1.24.2004

Today I feel the sneaky tendrils of obsession fingering their way through my fingertips and into my ears and wrapping themselves around my heart. I have discovered the boxes of old records for $1 at Amoeba. I would have stayed there for hours digging through the dusty boxes on the floor, if only my knees had not started developing a dull ache somewhere between finding Joan Baez -- The First 10 Years and Mozart's Requiem Mass performed by the Robert Shaw Chorale. It Must have been all of the crouching. Thankful to have chosen against the low-riding pants today.

I bought a Gordon Lightfoot album for the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I couldn't even remember how the song went, but I knew that in college, I used to love it. I may have at one time had all of the words memorized. It is a sad song about the actual Sinking of the Fitzgerald. This website tells the story, complete with maps and a timeline breaking down exactly what happened when the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk (?) sank (?) in Lake Superior in 1975. Very interesting.

Shipwrecks are so disasterous, so epic. It happens so slowly, people rushing about the doomed vessel with the expression of those about to die, grasping at jobs to do to prolong the inevitable or to divert their frenzied minds from the too-big-to-grasp fact that they're sinking into an uncompromising body of water and there they will stay. The ship groans out, calling for the help of the whales, as metal bends and it upends and slides into the sea.

Romantic but tragic.






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1.20.2004

Did anyone else just see Dick Cheney spill a glass of water on George Bush as they were shaking hands right after the speech?

or am I dreaming?

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"My fellow Americans, we have faced many challenges in the past few years. Terrorist attacks, weapons of mass destruction, capital gains taxes -- the list of things to be afraid of seems overwhelming at times.

But together we have faced these challenges with resolve and compassion. Our resolutions of strong compassionatalism have defeated many threats, but we face many more, right here at home and in outer space.

The most important thing for all Americans during these terrifying times is to trust that your leaders are keeping you safe. That is what I want to talk to you about tonight -- trust. And more specifically, trusting me.

See, I know what is going on. I get daily reports telling me. Many smart people make these reports for me. I trust them. You must trust me. You must trust me when I tell you that things are better than they have ever been in twenty years, and getting better. You must trust me when I tell you there are many new dangers to fear. You must trust me when I tell you that I will deal with them and keep you safe."

This is just an excerpt from a very funny
State of the Union Preview: "Trust Me" on this guy's blog. I read the speech in my mind using George W.'s voice. I wish that I had some kind of fancy recording device that I could hit a button, and it would record every time that that bafoon is going to use the word "terror" tonight. Butchering it to make the sound, "Tare."

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1.18.2004

We stopped on the crest of our last hill. Well, actually, our car was parked on top of a hill, but this particular one was the last before that one. I took pictures of Mat, staging them as he rode back towards where we had come and then pedalled towards me. Action shot. I took a picture of the nothing that spread out from me and culminated in the sea. Green hills and cows, a few trees, but mostly space. Wide open space and sharp blue sky. I stood alone on the hidden highway (doesn't anyone else know about this place? I hope not..), fiddling with my new camera, learning its menus and settings and trying them out on the big cow only a few feet away from me, its head perked and interested, large almond eyes looking in my direction. I thought not of top-level predators or accelerated heartrates or escape.

Satisfied with the variety of shots that I had taken atop the hill, we coasted down, air rich with oxygen, singing in my ears. The downhill sound. It is hypnotizing, like harpies far out in the sea somewhere, the sound of riding fast down a hill on your bike. It's the impetus for pedalling up sometimes. The quiet uphill struggle, time to think and hear the hawks cry out in the sky around me before the bombing down, the rush of air past my ears, blotting out all else but travel. Fast movement, effortless and graceful.

The spell broke with the quickly releasing sound that a bike makes when the pedals have lost their leverage, they circle impotently. There's a sliding and a "Shit!" and Mat had lost his chain. We stopped the bikes, and the chain hung slack and tired. Mat tapped around on the deserted Point Reyes highway in his clicky clacky road bike shoes and turned his bike upside down on the grass on the side of the road. Realizing that we were right on a dangerous curve, he righted his bike with a "This is a horrible place to work on my bike..." Clickety clackety tappy tap walking a few more feet to a safer place.

Suddenly, the bushes next to him rustled, usually the amplified sound that birds make as they peck and kick around in the bracken (is that a word? I love it), sounding bigger than they are in the dry and cracking leaves on the ground. This time the sound was much smaller than the thing which made it. Surreally, I looked up to see a BIG CAT. A big cat. It ran up the hill, its wide shoulder muscles propelling it so quickly with each step, the body in motion beautiful, powerful, so big and strong, the midback lunging a bit towards the ground, its hips and shoulders, fulcrums, hinges on which the graceful body was draped. The velvet fur, the ears like little teepees perched on its head, black and pointed. The long tail that flowed behind it. I couldn't take my eyes off of those shoulders, so magnificent, so amazingly strong and broad, so powerful. Powerful. Oh yeah. Those shoulders are really powerful and *really* fast. And they carry sharp teeth And we are here, Mat in his tippy tappy shoes and no chain, on this desserted stretch of Point Reyes highway. Oh, and now it isn't running anymore. Why, it's perched on top of that hill. Not afraid of us. Surveying its land and planting its big cat eyes on us, floundering and walking fast and tap tap tapping and trying to look not scared and mumbling to each other, "What are we supposed to do here?" and "just keep walking" as though loud speech would enrage it and it would come flying down the hill to devour us. Don't look at it. That is what I was thinking. Just don't look at it and keep walking. That will work. I bet that it really worked for the last baby elk that this thing had for breakfast.

Even as it was hunting us (for that is what was happening in my head, I love drama), I couldn't take my eyes off of it. The dark silhouette of the lonely predator perched on the hilltop. As I darted my eyes from the cat to the road and took cerebral measurements of the distance from where we were to our car on top of that other hill, dividing that distance by chainless bike walking and multiplying it by the surely enraging tapping of the road bike shoes (can you tell that I am jealous of the road bike shoes?) that would call attention to us, bringing the cat down from the hillside to bite and claw just to stop the tapping, I reaized our chances were not good. We were basically at the mercy of the big cat. Big Cat! Very big cat. It was no bobcat, let me tell you. It was a mountain lion. Just like the one who had killed someone recently and so, of course, was broadcast all over the television news.

The television news had been so excited about this mountain lion *mauling*. The word mauling used many times in one segment because the television news loves words like that. Words like mauling expedite the fear response that is the goal of the television news. Mat and I had poo-pooed the television news for its announcement during a commercial for the television news at eleven... "California park rangers think that citizens need to be very afraid of big cat maulings and so we will tell you what you need to know to **Save your life and the lives of your Children** about big cat maulings on the eleven o'clock news. If you love your *children* and don't want them mauled by big cats you will watch this broadcast." or something like that, I can't remember the exact words. We had not watched the broadcast.

We did not know what to do to prevent the big cat from mauling us.

So we continued with our shuffling, clicking, wounded-animal walk away from the cat's gaze. My heart beat deliciously and I could taste its iron and adrenalin in my throat, and the moment zoomed into close-up. Every breath was monumental and every step an effort as my mind raced but my actions remained calm. We remained calm! Finally, a rental car, lovely rental car with tourists and a convertible in windy desserted Point Reyes came gliding down the hill from which I had taken the pictures. The hill of unsuspecting isolation and swooping vistas. We put our hands up in stop signs and stood before the car in the road, the automobile no longer our only predator on the rolling highway. The car slowed suspiciously, not wanting to stop for these possibly murderously crazy bicyclists, but we gave them no choice placing our bodies before the grill, imploring them with our eyes.

We explained, breathless from the effort of being wonderfully gripped by terror, that there was a mountain lion just at the top of the hill. The two men looked at us, "ooookaay?", smirking, not really sure of the believability of this story. Could you honk your horn a few times? They offered to stay there while Mat put his chain back on. We looked for the big cat and didn't see him or her any longer after the horn honking (the cursed horn honking that we were shaking our fists at just the other night as some buttface honked their horn to summon someone from inside their residence on our quiet street). The chain was back on. We pedalled away, taking the hill without even a minute slow in cadence, not really realizing we were going up a hill, looking over our shoulders, and talking talking loudly, the amphetamine of death faced coursing in our bloodstreams.

One of the best parts of any physical endeavor is the hanging out afterwards, the sitting on the tailgate and eating grapefruits and apples and nuts and drinking water and stretching and watching the afternoon sun and feeling tired and sweaty and talking excitedly about what you have just seen and done. The heady cocktail of adrenalin and movement and lactic acid. As we basked in the afterglow of being a part of the food chain and living to tell the tale, the impossible luck, the unexplained fortune, I was high. Point Reyes. is the greatest place on earth, and I hope that no one else finds out. Will I be afraid of isolation and desserted stretches of highway on my bike from now on? Maybe a little the next few times I am out there, but no. Not really. I am alive. And every time I am reminded of that I feel a little more so.


** After a sufficient amount of basking, we got in the car and drove down the hill to where we had seen the BIG! cat. It was still there, hunting, looking, blending effortlessly into the brown patches of the hillside. Lonely. Solitary. I nearly cried when I noticed its limp, a slight injury to the back leg somewhere. It seemed to be doing ok, though, and owning its hillside. Its movements were so surreal, so smooth even with the limp. It was so big. We sat on the roof of the car and watched it for a while before I began to feel like I was an intruder and we left. **

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1.13.2004

"Former secretary of the treasury Paul O'Neill revealed in a
new book that President George W. Bush was already looking
for an excuse to invade Iraq during the first few weeks of his
presidency. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That
was the tone of it," O'Neill said. "The president saying
'Go find me a way to do this.'" O'Neill said that the very
first meeting of the National Security Council involved
discussions of a "post-Saddam Iraq," peacekeeping troops,
and war-crimes tribunals. O'Neill provided the book's
author, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, with 19,000
internal documents -- one of which, from March 5, 2001, was
entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" and
included a map of Iraqi oil fields listing contractors and
countries with interests there. O'Neill also said that Bush
was disturbingly disengaged ("like a blind man in a room
full of deaf people") during cabinet meetings, and that many
high-ranking administration officials have no idea what the
president wants them to do and that they operate on "little
more than hunches about what the president might think.""

--Harper's Weekly Review

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1.9.2004

I'm going to a novel writing workshop at 826 Valencia
 on Sunday. Wow! I am a little nervous. There will only be a maximum of 30 people there, and that means that I will not be able to quietly blend in with the furniture while staring at great writers and feeling inspired.

I see in the description that there will be breaking into small groups. Argh. That statement always makes me cringe. I remember it from elementary school when we would have to work on group projects. The teacher would point with her piece of chalk, gesturing in the air and dividing the class into little continents. I would always end up on nose-picking-knee-bouncing-making-the-desk-squeak-staring-at-the-floor continent. No one on my continent wanted to be on the continent at all, and no one had any great ideas. I would look around at the room at the Continent-Containing-All-of-My-Friends headed up by the pretty student teacher who I had begun to idolize with her canvas tote bag and green sweater with an apple on it with a worm poking his jaunty head out of the top. The Super-Organized-Continent-who-had-already-appointed-a-note-taker fast on the way to the end of the misery and the end of the project. My group would shuffle and cough and try not to look at each other, muttering "I don't know" and "You come up with an idea... no, you"'s. It was just so much pressure. The minutes dragged by.

Sometimes in a yoga class, I will be out of my body, floating in the velvetty air in the room contemplating the sweet pull of my right hamstring when the teacher may bring me crashing down to the hard, smelly carpet of the floor with the words, "Find a partner and do this..." No. NO!! I don't want to exchange pleasantries with another sweaty class member, ending up hefting each other's legs up in the air and worrying if they are grossed out by touching my stinky armpits.

I don't like breaking up into groups.

Maybe it's why I don't like team sports or really like big social gatherings where people break themselves up into groups voluntarily (unless there is a large amount of alcohol involved). I always end up with the group of people who don't really know each other and who are rounded up and forced into conversation while the groups around me just magically hit if off and launch into animated discussions and laugh loudly.


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1.8.2004

Why don't I ever have these kind of ideas? This article,Man's apartment encased in aluminum foil, on Salon today is so funny I was hooting and laughing out loud as I read it. Brilliant. This guy was staying in his friend's apartment while he was out of town, and he covered the whole place in aluminum foil. Even every coin of his loose change. The cd's were all covered, but he made sure that you could open them. This is the best part. He unrolled the toilet paper, wrapped it in foil, and wrapped it back onto the roll.

I love it.

One of my very best friends in high school, Jason, lived in the loft part of an A-frame house with another friend, Michael, a few years ago. You could only get to his little nest by way of ladder. It was so neat.
Jason loves to sleep and was doing so late one morning when Michael left the apartment after taking away Jason's ladder and turning the stereo on to some really awful song, like The Macarena but it wasn't that and I can't for the life of me come up with a song that is as bad as the one that they told me but... and putting the awful song on repeat.
Practical jokery.
Now that is really an art. A beautiful, creative way of making life funny. God save the skilled practical joker. Someone play one on me.
I know that I will be twisting my hands, rubbing them together, and smirking as I plan a nice one on, perhaps? One of you? Be afraid. I'm inspired.

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1.4.2004

Fidgety People

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"Days it takes an adult in Los Angeles to breathe in more air pollution than EPA guidelines recommend for a lifetime: 25"

From the Harper's Index December 2002

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OK
Now I am ready. To start writing again. I have shunned the written word long enough. For the whole month of December the thought of stringing two words together in some semblance of intelligent meaning repulsed me. I wanted to sink into the lower level of brain waves occupied with episodes of The Simpsons, staring out the window at steam rising off of the roofs, wrapping Christmas presents, and fantasizing about the Return of the King. NaNoWriMo, writing a book in a month, was a beautiful thing. And it was equally beautiful to witness the way that my mind balanced itself out in the aftermath. And I'm proud of myself for respecting the way that I was feeling rather than turn "writing something every day" into something that was forced rather than something that I couldn't help but do.

So I am donning my Blogger hoody. I am going to actually print out and read the novel that I wrote (haven't even read it yet in its complete form). And when I am good and ready, I will edit it. A week from today (7 more days) I will attend an adult fiction writing workshop at 826 Valencia with !*#@***dave eggers!@%&****** and ***###! Michael Chabon !!****%%%

I can't believe it. Two of my most inspiring authors at one workshop. Sure it's costing me a hundred smackers, but it goes to the writing center. 826 Valencia has free writing classes and workshops for kids. Mat volunteers there, and so does my friend Aimee. It is a very worthy cause, and I would honestly have given plasma every day for a month to raise the hundred bucks to go to this because those two guys are the ones who planted the seeds of my novel. I just would have had to overcome my severe anemia and dehydration experienced only by a body with no plasma and propped myself up at a table or something. Perhaps I could have rented a walker.

So, now, thankfully I can maybe compose enough little things to get that dreaded Common Sense link off of the damn page. I am so tired of seeing it. Go down, black link. Down down and into the archives for I grow weary of you.

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