Happy, Happy Birthday.

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Our daughter is seventeen today.

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Just like the day of her birth, we spent many hours last night in agony. Red-faced, shouting, screaming. 

There was gnashing of teeth.

There was rending of garments.

There was blood, sweat, and tears.

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the agony of birth, redux.

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I guess it makes a kind of sense. 

Some new thing is aborning.

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You've got to expect a roller-coaster, a convulsive train-wreck, carpet-bombing and torching villages with Zippo lighters and crying girls with their clothes burned off running down the street.

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Right?

*

So this morning finds us much like the morning seventeen years ago. Exhausted, red-eyed and bleary. Astounded by the force of life that has announced itself, and more than a little frightened. 

No fucking clue as to how to proceed.

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At least then we had a bag of diapers and a little bassinet and Dr. Spock and onesies and pale, terry-cloth animals to hold up and shake and show her to get her to stop crying.

And breast milk.

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It feels like she has to utterly destroy us in order to claim her prize of autonomy. She seems to think that's the only way.

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We're ready to head for the hills.

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The worst is not being able to soothe her, comfort her, give her a measure of peace. 

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Not looking forward to a sad and sullen birthday cake, begrudging present-opening, insincere thanks. 

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Is there a goddamn book of instructions around here somewhere?

I mean, what the fuck?

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We struggle to engage this suffering without resistance. We struggle to engage it without resistance. Hmmm. Okay, I'm not going to struggle. I'm just going to suffer. Suffer mindfully, if not gladly. She is of us, but she is not us. We are strong illusions that she must shatter if she is to see the world clearly, through her own eyes. We are the enemy. We are. 

Despite, or because of, our love for her. Our desires blind her and bind her. Our thoughts and opinions choke and oppress her. The dipperful of cold, clear water we hold out to her to slake her thirst is full of salt. It does naught but make her thirst greater. 

She is in the bad wilderness and we think we are helpful guides but we are dark and scary monsters who will set upon her and devour her. 

She must flee our noises and the frantic waving of our suckered tendrils. 

The horrible cries of our beseeching.

***

"But we love you!!"

***

This parenting gig really brings me face to face with my worst self. I get to see a man who is selfish and self-centered. Bitter and enraged. A fool and a lout. Not always, not all the time, but often enough. More than often enough. 

My heart is in the right place, it's just not very good at its job. 

There is a great deal of learning left to do. 

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Perhaps I can do some of it.

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Happy Birthday, kid. 

We love you super bad.

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Namaste. Ohm mani padme hum. Shalom. Ah salam malakim. Peace be upon you. 

Move along. Move along. There's nothing to see here, folks.

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I can take this guy.

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It feels like this sometimes.

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You are up against it.

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I am happy to have my wife home. It is my kid's birthday this weekend and I have to run off to some prison and collect some DNA and try to interview this guy who won't talk to me in a hundred years and I'd just as soon not.

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I had coffee with a couple of guys this morning. We all used to be on the SWAT team, one of them still is, and he was talking story about whatever. This warrant, that warrant. This happened, that happened. This guy did this, the other guy did that, I did this, the bad guy...

It makes me sad not to have that in my life.

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I like kicking doors. 

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I miss it.

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I sometimes wish I was a warrior, and I aspired to it and still do in some ways, and I got close to it. I did. But I am also too lazy and too soft and too easy on myself to really be one of those guys. I can hang around the edges of it, but I somehow missed the boat. I know guys who I think really walk the walk, and they are few. 

I mean, I could put a hurt on you, and I'm game for almost anything. I'm no wimp. 

But the guys who really live it...

***

My wife thinks, no, she knows I'm crazy when it comes to this subject. Shit, I know it.

There's a part of me that knows it. 

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Part of me says fuck it, let's hit the door.

***

Namaste.

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Aeromotor at dusk

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May you be calm.

May you be happy.

May you be at peace.

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Ohm mani padme hum.

***

This has been a public service announcement from The Tearful Dishwasher.

***

ratfuck

*

My better half is at Esalen for the week. Thai Massage workshop. This Esalen place, you should see it. Nestled into the cliffside overlooking the dark, seaweeded, sea lion studded, rocky swirling beauty of the pacific just south of Big Sur. Lots of little wooden buildings, lawns and paths, organic garden, naked folks in the hot tubs down by the water, everyone in hemp clothing and dreadlocks and no makeup and bare feet, little woven bracelets and anklets and everyone when I was there dropping her off was hugging, very seriously and intently, and looking into each others eyes and nodding. Organic tofu and free range onion soup and garden greens for dinner and meditation and drum circles under the stars.

I'm making a little bit of fun of it, but I'm fucking jealous as shit.

You could feel the good vibe.

*

As usual when she's gone, I'm at sea. 

I pace and whine and look out the window. I brood and drink. I flip the pages of my book and I have no idea what I've been reading for the past two hours. I eat hot dogs and pizza for dinner.

I jump on the bed for a while, but my heart isn't in it.

*

Even Anthony Bourdain in Spain didn't lift my spirits, or make me want to cook.

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My kid, she's in a bad way, too. Her own thing, teenaged angst writ large. She's doing pretty well with it, better than I did at that age, but she's on edge and depressed and moody and we're both kind of throwing off sparks all the time.

I made the mistake of trying to talk with her last night, and it got ugly fast and pretty much has stayed that way. I backed off, trying to give her the space she needs, but the damage is done.

I am such a bonehead.

*

I should take the dogs to the beach, but I'm reluctant to leave the house. Plus I don't want to be giving a bunch of dog baths. Still, I should. 

I should.

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The long, dark tea-time of the soul. 

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I'm really in the mood for "Kill Bucket" now. I wish I could be as stoic and comical and violent and quietly resigned as Beat Takeshi. 

Maybe I'll just dress in black and wear sunglasses and not say anything. Go stand by the water's edge and smoke a cigarette. 

That's what I'm doing on the inside.

*

I look pretty cool.

**

namaste.

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Kill Bucket

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I sometimes believe that I am Beat Takeshi.

This is the poster from a movie we did together, "Kill Bucket."

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You probably haven't seen it.

That's okay.

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He plays a depressed detective who is forced to take a vacation when his bosses realize he hasn't cleared a case in two years. He and his wife travel to the US, where they visit her younger brother in Los Angeles. The three of them go out for drinks, and Beat gets so drunk his wife puts him in a cab and sends him back to the hotel. 

When he wakes up in the morning, he sees on the news that his brother-in-law has been murdered, his body dumped in an alley. There's no sign of his wife. 

Beat goes to the cops and gets put with the detective working the case. Beat wants to find his wife before she ends up dead, but he's got to convince the local cops he's not the one who killed his brother-in-law.

Lots of drinking, brooding, and shooting ensues. 

It's a buddy movie for misanthropic, violent depressives.

*

Catch it at your nearest indie movie rental place. 

Look in the bargin bin.

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Regard All Dharmas as Dreams

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What dreams we make for ourselves. 

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You would think that we would make better ones. Dreams without endless, senseless striving. Dreams without unease and bitterness. Dreams without dead children, faithless lovers, flesh-eating diseases, floods, famine, and pestilence. 

Dreams without those who would harm us.

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Ah, but it is more complex than that.

*

Sometimes I am more than half convinced we are little more sentient than bacterium, or a virus. We eat, shit, fuck, and scheme. We see a green light and we go. Red and we stop. We do what our genes tell us to do, like the kinds of food our genes tell us to like, want to fuck the gene package that is most likely to successfully replicate our own set of instructions so we can make another one just like us to eat and shit and fuck.

The monkey on the back of the tiger holds an imaginary steering wheel, connected to nothing. He chatters to himself about why he wanted the tiger to turn left instead of right, but he's only fooling himself. 

Anyone can see the tiger's the one in charge.

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I guess we need the fiction of control. 

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If you think I'm off base on this, consider someone else, not you. I don't mean you. Or me, for that matter. But think about someone who really has lost it. A drug addict or alcoholic. A republican. A preacher or a cop. 

They come up with all kinds of reasons for what they do, but anyone looking on from the outside can see what's really going on. 

Right?

I mean, haven't you seen that yourself?

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Yeah, me too.

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So, if it's true for some of us, why isn't it true for all of us?  Because if you are sensitive and loving and compassionate and spiritual then the lies you tell yourself are better than the lies an addict tells himself so he can keep getting high. 

Right?

*

I remain dubious.

*

Whatever the reality is, I still am a big fat sucker for love. I don't even care if it's real, or what. I'm going to act like it matters, and that's all I need.

It doesn't have to really matter.

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I believe it does.

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I am a fool for love.

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Maybe my steering wheel isn't connected to anything at all. 

But it is still fun to lean into the turns, and to feel the wind on my face.

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Namaste.

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You Are Not Judged

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I may be coming to some sort of a preliminary understanding about one way of looking at the nature of reality. When I studied geological processes and tried to become comfortable with geologic time, I had to radically realign my understanding of the physical rocks and dirt I was standing on, as well as my sense of what permanent might mean. It sort of started for me with the realization that a glacier was just a very, very, very slow river. It flows with the same basic process as a river of water, its just that we are so short lived and sort-sighted that it seems to most of us, most of the time, as a giant, immovable, frozen wall, frozen lake, frozen mountain, field, valley, world, of ice. But if you study closely, you see without too much effort that it is constantly moving, seeking low ground, seeking the sea. You could set a sofa down at the top of the glacier and in a few thousands of years it would flow all the way to the sea and drop into it.

Maybe float off on an iceberg. 

So, that was one light bulb going off.

Then you start to understand that mountains are the same. Continents. Rocks, boulders, pebbles, grains of sand, grains of dust. They are what we call them only for a short slice of time, the time that we are present to observe and name them. The vast majority of their existence, they are something else entirely. 

You can go see the other end of the spectrum, too. Put an ice cube on a hot stove. Solid, liquid, gas. Watch a flower bud, bloom, fade, shatter, and die. Drosophila Melanogaster has a what, twenty-four hour life cycle? Forty eight? 

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So, things are maybe not what they seem.

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Then there is the matter of my own self. You. Your family, my family. Are you the same person you were when you were a baby? Or is that baby gone? Can you talk to that baby? Is that baby having any feelings or thoughts right now? 

Really?

Are you still a fifth grader? In high school? On your first marriage? 

Or are those folks dead and gone? 

*

It's not that simple, though, is it? There are maybe fragments, memories, shards, little cloud like pieces of them still floating in the biochemical soup that is your brain. And those Proustian moments when you catch a whiff of new-mown grass and you really are, for a second or a nano-second, but some bit of time, that kid again. 

Right?

*

We are as the glacier. As the rock. We are subsumed under the tectonic plate of death and obliterated.

Something comes out the other side, though. 

Not recognizably us. 

*

You would not say hello if you passed us on the street.

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Circles. Wheels within wheels. Cycles. Rings. Interconnected. Twinned together. Ephemeral. Shifting. Non-quantifiable. Just like our coffee tables and our meal of grilled salmon and baby arugula. 

*

Ah, but the miracle is how real it all feels. 

And, of course, it is real. As real as it gets.

And let us not forget that on a quantum level, its all blinking in and out of existence a billion billion times a second. All these patterns of probability winking into some recognizable state just by virtue of our own attention. Without an observer, the potentialities don't really manifest. They remain potential. 

*

Maybe the large hadron collider will sort it all out.

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It is all a great mystery to me, and it slips out of the grasp of my understanding like a dream upon waking.

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Namaste.

***

The Cyclops Inside

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What it looks like inside my head right now.

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Peace like a river in my soul.

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My shortcomings are many. 

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I can be ungenerous. 

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Selfish, I think it's called.

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*

I strive to do better. To be more kind. To have compassion. To be generous. Thrifty, brave, and clean.

My progress is small.

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I am a simple unfrozen caveman, frightened and confused by your modern ways.

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Namaste.

***

intermittent rage disorder

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I look nicer with my glasses on.

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sometimes it just sweeps over me. it has been a long, long time, but here it is again. 

stay out my way.

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They say that rage is because you are not getting your needs met. You feel rage, you need to express what it is that you need right then. 

I figure that's true, but you probably already asked for what you need.

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It is nothing like a temper tantrum to make you see yourself as a giant three year old child.

It is about the least manly way to behave there is. 

I am ashamed of myself.

*

When you think you have something licked, thats when you had better stand the fuck by.

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Namaste, y'all.

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Portrait of the Dishwashers

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In all our cartoon glory.

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Compliments of the kid.

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Namaste.

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disaster

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You could choose, if you want. Do you want the hundred and fifty women and children trampled to death today in a stampede in India? Or would you prefer the nine climbers swept to their deaths on K-2 by an avalanche? Or the dozen climbers stranded at the peak, who are doomed because the fixed ropes at the bottleneck were swept away too? Or the macheted tutsis? Or the jews? Or the armenians? 

The list is endless.

And growing.

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And yet. 

I get to be with my wife. I get to struggle with the problems my daughter brings to our table. I get to pay my bills with the money I make at work. I get to wash my truck and cook shrimp and bok choy in peanut sauce with peaches and limes and chilis. 

It makes me sick.

*

It makes me sick.

*

And yet. And yet.

*

I can't stop looking at it. I can't cease licking my fingers and pouring another glass of wine and reading another book. 

About how fucked up we are.

*

I love this whole blasted contraption.

The wheezy calliope. 

*

I think I could win you a gold fish or an ashtray or a lime-colored stuffed dog.

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It is a carnival.

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It is, it is.

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I am not blameless in any of this.

****

mother and child reunion

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We watched "Encounters at the End of the World" yesterday. That Werner Herzog, man. He's something else.

He makes the world a richer place. He's a real student of horror. He looks for it, finds it, everywhere. But he's enraptured by it, and he makes us feel it. I love the guy.

In this film, he goes down to Antarctica and points his camera into the faces of the strange creatures there- the bus driver, the linguist/gardener, the philosopher/bulldozer operator, the Mayan king/journeyman plumber, the escape artist/small engine repairman, on and on.

The prosaic ugliness of the last outpost.

And the ice. The strange world under it. 

*

Antarctica self-selects for weirdos. 

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The other day I made a thai hot and sour seafood soup that was very good. Last night I roasted a bunch of baby broccoli, sweet peppers, and onions and then coated them with garlic and butter and tossed them in with some farfalle pasta. It was good.

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After two weeks of being sick, I think I'm better today.

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Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

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