It’s been an epic minute since I’ve posted anything here but rest assured an amazing amount of crazy adventures have been occurring in the bends and weaves of this project, The Nature Of Refuge. One of those being that I have been experiencing gorgeous sanctuary in Los Angeles, CA for the past three months. I came here in mid November of this past year and dove right into writing the first draft of the book for The Nature Of Refuge. I’ve never written a book before and is an incredible undertaking that I am throughly obsessed with. The book is a work in progress and here is an excerpt – it’s a slice of how I got to here.
The current reality:
I had been driving for the past two days the most excruciating dry socket tooth pain that I have ever experienced and was dimly headed to Detroit, MI in a dangerous haze of mind numbing nerve pain. Going to Detroit to interview an unnamed, faceless, female identifying human that would spontaneously cross paths with me, that was my plan for Detroit. By this point, this kind of interaction and connection had happened many times, resulting in an amazing heart to hearts and interview experiences with the women who shared themselves with me. And also at this point, I had been on the road with the project for going on eleven months in a great big curly-Q shape all the way down the west coast, crossed the southwest, and then over and up to South Dakota and then down into the midwest. Now I was straightening myself out east for that big finish-line-Kodak-moment of breaking the ticker tape in New York., my adaptive superpowers being endlessly employed throughout the experience of this project and now, I was finally on a linear trajectory and nothing was going to stop me.
I had everything I needed to make it, my conviction, my aforementioned adaptive superpowers, my truck was in good working order at this time (knock on wood), and I still had a decent amount of money due to the extraordinary financial support from a private donor from a month or so back. It was a golden moment in which I had everything that I needed, so it seemed and the rug was slowly but inescapably pulled out from underneath me anyways.
Right before I left the midwest I went to the dentist as an old dead tooth had popped out its old tired filling and I was left with an alarming broken empty tooth-thing in the back of my mouth. The dentist pulled it, packed it, and called me good so I got on the road, per my plan of course, and started driving east with the intention of finishing out the last two months of this epic eastwardish bound journey, interviewing amazing women along the way and ending in NYC with a sense of well earned satisfaction of a job well done in this first trip around the sun with the project.
Plan intact? Check. Activate!
There I was driving determined towards Detroit as I have been fascinated by its DYI artistic and local community resurrection in the last few years after being deemed a “dead” city by the powers that be. I wanted to go there and see the urban flowering myself and interview the woman who would present herself to me, to tell me in her voice, what could be.
The pain though. I was stopping every few hours to close my eyes and tilt my screaming head back for a few minutes. I had clove oil and cotton ball pellets with a bottle of Advil riding shotgun in my cup holder tray. I reapplied pungent clove oil balls and downed fistfulls of the Advil when I felt it was needed, screw the damage to my liver. I did this for a couple of days.
I directed myself to Ann Arbor as i was vaguely aware of its liberal, hippy vibe and i needed somewhere that felt relatively safe, where an outsider could blend in for a minute, and for me to stop and check in with what the hell was spirally out. Pain fog and I let the Google Lady lead me by the hand to a quiet parking lot behind a nursing school in a pretty neighborhood in Ann Arbor, MN. I turned the engine off, leaned forward and rested my head against the steering wheel. This was fucked. I silently acknowledged that I need to see another dentist, I really was beginning to dislike dentists in that moment. So the trusty Google everything came out again, searching dentists, talking to receptionists, talking to voicemails, being told that it was all crazy expensive and no one was available for at least three to four days.
Fuck.
I was bleeding money by then, staying in motels instead of camping in my truck because of the pain, multiple dentist visits because of the pain, exploding inside because of the pain – this was not a part of my plan. I had come so far in this past year, there had been other times of crisis, often due to the bedrock foundation of a lack of stable funding throughout this entire project. But I was willing to do anything for this work, and I had worked so fucking hard everyday in this epic endeavor because I Believed in it, and I said I was going to do it. Now here I was finally sufficiently funded but only if I stayed on my budget for the next couple of months and this tooth was bleeding me and had turned into a complete fiasco, and god dammit, it hurt!
So I did what any sane person would do in a time like this, I picked up my phone and called my mom and promptly burst into huge, gulping, tears. I cried and cried and cried and bless my beautiful mother, she listened and accepted them and took those fear tears into herself and let me make space in my pain and helplessness.
Our half coherent conversation of snot, tears, and railing against the fates came to a close with me sighing into the possibility that my plan may have to alter itself and my mother making reassuring love noises into my ear. I was a mess, all swollen eyes and bleary face to go along with the cacophony of pain that was still screaming around my skull. I had wiped myself out with my fear of having to potentially alter my course and the continuing rollercoaster of nerve pain. I also needed to pee.
Now, when traveling, especially for months and months on the road, a person becomes – I hope – very easy with peeing just about anywhere with speed and agility. Pull over any side of a road and get the job done. Duck behind any parked car, any swaying tree, any bush, any side of any building, any dark corner, any wide open starry night filled sky in the desert, any billboard, any cornfield, anywhere you can feel like you can release, just do it. As a woman this is a little more tricky than for our penis-equipped brethren; they can just unzip, pull it out and take a pee with ease. A woman must squat when she pees, take off a lot of clothing sometimes to let her urethra free, all of this in a posture of great vulnerability to attack from behind where your bare ass is waving in the wind.
I am a great pee-er outside-er. It is something that I have cultivated in the last couple of years, I take great enjoyment that I can pee anywhere with ease, that I have escaped that societal noose of that specific body shame, especially as a woman. Women are not supposed to pee outside due to the before described position of vulnerability whilst peeing, but also because Ladies do not show their hoo-hoo in public no matter if there isn’t another soul for miles or not.
Fuck that.
It’s probably my Oppositional Disorder coming to the fore as well, I just dislike having my instinctual urges dictated otherwise in any way.
All of this to say, in my weepy state of mind along with the nerve pain fog, in needing a pee, I just got out of my truck looking for there nearest semi-private place i could quickly take care of that. I was parked behind a big stone university building and right in front of me was an old looking vestibule with a door that looked forgotten, perfect. I was wearing a dress so all I had to do was squat and slightly lift the hem to do the job, no untoward exposure. As I was peeing, a woman walked right by me. No way to hide the fact. I took the bold route of shrugging-smiling and waving, silently acknowledging, I thought, the silliness of being caught out in this position. The woman quickly hurried by with a sideways stink-eye, can’t win them all.
I finished up and got back in my truck with the intention of somehow figuring out what I should do next, I was exhausted but there was no one else around to do the job of decision making for me, I sat for a minute. I was just about to put the truck in reverse and start moving again, when I saw two police cruisers in my rear view mirror pull in the parking lot behind me and neatly blocked me from going anywhere.
Shit.
The iconic, big, older white man in a dark blue outfit, sunglasses and gun came sauntering up to my drivers side window. As I rolled down that window, another matching cut-out man casually rolled out of the second vehicle and took the classic stance as back up.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
The renegade female Pee-er caught at last!
I had not yet caught up to hilarity of the situation, being as sensory overwhelmed as I already was in the moment, I faced this new bizarre turn of events with a rush of anxiety and faced my doom with a limp flag of surrender.
This was my first time in this epic adventure dealing with the police, something I had been probably unnecessarily crafty about avoiding this whole past year. But here I was, at my weakest of course, looking down the barrel of the Po-Po gun.
That was totally holstered in reality, my own inner outlaw narrative taking over in my fevered state.
The cut-out cop at my window quietly berated me for peeing outside, the woman that had walked by me had been freaked out by my peeing behavior and called the police. I could feel him assessing me to see if i was crazy or dangerous in some way, that trained, two dimensional evaluation that these law-upholders ran any strange human behavior through. I told him my tale of tooth pain and woe, that I had just got off the phone with my mom after being overwhelmed and in pain and crying my eyes out and made the poor decision to pee right there instead of finding a proper peeing place. He responded in an exasperated tone that there was a bathroom right inside the building I was parked in front of, for god’s sake. The officer then asked for my registration and driver’s license which I meekly handed over, my liberty in his callused hands.
The second cop now took his turn to sauntering up to my window, to baby-sit me while his partner checked out my legitimacy. This second cop was much more relaxed and wanted to just chat, in telling my ridiculous tale of illegal peeing once more I realized that this cop was trying to flirt with me. I internally sunk further into a gloom funk and raised the limp white surrender flag higher in hopes the universe would see it and end its tyrannical war with me that day.
First cop finally came back with all my identification and released them back to me along with a yellow-papered trespassing warning, I was not to be arrested for my improper peeing after all, only a warning and that I needed to leave the premises immediately. And of course another heartfelt, again exasperated, lecture on the fact that the proper bathroom facilities were right there available to me inside the building I had recently desecrated.
I was released back into my own custody. The two cop cars eased out of my truck’s way and I reversed under their watchful eyes that I could feel burning into the back of my head as I carefully drove away down the block.
