cybunny: February 2008 Archives
Ten minutes on February 24, 2008
It is very late and the moon is out the night is post storm and pre storm a calm almost balmy considering it hailed tonight but now very late very quiet the night is a bowl of soft air
Margann was gone all day at births Bailey was gone a lot he cooked breakfast with Owen Cat made bacon Peter ate we had coffee Peter and Cat talked for a long time about Laurel I did dishes and at the last minute dragged Bailey and Cliff to shop for Timmie’s birthday bookstore we looked at the odd presents Bailey like me loving what was not a book a tall golden cone made of paper and cardboard a brass pot for incense a statue of a boar a big jar thingy with a handle and beaters inside it and a kind of strainer on top
Bailey nixed all these and the books we went to the surf shop Cliff jumped on Bailey and they did the cliffy car dance and cliff always walks on your nads in the store we found West Side t shirts got one for Tim color? Bailey Black out the door back to coho all the kids on their way to indoor soccer birthday party but for now a skunk is walking across the green back and forth black and white the kids are running around or not running around all excited is maceo throwing stuff at it is sam?
Bailey gone to Zander's sleep over Margann gone births then just as she is about to come home…the Call. Three times, no break. I talk with her on the phone consider how much of our lives is spent apart in the last year then I think of death of her sister of Kate and I and Margann and the ordeal of December what 27 I think Jonathan Sofer calls how are you how is Margann and I realize I’ve answered that sentence what twenty thirty times “Well she is sad so sad about her sister she is also trying to feel out how to feel how to grieve she is working hard not enough time to let down exactly (though Darcy did end her life in the middle of Christmas vacation, thoughtful of others to the end, the brat) I think she is trying doing the best she can feeling her feelings and trying to use triathletics and working out and eating better a little to build a foundation of wellness…and being, always, Margann.
The thing I want to say about Margann is how she looks sometimes so tired then so glowing so alive and healthy and younger her hair is cut shorter she walks differently (either with a bounce or like she’s been hammered by tongs after working out or running.). But other things too: watching her play with cliff and love him up, watching her with Bailey, how physical she is with him, closing the gap more and draping herself over his bed with Cliff biting Bailey’s toes and everyone squealing, I watch it as if it an island, this bed of three crazy squirming mammals, all tangled in each other, like a family.
It is very late and the moon is out the night is post storm and pre storm a calm almost balmy considering it hailed tonight but now very late very quiet the night is a bowl of soft air
Margann was gone all day at births Bailey was gone a lot he cooked breakfast with Owen Cat made bacon Peter ate we had coffee Peter and Cat talked for a long time about Laurel I did dishes and at the last minute dragged Bailey and Cliff to shop for Timmie’s birthday bookstore we looked at the odd presents Bailey like me loving what was not a book a tall golden cone made of paper and cardboard a brass pot for incense a statue of a boar a big jar thingy with a handle and beaters inside it and a kind of strainer on top
Bailey nixed all these and the books we went to the surf shop Cliff jumped on Bailey and they did the cliffy car dance and cliff always walks on your nads in the store we found West Side t shirts got one for Tim color? Bailey Black out the door back to coho all the kids on their way to indoor soccer birthday party but for now a skunk is walking across the green back and forth black and white the kids are running around or not running around all excited is maceo throwing stuff at it is sam?
Bailey gone to Zander's sleep over Margann gone births then just as she is about to come home…the Call. Three times, no break. I talk with her on the phone consider how much of our lives is spent apart in the last year then I think of death of her sister of Kate and I and Margann and the ordeal of December what 27 I think Jonathan Sofer calls how are you how is Margann and I realize I’ve answered that sentence what twenty thirty times “Well she is sad so sad about her sister she is also trying to feel out how to feel how to grieve she is working hard not enough time to let down exactly (though Darcy did end her life in the middle of Christmas vacation, thoughtful of others to the end, the brat) I think she is trying doing the best she can feeling her feelings and trying to use triathletics and working out and eating better a little to build a foundation of wellness…and being, always, Margann.
The thing I want to say about Margann is how she looks sometimes so tired then so glowing so alive and healthy and younger her hair is cut shorter she walks differently (either with a bounce or like she’s been hammered by tongs after working out or running.). But other things too: watching her play with cliff and love him up, watching her with Bailey, how physical she is with him, closing the gap more and draping herself over his bed with Cliff biting Bailey’s toes and everyone squealing, I watch it as if it an island, this bed of three crazy squirming mammals, all tangled in each other, like a family.
Ten minutes on February 22, 2008
So simple. Brown demi tasse, white rim, brown saucer, white rim. Macchiatto, white foam with brown rim of crema. After, the insides of the cup, brown foam like a rorshach, like a fractal of pleasure. Or a bit forlorn, cold, a far cry from the symmetry of the just made cup of espresso, empty. All its former glory gone.
Yin and yang. Cup empty, and customer full. This customer full twice over; the glory of espresso racing down the veins and nerves as though in a top down convertible, neural hair flying. The entire buzzing blooming show zipping over the previous establishment’s piece de resistance, Veveto’s clam chowder, the bowl now no doubt tilted forlorn in a tub of suds. But in its prime, large white dinner bowl, a foot across it seemed, chowder hot and swimming with fresh clams, white broken here and there with red, green, black. Fresh ground black pepper; a packet of New England style chowder crackers; one bite after another, the real deal, another reason to celebrate the mouth, the palate, the tongue. The mandatory bite with a tang of sand, to remind one of the veracity of origins, no cans here, a quick auditory and gustatory memory of the sea, boats on the water, men fishing, in all weathers.
I’m in the café across the street from my favorite café, or rather the empty space it used to occupy. Gone, gone. Money, or greed, or a deal behind doors, and a perfectly satisfactory café replete with locals, old Italians who fished and fought in the world war, students and business people and the unemployed or underemployed young in scruffy clothing, a great even magnificent espresso machine, baristas with regulars and regulars who made the baristas’ days an ongoing story, a story of stories… gone. Hopefull gone to a better place: not heaven, but a space in the little art and industrial shp area of Seaside, behind the box stores, near the performance space and the patisserie, invisible unless you know which street escapes the massive sameness of the uber-mall that makes up 90% of the little town.
I wanted to talk about books, the books I am reading and the way I fall crazily in love with books, with writing, the way I get caught up in them as I am in the lives of close friends, so that I think about them when I am not with them, the books I mean. Jigsaw, shortlisted for the Booker in 1989, given me by Blythe and read first in a slightly drunken haze (her husband Dirk, the always perfect host, invited me in and five minutes became an exquisite dinner with several wines), then put aside on the bed table, a commitment to perhaps commit to reading some day. And (yin and yang) Steinbeck’s East of Eden, listening to it on 22 CDs as I drive to and from school. I read about Europe between the wars, and the life of a bohemian girl born in Germany, wandering with eccentric erotic intellectual mother in Italy and France, with time in England…then as if reading a bizarre hybrid story, I am in the Salinas Valley after the Civil War…
But my minutes are up, and so I’ll save Steinbeck and Sybille Bedford for another day. The shift of customers here when I began have just exited, two pretty young women saying goodbye to the young man in the Andean clothing they met, a trio of Eastern Europeans speaking musically, all in black, the 40 something woman on her laptop who looked up and smiled at the other 40 something woman leaving with her laptop, briefly trading the notion that it is quite nice to work in a space like this instead of…
Au revoir! The new crew is here: the curly headed guy from Berkeley who asks about wirelss access (pay, sadly), the woman with the toddler in blue and yellow stripes like a fat bee, the woman on the cell phone who goes outside to talk (thanks!).
Au revoir! And the empty cup, and inside, I feel rich (a cliché, and yet…), full of reading, caffeine, chowder, and the sun breaking through after a morning of torrential rain general all through the Monterey Bay. And the music, which has been insipid and ignorable: Cranberries. Dreams.
Leaving to the Irish pop, the keeing rock vocals. Head tossing music; emotional, defiantly vulnerable.
Au revoir!
So simple. Brown demi tasse, white rim, brown saucer, white rim. Macchiatto, white foam with brown rim of crema. After, the insides of the cup, brown foam like a rorshach, like a fractal of pleasure. Or a bit forlorn, cold, a far cry from the symmetry of the just made cup of espresso, empty. All its former glory gone.
Yin and yang. Cup empty, and customer full. This customer full twice over; the glory of espresso racing down the veins and nerves as though in a top down convertible, neural hair flying. The entire buzzing blooming show zipping over the previous establishment’s piece de resistance, Veveto’s clam chowder, the bowl now no doubt tilted forlorn in a tub of suds. But in its prime, large white dinner bowl, a foot across it seemed, chowder hot and swimming with fresh clams, white broken here and there with red, green, black. Fresh ground black pepper; a packet of New England style chowder crackers; one bite after another, the real deal, another reason to celebrate the mouth, the palate, the tongue. The mandatory bite with a tang of sand, to remind one of the veracity of origins, no cans here, a quick auditory and gustatory memory of the sea, boats on the water, men fishing, in all weathers.
I’m in the café across the street from my favorite café, or rather the empty space it used to occupy. Gone, gone. Money, or greed, or a deal behind doors, and a perfectly satisfactory café replete with locals, old Italians who fished and fought in the world war, students and business people and the unemployed or underemployed young in scruffy clothing, a great even magnificent espresso machine, baristas with regulars and regulars who made the baristas’ days an ongoing story, a story of stories… gone. Hopefull gone to a better place: not heaven, but a space in the little art and industrial shp area of Seaside, behind the box stores, near the performance space and the patisserie, invisible unless you know which street escapes the massive sameness of the uber-mall that makes up 90% of the little town.
I wanted to talk about books, the books I am reading and the way I fall crazily in love with books, with writing, the way I get caught up in them as I am in the lives of close friends, so that I think about them when I am not with them, the books I mean. Jigsaw, shortlisted for the Booker in 1989, given me by Blythe and read first in a slightly drunken haze (her husband Dirk, the always perfect host, invited me in and five minutes became an exquisite dinner with several wines), then put aside on the bed table, a commitment to perhaps commit to reading some day. And (yin and yang) Steinbeck’s East of Eden, listening to it on 22 CDs as I drive to and from school. I read about Europe between the wars, and the life of a bohemian girl born in Germany, wandering with eccentric erotic intellectual mother in Italy and France, with time in England…then as if reading a bizarre hybrid story, I am in the Salinas Valley after the Civil War…
But my minutes are up, and so I’ll save Steinbeck and Sybille Bedford for another day. The shift of customers here when I began have just exited, two pretty young women saying goodbye to the young man in the Andean clothing they met, a trio of Eastern Europeans speaking musically, all in black, the 40 something woman on her laptop who looked up and smiled at the other 40 something woman leaving with her laptop, briefly trading the notion that it is quite nice to work in a space like this instead of…
Au revoir! The new crew is here: the curly headed guy from Berkeley who asks about wirelss access (pay, sadly), the woman with the toddler in blue and yellow stripes like a fat bee, the woman on the cell phone who goes outside to talk (thanks!).
Au revoir! And the empty cup, and inside, I feel rich (a cliché, and yet…), full of reading, caffeine, chowder, and the sun breaking through after a morning of torrential rain general all through the Monterey Bay. And the music, which has been insipid and ignorable: Cranberries. Dreams.
Leaving to the Irish pop, the keeing rock vocals. Head tossing music; emotional, defiantly vulnerable.
Au revoir!
Ten minutes on February 21, 2008
Rain, rain rain. Rain so constant it feels like the rain is being rained on as it rains. Across from my table, through the window, I can see it hit the wild assortment of flowers in Elisa’s garden. Against the gray day, the gray blue of the house, the dark brown of the deck, the long spears of two massive plants thrust impossibly green, rain shaking the spears like a defiant vegetative tribe.
Inside, warm. Light; table; coffee; cocoa almonds; tunes. Remain in Light: “take a look at these hand, they’re passing in between us; take a look at these hands; I don’t have to mentions it…hands, the hands of a government man.” Eno and Byrne, the beat goes on where the hand has been. Electricity is everywhere: computer, iPod, CD player and tuner, numbers on clocks on appliances, energy saving lights beaming, refrigerator humming. A space ship right now, and outside cold and rain and not weather for walking a dog.
Find a little space, so we move in between…this little space between all the work I must do, writing an article grading papers sending attachments managing online students responding to email which pours into my Inbox, a monsoon of messages, not all of which promise me ten inches of pussy pleasing power. So much writing and thinking happen between, in between, on the edges, in liminal space. After the presentation; before the presentation; in the corridor, not in the auditorium. In the kitchen at the party, not on the dance floor. Outside where the smokers are; on the fire escape, the back porch, half hanging from windows. We need to be in between and away to do certain kinds of thinking, talking, sensing.
Since I last wrote: the ski trip. Kate Bailey Margann and I beat the traffic on Friday, Margann gets asthma or something like it and we then burn all our time at an Urgent Care in Grass Valley, get to Claire Tappaan right at dinner, and then ski like demons for three days. Skiing with Margann, something I haven’t really done since we started a lifetime ago on Crystal Mountain in the 90s in Washington State. Black diamonds, speed, the energy of big ten year olds trying to squeeze every bit of fun out of it all, pleading for one last run keep the lift open for us wouldya?
Skiing is also Kathy Kelly finding a way to get time to ski the back side, Ravi learning to like it all and then surviving illness, Claire skiing for a day and Kevin not getting to, kids bailing on skiing early and adults complaining about kids bailing on skiing early, logistics occasionally overwhelming our brilliant minds’ abilities ot manage fun and responsibility, Jen getting to ski alone on Monday and rocking her joy so that she literally beams when she gets off the lift. Gorgeous mountain snow air and at times all the kids in the lodge all on their phones, texting each other and the tiny photons making their faces glow a little like the light in Kubrick’s 2001, unearthly. Kate loves to ski by herself and so she does, all day, and laughs about telling her friends what fun skiing is when you schlep so much stuff out of rooms into bags into cars onto racks drive drive drive and then lug stuff up icy slippery inclines to the lodge and stuff it in tiny cubicles and then get up early lug stuff down icy slippery inclines to the cars load stuff into cars on racks drive then unload stuff lug it to lodge…and you pay for all this!
Ok my minutes are up but I must tell you: up lift one to the top of Donner Ski Ranch and you see Donner Lake the mountains ringing the horizon snow capped and magnificent Sugarbowl to the West I 80 to the east and south the whole bowl of snowscape and trees and mountain…and you are up there about to begin the controlled falling that is skiing fast down steeps, the air cold clean rare at 7200 feet a crow or raven hits an updraft and sails effortlessly by the jet contrails make a curious code of white ideograms in the sky cold shaping you your body until you are yourself for a perfect set of moments, leaning over skis looking out over the Face not able to see what is next that first commitment to the inevitable looking down at your gear skis boots poles a sort of cyborg human and machine integrated and about to do something impossible for human or machine alone the future is fast but manageable, full of excitement, challenge, physical as your muscles, mental as the decision to point skis down a 25 degree slope and not pull out, soulful as you can make it.
Everything we do, anything we do, all we do, the possibility of grace, and the world gives us the constant feedback: fall, crash, don’t crash, maneuver, turn, turn again, fly, fly, fly.
Rain, rain rain. Rain so constant it feels like the rain is being rained on as it rains. Across from my table, through the window, I can see it hit the wild assortment of flowers in Elisa’s garden. Against the gray day, the gray blue of the house, the dark brown of the deck, the long spears of two massive plants thrust impossibly green, rain shaking the spears like a defiant vegetative tribe.
Inside, warm. Light; table; coffee; cocoa almonds; tunes. Remain in Light: “take a look at these hand, they’re passing in between us; take a look at these hands; I don’t have to mentions it…hands, the hands of a government man.” Eno and Byrne, the beat goes on where the hand has been. Electricity is everywhere: computer, iPod, CD player and tuner, numbers on clocks on appliances, energy saving lights beaming, refrigerator humming. A space ship right now, and outside cold and rain and not weather for walking a dog.
Find a little space, so we move in between…this little space between all the work I must do, writing an article grading papers sending attachments managing online students responding to email which pours into my Inbox, a monsoon of messages, not all of which promise me ten inches of pussy pleasing power. So much writing and thinking happen between, in between, on the edges, in liminal space. After the presentation; before the presentation; in the corridor, not in the auditorium. In the kitchen at the party, not on the dance floor. Outside where the smokers are; on the fire escape, the back porch, half hanging from windows. We need to be in between and away to do certain kinds of thinking, talking, sensing.
Since I last wrote: the ski trip. Kate Bailey Margann and I beat the traffic on Friday, Margann gets asthma or something like it and we then burn all our time at an Urgent Care in Grass Valley, get to Claire Tappaan right at dinner, and then ski like demons for three days. Skiing with Margann, something I haven’t really done since we started a lifetime ago on Crystal Mountain in the 90s in Washington State. Black diamonds, speed, the energy of big ten year olds trying to squeeze every bit of fun out of it all, pleading for one last run keep the lift open for us wouldya?
Skiing is also Kathy Kelly finding a way to get time to ski the back side, Ravi learning to like it all and then surviving illness, Claire skiing for a day and Kevin not getting to, kids bailing on skiing early and adults complaining about kids bailing on skiing early, logistics occasionally overwhelming our brilliant minds’ abilities ot manage fun and responsibility, Jen getting to ski alone on Monday and rocking her joy so that she literally beams when she gets off the lift. Gorgeous mountain snow air and at times all the kids in the lodge all on their phones, texting each other and the tiny photons making their faces glow a little like the light in Kubrick’s 2001, unearthly. Kate loves to ski by herself and so she does, all day, and laughs about telling her friends what fun skiing is when you schlep so much stuff out of rooms into bags into cars onto racks drive drive drive and then lug stuff up icy slippery inclines to the lodge and stuff it in tiny cubicles and then get up early lug stuff down icy slippery inclines to the cars load stuff into cars on racks drive then unload stuff lug it to lodge…and you pay for all this!
Ok my minutes are up but I must tell you: up lift one to the top of Donner Ski Ranch and you see Donner Lake the mountains ringing the horizon snow capped and magnificent Sugarbowl to the West I 80 to the east and south the whole bowl of snowscape and trees and mountain…and you are up there about to begin the controlled falling that is skiing fast down steeps, the air cold clean rare at 7200 feet a crow or raven hits an updraft and sails effortlessly by the jet contrails make a curious code of white ideograms in the sky cold shaping you your body until you are yourself for a perfect set of moments, leaning over skis looking out over the Face not able to see what is next that first commitment to the inevitable looking down at your gear skis boots poles a sort of cyborg human and machine integrated and about to do something impossible for human or machine alone the future is fast but manageable, full of excitement, challenge, physical as your muscles, mental as the decision to point skis down a 25 degree slope and not pull out, soulful as you can make it.
Everything we do, anything we do, all we do, the possibility of grace, and the world gives us the constant feedback: fall, crash, don’t crash, maneuver, turn, turn again, fly, fly, fly.
Ten minutes on February 7, 2008
Today is my brother Peter’s birthday. I talked to Will two days ago on his birthday but didn’t remember, and he didn’t say. Birth. Daze. I always think, why don’t we celebrate mothers on our birthday. I mean, we weren’t exactly doing the heavy lifting…or were we? Man, we used to be so small, at the several cell size, then floating around incrementally coming into something like consciousness and realizing we are banging around in a pink trunk with a straw connected to the sweet liquids of human kindness somewhere else in the car…I wonder if we wonder, with the roll and pitch of the belly, whether this pitching and rolling and then stopping and then starting is the rhythm of life, always, forever?
And just when Peter, or Will, or any of us were getting pretty comfortable, big headed in fact, here comes the Big Squeeze! Forced out of our rent controlled womb, often into a big racket, with no nice momwalls to protect us from all this goddamn NOISE out here!
I’m in a quiet place now, the one light in the living room casting a demure glance down at the installation piece someone (Bailey?) has, well, installed. Three umbrellas are open and places on the rug, looking somehow like dwellings for some creatures who have left for an engagement but will be back someimte. Two chairs mimic each other, plush, with straight backs like Puritan chairs grudgingly allowing a modicum of comfort to the sitters, in this case a bass guitar on the left, and Cliff on the right. Cliff is not sighing or groaning, and his silence enhances his already dignified muttonchop features. He looks like a Scottish legislator from Victorian times, about to deliver more bad news about the Empire; the guitar looks strangely at home, like a Surrealist drawing of a dressmaker’s dummy.
Or perhaps the umbrellas were left by three people who are now in my house, asleep, dreaming of rain.
Today I taught Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and William Blake, and a bit of Wordsworth, and some Robert Bly. I learn so much when I teach; I love the surprises I find when I begin to talk about a text and read it closely with students. In Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the realist’s veering between photographic unsentimental realism and a realism of consciusness, which can be “unreal” in so many ways. Also Bierce uses water to imagine a streaming of consciousness well before William James coins the term. Connections abound; I teach English Romanticism, and then the American realists, naturalists, and local color/regionalists. The latter are “anti romantic” but share so many strategies. I found a section of Bierce which could be lifted straight out of Poe. I read Blake and found Bly all over it, the two of them joining hands around all that we repress in the name of custom and a desire to be accepted by the community. “Energy is Eternal Delight.” “When we are born we are a 360 degree ball of energy.”
Indeed, When we are born, we come barreling into the world and nothing is the same. We bounce like pinballs beween people, sometimes setting off buzzers, dials circling wildly with points of intimacy and connection, sometimes falling into the chute and disappearing into the machine. We bounce and spin and the flippers smack us back up as we defy gravity and obey it, falling towards death and all our endings, flying as we fall.
Today is my brother Peter’s birthday. I talked to Will two days ago on his birthday but didn’t remember, and he didn’t say. Birth. Daze. I always think, why don’t we celebrate mothers on our birthday. I mean, we weren’t exactly doing the heavy lifting…or were we? Man, we used to be so small, at the several cell size, then floating around incrementally coming into something like consciousness and realizing we are banging around in a pink trunk with a straw connected to the sweet liquids of human kindness somewhere else in the car…I wonder if we wonder, with the roll and pitch of the belly, whether this pitching and rolling and then stopping and then starting is the rhythm of life, always, forever?
And just when Peter, or Will, or any of us were getting pretty comfortable, big headed in fact, here comes the Big Squeeze! Forced out of our rent controlled womb, often into a big racket, with no nice momwalls to protect us from all this goddamn NOISE out here!
I’m in a quiet place now, the one light in the living room casting a demure glance down at the installation piece someone (Bailey?) has, well, installed. Three umbrellas are open and places on the rug, looking somehow like dwellings for some creatures who have left for an engagement but will be back someimte. Two chairs mimic each other, plush, with straight backs like Puritan chairs grudgingly allowing a modicum of comfort to the sitters, in this case a bass guitar on the left, and Cliff on the right. Cliff is not sighing or groaning, and his silence enhances his already dignified muttonchop features. He looks like a Scottish legislator from Victorian times, about to deliver more bad news about the Empire; the guitar looks strangely at home, like a Surrealist drawing of a dressmaker’s dummy.
Or perhaps the umbrellas were left by three people who are now in my house, asleep, dreaming of rain.
Today I taught Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and William Blake, and a bit of Wordsworth, and some Robert Bly. I learn so much when I teach; I love the surprises I find when I begin to talk about a text and read it closely with students. In Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the realist’s veering between photographic unsentimental realism and a realism of consciusness, which can be “unreal” in so many ways. Also Bierce uses water to imagine a streaming of consciousness well before William James coins the term. Connections abound; I teach English Romanticism, and then the American realists, naturalists, and local color/regionalists. The latter are “anti romantic” but share so many strategies. I found a section of Bierce which could be lifted straight out of Poe. I read Blake and found Bly all over it, the two of them joining hands around all that we repress in the name of custom and a desire to be accepted by the community. “Energy is Eternal Delight.” “When we are born we are a 360 degree ball of energy.”
Indeed, When we are born, we come barreling into the world and nothing is the same. We bounce like pinballs beween people, sometimes setting off buzzers, dials circling wildly with points of intimacy and connection, sometimes falling into the chute and disappearing into the machine. We bounce and spin and the flippers smack us back up as we defy gravity and obey it, falling towards death and all our endings, flying as we fall.
Ten minutes on February 4, 2008
All day I thought how close the Patriots came. So many chances to ice it in the last minutes. And surprisingly how hard hard hard it is for me that they lost. Just gut wrenching. All the clichés, but immediately true and visceral.
Bailey was sick today sometimes I bend over him and am overcome with love a desire to protect him but also be with him, not over him or under or anything but next to. He stayed home today and Margann came home from lunch and he liked it so much he told me in chapter and verse what she brought him. You love your kid, and you love your partner loving your kid. People often look so lovely to me when they are, unawares, in the quite quotidian moment of serving up love and affection in its simplest forms. The way a hand brushes a cheek, or the way a word is formed by the mouth. I came home and made him tea (make me black tea with lots of, lots of…sugar? No…honey! [huge smile] Ok) and heated up a molasses ginger cookie and we sat on the bed and listened to the Spiderwick Chronicles and talked about how weird it is to be sick how your throat feels all leathery and you think you have energy and jump up from bed but then you don’t.
I feel almost all the way back from eight weeks ago. I felt like such shit then; no idea if I would feel better ever. The feel of mortality, pulling one down like a special effects monster from a lord of the rings-like film. Boy. I walked Cliff so many times down the street and thought I might never drive again, or have to quit my job, and yes we know I can be a tad dramatic but still. Suddenly I feel something quicken in me…why does the body do what it does? Perhaps I have unresolved issues!! ;-0 The trees were so powerful then; often they seemed rainy, windblown, harbingers. And then I’d feel stronger and healthier and the big eucs down on the corner of Monarch and Western would just rise from the ground like massive columns barkless and white and shedding light so that the canopy seems like a fantastic lightshade green dark with the light snaking down the lamp toward the ground.
Tonight I walked Cliff the trees were there I thought of the story Margann told me about walking Cliff and a huge coyote walked right up out of the blackdark arroyo over there and she crossed the street quickly as it looked at Cliff (as Tycho later put it, thinking “You gonna eat that?”). and it followed beginning to cross as well when a car came between them and it stalled and she made her escape. When you walk there at nght it is fucking dark scary red riding hood fairy tale dark and knowing there are coyotes and mountain lions just over there and being tied by a leash to something either of those things could eat…well it does bring one back to a different time, a different relationship with the dark and the forest. I love it. And then you walk up to the house with the white lights where Jasmine the dog lives and Cliff hits his rhythm and pees on all the usual spots and that abyss of danger and death is behind you, forgotten. Mis en abyme, the French say; put into the abyss. Now the dark fairy tale forests are inside us, even when we walk under streetlights and drive in metal cars with the bright lights on.
I came home the other night I talked to someone Darcy came up condolences and then she began to shiver so violently I could see feel the kind of depression that makes one want to end one’s life in the moment the body isn’t depressed but literally shaken by the knowledge of what it feels like to be depressed unhappy oversensitive for too many weeks for too many months. There is a number, all of us have it, the number which is too much of something. We all will die, we all have a foot in the abyss, we all walk next to that wood on a daily basis; sometimes I think art is what we use to understand how to live with this knowledge, what to do with it. Art is always already a virtual reality. And two three four times in the last week I have read about people whose lives became ‘real’ (not virtual I guess) when they experienced trauma the death of a loved one in each case. Real as in realized. Something, some things, become real for us.
As my brother Will said, words are slippery skin is slippery sometimes. The real is slippery as our skin, our words, our minds full of brains spread like a thousand roads across several continents of experience connection. Between our brains and our eyes and our skin, something happens; between these things and the world which is not us, something happens, something complex. I was walking the dog and looking at trees for six weeks and I thought, our brains are arboreal, like trees, branching toward a neural sun; our brains are like trees are like networks of trees, a forest up there. When the moths came and descended like a plague and ate whole forests, I found myself wandering in one of them and I thought: this is the brain dying, dead. The bare sticks, so sad against the sky, forlorn, greenless.
And then. A month later, walking that same forest (Don Dahvee Park, off Munras in Monterey, a long flat panhandle next to a deep deep arroyo). There they were. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten and on into hundreds. Each tree had them. Each brain stem. The new buds, like green diamonds with the dew on them.
I am closing my eyes now. Looking inside at the mind’s forest. Over the river and through the woods. Here we go. Once upon a time.
All day I thought how close the Patriots came. So many chances to ice it in the last minutes. And surprisingly how hard hard hard it is for me that they lost. Just gut wrenching. All the clichés, but immediately true and visceral.
Bailey was sick today sometimes I bend over him and am overcome with love a desire to protect him but also be with him, not over him or under or anything but next to. He stayed home today and Margann came home from lunch and he liked it so much he told me in chapter and verse what she brought him. You love your kid, and you love your partner loving your kid. People often look so lovely to me when they are, unawares, in the quite quotidian moment of serving up love and affection in its simplest forms. The way a hand brushes a cheek, or the way a word is formed by the mouth. I came home and made him tea (make me black tea with lots of, lots of…sugar? No…honey! [huge smile] Ok) and heated up a molasses ginger cookie and we sat on the bed and listened to the Spiderwick Chronicles and talked about how weird it is to be sick how your throat feels all leathery and you think you have energy and jump up from bed but then you don’t.
I feel almost all the way back from eight weeks ago. I felt like such shit then; no idea if I would feel better ever. The feel of mortality, pulling one down like a special effects monster from a lord of the rings-like film. Boy. I walked Cliff so many times down the street and thought I might never drive again, or have to quit my job, and yes we know I can be a tad dramatic but still. Suddenly I feel something quicken in me…why does the body do what it does? Perhaps I have unresolved issues!! ;-0 The trees were so powerful then; often they seemed rainy, windblown, harbingers. And then I’d feel stronger and healthier and the big eucs down on the corner of Monarch and Western would just rise from the ground like massive columns barkless and white and shedding light so that the canopy seems like a fantastic lightshade green dark with the light snaking down the lamp toward the ground.
Tonight I walked Cliff the trees were there I thought of the story Margann told me about walking Cliff and a huge coyote walked right up out of the blackdark arroyo over there and she crossed the street quickly as it looked at Cliff (as Tycho later put it, thinking “You gonna eat that?”). and it followed beginning to cross as well when a car came between them and it stalled and she made her escape. When you walk there at nght it is fucking dark scary red riding hood fairy tale dark and knowing there are coyotes and mountain lions just over there and being tied by a leash to something either of those things could eat…well it does bring one back to a different time, a different relationship with the dark and the forest. I love it. And then you walk up to the house with the white lights where Jasmine the dog lives and Cliff hits his rhythm and pees on all the usual spots and that abyss of danger and death is behind you, forgotten. Mis en abyme, the French say; put into the abyss. Now the dark fairy tale forests are inside us, even when we walk under streetlights and drive in metal cars with the bright lights on.
I came home the other night I talked to someone Darcy came up condolences and then she began to shiver so violently I could see feel the kind of depression that makes one want to end one’s life in the moment the body isn’t depressed but literally shaken by the knowledge of what it feels like to be depressed unhappy oversensitive for too many weeks for too many months. There is a number, all of us have it, the number which is too much of something. We all will die, we all have a foot in the abyss, we all walk next to that wood on a daily basis; sometimes I think art is what we use to understand how to live with this knowledge, what to do with it. Art is always already a virtual reality. And two three four times in the last week I have read about people whose lives became ‘real’ (not virtual I guess) when they experienced trauma the death of a loved one in each case. Real as in realized. Something, some things, become real for us.
As my brother Will said, words are slippery skin is slippery sometimes. The real is slippery as our skin, our words, our minds full of brains spread like a thousand roads across several continents of experience connection. Between our brains and our eyes and our skin, something happens; between these things and the world which is not us, something happens, something complex. I was walking the dog and looking at trees for six weeks and I thought, our brains are arboreal, like trees, branching toward a neural sun; our brains are like trees are like networks of trees, a forest up there. When the moths came and descended like a plague and ate whole forests, I found myself wandering in one of them and I thought: this is the brain dying, dead. The bare sticks, so sad against the sky, forlorn, greenless.
And then. A month later, walking that same forest (Don Dahvee Park, off Munras in Monterey, a long flat panhandle next to a deep deep arroyo). There they were. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten and on into hundreds. Each tree had them. Each brain stem. The new buds, like green diamonds with the dew on them.
I am closing my eyes now. Looking inside at the mind’s forest. Over the river and through the woods. Here we go. Once upon a time.
