June NaHaiWriMo, haiku

Playing catch-up on haiku prompts, I only just discovered this Facebook NaHaiWriMo site on July 5. There are also May prompts. (I’ll stop here for now). Since I injured my leg June 28, it’s been hard to think about writing, but haiku is feasible.

30. Summer's end 

BRÓN TROGAIN, SUMMER'S END

Lúnasa dances 

with the coming dark season. 

Winter's cold music.

29 seashells

BEACH GOSSIP

Listen to seashells—

long distance conversations 

with tide, wind, and waves.

28. ocean

ANOREXIA

The ceaseless hunger 

of the ocean nibbling 

on towering cliffs.

SHAME WORN HAND-ME-DOWNS

My aunt brought home a cardboard box of old clothes.

It was like Christmas in July. My heart foundered

on the festive picnic of a gingham dress 

with puffy sleeves and ruffles framing a scoop neck. 

It made me feel so grown-up as I whirled and twirled 

like a dust devil dancing up a storm in the driveway. 

I wore a funnel of pleasure floating off into the blue sky. 

I wore it to church. I wore it to school, it made me feel 

like a princess with its full skirts rustling in the breeze.

I vaguely knew the girl from catechism, she was older,

she didn’t go to our church or to our school. 

But it was a tight-knit farming community 

so I was careful not to wear it to the other church 

where her family were parishioners. I was in 5th grade,

it was a time of transitions. At our annual church bazaar, 

as my grandmother culled clothes on the rummage table,

there she was, whispering to the others, pointing a finger

at her old dress. She made me feel so ashamed 

for wearing hand-me-downs. Thing is, there was 

no shame attached to old clothes—until she outed me 

and I put that dress away, never to wear it again.

6/28/23 Write On! Prompt. Terri Glass

Facebook addiction and other revenge leitmotifs

An artist friend, whose work and being I very much admire, announced that she was leaving Facebook. We later found out that unkind comments were behind her urge to leave the platform. I periodically run into jerks on Facebook too. Aside from wanting to kick the scumbags in the proverbial kneecaps, or perhaps a little bit higher, my revenge is often siphoned into writing scathing blogposts about the situation. 

I was saddened to learn of her experience because I enjoy seeing her artwork and I enjoy her commentary. It made me think about the role of Facebook in my life. So much depends upon… a right attitude to commentary. If I do run into nasty commentators, I usually gain satisfaction by leaving a pithy comment, and if they persist, then deleting all my comments, and erase myself from the particular site, leaving a grim archaeology of their negative comments behind, stet. There are a lot of loonies out there in Facebooklandia, for sure.

I used to worry about Facebook addiction, but then the pandemic came along, and I realized that social media was not necessarily an addiction, but also a lifeline for me to keep my sanity and to be able to interact with a wide swath of people I have known throughout my crazy myriad walks of life, bringing them all under one roof, so to speak, and also to meet many like-minded new friends. The best bonus of all.

Because of Facebook, I now know many passing acquaintances on a more intimate level, despite the physical distance between us. Some folks whom I’ve never met, I could count among my closest friends. I’ve met many Facebook friends later in person. So many kindnesses. One time I needed a place to stay for the Highland Games and a Facebook friend offered her floor for the weekend. Getting to know her in person was delightful, but it was facilitated by Facebook.

When I decided to join Facebook back in 2009, I vowed that I would use it as a tool, and to not be sucked into the shallow world of senseless trending inanities. I primarily use social media as a stimulus, and a platform for my writing, art and photographs. The people I befriend are primarily creative colleagues, so Facebook offers me an opportunity to keep up on their dailiness as well as their creative processes.There’s a certain comfort in knowing that an artist acquaintance is going through similar things as you. Life as we know it. One way or another, we are all in this together.

I use Facebook as a tool to learn new ideas, to expand my reading repertoire (before the introduction of those inane sponsored posts), get ideas for new artwork, and to also write new blog posts. Heh. The Facebook groups I belong to tend to be science and nature groups, so I also use Facebook as an online learning tool for geology, plant and bird identification. I had to give up the bug group. It was just too squeamy for me. 

I think the secret is to make Facebook work for you, and not to be a slave to it. I mourn the loss of those who have permanently left Facebook, like UC Berkeley classmate, the brilliant engineer and musician Chris Devine, but I understand their motivation. And then, there are all the ones that we’ve lost. And their Facebook pages become a perpetual memorial to their memory. Norton Buffalo, Howard McCord, and others.

There is so much trivia in the shallow end of the wading pool. I, for one, am glad that my artist friend has returned to the Facebook fold after a hiatus, because I so enjoy her posts and I love seeing her artwork. It changes my daily outlook for the better. For me, seeing her art process is a golden bonus.

Maybe the right attitude is to ask not what you can do for Facebook algorithms, but what Facebook algorithms can do for you… Perhaps, in my case, the best revenge of all is the excuse to write about it, warts and all.

My father’s pony

Not all of us had functional fathers, or parents that were present. Neither of my parents were cut out for the job of marriage, let alone, raising a child. Let’s just say, it’s complicated. Mine was an absentee father who drowned in the belly of a Seagram’s 7 bottle, and never recovered. His heart failed him. It’s heartbreaking that he turned out to be such a tragically flawed individual. From a photo I learned that he loved Big Band music and played the piano. Recently I found a news clipping—very nearly accidentally—where it reported that  his mother had committed suicide using rat poison, leaving him to find the body after school. And a note saying that he should join the priesthood. The only thing I was ever told was that she had committed suicide, nothing more. Finding the news clipping was devastating. Also enlightening. And with that, came the beginning of compassion. No wonder the poor man was so effed up. His father, a San Francisco cop, died earlier of TB. Perhaps it was all too much for her, being a single mother, and it sounded like she suffered from depression. And a sadist uncle stepped in to raise my poor father. He might have been better off in a foster home. I chose this photo of my father on a pony because obviously it was a time of innocence versus the grim reality of what was to follow. My crazy, gorgeous, talented, bipolar mother wasn’t much better a parent. She left me with my grandmother as she went off to design costumes for Frank Sinatra’s showgirls, and to pursue Hollywood dreams—but then, when she came to collect me, I refused to leave my grandmother. I was extraordinarily lucky in that my grandmother raised me. She was both my mother and my father. And I don’t regret that in the least. However I refuse to close ranks for the sake of Hallmark cards or sympathy, by hiding the unacknowledged family trauma caused nearly as much damage and grief as the myriad traumas themselves, that is why I chose to share this story. I’m not one to latibulate. Cormac McCarthy, God Rest his Soul, ain’t got nothing on my family tree! After all that, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. For those of you who had extraordinary fathers in your lives, I wish you all a Happy Father’s Day.

COYOTE COMMUTE

In the rearview mirror, I saw a scrawny coyote 

trot down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard,

midday, in the tiny hamlet of Forest Knolls, 

looking over his shoulder, watching for cars,

before turning up Tamal Road, 

headed for home as if he lived there.

I kept looking for Road Runner, 

knowing I was in the wrong cartoon.

6/16/23

Taming my spam box

It seems that once a year I get fed up with my bulging junk mail folder and begin deleting hundreds of political newsletters. During spring cleaning, I go on an extreme culling binge. If organizations ask me for money instead of offering a petition to sign, I give them the proverbial axe. 

In order to tame my Gmail inbox, I send Zoom events, newsletters, rewards, and political action items to my junk mail folder. It also means those pesky emails load in plain text, sans imagery. I have issues with flashing graphics, too much color on a page (especially red and yellow) interferes with my reading comprehension—which makes me angst ridden. And, more importantly, anything in the spam folder is a one-click forever delete button away instead of the usual three clicks to banish it from the trash. 

When I am on the unsubscriber warpath, very few sites escape my delete finger.  I don’t mind when reputable political websites send me petitions, as I spend considerable time each morning signing them as my standalone civic duty, but I get irritated when organizations attempt to either shame, or browbeat me, use insulting infantile, or alarmist verbiage (DCCC), or aggressively seek contributions. I am also not fond of surveys either. It seems like it’s another bogus attempt at drumming up money for their coffers.

In that case, very few political websites get a free pass. Most California politicians, also Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sauders, and Robert Reich, and most progressive websites such as Daily Kos, WinWithoutWar, MoveOn, Social Security, Medicare for All, and a few environmental websites—all get to stay and play.

I think some political organizations exist solely to pad their own coffers, rather than actually offering successful progressive political acts with those petitions. It’s a racket. The thing is, once you sign a petition, they often pass your email address onto the next political entity, and so on, like a bad virus. I don’t worry about losing touch, as the deleted political action websites eventually find their way back to my junk mail box.

I swear some of those sites look legitimate, but I have to wonder why I get an influx of weird spam email after signing some of those petitions—as if my address was intercepted and held hostage in a Soviet silo along the way. The past few days I’ve been unsubscribing to nearly every entity that has asked for money, thus taming my spam inbox. Blessed quietude. At least for a while. But then it will begin all over again in a few months.

HOUSE SPIDER

HOUSE SPIDER

Nearly invisible house spider 

spins desoléis on his delicate web 

searching for breakfast 

in all the wrong corners.

6/15/23

PLAYING WITH WORDS

There are holes in the lost ecology of language. 

Words, falling from grace, out of lack of usage, 

acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, otter—

words wandering far from home, looking for loose lips 

of poets, perhaps long in tooth but not short on ideas.

I never meant to play with words, it wasn’t my idea,

they came to the rally all jumbled up and in a mess. 

It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces 

no endgame photo in sight, or a Rubik’s cube bereft of color—

as if to taunt the most OCD of us to complete the poem,

so we ratcheted color into shape, hoping for form.

Sometimes I want to take a hammer to language 

or to pry syntax apart with a flathead screwdriver, 

and beat it up until the cube shatters, internal structure lost, 

leaving larger puzzles to decipher in the aeolian winds,

but the lyres are silent, once destroyed, won’t resurrect.

Only a pale shaving of sawdust and grit riding the wind.

And as we grow grey with age and larger in vocabulary, 

old words continue to haunt us, wanting a mouthpiece,

but the audience shrinks to nothing until we are left alone 

in a cavernous barn with archaic words roosting in the rafters 

looking for flight to escape the throat of darkness.

6/14/23 Write On! With Terri Glass

Swapping MacBook screens

Well, Margretta’s old 2011 headless MacBook Pro is still running. But swapping out a new screen didn’t fix its problem. Namely, it doesn’t have a working screen, which is a real bother, complicated by the fact that I actually need a laptop that will also run Snow Leopard (mid-2011 was the last year that the Snow Leopard OS was supported) for editing and scanning software that too has been rendered obsolete. Not to mention software for those back taxes.

And it’s nice to have a laptop I can move around. You know, actually use on my lap. Margaretta’s old MBP is tethered to an wonky lavender-hued external Apple LCD monitor—which is also losing its resolution. Now, I love lavender and all things purple, but not on a screen. It’s OK for Netflix, but makes editing photos a nightmare. I harbored some vague hope that swapping screens would work, I had nothing to lose. It was way easier than I expected, so I was pretty chuffed.

I do have other obsolete MacBook Pros, but this one was once my main squeeze for a few years as it has most of my work (photo archives) on it. And it runs my scanning and editing software. I have an exceedingly pricey top of the line Epson negative film scanner that cost $1200. Scanning old negatives was my big pandemic sequestration project.

I have file cabinets of thin black and white negatives of famous artists musicians and writers I need to bring into the 21st. c. (See a few samples here.) Reason enough to keep a working version of Snow Leopard alive. And before you ask, yes, I tried some of the newer third-party scanner software. No joy.

Then there are those back taxes. Shhh! As a teaching artist/poet, I make so little money, I am below the poverty belt, so to speak, but because I am also self-employed, I might as well be a billionaire as far as filing complicated taxes goes. 

Why do I write, and who do I write for?

Today I spent several hours fleshing out a rather long paragraph I had written on the ambling gait of horses way back in 2019. It’s sort of a longish sidebar or a companion piece to go with my Kiger Mustang blogpost. I posted it there because that was when the genesis of the essay began, but the bulk of the work was done today. And little of the original writing remains. What took so long? Every time I circled back to it, I never felt like I had the chops to flesh it out. Today was different. I was ready to tackle it. I realize that I have an audience of one.five people on this rather obscure topic. But that’s what floats me. Sometimes my thoughts are like a three-dimensional scaffolding built by synesthesia. I hear rasping sandpaper sounds as I uncover ideas, words take on notes and color. Writing soothes them, puts them on the bookshelf. Ever since I was a child, I was fascinated by obscure and ancient horse breeds. In contrast, I wrote my Connemara pony piece all in one long go—because I was irritated that an acquaintance, Phil Cousineau, who leads spiritual journeys to Ireland wrote that the Vikings brought the Connemara pony to Ireland. I went ballistic—nothing like cultural appropriation via Wiki and Google to get my knickers in a twist. So why do I write, and who do I write for? Myself, alone. And for you, Dear Reader. I don’t think the web crawlers can read.

BLOW WIVES

BLOW WIVES 

She filled a cow pelvis with wild roses, 

as if that would repatriate the long dead. 

Scapulae nestled like snow angels

in the powdery alkali dust as if

the beauty of death in bleached bones

was seeking a redress with the darkness. 

Her small poems traveled on the wind 

like the wishes of blow wives, 

lost in the desert varnish of time.

6/7/23 Write On! with Terri Glass

Note bene: this is a stub, no idea where it’s going. Sort of Georgia O’Keefish! I have been looking at a lot of her work that I’ve never seen before.

About those famous musicians…

A silly Facebook meme asked what famous musicians we’ve met. There were so many, I couldn’t choose. I liked Allegra Broughton’s (Solid Air) idea of telling the backstories of how we met. Much more interesting than a vanilla list.

After I posted a partial list, someone asked me how come I’d met so many musicians, I said mostly it came down to time and place. Many nearly famous rock musicians played at our high school assemblies and political rallies (Class of 1970—we made the 6 o’clock news when we shut down the Marin County draft board). From the Tubes, Moby Grape, Talking Heads, Country Joe to John Cipollina. So we thought hobnobbing with musicians was normal. 

After the Summer of Love, when utopia began to sour, and society as we knew it had the DTs, the rock musicians and hangers-on began to flee the Haight in San Francisco for Marin County, they invaded our tiny little valley. We all had to learn to live with each other, which was an uneasy compromise. Old redneck school met hippiedom. It was not love at first sight. And I was not at all starstruck. If anything, I was angry that our valley had been invaded. 

The influx of new people stretched and tore the warp and weft of our bucolic valley. And when Tam school district took away our buses (too expensive, they said), we had to hitchhike in order to get to school. We demonstrated, we walked to and from school—but it was 17 miles each way! I was exhausted. I took up hitchhiking. And the only folks that would stop to pick us up were the rock musicians. Never the ranchers who even knew us. No solidarity there.

I grew up in west Marin so I met many of the musicians while I was hitchhiking home to Forest Knolls. I thumbed rides with Van Morrison, Jesse Colin Young, Sons of Champlin (our main lid connection), Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and of course, Janis—many of them lived on my road. Carlos Santana was always good for a ride. Janice never stopped for us, but then she only had a two-seater Porsche. She always braked for young men hitchhiking.

Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, most of Jefferson Airplane, Maria Muldaur all lived in nearby hamlets at one time or another. When Jefferson Airplane moved to Woodacre, they hung a model biplane that was featured on one of their albums from an oak tree.

I met many, if not all of the Grateful Dead—both living and dead, Micky Hart was a neighbor both in Forest Knolls, and later in Forestville—we boarded his girlfriend’s horse. Later, poor Jerry Garcia was in rehab at Forest Farm Camp, renamed Serenity Farm, so we saw him dawdling down the hill to the little grocery store in Forest Knolls to get his daily fix of Häagen-Dazs, or Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, right before he died.

Bobby Darin was a very good friend of my mom’s. I tried to play If I were a Carpenter for him on my Palamino Pony guitar. He was not impressed, I was 12, but he showed me an E minor progression chord I was having trouble with. I met Pete, Mike & Peggy Seeger at several venues. I must’ve been radiant with joy because after one concert in Grass Valley, Mike Seeger came up to me and gave me a huge bear hug, and wept on my shoulder. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott used to hang out in downtown Forest Knolls. He liked watching all the girls on horseback. I was one of them.