Today, Nothing

I come home sapped, tapped, completely out of ideas, yet my bones want to write and create when the brain just feels mush. Craving the escape of words but just not finding it in me. So I blather and rattle, regurgitate the day's news or tell a pointless story about the day. And then today comes, and I just really truly have nothing to say.

Dear Jon

Dear Jon, Dear Jon,
By the time you read this note, you'll be gone...

I've been putting off writing this letter to you because I'm not sure of what I'm going to say or how I'm going to say it or even where to start.

I can start with the fact. The fact that you are dead. That you killed yourself and are now gone forever even though I can picture you clearly with those sweet eyes and goofy smile.

I picture you with a sky full of stars behind your head. Perhaps a puff of smoke you exhaled climbing towards the moon.

I picture you wading into the water, muscled, alive and glistening in the starlight, somehow looking at everything but the waves, getting knocked over and under, surfacing laughing.

I picture you digging in the sand, endless holes to nowhere, constantly being borne open and filled back in again.

I picture you drinking. I picture you smiling. I picture you sleepy at sunrise saying, "I've got three brain cells left and they're fighting."

I picture you knocking the sign and knocking it down again the next night in triumph.

It is hard to picture you sad, although I hear you slur your words, which makes me sad now. I know you drank too much but it's hard to have known there could be consequences, not then, when we made it night after night traipsing until sunrise alive.

I wish you didn't do it, but imagine when you did, it was with your whole heart, and there was no turning back. My guess is it was swift and violent. And there is a part of me who is glad that if you were feeling that much pain, suffering that much, that I'm glad it is over, and I hope you're in a better place, as cliched as that sounds, no one should hurt that much that they feel death is the only choice.

And I wish and I wish. I wish you felt you had a choice. I wish you'd sought help and maybe you did and that if that help wasn't working that you'd sought it again. I wish a lot of things. That we could have those nights back when we were young and could have taken ourselves a bit more seriously. That we hadn't drifted apart. That it wasn't all just so much fun and fluff. And selfishly, I wish you'd reached out to me, that I could have helped you, or at least tried.

It was shocking and not shocking at the same time that you left instructions to have your ashes scattered right at the spot where we did so much hanging out, so much talking and laughing. Way before I ever met you, this beach was my magic place, a place out of time where I always felt I belonged. As a kid, I'd spend hours digging at the sand near the breakers, entertained by the dislodged crabs and clams, watching as they over and over again dug their way back into the sand until the water would come again. I made sandcastles. Mermaids. I swam and jumped through waves and wiped out and went back in for more. I'd search the tidal pools for shells and watch the moon rise in the water making a path that led all the way right to me. I listened to the crickets in the dunes and my hair went blonder and my skin went brown. And at night I watched meteor showers and mapped my own constellations. It's a place where the world is mine.

It's the only place in my life that's always lived up to its idealization, and now it's marked by your death. And I feel sad and mad about it in a way that's making that the focus and not your death, because it's still hard to think you're gone forever, and that any goofy laugh I hear of yours on those sands to the pound of that surf will be in my head, a memory, and there are no more times with you to look forward to, and that's the way it's going to have to be because you made it so.

Perhaps, I feel closer to you now that I know that the beach, my beach, was your beach, too.

You shouldn't have killed yourself. I wish you hadn't. You're too young and too smart and I just wish you hadn't done it.

For now with love, From Me

After

we fall asleep cheek to cheek,
all the day's dance
dissolving into loose jaws and
untidy limbs and the sweet sighs of dreams.

we lose our definition
to each other,
as one as two in sleep.
no seeing, just being.

i like to imagine so many
of our shared breaths
leaving our lips and
coming together to
carry on an invisible routine,
of which we aren't aware.

Oh-Bah-Ma

So it's Friday and I'm at my desk at work and I know I shouldn't be blogging right now but also it's been a hard week and I've done a lot of hard work and at the moment, nothing is urgent, and, and, so it goes.

This has been quite a week with the new president coming to office and all the festivities in D.C. and watching history unfold, that oft-repeated cliche. Closer to home, my homeless friend scared the daylights out of me the other morning when he jumped in front of me (where he jumped from, I have no idea) and yelled out Jack Nicholson-style, "who's your daddy?" When I jumped in return (out of being startled, not a sympathy gesture), he then goes, "just kidding, just kidding," and walked away. Just another day in the neighborhood with the people that you meet each day.

The day after the inauguration, on the crowded 22 bus, we stop at a light and some man runs up to the bus, yells something cheerfully, and runs away. "What he say," asks some girl sitting in the back, turning to her friend. Her friend replied, "He said 'Obama.' Oh-bah-mah! Oh-bah-mah!"

Ready for Change

tonight football at a friend's, the dark light of night staved off, that sundayitis made-to-hide-us, for a few hours at least. sandwiches with roasted peppers. pita and corn chips. a bowl of sauce. the alcohol running. the child comes in, watches mommy and daddy drink beer, shits her diaper, gets taken to the back room. the men on the screen advance forward and backward in the shivering cold. and on commercials, we switch over to the inaugural concert. everybody's playing with a smile in the frigid dc air for barack obama and dc does look its gorgeous self, all those stars and celebrities and the happy crowd, but mainly the monuments so grandiose and showing off and knowing it. what a city, my former city. and there's a little homesickness and there's some tears that want to well up for the momentousness of the occasion, that the bushes are leaving, finally they're leaving, and a new regime is coming in, one that holds promise to be inclusive. never seen so many so-called minority faces up and parading across the america's stage. it is so beautiful and so long in coming and i am, i am, i am ready for that change.

Avoiding the Subject of the Devil

A silly gaggle of writers gathered tonight to hear about Tasmania. No devils were mentioned, like so many other elephants in the room. Limpid, pale people dined on abalone, shells shining bright to catch the spotlights, particularly when someone accidentally would walk in front of projector that was displaying various images from the island: all sorts of sheep and nude statues and abstract art and modern wallabies. The wine flowed as the conversation droned on, and I flittered around, on the outskirts, playing with a piece of cheese, like the mouse that might scare the elephant, so many devils inside.

Mixed Messages

it's hot hot hot out and it's stirring up all the crazies outside. the homeless man i mentioned before was standing on the street corner shouting "HELP ME. SOMEBODY HELP ME!" So this woman approaches him to offer help and he turns on her, screams at her, "you don't know me. back off bitch!"

BART and the Riots

On New Year's day at an East Bay BART station, a policeman stared at the back of one 22-year-old Oscar Grant and discharged his weapon, a shot that proved fatal. Since then, I've watched this story percolate and grow, knowing it was only a matter of time before it started getting the attention it deserved. This black man was shot in the back by a white police offer while he was lying on the ground, and so far BART police or the officer himself has offered no explanation at all. Instead they ask the public for patience.

But it's '09. There are already at least three videos virally circulating the news sites and the web taken from witnesses at the scene with camera-equipped cell phones, showing what happened, if not what went on in the mind of the officer when he took that shot. Did he feel threatened? Did he think he'd grabbed his taser instead? Or, did he just intend to cold-bloodedly fire that shot as soon as he started fumbling for his gun?

We don't know because no one has spoken up. But the public is starting to. Today, there were protests that ended up closing down two BART stations near Oakland, and at this moment, there is rioting going on in the streets. While the reaction is delayed, it doesn't surprise me, just as it didn't surprise me to hear that the lawyer who represented Rodney King will be representing Oscar Grant's family. What a terrible loss they are suffering through right now, made no easier by the BART P.R. machine (what are you thinking, BART P.R. machine, to keep asking for patience, patience, patience, like you're Axl Rose singing that lazy song?). My thoughts and condolences go out to Grant's family and friends.

The Oxymorons

Obama moved to DC today, and is staying at the historic Hay-Adams Hotel until inauguration because Bush is too much of a dick to let him stay in the residence usually set aside for the president-elect. In the meantime, Bush Senior is jabbering on about how his dear Jeb should be president next, and I just want to gag. As the "pop culture" specialist guy on Rachel Maddow said tonight, "what Bushes? why do you hate America so"?

In the meantime, I'm having major ambivalence towards Israel right now. On the one hand, they've sustained a rather unreported 300 missile fires out of Gaza by Hamas and into the southern end of the country. So I get that it needs to defend itself. It's teensy tiny and still a baby, in world power terms. But does it have to defend itself at the expense of civilians?? Or is that an oxymoron? Not to sound too hopelessly idealistic, but why is it the people who pay most for wars are the ones who didn't make them in the first place? As long as civilians are being killed, Israel's going to lose the PR war, which is so much of the battle. After thousands of years, you think they'll ever just lay down their guns, Israelites and Palestinians, and just start kissing instead, or at least laughing at themselves for wasting so much time on foolishness? Yes, I said it. I fear for what will happen there, to all those antiquities, so storied and so historied and so imbued with spiritual and religious meaning to so many, but still in the end JUST SO MANY THINGS. Isn't one life, just one, an entire world?

A Simple Hello Will Do

There's a homeless guy in my neighborhood who I see almost every day. He's got mussy blonde hair, a wide and browned face with big blue eyes, and is of some undeterminable age between 20 and 40. Some days he's simply hanging out on the sidewalk, or sitting at the coffee shop, sometimes chatting with other homeless folk or just minding his own business.

Other days, he's off his rocker, railing at passing cars and passersby, sometimes more or less intelligbly, but mostly it's an angry stream of insults that make people freeze in their tracks for a split-second before moving on and pretending they can't hear the racket. Today he was like that, screaming down Market Street, and everyone who saw him became a target of his rambling rants. (I, for example, was called a ho-ho-whore.)

There was one day, a few months ago, when he was lying on a stack of newspapers on the sidewalk, just soaking up sunshine quietly, seemingly at total peace, and I walked past. He looked up at me and we made eye contact, and I smiled at him, said hello, then kept walking. Behind me, I heard him say, "Thank you. You just completely made my day."

Bushisms

Ahhh, the days of the Bush administration are blissfully numbered. And already the nostalgia begins! The Associated Press released a list of their favorite Bushims over the years, which you can find right here.

Excerpted verbatim below from the AP article, are five of my personal favorites:

Bush on Foolishness:
• "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." — Sept. 17, 2002, in Nashville, Tenn.

Bush on Gynecology:
• "Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." — Sept. 6, 2004, at a rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo.

Bush on, Like, Total Awesomeness:
• "Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome speech." April 16, 2008, at a ceremony welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to the White House.

Bush on Success:
• "There's no doubt in my mind, not one doubt in my mind, that we will fail." — Oct. 4, 2001, in Washington. Bush was remarking on a back-to-work plan after the terrorist attacks.

Bush on That Magical Place Where Jobs Come From:
• "The fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place." — May 27, 2008, in Mesa, Ariz.

Snuggies and Shamwows

Snuggies are a potentially life-changing product that’s currently being sold on the teevee set. Essentially, behold, it's a blanket--but a blanket with arms! Imagine, a blanket with arms, to keep you extra toasty warm around the house! The commercial is over-the-top in the way that sold-only-on-teevee commercials are, showing glowing white and happy families hanging out sanctimoniously together in their snuggies, delighting over what can only be the world's most hilarious books (reading lamp included), and waving their arms all around so the viewer can see that, indeed, your arms are free to move in a snuggie.

It’s all a little preposterous. Yet. I kind of want a snuggie. I’m home, and I’m cold, and all I can think is, Gee teevee, you’re right. How nice it would be to have a snuggie of my own to wear and warm my bones (and make a good Benedictine monk costume at Halloween). Now is that good product or good marketing?

What holds me back is the slippery sold-only-on-teevee slope. Next thing you know I’ll be snatching up shamwows like they’re on limited-time, one-time-only, get-em-while-they’re hot, these-things-sell-themselves, call-now-or-you-will-suffer-the-consequences, it's-not-wow-it's-shamwow shamtastic offer.

Sooo Sleepy

Each night, I love how it feels when lash finally meets lash--to stay. They've been flirting together all day long and finally the upper snuggles into the lower one, right and left, and as my eyes close my lashes settle in together all cuddly for a night of dreamy secret telling, filling my slumbers with their sleepy sweet nothings.

2008: Repudiate!

--What of a collection of 12 calendar pages can combine to such startling force and feeling?
--What of wrong places at the wrong times, the crash of cars and sound of screams in the night, for instance, negated?
--What of the cat gone and all the other dead, can a page be turned to bring them all back to the living?
--What of dim finances and collapsing economies, can they resurrect from the red and good fortune return?
--What of the anemic can be refortified, forcing energy into 2009 like powerful tea leaves?
--And what good can be unrepudiated, held over and hoarded for the new year?
--Is it enough to tag another calendar to the wall, heed that fresh start call and just begin, again?