For one thing, I don’t particularly enjoy having to give anyone in my family a violent verbal shove or contemplate total “divorce” from the lot of them, even when my mom insists upon continuing to pound my buttons as if they were nails and all she has is a hammer.

It also kills me to force distance between Ted and me when all I long for is the opposite.

I keep thinking of Aron Ralston, the guy who sawed off his own arm to save his life, or the animals who chew off a paw to get out of a steel trap. I feel like I’ve been trying to chew off a paw. It’s an act of desperation to cut off a part of yourself in order to (supposedly) save yourself and get free. It feels like sawing off living flesh.

**

I do feel much stronger about my exchange with my mother, because it was truthful, and confrontational, and not least of all (to be brutally frank) because it was more painful for her than it was for me. My worst agonies of maternal alienation and abandonment already happened a long time ago. Really all I did was quit being invisible in the name of protecting her. And the truth is, I feel much freer now.

In a nutshell: she pushed the religion on me one more time (after I expressed something resembling self-doubt in my Facebook feed) with the tired message that I “already know where the answers are.” (Wasn’t I just describing for you in my last post how fundies pounce on the faintest indication of vulnerability as an opportunity to proselytize?)

I lost my shit, kids. This time around it was the last proverbial straw hitting the camel’s back.

The first thing I did was to adjust my privacy settings so that she could no longer comment on my posts. Then I decided to take away her ability to so much as see them. Finally I sent her a private reply.

In my defense, I could have been a lot meaner.

Will you never let it rest? Oh, no, that’s right…you’re working on Commission. What you seem to forget is that you’re trying to sell me the same old lemon that never drove for me (subjectively speaking) in the first place – and a bizarre, bloodthirsty theology cobbled together from literalized myths from a plethora of ancient sources (objectively speaking)…

Do I ever try to force my beliefs (or lack thereof) on you? NO. Do I live and let live? YES. Why can’t you have just a tiny bit of respect for me, too, for a change? (That’s what finally gets to me. The constant picking. It’s like with parents who can never be happy with their child the way he or she is.)

Oh, no, that’s right…I’m going to “Hell.” I’ll tell you what…if “Heaven” is anything like that nutter Jesse Duplantis made it out to be (in that badly written book [my brother's wife] forced upon me), there’s no way I’m hanging out at that infinitely soporific church picnic. Send me wherever Mark Twain and Bill Maher are. I can’t imagine any decent god would want to live without them, myself.

I’m going to regret this outburst tomorrow, but…I just can’t take the picking, always picking. And the smugness of “being right.” You’re as bad as some of the more strident atheists I know. Fundamentalists (on both sides) and their certainties!!! I’m long overdue for a good explosion.

It took her a week to respond. Her reaction was predictable: shock, hurt, and the confusion that comes with years of stubborn, intentional denial. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years,” she lamented (with a nice heaping helping of parental guilt), “and wondered what was going on in your life that produced such an outburst.” Ever the willful innocent, she continued “I never expected to receive such a hurtful attack, not ever.” My reply was an “attack,” as if it came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. As if she had not been attacking my choices and beliefs for decades.

Clearly (and perhaps deliberately) misunderstanding what I meant by “respect,” she defended herself by talking about the admiration she had for certain thoroughly unobjectionable qualities of mine, like the “tender heart” that led me to take my first job at a local homeless shelter. (I swear on Lucifer’s balls, every time my mother talks about my “tender heart,” so help me Jesus, I want to go out on the street and kick a puppy or snatch a little old lady’s purse.) She expressed bafflement at what I called “picking,” and insisted she only wanted to “share” things like “videos and stories” that had “touched (her) deeply,” completely ignoring the fact that it had been yet one more presumptuous evangelistic prod that had pushed me over the edge.

With a feeling of weary, almost callous resignation (perhaps the feeling one has when it’s time to get an actual divorce) I realized that just because she was never going to “get it” didn’t mean I had to sit down and STFU. I wrote back.

Follow my metaphor for a moment. You’re sitting behind someone who used to agree with you. Now she just does her own thing, and tries not to bother you or anyone else, but you feel the need to keep intermittently poking, prodding and nudging her. It’s not good enough for you to peacefully coexist. She must agree with you!

For twenty-five years this goes on, you poke and you prod, and from time to time she turns around and politely asks you to stop.

Finally, after twenty-five years, she suddenly turns around and gives you a violent shove that sends you sprawling, shocked and hurt, onto the floor.

Honestly, can you blame her?

Of course, much of the problem here also lies in the phrase “Who wrote that?”

I’m afraid that no matter what I say, I will fail to communicate with you in any significant way. The fact is, I’ve tried several times in the past few years to “come out” to you — which would be easier if I were actually gay, then there’d be a thorny but concrete identity issue that might possibly work some change here — but at this point it seems like whatever you don’t want to see or hear is going to get filtered out. Or maybe it’ll be just chalked up to “evil” or “sin,” which are handy catch-alls for otherwise normal human traits and behaviors that often frighten and/or confuse fundamentalists of all stripes.

When I say “respect,” by the way, I don’t just mean “admiration for certain desirable traits.” I mean respecting other people’s boundaries — which runs completely against the whole born-again modus operandi of “witnessing,” I know, Henry Cloud notwithstanding. I also mean respecting the differences and choices of others, which in evangel-speak would probably be translated to “tolerating sin and destructive choices” — so there’s really no way I can win here.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was an angry outburst. I hoped to shock more than hurt, although I could write entire volumes about what, within the belief system I was raised in, has hurt me. Perhaps now I can start doing that publicly. What I couldn’t tell you before is that the work I did with that career coach revealed that one big thing I want to do is somehow help others who have been screwed up by Manichean evangelical Christian doctrine/culture. Franky Schaeffer (prodigal Greek Orthodox liberal son of Francis) is a role model of mine.

I have to say, part of my outburst, at least in my opinion, was damn funny too…what I said about Jesse Duplantis and church picnics and Mark Twain…that’s my real sense of humor: sharp, pointed, ironic/sarcastic, highlighting absurdity. It’s nothing foreign or affected — although I tone it down to the point of disappearance around every (member of our family) but (my brother). I don’t think he would have been as shocked as you, or found me quite so unrecognizable. He’s a lot tamer and more conservative than he used to be, but he still has a little bit of a subversive streak.

I’m more than a marshmallow peep, Mom. I’m not just sugar on the outside and a soft, chewy center. I’m also tart and I have bite. Don’t you like Macintosh apples?

Sorry to have hurt your feelings.

That was over a week ago and I haven’t heard from her. But at long last I feel freer than ever to say whatever the hell I want, even without the anonymity of this blog. Perhaps I’m that much closer to setting up my own fundamentalist-recovery Web site.

I thought the marshmallow peep comment was particularly inspired.

**

On Super Bowl Sunday I went over to my 74-year-old gay friend Richard’s house for wine and cheese, and we watched Howl instead of the game. It was an imaginative project, built around the 1957 obscenity trial of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s titular opus. James Franco completely inhabited the otherwise inimitable character of Ginsberg. He was astonishing.

The reason I mention the film is because of something Ginsberg said to a writer from Playboy during their lengthy recorded interview (shown between clips of the trial, Ginsberg’s first public poetry reading of “Howl,” and hallucinatory animated interpretations of the poem). He talked about how he would have been unable to write such an uninhibited, nakedly honest poem if he had ever thought about his “daddy” reading it. Instead, he strove for the kind of intimate self-expression one experiences with one’s closest friends. “Don’t hide the madness,” he said. “You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.”

I wish it hadn’t taken me so long.

**

But it’s been another film, or more properly a film series, that has given me a non-fictional character with whom I could wholly identify, who makes me feel less alone in my particular life ineptitudes, and who gives me some hope that I can eventually prevail.

Out of a longtime curiosity, I requested Michael Apted’s 7-Up series from Netflix. This is the ambitious ongoing documentary series that began in 1963 with a group of fourteen seven-year-olds from various areas and social classes in England. Apted intended to follow up with them every seven years, although as the years went by some of the grown-up children wound up opting out.

It’s fascinating. Even at seven, the children have distinct accents, opinions, and personalities. (One upper-class Londoner named John is practically a miniature William F. Buckley.) Some become more subdued by fourteen. But by twenty-one, a few have changed pronouncedly. Neil Hughes, a middle-class Liverpudlian, is one of those few, and the filmmaker’s interview with him made me burst into tears. I saw myself in the series’ only societal dropout — rejecting his upbringing, questioning everything, devoid of self-confidence, unable to find his place in the world.

A bright-eyed and precocious child at seven, Neil is, at twenty-one, perched on the edge of homelessness — living in a squatter’s flat and doing day labor after having dropped out of a third-class University. His expression is one of perennial woundedness and bewilderment. Battling depression, directionless, he has a strained relationship with his devoutly religious parents, who (as he relates, with a nervous calm masking suppressed rage) taught him that “if one was to survive in the world, one had to believe in God” and that he should “always think of other people first before yourself, to a ridiculous neurotic degree.”

I don’t think I was really taught any policy of living at all by my parents…I was just left to fend for myself in a world which they seemed completely oblivious of. I found when I even tried to discuss problems that were facing me in school, my parents didn’t seem to be aware of the nature of the problem.

At that point I felt such a powerful recognition and sorrow I started to weep. The cluelessness and helplessness of which he speaks is, I believe, part of the fallout from growing up within a narrow religious worldview in which all problems are “spiritual” in nature (rather than social or psychological), we are essentially powerless to direct or change our own lives, and everything is a matter of God’s will. That is, some invisible, inscrutable external Being is in control of our lives, not us. Decisions are made and problems solved through prayer and submission to His divine will.

Given the overwhelming silence and absence of said Being, and the reinforced belief in one’s own helplessness (and worthlessness), this does not prepare a child to go confidently into the world and shape his or her own destiny. What it does do is encourage passivity and paralysis.

When Apted asks Neil if he is “kicking against stability,” Neil replies that there never was any stability to begin with. “I think I’ve been kicking in midair the whole of my life.”

Ouch. I hear you, brother.

“How many parents really think of their children as individual human beings?” Neil blurts out passionately, tangentially, at another point, interrupting his interviewer. And I found myself thinking of my own losing battle to show my parents who I am. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years.” That unwillingness to let one’s children, or even other people, be visible — it seems to also come with this religious territory.

At the end of the conversation, Neil rues his inability to “take any positive course of action” and hopes that one day he’ll be able to “wake up in the morning and feel this day is going to be worthwhile.” Which I couldn’t have said better myself.

By 28-Up, Neil is a drifter in Scotland, living in a rented trailer, picking up odd jobs. He waxes philosophical about what Thoreau referred to as the majority of men living lives of quiet despair. He never wanted the 9-to-5 life and evenings spent watching television. (Another thing we have in common.) I already know that by 49-Up he will be living in a small England town and be involved in politics, so somehow it’s reassuring to see him flounder, rootless and directionless, the way I have all these years.

If Neil can find his way, I can too.

**

But then there’s the ongoing story of Ted.

After a while, Ted seemed to grow used to the status quo, i.e. my assiduous avoidance, and by then I had become too passive and cowardly to change course. Following three weeks of no contact (other than being in the same big room), I was at last getting to a point where I didn’t think about him that much outside of work. I was going on some Internet dates, which, though unsuccessful, were at least dates, and resulted in some interesting conversations. (What would be even nicer would be if I could inspire interest in someone I actually found at least marginally attractive.)

Granted, on the days I did see Ted, I still felt that undercurrent of low-grade misery that comes from prolonged, unresolved inner dissonance, of behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to one’s true feelings, and my numbers suffered. (I’ve had four quota warnings in six weeks. Good thing they like me too much to fire me.)

Then those nonexistent rom-com scriptwriters decided to fuck around with me again.

Ted had, one particular evening, decided to be more in-my-face than usual anyway by taking an empty station just on the other side of the row partition from me. Perhaps because my (nervous) energy level spiked as a result, I started scoring some solid pledges right away. There had been a system crash earlier in the day, but we hummed along without incident for an hour into the evening shift. Then suddenly my computer screen froze. I kept “pitching” the donor without the use of my script, and had just persuaded her to donate ten dollars a month to the ACLU, when the line went dead.

Another system crash. The supervisor rebooted everything. In the meantime, I jotted down the donor’s information and phone number to complete the transaction manually, and went to the reception area to call her back. Twice I got voice mail. The second time, I left a message explaining what had happened with the system. I told her she would probably be getting a call from someone else in the near future. (Ruefully, I assumed I’d lost the pledge.)

When I walked back into the call room, Ted and the supervisor came rapidly toward me. My donor was back — on Ted’s line. Apparently when the system came back up, the autodialer must have redialed her number and sent her to his computer. I had to finish my call from his station. (Out of all the call stations in all the rows of all the sections of the call floor, as Bogart once said…)

With a laugh, Ted told me that both he and the donor could hear me leaving the message. It was the most we’d interacted in a month. Again, as in my last post, I experienced that fleeting warm and homey feeling of everything being all right with the world.

Ted either left of his own accord or got sent home at the shift break, but my performance continued to shoot through the roof for the rest of the night, and saved my whole week. That’s the good news. I can’t say if the indulgence of renewed fantasies involving furniture-smashing resolutions of sexual tension later that night, leading to certain unmentionable conclusions, is good news (Russ would probably say so) — but it might just as easily be comparable to the indulgence of a self-destructive drug addiction. After all, you come back to work the next day, and he’s way over there again, and it hits you that this is never really going to happen, and then you feel about as shitty as a junkie with a crack hangover.

Ted may be leaving soon. I know he’s had a number of interviews, and last week he was in the director’s office with the door closed, which may mean he was giving his notice — but not having talked to him, I don’t know. Yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me how lame that is.

**

My rational mind tells me to get free and get on with my life. My emotions and my body still crave Ted. Avoiding him is an act of both despair and helplessness, because I feel on the one hand too weak to follow my mind’s ruthless resolve, and on the other utterly helpless to get what I want from him.

Is it worse to divorce yourself from what you know you want today, or to sabotage possibilities you might want in the future, but don’t yet know you want? Especially if you have no confidence whatsoever in your ability to win either way?

If Ted simply leaves, it will be taken care of for me, by virtue of my own passivity.

Which is how good little Christian boys and girls like me and Neil have been trained to deal with our life challenges.

Sometimes that’s a good thing.

**

Tyler Tervooren, another Portlander like Chris Guillebeau who advocates risk-taking and living an unconventional lifestyle, said something (which I can’t find to quote now) to the general effect that being courageous in the everyday choices we make accustoms us to taking risks and being bold in more significant areas of our lives.

It was for this reason that, presented with the option of either taking a permanent, secure job in a toy company’s Internet department for a $30K salary (in a basement with mostly women) or becoming a full-time fundraiser for the anti-corporate underdog in our Democratic primary (in a a diverse and bustling campaign office), which by all accounts would be temporary and hourly, I chose the latter.

The former was a sure thing, but would definitely be stressful and suck precious hours of my life away (underground) for no real purpose. The campaign job was risky, but held promise as well as meaning. It would enable me to advocate for and help elect a real “people’s candidate,” while also possibly providing new connections and leading me in any number of new directions — if I wasn’t automatically out of a job after the primary.

In the midst of this decision, I had my first truly bitter fight with Jeannie. To make a long story short, she believed she was acting in my best interest, while I was shocked at her sudden “bossiness” with me and apparent lack of trust in my gut feelings.

What I derived from this episode, however, was a greater understanding of how Sam must have felt when I “bossed” him and showed little faith in his judgment. I didn’t like it, either.

Choosing the campaign involved a leap of faith. It was an act of trust in the future as well as belief in the candidate, and belief that fortune does in fact favor the brave — belief that my life will only change if I start making choices based not on what is already known and safe, but on what draws me forward and closer to a greater expression of who I am and what I value. It was the same kind of leap I took last year at this time.

As you know, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

**

For the past month I have also been working with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in Sonoma, California. We have weekly hour-long sessions that are meant to correspond to each section of the book. So far I don’t seem to have Called In The One, but I have definitely become more “magnetic” (to borrow from Katherine Thomas) when it comes to the opposite sex. More on that presently.

Beth’s input, along with some of Frank Schaeffer’s well-chosen words in his latest book (Patience With God), helped me deal more effectively with the latest Come-To-Jesus letter from my mom.

Dripping with the catchphrase-laden sentimentality peculiar to born-again Christian women, her missive gushed about how her life with her Heavenly Father/Lover (shudder) was so much more fulfilling than mine. (That incestuous blurring thing BACW do with their version of God I’ve always found unsettling.) It also took for granted, as usual, that her literalist cult had the corner on the “Christian” label and on what God wants.

God has always had a wonderful plan for your life, and has always wanted to reveal it to you. He has given you delightful gifts — tenderness, kindness, mercy — plus all the “smarts” with which He has endowed you. And the life He offers is one which is filled with His loving presence!

Do you still feel that the Christian life is one of rules and regulations legislated by a tyrant God? Not so! It is a life of a loving relationship with the God who designed us and Whose will is only for our good! You may feel your life is full of excitement and adventure, but I assure you “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” A life lived with God is a life of deep satisfaction because it is lived according to the blueprint of the Designer! And instead of being confining, it is a release into freedom, life as it was intended to be!

To top it all off, she sent me a Facebook message later that same week complaining about the words I’d used on someone else’s thread. “I didn’t bring you up to use such crude language,” she scolded.

First a child’s blush, and then a flash of rage, made blood ring in my ears. How dare she? The letter was already presumptuous to the max, but this was beyond the pale.

I took a time-out to cool down rather than going with my first impulse and using language that would have made her sorry she’d said anything at all.

**

Instead, I explored with Beth the critical relationship issues that surface in my dealings with my ever-proselytizing mother. Namely — the inability to stand up for myself; the distasteful bind of being either projected upon in the most saccharine manner (as sugar and spice and everything nice) or dismissed as invalid (stubborn and sinful); invisibility. All of which inspire a sort of primal and inarticulate rage.

To this day, after all, I often allow men with strong personalities to dominate and silence me. I have attracted admirers who idealize me so much I don’t even recognize who the hell they think they’re enamored with. I have chased many highly visible (attention-grabbing and handsome) men to whom I have been essentially invisible.

These relationships are mirrors of what I picked up from my earliest connections. Jeannie and I even discussed how the dynamic of our conflict resembled the dynamic of me vs. my mother and her well-meaning but overbearing Come-To-Jesus letters — just days before the latest one arrived.

So, theoretically, I should be able to apply the remedy where it all began.

Beth had me imagine the part of me that feels this rage as a small child. What does the child want? she asked. How would you take care of this child, as the responsible and mature adult? What would you say to her? What would you say to your mom?

This simple visual aid was remarkably helpful. I found myself feeling angry and protective of the marginalized, silenced, “unacceptable” little girl who was supposed to “be good” at all times and not upset anyone. In my mind’s eye, I picked her up and told her she was just as important as everybody else. I told her I recognized and valued everything she was, whether or not my mother or anyone else judged it to be “good.” I told her to express whatever the fuck she wanted. And I told her I wasn’t going to let my mother talk to her like that anymore.

**

The next day I wrote my response.

The fact that I have no idea which comment you’re talking about only serves to demonstrate that I am finally letting my hair down around here. I’m sure whatever it was could have been a lot worse in your book — I’ve been using language you’d probably call crude since I was a teenager. At forty-two I’m just getting over things like walking on eggshells and self-censoring to the point of nonexistence. I don’t want every part of me that isn’t inoffensive to someone to be invisible…

I can only marvel at the hubris when any human being thinks that they can read the mind of God and outright tell me I am NOT following His wonderful Plan for my life in my own damn time and way. (Oops, guess I cussed again. Somehow, I think God is bothered more by the behavior of the Enron Corporations of the world than by my saying “damn.”) Look, I know it’s just your way of trying to communicate love and concern, but doing it that way is neither welcome nor necessary. Why not just trust that God knows what He’s doing with me? It seems like a lot of hurt, tension, and resentment could be avoided here.

Defensive, my mother backed off somewhat, thanking me for being honest, but she still couldn’t resist throwing out the classic fundamentalist argument:

I don’t pretend to ‘read the mind of God’ other than reading what He says pretty clearly in His Word. I know you feel that Jesus’ words about being The Way, The Truth and The Life sound pretty exclusive — I didn’t say it; He did! I have chosen to believe Him as I would if a doctor told me ‘This is the ONLY medicine which can cure your disease!’ It is not a matter of opinion; either it is the truth or it is not. (Pascal) was willing to trust it as the truth — what was there to lose?

This “because he said so” tautology used to work on the child. C.S. Lewis made something like this argument too, saying that Jesus had to either be the Messiah or akin to the madman who claims he’s a poached egg. (What Lewis et. al. fail to consider, even within their dubious closed arguments, is that we can never know how much the canonized New Testament writings reflect what Jesus, if he really existed, actually said, written as they were after decades of oral tradition within a revisionist religious movement. To say nothing of those heretic Gnostics who didn’t even make the cut!) I replied:

There’s a couple of places we diverge that are irreconcilable, I guess. I don’t believe that I need to be cured, or that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, although I do believe that someone in the first few centuries wrote that a guy named Jesus said the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” thing…

You may or may not remember this, but I took a preceptorial (elective seminar) and wrote a paper on the Pensées at (college). (Pascal) was a fascinating character, but I agree with Franky Schaeffer’s assessment of his famous wager: “Pascal’s wager, wherein one bets in favor of God rather than risking damnation, is one of the stupidest ideas ever articulated. If there is a God, He knows you were just a good betting man splitting the odds – insincere but scared.” There are better reasons than fear to believe in some kind of Divine. On that perhaps we agree.

After that she pretty much shut up about the whole business, and since has stuck to subjects like how the campaign is doing, what’s happening with people we know, and the news.

It felt like some kind of watershed moment.

**

Just as Jeannie taught me what it was like to be on the receiving end of the “bossing” I gave Sam, my mother’s letter taught me something else about myself. Something uncomfortable to look at.

I realized that my mother was trying, time and time again, to persuade me with impassioned and sometimes manipulative pleas to take on her emotional experience when it was definitely not mine.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: no wonder my carefully-crafted, effusive love letters to nearly a dozen indifferent or ambivalent men over the past twenty years never won them over. I could no more “convert” these guys to my subjective and unshared emotional experience than my mother could convert me to hers. They were probably even less into me than I’m into Jesus…and I wouldn’t or couldn’t accept that.

I flushed, thinking how cloying and annoying my attempts must have seemed. Perhaps as annoying as a subway evangelist handing out tracts.

I guess it’s a hard habit to break.

**

But about that “magnetism”…

I should mention that Ted has been working a few hours a week for the campaign, and that Padraic came over after he found out I was working there. (Ted has since quit the call center, and may be going more full-time until he passes his pharmacy exam.) I must admit, I never fully got over my crush on Ted, that nondescript but intelligent liberal Texan of my own generation. When I met him, he reminded me of a forty-plus version of Sam — hence the attraction. But I gave up on Ted months ago. I really don’t want to suffer over any more men who’ll play with me when I’m the only game around, but run around after other, younger women when I’m not. He still kids around with me, and seems genuinely glad to see me when I’m there…clearly he has a friendly affection for me. So I take our relationship for what it is, no more and no less.

Padraic I take with a grain of salt. I figured him out after a while: if I take a step toward him, he takes a step backward. This dance is time-tested and guaranteed. When he complained that his young ex-girlfriend was “too into” him and wanted to get serious (which is why they broke up) I realized I was being presented with yet another opportunity to play chase-the-carrot. Wisely, I declined. Padraic really does remind me of my brother John. I could have broken my own heart again and run after John one more time…but I wouldn’t have caught him this time, either.

No, I’ve had it with the terminal ambivalence and mixed messages. I deserve better than that.

**

One thing worthy of note, however, is how one of the Big Fish at my new position reacted to me. It caught me completely off guard. This is a national campaign, so it’s populated by local political luminaries who are Big Fish in our small pond.

During my first few days there, I came into contact with one of them repeatedly. A handsome, charismatic figure who knows how to work a room, Matt shook my hand with an oddly dazed look and seemed at a loss for words. I just smiled and nodded. I didn’t burble or effervesce the way most women do in his presence. Mind you, this is a guy at whom multiple eyelids flutter whenever he enters the field office, who gets to rub elbows with impeccably groomed Abercrombie & Fitch princesses at events.

Yet every time he’s had contact with this low-rent, un-svelte, T-shirted fortysomething in chipped librarian frames and holey sneakers, he looks like nothing so much as a dumbfounded adolescent boy alone with the prom queen. I’m tickled to death by this. I know I didn’t put the energy out there, but I feel it in the space between us.

I haven’t told anyone but Beth about this. And now you. No one around here, at least no one who knows local politics, would believe me if I told them. Beth, of course, says it’s a sign that I’m becoming more “magnetic.”

Even Ted, the other day, surprised me: I was standing outside with him and one of the other fundraisers, an ex-Marine in his fifties who had come down to work at our office location “just to see you,” he told me with bald flirtatiousness. Suddenly I felt Ted’s hand resting on my shoulder as he talked to the Marine. It felt weirdly territorial. Then Ted made a humorous remark, and shook the other man’s hand in a conciliatory fashion. The body language honestly seemed like something dogs might do if they were bipeds. Again, I was tickled, especially as it was Ted. At least he didn’t pee on me.

**

There’s really something to this whole let-them-come-to-me business. The best example of all happened when I went down to the call center to pick up my last check.

I would never have expected it to be so effortless, to get what I had been hoping for for weeks. I had by this point pretty much resigned myself to never making significant contact with either of the beautiful newbies mentioned in my last post, as I was (at long last) leaving The Job.

Stopping by various cubicles to bid my farewells, I didn’t see the half-Asian Adonis anywhere. The raven-haired Sir Lancelot, however, was sitting just a few seats down from my friend Jane. Standing there beside her, telling her about the campaign, I noticed he and I were still just missing each other’s glances. Before long, he stood up from his seat and logged out for a break.

As he came toward us, both Jane and the supervisor coming down the row read his subversive T-shirt slogan aloud. Lancelot laughed, stopped, and explained it to us, introducing himself with a firm handshake. His name was Tanner. Actually, Tanner was his surname; Jim was “everybody’s name,” so he went by his last. Close up he was even handsomer, his dark-lashed brown eyes larger and warmer. He had a sexy voice and an easy affability, and I wondered why on earth we hadn’t managed to introduce ourselves earlier.

After a minute of chatting he left us to go outside. I followed suit not long thereafter, not expecting to see him unless I deliberately went up the alley. The designated smoking area was on the other side of the building. I was contemplating whether or not to go that way, and how I might contrive to speak to him again, when the elevator doors opened.

To my surprise, Tanner was sitting right outside the front door. He held it open as I wheeled my bike out. I stopped to chat with him for a few minutes more (and to tell him that this was my last visit to the call center). I found out a bit more about him: he was twenty-seven, currently in his last year of school at the Art Institute, and had been a new recruit in the military — dispatched to the Pentagon — during 9/11. After witnessing censorship and the suppression of information at the site in the immediate aftermath of the attack, his politics did a U-turn and he became something of a 9/11 “truther.”

I tried not to stare as he spoke but couldn’t help myself. Sweet Jesus, what a delectable young radical was he. I wished I could eat him with my eyes. (And so friendly! Who knew!) When at last he turned to go back inside, he wished me luck with the campaign and said he was glad to have met me.

“I’m glad to finally know your name,” I said, starting to wheel my bike away as he pulled the door open. “Now you’re not just the tall handsome one with the tattoos.”

He paused, grinned, and laughed: a pleased laugh, a very sexy laugh. “Thank you!” he purred, with that sultry voice of his. “See you around…”

Oh, I wish, honey.

Nevertheless I couldn’t believe how easy that was.

Maybe he’ll turn up at a rally somewhere.

It’s been a crazy time.

In a nutshell: Sam accepted a contract job doing physical labor in the middle east that will pay off his mountain of student loan debt — and keep him tens of thousands of miles away for the next nine months. For exactly one moment, I entertained the notion of going with him, but it’s not exactly the green hills of Ireland, and my own options would have been restricted to some pretty unpalatable choices. Besides which, as it turns out, my presence would interfere with one of his main objectives for going (more on that in a bit). We had talked about vacationing abroad together during his two-week break in four months, but apparently that possibility has been shelved as well. I guess. I don’t even know where we’re at now. All I know is that I’m bereft, and sad, and that I don’t want to go back to our stupid workplace. This has made me want to fly to my own far places again, find my own adventure.

Sam and I didn’t part the way I would have wanted, but I can’t regret what I did that precipitated his angry withdrawal. He may have been looking for an excuse to withdraw, anyway.

As if that would make it easier on either of us.

**

I don’t know what I’m going to do now, how I’m going to cope, waking up without Sam’s arms wound around me, without the rich musk of his sweat-dampened skin or the surprisingly sweet, comforting scent of his hot breath. My inner animal is permanently chemically bonded to him. And that’s to say nothing of the sex: unprecedented pleasure I had felt doomed to live largely without ever since my mother “cursed” me (“No man will ever satisfy you”), whether because of social or previously discussed physical handicaps. With Sam, I’ve felt like the pornographic version of Goldilocks, finding “just right” at last. (Who’s been sleeping in my bed?) Not only that, but Sam has proven to be every bit the lover most women will tell you they long for: attentive, accommodating, passionate but loving, taking his time, with just the right touch. (And Jesus, what an outstanding kisser.) I’ve loved everything he’s ever done to me, without exception. I cannot say that about anyone else. Not anyone.

I love Sam’s body now as if it were my own. Perhaps more: I still judge my cellulite and varicose veins ruthlessly, whereas everything about his body I don’t adore I simply accept. I know all of his smells and his textures and his sensitive spots; I know the landscapes of his black, wiry hair and his scars and his rippling stretch marks where he lost lifelong fat. It pains me, physically, palpably, how cruel Sam is to this body I love, treating it like a malfunctioning machine or a workhorse to be beaten into obedience rather than as the sacred and irreplaceable temple housing and expressing all of the beautiful tenderness and passion inside of him (and giving us both so much pleasure). He will sacrifice scores of cells to kill his chronic pain; he will inundate his struggling lungs with foreign toxins, and think nothing of repeatedly burning or cutting his wonderful hands. It makes me want to weep, and to kiss them. (As things are, this would probably piss him off.)

**

“Would you have his babies?” my life coach friend asked at one point. He always asks his women clients this to determine how much in love they are on a visceral, biological level. About Sonny, I said yes; about Rick, I said no.

Sam and I, STD-free, and with me on the pill, never used any protection. At first, this made me nervous, given the sheer quantity of unfiltered sperm he was pumping into me on a regular basis. But when I started my period last week, the week of his departure, I felt the pangs of a strange and ineffable sadness.

**

This young man, about whom I once felt so ambivalent, has effectively ruined me for other men. Now even the most devastatingly attractive stranger evokes the question: How capable would he really be of intimacy? and: How could he possibly be a better lover than Sam? Even my way of seeing has changed. In the office on Sam’s last night at work, greedily gazing at his hair, his face, his body as if to memorize every last detail, I thought him the handsomest man on the planet. I think of the beautiful poem by Peter Handke that runs through Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, “Song of Childhood,” beginning the film with Als das kind kind war (When the child was a child):

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.

Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

I seem to have exchanged what Rilke called “the adult’s defensiveness and scorn” for the wide-open eyes of childhood. Every person I meet looks different to me now. No one gets judged — any longer — against anything but him or herself.

I think I like the ways in which Sam has changed me.

**

Everything in my life has been disrupted lately, from my sleep schedule to my daily routines to my eating habits to my expectations of what a day or a night will bring. Sam introduced chaos into my life; I introduced calm into his. He fell asleep much more easily when entwined with me; my apartment was often the tranquil island where he shipwrecked at the end of a stormy night.

Before he left town, Sam was determined to share with me, as completely as possible, his secret second life, his insomniac’s nocturnal social circles and activities — some of which wound up making me feel akin to the girlfriend in “Twilight.” If I were to go into much detail about it here, most of my readers, except for possibly Russ, would engage in a collective hand-wringing session. Suffice it to say that, metaphorically speaking, one excellent reason for Sam to get the hell out of Dodge is to cut ties with the vampires — and to free himself of his own blood-lust. Sam was alternately defensive with me about his alternate world and pushing for me to be more upset about it. I tried to walk a fine line.

The past couple of weeks have been an uneasy education for sure. But as Rilke wrote (in the book I gave Sam), “if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.”

As if in response to my initiation into Sam’s alien universe, I dreamt of a sort of vast nighttime carnival populated by a motley assortment of semi-costumed individuals exhibiting various degrees of intoxication. It was as if I had inadvertently wandered onto the set of a Fellini film. Strangely, I was not in the least bit frightened, but meandered among them, eventually turning toward a destination where I had heard some kind of movie or show was going on. Sam’s friend Rob was there (I seem to remember him with a fishing rod and a tutu), and I easily befriended some of the others who were unfamiliar to me. I was comfortable and at home in this bizarre environment, and was almost sorry to leave my new friends behind when I awoke.

But then I guess I’ve always gotten along better with the so-called freaks.

**

“He’s twenty-one,”  my coach friend reminded me. “Do you know what I was doing when I was twenty-one? Taking speed so I could whip through my job stocking candy machines, get out of there, and go party.”  Doc (a pseudonym I came up with thanks to Sam) met with the two of us the other week; he liked Sam a lot. Doc can handle all of the freakier truths without overreacting.

Sam is just young, he said. I grew out of all that shit, and hopefully he will too.

**

To know the pain of too much tenderness. — Kahlil Gibran

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone so hard.

From the outset, I’ve striven to honor the inherent, impenetrable solitude of Sam’s being, even though his deep and persistent sadness — the byproduct of an upbringing filled with struggle and privation and cruelty — makes me yearn to make it all better for him.

Sam is, at any rate, a beautiful and extraordinary person. He has a mind unlike the majority of other people, sharing many of the gifts, and also many of the challenges, of people on the autistic spectrum (Russ and bluemorpho3, take note). He urged me to read Born on a Blue Day, the autobiography of a savant with Asperger Syndrome, in order to better understand him, and I complied in short order. The author of the book, Daniel Tammet, has synaesthesia, too, a fascinating multisensory way of perceiving and ordering things like numbers and days of the week. (Wednesdays are blue, hence the title.) Daniel grew up withdrawn into a world of his own, and has always had difficulty with social interaction. Much as Sam has.

An aside: the book had the interesting side effect of making me think long and hard about my own math-whiz father — whose rationalistic and unemotional values always seemed to denigrate and invalidate my emotive, intuitive, empathic self (as “frivolous”) — and who is very likely an undiagnosed case on that same spectrum himself. My fossilized resentment began to dissolve as I realized that he probably couldn’t help himself, that it was easier for him to be friends with numbers than with his own daughter. I started to find myself relenting a little, being more able to find a scrap of compassion and forgiveness for his limitations, rather than seeing him as the towering and rigid authority figure he seemed to me as a child. Maybe he had simply done the best he could.

But back to Sam. I spoke before of what a terrific leader and manager he is because of his listening skills and his responsiveness. I had no idea at the time of how hard he has had to work, both to understand others and to respond appropriately. It’s no wonder he has a way of making people feel as if they have his complete and undivided attention. He has to intensely focus upon their words and their body language.

A fierce Libertarian, Sam talks the talk of unlimited personal freedom (and chafes at any infringement thereof), but walks the walk of a “bleeding-heart” caretaker who frequently assumes responsibility for the well-being of others (often at substantial personal cost). Miranda was far from his first emergency. People utterly exhaust Sam, but somehow he always winds up in the thick of the fray. When the assistant director got suspended from work, Sam wound up putting in a lot of extra time as the only person at the company who knew how to take care of everything.

His tragic flaw is that he can’t say no, at least not when friends and coworkers ask him for help. This leads to a whole host of other difficulties, including the extreme stress he suffered at the time of his leaving that precipitated our blowout.

**

I have never had any man let me so unreservedly and unequivocally into his life before, and share even the most unflattering and trying aspects of it with me. It’s as if Sam were as ready to find me as I was to find him. He frequently said that my timing was impeccable. I don’t know about that, but things did seem to fall right into line once I made up my mind to make my move. Sam’s pre-dawn dealings among the night-crawlers and his cognitive obstacles did create challenges for me, but I somehow located equanimity and patience within myself beyond what I even knew I had. And he fully recognized and appreciated this.

What makes me sad is to think he’s convinced himself that I don’t fully recognize or appreciate his own needs and priorities.

**

After an idyllic weekend, our harmony began to disintegrate in the days leading up to Sam’s departure for his childhood home in the midwest. He had planned to drive the 650 miles to visit his parents (and brother) before leaving the country.

Sam being Sam, however, he had agreed to take on numerous shifts, trainings, workshops, and other responsibilities at work that week, including closing on Friday night at ten o’clock (after which he would leave on his long drive!). He was quickly running out of time. On the phone, after I complained about him not returning my calls, he vented bitterly (and with escalating anxiety) about all the things he still had left to do, including figure out what to do about his apartment still under lease — which he had asked me if I could move into not long before, and I had said I couldn’t — and what to do about his truck, which still had no brakes to speak of. A relative he had paid to repair them had never come through. His anger, and the desperation of his situation, completely infected me with anxiety (how could I stand by and watch him drive away in a car with no real brakes?) and I offered to buy him a plane ticket or rent him a car. He was adamant about not taking any money from me, or anyone, and about not being indebted to anyone.

He informed me that he intended to get as much sleep as possible that night because he had to work all day the next day, Thursday. He had originally hoped to have all day free. (He even threw some of the blame for that at me, thinking he was taking a workshop or orientation I had begged off of, but that just wasn’t true. Another employee had gotten sick.) I kept asking how I could help him, but he just wanted to be left alone that night.

So I left him alone that night.

And stayed awake for most of it, weepy from worry and Sam’s curtness and trying to figure out what to tackle. I agonized over my decision about his apartment, even though I knew for certain I couldn’t live there. I appealed to my old absentee boss: “Help me help him,” I prayed, to whomever would listen. In the end, I realized that what was bothering me most was the truck. I couldn’t let Sam drive away in a vehicle that big that might not be able to stop. Flipping through the Yellow Pages in the wee hours, I decided I was going to get that damn truck to Just Brakes tomorrow, somehow, even if Sam never forgave me for it.

Except that Sam didn’t show up at work the next morning. And he wasn’t answering the phone, either. So I went over to his building, tossing pebbles at his window the way his friends do. Some facially-pierced skater kids let me in the front door, and I went down to his garden level apartment and knocked. I heard a door open somewhere inside, but no one opened the apartment door. I left Sam another message, reiterating my full intentions, waited in the hall awhile, and then left.

Sam called me in the late afternoon, fuming. He had been up all night dealing with shit and had been trying to sleep during the day…but “people kept fucking calling me, and throwing gravel at my window, and knocking on my goddamn door!” He had told me twice he wouldn’t take money from me. Why couldn’t I respect his wishes or trust his judgment? The Miss Cribb in me, who had surfaced over this issue, wouldn’t back down, even though the rest of me was trembling, and I told him I wouldn’t push so hard if it weren’t a matter of life or death, and if I didn’t love him. If anything happened to him on the highway, I’d never forgive myself. Still furious, he snarled “Well maybe at least THEN I’d get some peace and quiet!!!” (He didn’t see the humor in this.) Anyway, it wasn’t for me to worry about, it was for him to worry about, and I was just adding to his stress.

After his angry hangup I called Doc, crying. Doc talked me through it. All people in relationships fight, he reminded me. You’ll get through this, just like everybody else.

At work that night, Sam did seem to have calmed down some. He was still dealing with trainees when the rest of us were let go, so I called and left him a message while walking home.

He called me back, but was brusque and cold, telling me that I wasn’t one of the people who truly understood why he was taking this job in the first place, and that he hadn’t ever been able to communicate it to me. No, he didn’t want me to come over. He had too much packing to do. He ended the conversation saying “this could have gone more than one way”…meaning, obviously, that I had done something wrong, “blown” it. He was eager to get off the phone, despite my pleas for further communication. He said he’d see me at work tomorrow (his last day at work and in town).

Reeling from shock, I had a Three-Mile-Island-size meltdown.

Such irony. I was afraid to start something with Sam for fear I might break his heart, remember? And here I was, feeling rejected, abandoned, shattered. He had urged me before not to let him shut me out, but I had no idea how to break down this wall now. Sam was going away, and I felt he was corralling me behind the fence with all of his “unnecessary” people, the ones being cut loose. I curled up in bed in the fetal position and convulsed with sobs.

That jagged, ancient heartache I’ve often spoke of was not only present, but radiated outward, until every cell, from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair, throbbed with pain. I fancied I might fly to pieces from the internal pressure. Soon after the first wave engulfed me, there was a blinding flash of light, then the crack of thunder. An electrical storm raged outside. As the feeling ebbed, the storm seemed to do the same; when another wave washed over me, another flash of light illumined the room. I began to believe, with mad conviction, that the wildly oscillating electromagnetic field caused my my overwhelming pain was causing the storm, not unlike the way the sky is said to have gone dark as Christ writhed crucified upon the cross. And it did feel as if I were carrying not only my own anguish, but also the burden of all of Sam’s disowned and banished emotions. I thought I had plumbed the depths of heartbreak, but this was agony. I wept myself totally dry. I imagined that my hair might turn white overnight from the stress, or that I might otherwise physically transform.

And indeed, in the morning, I was confronted by a stranger in the mirror. My face was hideous. Both eyes were swollen beyond recognition: baggy frog-eyes with deep creases and circles beneath them, both eyelids drooping heavily. My left eye, half closed, made me look as if I had had a stroke. It was frightening. I looked like someone else, someone twenty or thirty years older. I can’t go into work looking like this, I thought. I can’t let Sam see me like this. What was I going to do? Recalling something I had read in a magazine about how supermodels alleviate eye puffiness, I smeared the affected area with Preparation-H. Then I got dressed, put on my glasses, and went to see Doc.

**

“Yeah, yeah,” Doc said. “I know you think he’s so mature, but don’t forget, he’s twenty-one. Guys, when they’re twenty-one…when I was that age, I thought I knew everything, and I had that same kind of an attitude, like — fuck everyone, nobody understands me, and I’m going to go off and do my own thing.”

He chuckled. “You can’t take any of it personally. He’s under extreme stress, and just isn’t equipped at this point to handle his emotions. He probably has problems receiving, too.

“Look, you just love him. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

**

At work that evening, Sam came to get me, sat me down in the office, and closed the door. He smiled faintly. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m getting the brakes fixed tonight.” He had apparently used “the right threats” with his deadbeat uncle, who was going to get the job done for him at midnight, after which Sam would take off.

I gasped with relief. “Thank God,” I said. “Thank God.”

“I told you I’d take care of it,” he said, busying himself with a printout he’d made for another employee. I could have wept, if I weren’t already cried out, and told him so. He really didn’t want to hear about how I spent the previous evening, or what my eyes had looked like. He said he’d shoot me an email when he got to his folks’ place. I wanted to know if we were okay, but all he would say was “I’m leaving for nine months.” Then he shooed me out of the office.

But I was still smiling. I’d won the right battle. Sam would be safe.

At the end of the night, I lingered. There seemed to be a small posse of guys hanging around waiting for Sam to close up shop, and my fear was screaming at me that he didn’t want me there. I told my fear to shut up, went into the office, and sat down next to Rob. And gazed at Sam’s face, trying to memorize it. What else was important? My beloved was going away. Even if he didn’t love me, I was going to stay by his side until he chased me off.

When we did get out of there, it wound up being me and Sam and Rob and another guy named Brad in the truck, heading into the heart of the Hill to pick up something necessary to the repairs (I forget what). On Eleventh Avenue, we pulled over and piled out. Brad lived close by, and was walking home from there; Rob walked toward an apartment building, then turned to wait for Sam. I walked toward Sam. “I was just following you,” I said, shrugging.

“Right on,” he said. He and Brad said their goodbyes. As Brad walked away, Sam turned toward me. He pointed out that I wasn’t far from home, and I understood that I would have to get myself there. He went to embrace me — an embrace without any Sam in it — and began to say “See you…” but I interrupted.

“If this is over,” I said over his shoulder, “I want you to know that you gave me the time of my life.” I turned my head to speak into his ear. “Take care of this beautiful body I love.” (He expelled a quick snort, the way he did when I surprised him with an unaccustomed compliment.) I kissed his cheek, and pulled back to look at his face. “Take care of this beautiful mind that I love.” I kissed his lips. For once, Sam was virtually unresponsive. As we separated, however, I saw a flicker of the Sam I knew best in his eyes before he turned away. “I’ll be back in June!” he boomed heartily over his shoulder, walking toward Rob.

I started home, and the tears started again. But I felt no regret. I had said what I needed to say. And Sam would be safe. I could sleep well tonight.

**

The next day I attended to all the neglected things in my life, like buying groceries and an adapter for my computer. Coming back, I decided to catch the bus home over by Sam’s apartment building. Absorbed in Sam-reverie, I suddenly heard Glen Hansard burst into song in my pocket. It was Sam’s ringtone, “Falling Slowly.”

He was calling to tell me he had reached his brother’s town safely. I was elated, and thanked him for letting me know (especially since I’d never expected a call). He said his uncle had fixed not only the brakes, but some other things too. He told me some of the things he’d missed about the midwest, like the smell of cow shit. I laughed. He said this would probably be his last phone contact before leaving, but that he’d be on email. And possibly Facebook. Even though he hated Facebook. I told him he didn’t have to do Facebook.

It was a pleasant and upbeat conversation overall. I didn’t try to address the state of our relationship; I just slipped in a “love you” before hanging up.

**

I told Sam, in happier times, that I’d take a bullet for him. Maybe in the end the “bullet” I had to take for him was his rage and his rejection in exchange for his ultimate safety. I was ready to lose Sam to save him. Maybe I did.

Or maybe Sam planned this all along — to put distance between us before leaving, even though he insisted he wasn’t doing this to get away from me.

Because the fact is, I do understand why he’s going over there. To get the hell away from people. To “be a robot,” as he put it, at least for a while. To work his body hard, and give his overtaxed mind a rest. Our relationship was truly heaven on earth for me — it was what I had waited for all my life — but it may have been too much for a boy born on a blue day.

Then again, when someone gives you everything you ever wanted, and asks you for just one big thing in return, it’s only fair to give it to him. Even if what he asks is for you to let him go.

But part of me is still crying in the dust like Psyche, clutching after Cupid’s fleeing golden feet.

I caucused for Barack Obama on February 5, but I wouldn’t let the overzealous precinct captain cover me with Obama 08 stickers; I was still reluctant about voting for an “establishment” candidate. Somewhere in the back of my mind I could hear one of my more adamant political comrades shouting that Obama had continuously voted to fund the war in Iraq, that he had taken dirty lobbyist and PAC money, and that furthermore he was a liar and a fraud.

But I did (and do) believe there’s something different going on here.

Much has been said about Obama’s gift for speechifying, and cynics are quick to mock his “hope” and “change” sloganeering, including the Democratic Candidate Who Would Not Die, Hillary Clinton. (Click here for an audio excerpt from one of her more derisive speeches accompanied by subversive animation from Scott Bateman.) Both she and McCain can easily jackhammer home the point that Obama is only a freshman Senator, too naïve to understand the hard decisions one has to make in our threat-filled world.

He displays a fundamental misunderstanding of history and how we’ve maintained national security, and what we need to do in the future to maintain our security in the face of the transcendent challenge of radical Islamic extremism. — John McCain, as reported by ABC News

There’s a big difference between delivering a speech at an anti-war rally as a state senator and picking up that phone in the White House at 3 a.m. in the morning to deal with an international crisis. — Hillary Clinton, as reported by the PBS Online News Hour

In using this approach, however, they both (unwittingly or not) frame the state of the globe with the smallest and darkest box possible: terrifying danger is everywhere, violence is inescapable, endless struggle inevitable. A conclusion with which any one of us might agree after years of reading the newspaper. And in agreeing, we become anxious, and start to look for someone tough, someone who’s been around the block a few times, to protect us.

Now listen to what Gary Hart, the 1980s-punchline presidential candidate who would grow up to be the stately and patrician Cassandra of 9/11, had to say in endorsing Obama on The Huffington Post:

The rare leader capable of transforming threat to opportunity is one who welcomes transformation and sees it as a chance to abandon tradition and convention, to transcend that which is stale, unprofitable, and ineffective…

In an age of great transformation, experience of the past is worthless because it is a barrier to the breakthrough gesture, the instant response in crisis, the instinctive bold decision in the face of totally new circumstances.

This dude is actually talking evolution. As if there were a dynamic quality to the times we live in, as if there were more to leadership than just the same old offensive and defensive positions. As if we were actually free to create something new. It is this sense of possibility that pervades Obama’s (frequently electrifying) way of speaking. I believe this is why his appeal crosses party lines, racial lines, class lines, religious lines, gender lines, and so many of the other lines we draw in the sand. He knows how to evoke the in-between, to tell the story of WE — we as Americans, but also as citizens of the world.

In his March 18 speech on race, Obama projected that the path to a “more perfect union”

…requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams (emphasis mine); that investing in the health, welfare and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

That there is some WE talk.

We could continue to engage in the politics of division and conflict and cynicism, he continues (providing illustrations which I will omit), or we could say “not this time” –

This time, we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time, we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not ‘those’ kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

Our kids. Four years ago Obama received a great deal of attention for his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention in which he said

It is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

His moving closing story in his “race” speech, about a young white girl named Ashley who had tried, as a child, to help her unemployed mother cope with cancer and poverty by feeding her mustard and relish sandwiches, evokes this sense of co-belonging beautifully. Ashley and almost everyone in the room have given their reasons, their personal stories, for working on Obama’s campaign. When they get to an elderly African-American man who has been sitting and listening quietly, he simply states “I’m here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

I certainly may be in for a rude awakening, if he’s elected — there’s no way for me, at this point, to dispute that — but I must admit that Obama seems to be calling on the best in us, our “central selves,” which seek to contribute in relationship with one another. It’s not every politician who recognizes that, as Mother Theresa famously put it, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

Well, as sure as I have ever been about anything. I thought I knew which were the correct platforms and the best policies, what specific actions our elected leaders should take, whose values were valid — and anyone who disagreed was ignorant, unenlightened, or else driven by some form of fundamentalism or crass self-interest. And they didn’t even have to be my ideological opposites, i.e. conservatives. So-called “moderates” were bad enough. I was proud to be identified with the Green-est progressives, the Out-of-Iraq-Now, Universal-Single-Payer-Health-Care, Repeal-NAFTA, Department-of-Peace-niks, the “far left,” the Labor liberals, the socialists in spirit or in word. I went as far as the state convention as a delegate for Dennis Kucinich.

I sympathized with the Naderites, who made sense when they voted to demonstrate that they were sick of a corrupt and mercenary two-party system. Nader was not the “spoiler.” The Democratic Party, they said, was the “spoiler,” since the party couldn’t or wouldn’t break the stranglehold of the corporations and represent the real concerns of the people. Why not vote for what you really want? If enough people did it, so the argument went, it would (if not effect significant change) at least “send a message.”

Still, after the debacle of 2000, I wasn’t sure what message could have been more important than choosing a vocal environmentalist over a John Wayne wannabee looking for an excuse to draw the national pistol. I had to disagree with Nader’s third-party fundamentalism when he insisted that there was “no difference” between the two parties’ candidates. Even the fraction of a difference (as another argument goes) could easily have made the difference between life and death to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not to mention 4000 American soldiers. (In the immortal words of the Talking Heads, this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.)

Of course if we had a more democratic election system that utilized something like Instant Runoff Voting, voting would cease to be a zero-sum game, and there could be no such thing as a spoiler.

Maybe Ralph could be pouring some more money and time into election reform.

But I digress. When I run into my former political cohorts now, I am aware of a certain stuck quality in many of their well-intentioned but absolutist positions. As if it were a total capitulation to give any opponent the benefit of a doubt, or to forgive even somewhat sympathetic pols for any ideological transgression whatsoever. I recognize that rejecting rigidity that digs in its heels and generally gets nowhere (beyond the smallest picture), and I remember how I identifed with it completely. As if continually stoked resentment could change the world. Maybe it has in the past, but not without significant bloodletting. Is that what we really want? Almost everyone I know in these circles claims to “love peace!”

It seems to me that the peaceful resisters who effected real change — Gandhi, King, Mandela — didn’t whip up the people into a righteously angry mob, even if righteous anger was warranted. They recognized on a deep level (like the Dalai Lama regarding the Chinese in Tibet) that “them” was “us.” There is only we.

In the wonderful book “The Art of Possibility,” Ben Zander talks about telling the WE story, and what is required of us in order to be able to tell it. Here I will quote liberally and directly from that chapter, simply because I can’t imagine being able to paraphrase it better.

The WE story defines a human being in a specific way: it says we are our central selves seeking to contribute, naturally engaged, forever in a dance with each other. It points to relationship rather than to individuals, to communication patterns, gestures, and movement rather than to discrete objects and identities. It attests to the in-between. Like the particle-and-wave nature of light, the WE is both a living entity and a long line of development unfolding. This new being, the WE of us, comes into view as we look for it — the vital entity of our company, or community, or group of two. Then the protagonist of our story, the entity called WE, steps forward and takes on a life of its own…

Usually what we mean by the pronoun “we” is “you-plus-I,” and so the questions “What shall we do?” or “What will work for us?” generally refer to a compromise between what you want and what I want. The assumption is that people are singular, constant beings whose stated desires are for all time. So it follows that some will win and some will lose, and neither are likely to get all they want. The resulting competition structures us in two ways: it encourages us to exaggerate our positions and keep back some of the truth, and it pushes us into offensive and defensive positions, so that we are all too soon handling out ultimatums and guarding our turf. (emphasis mine)

The practice of the WE offers an approach to conflict based on a different premise. It assumes there are no fixed wants nor static desires, while everything each of us thinks and feels has a place in the dialogue.

Don’t you feel more expansive and optimistic already? Zander somehow opens a window in the stuffy room of our minds. Note the italicized part. Can you acknowledge the truth of it? He’s saying be honest. Are we static, or dynamic?

Which would you rather be?