My Secret Weapon for Living
I carry one everywhere I go
News
It’s less than a week before DUST is released. If you haven’t preordered yet, please consider doing so, especially from an independent bookstore. Preordering makes a difference because it tells publishers there’s strong demand for a title, and pre-ordering also puts the book in the running for bestseller lists.
If you’re in the Cleveland, OH area, you can buy the book early and get it signed by me in person. This Friday 11/29 from 5-6:30pm EST, I’ll be signing at Loganberry Books (13015 Larchmere Blvd, Cleveland) as part of the Larchmere Holiday Stroll.
There will be hot mulled cider and bottomless cookies (!). I have some free swag to give away, and a related art project I’m scrambling to finish in time… Hope to see you there!
My Secret Weapon for Living
In Denver, we went to the bar every Friday: we, meaning the lover I lived with and mostly the only other people I knew in a city which was not mine. That was the tradition, and I liked it. There was companionship and laughter, energy and light. And of course, yummy pain-numbing alcohol.
I preferred the big, dark beers, the kind of which you can only really have one. Sometimes I’d have two.
New place, new time, new traditions. I’ve started a different pattern on Ohio Fridays. The beers in my part of town aren’t very good. But more than that—much more—I am good. I am good without them.
Now on Fridays, unless the weather is so terrible I can’t pull my boots out of the mud, I walk in the woods alone.
I went for a hike the day after the election and glared and felt suspicious of everyone I saw. Then I felt nervous about glaring.
I do a lot of things alone these days, and I’m okay with that. This is the time we live in. I live in. I live alone with my teen kid. I work by myself. I go to movies, coffeeshops, art galleries, farmers’ markets, museums, and music, and it’s usually just me. But I also go to remote places alone: unpopular hiking spots, overgrown trails. I go when it’s cold and gray because I like getting outside in winter, and at odd times because I prefer only running into squirrels.
Sometimes, though, I meet more than squirrels.
We’ve been thrust into a time few people would probably choose to experience, if they could pick their timeline: a time when a lot of people are being targeted and feel and are vulnerable simply because of who they are. Sometimes I blend in, but sometimes I can’t, even if I tried. People can sense difference in you, smell it like blood.
I went for a hike the day after the election and glared and felt suspicious of everyone I saw. Then I felt nervous about glaring. What if someone physically lashed out because of it? I was wearing my Not Today, Patriarchy shirt. (But it was today. It was yesterday. It was every day now. Still.)
But that day in the woods, and every day for years, I’ve been carrying a weapon. It’s one you can take into coffeeshops, libraries, airports. You can take it everywhere you go and should.
It’s a heavy, insulated water bottle.
I use the kind with a lid that has a handle. I swing it by the handle when I walk. I keep it full. And if I’m passing someone I’m a little nervous about, someone my gut is telling me to avoid but I can’t avoid, I swing it obviously on the side facing them.
A big, 64 ounce water bottle can weigh 4 lbs or more when full. That’s not nothing. And it’s metal. Even smaller ones, like the 32 ounce I carry, are heavy. Getting hit by one of those… well, that would hurt.
Get yourself one of those. Don’t stop going outside, or being yourself if you can, when you can. Anything can be a weapon if you wield it right. You know that, as an artist.
From one woman who walks alone to another. As Alan Watts said, in his speech The Woman Who Walks Alone, "she carries with her the wisdom, that everything she needs is already in her."
Walk on sister, walk on.