Hippo Homeowners

It's official. We bought a house. We move in tomorrow.  Our lives will finally be unboxed.  For me it has been almost 13 years since much of my record collection has been out of boxes.  For Barkley it has been an imagined eternity since he has seen the pink Hippo.  

It had only been about an hour - but he doesn't know how to tell time.  

.

We tell ourselves

Life can be ironical.  Mine is.  It's as if I'm living out the chapters from Winesburg, Ohio.  It's where I endlessly roam.  My yearnings an unheard scream.  I am trapped in the teeming pull and push of it, fumbling along in the unbroken light.  Fighting a torrent of wind that leaves the world untouched.  Stumbling into misfits along the way.  Ever blundering towards them, with them, for them - from them. Ever and ever, dividing lines, telephone wires.

We all tell ourselves one thing and other's another.  Every step somehow a misstep.  Every step a struggle.  Every step gets steeper.

The horizon distant in all directions.  Reminding, remaining.  

We tell ourselves one thing.

Other's another.

.

Out of the frying pan...

(meatballs, no mayo)

I can't tell if it's me, or others.  It seems that everywhere I go I'm stuck in some situation, some interaction, with somebody that is driving me nuts.  But when I try to look at the interaction objectively I can't see where it's me that's doing it.  It seems to be woven into the world around me.  It's everywhere and many of my daily interactions are evidence of it.

Yesterday morning I went to get a coffee. There was one guy in front of me.  He was young, about the same age as the girl behind the counter helping him, and he was leaning forward on the counter.  She seemed to be taking his order at first but then I realized that they were just discussing the various merits, or lack, of the items on the menu.  She was being bubbly and informative.  After a minute or two of watching this clumsy flirting I began to shift my weight from foot to foot and gave the occasional scraping of the shoe against the floor.  Their fumbling continued, with me unnoticed.

The young guy finally ordered a coffee.  I wasn't paying attention to whether or not she had actually sold him a specific one that she was peddling but it seemed to me that he ordered one that he was familiar with, a favorite.  Their conversation shifted to other people that worked in the vicinity and whether or not either of them had attended various people's parties.  Nobody had filed in line behind me so I didn't have the type camaraderie one can often easily acquire in situations like this.  I was on my own.  The guy was leaning over the counter about halfway at this point.  I noticed because it was somewhat difficult to do.  The counter was rather low, as all Starbucks counters are, and he was having to let his legs fall out behind him to make anything that he was doing seem normal or natural.  

He paid with a $20. His drink came to just over $5, so he handed her another single dollar bill after she had rung it up.  This confused her a little bit so he told her the appropriate amount of change to give him back, which was $15 and some change.  He asked for three fives, or a ten and a five, or fifteen ones.  This confused her further and it started to become obvious that he knew he was losing his grip on whatever flirtation they might have been sharing.  He was the sharper of the two, though not by much.  Once she had counted back his money he was standing straight up.  It became a little more obvious why he was prostrating himself on the Starbucks counter. She was slightly taller than him.  She bounded off to make his drink and two people filed in line behind me. They continued their conversation while she made his coffee but she suddenly seemed to recognize that she was working, there was coffee to be made.

I have no idea why she was the only person working this morning. The place is often staffed with two or even three employees.  

Can I help you?

Oh, I didn't want a coffee. I just wanted to hear what you guys were talking about.

To say that she gave me a stare that stated simply that I am a creepy old man would be an understatement.  I hadn't exactly developed any solidarity with the people behind me as they had just come up.  I was on my own and somehow now I was the asshole.  The kid was still at the other end of the counter drinking his morning chocolate-caramel frozen desert coffee with a spoon.  A pimple trapped in plastic, soon to be freed.  He didn't hear any of this but he clearly seemed to be waiting around, hoping to slow down the economy further before he took off for good.     

Um, no, I'm kidding.  I'll have a ....

It was after ordering that I realized that I come in here to get a coffee all of the time and it makes no sense to upset the staff.  She neither got my joke, nor did she think that she was doing anything wrong.  She's been trained to recognize creepy old men and she knows to take note of who they are, and what their patterns are, in the event that a police report needs to be filed.  

So, then there was lunch.

To save money I often eat at a sandwich from a supermarket deli.  I've written about it here before.  There are several employees there and some of them are quite nice and engaging, while others are surly and put little care into sandwich making.  I don't blame them, I merely state it as a fact.  

There's one guy in particular who seems to have a somewhat managerial air about him. At least he seems to wish to engage customers in a vaguely corrective manner, disguised as information.  He has attempted to do that to me a few times in the past.  I ordered a stock sandwich from the placard menu that hangs above the glass divider, a sandwich I have had many times.  It's an easy sandwich to get along with, not messy, and reasonably light.  The ingredients of the sandwich are listed next to the picture.  I know them well.

I gave the only instruction, that I wanted "light mustard" on the sandwich.  I state this each and every time because if you don't then you will get a sandwich that tastes only of vinegar.  Their enthusiasm for condiments knows little restraint.  Then, as I always do, I got myself a cup of water from the soda machine.  By the time that I came back, only a few seconds later, I noticed that there was an enormous glop of mayonnaise on one side of the bread.  

"I didn't want mayonnaise.  I asked for light mustard."

He responded, "When I ask you what sandwich you want, you say light mayo. I think you are confused, my friend."

"I'm not confused, friend. I know the difference between mayonnaise and mustard. I order the same sandwich all of the time and I never order mayo with it.  I don't eat mayonnaise."

"Then why you order it this time?"

"I didn't and this isn't the first time you've made this mistake.  I eat here quite often, as you know, and you've made this same mistake before.  So, for the future, to avoid confusion, you can know that I don't eat mayonnaise.  Also, not that it matters, but that wouldn't even qualify as 'light mayonnaise', would it?"

"You didn't ask light mayo, you ask mayo."

"You weren't listening then and you're not listening now.  The ingredients of the sandwich are listed on the board here.  If you look at it you'll see that mustard is an ingredient and mayo is not.  You can use this board for future reference if you need to.  But if you're going to need me to list all of the ingredients that I don't want on my sandwich then I'm going to need a longer lunch break.  But for now, and for the future, please just make the sandwich that I order, as shown above, but with light mustard, friend."

  

"Ok, you no need to be angry.  Mayo is your friend too."

Sight vs. Vision

I don't know what's wrong with me, I probably never will.  I make the mistake of responding to people, I guess. That's what does me in.  Before I know it I'm wrapped up in some bullshit that I can't seem to get out of and I wonder how I allowed myself to get waist deep in it again.  

I'll never figure any of it out.

Selavy and I have been writing back and forth through emails. I have been haranguing him about his tolerance of people telling him what is wrong with, or what he should be doing more of, with his writing and photography.  It drives me nuts but he mostly just seems to sit back and laugh at it.  This posture is somewhat unlike what I know him to be and it perplexes me.  So, I finally got fed up with it again and posted a bunch of angry responses in his comments section.  I have since gone back and deleted them.  He is right, there is little point to it.  None.  But here is his last email to me.  He mocks the wisdom of it, but it is there.  He's right.  I get it.

Selavy wrote:

People are fucked up bad.  I used to think it was just some, then I thought it was most, but it is even more than that.  All I can do is try to stay out of their way and laugh.  Everybody is scared, everybody is an asshole.  I am.  You are.  I don't have any desire to fuck with them except when I am driving.  I have more problems than I can bear and much more suffering to come.  People bring me little succor.  Sometimes, though, they can distract me.  Your child will distract you and you will care about him and at some point that is about all you will care for.  You'll sit in the bleachers of the little league soccer games and cheer with all the other parents.  And you won't care.  What you'll worry about most is embarrassing him.  You won't want him to think he has a freak for a father.  You will learn to be quiet.  You will grin at idiots and watch movies and marvel at how little time you have.  Then one day you'll feel a pain in your side that you can no longer ignore and there will be trips to the doctor.  All those books we read about heros who lived and died larger than life. . . it isn't us.  Whatever we had was squandered long ago.  Go to yoga.  Learn to be quiet and look at things.  As you say. . . there isn't much time.  But don't die until you do.  Don't project into the future.  That is all shit.  You will be sorely disappointed.  

That is enough of that.  I'm just saying. . . don't waste your time being mad at made up people.  The best thing to do is agree with them in words.  That usually hits the spot.  

Yea. . . fuck me.  I'm a fountain fucking wisdom. 

Lotta Love

Lotta Love

It's gonna take a lotta love

To change the way things are.

It's gonna take a lotta love

Or we won't get too far.

So if you look in my direction

And we don't see eye to eye,

My heart needs protection

And so do I.

It's gonna take a lotta love

To get us thru the night.

It's gonna take a lotta love

To make things work out right.

So if you are out there waitin'

I hope you show up soon,

'Cause my heart needs relatin'

Not solitude.

Gotta lotta love

Gotta lotta love.

It's gonna take a lotta love

To change the way things are.

It's gonna take a lotta love

Or we won't get too far.

It's gonna take a lotta love

To change the way things are.

It's gonna take a lotta love

Or we won't get too far.

- Neil Young

.

Easter Monday, Pt. 2

Well, we did it.  We went to Easter Mass.  Rhys's first step towards the foggy mumblings that will either shadow him or light his way.  

So be it.  

St. Francis watched over us, the patron saint of fuzzy bunny shoes.  

I was always more interested in St. Augustine, the patron saint of brewers and printers.  Beer and Books.  My kind of guy.  When I tell people that Augustine was black and from Africa they look at me like I'm out of my mind, or just taunting them.  White people do, I mean.  I'm afraid to talk to black people about black people.  No, I'm kidding.  I just prefer to be drunk or drinking when doing so.  Then, and only then, I'm an authority on all issues, especially the sensitive cultural/historical/religious ones.  I'm a god-damned expert then, on all repeatable issues. 

No.

If they happen to know what the "City of God" is then somehow the author being black doesn't quite fit into their conception of him.  I suppose many have forgotten, or never been taught, that a fair portion of North Africa was Roman for a time.  When I was very young and under the religious jurisdiction of my mother she used to take us to a Catholic church that was his namesake.  There were several paintings and depictions of Augustine in this church, none that accurately reflected the color of his skin, which matters not at all to me, other than in retrospect and in others' denial of it, etc.   It is found often and everywhere.  It's much more challenging to find a painting of him that honestly reflects his African heritage.  Imagine that.

His skin was most certainly a dark brown being from what is now known as Algeria with family history reaching back more than 100 years in Africa.  I grew up believing him to be of European descent, if not being from the Vatican City itself.  The Holy See, originally a circus ground begun by Caligula and completed by Nero.  I only found out in my early 20's that the depictions of Augustine that I had grown up with were hardly accurate considering his mother was of full African descent, his father was likely a Berber.  

I say all of this to remind my readers that I grew up in Florida, during a time when issues of color were still taken very seriously by some, and alternately very seriously by others, though in a wholly different, near opposite, way.  Part of what motivated my decision to leave Florida was based on the quotidian bigotry found there and still on display in most places.  Little did I realize at the time that I was out of the frying panhandle...and into the friar.  

New York is quite possibly one of the most bigoted places I've ever been in my life.  I have witnessed more open and forceful intolerance there than just about anywhere else I've been.  It is a myth that New York is a melting pot.  New York is at best a paella, or fondue. 

Well, this isn't what I sat down to write about at all.  But rest assured that there is as much bigotry in NYC as anywhere else you've ever been.  It's just divided pretty evenly between many more groups, so each citizen tends to feel the effects of it it much less as when it is divided almost exclusively between two groups, white and black, as it tends to be in the south.  

In California there is a different kind of white/black divide.  It is more white/brown here.  Nobody talks about it but it can be easily felt.  Mexico is California's Africa.  

There are two California's: the haves and the no lo tengo.

Aye, Happy Easter, Pilgrims.

The partisans are everywhere, else how did we ever get here?

.

Easter Monday

I feel like I've been raped by those flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz.  Yesterday we went to help begin the process of planting vegetable gardens at our friends' house.  There was a lot of soil to be spread throughout the yard.  Deep, rich, heavy soil.  It was like the crystal-meth of soil, glistening with reflective particles, waiting to be activated.  For several hours we shoveled the rich soil into a wheelbarrow and then dumped it and spread it throughout the various beds and planters.  It was a lot of soil, 20 cubic yards, maybe more, I forget.  I slept terribly and awoke with bruises where my bones and muscle used to connect.

No, it's not as bad as I claim.  It falls just shy of flying-monkey-rape.  But I'm a little bit sore, even my anus is, though that might be unrelated.

Hold on, I'll make a tea, and then we'll see. 

Here, take a look:

I ate an enormous amount of fiber, suddenly and without warning, after having had a stomach virus for several days.  That's probably why my anus hurts.  It's difficult to say for sure.  If I try to touch it to gather evidence as to what might have happened it announces its dissatisfaction throughout the halls of my nervous system.  Only running hot water over it in the shower seems to make it happy at all.  I've gotten old.  The phrase "falling apart at the seams" has taken on fresh new meanings for me.  I think a few stitches might have come loose back there.  Rachel refuses to look at it.  She views it as enema territory.  Maybe she said enemy territory.  I couldn't hear her.  I was face down holding my ass cheeks open.  My hearing's going also.  Who knows.

No.  I'm just being irreverent because it's Easter.  If I have to listen to people talk about other people rising from the dead - after going to hell where Satan, death and sin were defeated - then the gates are pretty much wide open for me to talk about flying-monkey-rape and early morning Easter anus inspection.

The day does hold special significance for me, though not for religious reasons, or the reasons I've mentioned above.  

Four years ago Rachel and I were trying to find ways to make our relationship work.  We went to church together on Easter Sunday.  To my memory it was the first time that we had ever walked into a church together.  Over the course of the next year we decided, in various ways, that our relationship was not working.  By the following year, three years ago, we were not speaking and I was dating somebody else.  A woman that I had known for some time, from Orlando.  She was the first person that I felt like I might be able to form a relationship with after the many years of dating Rachel.  I had assured her that everything was over between Rachel and I, and it was. 

We hadn't spoken in about three months, Rachel and I.   I finally told her that I needed to move on and there was no easy way to do so with us still being in touch with each other, still seeing each other, etc.  So, after leaving her apartment one day I decided that I would never go back, that I would stop calling her, that I would not respond to her calls.  It worked.  Within three months I was seeing a girl named Crystal and I felt like I had broken the hold that she had over me.

Crystal left New York on Easter morning three years ago with tentative plans to come back, even though I had an aversion to long distance relationships.  I knew how misguided I could be in a relationship and I questioned whether forming a long-distance affair was what was best for me.  Before she had even left New York I was hinting that it might not work.  I was a little bit worried that it might not happen between us, that it was still "too soon."  But we liked each other and had fun together and we had known each other for many years.  There was a comfort factor involved.   But the main thing was that it was the first relationship that I had had in many years in which I felt that it was possible for me to have feelings for somebody else.  That's what I was trying to say.

Later that night Rachel texted me.  Women have supernatural senses when it comes to this sort of thing.  Rachel says that she had a dream in which she realized that she was losing me.  I was at our mutual friends' condo while Rachel was at another's, just a few streets away.  She was leaving there soon and she asked what I was doing.  I told her that I was where I was and she asked if it was okay if she came over.  Within an hour or two of her arrival, and shortly after leaving our friends' place, I had asked her to marry me, late Easter Sunday night, in front of one lone witness, her friend visiting from Canada.  We decided that we would put all of this breaking up and getting back together behind us, once and for all.  We agreed that we did one thing better than breaking up, and that was getting back together.

Telling Crystal was not easy. I went from hoping to see her again in a few weeks to being married to my long term girlfriend with whom I had claimed to be estranged, overnight.  There was no way to get her to believe me.  The story seemed too improbable and likely riddled with lies of one kind or another.  But as improbable as it all was I was being honest.  I swear to it.  There were many witnesses.  

Rachel and I went to the courthouse and got married.  We texted our friends that we had done so and were generally met with support and happiness.  There were some that were perplexed at such a sudden and drastic shift, others were unsurprised by it.   Rachel never mentions our courthouse wedding as the actual date that we got married.  For two and a half years now I have listened to her cite Oct. 17th as our wedding day. That was the day, six months later, that we had a wedding ceremony in Sonoma.  Perhaps because she was wearing a wedding dress, surrounded by family and friends, and got her diamond ring... that day that makes it official to her.  She sees that as the more orthodox version of our marriage.  

The state of New York disagrees.  

She is trying to get me to go to church with her and Rhys this morning.  For an atheist, being at church on Easter Sunday is like being in a co-ed jail.  You know you don't belong there, you have no respect for the judge,  you're hoping to make bail soon, there is no beer, and everybody's wearing the same costume.  

I will probably go.  It suits her vision of Rhys' first Easter, all of us together, dressed nicely, enjoying the friendly communion of believers.  What harm can it do, as opposed to the possible trouble made by not going?  I hear people prattle endlessly about their horoscopes and various other nonsense, why not about a man rising from the dead only to forgive my transgressions against him?  It seems fitting, all things considered.  Without him we have little left but romantic memories and flying monkey rape.

.

Fuji X100

Fuji X100

I don't need another camera. I know this.  I have three other cameras.  This camera would do little that my Nikon D7000 doesn't already do.  It offers no size advantage over my Panasonic DMC-LX3.  My Nikon F-801 shoots actual 35mm film and I keep a 50mm f1.4 lens on there all of the time, giving it that "natural" perspective.  I am not a professional photographer on assignment in the Sahara.  National Geographic has not contacted me with interest in my work, pushing paper bags filled with cash on me at some lunch rendezvous.  I am not a fashion photographer.  I have never shot a single professional frame in my life.  I am not wealthy.  I know this.  I know this.

But I long for a new camera.  I find myself looking at it online, reading reviews, justifying the costs, favoring features that this camera barely bests my other cameras in, ignoring its faults, making myself promises about how I would take even better care of this one than any other.  I'm like Gollum.  

A good friend, and even better photographer, once told me to, "Buy the camera that makes you feel cool.  If you feel cool then you'll shoot more often and better."  I know that this camera will make me feel cool.  I mean, just look at it, classic rangefinder design.  It both captures and emanates cool.  What woman would not undress in front of its lens...?  But it's expensive.  

The total cost of the camera and memory card and extended warranty and tax is around $1600.  I might have mentioned that this figure meshes perfectly with my expected tax return for this year.  Not sure if I had mentioned that already, or not.  Something to think about.

The camera has problems too.  One of the main issues is that there's no easy (cheap) way to put a lens filter on it.  The glass is nearly flush with the rim of the lens.  One small mistake would ruin the camera forever.  Fuji sells an adapter but it's also expensive ($140).  There are workarounds but none that are all that great.  It would mean always using a modified lens hood or rigging a filter ring and an UV filter together to allow for macro focusing, a feature I often use.  What to do...

I fell asleep with the full Pink Moon shining on my face through the blinds, a guaranteed cause of madness, I'm told.  Perhaps that is what has happened to me.  I have been bit by the bug.  Most of my wants in life are relatively meager; books and music, wine and food.  Cameras are my only interest that carry a difficult price tag.  Even computers do not do for me what they do for others.  I like them, and I'm happy to have a powerful computer, but I wasn't unhappy with a lesser one.  But I look at camera review websites like its pornography.  I'm almost naked now as I write this.  

Perhaps this is just more of the mid-life crisis I've been going through.  I am yearning for cool objects because I don't feel as cool as I once did.   But if there's a solution that's as easy as buying a cool new camera, then why not?  

Who among you would want me to feel anything less than cool, right?

.

Such a life

(The bouncing baby boy)

We took the boy to the beach today.  Well, we took him to the shore.  It was the lighthouse at Pt. Reyes, not exactly a place to frolic in the hypothermic surf.

I was being sentimental as the day wore on, as the wine worked on me at home, thinking of little boy Rhys.  Stop reading now if that sort of thing bothers you.  You've been warned....

Some of us use our time hoping to create anything of beauty - whether in writing or in whatever else we might do - music, art, dance, anything.  We often spend so much of our lives mired in self doubt, or held under the tedium of work, that there is little time left for beauty.  Allure is much easier to acknowledge than to produce.  Each of us reacts to feelings of uncertainty and insecurity in our own strained ways - wishing to cast off, extinguish, or explain away the various monsters of self-doubt.  We search for love to assuage those feelings, often to find that the reaction of romantic love only serves to make matters worse, amplifying the weaknesses - sometimes exacerbating them beyond control, beyond reason.

Then one day along comes a little adorable child that is as beautiful as anything we've ever imagined.  It's still hard to believe that we created the little boy, the two of us.  The mind wants to doubt even in the face of simple proof, such is uncertainty carried so long, so well.   Self-skepticism most of all wants to live on.   But in his easy beauty and newness to life there is a simple thing, redeeming and pure, unhidden for us.  Effortless to understand, impossible to explain. 

I feel less uncertain - more confident that I am by some means not a lost, hopeless or corrupted soul - but one capable of generating this little beauty, in spite of myself.  It is all there in his smiling wondrous face.

I say all of this not to be maudlin, but as a frank admission.  I'm sure there are some, rolling over in their memoirs, at such an unadorned admission of love and change.  

Such is life.  

So be it. 

To the sea, and on the way back, the brightly colored blossoms of the California Poppy were everywhere roadside visible.  It's easy to take note of the parallels, almost biblical in their plainness.  Out of winter soil comes a flower so bursting with life and the announcement of future promise that it makes one re-examine what they know about the earth, of life.  Any number of parables would serve to further elucidate here.  I'll leave those to the others.  

I'm not drunk with emotion, or overly sentimental.  I mean each of these words, truly.  I know that one day the boy might grow up to resent me, and my love.  He might denounce me in his heart as a fool, an out-of-touch ogre, incapable of understanding a tender unique soul such as his.  I will ask him to mow the yard, or to help his mother get the groceries out of the car, and all the triumph of love will crumble at his bitter response and self-anointed indignation.  His world will be his alone.  I might have the memory of today, he won't.  It is all a normal part of the process.  I know.  I was once there too.  I also returned from there.  

But tonight those days are far off, and he is quite close, gurgling and cooing in his sleep, dreaming of sucking titties and mommy's voice and being held by us both.  I'm certain of it.  

Just a few thoughts before I go to bed.  

Each morning becomes more precious, once I stop to consider what such a thing as another day gained actually means.  How short the days, how fast on their way.

(California Poppy)

.

Tangled Up In Blue

My maladies continue.  They make no sense, but there they are, undeniable.  I am bored of the details, too much so to write another word.

Today we will get out of the apartment.  We will go have an adventure, possibly the beach.  Rhys is too young to really enjoy the beach, I assume.  But Rachel and I could use a day-long getaway, lunch in a strange town on the coast.  We are both exhausted from the buying of the house.  Everything has gone wrong.   The banking institution that manages my 401k is criminally inept.  They have caused everything to be put on delay.  Now we must apply for a second addendum, pushing back the closing date even further, past the agreed upon final date.  I am not certain of the details but I believe this might possibly put our deposit in peril, if the sellers so choose to be difficult about this latest delay.  It is their option to exercise, or not. 

Rhys may not know what a beach is but as new parents we are unsurprisingly excited to have new photo opportunities with him.  It really is astonishing how quickly he changes.  Just look at the pictures.  He looks less and less like a little duplicate of me as he develops, though still favoring me a lot.  We're starting to see other family characteristics emerge in him.  It's really something.  The boy sure is cute.  That's one thing we all agree on.  Everybody must feel that way about their own children though.  Yet it's a universal understanding that most babies are not cute at first, that they become more so over time, hopefully.  

My heart goes out to all of the ugly infants of the world.... hehe, no I kid, it does not.

Selavy wrote something very funny in response to my post from a few days ago.  He sent it to me in an email, not wanting to post it for some reason, probably because he assured his fans that he wouldn't be reading my posts at all.  In any event, he wrote to me, "I am nostalgic - for a time when you weren't so deluded."  Hilarious, and true.  Ever since having the child I have been suffering from a massive drug underdose.  Everything has shifted on me.  All of the things I used to believe to be true are rising up against me.  It was time for such a thing, I suppose.  My life had gotten too static, for far too long.  But now I long for a taste of the past. Too much change, too soon.  

I think back to New York and I do miss it a little bit.  The post from the other day was part truth, part playful nostalgia, part memoir.  As I sit here typing this I am listening to Bob Dylan's "Blood On The Tracks", an album that evokes a lot of memories for me, some distinct and some obscure.  There is something hidden there in the album that I enjoy.  It very well might be nostalgia.   The rare sanguine feelings of past lost love, the balance between desperation and hopeful assertions of a future freshly changed.  It is one of the greatest breakup albums ever.  It has saved me countless times.  No, that's a lie, the times are easily countable.  The album induces in me both the memories of newly felt pain as well as the feelings of blind optimism for change that can sometimes only be achieved as the result of a broken heart.  That foolish little thing we tell ourselves about how things are going to be.  Next time.

Is that also nostalgia, or just more of the nonsense?  

.

As if,

I felt like today was going to be 

an almost total waste, 

perfect in that one regard.

So, I sat down down to write 

words that somewhere end.

As if I was pretending

perfection, 

tilting regards.

I felt like I sat down.

I must have.

Let's just say, again:

a perfect waste

of difficult days.

.

Nostalgia

My body refuses to recover.  I have had a stomach virus for days, which has complicated other things for me.  Eating, for example.  My body just keeps getting weaker and weaker.  All I want to do is lie in bed all day, which is mostly what I have been doing.  For 3 days now I've been too lazy to go out to my car and get the book I've been reading.  It's a re-read so it doesn't matter that much to me, I guess.  I could start another book, one that I have in here, but it's easier to just watch tv.  

The weather has turned for the better.  It looks very nice through the windows.  

Selavy has outlined his version of our interactions today on his site.  It is not my intention to argue with him, even though he is wrong.  He is a romantic and he often sentimentalizes the past, which is the very definition of nostalgia.  I sometimes do the same, but nobody likes to be accused of such a thing.  He believes that he has found an escape route though.  Because he does not romanticize his past but instead romanticizes a fictionalized past of his invention, one which is deeply associated with him through its very creation.  There are times with him when it is as much a fetishization of the past as it is mere romanticizing.  But it works for him and it suits the tone of his site.  His audience seems to adore him for it.  But it would be very, very easy to pick a handful of his posts at random from the last few months and find strong currents of nostalgia among them.  

Is it possible to speak of loss without a certain sense of nostalgia?  

But I will continue longing for the present and the future, as well as fondly recounting portions of the past.  Much of the music I love is from the past.  I sometimes also romanticize the music from those other times.  It's easy to do.  Is that nostalgia or just imaginative appreciation?  I don't yearn to return to those times.  I only wish to fully appreciate them and their time of creation.  They are like postcards from another time, postcards that require some participation for fuller enjoyment.

I think it was the mention of 80's music that caused all of this.  The music of the 80's must truly anger him.  It was perhaps a time that he finds contemptuous and it is bothersome to him that I might have felt otherwise.  Who knows.  I say none of this to argue, only to try to understand the lines that divide the crime of nostalgia from what is only fond memory.  I didn't enjoy the 80's as much as I should have as it was happening.  Listening back now I find more and more to like about the time.  Some of those bands certainly sounded like they were having fun.

Ok, I retire to the bed now, along with the pup Barkley, where we will discuss politics, and the many merits of sentimental longing for the past, or lack thereof.  

  .

  

Oh, how I miss New York...

(Turgenev)

I miss sushi.  I am recovering from a stomach virus and I just went to the grocery store and bought a plastic carton containing what they claimed was sushi.  It was not.  It looked similar but the color of the fish wasn't quite the same, and when examined closely the rice was not the same grain, it was an unholy seed.  This synth-rice was developed by the Monsanto corp., Halliburton,  I'm certain of it.  

I ate it all, but only out of longing.  There are countless deli's you can walk into in New York and buy actual sushi for anywhere from $5 to $10 a roll.  Imagine that.

Sushi is my favorite food and there is none here.  None here to speak of anyway. None here to speak well of, anyway.  Let me be more clear.  There is a sushi restaurant here.  Everybody has advised us not to go there, that it is very expensive and not very good.  The closest sushi place that is worth going to is in Santa Rosa, about 35 minutes away.  In New York the closest sushi place that was good was 3 minutes away, on foot.  If you wanted great sushi that was a 5 minute walk.  To be clear, we live near the Pacific coast now.  I had thought that sushi would have been knocking on our door like the Mormons, to be eaten.

The stuff I got today was made from used band-aids with a brightly colored fish flavor paste spread across it, generously.  It tasted like what a flavored japanese condom might taste like, rubbery and wrong, yet colorful and somehow festive, packaged and purchased, forever confusing the term condiment with vending. 

  

Rachel and I had much better sushi in St. Petersburg, Russia.  Honestly. There was this cute little place that put the dishes on a conveyor belt and you just picked what you wanted, they counted the dishes - both the colors of the dishes and the number - at the end, and that's how much you paid.  It was delightful, and the fish must have come in from the Gulf of Finland, or the Baltic Sea.  It was great, we ate there twice or more during our short time there.

We did something very stupid in Russia.  We were looking for a taxi and we got into some stranger's car who happened to be driving by.  He pulled over and motioned us in as we were trying to hail a cab.  The streets were deserted and we were across the river from the Nevsky Prospect, a long way from home.  We negotiated our way back towards our hotel, drunk.  We were showing this stranger where our hotel was by flashing tourist maps and gesticulating wildly as the white night and the treetops passed us by.  He grinned as he ran the red lights for us.

Once we realized that he was driving us back to our hotel to rob us further, and more completely, we panicked.  I started babbling something in semi-Spanish with an occasional Asian word thrown in about our hotel being a different hotel, and where we showed him before was where our friends, The Polizia, were staying.  He smiled a knowing smile and drove on.  When we got the the hotel I held out all the cash I had on me, hoping this would end the robbery for good, before we had to be shamed and raped further upstairs.  He took a few small coins, smiled, and waved us on.  He waited for us to get inside the hotel safely before he drove away, waving.

Angels, everywhere, I'm told.  

I turned to Rachel and said, "That fucker just took us for almost 75 cents...."

Close call. 

When I took Rachel to see the statue of Turgenev around 3am we almost did get robbed, truly.  We rounded a corner and there was a group of aggressively inquisitive youths, up late, and demanding to be acknowledged.  We ran..... we escaped.  

That was our partial story of Russia, running from ill-informed foreigners.

St. Petersburg was one of the worst cases of jet-lag I've ever had.  I slept, or tried to, all day long.  At night, if it can be called that during "white nights," I was wide awake and wanting to roam the streets of mighty St. Petersburg.  Dragging Rachel along to show her the statues of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Goethe, Gogol, Peter The Great..... To bars where food and beer were served all night, and music was played quietly as the night wore on.  I wrote a quick post-midnight poem on the banks of the Neva.  It is lost now.  It was an homage to Jim Harrison, suggestive of loss, and the loss of memories.  Never nostalgic, merely plaintive for a past shared, now mostly lost.

One night at Selavy's house I read aloud a poem from a book on his shelf, one of my favorites.  He and his girlfriend hated it.  That's right, he once had a girlfriend.  Just because he has an interest in literature means little, it admittedly means perhaps even less to him, to hear him talk of it.  To endure him daily recounting his past loves, his longings.

Because literature is, if nothing else, an accurate and artful accounting of nostalgias, past and present, if nothing else, of nothing else.

.

Don't be selfish

I had been warned. I had been told to prepare.  That once the baby was here I wouldn't matter any more. Several of my closest friends told me to brace for it, that it's a big shock to the ego.  That the woman you love and have done all that you can for is suddenly in love with somebody else.  It's not quite jealousy, you love the little guy too.  But there is a distinct sense of descent, of loss.  Not only am I not the most important guy in this relationship any more, but if I don't fall in line quietly and happily with all of these new changes then that's a clear sign that there is something wrong with me.  

My place is now somewhere between Barkley the pup and where I was, or thought I was, towards the top of the totem pole.  Nope.  I'm suddenly the long square head that's visible just above ground level, not quite the base, but right above it.

I won't trot out all of the details, this is not the place for it.  I'm not even sure if there is a place for it.  When I have hinted at some of my feelings the responses I've gotten fall into two categories.  There is only the "Don't be selfish" response or the "What did you expect?"  Well, I don't feel like I've been selfish, at all, and I'm not quite sure what I expected.  But if I would have described this feeling, in advance of the child, with the terms that now seem clear to me, then people would have accused me of some other, greater wrong at that point.  I'm certain of it.  Everybody described the experience with the, "You can't possibly know until you've been there" type reaction.  But what they mean is that you can't or shouldn't be honest about it.  Once you've been there you'll understand why.  Complete honesty about this experience is valued by none.  What is valued is the strained smile of budding patience and fatherly understanding.  

Or, even other inner principles that have been in existence but perhaps had atrophied from dormancy, sloth.  As much as it is a new experience it also reminds one of qualities long rested, and even less practiced.  I almost feel like I'm in perpetual Sunday school.  Best behavior, no booger picking, etc.

I say none of this to hurt Rachel, or to question her enjoyment of motherhood.  She's not to blame, at all.  It all makes sense, I see it.  She is very happy with these changes and does not see them as limiting in any way, but rather the opposite, that our lives will now open up from this point forward.  In some ways I see that this is true.  But that doesn't blind me to the other aspects of it.  I see now why people invest into their homes, creating a comfortable space of suburban enjoyments.  If that's where you are going to be then it makes sense to enjoy what you have there.  I have books and music and guitars and cameras.  The internet.  Soon we will have a baby grand piano.  I have begun to look at flat screen tv's with a different eye.  I have a new interest in any noteworthy television programming.  I downloaded the first season of The Wire on Selavy's recommendation.  We'll see.  Rachel says she doesn't like cop shows.  I wonder if I do.  

Who knows, maybe I'll become a cop now.  It doesn't seem impossible any more.  Lots of things seem less improbable now, like Rachel says.  If only I wanted to be a cop...

Soon I will have a tool shed filled with power tools. The garage will be my sole domain.  Though the place we've bought doesn't have one.  The imaginary garage will be my private place.

I suppose it's just a transition that all new fathers must go through.  The recognition that you are no longer leading your life, that you barely even have a vote when it comes to some things.  That there are expectations of you and the quiet fulfillment of those expectations is the only indicator of happiness that anybody wants to hear from you for a while.  

It's quite an adjustment.  What did I expect?  

.

Tummy Time

The boy is getting good.  A natural athlete, with hippie-length hair and blue eyes.  He almost looks like one of The Beatles in their "Rubber Soul", "Revolver" years.  It's only a matter of time before he'll be falling in love with their many children's tunes; Ob-La-Di, Yellow Submarine, Octopus's Garden and Maxwell's Silver Hammer.  All of that nonsense.  Don't worry, dear readers, I'll have him listening to the great Beatles tunes also.

I just saw that the children of The Beatles are forming a band.  I can't wait.  Their first album could be called, "I should have worn a rubber, soul..."  No, I kid.  They have just as much right as anybody to shame themselves with a manufactured idea that nobody has begged for, except to laugh at.  I should stop.  I have a disproportionate amount of friends that are hard-core Beatles fans (is that even possible, hard-core?), and they are probably eager to rush home to iTunes to buy this new Fab-Fournication.  

I love The Beatles, but love them more where they are, in the past.  Is that nostalgia?  I had better stop.  That's dangerous territory for the the Ol' blog-cop, Selavy.  He's been trying to tell me that I'm blind to my own nostalgia.  You see, he reminisces and recollects, I merely nostalge.   Nostalgia is dangerous, we all know that.  Now that he has the power to strip search I had better know when to keep quiet.  He might find some fond memories hidden away in a cavity.  No, I kid.  His posts have been really good lately.  I encourage everyone to read them.  

But, in all seriousness, I only hope that the children of the Beatles know not to try and cover any of their parent's material.  Or, if they do then please let it be Yoko and Linda's stuff.  Please, let it be...

Ok, I have little else to say today.  It is probably time for me to go back to bed.  I've had enough tummy-time for today.  It's only a matter of time before I start crying.

 .

Get used to it

(Town-House Cusick)

A day spent in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, feigning life.  The more you sleep, the more you can sleep.  The internet says it's because of depression and low socioeconomic status.  By that standard my normal inability to sleep could be explained away by elation and wealth.

I had to be told that I couldn't drive last night.  Something I'm not used to.  Having lived in a land of taxis for so long.  I'm all for telling people they shouldn't drive when they've been drinking.  Though I typically resist being told such a thing, when drinking.  I had plans later that evening, but they were not to be.  I began playfully resisting, asserting that I was not as drunk as my friends were suggesting, and at the time I believed that to be true.  They cited that I was slurring a little bit, but that's mainly because I had eaten a Xanax, not because of the drinking, or not as much anyways.  Truly, I had only had 4 beers over the course of several hours.  I had eaten some mushroom stems, which might have made me seem more "off" than I actually was, but might have possibly helped with night vision, etc.  

But belligerent behavior is not to be tempted.  It ended poorly, with me walking home and leaving my car at my friends house.  My woozy belligerence was met with sober truculence and it ended with difficulty, and harsh words, spoken by those with whom I am unaccustomed in that way.  Never a pleasant thing to experience, and an even less pleasant thing to be the cause of.  Being wrong robs one of the pleasures of self-rigtheousness.  It is a theft that sometimes takes hours to complete, but sure enough, there it is.  One feeling is gone, replaced by another.

I have been too lazy to recover the car today.  Perhaps tonight, or tomorrow.  Who knows.  I'm afraid that I might fall asleep on the long walk over there.  There is a comfortable looking river on the way, running perpendicular to my destination.  Perhaps I should first go to the grocery store and buy a raft, one with a mast and sail.  If such a thing even exists.  I doubt it.  

As I was drifting in and out of sleep today I could hear Rachel arguing with the banking customer service representatives.  Saying the same thing over and over.  Every new person she spoke with would cite that there was missing documentation.  Then she would trot out the prepared speech she had, telling them that she is having to do so each and every time she speaks with them, and why can't they seem to accept that their own loan application lists the needed documents, all of which have been filed already, and that without the money from them there will not be any need for the loan because we will not be able to buy the house.  Each time she emphasizes how important and timely this loan is, as we have several thousand dollars already on the line,  $7000 of which we will lose if this loan doesn't come through soon.

Then we got the news that it looks like she finally got somebody on the line with the power to help. The wire should hit the escrow account tomorrow or the next day. We should have the keys by Thursday or Friday. The movers come on Saturday.  I am supposed to be very happy, and part of me is.  But these are very big obligations.  My needs seem so simple in comparison.

But as so many of my friends have already told me, get used to it.   I don't matter any more. 

. 

Happy Ln.

(A rainy view of our new back patio)

We bought a house this morning, sort of, it's a town-house.  We signed the financial documents, we are waiting for the money to hit the escrow account before we get the keys.  If all goes well we'll own it sometime early in my 73rd year of life, AD 2042.  There is a way to own it sooner.  By increasing a certain payment, probably our mortgage, by 3% each year we save a lot off the end.  It's math.  I was barely listening this morning when the tactics for accomplishing such a task were being outlined to us by people who know, old people.  

All I could think about was myself at 73, Rachel at 66, and Rhys at 30.  Perhaps some yet unnamed, unformed creature still in their 20's.

Strange, that.

When discussing financing that stretches out for the remainder of your life, or perhaps even further, it is impossible not to try and imagine what your life will be like then.  You realize that each detail not carefully considered now can balloon into nightmarish numbers later on.  Debt.

We do all of this to build equity in the home.  Everybody talks about "not throwing your money away on rent."  But I know quite a few people living in Florida that would love to have had an apartment rather than the home that they're now trapped in when "the bubble burst."  

But today is not a day to consider such things. We are to believe that the housing market will rebound and that the place we bought today is not an investment as much as it is a home for us to live in.  The investment aspects of it are truly secondary.   We did, after all, get a good interest rate.  

Thanks, economic crisis!

It is the first home that either Rachel or myself have ever bought.  That part of it is very exciting.  The idea that we will be homeowners together.  We can do as we wish, with the Home Owners Association written permission.  It's a little bit like New York in that way, but only with a dirty river not far away.  

Or, there's grass there.  

If you ever want some insight into why the financial markets collapsed, and I don't mean the greed of the big picture which has been outlined by many, but the incompetence of the little picture, then simply take a loan against your 401k to buy a house.  We have had to do most of the work for them.   Right now I am listening to Rachel discuss the expected loan against my 401k and, though I have heard her make many calls like this before, she is just now being told that we have not filed all of the appropriate paperwork. But Rachel is swift and clever, she pointed out to the representative the spot on their own website that provides information disagreeing with everything they are now telling us, as well as documenting for the record the last communication we had with them when they informed us that all was in order. 

The important thing to note here is that something was holding up our loan, we were not made aware of it.  Had it not been for Rachel calling then the process would have been stalled even further.  They are asking us to provide proof that we have already purchased a home. We've tried to explain that the reason we're borrowing from the 401k is to do so, and that one must happen before the other, there is a one-way temporal relationship between the two events.  

The "ball" could not be any more "on their side of the court."

Rachel has had more extensive dealings with financial institutions than I have.  She assures me that the one facilitating this loan for us is one of the better, if not the best, among the various banking organizations.  At least in terms of customer service, that is.  That's the problem though.  The service and the experience completely suck.  Had we not called this morning then we would have never even known that they had stopped the loan process.  They make us verify our email addresses, mailing address, and phone number every single time we interact with them.  So, we're pretty fucking sure they know how to get in touch with us.  Yet something prevented them from doing so.  It's simple, they have my money, we do not. If we had their money then things would be different.  The next time a debt collector calls I'm going to make them verify all of their contact information, in triplicate. 

It's difficult to listen to Rachel on the phone with these people while writing this.  It's making me angry, very angry.  No matter what it is we've already provided, they want something else.  It is very easy to understand why people lose grip and begin to suddenly act with extreme disregard and loss of rationale.  I just suggested stabbing somebody in the neck, but Rachel doesn't see this sort of talk as being supportive.  She's "shushing" me.  But I mean it.  I want to kill, and soon.

Ok, I took a breather.  It didn't help much, but I took it anyway.  Life is absurd, banks are organized cruelty mated with demonic greed.  We're all supposed to just accept it.  I hear Rachel saying that our closing will be delayed now.  It seems inevitable.  Unstoppable.  So be it.  Namaste.

A lesson for all of you.  Never rest, always worry.  When something is important call twice a day to verify that others are doing what they are charging you to do.  Be vigilant, always be ready to transmute that vigilance into violence.  Never apologize.  Fight the good fight, etc.  

The walls will always fall.

.

"I am a DJ, I am what I play"

The clouds escaped in my sleep.  This morning it is clear again, and cold.  Spring still hasn't hit just the right combination of clear and warm.  Soon.

Last night I played the part of being a dj.  It was an 80's party at my friend's yoga studio.  It was 2 hours of time machine fun.  I brought my speakers down and played off of iTunes. Not precisely dj'ing but I was playing tracks again for people dancing, putting them in the order that I thought made the most sense, at the moment.  It was nice to not have to wear headphones, the ubiquitous dj fashion accessory.  Nobody offered me any cocaine, which was kind of a drag, but everything else was cool.  I never tire of watching people dance, especially white people.  No, I only kid, again.  I was texting Rachel at home telling her that I had done some cocaine and I almost had her believing me.  I mean, can you even imagine....

As for white people, well, they are fun to watch, truly.  They are imaginative and expressive when dancing, some might say a bit too much.   But don't worry dear readers, I was dancing too, for a little bit.  I wasn't going to be one of those dj's.... I remember many years ago at a club in Florida.  I drove up with our local dj.  It was the first time he was guest dj'ing there.  As we were standing at the edge of the dance floor I asked why he wasn't dancing.  His response struck me as strange.

"It shows approval."

Sure, I guess it does.  The world of dj'ing sure is an odd one.  Many years ago I would often write about it for an online magazine out of Amsterdam that my friends maintained.  They found it novel that a dj could be so openly critical, even contemptuous, of dj culture.  It was part of what ruined my dj'ing career, but I had a lot of fun doing so.  I jokingly blame them for destroying my vocation, but we all know who accomplished that singular task.   I thought I was being "punk rock."  I quickly found out that assuming a punk rock stance is not rewarded by those with whom you take the stance against.  I was not nearly as charming as I thought I was.  Doing cocaine and playing poorly does not necessarily a punk rocker make.

I learned my lesson.  It shows disapproval.

.

Cherries, all of us

I haven't seen the moon in nights.  There is just the grey phosphorescent hole in the billowing darkness where it should be.  Where it was.  Where it used to be, 1.3 seconds ago.  The mind crumbles at such perpetual vagueness.  Rain makes life less distinct, yet gives certain emotions distinction.  

Funny, that.  

We are born into the doom of distractions.  

.

Don't tread on me

Not much time to write today.  We will strike out on an adventure of some sort.  It's raining and will be raining all day today.  Seems unlikely that we will be able to drive far enough to escape it.  But with my only day off I refuse to sit in the apartment all day and just watch it through the windows.  That's what I've been doing far too much of lately.  The rain here is not like the rain in New York at all.  Here it is a season.  There it is an event, with one rain being separated from another by dryness, clearness of sky.  

I should have known.  It is a valley system and the entire bay area unique in its odd climate regions and changes.  It makes sense that there would be both microclimate diversity and seasonal patterns, considering the proximity to the coast and the range in elevation, the many valleys, mountain lines and inland waters.  But it didn't really occur to me until living here.  None of it did.  I have lived too long in the city, where there are only 4 seasons, and occasional gifts of weather peppered here and there.  Before moving to Sonoma valley I was reading about the place and discovered that it gets about 30" of rain each year.  I forgot all about this once I got here and it was just endless slices of sunshine, days of heaven.  

All 30" have dropped in the last 3 weeks, it seems.

On part of the road driving out of the valley, up towards the bay, there is a fenced off section that has filled with rain water.  I had noticed it before but assumed it was for a certain type of corralling, for the cows.  Branding, slaughtering, castrating, or something less dramatic, I told myself.  Not until the perpetual rains, with the fenced area filling to form a new lake, had it dawned on me that it was put up as an understood yearly estimate of the rain's reach.  They predicted well, the newly formed lake comes right to the edge of the fence now.  If the rain stops soon, as everybody claims that it will, then the cows will be prepared to make their delicious transition from cattle to livestock.

I witnessed a strange migration of sorts yesterday on my drive towards the peninsula.  There was an entire herd of black cows all walking due west.  There were no herders there, or dogs, or anything at all that I could see that had caused it, or was causing it.  Just one massive bovine exodus, headed for the other side of the field.  Maybe a snake spooked a few of them and the movement took hold based on fear, instinct and partial knowledge - like the Tea Party.