I feel like I need to take some time, to have a good cry right now. It feels sometimes like clawing at the sky, trying to rip holes through it to get to the other side. To get to a writing space. Or when in a writing space to defend it. From everything that would ambush my mind. From all the stories, from all the sounds, from all the empty words, from everything vapid in my life, everything that doesn’t feed my creative heart. From myself. From my inertia. My champion defender is asleep at the wheel. Most of the time. Most of the time. I let her be. Trying to keep the life. Smooth things over moment to moment. Have it easy. Have it. To have something.

I have to defend it. I have to wake up. Defend this moment, this spark. Make space and nourish every bit of creative energy that sparks inside me. It’s hard. It’s so hard for me. So, I don’t fly to writing when the moment hits me. As the Ani Difranco concert is ending and everything in me is churning and my mouth is shut and my eyes are full of water and my belly full of holes and I’m silent, eyes turned inward fixing on the discomfort of digestion that comes with the flint taste in the throat of words waking, striking against each other, catching, igniting, and burning away into ash again and my girlfriend and I walk to the car, get in, snap seatbelts and discuss which way to go and what we didn’t like about the audience at the show and all the while I’m churning and burning and my girlfriend—who doesn’t know any of this is going on—she passes me Harry Potter, puts it into my lap and everything in me that is crackling and popping, everything in me that is alive and alight shudders and crackles and dies down as I dutifully open to page seven hundred and two and resume the reading I usually enter into with the greatest of glee. It’s garbage to me right now. This wild fun story is rotting me inside out. Could very well be television for the effect it’s having on the part of me that holds this itty bitty almost nothing of a flame. It’s just so far from what I need. And why couldn’t I put it down. Put it aside. Say no. Not right now. I’m not in the mood. Why couldn’t I just let her in on the sick heavy fragile excitement inside me? I’m sure she would have enjoyed it.

And then we get home and Netflix has arrived bringing me episodes of Highlander and Michael Moore’s The Awful Truth. And a package. A book I ordered by Oliver Sacks. And this week’s copy of The Nation. And I am with my lover. And I am making food. And she suggests we watch an episode of the Michael Moore. And I think that my fire is being drowned and I rationalize—I say to myself it’s Michael Moore. It will give me things to think and write about. It will inspire me, not kill my fire. It will light me up—but in the moment, it’s just television. It’s just more noise and light and sound, because I know what I need right now. I need time and space. I need to be with my body and be with my words. I need to be alone with the door shut and endless white space to fill. No internet connection. No television. No escape. No way to use my lover as an excuse for why I am not the most extraordinary, ecstatic self I can possibly be. No way to avoid the work I must do in the world. I am a writer, no matter how much I try to hide. I am a writer, no matter how I tear away the skin of my hands so I cannot hold a pencil, cannot type a line. I am a writer, no matter how I hide from everything in the world that would call upon me to action. No matter how I let myself be decimated.

Andre half chased me out when she found out what was on my mind. She does not want to spend a single moment with me if it is not where I most want to be. She asked me—oh, what did she say?—something about a freedom-based model. In a freedom-based model, if I could do anything right this minute, what would it be. The answer was obvious. I would write. I am feeling so compelled.

I must write. About everything. About everything gone wrong. About everything going right.

Right now, I need to write about the woman who has so long been my hero, who is only human and frail like every other human is frail and fragile like every other human is fragile and breakable and surmountable and overwhelmed by the enormity of everything there is to stand against. How do you keep standing. And singing. And begging and convincing and raising consciousness and protesting and screaming and writing to Congress and the misbegotten arrogant Nazi who declared himself President. How do you keep rising, when over and over again, the forces of hatred and violence and greed and power-lust and war keep gathering like a tide perpetually rising higher and stronger and faster and with more media power and with more money and with more voting power and with more fucked up ways to keep people frightened and ignorant and angry and with more venom and vengeance to knock you down and with you every other force of truth and peacefulness trying to clear a space in the toxic smog for air?

I have been knocked down. Over and over and over again. I can’t even remember when I stopped standing.

I lie down. I listen to KPFA and I weep. I read The Nation and I weep. I listen to Ani Difranco, I listen to the results of the polls and I weep. I do not write. I crumple. I give in. I take it all in me as if my body were America and every abuse of each individual inside this country and outside of this country and every abuse of this country’s name and every perversion of the notion of democracy and freedom and every hand or fist or firearm or tank or flag raised in anger or self-righteousness is a fat nail driven into my flesh and through me. I am full of holes. My blood is rusting my body. Everything is agony. I do not know how to live. I do not know how to breathe. I do not know how to stand up. I am nailed to the ground. I am turning to sand and blowing away.

I want to flee this country. My legs and heart are itchy. Everything in me wants to run. Wants to travel until I find the place where they’ve figured it out. How to be peaceful with one another. A place where men and women and those who are both male and female or neither male or female or something else altogether are all treated with respect and all have the same opportunities with respect to power and support and encouragement. A place where women who love women and men who love men and men and women who love men and women and other-gendered folk who love whomever they wish to love and everyone else, for that matter, loving anyone else (and themselves) are given the same acknowledgement, the same rights and privileges, and their love the same appreciation and delight as men who would love women and women who would love men. A place where brown people and peach people and pinkish people and ivory people and reddish people and purplish people and turquoise people and polka-dotted people and plaid people and argyle people and tie-died people are all just people, all celebrated for being the wonderful miracle that they are. A place where being human is being one with Nature and all the other creatures of the Earth, not one above and abusing Nature and all the other creatures of the Earth. A place where being different and unique is exciting, a place where being exactly who you are is cherished and treasured and valued. A place where guns don’t exist. Where the very notion of firearms is horrifying. Where war has no purchase. A place where all of the people will organize and intervene, however, using peaceful and nonviolent means to de-escalate the violent situations of the world. Where money is not the ruling principle. Where fear is not a staple of the diet. And neither is Coca Cola. Where art is valued as highly as science and science is in the service of the Earth and not the coin. Where Freedom can be felt in a lightness across the chest, a release of the shoulders, the ready smiles on people’s faces. It’s not an organizing principle for declaring citizens righteous and foreigners sinful or uncivilized. There are no jails, no prisons. Everyone has health care. Everyone has food and drink and sanctuary. I’m looking for a place in the world that makes sense. The only kind of sense I know. Because I don’t know anymore how to make America into that place.

I fear that I’m looking for Atlantis. That the place I’m looking for does not exist. And if it could. If it possibly could, I know it would not be safe. No one is safe right now living in a world with the United States in it.

These are the thoughts that defeat me.

Nevertheless, they are crucial to my rebuilding. To my standing up. I must learn to face the truth and not be decimated. I must love and agitate and love and find sanctuary and love and shape and love and weep and love and hold and love and carry and love and write and love and teach and love and fuck and love and tremble and love and learn and love and create.

This is the beginning. Just the beginning. Of my standing up.