Parts into a sum

It is indeed winter in southern California, the sun low and blinding though warm and bright. My companions laugh; this resembles nothing of their winters, this farcical spring in a land that never pales. There are no seasons here, they complain. They hate this place. They don’t see what I see, and it’s obscured even for me.

But everything changes, even here, and not just a new shopping center in the place of the last strawberry field. Some changes are so slight that it takes a sixth sense to realize them.

These old friends of mine, faces from my past life, barely notice the changes: thin, slight perceptabilities. It is not because they are incapable of the awareness but because, like the rest of us, their lives move fast with few silences. They take me to a bar, where one of my old friends spins vintage soul music on vinyl against a backdrop of drinkers and hipsters, not-so-starving artists and lonely souls hoping for someone to take home — a social haze that is unusual for me now. Half of the people there are old friends of old friends, the same friends have been meeting up for years, longer than the whole time of my absence. Some changes are imperceptible.

I drink with them, knowing I can’t afford enough liquor to break down the walls that separate me from them, my oldest friends. I’m thankful for them, these boys surrounding me once again, protecting me from bar vultures that keep looking at me, trying to catch my eye. One of these strangers, drunk enough to be brave, or maybe just from a more bold subculture, tells me it’s his birthday. He looks deep into me with his dark, soft, unfocused eyes while my friend puts a song on the turntable for him. He asks me how old I am and I ask him back. He says, how old do you want me to be? Then he tells me I don’t look a day over 26, which is how old he is as of today. Would I ever mess around with a 26 year old, he wants to know. I tell him it’s not about age. When he leaves the bar, alone and with a loud flourish, I think: there goes a person who will never remember meeting me. We could meet again tomorrow and he would not remember my face.

But my old friends surprise me with their remembering. I hear one of them, one I was never even close to, call my name from a car outside the airport where I’ve been anxiously waiting for my ride. The friend who was supposed to pick me up, my best friend from that period of my life, is himself stuck on a plane between here and Portland. So this person, whom I barely know and haven’t spoken with in at least six years, takes me to his house and we renew a friendship we never shared. But the shock of him being able to pick me out of a crowd, in the twilight, sits with me throughout the evening. I think that I’ve changed so much, so many times. I mention it to one of my old friends later and he dismisses it. “You haven’t changed that much,” he says. Really? Damn it.

The whole visit is a memory game: remember this person? Remember when we did this? Remember when that happened? Exercising parts of my brain I rarely use. These memories are some of the furthest I can recall, and even then only when I’m here, it seems. My old friends, who never leave this place, must be able to recall every moment of their lives. What would they do if this place no longer existed?

My friend gives me his usual litany of excuses for not leaving, and I give him mine for not visiting. I’ll be better this year, I swear. He doubts it. He tells me he’s going to move across the country. I doubt it, but I tell him I’ll visit.

We see a performance by a woman who sings heartfelt jazz-inspired songs she writes herself, backed by a band of people that have never played together before. They all grew up here but now live in New York; they are playing together because they all returned home to visit their families for the holidays. The music wraps around us in our seats, something deep in a shallow pool. My friend is deeply touched by the music. He says “it is rare that I feel so connected when I go see live music.” I don’t tell him that, in my present life, it is rare if I don’t feel that connection.

I connect to him in almost the same way that I used to, except with less sexual tension. It seems we have grown up, that sex was more meaningless before it was really part of our lives. Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong. Though we connect as adults, it feels like something is missing, and I wonder if it would help if we kissed in that careless friend way I always thought we could when we were young. I usually miss feeling connected when I’m here and I miss being touched, the way that my friends now hug so easily. Everyone here barely touches each other, only briefly hugging hellos and goodbyes. In a comfortable, lazy moment on the couch, I consider reaching out and hugging my old friend, wondering what would happen. Would he be receptive or repelled, as if I’d broken something? I keep reading my book instead.

There is a permanent sense of a vague loneliness, surrounded by the almost sexless flirtations that always made me feel equal, in this group of male friends. It is odd, these are my friends, so I know how they can talk about women — the senseless, sex-filled ideas that have popped into their heads — but I never feel objectified by them. Instead, I lulled into the security of being surrounded by men who are not trying to sleep with me, the safety, the comfort of harmless flirting. There are few men I feel that way around anymore, I realize with a slight shock.

Now we are at a different bar, a dimly lit Hollywood dive that’s playing excellent old blues on the stereo. We exchange fluffy conversation filled with bits of Hollywood trivia, old tv shows and movies, dead hip-hop artists, things I never think about but somewhere in the back of my mind I still know, my B-ticket into this conversation. I enjoy it, the same way I enjoy the fast food we eat later that night. No one asks me about the other things I know: how to identify plants, the shortcomings of capitalism, how to knit feather-and-fan lace, what it’s like to hike from the forest to the ocean . . . And I don’t offer them this knowledge either, because sometimes it’s just more fun to eat fast food.

I never used to blend my social spheres and I still don’t. I don’t introduce my new friends to my old, barely mention them to each other, in fact. But being here reminds me that I don’t want to lose all of my past, having lost so much already. Maybe not lost. Maybe buried or thrown away with both hands. But I’ve been so many people since then. Possibly they were more similar than I give them credit for: people in different locations, all looking for the same thing.

Grand

We walked down to the great meadow, your dancing hands accidentally bumped into mine as we navigated the steep terrain. At the bottom, I turned to you and touched your round cheek in my outstretch palm. Dragonflies and small winged insects hummed in the still, warm summer air, swimming in circles, catching the light. If I looked closely, I could see my face reflected in your wide eyes, and in mine I could see yours shining back. Gentle mirror, growing and reshaping the tools I had given you, and the crutches.

Your skin smelled of jasmine and candy as I swooped in for a quick kiss behind your moist ear, where I paused for a breath. You giggled out loud, teaching me again the precise expression of girlish laughter. I echoed you, and you in turn echoed back. We went on like that for what seemed like hours. Laughter pealing through the grass, growing and evolving on itself until finally the joyful noise completed full circle and sounded the same as the very first laugh. With that you turned and ran across the field, a sly eye turning back, daring pursuit. I submitted and felt my feet leave the ground, fine strong muscles stretching and exerting against the bone, against the air, against time.

Dropping our pace, we made our way down the bank, toes slipping in between the muddy reeds. You squealed as you dipped in your feet, and then a leg, into the freezing water. Lotion melted away from your skin making swirling rainbows in the water. Your damp, sandy hand reached up to mine to steady yourself. I was taken back to a time with your father, when we stood along the Bay in the rain. Fresh in love, he slipped his wet hands into mine slowly as we began to kiss. The smell of his wet dog that accompanied us filled my nose, a scent that mingled with his, an etched moment. Your exclamation about a swiftly skimming water bug pulled me back into reality.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, taken with the beauty of the moment, skirting the gravity of what I was to share. Your silence communicated readiness, but you wouldn’t take your eyes from the water and the playful insects.

“My grandmother died.”

“My grandma’s dead!?” you yelped, shocking me into weight of my statement.

“No, My grandmother’s dead,” I replied, feeling a sudden rush of possession, childish pride swarming through me. She was my grandma. She marked the passage of my tender youth. It for me she made crochet angel ornaments, weaved blankets, knitted stuffed animals, dragged to countless auctions, church fundraisers and square dances. It was me who she faithfully sent annual subscriptions to the World Wildlife Federation, pressed leaves dressed in fall colors, and maple sugar candy from Vermont. My grandmother, my grandma is dead. Maturity tapered these thoughts. This moment was being recorded by your fresh young mind to echo into eternity, I was sure.

“What I mean to say is your great-grandmother is dead. She was my grandma. She was an amazing person. Your grandmothers are still alive.” You were already mourning the loss of a grandparent you never knew, however. Within moments you came to realize that one day you would loose your grandmothers as well. I tried my best to reassure you that would be a long while off, feeling helpless and stupid for not telling you more carefully. Your first glimpse of mortality.

To My Friend, Who Happens To Be My Son

Letter to my dad, but not my father figure.
To my friend, who happens to be my son.
Dear Son,	Dear Dad,
There’s a moment in your childhood that I still have both the photograph and the photographic memory of.  You were standing beside a chain link fence near Tehachapi looking at me, humoring me and my photography, with your curly blond hair and beautiful brown eyes.  How old were you?  Maybe seven.  Maybe eight.  We were on a rare camping trip alone.  Rare, not because I didn’t want to spend every minute with you, but because… well, because… really, this is where story breaks down.
	I am awake and heading into town. You were right about writing early. Beautiful thoughts are filling my head this morning, giving me sway to write (now I am not so sure they are beautiful, but it feels good to have them in my head). It would be nice to see you, even if just for a moment. The coffee will be extra strong if you agree to come see me.
(he agreed)	(he agreed)
In retrospect, we fold under the raw parts and comb up the nap on the handsome memorable parts. We mellow with age and our stories get dull and dishonest.  We establish detente with those we fought tooth and nail.
	A drip of water drops next to me this morning. I am outside, and there are no lampposts, overhangs, or trees near me, so I can’t understand where it came from. Maybe just a lone raindrop? That seems unlikely. I am completely stumped over this single drip, so I look up.
A true life of insurgency – of constant social conflict – is hard to maintain.  And the youth, with their bitter urgency, know this all too well.  Someday, they too will find themselves on the other end of a phone call with an old hated enemy sharing the worried fate of someone they both love.
	Powerlines
Of course.	Of course. There are powerlines constantly over my head- so often in fact, that their presence has ceased to register on my mental radar screen. This morning a drip of water drops from some powerlines, wet after a heavy rain the previous night, whizzes right past my face, and for the life of me I can’t figure it out. If I was focusing on the powerlines, hanging dangerous and flaccid above me, all the time, would I start to go insane?
I never felt the role of a parent is to keep you out of danger, to constantly parcel and to measure and to weigh and to judge and to allow and to disallow and to set on the straight and narrow. It exhausted me then and exhausts me to even think of that now.	Watsonville and Santa Cruz do not exist on a map. They are not related to each other by any miles or compass directions. They only exist as two ends of a lonely busline that I take every day. An hour there, and an hour back.
	Do not say that I am not a morning person. I hate that. You say “geez, you’re not much of a morning person, are you?”
You’re not much of a morning person, are you?
	And I will say, “Just because I don’t enjoy blithely socializing with everyone I know the moment I wake up doesn’t mean I’m not a morning person. I love the morning, but I prefer to spend it differently than you do.”
I felt that, especially in your sometimes surly, sometimes contentious, sometimes inexplicably angry adolescence that one of the best things I could do for you is to stay the fuck out of your way. But it starts well before this.
	I came up with that before anyone had said anything so that when someone did I would seem quick-witted, opinionated, and ready and maybe for that moment I would transform into a comic book character.
Of course, there were times when I sensed you just wanted me to be with you, to be present, to listen.  I could have, and I didn’t.
	Dad,
It starts earlier, the time of climbing trees, camping in the desert, walks in the woods.  An opening up, our lives interwoven like fingers holding hands.  It was around then, that you were taken away.  And even when things got better, when things got more then better, when they turned around completely, there was something in me that was never quite fixed.
	you told me that when you were a kid you spent a lot of your time coming up with good comebacks. Comebacks that would penetrate your bully’s deepest insecurities- something that would cut to the quick (a phrase I’ve always enjoyed).
The sharp edges of words, of the tossed barb, the cutting comment that can lodge and fester.
	Something so devastatingly true that it would cut the conversation clean off. The jack of trump of all 5th grade squabbles.  Is that really what you wanted, dad?
I lived with a woman once who could kick my virtues, one by one, out from under me, leaving me contemplating the rope or the car?  The poison or the sea?
	Is that really what I want? To be the best undiscovered retort writer in school, brooding in secret corners, spilling over with brilliant quips to which their conversational counterparts will remain only imaginary?
I caved in my heart to conform.  It left a solid little dented thing.  I haven’t looked people in the eyes quite the same since.	Or is the goal really just the private satisfaction gained from playing these idyllic scenarios out, over and over in our heads, being convinced that for them to actually take place would be contrived and unnecessary so that we can do our best to refrain from steering every casual conversation to that impossible desired setup?
The cutting word.	The cutting word.
I always wanted, you point out, to be master of these weapons.  But
Honestly	Honestly
I didn’t have the heart or the inclination.  I never wanted to hurt anyone enough to use the clever, stored-up, devastating truth that cuts to the bone.
Even if I had it.	Even if I had it.
	Dani and I talked about teams the other day. You know the kind. Your special, secret, private team of people you know, for the hard times, for the good times, for when the shit finally and climactically goes down.
I feel that rage in you sometimes and it scares the hell out of me.  Not in the usual way that parents are scared for their kids.  But for me.	Everybody has a list in their head or on paper of at least the first few people, if they don’t already have the whole list pegged.
	If you didn’t think about this before, you’re going to now.
When we break a window in a fight, or bust a door, I want to get into my bed and pull the covers over my head and come out in approximately 4 to 5 years when it’s all over.
	We talked fondly of our teams, naming names. I admitted that my team’s first slot was private, but that I had a terrible feeling that even though the person was at the top of the list, they would evasively never be on my team.
I want to turn in my fancy bronze parenting star and trade it in for a little modest friend patch that I can sew on to my favorite shirt,
the one I wear only when I’m feeling strong and worthy enough.	Dani told me that she had the first three people (at least!) solidly down, and
	I was under the impression that they had even all talked about and agreed on this.
We camped in a gully and cooked and ate pasta and slept in the car. It was one of my best memories from your childhood.  It was one of your best memories.  It was perfect, or retrospect paints it so. And that’s the way we tell those stories. Maybe we can do that again sometime.  Or we said that, or we always wanted to.	It’s chilly today, but not a deep chill. Chilly like it’s supposed be chilly- chilly breezes, but everything’s dry and the sun’s warming me a little. I had a smell in my nose a couple of minutes ago like chicago or a smell like waiting in a trainyard. It didn’t smell like chigaco or the trainyard, but like the experience of it. It smelled good. Really good. I think I am smart enough in my life now to understand what that means.
Of course everyone has a dad story, and a mom story, and we tell these stories and everyone understands. Some are heartwarming and some help explain where we came from.
	Dad, this is not a nostalgic letter- don’t get confused now.
Nostalgia, I guess.  But the stories we tell about our children have to fit a certain mold. We, the grown-ups, are forbidden to tell stories about suffering, and the stories that we are left with are all so boring we forget them as soon as they are told.
	But when you hug me, you pull on the hair on the back of my head, just above my neck, so hard that it hurts and I know that you love me.
And after a while, they’re no longer heard, and we no longer tell them anyway because our hearts were never in it to begin with.
	This is not a love letter either, but when you write to me you say “I love you so much, I can’t even tell you,”  you of course, keep to your word on that.
If truth be told, you were homesick and mad at me on that trip.  I fought your mom for weeks to take you and she almost made me cancel.
Sometimes we only tell the whole truth, when we cry alone.  But I need you to know, that in spite of everything, when I secretly devise my team, you’re on it.	Dad, this letter is for you, but for fuck’s sake, don’t read it, because neither of us wants you to know that when I secretly devise my team, you’re my number one.
I have your back, come hell or high water, come whatever.  Your anger and frustration, the way you spit “You kept your word,” notwithstanding, I hope you know that.
You were always on my secret team, and yes, I’d thought of that before,
even when you didn’t think so, even when I was stupidly hopeful, even when you were an eight-year old kid believing the lies of a jealous parent.	But you kept your word, and since you love me, you damn sure ain’t tellin’.  And if you love me, I sure as hell will be the last to know,
	so when you come in for your coffee, you better expect it to be cold because you took too long to get here and I got tired of waiting and went back on home.
I hope it’s not too late to tell you that I love you.  My number one slot is open for you when you want it,
	This time, my busline is some other number.
but not until then.
	An hour there, and an hour, and an hour, and-

night sounds

Like your Aunt said, I want to hear the night sounds.
I want the kind of sounds one should hear at night.
The sound of crickets,
The sound of my lover’s breath.
Perhaps even a little wind or
Rain in the Spring and Fall tapping my roof and trickling down my windows.
These are the sounds you should hear at night, not -
Not the sound of racing taxis,
The tragic siren of the ambulance,
The screams of womyn who I never see when I run to the window.
These are the sounds that never move through your body.
They knot into the back of your neck and along your spine.
These are the sounds that clench your teeth.
I want to hear the night sounds that move through my body like blood.
The sounds that are so much mine and yours that we hardly notice them.
The sounds that transition so easily from one to another,
From the crickets,
To my lover,
To the wind passing over us as we sleep.

Letter to my dad, but not my father figure.

Dear Dad,

I am awake and heading into town. You were right about writing early. Beautiful thoughts are filling my head this morning, giving me sway to write (now I am not so sure they are beautiful, but it feels good to have them in my head). It would be nice to see you, even if just for a moment. The coffee will be extra strong if you agree to come see me.

(he agreed)

A drip of water drops next to me this morning. I am outside, and there are no lampposts, overhangs, or trees near me, so I can’t understand where it came from. Maybe just a lone raindrop? That seems unlikely. I am completely stumped over this single drip, so I look up.

powerlines.

Of course. There are powerlines constantly over my head- so often in fact, that their presence has ceased to register on my mental radar screen. This morning a drip of water drops from some powerlines, wet after a heavy rain the previous night, whizzes right past my face, and for the life of me I can’t figure it out. If I was focusing on the powerlines, hanging dangerous and flaccid above me, all the time, would I start to go insane?

Watsonville and Santa Cruz do not exist on a map. They are not related to each other by any miles or compass directions. They only exist as two ends of a lonely busline that I take every day. An hour there, and an hour back.

Do not say that I am not a morning person. I hate that. Someone says “geez, you’re not much of a morning person, are you?” I will say, “Just because I don’t enjoy blithely socializing with everyone I know the moment I wake up doesn’t mean I’m not a morning person. I love the morning, but I prefer to spent it differently than you do.”

I came up with that before anyone had said anything so that when someone did I would seem quick-witted, opinionated, and ready and maybe for that moment I would transform into a comic book character.

Dad, you told me that when you were a kid you spent a lot of your time coming up with good comebacks. Comebacks that would penetrate your bully’s deepest insecurities- something that would cut to the quick (a phrase I’ve always enjoyed). Something so devastatingly true that it would cut the conversation clean off. The jack of trump of all 5th grade squabbles.

Is that really what you wanted, dad? Is that really what I want? To be the best undiscovered retort writer in school, brooding in secret corners, spilling over with brilliant quips to which their conversational counterparts will remain only imaginary? Or is the goal really just the private satisfaction gained from playing these idyllic scenarios out, over and over in our heads, being convinced that for them to actually take place would be contrived and unnecessary so that we can do our best to refrain from steering every casual conversation to that impossible desired setup?

Danny and I talked about teams the other day. You know the kind. Your special, secret, private team of people you know, for the hard times, for the good times, for when the shit finally and climactically goes down.  Everybody has a list in their head or on paper of at least the first few people, if they don’t already have the whole list pegged. If you didn’t think about this before, you’re going to now. We talked fondly of our teams, naming names. I admitted that my team’s first slot was private, but that I had a terrible feeling that even though the person was at the top of the list, they would evasively never be on my team.  Danny told me that she had the first three people (at least!) solidly down, and I was under the impression that they had even all talked about and agreed on this.

It’s chilly today, but not a deep chill. Chilly like it’s supposed be chilly- chilly breezes, but everything’s dry and the sun’s warming me a little. I had a smell in my nose a couple of minutes ago like chicago or a smell like waiting in a trainyard. It didn’t smell like chigaco or the trainyard, but like the experience of it. It smelled good. Really good. I think I am smart enough in my life now to understand what that means.

Dad, this is not a nostalgic letter- don’t get confused now. But when you hug me, you pull on the hair on the back of my head, just above my neck, so hard that it hurts and I know that you love me. This is not a love letter either, but when you write to me you say “I love you so much, I can’t even tell you,”  you of course, keep to your word on that. Dad, this letter is for you, but for fuck’s sake, don’t read it, because neither of us wants you to know that when I secretly devise my team, you’re my number one.

But you kept your word, and since you love me,  you damn sure ain’t tellin’.  And if you love me, I sure as hell will be the last to know, so when you come in for your coffee, you better expect it to be cold because you took too long to get here and I got tired of waiting and went back on home. This time, my busline is some other number. An hour there, and an hour, and an hour, and-

Double life

Can I feed my child?

Simple enough request to ask the goddess when I was pregnant. I did not think this would end in a battle of stealing from trees/property (apples and lemons mostly). I can recall these recent years of struggle well. It was when I was most connected with my spirited no ties to government bondage ideals. Now I ask myself daily how do I know that I have not sold my counter culture desire to live freely. One very recent year I grossed 13K. I have a kid… pressure to stay a few steps ahead of being homeless always chases my sleepless soul. I was homeless before I had my pretty little boy. I am constantly reminded that I must stay on the up and up (I mean a little home, little food). I miss being homeless. I miss being able to wander as my heart felt the pulling desire to move against the soft earth or rough cement. I miss having a pack of smokes in my pocket, a few small silver coins, a back pack and pan handling for an 89 cent chicken sandwich and then wandering into an abandoned house where others would be painting and writing on the walls. I miss opening a can of beans with a dull knife, and using my fingers as a fork/spoon. I miss finding tossed aside ovens and taking the metal racks out of them, digging a good hole, marinating some meat we stole from the back of a grocery store in budweiser and cooking it on the oven rack that I put over the hole filled with fire. I miss pieces of chalk in my pants that I would write the name of this place in my memory map on fences or rock. I miss sitting outside at parks with no where to go or be and slipping into the sparkling desire of being a physical part of the black night sky. And now what do I do. I raise a beautiful child in a little home by the ocean with my gorgeous partner. I love these parts of my life, coming home and my true love is playing with my 10 year old child or my son is taking apart some old record player we got for free from a dumpster. We have food on a regular basis, I pay my rent with out juggling grocery money and paying pge one month then water the next. I can live a modest life. My son has had to go with me garden hopping to extract lemons, tomatoes and apples for our dinner when we had nothing in our pantry. We have eaten rancid govt issued mac and cheese. Two years ago we had a performance routine for the local bus drivers. When the bus would come we would pretend to check all our pockets and bags for our buss pass… they would wave us on (my son was 7-8 yrs old and had this down pat!) A couple of heartless ones made us get of the bus were I would watch my child cry from rejection of public transportation. In the last two years I secured employment in one the few machines in this town where I knew I would raise my child- ( I decided this when I was 10 years old). Now I can afford to buy him a bus pass. I can afford to make his lunch, pay for daycare and not have the county document my 40 hours every week. I am not rolling in the cash flow…but I make enough to eat and sleep. Just 3 years ago I was in a long term relationship with a raving trans woman who drank her violence to the nearest city with a 22 year old feminist studies major. Now I have beautiful partner who helps me do house chores, reminds me to go for walks when I hide in books for too many days in a row. She nurtures me with this sweet slip of the skin touch that makes me shiver into her warm neck. I am at peace… but I am missing something… where is the social activist that pounded on doors to advocate for myself and my peers to attend a university while on the state rolls. I am not struggling as much (I mean my debt is swollen, but I cant change that so I don’t think about it). My job is a calculated process of paperwork. I enjoy the group I work with, I am glad to be funded to push paper for researchers who are committed to good not evil… but is it radical enough to keep my passion from leaking onto the kitchen table? I need something more than this rote policy and procedure process that happens every day. I am not complaining at stable employment when clearly I am blessed with a home, a son and a woman. How do I create space that is based on what I have now? It was easy to create a space when I had nothing because it was apart of the survival mode of willing myself to stand in one more line to get some rice from the food bank. Now I need it but where do I find it? Where do I find a a space that will embrace the young woman who had lice in her hair and chalk in her overalls… while still embracing who I have become on a secular level to provide for my child! How to reconcile to rebel with the complacent office drone. I resent the office drone because:

I want to go the sea with a ripped quilt, tuck into a book and eat black berries, with moldy cheese and cheap wine while smoking a cigarette.

catching a thermal

A hundred or so Turkey Vultures moved onto my street, behind my neighbor’s house where there are some very old trees and a thicket of undergrowth. They roost in large community groups and often stick to a certain spot for some time–they’ve been there, now, since early Autumn. They feed on carrion, and I have to say the roads in our area have been exceptionally clean of small dead creatures this winter. They are gruesome looking when hunched over on their branches, these two-feet-or-taller birds with their wrinkly naked heads and creepy, crooked beaks–a fine homecoming to our road on a gloomy winter evening. But in flight, they are a different matter all together. They have a five foot wingspan with a beautiful fringe of silvery flight feathers on the underside of their brown-black wings. Watching twenty or thirty of them riding thermals over the tall pines, over the snowy landscape–gliding, still, unflapping–is the essence of calm beauty. They lack the normal vocal organs of a bird, and so they don’t screech or call out. They simply float, silently, with their silver fringe fluttering in the breeze.

I was watching them one day, and a thought occurred to me. These creatures are so beautiful when they are doing what they do best–flying, floating, circling on an invisible current of air. They are so lovely and free looking, even more so than their frantically flapping, tiny friends who are blessed with comely breast feathers and melodic voices. And I wonder, when do I look that free? What am I doing when, if observed unawares, I am a shining, peaceful thing? When do I slip out of everything physically unbeautiful about myself? I know that when I’m elbow deep in pots and mulch and dirt and new plants, I am free. When I’m picking basil and chives in my garden, chopping fresh veggies from the market, a glass of red wine at my elbow and a warm summer evening coming in the windows, I feel glowing. When I am walking in the woods through filtery sunlight, or making love to my partner, I am floating on my own personal warm current.

A dream

Sarah picked me up and drove me to seattle, which

seemed so much quicker than 14 hours… we drove

up these STEEP roads lush with trees all around.. it

was beautiful.. she said “do you want me to take you

to the water’s edge?” and we went to her house that

had a beach front. while walking up i gasped

because there were northern lights! “Oh

how beautiful! I’ve never seen them before!” i

exclaimed. I walked closer (they were a green/wispy

hue) and these figures of old Eskimo men were among

the lights. It was intense and beautiful. We went back

into the apartment where she and matt lived and they

were both wearing shear night gowns (him too) and

matt was wearing red shorts underneath. Then it was

time for me to go, but they left instead. There was a

man in the apartment that was a friend of theirs

maybe? I asked him for help with directions back out

of seattle to santa cruz. He helped me and cooked

me 3 sets (two each) of fried eggs then put them in a

jar with a lid. A guy  walked in and sat down and

opened his mail. One was a brochure from my mom!

and her theater group. I thought how weird! in

seattle? In this apartment? And I had heard his

comedy before.. it was strange. Then a few people

were around now and this guy (detective/reporter

kinda guy) opened the fridge and there were two

women in there (as if they had no legs) and the one

was an online stalker to the other and they were

meeting, but the stalker got her in the fridge to try to

eat her and she said, as she was pulled away by the

authorities “mmm how I’d love to eat her hair” so then

it dawned on us that she was trying to eat her… it was

crazy! i crossed bridges heading back home and then woke up.

25 Random Things About Me

You have been tagged in this note.  Now you are obligated by the law of chain letters to respond. I was going to tell you about this guy in Peoria who didn’t pass this on, but I won’t tell you about his tragic misfortune.

Here are the Rules:  Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.  At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. You have to.  If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.  Really, I do.

1. I was born in Inglewood, in the heart of the ghetto, but so many years ago, its ghetto future was still on the horizon as the last of the old white World War 2 generation was slowly creeping into their final years.  There was an apricot tree in our front yard in which I spent days at a time high in the branches.
2. The rest of my time I spent reading.  I’ve had the same three favorite books — past Conrad and Tolkien,  Salinger and Morrison, Bowles and Borges, Rushdie and Delillo, Orwell, Vonnegut, Faulkner  — the same three books at the top of my list since they were introduced to me in 5th grade.
3. Looking back, I am pretty sure that all my best friends from earliest grammar school onward have been gay.  But as a young sheltered lower-middle class white kid, I genuinely didn’t think gay was something ordinary people could be — only a derisive name made up by kids. I was an overly-friendly mamma’s boy with oddball social skills, and inevitably other kids incorrectly concluded I was gay too.
4. I was gay.
5. Well, not really.  Sort of.  Let me explain.  I liked some boys, but I mostly liked girls.  Even if I lost my virginity to a boy.  In church.  But they tell me that doesn’t count — everyone has their early experimentation — this is not a score in the race to deflowering.
6. I am an anarchist, which means I think I know better than governments, better than corporations, better than institutions, better than you, better than anyone what is best for my life.  I believe that our communities know best what’s good for them too.  On a practical level, I don’t believe in police and jails and military force.  I don’t believe in your laws and representatives and electoral politics.  I already cast my vote in the street.
7. I got your back.
8. I’m an anarchist, but not that kind of anarchist.  I am less bigoted than anybody I know.  This may be the result of early and extensive product testing of Sesame Street on my young mind.
9. When I first heard Indonesian gamelan, it was like a musical orgasm.  I thought, “Oh, of course.  There it is.”  It immediately felt right, like the music of the spheres, or the sounds made by the turning of the gears of the Universe, divine, particulate and yet inseparable.  It was the music I’d always longed to hear, the music I heard hints of in every beautiful chord, in every inspired melody, in every inexplicable, untouchable rhythm all my life.
10. When I was twelve, I used to tell my parents I was going to visit a friend, and then secretly ride my ten speed across LA to the ocean and spend the day bobbing in the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean. I have secret lives, thousands of secrets I’ve never told anyone.  I’m not sure how this is, since I feel like all I do is tell stories constantly.
11. I tell stories constantly.  I believe in stories.  I believe human beings traffic in stories.  We ooze them out of our pores, exude them around us.  Let me tell you about my day, or my life, or something that happened to me once upon a time.
12. I’ve been accosted numerous times by people who thought I was a long-lost friend.  Each time it leaves me off-balance and wondering if I am leading a secret life, part of a witness protection program that I’ve forced myself to forget.  One time a motorcycle repairman in Visalia named Marlon was sure I was his long-disappeared brother, and quizzed me skeptically about the details of my life.  This is not just a story.
13. I often feel that there is something that. we’re. just. not. reaching.  I want to touch that thing that moves just below the surface, just beneath our perspectives and symbols and abstractions and bullshit and hang-ups and distractions.  I want to get to that impossible, anything-but-comfortable, just-beyond-the-edges frightening place.  Where is that?  All my life, literature comes closest to touching it.
14. Those three favorite books are the Phantom Tollbooth, Kon Tiki, and Never Cry Wolf.  The 5th grade librarian of Harbor City Elementary should be held responsible for disemboweling the brain of an eleven year old and filling it with adventure rage humor desire and whimsy. Thor Heyerdahl fucked with my life.  Someday I will spend months at sea, a blue dome of solitude from horizon to horizon, on a raft at the mercy of wind and sea.  I’ve longed deeply for this everyday of my life for the last thirty years..
15. My only regret is that life is so short and there are so many things I’d like to devote my full attention to, that I will probably never be a midwife or a sailor or a writer or an outlaw or a terrorist or a full-time vagabond or a thousand other things.
16. As it is, I am a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.  But I once made a list, an inventory as it were, of all the things I could do competently.  It exceeded four pages small print, and included build a house, perform CPR, identify wild plants, program any computer language you can give me, complete a triathlon, hop trains, acquire almost anything for close to free, bake bread, build a homemade raft, make radio, make love, make wine, make a bomb, and weld.
17. All my life I’ve considered myself a poor dancer.  Scared, shy, self-conscious, awkward, all things that do nothing to contribute to dancing well.  Years ago, a friend invited me to contra dance, something like squaredancing, where I discovered to my surprise that I am an excellent dancer.  A dance like the wind, me, my partner, turning like a top, with precision, with procession, faster and faster.  The middle-aged ladies vie for an opportunity to dance with me.
18. I have to be honest with you.  I don’t really think of myself as gay.  But I believe sexuality is a spectrum.  I ask you.  Who is completely straight or completely bent?  Who doesn’t fall in the middle somewhere?  While shyly, I consider myself queer, I haven’t fallen in love with a boy in a long time.  Though I was thinking recently, why not?  The boys I know are unbelievably dreamy.  But I think in my boy-boy fumblings, that I’d be too scared to initiate one goddamn thing.
19. I stole this, but its still true: I am a secret bottom, waiting for a worthy top.
20. I don’t eat the critters.  Floating on the Missouri River on a raft made of trash, my fishing attempts were rewarded by two large catfish.  I realized in that instant that I had never killed and cleaned a fish.  Never killed an animal.  Not personally.  Not with my own hands.  Looking into the eyes of my captives, ending their life with a knife, and taking their energy for my own was an experience sublime.  From that moment, I didn’t want to eat anyone with whom I didn’t share that connection.  A conversion to vegetarianism that took me completely by surprise.  By that same token, I don’t hurt the peoples, who after all are just critters.
21. However, I can see the necessity of a bullet in the head of the slavemaster.  Meant with all the love and compassion I can muster.  A recognition that every animal has a context and a nature and acts out that destiny according to its programming.  And perhaps my oppressor is only an animal trained to dominate.  But perhaps I am an animal that has learned to resist.  Nothing personal, you understand.  I will mourn your passing this world and, at the same time, celebrate the possibility this creates.
22. I often hear poets claim words are a weapon.  But I don’t see words being used to stab, punch, pry, and destroy.  If you were wielding words like battle axes, you wouldn’t have to tell me.  I want to see Shiva in everything we create.  A frenzy of creation and destruction.  Tear down what we build, and build up what we tear down.  The inexorable need to stomp the sandcastle we painstakingly build.  And then build it anew.  Or better yet, just let the ocean take it back.
23. I want art so dangerous that merely creating it may cut us.  I want art so dangerous it creates irrational, instinctive, intuitive panic in the hearts of authoritarians.  Art that doesn’t talk about revolution, but art that spawns revolutions.  Not merely challenges, but rips down the status quo.  I don’t want revolutionary artists, or artistic revolutionaries — I want to abolish both words, smudge the lines until they are one and the same.
24. I’m no longer an apocalypse fetishist, a radical that hangs on to the idea of a post-rev paradise.  I see revolutionaries that remind me of the Seventh Day Adventists of my youth, with tracts of a similar flavor:  Awake!  Alert!  Alarm!  ATR wishes and plans and schemes.  Dreams of life that only begins in a post-collapse world where the lion will lay down with the lamb. But from what I see, the cataclysm means the rich get richer and the poor and the black an the brown and the crazy an the very old and the very young get fucked.  And too often the revolution is bloodier and more brutal than what it replaces.
25. But still.  But still.  But still I crave disaster because it opens up possibilities.  The usual rules are off.  The established relationships no longer apply.  A chance to breath, a chance to stretch our arms and fly.  I want everyday to be a revolution.  I want to practice disaster in every moment.

crying

i felt like i couldn’t cry.

i thought, what is it going to take? will it be like this forever? this god damn sadness has just been building and building up in my heart and it’s easy to ignore until the next bit of it comes. i’ll tell you that it’s getting so bad that when i hit a pothole in the road on my bike, it shakes me up so bad, me and my weak little heart, and i just want to cry there in the middle of the road.

but i couldn’t cry. i sat at the bus stop thinking about how great it would be to do it. that feeling of release and validation (because crying validates emotion, as everybody knows). i sat on the bus and resigned my eyes to being dry, which is a terrible feeling, as you must know, because it makes you want to cry even more.

i was making tortellini. the house was dark and deathly quiet- a tableau blanc for my introspection. i started thinking about my dad and i had all these memories that came up, so i wrote to him, when i called you today, you caught me off guard when you said ‘hey! i love you…’ in such a plaintive way that it was like you were sad about the distance between us too.

i was making tortellini and i caught hold of a whimper that came involuntarily from my lips. it was comparative to a tiny opening into some other dimension in some science fiction, where you have to put your little finger into it (before it closes) and then rip it open. and it fucking ripped open.

standing there in the kitchen over the tortellini with a wooden spoon in my right hand, sobs began to wrack my body. my bottom lip was tightening (i didn’t know it could even do that) and quivering in a cliched sort of way. inch by inch my body was tensing up as i lost control. my face contorted and contracted, my mouth hanging open with no chance of closing it, drool trickling out the side, it was as if i had never cried properly in my whole life. it was as if i had been holding back, willfully controlling the crying fits of my past – now my whole body paralyzed and shaking with violent small-wavelength tremors. i felt like a fucking sponge. tears were flowing out my eyes and right back into my open mouth. i tasted salt. i couldn’t do anything – couldn’t even put down the god damn wooden spoon in my right hand as my body just crumpled. i thought of god. i wish you could have seen me. i’d have bet anything that every single tiny crease in my face was five feet deep, that my usually modest dimple looked like a horrifying chunk taken out of my face, that my eyes were clenched up so much they retracted into my face, replaced by something like Mono Lake, and just as salty.

at the end my heart feels like my head feels when i drink slurpee too fast. my face is sore. these feather-soft cough/sobs are coming from somewhere in my throat. fuck! i want to do that again! or am i going to have to wait another year for it to build back up again?

The great flying elevator

2009 greeted me with a harsh winter cold that made my voice deeper and hoarser than normal.  I bought a dungeness crab and a bottle of champagne and proceeded to get more drunk than my health would have preferred.

Last night I saw the girl off to her father’s and went straight to bed, covered in a mock bearskin blanket we call “Horse-ee.”  The old bear and I snoozed the winter evening away and dreamt of riding elevators that could perform trapese tricks and giant tidal waves that were both invigorating and terrifying.  I awoke, washed the sand from my eyes and set out to buy a calendar.

The new year is like standing on a precipice where it’s unclear whether I’ve just climbed up or I’m about to tumble down.  I have more opportunity then I know what to do with and more alone time than I feel comfortable about.  The cold in my head, however, whispers just one thing.  “Sleep, my dear.  Sleep this one out.  I have an elevator in mind that can show you some new tricks.”

So I submit, curl up with Horse-ee and wait for the frigid air to break, the days to grow longer and sunshine to return and warm this tired, cold soul.

inner pukings

A first…

It’s a funny thing, to lose yourself, even while with yourself always… Where did I go wrong? How long has it been since I have been lost? I’m sometimes surprised at how I can be so gone, yet so aware of how screwed up my life has become.

The change has been nice, exhilarating if you will. Going from “girl on the move”, to, “girl is now a mama”. I have to admit, I’m not who I want to be, nor who I’d pictured myself to portray.

A lot of me is hidden to the outside world. And, honestly, I’d like to keep it that way. Other parts of me yearn for more connection to that world. This is where turmoil begins.

On the inside I think marvelous things about my existence… On the outside I see my reality. Why have I become so stagnant? What is the purpose of this? How is all so lost? I’m lost. I hear me in the distance. I will be found, some day… I need a push.. a friend. I need different. I need to get out of this pile of life-stuff that suffocates me. Find the LIFE-STUFF that exhilarates me. Yeah. This is what I need.

Bandon, Oregon

One winter morning, I had crab in Bandon, Oregon.

I went up the coast and went out one morning and bought crab in Bandon, Oregon.

I drove up along the rugged coast of Oregon and went out one morning and got crab in Bandon, Oregon.

I rode up the coast on my motorcycle just as my marriage was ending and stayed at a hostel. I was lonely and so I woke before dawn one morning and walked out to the docks and talked to the fishermen. I bought a crab and went back to the hostel and cooked it and ate it for breakfast in Bandon, Oregon.

I rode up the coast of Oregon looking for solitude and some measure of inner peace, and stayed in a youth hostel right along the beach. I read the Tao Te Ching and meditated in the cool morning air before walking down to the beach and watching the early fishermen catching crabs in pots that they lowered from the dock. I bought and cooked a brilliant pink King Crab nearly eight inches across and ate it before getting ready to go back south in Bandon, Oregon.

I rode into town looking for something, not knowing what it was, but found it in a funny, unexpected way one morning when I rose early and watched the seagulls and the fishermen fishing off the docks, and bought a big crab and ate it sitting outside on a wall in the cold air burning my fingers on the bright pink shell and letting the soft white flesh melt in my mouth in Bandon, Oregon.

And that was in Bandon, Oregon, where I stopped on a roadtrip one morning, partly just because I liked the sound of the name at a moment when its coded meanings and infinite possibilities spoke to me most.

People often fail on the verge of success; take care at the end as at the beginning

Some summer afternoons we would go out to dinner in a neighboring town. We’d take the backroads and meander through dust and meadows and pepper trees. On these drives, talk would turn lazy and philosophical.  They were our best moments by far.

Now, I’m just tired. When I regain balance, she knocks me off my feet again. This is breaking my heart little by little.

Regarding life after 50: I asked, “Do you ever do something and think this will be the last time I’ll do this?”

And her answer: “Absolutely.”

She asks me if I know this group or that group, have seen this film or that film.  When I say no, she laughs and says, “Oh, of course,” as if just remembering.

I believe problems of imbalance don’t work out. In my experience, they just don’t. On the other hand, I want them to.  So I continue to try.

She was eighteen years my senior. She didn’t know I kept a shrine with everything she’d ever given me in it. I began a passionate interest in female jazz singers solely because of her interest. I see hints and omens everywhere.

She hit a squirrel on one of our drives. She looked back in the mirror and dismissed it as Darwinism. “Slow one,” she laughed.

Here’s what I was trying to say. I found it: That which goes against the Tao comes to an early end.

“Don’t work so hard. Don’t worry so much,” said she. But what do you do when doing what comes naturally is too much? And sometimes there are things to worry about. I worry that she thinks I worry too much.

She bought me a book of comics from two cities away and reads it with me in bed.  I think for a moment that this is perfect.  We make love and the energy is slightly off but I push down the feeling.

She is a singer.  At cafes at bars at parties.  A torch singer by preference.  Reluctant rock singer by circumstance.  Husky-voiced smoker.  Not the worst, nor the best.  I didn’t meet her in a club.  I was slightly embarrassed when I first saw her perform, but I can’t exactly explain why.

We met in Mexico.  She was sunny, sexy, mysterious.  She laughed easily.  I loved to watch the curve of her hips as she laid in the bed in the southern sun.  An example of a vacation fling taken too far too long.

She may or may not have broken up with her ex-boyfriend.  I remember her telling me that she needed to get away, that she was relieved, that she didn’t want to see him again.  Later, they are friends.  Or maybe something else.  Do I want to know this?

Asked in a café: “Do you have a tea that will keep me from crying?” Action is the antidote to despair.

We get high and I look at her face which looks unfamiliar and vaguely sinister.  I wonder, is it the hard-lived life, or just years?  I want to roll with this, but it is never the same again.  A djinn out of the bottle.

We travel half a state away to go to a party.  Her old friends.  People she used to party with.  I guess still does.  Everyone is high.  I pass.  I need a break from the madness.  I drink a beer and then another.  She is giving a hazy lapdance to a man I’ve known as long as I’ve known her.  He is handsome in a generic California surfer bro sort of way.  I always suspected they had been or would end up being lovers.

I wander into the kitchen and inexplicably pocket a bottle of fancy hot sauce. I make the rounds, am friendly and amiable, the hot sauce a secret that bumps against my side.  Then I quietly slip away, telling no one.

I walk all night in the Hollywood hills. Near sunrise, I hear a train whistle and know I have to ride that train home.  The train yard is quiet and empty, awash in the yellow billion killowatt glare of sodium vapor lamps.  My train sits waiting for me like an old and familiar lover.

The enduring lure of solitude has always had an undeniable grip on me.

Let it go. Let it go. Let it go. A mantra. I am learning slowly. Still learning. Oh, so slowly.

Meanwhile, she is still driving.   A dust plume in the distance settles into a low haze.

Awareness

I have a feeling in my diaphragm, like an empty hole.  A void I’m aware of when I stop to listen.   Its the space that at other times has  filled with fluttering leaves that I can’t ignore, the wandering, spreading flutter that radiates down my stomach, up my back to tickle and scratch at the top of my neck, distracting my attention and whirling around my thoughts.

The emptiness I’m noticing now is pulling down on my heart, sapping my motivation.   The more I listen, the more I notice, sadness, longing, loneliness. I’m wanting a connection.  Someone to look in my eyes and hear me. The intimacy of shared experience and understanding.

I find myself reaching out to folks, grasping for that understanding. Feeling disappointment and frustration at the distraction in their eyes, or the wall my fingers can’t penitrate.  What am I missing? What is this hole? I ask Kiyana, “When you feel homesick what do you think is the source of that feeling?” She says, “It’s not home, it’s the people I’m missing.”

Ah. I’m missing you, so simple.

Ugly Intersection Drawing of a Scrub Jay

washington street by n.elle

Had unusual dreams last night under a foot of blankets.  Elaine told me she’s never had an orgasm.  I said, “Never?” And she said, “Never,” in that way she has that is sardonically accepting of every situation. And I wake up thinking of Sophie.  Just that thought in my head.  That’s all.

I’m chafing in my life right now.  I need adventure and freedom and release from some of the responsibilities that feel like a heavy weight.

I want to learn to draw.  Gestures, shading, faces, bodies.  I’d love to know so much more about how to draw these. I’d love to know so much more about everything.  I know next to nothing.

I relish the exercise of just quietly seeing. I found an inexplicable list in my bag:

• leverage
• failing economy
• south pacific plan
• empty space
• ugly intersection
• drawing of a scrub jay
• a kiss

Where am I?  A longing for space and time.  I want to just sit and sit, read and write, smoke a cigar, watch the snow fall, clouds pass, deer nibble on the lower branches of the trees.

It begins to thaw my heart, this idea of getting away.  The renewal of possibility.  And I look at the date and realize it is the solstice, the rebirth of the sun.  Renewal of the seasons.  From here on out, more light, more day.

There’s a glimmer in the air of possibility.  Everything seems possible right now.  Or almost possible.  Like the veil between what is and what could be is thinner, gauzier.

Or perhaps it seems like life is so absurd that any old absurd thing is full of possibility.  For instance, is it really all that crazy to rent out our house and go to Spain for a year?  Or to learn to draw?  Or to start a soul group?

The server at this cafe is charming.  She looks at me with so much sparkle, like she is secretly in love with me.  I never allow myself to believe such things.

Maybe I will go to Idaho.  My own private Idaho.  Where does that phrase come from?

I liked the contra dance last night.  It felt nice to have some attention from strangers.  I remember a dance with a woman named Natalie.  After the dance we were both flushed and breathing hard, looking at each other a little amazed.  I think I needed that.

Hop in a car, pick only blue roads, selecting at each intersection the road that takes you further from what is into what could be, stop at some nowhere little town and rent a cheap motel room.

Or motorcycle around, staying in hostels, drinking cheep wine with travelers and talking to retired ranchers in nearly empty bars?

Hop trains to wherever? Get on a greyhound to anywhere? Should I throw a dart at a map?  Flip a coin?  Roll dice?

I’m not sure it even matters.

I thought of going to Salmon, Idaho or Bandon, Oregon or San Diego.  Idaho was snowed in. And anything off the major routes were expensive via Greyhound.  San Diego was too I don’t know.

When I’m traveling, I can just be.  The worries and concerns are immediate, real.  Hunger, thirst, desire, all now.

Traveling on Christmas eve.  So strange.  Such a relief.  Such a sense of unreality still.

Everyone on the bus is holiday antsy, up down up down.  Every stop trying to get off the bus to smoke, then chased back on by the driver.

Strangely, the Greyhound seats, so molded and plush and padded are remarkably uncomfortable.  A small ache between my shoulder blades.  I don’t remember that.

Sitting here endlessly in a station in Sacramento.  No explanation.  No new schedule.  No anything really.  Just waiting.  There’s no information about when and if we might depart, or why we haven’t already.  Storm closed all the roads?  Cascadian independence movement cut off the border?  Classified alien activity site on Mt. Shasta?  My Sacramento friends are are out of state.

A combination of untruths and gentle pestering gets me on to a bus as far as Medford.  I promised the bus driver to have my friends in Medford pick me up.  I’d rather be stuck in Medford than Sacramento.  Plus when the road clears I can continue my journey.  What will I find in Medford?

I’m headed to Portland chosen more or less arbitrarily, seeded perhaps by my friend Bay there. Maybe I just wanted to see her all along.

A high school girl gets excited at the prospect of seeing snow for the first time.  Snow beings to appear alongside the road.  “Is it snowing?  Is it snowing?” she asks, craning her neck to see out the front window.  Her companion asks if she’s ever seen Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon goes into hyperspace.  She hasn’t.  Has she seen a computer screensaver with stars coming at you?  Yes, she’s seen that.  “That’s what it looks like when you are driving at night and it’s snowing.  That’s what it looks like,” her companion explains.

When we stop, the snow is falling so thickly it looks like a sloppy special effect.  Less like falling flakes, than someone is disemboweling a couch from a high building.  There are white sheep in a white field covered in white snow.  They are nearly invisible.  Will their wool coats keep them warm enough?  I assume so.

The bus gets stuck at several stops, backing up, going forward, backing up, going forward.  The driver puts on chains over the high passes.

At Medford, we switch drivers.  My Medford-bound bus is going to try to shoot through to Portland.  Someone asks if we’ll make it to Eugene.  Bus driver says “Gotta have a positive attitude.” She asks again.  He says again, “You gotta have a positive attitude.” And so we proceed down the road with a bus full of positive attitude.

Duke Ellington And The Obsession Of Collection

I collect records. Ever since I was a kid. My first record was not a collector’s item. It was Shaun Cassidy. An album called Born Late. I still have it. I haven’t listened to it in twenty years. But I can’t bear to get rid of it. It was my first album. I’m a collector. Even that may be worth something someday.

I’ve collected stamps, glass insulators, road reflectors, old lanterns, furniture, license plates, books, turn of the century cooking utensils, Schwinn Stingrays, marbles, comic books, Hot Wheels, and Star Wars action figures. I’ve flirted with a thousand different collections. Sewing machines, 50’s cars, lawn ornaments. I’ve collected millions of individual items. The fads have come and gone, but through it all, I’ve collected records.

I have over ten thousand records in my collection now, in three storage lockers. I estimate I’ve spent nearly a 100 thousand dollars over a lifetime of record collecting.

Here are the top 5 most valuable records in history:

1. John Lennon & Yoko Ono – Double Fantasy (1980) – $525,000 – Autographed by Lennon five hours before Mark David Chapman assassinated him.
2. The Quarrymen – “That’ll Be the Day”/”In Spite Of All The Danger” (1958) – $180,000 – Only one copy made.
3. The Beatles – Yesterday and Today (1966) — $85,000 – with rare cover of Beatles in butcher smocks, covered in baby parts and raw meat
4. Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) – $35,000 – Featuring 4 tracks deleted from subsequent releases.
5. Long Cleve Reed & Little Harvey Hull – “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” (1927) –$30,000 – 78 RPM in plain sleeve.

My collection isn’t worth near that, but any day one of the gems of my collection may reach maturity and make me a million. That is, if I could bear to sell it. I was once offered four thousand dollars for the pride of my collection: A very rare 1930 recording of Duke Ellington.

My crowning achievement as a collector was so easy it was almost criminal. My Great Aunt Ethel lived in Portland, Oregon. I joined my grandparents on what we thought might be our last visit before her death. Whenever I go over to an old person’s house, I thumb through their music collection. Just in case. You never know what you might find. And this visit to Aunt Ethel paid off. I found a collection of 78s in a box beside an old Victrola in an upstairs room. It was her sewing room. She hadn’t sewed in twenty years since the arthritis. The room was thick with dust. The box of records was underneath piles and piles of scrap cloth and half finished quilts.

I found the box by the Victrola, and my heart raced. I always begin to sweat with anticipation when I know I’ve found undiscovered treasure. An entire box of old 78s. I thumbed through the records one by one. Most of the records were commonplace in the collector’s market and were nearly worthless. Furthermore, most had been played out or scratched beyond repair.

But, near the back, there was a box set. It was a Duke Ellington collection. This was a very old set of records. Each of the records except one were marked with deep scratches. Daggers pierced my heart as I slid each one out of its sleeve and saw its condition. My life’s find seemed to be slipping away. But the last record was in a sealed envelope of translucent cellophane. I could read the label. It was a Victor recording of Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. Ring Dem Bells was on the A-side. Mood Indigo was the B-side. It looked like it had never been played! It was the find of the century!

I cradled the entire set in my arms as I descended the stairs. I panicked when I began to wonder if the old bat would give me the record. Would I have to buy it from her? Mightn’t she guess its great value if I was willing to buy such an old record? I decided to try to keep it casual. I had to stop and calm down. I sat at the bottom of the stairs with the Duke and breathed deep breaths.

“Hi, Aunty,” I said to the old woman in her wheelchair.

“What you been up to, boy? Mischief?” she asked.

“I was admiring all your great old stuff upstairs,” I positioned.

“What great old stuff?” she asked suspiciously.

“The old furniture, the grandfather clock in the hall,” I said casually.

“Are you waiting for me to die, Son?” she squinted at me.

“All those memories,” I said trying to work my way around to my casual question. “You use all that stuff? The sewing machine? The old Victrola?”

“No, I don’t use it anymore, boy. The arthritis keeps me from sewing, you know. And why would I want to use the old Victrola? I have me a cassette deck radio right here that I don’t have to keep winding,” she smiled and patted the cassette radio my dad had bought her.

“I love that old Victrola. It puts me in touch with another era,” I dropped.

“Hmmm,” she muttered, lost in another era herself.

“Is there any way I could borrow it?” I asked.

“The Victrola? Sure. Take it away. And any other trash you find up in that sewing room.”

“Can I have the records that go with it?” I asked, almost beside myself with excitement.

Suddenly she got very grave. “No,” she said sternly. “Those were Bob’s records. You can borrow them if you like, but you can’t have them.”

“Aunty, can I ask you a question? I was curious about this record,” I said, holding up my treasure. She extended her hands and I got fearful to turn it over to the old woman. I reluctantly gave it to her and sent up a little prayer that she wouldn’t open it.

She looked at it a moment and made a frowny face. “Do you know the record, Aunty?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Bobby listened to those Negro composers, the Jazz men, back then.”

I gently snatched the record back as her focus shifted inward. “But it’s never been opened,” I said. “How come?”

“Well, that came in that box of records, right?” she was sharp as tacks. “That song on that record was playing everywhere you went. You went to a party or a dance and it was playing. You went to a store and someone had it on the record player. You couldn’t get away from it. And so I told Bobby that if I ever heard it played on our Victrola, I would pick it up and break it. So it was never even taken out of the paper.”

I took the record home, almost forgetting to take the Victrola as well. And I lived in fear for the next several years that Aunt Ethel would ask for it back. When she called I felt awash with guilt.  When my parents or grandparents went to visit, I found an excuse not to go. I didn’t know if she remembered my loan, but I took no chances. She finally died and I heaved a sigh of relief. The record was mine.

I kept it in the envelope, unopened, in mint condition. It’s the pride of my collection.

That record, that wax testimony to the genius of Duke Ellington, has been heard only one time. It was broken out of its cellophane envelope, and the mystery that was a sixty year-old never-played 78rpm recording of a rare studio session dissolved in seven minutes. The record itself dropped several hundred dollars in value that day, I thought.

I dated a woman named Jacqueline well after college. We were to be married. She was a collector too. We would spend summer weekends driving around to garage sales looking for the Big Find. Once a month we would go all day Saturday to the City to several of the big auctions. We were going to open an antique and collectibles shop together.

The shop was going to sell “antique” furniture and knickknacks to the old women who come here as tourists. The stuff would be old, but none of it antique. It would be a place where we could get rid of all of the stuff that we no longer wanted to collect. Or stuff that had fallen so far in value that it was no longer worth storing. The general public has no good sense when it comes to old things. People would rather buy a beat up old dresser than a perfectly preserved one decades older. The reason, you see, is because it looks older. And what good is it, they figure, to spend the money on antiques if they don’t look their age?  Don’t even talk to me about “distressed” furniture.  Makes me a little sick.

Jacqueline and I were fiends. She was a master bargainer. She could talk the tusks off an elephant. Also, she was a great salesman. She could sell water to a fish. With her as my partner, I couldn’t loose in the business. We’d secured loans from our parents and several friends and were hoping to set ourselves up in business the following year.

We were great in business and great in bed. We made love in an 19th century King Louis bed in a dark recess of a museum in Amsterdam. We collected King Louis furniture for the next six months and refurnished our bedroom. We would both meet in period costume in the garden. We would greet cordially and talk pleasantly. Then when we were both flushed and breathing hard with anticipation, I would grab her, take her back to our bedroom and ravish her.

But Jacqueline was a jealous lover. She was competitive as well. Though we bought many items for our collection with our combined money, we both collected and kept things that we understood were part of our private stashes. Whenever I found a new treasure, Jacqueline had to best me with a find for one of her collections. If I found a rare old record, Jacqueline had to find a rare porcelain doll. If I found a like-new Schwinn Stingray, Jacqueline would look for a Fiestaware place setting in radioactive red.

She was crazy about my record collection. I’d started the collection fifteen years before I met her, and I didn’t see any reason why I should share it. It was mine. I wanted to keep something for myself, something that was just mine and no one else’s. Is that so wrong?

When we first met, she bought me several records for the collection. Her first attempts were lame because she didn’t know the field. But after a while she got better at sizing up a valuable recording, and before we were living together, would often bring me fantastic finds from hours of combing used record stores. She started collecting records of interest to her, old 70s albums that could be found by the dozen in thrift stores, but would be rare in another twenty years. We were courting and collecting together.

First she asked me to share my collection. Sometime after we moved in together, she referred to the records as “our collection.” I gently, but firmly told her it was mine. I don’t regret keeping it to myself, but probably the seeds were planted in that moment for the beginning of the end.

Later, she asked me to sell the collection to fund our business. Then when I refused, she got angry and accused me of loving my records more than her. It was the worst argument of our romance.

“How could you even ask me to sell the collection?” I screamed. “Its always brought me so much joy,” I said.

“If you are so happy with it, why don’t you marry it?” she yelled.

We patched up the fight and made things right again. But there was always a glimmer of accusation and distrust around the subject of my records. We tacitly agreed never to talk about it. I no longer told her when I’d made a great find. I no longer joyously played old records for her. I had a very brief affair with a new record collector upstate.  But Jacqueline and I had other fish to fry and we moved on, planning the business and acquiring salable items.

One day I home and surprised Jacqueline in the bedroom.  She looked up guiltily and little bit defiant.  She was holding my Duke Ellington record. I stood there a little stunned, wondering what she was planning to do. It was kept in a special case inside a fireproof filing cabinet in our bedroom. The record had still never been played. It was sealed in its cellophane envelope like the day it had left the Victor factory.

“You’ve never listened to this thing,” Jacqueline said, looking up at me.

“No. It’s never been played,” I said. “It’s very rare. Over seventy years-old now.”

“Never? Why not?” she asked.

I told her the story Aunt Ethel had told me, though I knew I must have told her before.

“And you’ve never gotten curious?” she asked.

“Oh sure,” I said, “But I know its worth so much more–”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said cutting me off. “I know about your offer. Three thousand dollars, but you wouldn’t sell.”

“Four,” I said.

“Four thousand,” she said. “Wanna put it on now? Wanna hear it? We could make love while Duke Ellington plays for us, straight out of the past.”  I’d found that Aunt Ethel’s old Victrola was actually worth something
after all, and it sat on an antique table in the bedroom. Jacqueline started to walk over to it.

“No!” I shouted.

She stopped and looked alarmed. “I was kidding. Kidding.” She shook her head. “Geez, Louise,” she said and carelessly tossed Duke Ellington to me and strutted out of the room. I hated her for that one moment. And then it passed.

Three months later. We were weeks away from opening the business. The location was secured. We had a deposit down on the lease. We had crews lined up to renovate the place and move the fixtures and antiques into the shop on the first of the month. The pressure was enormous. We were getting no sleep. We hadn’t made love in weeks, months maybe. We didn’t argue, but we didn’t talk either. We grunted orders at each other.

“Uh, get the door.”

“Hmmm, grab some burgers while you’re out.”

“Hey, don’t forget the tax forms.”

“Pick up that chair you bought last weekend.”

Jacqueline had gone home early to throw together some dinner before we had to go back down to the shop and work the rest of the evening. I was going to stay assembling fixtures until she called me for dinner.

I gouged my thumb with a screwdriver and found that we didn’t have any Band-Aids down at the shop. I was getting hungry and decided it was time to pack up for now.

When I opened the door, my heart sank into the pit of my stomach. I heard the first few piano bars of Mood Indigo. I knew.  Immediately.  I ran, though it was already too late.  When I reached the bedroom door, the clarinet began its sad solo. I stood with my mouth open and looked at Jacqueline. She was standing over my Aunt Ethel’s old Victrola staring down at Duke Ellington spinning on the turntable. She was smiling. I was in shock. I wondered what she was smiling at.

Then I began to hear the music.

It was so finely textured I couldn’t tell where one sound started and another began. It was a synthetic whole. It was one piece of finely woven cloth with clever variations of texture and mood. It was lonely and exultant. Somehow happy and sad. I saw in it reflected the entire Black experience in America, the hope and the heartbreak.

The quality was like a punch in the ears. A never before played 78rpm recording of a musical genius with almost no hiss. It was like a voice across the years. The trombone tripped up and down the scales, rising to meet the clarinet which took the lead. With the bass clarinet providing undertones, the clarinet made impossibly complex rich music. Then the whole orchestration fell into a more somber groove, with now-and-then flashes of improvisation from the clarinet. I’d heard the words to the song in later recordings and couldn’t help hearing them now in my head.

You ain’t been blue… no, no, no…
You ain’t been blue, till you had that mood indigo…

Then as the clarinet and trombone took it home slow and sad, Duke finished with a flare, those staccato blasts from those great horns! Chills ran up and down my spine. Jacqueline was still staring at the record, smiling.

The record ended with the distinctive hiss-hiss-hiss-hiss-hiss of the 78. I was still anchored to my spot. My mouth was still open. My record was still going around and around and around.

Jacqueline looked up, and we looked at each other’s soul for the last time.

-o-

Prologue

She left the next day. I wanted her to leave and so did she.

I found out later in correspondence with one of the most esteemed vintage record collector in the country, that being in the factory packaging seldom affects the price of a high-end vintage record sale. They look exclusively at its rarity and its condition, he said. The experts would have had to take it out of its wrapper to grade it anyway.

I’m hopping to open up a shop here sometime soon. I don’t have the business sense that Jacqueline did, but I’ll try. We’ll be competitors in fact, for she opened up her own shop across town. I hear she’s doing very well, selling eBay and mail-order all over the country.

The words of the song still come back to me sometimes. I wish I could reach back seventy years and thank the Duke for expressing it so well.

That feelin goes stealin down to my shoes, and
I sit and cry “Go ‘long Blues.”
Always get that Mood Indigo,
Since my baby said good bye…
I’m just a soul bluer than blue can be
When I get that Mood Indigo

Revolutions

Feeling guilty about it is no good at all. He can’t win this one. She can’t win this one. It isn’t that he wants to tell her how to behave, and he’s not willing to tell her how to feel. But if he would, if he could. In a secret place. A secret safe place. That’s exactly what he really wishes. He wishes he could change how she feels.

Guilty doesn’t help. Guilty doesn’t make her want him. Its a maelstrom of transmuted feelings. Desire to pressure. Honesty to rejection. Inadequacy to guilt. That’s where she’s at — she wants to want him. She wishes she loved him the way she did. It would be so much easier to live with, to love with. Easier to understand.

And where does that leave them? He feels desire. She feels only that she should desire him. A duty (though she doesn’t think that way). A part of the bargain of love. If they love each other, he for her and her for him, there a trade of mutual desire. Anything less, an unpaid balance, is debt in the finance of love. And from there comes guilt. Because the currency of love is desire. It it isn’t there, it isn’t there. An unbalanced account. A debt unpaid.

He wants to tell her without words that there’s no use her feeling guilty about it. He wants to tell her so much more. He can’t. He has no idea how. Language doesn’t work anymore.

He lays down beside her. She sleeps with her back to him. He pulls the blankets up. He eases his arm around her and snuggles in close. She grunts from someplace deep in her sleep. Neither pleasure nor displeasure. An only semi-conscious grunt of acknowledgment. This is it. Here we are.

He’s holding his breath. He remembers to breathe. He waits a very long moment. Breath in. Breath out. Slowly. He moves his hand to her stomach. Her nightshirt has come up and her stomach is bare. He places his hand flat against her smooth skin, against the slight swell of her stomach. Something turns over in him. Another sound bubbles up from the depths of her sleep.

A swirl of feelings. Confusion. Was that irritation? Was it the stirrings of excitement? If she responds to his touch, what does he do? How far does he take it? For him, this is enough. Almost enough. If he knew that she liked, even wanted his touch, this gentle intimacy, it would be enough. If only she would push against him, nuzzle into him, then it’d be enough. Then he’d know.

Even in her semi-consciousness, she’s afraid. This is enough. This is safe. A soft hand resting on her, an arm around her, the possibility of more. Only the possibility. Right here. Right now. She doesn’t have to plow up the barren fields of her missing desire. But if she gives a Sign, a low moan of contentment, a smile, pushing against him (she can already feel him hard against her), it begs the question: how far do we take this? Above all, she wants the answer to be, this. This is enough. So she lies perfectly still. Afraid to reject him, afraid to encourage him.

She feels guilty and pressured and confused, and in this swirl of feelings, and out of this not-so-contented, not-so-peaceful, not-so-satisfied, utterly unbalanced moment comes a very real sleepthought. This isn’t enough. No, not nearly enough for her. She can’t put her finger on the why of it, on the what of it, and so we’re back around to guilt.

She doesn’t know that she simply wants peace.

In her circles she feels trapped. Hot. She moves to throw the blankets off. With her movement, he springs away from her, tensing at the vague subtle edge of frustration.

He’s rejected, confused, angry. Hurt. She senses it (and feels guilty). He turns his back to her (but moves his backturned body close enough that she could move against him if she chose). She wants to comfort him. She wants to explain without explaining. This hurt child pulls out a mothering urge in her. But how does she hold him without giving the Wrong Signals, without putting out a Sign. How does she show that sometimes this can be enough.

She can’t. She has no idea how.

And round and round they go through the half sleepless, half wakeless night. And all he knows is that guilt doesn’t help.

We will not be the last

You’re a dark spec on the horizon while I’m floating away.  Walking the streets of London. Curling up close to musical voices more embracing than the California air outside.  I am everywhere and simply nowhere.  Do my eyes betray me? I’m sure the blank stare is confusing, but I’m too impressionable to resist the lure of simple imagination.

How long is too long?  When is never long enough?

My steps are wet and vibrant on the street at dusk.  Damp boots carrying the dust of a thousand miles crossed in an instant.  My cold breath makes wispy clouds in the air, circling my head in a gentle parade of vapor mixed with warmth.  I reach the steel door and slide in the ancient key.   There is hot tea and bread waiting inside.  I sit down across from your ethereal presence.  We celebrate the magic of never knowing each other.  Aren’t we so lucky to live as this?  Lovers that never were.  For a moment I would give everything to just be here, in this place within my mind, forever.  In love with your voice as it cracks while you’re singing.  Your breath is as warm as a blanket covering my soul, as it draws in to issue another round.

4254 0050 1006 2552

When first I lost you I was unconcerned
I knew you’d come back
Maybe not today or the next
But eventually and inevitably
Like that time I lost my wallet
And it turned up in a park
Full of cash and cards
Two states away.

I figured you dropped out of my pocket
As I rode back from the Farmer’s Market
With peaches and strawberries
And five avocados
(I’d eaten the sixth)
The drunk Mexican guys
Outside the taqueria yelled
Hey, you dropped something.

I thought you’d turn up.
I thought you’d come back.
I want you, I miss you, I need you.
Without you, there’s an empty space.

I miss the way you sparkled.
I miss your bright colors.
I miss running my hands over you
And feeling my own name
Embossed on your surface.

You have ten days
Before your replacement
Arrives in the mail.