Watch This Spot

There’s a pile of lavender soaking in a pot of vodka on the kitchen counter. I plucked nearly every flower head from the plant in the driveway median. This lavender, a sticky monkey and a plug of native grasses are the only things that have taken root and taken off in what I’ve come to endearingly call the kill zone.

I’m in somewhat of a funk today – though I don’t rightly know why. I think I need to go for a walk and think. I’ll get back to you on the other side of it…

Watch this spot…. I call it the other side of it. I hiked near ten miles, soaked in a hot tub and ate English cheese to get here. I took photographs too. I’ve been lounging and reading the fabu digital photo book that Cassie gave me for my birthday. Thus far it’s saying that to take good photos I need to buy more shit. Secret Agent Dog is belly up on my right, snoring at the sky (okay, the ceiling.) There are random thoughts fleeting around the room. I grasp at them like buzzing flies - trying to catch them, make them stop. Here are just a few:

I always thought that Catholic school girl thing was an act. I’m still mystified near thirty years later that it was devastatingly real. How do you reconcile all those kisses?

On days when my world is small and I don’t leave the house much, I get pretty bitchy. It’s like somewhere inside I must believe I can control the world by yelling at it or being mean to it. Maybe I’m just looking for a reaction.

One of the recent Google “word of the day” was swan song, which clearly isn’t a word and should more rightly be in phrase of the day or couple a words of the day. See above.

Follow Me

I’m all muddle-headed for the cold Ed generously shared with me. He’s so giving when he wants to be. I called off work early today – not so much because I must sleep, but moreso because I’m having a hell of a time concentrating. At a certain point I just concede that it’s not even right that someone should pay me to gaze out the window while my head’s in a day-dreamy fog. I’m not sleepy for the DayQuil and coffee, but I’d call what I am decidedly distractible. I’d describe it as a day of oh look, something shiny! It’s going around. It’s not terrible – but it starts off with a scratchy feeling at the back of one’s throat (at 4:30 am night/day before last I woke up with that burning swollen dry throat feeling – assuaged by a popsicle in the wee hours of the morning.) And then it burns on with a mild fever, loss of appetite and stuffy nose, etc. This too shall pass.

Day before I stopped work early too – but later in the day. Not for the muddle-headed stuff, but due to inclement weather and flood warnings. The town activated The Emergency Notification System (TENS) and I received a phone call around 2 pm, notifying me of imminent flooding and encouraging me to evacuate. I watched the neighbors evacuate. I thought they were being a bit premature. Instead, I made sure the electric equipment (cameras, lap tops and other valuables) was up off the floor and before even rolling up the carpets I went to see the water level in the creek/river. It looked okay. It was actually receding some as I arrived which was my cue to let the carpet’s lay. The rains were relentless, however – coming down steady and heavy for hours. All together, in a 24 hour period, we easily saw 5 inches. It continued yesterday at a much slower pace. The weather services changed the flood warnings (which mean flooding is imminent and/or occurring) to flood watches and/or advisories. The striking danger now, they say, is probably not so much the risk of flooding (which has abated some now that the rains have slowed and become more intermittent) but the risk of earth movement/landslides.

We saw evidence of this yesterday evening and we climbed the rise up Bolinas-Fairfax road to the Water District preserve around Lakes Alpine, Bon Tempe and Lagunitas. Slides were occurring all along the rises banking that road – even the short distance to the preserve area.

A few towns away there’s a Mill Valley man reported trapped (dead?) by a 14 foot wall of mud that came tumbling down. The earth is so saturated it’s now the people who thought themselves safe in the hills that have to worry. Those of us in the lower flat lands – in the flood plane –rest a little easier while our neighbors in their lofty perches begin to sweat. Whoever is worrying, it’s never good – though perhaps all part of the order of things.

I think of when I lived in the City, we never worried about such things. Cities are immune, for the most part, to most of the effects of inclement weather and natural disaster. Oh at least the inhabitants believe they are. It’s that little insular bubble of energy/heat/pollution that for the most part pushes the weather to the suburban areas – protects them from tornados and the like. Public works are set up to respond promptly and accommodate things like increases in volume of sewage processing and/or a terrifically windy day.

When things go wrong in a City, however, the level of devastation can increase just for how people pack themselves in to live so unnaturally on top of one another. But even still, it’s always amazing to me how relatively few lives are lost in natural disasters that strike first-world Cities. I know, folks might be thinking Katrina – but I’ve yet to see a good breakdown of urban versus rural life lost and the numbers were relatively small at the end of the day. There were predictions of tens of thousands – and I believe it was just shy over one thousand, wasn’t it? Compare that to losing upwards of 130,000 to 230,000 people in a single day, from that massive Indonesian tsunami, however – and it really puts things in perspective. Or does it? Are we capable of really understanding perspective at that level?

The thing is, when we hear numbers like this, 230,000, they don’t mean anything to us. I’d read a good/fun(?) book called Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow. I think it was written by a guy named something-Fawcett. I read it a long time ago. Anyways, he talked about numbers and statistics and how we can’t really fathom or hold the impact of numbers that are really large. What does that mean? Does that mean one in five of my friends and family members, one in two? Does that mean, if they were lucky, entire families? On some level it’s got to be worse, don’t you think, if you’re the only survivor? I don’t know.. maybe, maybe not. I doubt one would ever think of it that way. We’re used to saying that the survivors are the lucky ones. I believe that. I think life is fun, even when we lose parts of the game.

So I try to embrace these numbers. Over the past twenty years, roughly 18,000 people have died of AIDS in San Francisco (about 2.25% of the population of the City.) Generally the current population of the City is believed to be about 800,000. All together, throughout the southeast, the death toll from Katrina was said to be something like 2,000 people – not from a single city, but throughout the entire region. Even still, however, consider the context of population density of New Orleans, estimated at roughly 470,000. Looking at less natural disasters, the death toll associated with 911 in New York City was roughly 2800 people – in a City of 8 million people. 2800 people represents just a little over .03 % of the population. That’s nothing when you think about it. Over the past twenty years roughly 85,000 New Yorkers have died of AIDS (a little over 1% the city’s population.) Even when you average that out, that’s over 4,000 people per year. I don’t even know how to compare these figures to populations in Indonesia and Southeast Asia affected by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami – given just the raw numbers, however, it’s clear these are relatively small.

While statistics are a bit old, I found one source suggesting that 41,000 women die of breast cancer each year in the United States, total. Similarly, the total annual AIDS deaths in 1995 was about 50,000, but that number seems to be decreasing with the advent of more potent therapies to treat the disease. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how we would estimate the number of deaths in the United States due to poverty and violence, but I’m sure it would outstrip these numbers.

So what’s the point here? Sure, many people die for many reasons, every day. What’s the point of comparing these statistics and then talk about 7,000,000+ Jews, Gypsies, queers, etc. who perished in extermination camps under Hitler’s Nazi Germany? Or the 2+ million deaths in the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia (which was believed to represent 15 to 25% of the countries entire population)? Or the slaughter of upwards of 850,000 ethnic Tutsi’s in Rwanda? Or the stoning to death of a single woman in Afganistan by religious zealots?

The point is that there is something horrific and frightening and political about these numbers. And they don’t include the suffering of the living, who long afterwards, perhaps generations, are scarred by the events. Nor do they include the stories of people who are strangely healed by them either – the people whose hearts are uplifted by helping those more keenly affected by death and dying nor those inspired by the telling and hearing of heroic tales. What affects us more, broad sweeping figures of annihilation and destruction or the suffering of one – our mother, our father, our sister, our lover, our dog?

When it’s close, the personal becomes the political.. the political becomes the personal. It’s that one, I think, that we take into ourselves. The one whose suffering becomes our own suffering – or perhaps the end of their suffering is the beginning of our own – a slow overlap where we take possession. At first diagnosis, at first threat, they hold all the fear, uncertainty and pain. Later the loved ones take possession of all the fear and sorrow. And oh how we can caress it. And we have two choices – to become it or to let it go.

Those who become for a spell or forever are the ones who walk the earth hollow-eyed, always reaching out to touch something. They are aware of the thin layer of energy, space that surrounds them that keeps them from truly ever touching anything or anyone.

There is a chemical you put in pools that breaks the hydrogen bond at the surface of water – the thin sheath that the bugs walk across or that allows a leaf to float, rather than sink, immediately. Disease, fungus and worrisome stuff can grow in that space and become difficult to get rid of. At first blush, dissolving that layer makes all things sink and die. But it also allows you to touch the problems and deal with them. What a scary place to be.

Those who let it go – they’re like the ocean horizon. At first the line looks so clear where the one thing, the water, stops and the air begins. But it’s really not so clear is it? The water evaporates and mingles with the air and the place where these two things meet are quite entwined like the legs of lovers. Not only do they touch everything around them, they become part of it and it becomes part of them.

It was Rilke who wrote that if we fling the emptiness from our arms perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

I lived in San Francisco during the time of the big earthquake of 1989. This was a 7.1 on the richter. My understanding is that the richter scale is logarithmic, not linear. Thus, the 9.3 magnitude earthquake that shook in the middle of the Indian Ocean in late 2004 was over 100 times the magnitude of the famed Loma Prieta quake. It was also the longest in duration ever recorded and I’ve read reports that suggest that the quake that inspired the tsunami caused the entire planet to vibrate over half an inch. Now… are you absolutely sure that you have a solid foundation, that your feet are securely planted on the ground, that the earth beneath you is solid and that everything you hold in your beliefs is right and sound and true?

I’m telling you, I think we’re all only scratching the surface – picking at it really, like an itchy scab. What’s down there deep is powerful, destructive and very, very fragile.

And now you're thinking.. enough already, we liked the pretty pictures. bring back the pretty pictures!

Podiatry

The podiatrist gave me little over-the-counter pads with stick’ums on one side. I’m supposed to paste these fuckers to the bottom of my feet while he sees if my insurance will cover some professionally made inserts and we’re supposedly going to talk next week via the phone. I forget what he said he conjured was causing all this. Something rolling in a particular direction, obviously a particularly wrong direction. Pronating? Bones suspected of curving. You could tell, he said, by the wear pattern on my shoes – which were shoes I don’t wear often. These are comfortable shoes, He says, so people like them. They are the least comfortable shoes I have, I tell him. My feet hurt worst while I wear these particular shoes. Wouldn’t it be awesome if just once you went to the doctors and left feeling better than when you went – that they were able to tell you why were you having particular symptoms and outline a course of action that would actually make a meaningful difference?

Off like a prom dress to the optometrist. My prescription hasn’t changed significantly (all the change, I guess, is just in my head.) And I really couldn’t find a pair of cool new glasses. I went to visit Dan because I was too early for the eye doctor and he says, but those are really cute glasses. (Referring to the ones I’ve had for the past however many years.) I have to agree. They are really cute glasses. So I just up-graded an old pair of glasses with my newer old prescription and picked out a cute pair of prescription sunglasses. Five hundred and ninety dollars later and my flexible spending account is clean, zippo, wiped out. The sad part of this purchase is that I totally have a premonition of these expensive new sunglasses laying in the dust, trampled, at the side of a trail after some mountain biking fiasco. I know they’re not long for this world and I don’t even have them yet.

He says he misses me. I miss him too. I wish he lived closer the same way he wishes I lived closer and we won’t. That’s just the way it is right now and maybe for forever.

Cassie’s back from her astral travel adventure (heretofore known as ATA.) She came to visit on Saturday – but now I suspect she was just a mirage, an ATA illusion. She’s not only merely a lump of flesh channeling Cassie, but she’s not even real flesh. (I pinched her and she didn’t even notice – she didn’t even flinch.) We went on a short hike and I made us stop in a peaceful little meadow near the stables. It was too short – both the hike and the visit. Short because Ed and I planned to go the beach – something fun for a change. But that didn’t happen. Time got away with us so instead we began the arduous task of getting the kitchen cupboards up. They’ve been painted (or so I thought) for months and months – laying on the floor of the extra room. I bought hinges a few weeks back and it was time to do something with them.

As we began to affix hinges I realized the bastard who I paid an arm and leg to paint them didn’t even frill’n finish the job. One word - Asshole. But up they go nonetheless and I’ll do touch up later. The kitchen looks so different. Less cluttered. Brighter. Different. It’s a little shocking to have cupboard doors on – it’s been nearly a year since they’ve been off. Now I need to make a decision about knobs and pulls. But really, who needs knobs and pulls when you have no arms or legs?

Did I mention I bought a new lap top? Well, actually, one place I work for agreed to pay $1,000 toward the purchase, the one agreed to pay half the remainder. So I bought a quarter of a lap top but I get to keep the whole thing. It’s an HP 8000 series (8140.) Very sweet. It’s being shipped. I decided to demonstrate patience and choose the free five to seven business day delivery option as opposed to paying extra for next business day or second business day delivery. This proves I’m a saint (read patience of a saint) for anyone who doubted.

Okay.. this ranks up there as one of my most mundane entries. It only gets better from here. Promise.

We Were Children

Eenie meanie miney moe, catch a tiger memory by the toe. If she hollers let her go. And my mother says to pick the very best one and you are IT!

Yesterday I drained and cleaned out the hot tub. The fiberglass shell is much slicker when it’s not full and just a little damp. There’s an inverted V-shape in one of the contoured seating areas, intended for your knees to drape over, positioning your feet at one belting jet that gives an awesome foot massage. For reasons I can’t explain, I was standing with one foot on either side of the sloping upside-down V and for reasons I further can’t explain both feet slipped outward at once and both knees crashed inward, toward the top of the V, simultaneously. It hurt like a mother. The right knee seemed to get the worst of the tork. I kept it elevated all night. I suppose I’m lucky. I don’t think I tore anything, just torked it good – no bruising but it hurts, hurts, hurts.

So while an early evening of chores was fumbled, I was laying on the rug in front of the fireplace, knee propped up on pillows and had plenty of time to think. Thinking is my affliction. The unexamined life is not worth living and all that rot. Examine, I do. Think, I do. I let my mind thumb through a pile of reruns, memories from this era or that. It paused on this one:

I was twenty four and he was twenty five. Under other circumstances I don’t think we’d have even been friends. In these circumstances, I watched his friends disappear one-by-one – unwilling or unable to sit with the changes happening in him. But I don’t think he really had friends – he just didn’t know it. Or maybe I just couldn’t see the friendships – built on such strange and frail foundations. I cared for him, perhaps I even loved him, but I didn’t like him. I spent hours and hours with him. We spent one night together. I arrived at his place around midnight. There was a candle on his bedside casting a warm, almost romantic glow around the room. Sometimes I held his hand. Sometimes I talked to him. Mostly we sat in silence. The folks from the coroner’s office didn’t arrive until five or six that next morning.

One day, a few months before, I held his frail, wasted, naked body as he wailed. The porcelain bathtub in his Tenderloin apartment was too hard and he lacked buoyancy – he was just bones and nerves covered by a bit of flesh. If I held him, he could bathe and not be in pain – nerves crushed between porcelain and bone. He cried. He shook as he sobbed. “I wanted to make $30,000 a year,” he screamed at the wall. “I don’t want the first time my name is in the newspaper to be in my obituary,” he pleaded. As though either money or some notoriety is worth anything – has any value. And some people don’t know how to make anything of their lives. He didn’t even really get one.

No one else knows these things about him. No one but you, now. You and I. That he wanted more. That what he got wasn’t enough. That it was just he and I. I cleaned shit off the walls and floor when he couldn’t make it. Sometimes he thought I was his mother – no, really, he really thought I was his mother. I was twenty four. He was twenty five.

We were children.

On The Subject of Blood

I didn’t know Zimbabwe used to be called Rhodesia. I wonder if Rhodesian Ridgebacks roam the rural roads.

On the subject of blood. It’s very dirty. I think I’ve addressed this before. If you have fantasies and ideas of vampires, the whole undead thing, I think you’d do better off sucking on a potato. It’s safer, cleaner and it’s sort of undead – it thrives in darkness. While I say this, I personally have yet to come to appreciate the potato as a complex and beautiful thing. Blood may be dirty, but it’s also beautiful, historic and complicated. I wish a clever scientist with aural appreciations could find a way to convert cytokines to tones and unleash the symphony of blood. And you know it’s not just blood – it’s the entire system that’s so wonderful. It is not ‘irreducibly complex.’ The brilliance, wonder and genius of it is that it is reducible. The redundancy in the system is exactly what allows it to be a dynamic, evolving and learning system. It is mathematical, musical and mysterious.

We can break the immune system down in many ways. It’s no different than anything in this regard. For example, we can walk into a room and talk about the number of people who wear glasses versus those not wearing glasses. Similarly we can talk about the cellular versus humoral arms of the immune system. We can talk about people who write left versus right handed. We can talk about innate or acquired immunity. And in all instances there is a spectrum, a spectrum of sight, those who wear contacts, and those who perform some functions with their left hand and others with their right and of course those who fall smack dab in the middle as wholly ambidextrous.

So what’s the difference between innate and acquired immunity? Innate immunity is what we’re born with, ancient immunologic knowledge passed down generation after generation. It’s very old wisdom – very valuable. It’s our first line of defense and it’s typically extremely effective. That we carry this ancient wisdom in our blood, this intelligence, isn’t it some kind of evidence of reincarnation or at least proof that it’s really quite possible that we have other kinds of ancient wisdom that we’ve yet to really tap into and understand? When birds migrate or animals engage in certain unlearned behaviors that promote their survival, we’ll call it instinct. But what is instinct other than mysterious wisdom? And why is this wisdom mostly recognized as behavior? Haven’t you ever had the experience of knowing things and not really understanding how you know it? When people say, trust your gut, what they often mean is trust the innate wisdom that is within you – the ancient knowledge that we need to learn to get in touch with and learn how to listen to. But then I wonder, in the same way some people’s innate immunity fails to control disease, perhaps not all innate wisdom is good. Makes you think.

And acquired immunity is learned. While certain cells and functions within us are a result of ancient wisdom, to complete the system there is also the ability to learn and learn we do. We can teach cells to do new things – which is the foundation behind vaccination – to teach the immune system to recognize and respond to say a flu virus before it ever actually encounters the flu virus. Thus if and when someone becomes infected with the flu virus, the immune system is primed and ready to act – to contain and control the infection before it causes disease. A very misunderstood thing about vaccines is that they do not prevent infection, they prevent disease. But I think a very cool thing about the acquired immune system is that we are not all equal – we’re not all able to mount an effective and robust immune response to an “immunologic lesson” – we do not all learn the same. Some have immunologic learning disabilities and/or defects and often these are in discrete areas – in some instances causing no noticeable harm or effect, in other instances leaving one vulnerable to certain diseases and in other instances these defects have benefits (perhaps unintended.) And I think when we dig deeper, what we find is that on some fundamental level, something is controlling our capacity and breadth of learning. I’m apt to believe that what’s controlling our capacity and breath of immunologic learning is actually much to do with ancient wisdom, genetic information passed on through history, from the earliest days of evolution, from our mothers, mothers, mothers, mothers, mothers, mothers… and so on. So there’s that spectrum, that continuum of experience – the inability to slice diversity neatly along a line.

It seems (almost) the human condition to deny this link with the past. It seems (almost) the human condition to deny this link with the future. It’s perhaps something we need to rail against, the inability to live in the long now. Somewhere the silver cell divides.

I digress.. more on blood later. Or, well, maybe not (does it bore you?) But you know, think about it… if I touch you is there perhaps some wisdom my skin cells whisper in the ears of yours? I like to think on it – the logic of your touch, intelligent kisses, our ancients communing while we pretend we’re just having tea…

Jump

This ranks as a bad week. Something like food poisoning struck Tuesday night/Wednesday morning of week last. Much pain, an Emergency Room visit, and no small amount of blood later, I’m crawling out of a dark place and readying myself for NaNoWriMo.

A year ago today the Honey Bee had the mishap with the stick, through the leg, and we spent the evening running back and forth from the Emergency Vet while they performed surgery and released the Cookie Pie in quite a state of stupor to our care. This and a night of hundreds (yes hundreds) of trick-o-treaters, left for a surreal evening. A month of tendering, head cones, ripped and re-ripped stitches followed. Last year, November was a cruel month.

Despite my malady, I’m looking forward to a cozy November. The rugs are beginning to arrive, which makes the living room feel so much warmer. The new gas stove/fireplace thing fills the room with a nice ambiance and there’s always hot water heating atop it for tea in the evenings. The evening is brisk now, a biting cold. Sitting in the hot tub under the towering redwood trees, beneath a canopy of stars, while steam rises around my shoulders… sigh. Snuggling into a new soft robe and drinking tea by the fire – the Honey Bee curled in a ball with her head on my leg. Butternut squash with maple syrup. Split Pea soup. Hot apple cider with cinnamon and cloves. All these things, for me, are harbingers of……. spring.

Freeze Frame

Looking through the lens of a camera I’m never more aware of what my mind erases. It forces you to look, really look, at what is there – the debris in the foreground, the splinter in your eye.

I’m tired. How was it that I became so bitter? On a day-to-day basis I don’t really see that bitterness, but it’s there – the figurative debris in the foreground, the literal splinter in my eye. I want to find a way to dissolve it like sugar cubes under absinthe.

I wonder if the trees make me feel lonely of if I’m lonely and thus have developed an affinity for the trees. One day I’m so happy, content and feeling apart of life – the next I’m a bit wrecked. As I have parted ways with lovers more than one has said, you’re just too intense. I wish I could part ways with me sometimes too. I think I’m coming to know what they meant – maybe. I really crave, demand and need a high level of engagement.

Okay, okay.. back track. I’m sick. I’m sick today – I’ve been fuzzy, foggy-headed, dizzy for days on end. And last night I was up most of the night, at least every hour and today is no better. I’m not feverish (unless the thermometer is broken… just my luck), to the contrary my body temperature is incredibly low. I just realized that most (really, maybe all) of my symptoms are side effects of an antibiotic I’m on. Fuck it. I’m stopping the antibiotic – frill’n MPH ho. I’m not convinced I need it anyways. While I love (in principle) the idea of solving a problem with a drug, it’s just not always the answer. In fact it’s rarely the answer. I just want my body to work better. The point of telling you that I feel sick, however, is that when I feel sick I come to the conclusion that my life sucks – even though just a few days ago I was riding high on how lovely and cozy and wonderful things are right now. So really it’s to say likely it doesn’t suck at all, I’m not really lonely, generally speaking, pervasively speaking (can one speak pervasively?) and perhaps I’m just intense, needy and demanding when I feel sick. Or maybe I’m intense, needy and demanding all the time – sound attractive?

Anyways, if you’re not in the mood for intense, needy, demanding and whiney then do not inquire within.

I’m freaked out by the idea of having to look for a job. I thought, oh, I’m not working today (because I called in sick.. because I am sick – it’s a weird thing to call in sick when you work from home), I’ll work on my resume. But I’m too dizzy-headed to work on anything.. duh.. that’s why I called in sick. I have to take a conference call in an hour and I really just want to heave. ((Why I am writing about this?)) Anyways, I’m freaked out by the idea of having to look for a job. I haven’t had to do that in over a decade and I didn’t really look for this job – it found me.

The truth is, I’m really freaked out about not having a job. And while not having an income does wig me out, not having a job wigs me out equally if not more. And worse, the fact that not having a job wigs me out more freaks me out even more. What does that say about me, what I’ve come to rely on for identity, purpose, blah, blah, blah? It means I’m becoming someone I don’t like – I’ve become someone I don’t respect and maybe that, as much as anything else, has inspired me to quit the job. I mean, you may have a job that you really love – and believe me I can relate to that – that used to be me – but the day that the job that you love and your identity become so intertwined that you don’t have one without the other, that is a problem.

And through all this lamentation my boss leaves a message on the machine telling me that she can’t give me any information about the possibility of a severance because they’re now entering into some kind of discussion about restructuring my job into something that might be palatable to me – something that I might be willing to stay for. I’m not calling her back. Talk away. Talk is cheap. I’ve had nearly fifteen years of talk. Blah, blah, blah. Do something already.

Monday

Just like millions of others, our new Harry Potter arrived in the post on Saturday morning. The day was spent lounging on the lawn while Ed read aloud. On Sunday I remembered I was capable of multitasking and while we plowed through another few hundred pages I weeded, pruned, preened and otherwise beautified my sorely neglected garden. It looks so content and cared for right now – it’s just magnificent. With all the bother over Hell’s Kitchen, my lovely yard and garden has taken a back seat. It took Harry Potter in the side yard to provide a window for this clever endeavor. Not only did I not mind doing chores while I listened, it was immensely gratifying to take a project from start to finish and see relatively immediate results. Quite happy making indeed!

It’s taken two weeks for me to sink into a routine of nothingness – of waking, of puttering, of dabbling, of drinking coffee and surfing about on the internet, checking in to read my favorite this-and-thats. This is the week I’ll begin adventures and the whatnots - you just wait and see!

Water Lilies

The head cold, sore throat, achy, fever, chills thing persists. My throat feels like a gravel road or rather perhaps more like stippled, bulbous, fleshy alien pods. Hmmm.. pretty. Perhaps these bulbous throat pods are indeed the seed casings for Monet’s water lilies. Stranger things have happened. It could be, you know. It could happen. It could. Oh shut up.

Fill Them With Gold

Honey Bee is on the mend and daily she’s more and more herself. She still has a bit of a scar on her nose and likely will from here on out. It’s added to the larger self inflicted scar in the shape of Italy. These are her little wabi sabi’s. I feel like I should fill them with gold.

Prickles from the Thistles

I love the sound of rain. It’s dancing on the roof like a huge chorus of showgirls, tiny dancers, with little feet - little fairy showgirls with wings and pink and blue and yellow tutus. I imagine the gutters will be filled with glitter and fairy dust and I’ll be sweeping out the sparkly things far into summer.

She’s healing, though I dote on her endlessly and love her mercilessly – she’s surviving nonetheless. In an attempt to get back on the proverbial bike we’ve toured the local bike shop twice thus far. Her ears go back and she flinches when she sees the wheels turning - a grand set back from where she’d been. Several mountain bikers had heard the news and stopped during our daily sojourns to offer their sympathies and were kind enough to let her reacquaint with the bikes. Her breathing is sometimes labored, likely due to the damage to her sinuses, which are clearly still suffering irritation. Perhaps the blood clots are loosening. It will take some time, but she’s speeding toward recovery.

The Neighbor is gone. Can you believe I didn’t pounce like a cat on my opportunity to announce this? It’s been over a week, nearly two now, and they are gone! There are lingering remains like dog urine soaked carpet, which she doused with so much ammonia that four days later it was still dripping (not merely damp) and leaving pools on the floor beneath carpet and heavy matting. Three years of dog urine and seemingly some kind of ritual ammonia use (?!?!?) destroyed the oak floors beneath the carpet. The floor guy complained of the smell and rolled his eyes, I hope you kept her deposit.

I’ve started working on pulling the weeds, an endeavor I anticipate will take a week or two (not constant) of labor. A day’s effort got me less than a quarter of the way through the wilderness of weed and I’ve filled one and a half large yard waste buckets thus far. The prickles from the thistle are lodged in my forearms – but somehow the sting feels merely like a symptom of progress.. in a good way.

Sweeping Pigeons

The Neighbor called to tell me that she got the apartment she applied for. She’ll be moving sometime between now and the end of the month. I’m vibrating. I’m so thrilled. She tells me tomorrow the precise date of her departure.

With the news of her imminent departure, my emotions feel like a ball rolling down a hill, gathering speed. I’m giddy and happy and like things in motion and accelerating, some of the details are becoming blurry – the details of the good and the details which outline my discontents as well. I want to hasten her exodus like sweeping pigeons from a belfry – a swoosh of something white and smelly, a few feathers floating down and poof she’s gone.

It could have, it should have been a great experience. It really held potential but never hit its mark. Instead it’s been a grand disappointment. It’s too bad.

Big Brown Eyes

She looked at me with her big brown eyes and all she felt was that for reasons she couldn’t comprehend she was enduring relentless punishment.

On the day she was got her stitches out I’d planned a celebration in the park with a cadre of her pals. Within an hour and a half of the sutures being removed the wound had re-split and we were starting all over again with the restriction, the cone and the pills. She’d just finished the course of antibiotics for the Lyme’s disease as well. All this bum luck plopped in her paws at once. I was in the vet office when they re-cut the skin to make rough edges for healing and held her while they sutured her again – that is until I felt faint and sad and asked the vet tech to step in.

And then Ed slammed himself in the head with a tire iron – a huge Harry Potter-style scar runs the length of his forehead (now showing some kinship with Secret whose own scar has now acquired a heel and looks suspiciously like Italy.) He achieved a concussion and to top off a stellar week his car exploded on 19th Avenue and he had to spend near $100 for a taxi home. (This would turn out to be a small blessing as I found him a new vehicle on Craigslist – a fabulous Isuzu Rodeo. I make him drive me about and I say things like, “Whoa.. did you see that cow!?” or “Hey there now, be careful for that horse.” These things happen in the Rodeo you know…. Or “Did you know you have the most dangerous profession on land – you know, a rodeo clown…” It’s been a few weeks, he’s not so amused anymore.)

No Amount Of Love Can Set It Right

Lisa is in Oregon at a job interview with the kids and the dog. I did a Haz Mat clean up on the yard so that we could perch up front and pass out Halloween candy to children and wine to adults. I picked up an entire kitchen trash bag of shit and I didn’t get it all. I was ready to call the humane society and CPS myself – it seems like there ought to be something reportable about it.

Halloween would have been quite fun had it not been for the mishap that left me distracted. It all began as an innocent walk in the park – as usual. Exactly what happened is a little unclear, though we all agree that she tried to jump up the cliff because the log in her mouth was too wide for the pass, which was flanked by the hillside and a tree, causing her to attempt an alternate route. There had been a sighting of paws on the ledge of the 12 foot rise - proof of a valiant attempt to achieve the impossible – and then she disappeared out of site. She reappeared at the bottom of the waterfall and without a peep or any sign of injury ran with grace and fury to rejoin us.

I was just being my doting self when in the clearing at the top of the hill, before the truly strenuous part of the hike commenced, I decided to check her from head to toe. That’s when I saw it - a gash, a chunk missing really, quite large on the left hind leg. At that point there wasn’t any blood – though by the time we walked the mile back to the car there was plenty of blood. She never limped and she’d never made even the slightly sight or sound of injury.

I think her heart stopped after I got home and I was in the shower – because suddenly she felt very far away and frightened and I was overcome with grief. But then she felt closer and I knew she’d be okay.

We were up most of the night tending to her after we brought her home from surgery. She was afraid and whimpering and not at all liking the cone she will wear for the next twelve days. She urinated on herself and the sofa in her delirium and she was afraid.

Today she woke up timid and disoriented but as the day wears on her eyes look clearer and sometimes she resembles herself. Ultimately she’ll be okay but these next two weeks don’t promise to be her most joyful. She has this look about her, as though she wonders what precisely she did to deserve this punishment. It feels like no amount of love can explain things to her and set it right.

Becoming a Familiar

Secret and I rose before the sun to trek in the mountain in the quiet early morning hours. It’s been over a week since I’ve been able to make this sojourn for all the business of convalescing. Yesterday and today we unfolded back into our routine. I was distracted by the effort it took. Whenever I stop something for even the shortest spell, it can’t be resumed with the same ease of habit. It takes a period of readjustment. But as difficult as restarting something is, stopping something is much harder – filled with that soulful longing, missing and grief. Oh how I missed my mountain.

On Friday I had my post-surgical consult. I’m healing slightly ahead of schedule with no untoward events, besides all the untoward events I experienced in the week following the surgery and of course all these peripheral complications seemingly not associated with the surgery – but associated with what, I do not know. On top of everything else, my hands are peeling. The skin is just shedding. What’s up with that? Perhaps it’s just a hallmark of eternal return. Yes, yes, that’s it – I’m becoming a familiar or some mythical creature.