My dearest Amy, it is your birthday, and as you know I celebrate this as my very own holiday. I know it’s kind of weird that I am sending you your birthday letter like this. Might feel a little impersonal, this public birthday carding, but here’s the thing: shit’s busy. But what’s more intimate than sending a deeply personal letter to your oldest friend to a thousand people, right?
Life’s not just busy, full frenzy, like pipes bursting, flames aloft, wild fireworks flying out of my nostril’s kind of busy. It’s an explosively creative time. I am working a new story to the bone, and have another collaborative video project, all getting published on Sunday in my zine, so I figured, to make this work, I am going to have to make it art. Now, I know this isn’t exactly art, but I thought this could be a kind of gesture, an across the pond wink to just how much you are under my skin.
I mean, I don’t have to tell you just how much you are in my writing, maybe I should tell you how much you are in my writing. It’s like you are the teabag, I am just the hot water, you know? Every damn thing I write about has you inked all over it. I mean, it’s kind of weird. All these years of making art, it was hardly ever about you. You, keep a simple, human presence in my life. But maybe it’s the fiction that makes it all go wobbly, and my spine open up like some kind of Pezz dispenser, and the Amy comes flying out.
Writing fiction is fucking weird, Amy. I mean, I’m not the only one asking this, but seriously, where does this shit come from. I mean, D. Lynch was all about the waking dream element of writing, and that’s exactly it. Try to explain to your boyfriend why there’s all this man killing and man hating going on in the fiction… I’m like, well obviously it’s not you.. even though there are obvious daily references to you in that guy my character just brutally murdered.
I mean, what the fuck right. It’s a dream residue in the fiction. But mostly it’s just you, all over my fiction.
The teabag metaphor is the right one. Everything is steeped in you. It’s your dark curls in the drain. It’s your family in some of the drama (and certainly sometimes my own, you should read the new monologue I wrote for the June theater monologue performance for my theater class… that shit is spilling Libbey saga.) But so much of it is lifted from your letter, your struggles and your grief.
Bear with me here, there will be a point:
I did a live video on Monday with a stranger---she was there for me in a steep vertigo moment, so when she had a similar vertigo, I was like… you can count on me, and she took me up on it. She could have been anyone, but the magic of the Stack brought me
.As I was eating a banana and brewing a coffee to get ready for the live, I read a few of her pieces, and DAMN, how did we find each other? Not only did her writing speak to a part of me that doesn’t get to speak to a lot of people, I was in total agreement with so many of her thoughts, and her work on herself felt exactly like the kind of work I do… and and and… we were going to be talking about her time in a cult. A cult!
How did this, of all things, land in my lap? A subject that no one should ever get me started on, I get so excited and have way too many things to say. You know one of those party killer Sandolore topics to avoid at all costs. (Like how perfumes are made, the french school system, that one dancer teacher I had for contact dance.) You know, subjects to be avoided if you want to escape Sandolore… someone should be offstage waving their arms like don’t get her started (loud whisper).
But as we spoke about her cult experiences and her difficulties in reconstructing herself and rebuilding her sense of being able to trust her own instincts (I of course mentioned how I also experienced this after finding myself in another abusive relationship with you-know-who).
But I also said that a family is kind of like a cult. And here’s where I circle back. First of all (a number of people commented on this, and so first, I want to explain my idea) what I meant is that a family is like an insular value system.
When we are kids, we swallow the world view whole, no chewing. Dad says smart people read books, you believe it. Mom says that the dark is scary, the dark is scary. But more than that, it’s the infused value system, the unspoken shit. You build your identity around it… dad wants me to be sparkly and smart, mom likes it when I am wacky and funny… and so the construction begins.
And there’s all the infused ethics and what is considered good and bad… you know all this by heart, but I am talking about how for me, the Libbey’s life was infused in, money is power, stuff makes you happy, the Sykes side infused the importance of intellectual reflection and the importance of imagination, the Schwerm family steeped me in theater and jazz handed exuberance… and the whole ‘pot au feu’ ends up looking a lot like me (can you see the freckles reflected in the broth?)
Growing up is the unpeeling of this onion, rebelling against the things you took for granted, realizing your cult leader mother’s authority is built like a sandcastle, seeing the contradictions in the architecture of everything you took for granted. And you start pulling out dry wall and even, if you want to be a really evolved person, some of the anchoring beams.
So that’s what I meant about a family being like a cult. You built your reward system around what your family wanted from you, who they think you are, how they control you. Growing up is about rewriting the code, so you get to find your own compass needle.
Thembeka and I both agreed, that sometimes, it’s a gift… the more fucked up the cult, the more you’ll really have to get to task to figure yourself out.
So, thinking about the cult family, I started thinking about your family, and how, the fact that you and I started writing each other’s code so young. We spent so much time in each other’s architectures and your family’s codes are also in my blueprints, both directly and indirectly. I mean stupid stuff, my musical ear comes from your family, or from you… just learned. But also, my sense of rebellion, what being a part of an alternative world could be, from your brothers and dad and their musical other worlds, shit like that.
But the real cult, between you and I (I wonder how the Sykes’ and Schwerms and Libbeys affected your architecture….) is the one we built together, and I am not even talking about the creepy religion we created in the forest calling Zoltron to the earth. I am talking about the one we seamed up together, the value system you and I built together as children and then in adolescence. Is this part of why you get into the fiction so deeply? Is that why your dark curls are swelling up from the dredge of the drains in my stories— which come to me like I summoned them in a séance?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, meant more to me than when you said my last piece of fiction made you feel less alone.
So today celebrates you, and the fantastic luck I had in finding you and getting to make an Amy and Sandy pot au feu out of this life. Amy and Sandy have 40 years of infusing bone marrow in this broth.
I know you know that everything I write is to you and weirdly, about you. But this deserves underlining. I have a thousand other things to tell you, about the boys and the challenges and successes, about E’s braces, about his grades and how we did good work getting communicating about pressure and support and how get that in equilibrium about how S won a winning goal and though I can’t follow the soccer game for shit, I got a little streamy tear of pride.
How I bought Aymeric a kilt for Valentine’s day and how we sang karaoke together in front of the fireplace and talked about a thousand things. I want to tell you about my new band of invisible friends who are way better than the imaginary invisible unicorn that used to follow me around as a kid, because my friends make art with me and are a tremendous band of super geniuses.
I want to take time to hear how you are handling all the changes in the US and how it will affect you, I want to hear about the underground railroad of maps and how the resistance is protecting information.
I am so happy to hear that your grief has lifted at least one shell of grey wool. I know it will come waves, but I am so relieved to know that it is a little better these days. I want to hear about how Wayne is upping his game with the bot conversations from WhatsApp and tell you how fucking great his latest conversation was.
I love you to the moon and back, which you know, deep knowing, in the juicy sludge of your delicious marrow. February 19th is always the best day of the year, because, fuck man, what would I do with you?
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