Monday, May 12, 2008
Follow these four simple rules, and I promise, the hopelessness and gloom you've been feeling for the past week will start to subside.
Sep 9, 2004 | I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon -- because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist. But last Friday, with news of the massacre of children in Russia, Bill Clinton's sudden hospitalization, and the Time Magazine poll that showed Bush pulling ahead by 10, I sank into such stunned hopelessness that I honestly didn't think anyone could write or say anything that could help me get my chops and pride and sense of humor back.
No wonder a lot of us feel paranoid and hypochondriacal -- it feels more and more as though the Dark Side is truly rising. Did it cross anyone else's mind that Karl Rove was somehow involved in Clinton's heart disease? No? Well, never mind ... The only things that cheered me up at all last week were the Bush twins and Zell Miller at the Republican National Convention.
On top of it all, it was hotter than fucking hell, as Sam put it. I hate the summer. To plagiarize myself, from these very pages: It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long. Spring is sweet, the baby season; but summer is the teenage season -- too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they were cracked up to be.
So I lay down to practice my Prone Yoga, and I remembered that people already had said things that helped: Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward freedom. Molly Ivins said during the reign of George Herbert Walker Sushi Barfing Bush, that freedom fighters don't always win, but they're always right. I started to feel better. And this is when I came up with the Dark Side Rising Beauty, Diet and Exercise Program, which I follow strictly now.
There are four rules of the DSRBD&E. First, moisturize, moisturize, moisturize. Put lotion on your legs and drink a lot of water. We Democrats are still -- and perhaps even more deeply -- in the desert, and I hate the desert. It is way too hot, there are snakes, the light is implacable, and when there is actually some shadow or shade, it contains too many surprises -- and I'm not talking Easter eggs. So you need living water -- tap, bottled, spritzed-on-the skin -- and you need unguents, unscented unguents, as there are many aroma-sensitive people in our lives, and they are all liberals, and we don't want to lose their votes.
If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young. In it, you can hear better than you've ever heard before -- labored crow wings, your stomach gurgling. Maybe no one will make you get out of the car -- which would be my preference -- but if they do, boy are you going to be paying better attention than you have in awhile.
These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
Everything in the desert is intentional: Underneath your feet is something that definitely struggled to be there. A lot of it is too voodoo-ey for a nervous type like me -- the skulls and skeletons and snakes. But there are also columbine and fern, hawks and kestrel. The water is so hidden and surprising that when it finally rains, all the creatures come out, and it is like the Rapture.
Get Salon in your mailbox!