field-notes-from-wacotown

[field-notes-from-wacotown]

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A post shared by Waco Pride Network (@wpridenetwork) on Sep 17, 2019 at 10:32am PDT

[field-notes-from-wacotown]

Reminded of this quote: "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist. Dom Helder Camara – one of the great prophets of Christian "Liberation theology".

Pondering the limits of nonprofit models in a capitalist system. Jubilee is serving its neighborhood’s needs well, but struggling financially. I wrote a tweet thread wondering why that could be. Article is reminder to me, as lower-income person, to frequent this non-profit grocer, out of practicality and pushing back against unjust system. \ #whyiwrite (at Waco, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/B1j-sfVjGcqY74aZl0TjSHvgVtf_gNi8zRZbUc0/?igshid=19xy3fcg9lptj

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City bus tour

I imagine an alternate story told over the PA. Another kind of Waco tour. This is the neighborhood where Jesse Washington was lynched. This is where the hood used to be - hookers and drug dealers in sight. We've driven them further down the highway. Away from sight and mind. This is the VA, where service men and women come to beg for services, have their paperwork processed, where there's a suicide hotline on the gates. You see, we care enough to recruit you, but not to protect you from the invaders we sent to your brain. This is Baylor. Where we whitewash history. Ignore LGBTQIA students. Benevolent homophobia. Heterosexism. A quiet no kinder kind of cruelty. This is the river when no black man or woman could dare cross for fear of loss of life or worse. This is the community of color that keeps living, keeps fighting, keeps shaking the dust from their feet to make something new. For them, of them. We are creating something old and new, of us. This women's work of telling stories, remembering history. Healing the world we know. Putting us back together. Banishing fear every time they come back. For our friends. Neighbors. Us too. Lynching was never about rope at all. Trial without jury. Without compassion. How that we died with Jesse Washington. "May we mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living." (Mother Jones). Amen.

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Scenes from my other blog...

This is my #communityofstorieswaco submission. A story, my story: about a girl named Kat. Whose brain is probably a cat lady. \ Fellow Wacoans with mental illness [i.e., psychiatric disabilities, mental health conditions / impairments], in whatever form these lived experiences may take, feel free to submit your own art for posting to our / this Instagram account. Email your single image piece to community.of.stories.waco@gmail.com for consideration and for questions or concerns. \ #punsmakethingsalittleeasiertoexplain #talkingaboutit #arttherapy #communityofstories #writingaboutmentalillness #thisiswhy #whyiwrite #whyikeepwriting #mentalhealthrecovery #demystifyingmentalillness #mentalillnessstigma #actuallyautistic #actuallyocd #actuallydepressed #severedepression #andyoufindawaytosurvive #andyoufindoutyoudonthavetobehappyatalltobehappyyourealive #maybenexttonormalcouldbeokay #idontneedalifethatsnormalthatswaytoofaraway #actuallygenerallyanxious #anxietygirl #thebloggesstribe #actuallyadhd (at Waco, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/Btjku-cjNoR5m23qX3yjGWRwN4TfaeVafAINDI0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=ariz9d2pmg34

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Mere feet away

I don't know how to describe the fear in me, sitting mere feet away from three Christian hipsters, in their maybe twenties and/or thirties, I think; probably evangelical and charismatic in tradition: Antioch shirt wearing young woman. It's the olive green world mandate tee; she works for magnolia market or the bakery (it's all the same trademarked whitewashed space to me; where everyone prays before work; what happens to their atheist coworkers or other not-Christian, still valued by their God(s), faiths?). Why is she so concerned they're tearing down the IHOP? But seems utterly unconcerned, unaware of how we're losing more affordable housing with every new Magnolia success story. For whom?, I ask. A laptop covered in campus stickers, many from multicultural orgs. A club soda drinking bearded older man. All sitting on my mustard yellow couch. This is me sitting too close to them. Because I don't have much of a choice. It's like witnessing a storm before it arrives. Clouds coming. Me grieving. Nice words for a brutal process: "It has happened before. It will happen again." This is neocolonialism. Whitewashing. Trying to forget the violence of what came before. "You didn't build this," I would reply. Why must you tear it / them down. Us down. Because seeing my neighbors of color as them [or worse yet, it: objects to forget] isn't helping anyone. Me included. This is me. Trying. Listening. Often wondering if the town I've come to love will be sold out from under me. In the name of kitsch. Rebranding. Restoring. But to what end? Whose stories? Whose histories. This is me weeping for the stories they will bury. The venture capitalistic faux builder craftsman plagiarist art-fakers. Who tell a pretty story of how they will destroy where and whom I love. "This has happened before. This will happen again." But please, not yet.

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Oh fuck, what was left of my social filter is having to work far too hard right now.

Dear nice white girl following Jesus,

I’m not entirely sure why I opened my mouth, except to ask when tours of Waco typically happen. Is there a structure, a pattern? Should I start putting out a tip jar when I see the candy van parked on the street in front of my local coffeehouse. I don’t hate you, but I am deeply suspicious of the “narrative of restoration” you describe for my beloved town.

Perhaps it’s the Christianese peppering your speech. Or the pasted smile on your face. You’re just another member of the service industry that popped up around Magnolia and fixer upper. Waco is not your town to save. Or restore. I think what you really mean is whitewash. Your subtext, maybe unintended, screams louder than your words.

Waco is brave. Waco is resilient. Waco is full of community leaders already doing the work in their own neighborhoods. Bandaging and plastering, bracing, the wounds and breaks of a post- Jim Crow south. You did not discover this work, white people engaging in yet another round of neocolonialism.

I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m scared. Not at you, not exactly, nice white girl. But the ideas you prop up. How none of us Wacoans agreed to be on your tour. A twisted kind of taxation without representation. Their personal zoo, for the interlopers and looky loos. We are not your show. I am not an object. Neither is my service dog. We’re just folks trying to drag ourselves through the day. Again.

That’s why when I see the Waco Tours van. The crowd of old white women. All I can feel is grief and contempt.

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#justanotherday at @CommonGrounds. #depressionis #chroniclife #closeenoughtonormaltogetby #maybenexttonormalcouldbeokay (at Common Grounds) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsY2iQtDtsbUq1mdPrDrJgoM5WBp-RovIybgFQ0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=11cpyc3v39iu

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Text: looks like Waco Tours (oh hi neocolonialists and future gentrifiers) are in the backyard too. Seeing a semicircle of old people and middle aged women above a certain social class, usually middle class and above, is never a good sign. Hashtags: Waco probs, Wacotown, gentrification looks like. Gif: What white nonsense is this?

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Text: being a service terrier handler in any setting - neighborhood coffeehouse too - means being able to recite my rights under state (TX legal codes on service dogs in public spaces) & federal law (ADA). And having a 1-2 min elevator talk on how Marty helps me. #agirlandherservicedog \ End text description. // This tweet is the 280 character version of a much longer soapbox I have about being a 29-year-old woman, who’s mentally ill / lives with: severe depression [MDD-anx: major depressive dx, with anxious distress], obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD- harm-obsession, checking compulsions), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD: unremitting worry, chronic condition). I’m also Autistic (ASD- diagnosed in 2015, post-DSM-5; I prefer autism spectrum disability or condition [ASC], not disorder.) and [combined type] ADHD-C. With icing on the cupcake of developmental trauma history / complex-PTSD-like-condition. // I am a human chemistry set, a highly therapized adult. // But I don’t think the general public realizes when they gawk at my psychiatric service dog, they’re really asking, “what’s wrong with you. Because you look normal, maybe a little quirky. Oh, it’s cute you can take your dog inside. He’s not like service dogs I’ve seen before. Because there’s nothing physically wrong with you, they loudly imply” (sometimes subtext shouts back at me). \ Being a proud disabled woman in a world that hates people like me for existing so goddamn fucking loudly, for daring to stim in public, for insisting our needs matter and that we will seek legal recourse when our rights as disabled people are violated, individually or systemically. \ Maybe this is why I come out, as a chronically mentally ill woman, who IS Autistic, IS Disabled, IS ADHD-C. Who is queer enough, lesbishly bisexual, insistently my full rainbow of experience. Because I follow the Harvey Milk rule of existing in public spaces: come out. If you can. If it’s safe. If you’re willing. If it helps. If you’re ready. If you’re able. Because then that person sitting across from you knows someone like you: a minority, becoming more common every story we dare to speak aloud, being ourselves. This is how the world changes. (at Common Grounds) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsBgUXVDrDr5ZoYI00sNDFW0DMFJgRxNU9jM-Q0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=picrjlfxgadx

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A stream of grief screams: On listening to Homecoming podcast, as I walk my service dog.

I’m not really sure where to begin this narrative so I’ll do what my friend Jen (and writing teacher) taught me to do. Put words on the page and see what comes out of your brain.

Content note: suicides of soldiers and former service men and women. Lots of strong language. Substance misuse and abuse. Emotional manipulation and abuses of power discussed.

Maybe I’ll begin here. I went to high school in a 26,000 populated town in East Texas (near Commerce and Paris, TX). I remember the military recruitment tables who stalked our junior- and senior high school, mostly teen boys and a few butch teen girls. The officers looked like bible salesmen or snake oil peddlers. They offered the ASVAB, as if it was a gospel track or these students’ salvation. A answer to the abyss of poverty and no direction of post-graduation.

This is who you are. We’ll train you to be better: Soldiers. Identified by serial numbers and rankings. Real people. Not fuck ups who never left Greenville. Not the guys who work at Walmart and smoke too much weed on the weekends to try to forget no one really believed in them (or cared) anyway. The high school graduated them, passed these perceived fuck-ups through regular classes. Caps were tossed. Graduation robes discarded. Now you are no longer our problem.

Maybe the military wants your burnout-fuck-up-self. They will make you a soldier. Push that sadness down, that anger too, channel those intense emotions into endless war, in deserts you never planned to visit (or die in). You have purpose now. Just sign our contract. Take our blood money; you are one of us now. A soldier. Leave your sadness, existential fears, and doubts behind. Join us. We’ve waited 4 years for you to decide on what we have already planned for you. Come join the war machine. You matter now. Soldier.

When I listen to Homecoming, on my walks with my service dog, I hear the voices of the Podunk town where I graduated high school. Where Walmart was an escape in high school, a place to explore on Friday nights, and the steady place of employment for the fuck-ups who couldn’t do college. Or perhaps college couldn’t do them. Most of those “fuck-ups” probably had learning disabilities or emotional problems, not their fault at all.

The fault of a series of rube goldbergian systems that set these teen boys (and a few butch teen girls) up to fail. If we don’t help you, they thought, we can train you to be only one thing: better cogs for a broken machine. The machine is wearing out, breaking slowly, losing its usefulness, but they keep feeding it cogs to eat. To break; to destroy. To send off to war. To die. Or best case scenario for the military nightmare high ups, they’re not people - they’re fuck up burn out soon poors anyway, to die at their own hands: Guns in mouths, then bullets into brains. Pills in mouths. Repeatedly swallowed, until existence fades away then stops entirely. Numbed out by nonprescribed substances: pills, liquids, solvents, aerosols, and chemistry lab experiments gone wrong.

Fading away from notice until the military industrial complex can ignore these broken ex-soldiers or blame their deaths on: “I wish we could stop these tragedies. We really do. But they gave up. They lost hope. We’re sorry for them, but honestly, they were never really there or real to us, anyway. Burnt-out-fuck-ups, sacrificed to the war machine. Gone at: 22. 24. 19. 20. 26. 28. 32. 39. 40. 50. 62. 22. 20. 16.

We lost them. Of course we don’t blame ourselves, said the war machine; they merely fell into harms’ way. Fog of war. Passive voice shielding them from further inquiry. I wish they could just forget. What happened. Over there. So we could forget about them. Soldiers yet again. Let’s send them back into the deserts, like deserted perpetual motion machines. Fallen, dying demigod, risen yet again. Ad nauseum.

This is the Homecoming I never expected. 20-somethings from a small town with one major highway and one public high school. Gone. Lost; dead. Best forgotten? No. But hearing their stories is so much more painful than deadening our collective narratives and memories. We are witnesses to their homecoming recollections. All of us. But especially those left behind, me included, like them. “May we mourn for the dead. And fight like hell for the living,” Mother Jones reminded us.

Amen.

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Tours led by white people of a brown and black town.

Once upon a time there was an angry girl minding her own business, knitting in the local ice cream joint. Just sitting there, wishing she could disappear. It had been a particularly shitful week. Of depression and anxiety. Those ten days in May growing ever so closer. Fuck, I hate anniversaries, she thought.

Then, as if they heard her prayer for silence and peace, then blatantly ignored it (fucking white people, she muttered to herself, acknowledging that while she herself was white too, she lacked the class and economic privilege of these Waco Tour-ists). She sighed to herself, thankful her twice-magnifying reading glasses had the unintentional side effect of making the masses appear to be friendly blobs.

Why, Waco Tours, why. She returned to her knitting and the quiet of huge blue headphones and her service dog beside her on the couch, daring everyone to leave her the hell alone. I am not part of the tour, she exclaimed.

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Looks like the wall by Alpha and Omega (a relatively bougie Mediterranean cafe downtown) was spray-painted on. The historian in me is curious who this artist is, but is also glad they maintained their anonymity (because this still is vandalism, according to the legal system). I'm fascinated by the evenness of the lines and the spacing of the shapes. Looks like nihilist folk art. Probably referring to race/class divisions and related problems in Waco, which still lives in the shadow of Jim Crow (and the ghost of Jesse Washington; one of the most horrific lynching cases happened in our little town, y'all). It looks like the artist used the bricks on the wall for spacers, as they constructed the two house figures, which are reminiscent of melancholy milk cartons.

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This is me too. New social media project I'm working on... Mostly via Instagram, but I'll share some of my lettering projects and related artwork on here too.

I often color during therapy. Drawing is amazing grounding tech. When I notice I’m having a panic attack, I color, listen to show tunes and breathe through it. \ #anybodyhaveamap #doesanybodyhaveamap #becausethescarythingisimflyingblind #andimmakingthisupasigo #letteringartist #whiteboardmarkers #blueandgreen #lettering #dearevanhansen #bringevanhansentowaco #wacotown (at Waco Psychological Associates PC)

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The first time I heard #dearevanhansen I was having a particularly awful week. So I played my pick-me-up playlist on Spotify: Weathering the Storm. \ Then I heard “Waving through a Window” as the radio feature appeared. \ I was utterly transfixed; I rely on the complexities of rhythm and melody when life is particularly shitty. So #thanksevanhansen. \ #bringevanhansentowaco #bringevanhtowacotoen #becausenoonedeservestobeforgotten #whenyourefallinginaforest #andtheresnobodyaround #theconnorproject #connorproject (at Common Grounds)

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It makes me angry when...

I hear my fellow white people say the silos are neural. How they bring money to Waco, a bigger tax base, so Magnolia is good. The Gaines are fine. Just keep moving along. Don’t question. Don’t fight. Just be nice. [Fuck that.]

I wish others could feel how afraid I am in public spaces. How I can never fully be myself without fear of censure or violence. How the same people who stand in line for a cupcake find my very being inconvenient.

I’m tired of defending my right to exist. I’m tired of people touring a town that doesn’t exist. Fixer upper is no more real than the Bachelor. Money doesn’t mean good or right. Money is power.

I’m tired of feeling powerless and of making myself small.

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Dear bougie white people visiting Magnolia.

First of all, I see y'all. You’re pretty difficult to miss: near-perfectly dyed hair, a shade too light or dark. A look in your eye that says I am above you. The way you want everything explained to you.

I hate how y'all insist your presence can only help us. That we should be grateful for your money. How you not at all subtly imply Waco was a shithole before Shiplap began.

This town has persisted and survived long before Chip and Joanna. They’re not saints. They’re not [white] saviors. They’re people taking advantage of Wacoans’ goodwill.

So please keep walking when you see us. Take memories, not pictures. Learn before questioning. Before judging. Remember we all live in the shadow of Jim Crow. Research who Jesse Washington was. [Say his name. Say his name. Say his name. Won’t you say his name.]

Because Waco is my home. It could be yours too. Please stop being neocolonialists discovering what we already know. Listen first. Learn more. Because Waco is fiercely resilient. Not cute.

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Service dogs

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only girl in Wacotown with a psychiatric service dog. He helps with my panic attacks. I'm grateful for spaces like @commongrounds-blog-blog who acknowledge and accept my disabilities (and recognize my right to access public spaces).