A STATEMENT FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK

THE DEPARTMENT OF CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK

SOMEWHERE IN WISCONSIN

February 1, 2018 The Honorable Milkman Chairman of Milk Intelligence United States Dairy Administration Lac du Lac, Wisconsin, 44321 To Whom it May Concern: Regret is that thing you really​ ​can’t handle. Shoulda called your grandma on her last birthday.

Shoulda cared to call. Shoulda called the bluff about last month’s rent. Shoulda spent your last dollar on food. Shoulda walked instead of driven. Shoulda had good intentions with that dude. Shoulda learned how to make a living. Shoulda invented Instagram. Shoulda screwed your Ikea bed frame in tighter. Shoulda stopped regretting. In the beginning. In the beginning. There was regret. As your mother says, “As the scriptures say, there was Adam and Eve naked and ashamed in a cave.” It’s hard for us to behave and harder still to remember all those mistakes, missteps, and breaks in integrity, so yea, we don’t even like to call them “regrets”. We like to call them​ the things we really can’t think about right now, ​which is true in part, because that thing you shoulda done, it’s not inside you anymore. It’s fallen out of you. That thing you can’t go back and do. It’s fallen out of time as well. It’s the way the past escapes from the present without you. Pain panini pressed out of your body. You can’t hold it; that thing you shoulda done. It’s already downstream. The proverbial spilling of milk. Milky rapids. Milky seas. See, all of this hurt you and your ancestors have ever enacted and suffered through is the milk, spilled. Your traumas are the milk.

Your mama’s traumas are the milk. Your ilk’s the milk. Your birth’s the milk. Your breakups. Your breakdowns are the milk. All that bad stuff that just doesn’t compute: that’s the milk. And strangely, you need it and it needs you. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, is the answer to the question; Got milk? We have a lot of it. Fountains of milk. Cold glasses of milk. Squirt guns filled with milk. Entire Wisconsins of milk. Milk on milk. We are mammals after all.

We love the stuff. We are the only mammals that drink it after we are babies too. And, we are also the only mammals that refer to each other as “babies” into adulthood. Hey baby. Good morning baby. Still babies. Babies. Milk. It reminds us of the beginning. Of that time when all of the things we shoulda done were contained--still inside us--soft milky bones, milky teeth, milk not yet spilled. Delicate but safe. Like fine china in a hutch. Milk. It’s also something new mothers can make without thinking about. Mother and child. Oxytocin and love. Other animals can’t make it, but humans like to make stuff up, so we have a lot of milk. In a way, we nourish ourselves. We entertain ourselves with milk, with the promise of keeping ourselves alive forever.

But, let’s entertain something else for once. We’ve got all this milk, spilled, and unspilled. This abundance of nutrition and pain. Goodness gained and goodness lost. So now what? What do you do with potential regrets? What do you do with past regrets? What do you do with the regrets of your foremothers 1

and fathers? With all that ancient shame that pools like dew in the curves of your twisted D.N.A. ​Maybe you learn to dance, learn to speak, learn to write, learn to feel, learn to fall into something, learn to run your mouth, learn to deal with it, so you can finally express, finally relinquish your regrets. Let them flow like silk from our mouths. A creamy confessional poem; because the difference between dairy and diary is one letter after all, just put the “I” in a different place to achieve new footing. You might just lack the toes to secure yourself in soil---so root yourself from within--become less lactose intolerance. The difference between milk and yogurt is time after all. Time and some bacteria. Time realizing that the small terrors that are supposed to hurt you are actually there to feed your gut, trying to give you the guts to face the things that ​actually​ hurt you: big things. Sickness. Strife. The difference between time and space as we perceive it is milk after all. I mean, what is human perception without the nourishment and departure of the body and soul? Life and death. Contain and spill. Composition and Decomposition.

Our confession, though: the difference between a rant and a P.S.A is that nobody can listen to a rant at the end of the day. Nobody wants to watch someone spill milky words. So, what if this P.S.A is itself spilled milk? An accident. A fumbled hearing before a trial, something that we at the department of crying over spilled milk might regret. What if we regret ever speaking to you?

Disclaimer: since it’s too much to handle, we at department are obliged to tell you to not cry over this milk. Hence: ​do not cry over spilled milk​. But, as always, we await your canned response. You will try to explain that the only reason you made it through infancy and adulthood is because you were a milk drinker. You are here today because of milk, so your tears would not fall without them. So, in a way, you cry milk tears and it’s just so hard to keep them from hitting the ground. Waa Waa Waa. You even cup yours hands to catch them just to try to put them back in your eyes--like some kind of game. Hold them back like unrolled dice.

It’s absurd--what you do to avert the pain of remembering pain. So why not take this to its logical extreme? What about milk on a cosmic level? Cosmic coffee with cream.What happens if you spill the milk into a black hole? Will you then spill the milk into a parallel universe, where, let’s say, spilling milk is a good thing and drinking milk is a bad thing? In this ​other​ universe, people intentionally spill milk onto the ground to feed the earth. The earth, in turn, through a ecological glandular system of sorts, distributes spilled milk equally among all livings things. Drinking milk in this universe is considered unfortunate, as it over-nourishes individual organisms, leaving everyone else vulnerable, which, in the end, feels somehow similar to our solar system, our world. In this milky way.

Oh our milky way. ​Your​ milk way. You. This is about you after all. So here’s something more personal: what if you just decide to let the milk spill? Just let it fall. Watch it in slow motion--notice the splash. Maybe even grin. And what if you take this a step further still? What if you decide to bend down to lap up a life’s worth, a ancestry’s worth, a species worth of spilled milk, as if it were a powerade mirage in a desert? What if you’re done crying the milky tears of your childhood? Of your mom’s childhood? Of your great grandpa’s eleventh year on earth, the one when he accidentally hit the neighbors dog on his bike? What if you decide to recollect--​re​collect--your regrets?

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Well then, if that’s the case, you’ve just started searching for the thing that’s made you feel the threat of feeling regret, all that weeping for the things you can’t keep anymore. As they say, if there is a will there is a whey. If there is a curd of courage in your rage there is a whey. A way out. Start searching for a method of escape from the regret-inducing fist that has you pinned. That claw machine inside your dreams. Not the thing that pushed the milk from your hands. The thing that pushed your soul outside your body. The farmer who overmilks your brain. The monster waiting for you somewhere on the earth. The earth. So small inside our milky way. If you know where haunts it you, you might as well find it and milk it. Start seeking it out: that thing. That thing that’s messing you up. That ancient algorithm of regret. That self-destructive Rube Goldberg crying-over-spilled-milk-experiment that’s somehow stood the test of time. Time. This time. It’s ​your​ fault. ​Your​ fault. ​Yours and ours.​ Faults shared. Faults exalted and burned at the stake.

A fault. A fault is actually a crack in a tectonic plate. The way the earth evens the score with itself. The earth’s way of displaying its mistakes--sutures that make the planet and skull possible. Fissures in this rock we live on that releases magma, the milk of the land. Go into it! This fault. Propel into what the earth is spilling; the fire, the carbon, the rock, the grass, the trees, the ants, the baboon, the australopithecus, the Babylonians, the Bintu, the English, the Americans, the Oregonians, the New Yorkers, the Sheboyganers, the Balitimoreans, the towns, the homes, their lands, the rooms, theirs heads, their mouths, their words, their moans, their hormones, their glands, their skin, their blood, their minds, their thoughts, their data, their prolactin, their food, their drink, their thirst, their thirst for milk. Yes. Milk.

White ass milk. Drink that shit up. All of it. Nourish yourself by downing shame; whole fat, no skim, pure swill. Regret on regret that’s been spilled like all that milk before you. Spill, surge, run toward that thing that feels, feels, feels, feels like it’s spilling from and toward you.

Sincerely, Milkman cc: Homo Sapiens The Human Race

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