Sounds like a funny thing to say, when I live in a place where "air" is in such abundance, in the quality and clarity of light and sky - and I'm feeling swamped - cliche for lack of better expression. My summer idyll has faded, and in its place, the sideways cement buckling of a new semester of jr. college professor-ship threatening to buck me off an uneasy ship - did I sign up for this voyage? Distinctly, and already, this is not a cruise to Ensenada.
I feel like I've just handed my freedom over to the coast guard and I'm on a loppy ride to south Texas during hurricane season. Where's the mop and bucket? How can a job suck so much life out of me without even trying? I'm damped down in pressure-cured crunch of desert pavement - stuck in clay, natural roadway and parking lot - but rocks move across its surface, unseen and unbidden, but they do, I swear! Sometimes the desert really does provide its own zoo. If you only look at the right times, and don't anticipate too much. Like waiting for your baby to finally - suddenly - crawl - then walk!
I guess I have to have some faith here - faith being that small thing, that narrow slant of light, and find my little bottom water clinging. I'm teaching creative writing and poetry/lit, and that should suffice in itself. It's the other things that nag and rag my concentration - sabbatical presentation and report are due; three online classes that need vigilance; piles of little things to tend to that can't even fit onto a stack of sticky notes for remembering, can I really be ready to retire in my mid-40's? The bottom looks pretty good about now, and the good bits and bones of poems and prose live down there.
My daughter Tarah Jo is 20 and I'm bickering with her to make sure she pays her auto payment - the loan is in my name - and realizing that for every bill I stare at and wonder how to pay, she's got it a lot harder at her age than I did. I was able to rent a small adobe cabin with my long-ago boyfriend for $100/month. We had time to spend with other friends in our age group, figuring out how adult life was to be run. Plenty of space to get crazy in the desert. Parties and cheap living. Plenty of financial aid money, medical help even for those without insurance, food stamps for gettin' through college - which was, by the way, less than $100 a semester when I went went to Cal State...hers is a world of pressured staying-in, too costly to really go anywhere, and the spaces I inhabited are closed in. Hers is a world of kids having to live at home into their 20's, simply because apartments are way too costly. What 20 year old can even afford security deposits on utilities?
I have a master's degree and a tenured teaching job and I can barely pay my $400, summer desert heated electric bill (not to mention the $2,000 for a new air conditioner compressor when the old one decided to go out on August 1st.) Of course you could argue that many people have survived desert summers without cooling systems, back in the old days. But - from what I'm reading - a majority of them, from the Indian inhabitants to, particularly, homesteading women, got the heck out during the summer months, as often and as much as they could. So, there goes that "people used to be tougher" theory! Good thing we have lots of oatmeal and canned foods in the cupboard while I pull the usual struggle to get back on the financial toe-hold after a long, unpaid "teachers really DON'T have it easier" summer! And you NEVER get used to extreme heat! Or oatmeal or rosarita refried beans, even the ones that are lard-free.
Conflictingly, in a hot and cold tug of war with my "instant whale of a job," I'm in the middle of editing a desert anthology for a major publisher, and I am wondering if my assistant, who I've been paying to help me with the technical and time consuming permissions-getting, will walk off the job since I've told him today I can't pay him this month - work I simply have zero time to do, and work that makes me resent the energy allotted in community college teacher housekeeping chores, and course and student overloads. The quota for English 1B, for example, somehow mysteriously jumped, while I was on sabbatical, from 29 to 35, and yes folks, I teach five classes total, and I have a great schedule compared to those who have developmental English classes....of course, I've been here for 10 years and have taught a vast share of tough classes here, not to mention the four years I taught alternative high school - still, so many people are jobless and homeless right now and I know that, somewhat shamefully, I have no room to complain!
Still, "I want to be a writer," and I'm tired of putting that off. Something in my stubborn 40 somethin' self, now with daughter "sort of" grown, has cracked, in fact, shattered, and the rock face has peeled off - revealing a stubborn stare of craggy metamorphic edges, not the smooth granite facade of once what was (think: Joshua Tree rock climber boulders) of what once allowed me to stay even throughout yet another day of putting my dreams, and story-urgings, on hold. I'm raw to the touch and uneven - but this is exactly the stuff of my inner world, now on display for all to see, and ready to be given the words their powerful girth deserves!
And all the while, the desert stares at me, daring me to come on out to see how much more space has been gobbled up by suburban crush, by smog, by tourist overload. Somehow, I can't help but feel that the completion of the desert anthology will be, in fact, my final steps in obtaining an odd and middle-age-crisis type of divorce from the desert - from my "clothes are way too tight" job at C.O.D. -- it's become, my once-familiar homeland, a place to escape - ironic, because I live in one of the #1 "escape" factories on the planet, but it's become a trap for me. I have one book left in me after the anthology, and that's my Joshua Tree story; well, another one, I think, but how to pull that off while I'm being Teacher Me?
I love my students! I hate what's happening/happened to the college system: student learning outcomes galore, mainstreaming of everything and everyone, monotony, number crunching, who CARES about a new desert book? We're just trying to herd students through registration. We don't need writers on our faculty. We just want people who can step in line, teach what they're told, attend myriad meetings to rehash the same old things and same old things and give them a different name (well, that's what writers do, but at least for me, that's much more fun and cosmic, private and individual, and on-my-own-fucking-terms) - Ward Churchill, I channel you - unwittingly but in solidarity!~
Joshua Tree, will your trees survive with gas $4.50/gallon, with a possible vice president who poses for pictures of a dead elk she's just slain with her young daughter and says her church prays away the gays, with your topsoil filled with alien nutrients and odd grasses that limit the odd yuccas chances of survival? Transplants rarely work. Imagine a monument without it's namesake plant. What will they rename it: Joshua Rock or Joshua the Prophet? Build statues in place of the living thing, and hope for eternity. And that's what I want my word-language to be, if I can swim my way to the hidden stones that have been sculpted through some long beauty regime in something that outlives me. I can live minimally off of my canoe, and I have a vintage 1973 Jayco Tent Trailer in the yard, and the hummingbirds seem extra thirsty this week, and I've yet to fill the backyard sugar water, my pool man has had to rig an odd spare pump of his to keep my water circulating because I need a motor I can't now afford, and the shortening days of September aren't doing enough to keep the temperatures down, will summer ever end and bring some type of granite cooling down? Enough to the touch.
Back underwater, 'tis, if only in the imagination. My writing life has not suddenly ended, as I might feel it has, this past week. It only feels like drowning, my face it turned to the sky and I can still breathe, I can still breathe. And maybe, if I'm lucky, go for a swim, baptize myself in the memories of when our desert was underwater, we will be there soon again, maybe freezing a little, and I hope I see a polar bear down there, happy like a zoo, swimming with its joyful and bizarre complexity of white fur and snout, of water-web and deep sea tail paddle, smiling at the universe, or at least seeming to.
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