Summer 2003

The dreamy blood red basin slowly went down the drain.

So this is the place

this is the place I live she thought,

and died.

support the ones you love

"Because she knew he wouldn't mention this afterward; she knew he wouldn't take it as a sign that she was losing her nerve or was in too deep. There weren't many people in this world who would let you be vulnerable and still believe you were strong."

Veronica Mars, “The Thousand Dollar Tan Line,” an original mystery by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, pg. 188

bound by blood, not bloodlines

from Web MD:

"The original meaning of the saying “blood is thicker than water” is that family ties are the tightest of all.

• YOUR ANSWER: True

• CORRECT ANSWER: False

Actually, it’s quite the opposite. In Middle Eastern culture, blood brothers -- warriors who share blood they shed in battle -- are even closer than biological brothers. An earlier expression is that blood is “far stronger than the water of the womb.” Historians think wealthy Englishmen may have bent the meaning to stress the importance of bloodlines and keep money in the family."

the rain

People accuse me of being contrary when I say I love this weather, but I don't mind. It's not overcast, it's tropical balmy. It's soft, bunched-up, pearl grey, Maui overcast. It's not grey, it's Paris grey. It won't rain, but if it does rain it will be something soft and transparent. I've worked 12 hours in the rain, I've slept in the rain and today I don't mind the rain, because I know I can go home and put on clean, dry clothes and open the window and listen to the rain; if I choose. I may choose to go for a walk in the rain. I might enjoy getting soaking wet just because I can get dry again and it will be easy; as easy as going home to where I live, where I can afford to live, where I rent a clean, dry space all my own where I am free to be. Where I have stocked with food and blankets and bed, where I have built in space and time and my own. I don't mind the rain, because I can do all these things, and still get soaking wet and still be okay. It is just the rain. I have loved the rain since the summer we cut the hay and it was lying flat in the field to cure when it started to rain. And it rained. I remember my father coming into the kitchen and starting a fit something awful because it was raining on the hay and it was the end of the world (and it might have been for us at the time. To lose the hay crop meant we would have to buy hay and hay was expensive for all the animals and beds to feed; even I understood this as a small child and understood this import and that that was why my dad was so upset.) Still, I remember standing in the kitchen window, listening to the storm above me, staring out at the rain, and thinking, "but Daddy it's only raining." And I felt bad for the rainy day because it was so beautiful. We lived in Washington state and when it rained it rained. I remember looking out into the yard and it was so green it hurt. The apple trees, the pear tree, even the old scrappy little prune tree that was always trying to die, were green and bright and budded and bending over in the rain to accept the rain. The grass was too long and looked like a horses main, standing up in thick green tufts. The sky was heavy and leaden and dark, and in the window I could see reflected the bright, clear primary red of my favorite sweatshirt. It was like the earth was seething and breathing thick blood-dyed color. I have been in love with super saturated color ever since. And with the rain. So no. I'm not being contrary when I say I love the rain. I want to lie down in it and let it soak me to the bone until my blood threads with the trees and my skin dissolves into the dirt and I wash away from it all. I want to be like a ribbon of water threading through a river, made of rain, made of me.

more early american literature

"I have said a good deal more here on what ought to be than on what is: but God forbid I should appear to say, "I know what ought to be, and this is it." But it did and does seem better to shout a few obvious facts (they can never be "obvious" enough) than to meech. The meechers will say, Yes, but do you realize all (or any) of the obstacles, presuming you are (in general) a little more right than merely raving? The answer is, I am sure I don't realize them all, but I realize more of them, probably, than you do. Our difference is that you accept and respect them....Oh. I am very well aware how adolescent this is and how easily laughable. I will nevertheless insist that any persons milder, more obedient to or compromising with "the obstacles as they are," more "realistic," contented with the effort for less, are dreamy and insufficiently skeptical. Those are the worst of the enemies, and always have been."

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pg 308-309 James Agee

"This Happened"

I met this girl once, or anyway I knew of her or perhaps I thought I knew her or maybe I just hoped to know her, and you would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up, or at least what she hoped to be when she grew enough to live by her own decisions ‎(though we wouldn't say all that) ‎and she would say, "Oh I am going to see the world," as if that was a profession. I saw her once many years later and she seemed like the same girl, or at least she did to me if the light was right. I asked her if she had seen the world and she said no she had not and I asked her why and she seemed lost at the train station trying to answer; for a reason to find an excuse for the choices made and not made, of living in no outside of a yes, or at least that's what it seemed like she would say about a life not yet entirely lived, had she answered.

 September, 2003

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the sounds in my neighborhood

Sometimes I sit down right where I am standing and listen to the sounds in my neighborhood.

A car drives by playing loud music. It’s so loud the windows on the car rattle and it sounds like the car said boom.

My mother says the music is a little too loud, but my brother says it’s just loud enough.

An airplane flies overhead and sounds like a giant bumblebee making lazy circles in the sky.

Several people are mowing their lawns. It sounds like the Christmas concert we went to in the city. My mother called that a symphony, so maybe this is a symphony of lawn mowers.

Our neighbor is running a table saw in his garage and it sounds like a lion’s roar and I imagine being a famous explorer in a far off country.

My sister says I have never heard a lion roar so how do I know if that is true, but my mother says maybe I hear what I hear and my sister hears what she hears and that is okay.

A truck drives by after making deliveries to the market on the corner and it sounds like its climbing stairs as it drives passed our house.

My father says the driver is “shifting gears” when the engine makes that sound.

One of my favorite sounds is the sound of wind rustling through the trees. It is a quiet sound and easy to miss. My grandmother says it is a lullaby the trees sing to the birds. She puts her arm around me and kisses my forehead when she says this.

The sun is hot on top of my head and even the heat seems to have a shimmering kind of sound. I can’t explain this sound, you will have to listen for it yourself.

It’s easy. You just sit down right where you are standing and listen to the sounds in your neighborhood.

What are the sounds you hear?

book note

"Now, see, that's where you're wrong, Featherstone said. You're making a young man's mistake. You need to let your anger fall away. It won't get you where you want to be. It's poison. But it will rise from you like smoke from a fire it you let it go. And anger is not a becoming feature as you grow older."

13 Moons, Charles Frazier

dream big/work hard/try always/Moby Dick

"And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor--as you will sometimes see it--glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."

"Moby Dick," Chapter 85, Herman Melville

perfect/imperfect/love in retrospect

Someone once said to me, What's wrong with you? How come you're not married?

I said, It's a long story.

He said, What's the short one?

I said, He died. 

The irony is, had he not died, I doubt I would have learned this about myself. They say marry your best friend, and I never would have married him. He said, I want to have a baby. I said I will never have your baby. He was too old, I was too young, but it felt like we'd known each other for a thousand years. I remember the conversation, sitting in his living room on a low to the ground beach chair he used like an arm-chair, and him saying let's get married and me saying, but I don't like you like that, I don't like you like that at all. Yes we are friends and yes we can talk together, but I want everything. I want the man, the myth, the romance. I want tall and broad and perfect and like you, but not you; you but more like screen idol you and less like who-you-look-like you, but still you who I can talk to you, who is my best friend.

I remember him saying, MBC (that's what he called me), what we have is rare, you don't know this, but I do. I angrily stormed out, and probably said something like, how dare you tell me who I am? You don't know me! But he did, and he didn't mind. He never got mad-- sure he had a temper-- but he never got mad at me, even when I was yelling. He would just laugh and eventually I would laugh and that would be that. It was as easy to miss-communicate as it was to communicate. I was too young to know this, but he was not too old.

This is not a sad, bad, terrible, tragic love story. When I first met him it felt like the love match of the century, true. But that was because I was in a highly altered state of mind. As I got clean and stayed clean (he already was clean, that's how we met), all that quickly faded and without thinking about it we went everywhere together. It was as they say, easy. Maybe it didn't feel so easy at the time, but having lived 14 years in the interim of his death, I look back and see how easy it was. He would tell a story of his brother Mark, who had died in the 60s. When they were little boys his mother once asked Mark, who was quite a dreamer apparently, "Mark what are you doing?" and he said with affronted 7-year-old wisdom, "I'm not doing anything. I'm just being." So we would often say to each other in regards to each other, "we're just being."

I had no appreciation for most of this at the time, and the time was relatively short. Four years and four months, but it felt much longer.

The story would translate into an impractical love swept Cinderella in diamonds tale of love worn female afraid to love lest it not be perfect, spending her lonely days in the tower, tossing rose petals out the window on the back story of imperfect love and tragic endings; except that is not the case_which is not to say I did not write exactly this for a publication several years ago about the clamors and questions of seeking unattainable love. The editors tacked on a stupid title which I hated and published it (and I would not do that again; a writer's misspent writing youth); and although I do think romantic love relationships manifest unresolved business in the human spirit, the purpose of this story has nothing to do with pining or moping or sad or destroyed or never again or why me, or never me, or when will he, or why didn't I, but simply to remember (or possibly to realize) this person.

It's not his birthday and it's not the anniversary of his death, but he walked across the screen of a dream the other day, literally just walked across in front of me, like someone who knows you are watching but is pretending he doesn't know you're watching. He was young and vibrant and vital, a Damien I finally realized I had always known in my heart, but never seen with my eyes. He was a young stallion heading for the hills, he was on his way.

swimming pools/flip turns/point break

Many years ago, I lived in a coastal town. In the summer, sometimes I would go with my neighbor to body surf. He would body surf while I would swim/struggle past the break, flip over, float on my back and marvel at salt water. One day the tide was higher than usual and was coming in about three-foot rollers.

I am a strong swimmer and an athletic human and managed to fight my way past the break, popping out into a little drift zone. At first it was fun to ride high up on the wave like a bathtub in a comic book, but that didn't last. My neighbor shouted over to watch out for the rip current, because it was right behind us. At that point I was probably in 30-50 feet of water.

I sensed the tide turning, was already worn out and decided to head in. Hot sand and a blue sky sounded nice. I remember thinking, "It will be so much easier to get back in, because I will just ride in on a wave..." Except I didn't take into account waves are reciprocal and tides turn.

I managed to get myself up to the break, but bad timing caught me in the middle of it and I couldn't get past it, which is when I started going through the washing machine. I was a rag doll thrown into a forward roll under water, and would barely surface and start stroking for shore and the tide would immediately come rushing back at me in a tumult.

Conscious I did not want to exhaust myself, I relaxed and let it happen, which is the best way to handle any kind of rip tide or rogue current. There is no fighting, it will win, so let it happen. I heard my neighbor shouting at me to just relax and keep swimming, and I knew eventually I would pop out on the shoreline, or a place I could swim from, so I protected my head and saved my energy and kept swimming when I could and stayed afloat where I did.

Eventually, I made it back to shore, suffering only abrasions on my palms and a few odd bruises. I remember lying down in hot sand on a warm towel and luxuriating in the lassitude particular to physical struggle.The blessing happened days later when I was at the pool swimming laps and I thought, I bet I can do a flip turn, something that had evaded me since I was a little girl in swim lessons.

Up to that point, I had been unable to make sense of the forward roll half turn under water in a flip turn without inhaling water. Having gone the break in a perpetual forward roll, I had a funny feeling I could recreate the same action and apply it to a flip turn. It worked. And just like that I learned how to do a flip turn.

It's one of my favorite swimming stories and I am sure I have told it before. Swimming (today) I was thinking about trust exercises and how, self-improvement-team-building-exercises generally schedule trust exercises with another person, when in fact, a trust exercise would be better served performed as self alone.

"Trust your partner," and "you don't trust me" or "I trusted you and you lied to me" and so forth and corporate group activities where the person has to dead fall into the arms of the person who will "catch" them and I was swimming and I was thinking about the coast and I was thinking, really, as trust exercises go, they ought to just throw a person off a wharf into 100 feet of water and tell them to swim to shore a quarter-mile out, or some other equivalent of survival and faith, because trusting another person means almost nothing. If I trust myself it doesn't matter. I trust I will take care of myself, and I trust I will take care of this or that, or you or me or life in general and so forth. Trusting "you" is almost pointless; a feel good exercise in futility.

Yes trust is profound and I'm not arguing relationship semantics, or the mysteries of faith; but the practical application of trust is best served, when I place my trust in self. Do I trust myself to make a better choice next time? Do I trust I can walk away if I need to? Do I trust that I will love with all my heart? Do I trustin my talents? Do I trust in something bigger than myself? Do I trust me?

My father will say, "faith is not knowing everything will be okay. Faith is knowing I will be okay." Because most of the time, everything isn't "okay." Life on life's terms isn't pretty and perfect and smiling ear to ear with a 1000 Watt day glow smile and nicely packaged for social networking. It's often quite the opposite. But that doesn't mean I fall down with it. It doesn't mean I just lie down in the break and let it roll me out to sea. I might swim smarter instead of harder, but I keep swimming. Faith isn't knowing everything will be okay, faith is knowing I will be okay. Do I trust myself? Yes, I do.

Burlingame High School swimming pool set to 50m

angel food

I once read a passage about arch angels eating angels, who ate humans, who ate animals and so forth through the hierarchy.  It didn’t strike me with knife and fork mental cannibalism, but as a horizon for higher principles and a compass for a clean heart. Since then, on my best days when I remember to be my self, I will stop and think, I want to be food for angels.