A1A Revisited

Around this time back in 2018, my friend Brenna and I took a trip to Florida. It was something we decided to do after she got an October 2017 email about a screaming deal on January flights in and out of Fort Lauderdale. Neither of us had been to Florida before and neither of us were doing great in the home stretch of 2017.

In addition to being pals, we were coworkers and shared an office then. I recall possibly being squatted on the floor in our office and trying (with little success) to regulate my breathing to avert an anxiety attack, and hadn’t been saying anything for a while. Somewhere in there, she saw the email about cheap flights and asked if we should take a vacation to Florida in the first month of 2018. The question brought me out of my witching hour enough to say we should do it.

I’m not really sure why I opted in without hesitation because I somewhat famously don’t enjoy traveling with other people. At that time, I think the longest times I had ever spent on the road with other human beings were when I moved out to Virginia for undergrad in 2011, and then after my sister finished undergrad in Missouri in 2013 and I drove back to Montana from there with my mom, sister, and an uncle. Perhaps it’s a testament to just how unhinged Brenna and I were at the time, but neither of us seemed to have reservations about committing to a trip to Florida on impulse. We had bourgeois jobs at the time that we didn’t much enjoy, and we had enough paid vacation to burn. I think we were both thinking why not/what the hell in the withdrawn way a certain kind of intoxicated person might consent to walking through a campfire on a dare.

It was a done deal in a matter of minutes without fanfare. Once our fate was sealed, we did do some research and itinerary planning, but with no great expectations beyond the novelty of being in warmer climes where you could comfortably swim in the ocean in January. It’s a concept that will never not blow your mind if you grew up north of the 45th parallel as both of us had.

The minimal expectations turned out to serve us. Not because we had a lousy time, but because within hours of touching down in Fort Lauderdale and starting a drive south en route to the Florida Keys, the trip quickly earned the tagline “Florida: Full of surprises.” We recited it amongst ourselves as a running commentary on what felt like one odd encounter after another—some confirming preconceived stereotypes we had about Florida, others disrupting them. I think it’s safe to say we both returned to our stuffy jobs and strained personal circumstances with an appreciation of how difficult it is to generalize Florida.

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The details of the trip are probably worth a more detailed accounting one of these days just because there were a lot of strange, if not full-blown kismet moments. Some of the most serendipitous revolved around the portion of the trip where we posted up at a hostel in Key West. From what I understand, Key West gets crowded to the point of being impossible to enjoy through most of the year these days. But Brenna and I somehow managed to hit the sweet spot of quiet January weeknights and kind of fell under the spell of the Conch Republic.

It helps that we were slumming it. Because we weren’t staying at a resort, our lodging was pretty cheap, and the cost of beer and delicious fish tacos was a bargain compared to the inflated DC dining prices we were used to. We thought the feral roosters roaming the streets were charming. Being able to nurse a beer or a frozen cocktail while you walked down the street felt novel and somewhat liberating. We became pals with some of the buskers at Captain Tony’s, a name I knew from the Jimmy Buffett songbook but never knew was based on an actual place until we walked into it. It didn’t take long to stake it out as our haunt of choice for nightcaps after sizing up the rowdier-looking watering holes on Duvall Street with obnoxious light productions and music blaring at all hours onto the street through open windows. One night, we were briefly joined by a drag queen on the porch of an old Victorian house that had been converted into a bar, which felt appropriate since I had at some point learned that the queer community is widely credited for the town’s renaissance that began in the 1970s.

One of the most notable encounters of the whole trip transpired on what I think was our second night in Key West. Brenna, a Seattle-born Washington State alum who is also the child of two WSU alums, recognized somebody on the street while I was gawking at a Freddy Krueger bong in a store window. She passively slurred something like, “I think I know that guy,” and calmly managed to stop him before he passed us by.

Brenna had correctly identified him as Mike Leach, who at the time was WSU’s head football coach. He confirmed his identity just as his wife emerged from behind him and started dabbing at ice cream that had leaked down the front of his shirt from a cone he was still working on. It was super hoaky from my perspective, and just a romp from Brenna’s because she knew her parents back in Maple Valley, Washington would flip when they heard that she had randomly run into Mike Leach in the southernmost town in the continental U.S.

We eventually ran into him again the same evening when we predictably washed up at Captain Tony’s. He recognized Brenna and beckoned her over to some mounted display case on the wall to point something out to her that I guess he thought would be of interest. He visited briefly with somebody else on staff that he knew and then only lingered long enough for his wife to again emerge and collect him for the night as if he were a child who had wandered off. Again, pretty hoaky stuff. Nothing to really write home about. But he came up in a conversation later that spring in an unrelated context, and I learned a bit more about this guy who seemed harmless, if a little buffoonish in my one encounter with him.

I was over at the house of an instructor from my MFA program in May or June of 2018. That instructor, named Melissa, had just edited a biennial anthology of work by DC area women writers. As part of a publishing and editing class she taught that spring, I had helped get the website for the book live and populated in advance of the launch. So I was familiar with the project, and she invited me over for a reading featuring some of the anthology contributors.

After most folks had cleared out, I visited for a bit with Melissa and her spouse Joe, who I remember kindly giving me a bottle of Tröegs doppelbock from his personal supply. Like Melissa, Joe is a faculty member at American University, but in quite a different department than his literary spouse. His academic wheelhouse is political violence and terrorism. Although I had never interacted with him at length before, I basically knew that much about him through Melissa. I think I also visited Melissa once in his School of International Service office just because it was vacant that day and a hell of a lot sleeker than the literature department offices where she usually held court. The only other thing I knew about Melissa’s spouse was that he was a Floridian, but only through a very strange coincidence of having a housemate in DC who also knew Melissa from a past life. Melissa had been her high school English teacher in Florida for a time when she and Joe were living there together.

When my conversation with Melissa and Joe meandered to the subject of their Florida years, I mentioned my big takeaway from the trip back in January—that it was kind of misguided to generalize Florida because its characteristics really run the gamut from top to bottom. I also noted that the biggest surprise of the trip for Brenna and me was Key West, and I cited the run-in with Mike Leach as a microcosm for our oft-reprised tagline of “Florida: Full of surprises.” I must’ve began to explain who Mike Leach was, assuming his name wouldn’t be recognizable to most people, because I remember Joe saying he knew who the guy was. More than that though, he casually added something to the effect of, “He’s a conspiracy theorist. He’s on our security watch lists.”

I confess at the time I didn’t really understand the connection between conspiracies and Joe’s area of expertise: the causes and consequences of terrorism. In fact, I honestly never thought back to that part of the conversation until last week. I don’t have much else to say on that score other than I’m much more aware now of the ramifications of people using large platforms to spread baseless ideas. Like probably a lot of people, I always wrote them off as crackpots whose machinations have no bearing on my reality. I now see why folks who study national and international terrorism can’t do that.

While I had the vague idea a few weeks back of revisiting the 2018 trip to Florida with this January missive, I didn’t have the uneventful run-in with a known conspiracy theorist in mind as something to recount. I was honestly thinking about my bond with Brenna as a case study in how friendships evolve. But how I came by that idea does actually have some parallels with what I think is a bigger theme of how ideas get misappropriated. I feel like something that I was newly able to articulate in the final weeks of 2020 was that most of my principles and interests can be traced to the ideas of speech, solidarity, and self-determination. And I think alignment on those core values is why my friendship with Brenna has taken on a second wave of meaning and valence in our West Coast lives.

Brenna now lives in Seattle and directs a union for University of Washington medical residents (so, doctors who work murderous schedules but don’t get paid as well as other doctors). Prior to December, the last time I had seen her was in early February—pretty much right in that last gasp of the before times for this part of the country. And just because of where I was at in my own journey with healing and recovery, I spent most of 2020 evaluating which of the people who’d been grandfathered into my life from the past belonged in it going forward. Not in an unhealthy cast-off way, but in the sense of consciously disinvesting in one-sided or insidiously toxic relationships in order to focus more on the friendships that reflect my values at this point. I think it’s a valuable exercise to go through, but a December visit from Brenna reminded me of an important variable in that calculus: people who are growing, and living their lives consciously aren’t static. Even friendships that survive the passage through time zones and circumstances might fall outside of the trusted circle one year, and return with good reason in another.

Since moving to the West Coast, I had struggled to suss out whether the foundation of my friendship with Brenna had ever been healthy in the first place. It’s hard to tell with some relationships that form when you’re still figuring out what you’re about. Plus, we were both pretty unhappy if not outright in crisis in the years we overlapped in DC. It’s not as though either of us were responsible for the other’s wounds. But I can for my part say that I was responsible for neglected healing that might’ve prevented those wounds from getting reopened by the people closest to me. Just by virtue of being in my life for five or more days of every week for about three years, Brenna was in that zone.

Brenna moved back to the western U.S. at the beginning of 2019. And she’s actually responsible for seeding the idea of my own move to Washington. She dropped me off at the airport after a June 2019 visit and I already had plans to return in August for a separate occasion. Before I stepped out of her car, she said something like, “Maybe you don’t leave when you come back in August and that’s just you moving out here.” Like the moment in October 2017 when she suggested a trip to Florida, she’d kind of just spoken into existence something that would bear out a few months later. I now realize how vital it is to hold onto friends who can manifest shit like that, but I had been pretty ambivalent about our friendship since moving to Washington really up until she visited me in December.

Kristina and I were talking about self-determination in the context of the relationship between Indigenous communities and the federal government when she remarked that it’s interesting that far-right armed militia types in the tradition of the Bundys also try to cite self-determination as a cornerstone of their agendas. Besides being a fucked up appropriation of a term that I think belongs squarely in the province of social justice movements, I have to say the dissonance is completely fascinating to me. And it made me wonder about interpretations of speech and solidarity that similarly fall outside what I think are their highest and most edifying uses.

I didn’t really have to clamber to uncover a bad interpretation of the idea of speech. As a Montanan by birth with a healthy interest in that state’s history, I’ve been weaned on the idea that suggesting that corporations=individuals and money=speech a la Citizens United is utter nonsense. I’ll never understand why we’ve decided synthetic shit like money and corporations, which are functions of commerce, deserve the same protections under a government as human beings, which are a naturally occurring phenomena like any other species. And yet, that’s the interpretation of speech that’s on the books as law. I would argue that it’s an abuse of the concept, because more often than protecting the will and voice of individuals, it undermines them.

In a similar vein, I recently read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, and two passages that invoked the concept of solidarity as a mechanism for upholding the caste order jumped out at me. The first was in reference to lynchings. Integrating commentary of several historians and sociologists on the ritual of lynching, Wilkerson writes:

Lynchings almost always occurred “at the hands of persons unknown,” performed “in a collective way so that no one person could be blamed.”

“Whites were unified in seeing the Negro as a scapegoat and proper object of exploitation and hatred,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal, a leading social economist in the 1940s. “White solidarity is upheld and the caste order protected.”

Later in the book, citing Ashely Jardina, an academic who studies white identity politics, Wilkerson highlights that “white racial solidarity” forms as a way for members of the dominant caste to shore up the remaining advantages of “the one immutable characteristic that has held the most weight in the American caste system.”

To me, what Wilkerson’s examples of the dark side of solidarity—white solidarity—have in common with our Supreme Court’s disastrous interpretation of speech as it pertains to corporations and money is that neither of these applications are about liberating people. Rather, they’re about denying people’s humanity. I confess I haven’t spent enough time learning about armed militia types to understand why they get off on the notion of self-determination (but thanks to everyone on Mountain West Twitter who’s been trumpeting Leah Sottile’s body of work as essential for understanding this moment, I will be rectifying that stat!). However, just based on how that movement has played out in the past week for the world to see, I’d venture a guess that there are probably more examples than not of self-determination being invoked to endanger more individuals than it’s intended to protect.

And just to kind of bring this all back to the friendship piece that I thought I’d be writing about exclusively this month, I think what I’ve realized is that the most symbiotic relationships—certainly on a person-to-person level, but maybe also on a movement level—hinge on a healthy sense of individual identity. The danger seems to rest in people looking outward to find that meaning, instead of looking inward first and then letting their bonds, community, decisions, and behaviors be an extension of that. I think it’s something that takes work for anybody, and all the more for anybody who’s had to consciously exile or repress parts of themselves just to survive certain stretches of their lives. But as a self-described lone wolf of many years now, I think one of the great advantages of working to reintegrate memories and aspects of our individuality is it does lend clarity on which relationships and roles in our lives are grounded in something genuine and constructive. Basically, it makes it easier for me to see where I’m actually building something sustainable and reciprocal. And, I don’t know, that just seems like a critical true north to return to when chaos and uncertainty have become so normalized.

When I was traipsing around this corner of the internet last month, I wrote about the resurrectionist streak of Sagittarians and my first foray into reading about healing from the long-term effects of complex childhood trauma. One passage from the book I was reading, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, that landed with me and that I’ve been thinking about recently says this:

Gangs, extremist political parties, and religious cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members from their trauma. Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of others.

I feel like, in addition to identifying the relationships that are solid and sustainable, one of the things that’s kind of come with healing work for me is a reckoning of the ways I’ve dehumanized others throughout my life to make sense of my own pain, resentment, or shame. But it’s also made me more vigilant about bullies and abusers—those who are actively dehumanizing others to rationalize their own discontent and anger. And, I don’t know, maybe some of the unsavory ones just get off on being assholes. Others are probably just not very bright, and maybe it’s unreasonable to expect much of them. Still others are probably truly sick and really need psychiatric care. But I think a critical mass of folks that are basically intelligent but still overtly cruel and have no compunctions about abusing power have probably just never contended with their own trauma, nor started the hard healing work that nobody else can do for them.

Somebody who researches this stuff can probably put it better, but I think there are similarities between the causes and consequences of political violence and terrorism, and the causes and consequences of violence and abuse in our daily lives and relationships. And I also think it’s fair to view violence as self-perpetuating—a cause and consequence of itself.

Some of the keys to recovering from trauma in van der Kolk’s assessment, and something that I’m working on personally, is examining the stories we have told ourselves to survive abuse and neglect and slowly reintegrating those and our disjointed memories into a coherent whole that’s grounded in the present, and in our full range of sense perception. It’s very fucking hard if your nervous system has been disorganized from trauma at a very young age. I’m currently learning that myself.

Often, those of us who’ve put off this work or simply haven’t had the language or resources to do it sooner have perpetuated our trauma, likely within ourselves but often toward others, too. And I guess all of this is just me processing that it makes sense that conspiracies and scapegoating are the seeds of violence and terrorism. They’re the makings of stories people tell themselves about the source of their problems. And as long as they’re not integrated in reality, they should absolutely alarm us because they operate outside of the realm of facts and logic. And, in my experience, falsehoods and speculation have always done more harm than willful cruelty. Because the former is insidious, it’s easier to normalize and dismiss.

I don’t have anything deft or wise to say in the way of conclusion. But there are some things I sincerely wish for anybody who’s reading out there. I hope you have people in your life that are there because of shared values. I hope you have a pal or two who’s a pro at willing future events into existence. I hope you believe, as I do, in the power of speech, solidarity, and self-determination to liberate people without having to hurt, suppress, or endanger others. I hope you only ever end up in Key West on a quiet weeknight in January. I hope you have the support and resources you need to do the hard work of healing if that’s a pressing priority in your life—it is in mine, and I hope saying so might encourage somebody to get started. More than anything, I hope you’re able to live a life that reflects your identity and your gifts as an individual. And in the most corny Mister Rogers way possible, I want you to know that I’m glad that you’re here, that you’re trying, and that you’re you.

It’s an effervescent shitstain out there, but if you give enough of a damn to read something like this all the way through, you probably aren’t.