Jennifer’s Ark

“as much as i try to be a stretch your wings and fly type… i can’t stop trying to burst people into flames with my mind.”

Thus reads a coaster given to me by a dear friend around my birthday. One of those cool, squishy coasters that’s really more art than a place to put your mug. I want to put it on a chain and wear it around my neck. As my friend  held it out at a recent dinner party, she said, with a loving grin, “I’m not giving this to you because it reminds me of you…” But we both know better. And I’m okay with it. Passive aggressive mania pulses through my DNA.

But I didn’t set out to write about my groovy new coaster, which I carry around in my purse. I set out to present a more biblical theme, as it’s a pretty biblical time of year. Or maybe it’s just a gift card time of year. And not that I’m a biblical kind of girl. And really I wanted to write about the invention of  the leaf blower, but the New Yorker beat me to it.

Again, I digress. You know the story of Noah’s Ark. God is seriously bummed about what a wicked pain in the ass mankind has turned out to be, so he picks righteous dude Noah to pack up his family and some hetero-normative animal pairs, and off they go to safe landing in the mountains of Ararat. Meanwhile, God sends an epic flood that wipes out all other life. It’s a helluva tale, really, and not to be confused with the short-lived cable series and subsequent film, Noah’s Arc, which featured gay Black and Latino men engaged in lots of socially relevant same-sex activities.

So my friend Jennifer and I are having coffee, and we’re talking about what a wicked pain in the ass mankind has turned out to be, and how the whole wide world is more or less coming undone, and she says to me, “You know who I’d take on the Ark? I’d take the people who are on five kinds of antidepressants, the crazy people, cuz they’re the ones feeling the pain. I wouldn’t take any dumb, happy people who aren’t feeling anything. Nope. Feeling fine? Fuck you.” And dogs – she’d take a lot of dogs. She really loves the dogs.

Some say Jesus was a schizophrenic. And while the Ark conversation calls forth a painful reminder of that incredibly awful personal-growth-seminar-life-raft-exercise, I can’t stop thinking about it. Jennifer’s Ark. Would there be hip hop dancers? A psychoanalyst, a beat poet, some disenfranchised youth? Could Pema Chodrin and Maya Angelou come along? Maybe Ravi Coltrane and the Be Good Tanyas? Van Morrison, Sweet Honey in the Rock? Would we need an attorney and an accountant? A good massage therapist and a crackpot barista? Whooping cranes? We’d have to bring polar bears. Would Obama be invited?… Or would it simply be a bunch of crazy people and their dogs? Start from crazy scratch. No “leaders” or famous folks; no professionals or service providers. No cats. No zebras. No peacocks or kangaroos.

This has evolved, for me, into either a very heady party game, or a much more startling exercise in who and what I really love, and value. The truth of who I simply am. I can stretch my wings, meditate, fight the good fight, be all loving and generous and shit, and try to burst people into flames with my mind. Not long ago, I heard Nina Simons, co-founder of the Bioneers, speak. She asked, given the state of things, “How can we not go mad with grief?” She also said that this is no time for small talk. Enter Jennifer’s sailors.

My daughter woke up the other morning excitedly designing the fort she would build in the living room after breakfast. Every pillow, sofa cushion, chair, stool, sheet and blanket we possess would be involved. “Oh Mom!” she declared. “It will be a beautiful mess!” I leave the Ark, and the future of all things, to her.