Another Week: Number 106

Our annual rollercoaster ride tops out in late June, then lazily tips forward and begins rolling downhill, slowly picking up speed. At the bottom is the solstice, Christmas, and the New Year. I always think of the period between Thanksgiving and now as a tunnel. Lots of business gets put on hold, school is paused, the TV schedule is suspended, people travel away, people travel back home, and there is lots of spending, eating, and drinking in the dark.

Now we’re finally out the other end, back into the light, and we can resume our actual work as we begin the slow climb toward shorts and flip-flops and 9:30 sunsets (or 8:30, anyway, if Elon Musk is allowed to shitcan Daylight Saving Time).

I spent the week mostly keeping my head down and my arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Nevertheless, on Monday, I still woke up with the Chicken Dance running through my brain for no reason.

There were quite a few fireworks in the neighborhood Tuesday night. There were group texts of everyone wishing everyone else an obligatory Happy New Year.

And of course, there were the New Year’s terrorist incidents in New Orleans and Las Vegas by former and current U.S. military men, both born in the U.S.A. — which Donald J. Trump immediately somehow pounced upon as validation of his immigration beliefs.

I was reminded yet again of John Mulaney’s “horse loose in the hospital” analogy because horses are famously full of shit. This one continuously pushes nuggets out of his puckered hole, and the news media is forever analyzing each one to try and determine what he might have been consuming — but horseshit is horseshit.

After the wind blows, I often find things in my yard. On Friday morning, a piece of paper was under my forsythia bush. It was letter-sized, folded in quarters like a note. But there was no note — just an image on the front, of a small child’s handprint cut out and taped onto a blank background, and then photocopied here.

This reminded me of an eerie Washington Post story that my sister Karen sent me back in May.

Now, personally, my hunch is that we do not, as individuals, survive death. I hope and sense that there’s a higher power inhabiting all beings — but when a life ends, I imagine that particular little cup of experience pouring back into the ocean, so to speak.

This Post story, however, challenged my assumptions. It reported on small children recounting obscure details of past lives that actually do check out upon investigation. It made my freakin’ hair stand on end.

So now, of course, the thought has crossed my mind that Amy could be a baby somewhere – perhaps sending me postcards in the wind?

Which reminds me: Scanning through the channels on Friday, I passed an infomercial called Larry King’s Prostate Report: Secrets to Prostate Health Revealed. Hosting it, he looked pretty good.

I walked zero miles this week.

All Fours, by Miranda July

Last week, I read a Guardian article: ‘This book is my bible!’ The women who read Miranda July’s All Fours, then blew up their lives.

Okay, I thought, something current and indecent — I’ll bite. I dutifully read Fifty Shades of Grey when that scandal was promoted, and my only extramarital affair was stoked, in part, by The Bridges of Madison County. Why not find out what drives reckless yearning these days?

The 45-year-old narrator of All Fours is unnamed, but she shares many attributes with its author. Miranda July turns 51 next month, lives in Los Angeles, works in assorted creative arts, and is raising the ungendered child that she had with her then-husband, whose work includes collaborations with musical artists.

In the book, the narrator thinks at her husband, “The real me is in my work. Any fan of my work knows me better than you do.” But, of course, she’s thinking this in a work of fiction.

All Fours contains a lot of wry humor. I laughed out loud several times at the narrator’s sardonic observations. It also incorporates an extravagant motel-room makeover, hip-hop dancing in the strobe-lit dark, the smell of tonka beans, outfits, workouts, suicidal ancestors, and healthy snacks.

There are flashbacks to her baby’s harrowing first days after miraculously surviving a serious fetal-maternal hemorrhage (FMH).

There is also a thoughtful examination of the implications of perimenopause and menopause — hormonally, emotionally, and as a mortal milestone — complete with a vertiginous graph and an informal survey via SMS. Society at large doesn’t recognize how drastically the “change of life” changes women’s lives. I remember how upset Amy was when chemotherapy pushed her over that cliff, and how fervently she felt that women needed better menopause education.

And yes, All Fours has chapters with some very explicit sexual huffing and puffing and grinding — some of it preliminary, and much of it ultimately frustrating.

This is how the book morphs from exhilarating to aggravating. The narrator is on an urgent quest to have other people fulfill her, primarily through sex. Her husband doesn’t even realize that he failed this mission some time ago. Now she’s auditioning a series of strangers — but there’s very little mutuality. I shouldn’t throw stones, but she masturbates a lot. Even her close friend exists only to provide feedback to her narcissistic loop via phone. 

The book’s anxiety builds because, after following her desires with abandon, our adventurer predictably finds herself out on a brittle limb. As a reader, you expect some resolution – for good or ill.

Instead, we get hazy transcendence — via a token performance by someone else, four years later — and we get to fill in the blanks ourselves. The suddenly “unashamed” narrator literally walks off into the sunset and she is buzzed with the kind of aesthetic arrest we were hoping to encounter at the end of, I don’t know, a well-crafted work of fiction or something. Four years later there should at least be some better perspective on menopause. But … nope.

In the end, All Fours feels more like portraiture — like, “Here are a bunch of crazy things that happened, and the beat goes on.”

But while it fails as story, Miranda July’s style is notable (I’m reminded of Lena Dunham, although I liked Girls better) and either her imagination is wild, or her life is.