i saw a picture of myself that made me think. it was the most recent photo i published of myself on instagram and facebook. it was a selfie with guest stars, my housemate ted ache a select handful of his family–mother and father, niece, half the head of a nephew, whose birthday was the cause of the paddling expedition. and me, only half of my head in the shot.
i took it in the midst of paddle boating on the lake at echo park. here’s what i was showing the world of myself this holiday season: me in a button-up shirt looking quite dapper, surrounded by family, surrounded by water, in the very center of the park that i have perhaps loved more than anything else this season.
i am great with family. like pregnant with them. i wonder hadn’t i wanted to escape this, the family thing? instead i’ve doubled down, having not only my own in good standing but also that of ted’s family, who seems to get on tolerably well with me, even in accepting my limited idiosyncrasies.
it is a wonderful thing to be accepted into someone else’s family and to perform a useful role in the schematics of their relations while also doing dishes. i will repeat that doing dishes is a reliable way into people’s hearts.
in terms of my own birth family, who i visited the weekend before christmas, and with whom i produced a reasonable facsimile of a traditional family christmas (exceptional only because it took place a few days before actual christmas)–doubling down, as i said, even having had ample foreknowledge of the immersion of aches upon my return to los angeles–it’s been a pretty scary year, 2013, in part because of a family curse whose existence was revealed to me by my mother.
the curse of the eleventh year began in january of 1980, two days before my birthday party. my grandpa aldo died that day. eleven years later in late december 1991 my grandmother, his wife, died. when mother’s brother died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2002, the eleven year spacing of the deaths was noted by my mom, who had now lost every member of her childhood nuclear family. she worried that someone was due to die in 2013, and she figured it would be her,
though i would argue i’m statistically at a far greater risk of death being a bicycle rider. anyway, i heard about this superstition this past summer and have had it in the back of my head ever since. in many ways 2013 seems like a cursed year and will be remembered that way. but if we escape it with our lives we may remember that we were lucky to do so.
the other day in fresno i realized the year was almost over and that we all gave every sign of surviving it. i almost started to gloat out loud to my mother but then thought better of it, remembering that my grandma rose died on december 29th, so this curse was really willing to go down to the wire.
ON MAYBE BEING A POET
i wonder, separately, whether i’d be better off just identifying myself as a poet and saying that everything i write is poetree pure and simple. even what looks like prose on the page is, coming from me, hereby poetry. poetry spaced like prose. doesn’t it make more sense to identify as poet, as potentially ridiculous as that might sound to people and as incredulous as some of them will be on hearing it? does it not sum me up more succinctly and hint at my more spiritual leanings?
i have long rejected labels and do empathize with all who would suspect self-labeling, but then i think it is important to name things and if i’m going to have a label because the people who label will label, might i not as well label myself and do so as accurately as possible? is it not better to control my own packaging? and does that sound miserably capitalistic?
i know a poem by the paragraph breaks.
i suppose i myself have been incredulous of the term, felt it an honorific only earned, something holistic, beyond the mere publication of poems, something about a way of being. and somehow spiritual. and i just hadn’t earned it yet, i always felt.
but now that i am old i feel differently by virtue of having survived as myself i feel called now to name myself and do so rightly. but is “poet” really the thing i am?
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