Tuesday, December 28, 2004

EOB

I see him through his office window on the fourth floor of an old building across the street from the bus terminal.  He’s standing in his shirt and tie, looking down at his desk, his hands on his hips.  All around him the rest of the bullpen is dark; I can see the room is full of other desks but no one is sitting at any of them at the moment.  His desk, under the tight circle of his lamp’s illumination, is not large; stacks of paper and binders crowd the meager surface before him.  I can’t make out his features but he seems to be at the leading margin of his middle years, a man of average size and strength, a man like any other, like all others.  The light bouncing off his papers faintly uplights his shirt, his face.  His head slowly turns from side to side; he takes in the scene of darkness and vacancy that surrounds him.  His hands rise to his face; he presses his palms slowly to his eyes, lets his head fall forward into them and cradles his face.  His shoulders rise and droop, once, weary.  He wipes his hands off his face - it seems, reluctantly - and reaches down to turn off his desk lamp.  The office goes black.  Moments later, I see his silhouette against the light of a doorway as he leaves.  Then the darkness remains uninterrupted until I get on my bus and go home. 

*******

Have a great holiday.  See ya next year.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Holiday Intermezzo

Here’s a bit of a holiday place-holder post. 

We here at Chuckles Central have been having a lovely holiday.  Christmas morning we made delectible canadian bacon eggles (over easy eggs with melted cheese on a broiled bagel) and then took a relaxing walk at Chrissey Field, where we took these pictures of, respectively, the warming hut, some ripples in still water, and Fort Point (huddled under the south span of the Golden Gate bridge). 

These ones, now, are shots of some of our favorite ornaments, as appearing on our two tiny treelets.  First up: Dog and Frog (pickle, background left).

Next, a traditional ukranian egg and a bathing beauty:

I’ve always had an affinity for this serene fellow:

And finally, this cheerful camper came with a set of soviet - not russian - ornaments we bought from some russians - not soviets - about ten years ago.  The set includes several glass spangles, a vaguely Santa-like personage, and this bulbous geek, whom we have always called “Corn Boy.” C’mon, Cornboy, say hello to the good folks.

Rather than blather, I’ll leave it at that.  We’re leaving soon for Maryland, so I’ll pick up with the brainfarts when I get back.  Happy New Year and all that.  It has been an absolute pleasure spending 2004 with y’all.  Here’s to more in aught-five.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

The Best Story I Never Wrote

I was reminded of it a month or so ago when pea wrote about how she tricked herself into trying to remember a bit of dreamed dialogue, and woke up with a mental bookmark that had slipped out in the night, telling her only that she’d forgotten what she’d intended to remember.  But at least she remembered to write about that.  That’s better than I usually do.

I carry a little memo pad (or two) with me, just in case I have some sort of notion I’d like to hold on to. I also carry a writing book in case I get a chance to flesh anything out into complete sentences.  I make occasional wordpad notes on a spare screen while at work, too, and I write on my hands and forearms and stuff my pockets with little loose notelets.  YET I FORGET.  Barely a day goes by when something doesn’t get past me - a scrap of a dream, a terrible pun, a poignant vignette, the first line of the best story I never wrote.... In every case, I promise myself that this one is too obvious, too beautiful, too witty to get stuck in the lint trap that is my ADD, and that I therefore won’t need to take the momentary effort to transcribe my thoughts into some less evanescent form.  Not a note; not a word; not a crude bleary doodle.  I’ll just remember, I tell myself.

I can be so full of crap sometimes.  I never remember a goddamn thing.  I even had to force myself to write down my ideas about forgetting things so I could make sure to touch on them all here. 

The insidious thing is, once I’ve written some notes down, I don’t usually need to check them again.  If I’ve gone through the whole exercise of writing something out completely, working it through all from start to finish (as I did with this little essay), of course I’ll type it up faithfully - I won’t wing what needn’t be wung.  But if it’s just a matter of a few words, the literary equivalent of the string-tied-around-my-finger, once I write it down somewhere it sticks to my brains tenaciously till I’ve sublimated it out in some sort of finished product or have formally dismissed it as unworthy of further attention. 

Try to remember?  Invariably forget.  Write it down so I don’t forget?  Never need to look at it again.  Not enough effort, or more than necessary.  If I ever figure out how to gauge my behavior to my needs, I’d get a lot more done and I’d have lots of extra energy too.  And plenty of fresh notebooks, to boot.  Meanwhile, if you see an absentminded dude patting himself down for paper and pen while you’re trying to get around him on the bus, give him a break.  He might not remember it, but he’ll sure appreciate it.

Ed. note: I’m gonna take a few days off for the Saturnalia, and next week I travel to the east coast for to party with the inlaws in Maryland.  Posting will be light till 2005.  After that, god only knows what the future will bring - but I do have a lot of crap written down in those ratty little notebooks....

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Embrace the Darkness: Schnecken Ahoy

RECIPE CORNER: Getting Nutty and Flipping Out

I’ve been asked for the recipe for schnecken.  I’ll tell ya, I’ve been vascilating on this point.  I considered posting the recipe yesterday and then pulled back, thinking that it was overkill, or that I was protecting some kind of semi-public secret, or maybe I just wanted to maintain a sense of personal superiority through knowledge control or something.  But then last night I went to my Tuesday Evening Yoga Freakout, and the irrepressibly bubbly instructor Nina (Jack!  Call CTU!  She’s alive!) reminded us that yesterday was the solstice, and in doing so, set our theme and intention for our practice that evening: to embrace the darkness and confront the things we hide.  People were coming to the solstice, and the shank of this holiday season, as if it were something to be endured, not enjoyed, and were treating these days of darkness-in-excess-of-light as days of gloom.  As I lay on my mat and aligned myself for 90 minutes of rigor and concentration, I could not embrace this prevailing attitude.  These days are good days, as good as any during the glaring summer months.  As the class proceeded and my mind cleared, these three thoughts occurred to me:

* The winter solstice marks the end of encroaching darkness.  Now the daylight hours are increasing again.  This is a time to recognize and celebrate the expansion of the natural cycle, not its contraction. 

* Even though the daylight is slowly lengthening now day by day, it is true that winter is now upon us and the temperatures will be lower, the earth less fertile, and our subcutaneous adipose layers, more tenacious.  (And that’s probably for the best.  The supracutaneous adipose layers are exceptionally unflattering.) So even as the sun shines more upon us, the earth will not warm up for some months.  This is not the kind of change that can be effected by flipping a switch.  The mere fact of increasing light is not dispositive.  The earth itself has to catch up with the process before it warms to the season.  And in the same way, I can make any change I wish to in my life, but my life will have to catch up with me before I notice the change making a difference. 

* Which led me to think that light is a distraction.  I get much of my best work done at night, in the darkness, when I can concentrate on what is really going on.  More light does not always make the problem go away.  As King Claudius eventually learned, you can call for the light but still not perceive the situation clearly.  And as Hamlet discovered, sometimes you learn the most from spirits in the night. 

With all this in mind I thought of the schnecken.  They rise in darkness, twice over, and we must wait for this process to fulfill itself before we can enjoy their sweetness.  Lightness is not a virtue in them; they are not done unless they have darkened properly and if they are too pale they go back in the oven to age and mature a little longer.  They seem to embody many of the principals that buoy me during solstice-days.  And with that in mind, how could I hold back the truth that has set me free? 

Plus, nobody’s gonna make these.  So what’s the harm?

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Sweet and Hot: SHNECKENING FOR BEGINNERS (a visual aid)

Every year for eight or nine or so years now, my generation of my extended family have been gathering in the holiday season to perform the Schneckening.  “Schnecken” is german for “snail,” but that’s as far as the escargot analogy will take you.  These aren’t bits of mollusk and phlegm broiled in enough garlic to hide the fact you’re eating garden pests - they’re yeasty treats with praline-brickle topping and lots of sugar and raisins rolled up inside.  These are what the family matriarchs made for special occasions - and only for special occasions, because they’re so labor intensive.  How labor intensive?  Let’s take a look:

Monday, December 20, 2004

Lessons Learned

This has been a great weekend of deckening and schneckening.  I’ll fill in some of those details later; I don’t have time to deal with the photos right now.  In the meantime, it’s been brought to my attention that some of you didn’t watch The Apprentice, and therefore didn’t learn the valuable lessons that I picked up during this recently-concluded broadcast of a “fifteen-week job interview.” So here, as a public service, are TEN LESSONS I LEARNED FROM WATCHING SEASON 2 OF THE APPRENTICE, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO:

* TiVo RULES.
* Men are more willing than woment to be filmed immediately upon rolling out of bed first thing in the morning.
* Rudy Guiliani and Regis Philbin are both whores, and significantly interchangeable ones at that. 
* Don’t let strangers in the park trim your dog’s nails, unless you like the sound of your pet yelping in pain. 
* Taking off your clothes on the streets of the city is not a foolproof means of professional advancement or corporate success.
* If the boss has made a final decision, agree with it. 
* It doesn’t matter if you’re a national debate champion - you will lose any argument if you let people just scream at you for long enough.
* Don’t talk trash about someone who is nearby and listening - unless you really want that person to overhear you.
* Actual experience beats academic education more often than not.
* The boss can wear any necktie, no matter how ugly, or any hairstyle, not matter how garrish, and you still have to act like the boss has impeccable fashion sense. 

These lessons will not inevitably lead you to success; the season winner broke several of them but still managed to score his dream job.  However, following these rules might help you avoid unnecessary failures and defeats, and that’s worth something, isn’t it? 

With that, I’ll leave you for the day.  This Monday has great potential, I think.  I intend to make the most of it.  Naked public dog-grooming arguments, here I come!

Friday, December 17, 2004

Why I Needed to Watch The Apprentice

I’ll admit it: somehow I wasn’t getting my RDA of office angst so I got myself hooked on The Apprentice this year.  For those who are smart enough to avoid the subject, TA is a reality show in which 18 aspiring brownnosers compete for the chance to work for Donald Trump for a year.  The competition consists of a series of business tasks, like developing and selling a new flavor of ice cream, producing a catalogue for a clothier, or staging a special event for a corporate-sponsored charity.  And I haven’t understood till today why I was putting myself through a weekly hour of television that’s basically like a bad day at the office writ large.  But now that the whole season is over, I think I finally have a clue. 

When I watch Survivor, I enjoy seeing how human nature bubbles to the surface despite our best efforts to the contrary, how personalities are eventually revealed to be abrasive or sterling or septic or actually vacant - it’s a show about sociology and psychology.  When I watch Amazing Race, I enjoy seeing how the two-person teams work, how people treat each other and the “outside world,” but also the cool locales they visit and strange feats they must complete.  But I didn’t know why I watched TA.  I’m not a big fan of The Donald, and I would not want to hang out with any of the people in the competition, who are all basically manipulative backbiting aggrandizement-monkeys.  I didn’t learn much about how to do any of the tasks they completed; it was more about how to manage relationships with co-workers and managers.  And maybe that was what hooked me. 

The show features two suits who serve as The Donald’s “eyes and ears,” since presumably Don has a handle on the rest of his own anatomy; the suits watch the two competing teams at work and report on who did what, how well, and to what effect.  At the end of each episode the losing team is brought to the board room where Donald and the suits grill them on why they lost, and then they’re sent out of the room so the honchos can confer about who should be fired - kicked out of the competition.  In each case, I found that people’s words and actions came back to haunt them to a certain extent, but that often a person could hide his or her misdeeds and actually come out smelling like a prickless rose by saying the right thing to the right suit at the right time.  Good contestants were scapegoated; bad ones harrangued their way into the finals.  And then Donald would ask each of the suits whom they thought should be fired.  Each would make a suggestion, backing it up with plenty of reasons.  Then Donald calls the contestants back in and fires whomever he wants to.  Often it is not someone that one of the suits has suggested, but as the show ends you hear Donald and the suits discussing the decision and the suits invariably support the choice that was made, even if they were strongly opposed to it just a few minutes earlier.  They go from, “He’s the strongest candidate, I’d hire him in a heartbeat,” to “Good choice, boss, gotta cull the deadwood, what a loser and I bet he’s inadequate in the genital department too.”

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Death of the Ghoul

I guess by now it’s as many as 10 years ago, but maybe it’s more like seven.  I’m not sure, really; I didn’t actually track it.  But, however long it’s been since last he haunted my streets, I think he’s back again. 

There are a lot of homeless people in California, and in San Francisco in particular, and quite a few of them around here have taken advantage of my own neighborhood’s many parks and greenbelts, like the one across from my house.  I get to recognize these guys if they stick around for a while or if they come back regularly.  Some are essentially permanent fixtures, benign, more to be pitied than feared - the guy who waits at the bus stop smoking stubs; the big guy who used to have that nice dog; the sadfaced man who spits in a styrofoam cup and sleeps outside the bagel shop....

But there are also sometimes men who roam our streets seemingly out of control, utterly empty, without even any remnant of an interior left to broach.  I steer clear of these, and even gregarious old Cosmo shies away from their invariably overenthusiastic, drunken, pisssoaked salutations. 

Got the picture?  Well, this one guy was one of the worst of these. Tall and stringy with a mullet and a scragglebeard, camos and a backpack and tattered basketball shoes.... you could tell he was trouble by the combination of three factors: his lousy posture, always tilted to the ground as if his actual fall from grace had been temporarily arrested just before he landed in purgatory; by the vacant hungry leer in his vacant hungry eyes; and by his unmitigated filthiness.  He made dirt look clean, and even from a distance he stank badly. 

For a while he ran with a couple other hard cases, but they didn’t seem to me quite so far gone as he was; I could never imagine how they withstood his proximity as he crowded next to them to hisswhisper some foul utterance at them, usually concluding with a mirthless barking laugh in their faces.  This guy seemed pretty much totally lost and, frankly, he scared me.  I never knew what he was capable of, and such dehumanization struck a cold chord in my soul.  One morning I actually thought I saw him curled up dead in a doorway on Clement Street; I was wrong, he was back on the streets in a couple of months, the worse for wear but persevering through his uncleanliness and degradation. 

And then one night I was taking Coz across the street for his final evening piddle.  There were, at that time, several big pines and eukes and downed boughs covered with ivy and nasturtium at the far edge of the greenbelt.  Coz nosed up in the dark against this dense undergrowth - and suddenly a ghastly phantom of a man, a hideously hopeless homeless haggard, sprang to his feet from his bedroll from behind the low shelter of a dead viney bough just a few feet in front of us, shouting, screaming, his gaunt face a rictus of hateful fear; and Coz stood still, said nothing at all; and I went rigid too, and bellowed back in inarticulate horror; and there we stood, ten feet apart, a downed bough and a mastiff mute between us, the two of us screaming till our breath was gone; and when I had no more screams to scream at him I backed away, dragging the shocked dog - dragged him back indoors and up the stairs, and then I went to bed and tried to go to sleep, my heart still pounding and my throat suddenly hoarse. 

But sleep came reluctantly that night and, regardless that this street ghoul seemed eventually to disappear from my streets and parks, I never did put the incident entirely out of my mind. I recall it still when I take Coz across the street on dark evenings.  Even though many of the trees and boughs are gone and the vines no longer cover the ground to hide the absent focus of my fears, I always remember where he sprang at me and I gather my strength there against him despite the years it’s been since last I saw him coiled like a sick starving snake in my woods....

I’ve been thinking of writing about that night, off and on, for years, but the tale never seemed to resolve properly so I let it go.  Still, it kept coming back to me, in images that scrounged for words in my head.  I most recently recalled these events as I watched a new neighborhood fixture stagger toward me one recent morning along the sidewalk by the bus stop. This was an old man, bent over with weakness and hunger and booze and sickness and all the terrible weight of the world… I’d seen him several times before in the preceding few months, usually leaning over a garbage can at a corner near my house.  It’s one of those big city cans with a cover welded over the top, and he’d station himself next to it, supporting his paltry weight against its sturdy solidity.  I’d see him there when I’d leave in the morning, and he’d often be leaning there still when I returned at night. Frankly, he depressed me, with his bent staggering gait as he made his painful way to his appointed spot, his wasted face and hollow empty eyes, his clothes and skin both stiff with filth, and his tangle of grey hair matted with dirt and leaves, and his unkempt beard that curled over lips that had long forgotten smiling....

That’s when I realized: it was him.  Again.  The man who’d leapt up from behind the dead trees and skeletal vines to scare me literally witless - he was back.  After years away, he was once more haunting my streets.  But this time, he wasn’t scary.  He had no power to evoke any emotion in me but sorrow, seasoned with some reluctant disgust.  It was the ending I needed for my story: hideous spectre turns human and blows away in the cold morning wind.  Finally, I am beyond the grasp of my nemesis.  I guess I should feel good about it, but really, I don’t. 

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Light Me Up

At sundown tonight the Festival of Lights will have come to its conclusion for another year.  Hanukah, as sophisticated jewologists like me know, celebrates the development of the Code of Hanukarabi, the first ancient king to establish the moral verity,"a gift for a gift, and a re-gift for a re-gift.” This Code ended the primitive concept of gelt-free pleasure, and the world (the clever bits of it anyway) has never looked back. 

The motto of the festival (for real, now) is “A great miracle happened there,” referencing the bygone battle between overthrown Hellenized Macedonians and underslung hellfire Maccabees.  Yes, Hanukkah is more like Armistice Day than Christmas - it’s basically a celebration of a military victory.  This left me feeling rather removed and un-moved, personally and spiritually, from the festival.  The miracle mentioned in the slogan happened a long time ago and seemed to me rather weak, as far as miracles go - the restoration of a holy place with an oil lamp that burned for a week longer than it should have lasted.  Growing up, this was not the kind of miracle that captured my attention, like those cool passover plagues or Kirk Gibson’s 9th inning home run against the A’s in game 1 of the 1988 world series.  The hanukkah miracle just didn’t seem to carry much meaning for me. 

My mistake was not seeing the miracles that do happen at Hanukah each year, sometimes right before my unseeing eyes.  I always looked back at the old Hasmonean hanukkah miracle, ignoring the fresh wonders that spring up each year at this season like the oilstains I get when I fry potatoes while wearing a nice t-shirt.  But this year, somehow, my eyes were opened. Great miracles did happen here - right here, to me and all around me.  In celebration and invocation, here are eight of the ones I noticed most clearly:

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Catbox Rant

I don’t think I’ve been abusing my privilege here.  I try to use my words, to explore ideas.  When I post photos, they’re usually chosen for aesthetic reasons; they’re not just pictures of my dog being cute, and I think I’ve avoided the classic trap of kitty pictures altogether.  In general, my cat has not been prominently featured here.  This is for two reasons: first, I fear that contributing to the current overstock of cute kitty references on line will eventually crash the entire internet in a mewling, lint-strewing catastrophe; and second, my cat is just not good blogging material.  She’s old, lethargic on a good day, shaped pretty much like a hairy football - a dear and darling companion but not a compelling literary subject.  I’ve been happy to keep her outof the limelight here, and I think she has appreciated my restraint in this regard.

Well, now I think I need to break blog silence once again on the subject of our cat Rufus.* I reached this conclusion on a recent morning while cleaning up around her litter box - again.  We’ve provided her with an enclosed facility which, in theory, should afford her with both privacy and containment - but that’s not the way it seems to work.  In short, her use of this device leaves a great deal to be desired.  And as I knelt on the tile floor sweeping and blotting and wiping and generally sanitizing the vicinity of her comfort station, I wondered if anyone could help me get it through her fuzzy little head that some of her habits need to be reformed.  It occurred to me that this medium of “blogging” (so quaint) might afford me just such a resource - with all the cat-mad bloggers out here, maybe one of them might know how to get a message through to Rufus so she understands it.  God knows I’ve tried, and failed spectacularly.  So, as a last-ditch effort to train my cat in basic hygienic functions, I’m posting ten lessons I wish my cat would learn about solid-n-liquid waste management.  Maybe one of you could have a word with her and clear this all up:

*Yes, Rufus is a female.  Just deal with it.

Monday, December 13, 2004

PowerDreaming

so tired today… out later than usual last night at a wonderful hanuka party up in the hills, filled with 12-year old cabernet and black muscat dessert wine, succulent tenderloins and roasted apples and fresh greens and all the latkes I could eat plus about one-and-a-half more… the upshot being that I slept this morning right through my “blogwriting” time, and have not been able to put the time together till now to share any thoughts, or at least none worth sharing with the general public.  Let’s face it, the world is better off not knowing some of my thoughts. 

In the meantime, since I’m so preoccupied with how freaking drowsy I am, here’s a little essay about dreaming.  I don’t think I have already posted this, but if I’m wrong, at least I can mark it down to my brains feeling so darn mushy today. 

*****

It’s one thing to remember a dream; another altogether to control one.  Many are the nights I put myself to bed with enough residual solar energy to convince myself I could pick a dream to dream, and actually dream it - but it doesn’t seem to work that way very often.  I get myself settled in amidst the bedclothes, and my mind, laser-focused only moments prior, goes fuzzy on me.  My thoughts wander, from a decision to try to pick a dream to dream, to a motley variety of possible dreams, to remembering something that happened that day or that needs to happen tomorrow - and by then it’s a free-for-all, my brain tossing scattered bits of thought and fancy like so much undercooked pasta against the wall of my consciousness, until the bonds of Morpheus overtake me and I drift away to the land of Nod using some randomly-generated thought as a starting point for my dream.  Rarely are these happenstance dreams memorable, and even less often are they remembered.  I just throw them away each morning like so much unread junk mail.  I know they’re precious, well-deep windows on my inner self, but really, I keep reading about other people’s dreams and they’re surreal, hilarious, sexy, exciting… my own dreams never seem to go anywhere interesting.  As a result, I tend not to keep them around for very long. 

My rejection of these happenstance dreams, my disappointment with my powerlessness over them, comes from a rather specific place: I clearly remember two dreams I dreamed a long time ago on purpose.  In those dreams I didn’t control everything, but in each case I was able to make one critical decision that changed everything for the better.  In the hopes of reviving this skill I’ll share my somnolent triumphs:

Friday, December 10, 2004

Instrumentality

It didn’t look like an instrument, and they didn’t look like musicians. 

I was stumbling back from the coffee room with a fresh mugga when I saw them pushing the big red box off the service elevator.  One of them looked like “the building super” - in his middle years, dressed in sturdy sensible clothes, his eyes preoccupied and his pockets bulging with tools, hardware and communications devices.  He was the guy I could trust with a housekey if I had to go out while he was at work.  The other guy with him was a little hinkier - the “labor,” with tight faded jeans, a scruffy little beard, a worn plaid shirt and long hair that clearly got more of his attention than most anything else in his life.  Between them was a red metal box on chunky metal wheels, about four feet tall and four feet long, rolling heavily, pocked with wear and corrosion.  It was an explicitally ambiguous piece of equipment so I asked what it was.  “Labor” grinned broadly but vacantly as “super” offered a terse but informative explanation: “It’s to test the fire department standpipes.” Okay, cool.  So we test standpipes.  We’re that much less likely to be consumed in an inferno.  I was grateful. 

A few hours later my gratitude took a new dimension: I was sitting in my beige cube staring at the screen upon which I concentrate for so much of my day when I sensed a presence both alien and familiar - heard it beneath the buzz and click of office hardware, felt it though the soles of my no-nonsense shoes: a groaning hum, surrounding me, in the floor, and across the ceilings and through the walls.  It sounded like the building was waking up after a long deep slumber.  Pipes that ran up the spine of the mid-rise building, sturdy though dusty, vibrated into expression.  It rumbled through my skin and into my bones, a sonic presence that seemed to lift my awareness up out of my head and into my world.  I knew that sound - I’ve made it myself often enough.  It’s the first croaking noise to emanate from a throat too long unused.  The building was finding its voice.  The building was singing.  Those two operations & maintenance contractors and their big red box had taken the distinctly undistinguished office block in which I labored daily, blind ot my own environment more often than not, and turned it ito something that breathed, sang, lived. 

Since then my goal has been to hear the other songs I usually can’t hear, and more to the point, to recognize the singers and the musicians that hide among us in grimy boots and rusty boxes.  There is music more places than I can hear it, and it’s up to me to open my ears a little wider.  The musicians are doing their part already.

Thursday, December 09, 2004

Black Belt

Since Jon and Lisa were still living in the Richmond, I know it was a while ago, maybe even seven or eight years.  I was, in many important ways, the same person as I am today, and in some very subtle ways, I was extremely different.  But whatever.  We had gone to a party at their house, probably Lisa’s birthday, and she was a giggly effervescent sprite so full of happiness that she’d long since stopped making much sense.  But at one point she turned to me (in the dining room, near the corner with the den) and told me how nicely dressed I was.  I hadn’t gone out of my way to prettify myself; all the clothes I owned were very well-worn and she’d seen it all on me before - except, maybe, for my belt. 

“And that belt!  It ties it all together!  That is one great belt!” My eyes wandered to my waistline and I remembered which belt I was wearing, and I understood.  It was a belt I’d already owned forever, maybe since before college, but I didn’t wear it very often.  I kept it for special occasions, I suppose.  It was less than an inch wide; glossy black with a gold-colored buckle outlining an elegant rectangle.  It was flattering; it looked good.  Lisa couldn’t know, though, that that this particular belt was also unusually supple, molding and folding howsoever pleased my fickle fingers.  Its holes were punched at perfect intervals so it always fit properly - neither binding nor drooping.  I had to admit that Lisa was right - whatever else I was wearing that night, the belt made the outfit. 

Then she lowered her voice and pulled consipiratorialy closer to me.  “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but that belt is so nice I’d expect a gay man to be wearing it.”

“Hmm,” I thought.  This was before straight guys got queer eyes, before metrosexuality.  Getting compared to a gay guy, well, I guess I just wasn’t used to it is all.  I took her compliment, however, in the spirit in which it was intended, and racked it up to Lisa’s natural enthusiasm.  I sincerely thanked her.  We each then returned to the party as if nothing had happened, and we never spoke of it again.  But I knew she knew.  And she knew I knew too.  That was a powerful belt. 

Time, incredibly, passed.  Trees grew, babies were born, nations clashed, and my wardrobe slowly evolved.  Which brings me to a recent day, an autumn morning.  I stood at my manually-operated rotating belt caddy, ready to accessorize my trousers.  For the first time in a long long time I pulled out the cool black belt - and I had to pause, and reconsider.  The sleek black leather had faded to an unappetizing green; the buckle seemed abraded and lusterless.  Several of the punchholes showed evidence of wear, pulled into evocative teardrops.  When could this have happened to my beautiful belt? 

I stood in the wan dawn light, the dark strip flowing limberly over my palms.  At one time it had been a prized possession.  There was no mistaking now that that era was over.  It was no longer a power tool, a charisma elevator.  It was just a belt, and an old one at that, one that wouldn’t look good on my fresh black chinos under my pinpoint oxfordcloth shirt and crisp necktie.  I saw in its soft drape an admission of expiration and defeat.  It was easier than I’d expected to throw it away and pick out an unobtrusive substitute to wear strapped around my waist that day.  I’d been proud of my black belt once; it had really held things together for me.  Now it’s worn out but I’m feeling ready to take over for it.  I’d like to think I can hold a few more things together my own self.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Waters of March

I woke up this morning to the first daylight of Chanukah with an unusually good attitude.  I feel well-rested, fully occupied at work, and in good health after a short bout with a cold.  Last night I went to a new yoga class and performed at a much higher level than I’d had any reason to expect.  Once we got home it started raining hard, and the sound of drops hitting the roof and of wind outside our window lulled me to sleep quickly and kept me sleeping soundly.  Today I have a variety of interesting and useful tasks to complete at the office, and if I get the chance, a few fun things to do for me, too.  In general, I’m in a damn decent mood. 

This seems to be a shift in the prevailing emotional conditions I’ve experienced over the past few days.  In retrospect, I’ve felt a bit glum and stressed-out over the past week or so, even though I rarely let myself become aware of it.  I do think, though, that those moods affected my blogposts lately; that fragment from yesterday has been rolling around in my head like a pachinko ball since I hit “publish.” It’s had me thinking of moods and fragments generally, and as I was ruminating on the matter and how things seem to have turned a corner in my mind, I happened coincidentally to come across a scrap of paper I found on the sidewalk early week: a sheet torn from a memopad, lined, folded into eighths; the only words on it are handwritten in spotty ballpoint pen with left-angled printing, reading: “I kiss ya with my thoughts of liven different”....

And that’s where I’m going to start today.  And the first place it takes me is one of my all-time favorites songs, which I only discovered a month or so ago, a Brazilian jazz standard called Aguas de Marcos, or “Waters of March.” I was pretty sure it was a love song when I first heard it (the Elis Regina version, not the original but the best) till I listened more carefully and imagined my pathetic shreds of high school french allowed me to translate enough of the portugese that I understood it to be a “love lost” song.  Finally my genius friend Simon from first grade wrote me a letter and included a translation of the lyrics, which I’m posting here.  I’ve read them several times and have yet to come up with a working hypothesis.  I suppose the song is about something I have yet fully to grasp, but it’s so beautiful I almost get misty each time I listen to it.  Seems to me like a lot of positive potential for a wednesday morning.  Let’s see how long it lasts. 

A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of the stump, it’s a little alone,
It’s the sliver of glass, it is life, it’s the sun,
It is night, it is death, it’s a trap, it’s a gun.
The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush,
The nod of the wood, the song of a thrush
The wood of the wing, a cliff, a fall,
A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all.
It’s the wind blowing free, it’s the end of a slope,
It’s a bean, it’s a void, it’s a hunch, it’s a hope.
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the end of the strain, it’s the joy in your heart.
The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone,
The beat of the road, a sling-shot stone,
A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light,
The shot of a gun in the dead of the night.
A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump,
It’s a girl, it’s a rhyme, it’s a cold, it’s the mumps.
The plan of the house, the body in bed,
And the car that got stuck, it’s the mud, it’s the mud.
Afloat, adrift, a flight, a wing,
A cock, a quail, the promise of spring.
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the promise of life, it’s the joy in your heart.
A point, a grain, a bee, a bite,
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night,
A pin, a needle, a sting, a pain,
A snail, a riddle, a wasp, a stain,
A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe,
A fish, a flash, a silvery glow
And the Riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the promise of life in your heart, in your heart.
A stick, a stone, the end of the load,
The rest of the stump, a lonesome road.
A sliver of glass, a life, the sun,
A night, a death, the end of the run.
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March,
It’s the end of all strain, it’s the joy in your heart.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

fragment

A few weeks ago pea posted a little piece of fiction that got me thinking about a lot of things, one of which was: I have not written much fiction lately.  As I thought about this on my daily busride to work, a scene formed in my mind - or, not even a scene, but a part of a scene, a moment, a bit of a story the beginning and end of which I did not know.  But this moment revealed itself to me clearly enough that I was able to write it down.  And now that that is done, maybe I can move on to bigger, better fantasies and fictions.  But in the meantime, it does feel good to write about somebody else for a change.  Even if that somebody else isn’t having much fun with it. 

*****

The excruciating thing was how everybody just sat there watching her.  All her coworkers, and the other people in the restaurant; the guy from the radio station, the social worker (redfaced and perspiring), everybody.  They pretended to look at their plates, or their laps, or to stare at their wristwatches or into their purses… but always stealing glances at her, their attention focused on her with surreptitious obviousness.  The place was deathly silent; all you could hear was her choking back her tears and gasping on her own breath, and the vacant sound of no one going to comfort or support her.  No one made any move at all.  It was as if something had happened, not just to her, but of her - something that rendered her, if not invisible, then certainly so regressive, so wrong and ruined, such a turd in the soup that no one would even seriously consider being soiled by proximity to her.  Seats shifted uncomfortably, whispered comments scurried on ratpaws around the room.  Plates and pans clanked back in the kitchen.  As she finally pushed away her chair and walked out across the hardwood floor, scattering the paltry confetti and balloons with which her place had been desultorily decorated, every sound she made echoed in the silence - especialy her ragged, gulping breath.  She left in utter, unredeemed solitude, more alone with every step she took.  And everybody just sat there watching her, until she was completely gone.

Monday, December 06, 2004

Poster Child

Saturday night was a time of exceptional comfort and graciousness.  Sha and Helena invited us over for a few bowls of their favorite risotto - mixed ‘shrooms cooked with rich beef broth.  Anybody who doesn’t like mushrooms out there?  Keep up the good work and stay the hell away from my risotto.  Sublime barely initimates how good it was.  Right down to the charming napkins festooned with scenes and specimens of autumnal mycology, everything hovered just a few sweet inches above perfection.  By the time we were ready for dessert I really didn’t feel like eating anymore, which was fine because instead of a traditional aftercourse they poured us a mug or two of the world’s richest hot chocolate, a complex spiced recipe that came out so thick and fullbodied that my mouth was outraged to have gone so long not knowing it existed.  (For the record, it pairs well with good cognac, too.  Hooda thunk.) In the meanwhile we viewed our hosts’ photos from their recent vacation in Europe.  The photos themselves were gorgeous: apart from the fact that it’s hard to take a bad picture of most of the places they went, both Sha and Helena have phenomenal aesthetics – and of course we got to see the photos projected onto their theater-sized screen, which made them that much more impressive.  (Then we checked out the ‘Hut’s photoblog, which was also fun to see made so big.  Maybe I’m just a guy but I like the big ones.) We got home late and I regret nothing. 

So now I’m well-rested, enjoying some lovely hot tea, and thinking about the world - what I know of it, and what I don’t.  And of course hanging with Sha reminds me of my halcyon days as an undergrad, many of which he shared with me as the coolest freshman I knew when I was a junior.  And thinking of my junior year, and of Sha in particular, reminds me of Brian; and when I think of Brian I often think of this story, so that’s the one you get today:

Friday, December 03, 2004

ow ow ow

Maybe you don’t read the comments, where I found and posted this link in the first place, so I thought I’d just do a little pubic service here to highlight this article from Kungfu Magazine, to which my subscription has sadly lapsed.  It’s a strange world out there, people.  Gives a whole new meaning to “yanking my chain.”

Wishing you a slack and comfortable weekend… and remember - lift from the knees.

Power Source

Jay, our office clerk, noticed it too - our iPod batteries seemed to be running down faster.  It’s not that we were doing anything different with them – they just didn’t last as long these days.  I think Jay said his dad noticed it as well.  And that seemed weird to us both.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

My Shame; The Game; His Name

Oh, so many things to share and drone on about.... but even with a notebook packed with onanistic ramblings, there’s only one topic that really has my attention: IT IS FREAKING COLD IN THIS HOUSE.  I’m sure some of you have it tougher, but please don’t assume I’m just some weak watered-down westcoaster who can’t stand a bit of a chill: temps are down in the 30s at night, only up to the mid-50s in the day; visitors to this fair city know that temps in San Fran feel about 10 degrees colder, usually, than they do anywhere else.  Something about the moist pacific air, the upjutting peninsula (heh), the breezes attendant upon this being the only break in a 600 mile mountain chain that divides the largest ocean from an entire transcontinental nation with its head buried in its own sand.... my fingers are cold; I slept wearing socks, and - o cursed fate - our furnace pilot light has gone out again. 

The gas company tells me they can come out in a little more than a week to fire things up....  but that just ain’t gonna cut it, especially when it’s been FROZEN SOLID.  But it does remind me that they came out a month or so ago to light the damn thing once already, and gave me some instructions on caring for a very large and important piece of machinery to which I’ve paid absolutely no attention in the past decade or so.  “Here’s a filter,” the man told me, withdrawing it from an unexplored crevasse in the avocado-green behemoth that is my heating system’s heart: “Brush it out and put it back, but then go and buy a replacement.  It’ll work better.  Over here -” (indicating an area underneath a removable panel I hadn’t known existed) - “there’s a lot of lint built up - take a vacuum, clean this out.  And over here - “ (pointing to an area where ductwork emerged from the furnace’s firebox) “ - you need to get some tape and seal this gap.  You’re losing heat here.”

“Tape?,” I stupidly asked, my mind a whirling welter of instructions, cautions, and prohibitions in the gloomy light of the disorganized garage.  “Just regular tape?  I think I have some masking tape, or packing tape - and maybe some electrical tape....” He cut me off with impatient disappointment that I, a fellow y-chromosoner, could be so painfully off the mark with what should, by rights, be a genetic sex-based characteristic, like growing a beard or standing too close to the weber kettle when fire is being created in it.  “No, not masking tape, not electrical tape.  There is special tape for this kind of job.  It’s called ‘duct tape.’”

His eyes searched mine for recognition and shame, and he found them.  This product has about thirty billion uses, at least six for every person on the planet.  It’s the subject of books, fundraisers, webcams, endless conversation.  It can be seen in innumerable places on a daily basis.  And when it was time for me actually to use the damn stuff for its intended purpose, I had repressed its existence entirely.  I’d almost think I’d given up my entitlement to the masculine gender, except for certain other details I will reserve for a less public audience.  Meanwhile, I think I need a refresher course in garage maintenance.  I don’t want my beard to get disgusted with me and leave for someone with a deeper voice.  It’s the only thing keeping the bottom half of my face warm these days, and Brenda Vaccaro would just look funny wearing my soulpatch. 

OKAY!  That was sufficiently distracting for me to be able to share perspectives on two news stories of interest to everyone involved in baseball steroids scandals and oil-for-food fraud. 

* Jason Giambi is reported to have testified to a San Francisco grand jury that he’s taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs, including testosterone and human growth hormone.  My interest in this story is limited to Kel’s response: she raised her arms to shoulder height, started stomping clumsily around the kitchen (where we were listening to the story on the radio), and insisted in a deep growl that she’s been taking INhuman growth hormone.  Maybe that’s why she’s grown so inhumanly funny.  Maybe not. 

* Kofi Annan’s son Kojo has been implicated in fraud related to the Iraqi oil-for-food program. No, really.  Press reports this morning included my contribution as a field correspondent providing this illuminating look at his descent from grace: Kojo missed the boat, the day he left the shack - but that was all he missed, and he ain’t coming back.  From such ignominious beginnings, how could we have expected anything else? 

Damn.  Still chilly.  Must walk torpid old dog in frigid dawn air.  Landlady may find someone to fire up our furnace by tonight.  Meantime I’m buying duct tape in bulk - I can’t rely on using heating oil after the Kojo fiasco, but at least I could wrap myself up in tape for insulation.  As for this morning’s other top news story, notwithstanding my shameful failure to recall modern Man’s most important contribution to civilization as we know it, I intend to continue to manufacture my own testosterone.  As for my growth hormones, human or otherwise - well, that’s between me and my growth.