Of Wolves, Wild Things, and Jan from HR: An Ode to Rustic Madness 🐔❤️🐻🐺
Plus, this is the week I think Kendall goes completely FERAL. He has that look right???
Hello, Lovelies, How the hell are you?
It has been a heavy-duty week of writing before the strike, and lo, I have had a television epiphany! I know exactly where Ryan Murphy should set his next American Horror Story: Shasta County.
Whenever I am home, I am often seized with a type of rustic madness.
Many of you have heard my tales of my dad cosplaying a farmer, how all the chickens were recently eaten by a bear save one—now known virally throughout the Internet as Needy Chicken, and how I accidentally made Trauma Pies on Thanksgiving by inadvertently using her small, difficult-to-crack eggs, necessitating an 11th-hour emergency pie run to please the fussy aunties who hate everything I cook anyway, and how she (Needy Chick, which we thought was a funnier name) follows you around like a puppy who needs lots of petting and singing to and company-keeping, how she will even do the dishes with you. To be clear, she won't actually do them. She will wait patiently right next to you while you do them, which is very sweet considering she is a chicken and considering how much the men in our family totally love Popeye’s, so even going near the kitchen is a risky move. You have to hand it to her. Needy Chick has balls. She has inspired poems and a masterpiece of artwork from across the country that is soon to be a poster in my office—thank you, again, Todd's daughter.❤️
Yes, indeed. This place is funny. But it is also as grotesque, bloody, and backward-hillbilly-gothic as it gets. Think Ozark on steroids but with some extra insane petty juju thrown in for good measure. Now, you would think it would be a more evolved place because the name “Shasta” in Sanskrit means “teacher” but no, dear readers. Alas, this joint is run by meth heads, anti-vaxxers, evangelical cultists, homophobes, white supremacists, and ultra-right-wing militias, all duly elected to the county council with voting machines they now consider too corrupt to continue using, and who demand regularly and quite angrily that Shasta secede from the United States altogether because it is too woke. Doofuses.
Most people go there because they are on the run from the law and want to disappear or they are total misanthropes who don't like other people and want to be left alone. It is the ultimate place that personifies an angry old guy in his dingy, unwashed underwear on his porch with an AR-15 bellow-burping, “Get off of my lawn!” Except his lawn isn't really a lawn, it's more of a dusty junkyard straight out of Sanford & Son, littered with a vast, crowded landscape of beer cans, broken washing machines, dead dryers, rusted refrigerators, carburetors, the odd vacuum or two, and other unidentifiable tractor parts.
It used to be pristine evergreen wilderness with hundreds of thousands of acres of crystalline mountain lakes, richly scented shaded groves, and secret streams... before it all burned down. This is another reason folks were drawn there.
When I was little growing up there, it was still an untrammeled, wild place... with even more bears and mountain lions and wolves and coyotes and rattlesnakes and deer... really every creature imaginable. The woods were alive with flora, fauna, and fungi. There was so much to explore and discover and find as a little kid sent outside to play on her own.
I did an interview this week with Womancake Magazine, which referred to me as “a wild thing” and it reminded me of the time when I was four and my kookadoo parents had gone to dinner up there at some friends' house and taken me along. The dinner had gone late and as a little kid, naturally, I'd fallen asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night in this strange bunk bed. It must have been three in the morning. But at age four, I'd never done a sleepover before, so the whole situation was completely alarming to me, plus no Scooby-Doo night light, hello? This was not good.
I looked around and I thought, I can't believe they left me here. No way. I've got to get home. So, very quietly, I got up and walked right out the front door and ran all the way home two miles in the dark with no shoes. As I came up the rocky mountain driveway, our dog, Braveheart, an Australian Shepherd mutt easily twice my size, started to go berserk jumping all over me and I was like, “Braveheart, shut up, it's me, down boy.”
As I get to the front steps of our little house in the woods, I knock on the door and my mom and dad answer, completely confused and bleary-eyed. My dad, whom I have never seen in a state of undress, is in his tighty-whities, going what the hell? My mother is gawping in a state of shock in her nightie, this Tippi Hedren-style, delicate, bird-like woman. It is three in the morning, and their four-year-old daughter is standing on the doorstep covered in dirt when she is supposed to be safely tucked in bed at their friends' house miles away.
I marched right past them and got into my own bed. And as my mom was dusting me off and tucking me in, while my father called the people to let them know what had happened, she whispered to me, still aghast at my epic nighttime solo journey, “Weren’t you frightened?”
And I said, “Yeah, I really don't like sleepovers.”
And her eyes got big as plates, and she carped, “No, of the woods! And the dark? There are wolves and bears. Weren't you afraid of getting lost?”
And I remember thinking about it for a moment, and I said, “No, I just followed the trees and decided to be... a little wolf.”
She paused a beat. “Why a little wolf?”
“Because...” And now I was getting super sleepy, so ultra-child logic was taking over, “They're wild, and… wild things aren't afraid of other wild things… or the dark.”
And then I was gone.
Years later, during one of those awful corporate retreat exercises* conducted by a prim woman named Jan from HR, we were going around the circle identifying our spirit animal, and I offhandedly answered, "Well, a wolf, of course."
Everyone in the room gasped. Apparently, I had said the most politically incorrect thing of all. (Surprise) And I looked around and said, “Do you guys NOT know anything about wolves? They are total pack animals. They get along really well as a group. They mate for life. They are super loyal and love their babies. They totally take care of each other.” But I knew right then and there that I had blown it because Jan was marking me down as a freak in her little HR file, which is why I am a writer and a brand consultant. I am a person who makes HR ladies like Jan completely uncomfortable because I write essays like this and have spirit animals, who are fundamentally misunderstood outlaws, but who still also make deep friendships with chickens.
And here is the other thing about the Womancake interview... When I say, I like that I no longer have a filter and that I am kind of the Queen of IDGAF Island, it is not that I don't care about people or their feelings. I so totally DO. It is more that I have finally grown into my authentic self. And one of the reasons I have been able to do this is because of my time in New York City. That I could not speak for almost a year there was also a factor. Being wired shut in the most talkative city in the WHOLE world forced me to shut up and listen to myself, which was good, even if the journey was a complete horror story and a shit show. Ooh, Ryan, here’s another pitch… AHS: Alisa, lol.
OK, this wolf has to figure out how to pay the rent. Stay rad, stay safe, and know that I’m thinking of you always – xoxo, gotham girl
*Nothing against Jan or HR (ever), she was doing her best, but this retreat really was hamstrung by a greater corporate malaise that was clearly out of her control :(
*As an Amazon Influencer, gotham girl may earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.
OK, this is wonderful on so many levels. Yes, your voice, your voice, your voice. Capturing of kid-mind is spot on.
LOVED having you at Womancake! So glad you elaborated in this post about some of the things we talked about. Your voice is so damn strong, and your heart is at least as big as Shasta herself. Wildness is sacred, and women need more of it, all the time, forever.