Romance and loss

I have been listening to Small Change a lot lately. It’s populated with beaten-down, world-weary souls, longing for small things: the end of the work shift, or a job at the filling station and a shot at the waitress in the diner. This is a life I have never known, and, I suspect, Tom Waits has never known (he was 24 when he wrote these songs and, by all accounts, did not have a particularly hard childhood—another testament to his genius).

I find the world he creates in this album extremely romantic. Why? Is it the simplicity of these lives? They just want a job that will pay the bills and time to spend with their baby. That’s the best they can hope for, and it’s a pretty reachable goal, unlike my own. They don’t chase after the trappings of the bourgeoisie—fancy clothes, gourmet food, the latest appliances—like I do. And they’re free. They’re on the road, or they have no ties to hold them to any one place, as I do.

I was talking to one of my friends about this, and she said, “But that’s kind of sad, isn’t it? If you’re free to go anywhere, that means you have no one who loves you back home.” I had to agree with her; it is sad. But I think that sadness is essential to romantic ideals. Think about the archetypes we idolize: the cowboy, the gumshoe, the vigilante; they’re all lonely; they all have demons. What’s so romantic about that? Why is Romeo and Juliet the quintessential romance, and not Much Ado About Nothing? It’s loss, not gain, that defines romance. We feel for those who have less than we do, and we can see their lives as perhaps more reachable than the lives of the rich and famous. We might wish we were rich and could live happily ever after, but it’s those who die young that we raise to sainthood. Do we really wish that for ourselves? Are we all, on some level, flagellants?

My mother the madam

You might have heard about this mother in the UK who is pleading for women to have sex with her son. Her son is 21, a virgin, and oh, he has Down syndrome.

That's the pivotal point, really. Take that out of the equation, and it's just an odd story. With it, the story raises all sorts of questions.

My gut response is that this mother's actions are really demeaning for disabled people (and virgins) everywhere. When I dig a little deeper, I see that it's really more troubling than that.

The mother spouts a lot of ostensibly disabled-sensitive talk. She questions society's response to People of Difference, as I like to call us. "Why should these people be kept separate and pigeon-holed when they have the same emotions, desires and feelings as so-called normal people?" she asks, quite reasonably.

But then she ruins it with this: "If he doesn't get a girlfriend, I will feel really bad, because I have sold him this thing that he is like everybody else. That's why I'm working overtime to get this sorted for him." Does her behavior make him "like everybody else"? Does "everybody else" have mothers arranging sexual partners for them.

In fact, under the guise of wanting her son to be "normal," this mother is treating him like a freak.

She's also instilling in her son the same shallow, aesthetically based societal values she supposedly rejects:

1. in order to have any value, you must experience what everyone else does (e.g. having sex, fathering children);

2. implicitly, women are interchangeable and have value only as sex partners, not unique individuals with whom to have a relationship;

3. perhaps most disturbing, as she says she would prefer that whatever girlfriend he gets not have Down syndrome, that "normal" people have a higher commodity value than disabled people and should be sought over others.

Beyond the scope of true disability, this mother seems to have a problem with any sort of freak, i.e., anyone who deviates from the "norm," and she seems to have a very narrow idea of what "normal" is. Apparently to her, if you're not having sex, you're a loser. If you're not a parent, you're a loser. If you're not like everybody else, you're a loser. It's sad, really. And it's particularly sad that she, and many others no doubt, believe that she is truly sympathetic to people with disabilities, when in fact, she is the worst kind of bigot.

The authors who have influenced me

Sylvia Plath


Katherine Mansfield


Raymond Carver


Samuel Beckett


Djuna Barnes

Do things happen for a reason?

There have been times in my life—those times when I feel happy and content—when I have thought that everything has worked out for the best. I may have even thought things had happened for a reason. I suppose it’s comforting, in a way, to think that the direction of your life is out of your hands. We all like the idea of free choice, but what if we screw things up? What if we make the wrong choice and make ourselves miserable? It’s comforting at those moments to believe that there’s a reason for that misery, that it’s all leading somewhere.

But what if it’s not? What if we’ve just made a stupid choice and that’s … it? Then what do we do?

We make a purpose. We say, “I can learn from this,” or “This will make me stronger,” and it often does. It’s important for our sanity to be able to this. We can create great things from our misery, but we can’t say that there’s any purpose to it. There’s no purpose to anything. Life is only one act of coping after another.