A 13-Year-Old Repost
"A Tale of Tails, Chained"
I deactivated my Instagram this past weekend because I’ve had enough, at least for right now. My friends’ beautiful writing or art or crafting or even comedy just isn’t enough to overcome the constant barrage of ads and talking talking talking. Even though I didn’t do a lot of it, the scrolling through everything — whether beautiful or ugly — has really made a dent in my reading, in my daily creative practice, etc. etc. I intend to do some art myself in lieu of scrolling and will certainly pick up the reading pace. I finished a weird novel called First Love by Gwendoline Riley, Next of Kin, a wild memoir by chef Gabrielle Hamilton, Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor, and The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard. I’ve been listening to Elizabeth Strout’s novel Oh, William, as I drive around the shitty, and I’m in the middle of Ben Lerner’s Transcription. I’m also doing a slow read of Homer’s The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson (and I’m taking a discussion class online with her!). Finally, I’m reading aloud to Sophie from The Wind in the Willows. That book is remarkably good, and I highly recommend it!
I don’t know why this came up, but I was telling a colleague at work today about an experience I had about a million years ago, when Sophie was 18 years old, and we were driving home from USC Keck Neurology, and after my friend walked out of my room, I went to the dark recesses of my old blog and found it pretty quickly by typing chain into the search bar. This was a pretty typical day in a long chain of days back then. It was 2013, about a year before cannabis medicine when Sophie’s seizures were just out-of-control, and whenever I read something from those days, I honestly can’t remember how we did it. I don’t know if there’s anyone reading this substack anymore that can relate, but we did do it, and in fact are still doing it (with dramatically fewer seizures) and so will you. Some days letting go feels like a free fall, though, and if I think about the bottom, I’d probably miss the view.
On about hour five of seizures, neurologists, and waiting rooms, I felt a tail, trailing behind me, when I lifted, or heaved, Sophie up onto an adult examining table this afternoon to change her diaper. She had already had so many seizures. I was stifling bereft. This has got to stop, I might have thought or said aloud. I can't do this anymore. I felt the tail, its scales the years, too many years. I drag it. Later, still more seizures and back in the car, I heard on the radio that traffic was backed up on the 101 North because of some obstruction in the middle of the highway. I'm not sure what the problem is, Kayjon Cermak of KCRW said, her voice attractive, lilting into laughter. Oh, Kayjon, you save us with your tales of road rage and obstruction, mattresses and ladders fallen off of trucks, fistfights on the side of the road, looky-loos. Oh, yes, here it is. There appears to be a large chain in the street, Kayjon elaborated, Watch out for that around Normandie. My car crept onward, north, while Sophie seized. My lips were tight closed, a trail, a tail behind me of years of doing this. I started at the sound of a police whistle and focused on an officer on a motorcycle, weaving in front of me, back and forth between cars, getting us to slow down from 10 miles an hour to 5 and then 0 and then we were stopped, in a line. The motorcycle was directly in front of my car. He climbed down off it, brown pants, the knee-high black shiny boots, the mirrored sunglasses, the bow-legs. He held his hand out, palm facing us. Stop. I think asshole, I see you and we're already stopped in the middle of the 101, where the hell else would we go? I imagine the perhaps tens of thousands of cars behind me, a tail, a trail of metal and stifled bereft. I am not making this up. The policeman turned around and stepped toward the middle of the highway, reached down and pulled up a long coiled chain in his black gloved policeman hands. He heaved it up and hauled it over and just before he reached the side of the road, he threw it, the chain, this metal tail, over the guardrail and into the brown highway brush. He was made for that moment, I decided, and was dressed for the part. When he was done, he turned to us, the front cars, gave us the signal to proceed and climbed onto his machine and took off. The beast moved forward. No gangs to bang or bust or pillaged villages to rescue, no girls in distress or crimes of passion. He could drag a chain, a tail, from the middle of the road and let it go. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
I remember. I didn't know how you did it, either, though I refrained from saying that, because I knew it was incredibly unhelpful and also hurtful and enraging, but it was the truth, and I will never forget those posts, and Oliver yelling who lives like this, and here you are now, your beautiful family, still riding out life's storm, hopefully it rages less, now, or at least differently, in a way that makes a difference. I confess I didn't and don't really have the words, but i did and do have the love.
I remember this post and I remember almost nothing these days. That's how powerful it was. How powerful it still is.