I am good in the mornings. The sunrise is ever hopeful, the strange way you can tell light is new, the way it comes at you, shy through the trees. Yes I love mornings, because it’s another chance, you get another stab at it, whatever it is. Nothing bad has occurred really in the early hours to scar me forever or make me hate mornings, not yet anyway. I usually have slept well and I am prepared. I look forward to the coming day, and maybe fondly backward at the night before. The day begins and there’s an optimism that I associate with waking, a half full glass I anticipate and drink down all the way in one gulp like freshly squeezed orange juice with some sparkling water mixed in. AM is citrusy and bubbly and just squirted from the fruit and that is glorious and makes my mouth water. It’s the best, the opening credits of the movie. Nothing has happened yet and I am ready for it to. I am glad for it to.

The only time this isn’t true is when I have stayed up all night, which is rare, I mean, I can count the times I have done this in my relatively long lifetime on one hand. That is terrible, to stay up all night, and this I have never done without some type of drug, an upper, which gives you a burst of good feeling right at the beginning, and then pays you back bad feeling with interest, robbing you of maybe a week’s worth of joy and patience and the accepting of things and peace and reason and that unnamed force that gets you out of bed to put on makeup and dress up in something nice and listen to music and dance and sing and think that anything is possible and a good day is coming on. All that for about 15 minutes of shaky bliss at the start, I don’t think it’s a fair exchange.

There’s also a guilt there too, if you haven’t been to bed, and you are looking at everyone who has, and you watch them with your bloodshot eyes as they are getting up and getting their coffee and going to work with big white cups with brown recycled paper rings to keep them from burning their hands and their clothes look just put on and they have the morning face that you wish you had, one that had gotten to bed at a decent hour and dreamed and woke untroubled and now is in front of you, and the sanity of it is mocking the insanity of yours. The streets get more and more crowded and you feel more and more alone and even though you may be surrounded it’s like an island or a raft is surrounded by water and there’s not a drop to drink.

Sometimes you can erase that horror show of being up all night with breakfast, trick yourself with the hot black medicine of strong coffee and the crisp, butter comfort of toast, but it’s only while you’re eating and maybe a very, very short time after. The healing power of omelettes and pancakes and waffles only lasts for as long as its on the table. After it’s in you it doesn’t do much good. I don’t stay up all night anymore. I can’t take it. This is not for me.

I love the morning too much to sully it. it’s important to me to feel like there’s a newness and a comeuppance and a day that hasn’t happened yet that is gonna happen and you never know, you never know. I get excited about the morning like I am a puppy, jumping and batting my paws all for nothing and for no reason other than I get to go around the sun yet once more.

The night is also the same way, as the night dawns much like the day. the sun goes away to reveal the moon herself and there is much delight as she is bright and sometimes a sliver, sometimes full and round, much like me, changing and growing and shrinking and different always and every shape of her has a name and distinct attributes.

The night is often when my workday begins, comedians and musicians and waiters and bartenders and chefs and emergency room doctors and nurses and drug dealers even and police and firemen and all of us on the graveyard shift who ensure the nourishment and care and protection, physical and otherwise, of the majority of the working people who make the world turn day after day.

I feel safe in the velvet cloak of night and I come alive when I go to work and see my friends and play in clubs and it’s always been exciting to welcome dusk and the rites of dinner and drinks that go along with it and that moment when you can let go of the day, stop white knuckling the afternoon and know that everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn’t soon it will all be over and the bed is a delicious promise that is always kept (unless you happen to do those bad drugs).

The night is good to me and good for me and I feel safe and dangerous at once. I am a night person and a morning person and then that leaves the afternoon which is a problem.

2pm is the fearsome middle I struggle with.

I’m a strong swimmer, having been on swim teams as a child, always smelling a little of chlorine, with dry tight skin and choppy braids that dried into hard gel waves. There was also an issue of mold in my locker. My existence was mostly wet and then you mix that with dark, you get mold. It’s a fact.

I can’t say I loved swimming but I did it because it was the right thing at the time and I was fairly good at it and there was a simple kind of reward involved because I grew up in a cold climate and the water of the pool was often slightly warmer than the air even though it seemed like it would be colder and you didn’t want go in initially as the threat of being colder even still was almost too much to bear but if you actually did it and jumped right in and braved the bracing shock of ice in your life, in a moment you’d be fine and warm and swimming and the fear would melt with the cold and you’d be alright. I swam for that small victory as well as other minor wins like having a place to go in an important somewhat distracted hurry right after school. “I can’t. I have practice. Yeah sorry, I can’t.” which to me kind of meant, “I belong somewhere. I belong to something. I belong.”

I remember that Culture Club video where beautiful Boy George is singing and climbing up the ladder out of the pool and I thought that he and I were the same and that song played in my head from beginning to end as I swam and at the point when he would come out of the pool I would come out of the pool to encourage our sameness.

I did have to stop going to the pool when my body started to change, and grownups in the shallow end would give me looks and then more. One old man, who was teaching a tiny girl to swim, she was maybe 4 or 5, just a baby really and too young to be in the big adult pool with the serious and sporty thick black lines painted on the bottom to guide the face down butterfly stroke swimmers in their lanes and rope and floating Styrofoam borders that were supposed to keep everyone not on the swim team out – crossed into illegal pool territory and actually grabbed me between my legs as I crawled my continuous laps that my allegiance to the swim team claimed as its due and lifted me whole out of the water struggling and flopping, exclaiming “I caught a fish! I caught a fish!” and the little new swimmer laughed and clapped as the man rudely and unashamedly shoved his fingers inside me. If he did this to me, a small stranger, I don’t want to think about what he did to that little girl. I don’t want to think of it.

I swam maybe one or two or three times after that but I eventually quit the team, because it never felt right to go back in the pool. It felt scary and ugly and I started to really notice when people would spit in the porcelain rim around the perimeter of the blue tile and see the spidery clots of hair that would collect in the filters and on the wet ground and I suddenly got fed up with the chlorine and the mucus of others and athlete’s foot and the child molesters that all these foul things represented and I refused to go and took up cigarettes instead.

But before all that, I was a strong swimmer, as our coach used to say, whistle and stopwatch hanging from his neck, looking down at me. I forgot his name, which I cannot believe now, because it was so important then. From the ages of 8 to 12, my schoolbag always contained a large plastic ziplock containing a cold and damp athletic orange swimming suit and an old rubber cap that squeezed my temples into a lifelong tendency toward migraine when it was on me, and stuck to itself and stank unreasonably when it was off. I swim good for a long while but then I get tired, unexpected and instant, a wore down feeling that is inescapable as water and it usually happens when I am right in the middle of the pool, where I am surrounded by the wore down and the water and the only thing left to do is drown.

That is what 2pm feels like to me.

It’s not the beginning. It’s nowhere near the end. What can I do? The sunlight that seemed charmed and uplifting in the hours before now seems ordinary and relentless. Time stretches out before me and behind me and I can’t make sense of it and I wonder what I can do until night falls to make me whole again. There’s no running from the middle of the day. The broad daylight offers no escape. You can’t start drinking or indulging in anything then because then that would mean you have a PROBLEM and I would do anything to avoid having a PROBLEM so I just suffer mid-days as if it is my cross to bear. I wait to be resurrected and it always happens and that’s not the concern, it’s the waiting that bothers me. It’s the waiting that is the cruelty of crucifixion. It takes so goddamned long to die.

I have the worst time of this midday malady in hotel rooms, as usually if I am working somewhere on the road, my day is far emptier, even more than if I am at home. Hotel rooms are bad places in my opinion, as most of my friends who have died thus far have done it in those temporary spaces that are meant to contain us only for a day or two. They have checked into hotels and never checked out and that seems like the worst thing to me, to have to die there and essentially stay there forever. That’s hell.

At 2pm in a hotel room I am lost and I don’t know where to turn or what to do. The hour oppresses me and there’s no escaping from it. The only way out is through, and through means minutes and then hours and the sky can’t darken soon enough to save me. I haven’t found a solution to this other than to complain and allow the existential dread to overwhelm me and crash over me like a wave and at times I can write and possibly describe the desolation and desperation I feel which helps because when I put words to a thing, it helps me own the thing and understand the thing. It’s like I am eating the thing or making love to the thing, letting the thing inside me and have its way and become a part of me.

At 2pm, perhaps I should go swimming. Most hotels have pools. I don’t think this is just by chance. I think the pools must be there for me.

I know that I need to go to the dentist soon, but my feet drag behind me, and there’s a herculean effort in lifting my finger to dial those numbers on my iphone. You and what army are going to make me go get my teeth cleaned? It’s not about pain. I am heavily tattooed and I can take hundreds upon hundreds of hours of impromptu and anesthesia free sessions without complaint. It can be nervous business, getting a tattoo, but I never flinch or falter or become pale with the pinpricks. I go with the pinches and the burn because I love the results.

With teeth, since I haven’t had any problems, the rewards are not as visible or satisfying. As a child I had countless hours of oral surgery, that left my psyche and mouth full of holes, stitched up crudely with thick black thread that tasted of blood and bone. My teeth had not lined up side by side as I grew, rather they placed themselves haphazardly along my gumline like headstones in an outlaw graveyard during the 1800s. there was a civil war quality to my mouth, and all my parents money went into the correction of this. Orthodontists and dentists were my babysitters, and I spent most of the hours between 4-6pm reclined in a chair with a light shining into my eyes and a tray and towel pinned to my neck.

About half my teeth were removed, as they came in huge and white and mighty to replace the feeble baby ones that were once there. There was no reasonable way my mouth could accommodate them all, so they got yanked. Being as big and deeply buried in my jaw as they were, it was no small feat to unearth them, and my flesh was cut away to expose the roots and kill the healthy tooth at the base of where they lay.

I spit out huge bloody clots of spongy gum tissue and this sped my healing as they didn’t rot with decay. The remaining teeth stood valiant and shiny and strong as the wire braces bound them into a kind of order that they still march in today. The lines of my orthodontists plan have faltered slightly, as the genetic pattern of teeth, your original tooth destiny has strength beyond what headgear and wires are capable of controlling, but even after 30 years they seem ok, and I don’t think I need to go back for anything.

Watch Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho, and Sanjay Gupta on PBS. See more from Finding Your Roots.

In coach class, food is rarely served, which is a sad thing. I remember when the tiny trays with all the compartments were passed to you on nearly every flight, but I am old enough to have witnessed smoking on flights, entire smoking sections of planes where people actually smoked and did so for the whole time we were off the ground. I can’t believe that they did this now but I saw it with my own eyes back then.

You can now buy food on flights, but this seems uncouth to me, in the cashless cabins. I don’t like what is on offer. The breads are dry and the meats are questionable and the chips and nuts would just dehydrate you further. Handing your credit card over in exchange for a shrinkwrapped box of unperishables seems almost as bad as bringing on a bag of fast food purchased at the terminal, the fried items leaking oil through the paper, the unmistakable smell permeating your clothes and skin. then you have the problem of hamburger hands, and you can’t wash that away in the airplane lavatory.

If I bring food from home there is the inevitable fight to get them through TSA screening, prompting philosophical arguments on what is and what is not a gel or liquid. What would you consider almond butter anyway? Also I never get to do this because I almost always fly early mornings, and that dark blue hour is usually too rushed to consider moving things from big bags into little bags.

I just starve on the plane, because eating in the presence of strangers feels filthy and debauched. I’ve seen some gross eating on planes and I don’t want to participate in that. I will eat when I get there. Trust me.

On one of my very first flights to Los Angeles, I sat next to a painfully thin man who had seemingly never cut his beard. His face was young but his hair was all grey. He wore ill-fitting old clothes that looked like they were not his but items haphazardly assembled into an outfit from a box of lost and found objects. Too many jackets for one person. He held a wrinkled newspaper article between his long fingers and worried it like it was beads.

I kept looking at the paper trying to discern what was on it, as the constant touching of his hands had worn down the newsprint. He carried an equally wrinkled brown paper bag and at some point during the flight he pulled what I assumed was an apple from the bag but I realized after he started eating it that it was not an apple but actually an onion. The crisp, white flesh looked the same but it smelled sharp and acrid and alarming. He pulled pieces of onion skin from his teeth with his clawlike fingernails and left wet fingerprints on the newspaper article, which darkened the font enough so that I could make it out.  I wanted to scream when I read it but I didn’t. I just sat there not knowing what to do but inhale onion fumes and be scared.

The article was about a man who had been stalking Michael J. Fox at his home and the criminal case against him and his appearance in court. The article had been continued on another page but that part had either not been cut out or it had been lost somewhere in transit.

There was a picture of Michael J. Fox, likely a promotional shot from family ties but the photo of the stalker must have been on the continuing page. I wondered if this man was the stalker and I am fairly sure he was. The cold blank insanity I could feel emanating from his skin was proof enough. I didn’t need to see the picture from the article to know that. When the plane touched the ground he leapt out of his seat and ran to the front of the cabin. The flight attendants told him to sit down and he held the bag with the remains of the onion and the article in his shaking hands and stayed standing. The cabin door was opened and he threw himself out of it and down the jetway as if he were being shot from a cannon, but these were days before 9/11, and so they just let him go.

And if God can’t forgive, or requires Jesus dying on the cross in order to consider it then forgiveness is expensive and even though Jesus supposedly already paid the bill, there’s all these hidden costs that God still needs to cover.

Like why do ‘Christians’ hate gay people? Why can’t they ‘forgive’ homosexuality? Why do ‘Christians’ judge constantly – don’t they know they’ll be judged? Apparently this doesn’t faze them in the least because they bang that gavel in the face of violence, inhumanity, death – children who are bullied for being gay and suffer to the point of suicide – the tragedy of all tragedies – and they still have the gall to tell us we are hell bound.

I have only respect and love for those who take Christ’s teachings to heart. It’s not that I am anti-Christian. I grew up in the church. I know about it. I know all about it. I taught Sunday school. I helped children from the ages of 2-12 learn about God and Jesus and answered their questions as best and lovingly and nice as I could, but I had many questions myself that no one, not even the clergy, many in my own family, could answer. So I gave it all up. I walked away from the church because I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to participate in a place where I felt unacceptable. It wasn’t school so I had the choice to leave. So I left. it’s not that I am an Atheist particularly either. I just don’t find the actions of many ‘Christians’ appealing. I don’t think they are acting christlike and they are supposed to. That’s what it’s called dummy – “CHRIST-IAN” ACT LIKE ONE!

What I take comfort in, which is directly from the bible, which is the most important thing really, is resurrection. No matter how much we are abused and scorned and hated and even crucified and left for dead or already dead, we will rise. Fuck yeah we will fucking rise so fuck you.

All I know, is that come judgement day, I will stand next to these so called Christians and homophobes and I will be smug and satisfied and may get some demerits for indulging in the sin of pride, but that’s way better than the hatred and psychic and literal murder of gay people that they are guilty of. It’s going to be like traffic school vs prison. I may get points on my license but they are going to fucking hell.

The Jedis seem distant, in the same way white people feel distant sometimes, or ‘sometimey’ which is what black people call white people who are inconsistent with their attention/ affection/ allegiance/ alibis.

in the later generation of Star Wars films there is some racial implication to many of the characters that is uncomfortable and take me out of the mythology of the series, so I’d say Wookie for me, and I have been satisfied with that status and label since the beginning of the Star Wars franchise.

I saw the first (or 4^th or whatever) Star Wars movie with my very first boyfriend Marco and his Native New Yorker parents, who took us to see it and smoked a joint together(!) as we waited in the long line outside the Coronet Theatre on Geary St. in San Francisco. Of course Marco and I loved the movie, and we chewed on a big bubblegum cigar throughout, imitating his parents by passing it between us until we both had massive baseball size pink wads of gum way too large for our kid mouths. We chewed them like cuds until we almost choked. I spit mine out into Marco’s waiting hand and it disappeared under the movie seats. That is love.

I experienced another wave of love upon the appearance of Chewbacca. The loyalty he expressed toward han solo, as well as the great pride in which he carried himself spoke to me. Chewbacca was a good friend. He was a gearhead. He could fix things and hang out. He had a temper but it was always justified. He was a giant but he also looked like a Pekinese lap dog. There was that tool belt and crossbow and the linked little boxes across his body – was that ammunition? There was something of a ‘burning man’ quality to Chewie style, which is both ultramodern and primitive at once.

Chewbacca also felt like a stoner to me, which might have just been the unruly fur and mechanical prowess. I can tell when it’s Peter Mayhew in the suit and when it’s a stuntman. Peter Mayhew makes the Wookie come alive. Look in his eyes. It’s all about the eyes. When Han Solo is frozen in the carbonite there is a Wookie wail that haunts my nightmares, and I feel it if ever I am abandoned, emotionally or literally. It’s like my default pain sound, as loud and ubiquitous as tri-tone or marimba.

‘I’m so in love with Skip! Please watch this!!’ – Margaret

UPDATE: Watch the full episode

Watch Martha Stewart, Margaret Cho, and Sanjay Gupta on PBS. See more from Finding Your Roots.

-Margaret

Margaret Cho is back! She will appear on 30 Rock’s May 10th and 17th episodes, bringing back her hilarious gender-bending interpretation of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Cho-as-Il kidnapped Jack Donaghy’s (Alec Baldwin) new wife Avery (Elizabeth Banks), and seems to have made her his First Lady. How this will play out since the real-life dictator’s demise last December is anyone’s guess, but look for Cho to play TWO characters in the same episode.

Today is a special day because its that weird week between Christmas and New Years, traditionally a slow time for everyone except maybe returns/exchange departments in stores, and every day this week is meant to be relaxing and rejuvenating and for your pleasure and in preparation for the coming year, so I started off my morning right with pilates and a good flush with the SinuPulse.

The SinuPulse is like a Waterpik from the 70s like my parents had, which would jet water in between your teeth ostensibly to replace flossing, although I can’t imagine it would be as effective. It seems like string would overpower water, at least in a game of rock/paper/scissors/string/water.  The SinuPulse isn’t for your teeth. It’s for your nose, or more specifically, for your sinuses. My sinuses are cavernous and deep. There’s a lot of space in this face. It makes my voice sonorous and melodic, as the sound waves bounce back through my caves and echo. There’s power in these pipes, but the sweetness is from the resonance in my big head.

I am lucky and also a bit burdened by it, because with the big sound comes the unavoidable and the inevitable. I am plagued by allergies, and at times it feels like there are weather patterns swirling just below my eyes. Hurricanes and rains and dry plains. It’s shifting and tumultuous and painful, but it’s my life. My nose life. I live it.

To cope, there are medications that I take haphazardly and ineffectively but I find most relief in mechanical solutions and this is where the SinuPulse comes in. I was scared to use it at first, being only just introduced to the Neti Pot, which is controversial in itself. I’ve had odd Neti Pot experiences too, where salt water I used to rinse out my nose came shooting out of my tear ducts instead of the other nostril. I felt like a leaky garden hose and wondered if I could wrap myself with duct tape.

The SinuPulse is like the Neti Pot on steroids – or maybe crystal meth. It makes a loud noise and literally shoots a hard stream of water up into the sinus and it hurts at first but then it feels good and then things that are lodged up there get dislodged and actually come out and you can’t believe what was up there.

I usually have it set to 8, but it will go to 10. I don’t want to take it up to 10 yet. I want somewhere to go, in my nasal threshold. The last two days I have been using cold saline solution, which chills my brain and feels like an ice cream headache but in a good way. The cold also seems to make the sinuses constrict or dilate or whatever sinuses do, so more comes out, which is immensely satisfying and totally disgusting.

My house has old plumbing and my bathroom sink is the oldest of all. There’s a little mesh basket over the drain to make sure nothing solid will go down there and as I drilled at one nostril with the sinupulse a huge wad of solid, hard mucus came out of the other. It went into the mesh basket and effectively closed the drain, the sink filling up with cold saline solution briefly warmed by my nose. I couldn’t believe I had that in there, and when it came out it fucking clogged the drain.  I would have taken a picture of it, but there are some things we should keep to ourselves.

I am not going to outright steal, but if you unwisely allow something to fall into my possession then it’s your fault. Just know that and keep track of your stuff around me. The worst was when I borrowed a load of books from a friend and then never returned them, and then the friend asked for them back, which I should have done right away, but I put it off and put it off and put it off and then my friend died. It was sudden and it was unexpected and it was fucked up but I look at those books now and I cringe at my selfishness and stupidity and what is so dumb also is that I never read them.

Still this didn’t cure me of the disease of not returning what is not mine. My grabby hands and empty heart join forces to covet then take your shit. I do it from people all the time, but when I was little I did it from stores.

I was in a baby shoplifting gang that terrorized the old outdoor shopping center that Stonestown used to be before a roof was put on it and it was converted into what we now know as a mall. The leader of the gang had the notion that she could steal a sweater and return it using an old receipt of vaguely the same amount as the sweater was worth and then just take the money. Now I know this is a bad idea for a million different reasons, but back then it seemed BRILLIANT. I was the littlest one so I was sent to the adjacent jewelry counter to run a bit of interference and create a distraction.

The saleswoman looked tired and harried and watched the other girl behind me steal the sweater with bored eyes as she pulled out velvet tray after tray of gold bracelets for me from the glass display case. She laid them out on the counter and was staring at the girl stealing the sweater so hard that she didn’t notice me pull a handful of gold bracelets off the tray and slip them into my sleeve. I straightened my arm and caught the bracelets in my hand and then quietly tucked them into the front chest pocket of my denim jacket.

I walked around the jewelry counters more as my dumb friend with the now stolen sweater and the fake receipt tried to return it. There was some commotion and there was no money exchanged and the third girl in this children’s organized crime syndicate signaled us all to leave the store quickly.

We got outside and for a moment we were free and it was ok and we were laughing and scared and relieved and this was extremely short lived as we were immediately stopped by two women (my age now) who looked much like the famous comedy duo French and Saunders. They flashed their badges and asked us to come back in the store. We were taken into the inner sanctum of the store, behind the mirrored walls and employee lounges and I was separated from the other two because I seemed younger and weaker and easier to break.

They questioned me and I said I didn’t know anything and I didn’t do anything and that I barely knew those girls and that they weren’t in my grade and I just wanted to hang around with them and I didn’t know what they were up to and I think that is when my acting skills kicked in because the women looked at each other and one nodded to the other and they opened the door to let me go, and the gold bracelets in the front pocket of my jeans jacket felt heavy and hot but they still went undetected by the detectives, and I got away with it – a fairly decent haul. I was a real live jewelry thief, and I couldn’t have been more than 10.

The other two girls got sent down to the police station and their parents had to pick them up and they were in TROUBLE like all caps TROUBLE and yet they had nothing to show for it. I had these gleaming gold bracelets that could never be worn because my parents would want to know where they came from as we had no money for those kinds of things. I don’t know where those bracelets are now, but I would wear them if I did. Perhaps someone borrowed them.