I love this country.

I love my big dumb loud bloated greedy sloppy violent country.
This country is my home. My home is where I come from.

“Go back where you came from!”
Here. I come from here. 

I come from America: Buffalo, Albany, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Saint Paul.
The 6-month road trip when I slept in a different city every week, sometimes every night.

I come from Glendive Montana where I sat on those short stubby Badlands mountains by day and drank beer and sang karaoke by night, and I come from Muskogee Oklahoma where I spent four days writing a play and watching television after the transmission on my Subaru dropped out. I come from Winona Mississippi where Led Zeppelin helped me get out of a speeding ticket and the bugs were so thick they turned to gravy under the windshield wipers.

I come from the Cincinnati four-way at Chili John’s in Burbank and the beef alicha wot with yellow peas and cabbage at Mesob in Minneapolis. I come from mochi at Fugetsu-Do and chicken wings from La Nova.

I come from delivering pizzas and answering phones and entering data and writing emails. I come from “yes, sir” and “sorry, ma’am” and sore feet and sunburned skin and frostbitten toes.

I come from pride parades and warehouse raves, 12-step calls and self-help books, door-knocking and envelope-stuffing, comedy clubs and polka parlors.

I come from Motown and Gershwin, Donna Summer and Joan Jett, Bruce and Aretha, Prince and Latifah. I come from Anne Tyler and Michael Chabon, dream hampton and Janet Malcolm, Shulamith Firestone and bell hooks, Gloria Steinem and Imogene Coca, Ruth Buzzi and Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Carol Burnett.

I come from a big rented house with a deep backyard, a fence halfway down the middle, hand-pushed lawnmowers and sticky tar driveways and that wild green spot behind the garage. I come from classrooms with wooden desks and dusty bookcases and deep red Persian rugs. I come from Fantasy Island and The Love Boat, Doritos and Coca Cola, licking my finger to pull crumbs from my parents’ bedspread.

I come from colonialism and slavery, capitalism and oppression, immigrants and refugees. I come from invasive non-native species. I come from a scourge and a virus and a plague, heaving seething roiling masses of desperate humanity, competing for resources, exploited by a viciously self-serving ruling class.

I come from George crying for his mother and witches burned at the stake. From children in cages and mothers crying back “please, please.”

I come from unfathomable cruelty and abuse and depression and alcoholism, ferocious striving and abject failure and chronic disappointment and existential terror. I come from tenuous, temporary assimilation.

I come from a single rose on a chain link fence, an ice-cold popsicle, a cozy-warm blanket, singing the baby to sleep in the rocking chair.

I come from fireworks that light up the sky and terrify the dogs, wars that leave these kids with a second scoop of ice cream and those kids dying hungry.

I come from the long slow exquisite note of a perfectly tuned fiddle.
Or if you like, a violin.

I come from fires and shouting and marching and voting and giving for the cause and taking back the night.

I come from early early morning, another hot wet day rising still and soft from the grass and the blacktop, quiet but for the birds, birds everywhere chirping and cawing and singing and maybe mourning I don’t know. I’ll never know. They speak a language I don’t.

I come from late late night, dark bars and sticky sweat and broken glass and rock and roll, drugs in the bathroom and subways rocking you to unsafe sleep. People taking what they want from you.

I come from wonder and horror and the finger trap of loving something gorgeous and terrible. From the state of endless compromise, making shaky peace each day, code-switching, liminality, neitherness, bothness.

I come from “we can make this place beautiful.”  I come from “when we know better we do better.” I come from always working, trying, hustling, for better, different, more, tomorrow. I come from freedom caught like lightning.

I come from not knowing where I come from, or where I belong, because I come from America.

I hope I come from “we survived.”
I hope I come from “we made this place better.”

I hope the Gods bless America before it’s too late.
I hope for this big dumb harmful diseased precarious country.
I hope it’s not my fate to hate myself.

I hope I don’t come from the country of hate.
I hope the walls inside me don’t crumble, cave me down into the poison pit, where there is no making it better, where it’s already too late.

So I love this place I call home, that calls me home.

All its lives, mine and yours, I can’t help it, I need to choose it, I love them all.
I have to light the sparkler, sing happy birthday, I have to be glad it was born.