fathers in fusion

where are we?  the baby's thought..we're home, I'm watching the hours pass wondering when I should leave..I think about her father...my daughter's father, totally disconnected from this and for good reason...he's from the future, her dad..  put it bluntly, she hates his guts...I try to think of this in couched terms 'h.ate' like assisted 'food'..somehow I try to make sense of her not loving the person who tended her so gently her first month or two...when everything blew up in our faces like a goddamn chemical war...and we were split apart more easily than a neutron bomb..totally fused..so I call this 'fathers in fusion'
I don't think we need cry about it..my daughter spews off a lot of illogic in her residency as the n ewest mother on the block and you get to know the phase options of talking in the manner of 'mother of pearl'..as in expressing anger...she hisses at me like a little poisonous snake when she finds that I've made what she perceives as a verbal faux pas...in fact I wonder at the sanctity of my using 'their' computer...as my scalp dislodges more and more of my own hair to pay the biology of the situation
there are good and bad in this but we ride across the top of it like we're at the skating rink and it's all good...he masquerades in New Orleans with her/myexmydaughter/and she's a veritable fashion plate but no one is sure is it her is it him...and of course I don't exist in all of this but that sad part was when we were sitting on the grassy knoll and watched across the parking lot, the doppleganger enter the apartment above ours...'this is the law as we now know it' he said to me then but I didn't understand until another day when I'd thrown out my last pair of shoes trying to catch the sucker

Politically Correct

day before yesterday, days are flowing into one another like too many people using the bathroom, overcrowded with impressions...rendolent of issues and times and places I never wanted to be concious in...but then I knew I was...
lately I've wanted to speak out in verse whenever the mood was right..I should say that I'd taken a bong hit but I'd be lying on that,  for with me it's all compact disk insertion and what I trade my plywood on..how I handle those moments when you're back there where you were once upon a time, this time it was Havana.  In real time we were in Jaime's back yard with his huge mottled dogs, wolfhounds both of them, massive striped creatures that looked eversomuch like my zebra fabric only this mottling a more deadly signature..heads larger than human, about the size of cows maybe, bounding around the backyard quite friendly.  I had a sense of dead fear with the dogs, the one mothering the smaller, joyous greeting strides to say hello to us but at the same time, a respect on my part...you  keep me in the real, the now.  I don't have to go back to Havana if I don't want to.
I'm drinking real coffee this morning.  I figure I can leave off the other bad habits and see if it's the coffee that truly does it to me, raises my pressure a few points beyond the norm, the edge of the norm at that...I guess those years of dephenhydramine didn't do quite what I had hoped, although I'm seeing signs of it.  Well, enough of that.  My daughter is lying in her bed curled in a semi-fetal position about to have a baby.  For days now she's been in prelabor and is at the point where she is extremely uncomfortable, vindictive, grimacing, breathing hard, hehe, I shouldn't say laboring but when an animal is cornered and about to be captured is how she is...the pain is pretty bad.  So I'm here in duress but I'm her mother and I am the only one who can handle it.  I guess I'm helping her husband with it as well because he's taking the brunt of things, her pain mainly, the excitement of the baby coming, the assurance that all things are going well.  A neoophyte obsetrics specialist told my middle son in the birth of his daughter that the 'placental wall isn't growing right, there could be problems' and we worried about that one for the duration.  When little Maia was born, it was all my fault for a few weeks.  I got the cold chill over something I said about Maia's mother being 'fat'...totally misconstrued but there you have it, I referred to weight gain melting off and if she thought so, rest assured with four kids it wouldn't be there long...something to that effect, but it went in the wrong ear, I think the ear that was to the ground long ago in Havana, the very same.  The one that got my attention day before yesterday when I was helping shovel rock into the brother's backyard, the little German shepherd following the huge mastiff at play, me scraping up their remainders from the site, the sense of nausea at the smell crowding out the particulars of what could be done at that residence.  It was not that large..there did need to be a bigger backyard there if one was to have such a large animal in it.  Like my backyard, peaceful, serene, soggy.  That dog at the brother's house, he was as big as one of us shoveling, pity we couldn't have harnassed his energy somehow, that was intense labor.  We were wheelbarrowing loads of gravel to lay down instead of turf, for this is Arizona.  You don't plant in Arizona unless you tend.  Me, I would be out there with the bath and kitchen water, the dishwasher and washing machines would drain directly onto it, I would have tomatoes and avocadoes, pomegranate, lemon trees...he does have some space for these things.  But he has instead giant dogs that leave giant  patties that smell bad and are usless unless one wants to incorporate a physical integer into it, keeping the dogs out and the ground moist, fertile and so forth.  I could do that there at home with seaweed for I have a similar issue with fertile loam, but I'm not hosting huge land rovers either.  They did bring the sinister into the afternoon and as it wore on, we walked to lunch in the shopping mall, bought shoes and a book instead of spending three dollars at Taco Bell, had a sugary grapefruit soda and ate much later in the day.  I've been hungry a lot of the time here but we eat well.  I have this uncomfortable sense about paying for things here, much like the mastiff occupation of the brother's backyard, a territorial dissonance no doubt ushered in by my acute lack of finances.  And that was the direct result of the Havana situation, which began so innocently back in the early fifties when Gullikson and Farnes took me sailing off Key West after the sewing circle broke up.  We were innocently afloat for several days, Farnes being the main man and Gullikson looking at us like he didn't know if he was the son or the daughter, but not unhappy.   He had provided the needle when the sewing circle started up.  I was good at embroidery I found, those rectangular moments making buttondown shirts being what they were, decidedly boring, it was a good change of pace, taking a float.  Well we got where we were going, several days after we set off.
Then there it was, closure, Gullikson sailing back with a little ghost boy from Dominica who trimmed sails nicely
News flash, we're going to the hospital, daughter and spouse, the pains are five minutes apart at last...we've been dragging heel around here all week and now is the time: beautiful sunlit morning, warm Mesa air no breeze, steadily pounding a footpath alon gthe side of the pool, large canines tails wagging spoiled grapefruits in their mouths, the black lab more likely to heist the fruit...and she utters a moan that recalls what it was there, in Havana, in the early fifties, something like blood guts and gore and Tana from Monroe, that large Teutonic woman that sewed well and made my life a misery.  Well, Roselind was friends with her and evidently my friendship with Roselind wore off because of the association with Tana.  Roselind and I carpooled each morning in my insight, usually, but sometimes we took the old Caddy that Roselind drove.  I always wanted to breach the gap Kezia had left and Roselind did it nicely.  but there was Tana...arc tan in geometry, if you can't heist the stress in a linear maxim, get it a curve, like the melted flesh of my belly that has born four live children and lost three, well, lost I suppose is a delineating word, I don't care to use it...for there are interlopers more than anything else.
"Ready?"  the husband walks in.
Speaking so I cannot hear her words, she walking in bright fuschia sleeveless gown to the floor, the belly hump maximum, jets in the far distance up above the mesquite and the one-story rooftop..pains are five minutes apart.   He hangs up his suit in the guestroom where I sit in front of this laptop, I hear her pant and moan in little gasps..it's coming.
so here I take a break and go out to the kitchen where the last moments of pregnancy are ending.  This is where Fidelito took the place of his father when the documents were signed in Montenegro.  There was an agreement that should it be necessary, such would be the avenue.  There would be no despair.  But in thata hot gravely rock afternoon in Havana...I could smell the long cigars and see the knivees coming out, the giant dog snarling and menacing..that it was no longer so and perhaps had never been, was only in my mind.  And then there were the Felices taking the Ashtons to Puerto Rico in the winters.  Such as it was, that's what it was for a long time, people saying they were where they were when they were there...I didn't hear much about the Puerto Rican landscape but I did know little Amy had a mother named Big Amy and they were friends of Purse'illa, my mother-in-law, who was manic depressive.  Pursilla had a psychotic episode on an Alaskan cruise we went on with the children.  I was in trouble with the burser big time because he was on the take, being we were so close to the Bering Sea and all he figured he was in good hands and could jump off at any large iceberg.  But I revamped windows '95 due to the fact the fish were shaping up nicely and a Val Kilmerov faggot caught me at it and gave me the what for in no uncertain terms: I could see the chin hairs on his softend jaw looking so much like sandpaper...now THIS is not a good sign...
But there it was three days of Pursilla getting the yahoos in her cabin with my then young daughter standing guard.  She's grown up to be a nurse from that experience.  I took one look at Pursilla and bent over to tie a shoelace.  My back went out and I was in pain for three days after that, during which they unloaded all our trunks and personal items and banished us from the boat.  Pursilla was laid up nicely in Sitka in the mental ward, such as it was, and eventually Grandpa flew up and fetched her h ome.  He also miswired a ceiling fixture in our living room which I had put right later on by the same crew...snarly monkies anyway, hehe
but back to Havana..I'm just kind of blown away the baby is coming today but it's been a good wait and I was glad I was here to help..  Childb irth is the sweetest form of torture and so rewawrding for all the pain..There is one thing I feel absolutely avoidable and that is pain, the mind does control the body...my daughter missed one of her five minute calls on thatnote because we were talking about the cousin's spontaneous wedding : the girl already has a two-year old with this fellow and they married in the park this morning.
 Evidently this person routes swap outs solet's hopes that's helping..I feel the far off call of my life wandering in and wondering if I'll ever tell the story of how Michelina Federales substantiated the issues that led to the DOS calibrations and which have been in place ever since the Bay of Pigs started Fun Days...hehe..now if that ain't cryptic I don't know what is...or should I say Hunter Thompson has nothing on me..
people don't wear much down here, because it's so nice.  I should sit outside and do this, in the sun, with my new sunglasses...write or draw, whatever, go on for days about what hmmm..that crunchy new gravel underfoot, the large dogs present...the battery is going kwampus suddenly, I think my personal computer likes the idea of a little sun...outside Angela is walking along the edge of the pool groaning and doing breathing exercises..in all a strange day and it got stranger
and there's the hospital delivery ..but that's not what I am thinking of I should have gotten a journal to record this, but eh, I didn't, and all morning the convertibles have been revving quietly in the corners, assuring the factor basics of this entire process...you bring some back, you cast some back in, you sneeze hard and think about the tobacco \disk, substituting a little caffee for the engenderment, whatever words come out beneath your fingers onto the keyboard, you are resolute about what you know, and recognize those very pigs squawking that we'd use human speech to calibrate integrity of their voiding systems..bark bark..leads you to the beer bin in the fridge come evening and you find that most of what you put there the night before has been purloined to prolong the sustenance of that which you have been forced to cultivate as a substitute for the mighty within..somtimes being ripped off the visual basic program the wa I was, irritates me to no end, but I could have it back, I think, I only have to recall it in my head to have it there in front of me again..like the sharpest scalpel that ever was..so bloody  efficient!!
and then you couldn't trust absolutely ANYONE to repair your stuff, not after the Alaska Cruise..nope...but you'd gained visual basic out of it, and that went back directly to the mind source in Havana, the development of the Satsop tobacco ring, a diversion to DOS for user states, a wonderful connotation of the sixties movement...we're liberal, localized and in nirvana always..  but you know, we need a little medicagion aftger things like Capote..I should like to say this fluently in Italian but I read about it instead, the young food travel writer with his daughter and eventually a new wife, the segments of that story that bred some influence over me in that regard..thoughts with winged foot spread lightly out of my mind onto the page and because can't type fast enough to collect them all...begin to collect dust in the corners as though they were part of the furniture..

my home your home their home OUR HOME

well, I miss my dogs, of course, but the ones here are pretty big, pretty friendly and seem to encompass some of the space and comfortability that the dogs at home supply.  I see the little logs of wood waiting for the fire.  I know where the chain saw awaits my turning around the chain so that it will cut these logs to the right size for the fireplace.  I see the cool weather with the damp lawn, the little shrubbery going down the slope, the woodshed of creativity that depends on morning glory to keep the rain off the wood inside it...mmhmm, not gonna happen, that, but I did tarp that wood and it still needs defining to fit in what I call the Polish stove...I suppose it is a Polish stove, so contrary, so unable to heat the house no matter what burns in it...well, I move with the pace of a hopping flea at home, always engaged in a task, unless I'm sitting directly in front of the fire, contemplating my next adventure.  That's kind of a fun thing to do, but then I'll sweep and dust along the sides of the stove, rearrange the furniture near it, wash windows, dust, play music...would that the piano had at last arrived...I cannot understand why it hasn't already magically appeared in its preordained spot...music waits at every turn near the site of the placement..there are oriental rugs christened and steadfast in their places, there are a stack of paintings holding the spot...there is a blank wall that will never hold pictures because the back of the piano will rest there...there is even new floor where the old floor was a plank of plywood.  but there isn't a piano as yet.
what I do actually have is the piano.  I do plan to tune it, I have a funny little tool that will twang the strings so I can determine the resonance...the right pitch I think they call it, the thing you do with a guitar, same principle, twist the little ivory-capped screw at the top of the neck, plink the string, compare it to the next until you've done them all...so it will be with the piano and it will provide me with a medium to declare my innocence in the world, a way of speaking to it, describing it, the bird call, the big long bus last night that was totally electric and running on a set of three wheels down its underbelly, the pregnant daughter about to give birth, that's a sonata right there, at least...
but I guess there's poetry as well, real words aligned in a paragraph or two, or several pages, that talk about an epic or just an observation..that could work, it has to have been working this long without the piano...oh, there's the garden too, well, I did the front part last month, just dug it all up and told it to behave, I need some fancy lilies there, stargazers and callas and so forth because the little slope there does very well with lillies and it's time to put them in for next spring.  there's also this funny bush there that needs a good prune, like I needed a good prune the last few days...it's boogered and shapeless and looks like a pair of nylons with ladders, about run out and I think, eh a little mugo pine or two, lots of bark, pretty big rocks, that would do it, it would, but there's the highway right on it, so you have to think about that, what kind of aesthetic isgoing on there that should be addressed, a kind of a buffer perhaps, like Sid's little cone of cedar...it will grow taller and I put another pine there, another baby I rescued from the gutter of Georgia's little cabin..I s topped hovering over them when it began to be rainy, I do hope they'll thrive and not turn orange like the other hemlock.  I was hoping to bonsai but apparently the hemlock did a new lifecycle and cloned itself so that there are now more than one of it..  so we'll see how the baby pines do.  there's also that mix of weed and weed out front there that I twisted up a bit with varigated grass, a variety I have that multiplies like flies in summer.  Like the flies here in Mesa that know about Cash and June, the two dogs...and the oranges, the flies must really like the orange trees as well..well I guess one is a grapefruit.  The varigated grass spreads in the yard as if ithas its own agenda, it goes where it will, determined.  I'm not sure the orange poppy is even there anymore it has spread so, but that lilly I planted in front of it, well it'll have to be put on the slope along with some others I'll find...some I think
Carolyn will give me when I get back to the gardening zone, the forest primeval where we live..
I just about blipped into a poem there
I wasn't going to speak in the manner of Robert Frost, but I was going to think and say a thing or two
in a way that made it the light skip of words that poetry is
some that rests with you afterward...a way of observing the clarity of observation
I see what Isee because it's in front of me, or I feel what I feel because I heard and saw it and perhaps I
processed it in my thinking mode in a way that made me have an impression of emotion
I guess
I should make some more coffee, I am having fun with this and it's all being put into my own words in my own place to save it..I think this is very nice...and it's willison cottage because that's what it is, where I do this
I could say more about willison cottage, what it meant to me growing up
that could be described
it's not a vermont snowcovered house in the woods where the trees are bare
no...and about charming, it's getting there but monkey brown paint is probably going to have to go the way
of troll dolls and neon shoelaces...a trend fortified by better paint in this case...
ok...I think I will talk about willison cottage since I talked about the front slopeand the lillies that should go there
the lillies that I have that aren't there that should be there
those are a nice yellow, Himalayan water lillies I described them...but what I meant was the stargazers are out and about...wanting to come home, along with all the tulips and the other flowers that were planted
and took a journey to another yard, that I might see them in their full benefit...
coffee..

rocky car and gravel

the Jung Dafoe in Missippi burniing, which I hadn't ever watched before but had the opportunity for a clear view of it, Frances is always very good in the actress department, her face bumps up like it hurts and such..Hackman being hackman, these guys perfecting their craft as if they could sail it like a boat,  you watch them turning into character, or being the storybook role, the crone, the little dumpling girl, someone I'd write for them...tear it all up because I'm so chilly I can't sit here..have to be in the sunlight..

ok, what killed kenny

I've been writing this morning.  Haven't done so in a good while, as if the communicates that simmer in the back of my head remind me once in a while, it's ok to speak words, to write them...that I can set down the parts I like best, to read over, more than once, little reminders
maybe that's it, why I would have to give a sort of eulogy here today because we lost one of the nice guys, friendly sort that was what do they say, yanked?
well, it's that he died, the modem...the parts of all the machinery everywhere, the twenty nine weedwackers hanging on the stair rail.  And he's gone.
He would be seen any day, well saw less of him in recent years I suppose, but he was around to do stuff, get things done.  And now he ain't because he fell dead of a massive stroke outside a house I thought should be the study room for students that need more learning than school provides.  The ones who want to be dummies because they're lazy, uninformed, backwards, plain ol insolent (at the beginning most of them always are).  That gets a little scary so we don't know that this death was a good thing.
But there you are.  And are you afraid?  Are you going to that great unknown without a big sendoff.
Or are we going to mourn you like the sorry bastard you think you are.  Well, we think you are.  Cause we heard that you were doing things to yourself you shouldn't have.   A good rumor, if it's not true, because it certainly seemed to have some creedence.
And then there's our animal population, which really hangs around a lot on this 'edge of the forest primeval'...I'm kinda bummed because we all like to say what a good fellow the chap was...Kenny Wasankari.  Well, this is the end of the road for you old fellow...you dedicated servant of the human race...wish you well and all that...stroke huh?  dang

counseling by Willison cottage, PA

you know, when my dad died, it never made me cry.  Pa, never called him that either.  PA is an abbreviation for our closest available major chain grocery, Forks, the city of Twilight, only has the IGA sort of chain, which doesn't count, I think, because it's IGA and not a SAFEWAY or something of that volume.  But any, PA is also short for 'professional association' which I think of Willison's Cottage being, since that's the kind of counseling offered by my little sign on the chainlink out front of the house.   And do you know, that darn new roof has leaked again in all the rain we've just had...the nerve of it...I been tarring and the cat's been dropping little chickadee feathers on the backdeck...thank heavens they don't come together to railroad a body out of town, b ut you know, the kind of conversation I had with my son this morning, it could come to pass...I know you're guilty of this because this is how I remember it being
I went through all those guilt trippy novels back in the day, come to think of it, every book I ever read by Sholsenitzyn was like that...a few by Nabakov...can't blame roach guy Kafka for describing the descent into insecthood but when  your nimbly able browbeater son decides the warpath is the way to fly...you just don't step out of the way, you look for clues, like the fact his father was adopted, hehe...the errant gene idea.
Well his father is long gone down the street playing with farm animals on Facebook, I think, or dating the really goofy girl that my brother says took on the entire Tacoma Dome in a game of RISK.
Not to be a slanderous fool here but I was totting up my own game record and thinking that Id done my own share of ice scraping...or whathaveyou if you want to know the truth about it.  Can't say that I get into really being honest about how much do I love my children, because it's a multifaceted concept, parenthood, has its pros and has its cons.  Like the neighborgirl who works at the county park begging for them to put in the bridge to the beach where they take it out every winter which I wish they wouldn't do but put it back and leave it that way because for too long every year we don't have anything.  I don't even want to know that she has to beg and politic her way into getting the bridge back down to the beach where it should be.
I don't want to know that she has any influence over it.  I just want to be able to walk to the beach whatever time of year it may be and cross that bridge like I always could before, when the kids were little, before it washed out.  I don't like that it washed out either.  I don't think that we should have lost our park, our picnick areas and tables and little houses in the brush of the woods...the woods nearly washed away by the tides because the county has better things to do (according to the park employee).  I don't know what better t hings the county has to do than attend to the beautiful beach we have here.   I guess they know what they're doin'...
I was on about my son ranting at me about his horrible childhood.  ...talk about an inexperienced young mom...somehow I feel exploited by our conversation, since I nearly died giving birth to him (I was hospitalized with a seizure from vomiting due to morning sickness).  In my experience, I have never held that over his head, that I was so ill.  What I did tell him was that I waited a long time before I had any other children, I got so sick with him.  I did love being a pregnant mom, that fat belly with the little life growing inside it, the big clothes, the deep hunger and deep satisfaction of a good meal consumed.  They cut me open like a pot roast to make passage for him, he was slapped up on my stomach red and blue and shivering.  They took him away and I didn't see him again till the evening.  I had a caudal bloc, numb from the waist down.  Grandfather came to visit and was most cheerful about it all, wearing a purple shirt and looking debonair, because he was a lawyer and an Army Colonel.  Husband was always uncomfortable around me and the baby only made it more so.  It didn't last, the marriage, because it was a contrived version of something never given the freedom to grow on it's own.  If anything, my son's father is more incoherent than I am, but then, we know who the bad buys are, the ones that get angry...ever so often this son's father calls and wants money he says I owe him...as far as I know he's been paid and paid and paid, but he keeps realizing that he could get more if he says he didn't get any..it's interesting that the main reason for wanting to blackmail one's wife is that one has certain issues one must face, the major of which is that one's father was a prosecuting attorney at Nuremberg...something else we don't talk about, my son and I...you can't walk around with that much guilt about the rest of the human race and not have some negative biofeedback.  Grampa liked to tell how the remaining Krauts tried to blow up his jeep on the way to work one morning.  He also tells of the German family member he went to visit while stationed at Geoppingen, a person who had been in the SS.  That family member left the room when Gramp walked in it but his daughter came to visit when I was expecting our son.  I wore this terribly short black and white flowered pique mini that I had made myself and we went sightseeing.  She worked for unilever and her name was Ermgaard Thieme.  I should look her up and see if she remains.  She could speak Arabic and six other languages.  She was a white blonde and she was nice.  My son doesn't know the half of it all...and neither do I but I don't think I know how to be mean to him even if he's trying to make me bite back, I just don't know how.
Adele at the Library asked about Willison Cottage as did Paul the bus driver.  Special Ed teacher asked how much I said twenty an hour and it's not the licensed PA variety talk your ear off, it's that other, basepolitically motivated rap about who to blame, like Hitler did to the German people, got them all tranquilized and neutralized so he could initiate genocide...this time around it's to help identify body parts their function, if they function, regardless of age, who knows what spaceship they're dumping us all off of...we are the garbage of the universe in that we beat our spouses, our children, our fellow man...right?
well, my son's not to blame for his father doing that to me but I do consider that I might be more sympathetic to his issues about his childhood if I hadn't been battered by his father.  After we divorced, as a result of that incident, he didn't really live with me again until he was 15 and it was court ordered.  At that time, I didn't have my own place and was living with my parents, but it worked out and soon enough we got our own apartment, wherein he would have the groceries eaten up by the first week of the month, be out partying and getting up late for school, sleeping with his girlfriend in his bedroom (like that's ok now, but I never felt too good about it).  She later was killed in a car crash, and that's what he's all upset about now, that his significant other passed away from cancer last night.  Yeah, he was a handful but I didn't go to his college graduation because he was causing problems his senior year and then he was gone, because I asked him to go, I screamed at  him to go and he physically threatened me.  It was sturm and drang for sure but it's like that one move of Crowe's that I like to watch, the one where he almost marries the Latino chick and they fight all the time...really 80's material with the hair and clothes, my son was a product of the 80's and we just kind of hashed out everything that we could hash out.  He kind of went from place, got an inheritance from his Grandfather and his Aunt that amounted to two hundred thousand, which he doesn't have a penny of now because he ...well...I can't say what he did with the money because I don't know.  I know he didn't buy me a new car or pay the mortgage... There's lots of things I could throw back to him when he says I was unfair in some way or another about what he did or didn't do, but when it comes down to it, he's not very generous with his time or anything else, rather if he's hurting, I'm a target.  Kind of like a mean drunk needs a target.  One way or the other he's going to do what he is going to do...I think in families you kind of forgive one another's behavior but between him and my brother's wife running my daughter's wedding last year, I dunno, is forgiveness the blue that means a broken heart?   I meant to type glue that mends a broken heart , I guess so, so never felt their behavior was anything to be too upset about it was their behavior that wasn't appropriate, right?  Anyways, doggiewogs wants to get on down the road and so do I...haven't had visitor number one here today and I've been on the pc all afternoon...whew...poor number one son, feels bad...don't blame him for feeling that way, guess I should go visit real quick but I don't know how I can do that, and he's coming home the end of the month...what an excuse to go to hawaii, hehe...how to permanently estrange your 40-year old child with countless words of wisdom (they won't listen to)...and that countless words of wisdom phrase I think comes from a song, maybe a Simon and Garfunkel, which when I presented the music to my mother she said, "what's that supposed to be about?"

ahoy, Saturday morning...

well, I guess since it's 12:33 p.m. it's no longer Saturday morning, but there you have it..a day in the life...making sense of the little things, like the laundry, which never ends, is 'donated' upon (here wash me up an extry 25 loads wouldja) and ends up becoming a process in the routine maintenance of the little shop vac that I use to siphon off the excess dirt, rocks, lint, thread, paper, sand, wood chip that come through the filtration system of the dryer.  It feels very good to clean up the laundry, get it in a system of order but then you get to the place where you're putting it away (how did you ever get by without what you've just washed, you wonder?)  You find that you've got a wretched excess (don't you?)  my God, where are you going to put it...??
It isn't like I take that long to get around to washing up the laundry because I don't procrastinate about it.  I just don't like putting it all away.  Things get dirty when you've started a house renovation process, you're raising a 17-year old foster kid with a penchant for motor oil and things connected to that, and you're redoing your rental house due to the fact the last tenants were monsters...

It's kind of like the shelf life of a double A battery: just whewn you think you're going to see your little clock run again, you don't have one, the ones you do have are spent, there is no place close where you can get one..eh..  Some one had some good advice about not sweating the small stuff.  Putting a battery in a clock is like that.  I'll do it when I get around to it.  At the moment I'm wondernig how to get the sludge out of the sink drain in the kitchen, rehang the garage door that was shoved up crooked, wash up the donation loads of laundry for the club that's having the mega garage sale, and check in the mirror once in a while to see if the lightener I put on my graying roots is doing anything interesting.

I can't remember the last tme I wore makeup.  I looked at my face in the mirror on one of those rare sunny days we get sometimes that are like a beautiful slice of nirvana for a few hours.   I saw the crumbly remains of my jawline folding into little white cushions of slackkening skin, very white, freckled as it is.  (and herein I took a several hour break to have breakfast, take a bath, do some laundry..and ponder what I had seen, hehe)...  I guess I seriously doubt that makeup will hide any of the changing planes of my face, but a little blush, lipstick, eye shadow, they make you feel nice, I think...so does a nice hot bath, in which I luxuriate..

meanwhile, have to get on my way so enough of this, major news on the homefront in the daughter department but that's for another time

art day

yesterday was art day.  I brought several green apples, dried cherries, a grapefruit from the treet in Angel's yard, and for art, I made a fruit salad.  June, Barbara, Gail, Flora, myself were there.  It was a cool day.  Oh, Kathleen was there as well.  We had a potluck lunch.  My fruit salad was pretty good.  There was elk meatballs, a chili cornbread casserole, a cake, cookie bread...potato chips, cheese and crackers.  Reiko was there too ..
I was thinking about the art process during the day.  After the session I went home and put a tarp o nthe roof.  This morning I put another one.  It's been raining and blowing something awful.  We celebrated Fat Tuesday last night with champagne.  I helped Diana in the afternoon with her organizational process at her house.  We moved the woodpile, swept up in the garage, got the room ready there for storing her building materials for the three bedrooms she's redoing in the house.   I guess I'll go help her when she needs it.  It was a good workout.
The girls gave me some really nice dry wood and last night before going to sleep the fire was so warm and delightful.  It was most pleasant.
I have to go help Barb now.  It's letting up a bit outside and the sun came out for a few seconds.  Whoowee...the sun...what is that thing anyway? hehe

1984

I watched a film version of this story.  I don't remember any of the background of it other than it was about a totalitarian society.  We had to read the book for English class.  It seemed at the time I read it far less entertaining than Animal House, another requisite.  It might have been Freshman English in College where I had to read these books, I don't remember.  I know I had read them both.  I don't recall seeing a film version of Animal House but I have now seen 1984 in film with Richard Burton as the ultimate inquisitor.  The main character is played by an actor named John Hurt but it's not the Hurt of later on with the blonde hair, it's a British chap with a pinched face and thin body.  He suffers a great deal on the path to enlightenment.  His crime is that he has a love affair.  He also smokes like a chimney and coughs a lot.  His country is at war, continents against continents.  You don't get to see the other continents but you begin to assume they must all be like the main character's home base: everyone in uniform, everyone tuned into all the state broadcasts, a few bombs going off, pretty much like World War II only it takes place in 1984.
That it takes place in 1984 is the postfuturistic element of the film version.  1984 has come and gone.  1984 was the year I came back out West after living for about fifteen years on the East Coast, mainly in Washington DC but for a few years on the Eastern Shore in Maryland.  I was a part of the counter culture while I lived in DC, at the last.  On the day Ronald Reagan took office, I was leafleting on Pennsylvania Avenue.  I ran into a good friend of mine, Eileen, who was wearing furs and had been socializing with Senator Warner and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor.  She wasn't with them, of course, she was with Harry, her longtime beau.  Eileen had lost her husband in the South China Sea during the onset of the VietNam War.  His plane was shot down.  I stuffed a leaflet into her hands and went down the block.  She was eagerly awaiting Reagan's motorcade.
At no time during that time leading up to 1984, did it ever feel to me that we were on the downward path portrayed in the story.  We hadn't gotten there because there I was prodding the story line with the kind of rogue mirth that anarchists are good at.  We had elected a competent now government official to lead us and so he did.  He wasn't on the radio too awfully much, certainly not broadcasting from loudspeakers at every lightpole.  He didn't have Richard Burton characters washing our braincells with torture for us.  He had a few little debacles to deal with, one of which was Desert Storm that gave more than a few people that fought there a kind of curious heat rash sort of condition that was assumed to have been caused by biowarfare agents, though one hasn't heard too much about it since that time.  I got to wear whatever clothes I chose to wear and there was the element of mirth again in the little demonstrations we conducted in places like Farragut Square.  You would have certainly been hauled off had you done that in the story.
I wouldn't say I'm championing our freedom here, certainly.  I would say I pushed the envelope all the way across the desk by the time 1984 rolled around in real time.  I had been there and done that in terms of being who I wanted to be in those years.  Well, I still am but there's the other part of it: if we didn't have stories like 1984 to predict for us where our predilections for power might get us, we might actually get there, as they unfortunately found out probably in Stalin's time, and Hitler's.  But we haven't had that gory mess around for while and the strange thing is we don't hear about it until it's a nasty pimple on the butt of the planet.
I would say that the United Nations is always on the spot when a situation becomes tenuous.  The problem with that is those troups that go in for the United Nation on peacekeeping missions don't have enough manpower or anything else to really stop what goes on.  The United Nation is hamstrung by its Joint Security Council because it's always a matter of warring with itself.  So there again, 1984 isn't quite here but if we don't keep that delicate balance Madison was so fond of, we might surely experience it firsthand and wouldn't that be lovely.
1984 more than anything depicts the societal death of love.  You might think it persists, but the story line goes along with the romance of its main character and the little nymphette he befriends who tells him she's done 'it' hundreds of time with hundreds of men, although that behavior is definitely frowned upon by the bureacracy they are saddled with.  A little thing like promiscuity isn't so much overlooked as it is begnine
(bee nine) I don't have my thesaurus along at the moment...it's one of the main symptoms of the rot of the society itself.  We'll just give our bodies for the pleasure of it, which might be argued happens today although the AIDS scare put the fear of God in a few of us profligates, I should think.   Burton then tortures the main character after giving him a tract on the aesthetics of the proletariate to think for themselves, which he finds quite sufficient to persecute the already suffering man with some quite graphic torture sequences, always to bring the person back to the cognizance that the state is all.  Indeed, in that society, it is all...the sum of life we would know it, were that our 1984.  The petty little behaviors of the couple, renting a secret room, sharing coffee and sugar as all things are rationed out, taking naps together, seem almost mundanely routine until the brain police burst through the door and both are hauled off to the interrogation rooms.
We probably didn't know people did such things to one another until it became patently obvious they did so during World War II.  Then there were stories about what happened in Korea, and Viet Nam, and all the places in between where people are caught in the middle of a quasi-jurisdictional dispute, like which tribe is the better tribe to be from.  Not that history is not replete with versions of torture, the Spanish Inquistion comes to mind, a little game we played in parochial school, Romans and Christians, being another.  Rather, it was more vivid, more widespread, more insidious in World War II and the immediate time after it, that made us aware that there were dark forces in the world that we must be ever on guard against. 
So I thought it was my duty to be a counter culture person, work in a cooperative art gallery, do art programs in the schools, protest whatever sword rattling our government was promoting, host events that culminated with myself and several other people doing a mime in front of the White House with red rubber noses on.  The Cuban ambassador happened to be driving by that day.  He actually got out of his limo and took the time to shake our hands.  I wouldn't say it was the highlight of my experiences back East, but I would say that due to those little catalysts of time and energy, we wouldn't be likely to experience 1984 as the book and film portray it.  We've got a little more mirth and ambiguity than to be pigeonholed in our bureaucratic cubicles, wherein we bow down and murmur yes God when the superior's superior happens to breeze through.  We allow just enough irreverance to make life tolerable.  We don't get around to wearing uniforms so much as we consign our clothes when we realize the quality and effort that are in them, and the fact they can be worn another season or four, by someone who didn't have the pleasure of shopping for them retail like we did.  We're becoming pretty good recyclers, and hopefully, through that and our alternative energy efforts and our healthfood diets, and our spiritual pathways, we'll keep on growing our versions of Victory Gardens and walking when it's only a few blocks.  We're not totally motorized yet and probably we won't get there where machines do everything for us.  We haven't lost our heart, I just wish we were a little more romantic, that's all...1984 portrays the death of love, I don't think it's at all dead but we're probably just a little more promiscuous than we should be and a little less tolerance of difference than might oughtn't be good for us.  We could use a rough polish for sure, but we love stuff, even if it's something like American Idol, where we pick a winner and follow him to the last round.  We have simple passions: ice cream, nice cars, our families...but we need to remember the lesson about love: that's when you know the society has died...when they outlaw it...
(oh, and that's something for the readership to ponder...exactly what love is outlawed today?  hmmm, I wonder...)