Here we go, 2010. Year for the pen. I have a bit of poetry coming out in various publications this year, and here is the
first one. I’m sitting among some personal favorites so I’m feeling good. Click below to read. My poem is on page 73.

link!

Wednesday, January 13, 2010
By Dan Majors and Sadie Gurman, Pittsburgh Post-GazetteIn the first hours after the devastating earthquake in Haiti,
while news reports of damage and death were still sketchy, three men huddled on the North Side last night to plan local
relief efforts.

“The first thing you do is share the pain,” said Luke Hingson, president of Brother’s Brother Foundation. “Then you share
the work.

“You talk to each other, and if you know anybody who has been affected, you feel sad about it. The next thing is ‘How
do we help?’ “

Mr. Hingson was meeting with Dr. Leon Pamphile, a native Haitian and executive director of Functional Literacy Ministries
of Haiti, and Russell Bynum, the organization’s chairman, to discuss what aid can be rendered now as well as what will
have to be done later.

“There is a strong connection between the people of Pittsburgh and Haiti,” said Dr. Pamphile, who founded Functional
Literacy Ministries, a Christian nonprofit organization, in 1983. “There is a strong desire to help in education, health
care and to provide hope for those who are hopeless.”

There are more than 100 Haitians living in Pittsburgh, many of them in East Liberty and Point Breeze. That number does
not include the students at universities, Dr. Pamphile said.

Many of those residents, he said, were calling him last night, desperate for any news from the island nation, which is
about the size of the state of Maryland, with a population of more than 9 million. News, however, was scarce as lines
of communication were disrupted by the quake.

“The phone has been ringing nonstop,” Dr. Pamphile said. “People are concerned, and they’re unable to get through.”

“Right now, we’re just hearing anecdotal stories about buildings being destroyed,” Mr. Hingson said.

The effort to help didn’t take long to get started, mostly because it was already in place. Churches and community
groups in Pittsburgh have been contributing educational and medical aid to Haiti for decades.

“We’ve been active in the country for 40 years,” said Mr. Hingson, whose charitable group has been headquartered in
Pittsburgh for 50 years. “We work with a number of groups in Haiti. We send medical supplies and other things through
Christian ministries. There is an enormous number of mission groups and medical teams that go to Haiti each year.”

Brother’s Brother has provided more than $3.4 billion in medical supplies, textbooks, food, seeds and other humanitarian
supplies to people around the world in more than 140 countries. It sent more than 50 medical shipments to Haiti last
year, Mr. Hingson said, and had already been planning to send another shipment before yesterday’s earthquake.

“There will be Pittsburgh hands on the ground in Haiti in about a week,” Mr. Hingson said. “These are people whose lives
have been damaged, and we have to help them. And then you have a rebuilding process. We’re talking about need, not
just today, but need four months from now, maybe years from now.

“We can deliver, because we have. But we don’t have the same personal connections that some other people do. People
who live in Pittsburgh who are from Haiti or have family there and have day-in, day-out connections there. There are
groups that have a daily interest in Haiti.”

Functional Literacy Ministries is one such group.

“We have had a medical and educational mission in Haiti for about 26 years now,” Mr. Bynum said. “We have about 70
reading centers there. We have a clinic that we just built in Thomazeau, in the mountains outside Port-au-Prince, in July.
And we already were in the process of getting a group to go to Haiti to convene with doctors there to do some medical
mission work.

“The doctors and teachers we bring in are native Haitians, so this is really hitting us very deeply. Because we know the
people.”

Another organization with local ties, the Friends of Hopital Albert Schweitzer Haiti, a nonprofit based in Point Breeze, was
working to help earthquake victims. The organization focuses on cultural awareness, as well as the health and economic
needs of people in central Haiti’s Artibonite valley.

Hopital Albert Schweitzer’s main campus is more than two hours from Port-au-Prince, near where the earthquake struck.
The hospital employs more than 500 people and has 120 beds.

Friends president Lucy Rawson said her husband, Ian, the managing director of the hospital, was driving home from a
village near the hospital when he felt his car wavering on the road. He was able to e-mail her about 6:30 p.m. Eastern
time, she said, but she had not heard from him since.

“He said his car was going from side to side on the road, and he ended up in a ditch,” Mrs. Rawson said. “He got out to
see what was wrong with the car, and all these people were screaming and shouting. He thought they were worried about
him. Then he realized they were worried about something else.”

Their homes and cars were shaking around them.

“He said, ‘We’re all OK,’ ” she said. ” ‘Surprised and shaken, but OK.’ “

Numerous charities are accepting donations to aid relief efforts in Haiti. Donations may be made to:

• Brother’s Brother Foundation - Haiti, 1200 Galveston Ave., Pittsburgh 15233, call 412-321-3160, or visit
www.brothersbrother.org.

• Functional Literacy Ministry of Haiti, 1064 Premier St., Pittsburgh 15201, call 412-784-0342, or visit the Web site at
www.flmhaiti.org.

• UNICEF also is helping with relief efforts. Call 1-800-4UNICEF or go to www.unicefusa.org/haitiquake

Proximity is always on the lip of my mind. If I’m walking somewhere, I think in invisible string–tethered to this, to
that and to nothing. Corners snapping connections and the bus coming drags another taut, reels me in and I get home
somehow, like a magic trick. I am here and then I’m there, and so my used-to-be present place is now another
then. It’s a game of vision and space. The only thing I think about when I am sitting still is the pilates teacher
talking softly and matter-of-fact about people who draw their shoulders in as if protecting their heart. She says you
have to sit up straight and push back, let the bloody beast be pulled to the ceiling on a string. You can practice this
and feel strong and proud of everything your body is carrying around–the guts, the thoughts, ghosts of cells once
regenerating now gone. I imagine them like the atom bomb fall out–shadows burned into the sides of houses.

Once I said to someone, “I think it’s all about my proximity to others that I focus on to keep me sane.” Whatever I
am between the things I can immediately define. It’s silly and true, really. Silly that I think this and vocalize it and
true that the line remains blank until I can flail out my threads and figure it out. The proximity. My here to your there.

Lately I’ve been spending a thick amount of time by myself, and I’m starting to see another side to
the nickel. Realizing the distance, the mattering distance, is the self from self. The solitude is taking string and
tying knots and staying close. Is it what we do alone that truly defines us? Those coffees at tables with books and
pens and headphone-less walks from the bus stop to the front door. After I take out the key but before I turn the lock,
the second the shower shuts off. That precisely solo and definite half of a breath that escapes us right then. I’m
talking about that. When I focus on those type of things I can’t help but feel some relief, as if the best chorus is in
an endless song–how you can have nothing to do with any of it yet own a universe.

I think about getting older at weddings, when I note the wonderful amount of gray in my hair and around kids, like
my niece. I like talking to her because I have to simplify things a certain way–I have to explain or ask with a certain
absolute, and I hear the wonder come back in my voice when we have an interaction. Last year I carried the
getting-older bit like a pinched nerve; I turned 28 and the state of the current dawned on me in a new way. At first
it was the coat that didn’t fit but choked me, or that amusement park ride where the floor drops away and you’re
clenched to the wall with force and speed as it continues to turn. A bigger hopeless than the usual insecurities. Is
this something that everyone feels at one point or another? I had to give it time, but I settled into it. After all I will never
fear a clock, only the blank pages and the moments wasted when I didn’t write. I say that with an affection.

Some may say these days we are too connected. That technology allows us to be anywhere and everywhere,
to find any person we are curious about, to put ourselves out there in playlists and blogs and instant messaging.
Sometimes I’m one of those people. Tonight? I’m not.Technology can beamazing. It can rock you back on your
heels and make you marvel and bring tears to your eyes. At least that’s my situation currently.

Here’s the background to the story: my paternal grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. He built his own
church, preached there, and had a consistent congregation with him. Up until the age of 7, when my grandmother
passed away, I sat in the front row of that church with relatives–between my father and my sister. My dad would
sneak me Certs from a roll in his blazer pocket, and the testifying would scary me something fierce. I watched
the same aunt who taught me to roller skate shout in tongues and raise her hands. I watched others turn and
kneel to the pews and weep while they prayed loudly. When my grandmother was sick with cancer,
they brought her in a hospital bed, and some people prayed over her and I remember one man fainting.
I watched relatives sing praise, watched my grandfather kick and shout and come down the aisle, face turning red as he summoned the spirit. Yes,
it scared me. And yes, it colored my experience with organized religion forever. I could never sit still in church
after that–if the service was calm and quiet and organized, then I couldn’t respond to it. I felt awkward,
uncomfortable and scared. Though the atmosphere of my grandfather’s church scared me as a small
child, the chaos of that makes sense to me now, feels almost comfortable. It is what I remember.

My grandfather passed away about six years ago. I haven’t heard him preach for much, much longer than that.
Since I was a kid. On my last trip home, my dad gave me a website to an archive of sermons. There, in
the archive, was a link to my grandfather giving a testimony, and a song. 4 minutes and 11 seconds of his
voice, his power–this man who could preach himself into raw shouts. I’ve been listening to it over and over again,
in tears. My heart feels crazy. I miss him, and that time in my life…it’s so long ago and hazy now, but
right there when I listen to him. That feeling of being overwhelmed, of witnessing this indescribable
power. It makes me bring my hands to my face and sob, and I can’t explain why. I will never be able to give
it words because it is beyond my language. It’s the tucked away room in my heart that opens so rarely–a space
I can’t force myself into. It’s only revealed in the unexplained realm of experience, memory, connection, fear, and love.

I think about my family, and about how much I know of them, and how little I know/will ever know. Thinking I
will live my life unaware of some things, and I will live with the features before me–that the line
leading back is something I’m a part of and extend from. I listen to him and think: this is something I witnessed.
I think of the songs the goosebumps would give me, and I think of who I’ve been and who I am. These things
they are connected. I’m tangled in that thread.

I think about his funeral. It was the first time that all the grandkids had been together in years. We sat in a
row together and I leaned against my cousin’s shoulder, tired and devastated and chest shattered. Thinking
of my father and worrying about him. We all stood in the front together and each held a candle, and then my
grandfather’s brother and his wife stepped up and sang together. He played guitar. My cousin and I looked
at each other and he squeezed my hand. “My god the sound of them brings me back.” I nodded, because it did.
We both started crying harder as they sang this beautiful twanged and practiced harmony, a memory breathing
before us. I remember this more than anything else about that day.

I sit here listening to my grandfather shout and sing and my heart feels like it’s fighting to surface, as if
hearing its name called. As if wanting to answer.

The above = my dominant viewing spot for the past 4, 5 days. Another epic migraine. Except for the 6 hour lie on New Year’s
Eve, when I convinced myself I was well enough to go to a party, smile and fake it. I was, of course, wrong. I had the right
intentions, however–get some fresh air, seem some lovely faces, engage in conversation. Pain trumps intent though, and so I
left without really saying goodbye to people and woke up the next morning with the usual unexplainable ache in my noggin and
a healthy dose of guilt(for the lack of au revoir–that’s very unlike me). Anyway, I feel like I’m finally crawling out of it…
right in time to go back to work tomorrow. Time for another doctor, because this episode was just ridiculous.

So I started my new year by hiding how sick I felt from everyone around me. I’m over it. I haven’t been well enough to do
much over the past few days except think–think on the ground behind me a bit but mostly on what’s in front. I squared away
my first gig for ‘10, and I’m ready to do more. There’s a new class to show my dukes to, and a few projects that are already
stealing my heart. Learning to approach them with “I will” instead of “I want to.”

More after I obtain some rest and a day or two of painlessness.

One of those unexpected days. The kind you aren’t ready for, or won’t think you’ll have. The kind where you drive a road you used
to drive all the time and knew like handbacks and simple addition and now it seems so different, more open, more things built
along its boundaries. A day with family, familiar faces, and remembering who I am and where I come from–a reminder that I can
go anywhere I want to go from here, that I am loved and hopeful. That I can still handle driving in the snow, and certain paths will always be simple to trace with eyes closed.

Going back to where I came from in a few days. I prepare to go with a project in mind–I’ll steal a few moments alone here
and there to make use of the rental and drive around my old town. Documentation for research purposes is one way to say it. Feelings
range from place to place–affection for some and a throat-full of bile for others. The visual is just a map back to how things
felt, cul de sac pockets in the brain, the hard-to-reach curved corner of the hippocampus. Then I will print them out, clothesline them over the writing desk and get to work.

Ink idea is the works for Jessica, my exquisite first roommate. I feel compelled to do something for her, in thought of her.
Ever since I found out about her murder, I haven’t been quite thesame. I think about her often. I’ve been in touch with our other roommate,
as she found out about Jess just as recently.We’ve taken to trading our stories back and forth, reminding each other of things forgotten which is the most precious & strange
thing–for someone to tell you so clearly about something you never remembered. Then, there. It’s back as if never gone. There
connection is key for me in dealing with Jessica’s death. It’s also pretty brilliant to have an old friend give you a lengthy
run down on their life and what they’ve been through over the past 8 years. That is exactly what we did for one another–the
summations are asymmetric, as significance is weighed differently in retrospect. In a way, we are talking about another lifetime,
or multiple ones with clumsy progressions. Anyway, it’s been nice to talk with someone who was there. It’s kind of like saying
“this happened and we lived through it.”

More thoughts, always more thoughts, but sleep summons me. Work was long and busy, and my therapy session cracked the
head and heart open. And some things are best when they are stirred up then reabsorbed into the body.

December 17th(today) is the international day to end violence against sex workers.

To check out gatherings today in/near your city, click here

Stopping the Terror: A Day to End Violence Against Prostitutes
by Annie Sprinkle

In 2003 “Green River Killer” Gary Ridgeway confessed to having strangled ninety women to death and having “sex” with
their dead bodies.

He stated, “I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would
not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought
I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

Sadly, some Seattle area prostitutes, their boyfriends or pimps, knew the Green River Killer was Gary Ridgeway for years.
But they were either afraid to come forward for fear of being arrested themselves, or when they did come forward the
police didn’t believe them over the “upstanding family man” Gary Ridageway. It seemed as though the police weren’t
working very hard to find the Green River Killer. If the victims had been teachers, nurses or secretaries or other
women, I suspect–as Ridgeway did– that the killer would have been caught much sooner. Ridgeway remained at
large for twenty years.

From working as a prostitute myself for two decades I know that violent crimes against sex workers often go unreported,
unaddressed and unpunished. There are people who really don’t care when prostitutes are victims of hate crimes, beaten,
raped and murdered. They will say:

“They got what they deserved.”
“They were trash.”
“They asked for it”
“What do they expect?”
“The world is better off without those whores.”

No matter how people feel about sex workers and the politics surrounding them, sex workers are a part of our
neighborhoods, communities and our families and always will be. Sex workers are women, trans people and men of all shapes,
sizes, colors, ages, classes and backgrounds who are working in the sex industry for a wide range of reasons.
Many of us are out and proud, and spend a lot of time trying to explain to the public that we freely choose our
work and we are not “victims.” But the truth is, some of us have been, or will become, real victims of rape, robbery and horrendous crimes.

When Ridgeway got a plea bargain in 2003, he received a life sentence in exchange for revealing where his victims’
bodies were thrown or buried. As the names of the (mostly 17- to 19-year old) victims, were disclosed, I felt a need to
remember and honor them. I cared, and I knew other people cared, too.

So I contacted Robyn Few, the founder of the Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP) based in San Francisco and we
made December 17th as the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. We invited people everywhere to
conduct memorials and vigils in their countries and cities. Robyn co-produced an open-mike vigil on the lawn of San Francisco’s City Hall.

Since 2003, each year hundreds of people in dozens of cities around the world have participated in this day to end
violence– from Montreal where people marched with red umbrellas, to protests against police brutaility in Hong Kong,
a candlelight vigil in Vancouver, a memorial ritual in Sydney, a dance to overcome pain and traum in East Godavery,
India. More events are planned for 2008, the sixth year of the event.

The concept for the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers is simple. Anyone can choose a place and
time to gather, invite others to gather and share their stories, writings, thoughts, poems, and memories of victims,
related news and performances. Or people can do something personal, alone at home, such as lighting a candle or
taking a ritual memorial bath. We encourage discussions among friends, by email, on blogs. People are encouraged to
list their events at the SWOP website so others can attend them, and to share the power of their actions. People can
also participate by making a donation to a group that helps sex workers by teaching them about dangers and how to best
survive. Two such non-profits are St. James Infirmary and AIM Healthcare.

Had another roller coaster dream last night. It happens every now and then, more often than I realize–a dream about
waiting in line, pointing out their curves and loops to others, getting in, and riding one, hanging on. Always hanging on,
warning my passenger as we ascend that I almost always fall out. I put both elbow bends up under the bar and push
against the pull, and that’s how I woke up this morning–arms in two L-shapes, fists clenched up, laughing. I woke up
in the middle of a drop and I was still laughing about it.

Officially, the semester is over. I had a stressful ending–the stomach flu found me on the very last day(Monday), when
both of my final projects were due. I spent the day puking and worrying about getting my work in on time. Everything
turned out okay and the sickness backed off by evening. The queasiness is sticking around but it’ll pass. br>

The migraines have been a bit better–I do believe this medication is working to a degree. I’m going to pick up some
magnesium supplements and riboflavin(Vitamin B2) as well–both appear to help with head pain. I’m working on an
apppointment with the headache clinic here at Pitt–neurologist, more tests, more trying things. I’m also applying for intermittent
FMLA to protect my job, since the migraines put me in a position to always be running out of sick time. FMLA will give me
the extra day or two per month just in case. It isn’t something I want to do, but my options aren’t exactly limitless.

Next week, I head to Ohio to spend the holiday with the family. I’m looking forward to the drive–I’ve been traveling so
little lately and I’m really getting antsy about it. Starting to daydream about exit ramps, road signs, beaches, bodies
of water. Part of me feels ridiculously bored with my routine, and a bit burned out by the semester. I have a lot of reading,
cleaning, writing, creating to catch up on. A lot of life to catch up on…that feels most appropriate to say.