The Spoon Café Journal

A Moving Target

3008-08-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Targeted by Simon Lieschke

Spoon is a moving target.

Trying to balance the whatnot with the heretofore. Not to mention the wherewith.

You know, not everyone is comfortable publishing their innermost thoughts to the entire Interwebs. Or maybe it is just a matter of presentation, the webs looks so... presented. I can see that that would produce a certain shyness. A kind of activation energy that must be overcome.

The old Spoon used to be a purely email affair. Mostly because in the heady days of the early internet, that was all we had. Firing off an email about your day, or your life, or an adventure was simple. You understood that the people at the other end of the wires were a finite and knowable group of humans who's stories you knew to a degree. Now, it is hard to imagine that anything like it ever existed. Stories. No pictures. Just thoughts and so many words.

Back then, webs were something spiders made. Some geeky people were playing around with something called NCSA Mosaic. A computer program with which you could go anywhere, but there was nothing out there to see. It was like riding a bike in a vast empty warehouse.

Now, I'd be surprised if your mom didn't have a blog. With photos. Maybe even videos of her Arizona vacation.

So there is some balance between the breezy ease of email and the flashy presentation of the web, and I'm looking to find that right balance.

I added a Spoon email list. You can post to it at spooncafe@googlegroups.com and it will go to all the subscribers (but won't appear here on the web). But if you post here on the web at spooncafejournal.blogspot.com, it will go to both.

So I figure some shy, hesitant conversation will happen on the Spoon email list, hopefully with increasing confidence and comfort. Then maybe when someone posts something particularly awesome, we'll have to encourage them to post it on the blog. And then maybe folks will just get into the habit of posting their stories directly to the blog (which will go to the blog and email list both). And we'll comment and shoot the shit on the email list in response.

Or something like that.

Kind of complicated until we get it all figured out and it all seems so easy we get impatient with the fumbling of newcomers.

And this is also a test to see if it will automagically go out to the email list.

Postblogs From Niger

2011-09-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

just dusted off this piece of writing meant to be sent off months ago, but here it is september &...

“Tuesday, May 17, 2011.”

That’s what the calendar she say. 45 degrees that’s what the thermometer said bout 8 o’clock this night. Celsius. 28 degrees C= 82 degrees F. you do the math...

the weather she takes a turn for the super hot from just hot...gittin hot enuff fer me, yep...that’s the weather report from these parts. how do people do it, but have they a choice but to? my life cushioned by the air con units in my various work, home, and social environs. aye, without it life would be a misery indeed. funny, for but the stint in new orleans before I arrived in this heat & dust, air con was not a part of my prior existence for any notable time. thus have I become, or becoming....
sooooo, according to the marks on my wall, I am now in the thick of my 10th month on these fair shores far far away from the california I did and mayhaps probly shall again call “Home.” osama bin laden has been perished, libya invaded since my last electronic postcard. the kidz and I are finishing up my first year of full time teachin’, currently in the midst of lessons on space travel, the U.S. Constitution, and a puppet theatrical show about some children who helped turn a dump in to an art/recycling/Friendship Park. hoping you and especially your american sized checkbooks will be making their way to our big show Friday next to help turn puppet shows in to Reality....

speaking of which, we couldn’t help but notice on My side of the atlantic that The Donald (Trump) has cast his name into & out of the presidential race. I’m sure he shall be sorely missed by comedians all over this fair globe, myself included...yes, america, what have ye been up to since last I did write? what of this libya adventure, this bin laden deposing? I would have surely been out on the streets chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A!” but, well...did people really do that?...or was this a Fox halftime infomercial somebody decided to run outside of the Super Bowl?..

I was tho able to sneak the jimi hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” in to our school’s international day practice instead of the heart swelling original version, tho not the int’l day itself alas as my cover was blown to the anti-patriots who run such affairs. communists! terrorists! joykills! or whoever is the Enemy these days....

Speaking of The Enemy, Libya, again.!? wasn’t that in the Reagan 80’s?! old moammar even looks like an 80’s washed up rockstar that’s seen better dayz. But alas, fair America, I must be the first to tell you that in these parts old mommar is not seen as The Devil incarnate ye have made of him. no, he has earned many friends in these parts due to his funding of various philanthropic endeavors south of the sahara from mosques to garden projects to schools, etc. But, not to worry, obama is still probably, probably, still as popular here as ever, so the america h8rs aren’t so much on every other street corner. Keep those dollars and rap songs/videos coming to keep the terrorists at bay! maybe just maybe it would blind people to some of the connections being made between Libya’s oil reserves & America’s foreign interventions in this part of the world... oil that is helping to send me to europe this summer courtesy of my benevolent employers by way of the Moroccan national airline, Air Maroc and her gas tanks filled with Libyan crude to the wide streets of Paris...see you in paris, london, and maybe even amsterdam, deutschland, poland, and of course The Ukraine!!! maybe we could meet in prague and marvel at the abundance of trash cans & art & paved roads, though wistfully admitting to missing the cattle & goats & friendly strangers in the streets of Niger...Africa! I miss ye already and would surely say or type it if I hadn’t just fried my keyboard on the sweat poring from every pore! I’m not even gone yet! or at least not for 2 weeks from Tuesday, though who’s counting, right??!!...X

(insert Euro Tour 2011 Adventure here, june-august 2011)...

grapes and gratitude

2011-08-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

Fret not, mothers of young children who read my last blog post and were filled with a desparate need to hug your children tightly to your chest and keep them young forever. Despite the heart-rending, tear-jerking moments, there are some good things about them growing up and, dare I say it, moving out. Not that I'm adjusted to life without my oldest son yet--I think a part of me will miss him every day that I don't see him. But. But, friends, there are moments when you will be Glad. You will be filled with Gratitude. And you might even be filled with Grapes, in the form of a good cabernet. I'm just saying. Youngest son is off an adventure to Cincinnati with a friend's family. Oldest son is off on his band's East Coast tour, coming to a city near you (I'm sure I'll be blogging more about that). I took the day off work. I got up early and ran 11.5 miles with my running buddy and wonderful all-around buddy in general, Tanya. I felt absolutely no pressure during the run. No one was waiting on me. No one needed milk or cereal or money or a ride or anything. I came home and I TOOK A NAP people. Yes I did. Then I piddled around doing some laundry and some reading. Now it is Friday night and the husband is due home at any minute. I have baked a loaf of homemade dill-onion-cottage cheese bread and the aroma is filling the house with amazing smells. I have opened a bottle of wine, and prepared a plate of fresh farmer's market veggies and crackers and even farmer's market cheese. I have poured myself a glass of Grape Goodness and am imbibing as I type this. We are having one of our weird veggie dinners that one of the kids absolutely hates. But who cares! He's not hear to complain! Not a word of dessention is to be heard in this home regarding weird dinner! (Sauteed broccolli, shitake mushrooms, and onions, piled on toast, topped with cheese, and popped under the broiler until the cheese melts, if you must know. It's truly delish.) And so, after raising kids for 21 years (29 years for the husband), we find ourselves Gratifyingly, Gladly, Goldenly.....alone. Until Sunday. Woot.

7 months Postblog from Niamey

2011-03-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Just about 7 months now since the “Niamey Campaign” began, since I left the glory glitter and gangstas of new orleans for the unknown and dust of west africa. now the dust coats everything just a little bit thicker, the sand gets deeper on the roadways, sometimes taxis getting stuck having to get pushed out by the nearby kidz. Niamey carves itself deeper in to me, I gaze toward the summer for flight to europe in june. okay, I’m getting a little sick of the squalor, dust, etc.!! and sometimes just a little sick...

much of the past couple of months here in Niamey have been shaped by the kidnapping of a couple of French guys from a local bar bout 2-3 miles from my house, one of the Unlucky or Targetted (depending on the source) about to be wed to a Nigerienne woman, the other his best man in town for the marriage between the worlds. the abducters got as far as the neighboring state of Mali where abducters and abductees were all exterminated in a hail of bullets from French Special Forces or maybe kidnappers, again accounts differing depending on opinion or source. because of this episode, the peace corps left the country as well as a study abroad program run through Boston University. other NGO’s potentially leave as well. there is something of a sense of flight in the “expat” community, except the missionaries and the chinese. no appearances of either one of these entities fleeing, nope. the locals are most effected as their opportunities for some kind of decent job/livelihood further diminishes with the security downgrades....

do I feel more “ in danger?” that the kidnappers will come for me? not really. my house, and job that is a mile away, are secure, guarded, etc. I rarely went out previously “on the town,” as much due to my language and transportation deficiencies as anything else. Now, almost never, except for when I had a couple of visitors from Israel and Mexico who were visitin, mutually conspiring to make things happen in this big friendly sleepy African village of about a million. one of the better social spots we went to is a bar called “Le Cloche,” formerly frequented mostly by the French and locals, but now mostly locals due to French flight and security concerns. there are pool tables and a funny atmosphere punctuated by a “midget” who is something of the maître’d and the ensemble of friendly prostitutes in their ridiculous showy flashy garbs...

so that’s something of the Scene. life for me centers mostly upon the school where I work, where enrollment has plummeted from about 80 a few years back to its present 49, further increasing the sense of flight in the surroundings. my class is converting the book The Phantom Tollbooth in to a play, a book where the main character Milo sees little use in learning such things as “adding turnips to turnips” or “learning to spell February." we do some lessons on waste disposal/resource conservation in science, discus the slave trade in social studies, start up a Drum Corps in an after-school class, etc. I am taking French lessons on the side and learning how to ask people if they are married and how many kids they want to have...

went to the local missionary school last week for their quarterly “Casa del Burrito” where they serve up various Mexican dishes in a festive outdoor environment. my table had my school’s recreation center director Ginger and her local husband; the assistant to the U.S. Ambassador, Lucy; myself; and a local friend of mine, Naba, who works at the school. definitely no sense of deprivation nor flight amongst the missionaries. their enrollment increases proportionally to our losses, their tuition kept reasonable by an unsalaried missionary teacher corps, their dedication unwavering amongst kidnappings and risilent Faith...

couple weeks ago went to the definitely coolest sounding African city, “Ouagadougou,” in the neighboring country of Burkina Faso, formerly called Upper Volta some years back. went there with our school’s softball team for a tournament. didn’t see a whole lot of the town, but it definitely has a more energized feel than Niamey. heard drumming in the evening, saw lots of bicyclists, including women. women rarely ride bikes in Niamey because of a more strident version of Islam here, from what I understand, or women not being “athletic” here in Niger as stated by another, or a cross somewhere between the two. my brother Nelson tells me that Ouagadougou is 30% Christian, 30% Islamic, and 100% Animist, animists evidently seeing no shame in the bicycle, nor music for that matter. maybe not so different from the States...

are things a bit gritty and grim a little less glorified from my previous journalings, though I do recall one previous blogging alluding to fluids fleeing my body like ex-patriots after the coup? the dust gets thicker, the various bacterias accumulate in this foreigner’s gut in this some times wretched wretching corner of the earth, the sense of newness deteriorates into honest assessments that yes this dusty corner of the earth can at times be accused of being a “Shit hole”....though I did neglect to mention the magical scene a couple nights back of playing drums for the local kids in the street as they danced about wildly, the night time foosball games with other Nigerienne youth up the street, etc....so it goes so it goes....and goes...from the ever shifting sands of sub-saharan landlocked west africa next to the so-called “Slave Coast,” historic departure point of Africans on their way to the Americas for a life of toil and servitude bout 500 years ago yesterday we learn about in my social studies class...

& so with that cheery thought, let us now turn out attention to my awakening this morn to the sounds of explosions, a text message from the director of the school where I work to stay home, to activate the “school phone tree” to alert the students & parents there shall not be school on account of unaccounted for explosions in the distance. there is excitement in the air. what kind of danger might be lurking, what armed menace outside our walls? my local housemate informs me that the 2nd in command in the army is on trial for treason or such, maybe there is a disturbance out at the military barracks outside of town, maybe maybe in the land of African speculation. what if we need to flee? this the classic moment of what you would take and why under such immediate circumstances. but, a call to my brother 2 blocks away lessens the tension as he informs me that he has heard there has been an accident involving a military truck and some propane tanks, which sounds suspicious and odd, but actually turns out to be the case, verified by the eyewitness reliable account of him going up on his roof to see smoke billowing in the distance from an unsuspicious location....

& so the interesting bizarre surreal moments of the “Anasorra” (white person) in Niger, attempting to get information on mysterious goings ons, a consistent endeavor for this relative newbie to the region. where do you go if you get completely sick, injured, need a root canal, want to see the town, let alone resolving a contract dispute with a sometimes despotic school headmaster, etc? where do you get your info, the News, etc. to find out what’s what? don’t think the previously mentioned accident will quite make CNN nor Fox. maybe get The News from the tv that plays outdoors by the foosball tables I play with the local kids and where I get my yogurt drinks, powdered milk, juice boxes, sodas? very outside chance maybe it’ll be broadcasting something bout something or perhaps more likely a patron could have heard the latest rumor, though my french still sux ass and I still could not be accused of being anything resembling fluent. learning just enough to make out half the truth, ask how much papayas cost by the kilo, etc. etc. & my bro offers up that the guards for the U.S. Embassy worker across the street from my house are likely to know what’s going down, if something is going down....yeah, it’s the sorting out the details, making those connections, hell figuring out what the hell is going on and how to get there without a car and minimal language skills to boot, etc etc ....

is this turning in to some sort of surrealist rant? no, that’s just the way it is it is, through these eyes necessarily conditioned and pre-conditioned by a world far more than the half way round the globe it purports to be, and perhaps still is, that stole the ancestors of my colleagues and neighbors from these shores half a millennia ago. in case you cared or are still reading, I do in fact have a right to be indignant, especially since I declared today amongst my colleagues over some carnivorous lunchtime dish that "I am no longer Vegetarian, but Nigerienne"...Please, tell me America, if I can’t put my toes in the Pacific Ocean does it still exist? are trees falling that i am not there to hear? chat me up on Facebook, sponsor of the African revolutions with Twitter and Google, to let-me-know.com....

peace.

Postblogs from Niamey

2011-02-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

“Postblogs from Niamey: 3 months in”

“3 months in.” Sounds kinda like a countdown to a release date, some kind of a prison sentence I am serving, which isn’t entirely fair. More like an exile, though self-imposed. But not a prison sentence, no, though my largish school provided abode is ringed in razor wire, but: keeping Them out not Me in...no, it is a journey far far away to a distant and oftentimes hospitable land...

& tonight going out for the second time this week on the town to dance dance dance the night away @ a Club with the Nigerienne hip set...and last time I went did notice & make note of the fact that there are people gyrating and jiggling and whooping it up on dance floors all across this World to an American beat. if America is in decline as it frets itself into believing these dayz, the newz hasn’t made it here yet. Brand America: still selling, delivering, providing beats & visions of Glory to dancers across the globe, of ghetto superstars and Hollywood star(lette)s broadcasting their songs and stories and messages to flatscreens and dance halls in impoverished countries all over the land... ..

And I realize that I dig the hip club at least as much as the funky corner store folks, “The Alimentation,” with the fridge out front you can buy the yogurty drink, or the bean guy up the way who always has the koranic scholars reading something in their big gold-rimmed sunglasses when I stroll on up for today’s and every day’s special: beans or beans and rice with a hot sauce and oil, ladled out of the wood fed cauldron...yes, there’s a many places to go and see in this corner of the earth...if only I could say more than the greetings, pointings, single word sentence usually wanting something! though in all honesty none of these various local & colonial tongues hold the allure & beauty of the Spanish I learned on my last adventure to foreign lands....

...and so anyway, back to The Club story, the heading off to the unknown with the best friend of my Taureg roomie who was visiting from Switzerland without his Swiss wife, wondering only in the end WWLW, What Would Leaf (my extravagant electronic musician woods dwelling shamanic graduate student ex-roomie friend living I think in Stockton, California, now) Wear? whose sense of shame shall be eviscerated this very night? I know you forbid ugly Americanness dear Reader, but you said nothing of freaky & I certainly did not Vote for such...

& I did go out on the town, though not nearly heroically on a Thursday night as the previous Saturday night: one more chance to see the groooovy hip spots in town, hear the American music over the sound systems before the visiting Taureg returns to Switzerland the following eve, German our only common language to navigate & dance dance dance the night away... & still at this point it’s not totally apparent nor transparent who are the single gals out on the town and who are the prostitutes, but after consulting various locals and “in-the-know” foreigners after the fact, it appears that in deed most of the aforementioned gals out on the town are in fact “working gals” & that “ hip gals out @ the Clubs” & “prostitute” are interchangeable & in fact redundant terminologies much to the detriment of any sort of political correct indoctrinations or pretensions or such I may have previously held...but it ain’t like that & tonight is just for pool on battered tables with small balls & spectating & respectable amounts of drinking of various club goings ons...

& so the next day I did go to the police station, though not on account of any sort of misdoings from the previous night mind you, but instead to procure a “Certificate of Residency” so that I could open up a bank account at a local bank to put some cash in, instead of various squirreled away places I currently hide my spending ca$h away to tide me over til the next payday. & I did go to such police substation & was treated to another cultural delight of waiting in the Spartan waiting room with my school driver (named “Innocent” of all things) for the desired stamp on my photocopied passport paper & aforementioned Certificate.

Yes, I was privileged to wait there in the Po Station & witness the quite vocal quite angry quite disturbed wall-shaking-yelling-threatening-to-come-to-blows-or-worse coming from behind the partially closed door marked something to the effect of “Judicial Affaires,” while the calm and bespeckled middle-aged gals in full African regalia and headdresses who waited upon me did calmly go about their business in something of a Gandhian manner behind their wooden Colonial desk in the waiting room, a portrait of the latest government/military head beaming down on us from his framed picture on the wall, He the head of the “Committee to Restore Democracy” the caption did read, anointed when the last head of state threatened to overstay his term indefinitely as African heads can be want to do but was dutifully deposed & put under house arrest, more peacefully mind you than a previous usurper of years back who met his end on the wrong end of a rather unfortunate rocket launcher “accident”...

yes, so I did get my certificate of residency duly & was on my way again with Innocent...my residence has been certified. I am here, Resident, my permanence recognized by the State of Niger amidst the ever shifting sands of sub-Saharan Africa...

and eegad man, it’s been 5 months now here in Africa and 2 months since I started this blog entry & in the meanwhiles I’ve had 13 hour road trips to the East to the ancient trading city of Zinder & then there were the kidnappings of some French guys here in Niamey (a groom and his best man caught in the crossfire of international relations, armed al-qaedians, hot pursuits across country lines, a large pile of bodies in the horrible end) & ensuing curfews issued to official Americans & then my Dad visiting & of course camel trips & ...but that’ll have to wait for next time along with conjured up ideas for “Jackass” style stunts at the local mosque (that continues to blare entire prayer services at decidedly unGodly hours) by hijacking the sound system with “They Built this City on Rock and Roll;”...& visitors to my Maisson from Israel and Mexico with stories of woe and glory to share about their West Africa meanderings en route here across the Sahara and such...

but, must not wait any longer to get it “Right,” these perceptions of Africa thru the Western lens, my lens! must send out this message in bottle/internet as incomplete and biased as it necessarily must be!....

Africa: 1 month In

2010-09-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Africa Adventure: Entering Month 2

It’s been 1 month now in to “The African Adventure...a few choice moments (not for the faint of heart!):

• night time bike rides: by the gardens, etc, electricity in the air, donkey carts, people wheelbarrowing their wares or carts stacked sky high full of flip flops cell phone head pieces & stuff lots of stuff 4 sale, bikin by the mosque with night time crescent moon & venus & mars overhead as people stand reverently in prayer facing my way....

• & Ramadan is over now praise Allah & the calls to prayer over 4 loudspeakers just over back fence only all hours of day now, not night. people not starving nor thirsting themselves sunrise to sundown to the brink of death or hopefully some spiritual vision of some sorts...food vendors out now, nobody givin you the evil eye for having a bite to eat or drink during daylight hours & it might be my imagination but seems like people also not dressed so covered up always all the time in the heat like during the holy month. why, allah, do you make people wear so many clothes when it gets so hot, cover up all over, African women dressed up like black little bo peeps?..

• my job: the school job kidz from senegal, niger, america, deutschland, schweis, hindustan, etc. 9 kidz to teach, down from the 30+ in USA. the easiest, best, best paying job with benefits I’ve ever had & it’s here in impoverished Niger..teaching bout native America, doing dances around the room, making paper & stick teepees, showing shadow puppets, making comix, meeting the kidz’ folx last week for the parent conferences, availing myself of the music room facilities and afternoon jam sessions with the kidz...

• shoppin @ the “petit marche” (“small market” for the non-francophones) all the stuff to buy, people to see, vat of peanut butter I do not jump into buying: that’s too much for me to stomach putting in my mouth & stomach @ this point.. things balanced on african heads, somebody sellin a shoebox of green beans & I buy a handful, the nomad & the bracelet I buy from him, the honey stand on the side o the road tastin sorta molassesy jarred in some olde sody pop bottle or such, but I taint complainin...

• security: & I am an american & 5 french kidnapped to the north of the country in uranium mine town of Arlit & somebody let the terrorists know that maybe some folx’ll pass the can for me back home, but don’t expect to get rich from this kidnapped american. still, there’ll be no going to the cool festival in northern niger with the dancing fulanis on account of “security concerns” and such, 80 French paratroopers flown in to get back their countrymen, Niger “on a war footing”...

• & the mosh up @ the bean place up the dusty road from mi home where we get a bag of hot beans for 30 cents, traded insults escalating to blows, rocks & hammer wielding between taureg roomie & drunken insulter...

• cholera outbreak sposed to be headed this way according to Mom wonderin bout my vaccines, one of the teachers @ the school may have typhoid...

• visiting big bro, his wife, my nephews over @ their house in the more Nigerienne/local section of town: more locals, kids playing on homemade foosball on the sidewalk, people walkin bout, open stank of sewers going 6 feet down we joke/fear bout stepping in to some dark night, everybody’s out sellin somethin or maybe watchin the telly under the stars with the family or neighbors...

• watchin football @ the “club” run by the very pregnant ex-peace corps gal with the missionaries, marine: am I really an american? are we from the same country/planet? why am I embarassed by other americans 90 % of the time I am travelling? but the peace corpse volunteers don’t seem half bad & the missionaries friendly when ya get down to it. americans in niger, is what it is & the gal with child in charge has visions of glory & realities of movie nights on the grounds: a “Jaws” screening by the pool, “Bad News Bears” on the rutted baseball diamond to go with weekend softball games, some movie about a stay @ home dad playing over at the playground, etc...

• my house: in the Kaoro Kano, meaning Beautiful Place: calm. not so much going on in this hood, but big dark places between houses watched over by guards sittin out front, goats eating loco weed as we call it back home on the side of the dirt road I take to work, people living out of the shanties to the side of the selfsame road, kids yell out “antasorra!” sounding something like “anti-sorrow” or such- the name for whities, them wanting a shiny coin or maybe a greeting & I give them a French greeting, “bon jour!” I buy stuff from the little store with the yogurt drink & dates & bubbly ginger citron drink, stop by the guy selling little black eyed peas by the vat: he puts them in my container not his plastic bag he usually puts hot beans in for like 30 cents american, enough for 3 meals. I’ll make it into chili with some tomato sauce & spices & corn. this place tain’t so bad in all it’s calm, especially when you find out it’s the last place in town to lose electricity during Black-outs & the first to have it turned back on merci...

• next day I go to load up on provisions at the bustling “Petit Marche’” where everything can be gotten...i’ve come on bike with my green army backpack/duffel bag to load the goods into. I’m getting familiar enough with Niamey to bike around the narrow streets, not get too freaked out by the cars passing close by this shared/strained resource: the road...i get to the marche, lock bike by the nicer restaurant with good pizza & parking lot attender for safekeeping, almost immediately accosted by everyone wantin to sell me somethin, lots of wheel barrows filled up with produce: oranges, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, eggplants, etc. I’m dressed in a nice shirt I cut the sleeves off of, thinking after a spell I shoulda dressed even a little more down, especially after the guy approaches me to sell laptop cases and a knife, switchblade knife, he pops open to show me its dangerous magnificence. is it my imagination? ”americain, americain.” is there malice in this display? he repeats, “americain, americain.” pops the knife open again. he knows from my lack of french speaking, accent, that I am american, or did I unwittingly mention it at some moment? there is something dastardly in the way he says, repeats, “americain, americain.” I don’t like the way he brandishes the switchblade, tell him so, move on to the potato seller. but I realize that I’ve spent my change & my smallest bill is worth $20 American, 10,000 CFA (Central Franc Africaine), the local currency. read recently the per capita income here in niger somewhere between 300 and 700 dollars depending on the source, though they all agree niger is one of 5 poorest countries in the world. you do the math on how much that 10,000 CFA note is worth & to who...I need go elsewhere to break my bill, don’t want to break it here, make a break for the heart of the market, past the meat sellers and their long knives, trying unsuccessfully not to consider my images of africans with machetes in the Sudan. but here in niger the locals mostly smiling, kind, yes...i find a little shop in the bustle where I can get some cheap imitation corn flakes, dried milk powder, juice, where I can break the bill...i load up, go back to get the rest of my goods including bunches of mint & basil, taters, onions, zucchini, eggplant, oranges, get back to the bike, get a bracelet from the turbaned nomad, hop back on the bike, lug my backpack full of stuff home, done shopping, back to the island of tranquility, my home with 5 rooms & 2 roomies & one guard out front & 2 dogs & one green swimming pool, etc...

• oh yeah, except that I forgot to mention the garbage. the piles of it all about, even this nice neighborhood. kitchen scraps, the ubiquitous plastic bags, yard trimmings, etc...i visualize an army of commando master composters organizing this into something useful, the neat piles of goat food here, kitchen scraps there, plastic bags being made into some building material or another, compost, etc...not such a far off reality in a place where not much is wasted, everything used...and then the ecotopia visions of grandeur sees that most people also are not dependent on cars for transport, the urban gardens all over, the goats roaming the streets, the possibilities of rain cachement?...someday africa, someday ye shall arise in such splendor again!!!...from the trash piles ye shalle arise! like an african sunrise, a beauteous array of sorted rubbish!...am I crying, or is that my eyes smarting as I bike by the toxic burn piles I gag upon biking home from work?...

• and then there’s the whole subject of “shiting one’s brains out” and the debacle this night, the bent over praying to some god that must have been offended, “mercy” “mercy.” oh merciful allah, I take back at least half way the condemning of the blaring loudpeakered calls to prayer coming from ye place of worshipe over back fence...it’s like I discovered some years back upon my 1st trip to Niger: it ain’t like, ”guess I had a little too much spicy food last night.” no, it’s like I’m going to fucking die right here, all of my fluids fleeing the body like americans after the coup...this is not the way I pictured it while picturing it listening to Tom Waits singin “How’s it Going to End?” though there is something entirely too Waitsish about such a hellishly beatific & grim ending of bodily fluids & prayers...yes, all exaggeration aside, mortality never too too far away here in africa...and with that cheery note:

• that’s the way it was it was....

Dust & Glory

2010-08-28T17:19:00.000-07:00

2 weeks tomorrow since my plane touched down in Niamey, Niger. 2 weeks since the bags were packed up & i shipped out to this west african country "9th poorest in the world" according to some list somewhere. 14 days since it was "good-bye New Orleans, California, friends, good-bye U.S. of A, see you in 2 years." i'm under contract. that's how long. never been "under contract."
The first days some kind of dazed jet lagged get my feet on the ground get ready for my school job rush and bustle. Moving in to the new house, meeting the roomies, sizing up things, dinner over the river except no dinner because it's the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and nobody's eating & the cooks ain't cooking. So we get pizza and gawk @ the "Petit Marche" across the way, "Small Market" in the French. It's packed with vendors and there seems nothing French nor petit about it.
So here I am, made the move. Africa! I was here 20 years before on an adventure as a 20 year old, meeting my big brother and his then girlfriend now wife who had just gotten out of the Peace Corps. We traipsed about the countryside, up into the hills, over to the nearby countries of Togo, Ghana, and Benin, as well as 2 months in Niger. It was the most fascinating time of my life seeing life thru these different eyes and ways. Now I am back, as school teacher not intrepid traveller, return'd to the scene of the crime so to speak. For adventure and bizarrely enough to get out of debt, coming to the 9th poorest from the 8th or something richest country to make some coin.
And so every day an adventure unto its own. Moving in to the house to discover the house/my room is getting sprayed for termites my second day in residence. I recall my brother mentioning how toxic "first world" banned chemicals make there way down to Africa frequently when chemical companies need to find some kind of a market for their already produced goods. I am starkly reminded of it as I walk into the kitchen while poison is being applied, nearly retching right then and there, fleeing the scene to the school director's house next door to wait out the stench for a week. Welcome to Africa!!!
And so it has been over the past 2 weeks, every task an adventure. Making the connections to survival, food. Food that will not turn this American stomach inside out. The omelette and coffee stands of picnic bench with gas stove, out doors of course. The driving all bout town with a new friend, Naba, as he takes me to find beans, one place after the other closed for Ramadan til success is ours. But, we also mustn't forget the night of going out with roomies to the Senegalese place with yummmmmmy toppings over yucccckkky rice. Seems the local yummy rice gets exported to France, the yucky rice imported from Algeria or such.
And so as i recognize the difficulty of getting food, i decide to try out Ramadan for a few days, give the fasting thing a shot. Only, I drink liquids. They don't. Not a drop of water nor spit nor nothing sunrise to sunset. In the hottest place on Earth, Africa. But, I do realize that in numbers comes solidarity. People are ordealing this together. I have fasted before, but only with me & maybe another person or 2. This is a community act, but also an act of solidarity with the poor i am told. & a test in case @ one point in your life you find yourself involuntarily in a position of not having food nor water...
And so i see this shall be a tale of glory & hardship. The common endurance. The dust, donkeys, kindnesses, giraffes, hippos. The living softer and harder than I've ever done. The adventures to get the goods, buy the PVC for my shadow puppet stage with my Taureg room mate @ the aforementioned Petit Marche, people running hither and yon to make the sale. It woulda been alot easier @ the hardware store back home, but not quite the adventure nor glory nor something all together different than that from which I have fled 2 weeks past.
I am here in the dust.
& Glory.

A Cold Rain Fell As We Watched the Dust Settle

2010-08-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

I wondered why we had stopped. I looked up the tracks and couldn't understand what I was seeing. There seemed to be a haze along the tracks, like fog. But only near the buildings that were alongside the tracks just up from our unit. Wait! Those weren't building, those were freight cars! The fuck? What were they doing there? On their sides? They were a long way away from the rest of the train. Who'd left them there? Was that our train? Holy fucking shit. Was that our train? Was our train scattered about like you see in aerial photos of train accidents in Bombay?

And then it occurred to me. Those were the grainers we were going to ride. Our grainers were now tumbled ass over teakettle 50 feet or more from the tracks. Our. Grainers. The ones we were going to ride. Three or four cars up from our unit. The haze was dust and grain in the air. These cars were wrecked. Totally destroyed. Not like Bring a crane and we'll put them back on the tracks, but more like Bring a cutting torch and a flatbed.   Grain was spilled everywhere, still spilling in fact. Everything looked so settled. This had really only been a few seconds since the accident, and yet nothing was moving or rolling or swinging or burning. It was all planted there as if some grisly tableau. A film set waiting for special effects and fake-bloodied actors. It was hard to believe, even though we had just experienced it. I was thinking this was last summer, but I guess it was February this year. A friend called who was visiting from BC who'd never hoped, and we talked perfunctorily about someday taking a trip. Now he was showing up and I had to make good on my offer.

We really didn't care where we went, and started out in Roseville with the idea of going north to Dunsmuir or east and going through the passes. Instead of course, we got impatient and just took a train that stopped in front of the catch-out spot going south. Whatevs. We debated between a few rideable grainers near the back of the train but the weather was a bit chilly and damp and the cars were facing the wrong way and we didn't want to ride dirtyface. So instead we climbed in the rear helper unit at the end of the train. I'd never ridden in a rear unit, though I'd ridden in the back unit at the front of the train.

This unit was more techno they'd I'd ever seen. Most units look barely improved since the 19th century, all levelers and buttons and gauges. This one had not one but two touchscreen computer monitors giving constant readouts of engine status, speed, limits, position, everything. We were terrified that such a high-tech unit would immediately know we were in it and snitch us out. But we were under way soon and if they knew we were there, no one came (and how could they once we were moving?). After a while, we figured out how to switch off the lights so we could sit in the chairs and watch the world go by.

And of course it takes us south toward Stockton. Good old Stockton. I've been there as many times as I've been in places I actually like, like Dunsmuir, but never by choice. If my train is going to take a "wrong turn" it's going to dump me in Stockton. I could catch out in Indianapolis going east and a few hours later end up in Stockton. Maybe the name says it all: Stockton. Stock town. The town where stock is sold and unloaded and slaughtered and whatever. This time however it passed through Stockton (whew) and headed down the central valley corridor.

We lazily lulled in our plush locomotive cab with the occasional Where-The-Fuck-Are-We glance around. Rolling down through the long quiet central valley, we were lulled by the repetitious and monotonous view and insistent rocking, we all fell into a dead sleep. I found a few scant square feet to curl up in uncomfortably and with some weird anxious dreams, lost consciousness.

Lights! Suddenly awake! What's happening? A red light! A screaming alarm! Where was I? The fuck? On a train, looks like, in a unit. Oh yeah! Shit. I'd been jerked awake. Air brake release? Were we discovered? Was it us? Should we stay here, stay low, hide? There was a bright red light on in the cab and the alarm was still screaming. No I do not think staying here would be a Good Idea. Not at all. Something was going on, and it wasn't us. There was a door in the nose of the cab and I thought this was exactly the time we should use it. We gathered our shit up in seconds and were out the door. And swung down to the ground and walked safely away.

Insert colorful crash scene here.

We were stunned and walking around like dumbshits. We realized that somehow minutes after the crash, cops were already on the scene and we'd better make haste to look less conspicuous. We stashed our packs and went around the wreck to take some photos.   There was a wheel/axel set sitting on the tracks a 100 feet from anything else, disassociated from its car. Large stretches of the tracks were completely twisted and unusable anytime soon. The rest of the train from the point of the wreck was almost out of sight. I don't doubt that they had a big fast emergency stop too, but the rest of the train still took long enough to stop that we could barely see the severed end of it down the line. Apparently when cars stop by plowing into the earth and tumbling end over end, they don't go as far as the rest of the train that still has its wheels.

We took our photos and then returned for our packs. Clearly no trains were going to be running on this line anytime soon. So we walked a few miles to the loneliest, most humble Amtrak station in America.   Our new train took us to Stockton where of course, we hung out for a few days waiting fruitlessly for a train.

Tree of Knowledge

2010-07-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

You would carry on for hours, in love with own voice, your lengthy body spread gracefully over several stairs on campus. I sat, a rapt audience, dazzled by the confident magnificence that was you. Several years older, you substitute taught at my high school, but we became cohorts during lazy lunches in college. I was convinced there was no way you could ever see the eighteen year-old me as anything more than a friend.

During this phase of shifting awkwardness and obsession with English poets, I wore Edwardian ruffled shirts, punctuated by dour black tights. My primary intent of this fashion force-field was to simultaneously ward of frat boys and attract those of similar romantic fancies and love of Morrissey. I had recently died my hair a deep blue black. After frightening myself several times in the mirror I had it bleached back to dark brown. Any slight misrepresentation of the visual was not something I could weather at this juncture having just crawled out of the dregs of 1980s fashion culture.

In the midst of a crisis subsequent to leaving high school, I was having a hard time maintaining friendships and relationships. The harder I would to hold on, the faster they would run away. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing wrong, short of having horns protruding from my forehead that everyone but myself could see. Depression and isolation were my dedicated, yet tedious companions.

In the spring of our friendship, I began to formulate a plan. I wanted to know, one, and only one thing from you. Knowledge of this thing I was sure would set me free, thus opening me up to new friendships and a long fabulous life. I planned the day I would broach this subject with you well in advance.

You were amusing yourself with your talented wit as we sat in the lunch quad at San Jose State. I finally dove in and got to the punctum of our friendship.

With great earnest I asked you, "What's wrong with me?"

You looked on in horror at my distraught, yet honest, face and were unable to answer. I never saw you again. You wound up marrying a girl from my high school, two years my junior, of my own namesake.

Apparently, asking the question was the answer.

running haiku

2010-06-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

cracked asphalt stewing
batches of mulberry wine,
side-swiping drunk flies,

i run, i run, ai
yi yi yi, i run run run
on these hot mulled wine sidewalks

spicy with brow salt
and full body sweat slick and
purple spattered legs

dreaming of breezes,
icy margaritas, and
salty salty glasses

escape dreams

2010-05-26T06:25:00.000-07:00

I had a long, very vivid dream last night in which I left behind my entire life and everyone in it (I didn't have two teenaged sons in the dream) and went off with a band of people who were like gypsy pirates, the most handsome of which fell in love with me and talked me into joining them. It was a little scary to head off into the unknown, but I had decided to go with them and was headed off on the grand adventure.

HA! Escape! And no wonder, having waded through a particularly bad personal shit storm this week.

Odd details: lots of black eyeliner and steampunk clothing. There was much jumping up on tables and overrunning of townspeople. In one scene I had to talk a big, frightening, self-appointed bridge guard into letting me cross a bridge, but then I realized he was a simpleton (in the gypsy-pirate vernacular) and I talked him into letting me cross for a few shiny coins worth pennies. The gypsy-pirate guy I fell in love with was stunningly handsome and looked like this guy I had a crush on one time at an ashram I was visiting to do meditation. The ashram inhabitants did a nightly meditation that focused on raising the kundalini (real life here, not dream life) and I came to realize that with this guy in the room, my kundalini energy was getting stuck in my base chakra as sexual energy, which wasn't the point of the whole thing, but hey, I was a free woman and could daydream as well as night dream. I saw the guy recently and his eyes are so stunning that he does take my breath away just bit. In the dream, he was going to take off with some other men in the group for some kind of "raid" or something, but told me that if I went with the rest of the group he would know where to find me. He wouldn't be able to find me again if I stayed where I was in my regular boring life. Hmmm...that detail didn't make a lot of sense when I woke up, or only made sense in a metaphorical way, which sort of blew the whole dream state and brought me kicking and thrashing back into reality. Husband in kitchen grinding coffee beans. Get up. Make lunch. Watch the weather forecast. Go to work. A good life, but obviously I need to shake it up a little.

Big sigh.

UVA

2010-04-23T20:43:00.001-07:00

UVA

Earths wrinkled brown skin

Swallows rooted Cosecha

Rows of green limbs

Hunch over ripened Uva

Bodies planted in

Breathing fields

Burned by the sun's

Lengua

Blistered fingers gather

Someone eles's food

Withered brown hands

Stained with la Tierra

Parched bellies

Swell with suffocating thirst

Plants grow Vigorosamente

Suckling the bloodsweat

From Drying Veins

Dedicated to me Abuelo; Benjamin Candelaria

The Perfect Snack

2010-04-20T14:10:00.001-07:00

This is a journal entry written while I was living with my partner in Chengdu, China, the capital of Sichuan province.

Every afternoon, a small bevy of old women gathers on the corner near my building. They crouch or bring tiny stools that lift their thick haunches only a foot off the ground, so they give the impression of being balled up in a permanent squat, like gravity has finally won them over, and they have sunk into round, wobbling spheres of their former selves, like great big squashes rooted to the street. They are of a kind, these ladies, each with the sensible, short-cropped grey haircut of their generation, the mannish chop that implies a great indifference to bourgeois notions of feminine beauty. They wear the same dark-colored pants, the same thick tops and colored jackets and brocade vests, the little uniform of their age. They gather in groups of three or four, sometimes close together, sometimes spread out by a few yards, and they cluck and chatter and laugh in their old-crone voices like a murder of gossipy crows. They scare me the way all powerful women scare me. I adore them. Before each of them rests a pot or two, a barrel-like tub with a lid and a tea towel, and an example of what rests within lain on top, usually a yam, a sweet potato, taro, or corn. In the fall, they have soybeans and boiled peanuts. They cook great piles of the things at home, and then trot them out in the afternoons to sell for a tiny profit. I get the feeling this little bit of free trade also constitutes the bulk of their social day, like playing mahjong or doing taijiquan with other ladies from the neighborhood.
They come out around 3 pm, when students’ lunches have worn off and the stretch before dinnertime starts to feel long. They crouch and they wait, and slowly, the students wander past on their way to and from classes, and they lean over the old ladies’ vats and poke around inside, picking out a warm, starchy snack to tide them over till supper. The women sit there for hours, sometimes caught up in busy trade, sometimes only chatting, talking about I don’t know what, while their tubs dribble steam and their goods become waterlogged and slowly cool to mush.
Yesterday, I was really, really hungry. I didn’t feel like walking all the way out to the South Gate to hit the vegetable market, and I wasn’t in the mood to talk with my vegetable lady, anyway. I formed an accidental friendship with one of the vendors in the produce alley, even visiting her in the hospital when she was in a terrible bicycle wreck, but her Sichuanese accent and my weak Chinese often make her enthusiastic chatter more of a trial than a pleasure for me, and our bond makes me feel like visiting another stall would be somehow traitorous. So, sometimes I don’t buy veggies when I need to, more out of mental and social exhaustion than laziness. In any case, our tiny cupboards were effectively bare, and so I trotted out to the corner in my flip-flops and braved the mockery of the crow-ladies with the pots of afternoon snacks.
One immediately pounced: “Ni mai shenme!” she barked, “What do you want to buy!” It was an order more than a question. She lifted up her lids with hands wrapped in towels. Big clouds of steam flooded my face as I crouched in front of her. She had pale-looking corn floating in one pot, and bruised sweet potatoes with their skins still on in the other. Thinking of dinner later, I asked for two of each. She wrapped the corn in plastic baggies, and shouted a price that I knew was too much. People all around the world seem to labor under the impression that being louder will somehow help a foreigner understand. It doesn’t. I was at least glad she spoke; some vendors here assume I will comprehend nothing, even when I have already addressed them in Chinese, and they proceed to communicate only in esoteric hand gestures and grunts, a practice I find maddening and even more incomprehensible than the Sichuanese dialect. The other ladies clucked and chuckled over the price – it was roughly the equivalent of 50 cents an ear, a price I could live with and didn’t feel up to arguing over. She then picked out a couple of ugly sweet potatoes, “I’ll give you the big ones,” she said. Her face was broad and wrinkly and cracked open with a huge grin as she yelled; she was missing a lot of teeth. I said that big ones would be fine. She then seemed to feel sorry for having overcharged me, and after I paid her, she reached back into her tub and grabbed a pair of fingerlings, quickly stuffing them into a bag and then into my palms. She leaned in close to my face, her leathery squint growing tighter and brighter as she laughed a wheezy, windy laugh: “These are a gift for you,” she said. They smelled like sugar and loam and were warm like living creatures in my hand. She shooed me away as a group of students came by, and I practically ran back to the apartment with my load of boiled goodies.
Once I was in my kitchen, I tasted the corn first, as it looked ashen and had obviously been sitting in the water for hours. It was just as I’d expected: starchy and tasteless, like little pops of goo stuck to a cardboard cob. There is no sweet corn in China, as far as I’m aware; everything is seed corn, or the kind they feed to pigs. Both ears went in the trash.
Then, I pulled out one of my little sweet potato gifts. It was still steaming slightly, the skin on but scrubbed, and the bad bits whittled off, so it had a patchy, mangy look to it along with the bruising and pale russet of the peel. It was soft and broke easily into two pieces in my hands. I dusted it a little with salt, and was immediately overwhelmed: earthy, warm, and dizzyingly sweet. It was magic, a perfect size, a perfect weight, rich and deep in ways that vegetables never get credit for being. It tasted like candy and soup and bread and roots all at once, like the ultimate sustenance. I felt like I could be lost in a forest and dig up only these magical tubers for years and be utterly nourished, like they somehow were all food groups and vitamins rolled into one. I probably drooled. I inhaled one and set the other in the fridge for another day, and happily carved up the big ones for dinner. They were glorious with a little butter and some rice and beans.

NOLA 2010

2010-04-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

NOLA 2010

Norleans,
thou art more wondrous
& dredded than couldve
hoped for
Your Royal Street
jazzy street bands
of funkster bohemes
in 1920’s Depression Era duds,
glory & woe etched upon faces,
twitching gyrating washboard percusser,
bessie smith on clarinet,
squeezeboxes galore,
& I am transcended to
good clean dirty alice coming out of rehab Wonderland
side-slappin toe tapping goodness
but might I ask:
where are the sad sad songs:
5 years after
have ye recovered?
time to celebrate inebriate
blap a doodle doo?
Yes, there are idears
that sad does not sell
nor is in good tastes
for visitors from afar
in these medicated caffeinated
speeded up speedy times.
But.........

i pass, pass on, further on down this road
The Big Ass Beer place on Bourbon
and all the excesses,
intoxicatingly wonderful horrible excess:
ain’t nobody in this town gonna tell ya
stop!
no, not this town successfully coming out of rehab,
a town that know how to
party & let be be
&
EXPLODE!
in angry jealous gunshots & sirens & cops gone wild...

& I’m headed homewards now
past the projects
the everybody hates dem projects projects but me,
cuz them folx got some feelin I says,
& their kids are happier
every time I bike by & listen just for a sec
&
I’d go there tonight if invited or
could get by
the
verifiable warnings of gloom & doom waiting to
jump!
me there
and steal every last lump of lint in this empty pocket.
I’d go there but.
if it weren’t so.
didn’t look so.
if only it
was so safe I could parade grandma & the kids there
on christmas with all our new gadgets saying,
“betcha’ed like some o these?”
if only it was soo damn safe
& quiet
& dead as the suburbs on a Tuesday afternoon, then...
I’D NEVER FUKKING GO THERE...
and I keep going
keep right on going...

Down the Hatch

2010-04-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

Kodiak skippers come in two kinds: gentlemen and screamers. I only really knew two gentlemen skippers in all my years on boats, and both of them died at sea. I try not to make anything of that. My skipper was not a gentleman, but he was a very good fisherman. Kodiak seems to breed this type - something in the water, I guess. Still - working for a screamer is a hell of a way to grow up.

I was 16. It was a pitch-perfect Kodiak day, and we were having our version of “fun.” The wind was blowing so hard that the rain moved in horizontal sheets across the deck, pulling jellyfish into raw threads of fire that laced across my cheeks and slid under my gear onto my neck. My legs braced at the knees against the stack with every swell, my arms burning and wet as I strained to hold the purse line tight while, at the same time, batting and heaving the leads into a tidy pile along the starboard side. Saltwater rained onto my cap and hood from the block as it dragged the net from the water directly over my head. The wind was blowing so hard that a seagull flapped in place a few feet from my shoulder, surging against the current as if tethered by a string; it turned a strange eye in my direction. I stared back. The rest of the crew kept their heads down and did their best to be invisible to the skipper. To my dad.

“WHAT THE FUCK!!”

Something had gone typically awry. The boat was probably drifting over the net, releasing fish over the corks. We were full pursing, so we had the purse line on the winch snaking down into the fish hold as we brought in the net from the other side. Hydraulics are handy, but very dangerous - as my dad was always reminding me, get your glove or raingear caught on that winch, and it’ll snap your whole body in half before it slows down. I liked the tension of full pursing: it was loud and every line was taut and groaning. I liked the hum of the hydraulics. I focused on that sound sometimes, when I wanted to relax.

“HAVE YOU GOT YOUR HEAD SO FAR UP YOUR ASS YOU CAN’T SEE ME?!”

My dad was a screamer, and currently, he was screaming at the top of his lungs, waving his arms in what was probably supposed to be a signal to the skiff man, but what looked like what it really was - rage gone silly and incoherent with its own volcanic force. It’s tough to say who endures more abuse - the skiff man or the deck crew. The skiff man is the easiest to blame when a set gets fucked up. On the other hand, she or he also has the benefit of distance, and can drown out the screaming with a little extra throttle. The deck crew - or, as they were known on my boat, “cretins” - get it in the face and have the pleasure of hearing everything word for word, which sometimes hurts, even if we are just useless swab monkeys with shit for brains.

My dad picked up a plunger pole just so he could heave it against the deck, then picked it up and heaved it again, apparently dissatisfied with the tinny clank it made against the noise of the winch and the wind and the engine rumble and the sputtering growl of the skiff.

“WHAT THE FLYING FUCKING SHIT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!!” he screamed. “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO...”

After the screaming came histrionics. He pulled his long white beard in different directions. He gestured in agony at the heavens. He tore off his hat and threw it on the deck, kicking it and then putting it back on his head soaked in saltwater and gurry. He wind-milled his arms as if he would tear them out of their sockets, and then buried his face in his hands, shaking his head in a wild display of the burdens he bore, working with such imbeciles.

“YOU GET YOUR ASS AROUND THAT CORNER RIGHT FUCKING NOW YOU USELESS SON OF AN ASS-FUCKED WHORE!!”

His face was red and puffed out, like a boil ready to burst. Even his eyeballs turned red when he really went for it. I often wondered if there were a trick to this - maybe something he learned in the Army, an intimidation tactic. I sort of envied that level of commitment to an art, but I could clearly see the toll it took on one’s body. I remember thinking that he might have an aneurysm if he weren’t careful. I could swear there was smoke coming out his ears in symmetrical little white puffs, and an old red steam whistle blowing off the top of his head.

“GOD! FUCKING! DAMN! IT!”

He went through the different phases of sounds: the bellowing, the yelling, the high-pitched sarcastic pleading, and then finally went mute, jerking and hopping around the deck in a spasmodic, wordless rage. He began jumping up and down, stamping and kicking and pointing and looking for all the world like Rumpelstiltskin whose name has been guessed, damning the devil until the floor caved in - and then, it did.

Or at least that’s what I thought happened - it all went so quickly. In his explosion of anger, my dad had slipped and gone down the hole into which the winch was feeding the purse line; it was only about three feet across, but large enough for my dad’s foot, quickly followed by his other foot, and then the rest of him, to the waist. He caught himself with his upper arms, bellowed once like an angry bull, and then went strangely silent as the line continued to feed on top of him. Soon, he was half-buried in lead line, and half-dangling in the hold. The deckhand on the corks leaped over the stack, stumbling over the gear and mess on deck, and shut off the hydraulics. The relaxing hum stopped. My mother made some wordless noise of panic. I had a quick thought: “I think he’s dead.” And then I burst out laughing.

This wasn’t ordinary laughter. This wasn’t, “Holy shit - I didn’t see that coming,” laughter. This was all-out, gut-busting, pee-your-pants, wheezing, senseless laughter; this laughter hurt my face. I held onto the purse line and doubled over, my whole body shaking as I went soft in the knees. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t see, I couldn’t help. The deckhand and my mom were struggling to drag my dad out of the hold. He was conscious but confused, giving orders that were impossible to follow, wanting us to save the fish, save him, save whatthefuckever, all at the same time. I felt weak with relief, even as guilt and shock and comedy battled for the upper hand. I wasn’t relieved that he seemed to be okay. At that moment, I had been relieved that he was dead, simply because the screaming stopped. Some moments make no sense.

Somehow, we finished the set. He seemed to be injured, but it wasn’t clear how. He limped around the deck, now eager just to get the goddamned net on board with or without the help of his useless crew. The fish were probably gone - or maybe we caught thousands, I don’t remember - but the important thing was that he was hurt, and we were going to head in to anchor up at Bumble Bay, a nice, quiet, protected spot with glassy flat water and a couple of tenders who might have medical help on board. His financial day was ruined, and we were all probably somehow to blame.

We spent the next three days at anchor, listening to the groans issuing from the stateroom. He had broken some ribs, but was otherwise fine. “But I can’t take a goddamned BOWEL MOVEMENT,” he kept saying. It seemed funny to me that a man who swore as much as he did couldn’t just say “shit,” instead.

I was still young enough not to be concerned over the money we were losing by being at anchor. I liked having some time to rest, to read, to talk with the other deckhand, even though he was twice my age and married and had two kids back in what he always called “The Buckeye State,” wherever that was. It sounded like somewhere boring, especially if he had to come all the way to Alaska to get his adventure on. Probably the Midwest - that’s how it usually worked. The docks were crawling with guys from the Midwest who’d heard from a friend of a friend that you could make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the high seas in Alaska; of course, their information was a decade old, but they still came - many of them never having seen the ocean before, not knowing the difference between a rope and a line, or a humpie from a red. We sent them out to the marine supply store for lots of prop wash.

This guy was okay, though. He was funny and got along with the skiff man, and he loved my mom’s cooking. Plus, he could talk about books and ideas and didn’t jerk off in front of me or try to get in my bunk like so many of the others. Mike was a nice guy.

In the stateroom, the groaning continued. Broken ribs hurt. My dad finally managed to relocate to the wheelhouse, carrying a piss jug with him so he wouldn’t have to descend to the galley to use the head. With my mom bringing him meals, he wouldn’t have to leave the wheelhouse at all until he healed up. “I HAVEN’T HAD A GODDAMNED BOWEL MOVEMENT IN THREE DAYS,” he reminded us as the door closed behind him. We all snickered and figured we were in for a little vacation. His plan was this: my mom was going to take over the cork stack, because it was light and wouldn’t hurt her back. I would continue to do the leads, and would keep an eye on the web, as well. The other deckhand would take my dad’s place working the hydraulics - can’t trust women with controls, you see - and my dad would remain in the wheelhouse, issuing helpful suggestions as needed. This seemed like a delightful arrangement. Of course, we were wrong.

We were at a place called Red River. One of the things I’ve always liked about fishing there is there are always so many other boats. Of course, the competition is fierce, and it sometimes means jogging in line and waiting for turns, but there is a hectic, derby-style quality to the fishing that I found exciting, even when people started shooting at each other or running their skiff into other guys’ nets. Mostly, I just liked being close to other people, being able to watch other operations in action, and wave to friends on other boats.

This summer was no exception - it was busy, busy, busy down there. Boats of every color and size, from the stately limit seiners to the piratical aluminum pisspots were angling for a turn at the river mouth. The fish were puking up the beach, and there were lots to be had for the lucky, the early-rising, the hard-working, and the crafty among us. This kind of situation ignites a special kind of fire in a screaming skipper: the combination of money and competition really seems to bring out their best.

“GOD FUCKING DAMMIT LARA, WHAT IN GOD’S NAME DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? JEEZUS CHRIST, STEPH - STEPH? STEPH! JUST GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY AND LET HER...OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE. MIKE, YOU WORTHLESS IDIOT, WHAT ARE YOU - NO, NO, NO! YEAH, PUT THAT....WHY ME, LORD?!”

There is a handy feature on most fishing boats called a PA, which, of course, involves a handheld mic, which is kept in the wheelhouse so the skipper can issue directives to the crew on deck from the comfort of the captain’s chair. These instructions are then amplified several hundred times through speakers mounted on the deck and the bow, so that the volume is sufficient to broadcast the information across the entire fucking fishing grounds. With my mom and me on the stack, Mike at the controls, and the skiff man safely out in the skiff, we now had my father screaming at the top of his lungs through loudspeakers that were booming his stream of consciousness profanity into the air around us, drowning out not only the noises of the gear and the engine and the skiff, but the noises of all the other boats around us, frustrating skippers for a mile in every direction, who could barely get their own screams in edgewise.

“Grab that line! No, the other...”
“DON, YOU SIMPLE SON OF A BITCH!! I SAID SLOWLY, SLOWLY!!”
“Okay, boys, let’s close ‘er up..”
“GET THAT FUCKING LINE UP TO THE BOW - THE BOW - THE POINTY END, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!”

Our fishing operation had become Red River Theater. At the very least, it was entertaining. Other boats actually began gathering around us to witness the spectacle of it all: the highliner reduced to barking orders from the flying bridge; the brow beaten crew desperately trying to do their jobs; the skiff man with headphones covering his ears, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face. The fact that it was a so-called “family operation” only added to its charm. Deckhands I knew on other boats were loving every minute of it; they pointed and laughed, they did impersonations of my dad. One asshole even got out a video camera to capture the moment.

At one point, Mike started yelling back, which was cathartic and great fun for the boats close enough to hear, but ill-advised. My father’s flare for sarcasm acquired a special viciousness with the pain in his ribs.

“OH, IS THAT RIGHT, MIKE? I GUESS THAT’S WHY YOU’RE THE ONE RUNNING THIS MULTIMILLION DOLLAR OPERATION. SHUT UP AND DO WHAT I TELL YOU, IF YOU DON’T MIND.”

The audience loved it. I, too, enjoyed Mike’s spirit, but told him it really wasn’t worth it. As our skiff man of years always taught me, “in one ear, and out the other.” I tried to see it more from a creative perspective. Everyone knows swear words, but not everyone can cuss fluently, and add to it that special something that really makes it injurious filth. I think of it as a gift that my father has, along with his ability to call turkeys and shoot free throws.

Mike ended up having a gift for backtalk. We stayed out there with our special version of high-volume hell for about a week, until the run ended, and then limped our way back to the cannery to do some gear work. My dad kept telling the story of his broken ribs to anyone who would listen on the radio. “I didn’t take a bowel movement for THREE DAYS,” he’d always add. Other skippers commiserated. Mike wanted the hell off the boat the second we touched the dock. I was sad to see him go, but I really couldn’t blame him. Not everyone can handle a screamer. He and I got drunk together one night before he left...and then he took our sledge hammer to the speakers on deck. And that was fun, too.

This is a transcript of a piece I performed at this year's Fisher Poet's Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, a festival of music and spoken word for individuals (such as myself) who have been involved with or are currently working in the commercial fishing industry. It was written to be read - or screamed - aloud. Prior to the performance, I shared a claw from a bear that my father had killed, just to represent him in a more positive light. In any case, I love my dad. Even if he is a screamer.

Goals: (a short short).

2010-04-09T23:32:00.000-07:00

I found a map underneath a smooth ocean stone. I tried to keep on the path highlighted by someone else's blood. But then It became to difficult to keep in place, so I ran past the old ladies house with dripping skin. I should just go home.

When I grow up I want to live by the ocean and write.

I like limbless Men

2010-04-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

I feel like if they only have one legg, or one arm they are forced to develop an inner spirituality. Really I want to stand next to someone who is not afraid to practice prayer and then take off with only a backpack and a pack of smokes. With no destination in mind. So I searched in the hobble of limbless men, looking for soul, and passion:

I want a deeper connection, so I thought to myself as I sipped my pint in a sticky bar, I tell myself “that one legged man over there may be the one”, based on his lacking one leg. I went over to him and tried to kiss him, he must have thought I was deranged. I gave him no warning as I leaned in to kiss his cheek to see if he was magic. No such luck (he was startled to put it gently). well at least I can say my limbless phase of love seeking had a purpose. Which was wanting someone with texture around the person inside. I want the quality of the human shell to mean nothing.

Maybe I should try someone with no teeth? Maybe that's who my soulmate is, a toothless man who has developed a fine since of petal worship with that old religion I keep following. If this does not work I might have to find someone with all their teeth and limbs.

Cannery Wharf

2010-03-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

they had gained the wharf
and in defeat
we fell back facing inland
pushed against the sea
until one by one
my comrades just fell

by what virtue I remained
last on a foreign shore
I don't know
my presence flouting

giving in
I conjured myself as a child
probing for a previous occurrence
of the slip
something I needed to explore
in depth

I dove
submarine shape
I'd gladly rent the vessel
if they'd let me keep the message tinned

I thought
as I set myself to fall in
the surface reflecting the fleer
all is clear in a glass abyss

introduction

2010-03-10T12:59:00.000-08:00

By all outward accounts, I am Julie, female, 48, computer programmer, runner, cook, gardener, with a mortgage, two sons, a long time love, and one ginger cat. By my own reckoning, I am an adventurous soul, an endless possibility in a five foot four jacket, a big bleeding heart so full of emotions and experiences that it sings and breaks and explodes into spasms of joy by turns. Here's how I see it: Lucky me, with my painful experiences, with my outrageous highs and lows. Lucky me to have had my own small self stretched beyond recognition by the numerous and sometimes large people who have moved in and loved me. Lucky me to have laughed till I was doubled over and choking, to have made art, to have lost people, to have gained empathy, to have dropped acid, to have baked bread, to have had a lover paint stars on my ceiling, to have sat in one spot on the side of a mountain for an entire day, to have felt my spirit float out of my body, to have tasted a perfect apple, to have run twenty six point two miles without stopping, to have had some time to think, to have eaten peas and blackberries off the vine, to have been scared witless, to have been drunk on red wine, to have watched comets, to have seen the Mona Lisa, to have swung on a bipolar rope vine between spastic restless energy and perfect peaceful contentment, to have hopped a train, to have been cut, bruised, bleeding and permanently scarred doing crazy shit I love to do, to have sat by a lot of fires and torched a lot of marshmallows and told a lot of stories. Mostly, I have taken a pretty average normal life and imbued it with all kinds of magical and mystical meanings because that makes it more fun and a better story. Lucky me with my magic life and my stories.

Memory

2010-02-24T15:44:00.000-08:00

I remember a dark musty house and inside a crowded room there were a couple dozen computers, spray painted in bright colors and designs. It smelled like smoke and aerosol.

A bull mastiff muzzled my neck wetly, and I shuddered in my attempt to match the dog's drooly, imposing strength.

When I was with my dad I felt more independent. He would talk about what I called "computer stuff", and I'd go outside and explore our old truck, grown over with giant reeds, parked for the rest of eternity in his longtime friend, Strauss' backyard. I'd pretend my dog and I were trucking along the 5, pulling the rusted stick this way and that, the wheel too decrepid to turn. The seats were vinyl, and sharp where they were torn. When my dad came to get me, I'd ask why the yellow truck was there.
Would he ever take it back?

"No--Probably not." My dad would say.

I followed him back to the house, passing a small workbench covered in computer entrails and spray paint cans. We went inside, and I stared fearful at an old man staring through his glasses at me, his mouth straight with a smoking cigarette stuck in it.
The man would haunt me as I left the dim, smoky house, looking round wide-eyed at the psychadelic blue and green computer shells.

Life Beneath the Ice With the Meter Readers and the Parking Attendants

2010-02-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

My mind is blank. My mind is the great savanah, lying dormant and alive under the teeming herds of zebra and gazelle, beneath the restful pride of lions, the cackling jackals. I am open and watchful. Weary and cautious.

No. Correction. My mind is the great ice flows that cover the frozen oceans of the epic Northward expanse. Slowly, turgidly grinding under the surface, impossibly dense and viscous. Invisibly full and fertile.

I've had a drink and sit at a bar on the outskirts of a nearby city and hear a babble of human communication as music, as the racing confusion of a river.

I look to the door as if I expect to be joined by a friend, but nobody knows I am here. It is a rare and delicate feeling. I bottle it and put it away.

I resolve to move off the map more often. I don't even believe my own resolution.

How often do I feel free, that anything's possible? How often do I look at others, look at strangers, and think anything is possible between us?

I feel lonely and free all at once.

A suburban street. A city street. A metal garage door painted red. A green plastic trash can leans against it. Right there in this, the entire civilized world is captured. All of its pleasures and pain, all of its problems and comforts. This is the image I keep and put in the top right drawer of the desk to remember. Later I'll pull out this image and wonder, why was this important?

Ni Olvido Si Perdon

2010-02-13T22:59:00.000-08:00

“Ni Olvido Si Perdon”

Thanks, Gracias

from the little notebook I carried with me jotting down our secrets & inspirations,

from nogales to oaxaca & back again

by overland Mexican bus,

dubbed American action &

talking animal movies on board.

For my big bulging army backpack

over shoulder walking walking your handmade cobblestoned streets

and you still ask me where I’m from

wish me well

though I am from, born, in the u.s. of A which makes guns to bring you down,

but jobs to bring you up

or grind you down,

but not really thankfully,

not really hospitably,

not really wanting to hear your whole story.

Thanks for feral dogs and children

walking the streets, free,

I walk with them, you, to my next destination.

Thanks for bunk beds and hammocks & hanging beds

for 5 bucks a night.

For drinking beer in the street,

for

Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

at all hours of the day and night & morning;

even for the truck loaded with oranges,

announcing for all @ 7 a.m.

“senores y senoras!”

“eat your oranges! they are good for you!”

or some such.

Gracias for papayas wrapped in newspapers

bought from backs of trucks or

from overloaded backbreaking wheelbarrows,

Only 10 pesos each, that’s 75 cents! y dulce.

Gracias.

For Maria’s cookies, but no peanut butter.

huge speedbumps that pick-up trucks almost lose their bumpers upon, rattle over;

for the circus in the Mazunte town square,

fantastically 30 feet high, tethered by straps tied to trees,

supporting Argentinian trapeeze artists,

spectators sitting in white plastic chairs collected from local restaurants, loaded into helpful pick-up trucks.

For backyard temescal shamans

and front porch diners.

Clayudas! Clayudas:

Large tortillas folded over &

stuffed with stringy cheese frijole nopale whatnot.

Mole! Mole:

chocolate spicy goodness.

& Japanese traveller friend Tsutom to share it with & Krishna chants on Mexican naked beach & ping pong @ dive bar with sand floor, warped table.

Gracias por todos!

Gracias for

Even when I drive the occasional hard bargain,

though not for sport,

but necessity.

For pulque in Oaxaca @ corner market-

best damn drink I ever had,

served by the same indigena

who also scooped something else

from another gourd that

had me drunk all afternoon.

Drunk by the old indigenous woman!

Gracias.

To all the indigena who toil,

carrying wares on backs & heads to market,

selling bags of roasted peanuts with garlic,

toasted crunchy red grasshoppers I shall try once.

Yes, they of/from the Earth who have eyes of love and life

etched on their old world faces.

Gracias.

For buses that go everywhere, all the time.

For people riding standing up in the backs of pick-ups,

always room for 1 more & their belongings, spilling over & almost out of

self same pick-ups.

For the drunks lying in the streets,

snoozing last night off,

blind cd sellers on the subway playing their crackling new age metal mariachi etc. music

from bulging backpacks;

for grandma on same subway

scrunching her nose @ badly sung Creedence covers;

for the blue swine flu masks, masking pandemics;

the maimed guitarist singer

singing sad sad songs trying

to separate us from our hard earned pesos,

successfully.

for

Being hypnotized by warm waves I have never seen nor ridden better

To the grandma who was out in the

big surf with the rest of la familia,

laughing and loving life with the

7 year old grandkid,

all getting pounded together by las ollas grandes,

with me,

the whole family,

the youngest asking for pointers from me.

Thanks.

For the young princesses of the beach out

selling mom’s lemon cakes by the slice:

gourmet, cheap.

We are being catered to like some

fancy dancy resort up the coast i cannot afford

nor want to attend.

Gracias.

For stringy Oaxacan cheese & fine art Oaxacan paintings, 1 of 2 gay men praying to Virgen of Guadalupe in bedroom by neatly made bed, matching green pillows;

For Oaxaca Banana Magic Hostels,

a Tom Waitsish fantastical gritty hip loser winner hostel where dreams could find intoxication,

Basque roomies,

drunken yet hip proprietors;

cool Oaxacan graffiti:

“ni olvidos ni perdon!”

“Never forget nor forgive!”

(October 2, 1968, day of Mexico City Olympic protestor murders.)

!viva APPO!

Todos! Todos! Todos!

Mexico City!

Mazunte!

Patzcuaro!

Guadalalajara!

Oaxaca!

Zacatecas!

Chihuahua!

For paying when you get there,

when you are done eating.

something called trust.

Not giving a fuck, but caring.

for fantastical circuses in town squares, again.

for Irish hospitality in Mexico City,

for breaking all the rules that don’t exist,

for commandos doing their silly dangerous

daytime @ the beach routine,

guns drawn, fingers poised on shiny American machine guns.

for the fish boats that crash! to shore

on same beaches

on rollers made of tree branches,

bringing boatloads of fish, sharks, swordfish

that people gawk at, poke, buy.

Gracias.

For true believers

parading the streets on posada,

ceremonially seeking shelter,

as I do literally,

in their land,

as jesus joseph & mary did,

a stranger in their midst.

they do know jesus!

this is the christmas spirit I hoped to find

outside american shopping malls

& holiday rush hour traffic.

Yes, & to all the Virgins & their outlandish outfits: Soledad, Guadalupe, etc.

the days in their honor,

the fireworks & 13 piece bands celebrating

their piousness, devotion, sacrifice;

The images of Jesus miraculously appearing on tunics, billboards, etc.

Miracles large and small everywhere,

everyone waiting for the miraculous,

fishing fortunes from Gold sparkly guy’s

“Tu Destino”

gold sparkly shoebox

in mexico city zocalo

for a peso or tres,

hoping for a gold sparkly future.

Gracias.

And for the saints, all the saints

helping me on my way in polished beautiful stone churches,

discovering that my saint is Jude:

patron saint of hopeless causes,

displacing/joining my former St. Dymphna,

she of the wandering and insane.

All the virgins!

All the Saints!

All the Churches, sidewalks, streets

made of stone

made by hand

made with love

scrubbed daily,

cleansing my thoughts as I sit there catholically

early each and every morning,

almost each and every morning,

waiting imploring God to come in to

our believing hearts,

women crawling on knees,

only knees,

using no arms,

to this same altar we lay our dreams.

Waiting, hoping-

the same word in spanish:

esperar.

The unpronounceable favorite places:

Tlaquepaque, Chapultepec, the city next to ours on the oaxaca coast I never made it to, etc. etc.

Gracias. Gracias. Gracias.

Gracias.

to The yipping dogs,

piles of garbage,

the shitty norteno or ranchero or some such whatever it is called music playing

Always! Always! Always! Always!

The laundry lines,

the holes in sidewalks you could fall into and never climb out of:

Big holes, by big curbs, this obstacle course called a Sidewalk.

to squeaky clean bus stations,

public restrooms for 3 pesos:

you can throw the complimentary shit rag

in the garbage, thank you.

The scrapes on Mexican women’s cars,

the patched together clothing,

The old men and young boys trudging wheelbarrows filled with ________.

to being the only gringo on the boat to

the island near Patzcuaro,

the only one wearing glasses.

the only one.

Now, this sleepless night filled

with the thumpa thumpa thumpa thumpa

of rave music that refuses to go away

nor be beaten down

by cranky neighbors nor armed thugs

that do not complain

never

about this noise noise noise noise

1 2 3 4!

Uno dos tres cuatro!

The masked military boarding buses,

roaming beaches, accosting tourists,

me,

hoping we carry mota & bribes on dark streets,

they: guns drawn, fingers poised, faces masked.

No thanks, thank you.

The imagined murderous uncovered swine flu hackings on

buses and subways.

The loogies on the sidewalks.

Did I mention the parting shots of

my own bout of Venga de Moctezuma in Zacatecas,

me thinking it a bout of anxiety

about leaving your fair land

until my belches tasted of sulfur?

of course

Mexico City subway rush hour pickpocket stealing away my hopes to extend my vacation, on credit?

Gracias, no gracias.

Yes & to sensationalist pictures of

assassinated bodies & busty gals

covers of newspapers & magazines

at news stands,

while the real news goes unwritten,

but everybody knows whats what

through that ancient forgotten medium: mouth.

Si Si, did I mention the international tourists @

small beach towns &

I can still afford to eat

& live here &

go out @ night & forget why I came?

Now i did.

& Heading to Northward, to the pointy Chihuahua boots,

rico Sauvé hats,

and yes the bus driver

sleeping under the bus in

the luggage compartment,

as the other driver makes passes on windy vomitting mountain roads, blind corners, lights off to see oncoming traffic.

Gracias, even if you did almost kill me.

Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

1,2,3,4!

Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

More More More More

Uno dos tres cuatro!

Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa!

Again 2 3 4!

Insert sounds of ranchero music, dogs, etc etc here.

That slowly makes one social or insane,

but never raising one’s voice

in protest,

unless collective, in unison

against government armies stealing your freedom

and money and pretty much whatever they want because they have guns and you don’t/can’t.

All together now:

One two three four!

Uno dos tres cuatro!

Noise noise noise noise!

Gracias.

Gracias.

That this trip is sadly over &

I return to Here/U.S. of A.,

a better man for my (mis)adventures to mex,

back to u.s.:

·cleanest bathrooms this side of Heaven!

·New Starts

· fairy tale endings

·immigrants

·large impossible dreams

·California wilderness

· California amigos

·Home?;

Returning:

a little more Mexican,

a little more humble,

to the Mexico of small difficult dreams made by hand con carino.

I shall not forget thee,

nay,

but shall forgive,

if you me.

One last time,

one for the road:

gracias.

in a hundred words, it's all ok

2010-01-22T11:44:00.000-08:00

There are some moments when everything is ok, and I am perfectly bouyant in my private sea. I float while curled like a question mark into the warm body of my husband, under our pile of down comforters, under our cat, under our star-painted ceiling, under a low, cold sky of January gray, and everything is ok. We were marriage hold-outs for more than a decade--non-believers, non-joiners, damaged, skeptics. And then we did it anyway, in our garden on the day of an epic flood, with the friends and family who could still get there sweating profusely through their nice clothes on the hottest early June day anyone could remember. We had no definitive answer when people asked, "Why now?" He burrows into me, into my happy floating self, a year and a half later on this January night, and says, "I find such comfort in being married to you."

Water, water

2010-01-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

Twenty or so minutes into sleep the shaking began. A little earthquake in my body, like the vibrating of a serpent snaking it's way down my spine. I awoke confused, amnesic. Almost immediately after falling into slumber once again, another round of shaking engulfed me and then, the unmistakable sound, smell and sight of rushing water. I awoke again confused. Soon after I slipped back into sleep to repeat the experience twice more, both times ending in the sensation of rushing water. Quieting my psychic barometer, I surrendered to a deeper less antagonistic sleep. In the morning, the rains began. Water, water everywhere.

psych ward

2010-01-21T18:34:00.000-08:00

Her eyes were red and puffy as she explained. I stared into them, a rare demonstration of intimacy on her part allowing me the tears welling up in her eyes and rolling down her nose. In that second she became a young child, no longer the tired woman dressed in suicide-watch-blue hospital scrubs watching shitty movies in the common room until late at night. Eyes fixed on the television screen and her knees bent up to her chin. An old soul with old secrets she kept to herself.

"I could never do that to anyone," the old child said.

Fight or Flight

2010-01-21T15:10:00.000-08:00

The broken chair that I threw against the wall the night she left still lies like a shattered body against the wall. The night she left. The night she moved back to her mom's house, I carved an X apropos nothing into my palm, and realized only later how deeply frightened of her I was for the entirety of our four year marriage. Two months later in the car outside a grocery store, the tears came. Not of sadness, but of blessed relief, full-body quaking born of shock. Like the sudden realization of how close to death I had come.

Archetypes

2010-01-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

These are mythologies we breed from unanswered questions. Stories we breath life into to fill in the blank spaces, giving meaning to the black space between the headphones. This is all a grand design to a answer gap in my memory of you three decades ago, grasping to understand that watery forgotten past. I wish in every way to let it pass...

I pulled into the small lot. Pinwheels with rainbow colors turned vibrantly just beyond the gate, colorful markers of the dead, spinning wildly in a strong breeze. Even in this surplus of colorful markers, not one stood upon your grave. Under my feet crunched acorns, pine cones, dandelions, poppies, and grasses dried in the lovely, summer heat. Gophers, or perhaps snakes, had made their homes among the tombstones. Little black holes peeked at me here and there.

Of the three relatives in this cemetery, only one did I know by blood. As I searched, it was not clear to me exactly which grave I was looking for. After 20 minutes, however, I found it; her name on a lonely flat marker, with the word "Mother" as the only addition to the dates of her short life. The moment I found her, even in the upside down fashion by which I came upon the tombstone, I folded into myself. Grand theatrics of previous designs were forgotten. Only now, in this moment, did I feel her. "Mother."

I have a photo of my grandmother as a teenage girl. Jet black hair, pale legs so long it looked as though she'd been propped up on stilts. Impossibly tall. The photo seemed so removed from the old woman I knew, who drank too much and ruled over her grandchildren too roughly. She died early, at the age of 62 after multiple strokes. When I visited her death bed in the hospital, she looked like a geriatric woman aged perhaps 80 years. Such a departure from the vibrant, statuesque sixteen year old girl in the photo.

Born of mixed native descent during the great Depression my grandmother came into the world of harsh conditions in an Oklahoma farm life. She migrated to California, when her own mother hopped a train with her two infant children, leaving an abusive father and dust bowl far behind. In the photo of my great grandmother on the day of her second wedding, she is wearing well-worn boots and work dress. A solitary, white chicken bears witness in the background.

I suspect Grandma's life must have been hard. I doubt that she was the supernaturally evil, fairy tale grandmother we children conjured after living with her. After stroke number two, she became so docile. All day long she painted roses, smoked, drank, and offered Grandmotherly advice years too late. I'm sure her life as a farm girl in the Great Depression must have had some bearing on the hard memories we have of her. It must have.

At her grave I bundle together a small bouquet of flowers, dandelions, poppies, a bird feather, pine cones and lay them before her. I vow to return with my own daughter and plant pinwheel at her site to shine it's vibrant face upon the world. May the grace of "Mother" be with you, Grandma.

In a dream, I am there again among the graves, now black and charred from a catastrophe of fate. I am surrounded by archetypes of creatures passed. These are beloved and less love-ed from within and without me. This is the rest... this is the message.

The Angel Gabriel

2009-12-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

The sky opens up and the Archangel Gabriel
steps down and takes a deep breath of air.
He stretches his arms, first to his chest and
then high above his head.
He blinks twice and then once more hard,
and then shakes his head almost imperceptibly.
Only then does he look around.

There's a sizable crowd around him in Union Square.
And while he's shed his raiment
of pure blinding light and
donned a coat and slacks, it is
of a most expensive cut and
no one failed to notice his spectacular
entrance descending from the clouds on a stairway
of pure gold, trumpets heralding his arrival.

He clears his throat but can't bring himself to ask
directions. He has a meeting at two with the head
of the department of public works
about an issue with an elevated expressway
that is an affront to His eyes.

A patrol car pulls up to the curb.
No dispatch, just an officer who sees a crowd.
He flips on his lightbar and adjusts his
baton as he steps from his car.
He thinks it's that unpermitted DVD vendor
set up again in spite of God knows
how many warnings.
Stands back, hands in the pockets of his warm
patrol officer jacket.
Just interested, you know, community policing, not involved.
And here it is.
A man, Caucasian, mid-forties, six foot, 180 pounds, brown hair,
One of those Gucci suit high-rent assholes
in the middle of the crowd.
A guy standing there, looking at his expensive watch.
What's he selling?

A man wearing a tattered down jacket
is working the crowd.
Hey, man, I'm trying to get home to
my mom who has cancer and I just
need ten more bucks to get a
bus ticket.
And he's already twenty dollars up or so and
people are distractedly handing him
bills, two fives already and a bunch of ones
and this crowd is all up in
the shit of some dude in the middle
of the square who ain't doing nothin'
just standing there.
The whole crowd, just a lot of standing around.
And today no one is crossing the square
to avoid his asking for change
or trying hard not to meet his eyes
or mumbling apologies and excuses under their breath
as they walk past.
The fuck? Did that dude just come down
on that stairway from the clouds?
Jesus fucking Christ.
Well second coming or not,
He keeps the bulk of the crowd
between him and the cop
who's looking alert there, one hand on his
night stick, and the other on his
radio.

A golden stair spins down from Heaven
like an escalator at Macy's,
thinks a Muni driver in the crowd.
And God or maybe just an angel descends down to Earth
or rides down rather since I
didn't see his legs working each step,
And that's more like an escalator
than a stair, I guess,
but I didn't see each step coming down.
And if they did, do the steps
disappear at the bottom, or do
they go back up on the underside?

The stair is still there, but fading
and a kid named Beck, Becky,
Rebecca to her mother when she's mad,
considers briefly running up the golden stair.
But she's pretty sure the man in the suit
would stop her, plus she's afraid
that if she gets halfway up the
stairs and they disappear, like in a dream,
that she'd fall and get hurt.
She looks again at the guy in the suit
and wonders if this is an angel
Or even God himself,
But this man looks not much
older than her dad so
it can't be God who is
probably really old.

Gabriel moves into the crowd
thinking he knows the way to
the city administration building
and it is already a quarter of two.
The crowd tries to part to let him through but
really he doesn't look so very
different than anyone else
(a tad better dressed perhaps)
and so the crowd's efforts to part
look more like they are trying
to part from themselves.
And the Archangel Gabrial
is quickly lost in the throng.

The man in the down vest seizes the opportunity
and dives into the empty center of
the circle speaking fast,
Ladies and Gentleman
What you saw before you was
no less than a miracle.
A genuine miracle.
Jesus Christ is lost among us, but
the warm feelings of the Good Lord remain.
His message here still rings in our ears.
Be good to each other.
Be good to yourself.
Treat others with generosity.
And I only need one hundred
more dollars to get treatment
for my poor sick sister.
He puts out his hat and
it begins to fill up.
God bless you, he adds.
God bless you.

The crowd begins to turn away
already forgetting and dismissing
what it has seen.
People begin to return to their
usual disinterested lives,
miracles and revelations forgotten.
The officer, standing at the edge of the crowd,
adjusts his belt, his radio,
his baton, his service revolver.
He turns away satisfied
and radios that he's code four.

Bardo Thodol

2009-12-14T10:21:00.000-08:00

I remember that time
you told me that
Bardo was the Budhist concept,
the place between
life and death
that you go to
work out your habits
in this life.

And during my period
of heartbreak,
that's how it felt,
halfway between life
and death,
working out my habits
of loving you.

Womon in Eureka

2009-12-12T22:47:00.000-08:00

31 July 2007

I left Santa Cruz yesterday on a Greyhound bus. About ten hours later I arrived in Arcata. It is quite possible that I’ve left for good and Alaska will be my new home. Like most of the recent events in my life, I have not processed my departure. Once again, I’ve made a hasty decision. Maybe I will move slower when I’m older and (hopefully) wiser.

The bus ride was typical for Greyhound. The passengers were working class and poor, intermittent with a few unsuspecting Europeans. In Oakland I transferred to a bus where I sat next to a pregnant womon, who appeared to be in her late thirties. But it is often hard to tell the age of poor people, whose face and hands are wrought with years of hard experience. She held a plastic bag filled with cookies, Doritos, Taco Bell. She wore fake nails painted a shiny pastel purple. At every stop she apologized for asking me to move my legs, got off the bus and took a few drags off a cigarette, which she snuffed out and placed in her coin purse. I watched her from the window. I watched her stare at the side of the bus without blinking.

I thought about her as ten hours passed by in an instant. I thought about the life I just left behind, the pending telephone call, worried about the possibility of my misdemeanor hindering my passage through Canada or having all of the money I own, roughly $300, get stolen. I’ve since decided to keep my ID, social security card and twenty dollar bills in my shoe.

The womon on the bus frequently spoke on her cell phone with a man named Larry. “I’m carrying your child, Larry,” she repeated.

“You were trapped?

Well, I’m not raising this child alone, Larry and I’m sure as hell not giving it up for adoption. That should tell you the direction I’m goin’ in.

I’ve thought long and hard about this.

You’re not going to have to worry about child support or anything like that.

What? Fifty dollars a month like you give your other child? No thanks.

I will not have a baby asking me where her daddy is, like Aurora does for you now.”

Somewhere after Willits enough people got off so that I could move to a pair of empty seats, giving us both some space. At the stop in Eureka I was so occupied in my thoughts that I didn’t notice her get off until it was too late. I wanted to say goodbye or at least or tell her that whatever choices she makes for her life, it is going to be okay. I suppose I need to believe that for myself first.

Garage sale

2009-12-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

She hated to see her things strewn out like that, on the oil stained concrete. She hated to bargain with people over her life. “That’s a dollar… okay, I’ll take fifty cents.” She had put those things together so nicely in her little apartment. I was always surprised when I returned from college to see the home my mother had always wanted, but couldn’t keep before because her two youngest children were rough and always messed things up. She likes to keep a clean towel over the drying dishes in the rack and another over the toaster. She likes to burn candles at night. She doesn’t keep much food in the house, but the staples: cheap wine, beer, crackers, coffee and cream. All the furniture had been given to us or bought at a thrift store or someone else’s garage sale, but she put it together in a way to be proud of. And then there it was, back in the same random order it had been brought in at.

I had the same pit in my stomach as I did when I was eight years old, the first time I remember my mother having to sell nearly everything so we could move. All of her treasures were laid out on a blanket in the shade. I was keeping a watch over it all as she made trips in and out of the trailer, bringing out more and more things. A customer walked up and I recognized him as one of my classmate’s uncle. He wanted to buy her antique 7-UP wood crate, which was just out to hold my books for sale. With my mother inside, our landlord took it upon herself to sell the crate for three dollars. I ran to find her, excited to tell my mother we had made money off of something we had not even intended to sell. She was upset. She did not want to sell it. It was worth more than that. Our landlord said, be grateful for what you can get. And how could you argue with that, when all that has decorated your life is scattered behind you on the ground?

War Story

2009-12-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

26 June, 2005

His name is Wes and he is 23 years old. On his third and last tour to Iraq, he was captured by “insurgents” in Fallujah. He is now detained at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. In a few days he has a hearing in front of the military court and is being tried on 3 counts of war crimes. How did I meet him? He sat across from me, drunk, on a plane from San Diego. He was allowed a short leave to visit his dying grandmother. Behind Wes sat Philippe. He leaned forward to share his experience, “I know what you mean” he said, from when he was part of French UN forces in Yugoslavia in 1993. “How did you get captured?” asked Philippe.

Wes: “I was commander of the very left of my unit. Five of the best Marines, I mean they were awesome. We were so in sync with each other that we wouldn’t even have to talk.

We were on a mission to take over a hotel in Fallujah. The government drastically misjudged the strength of the enemy. We began clearing the rooms by throwing grenades in each one, killing the people inside. Usually the squad leader goes last, he’s supposed to. But I go first. That’s why I love Alexander the Great because he always went in front of his men. By the time we entered the fourth, fifth, and sixth rooms we were running out of grenades. In the fifth or sixth room we went in, the insurgents killed everyone but me. They shot me twice in my chest. Although I was wearing armor, I fell down and lost consciousness. The force that hit me was enough to blow through an entire town. I woke up once and shot a guy in the chin. Lost consciousness again.

Woke up a second time to see the last of my brothers killed, butchered. I saw his face normal and then saw it blown to pieces. He was shot in the face three times. There were pieces everywhere. I mean these guys trusted me without a second thought…

The insurgents took me to a jail. They were really nice to me, would ask me how I was doing and I would say, ‘I’m doin’ okay.’ They would videotape me so they wanted me to look happier. Then they sold me to a street gang.”

Philippe: “Yeah, this is where war gets complicated…”

Wes: “They would torture us to get information. They would take a metal pipe and some wire to make a noose. They would choke me for three minutes. I could hold myself for three minutes then I would be exhausted. They would let me go for twenty seconds and then lift me back up. I watched a friend die by being choked. First they twitch a lot and then their tongue falls out.

They would leave and then come back, leave and then come back. I got to know their schedule. Another prisoner there had been a prisoner of war before as a news reporter, but I guess they don’t like to kill reporters so they let him go. He joined the Marines afterwards and always carried a knife in his ass. We sat cross-legged with our hands tied behind our backs. He got the knife out of his ass and I stuck it in mine. When they didn’t come back for a while, I got the knife and cut my ties. I began to escape because I didn’t have anything to lose. This is life or death.

I walked up behind one of the guards who wasn’t paying attention, stabbed him in the lung then slit his throat. I took his gun and one by one started picking off the rest of them. Knocking them out with the end of the gun and then I took my knife and cut off their ears and noses. I was so angry and full of hate.

I walked outside… here I was…walking the streets. Suddenly a Marine convoy pulls up. They had been fighting in Ramadi and were on their way to me. If I just would have been patient, none of this needed to happen, but I had no idea. I told them what happened. I shouldn’t have obviously. They saw the bodies and my sergeant was pissed.”

Wes is being tried for war crimes because he maimed the Iraqi prison guards. He faces up to a life sentence in military prison. He feels extremely guilty, thus getting drunk at his first chance and shouting his story to a plane full of strangers. He also feels betrayed by the Marines; he feels like he was brainwashed and is being punished for something he was trained to do – kill.

Wes joined the military after September 11th, 2001. Philippe joined the French military because one is forced to serve at least one year in the military there.

Philippe: “You never know when bombing will go off. Snipers, snipers everywhere. In a marketplace [in former Yugoslavia], I saw a woman shot in the neck out of nowhere. Never know…bomb. Bomb. Bomb.”

Wes: “That’s how it was in Iraq. We would hear a bomb go off and I’d throw one of my buddies outside. I think its human nature to downgrade things to deal with them.”

“Iraqis are the best fighters. They never give up. At least my friends were killed by the best and not some retards. Sergeant Jenkins, a short black man from Jersey. Brave. Could stand right in front of the enemy and not be afraid. They took a machete to his head, three chops, so hard it cut off part of his shoulder. Taught me that we aren’t the best fighters in the world, we aren’t immortal.”

Bomb Squad

2009-12-10T09:23:00.000-08:00

Start again
Shift
Start over
Four cases of Crylon in a black backpack
    latex gloves
A sketch on a piece of notebook paper
torn out of an old
    school folder.
The night air cold on her cheek
    A fluttering knot in her chest
And the downstairs cat
Mrs. Coen's cat
Walks across the street between parked cars
    in the moonlight
A blueblack shine on a darkblack street
and the entire sky open up, horizon to horizon
and everything becomes clear.

Summer Neurotransmitter Disruption

2009-12-07T18:12:00.000-08:00

"I'm not ready to go home yet!" Phil was adamant. We were riding the trails down by the creek. He was on the upward surge of a powerful DXM high and soon would be having conversations with people who were not there.

I wasn't high, but I was out of cigarettes. Hot and tired, the sun was topping out the afternoon sky. Humidity at a hundred percent. I never understood what that meant. Seemed like a hundred percent humidity should be rain. Dinner tonight was at a pizza buffet. I wasn't very excited by it, but I did know that Mom would have the air conditioner on this afternoon. I longed for it and didn't want to baby sit Phil as he stripped his clothes off and ran through the creek, again.

"Why do you do that shit?" I asked him.

"Go home if you like," he suggested. He stood and peddled hard on his old Schwinn. Jumped a rock and narrowly missed slipping into the creek.

"I wish your chain would snap," I said.

"You can be such a little bitch." His long blond hair was sticking to the sweat on his forehead. That far away expression was starting to surface on his face. I wish he would have thrown up.

"I can also be home in the air watching TV," I snapped.

Phil stepped off the bike and sat on a log facing the running water.

"I'll be visiting you someday in an institution, where they put you once your brain becomes so damaged that you can't stop drooling and babbling."

"You can keep my bike chain as a memorial to hang on your wall," he answered cryptically. Sweat rolled off my hair and onto my glasses. I had to take them off to wipe them on my shirt, which would leave a big smudge so I wouldn't be able to see until I got home. Phil stood and walked away. It was a blur, like a dream. Some vision from another dimension. A blond robot, skinny legs protruding from dark shorts. A science fiction horror story. I tried to squint my eyes but was blinded by the bright sun reflected from the water's surface. I didn't get to see where he went. When I replaced my glasses he was no where in sight.

I sat on the log where he had been seated and sighed heavily. I wouldn't leave him. I knew that. My stomach would hurt later from the heat, and I'll be in no condition for the pizza buffet. "You'll get poison ivy again," I said out loud, just in case Phil was close enough to hear. Tomorrow I will stay home and watch Gilligan’s Island reruns.

Grand

2009-12-07T14:33:00.002-08:00

We walked down to the great meadow, your dancing hands accidentally bumped into mine as we navigated the steep terrain. At the bottom, I turned to you and touched your round cheek in my outstretch palm. Dragonflies and small winged insects hummed in the still, warm summer air, swimming in circles, catching the light. If I looked closely, I could see my face reflected in your wide eyes, and in mine I could see yours shining back. Gentle mirror, growing and reshaping the tools I had given you, and the crutches.

Your skin smelled of jasmine and candy as I swooped in for a quick kiss behind your moist ear, where I paused for a breath. You giggled out loud, teaching me again the precise expression of girlish laughter. I echoed you, and you in turn echoed back. We went on like that for what seemed like hours. Laughter pealing through the grass, growing and evolving on itself until finally the joyful noise completed full circle and sounded the same as the very first laugh. With that you turned and ran across the field, a sly eye turning back, daring pursuit. I submitted and felt my feet leave the ground, fine strong muscles stretching and exerting against the bone, against the air, against time.

Dropping our pace, we made our way down the bank, toes slipping in between the muddy reeds. You squealed as you dipped in your feet, and then a leg, into the freezing water. Lotion melted away from your skin making swirling rainbows in the water. Your damp, sandy hand reached up to mine to steady yourself. I was taken back to a time with your father, when we stood along the Bay in the rain. Fresh in love, he slipped his wet hands into mine slowly as we began to kiss. The smell of his wet dog that accompanied us filled my nose, a scent that mingled with his, an etched moment. Your exclamation about a swiftly skimming water bug pulled me back into reality.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, taken with the beauty of the moment, skirting the gravity of what I was to share. Your silence communicated readiness, but you wouldn’t take your eyes from the water and the playful insects.

“My grandmother died.”

“My grandma’s dead!?” you yelped, shocking me into weight of my statement.

“No, My grandmother’s dead,” I replied, feeling a sudden rush of possession, childish pride swarming through me. She was my grandma. She marked the passage of my tender youth. It for me she made crochet angel ornaments, weaved blankets, knitted stuffed animals, dragged to countless auctions, church fundraisers and square dances. It was me who she faithfully sent annual subscriptions to the World Wildlife Federation, pressed leaves dressed in fall colors, and maple sugar candy from Vermont. My grandmother, my grandma is dead. Maturity tapered these thoughts. This moment was being recorded by your fresh young mind to echo into eternity, I was sure.

“What I mean to say is your great-grandmother is dead. She was my grandma. She was an amazing person. Your grandmothers are still alive.” You were already mourning the loss of a grandparent you never knew, however. Within moments you came to realize that one day you would loose your grandmothers as well. I tried my best to reassure you that would be a long while off, feeling helpless and stupid for not telling you more carefully. Your first glimpse of mortality.

The Great Flying Elevator

2009-12-07T14:33:00.001-08:00

2009 greeted me with a harsh winter cold that made my voice deeper and hoarser than normal. I bought a dungeness crab and a bottle of champagne and proceeded to get more drunk than my health would have preferred.

Last night I saw the girl off to her father’s and went straight to bed, covered in a mock bearskin blanket we call “Horse-ee.” The old bear and I snoozed the winter evening away and dreamt of riding elevators that could perform trapese tricks and giant tidal waves that were both invigorating and terrifying. I awoke, washed the sand from my eyes and set out to buy a calendar.

The new year is like standing on a precipice where it’s unclear whether I’ve just climbed up or I’m about to tumble down. I have more opportunity then I know what to do with and more alone time than I feel comfortable about. The cold in my head, however, whispers just one thing. “Sleep, my dear. Sleep this one out. I have an elevator in mind that can show you some new tricks.”

So I submit, curl up with Horse-ee and wait for the frigid air to break, the days to grow longer and sunshine to return and warm this tired, cold soul.

We will not be the last

2009-12-07T14:32:00.001-08:00

You’re a dark spec on the horizon while I’m floating away. Walking the streets of London. Curling up close to musical voices more embracing than the California air outside. I am everywhere and simply nowhere. Do my eyes betray me? I’m sure the blank stare is confusing, but I’m too impressionable to resist the lure of simple imagination.

How long is too long? When is never long enough?

My steps are wet and vibrant on the street at dusk. Damp boots carrying the dust of a thousand miles crossed in an instant. My cold breath makes wispy clouds in the air, circling my head in a gentle parade of vapor mixed with warmth. I reach the steel door and slide in the ancient key. There is hot tea and bread waiting inside. I sit down across from your ethereal presence. We celebrate the magic of never knowing each other. Aren’t we so lucky to live as this? Lovers that never were. For a moment I would give everything to just be here, in this place within my mind, forever. In love with your voice as it cracks while you’re singing. Your breath is as warm as a blanket covering my soul, as it draws in to issue another round.

Midnight, Oakland

2009-12-07T14:31:00.002-08:00

I am a white woman living in an affluent country, in a liberal state, with an education and a good job. I am not oppressed like women in Darfur or Afghanistan. I have never been attacked… at least not by a stranger. Even with the most basic credentials of a first world country, I am minority citizen. I did not gain these freedoms by basic right of privilege.

Friday night, I went out in Oakland, alone, to see some local art openings. Walking to my auto around 11pm, two men slowed up in a car and began to trail me, speaking to me out of the passenger window. I knew my footfalls on the street, at night, alone, could beckon danger. I am after all, a woman. I had worked myself up into a fit of rage over this before the men approached behind in their car. They continued speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear them beyond the blood rushing in my ears. I’ve lived in the Bay Area most of my life. I have worked, lived, loved, and gone to school in the seediest neighborhoods for many years. I have been approached by strange men in cars too many times to count….San Jose, San Francisco, Berkeley. It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing, where I’m going or the time of day. It just doesn’t matter. They want sex? They’ll hope I’ll get in? The preposterousness of the situation makes me simultaneously laugh and cringe. What would a 13 year-old girl do?

From the far corner of my mind, I watched myself slowly turn to these two men, issuing elicit invitations to me in the dead of night, and heard a voice speaking to them. Not unlike a ghost from the grave, speaking in slow motion, I said to them in low voice: “You need to fuck off now. Good bye.”

Blink. The driver’s foot hitting the gas. The car speeding off. Me, in shock at the carnal rage within. Feet hitting the pavement, running to my own auto. I hope I frightened them more than they to me. Just like all the others, intimidating women caught off-guard and alone. One thing city living has taught me, you never let that guard down.

The last time I was a victim, I was sixteen years old. I learned that the word “no” itself does not execute intention upon your assailant. Nor does hiding your face in shame. The world still carries on after you close your eyes.

So I find myself in the dead of the night speaking in an other worldly voice to strangers and actually scaring them away. I do not communicate my intentions with physics, but the will of sheer hatred.

How do I teach my daughter to be fierce, but kind; to walk with grace and strength, but without bitterness; to carry all the best parts of male and female within? Or, do I just show her how to survive?

That Darn Cat

2009-12-07T14:31:00.001-08:00

The first breath of air upon going outside forklifts acres of nostalgia straight into my senses. I am alive with possibilities, alive with memory. A swift, brisk current sends the first leaves from the trees as I reach to pull my sweater down around my whitened knuckles. Autumn takes me back home. A sense of renewal, expectation, and sudden loss.

My hand marks the voyage to her name, a past horizon. Moving now past broken glass, discarded scaffolding, rotting lumber, wet tree litter. Her forest shelter lies in the center of a burnt-out redwood trunk, deep below fallen needles, alien insects, and the creeping, long-legged spiders.

They hid her from me when she died. Gandalf, the big dog… the “cat killer” took her in the French broom beside the dirt road. Everyone was upset, except for me. They were so serious when they told my empty face she was gone. Too young for grief, I felt nothing. I was curious about the body. The carnage was deemed too graphic for my young eyes. Fate and decision were not mine.

They buried her in a black plastic garbage bag in the old tree trunk in our mountain yard. I visited there daily, paying sacred homage to my first scene of death. This was spook of a place. My dead cat in a burned redwood tree. A young girl sitting among the redwood needles pretending to be a witch. The strange sensation of feeling nothing. The ghost of this memory marked the cold passage into autumn.

for D.C.

Old Friends

2009-12-07T14:30:00.001-08:00

I was walking towards the coffee shop when I saw you over there, serving tables. Pain of recognition struck. I knew I should have moved on, but it felt stupid to sneak away. I’ve known you since we were almost children. Could I really just turn and run?

I crossed over to the restaurant and walked in, convinced that you had seen me and it would be weird to walk away. You were punching in an order from a lunching couple sitting outside. We looked at each other and hard anger passed over your face. I had done nothing to you to hurt you, but I felt instantly afraid. I held my breath and and walked over and said hello anyway. We made small talk for a minute and then you asked me if I had tried to vandalize your car. Someone had messed with it days after I saw you last. Days after I told you I was hoping to not run into you. I hadn’t touched it, but instantly my knees began to shake, popping around under my jeans like some frightened animal. I told you that was simply not in my character. You quizzed me like an interrogator until you were satisfied I was speaking the truth, then kissed me on the cheek. I walked away feeling robbed.

Do I refuse to cross the street next time? If you see me at the coffee shop, do I stay on my side and wave across to you, mouthing small talk? “Your hair looks nice like that,” I’ll say with my eyes as I stare admiringly at your new coiffure. Looking my body over, you’ll mouth silently that I still look good. You’ll squint across the street to see if I have began to develop crow’s feet or gray hair and I’ll do the same to you. We’ll hold up the pageantry of our superficial relationship without all the trouble of direct interaction. Then I’ll walk away with my coffee beans and ice tea and wave goodbye. “Until next time, old friend.”

Shoebox Hornet

2009-12-07T14:27:00.000-08:00

There was something in the pantomime of your eyes. A quick flick down and to the right when you said you loved me. We were never the same again. Loosing you was just the beginning.

I remember distinctly sliding down the walls of doubt, a painful spiral, and my fingers slipping down the greasy bowl as I tumbled into her depths. I remained there for a six months and a day. Touching on her cruel suggestion in a routine matter. I believed all she had to dispense. I went native. We had a party down there, Doubt and I. Sitting in her dark, I would separate out the chaff, a neat segregation of all my parts, until I was naked and empty. Loving her for all the comfort she provided, I became dependent on her ceaseless gaze. I would hold up traits I thought gems to her penetrating stare, and they explode in my hand, catapulting shards of glass into the air. Breathing in the dust would further tighten the tourniquet on my heart. All parts of me would have to be rebuilt. Believing all this to be true, I concluded there was simply nothing worth salvaging. Soon a new soul grew within me from exposure to hazard. She was fledgling child colder and crueler than the original.

When I climbed out of the well, I had a slight limp and a tick in my gaze. I walked around with an enormous chip on my shoulder. My skin had grown used to the deluge and formed permanent armor that caused as much pain as it shielded. Try as I might, I could not remove the tarnish, so I began to wear it like a fashion statement. My eyes had the look of famine. If I opened the lids too wide, they would drop out like lumps of coal. I would have to fumble around to reinsert them as they skirted away from me. My mouth would spew forth synthesized sentences, a robotic reaction to returning to the shadow of the living. In addition to the mechanical sounds in my throat, and gears turning beneath, a strange dust would exude when I spoke, like the faint stirring of attic sediment. I envisioned insects crawling from my esophagus, creatures both strange and fascinating. They were a giddy display of legs and antennae, centipedes, pill bugs, slugs, and spiders of all shapes, sizes, and colors. I was like the hoisting of a floorboard. Lift too much an all the riff-raff would come spewing forth. I held a fixed gaze, hoping to conceal the sheer panic underneath when having to engage the mortal world. Six months and a day. That was the prescription for this journey.

I have grown beyond this, though the tarnish still remains. You still exist, however, as a slight buzzing in my peripheral. Like a hornet trapped in a shoebox at the bottom of my closet, threatening to release upon an accidental tripping of the lid. I’ve compartmentalized you to the nagging of an insect. You were my vital mirror, both terrible and lovely. You were my soul mate sent to destroy me and lift me up all at the same time. I am reborn.

scrubs

2009-12-06T06:12:00.000-08:00

"I could never do that to anyone," the old child said through blood shot eyes. The tears multiplied and ran down her chin. "Her family and friends were devastated, gathered around her dead body in the emergency room."

"You're the one still wearing the scrubs. Who are you trying to convince?"

"I'm not convincing anyone. I'm looking into the eyes of a dead man."

I was angry and I wanted to go to my room to hide under the covers. Tune out alone with my own tormented secrets. Does she enjoy being a martyr? Enjoy sitting without moving, eyes glued to black and white classic movies, sick with secrets just to spare friends and loved ones a couple months of grief before they decide they are pissed after all. Buying into the stigma of her own illness just like everyone else.

“You’re looking at someone who wants to leave the hospital,” I assured her.

“Put some scrubs on,” she ordered, “watch old movies with me.”

“Will I feel better?” I asked.

“Depends on the movie.” The child’s eyes turned to me and gave me a last look. “Depends on the company you keep.” She dried her eyes on her bent knees, and became the tired woman again.

I really hate the thought of putting those scrubs back on. They’re scratchy, stiff, thin, and not flattering. Still, I wonder what shitty movie is on the telly tonight.

Sunburn

2009-12-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

Kill me!” Fred cried. “Kill me now!”

“Fred is that you?” Phil asked.

“Any second now a foul alien creature will explode from my abdomen,” Fred explained. “Kill me now before it’s to late!”

“Is that Saran Wrap?” Phil asked.

“Yes,” Fred answered. “I’ve been Saran Wrapped to this telephone pole.” Her legs and feet were wrapped together and her arms were straight at her sides. She was wrapped from her ankles to her stomach; her exposed skin squashed against the transparent wrap.

“Who did this?”

“My best friend in the whole world, Vicky.”

A horse fly was buzzing around Fred’s face. Phil flicked his hand at it until it flew away.

“The sun will be up soon,” Phil pointed out. “You’re gonna get a sun burn on those white legs." The wrapping process raised the hem of her dress up so some of her thigh was exposed. “A bad enough burn and you could get skin cancer. I think Vicky is trying to kill you.”

“What are you doing out so early?" Fred asked.

“Going to the Convenient for some smokes. How long have you been like this?”

“Since about midnight. Vicky is really pissed at me, something about a boy. She can be way too competitive.”

“Aren’t you going crazy out here?” Phil asked.

“I got some sleep,” Fred answered. “I can see the big screen TV in the Hartman’s house across the street. The African Queen was on, that’s when I fell asleep.”

“What’s on now?” Phil asked. He turned to see.

“Looks like Bugs Bunny,” Fred answered.

“There’s bird shit in your hair,” Phil said, not taking his eyes off the Hartman’s TV. Fred’s short jet-black hair had a splash of white near the top of her head.

“That’s a bad sign,” Fred commented.

“Nonsense,” Phil replied.

“A bird shitting on your head before the sunrise is a sign to go home and crawl in to bed for the rest of the day.”

“My parents are taking the boat out on the river this morning,” Phil said. “You wanna come along?”

“You know I do.”

“You really love the river. Bring sunscreen this time if you’re gonna wear one of those dresses. And your big goofy straw hat.”

“Here comes Mrs. Stilman,” Fred said, her head turned to look down the street.

“In all of her blue haired glory,” Phil chided, “and walking her mean Chihuahua. Don’t ya just love small town life? Want me to stick around and make sure it doesn’t piss on your boots?”

“I’ll be okay,” Fred assured. “You’re probably dying for a smoke by now.”

“Be at the marina by eight?” Phil asked.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Fred answered.

Fred was right Phil wanted a cigarette bad. He meandered down the sidewalk toward the convenience store. Behind him he could hear Mrs. Stilman.

"You’re going to get those snow white legs sun burned,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a warm day today.”

“Kill me Mrs. Stilman!” Fred cried. “Kill me now!”

Blackberry Jam

2009-12-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

Ben confides to his friend Ash that he plans to commit suicide. The two are in a neighborhood bar that they almost never frequent. They have a lengthy detailed conversation about methods and timing. Ash says his preferred method would be a pitcher of margaritas, a warm blanket, and a commercial walk-in freezer. He’d die happily drunk and they’d find him frozen the next morning.

It’s too rainy for margaritas, so Ash orders another whiskey sour.

Ben says this kind of outlook proves that Ash would never do it. Too focused on avoiding pain, when the pain comes from just living every day after day after day after day. Ben says he doesn’t care how it’s done, just that it’s over. He is so so so tired. He wants peace, he says. So any method, really, would do. However, he adds, he’s not down with ending up as a vegetable.

A gun, Ash says.

Whatever, says Ben.

Overdose, Ash says.

Sure, says Ben.

Jumping off a bridge, Ash says.

That’s good. But seriously, whatever.

Hari kari, says Ash.

Too messy, Ben says.

Ash suggests that if Ben is committed to doing it, he might get down to final matters. They engage in a long inconclusive discussion about wills and other legal death instruments.

Lawyers, Ben says. What do I got that I need to worry about? Ash, in the event of my death, you get my car and its transmission problem. There.

Thanks, Ash says. Can I have your laptop?

Sure, Ben says. No, that better go to my little brother. He’s just starting college. Can you delete all my shit off it first for me?

Sure, Ash says.

Ben scratches at a blob of varnish on the scared bar top. Other people have scratched at it before. Ash watches a delivery guy with a hand truck on the drizzly street outside.

Ben says he wants to swim in warm ocean water once more before he dies. That’s his final wish.

Not sex? Ash asks.

No, warm ocean water surging around me one last time. Okay, he adds. Sex would be nice too.

Ash says he’d like to have a big sushi dinner before he dies. With sake. All his friends.

Ben thinks for a bit, his eyes fixed on the mirror over the bar. He says he’d like to see West Side Story one more time.

Ash says he’d like to see Rear Window.

Vertigo, says Ben.

Eggplant Parmesan, says Ash.

Not just sex, says Ben. Really good sex. Really good, really open, really mindblowing sex.

With a sweet, wild woman, Ben adds.

A beautiful woman, Ash says.

Yeah, a beautiful woman, says Ben.

Not a beautiful dude? Ash asks.

Hmm, Ben thinks about it. No. Too awkward and fumbly. For me.

Too sausage party.

No, Ben says. I’m kinda down. But I’d be an idiot. Too shy, too stupid. Ben says. Homo-amateur.

Ben raises his beer glass to the bartender who silently gets him another.

Strong coffee at sunrise, Ash says.

Pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, says Ben

Re-reading Grapes of Wrath, says Ash.

So sad, says Ben.

Uplifting at the end, says Ash.

Sorta, says Ben, Preacher Casey’s dead. Driving a car through the desert.

A sports car. A fast car, says Ash.

Any car, says Ben. The windows rolled down. AM radio on. Warm wind on my face.

Why do you wanna do this? Ash asks.

Exhausted, says Ben. Tired of trying. Tired of the phonies. Can’t bring myself to get up and run with the rest of the rats.

Fuck it, Ash says and lifts his glass like a toast.

Fuck it, Ben lifts his glass.

My Nanna’s blackberry jam, Ash says.

Ah, I’ve had that. Your grandma’s blackberry jam. Homemade. Fucking amazing. Like a wack in the head with the flavor bat. It always reminds me of eating a handful of blackberries right off the brambles along Bear Creek with my grandpa when I was a kid.

Ben’s eyes mist over. You still have any?

No, but Nanna made a batch in August and is sending a jar at Christmas, Ash says. Nanna’s blackberry jam.

I want some of that, some of your Nanna’s blackberry jam before I go, Ben says.

Teeth

2009-10-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Teeth. My first two teeth are chipped from a generally adventurous life and most recently from foolishly stripping insulation from wires with my teeth.

Once my dentist asked me if I wanted to cap my chipped front teeth. He offered to file them down and put what he called a prosthesis, a fake tooth cover, over each tooth.

“Will it protect the teeth? Keep them from chipping further?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said, “It’s mostly just aesthetics. If you don’t mind the jagged look of it right now, don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t really care,” I said and explained that I just wanted to keep my teeth in my mouth so I could chew my food when I’m old.

However, as my front teeth have chipped further — not seriously, but irritatingly — I wished that I had had my dentist at least file the edges smooth even if I had no need for the cap.

Driving in the car today, I was thinking about the teeth I never had filed as I ran my tongue over my jagged front teeth. They were knife sharp. If I hit my chin accidentally, I might bite my tongue clean off.

One thing that always strikes me when I go to the dentist is how similar the tools and process my dentist uses to that of say a sculptor or carpenter, just on a smaller scale. My dentist’s files look just like the ones I have in my toolbox. His grinders look just like some of the ones I use with my Dremel tool.

If only I had some way to naturally wear down my jagged front teeth, some way to accelerate the inevitable natural process of wearing off the rough edges. Maybe chewing on wood would do it. Or biting stacks of paper. Something. Lightly grinding on a soft metal, like copper maybe.

What did I have in the car, I wondered. Driftwood, copper sheet? The jagged teeth were so irritating. I looked around the car. I reached behind my seat as I drove. I came up with 150 grit wet/dry sandpaper that I had used when refinishing the car.

Hmm. why not? I ran my tongue over the serrated edge of my front teeth. Would it hurt? Could I feel it?
So I began sanding my teeth like a carpenter sanding down a rough edge on some cabinetry work. It didnt’ hurt. I couldn’t even feel it. In fact, it was strangely pleasant, smoother than you’d expect.

And it had an effect. I could feel it with my tongue. It was less rough. Teeth were neither harder nor softer than I’d expect. It took about as much effort as I’d expect to sand down mildly jagged teeth.

I sanded my front teeth until my tongue was more or less satisfied with the smoothness of the tops of my teeth.
A good day, with pleasing experiments in do-it-yourself dentistry.

At the Scene of an Intrigue: A River Before Dawn

2009-10-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sleepy sleepy eyes creaking
Open barely a caper
Creeping a long coat,
Hat pulled over eyes before the sun.
Barely four hours sleep tucked
Into my breast pocket
Another hour borrowed time.
A pre-dawn rainy-day
Middle-of-the-bridge
Hostage swap that didn’t come off.
A cell phone in one pocket, a
Cup and a packet of graham crackers
In the other.

I can’t read the stylized writing at all.
The scrawl on the bridge that says, I was here
A shout to the universe: I exist.

A note delivered early the previous day:
IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE YOUR CELL ALIVE AGAIN
BRING MILK TO THE SOQUEL BRIDGE AT 6AM
NO FUNNY BUSINESS OR THE CELL GETS IT!
DON’T CALL THE COPS!
COME ALONE!

My adversary is not there doesn’t come stands me up
Or didn’t receive the note in time.

No matter and no excuses.
No milk and cookies this AM.
I’d rather do this than be safe in my bed
Asleep for the rest of my life.

Plish.

The quiet sound of a phone finding its place
at the bottom of the San Lorenzo River.

Presence

2009-09-07T05:02:00.000-07:00

"I'm not at all unacquainted with sadness," she remarked. "You don't need to shelter me from the inevitable.

It was raining. I looked up to meet her eyes and my glasses became covered with water. The bill of her baseball cap was down to shield her face anyways. "I wouldn't try to hide the truth from you," I assured. The cold wind was blowing. Whether it was necessary or not, I felt I needed to speak loudly to be heard.

"Who said anything about truth?"

The bus was waiting, now was no time for semantics. Engine running exhaust spewing smoke. The driver was reading something. He seemed unconcerned. I was getting soaked, and my heavy duffle was digging into my side.

"I was just saying," I started, "that I'll be back this way in the summer."

"No you won't," she insisted. She spoke loudly also. I wanted to see her eyes. Get an idea of what was behind such an allegation.

"What the hell do you want?"

The gray winter had been tenderly eventful. It felt like a lifetime since I'd been home. The future was one step away. The last few months would live on perpetually the most glorious memories, fading into the warmest of dreams.
She stepped up, put her hands on my shoulders, and pulled me close. Warm steam escaped with our breath. I could feel her, alive in front of me. She leaned to my ear.

"Stay with me," she said softly, covertly serene.

That was unexpected. On an impulse I reached out for her waist, felt only the plastic slipperiness of her rain poncho. I knew she was underneath, soft and inviting. Behind the baseball cap and the rain gear was the woman I'd shared the past few months of my life with.

"Just this moment?" I asked. "Decide just like that?"

"All we have is this moment. There is no trip back this summer. The last three months are already gone. We can't keep them. There is just you and me, right now."
As usual, her thinking was going in different directions than mine. Her feet permanently planted firmly on the ground. This would be the way of it then, she would be the anchor holding the string while I soared like an enormous kite caught in the breeze of time and space.

"I want red meat," I said.

"Negotiating..."

"And I'm tired of listening to Patti Smith."

"Blaspheme..." A smile grew on her face. Below the baseball cap, I knew her dark eyes were smiling too. Sparkling with the shine of victory.
Over my shoulder she signaled for the bus driver to take off. I heard the transmission kick into gear. A wave of apprehension washed through me. Then it was gone, along with the bus.

"Nothing but you, me, and the rain," she stated. "You okay with that?"

"To late now if I'm not," I chided. I turned to walk back inside the bus station. The duffle bag suddenly felt much lighter.

Hurt and Gladness

2009-09-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

Today, I rode through an autumn snow flurry of falling leaves on my way to work. A single leaf separated from the flock and slapped me sharply across the lips. I can still feel the place where it touched me.

Yesterday, I hurt my shoulder while tumbling on the grass. The insistent throbbing has diminished, but I can still feel it when I lift my elbow or reach back. The pain today reminds me what it means to be alive in this body.

Today, I decided to get a tattoo. A narrative of my life and those who came before me, shoulder to shoulder, head to toe. For the fierce pain of it, of course. And to remind myself that I am here.

A Recipe for Perfect Lemonade

2009-08-20T13:10:00.002-07:00

You're sitting on the front steps of the little two bedroom place that you and your new bride rent -- your charming little cottage with the big picture window and the hardwood floors recently refinished -- and the baby is expected but not arrived yet, so she still pays attention to you, especially today that the warm sun is coming through the lemon tree and warming the cement and there is somehow, miraculously, nothing to do.

You lean to the left and there is warm sun, almost hot, openness, and laughter. You lean to the right and there is cool shade and secrets not yet revealed. Hot and cold. Yin and yang. And together they form perfection. What could possibly improve all this?

What if in this scene, the two people previously pictured, you and the woman of swollen belly, your lover and wife, were sitting in the falling sunshine with glasses of cold lemonade in your hands and the tinkling of ice cubes in your ears?

So you get up and wrestle the ladder that leans against the house. You climb precariously to the loveliest lemons near the top of the tree standing on the sticker that says, "This is not a step." You pick three lemons and realize you have no way to gather more, nowhere to put them, and of course, the ivy at the foot of the tree swallows anything dropped without a trace. So you tuck in your shirt doing a funny dance at the top of the ladder, your audience laughing from down below. You drop the lemons down your shirt and continue picking, looking increasingly comic as the lemons make you look pregnant too.

You climb down and disappear into the house, the cool house. Chop, chop, chop. Cut each lemon in half with the Chinese clever. Work each lemon over the glass juicer you found on the Saturday garage sale outings until your right arm hurts, then switch to your left. Fill up a bowl, and get another. Juice every last lemon until you have a few quarts of juice. Taste it with a finger. Oooo, sour.

Don't forget to strain the seeds through the cheesecloth you keep in the drawer on the end.

You put a few cups of water on the stove to boil and sit down at the kitchen table to wait. The cool dark of the house sucks at the warm brightness just outside the door.

You look around this kitchen that you and she put together from the total of both your stuff. Your knife, your wok, your cookware. All the pink plasticware that her mom gave her little girl when she moved into her very own place. And you remember again that you are criticized for thinking in terms of yours and mine. "Its all our stuff now," your wife says.

When the water boils, you drop in several cups of sugar, enjoying how it puts its fingers to its lips and shushes you as you pour. Dissolve the sugar and add this solution to the lemon juice.

You pinch in just a tiny bit of salt. Yes, its true, your wife thinks that's weird, but you know it makes perfect lemonade taste even better.

Adjust the amount of sugar in this concentrate. You want the sweet and the sour to achieve a perfect balance. Yin and yang again. Put this mix in the big juice pitcher.

Now if you weren't wanting to go back out on the steps right now, you'd put the mix in the fridge until it cooled. But you can chill that warm concentrate with ice. Fill up a couple big glasses with ice cubes and pour the warm concentrate over. Not too much now, you can always add more if it's too weak.

Add just enough ice water from the fridge. After a little bit, you'll get the hang of "just enough."

Don't forget to re-fill the ice trays. You usually remember, even though your lover usually forgets. There are unresolved issues of protocol here. Each one of you has his or her definitions of considerate. You're slowly re-learning what's right and what's important, according to her.

You grab a box of crackers and balance the two glasses and step blindly out into the sunshine. "Here, Honey," you say as you hand one glass over with a bow. She reaches up, mumbles a half-hearted thanks and continues reading.

There is a moment of waiting. Did you expect applause? By now, you realize the little kindnesses are seldom recognized. But is it worth making a bit deal about right now?

You make your way to the porch swing on the other side of the house, not quite as idyllic, full shade rather than dappled sunshine. But you have a glass of lemonade and the ice talks gently against the side of the glass. And you're alone and its okay and the journey matters more than the destination anyway.

Feathers, driftwood, old photographs, love notes

2009-07-22T12:47:00.002-07:00

I'd like to live in a house on the water, a homemade houseboat, with a small engine that can move it slowly from here to there. A water squatter. A place with tin roof and tin walls, insulated for winter, with a wood burning stove for heating and cooking. A porch, a porch swing, a lookout, windows, a banjo on the wall. Wood piled up in a wood pile on shore. A bucket shitter behind a curtain. Big and wide for a boat, difficult to capsize, made of scrap and scavenged things. Feathers from a hawk, phtographs from a garage sale, letters from home. A big wide bed with a dense down comforter and a homemade quilt.

Parts into a sum

2009-06-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

It is indeed winter in southern California, the sun low and blinding though warm and bright. My companions laugh; this resembles nothing of their winters, this farcical spring in a land that never pales. There are no seasons here, they complain. They hate this place. They don't see what I see, and it's obscured even for me.

But everything changes, even here, and not just a new shopping center in the place of the last strawberry field. Some changes are so slight that it takes a sixth sense to realize them.

These old friends of mine, faces from my past life, barely notice the changes: thin, slight perceptabilities. It is not because they are incapable of the awareness but because, like the rest of us, their lives move fast with few silences. They take me to a bar, where one of my old friends spins vintage soul music on vinyl against a backdrop of drinkers and hipsters, not-so-starving artists and lonely souls hoping for someone to take home -- a social haze that is unusual for me now. Half of the people there are old friends of old friends, the same friends have been meeting up for years, longer than the whole time of my absence. Some changes are imperceptible.

I drink with them, knowing I can't afford enough liquor to break down the walls that separate me from them, my oldest friends. I'm thankful for them, these boys surrounding me once again, protecting me from bar vultures that keep looking at me, trying to catch my eye. One of these strangers, drunk enough to be brave, or maybe just from a more bold subculture, tells me it's his birthday. He looks deep into me with his dark, soft, unfocused eyes while my friend puts a song on the turntable for him. He asks me how old I am and I ask him back. He says, how old do you want me to be? Then he tells me I don't look a day over 26, which is how old he is as of today. Would I ever mess around with a 26 year old, he wants to know. I tell him it's not about age. When he leaves the bar, alone and with a loud flourish, I think: there goes a person who will never remember meeting me. We could meet again tomorrow and he would not remember my face.

But my old friends surprise me with their remembering. I hear one of them, one I was never even close to, call my name from a car outside the airport where I've been anxiously waiting for my ride. The friend who was supposed to pick me up, my best friend from that period of my life, is himself stuck on a plane between here and Portland. So this person, whom I barely know and haven't spoken with in at least six years, takes me to his house and we renew a friendship we never shared. But the shock of him being able to pick me out of a crowd, in the twilight, sits with me throughout the evening. I think that I've changed so much, so many times. I mention it to one of my old friends later and he dismisses it. "You haven't changed that much," he says. Really? Damn it.

The whole visit is a memory game: remember this person? Remember when we did this? Remember when that happened? Exercising parts of my brain I rarely use. These memories are some of the furthest I can recall, and even then only when I'm here, it seems. My old friends, who never leave this place, must be able to recall every moment of their lives. What would they do if this place no longer existed?

My friend gives me his usual litany of excuses for not leaving, and I give him mine for not visiting. I'll be better this year, I swear. He doubts it. He tells me he's going to move across the country. I doubt it, but I tell him I'll visit.

We see a performance by a woman who sings heartfelt jazz-inspired songs she writes herself, backed by a band of people that have never played together before. They all grew up here but now live in New York; they are playing together because they all returned home to visit their families for the holidays. The music wraps around us in our seats, something deep in a shallow pool. My friend is deeply touched by the music. He says "it is rare that I feel so connected when I go see live music." I don't tell him that, in my present life, it is rare if I don't feel that connection.

I connect to him in almost the same way that I used to, except with less sexual tension. It seems we have grown up, that sex was more meaningless before it was really part of our lives. Or maybe I'm remembering it wrong. Though we connect as adults, it feels like something is missing, and I wonder if it would help if we kissed in that careless friend way I always thought we could when we were young. I usually miss feeling connected when I'm here and I miss being touched, the way that my friends now hug so easily. Everyone here barely touches each other, only briefly hugging hellos and goodbyes. In a comfortable, lazy moment on the couch, I consider reaching out and hugging my old friend, wondering what would happen. Would he be receptive or repelled, as if I'd broken something? I keep reading my book instead.

There is a permanent sense of a vague loneliness, surrounded by the almost sexless flirtations that always made me feel equal, in this group of male friends. It is odd, these are my friends, so I know how they can talk about women -- the senseless, sex-filled ideas that have popped into their heads -- but I never feel objectified by them. Instead, I lulled into the security of being surrounded by men who are not trying to sleep with me, the safety, the comfort of harmless flirting. There are few men I feel that way around anymore, I realize with a slight shock.

Now we are at a different bar, a dimly lit Hollywood dive that's playing excellent old blues on the stereo. We exchange fluffy conversation filled with bits of Hollywood trivia, old tv shows and movies, dead hip-hop artists, things I never think about but somewhere in the back of my mind I still know, my B-ticket into this conversation. I enjoy it, the same way I enjoy the fast food we eat later that night. No one asks me about the other things I know: how to identify plants, the shortcomings of capitalism, how to knit feather-and-fan lace, what it's like to hike from the forest to the ocean . . . And I don't offer them this knowledge either, because sometimes it's just more fun to eat fast food.

I never used to blend my social spheres and I still don't. I don't introduce my new friends to my old, barely mention them to each other, in fact. But being here reminds me that I don't want to lose all of my past, having lost so much already. Maybe not lost. Maybe buried or thrown away with both hands. But I've been so many people since then. Possibly they were more similar than I give them credit for: people in different locations, all looking for the same thing.

To My Friend, Who Happens To Be My Son

2009-05-12T14:19:00.002-07:00

Letter to my dad, but not my father figure.
To my friend, who happens to be my son.
Dear Son,	Dear Dad,
There’s a moment in your childhood that I still have both the photograph and the photographic memory of. You were standing beside a chain link fence near Tehachapi looking at me, humoring me and my photography, with your curly blond hair and beautiful brown eyes. How old were you? Maybe seven. Maybe eight. We were on a rare camping trip alone. Rare, not because I didn’t want to spend every minute with you, but because… well, because… really, this is where story breaks down.
	I am awake and heading into town. You were right about writing early. Beautiful thoughts are filling my head this morning, giving me sway to write (now I am not so sure they are beautiful, but it feels good to have them in my head). It would be nice to see you, even if just for a moment. The coffee will be extra strong if you agree to come see me.
(he agreed)	(he agreed)
In retrospect, we fold under the raw parts and comb up the nap on the handsome memorable parts. We mellow with age and our stories get dull and dishonest. We establish detente with those we fought tooth and nail.
	A drip of water drops next to me this morning. I am outside, and there are no lampposts, overhangs, or trees near me, so I can’t understand where it came from. Maybe just a lone raindrop? That seems unlikely. I am completely stumped over this single drip, so I look up.
A true life of insurgency - of constant social conflict - is hard to maintain. And the youth, with their bitter urgency, know this all too well. Someday, they too will find themselves on the other end of a phone call with an old hated enemy sharing the worried fate of someone they both love.
	Powerlines
Of course.	Of course. There are powerlines constantly over my head- so often in fact, that their presence has ceased to register on my mental radar screen. This morning a drip of water drops from some powerlines, wet after a heavy rain the previous night, whizzes right past my face, and for the life of me I can’t figure it out. If I was focusing on the powerlines, hanging dangerous and flaccid above me, all the time, would I start to go insane?
I never felt the role of a parent is to keep you out of danger, to constantly parcel and to measure and to weigh and to judge and to allow and to disallow and to set on the straight and narrow. It exhausted me then and exhausts me to even think of that now.	Watsonville and Santa Cruz do not exist on a map. They are not related to each other by any miles or compass directions. They only exist as two ends of a lonely busline that I take every day. An hour there, and an hour back.
	Do not say that I am not a morning person. I hate that. You say “geez, you’re not much of a morning person, are you?”
You’re not much of a morning person, are you?
	And I will say, “Just because I don’t enjoy blithely socializing with everyone I know the moment I wake up doesn’t mean I’m not a morning person. I love the morning, but I prefer to spend it differently than you do.”
I felt that, especially in your sometimes surly, sometimes contentious, sometimes inexplicably angry adolescence that one of the best things I could do for you is to stay the fuck out of your way. But it starts well before this.
	I came up with that before anyone had said anything so that when someone did I would seem quick-witted, opinionated, and ready and maybe for that moment I would transform into a comic book character.
Of course, there were times when I sensed you just wanted me to be with you, to be present, to listen. I could have, and I didn’t.
	Dad,
It starts earlier, the time of climbing trees, camping in the desert, walks in the woods. An opening up, our lives interwoven like fingers holding hands. It was around then, that you were taken away. And even when things got better, when things got more then better, when they turned around completely, there was something in me that was never quite fixed.
	you told me that when you were a kid you spent a lot of your time coming up with good comebacks. Comebacks that would penetrate your bully’s deepest insecurities- something that would cut to the quick (a phrase I’ve always enjoyed).
The sharp edges of words, of the tossed barb, the cutting comment that can lodge and fester.
	Something so devastatingly true that it would cut the conversation clean off. The jack of trump of all 5th grade squabbles. Is that really what you wanted, dad?
I lived with a woman once who could kick my virtues, one by one, out from under me, leaving me contemplating the rope or the car? The poison or the sea?
	Is that really what I want? To be the best undiscovered retort writer in school, brooding in secret corners, spilling over with brilliant quips to which their conversational counterparts will remain only imaginary?
I caved in my heart to conform. It left a solid little dented thing. I haven’t looked people in the eyes quite the same since.	Or is the goal really just the private satisfaction gained from playing these idyllic scenarios out, over and over in our heads, being convinced that for them to actually take place would be contrived and unnecessary so that we can do our best to refrain from steering every casual conversation to that impossible desired setup?
The cutting word.	The cutting word.
I always wanted, you point out, to be master of these weapons. But
Honestly	Honestly
I didn’t have the heart or the inclination. I never wanted to hurt anyone enough to use the clever, stored-up, devastating truth that cuts to the bone.
Even if I had it.	Even if I had it.
	Dani and I talked about teams the other day. You know the kind. Your special, secret, private team of people you know, for the hard times, for the good times, for when the shit finally and climactically goes down.
I feel that rage in you sometimes and it scares the hell out of me. Not in the usual way that parents are scared for their kids. But for me.	Everybody has a list in their head or on paper of at least the first few people, if they don’t already have the whole list pegged.
	If you didn’t think about this before, you’re going to now.
When we break a window in a fight, or bust a door, I want to get into my bed and pull the covers over my head and come out in approximately 4 to 5 years when it’s all over.
	We talked fondly of our teams, naming names. I admitted that my team’s first slot was private, but that I had a terrible feeling that even though the person was at the top of the list, they would evasively never be on my team.
I want to turn in my fancy bronze parenting star and trade it in for a little modest friend patch that I can sew on to my favorite shirt,
the one I wear only when I’m feeling strong and worthy enough.	Dani told me that she had the first three people (at least!) solidly down, and
	I was under the impression that they had even all talked about and agreed on this.
We camped in a gully and cooked and ate pasta and slept in the car. It was one of my best memories from your childhood. It was one of your best memories. It was perfect, or retrospect paints it so. And that’s the way we tell those stories. Maybe we can do that again sometime. Or we said that, or we always wanted to.	It’s chilly today, but not a deep chill. Chilly like it’s supposed be chilly- chilly breezes, but everything’s dry and the sun’s warming me a little. I had a smell in my nose a couple of minutes ago like chicago or a smell like waiting in a trainyard. It didn’t smell like chigaco or the trainyard, but like the experience of it. It smelled good. Really good. I think I am smart enough in my life now to understand what that means.
Of course everyone has a dad story, and a mom story, and we tell these stories and everyone understands. Some are heartwarming and some help explain where we came from.
	Dad, this is not a nostalgic letter- don’t get confused now.
Nostalgia, I guess. But the stories we tell about our children have to fit a certain mold. We, the grown-ups, are forbidden to tell stories about suffering, and the stories that we are left with are all so boring we forget them as soon as they are told.
	But when you hug me, you pull on the hair on the back of my head, just above my neck, so hard that it hurts and I know that you love me.
And after a while, they’re no longer heard, and we no longer tell them anyway because our hearts were never in it to begin with.
	This is not a love letter either, but when you write to me you say “I love you so much, I can’t even tell you,” you of course, keep to your word on that.
If truth be told, you were homesick and mad at me on that trip. I fought your mom for weeks to take you and she almost made me cancel.
Sometimes we only tell the whole truth, when we cry alone. But I need you to know, that in spite of everything, when I secretly devise my team, you’re on it.	Dad, this letter is for you, but for fuck’s sake, don’t read it, because neither of us wants you to know that when I secretly devise my team, you’re my number one.
I have your back, come hell or high water, come whatever. Your anger and frustration, the way you spit “You kept your word,” notwithstanding, I hope you know that.
You were always on my secret team, and yes, I’d thought of that before,
even when you didn’t think so, even when I was stupidly hopeful, even when you were an eight-year old kid believing the lies of a jealous parent.	But you kept your word, and since you love me, you damn sure ain’t tellin’. And if you love me, I sure as hell will be the last to know,
	so when you come in for your coffee, you better expect it to be cold because you took too long to get here and I got tired of waiting and went back on home.
I hope it’s not too late to tell you that I love you. My number one slot is open for you when you want it,
	This time, my busline is some other number.
but not until then.
	An hour there, and an hour, and an hour, and-

The birds are crying

2009-03-14T23:30:00.000-07:00

There is a fire burning in the mountains. The smoke covers the sun and the light looks like the end of the world. Even the birds are crying... the plaintive sound of wild turkeys the backdrop of our final farewell.

I walked through the forest alone and disoriented. As always, I could not just let you walk away, the silence left heavy between us. I followed you, not knowing if it was the right thing to do but needing to say or to hear one thing more, always one thing more. I could hear your cries echoing off the redwoods, the rumble sound of your voice consulting an ancient fir. I would have kissed you one last time, but you said to save it, as if there would be another opportunity. So much left unsaid, and nothing we could do about it now.

I used to say that I had never had my heart broken, but I don't think that is true now. Who knew that after I had broken your heart, you would still have the power to break mine. Goodbye, love, goodbye.

I returned to the house, looking for a place to cry, and sunk myself with heavy sobs onto a dark couch.

Did I see it or feel it, the bird that beelined into the room, heard it bounce against the window, wings flapping in terror at its trap. I threw the cat out of the room and returned. None of the windows opened, the bird could not free itself and its terror swam over me. I tried to cup its spasmodic wings in my hands, knowing that I was only scaring it more.

It is in my hands, I feel its life pulsing between my palms, I feel myself running outside and I feel it fly away, out of my hands forever.

This is true.

"You cannot call someone dead who fights for life"

2009-02-14T23:19:00.000-08:00

In memory of Sally.

I knew a strong woman with an infectious laugh and a shining smile. She was murdered. When I picture her face, it is full of life, of fun. When I think of her last moments, I see it filled with pain and terror. This is obscene.

And we are left to cope, to grasp at a meaning that does not exist. We are left with our own fears realized, the echoes of the warnings we have chosen to ignore. "See," they always say, "this is what can happen."

Well, fuck them for letting it happen. Fuck them for accepting it. This is not acceptable.

We are women and we are strong. We are warriors, healers, teachers, mothers. We give life and we take life.

When it happens to one of us, it happens to us all.

So, I enter into a circle of women, connected by her memory. We feed each other. We touch each other. We bind ourselves to the earth and to each other. We share our sorrow, our regret, our pain, our fear, our love, our strength. We remember our sister whom we have lost.

We draw circles on the ground. We draw a woman with flashing eyes and long hair. We clothe her in the clothes of a wild woman. We give her wings, dancing feet, a crown of leaves. We give her oregon grape, yarrow, rosemary, cedar. We give ourselves sage. We light a candle in her belly. We sing. We shake our hips and think of her. We dedicate our dance to her. We imagine her, dancing with the stars.

We remember her songs, her words, her dances. We remember the first time we saw her. We remember the last. We remember the other people who loved her who are missing from our circle. We remember ourselves, our beauty, our strength. We remember our grief. We remember death.

We remember other women, the survivors. We remember others who did not survive. We remember those we did not know. We remember those who were burned at the stake. We remember the healers. We remember our power.

We look each other in the eyes. We say "I love you." We say "I'm glad you are here." We say "You are a strong woman."

We feed each other. We sing songs for each other. We laugh. We share our stories. We share our strength.

We live on.

25 Random Things About Me

2009-01-30T13:24:00.002-08:00

You have been tagged in this note. Now you are obligated by the law of chain letters to respond. I was going to tell you about this guy in Peoria who didn't pass this on, but I won't tell you about his tragic misfortune.

Here are the Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. You have to. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you. Really, I do.

I was born in Inglewood, in the heart of the ghetto, but so many years ago, its ghetto future was still on the horizon as the last of the old white World War 2 generation was slowly creeping into their final years. There was an apricot tree in our front yard in which I spent days at a time high in the branches.

The rest of my time I spent reading. I’ve had the same three favorite books -- past Conrad and Tolkien, Salinger and Morrison, Bowles and Borges, Rushdie and Delillo, Orwell, Vonnegut, Faulkner -- the same three books at the top of my list since they were introduced to me in 5th grade.

Looking back, I am pretty sure that all my best friends from earliest grammar school onward have been gay. But as a young sheltered lower-middle class white kid, I genuinely didn’t think gay was something ordinary people could be -- only a derisive name made up by kids. I was an overly-friendly mamma's boy with oddball social skills, and inevitably other kids incorrectly concluded I was gay too.

I was gay.

Well, not really. Sort of. Let me explain. I liked some boys, but I mostly liked girls. Even if I lost my virginity to a boy. In church. But they tell me that doesn't count -- everyone has their early experimentation -- this is not a score in the race to deflowering.

I am an anarchist, which means I think I know better than governments, better than corporations, better than institutions, better than you, better than anyone what is best for my life. I believe that our communities know best what’s good for them too. On a practical level, I don't believe in police and jails and military force. I don't believe in your laws and representatives and electoral politics. I already cast my vote in the street.

I got your back.

I'm an anarchist, but not that kind of anarchist. I am less bigoted than anybody I know. This may be the result of early and extensive product testing of Sesame Street on my young mind.

When I first heard Indonesian gamelan, it was like a musical orgasm. I thought, “Oh, of course. There it is.” It immediately felt right, like the music of the spheres, or the sounds made by the turning of the gears of the Universe, divine, particulate and yet inseparable. It was the music I’d always longed to hear, the music I heard hints of in every beautiful chord, in every inspired melody, in every inexplicable, untouchable rhythm all my life.

When I was twelve, I used to tell my parents I was going to visit a friend, and then secretly ride my ten speed across LA to the ocean and spend the day bobbing in the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean. I have secret lives, thousands of secrets I’ve never told anyone. I’m not sure how this is, since I feel like all I do is tell stories constantly.

I tell stories constantly. I believe in stories. I believe human beings traffic in stories. We ooze them out of our pores, exude them around us. Let me tell you about my day, or my life, or something that happened to me once upon a time.

I’ve been accosted numerous times by people who thought I was a long-lost friend. Each time it leaves me off-balance and wondering if I am leading a secret life, part of a witness protection program that I’ve forced myself to forget. One time a motorcycle repairman in Visalia named Marlon was sure I was his long-disappeared brother, and quizzed me skeptically about the details of my life. This is not just a story.

I often feel that there is something that. we're. just. not. reaching. I want to touch that thing that moves just below the surface, just beneath our perspectives and symbols and abstractions and bullshit and hang-ups and distractions. I want to get to that impossible, anything-but-comfortable, just-beyond-the-edges frightening place. Where is that? All my life, literature comes closest to touching it.

Those three favorite books are the Phantom Tollbooth, Kon Tiki, and Never Cry Wolf. The 5th grade librarian of Harbor City Elementary should be held responsible for disemboweling the brain of an eleven year old and filling it with adventure rage humor desire and whimsy. Thor Heyerdahl fucked with my life. Someday I will spend months at sea, a blue dome of solitude from horizon to horizon, on a raft at the mercy of wind and sea. I’ve longed deeply for this everyday of my life for the last thirty years..

My only regret is that life is so short and there are so many things I’d like to devote my full attention to, that I will probably never be a midwife or a sailor or a writer or an outlaw or a terrorist or a full-time vagabond or a thousand other things.

As it is, I am a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I once made a list, an inventory as it were, of all the things I could do competently. It exceeded four pages small print, and included build a house, perform CPR, identify wild plants, program any computer language you can give me, complete a triathlon, hop trains, acquire almost anything for close to free, bake bread, build a homemade raft, make radio, make love, make wine, make a bomb, and weld.

All my life I’ve considered myself a poor dancer. Scared, shy, self-conscious, awkward, all things that do nothing to contribute to dancing well. Years ago, a friend invited me to contra dance, something like squaredancing, where I discovered to my surprise that I am an excellent dancer. A dance like the wind, me, my partner, turning like a top, with precision, with procession, faster and faster. The middle-aged ladies vie for an opportunity to dance with me.

I have to be honest with you. I don’t really think of myself as gay. But I believe sexuality is a spectrum. I ask you. Who is completely straight or completely bent? Who doesn’t fall in the middle somewhere? While shyly, I consider myself queer, I haven’t fallen in love with a boy in a long time. Though I was thinking recently, why not? The boys I know are unbelievably dreamy. But I think in my boy-boy fumblings, that I’d be too scared to initiate one goddamn thing.

I stole this, but its still true: I am a secret bottom, waiting for a worthy top.

I don’t eat the critters. Floating on the Missouri River on a raft made of trash, my fishing attempts were rewarded by two large catfish. I realized in that instant that I had never killed and cleaned a fish. Never killed an animal. Not personally. Not with my own hands. Looking into the eyes of my captives, ending their life with a knife, and taking their energy for my own was an experience sublime. From that moment, I didn’t want to eat anyone with whom I didn’t share that connection. A conversion to vegetarianism that took me completely by surprise. By that same token, I don’t hurt the peoples, who after all are just critters.

However, I can see the necessity of a bullet in the head of the slavemaster. Meant with all the love and compassion I can muster. A recognition that every animal has a context and a nature and acts out that destiny according to its programming. And perhaps my oppressor is only an animal trained to dominate. But perhaps I am an animal that has learned to resist. Nothing personal, you understand. I will mourn your passing this world and, at the same time, celebrate the possibility this creates.

I often hear poets claim words are a weapon. But I don’t see words being used to stab, punch, pry, and destroy. If you were wielding words like battle axes, you wouldn’t have to tell me. I want to see Shiva in everything we create. A frenzy of creation and destruction. Tear down what we build, and build up what we tear down. The inexorable need to stomp the sandcastle we painstakingly build. And then build it anew. Or better yet, just let the ocean take it back.

I want art so dangerous that merely creating it may cut us. I want art so dangerous it creates irrational, instinctive, intuitive panic in the hearts of authoritarians. Art that doesn’t talk about revolution, but art that spawns revolutions. Not merely challenges, but rips down the status quo. I don’t want revolutionary artists, or artistic revolutionaries — I want to abolish both words, smudge the lines until they are one and the same.

I’m no longer an apocalypse fetishist, a radical that hangs on to the idea of a post-rev paradise. I see revolutionaries that remind me of the Seventh Day Adventists of my youth, with tracts of a similar flavor: Awake! Alert! Alarm! ATR wishes and plans and schemes. Dreams of life that only begins in a post-collapse world where the lion will lay down with the lamb. But from what I see, the cataclysm means the rich get richer and the poor and the black an the brown and the crazy an the very old and the very young get fucked. And too often the revolution is bloodier and more brutal than what it replaces.

But still. But still. But still I crave disaster because it opens up possibilities. The usual rules are off. The established relationships no longer apply. A chance to breath, a chance to stretch our arms and fly. I want everyday to be a revolution. I want to practice disaster in every moment.

Bandon, Oregon

2008-12-28T17:24:00.002-08:00

One winter morning, I had crab in Bandon, Oregon.

I went up the coast and went out one morning and bought crab in Bandon, Oregon.

I drove up along the rugged coast of Oregon and went out one morning and got crab in Bandon, Oregon.

I rode up the coast on my motorcycle just as my marriage was ending and stayed at a hostel. I was lonely and so I woke before dawn one morning and walked out to the docks and talked to the fishermen. I bought a crab and went back to the hostel and cooked it and ate it for breakfast in Bandon, Oregon.

I rode up the coast of Oregon looking for solitude and some measure of inner peace, and stayed in a youth hostel right along the beach. I read the Tao Te Ching and meditated in the cool morning air before walking down to the beach and watching the early fishermen catching crabs in pots that they lowered from the dock. I bought and cooked a brilliant pink King Crab nearly eight inches across and ate it before getting ready to go back south in Bandon, Oregon.

I rode into town looking for something, not knowing what it was, but found it in a funny, unexpected way one morning when I rose early and watched the seagulls and the fishermen fishing off the docks, and bought a big crab and ate it sitting outside on a wall in the cold air burning my fingers on the bright pink shell and letting the soft white flesh melt in my mouth in Bandon, Oregon.

And that was in Bandon, Oregon, where I stopped on a roadtrip one morning, partly just because I liked the sound of the name at a moment when its coded meanings and infinite possibilities spoke to me most.

People often fail on the verge of success; take care at the end as at the beginning

2008-12-27T12:50:00.002-08:00

Some summer afternoons we would go out to dinner in a neighboring town. We'd take the backroads and meander through dust and meadows and pepper trees. On these drives, talk would turn lazy and philosophical. They were our best moments by far.

Now, I'm just tired. When I regain balance, she knocks me off my feet again. This is breaking my heart little by little.

Regarding life after 50: I asked, "Do you ever do something and think this will be the last time I'll do this?"

And her answer: "Absolutely."

She asks me if I know this group or that group, have seen this film or that film. When I say no, she laughs and says, "Oh, of course," as if just remembering.

I believe problems of imbalance don't work out. In my experience, they just don't. On the other hand, I want them to. So I continue to try.

She was eighteen years my senior. She didn't know I kept a shrine with everything she'd ever given me in it. I began a passionate interest in female jazz singers solely because of her interest. I see hints and omens everywhere.

She hit a squirrel on one of our drives. She looked back in the mirror and dismissed it as Darwinism. "Slow one," she laughed.

Here's what I was trying to say. I found it: That which goes against the Tao comes to an early end.

"Don't work so hard. Don't worry so much," said she. But what do you do when doing what comes naturally is too much? And sometimes there are things to worry about. I worry that she thinks I worry too much.

She bought me a book of comics from two cities away and reads it with me in bed. I think for a moment that this is perfect. We make love and the energy is slightly off but I push down the feeling.

She is a singer. At cafes at bars at parties. A torch singer by preference. Reluctant rock singer by circumstance. Husky-voiced smoker. Not the worst, nor the best. I didn't meet her in a club. I was slightly embarrassed when I first saw her perform, but I can't exactly explain why.

We met in Mexico. She was sunny, sexy, mysterious. She laughed easily. I loved to watch the curve of her hips as she laid in the bed in the southern sun. An example of a vacation fling taken too far too long.

She may or may not have broken up with her ex-boyfriend. I remember her telling me that she needed to get away, that she was relieved, that she didn't want to see him again. Later, they are friends. Or maybe something else. Do I want to know this?

Asked in a café: "Do you have a tea that will keep me from crying?" Action is the antidote to despair.

We get high and I look at her face which looks unfamiliar and vaguely sinister. I wonder, is it the hard-lived life, or just years? I want to roll with this, but it is never the same again. A djinn out of the bottle.

We travel half a state away to go to a party. Her old friends. People she used to party with. I guess still does. Everyone is high. I pass. I need a break from the madness. I drink a beer and then another. She is giving a hazy lapdance to a man I've known as long as I've known her. He is handsome in a generic California surfer bro sort of way. I always suspected they had been or would end up being lovers.

I wander into the kitchen and inexplicably pocket a bottle of fancy hot sauce. I make the rounds, am friendly and amiable, the hot sauce a secret that bumps against my side. Then I quietly slip away, telling no one.

I walk all night in the Hollywood hills. Near sunrise, I hear a train whistle and know I have to ride that train home. The train yard is quiet and empty, awash in the yellow billion killowatt glare of sodium vapor lamps. My train sits waiting for me like an old and familiar lover.

The enduring lure of solitude has always had an undeniable grip on me.

Let it go. Let it go. Let it go. A mantra. I am learning slowly. Still learning. Oh, so slowly.

Meanwhile, she is still driving. A dust plume in the distance settles into a low haze.

Ugly Intersection Drawing of a Scrub Jay

2008-12-25T20:05:00.002-08:00

Had unusual dreams last night under a foot of blankets. Elaine told me she's never had an orgasm. I said, "Never?" And she said, "Never," in that way she has that is sardonically accepting of every situation. And I wake up thinking of Sophie. Just that thought in my head. That's all.

I'm chafing in my life right now. I need adventure and freedom and release from some of the responsibilities that feel like a heavy weight.

I want to learn to draw. Gestures, shading, faces, bodies. I'd love to know so much more about how to draw these. I'd love to know so much more about everything. I know next to nothing.

I relish the exercise of just quietly seeing. I found an inexplicable list in my bag:

leverage
failing economy
south pacific plan
empty space
ugly intersection
drawing of a scrub jay
a kiss

Where am I? A longing for space and time. I want to just sit and sit, read and write, smoke a cigar, watch the snow fall, clouds pass, deer nibble on the lower branches of the trees.

It begins to thaw my heart, this idea of getting away. The renewal of possibility. And I look at the date and realize it is the solstice, the rebirth of the sun. Renewal of the seasons. From here on out, more light, more day.

There's a glimmer in the air of possibility. Everything seems possible right now. Or almost possible. Like the veil between what is and what could be is thinner, gauzier.

Or perhaps it seems like life is so absurd that any old absurd thing is full of possibility. For instance, is it really all that crazy to rent out our house and go to Spain for a year? Or to learn to draw? Or to start a soul group?

The server at this cafe is charming. She looks at me with so much sparkle, like she is secretly in love with me. I never allow myself to believe such things.

Maybe I will go to Idaho. My own private Idaho. Where does that phrase come from?

I liked the contra dance last night. It felt nice to have some attention from strangers. I remember a dance with a woman named Natalie. After the dance we were both flushed and breathing hard, looking at each other a little amazed. I think I needed that.

Hop in a car, pick only blue roads, selecting at each intersection the road that takes you further from what is into what could be, stop at some nowhere little town and rent a cheap motel room.

Or motorcycle around, staying in hostels, drinking cheep wine with travelers and talking to retired ranchers in nearly empty bars?

Hop trains to wherever? Get on a greyhound to anywhere? Should I throw a dart at a map? Flip a coin? Roll dice?

I'm not sure it even matters.

I thought of going to Salmon, Idaho or Bandon, Oregon or San Diego. Idaho was snowed in. And anything off the major routes were expensive via Greyhound. San Diego was too I don't know.

When I'm traveling, I can just be. The worries and concerns are immediate, real. Hunger, thirst, desire, all now.

Traveling on Christmas eve. So strange. Such a relief. Such a sense of unreality still.

Everyone on the bus is holiday antsy, up down up down. Every stop trying to get off the bus to smoke, then chased back on by the driver.

Strangely, the Greyhound seats, so molded and plush and padded are remarkably uncomfortable. A small ache between my shoulder blades. I don't remember that.

Sitting here endlessly in a station in Sacramento. No explanation. No new schedule. No anything really. Just waiting. There's no information about when and if we might depart, or why we haven't already. Storm closed all the roads? Cascadian independence movement cut off the border? Classified alien activity site on Mt. Shasta? My Sacramento friends are are out of state.

A combination of untruths and gentle pestering gets me on to a bus as far as Medford. I promised the bus driver to have my friends in Medford pick me up. I'd rather be stuck in Medford than Sacramento. Plus when the road clears I can continue my journey. What will I find in Medford?

I'm headed to Portland chosen more or less arbitrarily, seeded perhaps by my friend Bay there. Maybe I just wanted to see her all along.

A high school girl gets excited at the prospect of seeing snow for the first time. Snow beings to appear alongside the road. "Is it snowing? Is it snowing?" she asks, craning her neck to see out the front window. Her companion asks if she's ever seen Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon goes into hyperspace. She hasn't. Has she seen a computer screensaver with stars coming at you? Yes, she's seen that. "That's what it looks like when you are driving at night and it's snowing. That's what it looks like," her companion explains.

When we stop, the snow is falling so thickly it looks like a sloppy special effect. Less like falling flakes, than someone is disemboweling a couch from a high building. There are white sheep in a white field covered in white snow. They are nearly invisible. Will their wool coats keep them warm enough? I assume so.

The bus gets stuck at several stops, backing up, going forward, backing up, going forward. The driver puts on chains over the high passes.

At Medford, we switch drivers. My Medford-bound bus is going to try to shoot through to Portland. Someone asks if we'll make it to Eugene. Bus driver says "Gotta have a positive attitude." She asks again. He says again, "You gotta have a positive attitude." And so we proceed down the road with a bus full of positive attitude.

Duke Ellington And The Obsession Of Collection

2008-12-22T14:35:00.002-08:00

I collect records. Ever since I was a kid. My first record was not a collector's item. It was Shaun Cassidy. An album called Born Late. I still have it. I haven't listened to it in twenty years. But I can't bear to get rid of it. It was my first album. I'm a collector. Even that may be worth something someday.

I've collected stamps, glass insulators, road reflectors, old lanterns, furniture, license plates, books, turn of the century cooking utensils, Schwinn Stingrays, marbles, comic books, Hot Wheels, and Star Wars action figures. I've flirted with a thousand different collections. Sewing machines, 50's cars, lawn ornaments. I've collected millions of individual items. The fads have come and gone, but through it all, I've collected records.

I have over ten thousand records in my collection now, in three storage lockers. I estimate I've spent nearly a 100 thousand dollars over a lifetime of record collecting.

Here are the top 5 most valuable records in history:

John Lennon & Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy (1980) – $525,000 – Autographed by Lennon five hours before Mark David Chapman assassinated him.

The Quarrymen – “That’ll Be the Day”/”In Spite Of All The Danger” (1958) – $180,000 – Only one copy made.

The Beatles – Yesterday and Today (1966) -- $85,000 – with rare cover of Beatles in butcher smocks, covered in baby parts and raw meat

Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) – $35,000 – Featuring 4 tracks deleted from subsequent releases.

Long Cleve Reed & Little Harvey Hull – “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” (1927) –$30,000 – 78 RPM in plain sleeve.

My collection isn't worth near that, but any day one of the gems of my collection may reach maturity and make me a million. That is, if I could bear to sell it. I was once offered four thousand dollars for the pride of my collection: A very rare 1930 recording of Duke Ellington.

My crowning achievement as a collector was so easy it was almost criminal. My Great Aunt Ethel lived in Portland, Oregon. I joined my grandparents on what we thought might be our last visit before her death. Whenever I go over to an old person's house, I thumb through their music collection. Just in case. You never know what you might find. And this visit to Aunt Ethel paid off. I found a collection of 78s in a box beside an old Victrola in an upstairs room. It was her sewing room. She hadn't sewed in twenty years since the arthritis. The room was thick with dust. The box of records was underneath piles and piles of scrap cloth and half finished quilts.

I found the box by the Victrola, and my heart raced. I always begin to sweat with anticipation when I know I've found undiscovered treasure. An entire box of old 78s. I thumbed through the records one by one. Most of the records were commonplace in the collector's market and were nearly worthless. Furthermore, most had been played out or scratched beyond repair.

But, near the back, there was a box set. It was a Duke Ellington collection. This was a very old set of records. Each of the records except one were marked with deep scratches. Daggers pierced my heart as I slid each one out of its sleeve and saw its condition. My life's find seemed to be slipping away. But the last record was in a sealed envelope of translucent cellophane. I could read the label. It was a Victor recording of Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. Ring Dem Bells was on the A-side. Mood Indigo was the B-side. It looked like it had never been played! It was the find of the century!

I cradled the entire set in my arms as I descended the stairs. I panicked when I began to wonder if the old bat would give me the record. Would I have to buy it from her? Mightn't she guess its great value if I was willing to buy such an old record? I decided to try to keep it casual. I had to stop and calm down. I sat at the bottom of the stairs with the Duke and breathed deep breaths.

"Hi, Aunty," I said to the old woman in her wheelchair.

"What you been up to, boy? Mischief?" she asked.

"I was admiring all your great old stuff upstairs," I positioned.

"What great old stuff?" she asked suspiciously.

"The old furniture, the grandfather clock in the hall," I said casually.

"Are you waiting for me to die, Son?" she squinted at me.

"All those memories," I said trying to work my way around to my casual question. "You use all that stuff? The sewing machine? The old Victrola?"

"No, I don't use it anymore, boy. The arthritis keeps me from sewing, you know. And why would I want to use the old Victrola? I have me a cassette deck radio right here that I don't have to keep winding," she smiled and patted the cassette radio my dad had bought her.

"I love that old Victrola. It puts me in touch with another era," I dropped.

"Hmmm," she muttered, lost in another era herself.

"Is there any way I could borrow it?" I asked.

"The Victrola? Sure. Take it away. And any other trash you find up in that sewing room."

"Can I have the records that go with it?" I asked, almost beside myself with excitement.

Suddenly she got very grave. "No," she said sternly. "Those were Bob's records. You can borrow them if you like, but you can't have them."

"Aunty, can I ask you a question? I was curious about this record," I said, holding up my treasure. She extended her hands and I got fearful to turn it over to the old woman. I reluctantly gave it to her and sent up a little prayer that she wouldn't open it.

She looked at it a moment and made a frowny face. "Do you know the record, Aunty?" I said.

"Yes," she said. "Bobby listened to those Negro composers, the Jazz men, back then."

I gently snatched the record back as her focus shifted inward. "But it's never been opened," I said. "How come?"

"Well, that came in that box of records, right?" she was sharp as tacks. "That song on that record was playing everywhere you went. You went to a party or a dance and it was playing. You went to a store and someone had it on the record player. You couldn't get away from it. And so I told Bobby that if I ever heard it played on our Victrola, I would pick it up and break it. So it was never even taken out of the paper."

I took the record home, almost forgetting to take the Victrola as well. And I lived in fear for the next several years that Aunt Ethel would ask for it back. When she called I felt awash with guilt. When my parents or grandparents went to visit, I found an excuse not to go. I didn't know if she remembered my loan, but I took no chances. She finally died and I heaved a sigh of relief. The record was mine.

I kept it in the envelope, unopened, in mint condition. It's the pride of my collection.

That record, that wax testimony to the genius of Duke Ellington, has been heard only one time. It was broken out of its cellophane envelope, and the mystery that was a sixty year-old never-played 78rpm recording of a rare studio session dissolved in seven minutes. The record itself dropped several hundred dollars in value that day, I thought.

I dated a woman named Jacqueline well after college. We were to be married. She was a collector too. We would spend summer weekends driving around to garage sales looking for the Big Find. Once a month we would go all day Saturday to the City to several of the big auctions. We were going to open an antique and collectibles shop together.

The shop was going to sell "antique" furniture and knickknacks to the old women who come here as tourists. The stuff would be old, but none of it antique. It would be a place where we could get rid of all of the stuff that we no longer wanted to collect. Or stuff that had fallen so far in value that it was no longer worth storing. The general public has no good sense when it comes to old things. People would rather buy a beat up old dresser than a perfectly preserved one decades older. The reason, you see, is because it looks older. And what good is it, they figure, to spend the money on antiques if they don't look their age? Don't even talk to me about "distressed" furniture. Makes me a little sick.

Jacqueline and I were fiends. She was a master bargainer. She could talk the tusks off an elephant. Also, she was a great salesman. She could sell water to a fish. With her as my partner, I couldn't loose in the business. We'd secured loans from our parents and several friends and were hoping to set ourselves up in business the following year.

We were great in business and great in bed. We made love in an 19th century King Louis bed in a dark recess of a museum in Amsterdam. We collected King Louis furniture for the next six months and refurnished our bedroom. We would both meet in period costume in the garden. We would greet cordially and talk pleasantly. Then when we were both flushed and breathing hard with anticipation, I would grab her, take her back to our bedroom and ravish her.

But Jacqueline was a jealous lover. She was competitive as well. Though we bought many items for our collection with our combined money, we both collected and kept things that we understood were part of our private stashes. Whenever I found a new treasure, Jacqueline had to best me with a find for one of her collections. If I found a rare old record, Jacqueline had to find a rare porcelain doll. If I found a like-new Schwinn Stingray, Jacqueline would look for a Fiestaware place setting in radioactive red.

She was crazy about my record collection. I'd started the collection fifteen years before I met her, and I didn't see any reason why I should share it. It was mine. I wanted to keep something for myself, something that was just mine and no one else's. Is that so wrong?

When we first met, she bought me several records for the collection. Her first attempts were lame because she didn't know the field. But after a while she got better at sizing up a valuable recording, and before we were living together, would often bring me fantastic finds from hours of combing used record stores. She started collecting records of interest to her, old 70s albums that could be found by the dozen in thrift stores, but would be rare in another twenty years. We were courting and collecting together.

First she asked me to share my collection. Sometime after we moved in together, she referred to the records as "our collection." I gently, but firmly told her it was mine. I don't regret keeping it to myself, but probably the seeds were planted in that moment for the beginning of the end.

Later, she asked me to sell the collection to fund our business. Then when I refused, she got angry and accused me of loving my records more than her. It was the worst argument of our romance.

"How could you even ask me to sell the collection?" I screamed. "Its always brought me so much joy," I said.

"If you are so happy with it, why don't you marry it?" she yelled.

We patched up the fight and made things right again. But there was always a glimmer of accusation and distrust around the subject of my records. We tacitly agreed never to talk about it. I no longer told her when I'd made a great find. I no longer joyously played old records for her. I had a very brief affair with a new record collector upstate. But Jacqueline and I had other fish to fry and we moved on, planning the business and acquiring salable items.

One day I home and surprised Jacqueline in the bedroom. She looked up guiltily and little bit defiant. She was holding my Duke Ellington record. I stood there a little stunned, wondering what she was planning to do. It was kept in a special case inside a fireproof filing cabinet in our bedroom. The record had still never been played. It was sealed in its cellophane envelope like the day it had left the Victor factory.

"You've never listened to this thing," Jacqueline said, looking up at me.

"No. It's never been played," I said. "It's very rare. Over seventy years-old now."

"Never? Why not?" she asked.

I told her the story Aunt Ethel had told me, though I knew I must have told her before.

"And you've never gotten curious?" she asked.

"Oh sure," I said, "But I know its worth so much more--"

"Yeah, yeah," she said cutting me off. "I know about your offer. Three thousand dollars, but you wouldn't sell."

"Four," I said.

"Four thousand," she said. "Wanna put it on now? Wanna hear it? We could make love while Duke Ellington plays for us, straight out of the past." I'd found that Aunt Ethel's old Victrola was actually worth something
after all, and it sat on an antique table in the bedroom. Jacqueline started to walk over to it.

"No!" I shouted.

She stopped and looked alarmed. "I was kidding. Kidding." She shook her head. "Geez, Louise," she said and carelessly tossed Duke Ellington to me and strutted out of the room. I hated her for that one moment. And then it passed.

Three months later. We were weeks away from opening the business. The location was secured. We had a deposit down on the lease. We had crews lined up to renovate the place and move the fixtures and antiques into the shop on the first of the month. The pressure was enormous. We were getting no sleep. We hadn't made love in weeks, months maybe. We didn't argue, but we didn't talk either. We grunted orders at each other.

"Uh, get the door."

"Hmmm, grab some burgers while you're out."

"Hey, don't forget the tax forms."

"Pick up that chair you bought last weekend."

Jacqueline had gone home early to throw together some dinner before we had to go back down to the shop and work the rest of the evening. I was going to stay assembling fixtures until she called me for dinner.

I gouged my thumb with a screwdriver and found that we didn't have any Band-Aids down at the shop. I was getting hungry and decided it was time to pack up for now.

When I opened the door, my heart sank into the pit of my stomach. I heard the first few piano bars of Mood Indigo. I knew. Immediately. I ran, though it was already too late. When I reached the bedroom door, the clarinet began its sad solo. I stood with my mouth open and looked at Jacqueline. She was standing over my Aunt Ethel's old Victrola staring down at Duke Ellington spinning on the turntable. She was smiling. I was in shock. I wondered what she was smiling at.

Then I began to hear the music.

It was so finely textured I couldn't tell where one sound started and another began. It was a synthetic whole. It was one piece of finely woven cloth with clever variations of texture and mood. It was lonely and exultant. Somehow happy and sad. I saw in it reflected the entire Black experience in America, the hope and the heartbreak.

The quality was like a punch in the ears. A never before played 78rpm recording of a musical genius with almost no hiss. It was like a voice across the years. The trombone tripped up and down the scales, rising to meet the clarinet which took the lead. With the bass clarinet providing undertones, the clarinet made impossibly complex rich music. Then the whole orchestration fell into a more somber groove, with now-and-then flashes of improvisation from the clarinet. I'd heard the words to the song in later recordings and couldn't help hearing them now in my head.

You ain't been blue... no, no, no...
You ain't been blue, till you had that mood indigo...

Then as the clarinet and trombone took it home slow and sad, Duke finished with a flare, those staccato blasts from those great horns! Chills ran up and down my spine. Jacqueline was still staring at the record, smiling.

The record ended with the distinctive hiss-hiss-hiss-hiss-hiss of the 78. I was still anchored to my spot. My mouth was still open. My record was still going around and around and around.

Jacqueline looked up, and we looked at each other's soul for the last time.

-o-

Prologue

She left the next day. I wanted her to leave and so did she.

I found out later in correspondence with one of the most esteemed vintage record collector in the country, that being in the factory packaging seldom affects the price of a high-end vintage record sale. They look exclusively at its rarity and its condition, he said. The experts would have had to take it out of its wrapper to grade it anyway.

I'm hopping to open up a shop here sometime soon. I don't have the business sense that Jacqueline did, but I'll try. We'll be competitors in fact, for she opened up her own shop across town. I hear she's doing very well, selling eBay and mail-order all over the country.

The words of the song still come back to me sometimes. I wish I could reach back seventy years and thank the Duke for expressing it so well.

That feelin goes stealin down to my shoes, and
I sit and cry "Go 'long Blues."
Always get that Mood Indigo,
Since my baby said good bye...
I'm just a soul bluer than blue can be
When I get that Mood Indigo

Revolutions

2008-12-19T16:44:00.002-08:00

Feeling guilty about it is no good at all. He can't win this one. She can't win this one. It isn't that he wants to tell her how to behave, and he's not willing to tell her how to feel. But if he would, if he could. In a secret place. A secret safe place. That's exactly what he really wishes. He wishes he could change how she feels.

Guilty doesn't help. Guilty doesn't make her want him. Its a maelstrom of transmuted feelings. Desire to pressure. Honesty to rejection. Inadequacy to guilt. That's where she's at -- she wants to want him. She wishes she loved him the way she did. It would be so much easier to live with, to love with. Easier to understand.

And where does that leave them? He feels desire. She feels only that she should desire him. A duty (though she doesn't think that way). A part of the bargain of love. If they love each other, he for her and her for him, there a trade of mutual desire. Anything less, an unpaid balance, is debt in the finance of love. And from there comes guilt. Because the currency of love is desire. It it isn't there, it isn't there. An unbalanced account. A debt unpaid.

He wants to tell her without words that there's no use her feeling guilty about it. He wants to tell her so much more. He can't. He has no idea how. Language doesn't work anymore.

He lays down beside her. She sleeps with her back to him. He pulls the blankets up. He eases his arm around her and snuggles in close. She grunts from someplace deep in her sleep. Neither pleasure nor displeasure. An only semi-conscious grunt of acknowledgment. This is it. Here we are.

He's holding his breath. He remembers to breathe. He waits a very long moment. Breath in. Breath out. Slowly. He moves his hand to her stomach. Her nightshirt has come up and her stomach is bare. He places his hand flat against her smooth skin, against the slight swell of her stomach. Something turns over in him. Another sound bubbles up from the depths of her sleep.

A swirl of feelings. Confusion. Was that irritation? Was it the stirrings of excitement? If she responds to his touch, what does he do? How far does he take it? For him, this is enough. Almost enough. If he knew that she liked, even wanted his touch, this gentle intimacy, it would be enough. If only she would push against him, nuzzle into him, then it'd be enough. Then he'd know.

Even in her semi-consciousness, she's afraid. This is enough. This is safe. A soft hand resting on her, an arm around her, the possibility of more. Only the possibility. Right here. Right now. She doesn't have to plow up the barren fields of her missing desire. But if she gives a Sign, a low moan of contentment, a smile, pushing against him (she can already feel him hard against her), it begs the question: how far do we take this? Above all, she wants the answer to be, this. This is enough. So she lies perfectly still. Afraid to reject him, afraid to encourage him.

She feels guilty and pressured and confused, and in this swirl of feelings, and out of this not-so-contented, not-so-peaceful, not-so-satisfied, utterly unbalanced moment comes a very real sleepthought. This isn't enough. No, not nearly enough for her. She can't put her finger on the why of it, on the what of it, and so we're back around to guilt.

She doesn't know that she simply wants peace.

In her circles she feels trapped. Hot. She moves to throw the blankets off. With her movement, he springs away from her, tensing at the vague subtle edge of frustration.

He's rejected, confused, angry. Hurt. She senses it (and feels guilty). He turns his back to her (but moves his backturned body close enough that she could move against him if she chose). She wants to comfort him. She wants to explain without explaining. This hurt child pulls out a mothering urge in her. But how does she hold him without giving the Wrong Signals, without putting out a Sign. How does she show that sometimes this can be enough.

She can't. She has no idea how.

And round and round they go through the half sleepless, half wakeless night. And all he knows is that guilt doesn't help.

A moment of silence

2008-12-14T23:46:00.000-08:00

There are sounds we cannot speak
only listen to silently,
clinging to despair like an old friend
and imagining away the distance.
The lonesome call of a train whistle sounds through
the valley like an old friend.
The solitude I sought was always waiting for me,
here, right in front of my eyes so blurred with tears
I could not see it.

You said "There's more to life than dreams,"
but what dreams,
what moments of clarity held me when
you were away, those lost moments
shattered by the low hum of your voice, filling the air
like an old friend.
You still inspire poetry in me,
a flood of words rising from below the surface,
thoughts unheard, image haunted,
the low rumble of your voice on the horizon.

These mountains do not speak
but their enormity silences us in our steps.
For a moment, I failed to recognize myself,
my words unfamiliar, staring back at me in contempt.
Who crafted these long silences,
their delicate architecture threatening to bury us
under its sandy weight.
There is more to this moment than words can tell,
more than simple songs...

A sound that was either the rolling of drum or
of thunder left us dangling, mouths wide, and we
melted back into the space between words.

And, like old friends, we parted, drifting
back into our shelters: mine of words, yours of silence.

Picture Me

2008-12-04T23:47:00.000-08:00

I feel like you see me as though you are looking at a photograph taken of me taken on a drizzly November evening under the light of a streetlamp, one twenty-fourth of a second, captured in a neat four-by-six frame, slightly blurry. You keep staring at this picture and you like what you see. The girl in the photograph is smiling and looks rather romantic, in her old-fashioned hat and long coat, and you think she is real and that she lives and breathes and you think you might like her.

She is not real. She is an image, a frozen moment.

I admit that even when I look at her my heart stirs and sometimes I wish I could be her but I know that moments are only moments. If you are lucky enough to capture one in a picture then it is yours. It takes on a life of its own and you might fall into the deadly trap of thinking that it is real and that it exists. You might become lost, lost the way I am when I try to make my way back to the place where the picture was taken, thinking that I really am that girl. But I can never find the exact location again, the storefronts have changed, the summer sun is too bright, and I could never play the romantic lead.

I'm really some girl who will probably say things that hurt your feelings, who feels a little light headed right now because she just went to the gym without eating first so that not all of the things she says makes perfect sense, or any kind of sense at all really, but I had such good intentions of saying something explanatory that would clear mix-ups and misunderstandings and that would set fire to that photograph of the person I am not. Sometimes, especially when I'm with you, I forget that I never actually was her and I accidentally remember her memories and that's at least as unhealthy as being in love with a photograph, if not more so.

I feel like I have to warn you because I'm sure that the next time we're looking at photo albums I'll forget to. There are things I would rather tell you, the things that you called back to hear but I was in no mood for conversation. It felt like being on the phone with someone whose heart I might be about to break and having someone whose heart I have already broken on call-waiting. Is it symbolic, foreshadowing, dramatic irony, or completely meaningless? Maybe words are clearer and sharper when your hungry, so when I read this after I eat everything will be softer and kinder. This is me opening up to you even if you can't really tell and what I really want to say is that this is a bad time.

If only we would get along with time, time would do what ever we want, the Mad Hatter says, and the dormouse follows with a story about mustard and music and memory and all sorts of things that begin with m. "You can't change the past," Nick tells Gatsby. "Can't change the past? Of course you can," is his incredulous reply.

My friend Bobby tells me about a new philosophy that he is expounding, refining for himself. He says "Given an infinite amount of time, everything that can happen will happen." Whether time exists or not is irrelevant if we can capture it in a box. He tells me everything that existed up until the moment it was written down is included in a text, hidden, in between the lines. Everything: Buddha, Jesus, Einstein, Socrates, Hannibal, a war, a fake peace, a faux pas, a birth, a death, a kiss that left me smiling as i sat in air so cold i prayed for rain, a tree i climbed, every book i have ever read, every sound i have ever heard, every king and every president and every precedence, all the dreams that have yet to be uncovered and maybe more.

Maybe the moments to come, the dreams yet to be had, the songs yet to be written, they are all here, all contained in this moment. And this moment could last forever.

Greyhound

2008-11-26T19:11:00.002-08:00

I rode a shuttle bus last night up on campus and after everyone boarded and the driver turned off the bright overhead lights leaving a series of moody pools of warm reading light, I was flooded with longing.

Cross-country bus trips of my youth. Stopping for minutes at a time in little towns whose name I never knew. Longer stops, blurry-eyed at five in the morning, looking for warm coffee to wrap my hands around in the boring spaces between drivers, here in these bigger towns. Flagstaff, Oklahoma City, KC, St. Louis. Or the run-down, industrial outskirts of these towns at least.

I was just out of high school desperately in love with a girl who, though only a couple of years younger than I, was a million miles away from where I wanted to go.   Holding hands was her limit. I, who'd been sexually aware since I was ten and deflowered at fourteen, felt constantly hopeful and horny and guilty and ashamed.

Her mom and Nana were deeply enmeshed in every aspect of each others lives, forming a creepy three-headed, cross-generational triumvirate. I've wondered over the years if they were deliberately conscious of how effective this doling out and withholding affection was at keeping me around. Unconscious or Machiavellian or a young girl just not ready, I remained doting and obsessive and sexually frustrated for nearly two years.

I am mercilessly unforgiving with myself about this now. The less she gave, the harder I tried. This has been a central lesson in my romantic life in the last few decades. One cannot will a relationship into existence. I am willing to meet you half way. Or maybe more than half way, but I want to feel like partners in this. I'm not going to woo you, seduce you, convince you, pressure you. If you already think I'm funny and sexy and smart like I feel about you, maybe then, we'll see. What will happen will happen.

In her senior year, her mom, her Nana, sent her to a boarding school in Saint Louis. I wonder what part my ardor played in that decision. A Christian Science school in a treeless stretch of prairie as big as a university.

I wrote to her daily, or very close. She was at a new school, meeting new people and here was a boyfriend back home who she'd given maybe a chaste kiss once or twice flooding her mailbox with letters. Who knows whether she read all of them. She wrote me maybe once a week, answering only some of my jealous questions about who she was hanging out with and what she was doing.

During the winter holidays, I decided I would have an absurd adventure. I would travel across the country for a week to spend a few days with her. It was that kind of irritating and nauseous romance. A bus trip with money saved from working in her family's shop. Two thirds of the way across the continent by Greyhound bus.

The sense of expectation first. This sense of purpose and reason. Riding a bus across the country to get somewhere. Of course, anywhere, is nice too. But somewhere, a specific goal, has a nice feeling.

But being on the road that long, that far from home, there's a sense that anything can happen.   Might happen. Maybe should happen. What if I got off in this town, what is it called? Greensburg. What if I got off here in Greensburg, what would my life be like? Who are these people? How did they get here? Why are they here and not somewhere else? Why are they them, and me me, and not the other way around? Could I live here? What kind of connections would I have with these people? All thoughts that come in the night as the long highway detours through little towns.

In towns through Missouri and Kansas I spotted butchers that specialized in wild-killed meat. Their customers were primarily hunters. Indeed, in a coffee shop serving as a small town bus stop, in the middle of the night, we came upon a herd of hunters in camouflage drinking coffee ready to begin the hunt. I developed an inexplicable craving for deer jerky.

A jealous love. A starving man. An obsession. A manipulation. A lonely romance. A young young girl with the usual ambivalence. A scarcity economy. A long, slow panic. Shame. Guilt. A feeling of unloveability. A rationed affection. Still after twenty years I don't know how to think of it.

The pools of light made by reading lights. On this crowded bus, each passenger gets her or his own intimate bubble. An entire universe, wedged in between other universes, in which to read, snack, or think. A moment alone to dream, followed by another uninterrupted moment, followed by another.

In one town bathed in washed-out winter sun, a row developed at the front of the bus which quickly moved outside. A red blotchy-faced woman was having an argument with the driver. I watched distantly, dispassionately until the woman walked away from the bus cursing.

In the space of the bus, another space was created. A mental space, a separation between strangers, that was as wide and open as a desert valley. In two thousand miles maybe two or three people broke through that bubble.

One was a young blond girl curious about my travels. What was I doing on the road? Where was I going? Where was I going to sleep? She was from another town in California and was traveling much much further than me all the way to the other coast for reasons I couldn't quite discern from what she said. A man? A job? Both?

The other strangers I talked to were concerned middle-aged women. Motherly types, concerned about my welfare, full of advice and suggestions. Their smiles all looked the same. In my memory, they meld into a road trip archetype of all the concerned mothers I've met on the road who have a young wayward son in the military.

I'll leave the part about the girlfriend behind in these reminiscences, because every moment of the journey stuck with me deep down in this way that's hard to describe, except for the part of the journey, the three days I actually spent with her.   In the future of this young man, in the summer, several months hence, a great weariness overtakes him. The weariness of trying too hard overcomes him and he gives up on this quixotic romance. But this bus trip in the winter in an attempt to demonstrate the depth of his love.

Two days across the nation, and two days back. Three thousand nine hundred sixty two miles. Three days, twenty-three hours, and fifty minutes of bus travel over a long long week of an eighteen-year old young man.

And in the day, the unending vision of road and town and landscape scrolling by. The endless, boundless, constant, continual, eternal, everlasting, immeasurable, infinite, interminable, limitless, monotonous, never-ending, perpetual, unbounded, unbroken, unending road.

Dispatch from the Cab of an Old Truck in the RC&BT Railyard at the End of Autumn

2008-11-17T13:40:00.002-08:00

Sitting in the twilight in the old truck at the railyard. The last of the Saturday light fading from the sky. An unseasonably warm November evening, maybe the last warm night of the year. Car wheels crunching on gravel in the distance.

Someone asked if this was part of a larger story. Trite, but yes. Part of the story of my days and nights.

I'm told that some people recharge their energy by being with people. Others recharge by being alone. I'm alone for the first time in what feels like weeks. I can no longer tell in the blur of motion that stretches each day into an eternity.

I've lived lifetimes. I've lived many lives. And for the moment, this twilight evening, I'm taking a breather.

This evening. This cigar. This old truck. This body. This world.

I'm fortunate to be me and no one else. I'm glad to have this life to live. I'm not sure at all if I've done this before or if this is my first time around. And when I'm gone, I'm not sure if I get another chance, or if this is the only one I get. I'd be wholly content with that. I don't need another go at it, and I don't need an afterlife.

These moments. So human. So animal. So Earthbound. All of it. When I die, don't mourn. Celebrate.