blackberries

He doesn't want a cake for his birthday, which is today. He wants blackberry pie. Now, I could go to Safeway, or Freddie's to find them. (I'm sure they wouldn't have fresh berries at Winco. Ihatewinco.com-- there should be a site. I'll start it.) But no. He doesn't want store bought.... they gotta be fresh. So we went berry picking. Me and the mean girls. (I love those kids, they just don't love me. Yet. I'll get 'em....)

This is the part where I hate not knowing where I am. or rather, in this case, where the berries are. Down south, there is a sharp corner on Hwy 238 at Hamilton Road, and if you park in the triangle and walk down the gully, there are berries for days. But that's a 300 mile drive.

So my sweet husband, the birthday boy, gives me directions. I think I've said I don't take direction well. I also don't follow directions well. And the other part of that is: I can get anywhere if I have gas. So, it may take me a little longer, but I'll get there eventually. Oaks Bottom. That's where I was going. After a brief and fruitless tour of Multnomah -- no -- it starts with an M.... Milwaukee? No, that's not it. Anyway, its the road that goes to Milwaukee, and it is almost a freeway, but at long last I found it. Oak Bottoms. But as I left the relative safety of my truck, I gotta admit... there is no stranger sensation than trotting off into the uncharted urban wilds. Well, truth be told there are many, many stranger sensations, but this is not the time for all that. So, there we were, foraging for berries, a quarter-mile in, and we pass many forms of vegetation, but no berries, and I can hear the river, but can't see it from where we are. Finally, along comes a tall man carrying a tray of berries as though he were at a market. We had our empty milk jugs in hand (cut away to leave the handle--these are great for berry picking) and this gave us away as fellow fruit-gatherers. I freely admit confusion, so he says, "There is a place where the path goes under the railroad tracks and there is a trail off to the left." What I hear is, "Take the path under the railroad tracks and go to the left."

You can imagine what ensues. There are trails everyfuckingwhere....left right sideways, you name it. Of course, the berry patch is right where he said it was.

Now, the thing is, the girls know this, they had heard what he actually said, but they aren't comfortable enough to tell an adult what to do, so we traipse around for days, then finally, Haley says, "I wonder if that trail to the left of the underpass...." And I say, "Okay." Freely admitting I am so often so wrong.

We found the berries... buckets and buckets of them. And I will bake a pie and a cobbler. I have the best cobbler recipe which I am happy to share with y'all.

Jonni's Cobbler

melt 2 sticks of butter in a 9x13 pan

Batter -- mix together:
1 1/2 c flour
2 c sugar
1/4 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 c milk

pour into pan over melted butter

layer fruit over mixture (blackberries or peaches are best. It calls for another cup of sugar for the fruit but I leave that out. Maybe a little if the fruit isn't perfect, but then what are you doing with sub-standard fruit?) Bake at 350 until golden and crispy. (The batter bubbles up around the fruit to make the crust.) Serve warm with whipped cream.

too fuckin hot

I have considered documenting some of my own personal drama over a three day heat wave, but its like this: its only a heat wave if you don't have A/C. So yeah, I miss my air conditioner.  I have spent the past many years moving from one air-conditioned space to an other: home to truck to office and back. I've avoided heat. Now, I am attempting to embrace it. Sweat as part of life. I take diuretics to accomplish what the past three days have done for me, one drip at a time. Last night I sat in the basement on our newly acquired futon (there's one at every yard sale) and deliberately experienced the changes my body goes through when self-cooling. It is, like so much of my life these days, an adjustment. I used to spend the summer baking on a river bank, any river bank, but mostly the Applegate. Mostly McKee Bridge. And I remember endless days of 105 degrees, seeking shade, sleeping near a window or out in the back yard, and the heat was unavoidable. Until I started making money. Then, I could avoid weather. And I suppose that is an advantage. Ask any homeless person. Weather is a real equalizer. Ask an Alaskan. I'm going to digress now, I can feel it coming on, but hopefully I'll get back to my point, because, like Ellen, I do have one.

I went to Alaska a few years ago. Fairbanks. It was lawless and absent any apparent social heirarchy. I loved it. People wear pajamas to the store; houses, and most stuff, are purely utilitarian. Very little decoration (read: cheesy yard art) survives the elements with the notable exception of roadside altars. I wish I could find a link to show you, but I don't know what they are. They can be wooden planks, or telephone poles, covered with small stuffed animals nailed to them. I don't know that they are altars, I impose my own interpretation here. But you can imagine what these tiny sanctuaries look like after an Alaskan winter. The animals-- the kind you win at carnivals: cheesy, colorful, not the super soft yuppie variety -- what are they called? the ones with a tag in their ear...? Dakin? Something like that. Anyway, after a year of weather, the colors are muted at best and they hang there, ragged and rotting, like fuzzy little crucifixes all in a row.

What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah. Sweating. So I am feeling weather now, not just viewing it from my ivory window. I'm in it, body and soul. I sweat therefore I am.

back to the island

Sauvie's Island.

The first question was: why don't we come out here every day? We set up the shade thing and pretty soon I didn't care if all the fat women and screaming children in the world were upon us, blanket to blanket. All that mattered was the water, the mighty Columbia, my wading pool, and I am weightless, swivelling like an otter, the sandy bottom much nicer than lake muck. I'm a river girl.

 

Cowgirls and Indians

Having coffee this morning on Hawthorne, an indian (native) woman passed our table and asked how long it took my companion to grow her hair. "I've only cut it once in my life," she said. The woman took her hat off to reveal a really bad haircut. Really bad. And this is on Hawthorne where most things pass for good. It wasn't the answer she wanted to hear. Actually, the answer didn't matter. Nor did the conversation. I'm a shit to people who interrupt -- mentally ill or not. Indian or not. Spiritual giants or not. You could interrupt me and I'd treat you like shit. At any rate, she blathered on about losing a family member, cutting her hair off in one griefstricken hunk (a long braid, apparently) and burying it. She went on, at some length, telling us why indians do that shit. And I don't care. (theme of  blog.) They can cut off their arms and legs in honor of their ancestors for all I care. I was just having coffee. I didn't want to know. And the thing is, she didn't want me to know that. She just wanted some of my money. The psycho-tragic hair saga was simply the dog and pony show she was willing to do to get my money.

I was going to say that I can't stand rituals, but it isn't true. Some I find comforting, like the first day of school and new pencils. And easter eggs. I just don't think its okay to take out your religion and pander it on a streetcorner for pocket change.

Yes I do. I've changed my mind. I think that's fine. I should have been nicer. If I see her again, I'll give her something. 

I might.  

new things

I love my new bike. I got a horn with it. It's a squeeze bulb with three spouts or horns or I dont' really know what they're called. The metal parts beyond the rubber bulb.  
 
I also got a new dress.  It was cheap and that makes it even better. It probably won't hold up in a washer, but it will be fun to dance in one time. I used to have a beaded antique top that looked really good on me and I danced all the beads off. I remember dancing in it to the Beatles "Back in the USSR" in a bar in Coosbay with a stainless steel dance floor. Shiny. Me and the floor. I love to dance.

workaday

Back in the saddle again.

mama

I was listening to a woman discussing her dying father, that he was cold and emotionally distant. Her pain was real. I know that at the end of my mother's life, and it was a long long twenty-year ride to the end, that I couldn't see her for who she was, or accept her, until about a month before she died. What I know about dying is alot. I've seen many many families through the transition, and the only advice I've ever given (apart from the spewing of youth) is that there is no right way or wrong way. No proper behavior for the dying or the grieving. Dying seems hard. I'd like to say, given my experiences with the dying, that dying is hard, but I don't know that. I've seen two buddhist's die lingering deaths. One selfishly, one beautifully. (These are my judgements. I'm not a buddhist. I judge like a bandit....)  I've seen medical murders. I've seen husbands follow their wives in one day. I've been with a sweet little old lady as she sat on her bedside, waiting. I'd asked her what she was waiting for, and she had said, "Just biding my time." Until what? I had to know. The young are always in such a hurry to know. Its overrated.  "Until Jesus comes for me." she said. I smiled knowingly, nodded, left, and came back in an hour to find her dead. I've seen pain and joy in the same room holding hands, comforting each other. That I was not able to comfort my own mother, knowing all that I know, is something that I carry with me now. Its a little heavy, but okay. I was mad because she didn't take care of herself. I saw her illness as a product of intention. And anybody could argue that it was and be right. You can be right if you want. But what I know now is that she was afraid of doctors, and she couldn't, not wouldn't, find out what was wrong with her. And I protected myself with distance and called it hers.
 
My mother could dance the Charleston. There are times I wish I could ask her the names of obscure flowers (I still think she'd make up the name if she didn't know it), or fabric, or how to make our homemade, sugary fudge, and she is always gone.  The things that irritated me are so endearing now. It's funny what you remember.

day trippers

I've been fortunate to always land in Seattle on sunny days. I hear they are rare. As we pulled into town --no, Seattle is definitely not a town-- as we pulled into the clusterfuck of a city, we passed three accidents, one right after the other, people stopped in the middle of the freeway to change a tire. On the way up I had wondered at roadsigns saying, "if you have a fender bender, pull over to the side of the freeway." Well, yeah. Good tip. Then, upon arrival, it is clear that Washingtonians need direction.
 
We went to the Rock & Roll Museum. It's called something else. And the Science Fiction museum. It was expensive. I liked seeing Janis' magenta feather boa. That was my thrill. And, I guess seeing Hendrix's hand written lyrics was inspiring. And sad. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (W Blake), or, in somebody else's words: whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  Now, I really believe that is true. Its just that so often it kills ya.
 
I have no regrets.
 
There was a section on the Kingsmen (Louie Louie). One of them lived down the street from me when I lived in Portland years ago just after my father died and my mother fell apart. In that order. I was riding my bike (4th grade) and he was washing his car. Probably a corvette. He squirted me with the hose, I rode over a nail and popped my tire. That's my rock and roll hall of fame.
 
Let's see. We went on a ferry ride to Vashon Island, drove around the island to Tahlequah Bay and on another ferry to Point Defiance. I thought it was Cape Disappointment, but that's at the mouth of the Columbia. You wonder how they got the name. I do, anyway. I guess I could go to: howcapesgettheirnames.com. There's everything else.com
 
Plan for the next run is to go to the glass museum, then take the ferry to Port Townsend and drive down.
 
I got my bike! It is so fun to ride. I'd like to take a bike tour of the San Juan Islands, but I don't know if it is a burly deal. I'm not burly at all. I appreciate people who exert themselves, but I am not one. Riding up Division is a burly as I get. Mt. Tabor would kill me.
 
Well, it's a lazy sunday. The children, his children, are here, still asleep, complaining that we are too loud in the morning. Well too bad. I've tiptoed around one teenager and it didn't do him any good at all. Did harm, in fact. They hate me. It doesn't matter what I do. A wise woman told me this, in relation to step children: The only thing you can do about step children is love your husband.
 
I do I do I do.
 
 
 
 

tattoo early

I worked, therefore I was.

It was familiar to be in a healthcare facility. Even the designation of the setting takes work. I don't know that we care for health, but some seem to care. I wish I could just work at the coffee shop down the street, get some tattoos, live on less. That art can't come cheap, though. The thing about tattoos, for me, is the inability to change my mind, which I've never been able to prevent from changing. The things I thought I would always love when I was eighteen--acid-rainbows dripping through Peter Max-like clouds and stars-- would horrify me today had I strung them rib to rib like a permanent corset. Not to mention the probability of pregnancy and all of its attendant disfiguring. I love tribal art. What I really love are the celtic looking knots and armbands. But I've worked in nursing homes long enough to know that the crescent moon on the breast of youth is the banana hanging from the coathooks of old age. So there you have it. Nothing is static. Not belief. Not skin. And now that I'm on the topic of nursing home bodies, I wonder at the patients of the very near future: ninety-five year old women with perfect tits, tight thighs and flat bellies. There is just something disturbingly incongrous about it. In the final analysis, and fight it though I have and do, there is a certain symmetry to sag. "The organism will out," my physician used to tell me. "Gravity will out" is more like it. Gravity, like entropy, always wins.

I love entropy, atrophy, anomie. All forms of breakdown, from muscular to social to the resultant alienation and social instability. Its all good.

I gotta go.

yard art, strange monkeys

See old post: "monkey on the porch." I posted it some time in February of 04. We still don't know who left that thing.

I have to go back to work today. I don't know what to wear. White, I'm thinking. Virginal. Create the impression of guilessness (is that a word?) and bring out the black later. No time for turtlenecks.

Speaking of necks, mine looks like its been wrung. Bruises spreading like gossip across my lily white skin. Arnica arnica, work your magic.

all day in the house

I go back to work tomorrow. Actual work. I have settled nicely into this sweet slow life, this wife-thing, this marriage. I make our bed every day. I wash dishes joyfully, knowing beyond any doubt this is where I want to be. I have loved my personal investigation of feminism, and I do not reject the precepts. I simply embrace the domestic. I find it valuable, moreso than the pedantic pursuit of knowlege. Sorry, but I do. I've learned enough. (there I go again...) I remember writing a line in a novel that will likely never be published: "She straigtened slowly from the perpetual bent-ness of domesticity." (Jesus. With opaque shit like that, no wonder it will never see the light of day.) But really, I gather more hope from making the bed than a thousand heavily considered rejections of whose job it ought to be. The single greatest advantage of education is finally acquiring the ability to do what needs to be done whether or not I want to do it. Including making the bed. If I begin the day by making the bed, I have some hope of order for the remainder of the day. It is not that I can no longer embrace chaos -- be sure that I can -- I'm just not as entertained by it as I once was. I used to be known for the condition of my home. People who knew me talked about the science projects in my refrigerator. When asked, I didn't know where I kept the towels. I didn't do the dishes. I hired my eleven year old neice, who finally refused because she was afraid to reach into the sink. My husband, who was only an infrequent night time visitor back then, showed up one night and said, "That shit was on the floor last time I was here six months ago." I said, "Well then, you should probably pick it up." So he knows how it could be with me.

Well. I don't know what that was all about.

I've set up comments below. See if it works.

the line

I hate being a drug addict. It is inconvenient as hell. Most people, in most parts of the world, just take medicine for pain, or not, as the case may be. Not me. I have to weigh, consider, examine my body like a running CT scanner, ever vigilant for the slightest nuance of discomfort. And there is a difference between pain and discomfort that I have to be so very aware of. To thine own self be true. Yes. Great idea. The problem seems to arise NOT when I am consuming the drug, per doctor's orders. It's all good then. I have real pain PLUS something to look forward to. But when it is over -- the legitimate need for pain medication -- that's when the chatter begins in earnest. "Aw, c'mon. It hurts, you know it and I know it." It is at that point, when the voice in my head, (the mean one I'd hoped I'd gotten rid of in this past surgery) begins to refer to me as "we" I know I'm in deep weeds. I am alone in the room. Of this much I am certain. But suddenly, the voice dictates: "we" need medication. (I appreciate Bob Earl for his insight into this particular aspect of the addictive mind.) So, anyway, as of this morning, my medication extravaganza is over, and now I think I need a party thrown in my honor for not over-doing it. I want a medal. I want presents. I want about a bucket of vicodin to last me. But it wouldn't, would it? That's the sad truth. The sad truth is that the 15 minutes that are loveable about narcotics, those sweet, fleeting moments that crawl up your spine like an expert lover, bleed into hours of sedation. I used to be Willing to trade it all for those moments, and live a sedated life. And the thing is, wouldn't you think it was cause for celebration to be free of pain? Don't most people look forward to that? Isn't that what healing is all about? Twisted.

walking on hawthorne

We pass the kid on the street, a can for money sits to his left: "ninjas killed my family, need kung fu lessons. anything helps." I look him in the eye, not certain what exactly I am looking for, willing to share in what I think is a pretty good joke, but he's not laughing.

Safeway

Two for one sale. Eggs. Two dozen for the price of one. Only the one dozen price is three bucks. I don't care. (this is my theme, my mantra, my thread) By the time I hit Safeway, I've abandoned any hope of thrift. My husband shops at Winco. This is hard for me. I'll admit to being white trash in some ways, but I really like Freddy's better. Winco is just too much. The aisles too long, the meat department more like a slaughter house than I like to face. Miles of food. Bad veggies, unripe fruit, small avocados. No good sourdough bread. But it's cheap cheap cheap, isn't it? And bagging my own groceries.... I hate that part. Such pressure, and my obsessive need for order makes it nearly impossible to get through the chore. How many cans in one bag? How important is balance anyway. Paper or plastic? This becomes my own personal dilemma. I prefer paper, but only, I think, because of poverty. The remnants of childhood. We used to need them for garbage sacks, neatly folded over at the top, twice if you were good at it. And draining the grease from chocolate chip cookies -- we removed them from cookie sheets into neat little rows on brown paper sacks to cool. Now, there is little use for them save recycling. And its funny, the money spent on just the right paper towels to drain the cookies.... evidence of affluence. When we did not waste, we did not consider wasting. Recycling itself is a product of affluence.

This is serious

Oh my.... I had no idea blogging was so serious. The article in the Willamette Week brought to my attention the following: A. My blog is shit; B. I should edit more carefully (read: at all) in the event someone actually reads this shit; and C. In order to compete in blog world, one needs a topic, or at minimum, a thread. I don't have one. I just needed a place to take notes on my pathetic life, and this seemed as good as any. To my extremely limited readership, I offer a half-hearted apology. I'll try to do better. I'll capitalize. I'll let up on the elipses.... honest I will.... I'll consider the possibility that commas are a problem for me. Grammar seems, and has always seemed, so terribly personal. So subjective. I know where I want you to breathe, to pause, to stop, to go. Trust me on this. And, as is so often the case with me, I don't care. I just don't. Not today.

I'm not well. They stitched my face back together. My one and only face. I feel like a terrible cartoon of myself, prednisone conspiring with other agents of change to create a big, blonde chipmunk. Which would be fine, or at least tolerable, if I lived alone. But I don't. I don't suffer well. Not publically. I'm a heroin addict for Chrissake. I am a big fucking baby. I stub my toe, I shoot smack. Are we clear? So... Having a witness to my whining and bitching really puts a crimp in my style. He is so good, my husband, my sweet sweet man.... and I am usually very nice to him. Really. But not these days. I look like shit and that makes me mad. And when I'm mad, I'm evil. Ask anyone.

So, there's my blog for the day. No topic save my all time favorite: me. I welcome suggestions, but only for entertainment value. I don't take direction well at all.

I keep getting these little blurbs in the corner of my screen by way of Qwest: Americans hang Afghan detainees by feet... Ridge says new terror warning will fuck up election.... I suppose I could comment on these topics, and be newsworthy, but shit. What is there to say? Better by the feet than the neck? Stop doing that? Tom Ridge is probably just paving the way for yet another republican coup??? Really, I think I'll leave all of that for the more politically savvy to comment on. Don't get me started. Remember, I'm the one who doesn't care if the world is flat or round.

Grouchy

There is not enough Vicodin.

Minutae

Apprentice Cats

These cats around here think my newly planted lawn (yes, more lawn) is their own personal catbox. We have a old old cat. Sebastian, 13+ years and still the godfather of the neighborhood, although my man thinks he's becoming suicidal in his old age, says he crosses the street without looking, and that he never used to cross the street at all. His ears are notched, skin riddled with scars beneath a thick coat of wiry black fur. He was rescued, therefore loyal, with the notable exception of a two year hiatus while Click, the maddog, lived here. Shows pretty good judgment in my estimation. So, the plan is to cover the grass... tarp it so they'll have nowhere to dig. Besides, it's July, a stupid time to plant grass. But hell, up here, I can't tell what season it is. It's cool today, but I'm learning that the strong summer sun is hanging out right behind the clouds, ever available to fry shit when you're not looking. There are two kittens who live next door, and innumerable feral cats. The babies follow Sebastian on his rounds, learning as they go. The neighbors call Sebastian "Blackie." Clever. They feed him, have a cat door... took him in during the dog days, and now claim he IS Blackie, has always been Blackie, that they paid for him and he was never ours. I don't care (see?). And the beauty of it is, Sebastian has no idea he is involved in a property dispute. He just eats when and where he likes and sleeps inside if he wants to. The apprentice cats are theirs, and they are welcome to 'em.

Post-op

I lived. I am on drugs. There were complications, and it's all good, now. I'm home and happy to be here. I look like Jabba the Hut. Don't visit me. The thing he took out of my neck, turns out, was my evil twin -- embryonic tissue that never made the cut (until yesterday, of course.) I'm hoping against hope that we've finally removed that mean voice, the one who has the goods on me and uses them at the most inopportune times imaginable. Time, as ever, will tell.

Bikes

Nothing is ever really all that simple. Or, as JoAnne's screensaver says: "For every complex question there is a simple answer that is usually wrong." Something like that.

We have the bikes. Or, one of them, anyway. Atually getting them has been interesting. Mine is horribly flawed, but beautiful. He's ordering a replacement now. K got his, but it isn't working right either, so we're a little disillusioned, and may have paid medium money for a step up from a Huffy. No. I think they're better than that.

Blues Festival and Fireworks

Sitting on the sidehill, listening to band after band. Anything seems to pass for blues. Reagge blues, country blues, blue grass, rock blues, speed-metal blues and the occasional sweet down beat, that grinding, intensely sexual sound, something like the opening riff of "The Thrill is Gone." Chicago blues, Missippi blues, Delta Blues. Its personal, and what is the blues to me, may not be what is the blues for somebody else. So I wait and I wait for my blues. My turn to dance.

And, I would have said, prior to this week, that fireworks are fireworks. Not so. They are similar, but the intensity of Portland's fireworks over the Willamette, was, well, intense. Breathtaking, actually, for me. Ever the small town girl, I stood stupified as blast after blast cracked the sky and made it bleed.


Old Timers

I've found some of them. Some who have abandoned one program for the one where the grown-ups go. That's still what I'm after -- being a grown-up -- one distant day.

One Missing Flamingo

On the fourth of July, one of my prize, cheesy yard art items went missing. Finally. I suspect it met a bitter end, stuffed up the ass with firecrackers, pink plastic projectiles raining down Clinton Street.

A lone flamingo now guards the hydrangea out front, awaiting the next drunk night, awaiting release.

Fleetwood Mac

Went to the concert Monday night. I've always loved Fleetwood Mac. Always. And unlike many old bands, the music was so good. I remember watching the Moody Blues last summer at Britt and they were still wearing leather pants and trying to do synchronized high kicks with their guitars in unison. I was afraid they'd require paramedics. But this night, this music, was so familiar, so well-travelled. My favorite song, the Derelict, never gets played, but that's okay. I was watching history. My history. For the uninitiated, I think Mick Fleetwood has Tourette's and its treatable. If you were there... what the fuck was he saying???? For us, it was the speaking-in-tongues segment. But it was watching the woman that gave me pause. Stevie Nicks. I know when I was young I wanted to be her, was both compelled and terrified by her beauty, the rumors that she danced with the devil to get where she was. But as she sang that line: "...and I'm getting older too." The issue of mortality, mine and hers, a day before my surgery, arose. And she still had it. Not all of it, but enough.

So, that's the update. My slit throat hurts.

Social Heroin

I'm going under the knife again. I have all the information, which, if you've been paying any attention at all, I don't like to pack around in this busy busy mind. Trivia. Just hook me up to a hose pulsing full of demerol and tell me no lies. The outcome will be what it will be. Forewarned, in my experience, changes nothing. I must have this procedure, and knowing I could be permanently disfigured, but probably not, is cold comfort. Statistically, I'm almost certainly going to be fine. But, I'll be glad when this one is over, when the drugs I love have once again passed, however briefly, through my body, and I am left twitching in their wake, trying to remember what the fucking problem was in the first place, asking Why can't I have just the teensiest bit of social heroin? Just once, twice, three times a day??? Is that too much to ask? Vicodin is no close second, but as the time gets near, I consider it. Consider the remote possibility that medical need could take me by the hand and lead me back down that old road. I still don't think I'd make it as a crack whore on MLK. I just really don't. I don't have what it takes anymore. Now I am not naive. I know a good habit would inspire me to abandon the lifestyle I have come to know, but I just can't picture it. Which is good. Who would water my flowers? Where would I keep all my hand washable linen pants? Back in the day, I could never get the grass and the garden to grow at the same time. I didn't have towels or socks.

I'm just being dramatic. I'll be fine.

Long life

She spoke again this morning: "Life is.... long." She is younger than I thought, miles of bad road in her eyes, on her skin. I tell her to stay out of the sun, like I haven't. Self preservation. Life is long. And so very short. A blip on the screen. I am who I am in this aging body. I am who I've always been. Betrayed by skin and gravity. Complicit in the eventual, the unavoidable, the ultimate grounding.

It is a beautiful day, cloudy, as I await the arrival of my new bicycle. We have been married 2 months today. We have 60 days.

Turmoil has subsided in my busy mind as I lean once again toward acceptance of my own process, my transition into an altered life. It is not what it used to be, and sometimes I think the pain comes from my attempts to restore equilibrium. What I forget is that equilibrium was killing me. I was suffocating in stasis. Treading shallow water. Now I may be in deep weeds, but they are my weeds, I recognize them now.

Home is home. Life, if long, is good. My son, unlike others I know, (like my nephew Mike and Asha's boy, John) is not heading off to Iraq to fight an unjust war. I watched the movie Cold Mountain, which was okay. My favorite line went something like this: "I'll bet God's sick of coming down on both sides of an argument." I don't know what God thinks, but that seemed possible. Of course, the notion that this is a religious war seems absurd. Its always reducible to economics.

okay okay okay

It is noon and I'm not working. I'm not going to work. I'm going to go out in my yard, prune a red climbing rose probably a little further back than my sweetie would like me to. Whack 'em, I say. They're roses. Portland roses. What could go wrong? (I'll get back to you....) I'll organize terra cotta pots on my old wood bench and stake the tomatoes. This one guy from Hillsboro says you gotta compete for the first tomato. Not me. I want the best tomato. So.... less water, more sun. Sweet. I'm going to water the yard, slowly, deeply, by hand, because that's the way I remember where I am, who I am, to feel my own two feet, bare and wet in close clipped green grass.

I am so displaced. Yesterday, my 17th Anniversary, was awful. I tried to do the same things with different people. It didn't work. I made dinner, and it was appreciated, but it wasn't the same. I don't think I expected it to be the same, but I thought I would feel the same. I did not. I felt as alienated as I ever have, here, and it only serves to remind me that time takes time. I am so happy. But it seems there is always one area out of kilter in my perfect life. My perfect life. And I look around at my beautiful home, my flowers.... I consider my husband, away at work, day after day while I make this home my own... make his home mine, and I am content. I miss my girlfriends, but, if memory serves, I'd about had it with my social condition. I was already gone. I moved to Portland a year before I got here, and it should come as no surprise that I am isolated. I isolate. I like it like that. I just want it all on my terms. Come here--go away. That's me.

Eulogizing Kim Kinney

My brother was a good man. I think we buried him 17 years ago today. I think this because I'm not really certain. I was, as ever back then, drunk as a dog. I remember what I wore to the wake, a torn but handmade sleeveless cotton blouse that did little to hide my tracks. The celebration was huge. He had quite a following: east coasters, a judge from the Supreme Court of Alaska. I remember this guy particularly because I wouldn't have expected him to become a judge. Jeff. In my family we grew up with a Boston Terrier named Penny who farted like no dog I've known before or since. My brother's friends would visit, and the commentary was predicatable. People who knew that dog still blame her for their flatulence. Many, many years later, Jeff sent us a Christmas card, a shiny photograph of cellophane wrapped peppermint candy. Inside was blank but for this handwritten question: Is Penny dead yet?

Anyway, I digress. My brother, of all of us five, was the best one. Everyone of us liked him best. It was hard not to, the rest of us were such shits. I often think any of the rest of could have died (and now, some have) and it would have been better. He was an architect, designed many buildings along the Sunshine Coast of Canada. He made his own rootbeer, pickles and could play Sweet Georgia Brown on the banjo. I don't think he really got it right, but who cares? The end of his life was the beginning of mine, and for that, I owe his memory my attention, at least one day out of each year.

Tomorrow is 17 years for me. 17 years without the bane of my existence, without the elixer that seemed like life to me. I used to say, "My past is like a mad dog, snapping at my heels, keeping me ever vigilant to the danger I am capable of embracing." Now, I think that's overstating it a bit, but looking back, as I often do on these days, it was a little scary. I certainly couldn't have managed it sober.

Next topic: I sold my bike to Larry and his Green Garden Cart. Once again, calling Larry a gardner may be overstating it a bit, but if you've been paying attention, I'm always overstating stuff. He mows. I put my bike, my single-gear cruiser, in the Thrifties for 125 bucks. Got 120. Paid 189 two years ago, so did well, I think. I'm buying the Aero6 deluxe by KHS. It's a little flashy for me, but the Division street bike shop, 7 corners cycle and fitness, is making me a good deal. It is olive green with buckskin-colored seat and handle bars. Kind of the color of a John Deere tractor, like the windmill out back, if you'll recall. ....Well, Larry's mother, it turns out, called me and arranged to see the bike. You never know who'll answer these things and it's always an adventure to meet new people. A farm couple (you could tell) came waddling up the sidewalk, calling out house numbers as they went. 2587! "Keep going Larry. It might be the next one." I figured it was them so flagged them over. "You interested in my bike?"

She didn't look like she could ride a rocking chair, let alone a bicycle. "Is it for you?" My husband asked her. "Oh my nO, its for the boy." Well, I looked around and couldn't see a boy. Then, the oversized fellow in overalls raised up his head from whatever it was he had been inspecting on the sidewalk and I realized this was not her husband. It was her son, this was "the boy." And this was why they needed a single-geared model. (I have to insert here that selling the only bike I could figure out how to operate to a developmentally delayed person balanced my world for a minute.) Larry does yard work in NE Portland. So, the bike is gone now, and on to the next one. This friday.

We went to April's wedding, a full-fledged stargazing blowout, complete with unity candles, lillies and a relapsed drunk in the wedding party. Memorable. I made a fresh peach pie. I can be nice.

more bikes, shifting gears

I think I've seen them all: Raleighs, KLS or KHS, Trek, Schwinn, you name it. I've been to all the bike shops. One bicycle purist told me the bike I am interested in is little more than efficient walking. It is an UPRIGHT bike, meaning you don't lean into the wind (or rain, as the climate dictates) to ride. You sit up like the Wicked Witch of the East. I've test driven Cruiser after Cruiser. I love the Trek Calypso men's bike. The KHS aero6 is cool too. I like men's bikes over women's. I'm not sure why, but I suppose it has somehthing to do with the fact that I always rode bicycles handed down to my by my older brothers. Girls bikes are for wussies. I'll choose one this weekend. I put my old bike in the Thrifties. Watch for it.

I've never understood gears. I've mentioned this before, I know, but necessity is the mutha.... riding up Division has made a believer out of me. Last night as we rode up to Hawthorne to return a movie, we traded bikes and I finally got it. It was just like algebra: I didn't get it for so long. I took algebra in college because I had to, and because I was still loaded as a rat during most of my classes, I wrote answers on tests like, "X+2= Apples and oranges," and "You can't multiply letters," and, "Tilt." It was the only C in my transcripts, and only then because the instructor appreciated my sense of humor and inability to abstract. But then one day, many years later.... I was visiting a class with a friend and the instructor handed out a pop quiz. I took it. Suddenly, the algebraeic tumblers fell into place and I could do it. The equations seemed like tiny little recipes only when completed, you get numbers and letters instead of a cake. I took that experience with me into the much-feared Statistics, and flew throught it with an A, although I think I took it pass/no pass.

So I rode back from Hawthorne, shifting and gliding all the way. It was so easy, in fact, that I don't think bike riding will do my ass any good at all.

cleansing

It rained last night following a week of heat. For the past several years I've had the luxury of air conditioning, and have passed the time moving from one temperate zone to another: home to office to truck.... We do not have AC. Don't, as a rule, need it. It stays pretty cool around here. But it has been in the low 90's and managing the temperature of the house a challenge. Managing air. Try as I may to trap the cold stuff, corral it like a barnyard animal, it just doesn't keep. There are critical junctures throughout the day. Equinoxes. In the morning, as the outside temperature equalizes with inside, I shut the place down. Pull curtains, close off the upstairs. Then, as the whole place heats up anyway, as the temperatures become close again, I fling open the doors, turn on an upstairs fan and hope the laws of physics continue to hold sway. (heat rises) That's my life.

The hunchback got a haircut. He looks decidedly more male in his slivery pink top and mini skirt. The flamingos are still here, a fixture by now. my flowers are growing and Cooky came to stay with us. There is something about having outside guests that makes it seem less like a dream and more like home. I live here now.

disenchantment: What The *%$@~ Do We Care???

So much disturbs me. So many little ordinary things shift the ground beneath my feet. I want to say at the outset that I don't actually believe in magic. (magik, nowadays, among the newly annointed) I'm not in favor of any particular brand of belief; do, in fact, find belief difficult both to have and to undo, let alone outrun.

That being said, I love the idea of mystery, of not knowing, of being in the dark either literally or figuratively.

So we went to this inane movie last night (What The Bleep Do We Know?). Some people think it is wonderful, inspiring. I'd been hearing about it for some time and had some interest in seeing it. I'll admit it. Shit, I bought the book "The Celestine Prophecy" and hated it for many of the same reasons. It isn't that I'm not glad these movies are made. I am. I think there are people so misguided, so fundamentally asleep, as to make spiritual pablum a social necessity.

This is not to claim even a nodding acquaintance with quantum physics. Seriously. Those guys have figured out stuff most all of us weren't even wondering about. And good for them.

Here's the thing.... I don't care. I know it is probably the height of human arrogance to think we've figured out enough. I think during the age of enlightenment, during the renaissance, during industrialization, there was some bitch sitting around her hand carved dining room table in her mud hut, saying, "Enough, already.Flat, round, who gives a shit?" Well.... that would have been me. I'm happily human, happily stunned to have been allowed another day upright, above ground. I just don't need to know what is going on at the molecular level to be happy.

Not only do I not know what I don't know.... I don't want to know. I don't want my world demystified, disenchanted.

Beyond that, I think they get it WRONG when they take perfectly good information about quantum theory, molecular structure, perfectly good brain chemistry and neurological data and force it into a new age mold with romance, addiction and Marlee Maitlin to spin out a docu-drama so poorly constructed as to rival "Bird on a Wire." What was the point? WE ARE ALL ONE.

Are not are not are not.

You know what was cool, though? It was shot in the Bagdhad Theater, just around the corner, and that's where we watched it. THat, at least, was surprisingly eerie. The rest? Review.

Tits

Went on a bike run yesterday....wind in my hair and all that. Riding down Powell first thing in the morning is a wake-up I will try to describe. I consider biker poetry, and am sure there is some, but leather and words intertwined somehow seems antithetic. Wind blowing through my head is bliss. Takes all those fluttering words-- the ones who play at the windows of my mind, small flightless birds these days, tap tap tapping to be let out (or in) -- and turns them into something less important. Less urgent. Less insistent. And sometimes I fear words have left me for love.

But, in the final analysis, bikers are bikers and tits are tits. It is a stable universe, momentarily. We ended up at Hooters. Hooters girls on tiny little motorcycles, Hooters girls with hula hoops, Hooters girls with push up bras, the foam kind that let anyone look like they have great tits. Great tits used to be an advantage, but no more. With foam bras and implants, I am one of many. These little chicks had their tiny little breasts squeezed so high and tight (as though they weren't high enough... what do we want? Christ.) as to cut off circulation to their head and neck. And I won't walk headfirst into the assumption that nothing is going on above the neck to air out. I'm sure they're laughing all the way to the bank.

The ride was beautiful. Miles of winding road, fresh-cut hay, new construction, traffic, all the things that make a country road refreshing. We remained apart from the pack with brief exceptions at gathering places. It was a poker run. We picked up a card at each of 5 locations to make a poker hand, then followed complex directions in large print to the next site. My first card was an ace, but from then on it was downhill. Husband got two aces. We didn't stay long enough to see who won. We were just along for the ride, literally, and, of course, the hooters.

eastside sunrise

The room is bright, morning light slanting across rows of bent metal folding chairs. Little padding. Those who show up early sit with their backs to the window. Late sleepers get the other side, and those who have been there before bring sunglasses. The coffee isn't bad, really. It is too early for me to listen, but I sit, an act of obedience by now. Familiar words drift in and out of my streaming thoughts. "...made a list of all the people we had harmed..." I fidget, consider writing a list, dig through my purse for pen and paper, disruptive. Half and half, I write. Hooks for the bathroom door. Cheddar. Canned food for the prodigal cat. "I've always been more like broken glass." A woman's voice penetrates my domestic fog. "...born without sandpaper." I consider her. An aging hooker, hair too long, still wet from an early shower, clothing too tight, too bright, sexier than she is. Sharp edges, I think. Yes. A drunk life. There's her sandpaper -- and mine. We sit in the chairs, day after day, an hour at a time. Medicine for what ails us. Sandpaper for our rough edges.

birthday

It's my big day. One of two. This is not the one I celebrate with any vigor. My sweetie gave me a huge bottle of my favorite perfume, and I am happy. Perfume, flowers, jewels. The three gift categories that work for me. As I got in my truck and looked into the sun, I saw the silhouette of a squirrel as it dashed across the phone lines above me. Today I will try to find stone supports for my bench top. It is a huge slab of basalt complete with fossils and butt imprints. I wish I could find matching basalt crystals, the kind that you see along the Columbia Gorge east of here. I could go there, I suppose. Since I live here and all.

monday monday

We buried Richard yesterday. Sent him down the river. John Barleycorn takes another one. At all of the funerals, it is often a gathering to see who's left and to guess at who's next. Very few Applegate valley men remain. They played too long at a game we all lost. It is curious to me that at every gathering, every memorial, every wake, someone says, "We've got to stop meeting like this." But it is at this time of life, the middle, that these are the only reasons we meet. We don't get together for coffee, we don't make time for old acquaintances. We see each other at these moments, these transitions, where we stand around and dump some old drunk's ashes in the river, against the law, against the weeping old mother's wishes, and somebody always comments on the speed at which the ashes move through the water on the journey away from us.

I don't know why I go. I guess it is to see the ghosts, the ones who are still standing, who have stayed the course, kept the party going long after it ended. I need to see them, to remind myself of where I would be. There was one particular ghost there -- a mean one, a bad memory -- and he finally worked up the nerve to approach me after several beers. "I thought you'd be a hag by now," he said. I didn't answer. "Instead, you look 30 years younger than the rest of us." I think what is difficult about being someone's victim is seeing them again after so long. I smiled and talked to him as though he'd never raped me at all.

I remember several years ago when I saw another ghost, a nicer one, Crazy Billy at McKee Bridge one morning. It was early spring, the sun breaking over the ridge behind me, the air chilled with the nearness of passing winter. Billy crawled out from under a blue plastic sleeping bag in the back of an open pickup bed. "Where's the party?" he asked me. "Party's over, Billy. I been clean a couple of years now." He said, "yeah, me too, pretty much." I'd heard he was dead -- OD'd in LA. It wasn't quite true. Nearly.

So, that was a quick trip back to the southlands.

On Saturday, we took a fishing boat thirty miles out into the ocean out of Newport. We each caught a halibut. If you've never done that, its kind of fun. But the thing is that they are 600 feet down, laying on the bottom of the ocean. Reeling up 600 feet of line takes awhile. I got the first one. their bellies are white and the other side is camouflage. They look like flat round hunters without guns. I remember asking my brother, a fisherman turned basketweaver, if he was ever afraid when he was out to sea. "You deal with that before you get on the boat. LIve or die, he said. I found that was true. For all my trepidation prior to boarding, I was never afraid. I was out there, thirty miles from shore, catching sharks on fishing poles, porpoises racing the bow of the boat as we sped for home, and I hung over the edge like the most natural thing in the world. My father was a sailor. He would have been proud.

Some ghosts:
Mark Fossen
John Who
Michael Topar
Ken Powers
Ed Gregory
Richard Bohannon
Sherman Butler
Marc Kinney

rain gears

Coming up with a title for this stuff is becoming a preoccupation with me. I should be working. I am now gainfully employed again, and lazy as ever. I want to write about bicycles, but there is so much more to it.... I bought a bobo bicycle a couple of years ago: an new old-style single gear cruiser that worked well on the roads of talent. And that, by the way, is an issue here. All the people I sit with in meetings have lived "on the streets." They "come from the streets." This is heavy shit. Me? I come from the roads. I lived on the roads. See? It just doesn't carry the same weight.

Anyhow.... My bike flew, usually under cover of darkness, down the roads (well, one road) of Talent, effortlessly, or relatively so. But pedalling up Division is a fucking bitch. (Did I say that in my outloud voice?) The thing is.... I've never been able to figure out the whole shifting thing about bicycles. Its a walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time issue. Keep pedalling while you shift!! Don't stop pedalling or the chain will jump off the gears!!! It scares me, so when the cruiser craze hit, I happily paid way too much for a like-old bike rather than risk looking stupid (or fast) on a mid-grade street bike.

(I'm baking a chocolate cake for my sweetie. I slammed the oven door which it occurs to me is the psychological equivalent of yelling at the cake. I hope there is no long term damage.)

Anyway, now that I'm a city girl -- actually a displaced small town girl -- I need gears. I pause at intersections and fall over because I can't free-wheel, and I have to place the pedal just so for take off or I end up braking rather than accellerating. Very inconvenient. My woes have resulted in a city wide hunt for the perfect cruiser-plus a few gears. Just a few. I have to have a boulevard cruiser, though. Will I never learn? But they are so pretty. I can't stand the silvery sleek bikes. The modern rockets. I want a red raleigh cruiser, maybe. Schwinn has a beautiful cruiser. Or a trek calypso. Turquoise and cream. Goes with my hair. (Not the turquoise, of course.) So, I've narrowed it down, and will put a for sale sign on my single geared model and stick it out on Hawthorne. It's a Torker Boardwalk. Nothing fancy. It'll sell. But that's me... remember my yard sale? I recall admitting to complete ignorance about what other people want or will buy. This time will be different, I'm certain of it.

At any rate, the rain part of the title is about acceptance. I live in a rainy town. Back home I used to wait for the perfect 70 degree day. There were usually about three a year. Now, I have nothing but 70 degrees day after day, but also a little rain to keep it that way. So I wait and wait for a dry day to ride. I sensed a pattern in my behavior (inaction) and corrected it this morning. I rode to a morning meeting in the drizzle. It was cool on my face as I coasted downhill to the place. Going home? Uphill, as you might imagine. Steep and wet wet wet. I am here.

bitchy lamas and big sand

You never really know. I was delighted to see my monk/lama fall a little way from his perch. I put him there, afterall. My pedestal. Many have fallen from it over the years. I've pushed a few. But it was great to hear him tell us that he complained to another monk about how the dali lama is mis-handling world peace. He got busted doing it-- was overheard during the bitch-session at a lama convention. I love that. I love that lamas bitch at and about each other.

Well, we went clamming over the weekend and they were picked over like late season raspberries. We got enough to fry up a batch and make some chowder, but we didn't limit out, and they were small. I wasn't ashamed about it, afterall, I'm in it for the thrill of the hunt. I don't really care how many we get. I hate cleaning the slimy things anyway. And my boots leaked. My hip waders need a coating of shoogoo. Magic. You'd have to see me in my hip waders and my heidi hat to get the full effect. Out there among the Columbia sportswear/Eddie Bauer crowd, smacking wet sand with a shovel and looking for the tell, the little burp of sand that gives away the clam hiding place. We are not purists, we go after them with a clam gun (we don't shoot them. I don't know why its called a gun at all) instead of the classic shovel. I am a rebel, though. If I get a little one, I put him back in his hole if I haven't squished him in the process. But I do follow the sportsmen's code: if I kill it I keep it.

Speaking of tourists.... we wandered down the coast to Cannon Beach to the Sand Castle competition. It was okay. One team had won time after time, and they were professional -- many trophy flags flying above their site. But I liked the locals who did the melted witch from the wizard of oz. A broomstick clutched in a disembodied hand with a cone and partial brim of her hat nearby. Subtlety. There were dragons, of course, and a few actual castles. I wonder who won. We didn't stay.

back to work

Oh god. I've been on vacation for two months to the day. No, wait. Two months and a week. Two months, a week, and a half. I've lost track of time, which was my goal, so am feeling fairly successful. What is it about vacation anyway? When I take time off, it is my goal to seek oblivion in safer ways, non-life-threatening ways, but above all, to lose sight of the clock. And then, returning to work, they ask the inevitable question: What did you do? "Nothing. I did nothing on purpose. I had nothing planned. I planned to do nothing and did it." It isn't true, of course. During my time off, I've gotten married, changed my name, killed all manner of aquatic life and eaten them whole, painted the inside of a big house, packed, moved, unpacked, quit my job, and now, am starting a new one. I saw Van Helsing, the single worst movie to date. I've met the dali lama of Newberg, and you thought it was a Quaker town. My new job doesn't seem like a real job. It's marketing. Not the calling-people-at-dinner-time kind of marketing. Not reading from a script, paid by the word depending on how long I can keep 'em on the line. No. This is face to face telling. It goes against my grain, but I've done worse things for less money. I've done worse things for free. Shit, I've PAID to do worse. YOu get the drift.

I painted the living room a color my beloved calls "coffee with cream." He indulges me with his observations. He could give a shit less what color it is. He concerns himself with things I never think about, such as: will the paint stick to the wall? and Can we afford it? Tripe. Minutae. I was tearing off wallpaper and made a fabulous discovery. I am so excited about it. Beneath the antique paper (there was bad taste as far back as 1911) I uncovered an old plaster wall. I know I've complained about the lath and plaster, but this seems to be all plaster. I'm not going to paint over it. I'm going to decorate it. I can decorate anything. Ask anyone.

rockets and terrorism

I was talking with my sister in law today. She's a rocketeer. She has a pretty good time with it. She and her husband were just on the front page of the Living section of the Oregonian, and it isn't the first time she's made the paper about rockets. They were suspected of terrorism a year or so ago, in the wilds of middle Oregon, out in the desert near Bend. They sell rocket motors for fellow enthusiasts, and the ATF wasn't wild about the competition, I guess. I really don't know much about it: the ATF, their concerns, or Jane's rockets, or anything else, really.... but there they were, in the paper again. Apparently since the ATF became concerned, all kinds of interest in rocketeering has been generated. Kind of a draw for yuppie civil near-disobedience. They probably aren't really even yuppies... too young. But never the less, the disobedience is appealing. The build rockets some 5 and 6 feet long, with motors, directional gear and parachutes to guide them safely back to Bend. It is complicated. The rockets are painted with metallic paint, tattooed with decals of any sort, and I think they lose a few to the elements and distance. Blowing shit up.... I guess its one way to pass the time. Me? I like to go to the dump and break glass.

yards

We are making a back yard. We (he) pulled out a huge hedge, twenty feet high by thirty feet long, and now it is laying in the neighbor's backyard. It was mostly his hedge anyway, turns out. Redrawing the property lines, we discovered that the old fence gives us probably ten feet we shouldn't have but are happy to take. The fence has been there since dirt, since God, and that counts for something. Even in the backyard neighbor's mind. So, we tore out the hedge, pulled out the stumps, and are debating how to dispose of the schoolbus sized load of shit that resulted from my good idea: hey, honey... wouldn't it be nice to have a little more light and room? So, the wake of my gardening, a neighborhood manifest destiny: we'll take it all-- one yard at a time.

So, we (I) raked it smooth and seeded it. And he doesn't believe it will grow. I think mostly because of bad behavior in his/our former lives, he thinks the seeds won't take, thinks the laws of nature/physics will be suspended to maintain karmic justice. I just tell him water water water. Karma be damned. But Portland is self-watering. No need to worry. It just pours.

changing my name

Bureaucracy. Social Security lives to feed itself -- has nothing to do with the well- being of those it claims to serve.

Here's how it went. I got married, as you all know, and wanted to change my name. I've had the old one a long time, and I figure leaving it all behind means leaving all my names, pseudonyms and aliases as well. Marriage seems so legitimate, but in Portland Oregon, in the spring of 2004, it isn't that simple. I've worked around bureaucracies most of my adult life, and I know some things, like: bring a book and plan to spend the day. I know: bring I.D. get there early and grab a number. I know: sit alone and don't make eye contact. I know: If you appear to be in a hurry, the federal gods know it like dogs know fear and the whole process become as snarled as a 100 foot extension cord. I swear I walked in as zen as Ashland. Even the security guard smiled at me. I showed my ID, I took a number. I was first in line, for chrissake. FIRST. My number was 37, but I was first. I sat, I waited, my number was called. And I think where I went wrong was where I usually go wrong. Arrogance. I thought I had it wired. And I don't know why I feel compelled to relay this information to the cosmos of blog-world, but here goes.

Changing My Name. A play in four acts.

ACT I


the guy at the bullet proof window says: Do you have your old social security card?
I say: No. (oversight #1)
Do you have ID with your old name on it?
Yes (I yank out my Driver's license)
Okay, fine. Why are you changing your name?
I got married.
Oh, congratulations.
Smile, nod.
Do you have your marriage certificate?
Yes I do. (arrogance: you bet I do, buddy. Do you think I'd come all this way without it? I am so ready for this....)
Hmmm. Let's see. No, I'm sorry. This won't work.
Huh?
This document. It isn't valid as identification.
Huh?
This was issued between the dates of April 20 and May whatever.
Huh?
You see, this license was issued duing the time gay marriages were being performed and so it isn't valid.
Huh? But I'm not gay.
Yes. Than doesn't matter.
Matters to me motherfucker. (I didn't really say that last thing.) Okay. (I take a breath, regain some of the zen composure I walked in with.) Okay, I'm confused. (That's what enlightened people say instead of "bullshit.")
He says: Yes. I'm sorry. Do you have other ID?
Other than my driver's license?
Yes. It has to be something with your new name on it.
But... (I struggle here) I am here to CHANGE my name. I don't have anything with my new name on it because MY NAME HAS NOT BEEN CHANGED. (you fucking idiot.... as composure slips between my fingers, off my lap and pools on the floor next to me.) Tell me what I need to do.
You need to get something with your new name on it.
(No shit.)
Like a health insurance card or your driver's license.
If you won't change it, why would DMV?
Sometimes they do.
Just sometimes? (I'm picking a fight. I'm prone to this.)
He goes on to cover his ass by saying he can't promise anything, like THAT matters.
I leave.

ACT II

I go to DMV and the guy gives me a new license with very little trouble. The picture is shitty, but that's nothing new. I surrender my old license like a lost battle, and I ask him about the difference between Federal and state law and the marriage certificate. He tells me the governor is his boss and all he has to do is look at the certificate and see that an M and F box are checked. Not two of the same one. See?

ACT III

My husband comes home from work. "Look honey, your name is on the new insurance card!!!" Yippee. I'm covered. I have two pieces of ID with my new name on it.

ACT IV

Back to SS office. This time I'm more confident than ever. (slow learner) I have my original SS card and 2 (count 'em) pieces of ID, fresh off the printer. I'm not first in line, but that's okay. This will be a breeze.

Do you have your original SS card?
Yes. Yes I do. Right here.
Okay. You know that isn't useable as identification.
Oh, God. (my resolve dissipates.)
Do you have any identification with your new name?
Yes. I do. (I perk up)
Okay, fine. Now, I need something wiht your old name on it.
This is very bad. I've surrendered the old license. Have nothing else. I should have known better than to give it up. Never surrender. Who said that? I point feebly to the SS card.
She shakes her head.
I consider my options and tell her: I had these things in my old name, really, just last week, but the guy sitting in that chair told me to get them in my new name.
I'm sorry, I guess he wasn't thinking.
(ya think?)
Do you have the marriage certificate?
(Now, I'm smart enough not to go down that road again.) No, I tell her. It was issued during the April 20 dates.
She nods like that makes perfect sense.
I don't know what to do, I tell her.
Did you graduate from High school? Do you have a diploma?
Oh, shit yeah. I've graduated from so many fucking things you wouldn't even believe how smart I am.
Get that. She says.

And so I did. I drove home, grabbed all of my various degrees and marched back into that Social Security office like a terrorist.

Okay. so my name is changed, but I am not.

grass

We just put in a new back lawn. I've done it before and it brings back some memories for me of the old days. The strangest things will give rise to the ghosts, so many, so varied. It is during gardening events that I recall the aborted attempts of my early days. I mostly remember trying to blame grass seed for not growing when truth was that I didn't water it. My sweetie, my husband of three weeks, asked if I knew what I was doing (as I was spreading the seed). Sure. I always know what I'm doing. I've done it wrong so many times that by sheer process of elimination I get it right from time to time. What I know about grass seed is this: it grows if you water it. Now, if you plant grass seed in July, water it for three days running, then you decide its a good idea to shoot heroin and drink whiskey for three days and don't see the light of day and then, on the third day of 105 weather, you peek your head out the door and little brown whiskers are covering your lawn, it ain't the seed.

ghosts

There are so many. Once last winter, three ghosts showed up in the same room with me and it was too much. I remember waking up with all of them, but have no memory of laying down with any of them at all. Anyway, one of them just died. One of my ghosts. I'll dedicate a poem here for him:

Ruch (for Richard)

It's a church now
the whole thing
the whole town
even the bar
where we used to sleep on pool tables with strangers

a church.

The outside wall is still different
where Richard Bohannon tried to drive his truck through it
before he lost his license
and his mind
The wood is newer in that one spot
and you can tell if you know what to look for
but I don't think they do
the Christians

They serve coffee
and I suppose it's strong enough
in its own way
but we were stronger
it took alot of faith to be us
And every night was New Year's Eve
every morning cluttered with sacred resolutions
broken by noon

And we were all saved
by a grace I am only beginning to understand
and God was always there
in Ruch.

cheesy yard art and dali lama(s)

My husband brought home some more cheesy yard art. This one is a six foot tall windmill, metal, john deere green and yellow. It was in about a thousand pieces and it took him all evening and the entire slang dictionary to complete. The really pathetic thing is that I've always liked them. Always, in fact, wanted one. I am white trash. I give up. Pink flamingos and now a windmill. I don't think its a windmill, actually. It isn't like the Don Quixote ones with crossed arms and tulips. Its more industrial, with a pinwheel and a tail on top. LIke a shooting star only not. The flamingos are still in the yard. It was my bold idea to place them there and wait for them to walk off in the drunken night. But maybe drunks have changed. Maybe their taste in stealable, or moveable objects, has changed. I know when I was drunk, I stole anything that wasn't nailed down. One time I robbed Joyce Martin's house drunk on Yukon Jack. I didn't know it was Joyce's house. I'd never liked her that much, but wouldn't have robbed her on purpose. But there I was, robbing this house and the phone rang. I answered it. This is not usually done during robberies in case you didn't know. I answered the phone and identified myself. "what are you doing there?" she asked. A fair question. I told her, in my Yukon blur, that I was robbing her, but I justified my actions by assuring her I didn't know it was her place and I promised to put everything back. And I did, everything but a brass rooster. I don't know why. It seemed so valuable. Like the flamingos. I'd steal them in a minute.

There is a place I go, a place of like minded people sitting around talking about their commom malady, and it seems to me that wherever I end up (new town), there is a lama among them. I do not aspire to the position. Rather am content to sit at their feet and soak up the off-handed wisdom. Where I used to be, the lama's name was Don. Then Don died and Jack showed up. Simple men, utterly unaware of their lama-hood. They are usually men although I'm not certain this is a requirement. This one's name is Martin. He's a monk. A storyteller. He said, "If I was God, I'd like us.I'd want to sit with us." He didn't say, "I think God likes us." Big difference. He wasn't speaking for God as so many do. -- It was my husband's first anniversary last night, and Martin gave us a loaf of homemade raisin bread. Made by the monks. It is heavy, a good five pounds. I'm sure it is wonderful, although I don't eat carbs and I think any lama worth his salt would know that. But then again it wasn't my birthday. In fact it had nothing to do with me. At any rate, after the meeting Martin said, "come with me." So I followed him out to his car. Now, most of the time at these meetings, you wouldn't just do that. If some guy said "come with me" a respectable married lady like myself would nicely say "fuck off buddy" but I just followed the lama out there like a puppy.

It is good to begin to know faces and names, to be one of many. I am less a stranger in a strange land every day.

Cars

Married now. Yippie. I wore the little blue dress with sequined flip-flops, hair up. He wore Carhartts and denim. Its a little intimidating, and terribly inconvenient to sign things. My name is different, and yet it has not changed bureaucratically. What name do I sign? But it is an amazing thing to have created this marriage, this relationship, this thing that I was so sure was running off the tracks for so many years.

We fish.

So, there I was, in the parking lot at Freddy's, and this car was parked nearby. If you live in portland and are reading this, I'm sure you've seen the car: Extremo the Clown. Looks to have been around for a good long time. I'll try to describe it. It may be complete... it may be a work in progress. It looks heavy is all I can say. No, I can say more, I'm sure of it. It is a collage of old toys: dolls heads, I can't remember what all.... fenders coated with small things, pasted here and there, all appearing very secure and permanent. Atop it all is a big, really very big, hindu sort of head staring backward into traffic as though blessing or condemning following vehicles. Actually, it comes to me now that it is alot like one of those things they call arts and crafts, those pieces they send home from vacation bible school, piles of gold spray painted macaroni elbows and pinwheels and letters. It is gold. Or was gold. Its kind of gold mud now. I don't think it would fare too well in a carwash. But when the guy came out of the store to get in the car, he was just a regular, beer-bellied oregonian until he turned around. He wore a red nose and smiled at me. On the side of the car a ragged piece of fabric hung from the passenger door:

Extremo for president. I'm all for it.

I remember one time when my son was staying with his father, he made a plate of gold spray painted spaghetti. As I pulled up in my 73 station wagon to rescue him, he ran out to show me his artwork. The woman my ex was living with dashed out of the house and reminded him that he had promised it to her.

Now I know how hard it is to be a step parent. Or I am beginning to see. I let her have the macaroni then, and would again.

bus ettiquette

There is alot to know when riding a city bus, and plenty of mentally ill people to show the way. I've been taking the 4. It's called the 4. It's the one that goes up and down Division and into downtown. It is refreshing to report that the 4 never accidentally drives onto a freeway or winds up at the airport. The ease of the bus system is appealing. No parking to deal with, and on a beautiful spring day, cruising around on foot in downtown is fun. So much to see. But the strange thing is the social customs of bus riding. You are not expected, for instance, to speak to anyone. Are, in fact, expected not to speak. And the seats are narrow at best, narrower than my ass, and the people who sit next to you, sit next to you. And you don't talk. A tiny little man sat by me today. I wasn't so self conscious as my first time, when I clutched my purse and bags for fear a mugger would steal my new sweater. This time, a manic man was in the front of the bus. (The mentally ill stick to the front, from all appearances.) He was jabbering away, unlike us normal folks who say nothing and act as though it were a normal occurance. When the nut got off the bus, the tiny man next to me said, "Get a few more beers in him and he'd never shut up." I just told the guy I kinda thought he didn't operate on alcohol, had his own internal battery driving the train. bus. what have you. Anyway, the conversation initiated, I took it from there. I commented how odd I thought it was that we sit, literally almost, in one another's laps, and don't speak, and if we do speak, we're insane. or drunk. Well, I'm talking. I don't care. I'm sure after a million portland years I'll be silenced by the experiences of the city, but for now, I'm taking my small town manners with me.

Last night we went on a bike ride on our new bikes. We lay in the field at the school, and looked up at the stars, barely visible at 9:00. It's the light of the city, he told me. It doesn't get as dark here. You can't see the night. And it is true. I'm accustomed now to being in our neighborhood, and don't venture into town much at all. It's easy to believe I'm not living in a huge metropolis. It's easy to believe that nothing much has changed.

But it has. My name will change on Saturday, and I can't figure out what to wear.

Vows. I do.... I do too.... that's all we want to say. He says, "For the rest of my life, I choose you." I say, "me too." Me, the writer, speechless in the face of committment. Oh well.

Yard Saling

600 dollar day. What I know is this: you can never tell what other people will buy. I think most of it is shit, and my few treasures sit out there, glaring bright as rubies in sand, and the masses walk on by. The process I go through to finally place my treasures in plain view, pearls before swine, available to just anyone for a mere fraction of the original cost, is pathetic. It'll be the first to go, I tell myself.. I'll regret it forever, the voices assure me. I'll never find another (lampshade, oil and vinegar set, cape cod curtains...) Yet there they sit, among the refuse of leftover pharmacy salesmen coffee cups and obsolete computer manuals. After a few yard sales, you'd think I'd get the hang of it. You'd think I'd just toss the best of the best to the tasteless wolves that get up at six when an eight o'clock start is published in the paper, the faceless hordes who would rather have window pane widgets than an arts and crafts style headboard. Fuck them. And thanks for the money.

Learning Portland: phase two. I know I said earlier that all roads eventually turn into freeways up here, but that isn't entirely true, as is little of the crap I finally get around to documenting. So far, those roads that do not turn into freeways eventually take you to the airport, and the way you can tell you're at the airport is that the street signs are blue instead of green. I still haven't figured out where exactly the airport begins and the rest of the world ends, but I'm working on it. I'll keep you posted.

I am settling in, and am still in some phase of disbelief about my altered state. Better day by day.

lily of the valley

Would the plural be lilies of the valley, or lily of the valleys? Anyway, they are coming up through the sidewalks, piercing the ground, perfect green spirals unfolding in their own sweet time. Tiny white bells gave them away. I thought they were hostas. I thought I knew so much about gardening. It is a wet new world, where I don't have to leave the sprinkler on overnight or it will flood the basement. I am growing apricot begonias, three kinds of fuscias, and the lily plantation is on its own. I will try tomatoes.... I will I will I will.

Today, I missed my girlfriends for the first time. I don't know anyone really, don't make friends easily, and am cautious (Kelly says skeptical.) I am still unpacking. I shouldn't expect a full adjustment after one week. Anyway, I think new friendships at this time of life (mid way) are rare. I'll keep the ones I have, use my phone, and go to meetings anyway.

easter and eggs

Last night we wanted to watch something appropriate to Easter, and since the Passion of the Christ isn't out on video, we chose the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both horror flicks. Couldn't hang. We made it about twenty minutes and I was nauseous. I won't bore the few of you who follow this with a sociological diatribe on the effects of media violence, but I'll just say that those who think american violence is a mystery should rent that movie. It'll clear things right up. Now, some of you might chastise me and remind me that I did, after all, rent the damn thing; that I did, after all, exert my own free american will, which I debate, is not free, that there is no such thing as free will, that we are all a soup of hormones and upbringing and have so little to say about how it all goes that it is laughable to have words like "choice" in our vocabularies. Anyway, there I go....

I just want to say that I love any good reason for new underwear, and lace the color of easter eggs. That's what I really wanted to write about. Damn....

squirrel on a wire

There I was, sitting on my front porch, when a small brown squirrel cruised by on the telephone/electric wires in front of the house. I've seen birds on wires, of course, but never a squirrel. I knew we had squirrels in the neighborhood because the dog used to chase them obsessively. Maybe that's what drove them to the high-wire: fear of manic pitbulls (is that redundant?) Never a dull moment here on Clinton Street. OH!!! I had my first encounter with the hunchback. He (I am now fairly certain he is male) stopped by the driveway as I was unloading boxes and asked for cans. I gave him a few and told him I'd have more as I unpacked. He asked if I was moving. I said I was, and he told me he'd miss me. Well, I didn't think it was necessary to tell him we'd never met, but I did say (yelled), "No, I'm moving in." He's deaf, turns out. So many obstacles. I would have loved to maintain the mystery and fear the hunchback like the kids do, but he's not very scary. But then, I'm not a bus driver.

I've made some observations, mostly related to finding my way around.... For instance, in case you didn't know it, 82nd street turns into a freeway. There you are, just cruising down the road looking for the grocery store (Winco -- God I hate Winco.... more later about that) and suddenly, things are looking suspiciously like a freeway. Now, where I come from, you just can't accidentally find yourself on the freeway. There are signs and markings, flashing signals and idiot prevention devices all over the place. No ambiguity about it. Not so here. Suddenly, I was headed for Pendleton... not somewhere I want to go, again. I won't talk about my 17th summer or the "Let 'er Buck" room where you get a free t-shirt if you take yours off. Also, in Portland, there are crop circles in the middle of many streets, meant to slow traffic. This is what they seem like to me. I am just reporting my observations, remember. I'm sure there is a name for them. I just know that if there were no trees, a bird's eye view would look like crop circles. Some are larger than others. Ladd's addition is a particularly annoying one. I asked a rhetorical question at a meeting the other day: What is up with Ladd's Addition, anyway??? Who's idea was that? So this woman approaches me after the meeting and very earnestly explains to me it is a european concept meant to encourage a sense of community, which, she assured me, it does. I just get lost. But as I've learned, all roads lead to Mecca. You can get anywhere from anywhere if you have enough gas and a car that runs. So getting lost is just one way of figuring it out. My beloved suggest that I note the rising of the sun, determine east from west, north from south, and be a man about it. He cannot be as caustic as I am, but he tries, bless his heart. For my money, fuck the four directions... I just want to know where Linens and Things is.

Anyway, I'm decorating like mad.

daybreak

Its the buttcrack of dawn and here I am, plucking away at the keys. Getting my bearings. The house is coming together, slowly, and I consider materialism. I considered it when I was packing, but it meant something else then. My stuff becomes our stuff. It is a slow process, like roasting or stewing. As the days pass (4 now) and this place becomes a combination of he and I, we adjust to the process of release and acquisition that is the essence of blending lives. I get a basement, he gets new towels. I give up twenty-seven bed pillows, he considers the possibility that there actually may be a limit to how many weedeaters one guy needs. The lawn is small. It doesn't feel like winning or losing anymore. It is not a contest of wills. It is no longer about what do we want, but what do we use? What has real value? Constructing one life out of two, one home out of two, and all of the memories that go along with it. I have mine: my son's first grade projects, the mother's day cards he made for me that I was too loaded to remember, or maybe it's just that time has passed and I've forgotten. I need to get a picture of him up so he is part of this. I bought him an easter card yesterday, and will mail it today along with some jelly bellies. I will be his mother from a distance, I don't care if he's forty.

April

This is hard. Oh, I'm sure there will be time to write soon................

rain and unemployment

Yesterday was a record high. Rain today. I'm up early and finding this is probably my time to write. Nicole is still in bed, man gone to man work, and I'm tripping around the house, putting things in an order that makes sense to me.

Yesterday I applied for unemployment. That act alone was such a throwback to my youth I felt like I was in a time warp. I recall one particular stint on the dole when I was in my second or tenth extension of benefits and was required to attend a class on creating a resume and living through a job interview. As was my custom, I'd been up for three or four days and feeling somewhat transparent. My ability to fill out forms was impaired, but nothing compared to what happened when they turned the cameras on to record the interview process for my edification. I may have been just a teensy bit paranoid. "You need to make eye contact with the interviewer," came the review. Probably true. I couldn't look myself in the eye, let alone a stranger holding my life in the balance. The film was bad. Jittery. A neurological answer to the question: how long can you stay awake? Today, having slept well (for the past many years), eaten something and having less guilt about my situation, a late 50's longhair sidled up to me at the slick formica tables and gave me a tip: "unenjoyment." One word. I'm sure he though that said it all. I was nearly compelled to turn to him and come back with "unentitlement." But it didn't rhyme and I was on foot. On foot in the big city, asking for directions I can barely follow. So, I ignored him. If I've learned one thing in twenty-some-odd years of mental healthcare, it is this: never make eye contact with the mentally ill. He qualified. So, I filled out the papers, stuffed them in the drop box and wandered off to the engraver to get my ring engraved. I am learning my way around, one business at a time.

We began cutting down the back hedge. Why is it that these projects start out seeming do-able, but once the chainsaw is running, the hedge behind the hedge becomes apparent and what was a couple of loads becomes ten loads? Lotsa work. The back yard will double in size and I will plant shit like crazy.

Clinton Street

It is a walking neighborhood, Clinton Street. Everyone is out and about, yuppie parents walking their children to school, spiky goth kids those who are not kids anymore out in the light of day, pale skin screaming for the vitamin D of sunshine. And the sun is out this morning, gardens resurrected by the light, mounds of lobelia cascading down rock walls, snowcap and creeping rosemary competing to fill space. The azaleas are blooming. I am contributing to the circus of color, waiting now for the hostas to pierce their way to a perfect green and white unfolding. Down south, I always planted hostas, but the relentless heat and my laziness-- inattention really--was a deadly combination. My yard was too sunny. I was meant to garden here.

The Clinton Street hunchback is a creature of some note. He/she wanders the neighborhood with a shopping cart, collecting cans. Cans, I think, he uses to purchase shiny clothes. I can't tell if the hunchback is a man or a woman. He wears his hair in a bun, and has a few days growth of beard. He wears women's clothing, but not exclusively. His taste is reflective of the disco era, which, I am happy to say, is behind us. The deformity, the hunch, is considerable, but he does have a certain charm. He asks politely for cans, but cusses out bus drivers like a sailor. The girls are afraid of him. If I was him, I'd be afraid of Nicole. She's mean.

unhooked

My laptop died. Some tech managed to save it, but I had to leave it when I left my job anyway. So I've been at a disadvanage, blog-wise. I'm back. In Portland. I moved my stuff up here yesterday... my personal shit... a truckload of clothes and my bike. We still have to go back down there and load the big truck and get out of dodge. I had a bridal shower and got pink flamingos. Cheesy yard art -- that's me. On Clinton Street, if you leave anything in the yard after dark, they think its a yard sale, so I'm not sure about placement of my new animals. Maybe I'll have better luck taking care of them than I have had with Bailey and Watson and the long line of neglected animals in my life. All I can say is that I'm better than I used to be. I feed them. The flamingos, so far, aren't demanding, but then, they aren't out of the box yet. There are two of them, and I'm sure they'll get together and come up with ideas to make my life harder.

yard sale day

It was the first hot day here in Southern Oregon. I made about 250 bucks in a couple of hours. My neighbors bought my shit. Thanks to one and all. My observations of the day: the men show up first. They know what they want, sports equipment, fishing gear, tools. Not many of them want to shop. There are the junkies, the master buyers, always acting naive and surprised at the relative value I place on garbage. I tell them I price it for what I'd pay if I was in a good mood. If they want it, they pay. They're always after my patio chairs, metal, forties style bouncers. I love them and would not sell them to anyone. They may rust in Portland. Then the women show up.... they look, and buy less, generally, than the men. I got three fairly serious offers on my house. They actually wanted to buy the yard. The dog goes with it, I reminded them.

The collie lady showed up, the collie rescue lady. Did I mention her before? Oh, major oversight. When I was trying to find a home for Bailey, you may or may not remember, I called the pound. They gave me the number for collie rescue. Well, this bitch calls me back and asks me if Bailey has had all his shots and whether or not he has been groomed recently. "So, you only rescue well-groomed animals?" I wanted to ask. I told her he had been groomed and she asked about his nails. claws. paws. whatever... I was annoyed. She promised to consider rescuing him. I wondered, then, at her background, the improbability that she was in any other way acquainted with the term rescue. Talk about placing help line on hold. Anyway, Bailey is staying here. The tenants are keeping him. fine. Well, the collie lady showed up and wanted to dispute the tenant's ability to keep the dog. "They'll move" she assured me. Yes, I suppose they will. She claimed to know a nice woman with a farm that would see to him, keep him in a kennel, far from harm. I'm sure his nails will be done regularly, but I just think he'll be happier at home. It creeped me out that she knew where I lived. I didn't tell her. She knew because for years she has been walking by my house, stalking my dog, and when I called for a rescue, she acted like she didn't know who I even was. I certainly didn't know I was talking to my neighbor. Maybe someone will build a kennel for her.

One of the items for sale that created the most interest was the navajo treasure. It is, or was, a two-foot tall clay structure of unknown origin. Looked to me like it had been created during a seventh grade pottery class. It had a blue design baked into it, geometric. I don't know where it came from or how I got it.

Now that the garage sale is over, I am closer than ever to moving. Today was hard. I got rid of the red chair. Jan bought it. There is comfort in that, the first concession of my married life.

yard sale

I'm advertising right here in the hopes that my limited, local audience will show up and buy my shit. And shit it is. It's remarkable what I'm willing to hang onto, and, under the right circumstances, release to the next life. I hired a junk man to haul off whatever doesn't sell. I am not in a sentimental mood... I am setting aside things I don't love. But here's the thing... I'm getting rid of the red wine chair. It is named that because it has had more wine spilled on it than drunk in it. It's an old chair, overstuffed, maroon velvet where it isn't worn slick. Stuffed with horsehair, upholstery nailed with hundreds of brass tacks. There is a band of oak beneath the arms, and carved oak feet. Cooky and I were stopping by the goodwill box by my house in Central Point to steal a wheelchair for a needy friend. We were wearing nurse's uniforms, and thought it would be a perfect Farside cartoon: "When nurses go bad." I saw it first, yelled "Dibs" as is the custom in my family, and forever after there has been lingering discontent on Cooky's part that she deserved it. I don't think so. So, we loaded up the loot and hauled it home. That chair has been in my house ever since. That was at least 20 years ago, and it was old then. It's really fallen apart now. Thick string stitching the welt around the seat pillows is coming undone, my son Mark contributed some additional carving around the base. He's never respected that chair. He'll be delighted to see it go. The springs -- and these are some burly fucking springs -- are sprung. There is no hope. The chair represents many "one of these days" items. One of these days I'll: refinish, paint, upholster, mend.... It truly is the end of an era. I think my willingness to hang onto this crap is all about poverty. I've never been able to reconcile myself to success, to having enough. Enough just isn't a concept I understand. But I have more than enough. How many candleholders does one girl need, anyway? I have a box, probably three or four square feet in volume, full. When I was broke I used to take five dollars and fiind the best candleholder I could. It was a contest. My favorite is a hooded clay figure in prayer. Anyway, I'm releasing the chair.

ides of march plus one

People keep stopping by, wishing me well, telling me how happy they are for me. I go through much of life thinking I am invisible. A ship without a wake. I am so ready to be gone... am gone already in so many ways. I left in August if you ask me. But here I sit, amid the remnants of this life. A life recorded on scraps of paper, in letters never sent, in notes and scribblings, misheard quotes and original sin. I'm throwing it away, the better part of it anyway. I know I will not use it, that original thought flows through me and when I'm in the zone, don't need scraps. I amuse myself with the hopefulness, the sheer narcissm of having hung onto scraps of paper describing ad nauseum the varying conditions of my life. It is a map, of sorts, leading finally to here and now. And I dont' know why I am able to let it all go now. It comforted me, the labryinth of words, from the impossibly clever to the unimaginably inane. There is a quote, my favorite by tom robbins, about the nature of passion:

"... neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure. There are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than a six month long romance in Paris. But finally, there is a commitment -- however brief, a purity--however threatened, a vulnerability--however concealed, a generosity of spirit--however marbled with need, an honest caring--however singed by lust that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison..." TR.

There are many unsent letters to Lorretta, of many more sent. We wrote letters. Back and forth across the country. I miss writing that way, pen in hand -- perfect pen, perfect paper -- splurging in stationary stores, two dollars for paper with more flowers than room to write. We wrote on napkins, on scraps of out-folded envelopes. I remember one night, middle of a particularly dark crank run, staying at a motel and finding the amusing house stationary along with Gideon's Bible, but no pen. I had to have one, and went out walking, praying that the God of the Gideon's would allow me the luxury of writing. I found the stub of a pencil with the eraser intact. These are the memories of poverty: no paper, pens out of ink, when finding a quarter in the couch pillows was a big find; matching socks, towels and sheets at all, getting change from food stamps.

I will start the countdown: if it is the 16th of March, there are 18 days to go.

I rented a UHaul truck this morning.

dog abandonment

I'm not taking Bailey with me. I know, I know... he's sweet. But the thing is, I've never bonded with him - nor he with me -- and I'm not taking him. I got him for Spencer. It was back in the Dharma and Greg heyday when she had a dog for her dog. Truthfully, Spencer was aging -- aged -- and I'd heard a younger dog might help bring the party back into the dog. Not so. He only annoyed the old guy. You should have met Spencer. What a dog. Now there was a dog who knew how to be a dog. He'd go for rides with anybody. Once time, a pickup pulled up out front of my house and Spencer jumped out. He was laughing, you could tell, a big smile from black ear to white ear. He'd been to Ashland with an unsuspecting neighbor. He, the neighbor, told me he got halfway there and noticed Spencer in the back of his truck. Like other members of my immediate and extended families, Spencer was a known criminal, a chronic offender. I always said, as I've said of husbands and sons, "You go back to jail buddy and I'm leaving you there." But I always bailed him out.

the view from up here

We're tearing down walls. Real walls. Old walls of lath and plaster underneath panelling. I know I was alive during the "panelling is great" epoch. It covered, as my pentecostal mother would say, "a multitude of sin." I remember my sisters in law begging for ash colored panelling, black and grey, very mod. Mod. This stuff is utilitarian at most. There is too much underneath it all (as is true of so much), and I think we'll do a Dr. Phil remodel, not the deep Freudian fix. We'll put the past behind us, and behind new wall covering. We will not ask why --rather what's next? And it will fester there, the past, as things will if unexamined and popped like zits. We wondered together at the art of lath and plaster, the difficulty of making walls pre-drywall -- suddenly a marvelous invention. So, I'm off to Home Depot, to fix this new home of mine... ours. My dining room chairs sit around the kitchen table now and this morning I drank coffee on our porch. I am home. Nicole won't speak to me. I'm finally part of the family.

in preparation of retrospect

Living single. You must have known it would come up eventually. As I adjust to the bliss of anticipation, it occurs to me that bliss is linked closely to the fact that I am alone, have been alone, and planned always to be alone. I revelled in our togetherness because there was so much time apart. Now, I am not going to be alone anymore. And while that is a happy notion, I'm ever so slightly unnerved. I'm big on space and privacy. Huge. So, lately I've been sitting around, as I will, surveying the end of life as I know it. I brood. I consider. I do everything but get off the fucking vortex of a couch. That life-sucking thing hasn't let me up for years. Maybe I won't even take it with me. No -- his is worse. Lorretta told me to just start packing the art. She said, in fact, that I'd never leave as long as it was pretty inside my little sanctuary. I hate it when she's right. So, last friday night we began.... She began. She started packing my books. I stopped her. She smiled, sat, waited. Tried again the next night. I told her she could pack the books in the back bedroom. Nothing more. Then, finally, she made her astute comment and we began in earnest. Its funny how quickly I remembered my moving skills, the rhythm of it all. In no time, my home was reduced to a shell, pale green walls full of nails, full of cobwebs, absent my things: a metal falling star with James Dean in the window, the wooden staircase, the monkey, my crappy paintings. My first dishwasher. And the hard part is, Lorretta doesn't have a home anymore, and I can't leave her mine. The stark reality that I am a property owner with all of the attendant responsibilities and impossibilities jostles memories loose and up they float...

poem for my mother

she took people in
my mother
out of fashion these mean days
enabling
codependent
now we have nowhere to go
when we fuck up
or fuck off
or tire of being adults
the long days
of relentless responsibility
to rather buy whiskey
than electricity
and she undertood
she drank whiskey once
for twenty years
and we took her in.

stalled

packing is hard.

cell phone tendonitis

yep. that's me. i tried to blame it on typing, but i always type and so far without negative consequence other than non-published literature. but my wrist hurts so i don't write much. i'm using an ear bud, which is helpful. and packing to move is gruelling.