Zero hour

It is coming down to it; soon, I will be handing ceramic balls out to strangers on the street, with a note attached, inviting them to participate in my experiment.  So far, I have included only people I know in my experiment, and it has been quite inspiring, especially since almost all of the participants have volunteered before I could tell them I was not yet ready to begin.

One thing I have realized is that "cranking out" balls to give to people leaves you with a bunch of balls which look as if they have been "cranked out".  They really are not as good as I need them to be in order to be worthy of the trust that people will be extending in the telling of their stories.  So, though I have not yet finished the number of balls I initially thought I needed, I will slow down.  I will slow way down in order to create pieces worthy of the stories I hope to get, and maybe these more beautiful and cared for orbs will end up opening doors.

Long-Lost

I met a woman a very, very long time ago while working at a ridiculous restaurant in a meaningless strip mall suburb just outside of Chicago.  She made an impression on me because she was outspoken; to the point that one evening she had the tenacity to follow a group of people out to the parking lot of the restaurant and throw the handful of change they had left as a tip at their feet.  Through the magic of Facebook, we became reacquainted and realized through our interactions that we have quite a bit in common.  Recently, she and a friend of hers, who I am proud to now call mine, visited, and I gave them each a ball and told them to write me a story about fear and desire.  This is her story, I have not edited much, it is all her.

I often wonder if there are people out there who just act on their desires without any fear at all…..just jump headlong into things without the slightest thought.  Without this certain paralyzing feeling that takes me by the throat anytime I need or want to pursue anything of value.  I am sure this is your question as well.  I know that they are both necessary in life, just as you can’t have light without darkness, beauty without ugliness, filth without wisdom…still, it is a nuisance and it just seems like it should be easier.  And I just know it is easier for some than others.  Maybe that’s what I fear most, not living up to those who it is easier for.

I have many stories of fear and desire dating back to when I was just a little one, but there is one that I know lives and breathes in me far stronger than all the rest.  One that puts a stronghold on something I desire the most….love.  Now, I’m not going to pretend that I was not already skittish and afraid of real love before this for, oh, so many reasons, but it really has surpassed and reinforced any experience to a point where I’m sure it is growing its own limbs deep in the bowels of my being.

As I said before, I’ve always been skittish and afraid of love.  I was taught this at a very young age.  I was taught that men were evil and that any time you give your heart to anyone, they are sure to rip it out, smear it in your face, eat it, and then leave you abandoned and hollow.  This person even proved it to me by getting sick and doing that very thing to me.  Of course, this made me a cautious and guarded person.  I didn’t really date in high school until my sophomore year, and then I ended it because I got too “scared”…uh, surprise.  I finally gave in and surrendered in my senior year to probably the worst and best guy for me at the time.  The worst because he added things to my fear list that I hadn’t been taught yet, and the best because I really do think we fell in love and I’m sure that if he didn’t break down the door, no one would have for a very long time.  I wouldn’t have let them.

When it finally ended after years of me trying to throw him off a cliff, my love life became more or less a string of meeting guys and throwing them away.  No one interested me, no one that is, except for completely emotionally unavailable ones, and they were the ones I wanted to unload my whole bag of desire on.  It makes sense now. It was safer for me to mourn and yearn for someone I couldn’t really have rather than someone I could really have and then possibly lose later.  That would make me far more vulnerable, far more powerless.  During the time of a particularly one-sided love affair, (so significant it lasted eight years), a pretty awesome available type shyly made it known that he was into me.  I was too scared.  I needed someone to break down the door again.  I kept him at a safe distance and continued my pathetic and futile attempts at “Unavailable”.

“Unavailable” threw me bones, made out with me and even cheated on his girlfriend with me, but of course never really wanted me (until I was unavailable- that’s another story).  “Available” became my friend over the years….I saw him often because he worked at an establishment I frequented.  He became involved with an abusive and evil girl, (the worst girl for him?).  After some time of really realizing how much I cared for him and regretting letting him go, they broke up.  One impossible night, I happened to be working at said establishment, and after deliberately pouting in front of him because he was flirting with another girl, was taken by surprise and got my door broken down.  I remember it like it was yesterday; it was like magic.  I was standing a few feet away from him, and we began walking toward each other like some magnetic force was between us.  We held an unbreakable gaze, he reached his arms out for me, and I fell into them.  Instead of just a usual hug, (he gave the best), he met my lips.  It was the perfect kiss.  The kind in movies, the kind you feel in your knees…and through every cell of your body.  We kissed like that all night, and it never got old or lost that magic.  We told each other how we both had feelings for each other for a long time.  He told me in an accusing voice that he tried to get me to be with him 4 years ago.  I told him I was stupid.  The night ended.  I went home…as happy as I have ever been.  I was finally going to let the right person in and it felt like it was the most right thing in the world.  On top of a mountain, giddy with delight, I slept with many happy dreams of him.  When I woke to call my best friend and talk to her about it…she told me that…he had killed himself a couple of hours before.  There are no more words.  Just fear.

Three Graces

I sat in my office and listened as a young woman told me a story.  As she spoke, her husband sat next to her chuckling.  She had arrived at a new house her family had just purchased when she was very young and recognized the house as a place she had lived before with her dog, "puppy".  This of course was impossible, as her family had never before lived in the house, and she had never had a dog.  It turned out that the family who had originally lived in the house had a daughter who had fallen into a well and died when she was four, exactly a year before the young woman was born, and had a dog named "puppy".  Though the event had occurred over twenty years ago, she was clearly still moved by it.  After she finished, her husband told her that the story did not address the point of my question, and her exact response was, "It's a good story, douche."

She told a second story.  He sat and chuckled as she relayed her horror of watching her father's skin burn off of his body after he had thoughtlessly unscrewed the radiator cap immediately after having driven his car.   Again came the inevitable, "douche."

And then, finally, a third.  As a teenager, she had been a life guard at a theme park and somehow the management had gotten a hold of a tape of a real life drowning and decided to show it to the lifeguard trainees in order to motivate them to take the job seriously.  Part of the motivation was telling them to imagine the individual who had drowned as a relative.  This had clearly be traumatic for her, but again, did not seem to satisfy her husband's idea of what my question was addressing.

After she had finished, I asked her husband if he wanted to take a ball in exchange for a story.  He replied that he did not.

When I set out to do this project, I had very specific, some might even say rigid, goals in mind, and I too might have thought that these stories were not fear/desire applicable.  But in this interaction I witnessed a woman intent on telling her story, even as her husband sat and laughed, maybe even knowing he would laugh, but being brave enough to reveal herself anyway.  I then witnessed her husband's fear of telling the story he might want to share but could not bring himself to tell.

Maybe it comes down to what we have the courage to reveal about ourselves, who we are able to be in front of the people we love, and whether or not we choose to contort ourselves in order to be comfortable with the skin we wear in the world.

My Fear and Desire

My parents divorced when I was eight.  Three years later, they were both busy pleasing their new partners, often at the expense of their children; my brother Josh and I.  My mother, for her part, had seen to it that we could only see our father for two hours on Tuesday nights, when we would play games and hurriedly eat dinner in the large, warehouse-like apartment above his antique store.  His new wife, Gloria, had at one time been a patient of our mom’s, and had also been a family friend, eating dinner at our house occasionally and even going camping with our family a few times.  At home, our mom was never around, which was a relief as she was quite unpredictable in terms of the things she would randomly fly into a rage about.  She had a private practice as a Social Worker and worked most nights, leaving us to be cared for by our older step brother or the neighbors on various weekends so she could spend the time with her partner, Marg, a woman who had also been her patient at one time.  I would not know it until later, but it was at this time that Marg had told my mom that she wanted to adopt a child.  The way my mother tells it, she agreed to adopt so that Marg would not leave her.

Josh and I were told we would be getting a new brother when we got home from a trip to summer camp our mother had forced upon us.  We both felt it futile to express our thoughts or feelings on the matter, because, as recent events had demonstrated, we were not in a position to affect the outcome of anything going on in or around our lives.  We both knew we would be the cheap labor; babysitting the new kid whenever Marg and Mom needed, which would most probably be every day after school and some weekends.

When the baby, Nathan, arrived it dawned on me that this was a person whom I could love and who would love me back.  As this was something I had been longing for ever since my parents’ divorce, I poured a lot of time and energy into him, playing with him, feeding him, reading to him, bathing him, and often protecting him from mom’s anger.  If he walked into a room and I was one of many in it, including his mothers, he would come to me.  At one point, my brother Josh asked me why I spent so much time with him, and I told him that I thought that he needed us to love him, that it was up to us to provide him with a real and dependable source of love, as I saw my mother and Marg as incapable.  Of course, they eventually split, and as Marg had adopted Nathan alone, and the state would give no rights to gay parents at that time, I saw him much less, except, of course, when Marg needed me to babysit a couple days a week.  It was still nice, I got to see him and spend time with him, but Marg would occasionally use him to manipulate me into doing things I did not want to do and sporadicly threatened to not let us see Nathan at all in order to force my mother to go back to her, (ironically, she had left my mom for one of her patients; Marg, too, was a Social Worker).  Eventually, my mom made it clear that she would not be going back to Marg, so she stopped letting Nathan see us, and I felt as though my heart had been ripped out of my chest.

Though I did not know it then, this would be the event which would lead me to the decision to never have children. I felt at the time as though I had lost my own child, and I was heartbroken.  Of course, as I see it now, I understand very well that it might be the best thing for me to have a child, to face the fear that this loss created, but unfortunately, at this point, I have no awareness of that desire in me, and I feel that this heartbreak, born out of a need for love, will also keep me from opening myself up to it ever again.

The Process

I have been going to the ceramics studio for a week now, diligently leaving work at 5, riding my bike across town to arrive at PNCA in time to eat a modest meal and begin working on my balls by 6.  I begin each evening by exchanging my wet bike clothes for my clay-caked studio garb: an old pair of cut-offs and a black long-sleeve skating shirt a high school friend gave me.  I slip on my rubber clogs and begin checking on the balls I had made during my previous session to see if any of them need the bottoms trimmed off, then I begin to wedge the clay to throw on the wheel.  I spend the next few hours making and trimming balls, and as the time passes, I lose myself in the process.  I remember this meditation, and my body responds to the rhythm of the wheel turning the clay; I am in sync.  When all of the leather hard balls have been trimmed and my new balls have been made, I decorate by carving or painting colored slip onto the balls, more decoration for the less spherical ones, less for the more perfect orbs.   I have already noticed that I am getting better at it, as I have needed less and less decoration to compensate for my rusty throwing technique.

After having been away from the studio and making for so long, I feel as though I have just sprouted wings and learned to fly, as if a piece of myself I had lost  and forgotten long ago has come back to me.  I have gone through a wide-spanning range of emotions in the last few years, but this feeling, that of elation and absolute abandon, is one I have not felt in a very long time, and the other day in the studio, I realized I was so happy, that I began to cry.  I know well the feeling of being raw, where your emotions are on the surface of your skin and any little annoyance brings about a flare up of anger and hostility.  I believe that I am now experiencing a converse situation where any little wonder brings about a giggle; it tickles at the joy that resides on my skin.

Surprising First

I was recently getting treated for injuries due to a bike accident at the Western States Chiropractic College Clinic when an intern asked me about my project. After I explained it to him, he sat quietly pensive for a few minutes staring at the floor, and then looked up and began to tell me about his first experience dealing with fear and desire.  I was surprised at how easily he began relating the incident; I had not even had the chance to ask him if he wanted to participate, much less let him know I had not made any balls yet.  But, it seemed as though he wanted to get it off his chest, and I had no intention of stopping him.  He started by telling me that he had a story for me, and said simply,
"It was my first":
He was five, he said, when he got his first crush on a girl in his class. He wrote her a love note, gave it to his best friend to give to her, and waited. After school a few days later, she approached him and began talking to him about the note he had written to her. He told me that the moment she started talking, he freaked out, ran into the street and got hit by a car. The experience, he said, had set the tone for all of his relationships since.  The pain and resignation behind this man's eyes reflected his confidence that the event was a forshadowing one, but I couldn't help but wonder if the event itself is what has held him back, or the fear he faced when confronted by the girl which had chased him into the street and in front of that car.


As we have aged, modes of communication have evolved, but are we any different?  Do we still let our fears and anxieties get in the way of the things or people we most long for?  How do we get past the heart break of our failed attempts at happiness?  It was clear by the way the intern told his story that he was still there, horrified by the girl's attentions and too scared to know if she liked him or not, but that was not the point of his story, because, he never told me if she did or not.  What he emphasized was his reaction and his tendency to duplicate this event for the rest of his life.  It left me feeling hollow, and thinking that the injuries I had sustained in the bike accident were not really all that bad.

Either way, I think I owe that man a ball.

Another Layer

I have come to the realization that I cannot move out of the void until my lease runs out. This is hard, but giving my landlords an extra $800 for breaking my lease would be much harder. This means I have some very long rides ahead of me during this next three months, but it also means I will have more time to think as I ride the long (and most probably wet), road home.

I have also decided, with the help of some close personal friends, to hand out balls on the street with a piece of paper with my email address on it and a question about fear and desire, so it is their option to contact me in order to have a conversation.

I will also be adding another layer to my project; in addition to giving out balls with "invitations" to strangers, I will give balls to people I know each week and have a (hopefully) deeper conversation with them about fear and desire. With this added layer I am hoping to contrast the levels of intimacy between friends and strangers, and maybe uncover more about the people I am close to and therefor, more about myself.

I have planned to start making balls in October, so I will have a solid three months to make all of the balls I will need, which is turning out to be roughly fifty more than I thought, or, 400 balls.

I am feeling less and less like this might suck and more and more like this is heavy metal.

It Might Suck

This project has come about with the completion of my first project/blog, 20 Dates in 20 Weekends; A Craigslist Social Experiment, in which I went out on 20 dates in just less than 20 weekends with almost 20 different men (I had one second date). My experiences with my first blog led me to the realization that meeting new people and forcing myself open to their perspectives was quite valuable in understanding myself.

The dating element of the original experiment was quite arduous and led me down some treacherous and painful paths, which I am sure I will be discussing in therapy for a long time to come.

This project is more about the general, rather than the specific, matter of the value of human connection. That is, how we cultivate our friendships, work relationships, and intimate relationships. How we are measured, as Desmond Tutu once said, by the quality of our interactions.

My project is a simple barter, an exchange of ideas for a hand-made object. Of course, this satisfies two great needs of my own: one to create things, and the other to connect with people, and therefore, with myself.

My process will be to give a person unknown to me before the exchange a ceramic ball for which they will give me conversation. The project's theme is desire and fear, how they effect relationships and each other.

The first stage of the project is to procure space in which to make these ceramic spheres, which I have just gotten word that I have done; PNCA will be providing me with studio space in which to create these objects for a very reasonable monthly fee. The second stage is to do a bit of experimenting by handing out preliminary balls in exchange for preliminary conversations. I intend for this project to span a year, and as a good friend of mine said, "...it would be a horrible realization to come to after making 350 balls to find out that this project sucks."

There are other arrangements to be made; I must leave The Void and move closer to the city and therefor the studio, and begin the work of making the balls. I must arrange to have pictures of each ball I make in order to post them in my blog alongside the stories. I must come up with a very good conversation opener, one that will help people feel comfortable enough to open up regarding this highly personal issue. I think that last bit will be the challenge.

It is always scary to start such a large project, because as my friend stated, it might suck, but as with my last social experiment, its success relies almost solely on people, and as I have learned, the one thing you can rely on people to be is human, which in my opinion, is always interesting.