Malcontent

I’ve been rather busy.. and uninspired. Did I mention Ed got fired? Yes. Ed got fired. Bummer. He’s not unhappy or freaked out about it, however.. so I’m not going to be either. It makes me realize on some level what a whiner I am. I go from You’re never home. You work too much. to Oh shit, you’re way too up in my space in seconds flat. Something to work on I guess. Why do I have to be such a malcontent?

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!

Smoke and Mirrors

I notice that folks are generally more intimate in their blogs than I am. The sturm and drum of their lives have a dramatic flare that in comparison leaves my life feeling rather plane-jane at the end of hours. I think it’s mostly an illusion, however. Smoke and mirrors. I’m not sure on whose part there is more smoke and whose there are more mirrors. If when you look at my words you see yourself, it’s a sure fire sign that I’m the mirrors. It’s more likely, however, that I’m the smoke. Obfuscating. Subterfuge. Like a little bird hiding in the thicket. Peep. Peep. Peep.

Anyways. Here I am. I think I’m an expert at making mole hills out of mountains. Or maybe I’m correct in my presupposition that they’re really all mole hills – everything is – it just depends on your vantage point. The Himalayas probably look like little mosquito bites from the moon.

I went to dinner with my boss last night. He was hot on the topic of problems with immigration and seemed particularly focused on the troubles the Southern border poses. Personally I think he’s been listening to too much right wing radio. At one point he said, “do you think it’s our responsibility to solve the problems of their government?!” I said, sliding my chair back, when I take the long view, when I think of a bigger picture of humanity that transcends borders – I think just because someone was born on a particular side of a line doesn’t seem justification for them to live in squalor and poverty. Do I think it’s our responsibility to solve the problems of their government? No. But I do think we have more opportunities and access to more wealth – in general. And I think with that access comes responsibility that far too few people acknowledge or embrace. There is a responsibility to do something but I’m not sure what, exactly – honestly.

I digress.

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.

KavOuch, Kavetch, KavItch

My feet hurt like hell. Ouch, ouch, ouch. At first it was the just the right foot. The toes began tingling last October and then a dull ache and throb. Later the entire big toe and the ball of the foot went numb and it continues with the thudding pain that now extends down through the arch. And the left foot, it’s starting in now too. I dropped the transformer or whatever the heck that big ass thing is on the cord to the laptop. I dropped that on the right foot – it sent me gaga. And then I picked it up and it slipped out of my hands and it dropped on my left foot. I wanted to cry. So I go get the phone to call Ed and whine a bit, and I drop the phone on my right foot. On the bright side, I’ve got an appointment with the podiatrist on Friday. I think I want to marry a podiatrist. Sorry Ed.

And I’ve been having these headaches, I think because my prescription is changing on my glasses. So I’ve got an appointment with the optometrist on Friday too. I inquire with the HR guy at work if I have cashola in my flexible spending account. He replies that I do - $500. That’s gonna be a sweet pair-o-glasses. (He says get something with some bling bling cause it’s a bitch getting old and falling apart.) That’ll be me, limping around on Friday looking for bling.

Also.. I know I’m getting bit by fleas. For cryinoutloud. I bombed this whole frill’n place not three weeks ago. Where in the HELL are they coming from? I never had this problem in the back cottage. Help?

The Little Brown Shoes

I watched Rent the other evening on DVD. It served to make me angry. I found myself yelling at the screen from time to time – things like grow up, shut the fuck up and you arrogant, misguided, cowards. I’d seen it on the stage in San Francisco in the 90’s. I didn’t have this reaction then. I’m still rather surprised at how angry I am and how the anger lingers.

So what’s it all about? It probably doesn’t make sense to the average onlooker. I can’t remember. Do you ever, randomly, realize that you’ve been holding your breath? This happens to me often – maybe for the last two decades or so.

I have an unmitigated anger toward New Yorkers. Not against any particular New Yorker, but New Yorkers in general. As a group they are arrogant, self obsessed, myopic creatures. They are cowards masquerading as cool. Put on any clothes you want – it doesn’t change who you are fundamentally. Frauds. And if you’re a New Yorker or you have some adolescent obsession with New York and you’re feeling offended, just go have a cocktail and buy yourself a new pair of shoes. I’m sure you’ll forget all about it - it will pass.

Cassie was in my dreams last night. We had breakfast at 9 am and then she was coming back to pick me up for a conference I was to speak at at 1:30. In the meantime, my old friend T*dd came to visit. I haven’t seen him in a decade. I adore him. He doesn’t know it. He thinks I gave him my guitar and the comfortor I made when I was a girl, the one made out of old sun dresses and the whatnot, because I didn’t want these things anymore – not as any sentimental gesture. He was wrong. I gave him these things because I wanted him to have them. Because he wanted to learn how to play guitar. Because I didn’t want him to be cold. Because I’d given him money and I couldn’t give him anymore money. Because he lay shivering from a fever from the HIV, from the Hep, who knows, on my living room floor, still tweaked out on speed – but still found it in him to make heart-attack spaghetti. (He got his test results on an April first – I thought he was kidding. We ate Thai food. They told me I was positive and handed me a brown paper bag. What’s this, my do-yourself will and a list of hospices? I threw it back at them.) Because we got stoned and lay on his bed on Hayes and listened to Morrissey crooning the Queen is Dead. Because he is probably the smartest person I’ve ever known and he feels. Because we just had so much fun together – we always did. And then for a whole bunch of reasons, most all of them having something to do with speed, it just wasn’t so good that we hung out anymore and I’m not sure even if I found him today that we could retrace steps to all the laughter. I’m sure he lost or sold the things I gave him. He gave me a red cut glass candy dish. The red color, he told me, has to do with gold being mixed in with the glass. I still have it. I miss him. I miss who I was. I miss who we were then too.

So anyways, what does this digression have to do with Rent? In the dream, T*dd began singing one of the songs from the musical…. we’re living in America, at the end of the millennium.. He sang it over and over. He wore a black leather jacket with black keds – this very young, very blond, very earnest boy – bounced ahead of me down the street – mockingly singing this song. He laughed and everything became playful. I was serious – stoic – and he kept singing until I started laughing. It’s what we were – playmates. And there he was and there I was and we were laughing together – just like that.

He described it best from a short story he’d read. A drop of blood falling on a clean white cotton sheet – absorbing and spreading out in the fibers. That’s what A1D$ is like, not a fucking musical. Not fashion.

I loved his anger. More than mine. I wonder where he is. I saw him on the street in the Tenderloin many years ago. Seemed things were better – maybe – it’s hard to tell. But there was so much stuff… I hate that fucking musical and I hate New York.

Step Back

Greetings from the desert – sunny Palm Springs. I flew down on Thursday for a conference that ended today. Yesterday there was only a morning session so mom and B, my brother, drove to Thousand Palms preserve for a walk and to see the desert pup fish. The wind was howling – it hurt my ears and we were pelted with sand. You’d think it would serve as some kind of natural exfoliation. Really, I just got sand in my hair.

B was out for a conference in San Diego and rented a car – he’ll be staying until the 8th. I’m flying back Monday early evening. Every time I turn around, mom is putting food in front of me. Lemon-caper chicken with asparagus baked in garlic and olive oil, baked ziti, exotic quiche-like pastries heavy with cheeses, creams, and pancetta. Everything is fabulous and seemingly effortless. It’s not effortless. Emphasis on seemingly. She’s just amazing.

On Thursday morning we hiked Palm Canyon, the Murray trail to the seven sister’s waterfall. I brought the camera, but I’m not seeing what’s in front of me. And when I do see something, I’m sloppy with the camera settings. It’s interesting that on the mountain, at home, I just can’t get close enough. Here I wish I had a wide angle lens and wish I could get further away. I’m not accustomed to looking at things this way. Not used to wanting to back up. It takes practice, like standing on my head or reading upside down.