August 28, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

Just because BP’s fiasco oil doesn’t wash up onto our beaches doesn’t mean the oil’s not there:  According to the Center for Biological Diversity, it’s like pouring a cup of salt into a gallon of water — sure, the salt “dissolves” — but you still taste it.

The oil is definitely in the water, and can be currently tracked to a stream 3,000 feet down, running over an ocean-floor ridge, in a stream that measures 22 miles long and a mile wide.  Not to mention that, mixed into this millions of gallons of crude is an equal amount of methane in the millions of gallons, because methane is present near oil reserves and methane comes out with oil when it’s drilled.

And don’t forget to add in the 2 million gallons of “Corexit” that BP dumped into the Gulf Ocean, sprayed onto its surface, and shot into the gaping spewing leak site itself.  What’s “Corexit”?  A chemical compound that no other industrialized country will allow to be dumped into its waters!  Maybe because “Corexit” is sort of like a mix of kerosene and detergent and rubbing alcohol, all bonded together into the compound 2-butoxyethanol.

So the oil hasn’t “gone” anywhere.  In fact, BP has made the initial mess even more toxic, making the oil “look like” it’s gone and assuring itself a cover-up.  I guess they did have a plan, or at least this is the “plan” that “worked”… (see the post below, and, for a full expose of the facts, read the September-October 2010 issue of Mother Jones*).

Meanwhile, the “invisible” fall-out settles into the depths, amidst the carcasses of sea mammals, fish, and birds, all sinking to the ocean’s floor.  And no one knows what this will mean, for everyone and everything, for years and years to come.  And did you know that there are 33,000 miles of pipeline, 50,000 wells and thousands of abandoned rigs*, in the Gulf alone?

But anyhow, let’s go gas-up for Labor Day, take a hydrocarbonated jet mobile to somewhere we’ve never been before!  Don’t step too hard on that once-pristine sand; there’s oil down there…

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July 9, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

The other night, after dinner, and after reading Alexander Cockburn’s essay in The Nation of 7/12/2010, and after thinking more about the oil-based Gulf Disaster, I asked my genuine math-whiz husband this pretty and profound question:  If NOAA’s estimates of the oil, currently spewing as much as 100,000 barrels of oil a day (@55 gallons per barrel) — if this oil keeps spewing at such a rate into the Gulf until the entire reserve unloads itself (estimated by BP at 2.1 billion gallons), then how long before all 2.1 billion gallons enters the Gulf?

The answer goes terrifyingly like this:  100,000 barrels = 5 million gallons per day.  This means that if NOAA’s worst case scenario estimation of the amount that’s currently spewing is correct, 5 million gallons are polluting the Gulf every single day.  In ten days that’s 50 million gallons.  In 100 days, it’s 500 million.  This means it will take only 400 days for the entire 2.1 billion amount to empty itself into the Ocean.  We might be a quarter of the way there now folks, and if you’re thinking about this like I am, you might want to open another window on your browser and watch BP’s live spew-cam, imagining the pressure under which such a viscous fluid is enabled to spew itself from the Ocean’s floor like a fountain, or like a volcano.

Now, following this horrifying math, if the entire Gulf Ocean coastline, including all of West Florida and all of East Mexico, equals 10,000 miles, then according to NOAA estimates, right now, enough oil is spewing to coat every foot of that coastline with 0.1 gallons (about a cup) every day.  This means that there’s 1 gallon per coastline foot every ten days, and ten gallons per coastline foot in 100 days, and if the entire 2.1 billion gallon reserve enters the Ocean, there will be 40 gallons of oil every foot for every 10,000 miles of Gulf Coastline.  And we will soon be at the ten gallons per coastline foot (or the 100 days) amount.

If you’ve ever known someone who can do on-the-spot-&-in-the-head math and even calculus problem-solving, then you know how illuminating it is to ask such a person a few extraordinarily pertinent questions that really need answering…  And I’ve gotta think that BP has people working for it who are maybe almost as smart as my husband, and who maybe have even also done this math.  Which means they already know the possible amount of the spew (the total reserve), and the possible rate it can spew and is spewing, and the possible fact that it may only take 400 days to completely empty.

So I think we have to ask why BP has not vacuumed more oil and separated it from the water (100% possible and doable though such work takes vessels and workers and thus costs more than burning it off, along with LIVE sea turtles); and I think we have to ask why BP did not immediately employ an army-sized force to get on this disaster faster and more thoroughly and more competently (oh yeah those flimsy booms have worked so well);  and I think we have to ask why the oil corps keep saying the world is out of oil (hello, 2.1 billion gallons).

Unforch, not all Qs can be broken down directly or mathematically, but answers about numbers and rates imply conceptual speculations that may answer to BP’s motives and actions:  Like maybe they already know they can’t stop the entire oily load from emptying into the Ocean in 400 days; like maybe they’re doing whatever is cheapest for them while they send their media flacks and their private security corps out to do damage and info control; like maybe they’re just acting like they’re on it when they’re actually just waiting for 400 days to go by; like maybe they lied about all this and more from the beginning like always, like forever; like maybe they know where all the oil will eventually end up and permanently reside; like maybe in Mexico, or in the Caribbean, in places where people have even less ability to make the facts known, and less money or power or international clout to be able to do anything about it.

NOTE:  if you google NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) you can link to their site, which has further information on the numbers of dolphins, sea turtles and sperm whales washed up on the Gulf coastline oiled and dead, which does not include the uncountable numbers of oiled and dead land and sea birds, and the unknowable numbers of eggs and larval offspring of the unfathomable number of these affected birds and fishes, which does not include the affected plant life, or even the oxygen count in the Gulf waters themselves.  And of yeah, the eleven humans who were blown up on the rig, and those fishing professionals who have committed suicide since seeing their lives and their livelihoods washed up in the oily BP mess.

UPDATE:  Now emergency capped after 87 days of Full Spew (worst case scenario=500 million gallons or 1/4 of the total “reserve” — but since BP never placed a simple meter on it’s drilling rig or pipe, we’ll never know), this current 3-day cap on the Oil Spew is showing signs of deep fissure wounds down within the pipe that goes a mile under the Gulf’s floor, evidenced by methane gas or crude bubbling through the Ocean’s floor in the vicinity of the Original Gash.  As of the morning of 7/19/2010, the U.S. is trying to force BP to fork over all the information about what’s going on “down there,” and although BP is stalling, they may have to uncap the Spew in order to stop an even larger Rip of hydrocarbons from bursting into creation.

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April 28, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

In the desert, to have a walled garden, in summertime, where you can sit, all night, and watch the moon set, or the bats flit, maybe eat an ice cream, or listen to the owls doves quail wrens red-headed or yellow warblers, or brush your teeth, or wait, for the news, your last pet cat growing old, then disappearing, or your husband’s mother’s cancer is back, or your own father doesn’t remember that you already know your-mother-his-wife died, four years ago, this fall, while reservations get reserved, phone calls called, appointments appointed, disappointed, hey, hey you there, see, the moon’s sinking into the buttery clouds, watch, watch yourself, watching, watching you, watching the garden, watching the walls, watching the ceiling, watching the sky, watching the moon stars planets satellites, setting, and rising, the sun, the sun.

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January 5, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds received such a pan from The New Yorker that I thought twice about going.  But I got to see it on the big screen for a buck when it came to the Crossroads 6 Cinema in Tucson, which viewing refreshed my memory regarding both the truly entertaining and exciting nature of Tarantino’s filmmaking, and the curious resentment toward it by certain film aesthetes.

Inglourious Basterds not only held my attention from the beginning but it kept me wondering throughout about what would happen next, and moreover, it kept me surprised about what did.  Critics didn’t agree with how Tarantino “made up” some stuff about WWII history, but I liked this element of the film.  WWII history is so canonical that no “fact-based” film on the period can be genuinely surprising, thus cue the violins and watch the hunt for the last Sullivan brother behind the German lines. And while this one conceit itself was a fabrication, without which Spielberg’s film would not have been the typical fare that it was, the emotional territory covered by the movie is entirely predictable, and its fan-fared outcome can be guessed from the get go.

Because Tarantino “changes” aspects of the main WWII story, his viewer really doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and strangely, or ironically, the real events of the period actually become more gripping.  The horrors, the hatreds, the deaths, and all of the sufferings of that era become somehow more particularized and polarizing, more tensely watched and appreciated, when they are less the depiction of documented events.   When the outcomes cannot be predicted or correctly guessed, a viewer is pulled into the ride of the film, and in my case, left devastated and drained, yet thrilled by the immediacy of it.

I cared about, had family histories connected to, and had even written on commission about, the WWII period, long before I saw this film.  But the film made me feel more of what characters in that period might have felt when going through what they went through their histories.  I already knew what the facts of their experiences were, but the film made me feel what it might have been like to have lived then, and those feelings were terrifying, exhilarating, disgusting, frightening, hilarious, exhausting, revolting, and very very sad.

Something similar, on a smaller scale, happened to me when I watched the fragment of film in From Dusk Till Dawn which is shot from the POV of the child molester/murderer, as he imagines the little girl he has kidnapped flirting with him, and “asking for it” from him.  I found this alarmingly direct experience with such a warped and psychotically justifying mental force both emotionally true and utterly terrifying.  Had it been portrayed more factually faithful, would it have created a more moving effect on me?

I remember reading a required paper about this From Dust Till Dawn filmic event to my classmates in a graduate course at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center for the Arts only to have them label Tarantino an idiot savant, among other things.  This was before the Kill Bill series and Inglourious Basterds, and I’m not sure where those classmates are now or what they would think today.  But what Tarantino reminds me of is how sometimes the things we make up are more evocative than the factual timelines of life, that all art is made from a distillation of the materials with which the artist works, and that this distillation is itself a further fictional process, a process where details are cut or added to punch up its effects, in order to make human beings feel or think or wonder or curse or respond, in kind, in new, oily, ways.  A little Brad Pitt never hurts either.

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September 19, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

In Tucson we can see all the movies we want for a dollar.  They’re no longer in “first run,” but it’s not like people are running around analyzing the latest thing…  unless that thing is the U of A game!

The Crossroads 6 Cinema, a few minutes away from our house, shows movies after they’ve been out for awhile, including indie or foreign films if they’ve done well at the (one) local art house, for a dollar.  We began going to lots of movies when we first moved here in ‘07 (we’re members of The Loft, the art cinema), but we’ve noticed the attendance has really picked up at that dollar house…

So the other night we went to see “Funny People” for a buck and I came home thinking about language again.  Not that I didn’t enjoy the oily-ish portrayals presented by Adam Sandler, et. al., but did anyone complain about “the language” employed in the film?  Of course not.  Am I complaining about it?  No.  What I’m pointing out is the way “such language” can be viewed as “funny” when it’s depicted within a conventional narrative (there’s nothing new about the rich-successful-jerk-who-experiences-a-life-threatening-scare-and-tries-to-change) story, yet identical language is deemed “offensive” when those same words work to expose or question the underlying assumptions that we carry with us in this world about the “way” things are supposed to “be,” and for whom.

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May 7, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

Writing is… Like when you go to the beach at seven o’clock at night…  And you go with someone you know, or someone you used to know, or someone you wished you knew, or someone you thought you knew from a dream you dreamed one night while sleeping in a stuffy apartment in student housing, in Stillwater Oklahoma, where roaches climbed over the walls, in a town far far away from any beach, but while you were there, at this beach, this person you thought you knew so well turns into your mother, or your brother, or your child, or your doctor, or the third grade teacher who hated you for no reason, or the best friend you never thought you deserved.  In other words, when you write, you take everyone and everything that ever happened to you; you pull out a crazy assortment of your reminiscences, or your readings, or your flat-out lies, or things you over-heard, or things you never heard of at all, and you turn this that you know, and that which you don’t, into the big whole oily world.  That’s why there’s no such thing as an autobiographical beach.  Even when it’s Hemingway, even when he’s writing about the war, even when he’s writing about taking his son with him into the Paris cafes, even when he’s (ostensibly) writing down this very conversation word for word.  Because no one can write it all down, and so she selects, and she selects for a reason, and the reasons have to do with way more than that beach, that beach in San Francisco, near the zoo, near SF State, about which, she appears, to be, writing…

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March 2, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

My “writing” is not autobiographical. My “plays” are not autobiographical.  This passage you’re currently reading (if indeed, “you” are), is not autobiographical, and if I were to write a “true” autobiography, I doubt such a “thing” would be autobiographical either. Why not? After all, the “words” are written by a biographical person; the words feature human beings, thus justifiably leading to a mis/interpretation of “me,” or of other people I “know.”  In addition, the words are not written in strictly “scientific” or “just the facts” modalities; so, why not autobiography? Because, beyond the obvious distancing from “real” life that occurs just by virtue of the use of a language employed to “contain” or “convey” life (or to “comment” on the use/s of language/s itself, in, or, “as in” life), there is this bigfat stylization implicit in all language that implies an even greater distance from what that language might merely denote to what it can only connote. Therefore “I” is as much of an icon, or a cipher, or an “other,” or a symbol, or a shape of a signaling signifier, as are any of the other “people” in my, or anyone’s, “words,” or world/s.  And if I ever made any utterance to the contrary, then I (or the I who I was at that time) had not yet come to the realization that, in words, we “represent” something else, again, with every/thing we “do.” Either that, or I wasn’t as oily about weaseling my way “out.”  Word.

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February 15, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

One wintery moonless Tucson night, at the gravel driveway, a coyote flashed in the cold-white headlights, almost cardboard-cutout-y, looking bored, body following its head, down a few steps into the wash, waiting for those humans to disappear, through the automatic doors of their oil-heated and scrubbed adobe abode.

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January 7, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

In a 1976 interview with New York’s then-FM radio station WNEW, Patti Smith said, when asked whether or not the lyrics of her song “Redondo Beach” were autobiographical: “That song is based on an old poem of mine; it’s kind of like my version of ‘Endless Sleep’ — having nothing to do with anything but fantasy.” Smith’s attitude seems like the best one to take when talking about whether or not writing is “autobiographical”; not that every work isn’t at some level involved with that creator’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, perceptions, experiences, etc., but the art itself has to do with the craft, or the transformation of those “things” into a product that is then set forth, both within history and within a traditional (art) form. The worn-out, dumbed-down notion that “art” and “biography” are interchangeable can lead a lesser man to believe that, say, Woody Allen is actually the nebishy intellectual character who populates so many of his films.  Such a confusion can make even a regular artist person reticent to discuss anything in “life” that might be connected to work, above, beyond, or below the nuanced knowledges and technical juxtapositions of literally everything involved with creation itself. Is the idiocy of this weirdly stupid “auto-detailizing” phenomenon related to our current, annoying, twittering pop trend toward the fetishization of the banally personal, and, in the worst cases of the “famous,” to all of those not-solely American obsessions with the “lives of ” (or lies about, told by, etc.) “those” people, none of whom (or which) has anything to do with anybody’s art?! (Pause…)  The life is not the work, period, is my new(er) answer toward, the auto/bio/graph/i/cal: No matter how artful (or how boring!) someone’s life, or someone’s autobiography, is, no one with any smarts, or with any real substance, will be “reading” it, meaning/full/y, as art, in the future, when, as Heiner Muller put it, we’ll be lucky, with our oily-ass selves, to be “living” on Mars.

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November 16, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Lucky for me that, during the completion of a “terminal” degree near the end of Jack Gelber’s ebullient reign as the head of the playwriting division at CUNY - Brooklyn College, his response, to the response, to my work from most (though not all) of “my” numerous guy-colleagues, (whose own works “seemed” to derive from the hooker-gives-blow-job-to-lead-male-in-the-front-seat-of-a-car “mentality”), was precisely “same old shit” to their whiningly how can she use such language!

Once, in a private tutorial session subsequent to Rollover Othello’s inaugural reading in which the fantasy-writing guys literally jumped out of their chairs in competition to condemn my language, Jack said: “Susan, I’m not saying you’ve written the perfect play, but eliciting a strong reaction isn’t a bad thing; you have to realize that, if what you’re doing on stage is reinforcing what people already feel and think, then you can say ‘fuck your grandmother up the ass with a big fat dildo’ and no body’s going to get upset about anything you’ve written, because essentially, you haven’t said anything they don’t already agree with. The minute you start questioning people’s assumptions about life, and about how life should be lived, then you can’t utter one ‘goddamn’ without people protesting your offensive ‘language’; not because your language bothers them per se, but because the ideas you’ve expressed within your words make the audience uncomfortable; the ‘critics’ thus latch onto those ‘4-letter words’ to avoid you ‘ugly’ ideas.”

Sorry if I’m bastardizing here, Jack: R.I.P. (A/nother tangent: Why is it that The Living Theater, under the ‘history’ page of its website, cites The Connection but not Jack Gelber by name?)

In other words, in other worlds, my work is uglier than a hooker blow job? Okay! Okay to the fears of the teacher who submitted her high school writers’ works to SLM’s inaugural issue, yet would not give the accepted contributors their copies of the issue without filing parental sign-off notices and waiting until school was officially “over” for the year. Had these kids never heretofore heard any such “offensive language”? I guess they never go to the movies! But then, that (following Gelber’s analysis), would be a use of “words” in situations canonical to what we “all” know, and about which “we” all “agree.” Right…

How luckily wonderful to have another conversation with Jack, in which I would ask him if he thought that: The “load” was on me to edit my language down, to try and preclude ideas from being willfully obscured by a “bad language” critique, or if any cutting-off-at-the-pass was even possible, let alone desirable. Maybe he would tell me not to be surprised by the onslaught of continuously unconscious subterfuge. Okay then. Bring it on.

Because I trust that neither Jack nor I would ever suggest a writer uncouple language from its manifest presentation (of ideas) in characterization, action, and outcome/s. And the salience of his/my observation (and experience), with how an audience turns its own discomfort into a distorted discourse on the “ugliness” of the “thing” about which it is uncomfortable, informs my still-developing disappointment, and my continuing willful insouciance, I suppose, regarding how the uncomfortable-issuing literary step-sister gets made into the arty but nonetheless ugly-duckling.

We know how “those” stories end up:  Long live Swan Road!

Stay strong, ugly ducklings: Never let the audience-rejection, or perhaps worse, the no-audience, become the society-wide audience of self-censorship.

So whatever happened to Rollover Othello?

Neal Storrs placed it in Oasis (and lost a subscriber for doing so); the play then got picked out of a stack of unsolicited Samuel French scripts (the artistic director of Love Creek called me and enthused about how the play’s language flew off the page); it was scheduled for a 1998 or 9 production on 42nd Street, then abruptly canceled during rehearsals, ostensibly because the company actress playing the lead refused to say the words in the play, due to…

“Language considerations,” naturally. Oil! Oil? Oil.  Lucky lucky me.

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August 12, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Anybody watch the 2007 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, a little feature called “The Departed” which I among many found rather entertaining? Anyone hear or read even one critical attack on “the language” of that film, language which, in just the first five minutes, contained mucho many uses of cunt, fucking cunt, mother fucking cunt, what r u anyway a cunt, etc. etc., all of which words were used “literally,” as insults, insults spoken towards characters by other characters, all of whom the film encourages the audience to identify with as “real” people who “really” talk that way, and perhaps, therefore, “such language” is “understandable” thus “okay”? The words of the film go by, and the audience laughs or whatever, but does anyone think about being insulted by this so-called artistic use of the way so-called “real” people talk to each other, this supposedly real use of the supposedly beyond-the-pale “c-word” now used as the so-called new (yawn!) banal-insult-supreme of these “real” blue-collar “types”? As in, if the Scorsese cops say it, it’s okay, it’s PG-something-or-other, but if an/other writer lifts this word, or any word, up, out of it’s place, out of it’s context, and plops it into sudden, vast relief, then, THEN it’s obscene? Because we suddenly hear it? Because suddenly The Word is not iterated by a canonized “authority” but instead by One who might be questioning said authority, that very authority which may have assigned some of us the moniker cunt in the first place, allowing some Others of us to be/come the users-of-the-word-cunt-as-”literal”-insult, which “means” it’s only “obscene” when we DON’T know exactly who we are, who we’re NOT, and what it’s all supposed to MEAN? If you’re following me, Dear Reader, I think you’ll agree, (and thank you, by the way), that I’ve made a “pretty” “good” sort-of-an-oil-free-point, for now! To Be Continued…

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August 1, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

If I had a penny, or more like a hundred million bucks, for every time I’ve been beaten with The Language Stick, well, Christ, perhaps I’d be the richest woman in our solar system, quien sabe? (Or the sorest!) But since no one person’s ever paid me while he or she was busy being judgmentally or (worse) violently outraged by my literary uses of the American vernacular, I’m as poor as I ever have been. Rats!

I finally have some time, however; and in that department I am gaining stock! (Yay me!) So in the next few months on this post, I plan to address an assortment of bouts, both recent and past, with people who have either been “shocked” by MY “language” or shocked by the people who have been shocked by my language! (I love the latter!) And I plan to name names (some famous!), and give dates, (only literally; I reserve the figurative Ones for my husband!); but do come back throughout the weeks, my Readers, if you, you wonderful YOU, are out there, to share in the pain (I mean, the joy!) of the 4 letter Word!

What’s all this about Oil?

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March 5, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Who was it that said it was Proust who said that the best years of life are the lost years, the years lost in living, the years spent living without memories getting in the way of the lived experience? Somehow, the lost years are lived out of time, yet they become Time itself for the individual, when she stops living in lost time/s, and starts creating Memories.

As soon as living-time becomes composed of memory-time/s, the individual is no longer living. She has lost the lost-years of “youth”; she is doomed to live only remembering those years that she then comes to believe were the best years of her life, which fact she didn’t know or appreciate at the time, because she was absorbed (without knowing she was absorbed) by living Out of Time, in an experiential immediacy that she has Lost.

The moment she understands that the Lost Years are gone corresponds to the exact point she realizes that her existence is now made up of memories as much or more so than it is made up of the vivid, visceral experiences of life that go into making its memories, which must be what middle-age is… Not bad, for not reading Proust, right?

Hell, I think I Lost all of February, because I can’t remember a damn thing that happened last month!

Perhaps all is not lost, then, in my case, or maybe I’ve bounded beyond the cognizance of my lost years, to a more old-aged forgiving and forgetting?

But what I really want to know is, does this headache mean I’ve been talking on my cell phone too long? And, do I have a brain tumor? You decide!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody.

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January 31, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Another January come and almost gone. Finally. Yay.

Among my least recondite January memories, I hereby recall a New Year’s Eve at a club around 10th and Folsom in San Francisco back in the 80’s, whense I left with a black eye due to overly zealous dancing (on my part), but without my coat and scarf, the latter items having been pilfered by some cold thus-and-such, seemingly after observing me carefully stashing said stuff behind a partition, due to the fact that I had not wanted to pay the coat check fee.

Oh well!

My bee-u-tee-ful below-the-knee black wool coat I had scored at the buy-by-the-pound used place on Valencia or somewhere, but it had fit me perfectly, and so we dutifully searched the painfully-lights-up-closing-4-am.-club-space, to no avail, natch. As my friendship clique squished ourselves exhaustedly into our (truly responsible) designated-driver’s car (not in any bike condition that night!), and he fired it up (oil, again), the radio blared out a mid-song rendition of maybe the Grateful Dead’s version of “I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore…”

Hey, yeah, WTF, Happy 2007!

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December 26, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

How did I get here, to Torrance, CA, sharing a hot tub with another middle aged blond, who happened to have been in Cancun in 1985, four years after I was there in 1981, on my way to Central America?

The short answer is that the blond and I were both going through back problems, and together we had sunk ourselves into the tub for a little relief. The longer response involves her honeymoon, marriage, children, and South Bay SoCal lifestyle, I guess, compared and contrasted with my journeys onto various countries, cities, jobs, relationships, and writing gigs.

It’s not an essay question, but a second class bus ride from Mexico City had been my literal vehicle to Cancun.

Although the Cancun airport was able to take passenger jets for a year or two prior to 1981, what occasional and expensive flights there were originated from a very few U.S. cities and a couple of points in Europe. No doubt the tourist aspects of the place built up fast, and by 1985 the flights were cheaper and more numerous. The blonde had jetted in.

Her destination was the Club Med on the point that had been the only “nice” place around Cancun until the Hilton Pyramid was finished, an event that had just happened when I arrived. In fact, the road that would become Hotel Row was still under construction in ‘81, mostly labored upon by Mayan Indian Mexicans who lived either in the town of Cancun or in its surrounding ruralities, the human abode constructions of which vicinities were almost exclusively thatch-roofed palapa huts.

The town itself at that time consisted of a divison between two sections: the Mexicans of apparently mostly Mayan descent were on one side of town, living on dirt streets and in tin-roofed hovels of homes stacked side by side; the middle-class (and generally more European-featured) Mexicans, along with a small contingent of American expatriots, lived in cement, stucco, or cinderblock and tiled houses spaced evenly along curving paved roads.

Through a friend from Berkeley, I had a contact to an American who ran a small language school on the “right” side of town, and I was able to stay there in an attic room of the school for about a week before I made my way further South. It was not possible to see the ocean from the town, but one morning I headed off in the sea’s direction, expecting to arrive at the beach after an easy two-or-three mile walk.

Before long, an open air jeep driven by two white guys who turned out to be Brit tourists pulled alongside me and offered a ride; I hopped into the back of their rented old jeep. We proceeded on until the paved road came to an end and a group of men, somehow both standing up and bending over, working with picks and tar, made hand signs for us to stop.

Ours was the sole vehicle on the road. The workers appeared to have had no vehicle to get them to their worksite; perhaps they walked everywhere they went, as Cancun was teeming neither with cars nor people back then. The deserted-jungle-nature of the road and its environs, from whence Cancun-as-international-vacation-destination raised itself, is really something, I should say, although I never returned after 1981 to see it that way in person.

Anywho, the Rich Brits got out of their jeep, pulled out their wallets, tried to talk, then bribe, the workers into letting us drive further up the unpaved road. When the Mayan-Mexicans refused their money, this pair climbed into their jeep in a huff, preparing to roar back to town in a royal cloud of indignation. Not before I got out, however, and told them I would find my own way to wherever it was I was going.

Maybe they remember me as some (one more) Crazy American Girl, or more likely they don’t remember me at all, but I turned to the guys who were working on the road, and asked them the direction of the beach.

Ah, you want to see the beach.

One of them told me he would escort me along the path; he gestured for me to follow, and I did. He led me to an incline and up through a thicket of topical trees and deeply green shrubs. I had a moment of second-guessing myself, when I turned behind me and could no longer see the road, then looked ahead without being able to see anything but more overgrowth. Yet it was too late to do anything differently at that point, so what good would being afraid do me?

And within a few minutes we cleared the growth and then, yes, a cliche, the untouched and unoccupied beaches of Cancun spread their white sands and blue waters as far as I could see in any direction. I gave a whoop of shocked joy and ran down the rise to the sand, waving my thanks to the guy who had been nice enough to take his time to show me the way. He returned to paving the road for Hotel Row.

Insert your comment here on my arrogantly brief foreshadowing of 21st Century globalisms.

Yeah, well, like life itself, essay tests have a way of coming around full circle, if they’re C’s, or, if they’re better, to ironically (and perhaps endearingly) resonating insights. A’s are generally reserved for the transcendently bitter (sweet?) “truths” of experience, which brings me again to the blond, and to my aching privileged self.

My own back muscles had been pulled by all kinds of over-stretches I had put myself through, or endured, over the past two years: I married, moved, finished twenty-years of college teaching, moved again, and turned I’m-not-going-to-tell-you-how-old. My cat died, my mom died, and I found myself living near enough to Torrance to join a gym where I could swim everyday, and where, if I had to, I could soak in a hot tub or sweat in a steam room, nearly in solitude.

The blond had hurt her back playing tennis, she said, so when she gingerly made her way into the tub with me, looking older than I, IMHO, and a wee worse for wear, dare I say, I offered the solicitous concern I politely present to someone slightly older, whatever that means!

She claimed to be worried about being able to be as active as she usually was with her husband and their children on their annual family golfing, tennis, and beach trip to Cancun, Mexico, the trip she had taken every year since she and her husband had married in Torrance, California, and then honeymooned together at the enviable locale of Cancun, in 1985.

And, listening to her describe Cancun as “really nice after they cleaned up and rebuilt all the hotels after that last hurricane,” I comprehended that, oily-joking-snobbery aside, I was likely the same age, if not older, than this blond lady, and oh, so tre, well, downright unglamorously, my life now signified the “same as it ever was” (i.e., “Once in a Life Time”) song, a Talking Heads ditty I often lip-sync’d in the 80’s (so much for being cutting-edge) without the least prefiguring awareness that in twenty-five years I would have no G.D. idea how I had gotten here, or there, or to any of the times, places and peoples of my life, nor how little faith, nee good humor, I might have left upon said epiphany.

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November 24, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Plus or minus fifty years of reading, writing, thinking, (and watching movies) on the meaning of life, and death, yet I add up to inexactitude when faced with the actuality of failing, paralyzed, tumor-ridden bodies, then subsequently, with their cremated, ashy remains, those of my mother’s on October 4, and of my-15-year-cat-friend Spot’s on August 3, both of this year.

Weird or inappropriate that I place my mom and my cat within the same prozac-free paragraph? A comment on 21st C. American “personal” lives? Or on something else I’m too stupid to think up? Who knows why these two deaths together have sucked me into what has been maybe a not-so-sweeping-or-fearless inventory of my pensive past, and my present.

My cat Spot adopted me one night when I was carrying groceries, sola, up to my apartment. A month later she gave birth to four kittens, for which I found homes, before I took her to live with me in New York. She was there for me through the mean-street Brooklyn years, until I brought her back to Cali, still trying to scrape together a backyard or some such corner in the sun where we might have found a form of our own happiness. I didn’t manage to make that happen in time for Spotty, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t blame me for it; I’m pretty sure she loved me in spite of my failings, in her sweet cat-sized-brain way. Human love is more complicated, isn’t it?

I hear my mom calling me to breakfast, to dinner; I hear myself calling back, I’ll be right there. Not a great example of how the young take their received worlds for granted, but can any mother ever be adequately appreciated? Even “bad” mothers give us birth, even “bad” mothers make all of life’s joyful moments possible, and “good” mothers make life’s suffering probable, for which fact neither agonizing questions, nor thank yous, suffice.

I think I was a disappointment to my mom. I turned out differently from her plans for me; I lived far from any of those ways she imagined. We were essentially incomprehensible to each other. In some ways my cat knew me better, in some ways my cat was a better friend (hence my comparison, perhaps); but I’m pretty sure my mother and I felt the same feelings for each other that would have come with a knowing friendship; had we been similar in temperment and in inclination, we might have met life’s perplexing Qs with some really Big Shoes of our own - hell, we might have become friggin’ Dear Abbey or Ann Landers! Or whichever one it was who had a daugher take over the philosophizing where she left off - or was it a daughter-in-law?

That last question, I think I can find the answer to that one, if I cared to do so. It’s the one about the cat’s last breath, and how I felt her gone, right away; the one which made me wonder what she was in the first place, and how I knew, felt, that whatever she was, just wasn’t anymore, and never would be again; it’s the one about some of my mom’s last words to me, the ones I could understand, the ones when she thanked me for doing some chores for her that needed doing, and for doing some personal things for her that made her more comfortable; it’s the ones about knowing afterwards that, that would be the last time I would see her, and how I was so surprised by her thanks to me over the phone, that I didn’t know what to say, only later realizing that the thing to have said would have been, mom, thank you; it’s how I didn’t know that then, and all the other times I didn’t know the really simple answers for the really simple questions I had; those are the ones that bother me.

I wish my mom were still here, so that I could ask her if I’d ever have the answers I need to the questions that might tell me how to act in the future, or if this is even a reasonable request from “life.” And if my mother couldn’t have responded to my “strange” queries, or if I would never have asked her them anyway, it would be comforting to think I still could.

My mom always asked about my cat; she loved animals, too.

I wish Spot were here, so that I could call her to me, and hug her in my confused human way; even if she couldn’t hug me back, even if she didn’t want to, it would be comforting to think she could, the way a human being might.

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September 19, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Back in 1996, when I was teaching at a variety of CUNY schools, simultaneously, including at one 2-year campus where I taught developmental reading to kids who possessed NYC high school diplomas but few educated skills, I had the brite idea of using a Jacques Cousteau article on global warming as a vehicle for teaching vocabulary and critical thinking on a subject larger than good grammar. In front of the class during that special session, as I explained the delicate balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide, between animals and plants, I mentioned in passing how OIL develops (of course!) from the decomposed physical bodies of formerly living same said symbiotically related (even to us!) plants and animals, thus the term fossile fuels, I can still hear myself joking… However, none of my students in that class were acquainted with these interesting OIL facts; rather, they were visibly disturbed by my inadvertent presentation of How Death Becomes Oil, And Is Therefore So Useful To Modern Life. “What did she say? What did she say?” Students broke into spontaneous discussion asides and shifted angrily in their seats. While they hadn’t been paying attention, I had morphed from their mild English teacher into a full-on mad-witch, betraying their fragile horizons with an incidental fact I took absolutely for granted. I don’t remember how I extricated myself from that particular room altercation; there were so many! Wait. I don’t remember why I started this New York anecdote in the first place. Ah. I wanted to write about Death, and its oily surfaces. But now it’s too late, and I’m cross-eyed tired, so I’ll have to sign off right here and write Part 2 next time. Pues, adios.

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September 11, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Once upon a time, on 9/11 in 2001, I had recently moved from New York to California, which, for me, ended up meaning that I would “have people there,” as we started saying. Due to my M/W teaching schedule, I would be off that day, (it was a Tuesday); plus, I happened to have been recovering from an emergency appendectomy, which meant I wasn’t sleeping well, so I had been listening to the radio all night long. At about 5:30 am., West Coast time, I thought I heard John Dupree, then on KPFK, making some kind of a sick joke, talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Center; (I never did like him). I changed stations to my local NPR, but everyone was saying the same thing. I proceded to rise from my bed and open my window, imagining I might somehow see my morning-person neighbor, a guy from Jersey, up. Somehow he was. When I called him on the phone at that odd hour, and simply said “Ed?”, he said, “You have to come over here and watch this.” Now I, up to that (and this) point in my life, have managed never to outright own a TV, but I got to Ed’s place in time to witness the second plane hit. We watched both towers list and collapse, we heard the debris storms whistle through lower Manhattan, and we gasped when those poor people jumped… And a lot more, of course, mostly images I never saw after that Tuesday. Maybe I didn’t want to see them, since, when I moved again just a few months ago, I came across the front pages, printed on the next day, that I had saved from the NY Times, and from the LA Times, and I put them in the recycling bin. Because for me, the most memorable, the most socially salient aspect of the 9/11 event had consisted in how people everywhere, for a few short days, stopped participating in life-as-usual. Everyone sort of ceased participation in the repetitive activities that tend to fill up, and clutter up, a life, and we stared thinking about more important “things.” I rode my bike to the Queen Mary, watched the sun set without the sounds of planes or helicopters, and when I wore my Brooklyn College T-shirt around, strangers would pull over in their cars and ask me if I was okay, in a nice way! Later, I seem to remember the “president” telling us we all had to start shopping, immediately, or the “economy” would, what was his word, collapse? So it occurs to me, now, when I think about 9/11’s aftermath, that without each person’s continual and constant partcipation in whatever “this” that-we-call-living represents, the whole “thing” could not go on: Not as is, not without our acquiesence. Which is fine, I guess, if it’s what we want. When and if we do things differently, “things” will change. Meanwhile, back at the majoramericanmassmedia, there appears to be some fetishizing of the 9/11 dead going on, am I right? Yet with so many more dead and damaged, and so much more destroyed, absurdly, horrifically, since then, world wide, why mark 9/11 so vehemently, so obsessively, so nationalistically? Yes, on that day we saw real people really die. It wasn’t a cop show; it wasn’t embalmed. We watched real people see, smell, taste, hear, touch real people who were really running falling screaming crying dying, in “real time,” with their own eyes noses lips ears hands, and that was all very shockingtraumatizingupsetting, to say the least, not to mention the personal ramifications for some of us, not to mention that actual New Yorkers got hit way harder, way more viscerally, and for way longer. But in five years more, will these memories, our memories, merely serve yet another mediagovernmentfrenzy over whatever icons rationalize that OIL which requires rationalization? Will we think about those three little days, when we made our own actions, our own worlds, new? Or will we become our own objects, remembering the past as it’s currently being reified, as I write this text? Will we remember only where, we were, not who, not what, we wanted to be?

Posted in 9/11 and Oil | 1 Comment »

August 24, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Is it just me, or does the frenetic ebay selling off and buying up of “beauty-queen” artifacts from the closet of dead-six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey seem really really creepy? And how about the confessed-murderer’s (”it was an accident!”) use of his arrest in Thailand to create photo-op’s for himself, replete with his oh-so-studied, this-is-what-greasy-pedophile-killer-celebrities-look-like poses, splashed on the pages of every American rag, from The New York Times to People Magazine. Such a “story” seems much more interesting, I guess, than, say, the lethal effects of cluster-bombing on children. Anyway! For an entertaining and hilariously REAL treatment of the sexualization of little girls (and their adult “fans”), check out the new film Little Miss Sunshine, my make-em-laugh pick for your end of the summer-of-2006 viewing “pleasure.”

Posted in Celebrity Oil | 2 Comments »

August 22, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Guess what I found out from my oil internet today? Drew Barrymore and I share the same love for cleaning. She scrubs the bathroom too! Wow. I feel so NOR-MAL. Well, gotta go clean that oil. It’s taking over the world, you know.

Posted in Personal Oil | 4 Comments »

August 21, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

I live in an L.A. oil house. Okay, technically, my house is called a “condo,” but the carpet is oil, the paint is oil, the vinyl is oil, the dog - just kidding; I don’t have a dog, but my cat just died so I can’t joke about THAT - my computer (and yours, dear reader) is oil, the desk chair is oil, the thingie under the desk chair that makes the carpet smooth down so I can roll my chair around on it is definitely oil. The washing machine washes my husband’s oil clothes and the dryer dries them to an oil dry. The faucets spout oil and the noise from the cars and the trucks and the backup beeps and the radios in the alleys and the bombs going off all over the world are definitely oil noises. So compare me, or you, to an oily CEO well, why not to Paris, to Hilton, to my next vacation, to Hawai’i, to the Rez, to a Pakistani child diamond chip cutter, to the grand grand canyon, to NYC, to Brooklyn; we’re all living on, dying on, oil, while we’re busy blaming someone else. Cheers!

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