overheard today at Starbucks

Girl; Oh Hey! How are you?
Guy: I'm good, how are you?
Girl: Good, I'm getting ready to go back to St. Louis. First time in 5 years. I'm a pastor's daughter and there's a big deal thing going on for him at his church so I'm gonna go to that. It's gonna be wierd but great. I haven't seen those people for like 5 years.
Guy: I'm going to Cabo. Kinda like St Louis, right?
Girl: Yeah, almost.
Guy: Actually, I'm going down there for Kent Harris' wedding. Do you remember that guy?
Girl: Yeah, he worked in marketing right?
Guy: Yeah.
Girl: Why is she pregnant?
Guy: Um no.
Girl: Did he just meet her or something?
Guy: Well, they've been going out for like, a year and a half.
Girl: Oh is she from Iowa too?
Guy: No, actually she's from here.
Girl: Oh. Is she dumb or something?
Guy: No. I mean she's seems really nice. Well, it was good running in to you. Have fun in St Louis.
Girl: I will, it's gonna be really wierd to go back there, really wierd. Bye.

I sense a salacious back story.


The native populations (as in native americans) of coastal California believed that the Pacific Ocean had no memory. It's no wonder so many of us midwesterners are drawn to the magic water of Santa Monica Bay and it's ability to erase our pasts.

Memorial Day

My cellphone, a slew of relationships, ways of thinking and percieving, my 30s. All in memoriam.

Recurring dream imagery of late:
Scythe
Tower
Cliff Edge

GOOGLE SAYS...

SCYTHE: Symbolic for the end of something.
Cutting ties.
Reaping, expresses hope of a fruitful harvest of things desired.

TOWER: Paradigm shift.
Destruction of illusion.
Insights and revelations.

CLIFF EDGE: Indicates arrival at an increased level of understanding, new awareness, new point of view.
Reaching a critical point in life requiring a "leap of faith".


We know before we know.

Imagine how your day would go if these kids were the first thing you saw...

RAZR blades

After months of complaining about how much I hated my Motorola RAZR phone, fate intervened and took it away. At the time, and for the days following, it was the particulars of the dissappearance that got to me. For four days I looked for symbolic meaning. Was I not connecting with people? Did I need a push to get rid of some questionable friendships? Was I too attached to the past? Did I take things for granted? Was I a bad person? All aboard, express train to crazytown.

I have a new phone now.
Now Im thinking about the sense of isolation I felt when I knew I couldnt contact or be contacted. Many times I have accidentally left my phone behind and felt a rush of pleasure for the spontaneous solitude. Why was this so different? Sure there's the hassle of having to corral everyone's number, and a year's worth of dear images (spectacular sunsets, adventures, friends and intimates, children, oddities, the art in everyday life) are all gone. But I felt gripped by a sharp, hollow presence in those 4 phoneless days. I still cant quite shake it, and I feel different. Like, maybe something had to die so something else could be born...but it's all happened in the shadows of my being. It doesnt feel bad, just unfamiliar. I hope whatever got born has a rockin' sense of humor.

on today's walk

the definition of insanity

Me: I'm looking into taking voice lessons.

Mom: Hmmm (disapprovingly) Why?

Me: I'm not trying to become a singer or anything, I'm just looking to focus on unlocking my expression--- I thought it would be helpful to learn from someone who knows how to open up the voice. Plus, I think it would be fun and feel so good to sing.

Mom: That sounds expensive.

Me: Mom, can't you just be supportive?

Mom: How am I not being supportive? I just think you cant afford lessons and I dont see how it's gonna help you with your art. You express yourself to me just fine.

Me: Oh Mom, you don't get it. It's ok. I shouldn't have brought this up. It reminds me of that saying about the definition of insanity.

Mom: I don't think I know what your talking about.

Me: There's a saying, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Mom: That sounds like depression.

Me: Let me put it another way...It's like going to Nordstrom's and expecting to come home with groceries and enlightenment.

Mom: Ok. Well I still don't understand why you need singing lessons.

Photos by Jill Greenberg

I'd like to strap a collar and leash on my anger and stroll it around the neighborhood. Socialize it, give it some fresh air.

Setting up my private torture chamber, alternating who's sitting and standing.

My mind gives me a movie.
He is sitting... naked and tied to the chair, I have sedated him. I roll in a cart. On it a scalpel, a vat of flour and water, and a 2 foot chicken wire form in the shape of a phallus. I never make eye contact with him but feel his eyes on everything. I approach him with scalpel in hand and take a strip of skin. I dip it in the flour water and set in on the form, I do that until the phallus is completely constructed. I clap my hands and a chihuahua enters the room, it's wearing a shirt that says "cock-sucker". I place the skin-mache dick on the ground and the dog sinks it's teeth into it and takes it to the corner and tears it apart.

This feels good to me for about 10 seconds. On the eleventh I begin to empathize. On the twelth, I am ashamed of both my scheme and then my willingness to feel ashamed about it.

My turn to sit in the chair.

Get me off this pain-exchange program.

"...Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand..."
(the Skin Horse from the Velveteen Rabbit)

oh god, the moon (tonight's walk)

animal crackers

In last nights dream I was trying to care for and save 2 tanks of fish but I couldn't get the air bubblers to work right and the heaters were spiking the temperatures or not working at all. Some fish melted, some darted around crazily, some stood still but eventually they all died. While all this chaos was going on, cats kept jumping through windows and pushing open doors. I would periodically leave the fish to tend to the cats. I'd scoop them up and toss them out, shut windows and lock doors but they'd find some hole in the wall or through a crawl space and appear again. Eventually the cat problem was solved but the fish had a different fate.

I woke up mad. I woke up annoyed. Nothing in me is swimming anymore. Everything has been lurched onto an active volcanic island. Jagged black mountains, things that cut up the soles of the feet, noxious fumes.

on today's walk

The alp

An alp, a demon from German folklore. It sits on the chest or throat causing deep anxiety in it's victim (it's also fond of souring milk, tangling hair into knots and riding horses to exhaustion.) I certainly feel soured, tangled and exhausted. Sometimes expressing myself is like trying to shake off an alp while being encased in coffin of quick-dri cement.

Anne Lamott from "Traveling Mercies"

A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won't hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion.

on today's walk

TODAY.
I woke up this morning mind-chanting "time, time, time, be kind, be kind, be kind, time, time, time, be kind, be kind, be kind."

I did laundry, bought a scratch off ticket and won $100.
I laughed when the man who runs the convenience mart insisted on showing me the latest National Enquirer (celebrity plastic surgery issue) and giving me his opinion on who looks good and who doesn't.
I felt moved when he then told me that he felt sorry for all of them and hoped they were able to find some happiness in this life.
I walked by a local church parking lot where they were setting up a carnival: ferris wheel, tilt-o-whirl, rollercoaster and I remembered being 10.
I sniffed a passionflower and it smelled like grape kool-aid.

I confessed to myself that there have been times I've wanted someone to hurt me physically so that I could feel both pain and power.

on today's walk

THIS arrived today, like a window into an alternate universe. His beautiful handwriting dancing to the rythym of his pleasure. Descriptors like "turbo-charged", "phenomenal", "vitality", "blast", "grand show" (and the use of 2 exclamation points) displayed a spirited gratitude. I am blissfully happy for him, but jealousy and anguish peer through the window. Now insecurity has me competing with exotic locales for his affections. Also, the picture on the postcard fills ME with the wanderlust and a fervent desire to be engulfed by a foreign environment, to expand MY sense of humanity. I wanna connect to that which is bigger than me! I wanna roam a vast expanse instead of pacing the two square inches of my current head space. It was my greatest hope and desire that he'd have exactly the kind of experience he related. But the anguish over not being able to sit across from him and watch his pupils dilate as he narrates the story, and feel the energy flying off his gesticulations, and having his silvery voice glide all over my skin...

on today's walk

For MCH

neXXXus

I watched a man masturbate on the pier today. The pier is a quarter mile long and made of concrete rather than wood so that the sides easily obscure anything from the waist down. He stood facing the corner of one of the fishing alcoves overlooking the beach. He wore black nylon pants with an elastic waist allowing him to pull down the front and maintain a clothed appearance from the back. It was the rythmic movement of his right arm that caught my attention. It was the rythmic movement of his right arm that kept my attention. He would periodically look down at himself and slow his motion, as if simulating the pace of the waves rolling onto the shore. I watched him for several minutes and realized that we were sharing at least one thought, I wonder if I'm gonna get caught.

When we are outsmarted by our Desires

Arson

Wildfires burn inside me, threatening historical landmarks.
Who dropped the lit match, me or him?

For Fun and Happy

Trying to connect to my
inner treadmill dancer

yin vs. yang

From Feist "The Water'

The water.
The water came to realize
It's dangerous size.
The mountain.
The mountain came to recognize
It's deep and rocky sides
More than realized.

You got back from Aisa today

A head looking for a body, a head looking for a body so it can connect to a heart.

You take up a lot of room for a guy who's not here.

Hope that you'll come back...fully formed

This contains Magic

TRIVIA FUN FACT:
The opal is one of the few minerals which can be extracted economically by a miner working alone.
exerpted (from an article by Robert Hughes)

Coober Pedy, the Opal capital of Australia, is about 525 miles north-northwest of Adelaide. You fly there on a little 19-seater plane that stops first at a uranium-mining town called Olympic Dam, a cluster of machinery and huts in absolute flatness--red desert all around. As soon as you get out of the plane (which has to refuel), you are assailed by millions of flies. The fly biomass of central Australia must be 10 times the biomass of humans or kangaroos. You at once start doing the irritable wave of the hand known as the outback salute. The flies crawl into your nostrils, eyes and ears, and when you get back in the plane, they fly in clouds into the cabin, so that the pilot takes out a can of powerful insecticide--"Jeez, this is going to smell really putrid," he cheerfully announces--and sprays them down. Then you take off. Forty minutes later, you land in Coober Pedy, with dead flies in your lap.
Coober Pedy is Aboriginal for "white fella down a hole." Opals were discovered here, lying on the surface, by a 14-year-old boy back in 1915. He was looking for water but instead kept tripping over the "floaters," as surface opals are called. Few floaters are seen now; the opals are all underground, embedded in deep layers of soft sandstone. This whole area, millions of years ago, was ocean floor. So it is relatively easy to mine, and since opal mining is entirely an individual business, like California gold mining back in 1849, it has never been industrialized.
Indeed, it can't be. The big mining companies--which the opal miners hate, along with the government and the cops and the tourists--have never devised a profitable means of detecting or extracting opals. It's handwork. You just stake a claim and start digging. Sounds simple, but the trouble is that none of the conventional geological spotting techniques apply. Opals don't react chemically with the stone matrix around them, and they don't leave the "traces" that gold or diamonds do. So it is a matter of digging and digging and digging. One spot is as good as another; the chances are always essentially the same. You can drill or pick into one spot on the rock wall and find nothing or go in 6 in. away and hit a "pocket," or lode, of opals that could be worth $100,000.
Or--and the miners with whom I spent a night drinking in the clubhouse of the Coober Pedy Golf Club are full of stories like this--you can place an explosive charge, set it off and find that you've blown a quarter-million bucks' worth of opal to worthless dust, the texture of coarse sugar, because you didn't know it was there. Then you just go and have a drink. Or two.
Opal is a silicate fossil. It comes in "shells"--seashells originally, for this whole desert was once a vast inland sea--or more rarely in "pipes," or tubes, the fossilized backbones of archaic freshwater squid. The paradox of the stuff is that although it is so brilliantly colored, it has no color of its own. It's a solid diffraction grating, and the color you see is the light dispersed and reflecting through it. John Smart, the miner in whose mine we filmed, waxes reflective about this. "The opal's just a bloody illusion. It's as though you're spending your life down here digging for something that doesn't actually exist."

Express Yourself

Hurry up, go.
Don't yell at me!
Just say something.
I'm trying, it's hard.