Disorderly

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The fuck are you looking at?



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Yeah, that's what I thought.



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Yesterday I made us some Moroccan chicken on a bed of curried couscous and a salad of grilled zucchini and peppers with feta, olives, mint, cliantro, lemon and cumin.


It were good.


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Today we took the dog to the dog beach in Morro Bay and had breakfast at the Sea Shanty after.


That were good, too.


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It is sunny and warm and breezy. I am headed out to the hammock with my Lincoln book and a tall glass of vodka and lemonade.



See you fuckers later.



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Namaste.


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Interior with Girl On Fire

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We are all of us aflame.




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Watched "The English Surgeon" last night. About this neurosurgeon who lectured once in the Ukraine in the 1970's, and toured a hospital there. He saw how fucking terrible and primitive their neurosurgery skills were, and their equipment, how everyone was dying of things we in the west stopped dying from sixty years earlier. So he hooks up with a guy in Ukraine, another surgeon, and he starts teaching him, and bringing in used equipment from hospitals in Great Britain, and seeing patients there. He goes back every year and has done for fifteen years.

In the film he goes to visit the mother of a child he operated on ten years ago. The child had a terrible brain tumor and he operated on her and it went badly and he said that he basically ruined the last two years of her life, turned her into a paralyzed, blind, helpless wreck. And then she died.

So he brings the mother some flowers. They drink vodka around the table and cry. He makes a toast to his partner, how they are trying to do something good, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

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In another scene he sits with a stream of patients, looks at their MRI's, and tells the Ukrainian surgeon what's what.

"The tumor is all in the brainstem. Inoperable. The child has a year to live."

"She's blind. The damage is done. If we'd gotten to it sooner, she'd be fine, but as it is..."

"Inoperable. Six months. Maybe less."

"I'm sorry."


"I'm sorry."


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In Wallander last night, the inspector is talking to this beautiful woman at dinner, talking about his work, this case, these two murdered kids, and she tells him he needs to look at the bigger picture. The good he's  doing in the world.

"I don't think there is a bigger picture." He says. "I think this is all there is. We have our fragile lives, we do the best we can. I think about that dead girl, her boyfriend, and it doesn't seem quite fair."





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It struck me as profoundly true.



There isn't a bigger picture. There is just this particular, intimate failure. And then the next one. And the next.



On and on.




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But how can you be brave if there is nothing to fear? How can you be good if there is no evil in the world? How love without hate?




We are drowning in this world.




Drowning and incandescent.




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Peace be upon you.



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The Quiet Corner

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I have been in trial the last two weeks on a guy who shot his wife. He says it was an accident, we say he was criminally negligent, but either way, it's just plain sad.

But I got no sympathy for him.

He's one of those guys, he knows what time it is. You'd better not try to tell him, either. He don't like that. During the closing argument, he was sitting over there on the other end of the counsel table, his big hands balled up into fists, his arms shaking with rage, his eyes fixed on the prosecutor, his lips in a snarl.

He wanted a piece of that DA something awful.

The bailiff came over and stood near us, and I made sure I had a clear line at him, too. He wouldn't have gotten very far.

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We listened to her dying on the 911 tape. I couldn't tell you how many times I listened to it during the investigation.

As it was playing for the jury in court and we're all silent, listening to her agonal breathing, I can see the jury is horrified but I don't feel anything at all. I could have been listening to a ball game or the news.

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That's just how it is sometimes. You can't feel every little thing.


There's nothing wrong with that.


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I am reading Sandburg's Lincoln.


It is four volumes, so I will probably be reading it the rest of the year.



I find it astounding.


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Last night we watched the first episode of Wallender. Kenneth Branagh as the Swedish inspector. The thing is beautiful and moody and smart and despairing.


It's dead good.


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In other news, I remain obsessed with Homo Neanderthalensis. 




For over three hundred thousand years they were the show. Lot longer than we've been around.


You live your whole life on this planet, you think it's always been like it is now. You know you're wrong about it, but it's hard to feel it in your bones. But when you go out into the wilds you can begin to feel it.

I feel it at the edge of the sea. That sense of deep time, of timelessness.









We are transitory creatures.









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Namaste.



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Father's Day 2010

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A day for taking stock.


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I used to idealize my father. Worship him. How could I fail to? He was the ultra cool, ultra hip, bad motherfucker. He carried guns. He took down bad guys. Got in shoot outs. Left my dumpy mom for a hot, leggy brunette as tall as he was. Rode motorcycles, swung an axe, drove a sports car.

So what if I could only see him a month every summer?

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On the flip side, I used to hate my step-father. He worked at a shoe factory. He had two daughters around the same ages as my brother and I. He wore short-sleeved dress shirts and had a pot-belly.

He wasn't going to tell me shit.


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And my own failure as a father.

I thought I would be good at it. I thought I was good at it. I loved a lot about it, and endured what I did not love. I read her to sleep every night I could. I made Peter Rabbit birthday cakes, watermelon ice-cream cakes, bought fairy wings and tu-tus and changed diapers and cleaned up vomit and all that happy horse-shit.

Last father's day I got a letter from her, along with a jailhouse drawing of her mother and I as skeletons in a wedding.

She said she loved me, wished me a happy father's day.


I will probably get another one this year.


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I love her, I really do.


But I failed her in all the ways that matter.


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We are none of us perfect. And I don't hold a grudge against anyone. I love my dad, faults and all. My step-dad, too. The older I get, the better I can see them, and the more I like them both. Maybe my kid really loves me, underneath it all. Maybe she forgives me, maybe she doesn't hold a grudge. Maybe she doesn't blame me at all.


Right now she is a stranger to me, but that could change.


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I bought myself a bottle of vodka for my father's day present. It comes in a glass skull.


How cool is that?


I also took a four hour knife-fighting class, and ordered a custom-made dress shirt from some outfit in China.


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So I spend my Father's day weekend fighting and drinking and looking damn good doing it.


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I am not melancholy about any of this. I love my life with a fierceness that takes my breath away. I have earned my failures, my scars, my triumphs and tragedies. It is all of a piece. I am blessed beyond all measure.


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So, here's to the men in my life. The busted-up heros. The ones who fight the good fight, and hold back nothing of themselves. You taught me how to love as hard as I hit, and vice-versa.


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Namaste.


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Twirl

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I have always dreamed of my own destruction.



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Last night I dreamed I was on an Indian Airlines flight coming into Prabesh or someplace and we were too low and as we passed over the tightly packed slums our wing clipped a building and tore off and as we were going down, relentlessly going down, I wrapped my arms around my wife and I asked myself the question I always ask in that situation:

Eyes open or closed?




The funny thing about this dream is that I have it intermittently and for as long as I can remember, so when I find myself inside an airplane that is going down again, I have this little exchange with myself:




"Well, it fucking figures. You dreamed about this all the fucking time. No wonder you die like this."


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So last night I decided, fuck it, I'm going to land this motherfucker. And I squeezed my wife's hand and walked up to the cockpit and grabbed the yoke and landed that bitch on this skinny roadway and walked off into the dust and pink and gold and stink of India with my wife on my arm and the smoking hulk of the 737 standing askew on the roadway.


Good for me.


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In my dreams I have been axe murdered. I have been shot to death numberless times. I have been crushed under falling buildings. I have been tortured to death. I have curled up in a fetal position while knives were thrust into me without ceasing.


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I have a lot of practice in dying.


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I have been in a lot of tidal wave disasters. Ditto nuclear war. Mortar attacks. Sharks and bears. Drowning under the arctic ice is a big one. Elevator collapse.

It is like Jack Bauer all night long in my head.


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I have a violence in me like a disease. I have a romance with it.








Nor would I quit it, though it destroy me.







If you believe violence to be an anomaly, you misapprehend it.






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Hang down your head for sorrow,
Hang down your head for me.


Hang down your head,
Hang down your head,
Hang down your head, Marie.

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Do your hands hunger for damage?



When strange noises stir in the darkness, are you compelled to go into the void to face what awaits?



There are more terrible things than being destroyed.


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We are all for the boneyard. There are no exceptions.



Do you imagine your gentleness will save you?



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Namaste.



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PS- In my marriage, I am not indulged to be my true self, I am encourged at it.


Can there be a greater gift?


If there is, I am unable to name it.



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