If you are an author, please move your stories over to the new Spoon Cafe Journal site by the New Year.

For a while now I’ve wanted to move the Spoon Cafe Journal blog from WordPress to Blogger.  Blogger is a google thing, and so is super flexible, free, and more reliable.  For instance this morning, wordpress is all jacked.  I trust they will fix it eventually.  But in the meantime, it is worrisome to wonder what happened to the 81 awesome posts on Spoon.

The old site on wordpress:  http://spooncafe.wordpress.com/
The new blogger site:  http://spooncafejournal.blogspot.com/

The only problem I’ve had is that I can’t automatically import stuff over to blogger.  Or rather, I can import it over, but since I’m doing the importing I appear as the author of both my and your posts.  So switching over to blogger, please resubmit your work to the new site.  Depending on the number of posts you’ve done, whether you’ve added photos, etc it might take you anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour.

When I got the new site all shined up and working well and looking nice, I wrote this as an ode to spoon.

Oh spoon, my delicate hemoglobin, my subtle scented flower, distraction from many important things lo these fourteen years.  I’ve taken a polish to your old surfaces, replaced the rotting floorboards, dusted behind the jukebox.  You are looking pretty and swell this morning.  Oh how I’d like to see you flourish. Ever the awkward, stumbly child,  how I’d like to see you soar.  Congratulations for always being you on this your 13-3/4 birthday.

Ben confides to his friend Ash that he plans to commit suicide.  The two are in a neighborhood bar that they almost never frequent.  They have a lengthy detailed conversation about methods and timing.  Ash says his preferred method would be a pitcher of margaritas, a warm blanket, and a commercial walk-in freezer.  He’d die happily drunk and they’d find him frozen the next morning.

It’s too rainy for margaritas, so Ash orders another whiskey sour.

Ben says this kind of outlook proves that Ash would never do it.  Too focused on avoiding pain, when the pain comes from just living every day after day after day after day.   Ben says he doesn’t care how it’s done,  just that it’s over.  He is so so so tired.  He wants peace, he says.  So any method, really,  would do.  However, he adds, he’s not down with ending up as a vegetable.

A gun, Ash says.

Whatever, says Ben.

Overdose, Ash says.

Sure, says Ben.

Jumping off a bridge, Ash says.

That’s good.  But seriously, whatever.

Hari kari, says Ash.

Too messy, Ben says.

Ash suggests that if Ben is committed to doing it, he might get down to final matters.  They engage in a long inconclusive discussion about wills and other legal death instruments.

Lawyers, Ben says.  What do I got that I need to worry about?  Ash, in the event of my death, you get my car and its transmission problem.  There.

Thanks, Ash says.  Can I have your laptop?

Sure, Ben says.  No, that better go to my little brother.  He’s just starting college.  Can you delete all my shit off it first for me?

Sure, Ash says.

Ben scratches at a blob of varnish on the scared bar top.  Other people have scratched at it before.  Ash watches a delivery guy with a hand truck on the drizzly street outside.

Ben says he wants to swim in warm ocean water once more before he dies.  That’s his final wish.

Not sex? Ash asks.

No, warm ocean water surging around me one last time.  Okay, he adds.  Sex would be nice too.

Ash says he’d like to have a big sushi dinner before he dies.  With sake.  All his friends.

Ben thinks for a bit, his eyes fixed on the mirror over the bar.  He says he’d like to see West Side Story one more time.

Ash says he’d like to see Rear Window.

Vertigo, says Ben.

Eggplant Parmesan, says Ash.

Not just sex, says Ben.  Really good sex.  Really good, really open, really mindblowing sex.

With a sweet, wild woman, Ben adds.

A beautiful woman, Ash says.

Yeah, a beautiful woman, says Ben.

Not a beautiful dude? Ash asks.

Hmm, Ben thinks about it.  No.  Too awkward and fumbly.  For me.

Too sausage party.

No, Ben says.  I’m kinda down.  But I’d be an idiot.  Too shy, too stupid.  Ben says.  Homo-amateur.

Ben raises his beer glass to the bartender who silently gets him another.

Strong coffee at sunrise, Ash says.

Pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, says Ben

Re-reading Grapes of Wrath, says Ash.

So sad, says Ben.

Uplifting at the end, says Ash.

Sorta, says Ben, Preacher Casey’s dead.  Driving a car through the desert.

A sports car.  A fast car, says Ash.

Any car, says Ben.  The windows rolled down.  AM radio on.  Warm wind on my face.

Why do you wanna do this?  Ash asks.

Exhausted, says Ben.  Tired of trying.  Tired of the phonies.  Can’t bring myself to get up and run with the rest of the rats.

Fuck it, Ash says and lifts his glass like a toast.

Fuck it, Ben lifts his glass.

My Nanna’s blackberry jam, Ash says.

Ah, I’ve had that.  Your grandma’s blackberry jam.  Homemade.  Fucking amazing.  Like a wack in the head with the flavor bat.  It always reminds me of eating a handful of blackberries right off the brambles along Bear Creek with my grandpa when I was a kid.

Ben’s eyes mist over.  You still have any?

No, but Nanna made a batch in August and is sending a jar at Christmas, Ash says.  Nanna’s blackberry jam.

I want some of that, some of your Nanna’s blackberry jam before I go, Ben says.

Teeth.  My first two teeth are chipped from a generally adventurous life and most recently from foolishly stripping insulation from wires with my teeth.

Once my dentist asked me if I wanted to cap my chipped front teeth.  He offered to file them down and put what he called a prosthesis, a fake tooth cover, over each tooth.

“Will it protect the teeth?  Keep them from chipping further?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said, “It’s mostly just aesthetics.  If you don’t mind the jagged look of it right now, don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t really care,” I said and explained that I just wanted to keep my teeth in my mouth so I could chew my food when I’m old.

However, as my front teeth have chipped further — not seriously, but irritatingly — I wished that I had had my dentist at least file the edges smooth even if I had no need for the cap.

Driving in the car today, I was thinking about the teeth I never had filed as I ran my tongue over my jagged front teeth.  They were knife sharp.  If I hit my chin accidentally, I might bite my tongue clean off.

One thing that always strikes me when I go to the dentist is how similar the tools and process my dentist uses to that of say a sculptor or carpenter, just on a smaller scale.  My dentist’s files look just like the ones I have in my toolbox.  His grinders look just like some of the ones I use with my Dremel tool.

If only I had some way to naturally wear down my jagged front teeth, some way to accelerate the inevitable natural process of wearing off the rough edges.  Maybe chewing on wood would do it.  Or biting stacks of paper.  Something.  Lightly grinding on a soft metal, like copper maybe.

What did I have in the car, I wondered.  Driftwood, copper sheet?  The jagged teeth were so irritating.  I looked around the car.  I reached behind my seat as I drove.  I came up with 150 grit wet/dry sandpaper that I had used when refinishing the car.

Hmm. why not?  I ran my tongue over the serrated edge of my front teeth.  Would it hurt?  Could I feel it?

So I began sanding my teeth like a carpenter sanding down a rough edge on some cabinetry work.  It didnt’ hurt.  I couldn’t even feel it.  In fact, it was strangely pleasant, smoother than you’d expect.

And it had an effect.  I could feel it with my tongue.  It was less rough.  Teeth were neither harder nor softer than I’d expect.  It took about as much effort as I’d expect to sand down mildly jagged teeth.

I sanded my front teeth until my tongue was more or less satisfied with the smoothness of the tops of my teeth.

A good day, with pleasing experiments in do-it-yourself dentistry.

Sleepy sleepy eyes creaking
Open barely a caper
Creeping a long coat,
Hat pulled over eyes before the sun.
Barely four hours sleep tucked
Into my breast pocket
Another hour borrowed time.
A pre-dawn rainy-day
Middle-of-the-bridge
Hostage swap that didn’t come off.
A cell phone in one pocket, a
Cup and a packet of graham crackers
In the other.

I can’t read the stylized writing at all.
The scrawl on the bridge that says, I was here
A shout to the universe: I exist.

A note delivered early the previous day:
IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE YOUR CELL ALIVE AGAIN
BRING MILK TO THE SOQUEL BRIDGE AT 6AM
NO FUNNY BUSINESS OR THE CELL GETS IT!
DON’T CALL THE COPS!
COME ALONE!

My adversary is not there doesn’t come stands me up
Or didn’t receive the note in time.
No matter and no excuses.
No milk and cookies this AM.
I’d rather do this than be safe in my bed
Asleep for the rest of my life.

Plish.

The quiet sound of a phone finding its place
at the bottom of the San Lorenzo River.

Yesterday, I hurt my shoulder while tumbling on the grass.  The insistent throbbing has diminished, but I can still feel it when I lift my elbow or reach back.  The pain today reminds me what it means to be alive in this body.

Today, I decided to get a tattoo.  A narrative of my life and those who came before me,  shoulder to shoulder, head to toe.  For the fierce pain of it, of course.  And to remind myself that I am here.

I’ve just finished baking the second apple pie this week for my beloved family, husband and number one son, anyway. Number two son doesn’t eat fruit in any form. I keep telling him some day he will grow up and try a piece of homemade apple pie and realize that he has missed years of homemade apple pies and he will weep at the thought of it. The first pie, I cut the slits in the top and a tiny heart in the middle. Made with love by yours truly. Tonight, I was tired. I rode my bike five miles to work. I worked all day. I ran at lunch. I pulled a calf muscle. I rode five miles home in the heat with a pulled calf muscle. I made dinner and I cleaned it up. Dead tired. So tonight, where the heart was last time, I cut a small dollar sign in the middle of the crust, just to remind my dear ones: you can’t buy this kind of love ;)

You’re sitting on the front steps of the little two bedroom place that you and your new bride rent — your charming little cottage with the big picture window and the hardwood floors recently refinished — and the baby is expected but not arrived yet, so she still pays attention to you, especially today that the warm sun is coming through the lemon tree and warming the cement and there is somehow, miraculously, nothing to do.

You lean to the left and there is warm sun, almost hot, openness, and laughter.  You lean to the right and there is cool shade and secrets not yet revealed.  Hot and cold.  Yin and yang.  And together they form perfection.  What could possibly improve all this?

What if in this scene, the two people previously pictured, you and the woman of swollen belly, your lover and wife, were sitting in the falling sunshine with glasses of cold lemonade in your hands and the tinkling of ice cubes in your ears?

So you get up and wrestle the ladder that leans against the house.  You climb precariously to the loveliest lemons near the top of the tree standing on the sticker that says, “This is not a step.”  You pick three lemons and realize you have no way to gather more, nowhere to put them, and of course, the ivy at the foot of the tree swallows anything dropped without a trace.  So you tuck in your shirt doing a funny dance at the top of the ladder, your audience laughing from down below.  You drop the lemons down your shirt and continue picking, looking increasingly comic as the lemons make you look pregnant too.

You climb down and disappear into the house, the cool house.  Chop, chop, chop.  Cut each lemon in half with the Chinese clever.  Work each lemon over the glass juicer you found on the Saturday garage sale outings until your right arm hurts, then switch to your left.  Fill up a bowl, and get another.  Juice every last lemon until you have a few quarts of juice.  Taste it with a finger.  Oooo, sour.

Don’t forget to strain the seeds through the cheesecloth you keep in the drawer on the end.

You put a few cups of water on the stove to boil and sit down at the kitchen table to wait.  The cool dark of the house sucks at the warm brightness just outside the door.

You look around this kitchen that you and she put together from the total of both your stuff.  Your knife, your wok, your cookware.  All the pink plasticware that her mom gave her little girl when she moved into her very own place.  And you remember again that you are criticized for thinking in terms of yours and mine.  “Its all our stuff now,” your wife says.

When the water boils, you drop in several cups of sugar, enjoying how it puts its fingers to its lips and shushes you as you pour.  Dissolve the sugar and add this solution to the lemon juice.

You pinch in just a tiny bit of salt.  Yes, its true, your wife thinks that’s weird, but you know it makes perfect lemonade taste even better.

Adjust the amount of sugar in this concentrate.  You want the sweet and the sour to achieve a perfect balance.  Yin and yang again.  Put this mix in the big juice pitcher.

Now if you weren’t wanting to go back out on the steps right now, you’d put the mix in the fridge until it cooled.  But you can chill that warm concentrate with ice.  Fill up a couple big glasses with ice cubes and pour the warm concentrate over.  Not too much now, you can always add more if it’s too weak.

Add just enough ice water from the fridge.  After a little bit, you’ll get the hang of “just enough.”

Don’t forget to re-fill the ice trays.  You usually remember, even though your lover usually forgets.  There are unresolved issues of protocol here.  Each one of you has his or her definitions of considerate.  You’re slowly re-learning what’s right and what’s important, according to her.

You grab a box of crackers and balance the two glasses and step blindly out into the sunshine.  “Here, Honey,” you say as you hand one glass over with a bow.  She reaches up, mumbles a half-hearted thanks and continues reading.

There is a moment of waiting.  Did you expect applause?  By now, you realize the little kindnesses are seldom recognized.  But is it worth making a bit deal about right now?

You make your way to the porch swing on the other side of the house, not quite as idyllic, full shade rather than dappled sunshine.  But you have a glass of lemonade and the ice talks gently against the side of the glass.  And you’re alone and its okay and the journey matters more than the destination anyway.

     He drinks black coffee but never had an espresso. His life is filled with ‘have nevers’. The woman he married, and Howard, ‘have never’ taken a vacation together. They ‘have never’ paid more than twenty dollars for a bottle of wine. ‘Have never’ dined out anywhere but a buffet. ‘Have never’ had sex more than twice a month. ‘Have never’ watched a movie together. ‘Have never’ had a fight, or a kind word.

     Howard is depressed but doesn’t know it. Assumes everyone feels the same, and spends his days trying to rationalize the dualities he is certain governs the laws of his universe. Like how he feels ashamed that his favorite actress is Mia Kershner, but has never tasted the vodka-besotted lips of a stranger at two in the morning.

     The grimy window to his air-conditioned office looks out over the shop. Howard can see the workers all day, and they can see him. He seldom walks the wooden steps down to the shop floor because it can reach one hundred and twenty degrees down there; the workers are sweaty, tired, and mostly embittered. He knows this because he was down there for the larger part of his career, looking up at the prick in the window having an easy day in the coolness, going over green ledgers on a dusty computer monitor, and reading the newspaper at lunch.

     Two fingers on each of Howard’s hands are permanently turned inward from endlessly grinding small flame cut flanges on a noisy disk sander. Most of the nerve endings in his thumb are dead from nibbling burrs off larger pieces of metal. He can still taste the grit in his mouth. The production halls are poorly lit and resemble a cave filled with dead air that has never seen sunshine or felt rain.

     Each day he remembers the voluptuous blonde girlfriend from his youth, his best buddy who moved across the state, the Christmas of his youth and the red Schwinn with a banana seat, and when Howard’s father said, “I love you”, the day he passed away.

I’d like to live in a house on the water, a homemade houseboat, with a small engine that can move it slowly from here to there. A water squatter. A place with tin roof and tin walls, insulated for winter, with a wood burning stove for heating and cooking.  A porch, a porch swing, a lookout, windows, a banjo on the wall.  Wood piled up in a wood pile on shore.  A bucket shitter behind a curtain.  Big and wide for a boat, difficult to capsize, made of scrap and scavenged things. Feathers from a hawk, phtographs from a garage sale, letters from home.  A big wide bed with a dense down comforter and a homemade quilt.

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.