] and i hesitate to say i was triggered. but also this meme loomed large.) 

but now.

NOW.

NOW?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

NOW!!?!??!?!?!?!?!~!?!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!!!??!?

[by which i mean…

THEN.

THEN?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

THEN!!?!??!?!?!?!?!~!?!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!!!??!?]

now [/then, we are occupying two moments in time simultaneously within these words {cool, yeah?}], i don’t want to be an alarmist and i do not speak for everyone but speaking only for myself, now, it feels like we are those people, those people that, just looking at them and based on how limited their lines are, you already know they are doomed. those people hanging onto the edge with their fingertips, knuckles gone white, gripping the side of the boat as it slides down into the atlantic.

[lol. this was fall 2020. now it’s just normal, now it’s just how teaching is. i have made my peace with abandoning my life-long quest to stop biting my nails.]

think of me as the man in whose eyes rose dewitt bukater looked before he let go.

you remember that guy? we all of us who saw that movie remember that guy. the one who let go and bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced down the deck as he fell into the freezing waters to die.

hi.

it me.

A FEAT OF COMPUTER-GENERATED IMAGERY, the critics called it.

hey, me again, along with all of my comrades.

we are not a pretty picture so you may be tempted to look away but DO NOT DO IT. i command you. listen to the teacher: LOOK AT US.

as jackie’s mom reportedly always told her and her sister during arguments, according to that one book by jerry oppenheimer, EYES ON ME!!!!!!

we come to you every tuesday/thursday and/or every monday/wednesday/friday and/or– god bless the k-12s!!!!– every single fucking weekday as a feat of computer-generated imagery but we are here, we are real, we also are in our homes pasting on our smiles, throwing laughs down the alley.

we are here. this is us.

c’mon, you loved that show, right? lookit!!

THIS IS US.

***

they’re sitting by the air conditioner, the zz plants. IS THE AIR CONDITIONER KILLING THEM? are they too cold??! i do not know.

i was too hot, so this is where we are now.

it’s good to sit back and assess…

tomorrow, i will welcome 65 people into my bedroom and we will do i do not yet know what for 80 minutes.

elena bechke is 54 and a figure skating coach in north carolina. in 1992, she won the silver medal in the XVI olympic winter games.

verne lundquist lives!

so does scott hamilton!

my zz plants are… too soon to tell. [true story: it was an enormous, very old jade plant, and it died in spring 2021.]

but, still, they set down their leaves and, tired (aren’t we all), still, they reach for the light.

this’ll be about jackie having died on this day twenty-eight years ago today. 

wait for it.

***

we’re at a rooftop bar in athens, a former student and i, as the sun sets. we’re talking about writing and i say something like: we have to stay open, because the feeling is what makes the writing. or something less eloquent, along those lines.

i don’t want to misquote myself here, make myself sound more articulate than i am in the lived experience of me. (the lived experience of me is something altogether else.) 

and then i say something about time and writing, some incredibly obvious point about how one of the most extraordinary things about writing is that you never know where it will go, who will find it, where they will take it from there. 

because writing is lonely. and yet also something that can be done in community and something that, with reading, becomes a conversation. 

this feels so stupid to even attempt to put into words then and here because it feels quite obvious. and yet also mad important.

***

i’m in paris, now, as i write this. sitting in front of a picture window looking out on a courtyard and the famous rooftops and a blue, blue sky dashed with clouds like tattered kleenex.

it’s about feeling, is the thing. feeling and beauty and life and time. 

i don’t know what the “it” is there. 

when revising my own writing, one of my tricks is to always attempt to bring clarity to the pronouns, but i’mma let that one slide. because it’s summer. and summer seems to me, more than the others, a season of ambiguity. 

***

this really is my introduction to writing about the 28th anniversary of the death of my fairy godmother jackie onassis. lol.

which, well, how has it already been eight years since i sat in the back of a megabus on my way to NYC writing this??! 

time, ya’ll. time. 

***

i read as younger than i am. maybe solely because i dress fun and, at the age of 25, my mother told me to start using eye cream. and perhaps also because i have spent the entire last year reading a series of books intended for 12 year olds. 

i read as younger than i am whilst also having always been about 55. 

like, the person who wrote these words: 

that person was 12. TWELVE!!! 

what twelve-year-old wears this sweatsuit and can’t stop thinking about richard nixon?!?! jackie, maybe, yes. but dick nixon? no.

***

i’ve spent nearly thirty years thinking about this woman’s life and twenty years writing about it. and i’ve written before (on this very day!) about how the thing about writing about someone else’s life, especially over such an extended period, is that the writing of that life becomes the living of yours. 

i do not expect that this will ever be quite the same in whatever i write moving forward. but then, i could be wrong. 

what have the last six years of writing about kim kardashian/lost time been if not, in some ways, an attempt to survive in my own brain?

***

on that athenian rooftop, i described writing as my safe place. which cannot be true, because writing is the most dangerous place i routinely go. 

writing is a dark alley paved in broken glass, walked in bare feet. 

but as a girl in school, i was told i shouldn’t ask so many questions. i was told it was more important that the boys should learn. 

a dark alley paved in broken glass, walked in bare feet’s better than total silence, no?

***

i’ve thought and written plenty about why it may be that the story of jackie onassis, upon her death, slid into my brain and life and heart. but i’d not really thought much about why i write. 

(lol. lies! young oline, age 10: “I’ve never been able to understand why I write but I have always been able to guide myself into the mysterious depths of my stories and I can usually write when handed a pen.”) 

i knew that, in her story, there was an emphasis on silence and my interest in her had to do with a woman being so very loved. the lesson being: shut your mouth and you’ll be loved. 

a message that aligned neatly with my experience in church and at school. 

a friend asks how i started writing and i tell him that, as a kid, it was the place i could be loud. i could be free. (i’ve said this before.)

not coincidentally, i have written a whole book about a traumatized, depressive white woman from a restrictive society– a society where there were limited options for what and who and how you could be– trying to live a full life, trying to free herself from what she called “your miserable self that you were trying to escape all your life.”

***

i do not write fiction. that is not my gift. 

i take real stuff, true stuff, i borrow, thieve. i am a prize of unoriginality. 

there’s maybe a safety that comes from that. and also a terror. 

i assure you, you have not felt what it is to be alive until you have received a pile of photocopies from the LBJ library with an identical page paper-clipped to each archival piece informing you that CAROLINE KENNEDY WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND SHE WILL SUE. (<- paraphrasing, but truly, that is the vibe.)

***

i was 12. like that is hilariously tiny, age-wise. and yet all of the feelings were punching through me with nowhere to go, and she helped. her story helped and i seized it. to no evident end. 

certainly, where we have ended– well, not so much as ended, as arrived– this was never imagined. this was wholly inconceivable. 

though, looking back, there were maybe always little glimpses of the freedom available through her….

looking back, maybe we always see glimpses that were only feelings at the time………… 

***

in that taco bell, my parents did not laugh when i informed them i wanted to start collecting jackie magazines. 

in grad school, when somehow it came up that i did so, croftie said, breathily, excitedly, ooooooh, that’s so cool. 

i like to think these moments prepared me for the era of the rolled eyes. 

***

look for the gaps! they told us (i think) in grad school. 

but what is the future if not a big old gaping hole? we do not know where we’re going, we pretend we know how we’ll get there, we think we know what we want. 

if writing about lives and living mine has taught me anything, pretty much the only thing i have been correct about in my own life is that i could not stop thinking about jackie onassis. 

still can’t. 

everything else, yeah, no.

never in a million years would i imagine i would wind up where i am, and yet also it kind of is the outcome that makes the most sense. 

this is what i love about writing lives– how, in the looking back, they appear so logical, the pattern so evident, like we only missed it because we were young and stupid and couldn’t clearly see. 

if it seems like an accident, a collage of senselessness, you weren’t looking hard enough goes a lyric from one of my favorite songs. 

but also, i reject that. 

it’s not that we all have cloudy eyes. life isn’t lived like that. 

life is improv. 

yeah, we can look back and discern the patterns, but we move forward only with faith, not accuracy, and certainly not surety.

we none of us actually know what will happen next. 

***

biography with feeling. that is how i describe this book.

because my critique of biography is that the genre so often drains out all of the emotion and feeling that drive us in living.

but also because i don’t know where you’re going to go when you read it, i don’t know what you’re bringing to it or what you’ll find here, but you are gonna feel some things, of that i am certain.  

and that isn’t stupid; it is not a waste of time. it’s power.

***

you’ve basically written 94,000 words on the value of frivolous things, my editor tells me. 

and i thank god for the privilege of having the time and space to do that. 

and for being positioned strongly enough to have worked my way through the thicket of arguments against ever doing such a thing.

using one’s only life to do such a thing. 

***

when you write about lives, you think a lot about how writing about lives is what you’re using your one life to do. at least i do.

really, there was nothing else i could have done though. this was never a choice. 

this is not a scenario in which i am aware of having agency.

she was there. her story was there. it was right there, in front of me, for the taking.

i took. but the sensation is more one of having been pulled.

how much choice is there in that equation?

or is this just one of those things that was meant to be?

is this how fate works? or god? 

i don’t know. this does not make sense to me. it is what it is. it is what it’s always been. c’est la vie.

***

the memory i’ve kept coming back to over the last few months is when i left the yacht in chatham.

i’d walked there, up a ridiculous vertical incline in driving rain, peed at the m&s next to dickens world, and then wandered the boat under cloud cover for three hours.

but when i walked back to the train, the sun had come out and the skies were blue, the air brisk.

and i felt cleaved open with joy. 

i prayed as i walked, i was so grateful to be where i was. i was so grateful for the story i knew i was in the middle of. 

when i try to remember the last time i felt joy, that is the moment that pops to mind. 

undoubtedly, it was not the last. it was so terribly long ago. surely, there must’ve been others. but look at all the convoluted verbs there. there must have been. nothing is immediately at hand, at the moment. everything arrives at a remove. 

i hunger for closeness. i long for immediacy. and yet all of my sentences mediate themselves. the distance is there, in the expression of the feeling, in all of the words I supply to separate the subject from the object, all of the space i impose.   

but that’s the one that sticks out, that moment post-yacht and intra-blue sky, entangled as it was in jackie and writing and hope and living and adventure. 

***

i need to make clear that this entire post has been informed by and infused with tremendous grief amid the ongoing american disaster. 

on the athenian rooftop, just a few days after the leak of the SCOTUS draft and a week before we reached a milestone of 1 million people in america having died from covid, the dear former student asked questions about america, and i, more than once, told her: it is a death cult. 

that sounds glib. i mean it entirely.

it is the only framework i have for understanding the white nationalist theocracy that was on the move, mobilizing, long before i was that little girl in church, watching men telling me what i could and could not do with my body and my life as they organized pre-teens making signs for the march for life.

i remember holding the marker in my hand and the fear that someone around me would notice that i was not actually writing on the poster. 

i may have, ultimately, written on the poster. 

i don’t know. what i remember is holding the marker and not wanting to do what was being asked of me. what i remember is the wrongness of what was being asked of me. 

what i remember is, years later, the terror of being twenty, of being in college, of being in the middle of three years of what i did not then have the language to identify as sexual abuse and intimate partner violence, and of not bleeding for four months.

i wasn’t pregnant, just starving. but the extraordinary desperation i felt as a person who lived in mississippi and had been denied knowledge of their body has never left me. the memory of sitting at the desktop computer i was assigned to for my internship at the university news bureau, yahoo-ing how to attain abortifacient teas in the mail.

***

how to sit with the knowledge that– without baby formula, without accessible, legal, safe healthcare in the past– approximately 75% of the people i love might now be dead? 

***

she was intensely interesting, she carried a lot of weather. i saw this quote about carolyn bessette a few months ago and i thought, good for her.

and i think maybe also this was part of jackie’s appeal. her biographers frequently accused her of being moody, mercurial.

how wretched! to be judged by history for having emotions, for having felt. 

how cruel and dismissive we are towards feeling.

i was often called volatile. not exactly what i want to be remembered for but, i remember thinking, perhaps better than being forgotten?

***

in living, we do not know what will happen next. everything we ever do is informed by our ignorance and the decisions we make based upon it.

and this sounds so stupid and i’ve said it at least nine times on this blog at least, but seriously, i think we should marvel: how bold, the effort in going on. how wild, the ways in which we plunge forward, into all manner of things, hearts in various states of damage and disrepair, as the world crumbles and burns and melts around us.

***

in paris, i received multiple texts from friends asking if i was having the time of my life.

and it was just like, no. i’m living. and that’s enough.

***

this is about jackie, so let me bring it back.

obviously, i’m still thinking about her. obviously, i have not stopped.

i lean a lot on that john berger quote about the quaking mouse, so let’s change it up. let’s pretend this was a version of church– church being a site of love and grief and lies and hurt and glory– and let jackie’s cousin little edie bless us all on our way out: 

but you see in dealing with me, the relatives didn’t know that they were dealing with a staunch character. and i tell you, if there’s anything worse than a staunch woman… S-T-A-U-N-C-H. there’s nothing worse, i’m telling you… they don’t weaken. no matter what… but they didn’t know that. well, how were they to know?

(STAUNCH)

that’s the title of rose kennedy’s 1974 memoir.

at this point my biggest memory of times to remember is of the time i spent in the research room at the jfk library powering through the cassette tapes of rose kennedy’s recorded interviews with someone whose name i cannot remember.

someone who may or may not have been her ghost writer?

someone who definitely did not know to pause their question asking when planes flew overhead.

i learned that day that, wherever she was (hyannis, i assume, but also maybe an airbase???), there was a wild amount of air traffic. i also learned that day that, as an interviewer, you should always, always pause your question asking when planes fly overhead.

for if you do not, future people with cursed ears will curse your name. true facts.

i recently bought a mass market edition of this memoir. because i’ve not read it in ages and because i love me a mass market paperback.

(a goal i am manifesting: to one day be read in mass market paperback form.)

lookit:

the thing i love about this cover is that the designer was so clearly like, ok, rose, i’mma let you triumph in your lilac eye shadow…

AND ALSO like FUCK THOSE KENNEDY MEN.

i mean…

bless him, bobby left his sunglasses at home.

but…………..

this just blatant disrespect of jfk evident in that mitch mcconnell neck. yo, I AM HERE FOR THAT.

for the record, i am immune to his charms. cannot tell you why she married him. other than the fact that we are so many of us so often attracted to people who are not available to us, people who are not capable of loving us as we deserve.

(you’re not going to believe me, but this is going to be a post about watergate. at least i think it is. i don’t even know how we’re going to get there, but i think we are. wait for it…….)

i’ve entitled this post “times to remember” and i do not actually know when i went to what is called the jfk birthplace, but which would more appropriately be entitled ROSE KENNEDY’S HOME.

it would make sense for it to have been when i was doing my phd but actually i think it was before that, when i was going out to newport somewhat regularly (by which i’m pretty sure i just mean twice) to talk to jackie’s brother.

what i remember is that:

(1) i told them i was writing about jackie and it was WILDLY awkward how the docent kept turning to me during the tour and asking for my insight into family dynamics. i’d only just barely, timidly begun identifying as a writer. i’d never said i was an expert.

(2) i was struck by the presence of rose, the dominance of rose. as i just said: seriously, truly, for real– it should be called THE ROSE KENNEDY HOUSE, because she was our guide. the tour was about her life there. literally, her voice guided us through. mayhaps it’s of interest because jfk was born there, but it was interesting to me because it was a space dominated by a woman. rose got to have her say.

how much more interesting might history look if women got to have their say?

(which is by no means a promise that they wouldn’t very often say deeply shitty things, fyi.)

how much more might we know about what actually happened if women were free to speak?

i’m currently actively not writing an article i’m supposed to be writing, which will- if i ever write it- include jackie’s comment that “american history is for men.”

this was said somewhere in 1960, so i don’t think she was being wildly radical or even meant the thing i get from that quote when i read it.

her 1960 self may well have meant it as a compliment. i come to it as a condemnation.

i grew up in a religious tradition in which women could not preach. women could speak onstage only in an interview format, only if they were accompanied by a male interviewer.

this sounds like the 19th century. it was the 90s. it was 2008.

more and more, i think this is at least part of why i became a writer. part of why i wrote about history.

because i wanted my own life to matter. i wanted to be positioned within some sort of history.

i wanted to speak. and i spent a tremendous amount of time in spaces where that was not allowed, it was wrong, it was discouraged.

i was too loud at school and too doubtful at church. i was all wrong.

many years ago, during a pizza and dr. quinn marathon, i told a friend that i used biography medicinally. used the stability of lived lives in order to create my own.

because i did nothing correct by the standards of the religion i grew up in. i did not marry. i did not have kids. i did not pray hard enough nor often enough. i was never enough. i was always anxious.

but there was in biography a certainty unavailable in lived experience.

as a young person, this was comforting. as an adult, it is my biggest critique of the genre.

it is, ultimately, i believe, the genre’s greatest failure.

because none of us live our lives knowing anything for certain. to portray the events of a life as inevitable is to impose upon the life a structure that was not available to the person living it.

this seems to me a cruelty, an unfairness. in big part maybe also because it means the effects and disruptions of trauma are erased.

the story i want is the one that is unsettled. the story that lacks a conclusion. the story full of anxiety and fear and uncertainty and hope and beauty and questions.

for that is life, and that is the space within life that art can occupy.

you may not believe it, but this really is going to be about how friday was the 50th anniversary of watergate. maybe…

how october is the 55th anniversary of jackie’s marriage to onassis.

how november is the 60th anniversary of jfk’s murder.

the striking things about the times we remember is that so many of them are so traumatic.

when i was 13, i wrote an obituary of rose kennedy.

what i remember about watching rose kennedy’s funeral on c-span is the discovery of the hymn “all creatures of our god and king,” which i instantly loved.

because it wasn’t a praise chorus and it wasn’t a hymn we ever sang in the evangelical churches i was in.

it was the alleluias. they had me at the alleluias.

they had me hardcore. to this day, i am not free.

so here’s the thing about my book. the thing i am anticipating…

it feels very 2022.

it was finished in december 2015, i swear to god. it has not changed fundamentally since then at all. but it is nonetheless eerily 2022.

everyone, i suspect, will be like “how did writing during the trump presidency help you do this book?” and i will be like IT HAPPENED BEFORE. I SAW ALL OF THIS BEFORE!!!!!!! and no one will believe me.

i do not live my life expecting to believed.

this is the legacy of abuse and trauma and all of the fun times therein. always i am ready for a fight, always i am on the defense.

i said this when i wrote about challenger (maybe in the part 2 i’ve not yet published), but it still stands. god bless all the people who got through this shit without frameworks. god bless all ya’ll who weathered your grief and your PTSD before there was a diagnosis.

i couldn’t have.

i could not have.

this really is about watergate, in some sort of way…

we do not know where we’re going, in life. we do not know what will happen next.

this is the most obvious thing in the world and yet i have said it in at least twenty different ways on this blog in the last five years. because it is true. and because, whilst it is an integral fact of the experience of being alive, it is also a fact we’re often wont to gloss.

i’m an almost ridiculously sparkly person, and i am very often numb, my expressions of feeling siphon through words and objects and my emotionally incontinent face. but still, I REFUSE TO GLOSS.

i want to capture it all, even the anxiety and the uncertainty, the not knowing we all of us live with, always.

the uncertainty into which, with great valor, we constantly fling our selves and our hearts, filled with whatever hope we can muster.

what i remember of richard nixon’s funeral is how embarrassed all the other presidents looked. to even be there.

it was clearly an event undertaken under some historical duress.

i’ve said it before and i’m only moderately ashamed to say it again.

i’ve a mortifying soft spot for richard nixon.

i’m not proud of it. and maybe it comes from my decades of watching the brady bunch, in which there are an absurd number of references to benedict arnold.

as a 13-year-old, writing in the summer of 1994 after the deaths of nixon and jackie, i wrote in my journal that i couldn’t image anything worse than being remembered as a traitor. and that i’d “always had sympathy for benedict arnold in that respect.”

honestly, i do not know what even the fuck that means.

i don’t think rose kennedy was a particularly… i’m not sure what the word is.

maybe she was in a tight spot. maybe she didn’t have a lot of love in her life. maybe she didn’t really want to have all those kids.

maybe she would’ve preferred a husband who was faithful to her.

maybe her expectations of what she deserved were pretty low.

most probably she could’ve been a politician herself had she been born 20 years later, in a different culture, a different america, a different world.

i do not know.

i’m not so much interested in the fact that she had all those kids. actually, her kids interest me not at all. what interests me most, what’s popped out at me more and more as i work through the process of correcting my citations for the book and repeatedly encounter references for her diaries and notes and tapes, is that she traveled. she was a woman, and yet she saw the world.

that’s what drew me to jackie as well, but jackie died at 64. rose lived to 104, which makes her something of a special case.

at the age of 83, when women are usually written off and done for, she went to see her daughter-in-law in athens, she went to ethiopia, she went all sorts of places.

this is what i look for in stories of women, even rich, privileged, white women– the ways in which they broke the mold, the ways in which they rebelled, however small, the ways in which they pried open possibilities, hopes, ways of being free. ways made especially provocative by their gender, by how easy it would’ve been to just not go.

and not free in the sense of just being obedient to god, but free in the sense of living wide open to experience and pleasure and enjoying the one life you’ve got.

we tell stories in order to live. we tell stories in order to learn how to live. we tell stories because stories, even the seemingly conventional, extremely privileged ones, can still chart a map, open a door, and tilt the world.

i’m being grandiose and maybe entirely too generous towards the people who’ve appeared here, but the ultimate point is this: i want a world where american history is no longer for men.

ps. when i was living in the UK, whenever i came back to the US, i was stunned by how many flags there were. by the casualness, the banalness of the nationalism. i don’t know what work the flags are doing here, but there you go.

pps. oh yeah. they were there all along…