Stone/Star Strobe

Gone East for the Summer

2006-05-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

I invented a new fetish, feel free to use it

2006-05-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

Late 70s product characters!
Remember how in the 70s during the feminist revolution suddenly all the cleaning products and food products got all manly? As in "it's not a sandwich, it's a manwich?" I LOVE the term "manwich". It could be used to describe a 3some involving a girl and two guys.

And also, Brawny paper towels. During the feminist revolution of the 70s were they trying to make substitute manly husbands who helped with the cleaning? i.e. the Brawny Guy, the Warren Beatty yacht-guy in the Tid-E-Bowl, Mr. Clean--or maybe they were trying to make housecleaning more manly so that men would want to do it? I don't really think it worked, except that children of single mothers imprinted on the male archetypes of the Brawny guy, et. al, and now yearn for lumberjack types who did the heavy cleaning. I am so hot for the Brawny guy. I wish men still looked like that.

The fetish could involve the female dressing like the Sunmaid Raisin maiden (or maybe the tuna mermaid) and the male kitted out like the Brawny guy and they could have naughty product-placement late-70s style sex. You know, with vaseline-lens lighting, and string-bikini tan lines, and meadow flowers, and polyester backdrops. Wouldn't that be a fun fetish? I also love the babe on the Land-O-Lakes margarine container. And Mr. Clean always wet my whistle. Damn.

Also, I found the giant Koolaid pitcher simaltaneously frightening and erotic--the way s/he/it blasted through barriers, brought Koolaid, and had shapely legs in red tights. Now what do we have? That scary animatronic Snuggle Bear (creepy) and that's about it. Bring back the Brawny man! Bring back the lady with the dentures! Bring back the Koolaid monster and the tiny little man who puts his periscope up your ass. People could get so kinky with this... And in the afterglow, they could ride the Rice-A-Roni cable cars to a nice bar and drink some good old Blue Nun....

poison oak is draining

2006-05-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

Literally. It is draining in these magical yellow crystals, like I am exuding my own personal amber.
And it is draining because it itches, it feels like something is simaltaneously chewing its way out from the inside, and lighting fires as it goes. I am showering every hour. I wake up in the middle of the night itching. I have showered so much I am sick of showering. And the showerhead in my apartment broke, and was trickling about as much water as a drooly baby, and I was screaming, covered in TecnuExtreme and cursing and itching, so I finally dismantled the whole f*cking thing and now shower in a hard stream of water coming out of bare pipe; it's disgusting.

And all I can think about is poison oak, and how the hell I am going to sit on a round black cushion for hours at a time when my ass is like a topographical map with raised archipelegoes of rash, and my car is busted, too, and no one knows what is wrong with it, and I guess I can be grateful her clutch cable didn't snap on the Tassajara grade, because I'd have been off a cliff like Thelma and Louise, and I guess car trouble and a rash is better than being dead.

So I'm leaving very soon, and I can only imagine that all these setbacks are my unconscious ambivalence about returning to the monastery.

Whatever, I'm going.
I'll probably get bit by a rattlesnake, but I'm going.
So I won't be around here for several months.
Have a great summer, blogland.

My Gollum

2006-05-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

flightman71@yahoo.com continues to harass me, and I continue to be convinced that it is the evil poet. This has catapulted me unexpectedly back into regions of memory I have worked very hard to repress, patterns of addiction and emotion that were as piquant as they were grotesque. He is my Gollum.

He's as furtive as a crab. He insinuates. What I don't understand is why. I mean, Gollum was obsessed with the Precious, the ring had him in its thrall. He didn't really have anything else, being a twisted creature of darkness and slime. But the evil poet has a successful career as a full time poet and teacher, a lovely and talented wife, and a baby daughter. He is well regarded by all hs peers (except me) and has already published three books, won numerous awards, and charms almost everyone he meets.

It is only with me that this shadow emerges--the deviancies, the lies. I suppose either he feels free to express his shadow with me and only me because that is the only safe place he can act out, and possibly the fact that I exist is saving him from far worse depths, maybe I'm all that's standing between him and the prostitutes, or between him and a series of grisly ritual murders. I don't know.

What I do know is that it really, really gets to me. We had a really bad, bad, bad relationship for three years and I lost health and time over it, while he thrived. I would be reduced to migraines and hives, unable to get out of bed for days at a time after an especially violent fight. He, on the other hand, would go home and write a poem. As if he fed on blood. It's only fairly recently that I've realized I cannot metabolize stress very well, and that I have to guard against depression the way people in medieval times guarded against the black plague.I have to propitiate ghosts, wear garlic, and fight like hell just to be fairly even, fairly normal. He was an alcoholic at the time, but he has this amazing resiliency. He could drink, fight, stalk me at all hours, and go home zesty-fresh and ready to write another poem. Like a vampire.

And yet with him, I could exorcise my shadow, too. But it is terrifying, what happens when you really let yourself go, let yourself cross all the lines. It is exhilirating, the way driving off a cliff might be exhilirating, or the way that beating the shit out of someone might be exhilirating. But then you crash. I crash. I crashed. And the result is that it has taken me five years to put myself back together, and there are pieces missing, pieces that got smashed in the fights and that he either ate up or that got ground into the floor with the rest of it. He has gone on to quit drinking, write 2 books, marry, and father a child. The greatest accomplishment I can boast of is that I managed not to commit suicide.

I am bitter about this, though I try not to be. So any time I hear from him, (he always finds me) I can't help but think what a weak person I must be, not to have done better. And I can't help seeing him as somehow demonic, for thriving on other people's, on my, pain. And I can't help but think I must be talismanic for him, or else why would he need to contact me again and again?

I have a frightening tendency to cling to continuity at any price. I think I moved so often and lost so many friends and family member, pets and teachers and places, that anything that offers continuity, no matter how vile, feels vital to me. It is very seductive. I have lost touch with some of the people who really loved me and cared about me, and I think some part of me believes that continuity, even with people and things that are damaging, will keep me whole, give me a sense of time and place that I never had. The first time I rode on a airplane, I was in the womb. I haven't stopped moving since. So, too, it is perversely comforting when I hear from the evil poet, knowing that the devil, at least, hasn't forgotten me.

The greatest hold he has over me, I think, is that I feel like I have to GET HIM. That I have something to prove. That I still, still, in spite of everything, want to WIN. If you can get someone hooked into you that way, they're pretty well hooked for good. If I could give up wanting vengeance, or proof, or to prevail, if I could let that go, then I'd just feel sorry for him and get on with my business. Why can't I let that go? The hook is really, really, deep. So I can't completely blame him for all this. It is something we're still doing together. Sometimes I think we'll go on like this, like Spy vs.Spy,until one of us dies, hopefully him, he can't last long on one good kidney. But he's so full of bile and will, I'll probably die first.

What kills me is he has the life I want. The writing, the marriage, and hardest of all, the little girl. I worry about that little girl. Her father is a very unstable person, and he acts out toward women. All women. Not just me. That little girl is going to have a very confusing childhood. But still, I envy him.

So, envy and vengeance, the two least attractive human addictions, and he brings me bushelsfull, and I take them.

Ugh.

mindf*ck

2006-05-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Back when I was completely insane I started dating an evil poet. What can I say, I was doing penance for sins I'd committed. Anyway,evil poets, believe me, are worse than evil clowns, evil twins, evil scientists, or evil dead.

Their torture methods are as strained as their verse. In fact, this particular evil poet used to torture me by reading--no, I'm sorry, reciting his poetry aloud. To me. While I was trying to write.

But I was way up there in the self-flagellation trying to prove that if I just took it it would wash me clean of my sins.

The problem is, if you date the devil, you begin to change in subtle ways..

But that's a story for another time.

Anyway, my point is, even now, almost five years later, I am convinced that this evil poet is still trying to get under my skin.

For example, this morning I come into work and there is an email from someone calling himself "Dan Evans" aka flightman71@yahoo.com.

The email says: Guess who I am? (Hint:I am not Dan Evans)

Of course I am an easy mark--unsatisfied with job, obsessed with secret identities, secretly yearning for distraction and perhaps a secret admirer, even a stalker. I am still a little crazy. I am working on it. So of course, this email is going to bug me obsessively, because even though I am pretty sure it is the evil poet, it might be I dunno, Wes Anderson, or someone worthwhile.

But I doubt it.

It could be that someone's pulling a "Da Vinci's Code" on my ass, or it could be a more global prank--someone doing a kind of Rorschach psychological experiment to see what respoinses they come up with, because everyone has an evil poet or two tucked away, everyone has, or believes they have--a tormentor--and this prankster probably has a book deal already about this experiment, and I fell for it, and all these suppositions say more about me than about "Dan Evans", but I still think it is the evil poet. If there is anything I've learned from self help books and detective stories, it is to go with your hunch.

Anyway, my readers (all 2 of you) are welcome to send this mysterious "flightman71@yahoo.com" emails asking him if he has 4 kidneys, does he know where the pyramids of malaphagi are located, and why the hell he isn't tending to his baby daughter and wife instead of harassing innocent people?

Of course it could be a virus, or spam, but my spam filter didn't catch it, so use a public terminal or something if you do email him/her/it. But my gut tells me it is him.

Or not. This is going to bug me all day.
Which is so exactly the evil poet's style.

Prick.

the things we keep

2006-05-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I see my life as this big cane laundry basket--and I know where I got that image--my mom bought one 20 years ago at some Maryland farm auction, and I am not sure what became of it--the kind where some of the canes are broken and cut your hand if you do'nt carry it the right way, and the weave is coming loose in places, and the basket holds most everything, but as you carry it from the clothesline to the house, things fall out, things that you don't miss at first, because the basket is piled so high, embarrassing things, like underpants, or a favorite shirt, or little things, like a single sock, or maybe that handkerchief you started using because your best boyfriend used them, and you wanted to be close to him, so you bought one too. Sometimes you're walking and you trip and the whole basket spills and you miss things in picking up the pieces. Some things the wind takes. Others seem to leap out of their own volition. Some are left behind in the dryer, some get stolen from the line, some you ruin through mishandling.

And then as you're folidng it all, you think, what the hell--where did that go? And certain items you miss and you miss and you miss, and you go for years missing them, and they are gone forever, and often it's your favorite this or that, and the things you keep--or that keep you, well isn't peculiar, what we don't lose?

Some of the things that survive wreckages and moves take on a kind of value just for surviving--stuff you didn't care about that much in the first place--a cashmere sweater that you got from him that he got from her that is so ratty it must've originally belonged to a beatnik and that you only wear when you are very cold and very sick and running a fever, and it is so soft,but such a hideous maroon, that comfort in illness is its own function as a garment, or an ugly shirt, say, and after a while you think, how come THIS particular thing sticks with me, when I lost that other thing, the thing I loved so much and wore constantly, how come that is gone and this isn't? And then it seems unfair. And you don't know whether to be pissed off or grateful, or to just go shopping and buy new clothes, hoping you'll find something that will take the place of that perfect dress, or that one pair of shoes. But you never find those things through looking. Sometimes they find you. And then you lose them.

Then there's the stuff that's so lame you can't even give it away--and all the crap that accumulates that you don't really want, that just shows up. The guilt gifts, the bad choices, the stuff you got in a fit of mania, or maybe you were drunk, or stoned, or lonely, or depressed, or just had five bucks burning a hole in that pair of jeans that you've had forever even though they never really fit.

But you keep on missing the things that dropped out. That can never be replaced. After a while you start to mythologize them--the dress that always looked good no matter how bad you felt (even though if you're honest you were always ambivalent about it--half of you thought it was hideous, and wore it anyway), that eccentric velvet thing that, if you were being objective, had lost too many buttons but that made you feel like a madcap genius, pettable and brilliant--and the mythologies dwarf the things themselves, and you miss them and tell stories about them and spend too much money on shit that vaguely reminds you of them, that would better be spent on therapy and a gym membership.

That's how I feel about some of the people in my life, or should I say, the people who were once in my life, and aren't any more.

Sometimes it really rankles that objects outlive people, disasters, love, all of it. I mean, the flip side of "you can't take it with you" is that these objects stay behind--passed from hand to hand, saturated with meaning--while their givers, their possessors, pass away. Sometimes I want to howl because I still have a maroon cashmere sweater, when I don't have the person who gave it to me.

Back when I was pretending to be hard-boiled, I used to call these remnants trophies--like I was a great white hunter or a serial killer. But now I look at them and think, shit, why didn't I take better care? I would much rather have shrunk the damned sweater down to doll-size by washing it in too-hot water and kept the precious intangible. These fucking mementoes are just a pitiful assemblage that hints at what was once complex and alive. It is grisly.

But if I lose the things, then everything is gone. Because there's voodoo in them. If I have the thing it reminds me and if I am reminded I remember and if I remember than it isn't wholly lost. But ultimately we lose even the objects, and they go on to other people, trigger other memories, and they persist and persist and persist, and we perish like uneaten dairy products.

This, my friends, is why I dread packing up my stuff and moving. And this must also be why, my friends, I move so often. So I can pick through the wreckage once again. Sometimes I envy people who lose things in fires or floods. I think if I lost my shit I would probably get amnesia. Which might be a good thing.

revenge of the mole

2006-05-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

I like to think that my liberated mole reinvented itself as the boppy dot that bounces over the words in karaoke videos, and is even now happily bouncing along on top of the lyrics to "Copacabana" in a happy place, maybe in Japan town, maybe at a mall in Bangkok, or even in good old Bear's Place in Bloomington of a Thursday night.

that mole bugged me. It was an outie mole, the kind that sticks to you like a tiny spit ball, and it hurt whenever it got tangled in a necklace or high collar. But what a hole it has left in me.

Seriously.

It looks like someone put their cigarette out on my neck.

This makes me think of a Gogol story, "the Nose". If my mole is out there having a better time than me, I am going to be pissed.

I bet she is. I bet she's perfectly spherical and dressed in Versace and playing kissy-face with Peter Sarsgaard or even the hunky Mark Ruffalo. Maybe she wound up on some starlet's lip, thus ensuring her career. Bitch.

Oh well. I just have to say to my departed mole, ooh, baby baby it's a wild world...what are the next words? If only my mole were here to lead me through the lyrics. Alas.

relative values, 2

2006-05-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

My God, I could cry. Actually, I did cry, a little.
So it turns out that my editor, bless his heart, is a sensitive person, fond of harmony, mild and quietly brilliant, who suffers the tortures of the damned because he is in the wrong job. I remember his face in meetings--he had the stoic,pained look of a secret agent stubbornly resisting the commandant's ways of making him talk. He looked like Albrecht Durer with a bad migraine. He looked like the picture of quiet desperation.

I became incredibly fond of him after he once, in a rare moment of actually speaking, made a reference to Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". After that it was as though we had a secret pact between us--we knew that there were other worlds than these, better worlds.

So this editor's daily existence consists of having to deal with crazy rich folks who call him every two minuts about the status of their overpriced, overratedLarry Newman art (name has been changed to protect me from google searches). If dealing with harrassment from the rich with bad taste weren't stressful enough (and trust me, it is), he has to fight for every little decent thing for the other artist he handles, and this means going head to head with a hyperactive, garrulous, stingy and extremely rich and thus entitled boss, who changes his mind every three seconds and tends to follow his nose, like Toucan Sam if Toucan Sam liked blow. Long story short, the editor decided that he'd rather pay me out of his own pocket than risk the contretemps and dickering that would come of suggesting that I write the damn thing and that I get paid for it. This is what made me cry. First, that he'd do that. (That explains the modest figure. He can't make all that much money there. None of us did). Second, that he is under so much pressure that he would consider it worth it to be out the money rather than having to spend even a few minutes being badgered, harassed, and worried to death with fighting for every little goddamned thing. In fact, if this were domestic, I'd say he is in an abusive relationship and needs to Get Out.

So I was very touched, and very worried, and I told him to just forget it.
So it's all relative. What I thought was a stingy offer was incredibly generous, generous enough to make me cry.
And I wind up with bupkiss, yet feeling ok with it.
Funny thing, money.

relative values

2006-05-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Money is so insane.
I pay $200 for a doctor's visit that took fifteen minutes and doesn't involve (in the moment) any particular skill--I mean, a sushi chef could have lopped off my mole, lanced the infection.
$200 for 15 minutes = $800 an hour.

I remember being asked to find a Burberry raincoat, size 2, for one of my former's boss's girlfriends. Said raincoat cost about $2,000.

I got a gig I was excited about--writing a piece for my former place of work. The assignment gave me a week's deadline,(which is an incredibly short turnaround, considering I had to drive to SF, interview the artist, look at and analyse the work, transcribe the interview, and write the article) and I worked for a solid week--oh, let's say about 20 hours, after work and on weekends, on a freelance article for said former boss. They are offering me $75 for it.
That's less than 4 bucks an hour.

I was hoping this would cover my doctor's bill (my insane and stupid doctor's bill).
It will cover gas.

So now I have to dicker, and I feel really unworthy, dickering, like they are going to tell me my time and my work isn't worth it, because let's face it, they will find out I am a lazy slacker who cuts corners, they will unmask me and I don't really deserve to be paid anything. That's what I am afraid of. Or I'll come off looking like a greedy gold-digger because everyone knows writing isn't really WORK, anyone can write, it doesn't take any effort or skill,and a real writer writes for the joy of it, and poops words the way toads in fairytales spit out diamonds, and it is easy, and therefore worth less than say, a bottle of champagne.

Ok, a lot of art goes into champagne.

But when you really think about it, a lot of art goes into everything, and the amount of labor keeping the world spinning is boggling, and everyone has debts to pay, and everyone is contributing, and I don't understand why the rates are so skewed, and maybe I'll just up and become a communist.

THERAMINS!!!! (in honor of JohnnyC)

2006-05-14T17:42:00.000-07:00

The greatest, most mesmerizing invention ever. On earth.
You play the air. Literally.

"The Theremin is one of the earliest electronic instruments, and is played without ever physically touching it. Outfitted with two antennas, a magnetic field surrounds the instrument, and when the hands of the player enter the field, changes in pitch and volume occur. The left side controls the volume, and the right controls the pitch."

http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/om28000.html

I learned about it from watching Hitchcock's "Spellbound". It beats the Dali dream sequence hollow. I love these things. They used it in "the day the earth stood still" and tons of other sci-fi movies.

Seven

2006-05-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

After seven years all debts are cancelled, right?

Davenport

2006-05-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

Davenport is a cement plant and a stoplight and these hellbox cliffs that go down to a beach.
Whales migrate past there, and there's a bakery where you can get decent brownies, as well as cheeseburgers. Bikers love to stop there on their way down to Big Sur. You have to cross a railroad tracks to get to the bluffs that lead down to the ocean. Right now they are covered in vivid green grass, and the wind is always blowing. I will miss Davenport when I leave this area. I used to go there alone with a dog and walk around letting my skirt blow.

Masochist's Day Out

2006-05-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I really decided to pamper myself. Now, some women would happily drop $225 on, say, a day at a spa, being wrapped to the eyes in detoxifying seaweed and getting massages from brawny men with gentle, yet firm, fingers--maybe dipping into the sauna while maidens spritz them with lavendar water, soaking in mineral baths, getting their pores vaccuumed.

Or, for women of another stripe, buying that one pair of really hot shoes, the delicate, elegantly crafted kind make your ass look pert and your legs long, the kind that that make your feet look likes works of art,and that make someone want to sweep you off them.

Some women might drop the $225 on a good haircut and a decent meal--sushi, perhaps, with as much sake as they could hold. Some might buy a new outfit, or some good jewelry, or spend it on a series of dance classes, or on a few sessions with a personal trainer, or on therapy, or even (in the olden days) on a plane ticket somewhere.

But not me.

See, I had this troublesome--oh, let's say boil--on my left calf. It appeared last Friday. I thought it was an ingrown hair (my punishment for depilation--I never should have shaved. God doesn't want me to shave. He really really doesn't) or maybe a zit--but it grew, and grew, and grew. First it itched, then it swelled to the size of a cuckoo's egg. And it hurt. It kind of throbbed, like maybe there was a heart incubating in there. It turned red. It started to flash. Cars thought it was a stoplight. Many people died.

And did I mention it hurt like hell? I thought, great, I have boils. This is great. I had a boyfriend who had boils, and I always assumed it was because he was such a vile and poisonous human being. But that theory would not longer hold weight if _I_ had boils, because I am a sweet and pure person who harbors no ill-will whatsoever.

God must hate me. He hates me because I dared to shave my legs, in spite of his injunctions against it, in spite of his giving me cheap irish skin that you can't do anything to, because it screams in terror at sunlight, irritants, and synthetic fabrics. I must have a touch of leprecaun blood. Everyone knows they can't shave, either. But I digress.

So this growth on my leg, blazing and throbbing and distracting me from my fascinating duties as an editor of standardized tests, and it was driving me so crazy I started having lancing fantasies, which, as you hard core types know, I am sure, involve sterilizing a giant punk-rock safety-pin with a zippo and driving the point of the pin into the boil, causing a shower of pus to fly out onto the upturned faces of your adoring fans. But I had no such punk rock safety pin. I started fantasizing about poking thumbtacks into it, just to release the pressure. Or maybe, if I could stand it, using an unbent paper-clip.

But I am a wuss. Then I remembered there's a Doc-in-the-Box clinic at the bottom of the hill, right next to the Starbucks. Before you could say Buck Rogers I was in my little red wagon and laying tread for the place.

I got there. I didn't wait long--only long enough to count the ridges in Teri Hatcher's breastbone (there was an old issue of People lying there) before the doctor came to see me. Oh, and what a doctor. He was young, handsome in a human way, with a wedding ring and lots of soft brown hair and the kind of nose I like. What a relief. A cute doctor really makes a difference, because everyone knows that flirting cuts most pain in half.

So first he says, "oh, it's an infected insect bite, why don't we just do hot compresses and see if it drains on its own?"

But I thought, heavens no, you're cute, and I'm probably going to be paying through the nose for this anyway, and I've had these lancing fantasies all day, so I'm not leaving here until you take something sharp and stick it into me, buddy.

So I said, batting my eyelashes, "couldn't you just lance it, since I'm here anyway?"

And so he went to get his sharp sterile shiny knife-thingy, I think it is called a lancet, and he looked into my eyes and said "I don't like to cause anyone pain" and while I was melting he drove the wicked little blade into my goose-egg, and it didn't hurt at all. Until he squeezed.

He said, "Pus isn't really disgusting. Just think of it as all your helpful white blood cells rallying to clear the infection."

I loved this man. Then he lanced me again. And squeezed. And lanced again. And squeezed. It hurt like a bitch. I became very concerned about my breath. I'd had Greek Salad for lunch, and even without onions, that stuff can be pungent.

When I mentioned that I didn't have any medical insurance, he told me he wouldn't charge me for the lancing. I melted some more. I have never met such a nice doctor. Why, he was as nice as a hairdresser! Nicer! Then he lectured me very seriously about the importance of antibiotics. I could tell he thought I was a giant hippie who mistrusted the western medical establishment (probably because the hair was growing out on my legs--I couldn't shave because of the giant BOIL).

As he was about to dismiss me, I remembered the little twirly mole I've had on my neck forever, that's been bugging me for YEARS. Rebel Leady Boy once encouraged me to clip it off with nail clippers, but I am not hardcore.

So I figured, as long as Mister Doctor has his knives out, why not?

"Um, before you go," I said, "Could you just lop off this mole on my neck?" I arched my neck coquettishly.

"I'll even pay for it."
He threw down his latex gauntlets with righteous fury.

"Now that's just what I hate!" he cried. His noble nostrils flared.

"People will pay for anything that has to do with their vanity, but when it comes to something serious like an infection---" he trailed off.

"Oh no, doctor, I take your point. Please, though, it's been bugging me for years and I never go to the doctor and I'm not hardcore enough to use nail clippers and since I'm here and your knife is already out. I'll pay for BOTH. Please??"

He agreed.
And then the real pain began.

First he lopped off the mole, which hurt a bit. But then came the coup de grace. He held out this stick tipped with silver nitrate.

"It's a chemical cauterant," he said. "This might hurt."

The stick looked like one of those fourth of July sparklers before it's lit.
And when he pressed it to my wounded neck, it might as well have been a fourth of July sparkler after it's lit. It fizzed. It burned. I screamed the kind of scream a soldier on a Civil War Battlefield might have screamed during an amputation. Flesh sizzled.

Silver nitrate. Now I know what will cure my lycanthropy.

Ow.

So now I have a silver mole on the side of my neck.
And I've been infected by an insect bite.

Perhaps I will mutate into some sort of superhero.
And the doctor will be my Lois Lane, trying to cure what ails me, little knowing that it is precisely my ailments that make me so powerful, so wonderful.

They rang up my bill, and that's when the hurt really came. 90 bucks for a consultation. Another 99 for the boil/mole (I think he only charged for one). He peeked his head around the door and waved a nice goodbye. My heart lifted.

"Does he do pelvic exams?" I whispered to the nurse.

She smirked. "Of course."

"How much?", I whispered, even more intently, and with the sense that I was talking to his pimp.

"$90. Would you like to schedule an appointment?"

I sighed. It was a very, very deep sigh. From the depths.

I just couldn't do it. He was too cute. It would feel too much like paying a gigolo. Lop my flesh he can, but a cute doctor with a speculum is more than my psyche (or my purse) can handle. So I left. I will now suffer pangs of unrequited fantasy about Mister Doctor, his knives, and his stethoscope. He really was very nice. I didn't know there were nice doctors. I thought they were all cold-hearted, cold-handed, money grubbing righteous pricks with ugly faces and no bedside manners. It's nice to be wrong. Even if you have to pay $225 to find out. (The antibiotics cost $25).

So, if you are a masochist and like to spend money and don't have any medical insurance, I recommend a few hours of lopping and lancing at the hands of a cute doctor. Who knows, it might even bring you superpowers, as it did me.

"felonious while moving"

2006-05-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

Been thinking about the relationship between self-destructiveness and creativity--the obliteration of the ego and the freeing of the self through whatever means necessary--and the dissolutions, positive and disatrous, that come as a result. There's something about giving in to the looseness and danger and uncertainty and madness that we all hold back from that unleashes tremendous and terrible potential. Maybe addiction is a form of committment, and maybe at heart that committment to throwing yourself into anything is where art comes from, even if it comes at the expense of the physical body or, some would say, soul--certainly at the expense of normal relationships and "happiness". The key, of course, is to channel that terrible freedom, to give it form, rather than to just let it dissipate, which is what most addicts do, I imagine. They experience it, but don't give the experience form.

Townes Van Zandt considered himself "felonious while moving", which means, I guess, the he figured as long as he was conscious and doing, it was probably breaking some law or another. And yet the image this conjures for me is one of beautiful, terrible, freedom--the freedom that will destroy you. But what's the alternative?

There are lots of alternatives, many of them sane, productive, and fulfilling. I just don't know how people do those, either. I fall somewhere in the middle--too cowardly to ride the back of chemicals and destitution--to really let go and see what it's like on the margins, to be 'felonious while moving', and too far from the norm to achieve any sort of centrality.

Sometimes I have the urge to dive off the nearest cliff and sing as I'm falling. But I hold back at the last minute. Ultimately, I guess it doesn't matter what you use to cut the ropes--alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, Zen, love, sprees of every stripe--what matters is to cut the damned things--if, and only if, of course, you want to be an artist, a mystic, a saint, a whatever it is...

Almost every writer/creative person I admire is/was/has been an addict--drunks, mostly, but throw in a few junkies for good measure. I can't think of a single favorite writer who wasn't an alcoholic. I also tend to adore alcoholics in person. So the question is, what is going on with this? The river of alcohol tends to carry them to places both liberating and unwholesome, and, of course, winds up killing them. But I love them. So. I don't know.

Sometimes I think all this trying to get healthy, all this upwardly mobile self help is a load of tripe and that maybe "healing" or getting "centered" is a different kind of suicide--or if not a suicide, at least a pipe dream, a fantasy, a way of sanitizing (Sanity-sanitary?) those places where the ground is most feral, most fertile. I'm too chickenshit to really let myself go and find some bottom, and I'm too suspiscious of the alternative--of getting my shit together... maybe I should just go on a major bender instead of trying (or pretending to try) to know what I'm doing and who and how I should be.

Maybe I should stop fearing the long arm of the law and become a moving violation.

Sometimes I don't know where this dirty road is taking me

2006-05-08T15:36:00.000-07:00

all taken from "Townes Van Zandt: the self-destructive hobo saint". by John Kruth

http://www.highbeam.com/library/docfree.asp?DOCID=1G1:117665738&ctrlInfo=Round19%3AMode19b%3ADocG%3AResult&ao=

"Townes was always quick to credit "a greater power" as the source of his songwriting abilities. He truly believed that his songs came from out of the sky and would suddenly shoot through him like a lightning bolt. Van Zandt merely wrote them down as they occurred.

"It just goes from the top of my head out my right arm," Townes once explained, attempting to describe his supernatural inspiration. He often felt "slammed upon, hit between the eyeballs, out of the blue" by the muse. "Some of my songs, I just felt like I had nothing to do with. It was like, god, my arm's tired, what did I write?"

"Lauded as "the James Joyce of Texas songwriters" and "the Van Gogh of lyrics" by
Billboard Magazine, Townes Van Zandt lived the life of a wandering bard, scribbling down lyrics on placemats and napkins in coffee shops and old truck stops. He wrote sitting by the side of the road, in train stations, airports and taxicabs--some of the loneliest places on Earth. There was a certain kind of purity to his lyrics, an underlying formality that few of his peers possessed.

"You won't find a song that's better written, that says more or impresses songwriters more," Steve Earle claimed. According to Townes, "Pancho and Lefty" just floated in through a window one day after he made himself sit at a table until he wrote a new song. Van Zandt believed anybody could've done it. They just had to be sitting in the right chair.

"Whenever an aspiring songwriter questioned him about his artistic process, Townes jokingly suggested they get themselves a guitar as it's much easier to carry around than a piano. Then came the rap that had most neophytes quickly searching for the exit sign. "You have to blow off everything else," he explained. "You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money. You have to blow off security. You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar. You have to sleep with it. Learn how to tune it. And no matter how hungry you get, stick with it."

The level of Townes' commitment to his art frightened most people. "Townes was a brave soul," Guy Clark said with a sigh. "Very few people are willing to go that deep and take a hard look at the darkness. Nobody cut it that close to the bone. He went for the passion, not a bunch of clever bullshit."

making an effort to join the phenomenal world

2006-05-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

My head is full of voices. That's ok. It doesn't mean I'm crazy--at least not crazier than most. If the voices were 'outside' my head, then maybe I'd worry. But I'm not hearing angels telling me how to save France, and I'm not hearing dogs telling me to commit grisly murders; mostly I have your garden variety neurotic stream of consciousness narratives going blah blah blah round round round round like the Beach Boys. The problem is that they drown out the phenomenal world--so that I can't or don't hear or see what's going on under my nose. I don't see the tasks at hand. They're chatty. So chatty. They are mostly also full of shit, and act as a kind of blizzard of distraction, so that I can be listening to them and driving 80 mph on the highway and look up and realize I've gone ten minutes without seeing the road. It's making me snow-blind.

But more than that, these not-so-helpful voices, the legion of storytellers, the mind-bandits, tend to set me up for things by creating wondrous epic dramas of projection and then tormenting me with cruel disappointments when the external world flouts my internal scripts. I don't know if "writers" hear more voices than other people, or what, but this merrie band of brain-robbers hangs out in the sherwood of my synapses and sit around a-robbin and a-stealin and sometimes, yes indeed, they strike up a never-ending chorus of the Beastie Boys if I am threatening to get away off somewhere with reality for a change.

I am convinced that the solution to most major depression/despair/ennui/negativity and so on is not in taking happy drugs, but in somehow getting the Merrie Men to can it, or at least to change their tune, or to somehow stake them *punkt* through the heart so that they are blown to dust like the vampires in Buffy. That's one of the points of doing Zen practice. It gives you a stake to puncture the voices,and it teaches you to sit still and be quiet. If I remember from experience, if you sit still and stare at a wall for long enough, the voices get really really desperate and noisy, and then they throw tantrums, and eventually they get tired and shut up. But it takes a long time. And until then, you'll be delighted with discovering near-total recall of song lyrics, tv shows, jingles, movies, memories, encounters, etc, until you're deafened.

Of course when the voices get really quiet you discover they've just moved into your body. Suddenly sitting hurts like hell and there is no Greek chorus to distract you from it--physically, the sensations I recall are the certainty that the ligaments in my knees were slowly parting like string cheese and that if I stood up I'd fall apart like a marionette with severed strings; bolting, shooting sciatic pain from the ass-bone up my back, kind of like electrical shocks and then settling into a steady internal pain sort of like microphone feedback; the delightful (and surely psychosomatic) certainty that my ribs are actually caving inward and puncturing my lungs, so that every breath is like being knifed--and this comes with a rising sense of panic and the absolute feeling that if I don't stand up RIGHT NOW I am going to scream and scream and scream and scream; pins and needles, needles and pins; heart feeling like a bruised bag, part cat-guts, part lead; oh shit, there's the tearing sensation in the knees again, and then I start to sweat, and a fly settles on the corner of my eye, and if the bell doesn't ring soon, I'm really going to lose my shit, I'm going to stand up and scream, drop my baggy zen pants, piss, kick things over, what the hell are all these smug diamond-shaped bodies doing sitting there like that? can't they hear it? can't they feel it? and suddenly I'm one of Poe's madmen, screaming YOU FOOLS, IT IS THE BEATING OF HIS HIDEOUS HEART!

Yeah, why am I going back to Tassajara?

Because... I think, I hope, I believe that after the madness, if I stay with it, comes a pool of sanity, of vast, unconditioned sanity and from that pool I, you, anyone can, as Issan Dorsey says, "take the water of compassion and pour if over your own head", and then I/you can pour it over others. And that, my friends, is what we're rounding up the Merrie Men for, and that is why I am going to sit on my ass and feel my knees tear and my lungs fill up with imaginary blood and panic and panic and panic until the panic passes and then? and then?

Who the hell knows? I guess I hope I find out. Every time.

Babysit your boredom

2006-05-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

From one of my favorite writers, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (who reminds me of Donald Kilbuck, or vice versa):

BABYSITTING YOUR BOREDOM

"When people say they are bored,often they mean that they don't want to
experience the sense of emptiness,which is also an expression of openness
and vulnerability. So they pick up the newspaper or read anything else
that's lying around the room --even reading what it says on a cereal box to
keep themselves entertained. The search for entertainment to baby-sit your
boredom soon becomes legitimized as laziness. Such laziness actually
involves a lot of exertion. You have to constantly crank things up to
occupy yourself, overcoming your boredom by indulging in laziness....The
remedy to that approach is renunciation....For the warrior, renunciation is
giving away, or not indulging in, pleasure for entertainment's sake. We are
going to kick out any preoccupations provided by the miscellaneous
babysitters in the phenomenal world."

Another way to put it is:

blah blah blah becomes blog blog blog.

Ok, kiddies, who wants me to sing songs from the "Little Mermaid"! please don't pee on the floor! please don't color on the walls! please don't throw gobs of jelly in your sister's hair, and please, whatever you do, don't hide in your parents' suit of pseudo armor and get stuck in there. Please, no!

Raven/us

2006-05-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

So I am reading this book called "Ravens in Winter". I chose it because I am interested in natural history, and because I liked the title. It made me think of Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", and Poe's raven, and all the crows I've known in parts of California, and I thought, cool, this will be all poetic, but what I forgot was the real truth of nature--it's not just a metaphor. It's an organism that lives and dies and eats--bent on survival.

So there I was last night, happily reading about how ravens swoop and roll and dive and execute amazing flight manoevers in their courtship flights, thinking, what a groovy bird, how amazing, and reading about Odin's ravens riding on his shoulders, and reading all sorts of other tidbits--scraps of flesh, if you will, about ravens, and then I come to the passage that says, roughly:

Ravens, hunting in pairs, will pluck out and eat the eyes of newborn baby reindeer.

Right. after. they. emerge. from. the. womb.

while they are still alive
!!!

They also aggressively seek to divide the newborn reindeer from its parents, attack it, and kill it.

Suddenly I'm thinking of Hitchcock's "the Birds". Suddenly I'm picturing bleating, blinded, baby reindeer, and I'm thinking of my own precious eyes, the little brown jellies, eyes that I think of as "mine", that could easily, easily, be taken by birds. It is fascinating to think of one's eyes--organs of sight, of identity, our primary sense any more, our primary fascination--to think of them as FOOD. It really shifts your perspective. It's a chilling but helpful meditation, I think.

I mean, what do people get complimented on most often? Their eyes. What's the first thing we do in the morning? Open our eyes. They're the gates between "us" and "them"--they bring the world into us.

Now imagine them being eaten.

Plucked out, pierced, digested, and plopped from the cloaca to the ground.

Interesting, huh?

Nothing really belongs to anything or anyone. Not the eyes in your head, not the meat on your bones. Sometimes I think the world's main activity is eating itself.

Are my eyes bigger than a raven's stomach?
Turns out, the answer is no.

A conspiracy of ravens, an unkindness of ravens, a constable of ravens

2006-05-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

Terms from the 16th century:
a shrewdness of apes
a pace of asses
a cete of badgers
a sloth of bears
a fleet of birds,
a dissimulation of (small) birds
a blush of boys
a clowder or glaring of cats;
a dowt or destruction of wild cats
a peep of chickens
a chattering or clattering of choughs
a drunkship of cobblers
a rag or rake of colts
a hastiness of cooks
a covert of coots
a cowardice of curs
a dole, or piteousness of doves
a paddling of ducks on water
a business of ferrets
a chirm of finches
a stalk of foresters
a skulk of foxes
a husk or down of hares
an observance of hermits
a siege of herons
a mute of hounds
a desert of lapwing
an exaltation of larks
a leap of leopards
a pride of lions
a tiding of magpies
a sord or sute (=suit) of mallard
a richesse of martens
a faith of merchants
a labour of moles
a barren of mules
a watch of nightingales
a superfluity of nuns
a muster of peacocks
a malapertness (=impertinence) of pedlars
a congregation of plovers
a pity of prisoners
an unkindness of ravens
a parliament or building of rooks
a dopping of sheldrake
a walk of snipe
a host of sparrows
a murmuration of starlings
a sounder of tame swine
a drift of wild swine
a glozing (=fawning) of taverners
a spring of teal
a rout of wolves
a fall of woodcock

A female cat is called a quean.

Other terms:
ants: colony
bears: sleuth, sloth
bees: grist, hive, swarm
birds: flight, volery
cattle: drove
cats: clutter, clowder
chicks: brood, clutch
clams: bed
cranes: sedge, seige
crows: murder
doves: dule
ducks: brace, team
elephants: herd
elks: gang
finches: charm
fish: school, shoal, draught
foxes: leash, skulk
geese: flock, gaggle, skein, arrow
gnats: cloud, horde
goats: trip
gorillas: band
hares: down, husk
hawks: cast
hens: brood
hogs: drift
horses: pair, team
hounds: cry, mute, pack
kangaroos: troop, mob
kittens: kindle, litter
larks: exaltation
lions: pride
locusts: plague
magpies: tidings
mules: span
nightingales: watch
oxen: yoke
oysters: bed
parrots: company
partridges: covey
peacocks: muster, ostentation
pheasants: nest, bouquet
pigs: litter
ponies: string
quail: bevy, covey
rabbits: nest
seals: pod
sheep: drove, flock
sparrows: host
storks: mustering
swans: bevy, wedge
swine: sounder
toads: knot
turkeys: rafter
turtles: bale
vipers: nest
whales: gam, pod
wolves: pack, rout
woodcocks: fall

I have been thinking about animals, extinction, language, extinction, the connections. The ice is melting. The lights are being doused. Polar bears and hippos have made it onto the shortlist. Frogs are the canaries in the coal mines. People, our heat, is suffocating out life forms. Exhaust. Exhaustion.
An exhaustion of automobiles.
A melt of poles.
A boneyard of extinctions.
A snuffing of candles.
We're not set apart from this. Ultimately, we're going, too.
A dissipation of beings.

Remember how, in Frosty the Snowman, he has to go home before he melts, and it is really scary and sad, because Frosty is dying, and it's a race against time, but once he makes it to the land of eternal snow, he's fine--he can live FOREVER?
Not anymore, nope.
Nothing lasts.
A sunset world.

If I weren't already leaving I'd stage a protest

2006-05-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

Corporate Life -- a minor fracas

The weekend started badly with a case of major segregation at work. All the official company workers were given a corporate sponsored barbecue, and all the temps were not. This would have been merely gauche, except that there was no food in the cafeteria for temps to purchase, and none of us had been given notice to bring sad-sack lunches, so we did not eat that day.

It was like Potemkin--no bread! or no meat! or whatever it was. (Ok, truthfully we went down the hill and bought overpriced salads, but it was the principle, the principle of the thing!)

Temps do the same jobs--identical--to the regular workers, for less pay and no benefits. And they remind us of this with spitted pigs and potato salads and long tables blocking the exits at which the tenured ones are seating, swapping stories and wiping their chins. It's enough to make me want to dig up Jimmy Hoffa. Or make a voodoo zombie out of Cesar Chavez.

I had one of those depressing nutshell-epiphanies and so am engaging in my sad little protest by refusing to eat in the company cafeteria ever again. I wrote a brief letter of protest to my supervisor, but naturally the response was neutral and basically a brush-off. It was bad. All the temps were upset and bitching, and taking petty revenge by doing crappy work or screwing around on the clock or taking extra long lunches, but it was just--faintly pathetic. No one gave a damn. 24 more days...

Unexpected Memory

2006-04-22T09:58:00.000-07:00

Something I forgot about living in Austin:

I was driving today and I had to slow down at a cross walk for a pair of teenaged girls who were crossing the street. This was nothing extraordinary, but one of the girls was carrying a ski pole (who knows why) and it triggered a memory.

When I lived in Austin, Texas, I lived in an area called Hyde Park. There was a school for the blind in my neighborhood, and it used to be a common sight to see blind students walking with their guides, learning to use the cane. On warm, misty days with the cottonwoods all green and the sidewalks fragrant after a rain, I'd watch their gentle progress, crossing streets, cruising around. Sometimes they'd be in groups of three or four, sometimes in pairs. I really loved to see them, and didn't even realize it until this morning. In fact, I had forgotten that aspect of my daily life in Texas completely. It came back to me and I realized how much that sight moved me. There was something graceful and gracious about the relationship between the blind student and the sighted teacher. They moved slowly, but with tentative confidence and trust. It was really nice.

Sometimes one of the people would be wearing a sleep mask type blindfold,I don't know why. Sometimes they'd have a seeing-eye dog. The dogs always struck me as noble,so focused. You're not supposed to pet them when they're working.

And I have an image of a middle-aged woman in a red-and-white striped shirt,and the cane sweeping the grass, and myself pausing at a Stop Sign with my dog on a leash, waiting to cross to the bakery--the best bakery on earth--Quack's. Just a normal day, probably a Saturday, and everyone was out walking.

I am glad I remembered this. It is a really nice memory, and I have very few nice memories of Texas.

That's all.

Ways in which the voices in my head torture me, or Diary of a Mental Hostage

2006-04-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

The voices in my head are off the charts lately, possibly because I've been trying to pay attention to them. The little darlings are chirping away like crickets, beckoning like sirens, muscling me around like bouncers, using every trick in the book to... I don't know what they're doing, really, or why, but they're louder than a doo-wop band and more persistent than a hungry mime.
Here are some of their tricks that I am deeply, deeply, bone-tired of:

1. Having the acoustic version of Thunder Road stuck in my head.

I know that when I get a song stuck in my head it is the angels of my unconscious trying to tell me something, but PLEASE enough with the

"we've got one last chance to make it real/ to trade in these wings for some wheels/ so climb in back, it's waiting there on the track/leave what you've lost/ leave what's grown old/on Thunder Road

Ok, Subconscious, I get the idea. You're trying to tell me something.

Yes, I try so hard Mary to understand, I'm heading out tomorrow to case the promised land/ baby we're born with nothing in our hands/ hey its our only chance
so just roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
the night's busted open and these two lanes will take us any where
there's magic in the night
you're not a beauty but hey, you're all right, don't turn me home again/ I just can't face myself alone again.

yes, I know, subconscous, that you think I've been
hiding neath the covers and studying my pain,
making crosses from my lovers, throwing roses in the rain/
wasting my summers waiting in vain for a hero to rise from these streets--

but what am I supposed to do about it? Huh?
Just get in my car and drive away? I don't have la Springsteen's talent, heart, or nerve. So what are you doing nagging me to death with what is possibly the saddest song ever written? Shut up, already!

This song has been played in the top 40 of my unconscious for nearly TWO MONTHS NOW. I don't think it will stop unless I actually FIND Thunder Road and drive away to someplace better. But guess what, subconscious, Thunder Road is fictional, and there's NOWHERE TO GO.

2) Enacting long, pointless, heartfelt, well written and distracting conversations with lost-and-gone-forever exes.
Seriously, these could be made into a mini-series. One voice plays "me". She is eloquent, she'll bring them all to their knees with her wit and her fire and her pathos. The other voice plays "him"--mostly, of course, "he" doesn't talk because the whole point of this exercise is for "me" to get everything off my chest--everything I've realized, everything I regret. It's stellar material. I think maybe Frank Capra is in there, directing it. Sometimes we pull in for a close up and a single dewy tear trickles down my luminous face.

Won't somebody yell "Cut!"

3) The compulsion to eat cheeseburgers. I have been reading a lot of buddhist literature lately, and have made the considered decision that, in spite of the fact that red meat helps control my depression, there are better ways to get B vitamins, and I don't want to eat meat any more. So now, of course, I am dreaming, constantly, of cheeseburgers. Whoppers. Big Macs. Inn and Out, you name it. I want to eat at least 5 in one sitting. I think of the cows. I see cheeseburgers. I think of the cows with their throats slit, their big brown eyes, the thousands of acres deforested on behalf of the cheeseburger. I take some vitamin powder. And find myself pulling in to the nearest drive-thru. I'll just get a "shake", I think, and I emerge--dazed--with--yes, indeedy, a cheeseburger.

4) Not writing. Any time I sit down to write something "real", I fall under a paralysis so powerful that I wind up staying up until 11 pm reading chick lit, possibly after having consumed a cheeseburger. Another day wasted.

Then, as if to punish me, as I get into bed, Thunder Road will start playing in my head again.
Sing me to sleep, you bastard angels.

And if I'm really lucky, if I can get away from the unconscious radio station of guilt playing that song, then I won't have that dream, the dream where the long-lost comes back to me, and everything is great, and the dog is running figure eights in the backgroud, and my heart doesn't feel like a pathetic gob of cheese that's melted to a fast-food wrapper, and it's so good that I wake up in the morning wondering what the hell the point of being me is.

Rumors of You

2006-04-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

I heard the rumors that things are turning out as I expected.
Really we are torn between the hope that the lives we leave will fall apart, (a hope unworthy of us and who we wish to be) and the fear that our departure will weigh anchor, help you cast off for exotic shores, successes, happiness without measure. Or is it that we fear the first and hope for the second? Flipsides. Always flipsides.

But the rumors of you that came back to me were contrary to my better imaginings. I imagined that somehow I touched you in passing, sparked a creative fire, gave you a hit of youth, or beauty, or hope. Egotistical fantasies.

We mark each other. I know we do. So I can hope that the marks might be wholesome, like trace minerals, like vitamins, like potions that revive, give heart, or act as keys, opening us into gardens. But the marks are more like fingerprints of soot, or gouges, or trails of poison leading to the heart.

I imagined that you were doing well--I hoped that you were falling apart. If you were falling apart it meant I meant something to you. If you were doing well, I intended to take credit for that too. As a catalyst. I just wanted, however it turned out, for it to mean something, to have meant something to you.

But the rumors are that the house is falling down around you.That you're surrounded by bottles and ashes and haze. That the tv is always on. That your cat is dying and pisses everywhere, and that the house, oh beautiful, reeks to make the eyes water, and that you're in the middle of it, blind, blurred, talking big dreams and drinking your own heart. That you go to sleep with the oven on. Wake up, you're dying. Wake up, you're dying.
Do you miss me?
Do I miss you?

The door we made between us swung open, and both of us looked at it, and turned our backs, and when I looked back it had become a wall, solid, stained, and behind the wall was you, and on it are the rumors scratched very small, along the baseboard, where the cat is sitting in a puddle, crying for you.

Moby Dick, literally--a poem by D.H. Lawrence

2006-04-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

WHALES WEEP NOT

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.

The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whales's fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea
keep passing, back and forth, keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

D.H LAWRENCE

Tornado in Iowa City

2006-04-17T15:52:00.000-07:00

My sister lived right in the path of the twister that came through Iowa City on April 13th. It missed her house by mere feet. (see photo at left)
She's allowed me to print her account of it here, as well as a link to some more great photos.
http://www.thefullkit.com/

K's account:
"My impressions of last night. I was at a lecture by a visiting artist at the art building when the storm came. We spent the tornado time in the basement. I only saw the incredible lightning storm and shooter-marble hail that pummeled the magnolia tree outside the art building that had only a day before come into bloom. The lightning wasn't only the usual diffuse lightning we see here, but also crackling arms that reached out in the clouds and lit the ground for brief flashes that made your eyes spot.

I walked home from intermedia about 10:45, after a studio critique from which we were all distracted and after the storm was well past, and I was not expecting anything too bad. I'd heard some rumors about "a shed that fell out of the sky at Burlington and Clinton" or "at Washington and Dubuque" and some damage to the Dairy Queen.

[A] Fellow Intermedia grad student came with me, and as we walked by the Hydravlics (sic) Lab on Riverside and Burlington, we could see police lights flashing everywhere. There were droves of kids out, all with their cameras and phones, snapping pictures of the trees that were down along the river and the parking lots.

As we got closer to the Dairy Queen, the bike path became impassable because of the trees, but we went around and came upon a gigantic pile of red spoons and the smell of sugar as we crossed a little bridge at the back of the DQ lot. Upon arrival at the Dairy Queen itself, I was overcome by the distinct urge to get back to my house as-soon-as-possible because the Brazier was virtually destroyed, sheet metal and fiberglass insulation were littered all over, and there were crews trying to get downed trees and powerlines out of the road so traffic could start moving again.

(My math: DQ is about two blocks from my house, I knew that the tornado had hit Menards and WalMart, and my house lays on a straight line between the big box stores and the DQ. Oh crap I hope [my husband] and Sumi [the dog] are okay). Traffic was slowed to a snail's pace, and the scene felt simultaneously calm and chaotic. So many people were out gawking. The DQ employees, who hid with the customers in the basement and emerged unscathed, were handing out Dilly Bars before they melted -- it was like a weird carnival.

Luckily, [my husband] and some other friends who'd gone to check on him came walking up to us at that moment, saving me from worrying about his well being. A bunch of the car repair places and the car dealership on our corner were pretty trashed, with walls ripped out, glass blown from the windows, and the roof on the car dealership laying in the showroom on top of some SUVs.

[My husband] spent the whole time in the basement and didn't realize the tornado essentially came down Benton St. He was lured out by our neighbors shouting, "Holy Shit! Look at that! Dude!" He discovered that the source of their exclamations was was the large tree in our front yard, which had uprooted and toppled, leaving a four foot deep hole next to the sidewalk. It fell away from the road and missed smashing into the house by a matter of a foot or so. It crushed our fence and our beautiful white hydrangea bushes with its main trunk and limbs, and the outer branches came to rest on our roof and about half the back yard.

After checking in on Sumi (who was excited last night and anxious today) we decided to go be tourists downtown. Thursday night in Iowa City is the first night of the weekend for lots of the undergrads, so the many intoxicated party people were all out, drinking in public, crossing police lines, and trading stories. The atmosphere after something like this is always so lovely. I know that sounds awful to say, but people are so nice to each other, so open, more talkative than they would be otherwise with total strangers.

And everyone out yesterday night and today seemed to have two things: cameras, and stories. I think there must be 600 pictures of our uprooted tree (it was the first thing many people saw of the storm damage driving towards downtown from Benton), and the official post-tornado stance seemed to be one arm out, brandishing a cell phone and taking flash pictures.

We talked to people who'd seen the tornado come in from a vantage point at the top of the Benton St. hill and watched it wend its way across the city, a guy who'd been in the corner of a parking garage and heard six dumpsters in the alley booming up and down and came outside to the sight of overturned cars and a smashed in Happy Joe's Pizza building, the drunk guy who said he didn't care if he wasn't supposed to park on the lawn, the couple with matching headlamps who showed us a Vespa scooter, impaled by a 20' board, a sorority girl's boyfriend who was the self-appointed guard of a gas leak.

Everyone who heard the tornado characterized it the same way; they all said it sounded like an approaching freight train.

The sorority on Washington St. was pretty intense -- the east side outer wall and much of the roof got ripped off, turning it into a life-sized Barbie Dream House. This is one of the highest parts of Iowa City, and the worst damage to houses seemed to be on Washington St. and Iowa Ave. Trees in the area were sheared off at a height of about 20' and had no small branches left on them. A power pole with about 50 wires leading out of it had snapped in two, but the wires had the top transformer area suspended a few inches off the ground - all the art students thought it looked like a great installation.

Walking around in the dark, streetlightless night with the bright full moon and all these people out was oddly magical. The full extent of the devastation, seen in the dark, was obscured. We headed home about 1:30, sat in the dark of the house and drank some wine before going to bed.

Today, cleanup is beginning with great speed. By great good coincidence, my next door neighbor is an arborist. He had trees down in his yard and said he'd send his crew over to our place when they were done at his. So, much to my amazement, the huge tree and hole in our yard are gone already. I think that all the cleanup will take months, and some of the older parks and homes may never be what they were before the storm. Nobody died, and even the injuries the hospitals treated sounded fairly minor, so really, the city escaped what could have been a much more tragic event reasonably well intact."

I'm both glad she's ok, and a little envious.
I love natural disasters.

Hats lead to indecent proposals

2006-04-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

It was a Parisien dance party. Glamour seemed to be de rigeur.

So I got all dolled up much like you see here---only of course considerably larger.

Yes, I had a hat. A pretty, eccentric hat. The kind of hat you'd see in a Wong Kar Wai movie. The kind of hat a chanteuse in Bladerunner might wear. Or a socialite in the movie Brazil. Or even, possibly, Garbo.

The kind of hat that comes down over one eye and has little feathers sticking up and bits of velvet studding the veiling--the kind of hat that is dangerous to wear in the 21st century.

Why?

Because glamour is now a mark of the hopelessly eccentric.

Think about it--glamour has become camp, glamour, without irony, will put you in situations you'd rather not.

For example, at a waltz in a homely little dance hall, peopled with gamer-types in dirndl skirts and high schol graduation era pumps, where men wore bowties and suspenders, and everyone polka-d--a hat like this can lead to--well, lots of things. In my case a dance partner who claimed to be a diplomat from Geneva and who ended the evening by offering me a foot massage (which is, as anyone who has ever seen Pulp Fiction knows, one step away from offering to put your tongue in the holy of holies). I don't let anyone who is not a trusted and proven beloved anywhere near my feet, because, as everyone knows, there's this one spot on the arch where, if you hit it correctly, you can, in fact, induce an orgasm. Sneaky little pressure point, that one. And there are those who exploit this spot, in the guise of a good-natured foot rub.

I doubt that this little 'diplomat' knew about the spot, but it was Berkeley, so odds are that he'd picked up a few sleazy tantric tricks to make up for his, er, deficiencies. There's nothing worse than a man you want nothing to do with trying to spring tantric secrets on you, like he's offering you posies or freshly minted hundred dollar bills. Especially when this happens on a dance floor, during an innocent waltz, when all you want to do is the box step.

And why, as an aside, do men think that an offer of massage, cunnilingus, or orgasms is something that women will jump on right off the bat? We aren't men, for one thing! And we aren't so easily bribed. If you want to bribe us, be a mensch and use money or goods like you would with anyone else. I mean, a diamond bracelet, sure, but an orgasm's kind of personal, for one thing, and for another, no matter how skilled you think you might be, there's simply no way a woman will believe you if you brag about it. That's a sure sign of a liar, a novice, or a sleaze. We won't take it like baksheesh--hear this now, gentlemen--no matter what kind of hat a woman is wearing, bribing her with your supposed ability to give pleasure or help her to release tension will just expose you for the pitiful, manipulative sham that you are. You'd do much better with chocolate.

And I had only come there to dance. I will dance with someone I would never in a million years go to bed with. Or even take off my shoes for.

When I politely declined, he then offered to massage my back instead, and when I declined that, he said that it was just that he "had a skill he really wanted to share with the world", and went into a long new-age exposition of why and how he was not making a pass at me at all. At which point I said that I was simply dying for a cigarette, and would he excuse me since I didn't want to expose his purity to the disgusting fumes of moral depravity? In Berkeley, or indeed all of California, mentioning that you smoke is generally the kiss of death. People flee as from a leper. But he was undeterred. Then it came to me.

took

off

the

hat

And seeing my face unobscured by glamor, seeing the bared teeth, the steely eyes

he vanished, taking his massage oil and his diplomacy with him.

As for the hat, I'll save it for outings to the Castro.

Fido: A new low

2006-04-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was the sunset.
Maybe it was the conjunction of a full moon rising and a rainbow bolting out of the sky and the edges of the waves flashing green.
Maybe it was the flakey singer who played Ben Harper, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell one after the other and in doing so inserted delicate needles into my heart.
Maybe it was the trippy dose of nutmeg in my latte.
Whatever it was, it made me decide to stalk your dog.
Not you. Of course not you.
never you.
But your dog.
Yes.
I stalked your dog.

Maybe it was because the coffeeshop was within three blocks of where you park your truck and leave your dog while you work your shift.
Maybe it was the egregiously tall man greeting his tiny asian companion with obvious passion and affection.
Maybe it my heart.
But.
Yes.
I stalked your dog.

I wanted just one more look into his craggy, doggy, adoring face. His brown eyes. His outrageous breath. I wanted to rap my knuckles on that bucket head one more time. And sniff his dusty fur.
So I slunk into the dark parking lot. I peeked in the windows of all the white trucks. I stalked your dog.
But it must have been your day off.
Because, as usual, I got nothing.
But yes, my darling.
Yes.
I stalked your dog.

Human Candles

2006-04-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

This Saturday I saw him again and I believe it now. In the last two weeks, such changes. He is so much thinner. I used to think of him as a solid block--sturdy, hewn--as if of wood or stone--elemental. But he hasn't been able to eat, he is strung between chemo and steroids, and his flesh is turning to light. It is true, that people who are dying emit light. Or perhaps we always emit light, but the closer our bodies get to the end, the less the light is obscured--the shutters of the body (that strange lantern that carries us, that we carry) are cracked, and then thrown open, and the light emerges. Light in place of flesh. Does pain generate this light? Does love? Is it disease? Is it the phosphorescent net of tumors, lurid with chemicals? Is it simply life itself, that life is light, light in us?
And then we go out.

In the zendo, you aren't supposed to blow out candles or incense. You wave them out. I don't know why this is. Perhaps the connection between breath and life--we want to avoid the breath that extinguishes. In the same way we vow to protect and uphold all life. Keep the candles burning. And wave them out when they have to go. Wave at the light. Wave it all the way out.

A grey day dreaming of white nights

2006-04-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

"If you visit St. Petersburg in June, you will probably not manage to fall asleep the first night. You will be waiting for it to get dark, but even though the sun will set, it will not get any darker. At midnight you can read a book by the window without having to turn on the lights. But it is not really so strange after all; for at 3:45 a.m. the sun will once again appear on the horizon. The entire night, this enchanting white night, will last only five hours and twenty six minutes. On such a night, the city seems to sink into a silvery-blue haze that comes from nowhere. Lovers will be strolling along the banks of the river. When the school year ends, the happy graduates will dance and sing all night long by the Neva." -Lev Uspensky

Ladders in the Sky

2006-04-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

All this rain and driving my car under the sky is like looking up the skirt of a sad bag lady, overhead the color of dingy washing, looking up at her old pantyhose with ladders all up the sides--split seams and runs and big holes in the crotch, a flash of blue panty and bulging thighs.

Then everything will change and light will come through and there will be ladders in the sky, and fortresses of clouds, and I can see why people used to imagine heaven was up there, because it's like a landscape on top of the landscape, unreachable and beautiful. And then the bag lady lets down her skirt, crouches by a cosmic garbage can, and pisses stale beer.

When will the rain let up?

When I wake up in the morning to no visible world, it's hard to get out of bed. Then when I'm on the road trying to suck down coffee and get to work, the rain is so beautiful I never want the drive to end.

The rubber on my wipers is starting to go. My car looks like a candy-apple when it's wet. But its interior smells like a poker-playing dog.

Paradise Rooms 3--behind the shower curtain

2006-03-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

The light in this bathroom is pure as a visitation, white-gold--you expect visions offering lilies, paranormal clarity, hazes of brilliance, in the early morning or late afternoon, so that the shower, tub, toilet, window are charged with splendor and when you stand behind the shower curtain in the steam and mist and press your hands or tits or knee against the white plastic making wet pink impressions, glimpses of naked skin, it all becomes revelation, too brilliant to see directly, and the light is so clean, and so divine, and so pure and radiant that it's like the annunciation, even when he's just sitting on the downturned toilet seat watching you in the shower, there are angels in the water vapor, and when you soap yourself and rinse, you can almost believe that God is with you this time, with this one, if you can just stay clean and glimpsed through perfect light and mist, behind a screen, if you can just scrub yourself inside with light then this one will last.

Spats

2006-03-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

At the moment I'm pissy because I have a psychic hangover. I had a wonderful weekend--sheer ebullience and manic conversation, dancing to cajun music at night and talking and walking around with my friends in Berkeley--graduate students and teachers. Every time I am around people I consider to be my fellows I get all happy and feel like "myself" (not that any such entity has any inherent existence) and then when I return to four walls at home with just the ceiling fan and books and a deadly silent phone--or when I come in to work and listen to the beige noise of the copy machine and overhear co-workers conversations about their babies or what they're going to cook for dinner(stabs of both jealousy and disdain), and look at my beige temporary walls and my beige phone and the beige carpet and the white bland pages of bubble answer sheets I feel like ripping my own heart out, putting it on the glass of the photocopy machine, smashing the lid down so blood oozes a little bit and I can smell my own flesh cooking in that flash of light, and making a thousand copies of the still-beating, still wanting, still hoping muscle--copies that I will then scotch-tape or staple or tack to every telephone pole in the next 50 miles with my phone number and the single word PLEASE with a thousand exclamation marks after it. ----------------------------------------

There's a flier on the corkboards here at the office about a cell phone tower project that people want to oppose. Apparently a church has rented out its spire as a cell phone tower. They want to shape transmittors like crosses and beam the cell phone radio waves all over creation. The catch--there's an elementary school nearby, and people are scared the kids are going to turn mutant from the emanations of people's chatter about their babies and what to cook for dinner and their hangnails and their latest purchases at radio shack.

Cell phone towers in the shape of crosses on the pinnacle of a church.

It's perfect. It's God. I'm all for it.

Jiminy I am in a crappy mood.Is it true that in the original book version of Pinocchio, Pinocchio KILLS Jiminy Cricket, his conscience? Maybe he makes him sit in a direct line with the radio-emanations of a cruciform cell phone tower, and the poor little conscience keels over in his spats and dies of brain cancer.

When you wish upon a star... sometimes I can't tell the difference between satellites and stars. between the voice of God and radio waves bearing human voices--- maybe there is less difference than I'd wish. I don't know.

Paradise Rooms 2: The jungle, the green blanket and the smoke

2006-03-22T10:50:00.000-08:00

In this room it is always 2 a.m. verging on dawn.
The window is open to perpetual fog. It is the end of November, mud and snow.
The room itself is cinderblock. You get in by scratching on the screen.
You get in through the dorm-room door, and pass beneath the fronds of a pothos overgrown, grown so long it hangs in Tarzan-strands, blocking the doorway, a curtain of vines that thrive on smoke.
A single lamp. It is green and dim. Mirrors on the closet, a straight chair with an ashtray on it, a single bed. A green velvet blanket. Two pillows, side by side. And a plume of smoke rising from the bed. The source of paradise (perceived) is that spiral of smoke. The exhalation that bellows exultation. Of course all this is false. It is a fool's paradise. But for the moment you don't care. You drop your wrap. You kick off your muddy shoes. The green blanket is a warm-napped pool. You dive in. You dive into the heat and the corkscrew of smoke.

You smoke while getting head. You smoke before, after, during. Your throat is raw. Your nerves are stripped, like the rest of you, and you smuggle your nakedness across the room in the green blanket. You drink fog from the window. Cascades of vines. Cascades of hair. And that killing smoke, enervating you. You light his cigarette. He lights you. And the dawn is the grey of the ashes in the bottom of the cruddy glass ashtray he swiped from a Denny's. And your fingers tremble as you put your necklace back on, and you go to your first class reeking of paradise, green blanket, green vines, smoke and mirrors, incandescent with illusion, stinking of hope.

Paradise rooms part 1

2006-03-21T16:06:00.000-08:00

My idea of paradise:

a dim room on a rainy afternoon--the windows are open, a warm rain is falling on hazy greenery outside, and the rain makes shadows on the walls. I'm in someone else's bed, alone, because they're out, but they're coming back, and there is the rain--sound and smell of it, and the deep green light, and the slow shadows, and a sense of expectancy --because I'm waiting for their return--and of peace, because I know they will come back. I'm awake but dreaming. The walls are white. The windows are large and deep, and it is someone else's room, all quiet, and empty, except for me. Maybe I drowse a little. Maybe I just watch the rain, light, warm rain that pulses and swells and then drops back to mist, beating on the leaves. The smell of wet vegetation and of grass, and rain-on-dust. It is afternoon. It has rained all day. And I am waiting without impatience in a bed that is not my own, a bed I belong to, but that doesn't belong to me.

Strange confluences in 3 parts

2006-03-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

Part 1/the dream

Yesterday I was thinking intently of Tassajara--projecting myself there, both backward and forward in time. I have been reflecting on so many layers of my experience there that it is nearly impossible to cast into words--or rather, I am too lazy to take the time to do the casting. It would take a lot of effort and time. The speed of thought exceeds the speed of speech, especially since thinking is non-linear; I tend to think in layers and multiple dimensions, touching many things at once. It is hard to translate, and I am a conditioned shirker.

Anyway, last night/in the early hours of this morning I had a vivid dream.In the dream, I was at Tassajara, and Hector's ghost appeared. I knew it was his ghost, and not him, because he is dead, and the ghost, though solid enough, had a pale green tinge to its face (sort of like the faces in a Giotto). Also he did not speak. He smiled a canny, unsettling, brilliant, strained, funny smile--a smile that was both a provocation and a source of pain. He reminded me, in this gesture and in his movements, of a Silent-era comedian--Harpo Marx, specifically. Like Harpo, Hector's ghost could get across intention and inner life with great clarity. Like Harpo, there was something both sad and menacing and seductive about Hector's ghost. Like Harpo, he seemed driven by a sense of comic chaos and basic human desire (think Harpo chasing his blondes).

He wore a deep-dyed indigo jacket with napoleanic buttons. I was glad to see him, but felt a mixture of guilt and unease. I wanted to hug him, but told myself you can't hug a ghost. I wanted to ask him "are you a hungry ghost"? (the buddhist term for a spirit that is one huge belly and a tiny mouth--the inhabit their own particular hell realm of fierce, insatiable hunger--they want to eat but can't take in any nourishment because their mouths and throats are so small, and any touch of liquid or nourishment burns like fire--they are pitiful beings and the sagaki ceremony (which takes place around Halloween) is dedicated to feeding the hungry ghosts). I wanted to ask him this, but it seemed impolite. He followed me around, Harpo-like, grinning. He also greeted, silently, my younger sister and my ex-monk. Then he mugged at some pretty, generic young women. That's all I remember.

strange confluence, part 2/the magic radio station

I carried the dream with me this morning as I drove the 40 miles to work. As usual, I tuned in to what I think of as 'the magic radio station'--a public radio station that broadcasts out of Cupertino. Every time I tune in, the station is playing something strange and unlikely, something that is often a source of inspiration or delight. It is the only station on which I've ever heard Tom Waits played; I also heard middle eastern accordian there once. This morning, however, though I didn't realize it at the time, the magic radio station wasn't playing music at all. I tuned in to the announcer speaking the usual stream-of-consciousness amateur rambling that is characteristic of 91.5 on the FM dial.

However, he caught my attention because he said""this next portion of the program goes out to Hector, who's driving around this morning in his truck."Hector is a common enough name in California. It tugged at me a little, but I let it go.Then he announced what he would be airing: the Dalai Lama's explanation on Tibetan attitudes toward death; how to handle death; the appropriate actions to take around the death of a loved one.

The Dalai Lama had given annotations to an ancient text that expresses the stages the mind goes through at death; (also before sleep, when sneezing, and during orgasm) and this program was going to be readings from that book.

"For Hector, who is out driving around in his truck." I got chills.

The day I found out that Hector died, I was distraught. I'd just injured myself badly a few days earlier, and I was spending most of my time at Tassajara in bed, on ice, in a dark cabin listening to the sounds of others' activities. One of the older priests, a woman who had known Hector and worked with him on various committees in the Zen Center, recommended that I read aloud from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I didn't understand quite why she suggested this--I'd never been interested in the book, and didn't think Hector had either, and I wasn't sure how Zen buddhist practices meshed with the more florid and esoteric Tibetan practices. The priest said that it was felt to be helpful in guiding a spirit that might be confused by the death experience. Because Hector's death was violent (a botched suicide resulting in liver failure and death) and the worry was that one's consciousness at such a time would be harrowed.

The buddhists believe that the more conscious and peaceful the death, the better. Reading the book aloud to the hovering, uncertain spirit is supposed to be beneficial. Apparently, according to some beliefs, the spirit hangs around the body for seven days (or 49?) before going into Bardo. The book of the dead is meant to guide you through the terrors of the bardo.I read the book aloud, feeling foolish and uncertain. What I read terrified me. Tibetan imagery is vivid, violent stuff--tasting of blood and lightning. Afterward, I wasn't sure I'd done the right thing at all. But one has to do something. Anyway, this program came on and I listened with all my attention.

strange confluence, part 3/ another lost brother

So I'm driving, the tears bursting out and then drying up, with this feeling of sweetness and relief and connection, listening to this discussion of death, consciousness, and a long digression on the history of Tibet and China and the selection process for the incarnations of lamas, wondering what these connections mean, if anything, and feeling oddly consoled, as though Hector had touched me, or I had touched Hector, or maybe his ghost had found itself somewhere after all, that he was taken care of, or I don't know--these kinds of confluences never have clear interpretations, if they have interpretations at all--but I think they do, and certainly spending an hour listening to the Tibetan POV made me believe that they do--a whole country is founded on portents, a whole line of spiritual leaders... and I pulled into the parking lot at work and had to refocus.

As soon as I sat down I found an email another cut-off friend, my practically-brother Sam. And I wrote back to him. This is going to sound dumb, and is a terrible example of how we use one another as our narratives, force one another into stories, to great violence. I laid so much on Hector, when I had a crush on him. I believed that if I could only win him, that would solve the whole mess between me, my sister, and Sam. I believed this ardently, needed it, willed it--I convinced myself that he was the missing piece of the puzzle, the final solution. It was a terrible and stupid thing to believe, and it fucked up what would have been an otherwise great friendship. We were great friends anyway, but I kind of slimed all over it--to its detriment later.

When Hector died, I realized I could no longer punish people for not loving me. Not unless I wanted to risk the same sense of violent loss and shame--not unless I wanted to cheat myself, and them, of connection, of company. I lost a precious year with a friend because I was stubborn and punitive. I lost the chance, maybe, to make a difference in his life, to be a positive, loving, supportive voice. I don't know if being more involved in his life would have kept him safe. But I do know that I lost an opportunity to be present in the life of someone I putatively "loved". I can't live this fact down. I can only try not to repeat it.

The connections and conflations we make between people are dangerous and prophetic. They shape things. I imputed so much of my pain over Sam onto Hector. I lost Hector. Sam, bless his stubborn egotistical heart, is still around. I am managing to patch things with my sister. But I know, and always knew, that because she and Sam are now so much a part of one another, if I cut him out, there were ways that she would always be cut out, too. And there would be ways that she and I could no longer be candid with one another, and entire forbidden zones--minefields where neither of us could venture. There would be the eternal taboo. I knew eventually I'd have to relent toward sam, to find some way to negotiate my relationship to him, in the aftermath of what was a fucking greek tragedy.

So Sam wrote to me today. I hadn't heard from him since last June. At my request. And I wrote back. Such a simple thing. But I wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been for this dream, and the radio, and thinking all this stuff through. He still irks me. After an exchange of only 2 emails, I find myself getting defensive, irritated, all of it. It is actually funny. But I guess that's ok. That's the bitch of having to deal with people. They aren't abstractions. They're full of burrs. They drive you nuts. You have to relate to them as they are and not how you idealize or demonize them. Ugh. It's a giant pain in the ass.

But the alternative is-- the alternative is always worse. A world of propoganda, ego, and violent control. Or a world of disconnection, loneliness, and one's own narcissistic company. Or a world of regret. All closed worlds. I miss Hector. I hate that I have made, and still make, a symbol of him. That I use him to think with. I would much prefer that I had negotiated the friendship in a wholesome way. I would prefer his real voice, his real face, his company, his writing, his laugh, even his boundless self-loathing, obnoxious and desperate perfectionism and his occasional thoughtless cruelty--to this strange Hector-emblem, the words that are unmaking him, even as I am grateful for what I can learn from such activity. Ugh. I miss him.

Tassajara--Food and Work

2006-03-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

I am trying to get myself jazzed about going back there, so I am remembering and to some extent idealizing all the things I love about it.

I did a big post on the RWBS about food. But the corollary to all that good food is the joy of experiencing real hunger. Anyone who has done hard physical work can attest to this--when you work with your body all day, you get hungry. Deep down muscle and cell hungry, sharp in the belly, but you feel it all over. And when you eat--my God, the food tastes incredible. There's nothing like it.

At Tassajara, you basically wake up hungry, and get hungrier in the two hours of sitting and soji before breakfast. Soji is the set of chores the workers do the get the place spick and span and ready for the day. Some people clean the zendo, some people set up the dining hall, some people clean bathrooms, etc. By the time you're in line for breakfast doing the meal chant, you're so hungry and chilly and awake that everything looks crisp and the smells just sneak up into your head and make you high. It's all about delayed gratification, and savoring. The students do a meal chant, then you have to sit and wait for the signal to begin eating. (Yes, it is regimented--I reiterate my friend Michelle's observation that zen has lots in common with S&M). For the first five minutes of the meal, no one is allowed to talk. So you really get to taste and experience the food in ways that you don't when you're babbling bullshit over mouthfuls of whatever.

After five minutes, the edge is gone, and things slow down, and you can talk. But those first few bites--even if it is something as bland as plain oatmeal with a little soy milk thrown in--you think you're sipping ambrosia.

Every meal is like this--but breakfast especially. In the ordinary office-job world, I usually skip breakfast, because I am not hungry. But at Tassajara, breakfast--you can feel it getting into your bloodstream, combating the cold, shoring you up, giving you strength for the day ahead--can feel how food really is fuel and not primarily pleasure or distraction, feel how work and food and yes, shit, are intimately connected, and there's an aliveness in it--the food is alive, you're alive, the work you do is alive, all this energy circulating, none of it congealing to fat, none of it stored, all of it expended in lifting, running, toting, cleaning, greeting, working. I really love that.

The work gets tedious and so does the menu. And Tassajara brings out other hungers, too. Less wholesome ones. But the phenomenon of looking forward to food with my body--and of discovering a real relationship between food and work--is something I cherish. That is why I go back. To get into more balanced physical rhythms, if only for a summer.

California Birds

2006-03-03T10:42:00.000-08:00

Last night there was a rain storm and my room rocked like a ship. I think because the house I live in has pedimented dormers, they catch the wind like sails and the house sways. I don't mind at all; I like it. I woke up to the fury of the storm with a profound sense of well-being, and then fell back asleep. Then this morning I was awakened by all these starlings having a tremendous fuckfest outside my windows. It is their season, and they're all fluttering and pecking one another in the face and pumping away. They make noise that isn't exactly singing, and it isn't exactly chirping--it's more like--I dunno, the bird equivalent of a whole stadium of people cheering after a touchdown.

There are some days here where the bird patterns astonish me. I remember a few months ago walking on the winter beach at Moss Landing and coming on a transylvania of gulls--more gulls than I could begin to imagine, cross-hatching the sky, flapping ragged above and in the surf, overhead, as far down the beach as I could see. The beach was so spotted with gull shit there was nowhere to place a bare foot; it was like someone had upended an enourmous wastebasket of white paper, just shaking, shaking out gull after gull--a sight both beautiful and frightening. I am not especially fond of gulls, and seeing them in a --what's a good word for an exponential flock? A flock to the nth power--and not knowing what they were doing or why--it was astonishing. A few days later they were gone. The beach had returned to its standard quota of gulls, and the tiny sandpipers were back, and the wimbrels.

I love Moss Landing, too, because of the egrets, tremendously white and graceful and abundant. They fish in the slough. (Someone has put lawn flamingoes in the shallows near where the egrets hunt. Every time I see this,I am amused.) When the ice plants are green and red and blooming, the pure white of the egret pops you in the face like a good clean snowball.

Horseshoes and lucky monkeys

2006-03-02T10:52:00.000-08:00

More from the self-help book of 1925.

This shows how much the world has changed:

Instead of making their affirmations and looking to God for success and prosperity, they had each bougt a "lucky monkey". I said, "Oh, I see, you have been trusting in the lucky monkeys instead of God." "Put away the lucky monkeys and call on the law of forgiveness." The decided to throw the lucky monkeys down a coalhole, and all went well again. This does not mean, however, that one should throw away every "lucky" ornament or horse-shoe about the house...I was with a friend, one day, who was in deep despair. In crossing the street, she picked up a horseshoe. Immediately she was filled with joy and hope. She said God had sent her the horsehoe in order to keep up her courage.... I wish to make the point clear that the men previously mentioened were depending on the monekys, alone, while this woman reognized the power back of the horseshoe."

Lucky monkeys, coal-holes and horse-shoes--what a strange world.
Imagine finding a horseshoe on the street now--it would be a totally bizarre experience, rather than a mnior rarity.
And coal-holes--I am not even sure what those are. Though in Turkey I did see coal chutes.

As for the lucky monkeys, one can only imagine what those might have been. Something won from Coney Island, no doubt, and stuffed with straw.

What magic items do people have now? Bumper stickers? Ipods? Nothing so primitive and earthy as a horse-shoe, a monkey's paw, or a rabbit's foot.

The Magic Radio Station/Self-Help from 1925

2006-03-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

I am in love with this radio station. No matter when it's on, there is always something bizarre or wonderful playing. Ok, the djs are obnoxious, but I think that's a genetic requirement for all djs, and they tend to ramble, but it's better than listening to commercials, and their amateur stylings have a certain charm.

This morning they were playing a show that was all irish/bluegrass music themed around storms--the wind and the rain. You'd be amazed how many narrative ballads are structured around wind and rain--possibly because when it's sunny out, people are running around frolicking rather than telling stories or singing songs. Anyway, then they announced that this band, The Gourds, is playing tonight. I KNOW I've heard of the Gourds, but I can't remember from when or where. So I thought, hey, I'll go check them out, they play dance music, and I like to dance.

So we'll see if I actually go. I am training myself to go to things alone; sometimes it is fun; often it is merely uncomfortable. I LOVE going to movies alone, but that's easy--you're in the dark, there's no interaction necessary--and you don't have to have some inane discussion with your fellow movie-goers afterward. Going to shows alone is tougher. Plus I have to drive to this one, on dark old highway 9, scene of many accidents, so I can't drink. But I should go. I don't know why I should go, but I have a feeling.

This morning in the lobby of my house someone had put out a weird assortment of free books. The one I grabbed was a self-help book written in 1925! Not substantitively different from affirmation books now, but the language and use of references is sooo dated, it's fascinating. It uses Christian tropes to peddle the same hooey that new age gurus are shucking today. I didn't realize the self-help industry was not of recent vintage.
The book is called The Game of Life & How to Play It, and it's written by Florence Scovel Shinn. It mixes Christian law with Freudian psychology and basic superstition/sympathetic magic. Some of it reads almost as Wiccan rede--the law of three, etc, and some of it reads like a fundamentalist tract. And yet I had to have it.

Here's a quote:
All disease, all unhappiness, come from the violation of the law of love. Man's boomerangs of hate, resentment and criticism come back laden with sickness and sorrow. Love seems almost a lost art, but the man with the knowledge of spiritual law knows it must be regained."

It goes on and on in this vein. And it makes me wonder about the persistence of human superstition, human need for magic, human doubt. How old is this mythology--the myth of affirmations, of mental magicks? Is it, in fact, a mythology? Is it 'true', or is it a plausible program sold to dupes? This makes me wonder about prophets and charlatans, about will and magic and the power of the mind, the power of desire, of weak-mindedness, of hope, of an industry (religion, self-help) built on the back of the basic fact that people suffer loss and lonliness, poverty, ill-health, misery, injustice--and want, more than anything, to find out WHY. These self-help books all posit a WHY--and with the WHY a way to eradicate it, or to reverse ill-fortune. If you know WHY you lost your money or your love, or why you fail, then you can go about changing it, making it better. But what if there is no WHY, just a BECAUSE? Then these self-help books are just placebos, pastilles that get their writers rich (some of them) and their buyers--the brief hour or two of comfort that comes from believing, as they read, that there is a reason for misfortune, and that it is something that, with the mastery of the correct methods, can be averted, again and again.

I look around and see an epidemic of lonliness. But I bet Florence Scovel Shinn would advise me otherwise. Allow me to consult her at random
Says Flo: "I knew a woman who always went about bragging of her troubles. So, of course, she always had something to brag about."

Wow!
This book is my new oracle.

artichokes, accordian, and what happens when I post after drinking caffeine on an empty stomach on a sunny day where there is no work to do at work

2006-02-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

I finally found a good radio station--I don't know how, I don't know where,and I am afraid to touch anything in the car for fear it will blink out like a soap bubble. Last night on the drive home it was playing TOM WAITS singing a GOSPEL song--and right then, I knew, I'd come home. The frequency had found me.

After Tom Waits it played a bunch of good raunchy blues, Big Mama Thornton, and some other people I'd never heard of, and this morning, this morning I thought, well, it can't possibly be good at a different itme of day--it's a fluke, kind of like the Hawaiian music that always comes on between 4 and 6, so that you feel ike that one guy in Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer's shrink, obsessed with Hawaii, or like "Woody" in Earth Girls Are Easy--speaking of which, THAT is a movie I can watch over and over--I LOVE that movie--but where was I?

Oh, the radio, this morning, totally blew my mind. It was a middle-eastern accordian player, and his brothers, playing something that sounded like tango by way of the silk road. It was amazing. And of course, since it was the radio, they said his name but a) I couldn't write it down, even phonetically, because I was driving and the one time I tried to write and drive I nearly went headfirst into an artichoke field and b) I couldn't quite tell what the announcer was saying. Elias Lamal? Elias Mammal? Alias Lemond? I couldn't quite catch it. So now I have an unrequited passion for middle eastern accordain music, and I may never hear it again, and I will go to my grave haunted by it.

Then I stopped behind a giant truck that had one of those disease ribbon stickers on the back of the tailgate, and it said, in delicate pink script, "I Support Farting". I didn't know flatulence was a disease--I thought it was more of a celebration. The sticker would have been better if it said "toot your horn if you love farting" or "I toot for tooters" or---I should stop saying 'tooters' right now. Was my coffee extra strong this morning?

The artichokes are coming out--they look like giant green roses in the fields. It's very Wizard-of-Oz looking; there's a scathing political commentary in here somewhere about farm laborers and munchkins, but I can't quite find it.

Actually, artichokes may look like roses but they are a member of the thistle family. How cool is that? And when you eat them with butter and white wine, the perfume is incredible.

And now I'm craving artichokes. And middle eastern accordian music.
There's no work to do today. I want to go home. I haven't done laundry since the last Ice Age.

The Old Woman and the Bear

2006-02-23T23:49:00.000-08:00

The Old Woman and the Bear

The bear walked into the old woman’s kitchen. It nosed aside her screen and padded in. The click of its claws reminded her of her first dog, the big one, but then she’d been so small herself. Scamp? No, Rascal. With his wet grin and the droughty look to his fur. He was strong enough to pull her across the scrubbed boards of the kitchen. She’d grasp the root of his tail and he’d pull her. In her little cart with the metal wheels. Underfoot. She was surprised at the memory—more surprised than at the bear. At her age, meeting an unexpected memory was more surprising than encountering anything new. There was just so much you could take in. She was old. She was full up, as she often declared. There was just so much you could take in. Rascal. The big one. But then she’d been so small herself. Three or so. Or so. A lovely memory. Startling.
So at first she was unsurprised by a kitchen full of bear.
At first.

The woman loved her life fiercely, without knowing it, as people do. Then she saw the bear, and her blood bolted, and she knew. She dropped her vitamin pill on the table, she tried to push back her chair.

The bear loved its life fiercely, and didn’t have to know anything. It was a bear. It knew the woman, or would soon.

Drought in the hills. In the city below the mesa, people drank coffee beside latched screen doors and tutted comfortably at the bald patches on their lawns. Eventually more water always came from somewhere. In the meantime, the old animals emerged, you read about it in the papers, animals you didn’t quite believe in really, bears and mountain cats and other improbabilities of the staved-off wilderness, looking for water, coming down the mountainsides and surprising cyclists, hikers, backyard barbecuers. “Nature Encroaches”, the headline said. Not quite, thought the old woman, reading the headline through the damp coffee ring she’d left on the paper. Rather, we are like the mountain that comes to Mohammed. The animals aren’t encroaching on us. We are gobbling up the space between. We have eaten it all up.

Behind her, she heard the click of claws on her kitchen floor and was flooded by sense of herself at three or so, trundling behind her first dog. Rascal. The big one. In the cart with wheels. Crossing the vast space of the kitchen floor, board by board, and dust in the cracks and the click of claws. Gobbled all up, she thought, feeling both herself in a limp nightgown drinking coffee and the small legs itching from the starched dress in the seat of the wagon, pulled across the gaps in the boards, a lovely memory, instant and unreachable, hitching across the spaces that held her apart; her and the lives she’d led and the people she’d been, all the space between her and other people, between her and the things of the world, all the space between me and them and you and it, all the space between us, who has eaten it? Gobbled all up. The space between.

What space between? Says the nose of the bear, pressing a wet brand on her bare arm.

The facts are simple:
The woman was old.
The bear was hungry.

Her skin hung lean and spotted.
The bear’s skin sagged over its ribs.

The woman dropped her last vitamin capsule. Her blood bolted. She tried to push back her chair. An irrelevant beam of sunlight shafted through the fallen pill: a yellow eye on the tabletop. And the yellow eyes of the bear took in her nightgown, dotted swiss, pimpled with pink berries, her salmon bedroom slippers. The bear nuzzled her ear.
And hears her heart gasping like a fish.

tagged by Sandra

2006-02-23T22:40:00.000-08:00

I can't refuse that vixen anything.

Four jobs I've had:
1. Inspektor of standardized tests for the children of america
2. ghost writer
3. marketing assistant
4. goat farmer/shop girl/peon

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Auntie Mame.
2. Dead Poets Society. With turkish subtitles.
3.Animal House. John Belushi makes me melt.
4. Conan the Barbarian. it's so tautological. "doom's children, the children of doom"

Four places I've lived:
1. Seoul, South Korea
2. Ankara, Turkey
3. Canberra,Australia
4. Indiana, Texas, California

Four TV shows I love:
1. Scrubs
2. Dead Like Me
3. South Park
4. Twin Peaks

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven't seen (much of):

1. Deadwood
2. The X Files
3. Sanford and Son
4. Saved by the Bell

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Japan
2. Spain
3. Pakistan
4. the Philippines

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. mushu anything
2. anchovy pizza
3. creme brulee
4. inn n out double double animal style

Four sites I visit daily:
1. Rebel Leady Boy/Sandra
2. The Real World...Blogger Style
3. Craigslist
4. Boz' site

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. at a hot springs
2. visiting one of my sisters
3. in a field of bluebonnets
4. watching fireflies in midsummer in Indiana from my old porch

hector satya vasquez-robles June 27 1972 - September 19, 2005

2006-02-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

hector satya vasquez-robles June 27 1972 - September 19, 2005
Originally uploaded by ruuku.

A big wave of missing him hit me today.

Little things will do it, little dumb things. Today it was the cashier at work. They had the same shaped head. And as I was forking over my five bucks I felt like someone had suddenly socked me in the guts. I wanted to make some kind of animal noise, but of course I didn't, I just accepted the change, and left.

What else can you do.

I miss him.

Sydney Carton's Third Double

2006-01-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

"Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away."

-The Jackal, A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens

Sydney Carton has many doubles. Observe, please.

Either of us could go to the guillotine for the other.
Hell, we could go together.

microwave Burns

2006-01-13T14:08:00.000-08:00

For some unaccountable reason, the microwave in the cafeteria at work plays "Auld Lang Syne" when the food is finished.
Why should this be?
Why that song?
Is it so you don't forget your food?

Just another example of post-modern disconnect in a world with a place for everything and everything all over the place.

My mother claims that in Tokyo (or was it Yokohama?) the sidewalk lights play "A Foggy Day in London Town" when it is time to cross the street, and that when you are supposed to stop and wait, they play "Pennies from Heaven".

I may be misremembering her song choices.

And the cars, way back when I was a girl in South Korea, played Fur Elise when they were backing out of a parking space. So it isn't new. I just didn't realize it applied to microwaves.

But when did everything become a music box? It's all so pop-goes-the-weasel--as if we are children who need distraction, entertainment, or--and I think this is closer to it--consolation. But god help me if I can't stand by for 30 seconds in unconsoled silence while my food reheats. The lonliness can be unbearable, for those 30 seconds, but the song of the microwave only confuses me and underscores my sense of dislocation. Auld Lang Syne has to be one of the saddest songs on earth. Don't offer it up unless you're also serving champagne, with kissing to follow. Please.

Who can we plead with? The programmers? The machines?

Now it's stuck in my head. And my food isn't even hot.

2006-01-13T14:02:00.000-08:00

I am not the most logical of women even on those "sane days" the tampax commercials never mention and well, after a week of playing the good sport, lending my favorite dress to my much-buffer-more-toned-and-buxom younger sister who always looks better in my clothes than I do (thereby ensuring that I will never wear them again: the ones I don't give to her on the spot, that is; this is the same sister who fell in love with the man I was in love with and was sleeping with until he fell in love with her as well, thereby plunging the three of us into an Oedipal nightmare that we are only just waking up from) to wear for the wedding, doing my older sister's hair, smiling at the Bad Smell and pretending that I really wasn't completely self-absorbed and self pitying because I was the only person at the wedding who was Single; and giving myself little Jane Austen type lectures about affection and duty; and then feeling underneath it all how unloveable and outright doomed I am to spinsterhood and poverty and not wanting to take it on the chin or take one for the team because I am so filled with entitlement that I have to be the center of the universe just like everyone else, I am tired.

I figured out what's bugging me

2005-10-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

So I have this job with a mega mega corporation doing QA (that's Quality Assurance to the uninitiated) on standardized tests. I don't even know where to begin looking at the morass of implications I find myself wound up in--this job involves me, morally, financially, and personally with the No Child Left Behind Act, with corporate influence swaying our educational system, with the corporate sending of jobs overseas (we outsource a lot to India), with confronting the whole concept of standardization and statistical analysis of individuals, I find myself participating in the gas economy in ways I find disturbing (I commute 48 miles each way to work, that's about a tank and a half of gas a week, $50 a week) and the worst part is, none of this is what bugs me. See, I am socially irresponsible; I share this trait with my fellow americans (some of them). I even buy coffee at Starbucks, because I get up at 6 am and at the end of the drive I need fuel and it is the only coffee place near work. So. I find myself deeply implicated, and as a direct result of trying to jump off the grid, move to Big Sur, live organically and do something different.

A series of bad choices, catastrophes, and disappointments have landed me in the exact spot I did not want to be. And it's not like I even have a "family to feed"--so there's no excuse for selling out like this.

Why am I doing it?
Because I am living as a dependant in a house where I don't belong and I need to move which costs a lot in California.
Because I love the central coast and want to find a way to stay.
Because I need capital.

But are these reasons good enough?
I don't know.

But that isn't what bugs me.

What bugs me is that, in going over all these tests I remember taking as an elementary school kid and high schooler, my old dreams and certainties come flooding back. I remember who I used to be, how I hated school (after the 4th grade at least--the early grades were pretty fun) and how I vowed that once I grew up I would never, ever, ever EVER look at a bubble sheet again.

Twelve years later... Here I sit, at a desk covered in bubble sheets, and I think, and I wonder, how?
Is the burocratic gene just in my blood, like hemophaelia? Both my parents are burocrats-by-necessity.

But everything I have done or tried to do was an attempt to extricate myself, So how in the fuck?

I don't know.
I try to console myself by stopping at Moss Landing sanctuary on the ride home (I use the word advisedly) from work, but an hour with the waves and the seals doesn't quite quiet my conscience, my sense of dread, or the cold feeling I have in the pit of my throat (directly across from the lizard brain) that I will never be what I promised myself, and that I have become, by some process of naivete? stupidity? bad luck? impulsiveness? the very person I never imagined being.

So yeah, participating in the global economy, world domination, excessive consumption and a cubicular lifestyle is all very bad, but what really bugs me, what really bugs me is, here I am. Editing the very word problems that made my skin crawl 20 years ago, and still do.

And besides, I am lonely. I hoped that getting a job would throw me into a greater social milieu, but the office is laid out so that no one sees each other (it feels like a prairie dog village or a giant habitrail) and the few coworkers I do interact with are a good deal older. Not unfriendly, just unavailable. I see young people drifting in and out of the partitions, but they are gone before I can say hello.

I eat lunch alone, or at my desk. In that way, it feels a little bit like school, too.

So the terror is that I am losing the fight against my own mediocrity, that I have found my level.

on poisons

2005-10-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

Not to sound too nineteenth century sewing circle, but I have decided that I hate that demon, alcohol.
It has destroyed, or is destroying, or will or may destroy, some of the people I love or have loved best.
It is the most corrosive legal substance I can think of. I am coming to hate the smell and the signs of it--the memory loss, the slurred speech, the stumbling, the easy tears, the terrifying instantly accessible rages, the neglect, the brittleness, the self righteousness, the self pity.

My grandmother drank herself to death. She drank so much the lining of her stomach gave way and she bled internally until she died. My uncle, don't even get me started on my uncle. Or my grandfather, or my great grandfather, on both sides, or my friends, my friends---

I tend to consort with alcoholics.
I don't know why. Genetics? Sometimes I think of the bloodline, going back and back and back (those fucking Irish) with a twin vein of 180 proof splitting through it, stumbling up the spiral staircase of my DNA, saying "drink or love a drunk, bottoms up, baby"

I love wine as much as the next hedonist. I love to get buzzed, sing loudly, talk, flirt, say stupid things that I am ashamed of the next morning.

But the regular sodden drunk, beginning at beer o clock and not ending until one passes out at 4 a.m., the whole house reeking of open bottles (a smell reminiscent, or precogniscent, of vomit) the curtains drawn, cigarette butts all over, and that thick fug of distance--that going to a country or state of consciousness that no one else can reach, the Sovereign State of Anesthesia--I don't go there, and when I watch someone else doing it, I feel terror and rage.

I know someone who has been jailed for driving drunk, jailed for 70 days, and he still does it, more than ever lately. He drinks every last genie in every last bottle and I spose he gets his wishes, I don't know.

I know someone who killed himself because he had started drinking heavily again.

It's all such a cliche. It's all true.

Tippler
Tosspot
Wino
Lush

Boozer
Alkie
Nose Painter
Drunk

Bibulous dipsomaniac
Intemperate sot

Alcoholic...

A person can't compete with an addiction. This is one of the most offensive truths of all. Love can't conquer it. I don't know what, if anything does. But I have to get out of here. It's making me sad and angry and tired and bored and furious and totally nuts.

picking up the thread

2005-10-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

It has been a fuck of a summer. But now it really IS October, and where does the time go? My experiences with time this summer have also been totally whacked--I live in a house with so many out-of-sync clocks that the hour is always chiming, no matter what time it is, and in between the pendulums shave the seconds down to the bone. At Tassajara time expands and contracts with the turnings of one's awareness, and I noticed this time that the han (the large wooden block that one beats with a mallet to summon the monks to the zendo) was worn considerably away since I'd last seen it.

Imagine a block of wood being struck every morning and evening. It had a motto painted on it, that read something like:
Wake up!
Time is endlessly passing, beware, do not waste time!

When last I saw it you could read the whole thing. Now the last few letters of "time" are worn away, hacked off by the percussion of three years of mornings. When a han gets fully worn away (it starts with a splintery crater in the center, and erodes, and eventually splits down the middle) the buddhists have a big ceremony and burn it, I think.

What mallet has eroded my clear lettering? What splinters has time hacked out of me? And Hector, who I loved at Tassajara, who I thought of as I dodged stones in the path, as I passed his room doing firewatch, hitting the blocks together and blowing out lanterns, who I sat with and discussed "Jules and Jim" and argued with and adored, time took him, or he grew impatient with time, and or time became unbearable to him, or he lost faith in time, or time narrowed like a strait jacket, or just chopped off his head--at any rate, he cashed in his chips and he is gone. I didn't get to say goodbye.

It is ironic, I got to visit the grave of Sanchi, the wonderful Tassajara dog; I even left cheese on the grave (Sanchi loved cheese--he took his arthritis pills in it) but where is Hector? I don't know.

And to me, it became plain, seeing how others had spent their time, that I have been wasting mine, idling it, burying it, taking progress at glacial speed or not at all, though time has certainly been hammering away at me.

So now what?
A Rilke poem begins, "Lord, it is time"

I guess I should leave it there for now.

dylan thomas's "Poem in October"

2005-07-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Father Time hangs the children

2005-06-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

So it has already been established that the last thing I do before going to sleep at night (no matter how late) is to read Thomas Hardy under the covers by flashlight. Never has it taken me so long to get through a book-- 'Jude' is only a few hundred pages long, and I haven't finished it yet--but that 's an aside--and a frustrating one--I am reading like a sexually unsatisfied middle aged woman... perhaps that is an evil thing to say, but fuck it. I feel evil this morning. Perhaps because I read Thomas Hardy right before going to sleep, and the scene I hit was perhaps (Can it get worse?) the most horrifying moment in the book--when the parents discover that their oldest charge has hanged their children and himself in the closet in their mean old lodgings in Christminster.

This is Hardy's cruelest moment, his baldest moment, and the moment when he hits his point perhaps a little to hard--even though, in life, such things do happen (need I mention the recent horrors on the internet of the monk crucifying the nun? sounds like a bad joke. To Hardy life is a bad joke, and he seems to believe that most of us, if not all, are born with desires that we will only live to see thwarted, stunted, or compromised. That the conflict between our natural yearnings and the shape of existence is so deep that it brings frustration, madness, shame, and ultimately, death, in myriad unfair and hopelessly depressing forms. Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly down, I almost agree with him. However, he was really a social revolutionary in a way I could never be. But I am babbling.

I guess my only point is,
never mind.
I don't have one. This post was interrupted by a difficult phone call.
Now I feel exactly as Hardy did.
Thwarted. Stunted. Compromised.

the grave of my 20s

2005-06-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

I keep a photo diary, but can't find words.
The joy in language, and hence in witnessing my own existence, hasn't been there for years. Since I started feeling real pain, real loss, real confusion, the words went. Or is it the other way around? I don't know.
I haven't written anything real in over four years.
I am beginning to doubt I ever will.
I suppose it doesn't "matter".
As my thirtieth birthday gets closer, I think of the quotation

"I piss on the grave of my 20s"

Talk about wasted years. A decade of false starts, bad decisions, giveaways, and loss.

Should I mourn?
Should I piss on the grave of my 20s?
I like who I was--she was fucked up (is) but had a vitality, and a kept a kind of faith.

Now I have better taste and I am wiser, but the juiciness is gone. A friend of mine told me that "mellow", as a cooking term means a step away from rotten.
There's ripe, and then there's mellow.

sometimes I look at my life one way and it seems really meager. Then I look at it another way and it's sort of ok.
But my work--what is it, where is it, how do I find it? My spiritual life, ditto. And let's not even talk about love, family, stability, structure. I keep getting wiped out and starting over. Sometimes I knock the shit down myself. Sometimes it just gets snatched away. Sometimes it mellows, rots, and turns to dust before I even realize it's gone.

So what now?
I find that i am haunted by my own past words--phrases I came up with in writing now are lodged in my head; nothing new comes. Other peoples' words, fragments of songs, or my own ghost voice, but nothing new-- and this is incredibly scary.

Writing, identity, work, love, an inner life.
All these new beginnings, all these losses, and a new decade coming on.
I haven't accomplished anything. At all.
Not forged a real partnership, not done significant work, not had a child or created anything, and this feels, at times, unbearable.

I don't know what I've gathered from the last decade. I can only see the erosion, chunks dropping away into the sea.

I guess I am not as stupid about men. And I am more willing to be a bitch. (Is that even a good thing?) And I am a better reader.
I miss my sister.
I miss my dog.
I miss Tassajara.
I miss all the boys and some of the men.
I miss jangling all over because language is electrifying me and coming through me in torrents.
I miss that sense of being in love with myself.
I miss feeling like something good was up ahead. Something immense.
I miss my younger body. I thought I was ugly,but you're never as ugly as you think, and you just keep getting uglier.
I miss walking all night through Bloomington following the track of the moon.
I can't piss on the grave of my 20s. I was going to make a cake with a gravestone on it, bearing that slogan, but I can't. Unless I made a demon cake, with all the bones and photographs and hanks of hair and old wounds buried in the sponge, and then devoured it, bearded with blood and howling---

I don't know what I'm saying.
Yorick's skull. Cap and bells. The vanishing of a foolish girl. A second decade eaten. Mellowing.

Time is different as my twenties close. It dilates rarely now. Things don't penetrate me as they used to. I was up with the moon on solstice night and I felt coated like the bottom of a nonstick pan--nothing touched me to the quick. Is this a function of ageing? Probably, and god I hope not. I feel like I've been broken, and had my innards scooped out, and now, often, while I can feel affection and minor tenderness, the heart is a rubber ball and the nerve endings are capped off. The last four years have brought such loss and disappointment and unless I regrow my emotional body somehow, I worry that I may be dead for good. In spite of the beauty of Big Sur, in spite of everyone. Fuck, I don't know.

So I am turning 30 soon. Big deal.
I wish I could write something like Dylan Thomas's "It was my 30th year to heaven".
I remember when my boyfriend read that to me on my 21st birthday, I cried. I couldn't imagine turning 30.
I felt like I had all the time in the world. Bathed in time, like asses milk--thick suds of it, turning my skin smooth and white.
Perhaps I did, then.
But not now.
Time is going along at a pony clip. And I am not as green.

view from my tent

2005-06-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

view from my tent
Originally uploaded by AEP.

All that blue stuff is the Pacific ocean. If you squint you can see whales, sea monsters, and the distant coast of Japan.

cultivating language/reading Thomas Hardy by flashlight

2005-06-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

What really amazes me about working in the garden is how it makes real certain tropes in the english language.
I live the reality of what were just metaphors to me before I engaged in the actions that created them.
In working with the roots of plants, I encounter the roots of english thought and english language. It is immense.

For example, the adjective "harrowing", one of my favorites in describing emotional states, experiences, etc.

Yesterday I harried/harrowed/harassed the soil using a harrow, which is a kind of rake. We had to break up the soil in order to plant tomatoes. So I harrowed it. As I did so, chunking the heavy rake through dirt clods, roughing up the dirt, shaking it, clawing at it, and disturbing it until it became soft and crumby loam, the word "harrowing" kept going through my mind. I'm harrowing, I'm harrowing, I thought, and my back, my eyes, my body, my fingers, made the connection between the doing and the metaphor.

This happens all the time when I am gardening. The language of cultivation, of growing food, is so basic to the fabric of english thought that we speak of actions without thinking, and many of us, without ever having engaged in the activities that inspired the metaphors. In fact, some words are so intrinsic to the language that I at least, didn't consciously realize that they came from concrete things and activities.

So gardening is awakening the poet in me--if to realize the possibilities in the connection between life and language is to be a poet.

Plants talk. The dirt talks. Ideas come from cultivating the soil. This is one of the most pleasurable shocks I've had in a long time.

I am looking at cliches, at sayings, at basic words in a new light, the light of living them, directly.

I am also reading Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure) and noticing how his relationship to the natural world infects his language and his storytelling.

Hardy cracks me up! I haven't read him since high school.
He's so deadly earnest, such a revolutionary, dour and sexy and almost modern-- and with the plodding narrative pace of an ox, a pessimist to the bone, and yet his characters are round and real, and some of his descriptions--his still lifes, if you will, are so beautiful and perfect that I can't help it kissing my hand to him. Plus it is great to read Thomas Hardy under the damp bedclothes in the tent, by flashlight, knowing that I have milked an animal, or pulled a weed, or walked a field, like his characters. I feel close to Hardy's pastorals, and i also feel close to his characters' sexual and personal struggles.

Great fun.

goats milk and cobwebs

2005-06-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

Living out in the country makes some processes more obvious. The constant forces at work are visible, and many of one's tasks stem from either curtailing or encouraging the natural outpouring of creation. I milked the goat today, or helped to milk her, and each time I squeeze a thin stream from the living animal, I am amazed at the process. I also fed the goats alfalfa flakes, and the sweet alfalfa scent is in the milk--alfalfa to goat to milk to me--I ate goats milk yogurt just a couple minutes ago. The connections are so obvious out here. The black teat in my hands one minute, sweet kefir mixed with maple in my mouth the next. And there is something profoundly moving, to me, about carrying an aluminum pailful of milk up a garden path, and feeling the live heat from the milk on the bottom of the pan.

The cobwebs are another thing. The spiders here are always spinning, big and small, young ones, baby ones, they inhabit every free inch of space, between the bones, in the rock wall, the green house, on cabinet doors, decorations, candlesticks, corners, and their webs drift across--or connect--all the objects in the house. It's an endless task to wipe them down; and how tenacious they are--they don't unmoor easily, and even when they do, they ball up in sticky clots that won't come free. They snag, they hang, they snarl up, and as you knock each down there are hundreds of spiders, visible and invisible, spinning more. This feels profound to me, the act of taking down cobwebs and the constant energy of the spiders. The spiders, of course, have the advantage.

We plant tomatoes next.
There is always more work to do. But the work--the cleaning, the planting, the maintaining, makes sense to me. Even when I have spiderwebs in my hair, hayseeds under my fingernails, and goat shit on my shoes, or perhaps especially then. It didn't rain today--another blessing, when you're living in a tent.

cellophane wrapped immortals

2005-06-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

cellophane wrapped immortals
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Venerable immortals, holding the peach of eternity, or whatever it is called. Peaches from the tree of heaven. You'd think, if they were so Immortal, they wouldn't need to be wrapped in cellophane.

They'd be preserved by their own sanctity.
But oh well. It's pretty festive.

Speaking of cellophane, I was under the illusion that Big Sur summers were hot and dry, and this one is damp and even, shudder, rainy. A crow perched on my tent this morning eating snails off the rain fly. The tent already leaks, and in spite of the 6 inch metal stakes that hold it down, it doesn't do too well in the wind. My bedding already smells like mildew, and I worry about what a serious storm will do.

The crow babies are out and they have a special food call, high and hoarse, when they want to be fed. The crow sentry's post is in one of the fig trees next to my tent, and when I come out, it sounds the alarm and all the crows take off.

I feel lonely here a lot, though I am rarely alone.

blackprimavera

2005-06-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

blackprimavera
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Here's what Botticelli's Primavera looks like as a Brazilian Carnival goddess.

Savage springtime in the land of samba, Sugarloaf, bikini waxes and the mannequin from Ipanema.

BIG SUR GIRL

2005-06-16T00:26:00.000-07:00

BIG SUR GIRL
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, ok I know posting pictures of oneself is narcissitic exhibitionism, but I don't have time to read or write, and the digital camera is so easy, and so, here we go. Me in a cowboy hat, wow.

I will wear it when I am mucking out goat pens.
I already have a Big Sur sense of style.
It's amazing what living in a tent and not having am mirror will do to your fashion sense.

But what the hell, everyone gets to be Debra Winger for a day.

I think of J sitting there and quoting to me from Urban Cowboy, and I feel sad.
The earrings come from the store.
They are huge and gold and isn't it amazing how one's fashion sense changes almost immediately according to environment, but still maintains a certain consistency, too?
I never could have worn huge gold tribal shit in SF, but now I am wearing hats and belts and turquoise and acting like a total hippie.
Whatever.
Blah.
so
another picture
of me
until I find time to think
and to write
I'll just say
CHEESE

no concessions

2005-06-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

I wake at the same time here—quarter to seven in the morning. This morning and yesterday I was struck by the profundity of snails the morning brings out—glassine creatures making their way across the earth and straw with curling horns and brown speckled shells. I used to have a phobia of snails, when they lived in our letterbox and ate our mail,but maybe Australian snails are more violent, or else I am less so now,but now I am struck by how tender and vulnerable in spite of their shells are snails. I used to feel sick when I crunched a shell underfoot—but the sickness that comes of both pleasure and repulsion—now, stumbling half asleep down the path to the bathroom, I dodge them as best I can. I have no desire to kill them. I feel rather benevolent toward them.

The steps to my tent are barely there—they were cut into the dirt with a backhoe and have already worn away—the perpendiculars and flats are shallower and trickier each time I use them. But I take pleasure in navigating these few sod steps—each time I climb them I have to be careful of my footing, and I realize that my feet are erasing them every day.

The ocean is blue under a table of clouds. I went there yesterday after work, snuck in really, because you have to pay $5 just to park there and go in. I was talking about this with the owner of the property where I am staying, Brock, last night… Having to pay for access to a public beach. He says that until recently this wasn’t the case, but someone bought the concessions for all the state beaches and runs them for a profit. I don’t know how true this is, but I do know that California has started charging people for everything—and it feels damned perverse that a person who doesn’t have five bucks will either be barred from going to the beach at all, or ticketed if they go without paying. When will we be charged to breathe? Not to sound like Rousseau or any of those guys, but isn’t it a universal human right to exist on this earth and walk it? The beach is (or used to be) free entertainment, gratis solace, better than Prozac, Hollywood cinema, the carnival, etc. Hell,before that it was larder and mother and field of toil… Now it’s been stickered and cordoned and you gotta pay, baby, you gotta pay…

rambling various big sur at 7 a.m.

2005-06-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

This morning I heard (or thought I heard) the Pacific bowling in two strong surges outside the lip of my tent. The rain glued the tent fly to the tent in strange patterns, pressed drops and rivulets. My bed is soaked—somehow, somehow the rain got in, I don’t know how ---through the vents? Underground? And this has something to do with surrender, soaked foam, damp wools, and always, the fat drops rolling down nylon. What was I going to say? Oh, the crows--- over and over, my bells, calling to one another and calling me awake at 630. I wake earlier than I need to, of my own accord (or the crows’) a delicious feeling.

Big Sur jade—this is one of the few places in the world where the ocean makes new jade. This gives me the same mysterious reverberations as the idea of fresh water seals.

Two hills fold like the wings of a heart down to a view of the sea. Driving the gravel road in the dark—the road seems endless, as only small patches come into sight, and I am never sure where the next turn is, and the stars don’t give enough light in the high wooly black sky, and the smell of sycamore and eucalyptus filters sweet through the damp gravel, and the weeds.

the secret lives of goats

2005-06-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

goats
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Meet Billy, the he-goat.
Billy is an utter bastard.
He knocked up Morgan, the anorexic underage nanny and now he won't let her eat. Morgan is nursing the bastard kid, Barbecue, and she is so skinny that she should be admitted for treatment at one of those clinics for undernourished teen stars. Morgan, or Skinny Girl, is the runt and anytime she tries to get to any fodder, Billy, the rapist, headbutts her out of the way! When I try to feed her on the sly, he intervenes. He ignores little Barbecue, and he is always trying to be a player to the other females! Goats are dogs!!!

It's very sad.
I slip Morgan handfuls of extra grain, but she doesn't like me, because she knows that I know that the other humans are planning to slaughter her kid, the one she had too young and at such cost, and eat him, because he's a male, and the males you don't let live long enough to to let them fuck, you eat.

So Billy's got a big head and no heart, and his son Barbecue is just waiting for the spit.

High drama in the goat pen.
The End.

big sur amy on rock

2005-06-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

big sur amy on rock
Originally uploaded by AEP.

I haven't had any time to write yet; it is easier to post photos. The beach below the ridge where I live has purple granite sand and huge sandstone rocks. Not many seashells, but smooth stones that you can use to build walls, hold down flyaway tents, or set up little terra cotta shisa dogs from okinawa (I've done both).

This is one of the tamer pics from a photo series I did on the beach during my first week here. The hyperactive owner was away, so the newly arrived mice could play. I love this beach. The wind is fierce, it feels volcanic, there's a huge archway of stone that stands in the waves; very Andromeda meets the Kraken.

driftwood is automatically artistic

2005-06-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

driftwood is automatically artistic
Originally uploaded by AEP.

This is the beach that is down the hill from the property.

goat girl

2005-06-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

goat girl
Originally uploaded by AEP.

This is me feeding the friendliest goat in the pen.
Her name is something Hawaiin but I call her "The Friendly Spotted Goat Who Actually Likes Me".

Fog

2005-06-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

What day is it?

I have two spider bites on my left leg, and one on my forehead.
My body has black kerosene streaks on it from hitting myself with unlit poi while practicing firedancing (without fire).
I danced with fire, too, and didn't burn myself. I am not very good at it.

Other things I am not good at yet:
milking a goat
weeding a garden
sleeping in a tent
doing manual labor in the full sun for more than three hours without wanting to collapse, clap my hands for the servants to bring me some lemonade, and then lying in hammock and reading victorian novels. (I have not gotten to do this, and I managed five hours in the sun yesterday. now that it is my day off, of course, the fog is weaving around the ankles of the house like an annoying cat).

Espresso with steamed goat's milk is the nectar of the gods.
I caught a lizard when I was raking straw. It was growing a new tail. It was the first lizard I ever caught with my bare hands. The totem-aniimals book they keep next to the toilet explained that lizards symbolize intuition and the ability to detach from circumstances. I thought it was a pretty good omen.

They decorate with bones. I like it. Bones have a real warmth to them that I didn't expect. It's very organic here. There are dried chicken's feet in a basket in the bathroom. There is world music on the stereo and a shotgun leaning on a velvet covered cane chair. Redneck bohemian, voodoo yuppies--there has to be a good coinage.

I hurt all over.
Did I already say that?
There's more to tell, but my camera batteries just finished recharging, so I think I'll take pictures and let them speak for me.
love and itches
me

video pug

2005-05-29T15:23:00.000-07:00

video pug
Originally uploaded by AEP.

You can never have too many pictures of pugs.

the house York Street

2005-05-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

the house York Street
Originally uploaded by AEP.

I lived in the attic.
Glamorous.

video store pug

2005-05-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

video store pug
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Ollie the pug at the local video store.
Because it's not just about me.

Big Chief Kisses Horses

2005-05-29T14:54:00.000-07:00

Big Chief Kisses Horses
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Moving day.
I will miss that horse mask. It won't fit in my tipi.

Mr. Samy!

2005-05-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

Mr. Samy!
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Goodbye Mr. Samy.
The only time this man has ever smiled.
I love the Samys, two people more depressed than I was, selling hooch to local panhandlers and cheetos and orangina to me.

I hate moving during carnivale

2005-05-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

I hate moving during carnivale
Originally uploaded by AEP.

It's carnivale. People are dancing in the streets.
I however, am hauling shit.
But Justin got me some beads.
Which I had to PACK!
No, I gave them to him to give to Mrs. Samy.
the wife of see next photo.

I would rather be burned alive at the stake than move another fucking box of shit

2005-05-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

I would rather be burned alive at the stake than move another fucking box of shit
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Stoically awaiting death.

religious hangover

2005-05-28T20:49:00.001-07:00

religious hangover
Originally uploaded by AEP.

finally, I see god.

3rd world hangover

2005-05-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

3rd world hangover
Originally uploaded by AEP.

hangover two--oppressed and in need of intercession...

jedi hangover

2005-05-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

jedi hangover
Originally uploaded by AEP.

first of the three faces of hangover

Tolstoy, the genius of well-being

2005-05-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

Tolstoy is the great genius of well-being.
The only writer who can capture that sense of fitness, of fullness, when your cup runs over and you feel like you're right there, in harmony with everything, and brimming.

When Natasha screams at the climax of the wolf hunt.
Levin, harvesting in the fields.
The whole book (seven?) about russian christmas in War and Peace.
Natasha at her first ball.

Pierre and Andrei on the ferry crossing the river.

He is the only writer I can think of who can capture the moments of fullness as well (or better) than he captures the longing, the deprivation, the sense of futility and violence.

Many many writers write well of the ache of emptiness, of longing, of yearning, of absurdity.

But how many artists can capture that sense of being full?
Those rare moments when you could be struck down, and annihilated, and it would be ok, you'd die smiling, lacking nothing?
Only Tolstoy. If you can think of others, I'd like to know. I want to read them.
I feel full today. Don't know why. I am hungover and have a lot to do. And yet, if I die on Highway 1, or crossing the street, I just want you to know, I'd go smiling, lacking nothing.
love again,
me

Goodbye, goodbye, I will always feel a great attachment to you ALL

2005-05-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

"Lady Iris, will you ring for my wrap?" (and get rid of those damned COWBELLS)"

No, really, I love you all, I love you ALL, you all know who you are, every one of you, or maybe you don't, but I love you with such fierceness, such mad glad hunger I wish I could squeeze you all, sing to you all, scream it dance it draw it, whatever, because oh yeah, I love you. All of you! And I also love everyone you love, and by association everyone they love, until it touches everything, pretty much.

Everyone I have ever loved, know this, I love you still. Romantic love, fraternal love, filial love, friendship, combative love, lying love, cowardly love, all of it, all of you, I love you still.

It's not just the triple caffeine, it's this overwhelming welling up that always comes with a summing up, and I dream about you, all of you, every one of you, still, and I wake up smiling, or crying, or aching, and none of it ever leaves me, suffers a sea change maybe, but never leaves, you're all rolling around in the surf of my love, all the wrack and treasure alike, oh, I wish I could see every one of you, in the flesh or as a disembodied spirit, just peek in and bless you all, and heap you with goodness and happiness and wonder and health, I am so totally in love with everyone I have ever known right now. And I miss you all. I miss you!

I love the story of the Zen Master who, toward the end of his life, became so filled with love that he had to give up teaching, because he had lost the fierceness required, and could only sit on his cushion crooning love songs to his disciples...

That's how I feel at the moment. Give me a zither, or a washboard, and I'll sing it.
Be thou me, west wind, and blow it across the whole world, over all of you, even the ones I barely knew, even the ones who were only (you're never) tangential, even the ones I betrayed, or who betrayed me, yeah, even you.

This mood won't last. But right now I'm a kamikaze, on a henry-miller high, spitting out franc pieces and rising like a kite.
"World I cannot hold thee close enough."
"If we had world enough and time"

Yeah, I'm in love with every last one of you.
Just thought I'd say it somewhere.
God, grant me when I die the chance to fly around and peek in on every single one I've ever, just one last time.

love,
me

Procrastinating instead of packing

2005-05-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

nape
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Saying goodbye to the kimono collection.
It gets deep sixed in the garage until I stop living in a tent...

Sur

2005-05-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

Sur
Originally uploaded by AEP.

Saturday!!!

jo sisters feet

2005-05-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

jo sisters feet
Originally uploaded by AEP.

I think my sister and I look alike.
Don't you?

fragments from the Airconditioned Nightmare

2005-05-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

I was drawn to this book while dogsitting last month on Nob Hill. I'd known Miller through Anais Nin as a 19 year old and later through his trilogy, but this book compelled me, and still compels me. I think he saw America damned clearly, with the emphasis on damned. He wound up in Big Sur. He died there.

He describes his arrival in Boston after being overseas in Europe:
"it was like following in the wake of a demented giant who had sown the earth with crazy dreams...there was nothing of the animal, vegetable, or human kingdom in sight. It was a vast jumbled waste created...in a delirium of greed. It was something negative, some not-ness of some kind or other. It was a bad dream..."

I remember coming off the mountain after my second summer at Tassajara and feeling a similar sense of dislocation, and of recognition--of witnessing collective delusion. After months of total immersion in a narrow valley lit by kerosene lanterns and people with humans practicing silence, (I thought of it as akin to Tolkien's "last homely house") to come down into the visual barren clamor of the United States was a terrible shock.

I remember being struck, in particular,by the boxiness and divisiness of all the structures, and how obvious it was to me that these were physical manifestations of thought forms, of beliefs about property, and about basic reality, that were collectively and deeply held, so deeply that they permeated--no, they shaped the landscape. And the landscape in turn shapes us. Serpent eating its tail. We are what we dream, and what other people dream for and about us.

I saw what Miller saw, the jumbled waste, all physical manifestations of the American beliefs about containment, ownership, and Having, all squared into boxes--homes, storage units (so much STORAGE, I noted--things we usually edit out of our visual and mental fields, when we are used to them) hoarding, privacy, division--everything neatly cordoned and contained and seperate, each unit unrelated to its fellows, and the consummate utility (which is a kind of madness, when it is isolated from relationship, as many buildings in the american landscape are) of each structure horrified me and made me feel a deep sorrow. The irredeemable ugliness of american practicality, of american boxiness, of american compartmentalization and american lonliness struck me hard, after those months of communal life, where you could leave your belongings out in public and find them days later undisturbed, where people worked actively to cultivate awareness of their interconnectedness (sometimes to the point of neurosis, but that's a tale for another day).

In the american landscape I see the tunnel vision, the devastating myth of the individual, of the self, in the self contained units, related neither to one another nor to the landscape, but superimposed with what willfullness and what blind despair and what arrogance, the deep practice of segregation that has dominated this country since we first set foot here, the real american dream, the dream of the self in a vaccuum of comforts. Instead of Tiny Tim we have the Boy in the Bubble, every one.

The billboards steal your attention on the highways; they distract you from the superabundance of waste, of wasted space, of surplus.

I felt insane, those first few months back in the world. I was on the other side of the mirror, for a little while. And then I slowly assimilated. Acquired my own things. Inhabited my own bubble. Painfully. It was soul deadening.

I think the web offers us a kind of collective limbo, and also the dream of connectedness. It's shifting and permeable, and the containers we create for ourselves herein are easily breached, linked, (and links are everything, we leap from block to block,like runaway slaves crossing an icy river to freedom! ha!) and we can hook into one another. It's a radical, communal space where people are both freer and more playful. Among other things. I think those wounded by the delusion of seperateness, or the merely wounded (and also the bored, but boredom is a wound, perhaps one of the worse) congregate here to lick themselves, and to connect.

E.M. Forster says "only connect".
Now we can link.
But the boxes in the landscape remain.

sleeping seal

2005-05-25T01:06:00.000-07:00

IMAG0053
Originally uploaded by AEP.

A seal can sleep upright in cold water.
I can't sleep!!!

alphaville

2005-05-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

I have been so driven this week I think I know how alpha personality types must feel.
First of all,they don't. They are too busy doing.
To be this task oriented is disorienting. Like someone pulled the plug on my heart.
I can't feel. I can't imagine. All I can do is think and act strategically. Implementing checklists.
To do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do.
What's the big to do?

I sent the cat off.
I got my teeth fixed.
I did. I did. I did.
Do.

Do be do be do...

Doing is sort of mindless, but at the same time your mind never stops. It's always planning the next maneover.
where to go what to do who to be and how and when.
It's dizzying.
I mean, I am watching my mind map the coordinates of these actions and tasks, and my body follows, and they are both in hyperdrive right now, and I don't dare reflect, for fear that reflect will Slow Me Down, Get in My Way or god forbid, Stop Me.
Nothing can stop me. i can't stop.
not even to sleep.

So I got rid of the cat. I feel nothing.
I am leaving this job, and the security of benefits, and a paycheck, and I feel nothing.
Not exhiliration. not panic. Why not? I am too busy.

Busy bodies, I get it now. I get it.
You can be so busy little things like processing information can totally bypass your heart, your reflective capacities.
it's unnerving. I don't recognize myself.
I don't want to.
I am too busy.

And all these men. Like, for instance, the guy who was really into me when I was twenty five, and who ditched me without a Word of Warning (as PL Travers puts it) and went back to his screw-him-around-married-girlfriend, four years later she leaves him and her husband and he wants to have dinner now.
Yeah. Don't people know the difference between a 25 year old in an abusive relationship and a near-30 year old in an amorphous state (like a free radical) are like cheese and chalk, only related thanks to alliteration? I really get the sense that he assumes we will pick up where we left off.

Or the married 4 kidney poet who called this morning to talk because he is thinking of writing a novel,but really he wants some unnameable thing from me that takes the metaphorical form of phone sex, which I don't do with him,because his wife is pregnant.

My problem is, I love the attention. I hate the attention. My other problem is, I get where they are coming from. Who isn't lonely and delusional? Show of hands? Cast the first stone, you know? I get where they are coming from, part of me aches for them, for myself, for the whole bloody mess and if I could fix it I would but when I try I fuck things up worse and I am starting to get the compassion of being a bitch.
All you bitches out there I used to marvel at and look down upon, hear me now: you were on to something.
Being a bitch isn't mere self preservation. It's a public service.
It really is.
You get bitchy on someone, and that snaps them into reality. Or at least cuts through complications.
Which, in my new alpha mode of the bypassed heart, sounds pretty damned good.
Hell, if I can mail a cat to Chicago, I can do anything.

Who needs this heart, anyway? No, not you, caller number one, and not you, caller number two, and yes, I will probably end up like amanda in the Glass Menagerie, browbeating my gay son about my glory days when I was such a doormat I was the desire (or fallback option) of every cracked teacup hoof and mouth shuffler on the block, but... what was I saying?
Ah, bartleby, ah humanity.
That's about it.
Maybe now I can sleep.

So Kiss me and Smile for Me

2005-05-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

Farewell to Schmitty!
My cat. I never loved her. I don't know why.
So I'm sending her down the river. East of Eden.
To Chicago. She's taking the red eye tonight to the Midwest, poor thing, she's never known winter, or hunger, or sorrow, let's face it, she doesn't know much, she's a cat and we all know that cats, like certain beautiful men and women, only have an air of wisdom because they are so damned pretty, and for some reason we dumbo humans conflate beauty and truth (thanks a lot Keats) and project the depths of the cosmos onto anything that's green-eyed and symmetrical. So Schmitty, wart and all (see her wart?) only looks like she has a soul. She doesn't. She's a cat.

Me and Schmitty, we tolerated each other, but it was a marriage of convenience. We both knew it. She will be happier with my friend in Chicago. We're both mysoginists, and I'm a dog person anyway.
Good bye, Schmitty, I hardly knew ye!

A Very David Lynch Weekend

2005-05-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

I went to a party in the hills above Palo Alto on Saturday. Went with Bodhi.
One of those California houses shaped like a spaceship, all windows and a deck jutting out over a little vineyard.
You could see the Palo Alto particle accelerator in the distance, if you used binoculars. But we didn't have any.
And the bay.
And the gently waving cypresses.
And the perfect smoke from the perfect fire puffing out of the perfect chimney.
It was one of those houses that only the rich can have, maintained by money and invisible elves, and inhabited by a baby boomer who collects wooden indians.

Every two feet there was another one, counting coup.
I sang Kawlijah, but no one got it. Except Bodhi.
Gloria Estefan on the stereo.
It was that kind of party.

Spent most of the night talking to a Russian guy about literature. He would rather have been seducing his ex, who ditched him 20 years ago because he refused to stop living with his mother. He still lives with his mother, but he pined visibly for the ex, who was at the party, and flirted with him outrageously. She's the wild type. Even at 51. Wild, raw-voiced, adventurous, and callous. Poor schmuck.

There was one women there who looked like Charlotte Rampling.

THere were three crispy 50 year old blondes who all looked alike. They all must have been former cheerleaders. They still had that sweet, perky, wholesome vibe. And the makeup. And the pep rally smiles.

There was me, with paperwhite narcissi in my hair, all hippified (someone told me I look like Frida Kahlo, thanks, lady)and out of place, and young enough to be all their daughters, and the host dropped a spoon down my back when he was clearing the plates and got icing all over my ass and that is the longest I have ever spent wearing high heels without sneaking off somewhere to take them off, and the bathroom had stereo music piped in, and I kept looking for hidden cameras, and the food was delicious.

We had so much champagne I lost count.
Caviar.

They were nice people. From a galaxy far far away. But kind. Welcoming.

Still, I kept expecting something bad to happen.

Like a time-loop, or a grisly murder. Or a demon named Bob.

But the only thing that happened was, my one silk cocktail dress now has a chocolate frosting skidmark. I felt poor, and drunk, and amused, and sad, and bored, and mystified and felt that there really are So Many Americas in one place.
And the cigar indians didn't even get dusty.

the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe

2005-05-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

I have discovered, as I always discover every time I move, that I am essentially,
A BAG LADY
without the shopping cart.

Aren't we all, pretty much bag ladies, except that our carts don't have wheels, and are bigger?

Donald Trump is a bag lady.
Paris Hilton is a bag lady.
Queen Elizabeth II is a bag lady.

It's all just. STUFF.

And yet I cling to it tenaciously as a decorator crab, sticking it onto myself until I am crusted over with accoutrements that somehow define me, but they don't, they burden me and you can't fit much in a tent cept your own carcass and maybe, if you're me, an IKEA clothes rack from which depend a kimono collection and a beaded ball gown... Miss Havisham on line two...

Cor blimey, all I want is a room somewhere!

2005-05-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

So Boz agreed to be my Henry Higgins and turn this filthy cockney flower girl of a blog into a duchess, in exchange for my password and user name.

Isn't that the web-equivalent of giving the devil your soul?
That's ok, I always loved George Burns and his ability to play both god and the devil; it was comforting that both dudes talked funny, smoked cigars, and pinched women's asses...

So anyway, if this blog gets any readers it is because I sold my soul to Boz.
Thanks, Boz.
I am sure it will be worth it.

Now about those magic bullets...

Bus-World, two years of my life

2005-05-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, "I don't wanna ride in no city bus again."
All his songs are about cars. Buses are the car's fat sister.

Crossing this town in a MUNI bus is like trekking across a wasteland on the back of a wounded animal. Not just wounded, but vitally wounded, and stubborn and tempermental even when in the pink of health; the thing pauses and heaves every few steps, shambles, drops to its knees, foams and pants, trailing blood and wheezing, and you're never quite sure when--or if--the damned thing will Get Up and Carry On.

My last two years have been lived on buses. My memory of Frisco will be a memory of buses. The door hiss and the scree of brakes, the perfumes, varying by neighborhood, bad cologne, hair treatment, fish and mothballs, feet, dried shit, booze, the blood-tang of insane furies, aluminum-bitter sadness and general filth--the greasy poles, the plastic seats with various unnameable substances dried onto them, the tiny windows that let in rain but not air, the tinny songs from ipods, the bad dreams, the dts, the glazed looks, the looks that will not back down, the children with their metal teeth, the coiffed hair, the hair jumping with lice, the ponytails, the women in scrubs, the garbage bags, the cripples, the teenagers eating fries and spitting into condoms (a version of water balloons?) the rants, the fights, the horror...the horror... It's a moving Grand Guignol for those who have the stomach for it. But Over and Over and OVer... the new Ship of Fools, moving like a planet on a track, Over and Over and Over...

I will not miss my bus-body, dumpy and resigned, spine sunk in on itself, spreading thighs, flattened ass. The bus has shaped my body into its image.

To cross the city in a bus, an hour or more each way, morning and evening, day by day, back and forth, is slow torture. You never sense any progress. It's all arrested motion and bursting, or brown and settled, impatience. The bus is one of the city's symptoms, loaded with the working poor, the out-of-work poor, the just plain poor, the mad, the sad, those pressed by necessity, all sufferers. Except the tourists. They're like indifferent angels gazing down on hell... On the bus it becomes obvious that the poor are being robbed, outright robbed of time. The bus spends time like water, wastes it, dissipates it, eats it and shits it out and there's nothing you can do but try to make the best of it, reading, or dreaming, or writing, or fighting with your cracked out spouse, or taking the varnish off your nails, or talking to your imaginary tormentors, or calling your buddies on a cell, or exposing your genitals, or praying for death. Time, time, the buses are thieves of time, fat intenstines on wheels that belch out people and eat their time.

The Dreamtime

2005-05-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

I am waking up early these days--before 7, which is unusual for me.
I have lots of dreams, densely peopled with figures I yearn for, have never met, or have lost.
I dreamed I was playing with a five year old boy; I dreamed about the ex of mine I always dream about--he usually shows up livid, chews me out with the bitterest invective, and then leaves me. This time he was completely drunk; still livid, but so drunk that he could barely keep it together. He was as vicious as ever. I missed him as much as ever. And then I dreamed I was screaming at my boss; we were having a fight about the poor job I've done at the gallery, and I was calling her cunt at the top of my lungs. So much violence in these dreams. Vivid, as if televised, peopled with ham actors.

And yet...

So the buddhists would say that emotions of waking life are also like dreams, and the emotions in a dream doubly so. Images that race like clouds. I don't know. It is painful, even when I wake up and know it was a dream, or possibly especially.

We found the dreamtime of the seals in Big Sur, my sister and I.
According to Gary Snyder, in "The Practice of the Wild", the aborigines regard the dreamtime as specific to a sacred place, a place that is a kind of cradle of the essence of a particular animal or spirit. So a dreamtime of kangaroos would not only host plentiful living kangaroos, but would be a nursery for the kangaroo spirit, regenerative. This dreamtime of the seals really did feel otherworldly. It was at Point Lobos, in whalers cove. She and I were walking and we heard snoring coming from the water. There was a seal, floating upright, fully asleep, snoring. The more we looked, the more we saw--sleeping seals, a grove of them, all bobbing in the water. The cove was dreaming. Even among the presence of divers and lookers on, the seals slept in the cold water, sinking down (still asleep) to lie along the rocky bottom, and then buoying back up, (as a sleeper will turn their face to the cool side of the pillow). .

A Consummation Devoutly to be Wished

2005-05-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

So I've been reading Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild because my copy of Walden has disappeared. I suppose it went off to the woods to live deliberately after getting tired of gathering dust on the milk crates that pass for shelves in my hovel.

I have been thinking about the connection between wild animals, carnivores in particular, and people. Mountain lions attacking mountain bikers, bears wandering into Albuquerque during a drought and, in one case (this really happened) eating an old woman in her kitchen.

The mountain came to Mohammed. Civilization has reversed this--we are coming to the mountain in unstoppable droves. It only seems like the wild things are coming down out of their "habitats". Really we are just inching on, and on, and on. So when someone gets mauled or eaten, I feel a thrill of mysterious delight. It isn't schadenfreude. There's no moral tinge to it. I don't think, bad human, good bear, just desserts, or anything like that. Rather, I feel a thrill that such a brush with nature, such an annihiliating encounter, still happens, is still possible. "Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." Imagine if Hamlet had been devoured by wild beasts, instead of by his own ego. I think of it as the ultimate transcendence, your substance, yourself, being taken into the body of an 'alien' being, becoming it, feeding it, and an egoless being at that. To be eaten by a bear, or a killer whale seems especially profound.

The other animals not so much. Shark, crocodile, too antediluvian, too chilly and cold. A snake--that could be interesting. Being torn apart by wild dogs would suck. But a lion, ok. Tiger, ok, as long as it wasn't a sadistic tiger. A bear, yeah, because they are so nearly human.

We are eaten every day by so many things, eaten from the inside. I think it might be thrilling, even satisfying (beyond the terror) to be eaten up completely, licked down to the bones, by an honestly hungry animal.

Sorting the books brick by brick

2005-05-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

From an email I sent to CK:

I have been spending this sunday going through my books trying to decide what to get rid of. The going through of the books before every move is a profound review for me of my past selves, both what I have accomplished and where I have failed. This is similar to the going-through of my clothing that I did with my little sister, who is about twenty pounds thinner and ALWAYS looks better in my castoffs than I do--this time I wasn't so resentful or envious, but as I gave her things to keep, I insisted she listen to the provenance of every single garment. The books have a provenance even more profound, and the simple act of sorting brings up all sorts of grief, delight, wonder, sadness. I think of Thoreau choosing only a few good friends to bring to walden (tell me agian, what they were?) and I am going to do the same thing for Big Sur. The rest go into storage...again. There are some books I do not love and yet can't throw away. A copy of Coover's Pricksongs and Descants, a book and author I dislike immensely, but it was the first gift my first serious love ever gave me; all my critical theory books, because they link me to Collins, CMLT, your classes, my own promise--even though let's face it, those guys just don't speak to me; I am too lazy; or they are too convoluted, whatever... and for some reason I can't get rid of any of my Medieval Women writers books. I don't read them, I can't let go of them. It's weird. And of course there are the ones I have read countless times, Moby Dick so soft and thumbed and underlined, and the silly ones like Dianne Brill's "Boobs, Boys and High Heels, or How to get Dressed in Under Six Hours" that I can never replace... books like bricks or albatrosses or insurance policies or vanity plates or hopes for being or becoming someone I have not been and won't become, all the books that plate me like armor, all the books that have been my true houses.

It's sad. I hate moving. My hands are dusty.

I drove my sister to the airport today. Seeing her was very intense. As I get older, my illusions about people seem to be burning off. I hear and see things I couldn't hear or see before; I guess my willfully romantic eye has cataracts or something.

Part of why I am moving to Big Sur (though it feels like madness, and terrifying, and a fucking hassle) is to have more of a relationship with beauty again. To open up to what I think of as the ministry of the natural world. To sit by the ocean and watch the small stirrings of life in the sand and receive full blown penetrating metaphors from the movements of crabs, the shape of an anemone, the light, even; nothing a city can offer me comes close. My older sister once told me that she could never live in SF because she feared that eventually all her art would be about garbage.

I took it a step further; I stopped making art.
But just contemplating moving to Big Sur is generating ideas in me, excitement, narratives, possibility. I worry that the anti-intellectual atmostphere will make me even flakier around the edges, but it cna't be worse than the commercialism of the gallery; it will be different.

I have to go to the dentist before my insurance runs out. As soon as I decided to make an appointment, I got a cavity. Haha. It's true.

Ok, enough for now. It's late sunday evening and I should be turning my dwelling into a seductive showcase for prospective tenants. Ugh!

I HATE MOVING!

Since I've been 18 I've had the fantasy of just torching everything I own and taking off.
But I guess I need to learn how to do it brick by brick.

up close/the real/fantasy/beauty/habitation

2005-05-12T10:57:00.000-07:00

The problem, I have discovered from various episodes of yearning to live in a place that seemed (and was) profoundly beautiful and magical when I passed through it and couldn't stay, is that once you live there, and it becomes your real life, then suddenly it isn't a place to retreat to to get away from your crappy life, it becomes the setting for your crappy life. Not that life is crappy per se, but wherever you move and set out your shingle, your own interior bends and warps, your bad habits, mental and otherwise, shift with you, and then suddenly they're planted in what was the landscape of your dreams, your hopes, your "Away" becomes your "here and now" and it can be shattering. I have never learned how to drink the milk of a place, once I lived in it. Arriving and leaving bring out the sweetness and clarity of perception--the poetry inherent in any place, and I feel very tender and aware. But living, living, dulls the shine, and the fault, I know, lies with me.

It is a flaw or condition that I fear, or am wary of, because I'm doing it again, I'm moving to a beautiful place that I simply love, or have passed through and loved, and I don't know how long I'll stay but I don't want to dull it, I don't want to make it into another little prison. Will this awareness help? Can we learn to love, to inhabit, to change and to live without sinking into a sump?

This condition applies to relationships with people, as well, but for me not as radically. I still don't know how to belong. I keep moving to try to find it out. So far, I haven't.

I seem to only be able to take most things in sips, skimming the cream and imagining everything else. I can construct, (like certain monstrous detectives) or deduct, an entire existence from a glimpse. But only if that existence is imaginary. Constructing a real existence, in every moment, is a task that I fail at, over and over. I can live an entire life in a matter of seconds, in my head, and feel breathtakingly alive, aware, connected ecstatically, and feel that I have penetrated the very essence of a place, a person, an idea, and then I move on. This is fun,and useful in creating fictions, interpreting or unpacking metaphors, but it's a magic carpet that never touches down. And it seduces and fails me every time I do try to touch down. I have had glimpses of a way to live daily--at the monastery, for example, but even these glimpses, I don't trust, because they are just that--glimpses, and probably just the cream-skimming in another form. Details, I love them. But the grain-by-grain building of a life, how? Once you settle the question of where, how? Of course, if you settle the question of how, where doesn't matter, although each dictates, to some extent, the other.

I do believe that you can change your life by changing your environment. But I also believe you can't change your life by doing that--I've had enough, plenty, too many instances of that.

But this move feels right. Not quite as surrounded by fantasy and illusion. I haven't had time to create a fantasy existence, and I am fighting that urge. I am just going to Go and See. Go and See, and Work, and stay calm, and see...

I love Big Sur. Maybe it will love me. Maybe we can find a way to live together, and even though there will be no more "away", perhaps the "here" will reveal itself, if I stay calm, if I don't shut down, if I am brave.

Chile rellenos and a banjo from 2000 miles distant

2005-05-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

We met her in the BART station and she walked barefoot the ten blocks (glass littered, crawling with invisible terrors) back to the attic where I live. My little sister, desert girl, she's outgrown me, that's for sure. As always I am awed, impressed, and slightly aghast but also overjoyed to see her. She's been living in the mountains up of Taos, no phone, no internet, just a banjo and a beloved and apparently lots of elk. And she's burnished terra cotta and she looks good and I don't really know what to say, I always want to deny her vulnerability and ascribe some super humanity to her because it's there.
She's spent the last four (shit, is it four?) years well. I have spent them badly, losing things, losing the tips of things, letting go, deadened. And I wonder if in part this is a function of her having found someone to love and be loved by, or is it the other way around? The way she TCOB generates love, as the self help gurus would have us believe. Will, and habit, and patterns, and luck. I don't know. So she's teaching herself to play banjo and I walk around feeling like a double amputee,but who was the surgeon? Again, I don't know. The chile rellenos were cold. But good anyway. You couldn't pay me to walk barefoot in the Mission. Berkeley, maybe.

And that says it all.
No, it says nothing.

Anyway.

I am going to try a revolutionary experiment and dwell on my competence around my little sister, and what I have to offer, rather than running into this selfish retreat of assuming I'm shit and she's shinola. (and there are times when I wish I had read fewer self help books and more philosophy, because somehow their idiom always comes up in my relationship to my sister--why? I read acres of them when trying to deal with this thing with her, and so did she,and we traded them back and forth,and it was our way of communicating. To name a few:
The Dance of Intimacy--Harriet Lerner, Phd MD
The Dance of Anger-- Harriet Lerner, etc
Radical Honesty--Dr. Brad Blanton (meaty lipped Kurt Russell looking guy on the cover)
Non-Violent Communcation--Dr. Marshall Rosenburg (this is actually a fantastic manual for revamping knee-jerk modes of communication--I've since lost it, of course)
Pema Chodrun--When Things Fall Apart
and on and on...
what was I saying? Oh yeah, I don't remember.

If I could compile a list of self-help books that I've read in the course of trying not to slit my wrists over this breach with my sister, I would have to put Uncle Kurt Vonnegut at the top of the list.
Uncle Kurt saved my life. The very bleakness of his vision was a consolation. The absurdity and the pragmatic tenderness that runs through most of his books bolstered me. And he loved his sister. She died.

Christ I am rambling, but so what, this thing just hangs in a vaccuum anyway, it's interstellar graffitti, or the wash of thoughts that runs through you as you're falling asleep, easy come, easy go.

I was talking about my younger sister, and the idioms we embraced in trying to find a way back to each other, and thinking about how canned wisdom takes hold, and cliche, and how there are kernals there that really can help.
I draw the line at "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

Pascal's Sphere, borrowed from CK

2005-05-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

Thank god there are people in the world less lazy than I.

Here's an excerpt talking about a grand project my friend Chris is undertaking (and everyone is implicitly invited to join in). He articulates questions that only have dim cumulus forms in me. He takes what are, for me, unsettling wisps of vapor, dim flashes behind gauze, and lays them out in letters. (thanks Chris!)

His energy, integrity, and intensity are to be emulated.

But as it is, I'll just cut and paste.

Taken From: http://chris_kearns.livejournal.com/

"Although I am currently the sole proprietor and inhabitant, I created an on-line community today at LiveJournal.com, it's called Pascals_Sphere

"The community name comes from Pascal’s Pensées #72 – titled “Man’s Disproportion.” There Pascal talks about the gap between the immense swath of nature we can see or experience, and the incomparably more vast conception of creation we can form if we try to imagine what we encounter through our senses (you can, for example, imagine infinitely more stars behind the stars you can actually see). I’m always interested in ways the finite and the infinite might connect and interilluminate. But for Pascal, what is produced by such interplay is a dazzling blindness that brings us into the experience of a truth about ourselves that leaves us changed.

"Pascal sets out to dizzy his reader, saying:

"The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.

--Pensées #72 (p.16)

"It’s hard to conceive a more powerful claim – that if we try to imagine what we experience, the endlessness of the experience will connect us directly with the power of God.

"The logic Pascal here explores was also taken up by Kant and by Burke under the heading of the sublime, and although they didn’t invoke God directly (at least I don’t remember them doing so), they also say that trying to imagine totality opens it up to infinity in ways that leave us speechless and transformed.

"Pascal talks about how this line of thought can change our self-perception when he writes: “For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything” (p.17).

"In “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal” Borges notes that Pascal drew on one of humanity’s archetypical metaphors, and he outlines some of the key instances in which God or the infinite is imagined in terms of contrasting infinities as “an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Labyrinths, p.190). Borges writes that with this idea Pascal and other metaphysical thinkers situate humankind between the everywhere and the nowhere in order to produce a feeling of being lost in time and space. “In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there can not really be a when; in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, neither can there be a where” (Labyrinths, p.191).

"Pascal’s sphere is “fearful” because of the self-alienation that results when we cannot establish where we are in time or space (Kant considered these to be a priori categories. Without them, he argued, human perception is impossible). Pascal dislocates our sense of ourselves when he writes:

"Let us then take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the Nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the Infinite. . . . This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within the vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

--Pensées #72 (p.19)

"Drifting in uncertainty, Pascal’s solution is to have faith in a God we could not hope to understand. With Borges, as is true of our generation in general, the cultural faith in God has disappeared (this is what Nietzsche – or Zarathustra - meant when he said “God is dead.” God no longer serves the central cultural concept settling the West’s existential problems). With the disappearance of the centrality of God, Borges suggests, humankind disappears as well, because:

“No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows the size of his own countenance” (Labyrinths, p.191).

"Borges’ conclusion is pessimistic. Anyone might be anyone else – or no one at all (these alternatives being rough equivalents). Hence we have no identity. Each of us turns out to be someone different than we thought, a chess piece sitting on a board that, in its turn, is but a chess piece on a yet larger board, which likewise is but a chess piece on a still larger board, and so forth. It’s chess boards within chess boards (circles within circles, or Gods behind Gods) all the way down.

"But I think there is another, a less corrosive, way to look at Pascal’s Sphere. If my identity is fluid, then I am endlessly responsible for what I choose and what I avoid in the way I connect with others. Cavell makes this point in a beautifully wrought passage:

"The fantasy of a private language, I suggested can be understood as an attempt to account for, and protect our separateness our unknowingness, our unwillingness or incapacity either to know or to be known. Accordingly, the failure of the fantasy signifies: that there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which language reaches; that nevertheless there is no end to our separateness. We are endlessly separate, for no reason. But then we are answerable for everything that comes between us; if not for causing it then for continuing it; if not for denying it then for affirming it; if not for it then to it.

The Claim of Reason, p.369

"This, I think, is the hope of a “community” like Pascals_Sphere – here we might try taking responsibility for what keeps us apart, and we might do it in the company of others who are as interested as us in fashioning new models of experience, sincerity, beauty, and ethics.

"I have no idea if something like this can work. But it does feel like it’s ours to try.

"Borges finds something frightful in Pascal's image of God as an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. He feels it becomes a figuration of dread when God drops out of the picture. As Borges puts it, we don't know where we are in time and space. Thus the Kantian a prioris (those features of experience and knowledge that are constitutive of them as such -- everything we sense or know is encountered in time and in place) don't apply -- which means we experience a very different kind of identity -- if we can call it identity -- from the one we normally recognize as being human.

But isn't this what Thoreau's experiment in being present to all occasions means? Isn't pure presentness (let's pretend such a state were possible) another figuration of Pascal's Sphere? Everywhere becomes the center of creation. In terms of writing, Pascal's Sphere might be imagined in the way Cavell describes Emerson's procedure: Each sentence of the essay is its thesis. Certainly Cavell's approach to reading stands at this angle to the text -- he presses each word endlessly for its responsiveness trying in his turn to remain forever open to it.
"What do sincerity, obligation, love, and all of the other existentially central features of life mean, what do they become, when recontextualized in terms of Pascal's Sphere? The web confronts our generation with this question in pressing terms. Everywhere has now become someplace else, every identity can morph into another identity, this time is now flooded with all time. The spouse clicking away in the next room or in the chair beside you may be a thousand miles away with an illicit lover. This has always been possible in imagination. But now technology makes it possible to actually distribute identity in real time. The Lacanian Imaginary has become the technologically mundane.

"What would life, what would human relationships, be like if Thoreau's experiment in presentness were undertaken in our (rhizomic) place and time. Would it be worth living?

"Marxists, jihadists, and all varieties of fundamentalism say "no," life without foundations is not worth living. But I'm not ready to concede the point. As Thoreau said of his place and time, the experiment of living has not been tried. Life should be found wanting before we give it up for something safer.

"This experiment matters because, if we don't find our way into modernity as it is (rather than how we wish it to be -- the latter agenda belongs just now to the Neocons), then we are condemned to Hamlet's fate -- forever skulking, resenting, soliloquizing, but never acting until that last extremity, when we extinguish action itself. "

Running up

2005-05-06T11:38:00.000-07:00

So I was a finalist for this big writing fellowship. Not as big as the one I had before, but big.
It would have "changed everything".
When I heard I was a finalist, it was like the cage door swung ajar and I had a glimpse of redemption. Haha.

I got the letter yesterday. Skinny envelope, self-addressed.
Those are never good.

Ah yes, the SASE.

The sight of your own handwriting on an envelope is not a friendly thing. There's something cruel about it, really. I mean, to receive a rejection addressed in your own hand. It's as if your beloved shadow gave you the finger, or your reflection, independant of you, suddenly spluttered a rasberry in your searching face.
The SASE. I know foundations and journals demand them to save money, but Jesus. Expediency can be diabolical.