sweetness

by the christmas tree. a little late, not very. two of three neices drifted off as we watched a very wholesome, sweet movie about a boy and his cheetah (I kinda like the living these littleones bring...{all except the scrappin';). anyway it's been very very sweet. makes for a dull blogspot, perhaps, but it's been a precious time.

wee calm

far from the madding crowd for the moment.
hoping my little nieces make it through the snow to us tomorrow night.
living for holding those little hands.

am thinking of a field in Vermont. it's snowy. two fuzzy horses stand there. am thinking of reaching for the persimmons in our orchard when i was in fourth grade. am feeling very close to my many friends, even if i haven't talked to some of them much recently. (was slow to realize the blessing of friendship, i supposy).
i am thinking of the sweetness of socks rolled up in drawers, and dogs sighing before they sleep, fish not moving at the bottom of the icy creeks, glasses clinking and buttons up the back of velvet dresses. so many hugs through so many sweaters. ribbons of traffic lights. the right music at the right time. our lucky, lucky life. pray we deserve it, earn it, don't waste it, don't forget it.

enough children to get to the moon

foot to shoulder, foot to shoulder - from the sidewalk outside your house to the bluecheese crust of the moon it would take ONE billion children, one on top of another to reach the distance.

(i also like the goldfish visual aid: little goldfish crammed together would need a fishbowl the size of a football stadium if they numbered a billion).

okay. so there it is. let's multiply... by SEVENTY.

$70 billion dollars authorized for U.S. warring in Iraq and Afganistan. (for now)

I'd say, 'get climbing, kids'.

breaking the gate

how many colors of silver could there possibly be? Sailed on/through all of them today: sterling, payne's grey, pewter, flat grey, zinc white on our most gorgeous San Francisco bay, blacksilver seals guiding the way - the hills of tiburon metallicgreen as we passed, molten gold flecking the water. just enough near boatonboat collisions to keep up the excitement, but mercifully few tankers, no submarines, and no whales (alas) though there were rumors of one in our midst. i got to take the helm from my true-sailor friends as we made our way at a dynamic slant under the golden gate towards the breakers and the vast expanse of the ever-wild Pacific. most exciting. the sun came beaming out at just that moment.
a very good day.
some lemongrass soup to warm up. compared ipod collections all the way back.
as i'm writing this it feels like my glass of milk is slipping off my table.
i'm still moving, still moved.
gawd - California is a beauty.

don't judge, just write

this my pre-blogging motto. not to worry that my dreams of late seem to be about the end of the world and my thoughts of late seem to be about what a drawn out failure it feels my life has become. don't judge, just write.

we had already made the trip once. there were two levels: first, and already pretty high up, a town [much like Banos in Ecuador, that great little place under the rumbling -now blown again-volcano] and then higher still a vista over the clouds that stretched to the curve of the earth. just spectacular. [is this my travel envy appearing again as nearanddears draw cirlces around desirable spots in Nepal??]. Anyway, we'd had such a good time at that first town- - dancing, lining the streets, singing [much as was our Ecuadorian New Years]- that when my cousin Ecky was visiting we wanted to show him - to live that experience all over again though I knew there was no going back, really.

And so we climbed and wound up the first pass, looking down onto these first modest clouds. [lately i've been dreaming a lot about huge hills - as in my other days unrecorded dream of taking a joy ride in serbia, down, down, down, a windy road then super-steeply down until it dead-ended into dirt and there was no way to get back out. A surprising number of people lived there and weren't likely to leave. it was actually fairly nice place to live if you could accept life as a peasant]. (Sacramento?)

Anyway, back to this one. Maybe not much to it. I made just a little comment as we rounded a curve, something casual like "isn't that a pretty waterfall?" but was actually,"isn't that a mushroom cloud?" There was one, no two, and i felt a little proud for seeing them first. Within seconds there were more and more and at the same time the water (seems we were also near the meditteranean) was instantly FILLED with white jet skis and black jet skis - tens of thousands of them heading right towards eachother and insane speeds. We knew and were right that indiscriminate slaughter was what was next for us. It was and the dream degenerated into a fully impressionistic treatment of the subject. Not gory, per se, but all implied: fast, red, gruesome and extensive. Was this happening to the whole world at once or just the eastern Meditteranean?

When later I was picking through the rubble I saw that my mother had been pinned under a huge fallen bookcase. It was bad - her arm was back over her shoulder and had been extended to about eight feet in length by the impact. She was still breathing but I didn' t know what to do. It had happened, there it was, and no way was I strong enough to free her. I looked around and saw that others in my family were alive. My brother and cousin had stayed hidden behind a stack of large canvases in an arts supply store.
(kinda sweet that we're all trying to find cover in arts and literature to mixed effect -....but at least we've gone undetected.
maybe it's good to not have a very successful career after all).

i dunno. there was more. but i think once again i've woken up a little dumb. i wish it wasn't quite so loud here. i seem to be woken every day at fiveish by some sheet-metal gobbling truck. i hope to have a good day today but already i feel i need to dip back into sleep and try to save my family or find out if the end of the world is finished at least try to get to the top of the mountain. i'm not sure what the options are at the moment.


addendum. i did drift back enough to recall another section of a dream in which a particularly gifted student of mine was saying my name a few times over and said not to worry: ALL my students didn't hate me....

okay. i'll work with what i've got.
time to get a litte me-sized tree....

Inspiration

"A very favorable climate for professional writers and for all those who have something to write down..."

So says my horoscope. But what, what?

Okay. Don't make this difficult. Jump in.

Once upon a time there was a girl who was no longer a girl.
No. Terrible.
Okay.
Once upon a time there was a last leaf outside her window that when hit by just the right beam of winter morning light became a huge powderflaked lavendar butterfly from the Amazon. Come all the way here. This leaf was portentous. It brought good tidings. (tidings? is this a christmas story?) It fluttered there, granting a moment to be understood, accepted as a butterfly, not a leaf. If believed in as a simple loveliness fluttered up from the underworld (south america is not the underworld, you idiot), if understood as a magical thing, it would bring good things and a worthy story to tell to the coffee drinking would-be writer onlooker. Oh. ghastly. but go on...No go get more coffee.

um.
Curses.

The light has changed. The leaf is a leaf outside my window. No mistaking it.
A sliver of a magic moment, lost. Once again my Brilliant First Novel has eluded me.

Will get up earlier and try again tomorrow. But my horoscope will likely suggest I take a careful look at my finances.

from my friend, andy cohen

Today light is mute, communicates in sign,
vernacular hues of yellow, red and blue,
remnant green and brooding gray, this
impressionist state of unspeakable
absence here, in this playground, on this
late autumn scape where, I kneel in leaf
strewn mud, in lieu of prayer, my voice in
tongues, try to spell out the babble, try
to translate and address, the rambling
digressions of my manic eye; to converse
as if you were present, and light today
was bright,articulate.

i'm better now

nevermind.

seethingly misanthropic (for the moment)

i want to complain. but it's complicated because i might get busted. I want to complain about _________. it's not _____ fault. they are simply much more _______than my _______ and my _______ is _________ than the one before (even though that_______ seemed to have some astonishly unenlightened ideas about ______.. egh.) but i think even the most under_______ of them weren't near as ________ as ________. All those _________ _______s, those ________ _______. and the _______! how ___!!
geez!

actually this is helping.
I just feel so keenly these past few days like I am so fucking rarified in my concerns that there might not be any place left to really engage with people that isn't tainted by ______ and _______ and concerns about ________size.
i don't even want to share anymore because _______ _______ _______ period. but if i don't what can i do? just shop?

i'd also like to complain about not being ________ to after all that time by ______ AND then there's_________. I mean, GAWD!! it was really embarassing that my _______ was ________at_____. i have _________r than that. i wanted to leave the room knocking over all the _______ and the ________ly ______. that would have felt great. oh, the bondage of etiquette..

then though, _______was nice. and my house is quiet but pretty and the fire i'm sitting next to is nice even if i'm over-contributing particulates into the atmosphere.

what bothers me most is that i can't recollect __________, that if I admit it, I've lost ______, that sense of sense and innocence that WAS, was true and good, and our birthright. but it's as if it has long since (i remember the day it did) drifted over the backyard fence, rose up, vanished and just sailed away. it is probably fallen to some dewy field since and choked some small, grazing animal somewhere.

i am in a stinky mood, but because i feel that with my lack of _______, I, along with the rest, have betrayed ______the very heart of it without (at least enough of) a fight. but perhaps us worse, because we HAD it, KNEW it once.
(I am thinking of a Ray Bradbury story where everytime someone has a thought, the government, or somesuch, blasted loud music into the heads of the men and women struggling to think, to recollect and pull themselves together until they simply had no idea what they'd felt or wanted to say and so said nothing). In one way or another, this is all about that. Our collective 20-30 year slowmotionpaymentplanlobotomy. How _______ and _______ how alarmingly near to ________we are- all of us. Stunning we can even keep up the pretense, such a thin veil of _______.

_________, don't you think?

i just want to remember what i'm missing, because i sure am missing it.
i'm glad i can at least be so very clear about it because i am so much more _______ than ________. Which, I'm afraid, is also lie.

Regime Change

there is an extremely intense laser beam the width of my hand. i know because i put my hand in front of it and only my fingers are left visible and glowing on the other side. the beam is encircling us, hovering over the smoking river. it hurts (many people scream when I touch it) at first very badly and then not at all. my memory has been burned away that fast and i don't care. i can just feel the light passing through me - can feel the soft edges of the flickering beam and it feels like what i have imagined the edge of fire would feel like if we could touch it: it's gentle and of a wholly different order physically than anything we are used to.

The longer I hold my hand there the more I can see Hanguel shapes (this obviously from a student report last night on a Korean graphic designer) floating down from very high up in the sky. they contain within them (though unrecognizable from their outlined forms) actual dinosaurs. I say aloud, "Really? There are actual dinosaurs in there?" I don't understand the possibilities of scale. Other Hanguel shapes, in different colors, contain other life forms: trees, barracuda, mice, whatever.

They are floating down out of the night sky. The planet is being seeded for a new epoque of life on earth. Humans won't be part of this. Most of us are watching, leaning our back against a giant hill that is encircled by the smoking river and the laser beam that is buzzing above it.

I think we are all surprised that the end would be so peaceful, that it would be so easy to let go. In any case, there not much we can do about it.

no music for old men

just saw "No Country for Old Men."
uh....damn!

that's one sinister movie. I would think the main guy - the psychopathic killer - would be just a parody as he is very simply - EVIL, but pretty quickly this vaguely eastern european guy with a silly page boy haircut became the face of whatever has ever scared me: the man in my sister's psyche, the figure in all my photographs, the guy on the creek road, the guy in the bootleg, the possibility of pure evil which i'd never really felt impacted directly by before until about 2003 but consider more now, not necessarily as one of two sides of a god-debate, but as an actual force to be acknowledged (and ideally avoided, naturally) nonetheless.

though I don't mean it to be deranged itself, I have long wanted to write a paper about the Creativity of evil, the improvisational inventiveness of the truly pathological. I am curious why the violent act invites prodigious almost playfulness with the variables of pain and disfigurement and death. The Last King of Scotland, which was great, could be sited. The Killing Fields. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange. Eegads!, why are these the movies that stick with me? I guess many movies are about just those possibilities of dark and individual inspiration, but somehow this character was different. Utterly unredeemable, not just a man with a damaged inner-child, but the 'force' itself.

A stunning movie, I thought. It wasn't until the very end that i realize there was no soundtrack at all. My heart was pounding so much (in the first half, at least) that I didn't miss it. I think the silence had everything to do with how scary it was - just the sound of shoes, shoes stopping, a curtain blowing, the desert itself a character, the spooky oak panelling in those icky hotels... a car on the highway, maybe a little wind.

anyway. deeply creepy.
loved it.

cracks pops and scraps

i can't sleep in my house very well. the traffic is loud, the furnace makes all manner of weird noises (as it did when my house was broken into with me here before - one sound sounding like someone bumping into my chair - which it was), the walls are the same walls I left 9 years ago. all my shit travelled all the way there, (and there and there and there), to just wind up here waiting for the screwdriver. i feel there is no reason for my return. i should be near the girls at least. in the dream i am back in nycity meeting my mother for lunch and i ask myself (furnace crack) if i'd e happier going home to my little house across the river. i felt a strong 'yes'. i meet gilly's baby who is darling and gilly is extremely dear and says we were all wrong and asks me to be her sister. in the room behind is my actual sister. she is very sick but trying to recover and we are all there to help her. we are bringing her home. actually though we are all going to go party for a bit first which i want to do fairly badly as all is 'back to normal' and i want to go out. andrea is serious though, distant and trying. she wants out of the van. i go with her. I don't quite remember going back to her apartment on 80th. but i know that it is okay, even if I'm back in my house. even if i'm sleeping alone with scissors under my pillow. the furnace pops. whatever we have lost is well lost, as long as we have her and she still has a chance to live. i am impressed with how hard she is trying.

i am very tired this morning, typing with my eyes shut because they were open much of the night. i don't seem to know how to start again. not depressed just a bit spun. a friend wrote to say she dreamt of me. that i was living in San Francisco and ran a place called the Hibiscus Cafe. She said I was very well dressed.

maybe i should sell my house.

Dancing on the Stump

Is this really what I want to bring home with me from our lovely visit to the big trees - this humiliating evidence of human small-mindedness, the sixteen drunk couples on the stump of the tree that was born in 600 A.D. and felled and skinned and shipped to New York in parts, the rest bowled on in the 1890's? Not really, but the pit in the stomach lingers. (or is that still from too much pie....)

Anyway, the memory I'd rather keep and will is from our friendly late full-moon walk through the giant sequoia grove - the path easy to walk in the milky BRIGHT light, the bears likely asleep, the sequoias, some of them still there towering towards the moon, their 'slow consciousness' as Joe once said, abiding. Then my small-mindedness, smallness, briefness, was a pleasure to experience. (Why is that so comforting, I continue to wonder...) The dance someday will end, the road will return to impassibility, invisibility as the world turns round (even we can't stop that, try as we might) - night and day at once, future and past for a moment meeting as just present which will still speak as it does at this moment, without us, or the moonlight even- the slight rustle from the higher canopies settling gently onto a perfect world.

falling off the map

just quickly - as I want to remember the image...

had extensive dreams - about Zoe, just exactly her dear self, and Patrick (looking intensively, as he might, for wainscotting in the basement before I left) - but later (because I was worried about meeting my Drawing class in the morning in the rain, I think) I dreamt about trying to meet my students at "The Country Next to China". I was in a hurry to get there and circumnavigated most of a small (say 3 mile wide) globe. When I was nearing The Country Next to China and I began to lose my grip. The country peeled up a bit like paper and I was grabbing onto the larger letters of its name but lost my grip and fell into The See Below. It was smooth, blue water. I was fine. The falling was significant. But kind-of fun.

But why this surety that it was the "See Below"... What followed? Looking for wainscotting?? Maybe that came after? I'm a bit confused, but did feel quite okay falling off the map.

Perhaps that's direction enough for the time being.

decio

a name from the past, to be sure.
I just saw your comment here but don't know if you'll check back and don't know how to contact you. (I never look for comments as .. well, I never get any and I assume this is a place just to jot notes where I can always access them). Anyway, was surprised to see your name.
I remember you but just barely. I think we met once, perhaps twice. So long ago.
I would be happy to talk with you about my sister though I find it the saddest of all stories; we are all simply devastated by her absence.
Perhaps if you send an email I can tell you more. I'm sure she would have been glad to know you'd been thinking of her. I hope you're well.
- Laura

blisters

dancing blisters!
- as clear a sign of improvement as my unmanicured, paint-under-the-fingernails hands and the afternoon fire that is just catching now in my fireplace.

a beautiful walk by the river this morning. misty. golden. smelling of autumn and river dust (my favorite). a tiny sense of homecoming.

the bird so big I thought it was a fisherman. five slow wingflaps - six, seven feet across - just skimming the water before it disappeared into the lifting mists of my gratitude.

time now for a hot bath and early preparations for my list of thanks.
(will rent a cabin for thanksgiving near the big trees) that too feels right.
hope so.

anyway. little glimmers of light.

au prima numero dos

If you are calling to find out more about why you are increasingly depressed and would like to hear the options in English, please press one now. If you are calling to find out why you work 115 hours a week and haven't been taken out to a romantic dinner since the late 20th century, press 2 now. If you are over forty and still don't know what you want to be when you grow up , press 3 now. If you have a no income stated adjustable mortgage on a tiny house in a flood plane, press 4 now. Lost your joy, looks, keys, style, sense of humor, backup keys? Press 5. God dead? Mideast Rubble? Info on the Rapture? Lack of Role Models? Inability to help Those You Love? Oil-covered seabirds? Press 6. General Devastation, Certainty of Oblivion, Agoraphobia, Mercury in Retrograde, PTSD, Skin Conditions? - 7. DMV Problems, Trouble with IPP/TCP keychains or cable connectivity? - 8. Restless Leg Syndrome - 9. If the world has gone mad and there's not a light-hearted person left standing and even a puppy might not help, press 0 over and over until you get disconnected.

This call will be monitored for quality assurance.
To repeat these options in Spanish, au prima numero dos.

Dancing on the Stump

Is this really what I want to bring home with me from our lovely visit to the big trees - this humiliating evidence of human small-mindedness, the sixteen drunk couples on the stump of the tree that was born in 600 A.D. and felled and skinned and shipped to New York in parts, the rest bowled on in the 1890's. Not really, but the pit in the stomach lingers. (or is that still from too much pie....)

Anyway, the memory I'd rather keep and will is from our friendly late full-moon walk through the giant sequoia grove - the path easy to walk in the milky BRIGHT light, the bears likely asleep, the sequoias, some of them still there towering towards the moon, their 'slow consciousness' as Joe once said, abiding. Then my small-mindedness, smallness, briefness, was a pleasure to experience. (Why is that so comforting, I continue to wonder...) The dance someday will end, the road will return to impassibility, invisibility as the world turns round (even we can't stop that, try as we might) - night and day at once, future and past for a moment meeting as just present which will still speak as it does at this moment, without us, or the moonlight even- the slight rustle from the higher canopies settling gently onto a perfect world.

I am, indeed, Thanks-giving...
How lucky my life. How much I love it here.

courage & criminals

On one hand I have people I love - some of whom are being asked to live with death sentences of one duration and difficulty or another and who are, to a one, so brave and moving in their courage, I am humbled and amazed by them.

On the other, it is impossible not to notice that our runamuck capitalism begins to require that to get at all ahead you must go on and screw someone else - hard (but just in little increments, of course. just here and there): Get in/get out/get on. As long as you don't know the person and it's just about numbers, why not? Just a little indiscretion. All legal. Here and there. Just look what we can do... (the example below is minimal but $30 - $50+ dollars x a million or 3 million suckers makes for a damn nice vacation somewhere).

So. . . Screwed this morning with not so much as a kiss goodbye:
I just called to get info on a credit card. There was a message (from Target- BADBAD Company. For shame. I'm surprised. And unhappy because I like their homewares...) that they had changed their 800 number and referred me to a 900 number.
I called that number, but couldn't proceed without an access code, having been give NO clue what that might refer to. I hung up and tried again. Same thing. I think I just did it twice. Maybe I called a third time to hazard a guess and enter one of my forty three user passwords. So, anyway, I hung up again and called the original number back and - because I was busy with my hands - heard the message repeat four times with that 900 number to call. After the fifth repeat (which surely almost no one hears) there was a message saying it cost $9.95 each time you call that number!

Mother fuckers!
Are these people really going to live in such a different world that they won't be affected when the whole giant pretense of American comfort and promise falls like a 3,000 mile corn souffle and we're left individually sporting that gaunt, knowing look of those who have lost all as we slowly dry up, sick and uninsured, in gated communities that are mostly foreclosed and literally going to the dogs?

Individually we all try so hard, it seems. Even with the little things. I've lost my cell phone how many times and always had it returned. In NYC one cabbie drove in from Bensonhurst off-hours to give it back. I don't know anyone who would steal from their neighbor. I don't know anyone who isn't...good.

So what happens in the collective that exempts us so easily from morality? Why are so out of control - collectively? Why, when we can have the financial viability of this country's citizens nipped away at in aggregious interest rates adjustments and over-limit fees and... disappearing billion dollar airlifts to the middle east (beside the point?)... why don't the increments of our kindness also add up to more than a drop in the bucket.

We must hope they do. Perhaps we have to try even harder, do more than survive the brutal ruptures in our lives, extend our bravery even beyond our impressive individual tolerance and grace in living with our deep individual challenges.

Until we can turn the tide with the will of our collective humanity, we are a cancer on this planet and the world is brave and beautiful in trying to survive us.

dog in the library

When i first see him he looks good, but is very bearded and I overhear him saying he's heading for the Yukon. Not long after I see him again (in a library where a local musician is playing in the lobby; the performance is broadcast on pbs and it looks fun on screen, but in the lobby where he's playing its just me in my sweats, watching it all on my laptop. Quite dull). Later, my friend approaches me most directly in a nook of the library. He is quite truly a vision - his skin so young: kind-of blue and peach and gold, his face clean-shaven, his hair a radiant gold. I try to minimize how schleppy I feel I've become and find myself telling him that I regret just being friends, that I regret not realizing he would have been the best for me, the kindest by far. I didn't know he was so beautiful. Just as I speak the connection vanishes and it is clear he will remain with his dutiful wife. Moreover, he has my dog who is still alive, still my beautiful Zoe. She's gone up and down the stairs with him so she must be okay. I lay down with her and curl around her huge body, her heavy head flopped over my arm - just for a second exactly as sweet and bonded as it used to be. My friend goes home eventually with his family of now three children and my dog is following after on the street. I think she is looking for me but I can't be sure.

I can't tell if I am recognizable.
I have no idea if I have mattered at all.

put a cork in it!

advice to myself.
am going to try to invoke some deeper discipline here. shut off my head. ignore my heart for a bit. redirect my thoughts with action, sweat, even bluster. be grateful. still so much to be grateful for.

as Greg Brown writes:

my heart was torn
I'd made up my mind
I'd keep to myself and just be kind
and need nothing
just need nothing

love my folks my kids
my friends and make it on through
to the end
no more suffering
over loving

six inches.

no. not your six inches. (and mine too, more like five, four).
four inches between my nose and the side of a red truck flying past me. soooooo hadn't seen it. wasn't warned by my walking companion who didn't see it coming either. was just about to walk across the road. the tiniest hesitation. missed by a whisker. felt a breeze on my whisker even. wouldn't have even finished my sentence. would have been pulped.

this - much like the story of my father who was leaning out of a window in Beirut. popped his head back in for a second to relay an observation and at just that second a concrete block fell right passed the window where his head had been.

but as my sister said, 'almost died' stories are very uninteresting.
why did she always have to be so interesting.
I looked back at the road once I'd walked across it. The moment of my almost-squishing visible to me from the other side. I wish I could look back at her pool like that - what could have happened - right then, right there. The end in an instant. But what when something DOES happen/has happened: her story, absence, the memories of her rich and FUN and beautiful life and consequences of her lonely, horrible death permeate everything - was the immediate second thing I thought of after, 'damn - that was close!'.. I got hit by that black truck two years ago as impactfully as I almost did last night but that passed right through my body in the form of one phrase - then leaving just my soul as so much mush. One second to the next and all the rest just relentless consequence.

I don't want to die too but i can see now, as i never could before, how you can get kinda boxed in by your story, how you can kinda want out of it, how, as they say, life can be just suffering. I never believed that before. Anyway, it was a curious moment - the truck passed and my blown back hair still settling. More of a 'huh. interesting' than a revelation. I would like it to have been a revelation. A fast fix would have been nice. But this is a long story. And the dye is cast. I must quit being amazed that all has changed and try to invent who I will be instead of looking to reconstruct who I was when my parts are scattered up and down the east and west coasts: some in boxes, some stored with friends, some here- recognizable, but not.

ah. the grief blog. what a bore....

I had a little salvo yesterday though, earlier. Playing on my sister's electronic keyboard. The sustain offered a very different feeling than a regular keyboard. There, I could hold onto something for a long long time. Note overlapping with note. It didn't sound too bad. Was the first time I've felt like myself since this summer. That, more of a revelation: Hey, THERE I am!! Maybe, just maybe, I can peel myself off the Great Sidewalk of Life. Going to run off and get some mineral spirits today, see if I can't find that old girl of me somewhere.

either is a mistake

i chose one.
it was a mistake.
actually, i didn't choose but I said things that changed things. I don't want to become afraid of that. But these consquences are daunting.
how quickly we fall in love.
how little we know about what we need, can do, should do, have done, might do. how little we are sure about whether the satisfactions of the day are easing the soul or not.

i see no point anymore in making plans of any kind. nothing works out as planned.
often that's good - because we're too dumb to know any better. or, we just lose (all? again?) and, lost in nuance, start thinking anew, planning. As if we could plan, as if it wasn't well past midnight in our lives, as if it was ever just our karma we were negotiating, or that even if it was, it would play out at all - properly.

how could we know how it will come down when the next five minutes is different than we guess. totally. how can we know who will be lucky, who will be hard, or sick or beautiful, who seems delightful and then betrays, who will be the steadfast friend, the one there at the dark hour, or the one last standing. i'm always wrong, it seems. and yet there are the surprising friends and the ones who we are sure will be break us and turn out to be all the meaning we have found. and yet alsoontheotherhand people never seem to really change. in the end, when is the end, we will have been right, right??

and about ourselves -
to hold onto the self or give it away?
maybe either isn't a mistake.
maybe just one.

bad men

five inthe morning. five forty. computer is too bright to look at. nothing imperative to say. just a bit of a mess though. cried all day, all day, missing my best friend, (I need her just desperately) and all that is falling away from me now that i can't stop. my only choice: to leave EVERYTHING I've ever cared for or assume all your unmet responsibility. my eyes swollen shut. my whole life changed by someone)s) elses's(s) selfindulgent behavior. thanks for the other shoe, g.t. i'm sure there are others yet to follow. literally. im sure there must be something else you can take from me. getting harder to findthough isn't it. but you never let us down there.

did actually sleep for a minute before this. something very violent. new jersey lowlife. going back for my pet duck, tony, in a rented car full of crooks and crack addicts and prostitutes. or maybe were they babysitters?

i want to get out of your car.
looks like i never will.

trade it all for duck a la porn at jean-jorges? to die for.

this is my house (lyrics by emily trautman)

This is my house, this is your house.
What is yours belongs to me.
This is my house, this is your house.
What is mine belongs to thee.

(10 years later)

This is my house! That is your house!
Why can't you see! This is my house!
That is your house!
We were not meant to be!

(40 years later)

This is my house. Where is his house?
I've lost contact can't you see?
This is my house. Where is his house?
Where could he be?

stinky livers

well. i guess i just want to talk about the stinky livers. most of the time we are absent we are worried about the stinky livers, or I am anyway. I know they were left out. I'm sure the whole place stinks. I suspect the neighbors are upset. It's been quite awhile but still they have been left out.

When I go back I find they have been tucked into the leaves of my artbook that now is deep like some kind of dark. open box. The two livers are indeed there partially stuck to the skirt I've recently found (actually), liked and ironed. All in a mess. I definitely didn't want to touch it. And didn't know what to do with it. I tried to pick them up in public but the whole thing fell on the floor.

There was a lot more to it: people from Austria, a new student, a lot of talk and congeniality, a swing over the danube, skimming the surface with my feet (feat I wrote, ?) almost touching unknown big, clear fish underneath but still those two livers were left out stinking up the place.

That they were livers perhaps is the deathbyalcohol thing, but that there were two, almost fused, suggests (I was going to write) A. and Z, for my dear Andrea, my dear Zoe (great livers, both) In the writing then, which is often the interesting part for me, how the puns come out in the telling, (as in the 'leaves' of my artbook, the skimming of the surface) perhaps it is A-Z. All of it. All the stinking mess of it, perhaps fueled too by observations in the college cafeteria yesterday of how outrageously enormous so many of the students were and how sad I was feeling for all the youth and sexiness and all that could be for them and the world beyond obliterated by personal whole pizza lunches with 9' square brownies to round it out. I don't know.

Perhaps I've just been feeling like a stinky liver myself lately. A bit crusted over by all this grieving. Not a lot of fun. Not a good liver. But then again, not alone. I wonder if I have skirted the issue.

building a fire in central pak

why all these dreams about the park?)

i'm kneeling (oh, and why all these dreams about kneeling) (um. duh) by a fire that will barely light. my mother had put a wine bottle in it to get it warmed up but I'm afraid the bottle will explode (okay. not too tough there). I'm supposed to be calling back my friend dan to talk about my nieces. but I'm sitting by the fire. there is someone nearby giving a speech and he says something about being a force for light, or some political slogan. At the same time, I blow on the fire and it fans out in brilliant, high flames. The politician looks enormously pleased with himself and delighted at the coincidence. Later, a Russian intellectual, (himself a parody of the type) says I'm just playing into the hands of the media engine - all tricks and extravaganzas meaning nothing. I think he's a bit of an ass as I try to explain I was just trying to keep the fire going. Later I find myself at an Earth Gravity party, or something like that. It is 'a weekend for 'seekers' or Deadheads. I am aware that the Russian got to me a bit about playing along when I see the first woman in a circle get up and dance in a totally prescripted FREE way and all the others following suit without any deviation of style. It's creepy but I like my flowing Turkish pants, my white veil and the green cross I hold right in front of my face. There is some bit about Vermont. Images of big green and yellow cow barns, where if you get too high, you're likely to wake up. I liked the last one and wanted to wake up there.
I didn't. (sigh)

be a donkey not a sheep

My brother just sent me a link to an article by Garret Keizer in Harper's Magazine on our current collective moral obligation to civil protest. I don't usually post such things, in part because I agree with Steven Colbert who had a scathing 'Word' for people who can't seem to care, participate and act in their own lives, but can't wait to go home and blog about what they observed - (then referencing the use of stun gun on a student who went on too long amid a dead-bored looking crowd).
So, I do think it's important that we don't have illusions that our postings and musing constitute impactful protest. Nonetheless, at least kept here for my own records as I don't assume a readership, this article is a clear indictment of not trying, of saying 'it won't do any good.'

I will find some way to get in the way November 6th, 2007.
And hopefully thereafter. I'm sick of this shit.

Here's the article:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/10/0081720

the phone.

he is curled there, crying, on the phone learning something I will know soon. something new. something as bad, as much my news as his. I walk past him toward the door at the end of the dining room - the house, definitely theirs, a place I'm barely welcome. I rise onto my tip toes and, in impossible slow motion, finally come down in a smooth, fluid arc to my knees. i still don't know what it is. i try to be ready.

vicarious romance

living through my 11 year-old niece, whose particular-friend Philip said in her absence, "I see your face everywhere, even in my lunch tray..."

true love. there it is.

no need

to keep a complete dream journal. but...another 'visit from an old friend. nice. but no. nothing left.
anything interesting today? perhaps just the first tidbit in the newspaper - a new 'spy' robot you can have in your own house for just $299 that can read stories to your kids by remote control while you're travelling, stake out your cheating whore of a wife AND clean your rain gutters. Indispensible.

aside: i love my leaf blower even if it just goes 'puf' and takes ages to get the damn leaf to the curb. i only wish it had a shotgun mic on it so i could hear my neighbors talk about their storage problems.

branches

not quite sure why i set up this page.
to avoid actual work i think is the answer.

notes for me then. always about dreams. this - one of those great ones where the object(s) of your fancy is most truly in love with you. here - who was it - a combination of James McAvoy and .w or a.k. - Nope. It's too late in the day and the dream has become a kind of cushion at the back of my mind still covered by the branches of the central park trees that have closed over and blocked access except to glimpses of the festival that I turned back towards after he left me only to find him at the edges of the crowd again, aware of me and drawing closer. sweet all of it. all of it in the middle of the night, in the park, in the dark.

that's as gone as the real walk through central park. when it snowed and snowed and snowed and every single black branch held five inches of white and we all were there in the middle of the night at Christmas and under the Narnia lampost mom recited something - what? Frost, surely. But more. Perfect from start to finish. The only other sounds
the drift of easy wind and downy flake. How lucky we were then. We knew it - always. Paid attention to all of it. I know that. But how now to have those things comfort and not torment.

The spray as we ran through the deep snow fields.

Reminded now too of Andrea and I on the ice field in Montreal that looked just like marshmellow cream and mostly would hold us up but we'd every 7, 10 steps or so suddenly fall in up to our hips. It was hilarious. We were desperate/in pain with laughter.

A hundred years ago, it must be, at least.
I have a title for something i want to write anyway. The Same Life in Which I Loved You. As hard as it is to believe. It is. Always will be. Come what may, as it will.

The only other sounds
the drift of easy wind and downy flake
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
but I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

For example. half a dream 9/22/07

Because I know the next day I am supposed to move all my paintings from my old studio into my little house, and because I've gone to bed latelate, I wake up earlyearly and try to kill myself with an imaginary brick to my head.
I thought this neurosis had stopped. Apparently not. (aggressive/passive behavior?). Luckily ineffectual. In anycase, finally I sleep and engage in not lucid dreaming but lucid drafting.

Each of us left in my family has their own house and each seems to have huge wings that lead also to other suites of rooms, furnished, bejewelled, terraced with fountains, jade latches, beautiful tea sets set out in slate patios with thriving ferns. (In the morning I think this is a good sign of potential living for us all). I find many rooms I could work in. Front rooms with walls big enough for painting now that they have lost their normal function. I seem to be able to make an occcasional wall vanish or turn or simply absorb the deep stacks of oversized paintings. I have lost most of the dream but remember X (we'll call him) helping me move in as night comes on. We argue. He scolds me for leaving two dead birds in the sink.