For the Sake of Continuity

I started this bit about Havana when I was shoveling gravel in the backyard of Tony Winter's house.  I guess it doesn't matter if I name names.  He's got the typical suburban tract house and a couple of immense animals that fill the backyard with a noxious smell that is critically absorbed into the gravel he's put back there.  We were helping him shovel in a fresh load, and yes, it did need even more rock, considering the size the his dogs, but there was also the pool to think of.  The dogs are fond of swimming in that pool and it carries a fresh coating of scum from the dirt they bring into it.

Which all put me in mind of Havana half way through the exercise.  There were four of us, the home owner, his brother, my girl, my self.  There was another woman in the house who was studying.  She is in the same field as my girl and they are knowledgeable with one another on certain subjects, handwashing being one of them, I suppose.  Certainly after being in that backyard, I was germ concious.

Havana came to mind in the strength of the heat on the fresh rock.  It is about the end of November and in Tempe, on a good day like this one was, it was eighty plus degrees out there in the full sun.  That was nice.  The smell of the other rock wasn't so nice but there it is, you cannot have it all.  Like the dogs eating my biorhythm book and my girl saying when I was going to chart the new baby, 'please don't'.  It's what you call summarily dismissed and as much as they might grieve about it later, it's what they did.  What they said, who they are.  I talked to her father about it and he told me to forget about it.  Of course, I didn't really want to mend any fences with him either, but there it was, on the table, like Havana, waiting to be spoken about.

This must of all happened there, on the warm island in the Gulf, in the mid fifties, about the time that ol whatshisface, Gene McCarthy, was baiting hooks on the hill flushing out the radical few who thought it was cool to believe in extrasensory perception.  I'm not even going to use the word he was after because in this time, it's probably a good way to get that disease that Guevara studied.  Has something to do with cross dressing also, the way I observed it.  I've been thinking about this topic of Havana for going on two weeks now and it's still a little confused how I want to address it.

What I do know is that rocking the back yard in the mild heat, they all said they usually do those kinds of projects in the middle of summer when it's blasting hot.  I nodded, couldn't see how it could feel to be in that much heat, recognized I was thinking of a place that had some destiny to it.  I tuned in on that.

It was watching the motorcycle diaries movie that got me into the epic of Havana.  Then my middle son was telling me about Guantanamo Bay incarceration facility where we're not nice to the clientele.  My thought is that we're bringing them back from a place no one should go, like what happens to the rock in the backyard when the dogs have been at it...don't you just regravel now and again, I thought?  You take the whole clump with you and pretty soon it's down to a little square.

It was the ethic of the Cuban cigar that was behind the whole Cuban thing.  I know they make a good pulled pork sandwich, and then there was the idea that pigs eat anything but if they consume hair, they get stomach problems.  So always shave the head if it's a body, oink, oink.  Think how many bald heads are running around these days...like it's so cool to be a chrome dome.  Hmmm.  Little things that fit together in a complex bundle of wires and consequences.  Why would everybody want to be bald?  What's so cool about it?
Are we going somewhere?

I'm up really early this morning.  It's not even six yet but it's almost.  I was doing that when I was in Mesa as well, getting up before dawn, to tap on the little laptop in my room.  One day it wasn't there anymore because it had been given to the tv system installer.  When I got home, my satellite service had been altered.  I didn't get the Havana story written down because it was and is still coming to me in fragments.  I think it was something like this:

early on, before I knew what I know and was here and there and Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman ever, there was a Cuban part of me that was an adult and not six years old and I was a friend of a doctor of leprosy who had come to Cuba to practice.  I may have even been his wife, I don't know that part but I know I was like Marilyn Monroe, same blonde curls and sheath dresses and heels and lipstick and all that.  My doctor husband/friend if he were so, had a practice in Cuba, in Havana and he dealt with contagious disease and I served cold drinks on a plaza by the house where you could hear the sea but you couldn't see it.  Like where I live now, the sea is booming and ripping up the MOUND as though it were nothing.  It is flooding the backyard as well so it is something...

ONe day we had a visitor named Fidel but you know, back then the cigars and the bears, they just went with the practice of being beatnik and exposed and liking to think of oneself as an intellectual, which we all did.  I got my share of poems and so forth and perhaps the young doctor wasn't my spouse but perhaps I had several admirers and chose to spend my time with one and then the other of them.  That could be.  I don't think it was though, I think I was the one that pulled the books off the shelf and explained about protective coloring, disguise, camoflauge, genetic mutation.  I must have known something about it and that's why the island itself became what it became, of a sort, we don't go there like we go to Hawaii, because it's not the most friendly place in the world, not like Cancun in Mexico, the beaches nearby the ones I've always wanted to explore.  Maybe that place isn't that friendly either, maybe it's all protective coloring.

So the idea of leprosy as a disease spawned in filth and gestated in despair was one that my colleague, if that's what he was, explored and with the tune of latin rhythms clacking in a dancing beat, the use of tobacco was discussed in terms of a purifying agent.  It was known as detrimental to the lungs, but the gases of the aveoli affected in the progression of the disease, did that not have some consequence in things?  Developments...and were there not ways to speed things up and gestate some kind of cellular cure?  It was heady days and then into that courtyard came spitfire and the very disease itself, in terms of plain flannel suits and dark ties and cotton shirts mostly in white.  Pointy straw hats for the heat and sunglasses for the glare, which they were capable of at any hour, and the means to the end with the idea that we wouldn't imitate so much as reprocess.  The little deadly contagion was useful in this end but how is more a martini than it is a concept.  Like a Cuba Libre, who grows the mint?  Which on a hot day in that courtyard in the sun with the latin music champing away in a yayaya, the dark hair and eyes of the Indian combined with the Spanish aristocractic bearing, not that they didn't have their own but they were uncouth in many ways, stubborn and blunt, it came about that such must be so, if one were to come across good friends in low places, that it would have to work.  How it did, why it did, where we are now..another story.  Something along the lines of what Dana said to me when I left New York..."The problem is cannibalism"...didn't ever figure that out, but did get the gist of things.

The solution, as we saw it then, with our chacha and rumba was that the cigar would provide the blind.  It was a good cigar then and it is a good cigar now.  There's no difference in the production except you have to have green army clothes on now to qualify for a puff.  Who needs that.  Then we wore cheap suits, Florsheims if we had them, heels for the ladies, and we all had our hair done.  It was hot but there was a sea breeze to cool us because it is an island.  And you can't make an earthquake out of a green army uniform population.  Most everybody takes the sea change cure there. They started doing that right when the flannel suits came along in their bland whiteness with a slight buckle just below the knee.  They were many and soon they were few and everyone became a part of the green army and smoked cigars.  It was a natural progression.  Not a very friendly one, to hear it told, but children will repeat the harsh words of their parents as easily as breathing.  And that's what that became, in a word, a way to recycle ourselves in the face of a thing that had gone quite wrong, in the wrong hands.  The one was objectified by the other and wished to correct it, the compadres.  Everyone injected, the objectors laid out, but how...we were not about that in any way.  My favorite line, I think, was 'Maybe it's an orchid?' To which the reply came 'Should we change the soil?'  And, of course, we did.

It all seems quite scattered, what we were doing, other than entertaining, meeting friends, conducting business, being cultured and sophisticated, with certain promises not given but elected to choose from, in the eventuality things were achieved.  And so the lace curtain came down like the great pile sorted in the back room that leaks...here we are and here we are and here we are.  The rattan shades were drawn against high winds, the rains blotted out the sun.  Peace and justice became an extraction process decidedly in favor of the unknowable.  And I found myself staring in front of a mirror in my grandparents' house in Duluth.  I was nine years old, full of freckles, a pixie haircut because my mother would cut my hair, and cut my hair.  My eyes were staring into the mirror and I was aware of my conscious body.  I suppose they were there with me, that we'd all gone there rather than to take apart one more flannel suit.  I was brushing my hair and I realized I was here at nine for good, that that image was me that I was looking at.  I decided I liked it.  I couldn't see the aquamarine sheath anymore with the draped shawl collar, the patent heels from the really good store, the great white choker beads, the tube of red lipstick.  I wasn't that person and they'd come along for the ride because there were two of them, Che and Fidel.  When the time was ripe, they would correct comments and situations that came up but I didn't know this about them.  They weren't who they were represented to be, that was for sure.  The wind blows outside and ruffles the tarps that don't stop the one last drip drip and they kept coming and coming, for years, even today they stand up like ghosts of Jews and wag fingers.  Pointing and stealing, the resource of ecumenity is despairing over it.  The prices are skyhigh even in the thrift shops.  Who knows and pretends these days?  Socialites are busily culling the racks and reselling at the consignment shops, if the brand is right.  That's called making a buck.  Forget about the individual who wants to look good with no money, who is being threatened with repossession of everything.  Let that go by the wayside and think about who's doing what to whom around here.

Once upon a time it was flannel suits, now it's lawyers and bankers and people who speak out the side of their head and then rotate that head in a complete turn, blinking at you as they gyrate.  It's a little voice of a child lost within that megamass, not knowing how to get out, having been taught that to contradict and illeducate their listener is a surefire way for that person to know who put the wrong shoe on and where Fidelito really is. 

Now I'm getting sleepy.  And that's what tobacco did for Cuba, made a hazy aura in the fifties with the lubrication of Cuba Libres...
A similar innoculation as found in Lodz back in the day, when the cream was just right and hair bore no lice, what came of it, if it was fluent, was a good thing, if transitory and not too widely spoken of..what happened if it were used like a cheap suit, well, there was the negative biofeedback, the gerd reflex, a number of things, and pingpong never got to be a functional quality of it all, just a rattling set of drums without the music to set it off.  There were quite a few hefty slabs of meat to process, it was done efficiently and with poetry and light on the shore and in the cane.  Even today there is the reminescence of the cane in the wild iris after the first frost.  What comes of that and the jumpy beat of the music, the heat, the noise of the big city itself, the boats at the docks waiting to ship off for other ports, every place they went part of a place they would not go.

Isolation and containment, you're not my friend anymore, the freckles on my face pigmenting the tanning skin like a blooming field of brown sugar across my nose and cheeks.  Where I had gone and where I claimed to be.  Falling asleep now.  Don't know if I've described it adequately or at all..made a stab it though I think

strange doings at the hospital

I was alone in the conchshell house all afternoon when they went to the hospital to have the baby.  I dressed in some nice clothes but my belly made a mess of them and wouldn't behave.  It kept sticking out like a sore thumb and it embarassed me.  I thought more about what I was writing of in the Havana story and couldn't come to terms with what it was I wanted to say about that.  It had been so vivid in my mind the day before.  But then I'd counted six Pabst in the fridge drawer and when I went to have one that evening, they were gone.  My son in law said "I think I might have drank them all" which truly didn't bother me but I was interested why he wasn't down on his knees after six of them straight off in four hours.  Silly.  We had to get more beer last night and it was Coors because he 'has to have that', although the PBR hadn't bothered him.  We were talking about the legalisation of marijuana while we waited in line and it was as though someone flipped a metaphysical page in that 7/11 because as hippie as the cashiers appeared, they were doing Kids in the Hall bigtime while the remainders of Saturday Night live, myself and son in law, were not holding up the dialogue very well and I tossed the last of my legal tender on the counter to pay for the CAMELs..
That's where I'm at now...a dread sense of fear that I incorporate into my daily life, will my daughter be fine having the baby, will we be runover on the freeway going to see her andthe new baby?  will I wake up in the morning, will the baby wake up in the morning?  Like huge thunderclouds announcing the onset of rain, the clouds have broken away this morning by the way, last evening it looked like rain today but it isn't.  The baby has come.
I should be going to the hospital to see him some more but I don't know how to drive myself there, there's a freeway or two involved and I don't recall how it's done and the motherinlaw was supposed to pick me up yesterday but she never came.  instead the three dragoons, fils, dugouts and echinateri, made it over to my side of the swamp and fetched me away where I stood mesmerized by the sight of this beautiful little boy with the oriental eyes/momentarily.  I think he'll be the enchanted one, he's already got that characteristic.  When I held him in my arms he was as sweet and angelic as what I imagine heaven to be, the embodiment of it.  About as pure as this life gets, that little child.  I wanted to cry, moan, but I heard my daughter doing so again in my head and left it off, it had been done.  He was here, I was holding him.  I didn't say, you little pain in the arse you, making your mother suffer so for the last week, I guess you think you're worth it huh?  I bet you do, you little cheeky thing you.  Such an angel, just like your mother.  That's you all right, Angelo...
That's what he was alright, about a bright a star as ever there was, lying in my arms, glowing bright, pink, clear eyed, a trust within him that could only grow stronger as he matured.

So that's the baby situation, he's here and he's adorable.  Has a good self-preservation thing going on with that innocence and helplessness he has.  Very pleased to see him with us.  All the family gathered round.  Father inlaw offers to get us all coffee as we huddle with the new mother and child, husband hovering.  Nurse busily getting baby bathed a second time, which is perfectly within the right of the nature of things, the hospital room so new it squeaks, daughter banded with a blood pressure cuff, clothing minimal and hospital gowned is all, blankets covering the modesty parts, legs numb from epidural.  She looks slightly pale but much relieved, says it went quickly and was over by 5pm.  Father in law appears with the stragglers a little later and never mentions the coffee which he doesn't have with him and I don't ask. 

We go for pot roast at the brotherinlaws house where the mastiff is not in evidence.  The food is good,, .  \\\ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\we talk about remodeling the kitchen, it needs an island and skylights to enhance the space, the cupboards could be sanded.  I am thinking about havana again and decide I'll think about it further when I get home again, which I do eventually and it is a cool night.  The dogs are ecstatic someone has returned to them.

I've just woken up

well, it's probably raining outside, the room seems dark but I've been awake for a while.  I've been falling asleep in my chair I've been so tired from I don't know what...traveling...  It's awkward at times, being in your other home with your other family, awkward and they won't let me do anything major like wash windows or clean the pool...it could stand some tidying...reverent smears I see, what I call them...my sinus is stuffed again, it's getting better down here in the dry but it's still a presence, a condition
there was a bright light coming from under little Harry's door thismorning...I took it as a good sign, so there it is as well, the raininess, the weather report said yesterday it was definitely raining today and tomorrow...but under the baby's room door came a bright white light...
I've been and gotten my decaf with the last drop of creamer, the dog food bin is empty, I could walk to the store and fetch some but they need a giant bag of it, and I haven't any car keys with which to fetch such a thing, although there are a set of keys on the counter, hmmm..I don't suppose I should though...not truly kosher, driving the KIA Sedona
I eat up another flavorful yet scrawny grapefruit from the tree in the backyard...they are delicious to my uncultured palate, just going out to the backyard and plucking them from the tree.  It was pretty hot at the swap meet yesterday, Hispanic music blaring from loudspeakers, a groundswell of heavy incense and frying meat, I want to say pork, a carne asada, but I don't really know that's what it was.  Some drops a bottle of SASJA perfume on the floor in the bathroom, I open the sack and there it is, a new bottle of perfume.  I take a squirt and find it is not an instant headache scent so I take it from the floor, a busy place but no real trash, this is something someone forgot and I decide I won't buy anything at this venue, I have the SASHA.
There are three bracelets on my left arm now, a pearl bead, a gold filigree, a black enamel.  I wore them to sleep last night, they haven't been off my arm.  We watched the new Planet of the Apes prequel, again the animation is breaking new ground, we'll almost soon be at the place I am with Gracie and Gino, ultimately trainable dogs but for what reason?  it's more like a mellowness of purpose fills up the inner parts of everyone that one shares living space with and provides in that a certain sustenance that is containable.  I felt it most strongly with my son-in-law's mother last night.  Her husband is somewhere with someone and she is with her children.  They do that a lot here, mix and mingle with family.  I suspect in Minnesota it is the same.  For myself I don't see my mother that much but I do, she's always in the corridor about to come around the corner.  I want to work most of the time, be attainable, although my counseling sign is sitting in the garage.  I was asked the other day why I had taken it down, it was because Sid is in the front yard although there was cedar oil at that swap meet, which I could have gotten, the scents coming up from that place, well, the same with the sign...insults to my integrity...you presume too much I heard more than once in fact there was a KR that told me so...it's not like everest..K2..no, this is animal tortured and made to speak, so it will say things in holocaust that you really don't want to hear..like 'do you have a license'?? well, I guess I know a bug when I see one, that's all it comes down to ultimately, the training to know where life persists in an autoexecutor status...driving a car being a big one of those...how did I know that?  nearly forty years of experience and training as they'd like to call it.. sitting in a boring classroom with the lights down listening to a moron drone on about what's going on...one room the ceiling so high the ventilation system exposed for all the world to see, how the mechanic heart will beat...and beat...and beat
it sounds a little fluffing the edges, this, and now I'm kind of out of it and never was really in it I'm going to talk...it's like you have to have the negative edge down, totally, be sincere at the same time, know what's real and figure out how to make that reality more palatable...Dana Beal told me once, 'the trouble is CANNIBALISM' but I thought he was just being paranoid.  I didn't connect how much he looked like Hitler, that really he might have been Hitler if not for all the weed he advocated using...imagine the third reich on weed...staring at Jewish people wondering why in hell his own mother's traumas were to blame for that concept of his that Jews are the Planet of the Apes, subhuman...hmmm, perhaps I am getting a little on my Proust side here this morning with the grapefruit eaten, the coffee nearly drained from the cup...the computer without it's plug sot hat it could dry up on me any moment...I just was so in love with Dana at one time, sitting there shining a moon face into his eyes, as he yelled at me to get out of Nine...I had three kids then, one of them a newborn baby, only a few months old, it was a year and half of correspondence, a torrent of loveletters that were never answered.
I suspect instead of grief at being so silly, leaving my husband for this little demagogue, I would have once woken up and realized that it was not going anywhere and that I should go...ultimately I did go, but only after staying there a few days and having him tell me over and over again, yet out of here you pest...the floors covered in kiddie litter...kinderleider probably...there was a new baby, she was Alice, the form and frame from before another pest, this one, the little golden child, the angel...and both of us to proect it and to secure and sustain the being state of our little girl, well, that's how it went, the last child I ever gave birth to, I carried her there to Nine, he put me up in a rat trap, me and my children, and we hung on for a few days, and then we flew out to Seattle and went home.  I didn't ever punish him for being what he was because I don't think he knew and he was fabulous, the very right man for me, the one intelligent enough to debate me on any subject and not get me angry enough to swat him like a fly, verbally, intellectually.  I could do that and there were times when the borscht was running thick, that I did do it, couldn't help myself, like the research on the Holocaust I did for about ten years, soaked myself in photographs and text, even now, I learn a little here a little there, and there's Aid E there with me reading and researching and listening up as her mother tells here all about it through Visual Basic...a wonderful process, a lifeliver/giver/starter/transformer...and it's still going on.  The Hotel Rowanda being a case in point.  Our state department on the downswing on that one...have to march in there with three soldiers the UN peacekeeping force, well there's only so many of those, right, what with the UN Council being comprised of what it is comprised of...you really can't think that there is such a division of things as that can you?  you don't want to bring back the not sees do you?  but of course, that can be the only solution when the deck is stacked so unfavorably to human life such as that, yes?
I didn't know I was speaking about politics this morning but apparently I am.. It's going on 9 am and I should find a Catholic church somewhere nearby to get a taxi to..I could do that, I think I have some change for it...but I probably shan't go because I'm doing this and I think mayabe God's telling me it's about time...so about Aid E and our daughter and all that, I could about cry now, thinking how much love and desire I felt for him then, how my soul and body were delivered into a spiritual place where I believed because of a silly little incident that totally turned my head around like a Linda Blair doll...I was married at the time...I just didn't know that I had been seductive to this person and him sitting there with a dill pickle in his pants that he covered gracefully like Beethoven at tea, he kind of looked like the younger prince and he was of that age wherein he might have realized it was time to court the Spanish lady...I think he did and he'd matriculated from the court of the philosphers and strange things had happened during that time, or right after it, so I could only assume that that was what had happened, but it was in the TriAge, so there wasn't any speaking about it because we were in cellular mode, our lives depended on not knowing what we were doing...or why we were doing it...we just did it...and there he sat, looking ever so much like Teddy Roosevelt, not even recognizing the rat capabilities of his actions, how they affect me...sitting across from him barelegged, cutoffs with fringe feathering my white thighs, legs stretched out toward him, our eyes locked...he had a way of putting people down so that they didn't even know they were human, scathing isn't even close to how he did this...and I didn't realize that what it was was something about that word I learned in a class on psychotics...anhedonia, inabilty to feel.  We've learned as a culture, an American culture, to mix that ability in with our daily lives so when someone says something hateful to you but you know they don't mean it...we go there and soak up the bile that is spewing in our faces and then having soaked it up, the negative energy, we use it productively, somehow...that part I need to work on, because I'm sort of stuck there, after Dana...there was also Olma and Linda, Olmo Linda's son with Dana and Dana and Linda an on again off again situation from probably the first marriage to the German doll, Hummel.  His grandfather did come from Germany, around frankfurt or hamburg...and I suppose I could say some of the relatives were in the SS, because that's what I was told..this other person, this Dana...well, maybe me and Jeff Bridges, the men who stare at goats, recognized that old flame still burning in Beal's eyes, his ability to mesmerize...wasn't he really brought down by Eva Braun, and isn't that my mother's name..Ev?   mmhmm...it does tie up in loose knots that I could beat bushes with...truthfully, I beat all the bushes in the reef yard, by hand..never taking a chainsaw to them ever, although I let Jerry boe real name guys saw down the border between the gallery and the reef a little bit and don't you know there's actually a wooden fence there now..we put one up this summer
so the strings can be tied, the stale linen washed and hung in the sun, or like today left to hang and be fabric softened by the raindrops...to dry another day...a little ribbontied washcloth on the counter by the car keys...a token that our baby grandson is about to arrive...I have little anxiety about being here for the birth since it hasn't happened yet and I'm not really on a schedule although I missed my Gracie terribly when we were watching Planet of the Apes...I'm not saying I still love Dana because I feel foolish even talking about that episode.  I went to Bellingham straight afterward, I met up with Aunt Sis, she gave me a thousand dollars for the plane because I was with three children, we got on it, we flew to Seattle and we were picked up there by the same folks that I had come to terms with several years previously over my oldest son, where they had him during school, I had him during summer.   It was winter then, we came to Bellingham and stayed in a house that overlooked the lumberyards on the bay, great stacks of lumber looking ever so much like thousands of coffins freshly made...I guess then the emotion of Dana left me, since he made it quite clear that I was unwelcome there, that I should go...there was nothing about me that he wanted or needed and for heavens sake, what an absolute putz to even consider it...but then his penis like the hand of the clock had told me it was time, a time signified by my bending over the kitchen sink and his catching a glance, if he even had, of my errant labia peeking from the cuff of the cutoff...and I was making pies, when I set the hot pies on the table in front of him and turned to say...en voila, is when I noticed what had happened to him...the evidence plain his face a mask..when there would have been in another time probably the German camp commander and the little boy that went over the fence and put on the striped pajamas..for that is how it all ended and probably why it was not a sacrifice to either of us to let it go, but we do have that time in mind, I think where we could read those letters to one another and actually be what we were then intended to be from that clock's arm, that destiny unveiled, though it never was in the sense that I had when I got to nine, ok we're going to strip off our clothes, the Yips will take the kids to the park, and we'll get down to the bottom of this, and I shall see your bottom at last, he said it was 'shaped like a heart' in my mind's eye, what I wanted to hear...but what I knew was that he and I were intellectual equals and that's been an issue all along..seeing and believing and understanding and processing and wondering why one does have to beat around the bush so much about stuff political when you just can't spew it in a tirade like Hitler did...well then you're a demagogue aren't you, probably the ultimate dictator, certainly...he tried to be that to keep me away from him so I kept it all in my heart, just locked it up and swallowed the key and probably last night when we were watching Planet of the Apes yet anew...and I was afraid for the animals and I felt I needed to use the bathroom, out it came..smelling as bad as then when it was let go and sent away into the septic system to be processed so that it came out here as a set of platitudes and observations about what troubles our society and why the only clue I ever had that he was reading my letters was an old Ford, the Repo Man variety car in dark navy, not dented, good upholstery, but paint actually faded, the kind of car a mother would give a son because the father had died and she drove the good one and this one was sitting in the garage undriven, that kind of car, and he had put a plastic alligator in the rear window and it was pretty dang obvious because I had written something about alligators in my last letter...can't remember what I'd said but it was of the notion that if he chose not to love me that I would develop; the hide of an alligator and hold inside and never let it out until he did care for me...that was the only clue I ever had that he had read the letters and who's to say that was his car parked right outside my office building on 17th and L, downtown DC where I would see it first thing when I walked out.  I remember how I felt when I did see it, that car, I swallowed hard, I recognized Himmler on the stand at the Nuremberg trials telling the court that it wasn't the not sees that they had to worry about it was guys like Uncle Joe..and my eyebrows went up and I knew I can to achieve some kind of calibration of where everyone fit in this mess...if Dana was pretending to be a new reich then he could be what he would be...and I was playing a game that would jeopardize my marriage, for I was married at the time but we had only done that as a gesture of what do you call it, what has to be...because I was having our baby and that was what he wanted, my baby's father.. he wanted our daughter to have his name because he was her father, I wasn't into it...I think I knew that I wasn't going to be there always, we fought often and we always had but we were a couple and so it was, we had three children well not right then because there came a time we conceived the third one, another daughter, and that was part of what Dana was to me, if the last child was anyone's child, it was his, although the only part of me he ever saw that had anything to do with conceiving a baby was that little mole on my labia and bling..there it was..he saw it, became extremely tumescent and I saw that he had seen but I didn't know that he had...it was all very innocent, very discreet, and totally unprecedented because we didn't actually know one another, my husband was almost in awe of this guy, talked about it, Dana this Dana that...so that I was like ah this guy is to be respected, he's 'heavy'..in terms of counterculture, although I thought he yammered more than any Jew I'd ever known and I'd known a few having lived back East which isn't to say that my exposure was antiSemetic, not in the least because in New York, everyone knows Jewish people, New York seems to be a place of Jewish people, and so it was..I knew a little bit of every kind of culture, AfroAmerican/black the radical sorts the guys that would look at you and size you up by the color of your flesh...I think I began to feel I really  had been born on Saturn around those folks but they bear me any ill will, because I'd gone to reservation school and had been taught as the white minority, how violent a person of another color may feel to you..and I thought it was not nearly as emotionally disturbing as Dana not loving me, eventually, well..then I saw the clock's arm, sitting across from him with the hot apple pie steaming behind my head on the table...that was a tableau I shall have to paint one of these days but first I recall the neoGerman expressionist works in the Corcoran where the artists used the linoleum floor to grieve over the Holocaust..so I have some of those same works now in my studio, because I did feel that way when Dana shouted at me...'that dumb broad' is all I hear...he was extremely annoyed that his legman in DC's wife showed up and wanted to f him..hehehe..'you c...you c...'  well there was more to that word and it was not filbert but close..and what he said...and all these people showed up at nine one night while I was there, a handsome man in a tweed like a coat my father had when I was little in the fifties...dark hair, tall blue eyes, I made him up in my mind as the man in the South Seas who came to visit in a white linen suit he was German royalty (in my mind) and we were determining some capability of the planet in this remote place and he dropped onto the wharf from the boat and I realized it was the same thing as when at his mountain estate and the servants went running, I just couldn't swallow it, again and he was very charming and smiling and polite and very Jewish...well king of the Jews almost, and I never could get a good handle on my own appearance then, a sort of wild thing I was, but female, always female...and looking toward him, with some lover's arm about my waist, because I always had a lover it was never the person I was in love with, strangely..I was always moving towards a situation...like a disk in a computer, being changed out, again and again...I came to understand parts of that after Dana...but then this fellow shows up at nine I see how it is because Dana is Jewish, as Hitler had been Jewish as well, ,and the contradiction, well, then I did the holocaust research and while I walked away from that understanding that it had become of thing of consequence, like the Hotel Rowanda, like Bosnia..there was a reason for it..and direct operating systems, autoexecutor states, played into it...that the holocaust itself was represented by this factor and perhaps you couldn't really know anyone, but like the song said, 'love the one you're with' doodoodoodooodoo...do that, so it happens, but it seems it is always the one that is not with you..andthat's been an extreme resolution I've come to, that he is with me...I just have to get over being scared by abilities...TreeAge and so forth...borscht..and work toward it...I do think there'll be a time for the likes of Dana Beal but..eh, I don't worry about it much, just remember how funny it was how it happened that I fell in love with him after he saw mine and I saw his...that was hilarious and still is...but there has to beena  painting of it, and perhaps some sketches...humorously intended, not the striped pajamas camp commander for that is him always...doing the logical, this is how it must be...and so we got Olmo I think, Grecian curls in his hair, a young Adonis, sturdy..more like Morrison in attitude than Beal, but there it was...marching along...ahh, I sigh..I need more coffee, I love this composing on laptop..I talk about Beal at last in a way that evokes the partition that had been there before, a little teary regret he found me so unacceptable once the moment was achieved, but then I have to think, as the foot hits the wharf and the white linen suit appears again in the tropical breeze, it was blowing up to be a dark storm that day, good thing he arrived when he did...we ran to the huts and our clothing blew about us, we didn't wear much but enough to be acceptable...he'd found me and given me logic and so I was logical then, and now...

the morning after the day before..

today is friday, we've been to the doctor and the baby doesn't want to come out.  in fact he cmplained a bit about being poked at and he put his mother on the treadmill for an hour and a half after she'd had her pancake supper.  her mother did my hair.  I am now a blonde.  his father came home from work and talked about how all the computers at his franchized hotel which is a chain though not corporate went down.  there was a person there who had spent seventy thousand dollars on being entertained by that chain and someone in the staff was rude to him.  his father was a bit worried about that but you know what they say, 'it's business'.  I think his father worried about why every employee can't be the sweet polite interested person I am (as I pat myself on the back yet again for being a good person).  right.  I'm not going to go on about that being a good person stuff because probably I'm not that good a person, but maybe observant.  I think my daughter would say I didn't ever give her a wedding present, which is true, as yet I have not.  This is largely because her lifestyle is about twenty pegs above mine, she has marble floors and a swimming pool and an another new truck.  She also has a job.  Well, now she's expecting a baby any moment and I'm not going to worry about not giving her a wedding present.  Her husband gives everything she needs to her and I think maybe I should stay out of the way of that.  What I do is be there for her, take her insults along with her appreciation and just go with it.  That works for me, although at times she gets a little too upper crust on me and I cringe to think how she really feels inside when she talks to her mother like that.  My own mother I need to call.  I put in lots of onduty time with my mother, she's just turned 84 and she pretty much has to be told what's going on a lot of the time.  That's this baby's routine, the one coming.  He needs to be told it's time to get out and meet us all, so excited to see him we are.
there, I just ate a grapefruit off a tree in the backyard.  "those aren't going to be any good" says the baby's father, because they're pretty yellow, kind of shrively, but you know, in washington state where I come from, this flavor, this just off the tree thing, this is great.  this is something.  the rest of the grapefruits are pretty  much rock hard green and not at all ripe, but this one, it went down like something smooth, tart and wonderful, without any sugar because I couldn't find it in this house where they do their own thing and eat pop tarts.  I can't remember when I last had a pop tart but I know I gotta get that bag of whole wheat bagels out of the freezer one of these days.  I did make bread last week and I have a bag of it waiting to become a pizza or something.  How do I make a pizza?
first off you pour a bunch of flour, white unbleached works well for pizza dough but you could use whole wheat and be health conscious if that's how you are, about halfway up the side of your bread machine...they say you should measure but I got tired of washing up stuff like the measuring cups a long time ago
then you add some dry milk, the powdered variety, because that's the stuff that builds your bones and alters  your ego..keeps you calm and ready to take on scary guys that want you to pay bills you don't have any money for...you put in probably a third to half a cup because concentrated milk doesn't really detract from the flavor of the bread  but it's very good for you...any of you without milk allergies and when they get dry goats milk or soy, just put it in if that's how you are..
so third cup or half that, you get to know how much a thing is after a while because you do it so often, you can eyeball it but measuring's important for rookies..definitely, I'm so confident about preparing food I usually let the robots do it, hehe...kidding
so you got the milk, the flour, then you pour in a steady stream of yeast which is the equivalent of about a third cup, from the big bags you can buy at the wholesalers, because those little yeast packets from fleischmans cost about as much as the big bag from the wholesalers and if you bread a lot, you'd need it anyways...efficiency being what it is, more than one packet of fleischman's is going to be needed so why not...
you give that yeast a little breakfast in the way of leithicin, which you pour in steadily making a little brown pool in the middle of the bread dough until it looks like a little brown marble, it's about three big tablespoons give or take and that's the stuff that makes you a food superstar once you get it together and get going down the road of life after you bake this stuff and take charge of your life.
at this point you turn on the beater for the machine, it's the little fin at athe bottom of the bread pan which if you cook the bread in that  pan you'll be cooking that in there too and once I did that when I brought my mother a loaf and she says you trying to break me out of prison, lookit what you baked in this thing...
so remember to take that thing out if you're going to let the machine do all the work, after it rises a second time and is all set to nest and grow big...like this grandson that doesn't want to come out right now...I don't blame him, his mother doesn't give him a chance to rest up and be strong and get ready to let grandma give him a temple kiss..
so you got all that stuff in the bread pan, and you're thinking how dry and ordinary this all looks but its' gonna be good because I'm making it myself...this is true, it's going to be wonderful once you get it done but you do have to have liquid and the funny thing is that you can pour in either cold or warm water because of the properties of the yeast now days but it's best, and I would make it a pretty tight rule, that you use warm water..about the temp you would take a bath in, not burn your hand off in because if you use the totally hot stuff the yeast is going to check out and say bye dude, you mean...so pour in enough water, with the machine agitating like the washing machine, until the flour starts coming away from the sides and making a big mud pie in there.  you can take a scraper down the sides, get all the flour into the mix that you can, and if you do like Ido often enough, you'll put a little more flour in as the thing is agitating because it needs it, it's way too gooey..
so the bread dough comes to a point in the agitating process where it's coming together like that great hump in my daughter's stomach and then you know you've achieved bread dough status, which if you've worked at it like John Lennon reputedly worked at it five years getting it right, is a good thing to be able to do...at this point you can start dreaming about giving Krispy Kreme a run for their doughnut money...cause you make those kinds of doughnuts the same way only in this method, you fry the doughnut batter, not bake it which is how this bread is going to be done, what I'm talking about here.  so anyway...you get that perfect ball being agitated in the bread machine and bear in mind I've not really looked at the recipe book that came with this machine because it was a donate and had a mind of its own in the timer so I kind of just let it do the work and pull it out when i want to actually set it up to a final rise and do some bread baking..
I hope that's not a dashboard confessional because it's how a lot of us get these bread machines..they work great until you get bored with them and give them away and truthfully you don't really even need them if you like getting your mitts all gooey and such, my friend the painter used to make five loaves a week and still her family is vigorous and strong although she hasn't made bread in years because she doesn't have the counter space now...she's also getting up there and there's just her and her husband at home, but she would maybe do it once in a while if she had space for the bread machine, I think, it's pretty cool, saves you from being sticky and gooey although at some point you have to pour the glop onto the table into a nice nest of flour and work it with your hands and find out what kind of shape it wants...it'll tell you.  it gets you back to kindergarten when you were playing with play dough and making army guys and tea sets..it's pretty healthy and therapeutic and all that and no doubt why John Lennon was so avid about it after being told his peace initiatives were a crock of beans that won't soften and be delicious ...
when you do the work it yourself routine is after the good old bread machine has yanked it around a second time,k right before it starts baking the sucker...it gives it a uniform shape in there and all, you don't have to hassle with an oven, wear oven mitts all that, and you make some really good bread but you know the stuff is fattening unless you put the right things in then it's marvelous all the way around..even for chlorestorol and such...because of the leithicin...did I forget something?  ahh..that indeed I did and that is that when the dough is going around in the bread machine, when it's starting to form that great lump like my daughter's baby son is making out of her rock hard abs, you need to pour in some delightful cooking oil, or melted butter, or whatever kind of fat substance you need to use in order to have the flour have adhesion, the quality of all the molecules of the product holding together in a positive way, like an efficient congress, a gnarly state of the union where they give free college tuition to anyone who needs and wants to go (like myself a perennial student)...you put enough of this in that the dough takes on a very slight sheen, a shineyness then add a little flour as the dough is going round and round and up and down...my poor grandson in the womb was getting the treatment last night as his mother rode the treadmill with her ipod on..I'm sure of it...but there it is, better to take it out on the bread, which maybe I'll do it from scratch today because of worrying about that inutero situation with her, she's like a big prune inside at the moment, can't even find the pit, according to the obstetrician...I could just see her in a veg state on the sofa..but you know that room doesn't have a lot of light and i think she needs some light...gads, thank god for blogs I can't be running my mouth to my daughter about all those impressions...like she would listen...she did do a good job on my hair, I'm a blonde again..and she gave me the torture routine plucking my eyebrows...I always tell her I'm modeling myself after Brezhnev and I don't think she's ever understood who that was...
so...having forgot to mention the oil, I will tell you that olive oil, pumpkin oil, canola, butter melted and slightly cooled, remember the little yeast guys get fried in way heat, something from the health food store that's glorious with no transfat or anything nasty for your circulation, which I should say mine has a varicose vein this past year in the left shin..the poor shin that gets whanged anytime I start a construction project so I've taken to putting on baseball catcher's shin guards before I even get started on something like rebuilding the countertops or putting on some cupboard doors, haven't had a whang in a while now.;..it works, especially if you want to bring in that dresser you just refinished,k you know you're gonna drop the sucker on a reluctant toe along the way if you don't protect the body that's getting it there.  if you have help and where I live I don't get that much assistance with things now my big lug foster kid went homies..but I'll get some more of those type dudes one of these days again...another story there  and I guess I would describe ultimate mac and cheese, a recipe I heard on the Canadian Broadcasting Service...oh it sounded so good...a welcome adjunct to my own perfect pasta...
so...you've got the oil, the yeast, the yeast's food, the flour of choice (I always pour in a couple cups of oatmeal at this point because it's on my supply list for hearty winter breakfasts and always in stock) and the machine h as crunched up your goodies into that big ball like my daughter's stomach and so you pull it out after the second agitation when you know it's going to rise and bake...and you work it, take out the aggressions of the day, the week, the year...think of your grandson in the dryer tumbling as his mother walks the treadmill...for two hours...remembering to keep flouring the surface because it gets sticky and then you shape it however you want it go bake, be creative, think swan lake and mt rushmore, let your spirit flow and keep a cloth handy incase you have to answer the door or the phone or let out the dog or put another stick on the fire...
once everything is shaped and shifted and into a greased container, sometimes I use muffin tins sometimes I use cookie sheets, sometimes I save some of it to roll out as pizza dough later (that you don't have to let rise because it does its own thing when you put the pizza ingredients on it.)
this creation of yours you let rise until it looks like lucy made it, really amazing how it puffs up and then you know the yeast has had enough of you and is ready to go to its new life as something your stomach will appreciate since all you did for it was bash it around and intimidate and humiliate it so it's becoming something better, something you will appreciate.  you make that goodness in an oven of at least 350 degrees, it doesn't do so well ifyour oven won't heat past say 325 because it needs the heatness to reinvent itself, the yeast does, the flour doesn't care so much, the oil and dry milk, yeah...water...who knows about water, a hot bath is always lovely, don't even mention the Rogue River!  so...while this is cooking you wash up the bread making stuff which isn't that much on a good day when you've had out the oil and the flour and so on and so forth and do wipe down the containers you've used, the outside of the breadmachine, all that good stuff and take the dry mop and the swiffer to the flour for a second because that gets cheesy too with all of this commotion.
what comes of all this is a beautiful thing called fresh bread and you made it yourself..I had a bunch of ladies stop what they were doing, slather on the fresh butter and drink the tea, eating snatches of bread while we were preparing a benefit dinner last week...I know it's a real deal breaker, that  bread...without it you just don't have the sense of brotherhood you might otherwise have..it's pretty cool and I like it...and it's worked out my little worries about baby junior about to come into our lives...wonder if I can make him some teething biscuits further on down the road.?  those seem like a culinary mistake they're so hard...but good, good for the little gums...hmmm
ps...I was thinking about how to make pizza and that's a pretty simple proposition once you roll out that leftover dough into a shape that will hold the ingredients...ingredients being shredded mozzarella on a surface of oiled dough sprinkled with oregano, parmesan and lathered in tomato paste or tomato sauce...heap on the mozzarella, shower with chopped up green pepper, o nion, mushroom, shrimp, a bit of anchovie, that could go on the paste layer but eh...if you forget like what I do here, it goes fine elsewhere only don't put so much you know it was anchovie...it's a surprise...ground hamburg, cooked/uncooked, sausage, pepperoni, chicken cubes, always a bit of garlic depending on need and want, some flair on your part depending on where you get your pizza and how you like it...cook the sucker until the meat is done, the sides are getting brown, the cheese is wearing one of those funny old lady rainhats in a toasty brown and it smells like heaven sent an invitation for a walk through...to your stomach
so, I guess I've given up the family secrets there with the bread thing but I've been doing that on my own for a while, my mother never made bread per se and I think that I learned to make my own just because we grew up on Wonder...as I clear my throat and bless myself in the sign of the cross...this oatmeal thing I make is pretty sufficient and wonderful and I've been doing some great things with that in my stomach...well, like chop wood and move furniture here and there and paint rooms and so on...I gotta get that new sewing machine to work...hmmm, new to me, in the box for thirty years, hehe...the belt smoked, I suppose the rubber tire thing the belt is is kind of ossified after this time, hmmm...well anyway, me and sewing machines...in high school we made our own dresses and we were styling...they were all  Aline minis, in cotton pique, cotton sateen, sometimes with a matching triangle bandana or not...always tights in some bright color..I guess I'm going on and I'll be stiff when I get up and so forth and so on into the night, adios..

onion juice

well...I'm down here in Mesa and it's cooling off.  Me and the dogs have been holding the fort all day.  I got here last night.  I've been reading 'Charming Billy' by Alice O'Connell.  Her picture is in the back of the book.  She looks like an old neighbor of mine from my childhood.  It's a good story.  I spent most of my day reading it.  I could identify with the Irish Catholic factor in the story line because that's what my family was although my mother was Lutheran growing up.  She converted to Catholicism when she married my dad. 

My daughter is about to give birth to her first child.  She and her husband are naming the baby 'Harrison' but her husband says they won't call the boy 'Harry' but they'll call him 'Harris' so we'll see how it flies.  He's going to be tiny and red and want to sleep 24/7 right at first.  They'll be all dedicated to the new parent mode which is to be in total awe of their new child until he finally sinks in that he's no longer a lump in his mother's tummy.  He's finally arrived.  She does look rather distended now, these are the last few days before he comes into the world.  I'm sleeping in the guest bedroom where the laptop and desk are located.  That's why I'm posting, because there's time and resource to do so.  I had just the most wonderful day getting down here.  My neighbor was going to Port Angeles so I rode in with her and caught the bus at Tarciscio's in Sequim.  We did a little shopping.  I didn't buy much because I was already packed to the gills but I did get the book that I've been reading and some yarn for little Harris's afghan which I should continue to plug away at in hops that it gets done before he arrives.  I don't know about that one...I've been working on that thing since I found out he was coming and I haven't gotten that far on it.  Plus I have to study for EMT because we're due to take the exam in another month..yikes

I was thinking that the blogging thing, the recipes for successful blogging, might begin like the Julia Child adventure in cooking up her recipes and then writing about them.  That was a good approach to the sharing of information.  There's also the day by day observing, trending it's called...like observing that Russell Crowe is up the street in Vancouver BC being in a movie about Superman.  He's the dad in that one.  I wonder if he'll come down the straits in a fishing boat one of these days.  Going out to Port Renfro would be a good trip for him.

I was going to comment further on the O'connell book, charming billy.  I found it to be very eloquent in its descriptive style, a passage about the main character's mother and father, the girl telling the story, and the love between her parents, so good.  She talks about the resilence of a happy marriage, not always in bliss but always in loyalty and steadfastness, wherein the couple realizes towards the ends of their lives that this is what it has been for them, a devotion to one another that encompasses their lives together, makes it what it has been to both of them, a constancy and a source of their daily happiness, what makes them what they are, a resolution to that end.  It's very well told, this story, but it has the shortcoming of being a description of a lifelong depression in alcoholism.  It made me understand a little better how to avoid that condition: never dwell too long on your disappointments but focus on the things that you have loved and be happy whenever you can.  Surely we all have our upheavals but to over and over again drown our sorrows in the lake of alcohol, well that part is told well, you can do it, you can suffer, but should you?  and should you let those others that are of that belief: in sorrow and despair, disappoint you as well.  Even though the story is about Catholicism, in a sense, it doesn't give a terribly strong picture of the parish priest, which may not account for the attitudes of the characters as much as it makes me wonder why we don't tell that better, explain the mysticism of catholicism..why it works for me and for others.  we're born into it certainly, but along the way it takes hold of us and we're routinely reconverted by our daily lives to that blind faith in what we believe: that Christ is in the communion host, and he's there with us throughout the week until we replenish him again on Sunday at communion.  so we're not really blind as much as we're on autopilot, letting our free will be guided by that light inside us.  I kind of wanted to see O'connell talk to this but she didn't really, other than to take some of the trappings of the faith: the smell of incense, the church clothes, the monsignor urging the parishioner to believe her widowhood was intended for her.  accepting the death of a loved one is never an easy thing to do but if you just take it day by day, it becomes tolerable over time
in the case of billy, the charmer, he was in love with a girl one summer and planned to marry her, talked of her constantly, but she went home to Ireland and married someone else.  his family told him she died.  this gave him the opportunity to become an alcoholic, to delude himself that she had broken his heart when every day, he rebroke himself and not his faith and not his familya nd friends could put him back together, though they did make the effort to see he didn't fall apart too quickly.  more than anything the book speaks to the absolute lack of any kind of psychiatric therapy, there's no mention of it, other than the Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a group therapy kind of organization that works for some and not for others.  People I know who belong to it are like Billy, they'd still have a drink if they weren't totally convinced that they shouldn't.  A therapist might have gotten to the bottom of Billy's issues, that the girl had died, he thought, gave him the opportunity to grieve and so he did.  He recognized that the love he felt for this girl was the best thing that ever happened to him and nothing that ever happened after that time would be as good.  He didn't find in his daily life, although the author described these further moments well, the same joy he had found in the company of that girl.  I've known people like that.  It's like the light has been shut off inside them and they can't let go of their disappointments.  That was Billy.  It was frustrating to read how he kept going back to the bottle without ever again being as happy in his life as he had been with the first girl he ever loved.  He drowned in his disappointmentsead of realizing that was what his life was, fulfilled.  Some of us are like that, we always know our life is joy, a taste of heaven before we get there, others do not.  I think maybe in a post nuclear age, like we're evolving towards, we'll all be 'fulfilled'.  We won't be worried about global aggression, we'll have bigger things on our plate, like new planets to colonize.  All of us will be thinking in those terms, we'll be bred to it.  Maybe the sixties movement was the big wakeup call in that direction.  Maybe.  Maybe we were all meant to be able to laugh heartily and readily.  Maybe we're not cloned after all.  hehe...perhaps O'connell's book is about the ability to just gestate and be yourself.  The struggle for it.. 
I suppose it is a moral tale of how not to find happiness in your life.  For me, I've never been content to sit still and let life unfold.  Not worrying about conformity, if I might be unhappy for a time.  Truthfully, I glanced out the bus window on the way to the airport and there was someone I saw outside whom I recognized.  A person that made me very unhappy once upon a time.  Now he looked like a kind of a pilgrim on his way to wherever he was going and I didn't care about seeing him one bit.  I knew he was still alive, still riding a Harley, still wearing a beard but he wasn't anything to do with me anymore.  That was a good thing.  I felt nothing seeing him, not even anger, or disappointment, nothing.  A chapter from the past.  That was all.  How better Billy could have felt upon meeting up with his Eva, had he had that ability.  He wouldn't have drown himself.
There was also the wife that pulled him out of the gutter whenever he fell down in it.  She was as flat and colorless as beige walls, as responsive.  There must have been some intimacy between them, her and Billy, but you don't hear that, read it.  You don't see how she was a good wife to him, if, in fact, she was at all.  She was the sponge that absorbed all his disappointment.  They apparently lived on it, his disappointment, for the rest of his life until he died in production of it.
How can we be so negative and have so much potential at the same time.  A man who carried a book of Yeats along wherever he went, a real admirer of poetry.  Someone to shed a little light for the rest of us on why that would be a good thing.  A person who could describe the wing of an angel as it lifts off to heaven. Well, I guess I've gone on enough about Billy so I'd better let it go.  There's more interesting things afoot now, like actually having a blog.  hehe...what to write about...how not to clone a depressed alcoholic perhaps, and how to gestate the best of humankind..possibly...there could be some thought in that...well..it's morning again, I've discovered how to charge the computer so it functions, the hot tub is available..my lips are chapped from sleeping with my mouth open, I've been very tired from all the excitement...there's a baby coming..adieu mon amis..

issues of studying..

I am eating bundlesof rye crackers..I am crocheting..I am blogging, but I am not studying!  The teacher of the class even dropped by, but I'm not into it evidently.  It's a gorgeous day.  I'd like to sit o utside inthe s un with my sunglasses on, just warm up because it's a bit chilly in here.  Reflect on what I've been up to since I last posted here.  That thing I just wrote, I was musing about married life and then I sat in a friend's lap and he reminded me of my foster kid, a sort of inside out, reverse sort of hug because I was thinking of him.
That's kinda weird but how I recognized it.  Went to fluff out a house for someone very ill.  Me and another friend, we fluffed and buffed and threw away old fish and vodka.  The windows were opened, the carpet shampooed, the furniture vaccumed, the floors mopped, the fridge cleaned, emptied and cleaned and refilled.  One cabinet is almost all medicines.  There are used needles and boxes of glucose solution.  We toss a lot of things like the package of shrimp that was in the truck where the keys weren't.
As it happens I come home from that adventure, where I had stared at the empty swimming pool and wondered if it were boardable, and walk straight into another one.  My neighbor's mother is visiting.  She looks like Hughie Tierney from back in the day but she's much like her daughters as well.  She did well with them, they're all vi brant and sociable, very nice ladies, consistently pleasant I think you'd say.  They were having a fish fry in honor of their mother's visit.  I was handed a Corona with lime, a plate and directions to load up.  That was a delicious meal and as I finished it, I was handed dessert involving strawberries and an angelfood cupcake with sauce drizzled on it.  How very pleasant.  They lit a firework called a 'Cornupcopia' in the back drive,  We were entertained.
Doggiwoggs and I went home after that because it was evident they weren't starting a bonfire and the marshmellows I went home for would have to wait.  I hung up a fresh load of clothes on the line, hammered in the piece that wants to peel off of the clothesline, hopefully it's secured.  Contemplate digging a hole for the new clothes line but decided I am tired enough to go inside, which I do.  Flip on the tv and 'Missippi Burning' is on television.  Gene Hackman has a wonderful role, I should check to see if he got an Oscar or a nod for his role.  It's good.  He's portraying Every Man buying a soda in nowhere land, which if you've been there to say "Alabama' you know it's pretty weird, all the separate entries that are fading away.  Kind of hard to believe those white boys would just arbitrarily go shooting people of the colored community, but it seems they did.  When I went through Alabama, I was thinking of that little guy Wallace that used to run that state and how his influence might have colored things.  Well things is still colored but not really anymore, just different.  I got okra there and flew it  home with me.  It stayed in the freezer while my partner and I threw things at one another and then one day I made a gumbo with the Okra and a salmon I caught, and the partner brought me back here.  I'm not from the south but I love a good gumbo, the more peppery the better.  Well, soon be home to have my latest creation, big beef bone with meat, want to say brisket but I dunno if it's actually that, around the knee of the cow, with red beans, cabbage, cooking simmering for a while till it's all slush in the pot.  Tossed in a little basil, seasoning salt, no onions but I have plenty of them, probably have with a slice of rye and more of that Irish cheddar.  Maybe a jigger of cold vodka to wash it down, 
So the painting cycle is heading up as well, with two maybe more waiting on the runway to take wings and fly.  Have left the jar of paint open so that I'm bound to attend to it, and I have, a couple of strokes at a time.  Gardening t his morning, with a great pile of manure from the farm, thank you very much, which got shoveled here and there and the ground sighed in a great gasp as I tossed it over it.  There was steam rising.  Surprising how warm it gets.  Methane processes, evidently.
Later today am attacking barberry on the trim and thin/weed aspect.  My arms are chilly.  There may be a picnic involved to which my friend is invited.  I was bringing the woodcutter but I didn't think he was picnic material and I don't want him getting the wrong idea.  I haven't studied anything yet.  Next week I have to put on an art exhibit.  Strange how things have reverted to the old days of hammering nails in the wall and entertaining the press in hopes of a review.

imbroglio et fettucine...the blandness of argument

some of my senior friends are going to Italy.  I should like to stay home while they post letters from Palma but eh...I know they'll see Florence and the Vatican, and it'll wait...I'm just learning to be comfortable in cooler weather of the moment, cooking if I can seize the time, delightful repasts that fill the house with delectable aromas...painting on the side deck, thinking about dueling it out with the creekside some more...will dig up a good portion of the grape hyacinth that goes crazy in this yard, toss it back there, mow it down with the weedwacker , look for willow starts...get more yummy dirt, say a eulogy for the turd lawnmower to die of a slammed crankshaft (kaablong...dink)thuggy thuggy won't start again, ebbers...not trying to be cute, hate writing like that but do talk it, like going up to sol ducky...where they need haus kippers...hehe...that's going to be interesting, fluffing out the mausoleum of a stone col'drinker...I just thought it wo uld be interesting since he has a pool and they're so few and far between here...like when the river and the strait is across the street and it comes up in the yard like it is in the winter.
so for now, this is just words being blopped onto the screen and there's no stories being told today about Al and the life of a NYC cop although I was going somehwere with that one once u[pon a time although I think he became that Cafferty character with the pregnant belly, egads that makes me squint, at least, hehe
hmmm..
yep, there's the subject at hand, how women view men that they want to know intimately..
well, first you get your ideal, w hich for me is the actor Russell Crowe, that to me is the ultimate manly man because I really like the way he looks, now granted I know as a person he'd be a chump full of change probably, but that's as it is...am I any great shakes as a female? I  dunnno, but I'm myself and I think that means something...so
you gotta go for looks first off, because that tweaks the heart muscle in and laying over that the female organ of nursing...I don't say that any other way because I don't, what it does, that FOON..is get like someone blew a lot of air into the balloon and it's encased in this bridle harness of a garment known as la brassiere.which you know is pretty well filled up when you're lookin' over this guy's credentials in the 'do I turn you on?' department and he's filled out like well, the guy who reads the kids' their bedtime story and brushes his teeth before  he crawls in next to you and blows some warm air behind your ear (please don't tell me what a major tunnel the real RC has been known to be because this is the doppleganger theory taking hold here, ok)...a person can be the essence of the very intense emotional outlay trigger by looking the part, but what you want is that he know the part...so wouldn't you want your husband to be that...I don't think any of  us is perfect, but I do want him in frayed bermudas on Sunday afternoons looking in tidepools and being macho when we find the octopus...and what is macho?  it's like, ah, he knows how to chop lettuce and change oil, he can finetune the carbeurator and he is an English Lit major like me...he wasn't in the service, he was a detective in LAPD, he was a pediatric surgeon, he had his own hamburger stand...he shaves and wears cologne, but just a little bit to let you know if you get that close up to him that he smells very good and your toenails have permanently curled up and you'll have to get a little chainsaw to bust them loose..
so what does that do for you? well for me it keeps me going because my spouse was fremlicarta...I don't say the race or whatever because it doesn't matter, it isn't anymore...it cannot be because there's this...which I didn't mess with but it evolved... into this other ideal which you know, I don't get much chance for that kind of social interaction where I am and I don't go hunting it out like I have done in the past...yegads was I ever into that but a bit, what challenge, what fun...but...now I see that it can be that I am the soccer coach, blowing my whistle, spinning the ball on my pointer finger, tucking it up under my arm and exhorting the little soccer boys to run, run...while I blow my whistle at them...women don't whistle at men but sometimes they are quite worthy of it...our hearts are like magnets, glinnnggg, across the universe we find one another and there's it is...I love you, you love me, we are fitted together like inseparable pieces of a puzzle of our lives...the main sections of it, our family beside us, our dogs, cats, trees, houses, cars, faith, hope charity, that love...our dinner menu, what we eat for breakfast, read in the paper, heat the house with...I could go along the floor rolling over and over picking up the dust of your footsteps so I would glow and be a bit dirty...I shouldn't have gotten so particular about what I wanted from a marriage but I have because each day is the light into the next one, the eternal sun of it...and my little fetish works to sustain me in that it is continuitous unto itself and some good examples provided...he should be of a certain height and breadth, or he should be as intuitive as I need him to be, or have a gravely voice or know how to hit a baseball, what he should be is a man and what I am is a woman and that's what I want...no pale imitations, no guys polishing their shining armor until they can see their own face in it...some kind of guru of his own class...which I don't know what that is but he's about as into what he wants as I am...and so we become into it together and our children number over one dozen, I thought fourteen was a good number, gadzooks anyways...that's enough bubble gum to tar the driveway and glue on the roof...enough eggs for forty million pancakes and twenty cows for thirty million gallons of milk - an eggzageration but not that much...a guy that would do that for me there would have to be that many kids coming out of it...because he'd see them as I do...little windows of the soul with voices and armpits and teeth and eyes and toes and bedtimes and music lessons and hikes and beachcombing..
from the moment they're born they're like the page of poetry we were reading before we created them...why you liked it why I found it so eloquent, where you want to put the polish on the Guillietta...where I want to weld on the wing of the Cessna...we debate helmets for the motorcycle ride, I'm Triumph girl and you're just the beefcakes BMW because everyone knows those who ride Harley bild'm..more or less...I think of you on the paradise of a lost shore and then I walk the beach with the little white dog and it's a good story and one that sustains me, I'm never without it and it's part of my faith and hope and love that I have it...it's the containment of my female self within the large aspect of the marital bond...it's what makes the muffins rise, the spaghetti sauce get that certain sheen...the mushrooms brown up nicely...the flower open...the ground be quenched by rain...what is love...
well I wanted to go into it more but now there's this gray raincloud hanging over things...I don't think it bears mentioning since this is the decades of experience piece about what marriage is...you brought the Italian cold cut sub to it and I brought a cream soda and a celeriac because we both know that those good for you drinks like vitamin water are ok but they need a little zip...we had a slice of cheese cake walking through the park, the squirrel got some nuts, I told you I was nuts about you and felt like all I wanted to do was read the original score of one of Mozart's more popular pieces...and you said the same thing only you said that you wanted to rebuild the engine on my Accord because you got a reading on the compression that told you the block was very good for the work...neither of us could decide who was the more eloquent, I thought maybe that if I said that you were electricity you would tell me I was the rain, we're just electrical together, conducting...and I would say to that do you dance, which I could see your stomach would kind of curl up and you'd exhibit a sort of shyness then while I'd go off to the dance floor and sort of dance it out, how I felt...with my eyes closed because I'd be embarassed to see you see my face, so I understand that you won't dance, but I guess you do that too only you take me in your arms and whirl me close to you, a kind of control thing wherein the pressing the flesh gets the message across, you see, there's the stern paternity issue that the actor gives off but that's the actor, the real person, the ideal...another thing, a joker, practical joker that loves laughter which in my world would be like the night in the day...there would be an absolute absence of darkness in that humor...he'd giggle because he'd be delighted to have confounded you and you'd look at him and say, you will remember that you did this to me because I am going to get even with you...and I would
but I'd do something like rent a huge billboard on Madison Avenue that reads I LOVE YOU...YOUR WIFE

a new day in the neighborhood

summer is here

hail with it

the yard is begging for a facelift but it keeps being miserable outside.  I'm taking EMT classes, leaving by 8:45 a.m. and so far we've been cut short two out of the three days I've gone because of response calls coming in.  I've been learning to use the blood pressure cuff and the little finger clip monitor that analyzes the space between the heart beats.  Pretty interesting stuff.  Reading, I've finished the sequel to gone with the wind  which was a real potboiler and I liked it good enough.  Wondering about the summer, if it will ever get here...
Did a painting I called "japanese spring' after the incident in Japan.  Had an easter card from my brother and apparently their airport got blown around in a tornado.  He just bought a new house in the St. Louis suburbs...I guess they're ok according to family but what a thing to happen...
Today I helped the girls next door get the gallery for our women's conciousness raising session and book discussion club.  We generally have the book club on Tuesdays the last week of the month and the consciousness raising gets done on that Thursday, or vice verssa, but we couldn't this month because the girls were away doing their thing so we're doing it today.  I helped mop floors and get it tidied up.  They fed me an egg salad sandwich, which was nice of them.

mermaid icons

I've been working here and there lately.  One day it was absolutely beautiful outside, Saturday.  We got up early and went to the beach at Shipwreck Point where we scoured the beach and cleaned the roadsides
that was pretty much fun.  After that we had barbeque with theother beach cleaners.  Then we came home and unloaded the trash we'd found.  There was a rug and a tire with a rim also.  We tossed the tire and the rug is being cleaned for the rental house.
We're back to Monday now.  Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  I went to the Presbyterian Church breakfast but didn't get up in time for services at the Rock.  Went to Easter Mass at St. Thomas and then had a long nap because the day started so early.  Later on we had Easter supper at By the Bay Cafe and then watched television till bedtime.  I was crocheting a rainbow colored legwarmer. 
Today I am dressed warm because it's raining again.  I have to go to Tops at 3 and then to the firehall at 6 for the beginning of EMT training.  Another busy week lining up it seems.
The mermaid icons have been showing up.  I found one this past week that was oriental in nature but the woman had a fish tail so it qualified as a mermaid.  Not sure where I saw it, possibly the co op when I was in there for juice and milk.  I sometimes feel as though I ought to appropriate the mermaid symbols when I see them but I should just draw them in my own version of what I've seen.  That would be the thing to do.  I have wash on the line from Saturday, getting a nice dose of fabric softener in the rain fall.

Samuel Butler

it was the above named author that put me in mind of new zeland, the book erewhon...which I read in a very tumultous time a few years back.  i was soothed by it and intrigued by the author, who lived about hundred fifty years ago and I know nothing of him.  it appears he was a 'serious' satirist'.  i suppose the clowns who now write for saturday night live would do well to study him a bit...I again exposed myself to the humor of snl.  it again defeated my laughing whereas the purloined video tape (yes, Mrs Woolf, we still have them about) of Adam Sandler doing a takeoff of his sabbath singing would have been the kind of humor to toast my gabotchniks.  there's no depth to humor on snl.  the little fatboy 'big k' doesn't do it.  well he never did.  he's still a kidnik, what do they call those? boychicks?  yeah, that's him...lemmee see...the last macro of the corpse of john belushi...something like that
I sound kind of putzki myself making fun of a show still trying to be on the air
well yeah, we used to write for it, in black humor at 3 am on yahoo chat on sat/sun mornings, sat eve sun morn and laughed until we fell out of our chairs
where's the ability to do that anymore? can I find humor in the fact I'm staring the financial stew with a twisted stumick? nah..I was writing about the Butler book 'the way of all flesh' which kind of rung true, although it too smacked of the worry over one's pitiful financial picture (I look like the grim reaper in the mirror on that one, ishh)
butler's book, the way of all flesh, expounds on the limits of child abuse, in the educated...it was a good thing thought by this narrowminded minister who married a woman he couldn't hardly love but he did and had three children with her once he figured it out...I came away from the book, because it was hardly bearable to read that this minister assaulted his oldest boy for having a lisp, he couldn't say his 'c''s...it was painful to read and quite shocking
i could think in butler's day that the presentation of this child abuse would have been the thing to think on if one were looking toward the victorian era and the happy family of victoria and albert..that this righted the path to that end and thus a family was endowed with the graces it was intended
i would think also that love comes naturally if all else is in place and that such ideas as whaling on a child for speaking as a child wouldn't even have been a consideration...ah, but it was the father/minister himself that had been born without a good cause..that he came into the world was possibly to contain the essence of his wonderful grandpapa..who, as butler tells it, was one of those lights of the world that lands just in the middle of a common everyday settlement of people, individuals of all sorts, to whom his light spreads and things are good...he gives (the grandpapa) by his being among us, the joy of our existence...let's us know, here's why we're here...so his vessel of soul is maintained by his progeny, of whom he only had the one son..who was a prig, a bore, a bastard at heart and so on...according to butler
but, as we bear on in the book, and we do, we can't be putting it down because we're stuck in airports the long day, all day, from early on, we're reading it to find out a little on the advent of victorianism, which it is...and it does create the very fecund environment of victoria and albert and their many children...I do n't want to know about them, but I do know that if anyone read butler's book in his day, they would have thought the child beating passage most cruel..and also the alcoholic wife of the beaten son...who never seems to cut a break in his life until he's grown past most of it, including the raising of his own two lovely children (better off without me, he says)...bummer
what is life if you have kids and aren't there...I dunno, I figure I am, somehow, most of the time, but I'm me too and perhaps that's it, that's the sacrifice of the past centuries that we would now know ourselves a little better, go to a psychoanalyst of some sort and get our rages, dispossessions and so on, ironed out...I should hope that's what we've learned...It's kind of like treading familiar ground, this butler book, kind of peeping in the window and listening to incessant yammering of the quasimodo sort, where the dragons of no faith are ever in the cobwebs and the dust bunnies of life...
he doesn't go in for that sort of detail, butler, he tells a little of a house the beaten son occupies for a time, but only at the onset of the habitation (I'm talking in the vernacular of the book here), rather he goes on a mile about faith, belief in faith, faith as a constant, faith as a moral bankruptcy that it is so poorly interpreted
certainly we had lovely books on the saints growing up - oh yes, my catholicism is coming up like a newly forming volcano here, but I leave it aside to examine the fortitude of the epistle (the way of all flesh)...I also pad away a moment to investigate my own hearth..
 there, situation adjusted, fingers a bit stiff with cold, certainly that is the season, it's dribbling rain outside - we're used to it but it is dreary, so the thoughts about this book are of that sort, that its issues with theology lie buried in the attitudes of the family explored.  there is no joyousness in this family, and I don't recall its name other than it was of the cloth, throughout, the beaten son even ordained into it but not a minister, at last, rather a newborn theologian asking his readership (if there was) to qualify their beliefs in the foundation of his own thought.  That I had a challenge with.
Whereas we may all at some point be recognizable as churchgoers, when the chips are down, we have only our faith to turn to.  Do we?  would we if we knew what I now know about this particular English family?
Well, in a quick moment I recollect that we're never going to be the supreme being that God is.  If anything, The Way of All Flesh makes this a graphic presentation.  Here is the main church in England, I don't think Butler even calls it 'Anglican' though I suppose it must be, what else would it be? I came away not knowing for sure if it was the Anglican church, but I guess if one attends Cambridge and becomes a minister from it, then that must be what he was ordained to be serving in..hmm
What the book does is tell all that is without foundation in belief.  It comes up with the platitudes of belief - that God serves the daily prayer, but we don't see the characters being sustained by this, rather that they survive somehow in spite of it.  Only the original patriarch, the grandpapa early on in the story, has any joy of being in him.  Only he recognizes the true worth of life, that it is to be lived to the fullest.  Butler suggests this grandpapa may have been steered a bit by taking a wife it would appear to be not the most satisfactory spouse, but even this the man makes a good sort from, and they have a child.  It is this child that raises the ugly head of the best of our existence, our original sin in not recognizing life as a state of paradise.  Grandpapa knows well that life is this paradise.  He lives  his life out in this joy as Butler tells it.  Further on his family would have disappointed him no doubt, but had he been there to sort it out, surely it would have been a better thing.  Each child would have known his place in that man's heart one feels assured of it.
In the end the beaten child, whom I now feel confident (again the language of the story) to name as Ernest, whom he was.  Ernest lives to share with the rest of us, through Butler, how we may accomplish our life to the best of our ability.  We may be like a boat at sea in many storms, but if we listen to our inner voice, which we wou ld probably define as 'our soul', we may achieve the peace of knowing our place.  To reflect on how we got here, well, if it doesn't s uit, why bother.  That we are, and shall be, that's what we must do.  The book is an exercise in this  achieving element.  To be saddled with a set of behavior tools that don't suit us, as Ernest was at his father's knee (again and again) may take away our awareness of the essential goodness of being, most of it being compromised by situations that confound us, we may also know that having been born as Ernest was, in the bosom of the church, we may learn from it what not to take away from it.  That while God may be with us from the moment we are born, he does not sit idly by letting us be coddled by his presence.  Rather if we are the people in his service, we may be challenged beyond our ability to actual be human, and become as automatons of the written word of those with whom we share this life.  Did they know heaven on earth, could they understand suffering and death, were they not vile greedy sorts that consumed all in their path?  Some of them, perhaps, but they stand as effigies of the wrong way, and if they are the ones representing what He wants for us, then we know from that it is not what He wants for us.  So that is why Butler wrote the book for his time and for those after, that we may understand from it that we can choose our way, we can be strong, or we can crumble.
Certainly some of those characters in the story did crumble, or were made into clay statutes of their time, like Ernest's parents, who were outwardly the ones we would look up to, as minister and his family, their behavior was exemplary.  This is what also called them to be so cruel to their children as they thought it was called upon them to do so.  Their nature was not allowed to flourish and respond to the light of faith but rather to carry it out as some sort of dire military service, which in their recklessness was never made obvious to them.  They didn't squirm other than to respond to the base needs of their personalities.  As such, you can only surmise to get through it, the story, that this is faith on the surface when confronted with the choice to do evil.  I should survive it even if it calls to me like a siren.   Butler does reflect on Scylla and Charbydis a bit, in the case of Ernest and his choices as a youth, but we know that these are only for him signposts and he learns what the wrong turn can lead to. 
my fingers are still cold and I don't hear the fire crackling...I shall return momentarily
 here's momentarily...fingers again cold...fire is absolutely NOT cooperating, although I've finally made it go..
well...lots to think about with butler's book, but it boils down to live the life you've been given with as much good grace as you can give it..don't dwell on shortcomings but make the most of your opportunities, be enthusiastic, innocent and yet, trust in the Lord, for he knows all and will sustain you in spite of the major obstacles that a person like Ernest must face..to retain one's niaevete in certain danger is to be vindicated, however long that takes, it shall happen...and whatever theology one encounters, temper it with the experience of life for there is where you shall see love and grace in their element, and in no other place, however fine the speech...hehe, like here, haha