2.9.2004

Mat and I are training for the AIDS ride. We will be riding our bicycles from San Francisco to LA over six days in June. That is about 90-100 miles a day. Camping out along the way. I think that I will maybe get blisters on parts of my body that I wasn't sure existed, but we will make lots of money for AIDS research and education and, in some small way, help the world. If you have some spare cash floating around, go ahead and click on that new icon that you see on my page and donate! In the mean time, rest assured that we are getting in really good shape, trundling up hills and over dales preparing our butts for six days in the saddle. Maybe the next time you see me I will have Popeye thighs. Sweet.

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2.6.2004

I wrote this about Badly Drawn Boy's song "You Were Right"


"Badly Drawn Boy" makes me think of a crooked, angular, skinny kid who leans sideways, sketched in crayon with a slight flaw that makes him walk unsteadily.

I first heard the song in the summertime. I never pay attention to much in the summer, besides the yellow glow of the light that streams through the eucalyptus trees in the park, thick with little flecks of dust and tree bark fragments dancing down to the earth, or the smell of my skin after a day spent in the sun, the heat of my body diffusing warmth and ocean and grass and dirt and cypress and velvet blue sky into my apartment for hours after the moon has begun its rise.

In the summer, I wake up at 6:00 because the sun comes shining through the jewel colors of the sarong that hangs in our bedroom window; drifting stained glass sewn of thin cotton, furling between the worlds of sleep and morning breeze. The room glows warm, red and orange and blue. The sense of creatures waking up, of minds thinking and birds leaving their nests stirs my limbs, and I can sleep no longer because I am excited for The Coffee.

I pour half and half for ten seconds, stirring and watching The Coffee, monitoring the mug for the precise moment that the pitch blackness yields and turns to a tiny mud-puddle. And so it was--during my morning ritual of kidney-bullying beverages and playing loud music (since all of the neighbors are at work anyway), preparing for a day spent tossing Frisbees and pedaling bikes in flip-flops--that I heard "You Were Right."

It was around 9:15, and I sat on the couch among the piles of books, magazines, records, beer bottles, crayons, and whiffle balls that collect in our apartment when the weather is too beautiful to spend time putting things back where they belong, listening to a compilation CD that my husband had burned on the computer. It was a new one that had "I need a job" scrawled in Sharpie as a title. We laughed because, really, no one needs a job in the summer.

The song squiggled its way through weeks of blissful, warm weather mental softness, and struck me. I remember throwing the magazine I was reading to the floor and standing. My ears honed in on the magic carpet song as it poured out of my speakers like honey, filling the room in harmony with the white-gold of the morning sun. It bounded into the room and filled it up from the first note with red colors and shooting stars. I had to stand.

Sitting down hampered my full experience of this journey through sparkling layers of sounds, swirling the contents of my heart with its violins and surprising me with the beat of the drums that halted and started back again, giving each verse a separate identity tied in and blended soothingly by the chorus. Damon Gough's voice like the stick of butter that my dad rubbed on my arm when I touched the stove as a child.

I walked to the open window and inhaled the minty eucalyptus trees. I memorized the words, writing them down on the bus and going over them again and again in my head, knowing that they would forever remind me of this particular time in my life, would bring me back to how the air felt, the tilt of the earth on its axis, the weight of my bones in my skin, the minute characteristics of life that escape description, or chronicling in scrapbooks.

The song was my summer anthem. It came to me when I was not looking for it, and I lived it, breathed it, and sang it as I rode down the street on my bike (no hands!) arms outstretched from my sides, fingertips absorbing blue sky like gills. It would have been my summer anthem even if it had crap lyrics, thanks to the melody and what it did to me. Yet the words can stand on their own; they are poetry set to an orchestral score.

"Songs are never quite the answer, just a soundtrack to a life that is over all too soon."

"You Were Right" speaks of loss. The loss of great lives that changed the way that we look at the world, of Kurt Cobain, Frank Sinatra, Jeff Buckley. The loss of wanting to profess love for another but instead, disguising it in song lyrics, in art. Sad, really, but played with a celebratory feel to welcome the melancholy. It made me happy.

The summer pulsed around the song, the song permeated the summer. It is a song of massive proportions. A song of the broad and beautiful spectrum of human emotion. A song of tearful sentiments accompanied by sunshine and strong coffee and Frisbees and climbing out of the Pacific Ocean to stand shivering on the sand on one of the few 80 degree days of the San Francisco summer. A song that I will scratch onto my Top Ten Songs of My Lifetime list, that I will calmly compose on my 100th birthday. A song that begs for really good speakers or the scratch of a needle on vinyl. If I could, I would put it in a locket and wear it around my heart forever.


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2.3.2004

"Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" Cheney asked an interviewer. "It's a nice way to operate, actually." [Asia Times]
---Harper's Weekly

Cheney = Sauron

Why, yes, we think you are the evil genius in the corner. Your evil genius powers must have given you the ability to read our minds. I don't really see you in a corner, though. More perched atop a black marble pedastal, black shoes off and clawed bird feet clutching the stony surface.

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2.2.2004

Captain Kangaroo, I will miss you

My little-girl world was a small town, a big yard with a carpet of grass, autumn leaves and lightning bug summer nights. Captain Kangaroo, Mister Rogers, and Fruit Loops turning the milk pink mornings. Wrapped up with Bill Cosby Picture Pages. The shows nurtured my need to learn and to see the world outside of my little town, to see how it is lived in other places. In other places grown men shake hands with puppet kings and queens every day. Why wouldn't they? Someday I would too.

Captain Kangaroo's world of puppets and humans coexisting beautifully, integrating well in the 60's and holding hands through the 70's and 80's, was one of the pillars holding up the starry ceiling of my childhood. My three-year-old tongue lacked the coordination required to say his name, but I loved him. I called him Kack 'n Roo.

Television once helped to shape my mind softly, gently. The puppets with their muted colors and fuzzy edges, the light and simple music, Mister Rogers' voice like the Valium that I would discover fifteen years later. The shows kept the brand new and super-sensitive souls of the toddler and small child in mind, holding them in white cotton gloves covered in feathers.

Everything is so big when you are young, every discovery so darn exciting to the core that it isn't uncommon to see a four year old collapse and fall asleep, mouth open and thin layer of sweat, exhausted from the newness of it all. Over-stimulation is cruel to one whose every sensory nerve thrums and whose eyes reach out actively and grab everything in, pulling sunsets and kittens and the ocean in to them, sucking them in swishing them around, labeling, learning.

Captain Kangaroo and Jim Rogers knew this. They spoke softly and moved slowly, gently. They set the tempo for my days of early childhood, graceful and without hours or minutes to dissect them. I followed the wishes of my own mind, sat for hours under the rosebush that my dad had planted for my mom, took my blanket and stuffed animal pals out to the back yard and spread out under a tree, laying there and picking grass or watching birds.

I lived in a land where puppets were accepted and things unfolded and opened before me languidly.

Why did I later sell my mornings to The Bozo Show, with its overstimulating, raucous characters with their large disaster colored hair, loud clothes in ugly shades of red, white and blue and polka dots, frightening make-up, and ridiculous shoes? My favorite part? The Grand Prize Game, the forbidden apple hanging on the branch that, once bitten, planted in me the seeds of want, the strange desire of winning and obtaining things. Shiny things! I began to write letters to the show, you! can be a contestant kids. You, too, can win the chance to come and meet Bozo and get things. I wrote often, determined to one day be near the star of the show.

Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo did not make you enter some lottery contest to be near them. They drew near to those whose upturned and translucent fresh faces gazed at them from their living rooms. They reached out to me, held me in their laps and gently surrounded me with their beautiful lands. Mister Rogers changed his shoes and sweater when he came in the door to spend time with me, leaving his life and need for approval at the door with the articles of clothing. The time that he spent with me was just for me. For me.

They did not offer me new toys, wrapped in plastic and cardboard. They offered me softly expanding realms of magic and peace crawling with friendly mailmen and guitar-strumming folk singers. My mom must have witnessed the crossing over from these places into the Price is Right-like studio setting of The Bozo Show with sadness. She knew that it had to happen, that it was only natural progression, maturity luring me away from those pastel colored lands and into the claustrophobic grasp of The Real World with its contests and prizes.

We have lost Jim Rogers and Bob Keeshan. We have lost them physically, but they will never be lost from my heart and soul. They shaped the world that I escape to even now, for the land of my fantasies is drawn in crayon and covered in softly covered felt. When I close my eyes and seek refuge, I still shake the hands of puppet kings and queens. And softly spoken words surround me and whisper new information gently.

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