What I Have To Say Is This..

I wonder sometimes often if I have anything to say. I mean anything imaginative and creative. I love to read. I enjoy writing, though I lack patience on longer works. When I was a kid I loved to make my sister tell me stories and to this day I press Ed to tell me stories (though I get frustrated that they lack real suspense and exhilarating drama… I’m a rather spoiled listener and think I might just find bliss with my head in the lap of some spinster with a gazillion yarns. NPR picks up where Ed fails me.. heh.)

Poetry. Poetry is bite sized and I can chew on it and feel like I’ve finished something – like a painting or laundry. But it’s not so fulfilling, just like laundry. It gets done, but where’s the transcendence in that? It’s actually a little painful.

I had a dream. I always have dreams – deeply rich, colorful and imaginative. If those stories were more at the surface. Back to the dream. It was great. I was a white man trapped in a black man’s body. The black man was tall, trim, beautiful. He wore yellow rayon Capri-length pants, a silk red and white pin striped shirt and leather sandles. He was a bad man. He wanted to kill the skinny pale white boy with long blond hair and bad skin. But the skinny white boy was inside his head/mind and he didn’t know the white boy I was there. The colorful clothing looked beautiful on the black man, but when I looked in the mirror they looked terrible and clownish on me, the white boy.

So the black man planned to kill me, but being inside him, I was privy to his plans, one step ahead. I didn’t hide from him, I met him at the places of his mission and stayed ahead of the game, foiling his efforts time and again. It was exhausting but somehow exhilarating all the same.

You see, we were the heads of different houses or gangs. Each house was represented by a different colored bell. There were five altogether. A new, very powerful head of house had come to town, with strength and armature to kill us all. We’d only make it if we all, including the new one, united. If I could get the bells in a row, it would bring about a kind of harmony and peace.

And as I was seeing the metaphorical bells line up, I’d let down my guard with the black man and he’d gained the upper hand. Suddenly he was on me, had me by the throat with a knife to my jugular. He was all the more determined for all the constant yet thwarted efforts.

And the dream had a very Coen brothers ending where I (the skinny white boy) am screaming and pleading with the black man, No, stop. I have the gift of sight! I have the gift of sight!

So very few of us have even spoke of our resolves for the coming year.

To Sleep Perchance To Dream

After my mid-day 20 miles bike ride - with the steepest grade you can think of going on for over a mile - I took a monster 5 mile hike to the second waterfall at Elliot last evening. I love the long shadows and golden light of late afternoonish.

I keep forgetting to mention a dream I had. I was about to die - and in the dream, when one died, they had to meet the executioner (or maybe it was a reeper - whatever the case... I remember him as an executioner of sorts.) It was love at first site. I swooned and lamented the thought that at this juncture I would meet the person of my dreams and that that person would by the executioner. On some level, however, it didn't matter - because I was immediately smitten, immediately in love and something about that, in the face of everything, was perfect and hopeful and completing.

The twist of the story is/was that the executioner fell in love with me too. And I became the only person, ever, to be spared the fate of the executioner as a result. And it is/was because of this it became known that while incredibly rare some people escaped the executioner's fate - and in a place there was little to no hope there was placed a glimmer. And the most humble and wisest would realize that hope was realized through love.

I know, it sounds corny - but that was the dream.

It was almost as good as last night's dream - in which Ed not only quit smoking, he cleaned up after himself. Wow.. what startlingly divergent expectations for fulfillment. heh.

Eat Your Greens

I’ve been so restless of late. Cassie says to focus on my questions before I sleep and seek answers in my dreams. I dreamt I needed to eat more vegetables. I’m game – so be it. Vegetables it is. I hope it’s all that easy.

I want to do something different. I’m tired of the same. I’m dissatisfied with the same. I’m not inspired by the same. I don’t think I’ve ever been so discontent. But perhaps all the world’s ennui can be solved with a simple carrot.

Constant Stranger

From the garden gate the other day...

I used to always carry a notebook and pen that felt food for writing with me. With the advent of computers and other time-saving tools, I just never find myself relaxing with my notebooks the ways I did before all this technology became available to make our lives easier. I'm not so sure I want my life to be easier.

Sometimes when she's not around, I steal pencils from my neighbor's house. Sometimes I feel bad about this and when she's not there, I put them back.

I'm reading the Jeremy Taylor interview and the interviewer asked about archetypes. Taylor explains the universal meaning of say up (goodness, light, enlightenment) and down (evil, darkness, ignorance, etc.) You see, that archetype doesn't hold so true for me. I'm for of an in and out kind of girl. And perhaps in a true ying/yang thang, I'm really not sure if there is more enlightenment, goodness, evil or ignorance in or out.

He provided another example of archetype being the image of blood - which is related to family, he says, and obligations of relationship. I remember a recurring dream. There were holes in my wrists and instead of blood, my veins and arms were filled with sand and shells. My feet were on fire with pain. There were roses growing into them, out of them - in, out - like I said, it's really ultimately difficult to understand the difference between these things. The stem grew out of my foot, the bud and flower blossomed inside. So in place of blood, I have crushed stones, fossils and rose petals. So what does that say about my relationship to my relatives - living and ancestors?

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.

Apollo

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero – really look – and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. ‘You must change your life,’ he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message: ‘you must change your life.’” - Ursula K. Le Guin

I had troubling dreams last night. I was on a boat with my mother and others, in the Bayou, it seemed or someplace else mysterious. Something fell in the water, or someone, something that needed saving. My mother, who is historically hysterically fearful of water jumped in to save it. The boat kept going – leaving her behind.

I began screaming that we had to go back. We had to fetch her. How they didn’t understand such a bold move from my mother, who’s fear and panic in the water is inimitable. To risk what she risked by jumping in was more then it perhaps appeared on the surface. The boatman yelled that he couldn’t go back just yet. That he would, but right now it was impossible. I kept looking backward, stretching to see – but we were only moving further away and clarity was lessening by the moment.

Eventually the boat did turn around and fetched her from a medical unit. She looked pale and ashen, deathly really, and had a wound that had been tended, in the shape of an oval, between her ribs on her right side. It was though she had been speared with a sword and this is the mark left behind – neat, oval, and now sewn up. I asked her what happened, pointing to the wound.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I jumped in the water and that skin just fell off. I’m really not sure.” Somewhere along the line she had fainted, perhaps, blacked out and her memory of things were murky. “What was really disturbing,” she went on, “is that when I woke up I was on a cold gurney. There were dead bodies to the right and left. I was in a morgue. They thought I was dead.”

And we sat in silence pondering this as the boat swiftly carried us forward.

It’s unclear that she accomplished her mission. Unclear that she saved anything.. only risked.

And this morning I have this strange sensation of riding in a bright colored car – clear blue sky, soft warm wind, windows open, breeze in my hair, and I’m waving… waving while on my way. It’s all very… sunny.

I Need A New Drug

In a hazy, sleepy, drug-induced state, on painkillers to take over while the anesthesia wore off, I had a dream. A memory of someone, who I loved, traced like lightening through my subconscious. I woke, feeling like there was lover I’d forgotten. A real, true love that I’d somehow misplaced. Oh yes, there it is.. ooops, no, it’s gone again. And I feel like this beloved is waiting on a street by a particular lamp post, or in a café and it’s killing me that I just can’t remember who and where. How can something, someone, so important just be forgotten?

Every Violin

Isn’t every violin supposed to be yielding itself to my hearing?? Damn trees. Damn blades of grass. You mean they are not growing all around me with the recognition that I’m the gravitational center?? No, no, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be the center. I just want my corner, off to the side, out of the fray, outside the whirlwind chaos of everything.

I want time to slow down and I want crisp morning walks and a progression from one thing to the next that feels even vaguely like progress even if I don’t understand why, to what end, toward or away from what. I want my voice to be heard, my words appreciated. Yes, the problem is that I want a certain reverence that I neither want to work for or be terribly accountable to. That’s arrogant and unfulfilling all at once.

If I set wind to these words will it offer them the gravity to float away? My old therapist seemed to think so. There are too many words left undone, half spun, frayed and broken and the tapestry is unraveling as we sit here saying nothing.

I had a dream last night that I was a drummer. Yes. A drummer, of all things. New music, subtle and complicated rose and for the life of me I couldn’t feel the rhythm of it, could’t find the beat for the life of me. I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t who I thought I was. And in my waking I realize that I’m not.

Perhaps my anger is for what I’m not – not for what the rest of the world is or isn’t. And that sucks. And maybe all I’m trying to do now is deflect my disappointment in myself.

Do you think I’m having some kind of mid-life crisis? That’s a possibility, but it’s such a simple phrase that’s likely overused and abused. The term mid-life crisis feels like an excuse or a box to place angst in. Oh look, one more aspect of life to throw a few simple words on, since it’s just a phase somehow it’s not real life and it can be dismissed. I don’t think so. Not this time. That’s been part of the problem all along. Sometimes I feel like screaming at myself, “you’re entire life is not a phase to simply endure until you get to the other side of it.”

If I have a single obligation it’s to find, experience and express joy. That’s the goal of every single day and why do I have such a hard time accomplishing this mission? What’s the obstacle here even when there’s no apparent obstacles?? Why am I my own biggest road block to this?

The Dream (Very Dead)

I had fitful dreams again last night. I can’t really tell if they were inspired by something astrological in nature or perhaps somehow the carbonara sauce went straight to my arteries, constricting blood flow to my brain and crippling the synapses. I woke up constantly only to fall into the same dream, which made it feel all the more lingering and deep.

In the dream I was communicating with a being. We weren’t speaking. It was very telepathic. It was a he. I was shown that there is a difference between being dead and being very dead. He was very dead.

The dead, so it seems, have ego. They also have motivation based in and on ego. They’re rather ugly and frightening creatures who feed their ego choices. This was shown to me like a movie where the dead were depicted as vile gelatinous creatures that killed one another and fed on human attention in all its forms – from fear to praise and worship.

The very dead, on the other hand, were distinctly different. They are formless and colorless. They exist in a state entirely undetectable by the dead. It’s almost like they are spirits in the world of the dead. While the dead are maybe our spirits and ghosts in this world, the very dead are like spirits and ghosts in the world of the dead.

What makes you happy? I asked. He tried to explain but words failed so he showed me. He had me feel the state he lived in. Yes. Words fail. Makes was a silly query, is is sufficient. To describe the state in which he exists, I guess the best I can do is say it is like an extraordinarily contented smile. Hmmm.. it’s a joyful content like being deeply in fully requited love.

How do you communicate? I asked. Again, words failed but he tried. He showed me a computer, a light bulb, electricity. And then he had me feel again, and somehow I just understood. The best word for it maybe is electricity.

How do you become very dead? I asked. He simply laughed. Here I got a bunch of mixed images and impressions. On some level it seemed that if you were killed by the dead it’s possible that you could become very dead. But I didn’t get the sense that this was wholly accurate. There was something more intentional about the becoming of a very dead being. It had to do with a choice to abandon ego, which was/is more difficult than it might seem on the surface.

To abandon a sense of ego isn’t to become selfless or unselfish in some base human understanding of these concepts. It goes beyond our understanding and involves something more profound. It includes giving up one’s investment in our relationship to our others. It’s not giving freely to our fellow beings and relinquishing our own needs. It’s about letting go and abandoning altogether the constructs which hold us together. It’s refusing to play the game or any part in it completely. It may look, by human norms, like complete selfishness because it looks and feels like walking away without concern about how this impacts anyone and everyone. It is a total surrender and abandonment of the social norms we know and hold to be valuable. It’s being willing to give up our past, our present and our future and walk away – and at the moment we do this, the understanding that we have come to as we do this, allows us to do it without fear, regret or concern. If any of these feelings are present, then we’re not ready, then we will not become very dead. Then we are simply not becoming.

When shown so objectively how crude and cruel and ugly the gelatinous monsters are, it’s easy to wonder at why this would be a difficult choice. How could anyone maintain an investment in the status quo of this grotesque and violent culture? It simply is what is for the creatures, however. It’s what they believe being is suppose to be and so they all play by the rules and try to find contentment in it. Yes they laugh, these creatures, in big cartoon gestures – like bullies on the playground in a kid’s movie. But the joy of the creatures are birthed in a kind of violence, in what looks and feels like cruelty – maybe it’s merely a metaphorical violence and it lacks any sense of contentment. And they are equally invested in their dramas, sorrows and fears.

And the very dead have merely made the choice to give up these things (along with the constructs and trappings of that life). And in that moment in the dream it was easy to wonder at why this would be a difficult choice. How easy it would be to let all that go. But I was made to feel how it wasn’t easy at all. How it took courage, resignation and abandon to come to these conclusions. How it involved leaving loose ends to unravel instead of tying them up. How it was like being in the middle of a game where perhaps you were winning or maybe just a bit behind and it was your turn to roll the dice and move. Rather than rolling and seeing the outcome you perhaps set down the dice and wordlessly walk away or perhaps you toss the dice in the air but you walk away before you read them – and you don’t even have a desire to look back to see how your roll might have landed you. And when you hear the angry chatter of your playmates, you remain wholly unmoved save for a quiet little chuckle of contentment and you just walk away, forever.

This was my dream last night. And for whatever it’s worth it leaves me feeling oddly ill at ease today. I’m so aware of my investment in the game. I’m acutely aware of the loops of logic that run in my head that loose ends are meant to be tied, that I can’t just walk away right now, how I’m not ready or able and how it’s not the right time. And I can hear him laughing (I’ve named him, the very dead guy, Richard). I can feel him telling me, Yes, when you are ready it will be easy. When you really feel it you’ll know that you are perpetually in mid-stride, you’ll know that there really never is a good time or a bad time, that it’s always just time. You’ll simply know and you’ll simply do and it will amaze you how easy it is.

Strangely, I know exactly what he’s saying and I wince at this knowing. It’s familiar.

Bullet Holes

I know who I am. Who I was. In my dreams I shot a hole through the arm of my sofa with a 9mm pistol. It left a brown stain around the edges where the bullet pierced the fabric. The wood frame altered the trajectory and there’s a bullet lodged in the kitchen wall, next to the plastic clock.

I was laying on the sofa when it happened, when I pulled out the pistol and aimed at the forest green shadowed golden rose fabric and aimed between my toes and hit my mark. It was quite a good shot. Upon reflection I think I must have kept both eyes open (usually I close one when I aim).

I don’t think I mentioned that I found a home. It’s little house with a big yard. It’s where my stuff is going to be. It’s where nearly every morning I’m going to wake up for awhile.

Home

So commences the arduous task of finding a home. All those tawdry clichés seem to float away, not enough weight to hold them to the ground. Home is where the heart is. Home is wherever I lay my hat. Blah, blah, blah. Home is the place where my bed is, where all my stuff is, where I stack old journals in a bookshelf and dust piles up from time to time. Home isn’t some abstract place of comfort and serenity, it’s a place, preferably on a sloping hill that rises to a beautiful little hovel and falls to a boat dock on the bay or some inviting body of water. I suppose it could be on a park where children play on weekends and dogs run around like pinwheels.

Home has changed over the years. At one point it was a box on the wrong side of (and way too close to) the tracks. The commuter train would thunder by and the walls would shake as the whistle blew and the clanking sounds of the crossing bell would pierce the air on the hour, all night long. The pea-green carpets were terminally stained and the cocaine dealer who lived next door would beat his girlfriend and target practice in the backyard when he wasn’t drinking beer and throwing the empty cans out his front door to an ever-growing pile of aluminum on the lawn.

For a spell it was the back seat of a 1967 Dodge Dart, complete with built-in roommates, torso and full mannequins that would be rearranged at night such that we all could sleep, the largest with her foot out an open window. When it rained there was simply no way to keep the sky out and accommodate all of us comfortably. The trunk was my armoire into which many things fell irretrievable. This did not last long.

Then home was a small room on a windy hill in a house on a caldesac. Later it was in a room on a windy hill surrounded by trees in a Mormon household. Then home was little box in the sky, a dorm room built on prison specs, little single beds that pulled out from a bolster such that the bed could pretend to be a sofa during the day, two to a room.

Then home was a beautiful room in a big Victorian House, filled with college kids and dreams, a big pantry and sweet little fixtures from an era gone by, the wedding date of residents of years ago engraved on a broken pulley that one day opened the door from the top of the steps. The overhead electric rails strung out in front of my street-side window, sparking as the bus’ rabbit ear antennas scrolled over junctions in the line. Watermarks on the ceiling and roaches scurrying across the kitchen floor were just a few of the features of this aging beauty in the heart of the Western Addition. The demise of this fine paradise was the culmination of a summer sublet to a punk band from Wellesley. The once new carpets were beer-stained and haggard, the built-in cabinets filled with months of trips to the recycle center. It never regained it’s charm.

Home became a basement studio sublet in the heart of Pacific Heights, caring for cats who’d drag in mice from the backyard and taunt them, squealing, into the small hours of the morning. The dark subterranean haunt was hidden from the world and marked a moment of going inward. It was all very temporary.

I had a dream about the madwoman in the attack and by serendipity home became a small, very small, one bedroom let on the top floor of an old Victorian. The greatest feature of this miniature living space was a seemingly centuries old stained glass window that withstood earthquakes, fires and explosions to filter the light in colors across the living room floor. When the building exploded nearly a decade back, the sturdy room resisted the momentum and stood unmoved while the plaster and glass shattered throughout the entire building. The window remained unmoved. But not me, I moved a little back in the building to a far less hearty, but slightly more spacious nitch in the world. A nitch we’ve I’ve grown, admittedly, to despise most of the time, but it’s home nonetheless.

I wonder where home will be next. What little place exists for me that will grow as comfortable as a habit? Where will I raise my toes to point toward the ceiling and fall into fitful sleep at the day’s end? On what wall will this photograph rest that inspires me throughout the day and will my neighbors sit for a spell and watch the world go by on our front stoop? Will I occasionally smell aromatic wafture of briquettes in a grill and hear the far away echoes of children playing? One thing is decidedly clear, where home is next doesn’t have the roar of engines up a hill, the sound of sirens throughout the day and the ever present noise of car alarms and mayhem. It’s going to be a quieter place with trees and grass and perhaps water. I simply cannot continue to live where the only place of serenity is a place I cultivate on the inside.

Silenced

I went to speak to College students last night. Blah, blah, blah. It was a three-hour night class. By the end of the evening I could feel a scritch in the back of my throat. By the time I arrived home the scritch had turned to a burning ember. In the midst of dreaming about a strange house, painted artichoke green, mustard and eggplant, on the floor high heeled pink satin shoes covered with red fishnet appliqué bore an emblem saying stripper and in a closet three pennies lay on the floor, all donning the date 1972, I woke up parched, gagging and sweating, my throat and body afire. By morning I could hardly breathe and had lost my voice. I thought those students would feel privately vindicated this morning, not knowing how or why. The universe did what they weren’t allowed to do to a guest lecturer in their classroom - tell me to shut up.