graceless

well, cadence, what’s a cadence? I’m scheduling this for you but I have fucked off into the woods (with warning) and done my best.

this is a piece I read on the 30th in bucktown, Chicago, on the theme of Conspiracy. it is both winnowed and I wish it was more expansive. i do in fact have a series of poems about DB Cooper, and maybe something will come from this. i also wrote about girls school conspiracies as well as something important to me, to remain redacted, and i feel proud about it. maybe for the newsletter but I am feeling some kind of way about writing and “performing” or being someone aloud. this piece ended up specifically to be read out loud and i’m unhappy with it, but alas. here you go.

in any case, I guess I wish I could say I’d send you something next week, because I am working on things but safe to say: it’s grim. it feels very bad out there because it is very bad. i have to believe some things will remain in place no matter what, so what I will say is for the love of god, vote local - literally a shitty judge VOTED OUT may mean the possibility of a life, a family, a community less fucked. i am frankly very afraid of other things. and also ceasefire now. please, for fuck’s sake, please. better people than us were helpless, as carolyne forche said. i can’t tell you what to do other than what you do, but keep each other safe, and maybe we will see you on the other side, when i mark ten days from now, or longer.

xo and off to the woods with me

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Once, the word conspire literally meant the act of breathing together. There are urban legends and there are mysteries and there are thick and thin plots and there are conspiracies and sometimes they all get mixed up, as we tell the legends of them to each other and puzzle out the holes in the story.

In 1971 a man boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in Portland bound for Seattle with a ticket signed Dan Cooper. At cruising altitude, he ordered a bourbon and soda, then handed the flight attendant a note telling her he had a bomb, flashed his suitcase of wires and dynamite, and politely requested $200,000 in cash and six parachutes.

They radio the authorities and land the plane in Seattle. 36 passengers disembarked onto an abandoned runway The six crew members remained as the money changed hands in a sack. The man bantered with a flight attendant, handed her a stack of cash when she asked if he’d share, and she solemnly turned him down, because she couldn’t accept tips. When the flight attendants asked to leave, he obliges before the plane is refueled, and then Flight 305 taxied off.

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Where did I take off to in the fall of 2014? It was sort of incredible how many people tried to find me but I kept slipping away. This was also made more incredible by the fact that my keys had gone missing, and it was impossible to get into my apartment without them: the front gate required unlatching the bolt to go in and out. My phone went missing a few times, and my ID. Different parts of me vanished.

I wish I could say that I'd disappeared into a vast global conspiracy was out to get me, that I was key to a grand plan, or that I had a grand plan to take the money and run. In actuality I’d stopped sleeping for about six weeks after trying out one of those road warrior consulting jobs, getting fired, still not being able to sleep, and decided fuck all to that reality. Things had gone so awry and I'd run out of ways to ameliorate them. My brain had run out of safeguards to keep the harm away.

We are all haunted by our collective conspiracy to maintain this notion of everything happening for a reason. Why not piece together any narrative that would make this true, no matter it’s actual complete delusion? Because sometimes it's just your bad shit bingo card for a few years: assault and people dying and grinding through and keeping people alive and abuse and the garden variety harm. For me, no amount of work or exhaustion or drink could keep it away anymore, and now I was alert to all the dangers, and would find a way out. It just also meant everything I did was so erratic, hidden, and confusing, that I became very hard to find.

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In 1971, the newspapers mistakenly said the man on the plane was named DB Cooper and the name stuck. On the tarmac in Seattle, D.B. Cooper told the crew to head towards Mexico City with the landing gear locked down, at minimum speed. At some point he instructed them to remain in the cockpit and before they landed again in Reno, the suitcase, the sack, and the parachutes were gone, along with Cooper, never to be seen again.

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When I disappeared, I slipped from the searching eyes of my friends and family ten years ago, and also consensual reality itself.

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One day in 2024, I’m talking with my little brother, asking him about how he finds me. I am wondering about being skittish. I am asking about the meaning of wary, of aloof, of reserved.

It’s just, he says, it’s just that sometimes you kind of bail.

What do you mean? I say. Before he answers, I ask, actually, tell me more about how work is going.

My brother goes, see, you just did it, you just parachuted out of the plane of this conversation.

To which I say, are you saying I just DB Cooper things!?

You DB Cooper'd it! he says. Where'd you go? Nobody knows.

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In 2024 I still existed, though, because there was gChat and email and social media, although I was careful not to reveal too many things there. Like DB Cooper, it was important to communicate carefully, through few channels, keep it in the dark. There's still no clear consensus on what actually happened in flight, who he actually was or what he even looked like. Thirty six passengers, six crew members, plus the FBI, two fighter jets, and a Northwest Airlines representative who delivered the cash would never have the entire story. When he bailed, he took any possibility of fact and truth, consensual reality, away.

The FBI says DB Cooper didn’t make it, but they found a bunch of the marked bills cached away in Washington State. Plenty of people have claimed his identity. Some people believe the entire airplane crew banded together, conspired to either invent this man or hide him somewhere in the plane, then smuggled him out and split the money. I like to think he made it off that 727.

Once people found me alive and still breathing, out of my mind but not dead, it was a 5150 involuntary hold that went from 72 hours to 10 inpatient days. I went in on Halloween, which I do not recommend. While it is very hard to sleep in a psych ward, but sudden onset, intravenous Ativan will help. The entire first 72 hours parachuted out of my memory forever and into thin air. When I came to, I would stare out the hospital windows and plot the route to my house where I could hide out, and then vanish, if I could just bolt out the doors and up the stairs to the Pink Line, run as fast as I could and vault the fence into my apartment, then anywhere else. Safe to say I did not accomplish this. 

It’s dramatic to say I’ve been held hostage to the inability to bolt, but since then I’ve pushed at the possibilities of escape, of getting out, of bailing. I have done dirt trail runs or 100 mile gravel races, ridden down Highway 1 or through wildfire scarred mountains in the Cascades, alone, camped alone, mountain biked alone, driven very fast as far as I can go, alone. But to do no harm is to remain, even if it’s just a text message, a note left on my dashboard of which trail I went on, a pin dropped. 

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He probably wanted to tell people but maybe he was careful about it. Maybe DB Cooper was careful with the redacted life he would reveal so he could be known in pieces. Selective disappearance. Like now: there are things I wish I did not remember, in the way I remember them, but they have never been recited in total. Collect all the times I’ve told the story to different people and the composite might come close.

Maybe I shouldn’t DB Cooper through my life but this slipping through the cracks of conversations and seasons, lives and stories and spaces and places is my reward. I was found. I did make it. Ten years on, and I am glad I remain. 

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many thanks to yk for getting it out there, and the offers of others, and take care of yourselves. you can find the link if you want advice. here’s some metric: