This is My Confession

     The picture above was on my bedroom wall while I was growing up. It's of a band called the Afghan Whigs.  I was about eleven when I first saw one of their videos on 120 Minutes on MTV, probably '92 or '93. At first the appeal probably had a lot to do with the fact that they were from Cincinnati, and their lead singer was originally from a little north in Butler County, where I grew up and still live. My little mind was amazed that actual human beings from Cincinnati were on my television set, and the music and lyrics were probably a secondary concern.
     However, in short order I came to sincerely love the Whigs. Greg Dulli became my one true hero for being so unapologetically confident. I combed Sassy and all the music mags of the '90s for any mention. I put Let Me Lie to You on a mix cd when I was 14 (?!). I taped 120 Minutes when Greg hosted with Donal Logue and they acted out scenes from the Godfather with water guns. I was in it to win it, but I was always too young to go to any shows. When I was about 16 I joined an internet mailing list (remember those?) called Congregation just so I could keep up with all the latest Whigs happenings. In my freshman year at Miami, the band decided to break up and though I've seen Greg Dulli play in different incarnations I truly thought I would never see the original Whigs play live together.
     Tonight, I will see the Afghan Whigs play live at Bogart's in Cincinnati. I wish I could try to explain to you what that means to me in a way you could understand. I could tell you my favorite songs, my favorite albums, and why I think everyone should love them. I could tell you that after hearing news of the reunion tour I immediately knew why my life had been spared from that massive pulmonary embolism last year.
     I could tell you that I never was really a stereotypical Whigs fan, either a mosh-loving dude or one of the girls who would faint just to be in the same room as Greg Dulli (In fact my fave Greg moment of all time was an old 90's joint interview with Chuck Cleaver from the Ass Ponys/Wussy where they declared the only people you remember from elementary school is the kid who wins the spelling bee and the kid who craps their pants, and only Chuck knows why that is my favorite...haha. hahaha.) I loved the Whigs because I thought their musicianship was hard to beat amongst the other bands of the day (or any day) and their guitar and bass lines sounded so entirely different. Most of all, I loved the Whigs because I felt like Greg Dulli's lyrics, especially the most true, the most emotionally cruel, were an outlet for a side of me few people ever experience. I am not actually overly nice, and I never really was, even at the age of eleven, in the sense that I have always refused to compromise any part of myself to make other people feel better. I have a sense of self that is so strong-willed that it just refuses to be sacrificed to any greater good, and that has been both a saving grace and a detriment at times. And I always felt like it was really something not to be proud of, and Dulli's lyrics in Whigs songs made me feel better about my ability to sacrifice the will of others in order to keep my own self going. As I've gotten older, I am much less ashamed of my ability to be cruel for self-preservation as I see the sorrow people have endured for letting other people stomp on them. And maybe those lyrics about selfishness were actually full of shame but they always made me almost proud of myself.
     Lastly, I could tell you this. I could tell you I left that picture on my wall when my parents declared bankruptcy and we lost our house when I was in college, along with the picture of John Lennon from my mom's White Album above my bed, and some other music pictures dating from pre-teen years. I told my mom I would go back and save them before we had to turn over our keys, but for reasons not clear to me I never did go back. I think I had been forced to realized that houses, and pictures of the Afghan Whigs, are not permanent and never were even if we thought so at one time. It's the memories of growing up at that house that I take with me, and it's the memories of growing up listening to the best band to ever come out of Cincinnati that I take with me and not some old picture.

At the back of the mind, where we live now

I thought this email I just finished explained a lot of the thoughts I've had lately, and also who I've always been. Don't ask why I refer to myself in the third person, but it was rather fun to do. And if it is not succinct, at least it is weirdly descriptive. A missive from the chicken coop.

Dear ****,
Stacey is very thankful for your kindness in giving her your delicious pancake recipe. It is not everyone that recognizes the healing and comfort provided by a good pancake, and so Stacey realizes that you are quite special. She went to the doctor and no thyroid cancer, yay! But the visit somehow managed to still be pretty disheartening. Stacey wrote to you last month, but decided not to send it. It was somehow too negative, and she is tired of being negative. But she will tell you the story someday. It has to do with the old theater in *********** in the 40's and a poet put in a straightjacket and is sort of funny and sort of horrifyingly tragic. Stacey has been thinking about something lately. You know what scares her more than the dark, more than being on coumadin, more than Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet? People. What is a 'people' and how do you talk to it? Stacey might not remember. Stacey has spent so much time in the last year being a shut-in and lovingly decorating the make-believe home we each have in our head so as to make it as comfortable as possible that she is one chicken coop short of becoming Flannery O'Connor. How is it then that people will ever visit such a place if no one knows it exists? Her dad was a salesman and her mother has never been shy, so the bullcrap charm factor is not in question and it's always been easy to make a friend. But is there any amount of bulljive in the world that can entice these so-called 'people' to go farther and want to visit a place they don't understand? Since childhood, Stacey has veered between the most intense periods of repression and expression, and she never could decide if it was better to let people who will never agree know that your ideas of what's important are so drastically different, or to keep the structure intact for yourself in that one true place of belonging that exists in the mind only. The structure has been gradually and intricately built since birth and is the only true home that exists. Many years ago Stacey's parents lost their house because her dad had some strokes and they couldn't pay, and she realized then that 'home' had never been a physical place, or even a place tied to other people. Home is that structure in our mind that's made of everything we've ever thought was important, and there is a painful dissonance if your ideas of importance are tiny and delicate with blurred infinite edges instead of huge and finite ones that society understands like marrying a lawyer, having 3.2 children by age so-and-so, making a certain amount of money, lying to people to get that certain amount of friends, etc. It is easy for people to be slightly bemused but much harder for them to understand this different way of building the structure. There is a famous theory by William James that compares the substance and importance of the space between our concrete thoughts to the space between the periods of our sentences. Stacey thinks that's where the real verve of life exists. Stacey would rather talk to people about the feeling of freedom when you are little and you swing SO high on the swing set you might take flight, or talk about the psychological effect of pancakes, or talk about the exact shade of perfect red in Kieslowski's 'Red,' or that the only real sin that matters is to smother the Truth. So how do you tell people the directions so they won't get lost on the way to this weird building? Stacey has no sense of how to do that at this point, which makes those 'people' feel mildly dangerous. But let's tell the truth to Stacey today...how could any little old person and their lack of understanding be as dangerous as dancing with death and then literally walking away almost a year ago? In the end the fear is all foolishness, just wasting time in a life that may not be very long and we know what Stacey has to do. She has to venture forth and put herself on the line, tie herself to the mast, and be willing to go down with the ship if necessary to express that structure. She was never really meant to hide like this, and she knows it. Stacey is a strange bird, but what price glory, ****? Sincerely, Stacey Gunckle

Review: Goodbye First Love and Summer Interlude

     Both of these movies try to show the difficulty we have as adults of holding on to or letting go of our youth.  It's so hard to reconcile bitter realities of adulthood with that sweet innocence and belief. 

     Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse) is directed by Mia Hansen-Love, who directed The Father of My Children(which I never saw due to not being into sad sad movies in 2010, though weirdly enough I watched Summer Hours, which was sadder than sad yet life-affirming at the very end and was directed by her husband, Olivier Assayas). It stars Lola Creton from Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard as the protagonist, who is based on Mia Hansen-Love herself. Creton, who was 17 or 18 during filming, has been accused of playing too flat but I don't find that to be the case at all. Her eyes say all you need to know about this character, who loves an older boy while she's in high school. They have a bad break-up near the beginning of the movie and the rest details the ways in which the girl deals with that aftermath of her first heartbreak as she gets older, goes to school, gets a career, meets someone else (who looks a bit like Klaus Kinski). The problem is that in these more mature scenes Lola Creton is still 17 playing someone years older. Hansen-Love's priority was to have a real teenager play the teenager, but if the film has a flaw it has to be how absurdly young Creton remains throughout, and why they keep dressing her in the same outfits she wore when the character was 16 I'll never know. Still, all the performances are so good you almost forget any flaws of the film. The truth of the experiences and emotions of this girl was so moving to me. The construction of our adult self is such a painful yet weirdly rewarding process.

     "Life is never what you expect. Your fantasy version of the world is doomed to failure. It's up to you to create one that's deeper, more real. That's how you become yourself."

     I'm not into crappy folk of the last few years but there is a song that plays in the movie and again at the end that I thought was just perfect. It's called "The Water" by Johnny Flynn, who I hadn't heard, and Laura Marling, who I have and is a snoozefest. It's overdramatic and could be insufferable in that Joan Baez way but the lyrics are so appropriate to the movie('The water can't drown me, I'm done with my dying'). It plays at the end over gorgeous cinematography of the Ardeche deparment in France while a hat floats away down the river. Anyone with a heart that beats should watch and enjoy this movie.

     Summer Interlude is an early film by Ingmar Bergman that came out this summer on the Criterion Collection. Now, anyone that knows me knows I'm no Bergman fanatic. I watched Cries and Whispers in the middle of the night on TCM many years ago and thought it was somewhere between a horror and a comedy, had to watch the loathsome Wild Strawberries in psych class, and was just unimpressed with this Bergman person. More recently I watched and enjoyed and even bought The Seventh Seal. So I bought this and Summer with Monika because I thought they were my speed, and they are. Summer Interlude has beautiful b&w cinematography (even before Sven Nykvist!). Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a ballerina in her twenties who suddenly receives an old diary that transports her back to the summer of her first love as a teenager. 

     As she takes a trip back to walk the scenes where that love played out, we see the inevitable tragedy coming. You don't need all the foreshadowing to know glorious summers like that never last. You can't sleep in a little cabin and wake up every morning to put your bathing suit on and fish and swim all day forever. In fact, this movie has some incredibly dark moments. The contrast of those shiny summer days with the torment of the main character in the present could be off-putting or uneven, but the story progresses pretty well until the rather abrupt and somewhat incongruous end. Nilsson does a superb job and her face is eminently expressive (in contrast to Lola Creton!). The dark moments where she is haunted by that lost joy aren't as terrible as you would think because she is able to relate that maybe those happy times are just as much a part of who she is now as all the bitterness that followed. Bergman tries to reconcile these two halves of the character in the end and doesn't pull it off convincingly, maybe because the two halves can exist separately in the same person but there is no way to really ignore or obliterate either one. The interplay between the lightness of that young love and the haunting of what came after it is still definitely worth watching.

     Meanwhile, I've been feeling extra lousy lately(I had my first kidney stone in July and I have to go to a specialist at Ohio State in Sept. and I'm hoping he'll be able to help) but I had a good weekend. Saturday I got up and fixed a vegan banana pancake recipe that my pen pal just gave to me 'cause I've been feeling bad or because he is a nice person or because he likes my stories or maybe just maybe all of the above. They were really quite delicious, even if I'm normally a miserable pancake cook. I even fixed a couple at the end with chocolate chips added, but I think make the ones with just banana were even better. Then I went with mother dearest to see The Dark Knight Rises, which I mostly liked. On Sunday I went to lunch with my mom and nephew and visited my grandma, who happens to live in a retirement home out by the YMCA. I went swimming for the first time in a couple months. I felt pretty good doing my laps and I was proud that even with no practice I still was at the same pace I had been at the start of summer. And then I got out of the pool, and almost passed out while changing. It was scary, and I was glad there were other people in the locker room in case I needed them. I think the blood gets stuck in my clottified legs which makes my heart and lungs work too hard. I'm gonna ask my doctor about it because even though it took forever to feel more steady this afternoon, I can't explain the freedom that swimming affords me. I wish I could teach every one of you to swim so you could have the escape, too. I heard there's a new part autobiography/part why-swimming-is-glorious book called Swimming Studies or some such by some lady which I need to read. As I grew up I loved to swim on my back, on the bottom of my mom's friend's pool, and stare at the sun shining on the bubbles rising to the surface and marvel at how awesome life can be. And I still know that it can be, and swimming helps me remember.

Review: Blood Orange

I originally just clicked on a video by Blood Orange("Bad Girls") on Youtube the other day because my favorite drink du jour is Tropicana Trop 50 Red Orange juice. To my surprise, I loved it. It looks like they're signed to Domino Records and have one album, but nobody told me. So this is me telling you. The songs would mostly fit in a John Hughes movie or a Bret Easton Ellis book (P.S. Does anyone else follow B.E.E. on Twitter? Lately he seems to have devolved into ordering the same movies I do on pay-per-view cable and campaigning to write the movie adaptation of 'Fifty Shades of Grey.' Sad or awesome? You decide.) There are a lot of clear, twinkly 80's sounds but the man's caterwauling voice is different enough to make it really very interesting. The video above can only be described as crazy.org, and has a great moody plot though probably NSFW. As one man in Texas would say, please to enjoy!

Review: My life as it stands now at 6:19 PM

No excuse for a wasted life

     I think I'm going to write every post on this blog in the form of a review. That's what the kids like, right? But no letters or numbers, just words.  The way a review should be. I've read a lot of books and seen a lot of movies that I haven't told anyone about in the last couple of years and my plan is to share them with you all, otherwise known as forcing you to like everything I like.
     Sorry I haven't updated. I've felt quite poorly. See, I have this thing where my vitamin D goes down to nothing if I don't take it in pill form. It made some of my teeth go rotten a few years back because you can't absorb calcium without vitamin D and I had a bazillion root canals and crowns and two implants(ooh la la!). And yet when I start to get a normal amount of vitamin D in my body, everything starts to go wrong in a different way. No doctor has been able to figure it out, so I've now got an appointment with a specialist at Ohio State. It can't come too soon for me. Last week my kidneys started hurting and I went to the doctor but it wasn't a stone, so I'm taking an antibiotic in case it's an infection. Really, I think whatever is going on with my endocrine system played some part in 11/11/11 Day of Doom/Rebirth of the Cool. I will find out soon I hope.
     I'm really over being an invalid at this juncture. And truthfully, the last few years I have retreated from life in almost every way, in part because everyone died but also because I was waiting. I've been waiting since I was 18 and went down to Children's Hospital and had my Graves' disease adventure. I feel like I've been waiting for some conclusion, for someone to say well, this is what is wrong, and this is what we are going to do, and then it will be over, and only then can you have permission to live the life that you always wanted to live before you allowed yourself to break at all the stereotypical fault lines and be swept into a corner.
     Well, no one puts Stacey G-Funk in a corner, except Stacey G-Funk. Not Dutch Cat Aids, not everyone dying all at once, not my leg that hurts perpetually like it's gone to sleep, not nuffin' and not nobody except me. I did it. I tried to glue together what was left and bury it to try and be safe from harm, but since I had my dance with death I have been gradually accumulating courage. I have only been half-heartedly mimicking the person I once was for some years now. Being safe from harm(despite the fact that it's my favorite Massive Attack song) is not the point of life, and we all know it. It's something that's hard to remember when we lull ourselves into our cozy little comas, but sometimes life does us a favor and gives us 40 million blood clots to remind us that we will never be safe. And if we will never be safe, then why do we lull ourselves into comas? Why not try to throw every thing we have against the wall, and hopefully it won't break but if it does, it will break on our own terms for once.
     I have plans, academic plans, on the horizon. I am going to clear up this endocrine-related health enigma (a lost Agatha Christie title) and then as I feel better I'm going to get this party started.

I just want to be one true thing that don't fade

By the road to the contagious hospital

Leiden, The Netherlands

 I wanted to start this blog for months. I wanted to start it with an entry about my near-death experience last November so I could direct people to it and I wouldn't have to tell the whole story in case they wanted to know about it. At first I was excited to tell people about it because it was so odd and shocking. Hey you will never believe what happened to me! It turns out my body is traitorous! Who even knew that could happen? But now I think denial mode is the best way to live it. My weird ailments don't define me. I do recognize they exist but I refuse to allow them to make the rules and I just want to use the experience to further clarify my ambitions. The only rules or restrictions I've ever liked are ones I set myself that are small and manageable, like 'Stacey, don't drink more than two cups of tea per day.' It isn't like I cry or shake when I talk about my health or my experiences.  I just would like the world to know that although I have some permanent damage to my physical capabilities and may not live to be as old as some, and I have lots of doctors and lots of appointments, the essential part of me is not diminished and never will be as long as I draw breath.

 I've found it so difficult to write even grocery lists. I thought maybe I needed to trick myself into writing. And so I was finally able to write the story down when I decided to write it to a new pen pal that I have never met from a country very far from here. I wish I had thought of the format sooner, as I've always found writing to be therapeutic whether it's grim or silly. For many reasons designing the writing around a person I've never met made the writing pretty easy, and the pen pal is very kind and encouraged me to write, so I plan to continue writing emails. Hopefully I'll be able to at least write some small things in this blog too.

Dear *,

 It is still March 31st in Ohio (*Sentence redacted to protect the innocent*). I am watching Jean Cocteau's Orphée as I write this. Jean-Pierre Melville just turned up as a hotel desk clerk.

 Last October I had the rest of my wisdom teeth taken out under anesthesia. I had some nerve damage in my jaw and started laying around quite a bit. The pain finally started to get better on a Monday but my legs started to hurt. It felt like a never-ending cramp, especially in my left leg. By Tuesday night I could barely walk. I took off from work Wednesday and went to the doctor. He thought maybe I had low potassium or something and did a blood test and gave me a drug for inflammation. At night when I laid down my face felt strange and my hands went numb. On Thursday I was still hurting, so I called the nurse to ask about the blood test. She said it was fine. I said, hey, I'm still hurting. She said she didn't know, maybe I should go to the emergency room if it was so bad. At this point my lower back started to hurt. I was going to have my mom take me to the ER, but suddenly I felt much better. The cramping in my legs was gone.

 A couple of hours later my leg cramped up even tighter than it was before. I laid down for bed and again my arms and face felt numb. The next day, Friday, I resolved again to have my mother take me to the ER after she came home from work. She was finishing up a few things because she had a hip replacement scheduled that Monday. I started to feel a little out of breath. She came and picked me up, we went and got a sandwich and a Frosty from Wendy's so I could eat something quickly before waiting for hours at the ER. I propped my leg up and ate the hell out of that Frosty. Never had it tasted so good. What a last supper!

 I got to the ER and they took my vitals. The person taking them didn't say what they were, but quickly put me in a wheelchair and took me to a room. Normally, it takes an hour just for someone to come take your insurance info, let alone see a medical professional, but a doctor came in about ten or fifteen minutes to the room. He pointed to my left leg. I think you have a blood clot, he said. He came up close to me on the gurney and spoke to me a bit. And, he said, I think you have a blood clot in your lungs. 

 My mother and I looked at each other. What the hell? My legs weren't red, or swollen, or hot to the touch, or any other usual sign of blood clots. Even the nurse said she had bet the doctor that he would be wrong.

 Well, *, guess what? He was right. He saved my life. I had a gigantic 'saddle' pulmonary embolism laying over my heart and both lungs. They thought it had come upstairs from my leg during that brief period when it felt better. The leg had reclotted and was now blocked from my ankle to my hip bone, with a small baby clot in my right ankle. If I had waited any longer, if I had lingered over my Frosty, I might be dead. In fact, most things I have read about saddle clots say they are usually diagnosed on autopsy. Most people have a few baby clots in one or both lungs, not one giant one clotting up everything in sight, and many die as soon as it reaches the lungs. My lung doctor said if I had ever been a smoker or had otherwise compromised lungs I would be dead for sure.

 So I was given morphine for the first time (you'll never believe the things I said and how I laughed and joked!) and taken up to the intensive care unit. On Saturday, the doctor told me it was very serious and I could die. On Sunday I had a central line put in and kept open in the jugular vein in my neck. A permanent mesh filter was put through it down into my abdomen to keep any more friends from coming upstairs. A catheter was put in my leg to pump a clot-busting med called TPA through my body, though it might cause a stroke in my brain. My doctor said I would live. On Monday the radiologist worked on my awful left leg to see if he could get rid of any of the clot, and he did from my knee to my hip, but couldn't help ankle to knee. On Wednesday I was allowed to come off complete bed rest and was moved out of the ICU. On Sunday, the day before my 30th birthday, I came home.

 For a while, things were quite bad. I was afraid every pain in my leg meant I might have to go back to the hospital, which I dreaded. One day I almost passed out and couldn't catch my breath and had to spend the day in the ER. I had to be put on a blood thinning medicine called coumadin, or warfarin, and have blood tests to make sure it didn't cause internal bleeding. In December I learned I have a blood clotting genetic disorder named Factor V Leiden Thrombophilia. It's named after an innocuous-looking city in the Netherlands where they found it in a family in the 1990s. Thrombophilia literally means love of blood clots. That disorder, and the anesthesia from the wisdom teeth, and the laying around, and other risk factors led to my little adventure. My hematologist advises that I be on coumadin for life, which means always blood tests, and never a rugby or contact sport career, and you know how I dreamed of rugby, ha. No. 

 In February I had another operation to see if the radiologist could help the clot from my ankle to my knee. He couldn't, so my leg will probably always swell and hurt at times. At least I can walk. And swim maybe this summer. My leg hurt quite badly for a while after that operation and I was afraid it was for always, but I am much better now. 

 I haven't socialized almost at all since it happened. I think I'm afraid of people's pity. I would rather use the power of human denial and pretend as much as possible that it never happened. I don't want to be one of those boring people in love with their own illness, their own fragility. Or their own death, like Orphée! 

 I hope you are doing well. I have lots of stories, not all so grim, so maybe I will write to you again. (*Sentence redacted to protect the innocent*). I had almost written to you before, but I suppose I was just waiting for a good dramatic story to tell you. 

Sincerely, 

Stacey Gunckle

"Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams is one of my favorite poetic works. Here is my favorite part, that is hesitantly life-affirming and reminds me that my name means 'resurrection':

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind.  Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.  All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens:  clarity, outline of leaf


But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them:  rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken