Fireflies

*


This girl came to me in a dream this morning.



It is odd to see her still extant.







*




Odd and lovely.










*


Dog walked and washed.     Check.
House cleaned.                   Check.
Zebras painted.                  Check.
Japanese skirt pattern.         Check.
Lunch made and eaten.       Check.
Fish washed and fed.           Check.


Time to figger out what to make for dinner.


*




Or make a drink and do more art....




***


Namaste.




*

The Red Door

*

We done cured ourselves.

*

We ate fresh, lively, amazing Thai food at Osha. Noodles at Tanpopo. Ahmed fed us on croissants and scrambled eggs and salmon quesadillas with fresh tomato and garlic salsa and a fresh sliced mango and sweet attention and talk and he made us feel welcome and treasured and in turn we love him and won't go back without eating at The Red Door Cafe and yes, next time, Ahmed, we'll have the french toast.

We blew our minds and our budget at Blick Art Supplies. It was as big as heaven and everything was new and clean and called to us and would not shut up and the place was staffed with artists who spend every dime they earn at work.

We stayed at Hotel Tomo and wandered around Japan town and everywhere we looked was wonder and beauty and glowing treasure.

And I got to go to Justin's Ocean Aquarium and talk story and gaze at his wonderful planted tanks and thriving, happy fish and I took home some ottos and a trio of rare Zebra loaches and we drove home in the light of the dying sun through the green and rolling hills and the flat ag land of the central valley and came home to a fat and happy bulldog who rolled on her back and brought us her toys and stared and stared at us as if we were the most wonderful creatures god had ever made.

*


Which we are.


*


I am ready to man the oars again.



*


Namaste.



***

Fuck It

*


We are going to the City!





*


SCRAP. Dog Eared Books. De Young and the Museum of Natural History. Saigon Sandwich. Ocean Aquarium. Hotel Tomo. The Slanted Door. North Beach and The Mission. Japan Town Hardware Store. TAD gear.

I am going to eat every seventeen minutes and I am buying books and fish and something freaky that catches my eye if I want it.

We'll probably come back.


*


Namaste, y'all.


***

Burchell's Zebra

*

The last Burchell's Zebra died in the London Zoo in 1910.


*

This piece is my first experiment with trying to recreate the dioramas I remember from the Museum of Natural History. What they felt like to look at. What it made me feel inside to look at them. Thrilling and infinitely sad, they filled me with longing and wonder and despair.


*

The woman on the verge is out shooting with our new camera.



She will bring home wonders.



*


Last night I made a risotto with garlicky shrimp and bacon topped with sliced green onions, a riff on David Chang's shrimp and grits.


It were good.


*

We watched "The Shooting" on our Netflix on demand. A 1966 Western starring Warren Oates, a young Jack Nicholson, and Millie Perkins. It was just about the best damn thing I ever saw and odd as a two-headed duck.

I don't know what all to think about it.

*

We watch movies like a couple of crack addicts. The odder the better. It's like a damn art house cinema around here. French, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, old, older, new, whatever. Noir. Experimental. Indie.

It's a hell of a thing.




*

I took the dog for a walk and it depressed me. Can you believe that? Now I'm all fucked up. Not that I wasn't before. The world just seems ugly right now.



Not seems.

*



But I like those Zebras all right.



***

Namaste.

*

The Storms of Long Island

*

Do you dream like this?


*

I do.


*


Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I took someone down at gunpoint.



It made me realize how much I miss it.





*

Today the storm relents and the sun is shining high in the wild blue sky and it is fresh and alive everywhere. I am taking the woman to a new vegan place in town and we are going shopping to replace our recently stolen camera so we can continue committing art unabated.

A new day and all it brings with it is ours.


*

Namaste.


***

runaway

*
or


dance till the train smacks you down




*


Either way, it's a comin'.


*

I don't know why this constant recurring battle with The Wild Woman of Borneo undoes us so. It's not like we're new to it. She has been dismantling our lives, her life, for years, with a great singlemindedness. We've been in the trenches a long time. Imagine Groundhog Day had been directed by David Lynch. Like that, sort of.

"Good Morning, Lumberton! At the sound of the falling tree, it will be seven am!"


And you stumble to the window and the ground is littered with the mangled bodies of the dead, or there is a severed human ear on the carpet at your feet, and a dwarf dancing in the closet.

Again.


*

I guess we're in the middle of the movie, before Bill Murray has it all figured out. We're still stepping in the same damn puddle every time.


*

We have not yet figured out how to help anybody.


*

But we do tend to each other. We are kind and gentle and patient, each to each. We try not to ask to much of ourselves. We don't pretend everything is okay.
We try to find what comfort there is in the space.


We are the walking wounded.

*


And we're not kidding ourselves. We know this is small potatoes. It is, quite simply, the way life is. It's not an aberration. It's every bit as normal as sunshine and daisies. We are still showered with blessings in crazy abundance.

Look! We're not on fire! We're not blind! Parasite infested! Starving to death or being murdered!


It only feels like it.


*


Ha.


*

Compared to real trouble, we're livin' on easy street. Again, it's like that part in Castaway before the plane crashes, and Tom Hanks is in the little bathroom of the airplane? Remember that? And he's got a cut on his thumb, and he peels off the band aid and looks at his poor thumb and he grimaces and winces at the pain of it?

He's got no idea he'll soon be knocking his infected tooth out with a ice-skate blade and a big old rock.


*


It's all about keeping shit in perspective.



*

Good luck to you in your struggles. Try to find some peace inside it. It's there if you look hard enough.


***


Namaste.



*

River Lethe

*

River of Lethe 
Carry me down
But there ain't no water here 
to be found.

*


The wind is agitating the trees and filling the air with flying leaves and the crazy sounds of wind chimes banging and the little brown birds that fill our hedges are threeting and careening hard as thrown baseballs across the yard.



We have coffee and logs. We'll lose power soon.




*

As for myself, I aim to go out in the storm and stand on the cliffs overlooking the thrashing sea and lean into wind and spray until I am bone cold and drenched.


*


Namaste.


***

This Way To The End of The World

*



A day of wound-licking. Watching the rain come down and pacing from window to window. The tang of ozone still in the air. We're both jumpy, skittish, ill at ease.


How such a small disaster can claim you.


*

I should go for a walk or something, but it feels beyond me.


*

My neighbor has fired up his grinder. More Pakistani street dentistry sounds. That machine of his makes a noise that mimics exactly the mood I'm in right now.




Fuck me running.



*


Namaste.


***

Hard Lessons

*

We's all busted up after a visit from the Wild Woman of Borneo. She come in like a tornado, tearing through our little straw house. What she didn't blow down, she trampled and set on fire.

We had to send her on her way.


*

You got an idea about what's right and wrong. About what you'll do, and what's a bridge too far. But you can just toss those ideas out the window. When it is upon you, you just do what your gut tells you to do.




Your brain's too far away to be of any assistance.



Besides, it don't have no better ideas.


*

So we sailed on into a full gale and in seconds we'd snapped our rudder, got beam on to the seas, knocked down and rolled, green water rushing in through the hatches and portholes, gear strewn everywhere.

Goin' down fast.


*

We'll weather it fine. Bail out the bilges, drift for a while. Let the sun dry things out. Let go of what's gone or damaged beyond repair, fix the rest.

How we will deal with throwing a mutinous third mate to the sharks, I can't fathom. But its done so I guess we'll learn that next.

She never looked back. Struck off into the boiling seas toward parts unknown. She'll most likely drown. There's islands scattered here and there, but most are barren and lack what's necessary to survive.

Ah, me.

*

Learning more daily about my own shortcomings and where I'm stout and sound. I'm not all bad, but I can see that country from here. As can we all, I suppose.


*

They say it's going to rain hard and not stop for ten days.





***

Namaste.


*

Bereft Object No. 1

*

I love my silly life.



I'm going to hate to see it go.


*

Tonight we are watching a Japanese movie.


Premonition.




How did we live without Netflix? Now we got no cable, no network TV, no commercials, no sports, no QVC.

Just an endless stream of bizarre movies that maybe twenty people a year watch.


Yay!


*

Haiti. There's another example. It was their turn, I guess. Did those folks "manifest their reality" by thinking about a devastating earthquake? Did they make God mad?

Or was their mistake to be fragile creatures on a dangerous planet?


I pray for all of them. Whatever that means.

*


Namaste.


***

Twirl, Redux

*

Sorry, I want to keep looking at it.


*

Namaste.

The Dishwasher and the Lady on The Verge

*

A rare portrait of us at home.


Back from a recent trip abroad, where the Lady presented a paper on the thermodynamics and sub-atomic structure of dark matter and the quest for the Higgs boson, and I slipped off to settle a certain difficulty for the government that I'm not at liberty to discuss.

What a grind.


*

Last night I watched "Police Beat," a little indie film about a Seattle bike cop from Senegal who is too obsessed with his break-up with his girlfriend to pay much attention to his work. Throughout the film he rolls from call to call, wandering among the dead, bad, and injured, seeing them but not seeing them, hearing only his own internal dialogue, asking to borrow their phone so he can check his voice mail to see if she's called him, etc.

An odd, moody little movie.

I was struck by the crimes he responded to and thought over and over again how the filmmakers had gotten them exactly right- that mix of the boring and stupid and ugly seasoned with a dash of something you could never, never make up yourself if you were writing it. The lady who calls the cops because a branch from her dead tree fell and hit her. The woman who gets knocked down and has her purse snatched by a woman and a five year old boy. Etc.

Of course, it turns out that all the crimes in the movie were taken from real Seattle police reports.



*

Happiness.


It does visit us.


I think sometimes its there, even when you can't feel it. If you were smart enough, quiet enough, you could tune it in wherever you were. Like a scratchy radio station when you're driving through the night a long way from home.

You could make it out if you tried.


*

At all times I am blessed beyond reason. Don't think I don't know it. Good God. The horrors heaped upon us, and always I am spared.

Again and again it doesn't happen to me.


***

Namaste.


*

Twirl

*



Sometimes agony and joy take the same form.


*




Maybe there's a lesson in that.



*


I'm captivated by the show, I really am. All those lights! The wheezy caliope and the painted horses spinning around, rising and falling, their eyes flashing, their teeth bared, their thick pink tongues arched in terror.



I could just about wet my pants.



*



I am enthralled by death in its many forms. Monsters and evil abound and are not restricted to the darkness of night or to dank cellars and bedroom closets.


You don't have to look outside yourself to see it.


That's the real horror, isn't it?


*



I don't understand why I'm so anxious about things. You'd think that knowing you are doomed, not in some figurative way, but really for real doomed would free you from small-minded concerns and trivial worries. And, sure, when death is breathing in your face those concerns do diminish, but the end is coming just the same.

How retarded not to really act on that knowledge.


Imagine that freedom- especially if you could possess it before you got crippled by disease or enfeebled by old age and dementia.


ah, it's a pipe dream, I know.


I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't guess I'll ever figure it out.





That's okay. I like being me.



I wouldn't trade with anybody.






*

I love the piece I just finished.

I love doing them.


I could just look at them and look at them.



Which I do.



*


I am having a wonderful Saturday of long walks and good food and talking with my beautiful, intelligent, amazing wife and doing art and listening to the dog chew herself under the dining room table.


May your day be as full of blessings.



And if they drop the bomb on your ass, run outside real quick and dance for as long as you can.



*

Namaste.



***

Are You In The Possession?

*

A week into the new year.



Still working out. Still sitting meditation. Still doing yoga. Still resting the liver.







*


Still completely insane.




*


I feel on the verge of a great change. Unsettled. Restless.


I'm getting the crazy feeling that I'm having a midlife crisis.



Really?




That is nuts. But I've got it, man. Groundhog day. Little hamster on his wheel, spinning away the day. Expending great effort but going nowhere. There's a difference between knowing your limitations and feeling trapped by them.


Right?


Yes.


I'm forty-five. And I like it. Shit, find a better forty-five year old, I dare you. Okay, I take that back. But I'm okay. I don't want to be twenty anymore. I'm not clinging to youth. I embrace where I am on the journey. I'm happy with the choices I've made, and I am content to claim my failures as my own. I like the lines on my face, my bald dome, my care-worn eyes.

The gut and the extra hair I could do without. But they're mine, too.

But something is stirring in me. A new kind of restlessness, an understanding of my own mortality that is physical and emotional, not just intellectual.

Is it fear? Longing? Blind panic? Despair?


Yep.


In some ways I feel as unmoored and awkward and clueless as a teenager.


WTF?



*



But the wife is kind of feeling it too, so maybe it is more about being empty nesters.


fuck if I know.




but something's afoot.






***


Namaste. I know, I know. You're lost, too. Don't feel bad, though.



We're in this together.




*

Shuteye

*

"Don't confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them."




*


Today I went through all the cases I worked last year and closed out everything that had pled or gone through jury trial or been dismissed and I moved those cases down one big drawer and took the bottom cases from two years ago and put everything I didn't have to keep in the big blue locked bin to be shredded. Over two hundred cases last year, more than that the year before. Name after name, crime after crime, and the faces flashed in my mind's eye as I dumped them out, one after the other, in a seemingly endless stream.

More human misery in that four feet of files than you could account for.


My little thimbleful for the great ocean of samsara.


*

You forget how much shit you wade through in a year. You don't look at it. You look at each case in particular with great intensity and focus, you know it better than anyone every will, even the people who went through it, cause you've got all of it, all that could be gotten, anyway.

But if you look up and see the big picture...I don't know.


I guess you start to figure it really doesn't matter much.


*

The pain is everywhere. My worries are nothing special.


Alleviate what pain you can. Start where you are.


Don't look up.


*

Love is the rough engine of it all, this is my bedrock stance. Nor will I quit it.


I will spend myself in the cause of it.


***

Namaste.



*

Ed Gets a Visit

*

I got derailed that quick yesterday. Spent the rest of the day laid out on my side, smoking, oil spilling out into the dirt, everything twisted and smashed and no crew to set things right.







Just a thowed over train out in the wasteland under a yellow sky.





*






Now the sun comes up and I am yet where I laid.





*

Drive all blames into one. Regard all dharmas as dreams. Change your attitude, but remain natural. Work with the greatest defilements first. 


Etc.


*

It is only my emotions. It is not the world, it is my approach to it. My stance. My clinging, my fear, my ugliness, my small heartedness.


Still I lay wrecked on the plains.






***

Namaste.


*

The Crossing

*

So we begin another year.


I, for one, am hopeful.






Dubious, but hopeful.


*

We stayed up until the crack of nine-thirty watching "The First Spaceship on Venus" by way of MST3K and went to bed sober and the New Year got underway without our assistance.

We began the new trip around the sun with an hour of Sun Salutations. We were trying for  108 repetitions but I gave out at sixty. She could have kept going but was gracious enough to pretend that her legs were shaking, too.

It felt good, though. It was a nice way to say hello to the year. That and our long walk on the East/West ranch with the bulldog. We met up with a Russian lady walking four basset hounds, a crazy-looking mut, and carrying a little dog in a snugglie on her chest. She warned us that one of the hounds was autistic.

I wonder how that diagnosis came about.

"Well, he's three years old and still hasn't said his first word. And he can't tell time at all."


*


Saigon Eggroll in Paso Robles for lunch. Bahn Mi pork sandwich and a huge bowl of Pho. Fresh  and spicy and fragrant and murderously good.



Cacio E Pepe for dinner. Fancypants way of saying pasta with cheese and pepper. Plain, but delicious. Big salad and some leftover broccoli and crusty bread.


Long walk in the cold dark after. Through the deserted streets. In the vibrant silence.


*

I am going to try again this year to do all those things that will perhaps bring me closer to the man I imagine I am capable of being. Yoga and meditation. Not a lot but consistent. Something physical in the morning, a bike ride or a hike in the woods or a run on the beach or some good old fashioned calisthenics and jumping rope. Not a lot, but consistent. Eat clean Monday through Thursday, eat whatever I want on the weekends. Give my liver a rest.

Approach life with equanimity and some humor.
Remember that it's fatal, but not serious.


*

Love my wife yet more.

Give myself to the world without fear.

Be easy on me.

Find a way to help.

Have a good time.

All that regular old simple ass shit that is so easy to say and yet.


And yet.


*

I pray that this year brings you everything you want and nothing you don't want.


*

Namaste.


***