The Marj Memoirs

Poetry by Robert Bly: Stealing Sugar from the Castle

2010-01-02T09:28:00.002-05:00

The First Day of 2010

2010-01-01T09:28:00.005-05:00

Questionnaire

by Wendall Berry

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

via Pulse

Fabric

2009-12-12T08:06:00.014-05:00

Give up the illusion of the perception of truth.

There is no unmoving spot of ground on which to rest.

Now we are wanderers whose only point of reference is the echo of our pounding hammers. Nailing shreds of peach chiffon, charmeuse, old yellow prom dresses and the velvet black party dress your mother wore when she was beautiful. Sirens sounded around her. Listen.

Rip up the shirt that didn't fit her well as she was dying. Nail it to the utility pole, it is behind us, in the future. Walk on down the road. Tear little strips from a green calico dress. Hammer them to leafless trees.

Fluttering tulle and taffeta, bits of bandana, flannel pajama. We are wanderers whose only point of reference is the echo of our pounding hammers.

Mother Theresa was a Cowgirl

2009-04-07T14:48:00.009-04:00

Funny, coming back here, I feel like I'm coming back to someplace significant. Like driving down M66 into the river valley that was my childhood home. Maybe the most significant thing that has happened in my absence is that life has gone on. Dollar stores proliferate.

People are populating, blogging, facebooking, tweeting... the world is full of ambient noise. It is an abundance of insignificance.

If this were a yearly Christmas greeting, I'd say... "I'm TOTALLY in love with Morrissey (I TOLD you I could never be happy), I am still "teaching" and becoming more jaded-like-my-father. I miss some things. I, an obedient daughter, have many regrets, one being that I failed to devote my life to homeless people in India who have no human being who will sit beside them as they die.

If I could only be a cowgirl.

Holidays, Birthdays, Happiness, Sadness, Mothers and Friends

2008-12-17T05:05:00.003-05:00

Why am I grouchy and sad and overwhelmed?! Oh, I remember why. It’s Christmas! Not only have we co-opted a day that is about love and sacrifice and made it a selfish capitalistic orgy, but we have placed expectations on ourselves that doom us to failure. I cannot make everyone in my family a scarf. I push myself to the edge of sanity making ONE scarf.

I think part of my melancholy is about my mom, and what the holidays were like with her. I can’t rise to the level of wonderfulness that she was, and I miss her. Life wasn’t perfect, I mean my dad was a mean depressed drunk and all, but my mom was beautiful and giving and loving and you KNEW she loved you. No mistake about it. Her departure really left a hole. Especially during the holidays, and my birthday. She never forgot me. She was the one I knew would always love me. She was funny and popular and knew everybody in town and everybody loved her. I rode on her coattails. She was so unlike me, and she knew me so well. She was a master at making me laugh, she knew I had hives because I was stressed (when I didn’t have a clue), she never read a book, she was loyal, she was basic, she was full of fun, she held the family together, she was mine.

I am acutely aware that one day my own kids will be dealing, each in their own way, with my departure. I hope they remember that I was THEIRS. Everyone needs someone that really sees them, and really loves the shit out of them. Even if they aren’t perfect. Even if they drink too much. Even if they swear. Even if they don’t read books. Even if they failed or if they succeeded, or if they left, or if they came back again. These days I just try and love my kids unconditionally and discern where our relationship will take us.

Happy Holidays, Friends. This year I am most thankful for you. You know, I think my mom would have really liked you.

“What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. “

I Think I See My People

2008-11-15T05:04:00.003-05:00

Credit: NASA

I was taken by this image this morning. Maybe because we’ve been caught in the election bubble for so long. We are so short-sighted. GM is delaying the release of its’ next gas-guzzler until January because they are afraid they won’t get any bailout money, and Jennifer Aniston FINALLY talked shit about Angelina Jolie. We can’t see two feet ahead of us.

I think this is my new home! When I am 90 I will travel across our solar system and enter a new one, a stranger in a strange land (like all of us), though we shy away from complaining. We are thankful for little things.

Change Must Come from Us

2008-06-25T07:39:00.002-04:00

"... by the very design and scale of national politics, no presidential campaign could offer more than a wink and a nod to true participatory politics. Activism isn’t something that happens on TV for a general viewing audience, but at home with real people who aren’t watching the tube at all. While a president can provide some inspiration – Oprah-style, if need be - for a whole lot of people, the executive isn’t the locus from which real change occurs. As president, Obama could enact policies that make activism easier to accomplish, jobs easier to create, and corporations more easy to resist – but this activity itself would have to come from us." - Douglas Rushkof

Globalism=Imperialism

2008-06-17T10:42:00.003-04:00

"Globalization is an attempt to extend corporate monopoly control over the globe."
- Michael Parenti

One Winter Soldier's Tale

2008-05-27T20:46:00.002-04:00

American News Project

War Talk

2008-04-26T08:28:00.009-04:00

While the democrats fiddle about, the Republicans have big plans for winning the election:

"The nation's top military officer said yesterday that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" as one of several options against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq." (The Washington Post)

It doesn't matter how much propaganda we are fed, or for how long, or that we KNOW it's propaganda! Through our silence, we give permission.

Be Here Now

2008-03-30T09:11:00.006-04:00

in love
continually
with life perhaps
(being shy) may require

1. detachment

"It’s not about impressing people, it’s about moving them. I always found my mother extremely moving because she had no boobs. The girl who has the perfect body, like Betty Paige, freaks me out. My son writes on my jeans with big markers; I’m always writing poems on my arms with black pen and cutting my hair very short on the sideburns to have a profile like Napoleon. I like having those weird, tweaky things. It’s a stupid girl thing, but it’s better to not look your best so that people can imagine that the best is really much better [laughing]."

yes 2. laughing
3. a drug or two,
while 4. wearing these shoes

sometimes helps
5. a dalai lama memory
6. sidestepping (not even)
around spongy ground
full of melting snow

bangs cover your eyes,
migratory
bird.
I sing!

Love Struck

2008-03-21T07:42:00.002-04:00

"A color blind country is a false hope. Martin Luther King jr. did not want us to be colorblind in the sense the concept usually used today - he wanted us to be love-struck by one another. Being love-struck by your fellow citizen means embracing their humanity - which includes their color, culture and history." - Cornel West, in Rolling Stone

Ain't No Time to Wonder Why...

2008-03-13T05:31:00.006-04:00

What happens when you have an unbridled military-industrial-neocon complex?

Adm. William "Fox" Fallon, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, last of the Vietnam vets in the high command (The Man Between War and Peace), submitted his resignation as head of Central Command. According to former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Patrick Lang, Fallon told him, upon taking over at Centcom, that war with Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch.(antiwar.com)

"...the Bush administration intends to go out with a bang – one that will shake not only the Middle East but this country to its very foundations." - Justin Raimondo

Photo by Peter Yang

Best Cover Ever

2008-03-02T08:52:00.006-05:00

"A time comes when silence is betrayal."

2008-02-27T05:30:00.005-05:00

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." (Rev. Martin Luther King)

Strikes, Boycotts, Mutinies, Desertions

2008-02-24T20:10:00.004-05:00

"Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens. (Howard Zinn)

Monday Burn Millay

2008-02-22T03:20:00.008-05:00

I can relate to conflicting desires. But Americans' protection of the English Language while simultaneously hating it, just bites. I can't decide if I am irritated more at the English Only movement or the anti-intellectual stupidness (duh) of those who say Obama is nothing but pretty words.

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none."

George Bush, with his fifth grade English ability and his encouragement in the face of catastrophy to go shopping, is destructive. He's a fireman with no books hidden in his ceiling vent.

“So, when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world, there was no longer need for fireman for the old purposes. They were given the new job as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges and executors. That’s you and me!”

Two terms of Bush has dumbed us down. We don't want them fancy words, we don't want to learn no foreign languages, we want action. We want war! We want continual war! We want to feel superior! Goddamn it, we want sleeping pills!

Well... maybe not. Maybe two terms of Bush has given us more appreciation for language. I, for one, am not in the least conflicted about my desire to experience language that is creative and life changing. At best, language is art, and why wouldn't we want to live our lives as if we were making art? Why wouldn't we want to enrich ourselves through learning languages, finding the right word, and beyond that, through acts of kindness and friendship and mercy and love? Why wouldn't we want to keep growing, getting smarter, appreciating those who can teach us things? Why wouldn't we appreciate the pretty words of Obama? The movement to elect him is a manifestation of our desire to be better.

"Stuff your eyes with wonder ... live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that ... shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass."

(Quotes and Title)

I Remember Chrysanthemums

2008-02-03T20:03:00.000-05:00

Orange fields thick with flowers stretched across the moon to your doorstep. Constant warm winds blew spicy petals into the atmosphere, spinning, floating, forever preserved in a museum of weightlessness. There I once observed you from a distance on your knees, singing loudly a song that couldn't be heard. Your fingers dug through rare dirt, copper and stone, bone and teeth, sand and flint, searching for some thing that disappeared long ago.

Love Is The Key That Unlocks The Door Which Leads To Ultimate Reality

2008-01-20T07:36:00.000-05:00

"There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."

-Rev. Martin Luther King

Dolly Once Loved Carol Channing

2008-01-19T09:49:00.000-05:00

Checking my e-mail a minute ago, I realized I have reached a time in life where a "rebate processor position" doesn't sound promising. Not that rebate processing is great work, but turning the banal and mundane (like spam) into creative ideas and projects has always been an interest. I once worked as a mangler in a laundry at Yellowstone National Park, and the old me, on seeing spam in my inbox that said "rebate processor position" may have given it some thought. Just for the hell of it. Something fitting to write under "head mangler" on my resume. I have always liked collecting experience, experiencing life as art. But I feel a shift.

Does getting older mean caring less about things? Once Dolly loved Carol Channing. There was something about Carol Channing that she just adored.

Maybe Carol Channing's ability to play musical instruments and be the life of the party. Or the way she always looked nice, put on a big toothy smile.(Dolly was always encouraging me to "smile!") She also had a high dose of my mother's biggest asset. In fact, not long ago, in the town where Dolly spent most of her life, an old friend of hers told me, punching the last word:

"Your mother had personality."

These days, in the assisted living facility, Dolly could care less about Carol Channing. Or her old friends. Or her husband, who has been dead over 20 years. She doesn't care about looking nice or putting on a good face, either. She has changed.

Am I losing interest in the things that have always interested me? Maybe I'm afraid that my mind just won't work the same anymore, like Dolly's. And afraid that the strings that bind me with interest to people and ideas will no longer hold. I want to hold onto my big toothy smile, keep myself up, learn a musical instrument, but you can't be the life of the party forever, can you?

Toxic Simplicity (Britney and Me)

2008-01-06T06:50:00.000-05:00

I could quickly become as crazy and hysterical as Britney Spears simply by reading the news. World news, national news, celebrity news, all has merged into a manipulated parasitic mess. It is a cynical lens through which I gaze, with little hope in sight. On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

I hit my head against walls. I tear my hair out. Or did I shave it off? My job has made a fool of me, the thought sends me reeling with longing toward a toxic simplicity, some post-apocalyptic time of wandering, scrapping for food, creating fire with sticks and shelter with branches. I crawl into the walk-in closet where I am the best mother in the world. And I give it up. Don't leave me! Don't go! ...I must say what I feel and think in some way--it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

I need to test my meddle. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do? Things can get out of control so quickly, and any small change can send life reeling toward chaos. Hysterical, I need to be tied down. It's for my own good. My husband calls the authorities he is worried about the gun that he gave me as a gift, when he loved me. He is concerned for my well-being and is knowledgeable about my psychological state. He is rational, he knows best. My man ties me down, he drives me away with sirens blaring, he tells me everything's OK, he checks me into the hospital, he gives me drugs he calls me "baby" he calls his lawyer, he changes the constitution against me, he is the school principal, he is the president, he is the doctor he is the father, The Man, my lover. I live onlyto please him.

I have removed the silicone implants, I have sworn off botox and willed myself to face torture before being the life of the party. Three hundred men could not stop me from leaving this place. If this is Britney's fate, this is my fate.

"Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored." -George Saunders
_______________________________________________________
(all italicized quotes from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (1899)

Happy Holidays

2007-12-24T08:12:00.000-05:00

Farm Security Administration: Christmas dinner in the home of Earl Pauley near Smithland, Iowa. (Circa 1935)

This Particular Game

2007-12-21T01:45:00.000-05:00

Tired. Of this particular game, I say we play
Another game of an entirely different origin
and design.
A. Game. Where. instead of motion and gesture
We create a new language
Formed entirely of words of love.
and wine.

Words of love, you say words of love
Burping, swilling scotch, tipping and pointing
You asshole, you fucking existentialist, don't you know
you ruined my fucking life
in the process of constructing yours? Ouch! My eye!

This is an eyesore, a damned walmart where
trees should be
and I can no longer find my way home.

This geography. This flat landscape.
Within it a damsel with long blond tresses (no victim) whose braids twine around billboards and blocks of gray concrete (a heroine!) snake under highway overpasses (chanting words of love) climb rusted shell oil monuments and twist through foreclosed homes and vacant lots (no one dare climb) scans the nearby hills

Where children wander,
searching for parents who have already disappeared.

Dancing with Dolly

2007-12-05T07:35:00.000-05:00

Dolly's veined hands jerk up.up. on wires leading to monitors and bells. Then down.down. her head rests, slightly tilted. "Wirepuller," her dry mouth open.open. close.close. "make me dance!" Propped-up on the hospital bed, catheter controller, pelvis twitch, underpants down, door open, audience peers in.

"Wirepuller, make me sing!" Knobby fingers swing upward in arcs and a scuffy little song, accompanied by bells and monitors, begins. A duet, mother and daughter, a little soft shoe accessed from the far reaches of memory, a little Mack the Knife, a little Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, as we drive past pine trees decked with holiday lights, closed businesses, she wrapped only in blankets and hospital footies, me driving lost in the snowy Michigan night, something of a party.

We have something of a party! A crazy little drive, a reckless adventure, but soon I recognize this landscape, this street name, where we are going.

Dolly thinks someone was sleeping in her bed when we get to her home. "Why is it so messy?!" She wants to tidy up, tells me to fold her blanket. I, mimicking myself, throw it on the floor. "Dolly! You are such a neatnic! I'm coming over and mess this place up very soon!" She laughs and I slide her nightie over her head. "Go to bed," I direct, but leaving, I glance back down the long hall and she is still there, in her long nightgown, peering at me playfully from behind her open door.

Making a marionette dance requires three movements, a walk, a wave and a bow. It takes practice to make the marionette do all three together. Always grinning, hand jerking up.up. in a final wave, controller rocking from side to side like an airplane dipping it's wings, I walk away.

Walking the Dog

2007-11-03T08:16:00.000-04:00

"Oh my god. These woods are so enchanting, I must stand very still right here in the moment, and listen to that lone bird that sounds like some sort of teradactyl as it zigzags in the gray-blue sky above me. Shhh. Leaves crinkle underfoot, and that tree trunk looks like a drawing of a tree trunk, the detail and perfection almost overwhelming. It's alive."

Her brown hair, which she hadn't bothered to wash in two days, lay heavy on her shoulders in what was either stylish straightness or unattractive clumps, she couldn't decide. "If only my hair bounced and weightlessly separated in gusts of November wind in the sunlit dusk."

"Let's talk about you.' Wouldn't that be a good first line? That line says it all," she thought. "Selfless from the get-go. You'd hardly need anything else! Eureka! The form has to philosophically agree with the content. The form may be more important than the content." The dog tugged at her leash as she walked unsteadily through deep moss. Glowing green lichen softly lit her winding path and cracking branches echoed in dense patches of sky beyond, where the people were.

"If a dog pulls on its leash, does it mean you can't control it?" Behind sun glasses she had watched other dog walkers in her neighborhood, especially the thin blonde woman who, she thought, was younger than she, and appeared to have it really together. She could be seen frequently running in stretchy technical fabrics that move moisture away from the body and are made specifically for that purpose. Her dog wasn't on a leash and walked obediently beside her.

One day she and dog-on-a-leash approached the woodlot, and running-woman bounced past, greeting her with a heartfelt "Hi." She was mortified at her voice, which squeaked a strange and high-pitched "hello", crackling like a transistor radio. "Heel!" she said a little too loudly, with authority. "Should I hold the leash with my right or left hand? Which looks better? which better conveys dominance? which is correct? what would Cezar Milan advise?"

The woodlot is a place for strange encounters, she thinks. A liminal place where rules of the surrounding neighborhoods can't reach. She vows to sew every person she knows a special design on a small piece of natural fabric of special color for each, with one word attached, a word that is especially for them, that shows she has looked deeply at them, and pondered their existence. She wishes that her mother, or perhaps an insightful and wise teacher, had given her a word.

Emerging from the woods onto a street lined with modest houses with semi-landscaped lawns, she reaches under her jacket and tugs at the too-short cotton undershirt which her daughter had left at home on her last visit and now was riding halfway up her back. Yanking it down and pushing its edge into her slightly too-tight jeans was getting old. She imagines midwestern women peering from behind their livingroom curtains, like her mother used to do, holding their Dawn Dish Detergent that cuts grease in one hand and a dishcloth with pictures of wine bottles in the other and wishing they were thinner, and their hair was longer, and they again resolve to walk every day for 45 minutes just like that woman with the really cool hair who is walking by.

Unattended

2007-10-27T04:54:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw The Darjeeling Limited. Owen Wilson stars as the eldest of three brothers who persuades his reluctant siblings to set out on a spiritual journey, by train, through India. Owen Wilson's head was bandaged throughout the movie because, we find out later, his character tried to kill himself by running his car into a hill. It was difficult to get the real Owen Wilson, who really tried to commit suicide, out of the equation. Apparently the making of the movie didn't bring the spiritual revelation that he needed in real life.

I wish Georgia and Willa and I could share a spiritual adventure. If only we were able to love each other. It seems like that would feel so good. The earthquake of Dolly's leaving buckled and ruptured our bleak but familiar family geography. Everything is gone.

I arrived at the theater early and waited on a bench directly under a gargantuan poster of John C. Reilly's naked torso and smiling face. An old woman, gripping her popcorn and drink, slumped beside me, and I wished I could take a photo of the three of us.

A middle-aged man on a double-date bought his tickets and strolled into the lobby with an empty popcorn bucket. Demanding a refill from the adolescent at concessions, he winked at his buddy and rejoined his companions. The teenagers rolled their eyes, I stood up, and later, when the movie was over and I walked toward the back exit, it felt a bit adventurous. A forgotten threshold of concrete and black paint, unattended and liminal. Neither here nor there.

Then? I stepped through, to the other side.

All the Simple Things

2007-10-21T20:03:00.000-04:00

Maybe my youthful idealism is wearing off, but I'm seeing things in a different light lately, and in this perspective, it appears that there is nothing new under the sun.

I have fought hard against this perspective. People CAN change. We CAN make a difference. We CAN live in peace. Here's a "for instance", on a small scale: As usual, I went into the school year thinking "this year will be different! I'm gonna tweak this and that, and the students will want to learn, and my classroom will be a wonderland community of learning." It soon became obvious, however, that the same student archetypes are walking the halls, the same teachers, the same administrators... the same ME! This year is simply a variation of the past.

Taken to the macrocosm, people as a species seem pretty much the same. I don't think we're getting dumber, we've always been idiotic. We've always been destructive. We don't mind killing. And we're selfish and greedy. And there have always been those who are different.

I suppose the thing that sets us apart in 2007 is overpopulation. There are over 6 billion of us on the earth, and things are getting scarce. I don't think that's going to make us nicer.

Sometimes I think I long for collapse (Is that bad?). Let's just level this shit we've built. All the McMansions, all the fancy cars and expensive toys and clothes and bullshit that makes me better than you.

I saw Into the Wild this weekend, and I have thought about the movie a lot. Christopher McCandless rejected a sick society and yearned for something pure and good. It was hard to see him die in the end, and I couldn't help but connect his death to all the beauty that disappears around me. All the natural habitat and animals with it. All the farmland, all the simple things. The healthy earth, as we knew it.

Thursday's Child

2007-10-13T05:58:00.000-04:00

Mondays child is fair of face,
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

I have never liked to take naps. Strange, since I am in favor of many other forms of escape.

Dolly utilized all her persuasive charms to lure me to bed (she was most definitely in favor of naps), but as a pre-schooler I would not have it. Atop her mountainous bed, while her arms circled, hypnotic, sweet cooing, lovely song, caressing my eyebrows, softly whispering, I wiggled. Eyes wide open, I edged slowly away as Dolly drifted in and out of sleep herself, all her fairy dust squandered.

There was a little girl
With a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
When she was good
She was very very good
But when she was bad
She was horrid

The blonde bed with matching chest of drawers, dour curtains, thin worn brown rug and sparse surroundings changed shape as I floated to the ceiling. Cracks in the plaster meandered out, toward other rooms, through the green clapboard porch that Dolly painted herself, past spiders and carcasses of honey bees, out screened windows into the world of backyard. Marigolds by the porch, planted by Dolly on her knees in a house dress, grew in time-lapse lurches and I smelled their spicy orangeness.

The sky was yellow and I walked lightly on warm green grass, with the past already behind me and little dirt paths before me, which wound through shaded backyards with perennial gardens, pools of distant sunlight and other uncharted and unknown places.

This is why, to this day, I have never liked naps.

Makeup!

2007-09-23T11:33:00.000-04:00

I recently bought myself some "Volum' Express Turbo Boost Mascara", and I am positive that it is going to make a big difference in my life. How could it not? Last time I bought the plain old "Volum' Express Mascara", and to tell you the truth, the improvement in my life was so miniscule as to be almost unnoticeable.

Is Volum' French? Is it telling us to pronounce it vahloom? I would totally rather have French volume, so I hope it's French. Also, the "Turbo Boost" factor seems like it will really propel me into another dimension of startling lashes. Doesn't it?

I can't put mascara on without accidentally smearing it somewhere on my face. Usually under my eyes, but I tell myself not to worry. I have created bedroom eyes. Beautifying is not easy. Most people don't realize that.

When I'm feeling less than stunning, I like to slather cream blush on my face. It is instant health. Want to feel radiant? Lots of creamy blush does wonders. The more the better, I say.

Speaking of "the more the better," this morning I scrubbed my face with my "micro-dermabrasion anti aging kit", and I've got to tell you, I really glow. The directions on the jar say to use it 3 to 4 times a week, but twice a day is better. It is like turbo boosting your skin cells. Don't you agree?

The 11th Hour

2007-09-17T05:11:00.000-04:00

It's no surprise that we are destroying archeological sites in Iraq. Like Chris says at AMERICAblog, we don't need history.

"There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What's new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.

"Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There's been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It's like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake."

Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old Testament – and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet Abraham – it also features in the works of Arab historians and geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.

It's our style to destroy. I saw The 11th Hour yesterday, which reinforces how clueless we are. Why would we be concerned about the destruction of ancient Biblical cities? Hell, we are on a bigger mission. We are attempting to destroy the earth! The problem is, if we succeed, it will kill us.

One of the scientists interviewed in the movie called each of us a pixel in a larger picture, and we each have the opportunity, or responsibility to paint that one pixel, according to how we live our life, to fit in harmony within the larger picture. I liked the diversity of people interviewed, and that an American Indian had the last word. I'm sick and tired of Republican white men (and their token people of color)running the government. The movie didn't have too much Leonardo DiCaprio, which was good. I think I was a little Al Gored-out after his slide show.

We have to change our thinking. We are no longer mentally connected to nature, and see it as "resources" for our use. The abuse of nature is accepted as normal. We need to create a balance through sustainability. The greed of unbridled capitalism is destroying the world. We are a society of consumers, led by a man who encouraged us to buy things after 9/11. He talks about "filling the ol' coffers" as how he will spend his retirement. Right now both political parties prostitute themselves to large corporations that rape and pillage the world.

We need a paradigm shift, a tipping point, toward a realization of the connectedness of all living things, legal protection of the environment (the environment has rights), sharing of wealth, a reassessment of what is really valuable, and balancing our needs with the needs of all other living things.

Can we do it? If we stay on this road of greed and destruction, there will be a tipping point, but it will be toward our own destruction. The earth will regenerate and go on without us. We will have been a blip in the earth's existence. Like the movie says, we are in the 11th hour.

Raised By Wolves

2007-09-15T03:44:00.000-04:00

"I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand, and was vexed. I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically without result. This made me so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted."

"I think they have been raised by wolves," I tell Mallory. It's as though this moment is their first brush with civilization. They obviously have never said the words "please" or "thank you". Sort of like Helen Keller without the blindness.

Facing thirty-two of them from the front of the room after the bell rings, I watch them wiggle, snarl, grab pencils from their neighbor and loudly scream "shut up!" I must be careful when I explain the next assignment, I tell myself. They may think I am taking their food.

A few are limping, accidents of running and tackling. A girl who is a flyer has her hand wrapped and sits quietly like a bird with a broken wing. Cast out of the pack, some have cut themselves, mistaking it for licking.

They mentally pace, fidgit, blurt, dart, desire, hunt, agitate, gravitate, arouse. Laughter ripples across the room, paper crinkles, the pencil sharpener hums, and I see that what I am after is before me.

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.”

(quotes by Helen Keller)

I've Got Your Back

2007-09-08T08:31:00.000-04:00

Week One:

Only four days into school, and all the teachers who gathered at the weekly watering hole agreed that it seemed a year already. "A four-day sauna!" I added. None of the rooms have air conditioning (except the administrative offices and library, which doesn't help teacher/admin relations during 90 degree days). But there was laughter, and commiseration and even some defining of terms for us by the health ed teacher. "By the way, what does "tea bagging mean," I ask? The kid who said it in my room today has already begun his wayward ways.

You learn all sorts of things in high school, sometimes the least being prescribed curriculum. The catty girls have their claws out. The footballers are proud and the outsiders come to my room after school for a photo shoot. The kids who feel they can't keep up academically defend themselves by being rude. Already some move toward trouble. I will arrange a montage of photos on my wall when I have time, of all the students, all mixed-up into one homogenious group. I can't seem to kick my egalitarian hopefulness. Call me naive.

Students tell other students that they are stupid, and say it was just a joke. Some are bold and brassy, pushing their weight around and demanding attention. Others sit quietly, watching. Kids who have never felt success in school fumble blindly toward a new beginning. A kid tells me that no one likes him.

I find myself standing at the front of the classroom looking out at all of them. "If someone is mean to you, I will stop it. I expect you to be kind to everyone and I want you to tell me if someone is not kind to you. In this room everyone is equal. I've got your back."

Nothing Special

2007-08-24T22:00:00.000-04:00

It seems that I have spent a lifetime trying to unlearn things that I have learned. At least I've done my best to unlearn my upbringing, the nurture part. The nature part (DNA) is a struggle, too. One recent development in my quest for unlearning is the realization that there is nothing special about me. I mean that not in a self-centered way, but pragmatically. There is not one thought or emotion or "reality" that I have experienced that someone else has not experienced before me. I'm sure that Mallory meant this knowledge to console me. Everyone goes through the same mental process after a divorce. Shouldn't that be comforting? I am not alone. What feels like unique pain is universal. We are all wired the same.

Population Clocks

U.S. 302,693,838

World 6,613,983,597

11:15 GMT (EST+5) Aug 25, 2007

There are 6,613,983,597 homo sapiens in the world, "bipedal primate mammals that are anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning, are usually considered to form a variable number of freely interbreeding races, and are the sole living representatives of the hominid family." ("Man", Websters Online)

We are big selfish mammals that take up a lot of room, eat too much, get fatter and fatter, dirty our nest, fight and kill each other for natural resources, multiply multiply multiply, and have inflated self-worth, believing we were created by God and chosen to have dominion over the earth.

Even Mother Theresa, who lived against most negative human tendencies, was not special. "My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains," she wrote in 1958. "[People] think that my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing, and that my intimacy with God and union with His will fill my heart. If only they knew." Later she went into more detail: "The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God, and that God does not exist." Il Segreto di Madre Teresa (Mother Teresa's Secret).

Mother Theresa realized that she was not special. Somehow I find that comforting.

I Will Never Learn To Obey

2007-08-14T08:56:00.000-04:00

Dolly hugged my arm as we walked around the lake on Sunday, every other step asking "Did you tell them I left,"or "Is it ok that we are walking so far?" and it hit me like a platitude that we had reversed roles. Everyone knows this eventually happens. We like to quote Ecclesiastes and sing our plaintive folk songs about "Turn Turn Turn"-ing. "To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose. A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to reap, a time to kill, a time to heal..."

If I were a geriatric Dolly and she were me, I'd like her to be the 10-year-old fearless me that explored the woods and caught frogs and hugged the wet dog that lumbered from the lake and shook a spray of muddy water over gleeful me. Or even the teenager who staggered in the house with Veronica at 3am, hidden beer bottles sliding from her jacket that rolled slowly across the living room floor as Dolly, who had waited up, stood watching in her bathrobe.

Dolly has become the obedient and "perfect child". Now that I am her mother, she does all the work for me. I don't have to worry about her wandering away from the assisted-living facility. She is a mother's dream. Funny, I used to try to get my kids to skip school, get a little wild. All were such disciplined athletes and smart people. None matched my reckless rebellion.

When I grow old and am unable to care for myself I must get myself to the wilderness, push myself off in a canoe, and drift away. Caring for an aging me would be unbearable, no doubt. I fear I will never learn to obey.

The Burden of Being Butterfly

2007-08-08T06:52:00.000-04:00

Being a new person isn't so easy, I've found. It's like losing weight. Easy going on, but long and hard coming off. I like to eat. I'm a lazy coward.

"I need an ambulance! I need an ambulance!" were the desperate words that awakened me with a shock in the night. Had I said them aloud, or were they a little secret tucked silently away in my mind?

Maybe I'm dying, I think (metaphorically, of course). Just when you realize you will never possess that which you desire (and in fact could care less), it's yours.

The burden of accomplishment. Getting. Possessing. Striving. Having a dream. Reaching a goal, running to the finish line, believing, achieving, actuating, high-five, riding-high, looking good, confident, proud, satisfied.

What a lot of distraction.

The Unrest of Late July

2007-07-31T07:08:00.000-04:00

The world is depressed here. The economy. And the hard cracked clay earth where nothing grows. The scratching of mice in walls, and squirrels break off oak twigs, scurrying up and down the big tree, this way and that, noisily dragging leaves. A quiet feeling of unrest is in the air these days.

The fair is gone. It brought color and motion and drew devouring crowds. We all say, every August, that it wasn't as good as last year. Something is missing.

Remember that really great ride? The one that blared music, and went ninety miles an hour, and if you sat on the outside of the car you'd get smashed, but I always forgot and sat on the outside anyway? You were so drunk you puked from the heights of the Loopo Plane as fountains of coins, glinting in the sunlight, sprinkled to the ground from our pockets. I fell in love with the rubber man, and the kid who owned the double ferris wheel gave you free rides. Remember? It was so much better then.

We carried Dolly's bag of caramel corn home, dutiful children. She loved the bingo tent and we walked through the 4H building, the automobile building, the floral building, under the grandstand, to the free tent where local talent played for an audience of farmers wearing bib overalls, leaning back in folding chairs. The Geritol Gang. Sherry's House of Dance. The Magic Show!

Tomorrow is August. Summer tilts and the school year scratches at my consciousness. I keep those thoughts at bay, but the sunlight in the yard, filtering through the morning glory vines is softly diffused. I can't take my eyes off it, me in my polarized amber sunglasses which transform the faded landscape into a vivid and rich wonderland, like photo editing software for reality. I head outside once again, banging the screen door behind me.

Sentimental Things

2007-07-26T09:43:00.000-04:00

I wish I'd known my father better. He was what my mother used to call "a kidder".

Georgia called it cruel, but I thought he was quite clever when he told us to "look at the stars" by gazing up at the window through a coat sleeve as he poured water from a glass down onto our faces. Georgia also holds a childhood grudge from an incident at a birthday party where my dad told her to make a wish and then pushed her face into the cake. Georgia is not what you would call a practical joker. Now, as an adult, I can see that we could have taken practical joking to new heights with my father.

Before holiday meals, the only meals that apparently were important enough, we said "Grace", and his standard prayer was this:

Bless your ears and bless your skin
Pull out your ears and jam it in
He would then glance at the faces of his three daughters, and he could always count on one of them for a laugh. Dolly, with a look of disapproval, laughed too.

Sometimes on thick hot summer nights when we fled to the backporch to escape the stifling house, he would sing his repotoire of strangely archaic songs. We would be wowed by his World War II medly, including You're in the Army Now and The Caissons Go Rolling Along, and he'd belt out a song from his high school years that went something like this:

Hail hail to *-**-** High
You bring the whisky, I'll bring the rye

Send those sophomores out for gin
And don't let a sober person in

We never stagger, we never fall
We sober up on wood alcohol

All the loyal faculty lies drunk on the ballroom floor
My personal favorite, one that I always joined my father singing in an appropriately plaintive and ironic manner was called Oh, How He Lied:

She sat on her bal-co-ny and smoked her cigar
Smoked her cigar
Smoked her cigar
She sat on her bal-co-ny and smoked her cigar
Oh, how she smoked her cigar

He sat down beside her and strummed his gui-tar
Strummed his gui-tar
Strummed his gui-tar
He sat down beside her and strummed his gui-tar
Oh, how he strummed his guitar

He told her he loved her but oh how he lied
Oh, how he lied
Oh, how he lied
He told her he loved her but oh how he lied
Oh, how he lied
In the remaining verses the couple get married but then she "up and dies". She goes to heaven and "flip-flop she flies" and he goes to hades and "frizzles and fries" (presumably because he lied).

Wonderful lowbrow silliness. It's an artform that takes a certain humility to appreciate. A cultural artifact from a time when people, without the luxury of air conditioning, all hung out on the porch and spent unhurried summer nights together.

Rings and Things and Buttons and Bows

2007-07-16T21:18:00.000-04:00

Dolly's rings, which I slipped from her fingers during a long-ago hospital MRI and later dropped into a cardboard box, were tossed to the back of the storage space at the head of my bed with other once-important stray buttons, and bows. Unbeknownst to me, my mother's jewelry has disquieted my sleep with its' demands and emotional reverberations all these weeks and months and now it seems like years. Time is so difficult to gauge, in these days.

Just yesterday, visiting Dolly at the retirement home, for effect I pulled the square box from my bag with a flourish, like a silk bouquet, and studied my mother's face as she lifted the cover and peered inside.

"Oh. My rings."

She worked them one-by-one onto the ring finger of her left hand. First the engagement diamond, reset into a wide gold band years ago on her 40th wedding anniversary after the original tiny ring had worn completely through. Then the ring that was a gift from her daughters, upon which were set the birthstones of Georgia, Willa and me, MJ. Finally the fragile sliver of gold that was her wedding ring. She studied her outstretched fingers, quickly pushed the rings off, and began working them back onto the same finger, but in different order. This time the birthstone ring went first, followed by the wedding band and then the diamond.

"I don't want these rings!" she raised her voice in irritation as she pulled two of them back over her knuckle. "I'll just keep one."

"Oh-KAY!" I said in fake surprise as the symbols of her marriage bounced againt the walls of the cardboard box.

Dolly stared at her hands again, held stiffly in front of her. Then she removed the birthstone ring and placed it with the other rings in the little box. "I don't want this one, either." She closed the box, and left it.

"That must feel good," I said, searching my mother's face for connections, "to be free of all that holding-on. To not worry about keeping track of stuff. Or people."

"That's the way it is now," said Dolly matter-of-factly. It seemed, for her, neither a burden nor a blessing, but just the way it is.

3 Basic Survival Skills

2007-06-29T09:38:00.000-04:00

Three things I find exciting this morning:

1. Looking forward to 10-days of beach-bumming with Veronica in Naples, Florida starting next Tuesday.

2. The smell of pineapple basil.

3. The conversation about NYC street art. Seeing people talk with passion about the philosophy of art is exhilerating.

Rich and Poor

2007-06-25T07:04:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting post on Boing Boing called "MySpace, Facebook mirror class divisions in US society", which cites a paper positing that "...well-to-do, stable American teens with "good prospects" end up on Facebook, while poor, queer, marginal and non-white teens end up on MySpace (even in the military, grunts are on MySpace and officers are on Facebook -- guess which one the military banned!)"

Belief in the myth of a classless society, where all people are equal, perpetuates the enormous gulf between rich and poor. Cruelty is woven into our way of life through a thousand little rationalizations. American civil religion, government, schools, and family structures, all maintain the status quo. The ways that we participate in our own oppression never cease to amaze me.

Bush's encouragement for us to go shopping after 9/11 brought us to the mirror, but we can't see ourselves. Rich or poor, we are all pawns in the global economy. As egocentric as we are, we will never be as important as money. We are disposable. The economy must keep growing at the expense of rich and poor. We elect politicians who will ensure our misery.

Slate magazine's book of the week is Rich and Poor, by Jim Goldberg.
"[His] photographs of rich and poor Americans in the late 1970s to mid-1980s, with the subjects' own handwritten comments about themselves on the prints, give us an inside look at the American dream at both ends of the social scale. His pictures reveal his subjects' fears and aspirations and their perceptions and illusions about themselves with a frankness that makes the portraits as engrossing as they are disturbing."(Slate)

SAN FRANCISCO—"I keep thinking where we went wrong. We have no one to talk to now, however, I will not allow this loneliness to destroy me—I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS. I would like an elegant home, a loving husband and the wealth I am used to," 1982.
© Jim Goldberg / Magnum Photos

Link: Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Danah Boyd, June 24, 2007

The One is You

2007-06-07T05:51:00.000-04:00

We should be worried about the US attacking Iran. The set-up has been in the works for years. There will be a terrorist attack on US soil that our government will quickly use as pretext to bomb the hell out of Iran. They've been itching to attack Iran. They won't stop. The democrats obviously can't stop them.

Have I been reading too much Fahrenheit 451 and watching too much of The Matrix? We are in a dream-state. What can awaken us to action?

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

Where is the grassroots movement which will rise up against our criminal government?

Camping

2007-05-29T05:00:00.000-04:00

No movies this weekend. Instead we enjoyed an enormous bonfire and later slept in a tent with walls billowing in cold May wind. Rising early, we rode our bikes through sand, wiped out gleefully, climbed dunes, waded and skipped stones in the surf, paddled kayaks, spent days wet and sunburned and sandy and nights exhausted, tucked deep inside sleeping bags, reading by candlelight.

The Crying Game

2007-05-24T05:47:00.000-04:00

Number one on my movie list for the weekend will be... The Crying Game.

Unfinished Heart

2007-05-21T04:30:00.000-04:00

I shouldn't be allowed to read. Progressing to page 116 of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, it has begun to sink in with some clarity that I am a weak human being, a pathetic character with few redeeming characteristics. Probably my best quality is my tendency to isolate myself, thereby sparing society the embarrassment of my presence. My thought processes are too close to Chip's for comfort.

"I'm saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed," Chip said. "I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define dertain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. And I'm saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant." (The Corrections)

In the real world I drove across the state to see Dolly yesterday, and after signing her out of the retirement home, swept her away for a couple of hours. ("Are you sure it's ok if I leave?" "Did you tell them I was leaving?")

We ate at a riverfront restaurant where everyone looked "familiar" to Dolly, as usual. "The people at that table over there look familiar," she said. "You always think people look familiar. You don't know them, Dolly," I reply. And let's face it, everyone in the midwest looks pasty and overweight. Later, as they were leaving the restaurant, the "familiar" people stopped to say "hello" to Dolly. It turns out they are old friends.

"That girl has a big butt and tight pants," said Dolly, observant as ever. I watch her study the faces at the surrounding tables. "Do you call Georgia and Willa," I ask? Dolly assures me that she doesn't call either of my sisters, but to make sure, I quickly quiz her. "What is Willa's speed-dial number? "I don't know!" exclaims Dolly. "What's Georgia's," I demand. "I don't know." Satisfied, I smile at her across the table.

"You're so pretty," Dolly says. "I think about you all the time."

Fast-Approaching Global Devastation and Total Chaos

2007-05-18T02:44:00.000-04:00

AJ seems to have had some sort of epiphany resulting from an Arctic Monkeys concert which totally changed her life. The magical night also produced a hangover that took a full two days from which to recuperate. I too need an epiphany, so I bought myself a fifth of Ketel 1 and a six pack of beer. Now I have a headache. It must be the weather, which if you follow the headlines, may be causing fast-approaching global devastation and total chaos.

Lately I tend to blame all the earth's ills on over-population. Sometimes I long for a world less populated. Don't you? We are big animals, like this gorilla, running amok over the earth. And when I see the Expedition Bhutan advertisement on the Discovery Channel, it makes me crazy. "No one has seen this sixteen miles of the river before." Who are they, Christopher-fucking-Columbus? Kiss Bhutan goodbye. Here come the gorillas to stomp your country into empty Western conformity.

Bhutan, to me, always represented the last holdout, the one place that wouldn't compromise itself, that declared the whole country a wildlife refuge, where "...the King said that "Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product."

What are you doing, Bhutan?!

Well, I'm gonna go ride my new mountain bike. "You can't be sad when you're riding a bike," I've heard.

It's All Right

2007-05-12T05:28:00.000-04:00

Like I said, my father was cast in the mold of John Wayne, and my mother was a person who put my father first in all situations. What John Wayne thought, Dolly thought. She believed in "love", the kind where you were "swept off your feet" by a knight in shining armour to wait on John Wayne happily-ever-after.

But now Dolly has Altzheimer's Disease, and John Wayne is hardly given a thought, lost in the everyday activities of the retirement center, which consist mainly of moving furniture around with another resident and looking at squirrels. But even more alarming for her youngest daughter, Dolly has also forgotten me!

This became clear a few days ago when Georgia called. "Guess where I am?! In Dolly's room!" Surprised that Georgia had come all the way from Oregon without telling me, she proceeded to explain how busy she's been because two of her employees quit and she's been working 14-hour days. Here's more of the conversation:

Georgia: "I didn't even tell Willa I was coming that long ago!"
MJ: (She told Willa she was coming?)
Georgia: "I should have told you I was coming!"
MJ: "That's OK. "
Georgia: "No it isn't."
MJ: "How do you think Dolly is?"
Georgia: "I think Dolly's short term memory is better! She calls me and tells me what she has been doing!"

MJ: "Dolly calls you in Oregon and tells you what she did that day?"

Georgia: "Yes! Doesn't she call you?"

MJ: "No. She has never called me. Not once."

Georgia: "Oh!"

Later, I tried to sort out the issues, the pain, and my response. "That's OK?" That's all I could say? Fuckin-A!

It's not OK, Georgia. It's not OK that you didn't tell me you were coming. I could have taken a day off to be with you. It's not OK that you told Willa you were coming and not me. And it's not OK that Dolly has forgotten me.

My family seems to have misplaced me. In all the chaos, I have disappeared.

Solitary Man II

2007-05-05T10:16:00.000-04:00

In an attempt to get out of my weekend rut, yesterday I avoided the microbrewery and went directly home to movies influenced by Jonathan Lethem, violence, solitary men and dystopian dreams:

1. The Searchers. I'm sure my father based his identity on John Wayne's portrayals of men in isolation. Wayne's role in The Searchers is "...the definitive role for John Wayne as an icon of the classic Western--the hero (or antihero) who must stand alone according to the unwritten code of the West." -Jeff Shannon

My identity (and the identity of all women in the US) has been indirectly shaped by these portrayals of "real" men. I'm still working my way through the great commentary by Peter Bogdanovich.

2. The Warriors. All of the gangs in NYC come together under a temporary truce for a meeting in the Bronx. After the gathering goes bad, The Warriors make their way south through the streets and subways of the city, facing rival gangs along the way to get back to their turf, the shores of Coney Island.

Hilarious gang apparel (a gang dressed as mimes?) make for some memorable movie-watching, and I love the New York City stage.

3. V for Vendetta. A man in a mask who blows stuff up because of deeply-held political belief and a painful past and who recites Shakespeare? "Real" women who are highly conflicted have gotta want that. (This seems dangerously close to The Phantom for comfort, however.)

4. & 5. Mad Max and The Road Warrior. Cars. Motorcycles. Recklessness. Fearlessness. Lunacy. Cruelty. Gasoline shortages. Real Americana.

"Just one man can make a difference."

Solitary Man

2007-04-29T08:25:00.000-04:00

My weekends have fallen into familiar routine which consists of the following: stop at the local microbrewery with colleagues after work on Friday (although I think the word "colleagues" is generally used to elevate the estimation of stupid jobs, like mine) followed by a couple of days spent sleeping late, sitting in bed even later with my laptop, leaving the curtains closed until noon, experiencing some irritation at the sound of lawnmowers, wishing I had a dog so I'd get more exercise, renting movies, drinking vodka and soda with lemon in the evenings, waking up in the middle of the night to spend time with Jonathan Lethem, rummaging through cupboards searching for stuff to eat so as to avoid shopping, and actively maneuvering around any thought processes which might lead to student loans, home repair or my lack of meaningful relationships.

This weekend I mixed it up a little. Yesterday I went to the theater to see Reign Over Me, with Adam Sandler, who incidentally, looks really sexy with Bob Dylan hair.

He plays a dentist who falls apart after losing his wife and kids (and dog) on 9/11. He reconnects with his college roommate and through their friendship both find ways to begin living again. This is all very hopeful, being a person who is highly attuned to paradigms for new beginnings, if the path to living again for Adam Sandler's character hadn't been a supermodel. The inclusion of her character as a potential future relationship bummed me out. Why not leave him alone, but healing, at the end? Why does his future need to be redeemed through another relationship with a woman, in particular a supermodel?

Being a couple is easier. Conventional relationships make us part of the club. We are "normal" and fit in nicely at social events. Alone, we become outsiders, trouble, hard to categorize. Did Adam Sandler become "normal" in the end? I liked him better crazy!

All this thought of plastination and viruses lately. How does it all fit in? Maybe it doesn't. Maybe the connections never will be made. Perhaps all of my training and socialization is finally draining, like blood, and a new cyborg will walk away. Alone.

A New Frontier

2007-04-28T09:04:00.000-04:00

I finished reading Girl in Landscape sometime in the night, a fitting time to be reading it, I think. Another "simple" little gem, just the kind I love. I appreciated the genre-bending, the sexual tension, the classic Western elements, the feeling of stepping into the "invisible" role of anthropologist to study human behavior on a new frontier.

I spent a week in NYC during spring break, a lot of it at the Thompkins Square dog run with Huck and Pip's dogs, which also was a study of human behavior on a new frontier. That's the week AJ and I went to Bodies... The Exhibition. I neglected to add in my post about that excursion, which looking back on it seemed to be fixated on the penis, made AJ sick. She was ready to leave after about a half-hour. For me it did the usual, plummet me into an existential crisis. At one point I also experienced some irritation at the damn plastinated basketball player, but who knows where that reaction came from. So much for our grasp of educational opportunities. The conflict of intended and unintended curriculum.

One scenario I like to toy with periodically, and which also connects with the Lethem book, is this: If you were one of a small group of people left on earth after an apocalyptic event, what skills would you bring to the group? What role would you have in the community?

What I have come to realize is that I would like to be one of those guys in Road Warrior who can jerry-rig vehicles, think on their feet and use what's available to survive. But in reality, if it were up to me to carry the new society forward, we would be doomed. Hell, I would have trouble recreating the wheel. Let's face it. And fire starting? Forget it. Practicality has never been a strong point. And I'm not so sure the community would be so supportive of "the entertainer", "the artist", "the philosopher", or "the comedian".

So after I got back from NYC I got sick, another of the plagues which run rampant through institutional spaces, like the one where I work. I was flat in bed for 36 hours, and it turned out to be an upper respiratory virus, the cough of which, the doctor said can last weeks after the other symptoms are gone. Something to look forward to.

So I'm thinking about getting a dog. I have avoided it because I don't want to be tied-down, I don't know if I am a dog-person, I doubt I'm responsible enough to have a dog, along with a myriad of other reasons. I went in my virus-weakened state to the humane society a few days ago and checked out the dogs, and I found some of them quite irritating. Is that a bad sign? I think if I were living in a post-apocalyptic society, a dog would be great. A working dog.

I have a copy of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, but I want to spend a little more time in my head with Girl in Landscape. What I really want to read is this:

Flesh and Bone

2007-04-15T08:57:00.000-04:00

AJ and I attended "Bodies... The Exhibition" the other day. Here are some thoughts:

Most of the bodies on exhibition are male, which created a bizarre "hanging penis effect" that everyone was tactfully avoiding. I guess it had something to do with the placement of the testicles. Who knew?! Somehow the "scientific" nature of the presentation lent the male nudity respectibility, so I can't count it as exploitation. (I am always on the lookout for more male nudity as a signpost of equality.) On the other hand, this may be exploitation of another kind:

While the exhibit's representatives claim that all of the bodies were obtained through the Dalian Medical University Plastination Laboratories in China, human rights campaigners point out that Dalian University "[has] had been previously implicated in the use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes".[1] If the bodies are those Chinese prisoners whose bodies were used without their consent, it may be a violation of human rights and of Chinese law. (Wikipedia)

But they are only bodies, flesh and bone made into life-sized, primary-colored key rings. Cotton candy circulatory systems, underwater life, bizarre sea creatures with huge human eyeballs.

AJ found the fetus exhibit the most interesting. A woman with the front of her body sliced off to reveal a fetus curled inside. I remember long ago in Guanajuato, seeing the mummified remains of women and babies who had been exhumed because of unpaid cemetary taxes. There's some sort of corellary here.

We are born into this body and then we die, and between those points we cause so much commotion! But in the end it's just flesh and bone.

Nothing Heroic

2007-04-01T07:09:00.000-04:00

Rain drummed on my roof as on steel, and I awoke to the sight of a dog on my bed. Thought I. The world is overpopulated. With sameness. Just like beasts of burden, like slaves we shop. Our matter-of-fact and well-equipped appearance against the muddy ochre walls of a crowded mall. The trotting step, round. And round.

A battalion from the Somme marches up with music, an overwhelming sight. Everything yellow with mud. The unmilitary, matter-of-fact appearance, the steel helmets, the equipment. The trotting step. Nothing heroic, just like beasts of burden, like slaves. Against a background of circus music. - Paul Klee, diary entry, 6th December, 1916

This Is Not The Landmass

2007-03-24T06:56:00.000-04:00

This is not the landmass
for which I seek

toss a coin
walk a thousand miles
bloody footprints in snow
scattered petals fluttered
balmy beaches glowing
man-o-war
descending rain of gold

Thunder follows
all I passed through
to find you

Love Poem

2007-03-11T11:39:00.000-04:00

Waking up with feelings of dread
I wondered where I had left you
(and that old Cinderella watch, very pink, with very bouffant hair, I might add)

You once held my face
in your hands
My long hair a waterfall around us
where we climbed to your mountain home

Now I wonder if it isn't my hair, ultimately
that determines which road I travel

Robert Frost be damned.
I have misplaced my best barrettes,
hairpins scattered on a dusty palace floor,
the aroma of twenty-five pure flower and plant essences
never leave me

A Well-Defined Life

2007-02-24T08:26:00.000-05:00

The audience that Richie Havens looked out on at his concert last night resembled the crowd at Woodstock in this video. But now the white kids are old and sat respectfully in their seats. No unexpected art-happening, no bonding in wild brotherhood or free love or dancing in the aisles. Not anymore.

Every one has their life defined. How did I be(come) so out of step? Where are my unruly people? They were here a moment ago, and in an instant I would have left, tonight, on their caravan.

But there are no caravans. They became cubicles.

And within these well-defined spaces we no longer believe in ourselves. We can't protect the environment because it would hurt the economy. We can't stop the war because it would embolden the "enemy". We can't help it if the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. It is beyond us. We haven't the memory. We haven't the capacity.

Our imagination has been misplaced. We sit in the audience respectfully.

Very Good Friends

2007-02-20T19:49:00.000-05:00

Long ago there was a streetlight that peeked above the trees outside Little Bunny's window. Needless to say, the constant light and Little Bunny were very good friends.

Little Bunny often wondered about the little light, how it found her, how it was so beautiful, how it had become such a good friend.

But the beauty of the light, which she went to like a moth to flame, was inexplicable. Pure love, deep color, mixed with the taste of cookies baking. Her hand stretched toward it, long fingers of desire, between.

Once, Little Bunny thought she saw the flickering light laugh. But of course, lights don't laugh. And Bunny turned away, fortifying herself. "I love you," she said.

Of course, no one heard. No one but Little Bunny knew what being alone really meant. So she sang a little song. Bunny danced a little dance.

And the street light, while far away it seemed now, glowed it's warm glow and lent it's familiar light and spent the night, like marshmallows on a stick in the hand of a little girl, at the window of Little Bunny.

Brave New Worlds

2007-02-16T05:54:00.000-05:00

I have acquired a passion for chocolate recently, which seems kinda strange, as I've never been one of those people who craves chocolate. It must have something to do with the drugs ... caffeine, or maybe it's the released endorphins or something. Probably I have brain damage that caused extreme personality changes.

AJ claims I always go toward worst-case scenarios first. For example, on Grammy night when she messaged me that Wyclef looked horrible, I immediately declared that he was likely infected with the AIDS virus. This seemed reasonable to me, but obviously hysterical to AJ. "Hahahahaha! I doubt wyclef has aids mom. Maybe he didn't get a lot of sleep." Since then I have begun receiving text messages along these lines: "I had bags under my eyes when I woke up. I think I might have aids."

I heard a story on the radio, told by a woman whose mother had a stroke which caused her personality to reverse from introverted and conservative to wild and crazy. The daughter was appalled when her mother began a habit of loudly singing in public, which she had never done before, talking to strangers and generally living her life in an entirely new and outrageous, for her, way.

Isn't that interesting? It reminds me of people who go to extremes to experience reality in new ways, like trepanation. It also brings Dolly to mind, who, after recovering from a stroke, refuses to wear a bra. And, with the effects of Alzheimers, has become a totally new person.

We are so sure that things don't change, that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks," but that's just social conditioning. Everything is changing. My personality. Your view of the world. The way we see, our thoughts and how we process them... our ability to hold on to "the way things are."

I'm trying to experience fully the act of "letting go". And if that includes chocolate, so be it. I can handle it.

Strangely Undefined

2007-02-11T07:02:00.000-05:00

Life seems strangely undefined, and all the ordinary days, which once were extraordinary, disappear and reappear as one with all other days. All the champagne, glittering crystal, laughter-with-head-tipped-back, long-slender-hands-nervously-fingering-pearl-necklaces are nothing but goulash and red raw skin. A kid walks to school on gray pavement in winter. Do you want a hunk of bologna? A fart is only a whiff of heaven here. Delicate delicious decadent, you are all that's left of me. I give.

What Art Can Do

2007-02-04T07:51:00.000-05:00

Isn't it funny, how art becomes a signpost of home? Paradoxically, it allows us to leave home. Seeing familiar forms planted in another geographical location provides an instant psychological connection. We live among giant shapes that direct us without our knowledge.

Our vision is changed. We have seen in new ways. We will never go back. This is what art can do.

Small people seek to destroy it.

Thoughts of Interference

2007-01-28T07:36:00.000-05:00

I saw Pan's Labyrinth yesterday and liked it a lot. I agree with Jim Emerson, who wrote in a review in the Chicago Sun Times that the movie is, "...a fairy tale of such potency and awesome beauty that it reconnects the adult imagination to the primal thrill and horror of the stories that held us spellbound as children." It really does bring back that anomalous space in childhood, where we exist on the fringes of reality and fantasy, a world full of magic, beauty and potent horror and taboo.

The film's grounding in postwar repression of Franco's Spain in the 1940's reminded me again how we make sense of life and death and all that happens in between, through myth, fairy tales, the entering of that space that has no basis in "reality". We long for life to have meaning.

When I was very young I had a recurring dream where I entered a maze. (I didn't know then that there was such a thing as a labyrinth, or that a maze and a labyrinth are very different.) The dream took place in the woods off a dirt road near our family cabin in the north country, where I was presented a skeleton key by a sly fox. The fox would allow me to attempt to escape from the maze, which was full of locked doors, and perhaps find my way home again, but with the knowledge that I would be relentlessly hunted during this trial by the fox himself. I felt panic, excitement, and the realization that I may "lose," but enchantment invaded the dream to such a degree that I was taken.

As a girl I also believed in fairies, and spent hours rowing the reedy banks of the northern lake observing their mysterious nest-like hiding places. The black and white of life, even in childhood, sometimes demands extreme imagination.

And now, as adults, by what myths do we live? How do we keep the mundane at bay? Do we pursue a soldier's death followed by a hero's ascent to heaven? How do we process a president who tells us to go out shopping and spend money when we face crisis and long for meaning? How can we react authentically when we live in a real maze of illusions, with manufactured wars, the vision of utopia, the juxtaposition of a childlike patriotism and belief in democracy with nightmare visions of Abu Graib?

Can we be redeemed through death? Will we sit at the right hand of our "father" at the end of our story? Will we be rewarded for all of our purchases? Is Paris Hilton the most googled celebrity? Can we muddy our new patent leather shoes while chasing meaning for a bleak existence? Shall we interfere with violence?

I hate school

2007-01-23T07:17:00.000-05:00

Well, I finally got it. The flu that is. Some sort of plague is continually spreading like wildfire through the high school building where I work. Public school buildings are perfect for spreading sickness.

It's like "they" said, "Hmmm. Let's see. How can we spread infectious disease the fastest? I've got it! Let's put all young people in the country in huge energy-inefficient buildings without much ventilation! What else? Let's fill them with the fear of God about absences, like they won't graduate if they have too many, so they come to school even when they are really sick!"

So yesterday I crawled into bed at 4:30pm with a glass of wine (the perfect medicine for many, many ailments, I believe) and a bottle of NyQuil (also a near-perfect remedy, I have found, ~~for many things~~ for colds and flu). I drifted off to sleep watching episodes of The Office, which I had downloaded to my laptop, and awoke in the dark drooling on my pillow.

Lovely. Really. I would much rather be slightly sick here in my bed than there. What a hellish week this is, with finals on Thursday and Friday. Here "they" go again. Another brilliant plan. "Ok people. Focus. How can we ensure that our students are as miserable and stressed-out as possible? Hmmm... I know! I know! Let's have final exams count for 20% of their grade!"

I hate school.

The Stiff And Unbending Is The Disciple Of Death

2007-01-20T07:33:00.000-05:00

Seventy-six

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.

The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

- Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Our president's continuing rigidity is pathetic if not psychopathological. His pseudo-macho attempts to act "strong" are like watching a troubled child on the playground. His administration's lies and deceit have rendered him mute. I can't listen to his voice. Unfortunately he is still The Decider, apparently, and even though the democrats have made some encouraging moves, the troop "surge", war with Iran, and who-knows-what with Syria are surely already set in motion.

A 56 year-old teacher at my school (Army Reserve) was just called up and leaves Monday. He says he knows a 58 year-old infantryman who is on the ground in Bagdad. A couple of my at-risk students have been sporting US Marine t-shirts, lately. They're trying like hell to graduate so they can join, be strong, belong.

Winter Slap, Red Skin

2007-01-15T06:08:00.000-05:00

Freezing rain slaps the window and I dream of power lines weighed down above me. Eyes closed, I hear the redbud softly groan in the backyard and gently lie down. Seduction. Snow breaks like glass under red feet. Have you run barefoot in the snow? It doesn't hurt. Spots of blood dot the frigid landscape. Take off your clothes. Can you see? Once in the moonlight I watched a snaking power line crackle and spark on a wet deserted street. Ancient tree branches creaked and splintered clear pure ice. These days you stomp past the house with outstretched mittened hand, snapping icicles in loud torrential cascades.

"Fear is the Path to the Dark Side"

2007-01-01T08:34:00.000-05:00

After spending approximately five hours last night watching Everest on the Discovery Channel, I awoke this morning with thoughts of the British climber David Sharp, who lay freezing to death as approximately forty hikers passed by him, ascending and descending. He now lies in the rock cave next to a dead Indian climber, a place which could represent the yin of the mountain, the shady place, the north slope of the hill, the death zone. But yin and yang exist together on the mountain, moving together, containing traces of the other, demanding balance, juggling life and death. You'll hear no judgement from me, no "they should have done more to save him". His was a good death.

Much more troublesome are the 3000 US military deaths in Iraq. Our leaders have fed us with fear and led us into dark places.

Moody and determined to find ways to bring my unruly thoughts into balance, this morning I googled the word "overthinker", and share here part of of a nice little post I found:

The shihans at the aikido summer camp last week emphasized the ultimately “soft” nature of budo. They don’t mean lazy-soft but agile-soft, water-soft, receptive-soft, light-hearted-soft, and of course compassionate-soft. And then they throw some guy twice their size and half their age across the room to demonstrate.

It’s one of ‘em paradox things, I reckon: the idea is to be stone or water as appropriate, but with training I think you wind up being both at the same time. Know the yang but live in the yin, I think the Taoist saying went.

And then there’s this spirit thing they spoke of. It’s one of those things I think I see and understand to some extent, but typically can’t reproduce, myself.

In my own training I’m experimenting more with that lately: soft and receptive, light-hearted. It’s maybe not always appropriate to turn training into play, but it seems to work well for me. If nothing else it’s a lot more fun. The overthinker’s curse attempts to strengthen itself with failure, and this strategy sort of un-defines failure. If it’s all play, it doesn’t matter whether something “works” or not. There is no success or failure, there is only relationship.

My desire for 2007 is to stop overthinking, thereby strengthening myself with failure. To live more in the process, unafraid of death and unafraid to live and love along the way. To find balance through a soft nature, not "lazy-soft but agile-soft, water-soft, receptive-soft, light-hearted soft, and of course, compassionate-soft." To find balance through play.

Riding Down Fifth Avenue

2006-12-30T10:51:00.000-05:00

Born to Be Beach Bums

2006-12-23T05:26:00.000-05:00

As usual, the holiday break has come in the nick of time. Total insanity was narrowly averted once again as all of the teachers crawled to the finish line, panting.

Tonight I head to Florida to visit Veronica for four days, and it will be good to leave this bleak northern town.

The ocean calls. White sand. Dolphins. Beach umbrellas flutter in the warm wind. Looking out on the green water, I will be reminded that our destiny, entwined as it is, was decided long ago. We were born to be beach bums!

C'mon. Let's Walk on the Grass, Kids

2006-12-16T09:09:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Beep! Beep! It's Me!

King Kong Santas

2006-12-16T07:18:00.000-05:00

All things careen toward the holidays, toward that point where we must quickly jump on and catch the ride. The neighborhoods are awash with blow-up Santa's slowly rising up and out of bulging chimneys and tipsy toyland merry-go-rounds circling slowly behind transparent plastic. On my way to work I pass deflated Grinches (the handiwork of bored teenagers) and enormous top-heavy King Kong Santas weaving to and fro in the cold morning air, dwarfing the tiny houses in dark midwest lawns.

Bigger is better, of course. Especially if it's plastic. Yesterday, driving to work in the dark, I was reminded of the The Buddhas of Bamyan, two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved during the 6th century into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan.They were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

And now midwestern sons and daughters, raised in these tiny houses surrounded by the garish plastic monoliths of their religion, are in Iraq. Recruiters have been given unprecedented access to high school students through provisions of No Child Left Behind, and these rural poor kids, raised with "Support Our Troops" ribbons on their cars and "patriotism = support the war" mentality, think the military is a way to solve their life.

The Buddha said everything is impermanent. We can destroy, we can sacrifice our statues, our King Kong Santa's, our sons and daughters, but love will startle our worst intentions. Won't it?

If Wishes Were Horses Then Beggars Would Ride

2006-12-13T04:38:00.000-05:00

I wish I could see Lou Reed perform “Berlin,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

or magically have the hot water heater work again,

or Dolly be Dolly

once again,

my head on the lap of the universe

ease me down

to you

polaroid picture of you

2006-12-10T08:29:00.000-05:00

i am lost again
goin round again
to a polaroid picture
of you
caught in the instant
you said my name

lost again
spinnin round again
goin down again
i say your name
i say your name
i say your name

early morning photo shoot

2006-12-03T10:32:00.001-05:00

Remnants for the Future

2006-11-30T04:50:00.000-05:00

"A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait." - Theodore Roethke

Last night while watching the second season of Northern Exposure, I began suddenly to cry. 'What is going on,' thought I. 'Aren't I perfectly happy? I have a house to go in from the cold. I have money with which to buy food. I am stong and of a sound mind. So why then am I experiencing sudden sad, intensely painful, yet sweet feelings?'

"The TV screen is blank. Vikorn is looking at me with an expression of almost academic - and drunken - curiosity. 'My brother talked about you and Pichai quite a lot. He said you were both very talented in different ways. He said your problem was your total lack of identity. You can be anyone your like, literally, but only for short periods of time. Who were you just then, the victim?"

'I was distracted,' said I, 'studying Chris.' I observe how his lips curve up at the corner, making him appear perpetually happy. It is as simple as the luck of the genetic draw. People have always told me to "smile". If I had been born with different lips, my life would be totally different. And if I had given (after all, why are we here?), truly given, I would be dead. And free. Wouldn't I have reached our common destination? The tie that binds. The reason for everything that happens in between. There are no strangers.

"The fact that we don't know this man isn't important, really, because his experience is our experience, and his fate, up here, is our fate. 'Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas,' says the preacher. All is vanity. I think that's a pretty good epitaph for all of us. When we are stripped of all our earthly possessions, and all our fame, and family, and friends, we all face death alone. But it's that solitude in death that's our common bond in life. I know it's ironic, but it's just the way things are. 'Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.' Only when we understand all is vanity, only then it isn't."

And so we spoke the language of 'yes'.

Merit Lost in the Be Here Now

2006-11-26T08:01:00.001-05:00

The last day is already gone, she said, all eaten up by cannibals of thought. Fear of death holds us down, screams HOLLER UNCLE! I once saw a woman with rubber skin, the only person to be truly happy and released from expectations. Her own. I watched her carefully from under the tent. And Ch'an Master Sheng Yen sat rapping.

Whatever you are doing, just do it.
Do not concern yourself with the approval or disapproval of others.
Do not think about whether you look like a fool or not.
People waste so much time and energy trying to impress or take advantage of others........ If in your mind you are clearly aware of what is happening around you or to you, then it does not matter what others perceive or believe. You may appear to be foolish or gullible to others, but in your mind you know you are not.

So I kept on truckin. Moving down the sidewalk I saw vagabonds and whores, sons of bitches, they took me down and kissed me in all the right places while I meowed like a cat in my past life. Getting up slowly and assessing the damage, which may be great, my desire to be human lessened. The bodies of the arhats passed by me like horizontal rain and I, dripping with desire, heard them rapping.

So come on baby let me show you how
The less you know the more I comprehend
You don't have to drag me down
I descend

File Sharing

2006-11-25T07:54:00.000-05:00

When you die your blog will float weightlessly in the worldwide web (forever) until one day it will catch the eye of a small girl wearing decaying animal skin found in a desert near what was once a house where she lived (long ago) now.

Plucking it out of the air like a coke bottle, it becomes desire, she calls it mother, takes it to bed (far away) and keeps it warm and safe under her clothes until the orange sun threatens exposure. Then she tunnels under around over, winding, circling, crawling, flatout bending gasping until she emerges in a room.

One tiny room, where your blog is disassembled, sampled, studied, combined, merged and fitted tightly to an age-old movie reel found in a seedy basement apartment. Add video, add audio, mix in some documentary footage and reality programming, some news footage of the world ending the world ending the world ending the world ending and you will be the last installation (loop it), the last music video on MTV (for a start).

"Waiting is difficult only for those beset by the delusion of time."

2006-11-24T07:44:00.000-05:00

I moved Dolly into a new place, out of the rehab ward into assisted living. The facility is smaller and is located on a lake with a beautiful bay window view from her room of trees and a walking trail. Soon we were sitting in the commons with ten other residents, all with "assorted quirks in their heads", as one old man put it, and I listened to the conversation go round and round to the exact same statements met with the exact same surprised responses over and over again. Dolly remarked on the scent of the roses in the centerpiece. Where are you from? What did you do there? When were you born? Each time was a revelation.

Dolly wanted me to spend the night, but I left, excusing myself with the thought that she would acclimate more quickly if I was out of sight. Lately she has the idea that she is going home. At the rehab facility, she packed her belongings, which now fit easily into a large basket, and told her fellow hallmates "goodbye". For several days they have been agitated with the desire to go home, all of them, and asked Dolly every few minutes, "When are you going home?" They would then declare, "I want to go home!"

I suppose Dolly will begin wearing a bra again. At her new home people are snappily dressed and proud. Dolly had begun to sink into that hole where the desperate man in the wheelchair, sitting alone at the dining room table calling for "chicken pot roast" for an eternity, resides. She flashed me one day when I asked if she was wearing a bra. Pulling her stretchy shirt over her head, she said, "No! See?" In spite of being slightly mortified, I was delighted. Dolly, liberated at last! Or was she simply growing slovenly from spending time with people who were institutionally insane? Would she soon be yelling out demands from her room for turkey ice cream and quietly shedding her clothes in public?

Last night I saw the new James Bond movie, which seemed to go on endlessly, like some fast-moving loop of super-human feats of strength mixed with what could be called sociopathic romance, I guess. I don't know what the movie was about, but moment by moment I enjoyed the colors and shapes. Later I went to bed and read a bit of Bankok 8. It seemed so familiar, and soon it became apparent that I was reading a paragraph that I had previously read. Last night? Last week? It doesn't matter. I enjoyed it all over again. It seemed utterly new and perfect. Like a revelation.

"And then, of course, there are my almost nightly conferences with my dead soul partner, which I've not told you about. These days, apparently, he is not in the least interested in matters arising from the destruction of his chemical body, which, on reflection, he is glad to be rid of. There are plenty of ways of getting in touch, he tells me mysteriously while we share the twilight zone between waking and sleeping."

Again.

Icy Future

2006-11-20T08:19:00.000-05:00

We have arrived at Thanksgiving in a whirlwind. No time to rest or reconsider our destination, our eyes have become canny tools of quick-search and avoidance. Dizzy from movement, we head out for a walk. Is it still summer, wishful thinker? Or does this brisk air harbor undertones of an icy future? Hugging your blanket around your neck, I red-handedly light fire, say "Isn't this exhilerating?!", bring water to a boil, check your feet for frostbite.

New Language

2006-11-04T07:01:00.000-05:00

I sped over to see Dolly, who now lives twice as far away, about 80 miles, after work yesterday . I found her sitting in her room. Just sitting. No TV turned on, no stimulation whatsoever. She was glad to see "me", or rather she was glad to see "Georgia". She introduced me as "Georgia" at dinner.

The hall is set up so the residents' rooms are circled around a big open area where they all gather for meals (at like, 4:30pm). The women at Dolly's table are Jean, (who actually lived in the same town as Dolly!) and who really likes to talk about the orchard they used to own... Loudly. She is a no-nonsense midwest farm woman, with thick ankles and support hose. You know the kind. She also wears socks on her arms, with cutouts for her fingers and thumbs. I can already tell she is a mix of obligatory politeness ("The food is good here." "I felt at home right away.") and disgruntledness ("Is somebody coming to get me?!" "I've been waiting a long time.") One thing I like about her: When she tells stories about her husband, they always call each other "babe". One anecdote went something like this: "My husband said, "You're going to go to the beauty parlor every month. That's your wedding present, Babe. I get a haircut every month. Why shouldn't you go to the beauty parlor every month?" Jean, it has already become apparent, can be dominant. During my first visit she invited us to visit her room, straight across from Dolly's, to "see her dollhouse and photos"(!). After we weaseled out (Dolly and Pip and I went off to explore the building instead) she sat in her doorway and stared into Dolly' s room for some time.

There is a quite large and sober woman named Georgia who likes ice cream. She has gotten ice cream both times I have joined the group for dinner. She is a non-participant, but yesterday she became active when Grace, who is 102 years old, dribbled some baked beans down her chin. "She has food on her chin!" said Georgia forcefully. "I guess I'm the only one who noticed that!" Grace's beautiful young granddaughter, who was visiting from Toronto and had, I'm sure, already noticed and dismissed as unimportant the food dribble, dutifully wiped it clean. Grace is totally deaf. Like a petite little sprite, she sits at the table completely isolated from the other women because she can't hear them. She usually keeps her eyes down, but when she does connect with you, she is sweet and apologetic. "I won't be joining in the conversation because I can't hear!" Dolly, who can't remember from one moment to the next, keeps trying to ask her things, like "You didn't want your jello?" She interprets Grace's lack of jello-appetite and informs Georgia, "It must be all the excitement of having company."

There are a couple of old men in Dolly's hall, but they seem particularly "out of it", or maybe retirement communities are the one place in the world where women really dominate. One of the men has startlingly beautiful blue eyes, with which he makes contact with mine each time I pass. I have never heard him say a word. The other wears big thick glasses and is constantly slumped down in a wheelchair. He stayed in the common area for at least an hour after dinner yesterday calling loudly, "Bring me some chicken pot roast! I want some chicken pot roast!" We were in her room playing solitaire, which turned into a fiasco. I guess Dolly isn't ready for numbers yet, or cards, either. She still has a lot of trouble reading her watch. And while I'm at it, she has no idea what the cord with the red button is for, no matter how many times we remind her that it is for calling the nurse! The game of solitaire became simply an exercise of placing red and black cards in the right sequence on the stack, which was fun in itself. We cheered when all the cards were in four piles as the gruff voice demanded from the other room, "Where did you put the chicken pot roast?"

Dolly and I walked down the hall a couple of times and it was obvious she is much stronger. When we got back to her room she was tired and I was ready to leave (even though she said sadly, "Can't you spend the night?"). The voice outside her door had left chicken pot roast behind and begun its' nighttime call. "Come get me! Somebody come get me!"

Listening intently, Dolly and I began to giggle, and she quipped, "Yes! Please come get him!" But his demands echoed down the quiet hallway, past the elevator and the nurses' station and into the night. "Come get me! Come and get me!"

What's Important

2006-11-03T05:30:00.000-05:00

Georgia is flying in tomorrow from Oregon to spend a week with Dolly. Her daughter Pip has been visiting Dolly every day since she was moved from the hospital back to the retirement community, (which is what "they" call it). Pip and I took Dolly for a wheelchair ride around the place, and it is more like a college dormitory/swanky European hotel. Dolly wasn't all that interested in the pool when we reached the lower levels, but Blue and Pip and I want to jump in the beautiful blue water and do water aerobics! Three times a week!

Georgia and Willa's daughters, Pip and Blue, have been so capable and competent during Dolly's health crisis. Blue is the organizer, with notebooks and file folders and questions for the doctor. And Pip's no-nonsense get-in-up-to-your-elbows style is great. She gets close to Dolly, and isn't afraid to interact with this new person.

The next week will be busy. Grades are due, it is the end of the 1st quarter already, and next week are the dreaded P/T Conferences, of which I have written horror stories in the past. In the past. Now is the present, and I don't want to miss it.

Completely Free

2006-11-01T19:40:00.000-05:00

It is amazing what people don't notice. For instance. I have skipped out of the past three staff meetings . It makes me wonder. Could I miss every staff meeting this year.... and, therefore, be completely free? People are busy. There is a lot that they would rather not see.

Dolly had a stroke on Sunday. This was after I took her to the emergency room Saturday because she had trouble breathing. They said she had heart failure and pneumonia. Spending the night in the hospital with buzzers and blinking lights brings some sort of jagged comfort, I suppose. The neurologist held up a package of crackers and asked Dolly what it was. She said, "Potato."

Now Dolly is at the "Retirement Community," doing intensive physical, occupational and speech therapy. Fuckin-A. This cycle of life and death is a mother-fucker. Isn't it?

What Dolly Carries

2006-10-22T06:58:00.000-04:00

It has been gradually dawning on me that I should do the complete opposite of whatever I think I should do. The "alzheimer authority" at the home where Dolly may soon be living says, "Don't expect Dolly to be the same person you have known from the past. Get to know this new person and enjoy time spent with her. There will be happiness there." So I am determined to just "roll with Dolly", this "new" Dolly, wherever she goes. Wherever she leads.

Yesterday I picked her up and we drove to a nearby town where we enjoyed lunch in a nice restaurant by the river. Dolly wanted a glass of wine, and she loved the good food and ambience. She carried the remains of her dinner with her to the river, where we watched ducks quacking and swimming below. Reflections of fall trees moved in the cold water, Dolly's cheeks were rosy from the chilly air and we walked arm-in-arm to the car, studying the stuffed scarecrows hanging from every lamppost along the way. "This one is fat," said Dolly. "What did they do to that one?" Two scarecrows, taken from the posts and arranged horizontally atop a fence in a passionate leggy embrace, made us laugh. "What day is it," Dolly asks. "When is Halloween?"

The backway home took us down narrow dirt roads with a canopy of leaves overhead. The landscape was dotted with burning red bushes and swept into a flurry of constant change with wind, rain and bursts of warm sunshine. Slowly passing a brown field dotted with orange pumpkins, Dolly said, "Let's buy ten!" So we, standing out in the muddy field, chose "this one because it is bumpy", and "that one because it is strange looking, isn't it?" I drop our bills in the self-pay box as frail Dolly treks back to the car carrying a beautifully imperfect and dirty one.

"What day is it," Dolly asks again. Almost home, we drive once more through the county park, searching for the very place where she first saw my dad, sitting in the branches of a tree when they were 15 years old. All the jack-o-lanterns, all the pumpkin pies, all the indian corn and popcorn balls. All the pheasants that my father shot and I watched my mother gut. All the football games and hot cider and apples from the orchard north of town. All the chrysanthemums by the steps. Hot chocolate. Mitten weather. Warm house and steamy windows.

Back in her livingroom she puts on a headband with cat ears that Blue found in her closet the other day. "When is Halloween," asks Dolly. I tell her she looks beautiful. On my way home I glance in the rearview mirror and find a familiar lipstick kiss on my cheek. What I carry takes me back to her. I will always be taken back to her, wherever she goes

Underneath It All, We Are Home

2006-10-14T07:30:00.000-04:00

"I am having an existential crisis," I tell Mallory. I hear the wind's bluster, close my eyes and smile as the sunlight flickers on the wall through my eyelids. Squirming in my chair, my eyes open suddenly, dart for the window and land squarely on a picture of a perfect fall day. Cars are lined peacefully in a parking lot as dark clouds race to reveal sudden bursts of sunshine and let loose a flurry of glowing yellow leaves that float swirling sparkling and spinning toward wet pavement.

I have seen the imprint of maple leaves on concrete, nature's little art project, cave drawings for a new millennium, a reminder that we are all campers here. Wet autumn days challenge us, and we industriously chop wood, dig latrines, revel in our scrapes and cuts. Our red-cold fingers and red-hot tempers flare, and under a gray sky of freezing rain, beneath steamy layers of cotton and wool, we are warm and in love with muscle, skin, cartilage and bone.

A Mess (iah)

2006-10-03T05:33:00.000-04:00

Today while texting, "It looks like rain again today," my jaw dropped when these words magically appeared on my phone: "It looks like pain again today." Predictive text input technology has become my Shroud of Turin, Holy Grail and water turned to wine (which honestly seems the best of the three). "What is "aides milk", you might ask? If you are the recipient of a text message from me, you may translate it as "cider mill", but of course the words carry much much more. Perhaps to you I seem like some lunatic yelling jibberish from the street corner, but I am the only one who knows the truth. God speaks to me through T9 texting. Pretty much all the time.

TOO MUCH MATERIALITY

2006-10-01T06:23:00.000-04:00

The woman sitting next to me remembered when her son drove the 125 miles to visit her and she said TOO MUCH MATERIALITY. He said, are you sure you want to get rid of everything, and she said DO IT. So now she is in this wonderful assisted living facility that she loves, the people are friendly, the staff is great and SOMETIMES I COME TO THE DINING ROOM AND GET MY DINNER TO GO IF I FEEL LIKE EATING IN MY ROOM. Mustard sprays on the table, she asks for spumoni and the tour is over.

Blue and I glance at each other when the manager says "I thought I already explained that your mother can have the double room for the price of a single room until the room that she wants becomes available." Later, sitting in the back seat of Dolly's car we talk about the pros and cons of being a flight attendant. On call at an hours notice. Flying away to the beaches of Oahu.

What would you love to do, I ask? Blue says she would like to be a dog groomer. I say I would like to be a hair stylist. Willa says Dolly hasn't been taking her medication regularly. This place will be good for her, says Blue. Nutrition is so important. We all agree that the place is great, like a nice hotel, with bridge games and a theater and trips to the store and concerts and good food and rooms facing a courtyard filled with flowers and birds.

I would like to live there, says Blue. Me too! says Willa.

Dolly is irritated when I tell her she has to eat. I ALREADY ATE. I'M NOT HUNGRY. I see she hasn't taken her morning pills, it is already 5pm and she hasn't gotten dressed today. Dolly told the doctor that Harry Truman is president and she tells me that she didn't go to the doctor. The doctor tells Willa that Dolly can't drive anymore and needs to be in an assisted living facility for her own safety.

When I get up to leave, I search Dolly's face for my mother. Isolated, she recedes into herself. She exists in a place that she can't share with me. I leave a lipstick kiss on her cheek. Maybe later, looking in the mirror, it will lead her back to me.

Skeletal Remains

2006-09-28T05:34:00.000-04:00

Shall we say two hundred? Or two million? You there! I mean in the sense that you once were there in my wildest (foggy) dreams (illusions) way back far away once upon a time. Remember? You adored me. Are you there she said prettily? Back a millenium or more things were so much better she said the flowers were bigger, weren't they? Sun and shadows blanketed the landscape and quietly absorbed us into their composition. You jaunty existentialist creating your own reality jumping from rock to rock scraping teeth bones clattering toward the future. I adore you.

Calm Submissive Happy

2006-09-21T04:59:00.000-04:00

My recent unbalanced state has deluded me into believing that my life could revert to an idealized version of the past. "How did that happen?" I ask Mallory, who quickly searches her appointment book for regular openings. "Sticking a sword in my heart would be preferable to this!" I intone dramatically. I am anxious! Compulsive! Nervous! I jump up on people and run around in circles!

Which reminds me. I am now officially in love with Cesar Millan. After spending the past several nights with The Dog Whisperer (episodes 1-15), I realize that only He understands how to deal with my phobias and nervous behavior. He knows that walking me, disciplining me and giving me affection produce a good result. When I am calm I am happy.

"I need The Dog Whisperer, Valerie." Finally. I found someone who understands me.

Butterflies Behind Glass

2006-09-19T03:02:00.000-04:00

I thought I saw you
again
remember?
in that chair you like
laughing

again you turn slowly
stones crackle under tires
my heart beats

You ate eggs then
remember?
watching a movie
pulled from an idiosyncratic collection
like butterflies
behind glass

I'm sure I saw you
again
remember?
we watched
your movies

you wore your
smoking jacket
you smartly bought and sold
you acquired futures
from a distance

I thought I saw you
again
remember?

where map quest will take you

2006-09-17T05:01:00.000-04:00

you all
driving toward green clouds
passing
look skyward empty eyes thumb-out
cocked-hip
slow-cooked smile
drive on

How It Started

2006-09-01T07:59:00.000-04:00

1. If I were an animal I'd be a white tiger.

2. Goddamn it, I have always loved tigers. You know I have always thought of myself as a tiger.

1. But I'm a white tiger.

2. So you're more special than a regular tiger?

1. I'm a little out of the ordinary.

2. You bitch. You have stolen my identity. What will I be?

1. You are a dog.

2. Fuck you

1. Some sort of highly intelligent well-trained cool dog

2. No stop there I will be a gazelle

1. But you don't even dance

2. I'll be Bugs Bunny you motherfucker

or what about a fucking cloned sheep or

the world's largest octopus or sasquach or

how about a killer bee? Huh?

How about that?

Be Here Now

2006-08-29T07:31:00.000-04:00

Who was it that fiddled while Rome burned? Nero? (Hell, who needs school when you have Wikipedia?) I am mentioning this because I have lately begun knitting. Or rather taken knitting up again. Long ago, during my "Earth Mother Period" I knit soakers, among other things, so no plastic would touch the skin of my infants (which, obviously, is another story all its own, and another lifetime altogether).

Living alone for nearly a year now, I am surprised at how little I've changed from the "me" of various chronological eras of my life. I like to compartmentalize these different phases, like Picasso's "periods". A version of the "Earth Mother Period" (like Picasso's Blue Period) is what I have reconnected with this summer. Knitting is both frustrating and consoling, just as I remembered. Determined to make "an Irish Hiking Scarf for everyone!" by Christmas, I have actually finished one and begun knitting #2. But it is time consuming, and as usual, I wonder if I am avoiding the truly important stuff. Am I fiddling my life away?

Shouldn't I be in Africa treating AIDS patients? Or adventuring around the world losing fingers to frostbite? Or passionately creating great art, which would be related to Nero's downfall, as he seemed to be more passionate about the arts and chariot racing than governing the Empire (which made him very unpopular with the army and the Senate).

AJ wants a book of my poetry. Bound by me. If that were the work of my life it would be enough. Whatever it is that I do or don't do, is enough. Isn't it? There is no difference between Clyde's life and mine, Huck or Mo or Auggie or Brad Pitt or someone treating AIDS in Africa. Rich man poor man beggar man thief, it really doesn't matter in the end, does it?

The trick is to fully inhabit the moment and not worry about tomorrow. I didn't master that in my "Be Here Now Period". I really haven't changed at all.

Take it Easy

2006-08-27T09:48:00.000-04:00

I loved the Moody Blues. What a name, huh? In my youth I gravitated toward the minor-key, and even now I surprise myself by possessing no music to enjoy when I am happy. Well. This must change. My two-week funk-extravaganza seems to be subsiding and I find myself kicking around ideas for the new class I will teach (STARTING IN A WEEK!) in my head. I will consider this phenomenon "planning". Why not?

Georgia has reappeared in my life! She flew out to spend a week with Dolly, and I spent much of that week with them. It was a bittersweet visit, as Dolly has gotten worse. She forgets how to use the phone or coffee machine when she is flustered. She also forgets we are there unless we are in the room with her. But she is still feisty and fun and she and I played music in the mornings to wake Georgia. Bobby Darrin's "Splish Splash I was taking a Bath" was great for silly dancing at 9am. The day Georgia left, Dolly was throwing up because she had taken a double-dose of her medication. It was a sad parting. Georgia's last words to her son? "You should come out and visit. I'm going to be there for a long time."

My yard is in the process of being "cleaned-up". I ordered one of those huge containers and Huck and I filled it with cement blocks, the brush pile and other miscellaneous debris. Clyde hasn't finished the shed yet. After Royce got shot in the knee with a nail gun, Clyde's teeth started aching and he began having them all pulled. The dentist pulled a couple of bad teeth without giving him antibiotics first, and the infection spread into his jaw and beyond. His eye was swollen shut. So that little project is on hold. I haven't heard from them in a couple of days, and I'm wondering if Clyde's daughter (Royce's girlfriend) had her baby. They remind me how hard it is to be poor. One day Clyde drove Royce's loud clunker of a truck to my place because his truck died and needed a new engine. He got stopped by the county cops and they frisked Royce and harrassed them both, saying, "Your eyes look glazed-over. You got drugs in there?" They searched the truck, found nothing and eventually let them go without a ticket. Clyde says they jump to conclusions because of the way you look.

I set out to write something literal this morning and there you have it. University students are flooding back into town. It feels like autumn and there are already bright red and yellow leaves punctuating the landscape. The squirrels are busy burying nuts and I am headed toward nine months of a kind of hibernation. I think I will go to the theater and see Little Miss Sunshine today. Maybe rake a little. Do a little more planning.

Late August

2006-08-24T18:33:00.002-04:00

"I always feel like I'm struggling to become someone else. Like I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it's part of growing up, yet it's also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself - as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I'm still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I'll come to defining myself." - Haruki Murakami

Artistic Control

2006-08-17T06:29:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't noticed, I've added a couple of fashion sites to my sidebar. This one has become my focus lately and may be singlehandedly keeping me from going over the edge. When I'm feeling that I have an extreme lack of control over my life, (haven't you noticed?) especially my self and my emotions, it helps to focus. Go micro. Not unlike photographing flowers, it is a reprieve from thinking, or at least from over-thinking that is continually shooting out tentacles and forming connections with my inadequacies. Exhausting.

I find fashion complicated and interesting and smart. Of course there are ethical issues involved. It serves to set certain people (the rich) apart and it is a class marker. But fashion is also art. Stimulating, arresting, subtle and attentive to detail, it demands visual intelligence. And anyone can do it.

Fashion is an artistic presentation and we are all artists. The design of our surroundings, including our bodies and how we cover them, reveals our priorities and imaginative capabilities. Why shouldn't our world be full of visual interest and creative ideas? Anti-intellectualism and anti-art sentiment pervades large portions of our country. Dumbing ourselves down, we have sacrificed quality and beauty in favor of cheap uniformity.

Fashion represents control. Artistic control of ones' own body. How cool is that?

The Last Day

2006-08-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

Where is the canoe
you promised would take us away
on this
the last day?

All fingers and lace
we sailed off
once upon a time
forever.

Now your tools are gone,
your table,
arrows. Your bow

And I,
all wet fingers and lace
stand waiting
in sparkling water

On this,
the last day.

History Deconstructed

2006-08-15T08:21:00.001-04:00

"The only time I feel fear as others feel fear is when I think of you in harm. That is why I am on this porch, Ivy Walker." - The Village
The melt-down I have experienced in the past week caught me by surprise. Talking about it, in my mind, equals complaining, but I know that talking is what I need, even if it's uncomfortable.

Contributing to my crisis is "the job", which begins again on the 30th and for which I have done zero planning for the new class I will teach. Winging-it will be taken to new levels even for me, it seems. I actually had a ~~dream~~ nightmare about the first day of school. I was standing in front of a classroom-full of students and had done no planning. I was panicked and confused, but underneath it all I was curious. How would I perform under pressure? Could I bullshit my way out?

Another recent dream: Veronica's son (who recently has been in a series of unfortunate drug and alcohol-induced accidents and incidents involving the police) was driving a huge houseboat at an amusement park. AJ and Mo were passengers. He navigated to the middle of a lagoon and began speeding around in tight circles when suddenly the boat (which was towing another huge boat) flew into the air. It came crashing back down onto the water and then sped toward shore. I realized suddenly that the boat wasn't slowing down as it approached the shore. Crashing into the dock, it crumpled like an accordian. Running to see the damage, I was relieved to see AJ and Mo as little girls, sitting in their seats unharmed.

I am no longer my childrens' protector, and lately, awash in a sea of sadness, I realize I have no protector. There is no one who will appear on my porch if I am in harm.

I have given myself permission in the past few months to experience whatever emotional process might be necessary during a time like this. I have tried to just "feel", without thinking too much. This is not a pity-party, but stark reality. In the past year I have lost my husband to divorce, I have lost my mother to Alzheimers, my sisters have removed themselves emotionally and my children are in the middle of busy lives of their own. Even Veronica has receded, having found a new man to share her time.

Here is a new dream. Beginning to crumble, literally, like a statue, I am history deconstructed. In this dream no one can speak, as it has been for generations. Quickly turning to dust, in the nick of time I open my lips and breathing fire, I sear the virgin landscape, alter forever the ground that we walk on, change how we view nature, call myself by name and in the palms of my hands carry my children out of this chaos.

Life is Like Fashion

2006-08-12T08:04:00.000-04:00

Some approach fashion in a highly structured and organized manner. They are concerned about fit, always look "put together" and are outwardly confident and in control. Career-minded, they plan a "successful" life and follow-through with every detail, including wardrobe. They are the upper-middle class.

Those in the lower-middle are lost in a chaos of current trends. Possessing no ability to self-evaluate and seemingly devoid of identity, their clothes wear them. They secretly want to be famous.

Some simply don't choose. Utilitarian and oblivious, the vast army of the working class unquestioningly toils along in pleated khakis and button-down shirts, maintaining the status-quo that ensures the wealth of the upper 2% of the population.

The poor focus on survival and use clothing solely for warmth and protection. No wonder they are reviled.

And then there are the upper 2%, who look a lot like the poor and seek invisibility. Their photographs are not in the tabloids. They don't have reality TV shows.

Changing our social status is nearly impossible. The markers that set us apart routinely change and eventually turn on themselves. Ultimately anyone who is trying to be "fashionable" reveals themself as "lower".

For what do we strive? What does fashion reveal about our culture? What does it reveal about our desires? Is it simply a class marker? Does it celebrate life? Whose life? Is it a vital art form? Who is excluded through the hierarchy of fashion, and why?

Flying Shingles, Wood and Scattered Nails

2006-08-07T08:46:00.000-04:00

The guys who are working on my shed were recommended to me by a City Code Enforcement Officer as we stood in the courthouse hallway. It wasn't that he took pity on me, he was concerned that he'd have to hang around the courthouse all day long waiting for the judge to hear my appeal. The conversation went something like this:

Code Enforcement Officer (CEO): "Let's work something out. I'll give you an extension to fix your shed and clean up the brush pile and you will pay a partial fine. How about September 1st?"

Me: "How about you give me an extension and no fine?"

CEO: "Hey, I'm just a peon. I don't decide the amount of the fines. You have to get some kind of fine."

Me: Wanting to say "why?", but nodding in defeat.

CEO: "I know a guy who will do the work for you. He's honest as the day is long and a hard worker."

Fast forward a few days and the building crew is in my yard and in a flurry of flying shingles, wood, and scattered nails. The boss, Clyde, seems to know what he is doing, but who am I to judge? As usual I am distracted by insignificant details, like how very few teeth he seems to have, or Royce's (his future son-in-law's) homemade skull tattoos, or the other worker he introduced as "I guess we're cousins, ain't we?"

I have put my faith (and revolving home improvement loan) in their hands and I've decided not to panic when I see old shingles ripped from the roof and dropped onto plants in the herb garden. What the hell. I'll plant some more damn herbs.

Clyde seems to require that several family members accompany him while he works. His pregnant teenage daughter appeared one day and he introduced her by saying, "Yea, she's pregnant. What can you do? I guess he (Royce) is gonna marry her some day pretty soon." She was sweet. Exactly like a girl I might have taught at the alternative school. Immediately I see that her teeth need attention. She loves her man and has no self-esteem. I had asked Clyde if he would like one of the organs stored in the shed, and he brought her to see it. Later I stood leaning on their car with her and said, "Your dad says you sing!" "I sang kareoke a couple of times," she said softly. "And he told me you play the piano?" I said encouragingly. "Yea, I got a piano. It's been at my dad's flea market for two years. He wants to get the floor done first before he brings it into the house."

The day after I returned from NYC, Clyde, Royce and "the cousin" brought their chainsaw and cut up the fallen tree. They knew a guy (they called him Pudge) who heated with wood and would probably like to have it. Clyde described Pudge as a guy who "loves to work". "He works on the line at a factory during the week, but he likes to work on the weekends, too."

Soon after the crew began work the next day I called 911 after Clyde appeared at the door, telling me Royce got shot with a nail. He was crouched on the roof and the 4" nail had gone into his kneecap, apparently. He couldn't move, was in pain and after several attempts to get him down, Clyde had given up. Ten minutes later the ambulance and fire truck came blasting down the street, sirens blaring. It took some doing, but they stabilized Royce's knee and lowered him backwards off the roof and into the arms of several EMT's who gently placed him on the stretcher. I sensed Royce felt a little better when he heard the word "morphene".

The ambulance drove away and immediately my "Buddhist" neighbor came over to get the low-down. Changing the subject, I asked her if she knew who reported me to the code enforcement officer, but she had no idea. 'Everyone is a suspect," I declared! She, I'm sure, caught my negative vibe with her attuned Buddhist nature and hightailed it out of there to meditate and regain balance.

I noticed that Pudge, who showed up unannounced to haul away the tree at 7:30am the next morning, also had several missing teeth, one of which was a front tooth. Clyde's description of Pudge as a hard worker became obvious when, after he had finished loading the wood into his pickup truck about three hours later, I happened to look out the window and was arrested by the sight of Pudge, beer-belly covered tightly with a dirty torn t-shirt and thin hair clinging to the back of his neck, raking up fragments of leaves and branches with a stick! Actually I guess it would be better described as "flicking". It was slow going, I can tell you that. I quickly opened the door and demanded the obvious. "Are you raking with a stick?!" Unembarrassed, he looked at me and answered earnestly, "Yes."

Well. I quickly found him a rake, he finished the job in a very thorough manner (the yard looked better than it had in ages), and shining with grimy sweat he finally came to the door to tell me he was leaving. "I wanted your yard to look nice for you," he grinned.

Barometric Pressure

2006-08-06T05:19:00.000-04:00

"There is something very attractive about a person with deeply held beliefs. Isn't there? It takes great energy and stamina, but the fortitude to maintain strong viewpoints is burdensome," she said. "What do you think?"

"Kiss me," he quoted.

Barometric pressure, with its' twice-daily cycle caused by the tides, presses in on me. The rhythmic variation is strong and all at once blood runs down my legs. Tampax, flowers, perfume and bikinis, we are silly girls, we play hide and seek with our animal bodies, we dare not bear our breasts. Our mothers walked with rags between their legs, cupped heavy blood-soaked wads of muslin in their hands, held it under the cool running current and watched the river run red. Then they hung the rags to dry and used them again.

"Take all of me," he unzipped his pants.

So I took his heart. Ate it. Grew fat and sexy as I extolled the virtues of fellatio and sodomy. Liberated, I went under the knife, shrunk my female fat zones, fell out of favor with artists and intellectuals, declared myself a sexy bitch and embraced a mixture of creationism and evolution.

"You are beautiful," he whispered. "Let me take care of you."

Home from NYC II

2006-08-05T05:10:00.000-04:00

"The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home." - Theodor Adorno
To make a long story short, on Wednesday when I arrived home and was semi-unpacked and snuggled in (as much as possible in 100-degree heat), one helluva thunderstorm blew over the town wreaking havoc in my yard, not to mention probably more chaos at the mega-gargantuan-really-outrageously-oversized superstore at the edge of town where, as I waited for my film to be developed it became apparent that the power had gone out. Which reminds me. I think mega-gargantuan-really-outrageously-oversized superstores will play a big role in the apocalypse. (I am reminded of Girlfriend in a Coma.) Lots of drama will undoubtedly be played out in such warehouses of desire at the end of the world. Chance meetings, important realizations, deja vu experiences, meaningful relationships begun with total strangers and condensed into a few last seconds... Mark my words.

The sky was dark, the thunder rumbled overhead, the wind began to blow... hard! Loud and furious up in the air the trees churned like giant whisks stirring, frothing, creating chaos. I heard the tree's soft crack, deep background to the wind's tumult. When the rain hit in a torrent the tree was already on its side in the yard, heavy branches at rest on the roof and reaching out to the door where I stood.

The thing is, NYC seems like the center of the universe. Maybe I'm just desperately looking for a home when there can be no home. "Home" seems a very flawed concept, doesn't it? The representation of stability, the illusion of safety, the desire for permanence and ownership. All things unreachable, but that we spend our lives seeking.

Some snapshots from my time in NYC: Mo and AJ like two beauty queens, perched on the back of a convertible floating through the East Village. Mo conspiratorially asking once again, "Shall we do shots?" AJ scrubbing ashtrays and arranging flowers in her apartment. Pip jumping from his chair at 5am to earnestly relay what it means to be a "real man" (a subject that deserves future attention, needless to say!). Charming and generous Speedo (ha), sweetly revealing his nervousness at the prospect of spending time with Mo's dad.

The essence of this trip? Longing. Longing for more time. Longing for "home". The longing of lovers, longing between friends, artists longing to get somewhere, do something, be somebody. There was lonliness and sadness and drama! and chaos there. And there was laughter and music and lightness and joy. It seemed a lot like life. And I loved being in it.

Home from NYC

2006-08-04T09:53:00.000-04:00

On the evening of the day I arrived home from New York another tree fell on my house. Is this a sign?

Surprisingly awake and energetic after driving for twelve hours, I sped into the deserted town where I live (it's hard to slow down after driving in NYC!) and screeched to a stop at the mega-gargantuan-really-outrageously-oversized superstore to get my film developed.

Later, comfortable on the couch I sorted through photos which unsurprisingly consisted in large part of microscopic actors on a stage. Perhaps if we hadn't been drinking 40's out of brown paper bags as we sat waiting in the park in Bedford-Stuyvesant to watch AJ's performance as a "dancing hooker", Mo the photographer would have found her way closer to the stage.

Whatever. I love bad photos.

The weather channel beeped a periodic warning as the sky grew dark in the west and thunder rolled across the sky above me.

*to be continued*

Motion

2006-07-27T07:12:00.000-04:00

"Get ready for an intense physical, as well as emotional, transformation to take place over the next few weeks. Big changes are afoot."

I'm liking my horoscope today. Not that I'm a true believer, but I think they can be an impetus for self-examination. Right now I'll embrace the promise of transformation.

In case you missed the direction of my last post, the mental line toward fall was crossed a few days ago and the anguish of ~~preparing for~~ procrastinating in preparation for the beginning of school has begun. I have discovered that I can't function in my job unless I am totally unprepared and forced to wing-it, thereby inviting the unexpected and creating spontaneity (and humiliation and chaos, of course). This lack of preparation creates a certain tension leading up to the school year, but I can't seem to approach it any other way.

So I think I'm headed back to NYC in the next few days for one last fling with AJ and Mo before I settle into intense and troubled mental preparation for the school year ahead (re: procrastination). I may drive out if I can't find a last-minute flight that doesn't break the bank. The 12-hour drive sounds inviting, a time to think, and feel totally unleashed from the place on the earth from which I am tethered. In his last post, BR wrote this: "I’m thinking—inexplicably—of Holden Caulfield. His inability to progress. His eerily understandable curse of being tethered to all things static. My unattractive ability to relate." I also can (unattractively) relate, and wonder why I love change but am so unable to set the direction of its' motion.

Which reminds me of another recently quoted horoscope:

"What would you do if you weren't afraid? Ask yourself that question in all kinds of situations, from the mundane to the sublime. You might just start identifying your true desires -- and acting on them."

A History of Circular Thinking

2006-07-22T09:05:00.000-04:00

It is true. I have chased myself in circles and while biting my tail cried "Ouch!" Flying around racing racing panting panting becoming becoming that from which I run. It is inevitable, no? (see?) Chasin morning I arrive from sleep, put on a jacket in the cool air and suddenly it is autumn, appearing unnoticed while summer chased summer, or at least the thought of it. While summer was becoming what summer should be it was already too late for languishing. Now the cool air, gone already for an unknown time, is desired, scrutinized, sniffed, by me.