Poodle Advises Readers: Breathe In, Breathe Out

CURB YOUR HUMAN:  When I was a kid, my mother had a “Shirley Chisholm for President” bumper sticker plastered to her car. That was 1972. Chisholm, then a congressmember from New York, was the first Black woman to run for president. She was a genuine badass. My mother was a genuine badass. All the way around, it was a good fit. 

Chisholm wound up with 300,000 votes in the primary. I think she got on the ballot in maybe 14 states. Back then, my mother posted signs reading, “I support the right to arm bears” over our kitchen sink. She was also a big believer in “ZPG,” shorthand back then for Zero Population Growth. By then, my mother had given birth to nine children.

It was that kind of house. 

Fifty-two years later, and another Black woman just ran for the White House. Different circumstances, I admit, but despite my foolhardy, optimistic predictions a few weeks ago, Kamala Harris didn’t make it either.

I guess I owe you an apology.

Right now, I’m focused on keeping my own house from burning down. Especially with me in it. Especially with me as the match. For all of you facing a similar challenge, self-immolation is never a sexy look. If nothing else, it makes your carbon footprint look fat.

Right now, I find reading the news impossible. My eyes bounce off. I have to read the same paragraph three times. Then I give up. It’s a common symptom for people bludgeoned with an ax handle. 

I have taken to wearing a T-shirt I had made a few months ago that reads, “Fuck that noise.” It was part of a self-help regime I was then pioneering. I sent one of my shirts off to Anne Lamott, the great evangelist of radical self-care, self-love, and all that other Christ-infused radical self-stuff. I sent along a note explaining I was not a nut.

Strangely, Lamott — who spoke in town this week — never wrote back.

In that same vein, I also made a T-shirt reading, “Love is the last light spoken,” a line I stole from the famous Welsh drunk — and poet — Dylan Thomas. I don’t quite know what it means yet, but that’s poetry. 

Back before he drank himself to death, Thomas spent some time at UCSB, where he famously ran off with the wife of a high-ranking English professor, inspiring yet another English professor to write a short story about it. Out of that drama, the College of Creative Studies was born. Or so I was told by my sister who went there. The moral of the story? Drunks and poets make history. 

So do we all.

But maybe right now, we need to exhale and inhale a few times. Gather our thoughts. Stop sputtering so much about him. And them. Maybe it’s best to focus a little more on us and what we could do better. Last I checked, apoplexy was classified as a terminal disease that slowly renders its victims so boring that anyone within earshot flees. 

Yes, we need to examine why nine million fewer of us voted for Harris than Joe Biden four years ago. How many times were we told that this was an Existential Crisis, the Death of Democracy? Why weren’t we alarmed when the Democratic Party opted not to hold a primary? Kind of a big deal when you consider it. 

There’s a lot of necessary self-flagellation now taking place: How did the Democrats become the party of the educated, Tesla-driving elites and the Republicans the party of blue-collar workers and Latino men? How is it Democrats could not feel — or even acknowledge — the economic pain so many are experiencing? 

This ground is currently being strip-mined by accomplished analysts. We will inevitably discover it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault — what isn’t? — even though, ironically, Clinton was an absolute genius when it came to feeling other people’s pain. 

Right now, the voice that haunts me most is that of Babatunde Folayemi, a longtime social justice advocate and Santa Barbara’s first and only Black city councilmember. He died in 2012 — ancient history by Santa Barbara standards — so his name is not well-known. 

Folayemi was not a great councilmember, but his real genius was being a great human being. When the powers-that-be wanted to pass a gang injunction to stop youth violence then percolating in some parts of town, he suggested that we treated the kids causing the grief as if they were human beings. Maybe then they might respond in kind. 

Radical stuff, right?

But when he said it, you felt it. It had the impact of revelation. One day, Babatunde and I were talking about another activist in town who was busy calling out all the other activists in town for not being radical enough, Black enough, or Latino enough. “I know what makes him mad,” Babatunde said, shaking his head. “But I still don’t know what he loves.”

At the risk of impersonating Anne Lamott: That is the question. 

We’ve got four long years ahead of us. And they will be dark. And yes — to steal a line from a movie — they will drink our milkshake. To get through it, we need to focus on what we love. 

It’s not a matter of high-minded, preachy moral grandiosity. It’s not about love-your-enemy. It’s about survival. 

We got four years. Hate’s a luxury we can’t afford. 

Mostly, I don’t want to burn myself up. 

I’d like to be able to read newspapers again. It’s necessary for my job. Besides, I’m addicted to the funny pages.

What do you love? 

That is the question.