Taking Steps and a fear-based society

You may have noticed a bit of shambling around in the last couple of posts, trying to align my life (over here) with my values and actual passions (over here.) So, after a few weeks of trying to get my thoughts in order, yesterday I finally took some steps after several long walks in the unusual May sunshine watching duckling and bunnies and hearing the red-winged blackbirds chirping mightily and other such springy-visions.

I started a job application. (By the way, if any of you are looking for an MFA-holding, three-book-published poet to work for great pay part-time let me know! I’m looking at you, well-funded low-res MFA programs!)  I wrote to a publisher that had been holding a manuscript since last August, I looked at that same manuscript and rearranged it a bit and took out some poems I can see now don’t fit in it, I printed out my Excel spreadsheet of poems to send out, I looked at the drafts of the poems – eek, often full of angst and not much else – I have written in the past few months to see if any were worth revising. In other words, I actually did some real writing work. Also, I painted my nails cobalt blue, which looks sort of goth and scary but also reminds me that these fingers are getting stuff done. No more polite buffed nude fingernails, which seems like a metaphor for a life lived in more color, with more vigor. I know, it’s just nail polish.

One of the things I realized after this aforementioned set of writing chores was that, after an acceptance from earlier in the week and the publication of the new 2013 Jack Straw Anthology, every single poem from “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter” has been published. I also watched a bit of “The Girls of Atomic City” lecture from PBS I had recorded some days ago, really thinking about how foreign and alien the subject matter of nuclear enrichment and bomb-building in a secret city must seem to the screeners and editors looking at the manuscript, how outer-space-science-fiction so much of my actual real life has been. Most people, I know, don’t grow up with Geiger counters in their basements, knowing how to measure nuclear pollution in their gardens. I was thinking suspicious thoughts about government coverups by the time I was seven and eight, because it wasn’t science fiction, it was happening within a five-mile radius of my house. My whole early childhood, complete with men-in-black and secrets locked is safes, was like an Appalachian X-Files episode. A neighbor stabs their husband one night, my father is teaching me about radionuclides and dosimeters the next.

My next manuscript, almost finished, might be more user-friendly, but no less dark – it’s all about apocalypses and the end of the world, which it seems is the subject of every single movie that’s come out in the last few years. Kids today don’t know what it’s like to fly without taking off your shoes because of terrorism – it’s created sort of a fear-based society here, one different than the kind I grew up in the seventies, when, yes, we were worried about nuclear bombs and hostage-taking in Iran, but basically, America felt safe and secure – not “fifties” safe and secure, exactly – there were moving tides all around us then, racism and sexism held up in the light, the EPA starting to have a voice – but still, I felt safer and more secure than I bet the kids I teach in workshops today feel. That’s what I’m trying to capture in this (fifth?!?) manuscript, that sense that the world is about to end, all the time, if not by zombie, then by plague or food chain collapse. (I’m reading a delightful YA-style geek-and-tech book called “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” that features a near-future in which the food chain has already collapsed. So much fun to read, it’s like a vacation for the brain…) The idea that disaster, unpredictable and uncontrollable, is always near, right around the corner, and how one can live a life in that kind of mindspace.

Anyway, despite all the foreboding, the bad economy, the fears, young people today have the daunting task as they enter school and then the workplace, trying to decide what to do with their lives, how to make a difference. At forty, I’m considering the same darn questions, it seems. How to (and if I can) make the world a better place. How to do more than complain and be afraid, because those things, besides being useless, are boring. The idea of the superheroine and supervillain today seem more applicable than ever. If anyone is going to save us…it’s going to have to be…us.