eden

I know lots of you are getting sick of hearing me talk and write about it... I'm sorry... I'm having good cheerful loving relaxed moments and trying to write about them too. I'm looking forward hugely to this weekend's Mad Scientist party!

But I'm haunted.

So, go read this if you can: Operation Eden. Best descriptions and photographs... Very much fitting my mood at all this.

I wish I could go back, and this time, go to Slidell or Mississippi. With my asthma that isn't a good idea. I need to finish my thesis, finish my book...

Everyone's saying, "Oh, you did so much more than most, you make me feel bad. You need to relax and stop thinking about it. Take care of yourself and your family" and I'm trying really hard, but just.. know that it's hard for me every day. So, that's why I'm still working, writing, talking, phone calling, searching, compiling information. I need to know that I'm still helping a little bit.

Maybe because I feel like this is it, this is the time in my lifetime when I am seeing everything around us changing. The only way I know how to deal with that is to run into it headon, like I do with everything else. When I came to SF in 1990 it was... it felt like it was at the tail end of a lot of people dying, of one of those catastrophic changes, a disaster in a community. I wonder what the numbers looked like but it seemed like deaths spiked in the mid to late 80s. And that whole generation of queers were just fucking shell shocked. Our whole country is going to be like that. The gulf coast is like that right now, more than I am able to grasp. The ripples will spread our way - beyond the 3 bucks a gallon for gas and how we aren't going to be able to afford heat this winter. I'm just hitting the wall a little earlier.

The wall is a line in a parking lot, the wall is portable metal barriers, it's the Red Cross saying that volunteers who don't go through them make a small town a "hostile area" and they pack up and leave, it's anyone who says they aren't allowed and it's not in their job description.

I have to try to stop slamming myself up against it... Someone has to do it, someone has to look, someone has to be aware of suffering. People can't stand to look, mostly...

I think of all the good things in life and all the people I love...

I'm sorry to sound so melodramatic and "it's all about me"... it's not... I'm just trying to be honest... I'm feeling really naked like a hermit crab pulled out of its shell... my mood swings up and down almost every day and it's tough on me, tough on everyone around me.

Comments

[Koan Bremner]

You sound guilty as you write this - and I don't see why you should feel guilty. Whose blog is this? *Yours* - *you* set the agenda, not your readers. The simple fact that you *can't* stop writing about it, thinking about it, examining it, tells me this - right now, you *need* to write, think and examine what happened, to all those souls... and, yes, to you.

In my opinion, you're not being self-indulgent - you're serving at least a triple benefit by doing as you are - 1) as "compassion fatigue" seems to be setting in, you're keeping a problem that hasn't disappeared on the agenda; 2) you're reminding people (me, if nobody else) that volunteering is *hard* - and that's why it needs to be done, and that's why everybody has to do what they can (as great or as little as that is) because it's simply not fair to leave the volunteering to those whose natural implication is to do their part, without thinking); and 3) recovering from volunteering can be incredibly hard - and people will help you with that, if you'll let them. Maybe all that I can do to help you is read (and respond to) what you write - but I can certainly do *that* - you've earned that right.

Be gentle on yourself.

[Iris]

That is so perfectly what I thought when reading this post that I won't write anything else.Except it doesn't sound like you to be worrying that you aren't pleasing your readers.

[Iris]

I was talking to you about B0b Dylan.Maybe the time has come around again for protest songs .. with poetical lyrics written by you.