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Misadventure, with Hollandaise
So, yesterday we went out to breakfast as an unusual and most welcome break in the routine. This would have been fine if the devil hadn’t made me I hadn’t decided that life was impossible without Eggs Benedict. This particular place, which is actually wonderful, operates on the premise that more is more. It says two pancakes, sometimes you get four. It says Eggs Benedict and you get something that looks like a small buttercup color lake with tiny pontoons floating in it. Net net, it plunged me, even having not partaken of the dish in its entirety, in a state of suspended and putrified animation in a gaseous domain, temporarily.
Which left me plenty of time to think, while I was trying to position myself in such a way as to not a )explode, or b) implode. Last week was pretty rough, again. The spot of Friday pawholding with a friend who found dealing with menacing and foul mouthed 20 somethings on BART (the Bay Bridge has been closed , and the Ferry wasn’t working because of an oil spill in the bay. Perhaps, really we need say no more.) ultimately more than she could take was just a small part. Combined with her empathy for a colleague at work who had come back from a trial in the deep south. The trial of the murderer of his daughter. Who was white. By her boyfriend, who was black, and demonstrated his total innocence by immediately decamping to Canada post event. Apparently the papers in this town trumpeted the constant refrain that the only reason this young man was considered as a suspect was because he was black. Forget forensics, right? Meanwhile, I think everyone in the Bay Area is, and certainly should be, disturbed and sickened by what happened to the Richmond high school girl at a school dance. It is an odd thing to come to terms with the fact that there are individuals out there who seem to have, actually, no real human component. Who will hurt you and think nothing of it. The possibility of life in prison seemed to get their attention, interestingly enough. The thing that I noticed though, was that somehow, now, everyone is racist and right off the top, too. Before it was just white folks. Now it is everyone. Whatever happens, it is related to the color of your skin, not your behavior. While this is oftentrue, it isn’t ALWAYS true. Kids in the Richmond case who were picked up by the Police because they had been watching and texting their friends about it and not lifting a finger to help? They were of course picked up just because of their skin color. Not because they were there and participating on some level in an atrocity. Basically. People are accepting rotten behavior and limitations on their own freedom because they are afraid to speak up and experience the wrath of one of these individuals , who of course come in all sizes, shapes, colors, stripes, sexes and persuasions. I met a raving white one yesterday and it shook me up more than a little, in addition to narrowly missing turning my car into an accordion. Also I was not happy with myself: Yo Mamma lept to my lips in a heartbeat and that isn’t going to help anything overall. It’s terrifying, actually, to see all of this. It is as though all the work and thought that happened in the last forty years….just didn’t. On top of the stomach balancing act, it really was just too much for me yesterday. Even taking a broad view of why this happens and allowing for the truth of people’s feelings about discrimination and the brutal reality of its existence in daily life- we still cannot be treating each other in this disrespectful and cruel way. Period. It is time to put down Your Personal Very Important Story. What you do to one, you do to all. How you treat someone else is how you treat yourself. Food for thought. Without, perhaps, hollandaise.
*SIGH*
Well, hello again. Somehow the frazzled nerves here at House of Pain are soothed by writing, SO: onward.
One thing I have been meaning to write about and haven’t is: MY PROPAGATION WENT SWIMMINGLY THIS YEAR. I was actually, for the first time, able to propagate a rose bush. I know it is supposed to be easy, and usually my entire paw is green, but up to now, no baby roses. This is an especially wonderful one: Large coral and rose colored, intensely fragrant flowers. I dry them and use in a Persian style spice powder. The other projects, the grape, onion, ginger stalk, succulents, elderberry and scented geraniums are well established and on their way to being Big Plants. I am thrilled. Propagation is one of the joys of my life and given the Challenging Nature of Things at Present……
Which, ha ha, reared their ugly head while I was writing this earlier. So. Also, I was going to report on two things that made me laugh last week. Thing the first: My client in the nursing facility has a prized object, shaped like a cat. A pillow. One day last week, in addition to everything else, the cat went AWOL. I tore his room up, got lots of inarticulate hand gestures in response to my queries about what might have happened, finally got my homegirl up front to let me into the laundry room. So I could go through the dirty laundry from his wing in case the cat was there. Which I did. And, which, yes, is another little piece of hell on earth I got to tour last week. Nonetheless. The two laundry people were standing there goggling at me. I say I’m looking for a pillow, shaped like a cat. Black, round, yellow eyes with a tail. The man there, bless his furry and demented little heart, no doubt just wanted to help. So he said, OH, IS THAT IT? pointing excitedly. Hope springs eternal so I turned and looked. And saw, yes, a pillow.
A pillow SHAPED LIKE TWEETY BIRD. A BRIGHT YELLOW, EIGHTEEN INCH TALL, BULBOUS TWEETY BIRD. Well, no, I said, barely holding it together. Excellent try but I’m looking for Sylvester. (Who, eventually, I did find.) (But not there.)
Thing the second was on dooce. She printed an email comment from a headless, Germanic, anti-vaccination pioneer which…well. I felt like I might have found my long lost sister. I also wondered if all this hasn’t driven me just the teensiest bit crazy. Just. The. Teensiest. Bit.
Meanwhile, watching a program on tv while The Partner lay in quiet misery, (since, of course, there’s no doctor we can see for him because…oh, well) we see that there is no water in Fresno, they’re mowing down almond trees before they die, and the ground is empty, unemployment there is at 40%, and the food lines are so long people can’t even get…..anything. Which, since the San Joaquin Valley produces an awful lot of food? And it isn’t producing it now? What do you think?
I heard a very intelligent person, who is on the grid (unlike me), has a brain and a heart, give an opinion about what she thought was happening, worst case scenario. It really made my blood run cold because it makes a horrible kind of sense. The fine folks who have brought us to this situation AND I’M SORRY YOU KNOW DAMNED WELL WHO YOU ARE, GRAND OLD PARTY , BIG AND MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATIONS OF ALL STRIPES AND THOSE LUCKY FOLKS WHO ACTUALLY HAVE ALL THE MONEY, (sorry about the yelling) are just waiting for everything to collapse, undermining everything President Obama is working potentially toward. Then they can rebuild, again, in their own image, pointing to the failure of the Democrats and of Obama. Endless supply of immigrant labor, check. The supermax prisons they said they didn’t build but did? Ready for occupancy. These days are a real test of my faith, of my convictions about non-violent action. About everything. Thank God for gardening, is all I can say.
Back on the Street Again
Hello, Gentle Readers. Indeed, I was gone for few days, and here I am back again. Overjoyed? I thought so.
We went a few hours north of here to a summer art festival on a river. I must say it was wonderful, wonderful to see old friends, wonderful to NOT HAVE MY CEL PHONE WORK and NOT HAVE MY LAPTOP and NOT BE NEAR A TELEVISION. I almost forgot what bliss that is. Wonderful to be on a river, wonderful to see redwoods and a nest of ospreys. Of course, this wouldn’t be my life if the whole thing went without incident.
We decided to camp this year, to save money and just be outside. So, after packing up all the booth stuff and all the product, and all the camping gear and food, we set off. We arrived at the campground and it seemed OK. The Partner and I both prefer camping in the middle of nowhere, but this was a working trip after all. So, there we were, relaxing after a long day, looking up at the redwoods through the tent. I confess to having had a nagging sense of foreboding because the Partner had said, more than once, how much he was looking forward to peace and quiet. Uh oh. What to our wondering ears should appear but…..A Large Asshat. With a surround sound system to blare out his almost beyond belief terrible taste in music, two stand up barbeques to provide chemical fumes, AND!!! two, count ‘em, small pony sized dogs with basso profundo barks. This was nothing but enhanced by the arrival of four more humans, bringing the festive group to a total of six. Six loudmouths and two Hounds of the Baskervilles. Lots of liquid refreshment. So, there we were. “Quiet time” supposedly commenced at 10 p.m., so I called the ranger station after having endured two and a half hours of top volume Kenny Chesney interspersed with 80’s techno and intense barking. Rangers were at an emergency, apparently. I went to the “camp host” trailer, and found they were cowering in it refusing to answer the door. Yes, this meant that I, clutching my newly rebatteried MagLite, had to stump over to Happy Acres and ask them to tone it down. This did not go particularly well. What noise, Large A. enquired with a flat stare and stiff shoulders. The dogs? Ha ha, the dogs. They were by now foaming at the mouth and lunging at me, and his comment was, “they’re friendly”. This, Gentle Reader, is right up there with “I’ll only park in your driveway for a minute”. A passive aggressive owner with two out of control dogs telling me the dogs are friendly. So, I said, I can handle the dogs, pal. I watch the Dog Whisperer, after all. And, indeed, they started wagging their tails, sat down, and barked conversationally. They just need to be quiet, and the music and yelling needs to stop, I said. If you could just be mindful that you aren’t the only person here. I leave you to imagine the special hours that ensued after Large A. snarled at me, have a wonderful night. It was long, is what it was.
Anyway, we got out of THERE, giving Large A. & Entourage a hearty 21 horn salute on the way out, and everything was totally groovy from then on except for not having had any sleep at all that one night. (And not much the night before because our neighbors at home were up all night partying. Sleep people, sleep. It’s more important than you know.) My inventory got a bit gnarly but what the heck. I found myself laughing at irritating non-customers instead of worrying. Good. It took all this week for the fatigue to wear off and the anxiety to kick in again, so that once again I can send off my crisply worded memos to whitehouse.gov about how non-stimulating the stimulus is for small business. And blog, of course. It’s more fun than ever because Boo is now imitating my every key stroke with her beak against her food bowl and cage side. Ah, home again. I missed you guys!
Vox Populi
We were watching the news this morning, the Partner and I, and what a jolly bunch of stuff it was. Hoo, baby. North Korea is, well, Being North Korea, we might say, and the California Supreme Court did not allow the challenge to the passage of Proposition 8 to stand. The Partner figures it is about money. I, being of a more perhaps paranoid cast of mind, think there is something a bit more medieval going on.
Proposition 8, to my mind, was something that should never have been on the ballot in the first place. Conflating religious and “moral” views with a specific class having or not having the ability to enter into a civil contract seems to me to violate one of the basic tenets of this country: Separation of church and state. Either marriage is a completely religious act, or not. If it is a civil act, a civil contract, with additional possible religious meaning, then the civil aspect must, in a democratic society, trump the religious one in the making of law. So there’s a problem there. If marriage is a contract involving legal and financial aspects it should not be dictated by any rules other than civil. Historically marriage HAS been a contract involving legal and financial aspects. Historically, as well, homosexuality has existed. Logically, to forbid people of a certain sexual orientation who will form family bonds (since this is what human beings do) to enter into a contract protecting aspects of those bonds makes no sense and seems, actually, lawless.
As an issue, I have to wonder what people are thinking here. Many of my gay friends feel that marriage is not an item of interest, but the principle of being denied a basic civil right IS of interest. Other people I know dwell, in horror, on thoughts of same sex kissing. Really people. Do we have time for this? If two individuals want to get married, that really should be their business and no one else’s. Personally I have alot of questions about marriage. It has its’ origins in slavery in Byzantine and Roman times, after all. (A HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE, Vol. I, Aries and Duby, Eds) When I got married myself, one of the pastors I interviewed to perform the ceremony was horrified that I had deleted the “obey” portion from the vows, unless we both said it. We had quite the interesting discussion about that. He did not perform the ceremony. Additionally, I have no interest in watching anybody kiss, or worrying about who kisses who among those of age to consent to such activity, particularly.
But you cannot have things both ways. Either we have a society that functions under the rule of law, and preserves justice for its citizens, or not. Having a religious and moral control on who can exercise legal rights is dangerous, indeed, and it is at our peril that we confuse that issue with personal views on sexuality, or anything else for that matter. The real thing here is that while you may get distracted by the idea of drag queens marching down the aisle, the point is that it could be anyone having any right denied to them because a particular interest group decides it is not acceptable. That is the issue, to my mind. It is not about sexual persuasion. It is about justice and due process.
Not Again (or, Another Opinion)
I can’t quite express the horror and dismay I felt at being subjected to Dick Cheney on television again. Over and over. I don’t want to hear anything from that individual, ever again. I think we can safely say He’s Done Enough.
Cheney no longer holds any office in government and I fail to see why we should be subjected to his opinions any further. Opinions from someone who doesn’t, apparently, understand how a democratic society is to function (justice and liberty, for example), someone who has no respect for humanity, and someone who will justify any means to get to his desired end. I also wonder how appropriate his appearance was, considering he was Vice-President, not President. Presidential remarks might possibly have been appropriate. Given his theoretically lower position, his remarks were not appropriate, actually a bit disrespectful,and his whole litany was as offensive as ever and, basically, as thoughtless. I can’t help but wonder why he got so much attention.
I had to laugh when I heard Jesse Ventura say, after hearing Cheney’s remarks, give me an hour to waterboard Dick Cheney and I’ll get him to confess to the Sharon Tate murders. This summarizes the view on the veracity of information gained by torture (er, excuse me, what is it? enhanced interrogation?) of virtually every long term professional in the military and intelligence sector, many of whom have written quite extensively on the subject: It is extremely unreliable. So why would you torture someone knowing that? Knowing that you cannot count on getting the truth, knowing that the United States represents a supposedly higher moral ground, and knowing that torture is expressly banned by the Geneva Convention, to which the last time I checked the United States had been a signatory. ( Perhaps Cheney confused the Geneva Convention with the Kyoto Protocol?) In any case, torture is also completely contrary to that other document with which Cheney continually seemed to be unfamiliar: The Constitution of the United States.
Personally, I really really want Dick Cheney to go away, now. Go away and stay away and don’t come back, ever. In my view, he’s shamed the country by hugely participating in the dragging of it into a situation that was misrepresented from the beginning, violating the Constitution and kicking Habeas Corpus to the curb, and also: Profitting from it. Haliburton ring any bells? My opposition to torture, by the way, is in no way a denigration of the individuals who are forced to do it under orders they must obey. ( Don’t bother to think about the public health consequences of that, Dick. All the people who can’t live with the darkness they’ve inhabited. ) Cheney’s comments in that regard were even more insulting than his usual standard. Which is high.
Dick Cheney has been my meditation practice about compassion and forgiveness for the past few years. I’m not making alot of progress judging by how I felt watching him on TV. Or perhaps I have. I have compassion for him, but I see no need to allow him to continue in his injurious ways which have led my country to the brink of disaster. I don’t know what someone like Gandhi or Dr. King, Jr. would have made of all this. I still don’t think such a person as Cheney deserves media attention and analysis. His time is over, and he should have enough sense and self possession to acknowledge that.
Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say
Pressing matters in other parts of the kingdom have been requiring our attention of late, so, lest you, Gentle Reader, think we’ve gone tits up in a ditch, no, we haven’t. Not yet, anyway.
We seemed to have hit a new low; or, as a financial news commentator called the economic situation, a MULTI-DECADE LOW. Baking bread helped, as usual: crust speckled with fermentation bubbles, yes. Irregular holes in interior: lace-like almost this time, yes. Still. I am continuing to be quite struck with the Difficulties of Communication.
I think I’m saying something, simple usually, and it turns out the other person simply isn’t listening. Then when it becomes necessary to research the interaction, the memory of the person who wasn’t listening is the one that sticks. Whoever sticks to hearing whatever it is they want to hear, instead of what was really said, is generally the winner in such events. The model for this was firmly entrenched during the past eight years, of course, leaving me at least with an ongoing residual sense of somehow being totally lost. Words really matter to me; I love and admire them, and when they appear to have no meaning I get confused. REALLY confused. And this lack of meaning? Seems quite often to be covering up something that doesn’t smell right at all. It is as though everything was built on a non-existent foundation and quick as a flash, it’s all gone. Except that those who live in this world are still here amidst the rubble, whether or not they believed in WMDs, Santa Claus, affordable housing, having schools for children, or a consistent income and a trustworthy place to put it.
I listened to President Obama’s speech last night and as usual was impressed by his thought process and command of the language. He seems to be someone whose words actually mean what..well, what those words mean when you look them up in a dictionary. It’s refreshing indeed. However when I listen to the parts about sacrifice and responsibility, I feel very tired. I have already sacrificed and fought for what I believe in through all the channels this society provides. I have assumed responsibility for my consumption, my “carbon footprint”, my attitude, and all the rest of it. I guess I am waiting for others to truly step up and join in the work and begin to cooperate. There are some heartening signs in this direction but also many in the opposite direction. This is where the Words come in. Lots of people really don’t seem to understand them at all anymore. This, I find frightening.
It connects, somehow, to another thing that has occupied a portion of my mind that hasn’t been busy keeping dragons from torching the far ends of the kingdom, and that is an article in the New Yorker, relatively recently, on the writer Chinua Achebe. I have read and loved African writers, having had the good fortune in college to have a friend who read and shared them with me. It is true that there is a phantasmagorical quality to some of the writing, but in my view it is also completely real: the words of Ben Okri or Ngugi wa Thiongo describe things as they ARE. The words mean what they mean. In the aforementioned article, discussion was devoted to the issue of what language an African novelist “should” write in. English or the native tongue? This really made me stop and think. English being the language of the colonizer, the oppressor, the foreigner: However eloquent a language it is, it is still not the language that an African writer learns life in as a child. Yet in this case writing in one’s own language limits, at times quite drastically, the numbers of people who will read that writing. What a horrible dilemma, I thought. Then, I thought: What an incredible expansion it provides in a way for a writer. One has to learn the language of someone who, for good or ill, has vanquished one’s society. This means taking in the understanding of the world and the psychology of that language as well. Then, to weave it into a whole that expresses one’s own reality and response to all that has gone on before. This is an extraordinary achievement and it seems that may be what needs to be done now: relearn our “mother tongue” so that it no longer seems like a foreign language to us, and then truly understand what we are saying.
With Frog In Throat
It has been said that much of writing is about finding one’s voice. And here I am, next to speechless, stricken with stage fright. All those Clever Ideas I had earlier have dissipated like clouds blowing across a wide sky.
Well, alright then. Here we are at Post One. Allow me to introduce myself. I am not Boozilla, first off. Boozilla, or she who rules all, is a parrot and that is all we’ll say about THAT for right now. The name should give a tee-tiny hint, however. And she DID learn to fly by navigating around through our house room to room with a few dramatic conk-outs, as I have learned to fly by navigating however dyslexically and accident-prone-ly through…well. Through. Over. Around. Under. Sideways. Which brings us to the Now, wherein I am in the still early days of launching my practice in alternative medicine. I believe it is early days until about ten years after, and we may also say: VERY alternative medicine. So.
One of my teachers quoted Dolly Parton at a particularly complex juncture: “Find out who you are and do that.” Part of finding out who I am involved understanding what was outside me and what was to be done about all that. Which in addition to accounting for why it has taken me so long, also, finally, we hope, brings us to an actual point. Authority. Who do we listen to? What are they saying? and Why? Not only is this a relevant question for each of us but overwhelmingly relevant in the world right this minute. Being rendered speechless by what one sees and hears is almost a quotidian experience now. Distrust of what one sees and hears. All kinds of things are said by all kinds of people who, once you really look at it, have no experience to back up what they’re saying. Or, worse, the motives behind what they’re saying are questionable to say the least. Thinking about all that is happening now in the world, everywhere, can be a paralyzing thing. Overwhelmed by it all we think we can do nothing, or else jump on some information surge we’ve received from…see authority above. Or, just ignore it all, what the heck. It becomes now, then, absolutely crucial to understand what we’re hearing, who is saying it, and why. I think that is a big part of why I write. I hope it will be a big part of why some will read what I write. That, of course, and the ever amusing stories of my accident prone encounters along the way.
Today finishes with two things. First, I passed, at long last, the baguette test. One thing I do to revive myself after extended periods of crawling around on my eyeballs is bake. I have a sourdough starter that I began many years ago. I finally made baguettes with it a few days ago. The challenge of rolling something shaped like a softball into a long wand shape, well, piffle. In addition to having the desired effect of making me feel like a human being again, they were..well, like REAL baguettes. Lovely, lovely baguettes. Which I took to mean: Anything is possible.
Second. I walk by a lagoon every day on my way to see a client who is in a skilled nursing facility. Today for the first time ever, there was a water dog in the lagoon playing. The joy was radiating off this dog in megawatts, the tail was moving like the back rotor on a helicopter, and the ducks were chattily paddling over to investigate. The happiness was contagious. The thing of it was: the lagoon is only about five inches deep in that spot. Up to now, I always thought, lagoon-check, deep water-roger that….and it was kind of a mental shock to see that it was not deep but indeed quite the opposite. I walked away thinking once again that you really cannot know something until you explore it, and also that the power of joy is simple and uncontainable.
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