(i've posted this before, but i'm posting it again because i have several new friends and favorites and because i've been the grateful recipient of a whole lot of human kindness lately. much much much needed kindness since i've had some majorly dark days. i was blessed to talk on the phone with my friend AIM/Alison. i hope i entertained her because she gave me insight into a friend's behavior that was invaluable and because i had a blast. it was too much social life for me at one time so i was shellshocked but it was worth it. she's a current and very lovely Mass-hole. i'm from boston so i am a forever Mass-hole. we never recover. i'll post about all the recent kindness soon. oh, and i've been putting together a fabulous Folkie Friday post so don't miss it! we need an anthem, people! we so do.

Update: i went out and walked the wonderpups and visited our friends in the town center. i made an effort to look cute today. so i made people document it with photos. only two came out. this is my new strategy these days. i never get any compliments. they are rare in "laidback" Oregon. so now i just announce that i look cute. no one ever kindly agrees with me but whatever. also, i talk to strangers all the time and people here tend to back away from me. my new approach? i tell them that i'm not crazy -- even though i am -- but that i'm from the East Coast where we talk to strangers!! it works beautifully. relief washes over their faces and they actually talk to me. god, i'm cute AND brilliant. who knew? oh, carp/crap, the photo is more than 2 KB or MB or whatever it says. later, dudes.)

i'm just going share a poem about kindness that i wrote when i was no longer an accountant, when i had officially become a Recovering Accountant and was so extremely relieved about that. i had stumbled into writing screenplays by finding a writing partner/tv producer/music writer/ bitch (long story for another time) who was intrigued by my idea for a tv movie about the effects of witnessing child abuse.

we ended up selling the tv movie story to NBC and Connie Selleca was supposed to be in it, and i got to have lunch with her. that was before she hooked up with John Tesh and began touring with him, his orchestra and his "music". the movie never got produced but wtf, right? i was a Writer. i had sold something that i co-wrote. but the story was all mine. i wrote the whole thing, beat by story beat, in my head while driving from Hell Lay to Orange County somewhere to pick up my then boyfriend from a cycling thang. this was after NBC rejected my partner's version of the story. shit, whatever, it felt great.

so as a baby writer and recovering accountant, i wrote screenplays, of course, but i also tried my hand at poetry and other forms of written expression. i had forgotten all about this piece called "Accounting for Love".

i'd been feeling a tad funkish at that time, about the agent firing me and the prospect of a long hot summer, so this thing kind of put me over the edge. now, i almost never cry. wish i could do it more but there is a boring backstory and whatever. the girls and i had to go to Rite Aid and, i never do this, but when i got to the pharmacy, i burst into tears. i was almost sobbing out of frustration over the memos on my door and the wretched PB. well, i know the pharmacy staff very well by now. i've shared my dogs, of course. i've made them all laugh an infinite number of times as well as expressing interest and caring about their various life issues.

now, the problem with living in a city that has no ethnic people is that just regular white people are, well, different, from those of us who have a unique cultural background. Jews like me, Italians, Greeks, Armenians, etc. these are the people with whom i grew up, and i treasured the abundant ethnic mixes in san francisco and l.a. as well. people like this, like me, tend to be loud and emotional and guilt-provoking -- same guilt, different food -- and it's what i'm used to and what i love.

so there i was sobbing in front of the pharmacy, and not one person came out from behind their counter/barrier to comfort me or calm me or, god forbid, hug me. it was so awful and horrifying. they just stared at me. just stared at me like i had morphed into Kafka's cockroach. now, there is nothing special about me in this regard, but i wouldn't treat a, shit, can't think of anything. well, i might treat a leper this way if digits and appendages were dropping off left and right, but i would certainly say how sorry i was and comfort the sobbing leper verbally and empathize and all that good stuff. god, i hope i would.

i left there feeling chilled to the bone and intensely lonely. i didn't want to bug my friends on here with yet one more tale of woe. so instead, i went into a lovely Shame Spiral: my agent fired me (he re-hires me all the time and i have another potential agent) so i'm worthless. people keep telling me to write shorter posts and i can't focus on that while writing a memoir too so i'm a piece of shit/carp. the nurse practitioner can't seem to find the right bipolar 2 meds for me so i'm Fat and mood-swingy and volatile still and therefore need to go eat worms. you get the idea.

which led me to think about kindness, about those tiny moments in every day where we have the choice to reach out a bit, to give someone a lovely compliment, to smile and say hi to a stranger, to pet someone's adorable wonderpups instead of glaring at them, to comfort a crying person... again, i'm no saint, as i've been told repeatedly, but i don't believe that i have EVER passed a human being who was crying or who l0oked bereft and not stopped to ask if he/she was okay and to offer a hug, my dogs to pet and cuddle with, my empathy, what have you.

so this painful sobbing in public incident reminded me of a "poem" that i wrote after my family had cut me off for suing my childhood perp for damages. i wrote a post about this, about suing my perp and losing everyone who mattered to me.* a "poem" about kindness and about learning not to keep track of where it comes from or where it goes. i still love the idea behind this Thang. oh and, btw, i was a big 'ho/sex addict back then, but i was not the one paying the gigolo, and he was a gigolo for real. someone else was paying him while he f**cked me and probably everyone else in Hell Lay.

so here goes, and i hope that you can hear the good ideas that are behind this thing:

ACCOUNTING FOR LOVE                                                                             

I use strict guidelines to account for love,

Stringent parameters to measure who should give what and when and how and how much,

A running balance sheet that I keep in my busy brain of whose done what for whom and who is owed and what is due and who is overdrawn,

As I debit and credit all my human transactions.

(And God help those whose t-accounts I total in red ink.)

A family trait, perhaps: my brother's advice when I lost my longtime love was to write the investment off to bad debts.   

I have these careful guidelines to account for love,

But suddenly I'm learning in the hardest way that there are no generally accepted principles for caring,

No policies, no procedures, no trial balances of giving and getting in this best of all possible worlds.

That the family who's supposed to give me love is not compelled to wish me well,

That they can even try to trade my soul like some perishable commodity to keep me from speaking the truth,

Can even wish me dead,

And I'm watching in horror as my meticulously constructed system turns to chaos in my mind. 

I used to have many guidelines to account for love,

But now I'm feeling wonder at the miracles of kindness that issue from a family of total strangers.

And I'm thriving, unlike poor Blanche Dubois, on the compassion of these new-found cousins:

The saintly psychic who offers me hope and doesn't charge me,

The lady cop who saves my life and sends me a Christmas card,

The feisty nurse who risks her job getting my story to the T.V. actress.

The self-proclaimed gigolo who somehow reads my heart, holds me tightly while I sob and whispers in my ear that I'm good, that it wasn't my fault, that he'll keep me safe. 

I once had silly guidelines to account for love,

But now I've ripped up my mental ledgers,

Wiped my t-accounts clean,

And come to accept that there are no rules.

that It doesn't matter where you get love or where it goes or what the outstanding balance is. 

What matters is the giving and the getting,

And that one way or another, if you give love out, it finds its way back,

With one extraordinary member or another  Of our universal family.

Some kind of cosmic balance sheet for which I'm truly grateful.

okay, it turns out that this is a real poem according to some people i hugely respect. so please RATE this. please. and someone please tell me why my tags keep getting cut off!!!! i wrote beautiful, meaningful tags about sex and dogs and john tesh and now they are almost all gone. is this something new from kerry and company? am i being punished for "promoting my posts"? seriously, folks. i love my tags.