In Trash, Dorothy Allison is taking the name she’s always known (trash/white trash) and owning it as a generation of people born into something they could not help and certainly knew no better than the conditions they were afforded and the roles the women around them played.
I can’t say too much about the book because I’ll ruin a perfectly good thing with my shitty words but I love it so hard for everything it makes me think about. My mind goes crazy reading this book and stretches out to open doors for ideas I never had. It makes me want to say so much that I can hardly say anything at all.
I think when I wrote the last half of this post, I was mostly trying to say this:
“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
—Fight Club
…but of course, I couldn’t quite get it out the way Tyler Durden/Chuck Palahniuk did. Chuck could say the alphabet better than I can.
I think I need to have this (horribly depressing but ultimately true) quote in my life somewhere – perhaps on the bathroom mirror where I’m prone to scrawl inspirations in lipstick – as a reminder that I have to make my life worth more than a fucking desk job. Has anyone ever died on an overdose of routine?
I think about this degree I’m trying to obtain and how it won’t benefit me at all except to prove to myself that I can finish something. I talked to a doctor the other day who half-complimented my efforts before saying, “That’s how I did it. I put myself through one class at a time since my son was two, as a single parent.” And she’s a psychologist. I’m just trying to get a fucking AA at twenty-four years old and it is not easy. I thought about scrapping the whole thing so many times already. It should be encouraging that someone else could do threefold what I’m doing and be very successful but it’s not. It was discouraging. It was her looking at my situation and saying, “Yep, it sucks. And I did it longer and harder than you. Suck it up, child.” I felt like my difficulties and struggles were insignificant because her triumph was ultimately better.
This can be boiled down to self-esteem and insecurity and the infallible pressures I put on myself to do better, do more and to prove something. I’ve yet to figure out what I’m proving and who’s supposed to see it, but when I do I figure the load will get a little lighter.
-Pretty Lush
