Where'd You Get Those Boobs?

The only thing standing between me and greatness is me. - Woody Allen

Every day we must point out the lucky things that happen that make this the most wonderful and luckiest of all years. The year started out quite grand with Pelosi being sworn in as Speaker of the House and the fortunate events have continued. The sun rose again this morning, despite so many decries that the End is near. The wild lavenders continue to bloom in the kill zone of my driveway median, despite the encroaching cold (it’s supposed to go into single digits later this week! Absurd!)

There is a man who lives down the street who has always struck me as odd. I’ve never liked him. He makes me feel uncomfortable and he’s a bit touched, a bit off. This morning Ed saw him and when he returned with the Honey Bee following their morning sojourn he said, “you know that kind of odd guy that you don’t care for? He had boobs today.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, “do you mean man boobs?”
“Oh no, definitely not man boobs.” He replies, “But also not boobs that make physiologic sense with his body.”
“What do you mean?” I press again.
“Well,” he continues, “they were more like big giggly saggy sixty year old woman boobs that hang rather low.” He explains as he gesticulates with his hands, as though he’s cupping low hanging boobs in his hands and wobbling them about.
“Weird,” I respond. “I don’t like that guy.”
“He was on the other side of the street and further up, other wise I would have asked him where he got the boobs.” He said flatly and then left for work.

I Squander That

It’s like, at the end, there’s this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid? - Richard Bach

Saturday Ms Cassie came for a stroll and in the evening Cookie arrived (quite late) to spend the night following a celebration for Hannah’s fortieth birthday. It was a great soirée – a potluck, eighties music, dancing, periodic turning up of the lights for words or song or what have you. It was an absolutely lovely event.

I’ve always erroneously believed a homophone was actually a homonym - me and my errant ways. It’s perfectly shameful!

In the afternoon, G drove out for another hike around Bon Tempe and I scurried home for a hot tub before an hour and a half massage with the magical Lomi Tati. I arrived home at 6 and I was like jelly. I skipped dinner (bad girl, no donut) and ate a whole package of Boursin fine herb and garlic cheese on cracked pepper water crackers. It was totally decadent.

Like Bach said, I gave my life to become to person I am. Is it worth what I paid? Or do I need to give my life to become something I value more? I think it was worth it to give my life to become what I became. And now it’s worth it to become something different. I’m merely having a difficult time reconciling some competing sets of values. I guess I know, intellectually, that art and politics, social change – they’re not really competing - indeed they can be incredibly complementary. The time I want to give them in my life and how I feel about them, however, is in competition – or maybe simply at odds.

I’m incredibly blessed and yet sometimes I squander that with my angst.

The Fun's Just Started

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started. - John Updike

I’ve recently discovered Eddie Izzard and I love him. Maybe this is like my discovery of the reality TV show, Survivor. Everyone rolls their eyes, and I can actually hear them thinking “that’s so last millennium.” I suppose the result of not having a television is that I’ll never be a hip trend setter in the glamorous world of pop culture. If you don’t know what’s happening until it comes out on DVD, it’s hard to even feign being bleeding edge about such things.

I do in fact feel a great deal of optimism about the aught seven. It’s going to be a good year.

It’s been a terrific day. I woke to morning coffee – soft and lazy, blog reading, internet perusing like some people read the newspaper (but without the crinkly pages or newsprint on my fingertips.) LB called and asked if I wanted to hike today, so I took a shower, did a few loads of laundry, emptied and filled the dishwasher and dressed for a sojourn with the Honey Bee. It was a brilliant crisp blue perfect day. I took my camera but I wasn’t inspired to take pictures. After all was hiked and done I walked to the post office (tubes on the way, Alison!) and then to the bank and then home. Secret loves these little tool about town things. She walks about like she owns the place, little captain of her band of grrrrrrl gang.

I heated up some perfect chicken vegetable soup. Have I mentioned what a soup kick I’ve been on since the weather turned? Each week I roast a chicken and after a fabulous feast of that I start deconstructing the bird for all its pieces, the good meat in this pile for the soup, the stuff we don’t like for the Monster Girl, the carcass in a pot with an onion, three chile d’arbole, celery scraps, garlic, parsley, a whole mess of seasoning for a three hour boil and simmer into stock. The house smells brilliant and alive. There’s something about using the whole thing that feels so graceful. When the time comes the next day to add the potatoes, celery, carrots, corn and onion (when I’m feeling frisky a daub of chipotle paste for a kick) it feels wholesome and good. Anyways, that was lunch, a small bowl – a late lunch, around four.

After this I hopped on my mountain bike (which is in bad need of biannual maintenance) and road for a good hour up the back side of the mountain to five corners, from Phoenix Lake, down through Deer Park and then back home. I’ve been rather lazy and I haven’t done this trek in a while (I could tell.) My back (ouch) felt it more than legs or lungs (yes, I’m even optimistic I’ll lose that weight I gained when I stopped smoking frill’n three years now…) So after the last mile or so, which is a lovely coast down hill the whole way, I pulled up to the house, tossed the bike aside, tossed the clothes aside and plopped in the hot tub with a shot of top shelf Captain Morgan’s spiced rum and wallowed in the warmth under a quickly setting sun. Stars illuminated in a deep indigo blue night sky behind the silhouette of the towering redwood trees.

Once the heat had found its way deep to my marrow, revitalizing a kernel of me that felt spent and done, I dressed and LB and I went to my favorite fondue restaurant for a seven oclock reservation from which we just returned, just a shy bit before ten (talk about slow food!) It was awesome (as always.) I just finished folding the laundry of which I spoke earlier and I’m cozied up to the fireplace with a good book, a tall cool glass of blood orange Italian soda and that electric throw (which mom contends will give me cancer, but three cheers for the deadly electric throw! Every home should have several!) You know, if sort of feels like the fun just started….

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.

Oh God...

I’m sitting here near mid-day avoiding the to do list of life. The great and wonderous Emma Goldman wrote that women need to live simpler, yet richer and deeper lives. We can each take that to mean whatever we need it to mean, I suppose. At one time in my life this meant abandoning to do lists altogether and changing my ideas of accomplishment and success to be who I am and what I strive toward becoming with regard to my internal life. Lately it’s about moving out a kind of paralysis – a paralysis that was crucial toward accomplishing the task of stopping smoking – of sitting and doing nothing and not smoking, of weathering boredom and not smoking, etc. Now that I’ve proven I can do that after three years, I’m sort of bored. So I wonder, what am I avoiding, exactly, except my own fulfillment? (How did brushing my teeth become a metaphor for fulfillment? Heh.. I’m kidding.)

I was nearly through Son of a Witch (the sequel to Wicked, the story of the Elphaba, Oz’s wicked witch of the West) when I hit a stand still. I’d been so enjoying it and in to the story and I got distracted by something… I’m not sure what. There’s a few lines that have struck me. Here’s one:

People say “my God!” all the time, but usually they mean, “oh shit.”

And here’s another:

A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask. An Elephant in her disguise as a human princess, a Scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch’s hat, a Wizard’s showbiz display, a cleric’s stole, a scholar’s gown, a soldier’s dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?”

How will I, indeed! And I think to some degree we all live behind masks that we work at slowly peeling off so that we may reveal ourselves and feel both known and loved. Even when we don’t even know we’re wearing them.. then suddenly we realize, oh look, I’ve had this silly thing on all my life… it’s not so muggy and I can sure see more clearly now that I’ve thought to take that wretched disguise off…. Here I am. Wow. Who’d a thunk. And sometimes, strangely, we suddenly slip into something we never had on before, like waking up in tennis shoes (that’s weird) glued to our feet. How ever did that happen?

And I think Oh God! (and yes, I really mean oh shit) and find myself in search of the right strength of solvent.. something to loosen off the shoes but not so powerful as to wrench the skin from my bones. There’s the rub, eh? It’s all about the right solvent. If it scars, it’s too strong.

And what is this kind of pyschological (dare I say, spiritual?) solvent, this thing with the strength to strip us down to precisely who we are but not so strong as to destroy us? Is there really some precise science to the whole thing? Is the pursuit of this tangential question a mere reveling in the hollowness? (I think, yes!… and I so love to think yes!) And I think Oh God!, and I’d like to believe I meant something better…. But I probably don’t really…

It’s not really all so heady. It’s time to act, not sit in melancholy ponderings. It’s time to be, not think. Throw caution to the wind… it’s a new year…. Jump!

SAD

For those of you wondering how I’ve been, wonder is a neat place to be. I think I’ve had a touch of the season affective disorder. Who is the hell hasn’t? Who in the hell doesn’t? There’s no sunlight, how could we not be despondent, forlorn and withdrawn for fuck sake? (We being the royal we….)

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I’m off to Palm Springs for a few days. While I haven’t been journaling much these days, I have been reading ferociously. I’ll miss the missives of your daily lives while I’m away. I’ve so much to tell and yet so little. I’ve been on the road a great deal, mostly to the Eastern seaboard and the seats of power. I’ve met some interesting people. I’m dedicated to not bringing my computer – being tech-free these next four days. Ed will keep down the fort with the Honey Bee while I’m traipsing about the desert and hanging with mom and ‘em.