I found my ‘detox girlfriend’ on Facebook. Rather, I found multiple profiles, none of which had been updated since 2018. Because I am very smart, I thought perhaps she had found her way back to prison, but really, I worried she had died. After a 10-minute Google search, I discovered that she was, in fact, incarcerated (again) in Florida, or as I like to call it, the flaccid penis of America. It’s pretty easy to find loads of information about convicted felons on the internet, and her file dates back to 2007 when we found ourselves joined at the hip in the basement of a detox in Fall River, Massachusetts. My detox girlfriend—I’ll call her Sarah—was 22, a heroin addict with a record, and I was 26 and a bloated sloppy drunk with a coke problem and one minor arrest. She stuck up for me when another young ward of the state threatened to pop my blind pimples (a side effect of detoxing, a staph infection, and a touch of the Mersa virus) with a safety pin.

“Leave her alone. They’re UNDER the skin. There’s no head!” It was love at first sight.

My would-be assailant disappeared the following week after leaving the ward during a day pass in which she gave the last of her 5 children up for adoption. Of course, I was sad, but I was relieved to not have my roadmap of a face be the highlight of leisure time. In recovery, sadness becomes callousness. The reality is that most addicts don’t get clean the first, second, third, or fourth time. Some of them never get clean, and a lot of them die. After so many relapses and deaths, the rest of us become apathetic, not out of lack of empathy or compassion, but because allowing ourselves to be deeply affected by continuous tragedy is a slow suicide in itself—sort of like drinking and drugging without the intermittent bouts of euphoria.

I sent Sarah an email, put $10 in an account so she could respond to my email, and another $20 in her jail bank account for fun stuff like $4 Snickers bars and two-ply toilet paper. She wrote back almost immediately. She told me how good it was to hear from me but admitted that she was having trouble “placing me.” Now, this is someone I’ve thought about nearly every day for 13 years. She played a pivotal role in my early recovery and she was also the first person I’d been ‘romantically involved with’ without being under the influence. Even then it was a secret, closeted thing because fraternizing was off limits. My good behavior and disinterest in sneaking into the men’s ward at night, allowed for certain privileges like staying up late to watch movies with my secret lesbian lover unbeknownst to the night nurse, Sweet Ginger. Our friendship graduated to an innocent romance that lasted about two movie nights before I was abruptly shipped off to a halfway house, and Sarah and I fell out of contact. I found it absurdly hysterical that something I’d been obsessing about for over a decade had little to no impact on her, making me The World’s Least Memorable Detoxing Lesbian! She asked for photos to jog her memory to no avail. She politely blamed it on the course of her life after our institutionalization.

Since 2007, she has been in and out of drug treatment. Most of these programs will keep you for seven days (the detox), and if you’re lucky (or unlucky) you’re granted a 28 day visit but this all depends on insurance and the likelihood that you won’t take off into the night with a new boyfriend. As with any institution, there are gatekeepers at the helm making personal judgments and monetary decisions. When Sarah wasn’t in detox, she was in and out of jail for possession of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, violating her parole, and most recently, possession of MDMA with intent to distribute, prostitution, and one count of armed robbery. From these charges, one could easily deduce that this person is a drug addict whose addiction has significantly progressed. Since she’s lived in Florida, she’s been incarcerated more often than when she lived on the east coast and has been further ‘victimized’ by outrageous bail amounts that someone from even a middle-class family would have trouble affording. Collectively, her bail adds up to roughly $15,000 since 2012. I don’t know many people who could afford to pay that, let alone the average $500 per arrest. I believe it can reasonably be concluded that the justice system is less interested in reducing recidivism rates, or even collecting bail (which they know people can’t afford), and more interested in punishment and the ability to claim some kind of moral superiority; to divide citizens into the good and law abiding and the bad, defective, lawbreakers.

Prisons are useless at achieving their purported aims: Punishment and reintegration into society. I am focusing explicitly on my friend Sarah, an addict, and people convicted on 1-2 year sentences in the state of Florida. To include all prisons in the country, violent crimes, and thinking more deeply about race, gender and class, would require far more research and a lot more paper.

The Florida Department of Corrections has 143 facilities statewide, “including 50 major institutions, 16 annexes, seven private facilities (contracts for the private facilities are overseen by the Florida Department of Management Services), 33 work camps, three re-entry centers, two road prisons, one forestry camp, one basic training camp, 12 FDC operated work release centers along with 18 more work release centers operated by various private vendors (FDC oversees these contracts).” The FDC website boasts that that it is the “largest state agency in Florida with a budget of 2.7 billion” (taxpayer dollars) and the 3rd largest state prison system in the country. There are almost 1 million inmates incarcerated in the state and roughly 155k on probation. Way to go, you guys. Congrats on not allocating that money to public education. Well done. And shouldn’t the fact that there are only THREE re-entry centers out of 143 total facilities tell the public something about the fallacious narrative that the prison industrial perpetuates? If rehabilitation and reduced recidivism were in fact goals, logically there should be more re-entry centers dedicated to the transition from prisoner to free citizen, right?

Prisons themselves are not profit centers, yet drugs, the judicial system, and the prison industrial complex work together and are dependent on recidivism to keep this very expensive machine going. They are dependent on addicts to get caught with a crack pipe, re-enter the revolving door and waste taxpayer dollars on a system that DOES NOT WORK. Narcotics laws have focused on punishment rather than on the treatment and rehabilitation of drug abusers predictably causing the crime rate in the country to soar. The prison population in Florida alone has skyrocketed 1000% since 1970. To keep up with ‘demand’, private corrections firms started operating facilities in Florida in 1995. Today, the state houses about 10% of its inmate population at seven of these privately-run facilities that are run by three private firms—and pays three prison companies more than $170 million a year to run them.

Although prisons claim to offer rehabilitation, people who have been incarcerated know that this is a joke. Ideally, rehabilitation is a many-pronged fork with which the formerly incarcerated might wield upon re-entering society and indulge in meals of vast opportunity. As they eat, they move forward, step-by-step with a confidence gained from time served well. Unfortunately, the opposite happens. What prisons do is make it difficult to stay in contact with the outside world, and while I understand the concept of punishment in theory, if the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate, community is necessary. The FDC in recent years has expanded its dealings with private companies that do business in its prisons — generating more revenue off inmates and their loved ones. Prisoners are cut-off from the outside world because it’s too expensive. One of the largest revenue generators for the state prison system has been its canteen contract. Prior to 2014, with a different vendor, the canteens netted about $31 million a year for the state’s general fund. The current contract, with Trinity Services Group, averages more than $35 million per year.

Every time I send an email to Sarah in prison it costs me about $2. If we video chat, that’s $4 for 15 minutes. On top of the cost of the items at the canteen, friends and family have to pay other fees to this separate vendor, JPay, to get money into their inmates’ banking accounts, which they use to make purchases.It cost me $24.50 to put $20 in Sarah’s inmate bank account. Jpay pockets the $4.50. It is more expensive to wipe your ass, brush your teeth, and talk to your mother—or hey, maybe an AA/ NA sponsor—while you are in prison. While this might seem like a fair deal to those who believe that people in jail have broken a tenuous social contract and deserve these mild inconveniences, I doubt very strongly that anyone would believe that nearly 1 million people in the state of Florida deserve to not talk to their mothers over a weed conviction.

I’m going to get a little deeper here. One of the reasons this whole machine works is because the rest of us are inundated with stereotypes, laws and domestic policies that categorize the addicts/ incarcerated people as subhuman—at the very least, the knowingly broke the precious social contract that the rest of us abide by. Their problems are moral, ethical, and chronic. The broader issues are both systematic and deeply entrenched in ideological assumptions about those who are addicted and/or incarcerated. Drug addicts. Alcoholics. Felons. They shouldn’t be doing heroin or drinking so much. They shouldn’t have robbed that gas station for crack money. They should have simply separated themselves from their addicted family members and picked themselves up by the bootstraps. They shouldn’t have had children, married that guy, left treatment, been arrested in the first place. And goddamn right they shouldn’t be able to vote, EVER.

When I went to rehab—and I did the whole fucking thing, detox, 28-day program, halfway house, sober living, AA, monitored reentry into the ‘real world’—I was told constantly that I had potential. I was told by nurses, administrators, therapists; and I think this potential was contingent on two things: my whiteness and (although at that time I was not college educated) my perceived education (I was polite and followed the rules minus the secret lesbian affair). As an overweight, zit-faced, detoxing mess, I had this coveted potential. This potential was evident when my family visited me every other weekend—a sober, well dressed, educated, white, heteronuclear gang. People of color are not viewed as having inherent potential. Neither are poor white women with criminal records, or prostitutes and single mothers with multiple drug convictions. To the system, and to the individuals that make up the system, these people are expendable, undeserving of kindness and opportunity. They are not ushered out of detox and into van that will deposit them at a beautiful halfway house on Cape Cod named after Ralph Waldo Emerson; they are not encouraged to apply to prestigious liberal arts colleges.

And then, as Robert Frost so eloquently put it, I chose the road less traveled and my friend chose the one she’s used to. I don’t think Robert was ever institutionalized—I could be wrong—but it impacts people’s perception and cognition. The world becomes very small and hyper-focused on idiocy and the minutia of daily life; boyfriends, candy bars, second-hand clothes, Redbull, and clean urine. We all devolved into 13 years old girls at SSTAR. Without guidance and practical instruction as to how to navigate the outside world, women are released from these environments and into the wild, doomed to repeat the cycle—it’s even referred to jokingly as “wash, rinse, repeat.” My detox girlfriend is a good person. She’s found Jesus in prison and is a member of some kind of “born again” group. She’s frustrated because prayer and meditation aren’t alleviating the burdens of her circumstances. She will be released in 10 months to three kids, an addicted mother, and a criminal record. She will be perceived by society as a “bad” person. She will not have the right to vote, drive, or be gainfully employed. She will depend on the kindness of strangers until the stigma abates. She is not broken, but the system sure as shit is.

One of the last jobs I had before becoming unofficially unemployable due to alcohol and drug addiction was in sales. That’s a classy way to put it. It was the beginning of a year-long downward spiral in which I desperately sought to get my shit together. Having worn out my welcome in Boston, I decided to move back to Rhode Island to be closer to my family. My mother is a narc and I figured daily invasions of privacy would certainly curb my drinking. I moved into a dilapidated apartment building with one other tenant—the house was condemned and turned into condominiums after we left—bought a nice kitchen table and some dish towels, got used to the house centipedes, and prepared for my new life as a healthy, soon-to-be employed 25-year-old woman who drank socially.

I worked a lot of menial jobs in my life and they seemed to get, well, more MENIAL as my addiction progressed. There was a lot of toilet cleaning, coffee serving, sandwich making, and I had been fired from my last job packing used records for coke heads in a Warehouse in Brighton. I didn’t want to work at Dunkin’ Donuts, so I responded to a vague ad in the classifieds section of my local newspaper. Something to do with sales. Potential to make lots of money and keep my apartment and 1991 Toyota Tercel.

I arrived for an interview in my one ‘business casual’ outfit; a pair of grey slacks, white shirt, and loafers purchased for me by my mom in a show of good faith. The office was in a run-down part of Providence, RI (it has since been gentrified) and the apparent directors of the operation were painting wet hot rooms wearing dress pants and white tank tops, their gold chains swaying in the breeze of industrial fans. Clay and Jose ran this office, and they were longtime Kirby Vacuum salesmen. Clay conducted my interview. He asked if I was a go-getter, and about my attitude. He told me how much money I could make selling Kirby vacuum cleaners and showed me pictures of his boss’ mansion which he had purchased thanks to his vacuum slinging ability. He asked if I could start tomorrow. I said absolutely and he shouted “POSITIVE!” which I later learned was part vocal tic and part placeholder for words of affirmation.

What Clay failed to mention during the interview was how fucking hard it is, not to mention EVIL, to sell a $1200 vacuum cleaner to poor people and old ladies. I never sold one, but I did shampoo a lot of carpets for free. Once, when I was close to selling to a single mother who considered putting the purchase on her uncle’s credit card, I called Clay and Jose to let them know—this was all part of the procedure and then they were in charge of manipulating the person into closing the deal. The single mother was not seduced by their charm, her uncle said no, and I cleaned her carpet and got home at around 1am after another 18-hour day of apparent failure. Every morning, I arrived at the office at 7am to get pumped and positive with the rest of the sales crew but most of them were selling vacuum cleaners and making money. We drank coffee, the coke addicts snorted their lines, and we formed a prayer circle around dry erase boards with our names and columns written on them. Clay and Jose had us walk up to the boards and mark how many sales we’d achieved the day before. If you didn’t make any everyone offered encouragement and Clay would say something like, “POSITIVE! POSITIVE! TODAY’S THE DAY” and I’d take my seat on the floor next to my personal Kirby and wait for my assignment.

Once a month, as a group, we would meet at the office at 5am, pile into a few cars, and head to a Regional Kirby Conference at a 2-star hotel in Vermont or New Hampshire. Kirby Salespeople mingled with Branch Executives and CEOs in poorly lit banquet halls. Everything was cheap, business casual, Anne Taylor loft, all the time; cream blazers, dark suits and bold ties as far as they eye could see. I was part of an elite minority group of failures at these conferences and we were sometimes called out by name and cheered on by hundreds of Kirby folk who had made it rich. Executives shared PowerPoint presentations about their personal Kirby journeys, photos of their families and McMansions, and initiated call and response chants about making bank and buying boats. One sweaty guy, after giving a complete virtual tour of his glamorous house shouted, “I make sales so I can buy…” and the whole room shouted back, “A HOUSE LIKE THAT!” I knew I was an addict, out of control, and probably couldn’t trust my judgment, but I felt swindled and uneasy, like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. I would not have been surprised had a goat’s head dropped from the ceiling in a flaming pentagram while us no-sale losers were lined up and prepared for sacrifice.

After about two months of driving around with a vacuum cleaner, canvassing neighborhoods and receiving $0 I decided to quit. In typical alcoholic fashion, I didn’t quit, I simply stopped showing up and stopped returning Clay’s phone calls. I drank all day and all night for almost a week and shampooed and waxed my floors with my stolen Kirby. I’d made a decision to sell it so I could pay my rent. I felt it was owed to me and doubted they’d care.

Clay’s phone calls became increasingly less POSITIVE and more aggressive. He’d call the cops. I’d stolen private property. It was a KIRBY vacuum and therefore sacrilegious and grand larceny. One morning I woke up to Clay and Jose sitting in my driveway on the roof of their car, smoking cigarettes, waiting for me to come outside. They left more messages demanding their Kirby back. I was determined to wait them out. The thing about salesmen though, is that they’re fucking assholes. They’re stubborn and lifeless. And they will call the police on you while they are high on cocaine because they do not fear the strong arm of the law. They did call the cops, and that phone call officially ended the Great Kirby Vacuum standoff of 2006.

The aging process is a bit like selling Kirbys and, in hindsight, the standoff was a metaphor for aging ungracefully. Aging gracefully—and by grace, I mean with dignity, whatever that might look like—means forfeiting what has already been lost by design. In this case the vacuum. Rich people get butt implants and botox while poor, unemployed, addicted people with nothing to lose hold vacuum cleaners hostage. It was a way of securing myself justice for unpaid time served in life and under the Kirby Empire. But I should have let the whole thing go because what justice is there when Kirby men and the cops and the landlords and Jack Daniels are waiting around every corner and none of those men do favors for women over 25 if they’re not getting something in return. If I’d known then, what I know now….

The moral of the story is, let go of the vacuum.

Please consider this a very brief history of the progression of institutional, systemic racism in the United States and how laws and policies have been built and perpetuated in a way that systematically denies rights, privileges and civil liberties to black Americans. I do not intend to ‘mansplain’ this history to those who are familiar with it or who experience it on a daily basis; this is for those of us who are white. Those of us who fear that equity means losing some semblance of our inherent privilege that we have been freely afforded based solely on the color of our skin.

1. Slavery. This country was founded on the implementation of a slave economy and the exploitation of black bodies and labor.

Policing has roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers, vigilantes and civil servants who enforced laws related to slavery. Centralized, municipal police departments did not emerge until the mid-19th century and emerged as a response to “disorder” rather than crime—in other words, to protect an arbitrary social order defined by the white elite and, of course, to protect their economic interests.

2. At the start of the Civil War, the vice president of the Confederate States of America (who I will not name because he doesn’t deserve the attention) gave the infamous “Cornerstone Speech” which pretty much stated that the new government was founded on the idea that black people were inferior to white people.

This racist ideology grew out of hundreds of years of pseudoscience that was used to justify racial discrimination. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” was weaponized by political conservatives, racists and imperialists to validate their theory of Social Darwinism.

3. After the Civil War, the passing of the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and indentured servitude (except as punishment for a crime—see “The New Jim Crow”).

4. The slave economy turned into a sharecropping economy which ultimately exploited black labor, kept black workers from owning land and subjected them to inescapable debt, indentured servitude and poverty.

5. Black Americans were victims of Jim Crow laws, a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation, and black codes which determined when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and where they could go (see: vagrancy laws). “The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled.”

6. The Freedman’s Bureau was founded in 1865 and lasted until 1872 and was established to help black slaves and poor whites during the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. However, the legal system was stacked against black citizens, with confederates and wealthy whites working as police and judges, making it difficult for black Americans to win court cases and ensuring they remain subject to black codes. There have been many efforts by black people to work with/ within the federal government. Unfortunately, these organizations proved to serve merely symbolic purposes.

7. Lynching (muder) became a way for white business owners in the South to maintain economic and racial superiority.

8. Black men fought in American wars, for a segregated U.S. military (until 1948).

9. There were few educational opportunities for blacks in the south. The publication of the Chicago Defender inspired waves of black southerners to the North during The Great Migration of the 1920s, where they found themselves subject to low-paying jobs and employment discrimination.

10. In 1921, mobs of white residents attacked “The Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the ground and from private planes destroying “35 square blocks of the district.”

11. The Federal Housing Administration and Home Owner’s Loan Corporation implemented a grading system by racial and ethnic group based on who was best suited to obtain a federal ensured mortgage (the practice was outlawed in 1968). In the 1930s banks were to stay away from certain area—they literally drew lines on maps and said certain areas were ‘threatened’ or ‘hazardous’ if those areas were largely comprised of minorities.

12. The GI Bill offered opportunities to white, male GI’s after WWII. Despite the educational and loan opportunities, black and gay GI’s were excluded via ‘blue charges’ and/or funneled into trade schools and denied access to 4 year colleges and mortgage loans.

13. Levittowns (suburban developments) included an explicit racial exclusion clause stating that homes could not ''be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.''

14. Contract buying exploited hopeful black homeowners in cities like Chicago. “Contract buying worked like this: A buyer put down a large down payment for a home and made monthly installments at high interest rates.

But the buyer never gained ownership until the contract was paid in full and all conditions were met. Meanwhile, the contract seller held the deed and could evict the buyer. Contract buyers also accumulated no equity in their homes. No laws or regulations protected them.” (NPR “Contract Buying Robbed Black Families in Chicago Of Billions”)

15. Segregation was deemed unconstitutional in 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) but by this point, segregation and racism had been built into the architecture of the country.

16. The Federal Highway Act of 1956 allowed middle class whites to leave the cities and commute to work from the suburbs.

17. 1963 In hisLetter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., defends direct actionto clergymen counseling patience."We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed".

250,000 demonstrators attended the March on Washington demanding the passage of theCivil Rights Act (passed in 1964), outlawing racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities.

18. The rise of The Black Power Movement:

The Black Panther Party originally formed in response to police brutality in Oakland, CA. However, their core activities were community social programs like the Free Breakfast for Children Programs to address food injustice, and community health clinics for education and treatment of diseases. They were an armed, revolutionary socialist organization whose ‘open carry’ practice influenced the NRA to support the gun control laws that they so adamantly oppose today.

19. COINTELPRO (1956-71), or the Counterintelligence Program, was a branch of the FBI whose job was to illegally infiltrate, monitor, discredit and suppress the activities of American political organizations that were considered subversive.

20. The rise of evangelical conservatism and Ronald Reagan’s Presidency:

Reagan supported tax breaks for schools that discriminated on the basis of race, opposed the extension of the Voting Rights Act, vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act and decimated the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Hi administration responded to the crack epidemic in major cities across the U.S. with the “War on Drugs” that disproportionately affected poor black Americans while white cocaine users eschewed prosecution. Reagan’s symbolic stance on race issues is best illustrated in his deriding welfare recipients as “welfare queens.”

21. In 1994, President Bill Clinton passed the Federal Crime Bill that created new criminal sentences and incentivized states to build more prisons. The war on drugs and heavy policing in inner cities meant that prisons were packed with POC indicted on minor drug offenses—a real money maker for private prisons and supplying cheap labor for some of your favorite consumer goods.

22. The Los Angeles Riots in 1992 after the four officers involved in the televised beating of Rodney King were acquitted.

This is by no means an exhaustive or comprehensive list. I have chosen to focus on domestic policies that have economically and politically disadvantaged black Americans and continue to affect their ability to obtain “The American Dream.” Racism has been built into the fabric of the United States for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy. I hope that this timeline illustrates how explicit racism has given way to implicit racism, or unconscious biases, that serve to maintain white supremacy.

Reading material:

“The Migration Series” Jacob Lawrence (paintings)

“The Story of the Contract Buyers League”

“Women, Race, and Class” Angela Davis

“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” Audre Lorde

“Black Panthers” Agnes Varda, 1968 (film)

“The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” Richard Rothstein

“The New Jim Crow” Michelle Alexander

“A Price for Their Pound of Flesh” Daina Ramey Berry

“Prison Notebooks” Antonio Gramsci (re: Cultural Hegemony)

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The Souls of Black Folk” W.E.B. Dubois

“Nobody Knows My Name” James Baldwin

“Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” Ida B. Wells

“How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades" NY Times

Every election season, there’s a tiff between top presidential candidates—just the most popular ones because who gives a shit about the ones who don’t have a chance, right? It’s par for the course and fueled by a mass media that, against the greater good, creates a culture of divisiveness and fear. In this case, Russian bots, CNN and other news outlets are succeeding at alienating the first real female contender we’ve seen since Hilary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, two democrats who share similar values and an unwavering desire for structural change, have been reduced to bickering gladiators in Colosseum style presidential debates, flanked by centrist corpse puppet Joe Biden, and a businessman who bought himself airtime, among others.

I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary, and I voted for Hilary when she won the nomination because I’m not an asshole or a purist and remained of the mind that literally any democrat was better than a Trump presidency. I listened to my “Bernie-bro” friends who voted for Jill Stein or refused to vote at all when Bernie ceded his nomination. In 2020, I will vote for any democratic nominee, even Joe Biden, because the Republican party, as a whole, is a disgrace and any step away from the impending apocalypse is a step in the right direction.

I watched the most recent democratic debate on a plane from California to Massachusetts but only made it through about 20 minutes before switching to Jim Carrey’s new show about a children’s television star a-la Mister Rogers who is slowly losing his mind after the death of his son. You know, something more lighthearted. The debates become exponentially more disastrous and nonsensical as time goes on, but the moderators unabashedly stoked a nonexistent fire and appeared to successfully place the final wedge between Sanders and Warren, as evidenced in Liz’s handshake diss at the end of the night. They asked Bernie why, in 2018, he told Elizabeth Warren during a private conversation, that a woman could not win the presidential election, and when he denied ever uttering the phrase, they panned to Liz and asked how she felt about Bernie saying that a woman could not win the election. It would have been in her best interest to dodge that question or shut the moderator down. Instead she walked into a trap meant to boost ratings and create headlines. Even if Sanders never uttered that explicit phrase, I’m certain that he believes the sentiment. And when Biden and Sanders expanded on their alleged sexist comments, they both acknowledged that the presidency of the United States is not determined by gender, color or sexuality. But they also insisted that the future of the U.S. depends on careful strategizing and/ or revolution; that they are the most qualified and we (the collective ‘we’) shouldn’t take any ‘unnecessary risks’ (code for electing a woman) if we want to get rid of Trump.

I hadn’t seen my dog in over a week when my friends dropped him off last night. He’s an old guy with a weird body; a mash-up of bloodhound, beagle and German shepherd with a small head and beer gut. Strangers stop us all the time because he’s cute, old and awkward. When I saw him after my vacation, I saw him the way that those strangers see him. Distance removes the blinders sometimes.

The reality that my dog is overweight, and aging, is a useful metaphor to elaborate on my disdain for men during election years. Elizabeth Warren lost credibility and points by acknowledging sexism and Bernie Sanders is once again heralded the one true savior of our democracy. The point is, Bernie and Joe don’t have to say ‘A woman can’t be elected president’ in order for it to be true. Microaggressions exist in behavior, sentiment, gestures, attitudes, expressions and actions. Biden can team up with Lady Gaga and give heartfelt speeches about empowering women, but he still hasn’t apologized to Anita Hill and has no sense of personal space. Sanders, however, has consistently been on the right side of history, fighting for social justice and human rights, but he, too, has no respect for personal space, and gesticulates wildly—sometimes in women’s faces. He interrupts women and disregards them by making himself the lone champion of revolution. Just because Sanders’ supporters don’t notice this behavior does not mean that it—or the implicit double standard in a gesture or tone—does not exist. And this kind of blind idolatry comes at the expense of treating microaggressions as feelings to be swept under the rug. I can believe my dog is thin and spry when I’m around him every day, but it doesn’t mean he’s not a chunky senior. I see him clearly when I leave the protective bubble of our life and return with new an unbiased outlook.

I firmly believe that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are capable candidates with the potential to create the structural change they speak so passionately about. An important piece of revolutionary structural change is dismantling white, male, heteropatriarchy, so why would I willingly vote for another old white man? I’ve been saying this since the 2016 election: I would have more respect for Bernie as a progressive candidate (or any white male candidate) if he were more intent on unifying the democratic party or emboldening minority candidates; or if he supported Elizabeth Warren, presently. Although my political stance is more anarchic than progressive, I’m rooting for Liz and will continue to patiently await the decline of white men and the proliferation of equal representation at all levels of government.

I’m supposed to be writing a book but I’m too busy ruminating about a girl who forbade me from writing about her.

“Don’t write about me, I mean it.”

I don’t write about most people—only awful or interesting people who force me to investigate the crevices of my spiritual universe. The unconscious shadow parts that lead me to forfeit myself, every three years or so, to the possibility of a starring role in my very own nontraditional goth wedding with the first woman who shows me any sign of affection.

As careful as I try to be, I attract people who exhibit two pertinent characteristics: they’re not firmly rooted in their identity and/or they’re undergoing a major personal transition. Unbeknownst to me, I become the lesbian raft upon which they float into a new phase of their lives—this, historically, has been new, serious, longterm relationships with other people—or this time, a mental breakdown.

My last whirlwind romance appeared out of nowhere after years of self-imposed sexual and romantic exile. I created a dating site profile—a collection of candid photos, a Spotify anthem (The Crucifucks, “You Give Me the Creeps”), and a short blurb: “Lesbian. Historian, Musician. Vegan-ish. Not trying to get married; just trying to have sex again before I’m 40.” To be fair, I had not had sex in almost three years and was about to turn 38. Like sands from the hourglass…..

Women on dating sites tend to message back and forth for weeks before discussing the possibility of meeting in person. I hate this. For me, small talk, pretense and social niceties feel like nails on a chalkboard if the chalkboard was inside my brain and the nails were strangers asking about the weather. But this is the dance of the normals and I do my best to play along.

So imagine my surprise when I received a message from a gorgeous, heavily tattooed femme wanting to meet as soon as possible. Imagine my continued surprise when I sent her my phone number and she texted me. And then the sheer delight when I invited her over and she arrived at my apartment. All I really want is a wife (not legally because fuck the state), OR a lesbian version of the Grindr app. Either or. But this was like I had manifested a Grindr date out of sheer will.

She referred to me as her Long Term Girlfriend after the first night—a play on the whole “Lesbian/ U-Haul thing,” she said. She posted photos of me on her social media, something I had never experienced with an actual long term girlfriend. She drove to my apartment from Brooklyn just to see me before a I left for a work trip. We went to an AA meeting on our second date. She was really hot. She probably still is—she’s not dead, she just doesn’t speak to me anymore. And isn’t a breakup like a tiny, manageable death? They’re alive, living in the world, talking to other people. They’re just dead to YOU.

I spent my 38th birthday in Portland, OR because it was less expensive to stay for the weekend. Long Term Girlfriend called me that morning, sang happy birthday and all of that stuff. I left for the airport on Sunday morning and we talked before I boarded a plane that would never take off due to a mechanical issue. Hundreds of sullen travelers boarded an alternate flight to Detroit where we collected hotel vouchers and made our way to our respective hotels for the night. Long Term Girlfriend broke up with me, over the phone, while I was in a hotel bed wearing my dirty Aileen Wournos ‘I’m With Her’ shirt—because the airline held our suitcases. She said it wasn’t me, it was her, but all I could think was, ‘couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow,’ as I sawed at the mats in my hair with a tiny retractable airline comb (I am cursed with a thick, luxurious mane). I cried for a minute but decided that our relationship hadn’t lasted long enough to really sob, and I spent the rest of the evening listening to a heterosexual couple in the neighboring room have sad, unproductive sex, before dragging my ass out of bed and back to the airport at 5am. Long Term Girlfriend didn’t check in with me as she did every morning, and didn’t ask if my flight landed once I’d arrived in Hartford. It’s funny how you get used to the comfort of someone you sleep with also caring whether you live or die.

I am not such an asshole that I’d be surprised at someone’s hesitancy to pursue a relationship with me. I am an acquired taste with a shady past; a true weirdo whose eccentricity was predetermined by the locations of stars, planets and tides at the exact moment I exited by mother’s womb. In other words, I downloaded a new astrology app that says I am a freak—more validating than insulting, to be honest. I wasn’t shocked that she needed space or time to think, or just decided I wasn’t the person for her, but this is another pattern in the people that I attract or choose to pursue: they change their minds in a matter of hours and go completely cold. I don’t know what that mechanism is. The love/hate light switch. Clap on, clap off, the Clapper. If I were better looking I’d accuse these women of using me for my body, because the change in attitude is so violently abrupt, but I’m not.

My therapist told me that this breakup was positive because I’d chosen a nice person who had some mental health issues rather than a sociopath or a mean spirited art curator who relished in deliberately hurting the few feelings I had the emotional capacity to identify.

“Congratulations,” she said.

One night, when things were ok—which actually wasn’t very long ago because LESBIAN relationships do not succumb to pedestrian concepts of time—Long Term Girlfriend told me about her ex-boyfriend. About how nothing bad happened, they didn’t argue or bicker, they celebrated holidays together and at night they crawled into bed, turned the lights off and went to sleep. They didn’t have sex. He wasn’t affectionate with her. She’d lay on her back next to him and think “is this all there is?” He cried when she broke it off. She loved him but it wasn’t working. She hadn’t mourned her boring, unsatisfying relationship. I wondered why she felt the need to mourn something that didn’t seem worth mourning. I feel the same way about men who mourn their absentee fathers. I have one of those and have had a string of therapists who insist I feel abandoned. “I have so many other things I feel angry about. Can’t we deal with those?”

I didn’t recognize myself as the rebound at that point; as the peaceful lesbian raft in her personal shit storm. I think most people prefer to be bored with someone, longterm, than to endure the possibility of these tiny, manageable deaths.

I am going to preface what will probably be an unpopular critique of Hayley Kiyoko by admitting that I do get excited over any shred of queer visibility in popular culture. I am not a monster. Admittedly, I have traversed the Kiyoko Youtube wormhole and surfaced hours later, hungry, thirsty and exhausted. I get it, I do. But she’s still terrible. And she’s no lesbian messiah.

I can’t begin to imagine how differently my formative years would have played out had there been an unapologetically gay pop star on my radar. I’ve always had Madonna—she was easy to queer. Sometimes she performed it convincingly but mostly she just played the part and I knew it. It was, however, better than nothing. At 16, I scoured books and music magazines and became a kind of gay investigative journalist, searching for signs of lesbianism in interviews and album lyrics. And when the well came up dry, as it often did, I became adept at the art of projection. I projected all of my lesbian hopes, dreams and aspirations onto Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. I projected them onto Shirley Manson in Garbage’s “Queer” video. I projected it over and over again onto the kiss between Nina and Louise in Veruca Salt’s “Seether” video—which I had, of course, recorded on VHS tape. When Patty Schemel the drummer of Hole came out in Rolling Stone Magazine, I celebrated, privately, over a Kahlua and milk in my bedroom. I was not alone in my sexuality—or my alcoholism, as it turns out—but that’s another story.

An aging lesbian, I enthusiastically celebrate public acceptance of any and all things GAY—of women like Hayley Kiyoko who insert themselves into spaces historically reserved for cis men, like that leopard print stool on the Expectations album cover. I do not, however, celebrate the cooptation of the male-gaze and would prefer burning that script to flipping it. If a young, successful, queer, female entertainer is celebrated for embodying Justin Bieber-esque ‘swagger’—pouting under stage lights, licking her lips while looking women in the audience up and down—it’s probably time to reevaluate our definition of ‘progressive,’ ‘feminist,’ artists. I look forward to the day when a queer woman can be a successful entertainer without objectifying other women. I’ll have a party.

The history of rock and pop music is actually very queer when you scrape away the impenetrable layer of heterosexual cis men at the top. Expressions of same sex desire and gender fluidity existed before there was language to describe it. In 1936, Lucille Bogan recorded my favorite song of all-time, BD Woman’s Blues, a coded ode to “bull daggers” or bull dykes: “B.D. Women, You sure can’t understand/ They got a head like a sweet angel and they walk just like a natural man.” And recent Rock n’ Roll Hall of fame inductee, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, was openly bisexual, an interpretation often buried in rock history and scholarship in favor of placing focus on legacy and musicianship. In the 80s and 90s, there were openly gay mainstream rock and folk stars like Melissa Etheridge, K.D. Lang, the Indigo Girls, while the Queercore movement manifested, congruently, as an anarchic response to homophobic mainstream culture—similar to how Olivia Records was born in 1973 as a reaction to overt sexism in the music industry. And our patron saint, Joan Jett, was a visibly, albeit silent, lesbian with an attitude well before Hayley Kiyoko rebranded an entire year #20GayTeen. Most openly gay progenitors did not achieve mainstream visibility—and the ones who did were the ones who were able to be commodified, sold, and consumed. Butch and former punk turned All-American-Jewish-Lesbian-Folksinger, Phranc, had a major label deal in the 80s but it’s a lot harder to sell a visible butch lesbian singing songs about politics and being gay (during the Reagan/ Bush years) than it is to sell commercial pop music written by a former Disney star.

Hayley Kiyoko is to queer culture what the Spice Girls were to Riot Grrrl: An inoffensive, commercially viable version of a countercultural movement.

There are pros and cons to this commodification, of course—it’s not all bad. The downside of this commercialized “queer revolution” is that it is being heralded by the most physically palatable version of queerness—the same way The Spice Girls were the more conventionally attractive, virtually harmless version of those hairy feminists in Bikini Kill— in an era of gross capitalist consumption. And isn’t that the antithesis of queer culture? To participate in your own commodification and call it visibility? The upside is that Kiyoko is a femme, and she is aggressively gay. An aggressively gay femme. What a beautiful phrase! She even corrects people who mislabel her. She fights the good fight (femme invisibility) and illuminates the daily struggle of gay women who lack the physical (often masculine markers, septum rings and/or an undercuts) distinctions needed to be taken seriously, or recognized at all, within the LGBTQIA community. She’s a visible, aggressively gay pop star with a diverse, global fan base. And the vehicle for her women-loving-women message is radio friendly pop which means she won’t be exiled to the Land of Lesbian Music and her message and same sex video makeouts will be consumed by a wide audience. Sure, she’s making someone a lot of money but she has the ability to change how queer people are perceived on a grand scale.

So, my problem is not that Hayley Kiyoko exists. My problem is that her music is terrible (objectively); she’s not the first lesbian anything and if you work in music media and perpetuate that myth, you are complicit in the silencing of queer women in music history; her visibility and success is a matter of commodification, being in the right place at the right time, not some new, queer revolution. That being said, I find her videos HIGHLY relatable (the unrequited love parts because I am emotionally stunted), fun to watch, and I’m old so who am I to judge. I am not proposing that we disavow a successful young, queer woman; I am suggesting that it is possible to enjoy something and to be critical of it. That it is better to notice who rises to the surface during particular cultural moments, and to critique rather than pledge blind allegiance to any attractive woman who kisses girls and capitalizes on it. Let us ingest our pop stars and be forever critical of them, the industries that churn them out, and the gatekeepers who grant them access to audience.

Two years ago, I was in Hudson, New York visiting one of my favorite couples, B and S. They’re older creatives, descended from greatness and revolutionary art movements. We were drinking coffee when S mentioned that he enjoyed the movie Love Actually, a film I’d finally watched because it was one of my ex-girlfriend’s (I am using the term as loosely as possible...like 'wet fart' loose) favorite movies—which should have been a red flag, or at least solid evidence as to our fundamental differences.

“You liked Love Actually?”

“It’s a nice movie,” he said.

“But it’s so bad!”

“Well, it’s not a movie for you.”

I consider A Woman Under the Influence a lighthearted holiday film, so he did have a point.

Love Actually is an objectively terrible film, not only because it is completely ridiculous, but because it promotes the fallacy of closure. The kind of neat and tidy resolutions that emerge from the dust of romantic or interpersonal upset, and exist ONLY in movies. They are marketed, ad nauseam, alongside the ideology that there exists in the world one soulmate for you, and if you’re open enough, work hard enough, compromise and sacrifice enough, you will find yours in the form of Hugh Grant or something. These soulmates typically live around the corner or bump into you in a coffee shop, but sometimes they live across the country or even the globe. If they do, they will, after meeting you briefly, reevaluate their future at an airport while standing in line waiting to be accosted by a TSA agent, only to realize what they’re leaving behind in Whatever-Town (you), and the realization strikes with such force that they exit the airport only to run into their human counterpoint (you), who, by some miracle, reached the same realization in line at a grocery store and you made it to the airport just in time. You and your soulmate proceed to suck face in front of a bunch of strangers, and then, I assume, go back to your place, probably have sex, move in together, get married, have a kid, move to the suburbs, vacation once a year, advance in your careers and live happily ever after.

Love Actually is worse than other formulaic rom-coms, because it heralds a guy—Rick from The Walking Dead before he was Rick from The Walking Dead—who is so seemingly well adjusted and attachment disorder-less, that he’s able to profess his undying love for Keira Knightly in a series of well-articulated poster boards, and then casually move on with his life. Not only move on with his life, but remain friends with Kiera Knightly and her husband (his best friend). Yes, Rick from Walking Dead loves his best friend’s wife, tells her about it, and the general movie-going public seems to think this is an acceptable, romantic display. Poster board-wielding Walking Dead Rick exists, presently, as a Valentine’s Day Meme, annually flooding social media platforms with the message, “To Me You Are Perfect.” Even if he is some rare breed of earnest, self-aware guy, in touch-with-his-feelings-and-capable-of-expressing-them-legibily, there is no way that Walking Dead Rick did not suffer the ails of unrequited love. In the movie, he evolves seamlessly from “creepiest wedding videographer on earth,” to “I’ll love you forever, but I have to let you go,” in a matter of weeks—an ending more implausible in this capitalist consumer culture that covertly promotes transaction, overpowering or manipulating our objects of desire and calling it love.

I am 37 years old and reside in a strange resolution purgatory where a lifetime of indoctrination into the idea of heteronormative romantic love and happy endings meets gay optimistic nihilist with a hard preference for Jena Rowlands/ John Cassavettes chaos. I’ve experienced disappointment in love, twice, and I know that closure does not come in a box, gift-wrapped, with a receipt. Sometimes there’s an email, a text message, or a ‘fuck you’ and a facebook block for no discernible reason. Sometimes closure is the end of something, without explanation.

I am a lesbian and so I have seen the movie Carol. Carol isn’t a great movie, but it is a better movie than Love Actually because it is gay, it stars Cate Blanchett, and because it is rife with mixed messages, loose ends, guns, and disappointment. The first time I watched it, I suffered a devastating epiphany. I had been dating a woman, intermittently, for about a year. Every couple of months or so, she’d secretly begin dating other people, find a more suitable partner, abruptly end the relationship with me, and cease all contact and communication, leaving me, a Gemini, and therefore astrologically prone to obsessive rumination, alone with my thoughts. So, there’s this scene in Carol where Blanchett leaves her young lover a note after their second night of sensual boning: “You look for resolution because you are young.” I felt childish for seeking an explanation from the object of my desire and I looked to Blanchett for guidance. After all, Carol was a middle-aged woman with life experience, an ex-husband, a string of lovers, a daughter, and a mansion. Carol was stoic, mysterious, and wise. I wondered if my years of alcoholism and drug addiction had stunted my emotional development. I berated myself for morphing into one of those pathetic, love addicted, pedestrian lesbians who propose marriage to the first person who shows them any sign of affection. But then I watched Carol again, several months later, and Cate Blanchett seemed less mature and more like, well, kind of an asshole: “You look for resolution because you are young.”

‘Actually, CAROL, I look for resolution because you drove me halfway across the country, fucked me in a hotel room, took off before I woke up, and sent your best friend, Sarah Paulson, to drive me back to New York in your car. You’re a mess, Carol, and an explanation would be nice,’ is what Rooney Mara should have said. Resolution cannot be forced from a dry well like Carol, and there are a lot of dry wells walking around in the world, disguised as functioning human beings. Proceed with caution. Closure is, of course, preferable to the unknown, but dangerous if it exists as a prerequisite for letting go.

While Carol does not fall for the trap of tying everything up at the end of the film, it is STRONGLY implied that Cate and Rooney are destined to live a fulfilling lesbian life together in New York, despite their age difference and the fact that they hadn’t really spent much time together at all minus the ill fated road trip. But being gay in the 1950s did not provide much opportunity for sexual exploration, so I don’t blame Rooney Mara for shacking up with the first ridiculously hot Cate Blanchett that buys her lunch. Carol, like Love Actually, avoids the grim reality of life, love, and relationships—that things often don’t work out, love is not always reciprocated, forgiveness is not an implicit ingredient in the evolution of emotional closure, and it doesn’t always manifest in the ways we would like; in poster board messages, letters, reunions or friendship. In mature conversations, over dinner, with apologies, propositions, and promises to keep in touch.

Case in point: Maybe you, hypothetically speaking of course, fall madly in love with someone who uses you as a prop to periodically elevate their self-esteem in between more substantial relationships over the course of a year or two. Maybe they apologize and you fantasize about a future where you overcome the hurt and are able to forge a new kind of relationship out of the old. The two of you, perhaps, and your ex’s new fiance, a beacon of maturity illuminating the local queer community. The Love Actually ending. But sometimes the past is overwhelming and you might tell the fiance to go fuck himself because he liked one of your photos on Instagram and you assume he’s posturing—you know, ‘getting his dick all over everything’ so you know he exists—a very 21st century expression of masculinity and ownership that says, ‘I’m here and she’s mine.’ Kind of like a less expensive engagement ring. And then maybe your ex tells YOU to fuck off, and you both agree that there is too much baggage for a sustainable and functioning friendship. A few days later you apologize for insulting the fiance, and just like that, three years of navigating the insanity of the most significant romantic experience of your life ends with an agreement, via email, to be cordial to one another in public and remain social media friends (yes, this is a thing now). Social media is the new barometer of publicly successful, contemporary resolution. This need for some crumb of connectedness, as if to say ‘everything’s copacetic,’ is nothing more than the shapeshifting fallacy of closure manifesting in the digital age. But I’m nosy and want continued access to the ex’s Yearly Christmas Photo so I send a friend request and do my part in upholding the illusion of acquaintanceship. But, I mean, overall, this scenario did not end well.

Often, there is no resolution to be had when things end. There is no correct version of events or bigger person, there are only two people armed with conflicting projections of reality. Sometimes lesbians break up and they don’t remain friends—and lesbians remaining friends is a disgusting trend proliferated by gay media, like AfterEllen, as a necessity or sign of emotional maturity. Sometimes lesbians break up and they hate each other forever and THAT, too, is closure, whether or not it’s Rainbow Flag Endorsed.

Is it ironic that I’m struggling to formulate a closing paragraph for an essay about how closure is an insidious myth, a marketing tactic, embedded into the very fabric of our culture? Probably. But you can’t get articles published or movies made without an ending. I think my point is, that if you’re one of those lucky people like Rick from The Walking Dead, or Blanchett or Rooney Mara, great. Good for you! But I’ll be here waiting for popular culture to better reflect an array of experiences that don’t all culminate in something resembling a jewelry ad—that don’t perpetuate the idea that you NEED to resolve conflict in order to achieve resolution. Sometimes closure is a final ‘fuck you’ and never seeing that person again, except for intermittent social gatherings where you avoid eye contact or say ‘hello’ to be polite.

November 6th

I do two things, religiously, every winter: I listen to Marianne Faithfull and google stories about hermits who die in their homes without being discovered for weeks. Years ago, somewhere in Europe, a friendless recluse decomposed into her floor. Her body wasn’t discovered until it began dripping into the downstairs neighbor’s apartment. Last year, I considered adopting a small dog with a misshapen body and protruding fangs. The disclaimer on the adoption website read, “He did eat his owner.” The owner died at home and the dog ate the corpse instead of starving to death which seems reasonable enough. He has since been adopted and renamed “Rumplestiltskin.”

On November 6th, 2018, I drive to campus for an evening seminar and play Marianne Faithfull’s newest album, Negative Capability. I have my period and I feel hormonal and weepy. I rarely cry and I am confident about my suppression techniques until “In My Own Particular Way” begins and I promptly burst into tears for the first time in a little over two years, which, coincidentally, also occurred in a campus parking lot. I blame the parking lot, reapply my mascara, and head into class.

November 17th

As a closeted teenage homosexual, I spent a lot of time alone in my room, avoiding high school boys and their aggressive penis,’ playing music, drawing, adventuring in a homemade spy belt, and recording music videos and live performances on VHS tape—before the dawn of the internet and when MTV still lived up to its name. I watched Marianne Faithfull sing with Metallica on Saturday Night Live in 1997. I thought she was interesting because she was old and I’ve always had an affinity for “women of a certain age,” but I didn’t care for Metallica and failed to investigate their mysterious backup singer.

In my late 20s, having played in bands, and procured a sizable music library out of the nucleus of “best of” albums, I considered myself well-versed in rock history. But, I invented spectacular stories about how I arrived at a particular artist or album, which, for the record, is a gender induced phenomenon. Growing up female, just outside of Guyville,[1] with no viable source of music knowledge, you tend to discover things in “un-cool” ways. The road to good taste, whatever that is, is a bit longer for girls than it is for, say, a teengage boy who was, perhaps, encouraged to play drums in a shitty death metal band, or who had the privilege of living with older, cooler siblings.

The truth is, one December in the early 2000s, I picked up Marianne Faithfull’s “Greatest Hits” out of a bargain bin at a record store and that’s when she hit me. I have disliked almost all of my favorite artists at some point but there comes a day when my emotional maturation meets their artistic genius and the two coalesce to form a successful relationship. Soon after my foray into the greatest hits, I was the proud owner of her entire discography. I preferred her Broken English,[2] cigarette-ravaged, post-heroin voice. I still do. A weathered heel on cool snowy-blue, gravel; aged and imperfect. A cup of tea that’s just a little too hot and burns when it goes down.

November 28th

I started smoking in the sixth grade, after I got my first electric guitar. It was hard to smoke regularly at 12, with a mother who singlehandedly made every school in our district smoke free. In the 90s, I bought packs of Marlboros from a vending machine at Bickfords Restaurant and smoked in the woods with friends. I chain smoked from 18 to 31. I can’t say it was Marianne Faithfull’s fault, but I can say that she was a very beautiful smoker and I didn’t hit puberty until my senior year of high school. Coorelation is not causation, but it is something.[3]

November 29th

In 2007, I admitted myself to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. One surprising thing about rehab is that they confiscate books and music that are not ‘recovery-based.’ I was prepared for the strip searches, sleepless nights on a cot in a room with other detoxing women; to be handed toiletries and razors that had to be returned after showering; for barred windows and no exercise; but I was not prepared to give up my music. I was admitted to the facility as “homeless” which meant I was awarded a coveted state bed, an extended stay, and visitation privileges. Most of the other women had visitors who smuggled in makeup or drugs, but I insisted on burned compact discs that I would shove down my pants before exiting the visitation room. There were certain things my family wouldn’t provide—anything too “depressing” and no Judy Garland because she was also too depressing and an alcoholic. But an acquaintance visited once—I think he was curious about the place. He wrote vacuous short stories about the trials and tribulations of white, college-educated, red headed young men, and he was a redhead and a Brown University graduate. He brought me a Marianne Faithfull mix and I never saw him again.

December 5th

Romantic love is a social construct but the rush of oxytocin that comes with the honeymoon period is nice. Despite my ambivalence, I reboot my dating site profile and choose a series of flattering, candid photos that I hope will attract like-minded individuals. I link my Spotify account and choose “Why’d Ya Do it” as my Tinder Anthem.[4] I do not receive any matches.

December 19th

A french reporter interviewed me about the status of women in music over Skype. We discussed oral history and the always subjective art of curation. She asked who my dream interview would be and I answered, “Marianne Faithfull.” When she asked, “why,” I said, “I love her.”

As a newly functioning and, arguably, productive member of society (how productive is a Ph.D. in a capitalist economy?), I maintain the gift of having once been a total disaster. It is a gift to have lived a million lives, and I am predisposed to obsessions with artists who possess similar disastrous yet multifaceted pasts, and who have lived long enough to offer perspective. Not necessarily a happy ending, but the comfort of shared experience.

December 23rd

There is something about being a 37-year-old, perpetually single lesbian that makes me feel like I missed an important lesson during my formative years; the years of indoctrination into the heterosexual American ideal. In elementary school, we were asked to illustrate our futures using white paper and colored markers. I drew myself, a successful marine biologist, in a red Saab convertible parked outside of my condo, gazing adoringly at pet whales and dolphins in their large, well-maintained pools. I realized the error of my ways when the rest of the girls in class presented caricatures of weddings, husbands and bald infants. Twenty-seven years after that failed class assignment, I have managed to avoid any semblance of a normal romantic relationship. I procured a beard in High School, Brian Doolin, after a mean girl called me a lesbian in art class; from 18 to 20 I suffered massive crushes on my best friends which is an unfortunate but totally normal predicament to be in at that age; in my 30s I dated a younger woman who had a boyfriend but liked my attention on and off for a couple of years until she got bored and later engaged; and one cross-country romance with a turtleneck wearing art curator from Los Angeles who moved in with someone else while were dating and I didn’t even notice.

On bad days, I feel like a failure. Like everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, at some point, participates in the Wedding Industrial Complex. They cohabitate, marry, and trade in personal aesthetics for stark, mid-century modern chic, potted plants, and sparsely decorated white walls. For small, tasteful barn weddings, Ikea trips, dinner parties and compromise. On good days, I feel like a relationship renegade. I relish in my solitude. I am passionate about my work. I can hang as much art on my walls as I please and bathe behind the comfort of an uncouth Jeff Goldblum shower curtain. I leave the door open when I go to the bathroom so I can talk to my dog. I am not a failure, I am an enigma.

I travel often for work—I interview musicians—usually in Los Angeles because that’s where many of them live. Marianne Faithfull lives in Paris. Of course she does. I remember the first time I flew home to Massachusetts after visiting the turtleneck wearing curator girlfriend. My phone rang as soon as my plane landed and it was her. “Just wanted to make sure you made it.” I thought, this is why people partner up. I listened to “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” on the drive home but I didn’t recognize it as a premonition at the time.[5]

December 26th

I don’t know why ageism is a thing that exists in pop culture because women over age the age of fifty are inherently more interesting artists and performers. I would rather listen to Marianne Faithfull at 71, a woman who shares her bed with an assortment of books, (and if that’s not a mutually beneficial relationship worth striving for, I don’t know what is) than be subjected to another trendy 20-something year old cog in the revolving door of streaming music garbage. I would rather be alone forever than lose myself in a relationship. I wonder if that’s why Marianne sleeps with books. I would rather be a book on Marianne Faithfull’s bed than be in love.

December 27th

I listen to Marianne Faithfull in the winter, obsessively, because it’s purging music in a purging season. The cold, diminished daylight, the holidays, that voice—the combination begs for catharsis. Winter is the Saturn Return of the seasons and you can either absolve your shit or continue on your merry, unevolving way.

I have a tendency to disregard what I call ‘pedestrian emotions’—Love, loneliness, longing, regret—as weakness in order to maintain the illusion of someone confident, unwavering, and self-reliant. Because I am incapable of expressing true vulnerability—or more specifically, to vocalize my desire for “someone to love, who could love me back…in our own particular way”[6]—Marianne Faithfull is my conduit. And because she refuses to discuss her songs in any detail, she does us all the great favor of allowing for translation. I translate them in my private spinster universe, which, for the most part is a 2009 Toyota Matrix, in the dead of winter. Or sometimes in my living room with my old dog watching, and in those moments, that is “love, more or less.”[7]

[1] Great line from “Harvest Spoon,” by Free Kitten. 1995. Has nothing to do with Marianne Faithfull.

[2] Broken English is Marianne Faithfull’s 7th studio album, released in November, 1979. It is considered her “comeback.”

[3] Marianne Faithfull started smoking again but will quit when she goes in for shoulder surgery according to an interview with Jude Rogers for The Guardian. I still do not smoke and it’s not Marianne Faithfull’s fault that I was an impressionable and insecure teen who didn’t hit puberty until my senior year of high school.

[4] “Why’d Ya Do It” is the 8th track on Broken English, about infidelity: “Why'd ya do it, she screamed, after all we've said/ Every time I see your dick I see her cunt in my bed.” Not a great choice for a dating site anthem.

[5] I first heard this version of the song on the greatest hits bargain bin album.

[6] “In My Own Particular Way,” the 4th track on Negative Capability, is beautifully sad, vulnerable, and relateable. It’s about love, loss and aging. The most curmudgeonly of curmudgeons would cry in a parking lot over this one.

[7] “Love more or Less,” from Give My Love to London, released September 2014.