Confessions of an iPod Roadie

CONFESSIONS OF AN IPOD ROADIE:

FROM CLASSIC LEGACY TO THE OS X GENERATION

Our peculiar form of iPod madness began last June in conjunction with my partner Neil’s Big Five-Oh birthday. For months, I’d been fretting over what to get him. Something special, something interactive that would involve all his friends for such a momentous occasion, but what?

I needed a happening, but I kept drawing a blank. Zip, zilch, nada. Neil had just been laid off his teaching job and he was not going gentle toward the half-century milestone. More like kicking and screaming. Fifty body blows to the psyche. The bases were loaded. No way to ease his pain as the dreaded birthdate inexorably drew nearer.

Pondering that notion, I found the answer at the bottom of a bright yellow MacWorld Expo bag, a poster. I unrolled it. I was gazing at Apple’s 20th anniversary “Think Different” commemorative poster of that amazing 1984 TV commercial of the woman runner—who so famously interrupted half-time and changed computing history as we know it.

For the 20th anniversary poster, the jogger is updated with an iPod. Very cool. Synchronicity struck with the force of a sledge hammer. Give him an iPod to ease his pain!

We decided to update Neil O’Neill (who is a musician, actor and teacher) with an iPod for his 50th birthday. He was constantly losing CDs and his CD player was acting strange. Via clandestine emails, I tapped some 50 friends to fork over some music and dough for an iPod and accessories galore.

When I had collected enough moolah to buy a plane ticket to Tahiti, I ordered an iPod, an iTunes music store gift certificate and chotchkies from Apple’s red tag store and it arrived the next day!

Now, I had a an elderly cobbled together Mac PPC 9600—someone’s obsolescent technology was my ticket to paradise (alas, no firewire; OS 8.6), so I couldn’t upload music onto the iPod even if I knew how to do it, which I didn’t.

I smuggled the iPod off with a bunch of Neil’s favorite CDs (Beatles, Van Morrison, the Corries, Bob Dylan—Neil shook Bob’s hand, and wouldn’t wash it for a week! But that’s another story). I took the iPod to a friend with an iBook to DJ it up. (Friends also gave him a favorite CD to download special songs into the iPod.)

During the party, while Neil, now officially 50 and loaded, was jamming with Mike Husser on the base guitar, I ushered everyone into the back room where they signed the 20th anniversary “Think Different” poster. It was a cool sacrilege.

Neil was pretty blown away when the iPod was presented to him hidden inside the poster—after he blew out all 50 candles that melted the frosting, singed his hair and nearly set the deck afire. We all ate cake with wax, jammed on, and a good time was had by all. A real 49er send-off. Hello 50, the last good decade to be middle-aged. Time to hit the road, Jack. Have to pack our things and go.

We took off on vacation and shared earbuds as the new iPod sweetly serenaded us with a little Ray(ban) Charles at 40,000 feet, on a series of rather hellish plane rides with far too many layovers (and 12 hours of no food) from Oakland to Florida. Most fellow travelers will whip out pictures of their kids faster than pistols at the OK Corral, so we retaliated, we drew out our iPod and fired back a tune or two.

The iPod did famously at Miami’s “unconservatory“ school of music; most folks we met had never seen an iPod in the flesh—er—chrome and Lucite. The musicians loved it. Everyone oohed and ahhed—especially over the accessories. It had a stereo adapter? a FM and a car cassette converter? a microphone? Hook it up to MIDI and digitally record with it? Use it as a jump drive? You could see their (click) wheels spinning.

The iPod was such a cross-cultural smash success, even our friends’ Cubans relatives all wanted an iPod too. No translation needed. I think I must’ve “sold” a few dozen virtual iPods while in Miami.

I didn’t know a thing about downloading music into iPods or how to use iTunes, neither did anyone else. Hot Miami nights, no AC in the practice studio, plenty mosquitoes and geckoes galore. While the musicians jammed on Calle Ocho (a kilted Neil in a Cuban guayabera playing “Those Were the Days” to a frenzied Cuban audience is another wild cojone story), While a former Californian, composer and world class pianist, Kirk Whipple, and Neil were in the studio talking shop, I was figuring out how to use iTunes, and the iPod on a borrowed iBook with OS X. Baptism by fire.

I was a classic OS 8.6 California girl mesmerized by an OS X world. Luckily, MacWorld’s Mac 911 guru, Christopher Breen, graciously came to my virtual rescue; he was my sweet email roadie guide; he told me how to upload tunes (you need to be online to get the titles? I’d typed in about 50 titles), and how to make playlists. I uploaded a little Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffet), Gypsy Kings, Celia Cruz, and Kirk Whipple & Marilyn Morales’ nocturnes, “Elemental Portraits,” (for which I’d written a suite of poems in collaboration) and we were good to go on a little road trip of our own.

After our unconservatory gigs were over, we took off for a little snorkel trip down to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas—until three whopping hurricanes chased us home. We shared the iPod with musicians in Key Largo, we listened to the iPod as we drove across the Seven Mile Bridge to the old bridge at Pigeon Key—that’s Flagler’s Folly, Key West railroad bridge for the Havana-bound gamblers during the Depression. The bridge was featured in “Key Largo” with Bogie and Bacall, and again in “True Lies” with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.

We put our lips together and blew a few sultry tunes to the iPod as we kayaked and snorkeled (it stayed on the boat, alas no wetsuit, but Chris Breen assured me even that was possible) we saw manatees in the mangroves, swam with sea turtles, and dolphins. We even took our iPod on those famous Key West sunset cruises (their music seriously sucked.)

It’s a long way to the Dry Tortugas, a civil war fortress a tiny coral atoll in the middle of the Caribbean, several hours from Cuba, Cancun or Key West by fast boat. You have to want to go there. Samuel Mudd (John Wilkes Booth’s doctor) was incarcerated there, and Ernest Hemingway was shipwrecked there after a hurricane engulfed the atoll.

When the coffee and booze ran out, Hemingway fashioned a raft and made for Key West, 70 miles back to civilization to write “For Whom the Bell Tolls” before Cuba beckoned for good.

Our boat ride back to Key West was hellish, with pitching indigo-black seas, frothed with 10-15 foot swells, lightning striking the water. The first of four storms, Hurricane Bonnie, was brewing. Oblivious to the storm, Neil was in the cabin happily iPodding it with a little Led Zepplin while I rode shotgun outside to avoid mal de mer. I was distracted by dolphins and flying fish off the bow, a wayward barracuda miscalculated a wave and nearly jumped into my arms. Finding or losing Nemo?

Everything was going swimmingly until we got home and decided to upload more songs. We were getting a little tired of what was on the iPod and wanted a sea change. Change is good. But we had very little spare change and an elder Mac, a PPC/9600/200MHz. No USB, no firewire.

So I snagged a beige G3 mini-tower off of Craigslist. Dangerous learning curves ahead. I learned to swap parts, I put in USB and firewire PCI cards, rearranged a few ATA and SCSI hard drives, haphazardly flipped SCSI ID switches until I got everything to load.

I replaced the wonky modem, loaded OS 9.2.2 so we could use iTunes and download music from the iTunes music store. (The USB card is not OS 9.2.2 friendly; it only works under OS 8.6; I’ve tried various combos of USB drivers. No luck, To use my jump drive or download pictures, I have to load OS 8.6).

I added more memory, a 500 MHz Sonnet chip to speed the Gossamer G3 up, but we still couldn’t use the danged iPod, other than as a hard drive. I was able to load an old version of iTunes under OS 9.2.2. But it didn’t recognize the iPod. We’ve got great playlists, with some PC speakers, our G3 is a really great juke box. Neil rarely uses the analog stereo or the PC anymore. Well, I gutted the PC, so he couldn't use it anyway—even if I wanted to get it up and running again.

Back to the drawing board. It turns out, this particular iPod needs OS X. Well, I found out that first generation G3s (ROM v.1) are not happy with OS X, especially with a 500 MHz Sonnet card.

(I won’t mention the Superdrive (v. 105) I installed, that needed serious convoluted software patches under OS 9.2.2 because Apple doesn’t have a DVD Player driver in classic mode (not an issue under OS X. No media/video card meant the Superdrive was merely a hood ornament/CD -R burner. DVD files show up but DVD Player won’t load. Alas, no Nemo screensaver for us. But at least we could burn CDs of our growing iTunes collection).

I loaded OS X (10.1.3) onto an auxiliary hard drive, and it worked for a while. I loaded iTunes 4.6 needed for this third generation iPod, only to find out that it in turn, needed OS 10.1.5. ARGHHHH! It actually worked for a while. The IPod showed up in iTunes! We were good to go. Not.

Meanwhile, all manner of strange things happened, mainly Siberian-sized freezes; I was eventually able to jumpstart the G3 off an OS 9 formatted hard drive after hitting every panic button I could think of, but the OS X christened hard drive became a shy truant, it quit showing up to work on the desktop altogether. So we’re back to using OS 9.2.2, and using friends’ Macs to load new music.

I am at present cobbling together yet another beige G3 (ROM v.2) with OS X (10.2.8) to tide me over the next few weeks (or months) until I cobble together a blue and white G3, or maybe even a G4 (but I can’t use my Sonnet card in a G4-and all the G4s at 300 MHz are slower than molasses: 500 MHz is bare minimum requirement). I need a Mac with SCSI PCI card slots & serial adapters so I can still use my legacy SCSI & serial stuff.

If money were no issue, horses were wishes and pigs could fly, I would’ve bought an iMac last summer, and a Mac Mini, last Fall. But hey, I wouldn’t have learned all this obsolete Mac technology. I can now rebuild damn near any PPC you put my way.

The lucky recipients of my rebuilt PPCs are the public schools where I work as an artist in residence through non-profits, Young Audiences and California Poets in the Schools. A Title 1 (poor) school, Golden Gate Academy, in the Western Edition got a carload of  my 75xx series PPCs.

I believe in the Apple credo to think differently empowers us, it changes people’s lives. It changed my life. As a practicing dyslexic, I could not use computers, it was their way or the highway. With Mac, I can problem solve in any manner of ways. If one way doesn’t work, at least I can fix it. I discovered too, along the way, that I could strip & rebuild a PC too if needs be...I ripped wires and hard drive out of our dead PC to fix up the G3—Neil was once a confirmed PC junkie but he's since seen the light.

As soon as I get a new Mac, I’m fixing up all the old G3s I have lying around (3) for Cabrillo School in Fremont. Meanwhile I’m waiting for my ship to come in, onboard is a Mac Mini and a Powerbook. And maybe an iMac with Airport Extreme while we’re at it. It looks nice coordinated with the iPod. maybe a buddy, an iPod Photo would be nice too so a California girl can dream big. Maybe take a few pictures, play a few tunes of her own.

• Hurricane Charley, Mile Zero, Highway One (photos)

Enough Rain

California has enough water – after years of rain, after years of drought, there's plenty more rain where that came from. Call it El Niño. Laden skies—even the Central Coast is still green, no tawny cat hills slumbering before the fire, yet. Lupines painting the hills with deft strokes. Monet, Pissarro in the rain, in muted greens, shapeshifting into dark trees, keeping the best secrets, counting their ages within each ring, diligently measuring times of rain and drought. General Sherman, a redwood dating back to the migrations that spurred the rise of the Roman Empire against the Barbarians, faithfully recorded each season—wet or dry—until some numbskull who couldn't stand the idea of something so old, cut it down with one of those big push/pull saws. They began counting the rings, never expecting to work past the birth of Christ, but count back they did. They were preoccupied with European data, the Magna Carta, the birth of Christ, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the burning of Carthage. But the trees recorded another kind of history, of weather, and drought, and rain. We are so newly come to this place, we speak of variables as if they were constants. California has enough, or not enough rain, depending on the need—but the redwood that framed this coast have measured time in eons—this last fragile ring of green we follow from the Ice Age to time-present. This time, this rain, this abundance, where everything is rainbow rainbow rainbow —to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop's silvered fish carrying God's flooded promise forth unto greener pastures.

Tsunami Dreams

After the first blush, dreams invade the psyche, but I can't remember them any more, or I don't want to remember them, but sometimes one slips through to haunt my waking hours and I am trapped between worlds, neither fully in either realm. It's times like this I worry about my driving, afraid of continental drift, merging into someone else as we barrel down asphalt ribbons hell-bent on destination with little thought to those dotted white lines—place holders, your space, my space. We fleetingly occupy a revolving ribbon of turf, calling it our own for a breathless second or two, before we move onto the next bit of road. Hopefully the guy next to me in the oversized truck isn't too preoccupied with his cellular dream, that he won't merge to my little red crackerjack of a car built during a time when we lived in a kinder, gentler nation, and we actually had the time to dream. In those days, I awoke each morning in a small cabin under a vast live oak tree and dutifully recorded my dreams. Some were prophetic, some were erotic, most were laden with metaphor—the stuff of poetry, and I filled journal after journal. My dream life was as active and rich as my waking hours, but I left that cabin in the meadow for Oakland's identity crisis; there is no there here, as Gertrude Stein penned, and I and discovered there was also little here for my dreams too. Just a longing for a home, for a nonexistent place, my dream cabin having grown many rooms, stairwells, balconies, porches, until it resembled the Winchester Mystery House—the old lady kept building building building to keep death at bay. I know that one all to well.

Food is life freewrite

It’s those damn kiwis, the fruit, not the Islanders, that puts my tongue all in a twist. I love their burlap exterior against a jade green mandala, and that aroma, almost strawberry, almost passionfruit, but my tongue objects, turns into an object de art, swollen along the taste buds, inflamed. Bitter and salty buds objecting to the acrid tang of the kiwi from down under. Call them Chinese gooseberries if you want, but but they are more like burlap testicles hanging from the vine. Who would've guessed all that greenness hid beneath that all that burlap? A neighbor I worked for, Alice Kent ,delighted in the rare and the unusual. One of my jobs was to check on the progress of the kiwi vine spanning the trellis. I delighted in the creamy blossoms, a cross between a blackberry and a magnolia, all porcelain and cream. Strange progeny of fruit to follow left the tomatoes girlishly gasping at the stud fruit hanging from the trellis. The roses got all huffy and pulled up their stocks and took to the road, unable to cope with that upstart vine from down under. I remember one full moon, the siren call of the garden led me down to the pond barefoot where the water iris had open their triumvirate arms to the moon. I was so mesmerized, I stumbled into the pond to pluck that alabaster light from the stems. My bare arms were calyxes beneath the moonlight. Having no knife and their resistance to plucking got the better of me, so my teeth severed blossom from the stem, sweet juice like corn on the husk, this food of life for the soul, for the tongue, for Isis.

2/18/2005 Writers’ Group

Exorcism, or what am I afraid of?

What am I afraid of? Let me count the ways. Where is Emily when we need her? All hummingbird and rose wings in the garden. Neighbors dropping in for tea. The world came to her, our Emily. What was she afraid of: does it matter? Post mortems on writers long dead, butterfly wings resurrected and reincarnated too many times for the counting. Maybe some of those molecules made it to this coast from Amherst. Maybe they’re in the room right now as we write. Maybe a molecule or two found Its way into the first strawberries of the season. Unlike Emily, we no longer know the origin, the natal land of the food we eat. They say all molecules are recycled and so we eat dust of the stars. radium, butterfly wings, and yes and bits of Emily too. What am I afraid of? The void, like everyone else. That final answer where consciousness and corporeal body are seven at the naval and all that’s left is the umbilicus of faith, any faith, it doesn’t matter. Port in a storm. What we cling to, our egos building fortresses of thought to sustain us, to offer us hope, but it’s all Maya Maya Maya in the end. Therein lies the fear. The question: what if… yes, if, if, if. And not preposition but question, that is, interrogatories of unimagined futures or will versus shall and all that it conveys. The future is always in the imperfect tense, whether declarative or not, and wishes are horses riding that which never comes and is always too late. Regret is the other name of fear, a complex soup of what if, and should have—that is where fear lies.

2/18/2005 Writers' Group

Age has no mercy tonight or, freewrite

Age has no mercy tonight or, or any other night for that matter. In my latest poetry class a student uncharacteristically asked me how old I was and I said Older than dirt, which drew a few titters. Age has never been much of an issue with me. As the saying goes, You're only as old as you feel. But yesterday I was using a handout I had made on how to teach calligraphy dated from 1980, and then it hit me—these kids' parents hadn't yet been born. I had scribed out the alphabetic family of shapes from my cabin under the live oak in Sonoma County. What meadow, what age? I was not yet 30, negotiating a tricky Saturn Return cycle and poetry was my consolation prize. I was given a bottomless suitcases of muses' words, their glad rags, their hand-me-downs. Today I listened to young girls read their newly minted poems about the goddess within. Amazingly, they were so unselfconscious as they incanted their poems to the four directions. We made something come alive today in that dreamy classroom. So what if Tom Hanks went to school there, it's a dungeon, no monk's cell of arcane learning. But somehow we circumnavigated our surroundings and suddenly we were all of one age, one mind, scribing the words on the water, deep in the well, slaking a thirst we didn't know was there, pondering the ages of Man.

2/4/2005 Writers' Group

What I saw in the garden freewrite

What I saw in the garden was barely there as if an angel breathed, and the leaves shivered as if someone had walked on their grave. Is it spring or is it winter? Flowers make a run for the border and bloom in a fit of passion all at once—just in case winter should return, which it usually does. According to the marmot, it will indeed return for six more weeks. Meanwhile, I haul out last summer's clothes that I never quite got around to packing away, but the edges of shadows say it's not spring, though the jonquils and narcissi madly nod their perfumed heads in the breeze. Spring! Spring! they gleefully announce with their yellow splendor. Yeah, right, the shadows still converse with winter. Angelino Bernini, the old black cat takes a power nap on the stoop, his dark coat is so warm, it's like an electric blanket, sparks fly as I pet him. He looks up suddenly, as if contented, as if to say, aren't I responsible for the nice weather? I envy him soaking up all that joy and radiant heat. But he's no angel, he drools and feebly attempts to take down the more careless birds. But he's just a fat black cat living out the end of his years dreaming in the garden. That's what I saw.

2/4/2005 Writers' Group

How big is the heart?

Big enough, she said, to hold the universe, but not a singularity. A multiverse in verse, the pattern. Systole, diastole. The drum inside the drum, keeping time with the shore. The earth is our mother, the sea is our blood. How big? Big enough. There is so much to contain that the vessel capsized on a lonely shore. Enough to carry it across to the other side. Remember to bring honey cakes and coins, the river is asleep. Charon’s heart beating once every millennium, how big is his heart? The seas rose and no one remembered the honey cakes. The sea took her due. The river inside each of us carves a shore of grief and tears—the same as the ocean or blood. Can you cry underwater? Someone asks. Better to leave the unanswered questions for the city of the dead. They have time enough. They say the earth is resonating like a bell. Systole/diastole; Charon’s heart is beating a drum song, a tattoo of rhythm, life compressed, lived between the two beats of a wave. How big is the heart? Big enough. The elders are closer to hearing it, one step closer…they tell stories of when they were young. First job, first love. Their days carry the rhythm still. There is such a sweetness in the the room after they tell the stories and this room is filled with hearts so big the universe can’t contain them. So we write in verse, multiverse to Sinatra’s Very good year. And now that is enough to hold the world. Do we choose the size of our hearts? How do we measure the size of the heart. A beating heart.

1/21/2005 Writers’ Group

The last of the...

Wine? She asked, serving the guest of honor first. He gazed at her with his hooded cobra eyes, she forgot the other guests, the hangers on, the ones who came under pretext or another when the word leaked out, thrusting their foot into the the jamb of the open door, wedging their way in with tissue-thin excuses. Everyone wanting their brush with fame at any cost. Manners flew out the window, in this ex-pat town, where everyone was purveyor of everyone else’s business. The wine gurgled, cleared its throat in t the neck of the bottle, and then sang in the glass. A ray of sunlight caught the cornice and everyone was transfixed by that trapped rainbow. Then the utter stillness that followed. She too was trapped inside his gaze, like cat and mouse, the white wine trembled as if distant tremors struck the earth. It was possible the islands were restless. Sharp tang of resin, then, the sea. This is a defined moment when nothing happens, but within that moment, from the first restless tapping of the wine against the green well, to the final aria in the glass, an epoch had passed. It was as if all the ages of man were trapped in that bottle, and time itself ended when she poured the last of the wine. Soon, they would be reading about themselves thinly disguised as themselves in yet another novel. They would argue, and disagree as to who was who, never realizing that the wine had been poured and consumed long ago.

1/21/2005 Writers' Group

Memoir

At Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's Books, Sharon Doubiago says she's writing a 900-page single space memoir and I'm afraid of anything longer than a thousand words. She wears golden butterflies on her ankles—curious signs of slavery and freedom. She's living in Berkeley now. Three weeks. It must be a record. But the road is an old lover.

1/9/05
added,rev. 9/17

Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's 1/9/2005

Celia opens her reading at Cody's Bookstore, as an homage to Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country. She read a poem called Late, she says she undressing the idea of choosing to be lovely by wearing an earring as a talisman.

She reads a pantoum about being bareback and how the woods were on fire we rode towards the flame with the sky and our mouths close to that danger, a list poem. She read My Mother's Birds. Sucha was a nickname, she raised chickens. Chocka was the sound of chickens and also the sound of the ax falling. She said, We could escape unlike the chickens.

Blink a child's tattered self-image: being called wool-lock, chink-eye, Saint Cecilia, here is how the world turns on itself, a girl...

Apres la Luna Miel, a love poem the, moon of honey, the sky of milk. Naming the hypothetical children and escaping from them. She does a play on slow children at play, a dyslexic moment, something I know too well. 

Another poem The Passionate Suitcase, for her Gypsy sisters. I believe the moon blink, the traffic of leaving then the night slams shut. Don't look back.

She reads from Tsigani, a book-length poem. My friend Ken Bullock and Celia took another epic Budapest train ride, which led to the poem I knew snippets of the story, then I hear the Gypsy history interpliced. The what if poem… what if I had no documents, no country… While waking into the dream of Budapest, my name in his throat like a jewel. 

Dien dobre, Polish for good morning. Celia told a story of how she was robbed, no passport. Someone said something about selling her to the gypsies, with no proof of country. I had grown thin on a diet of grief, consonants lost between languages. The neighbor, worn as a blade, eggs in his hands. Djen—day: eat what is offered in that light.

Proposals: Happy Independence Day another list poem. I don't know who'd who they think I am dressed in rags of wind with eyes of green fire.

Doren Robins says there's a tenuousness in Celia's poetry. Segue to Sholeh Wolpe, born in Persia, who said who said 10% of the people will never kill, 10% will always kill, the rest of us who will go either way. Then a reference to Hotel Rwanda, the idea of distancing oneself from the current governments of the oppressive. What one man will do to another. 

The Persian culture is now flourishing. But women get the raw end of the deal. They serve men. Condoleezza Rice is a two-man army on her own. In their writing and art they continue to serve men. Bomblets, not leisure, but sperm. Muslim fighters are given a key to heaven to paradise. The idea of the virgin paradise is sewn into his father's pants. Words have no need for light, they shine on their own. 

Afterwards we all go out for a meal at an Ethiopian restaurant and talk until the restaurant closes. The foggy night tightens its prison issue blanket about our shoulders.

One heart

One heart beating, two hearts drumming, the little boy who lost his one heart’s delight, bearing a drum to the silken sea who took his heart and then spat it back each morning with bleached shells. The new shorelines were surprised to find themselves front and center as beachfront. They tried on their new coral sand gowns as the sea lapped at the hem of the coastline, mirroring their frothy beauty. The little boy couldn’t stop drumming. Each morning the reporter found him playing his solo concert to the sea.soon he noticed that the sea answered the little drummer with a cease-surcease. The boy was so absorbed he forgot about the pain in his heart. He drummed and the sea answered. There was a strange beauty to the sea, and the color of sky, so blue, but something more. He drummed for the mother who came down to the strand each morning to collect the gift of children’s shoes the sea had returned in the night. He drummed for the toothless old man hunkered down on his haunches, collecting shells and broken bits of coral. The boy couldn’t believe his sister and mother were gone in a heartbeat. Not until his father took him to their graves. But they were empty, so he still held out hope. He gathered the piles of shells and coral the old man had left behind and outlined their graves in the shape of one heart. They said that two sisters were buried in the same coffin, and his mother in another. He outlined their empty graves in the shape of one heart. Like after 9/11, everything was post 9/11. After the tsunami, everything is post tsunami. Gaia, Gaia, Gaia. The one heart of the earth beating to the drum line.

1/7/2005 Writers’ Group

Chichi-jima & Haha-jima

 Obviously the two rocks had to get married, living next to each other like that for so long. The sea was their witness. The fisherman finished tying the knot on the silken rope, the same knot he used to mend his nets. That will hold them for an eternity, he thought. But the sea was jealous, and pushed its waves between them, widening the distance between them until they were bowed, the lovers’ knot holding them true. The sea grew angry and threw up a wave so huge it lost its balance and stumbled. The ocean floor shifted and dropped. Too late, the sea tried to call back its wave but the anger had spread to distant rocks, more distant shores. Islands moved 60 feet, coastlines sank. The sea stared into the aftermath of flotsam and jetsam and strange fish, like the fisherman, sank to the sea floor—as if to mend the rift in her heart. The sea cried, her heart wept molten rock, a new island arose from the gaping wound of her grief, but it was alone, not another rock to marry. But the sea wasn’t about to give birth again so soon. She crept back to the two rocks that the fisherman had married but it was obvious he was gone along with the other strange fish on the bottom of the sea.

1/7/2005 Writers’ Group

Art from the Heart 2005, oil pastel, poster paint

Art from the Heart, 2005, oil pastel

Happiness setpoint freewrite

The bar for the happiness setpoint is ever raising for those without joy. No sooner do they reach the pinnacle where happiness, like a lenticular cloud hovers over the summit like a flying saucer up in its own weather system, blithely incarnating folklore about the Lemurians and Proto Atlanteans. Notice, how all the cool guys are from another planet. Not like Jesus, who was born within the midst. That’s mist with a D, folks. The idea being that a savior should come from within the throngs, the brainwashed hordes, not the elites. No matter that the couple was enroute to a census. Stand up and be counted. 

And the Bible belters of Jesusland are cheering on the war in Iraq, they rejoice when another tree falls, when Armageddon comes. The sooner the better, where they will be saved. Imagine their happiness: the end is nigh. They rejoice and sing modern day timbrels to the Lord in the street, sawhetting across the face of mother earth in the commute lane of exponential catastrophe.

It reminds me of the politician, who said. When you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all. And ketchup is a vegetable. And that other wonder that burning bush in the White House who today declared $250,000 plates to eat an inaugural dinner with the president, wanting a ceiling on the price of a plate so that school teachers and bus drivers could afford to attend the inauguration. There are happiness setpoints considerably lower than a quarter of million. 

But look, all the stars are ablaze in the heavens, only in America where happiness is legislated. But the Bible thumpers say the end is nigh. The world will end on December 31. The rapture is nigh. God bless America. 

12/10/2004. Writers’ Group

Candlelight freewrite

A slender finger of light dances in the breeze, Shiva’s nail scratching the darkness. A cat lies in the sun, sharpens, her claws, stretches, yawns, her become jewels in the night. Phosphor fire. Either fear or science will make an excuse for her eyes. Retinal mirror scrying the soul. 

Have you ever looked at house windows and seen them as eyes following you as you walk down and unfamiliar street at night? What thoughts arise? But look, a light in the window, harkening back to centuries before. Someone placed a candle in the window, so that the dearly departed could find their way back home. 

Candlelight in each window, the flickering pupil, sentient, ever watching. The hurricane lamp from the turret for sailors coming in from the sea. Bonfires on the hill. Markers of time. Names for surcease, for that dark moment when lights no longer drink in the darkness. 

That solstice when the sun sleeps, when we light the candles, and the moths circling the fire, confuse them for the stars. The odor of wings like burning hair, angel hair, when the rain comes when we’re weaned from the electric grid, freed from the tyranny of Edison’s light dream, the candle becomes a ritual for dinner, reduced to romantic interludes or for religious reasons. 

Or birthdays, marking the passage of time, or the big bang. Dangerous candles, soaring light tapers for the church, split an atom, a sesame seed of blue light, a seed pearl at the center of everything. Imagine a flashlight as a placeholder in its stead. Imagine the inventor of the candle. What did he use for wicks dipped in tallow and honey. 

12/10/2004 Writers’ Group

FOUND POETRY: VICODAN

thought weather trouble
blue house stand fast
last luck lord engaged
wife, she remained
respect finished
they point
surely part class drop
likely raised offer
fancy share afterwards
stayed period

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

’T’was the day before Thanksgiving

and all through the houses

plump turkeys were thawing, not petit grouses!

Though the cupboards were groaning

all the tables were laid bare. What? No carousing?

My birthday comes but once a year.

"We forgot," cried relatives and spouses

to friends and neighbors moaning in thin air.

They scolded their watches & their PDAs too,

"it's not that we don't care. Really, we do.

Forgive us. We really forgot. It wasn't a plot.

Forgive us, our memory's got dry rot. Or ergot.

We'll make it up to you at Christmas. Never fear."

Lest I complain, "let them eat crow," (or cake)

one year, even my mom forgot, alas, heartbreak!

I don't hold my breath lightly, nor do I lend an ear,

for tomorrow will come when pigs learn to fly

by all those pumpkin and mince pies in the sky

without gobbling them up, none for the throngs.

So much for the promises of yesteryear—

or even next year. Now, don't get me wrong.

Indeed I long for that glutton of a beast

with all the trimmings of a glorious feast.

I dispense fowl blessings reiterated with grace.

Hope springs eternal, so I save a small place

for dessert — because it might be a bit of cake.

OK, I’m quirky if I confuse turkeys with candles.

And tomorrow when we dismantle the big bird

I’ll blow out the drumstick with a wing and a prayer.

I won’t let this bailiwick of a pilgrim’s parlance,

betrayer of fowlish deeds, with dissonance absurd

occlude my birthday with a yam dance. Not a chance!

Conclude your fawning and hemming and hawing.

Pass the blasted dressing. For next year, never fear

my birthday will reappear on Thanksgiving Day. OK?

Pity my poor cousin born on Christmas Eve

and not to grieve on such a moveable feast.

11/24/2004

In North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle

11/17/ 2004  We’re in Myles O'Reilly's pub at 622 Green St. in North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle. Ha, ha, ha, we're all drinking somebody's open swill – Pinot Noir for breakfast. Ugh. I was hoping for food. It’s Myles’s birthday. The jazz club band brings us in with a little swing, some Maria Callas, and the Tarantella and the Godfather meets the Irish in North Beach.

Nearly an hour later, Roddy Doyle saunters in and steps up to the microphone, taps it thunderously, and says he's now a Yank, having been in nine cities in 10 days. We laugh.

Doyle is bald as a skinhead, it takes some getting used to. He read from Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and a small bit on Henry Smart, an IRA volunteer, from A Star Called Henry, and some stray bits from a play he's been working on, and then he thanked Elgie Gillespie for making this so. There is a River of free flowing booze. By this point, we're all fairly toasted.

Neil Jordan, steps up, looking upscale and fashionably thuggish, wearing shades, having just returned from a TV interview, he's a rare bit of gloom, despite it being sunny, midday. Maybe the alcohol's wearing off. 

He begins with: I know when I died, May 1950. It was a rare whinge, the perspective is written from that woman. He ended on an upbeat note: George killed me... He reads from The Dream of a Beast, with a segue into Interview with the Vampire.

After they were finished reading, there was a Q&A. Someone asks: Would you like to write The Commitments today?

Roddy Doyle said, Well, I'd need to express the conditions along similar lines. The Irish, the blacks of Europe would figure into it.

Jordan said the USA has been good to me, re: The Crying Game. 

Phoenix rising freewrite (drawing)

A phoenix rises from the ashes, is it Ash Wednesday, or resurrection, or soot from the chimney, midwinter, a creosote threat, sparks climbing the night sky, seeking distant cousins. The Perseids and Leonids flash, Astro fire, cat’s-eyes glowing. The phoenix lust, and foxfire, the moon, hidden behind clouds, bows at the torii gate. Heaven and earth. Wind and sky. Fire in the head. 

I am the word of science, the song of Amergen, as he set forth upon the land of Ireland for the first time. I am the fire in the head, I am a work of art rising from the ashes. Bone ash, white, hot, bonfires to couch, the sun, to bring it back after the darkness. 

My great grandfather drove cattle between two bonfires, their mad eyes glowing as they charged forth. Holy smoke anointed the sky and settled down, phoenix, rising. The tears of the phoenix will heal the mortally wounded. But after hearing one truth but she waited so long. When the bird lands, the land, the air is transform by fire. Flight and wings of ash falling down to earth nourishing it. 

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group

In the rain without an umbrella, freewrite (Merrill Gardens journal)

Singing, dancing in the rain, the world is transformed, even the gutters lose distinction with the sidewalks and curbstones. The rain pounds the pavement with such vigor that the streets are transformed into vast, gray trampolines, and the Magritte’s Golconda jumpers are falling from the clouds. Not to mention the cats and dogs. The rain bounces up and blurs that distinction between street and curb, ocean and sky. 

Today, in my Elder writing group at Merrill Gardens, one old woman from the northern provinces, tried to reconstruct images of home. She wanted to become a phoenix and rise up from her own ashes in another country. She studied hard to be a doctor. Tomorrow I’ll be 88, she said. I have not thought about China for many years. She is beginning to remember after forgetting the atrocities of the past for so many years.

She said, Once it was raining in her village, the Japanese had invaded, so she walked to school in the rain without an umbrella. She needed to be the strong one, she didn’t let go of her young cousin’s hand, not even when the rain beat down with such force, that their legs turned yellow from the mud. She tells me that the Yangtze means yellow river.

Rivulets made their way to the ocean, to the China Sea, and the school became a raft across the sea to Africa, to the Sahara, and then to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, the place of flowers, where she made her escape and met her husband in transit, waiting there for years as he perfected his surgery on the open heart. 

The breakthrough operation was the first of its kind in a country of parched thirst, under siege, in a drought. She wears an umbrella for the sun. She is waiting for her people to go to Cold Mountain, where she watched her first movie of a man with an umbrella, singing and dancing in the rain, and his heart was full. He was dancing with an open heart. The rain rose up, like a flock of phoenixes, seeking the eye of the sun.

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group

Total eclipse of the moon, freewrite

We watched a total eclipse of the moon from Treasure Island. The moon was like a Oreo cookie. The moon dangled over the Bay bridge, and the shadows nibbled with a dark hunger, until only the Sea of Tranquility was visible. I don’t know if it really is the sea, a swirling land formation at the top of the moon was more visible than normal. Hunters moon, being eaten by its prey and Samhain on its heels.

Time to remember the dead and offer their names up for the end of the year. That tradition got thoroughly bungled and swallowed in the Christian struggle against paganism, it got mired down and mixed up a couple of months. And everybody thinking January is the new year but it’s really November 1, All Saints’ Day. Then the second holiday was needed for all the souls who didn’t quite make it to heaven because they needed more time to work off their sins—as if they were on the moon, swallowed by the light by the shadow. Obscure and unseen. 

The Chinese said the red moon was a Dragon’s blood moon. A baleful red eye in the sky, watching all the people lined up in city canyons to peer through telescopes, as the moon verged on red, as if balancing atop the Transamerica building. Some said the red moon was bad luck, but red is the color of good fortune, the color of brides and the color of wealth.  

The bride of a moon peeking out from behind the earths’s shadow is shedding a wealth of light on us, no red moon of war. Everyone out on the streets is a little bit crazy and pointing at the moon, checking up on it, as if it wasn’t to be believed, or trusted and wondering where the man in the moon went. Full moon over Geary Street and a baleful dragon’s eye, bloodshot and drunk on all the smog.

10/29/04 Writers’ Group

What was in the attic? freewrite

God only knows what was up in the attic. It sounded like chains being dragged across the two by fours, someone shuffling convict chains, but we were far from the south, or the old world. This house is too new for ancient shenanigans a la Lady Rochester. Wrong continent, wrong coast for this sort of thing. An occasional thump punctuated each step as if someone were dragging a body down the back stairs, the head banging on each step. Only thing is, we don’t have a back stairs coming down from the attic, only a trap door, but I kept my eye on it just in case. 

The stove pipe was an echo chamber. I could hear the sporadic barking of a lazy watchdog, who felt obligated to bark a staccato at specific intervals. An owl practiced his calls. There was a faint SSS sound swishing—was it trees or bats or rain falling? A musty, damp smell as if from the grave, but then the attic grew ominously quiet. I didn’t know what was worse the noise, or the silence. 

Grandma told me ghost stories about how the dead preferred glamorous castles to a lone farmhouse in the country. The sound of something coming closer was directly overhead now. What could it be? A raccoon? My grandmother rose from the couch to refill her cup of tea in the kitchen. The ceiling bulged and groaned, and the sheetrock gave way. An avalanche of water and plaster cascaded down onto the couch where she was sitting just minutes before.

10/29/2004 Writers’ Group

Indiana Review Collaboration/Collage project Elemental Portraits

The Indiana Review
Collaboration/Collage 

Ballantine Hall 465
1020 E. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103

THE COLLABORATION/COLLAGE PROCESS:

Poet Maureen Hurley and pianist-composer Kirk Whipple first met during a series of Soviet-American cultural exchange programs in the USSR and the USA. Whipple, who studied at the Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts, performed in the 1990 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, Moscow, U.S.S.R., while Hurley was giving poetry readings and facilitating poetry and art exchanges in Moscow, Leningrad, and Cherkassy, a city near Kiev.

Hurley and Whipple performed together for Sister City cultural events in Sonoma County, California. During a series of benefit concerts, Hurley wrote several poems based on Kirk Whipple’s performances which won several awards and fellowships. Whipple approached Hurley with the idea to collaborate from the ground floor: to create poems as he was developing and composing a series of nocturnes for two pianos, compositions inspired by Chopin’s set of nocturnes for solo piano. Whipple is executive director, and co-founder with wife, Marilyn Morales, of the Unconservatory, Inc. (1988). Each of the individual pieces from Elemental Portraits were inspired by people very close to the composer or who were affiliated with the Unconservatory.

Hurley and Whipple met during 1992-1996 to collaborate on the musical compositions. First, Whipple played a piece in progress and Hurley freewrote to it. She interviewed him where he shared his musical composition book of dreams, conversations, observations, songlines, and musical phrases… She then interviewed the people who inspired each of the eleven Nocturnes. When the pieces were completed, she wove together a collage of the three strands of storyline, observation and impression.

In 1995, Whipple, Morales and Hurley premiered five of the nocturnes. In 1996, during the debut of the complete set of the eleven nocturnes, Hurley was in a serious accident, and was unable to perform, so Whipple and Morales debuted the entire set without her, and later recorded the nocturnes in 1999 at the University of Miami. In 2002, the duo, Whipple, & Morales, released their first commercially available recording of Elemental Portraits. Between 2002 and 2004, the groundwork was laid for a premier performance of the collaboration which took place in Miami, Florida, during May of 2004. A live presentation featuring the spoken poetry and performances of the nocturnes which were performed at concert halls, universities, schools, and television studios throughout southwest Florida. We were featured artists on PBS/WLRN’s “ArtStreet” with Marilyn Porte, which aired in June, 2004.

To Whom it May Concern:
Enclosed please find:
Poems “Elemental Portraits”
by Maureen Hurley

First page of sheet music for each piece
by Kirk Whipple, composer
8035 SW 26th Street
Miami, FL 33155
pianistas2@aol.com
(305) 266-9673

CD Music recording
CD jacket & postcard flyer
of “Elemental Portraits:
Nocturnes for Two Pianos”
performed by Kirk Whipple
and Marilyn Morales, Duo Pianists

STATISTICAL STASIS

Well, it’s come to this:

flip a coin when stasis sets in.

John the Ambiguous was always 

a great one for a coin toss to decide fate

like to have a kid, break up, or to get married.

So whatever flummoxed him was always reduced to

a 50/50 chance, & the odds were always in his favor

because that way he didn't actually have to choose.

A good thing coins aren’t like dice cubes.

It would have increased the odds.

We were a gamble anyway.

9/29/04

rev 1/2/14

WITH THE PROGRAM

He’s been around so long 

he’s bypassed his own due date. 

He returns to his natal grounds, 

naming schools and streets. 

This hindsight into the past. 

We visit Frick junior high, 

were the dead across the street 

sometimes wander over 

from the cemetery to write 

a little poetry with us.

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

Permaculture, freewrite

That which shifts down into the substrate, is permaculture, soil, rocks and bones… What we’re not aware of is what defines us, it is our secret garden. What we do without knowing why we do or say it. Our secret harvest, what we take for granted. Sometimes permaculture gets separated from the source and we’re left wondering why this or that action was required, and for a moment we’re left outside our skins, as if having gotten up, dressed all wrong. Who remembers that first day of school. A reoccurring dream: I took off my red princess coat only to discover I was dressed in my underwear. I forgot to put on my outer clothing. The shame and humiliation was too much for a first grader to bear, defrocked and dethroned all at once. I was too young to know about, Freud or symbolism or dreams. But that was permaculture. Something in the frozen tundra of self, thawing, leaving us vulnerable and lost. But wait as I bend down to touch the lichen, a miniature garden with willows no higher than my thumb, tiny lingonberries and bogberries ripening under the summer sun, small, red eyes, sweet and tart on the tongue. Substrate permeating up into awareness, into loam. 

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

The lake so smooth, not a report on the water, freewrite

Mornings were best, the drive to Sonoma State on backroads, I cherished beauty, the way the fog wrapped itself around the hills, like a bride‘s négligée with emu, feathers. And they would hug the hills, cling to them, so that the lake, so smooth, not a ripple on the water, was like glass. And the world was one vast mirror of hill, fog and sky.

It took me years to grasp what beauty was, having grown up inside of beauty, I had no eyes to see. I had to go away way in order to return. Prodigal beauty was a jail sentence. Me, peeking out from inside the word, holding the iron bars, wondering what all the fuss was about. 

But this lake, though man-made, reflects the fog and sky—beauty’s cnstant mirror, and I was a dust mote rising only to fall into that surface were sky in fog and water one thing—primordial—existing without my presence or witness. But beauty came dressed in fog to shroud the hills and the lake stood its ground, an eye of the sky watching me. 

A fish rises and mouths a speck, concentric ripples, spreading out, catching me and its stare. First day of fall.

9/24/2004 writers group. 

Letter to President Bush on Public Schools

In the National Mobilization for Great Public Schools petition box provided for personal comment I wrote:

Dear President Bush,

Having worked in nearly 100 California schools since 1979, I can emphatically state that the public schools have NEVER been in such dire straits as they are now, thanks to increased federal and state legislation that has negatively impacted our schools—coupled with a growing lack of state and federal funding. A deadly coctail for education. As a result, schools are seriously overcrowded. New legislation, including the futile "Leave no Child Left Behind" campaign, has left schools so crippled, that we've lost sight of what a school does: to educate children.

Public education is no longer about educating students but it's about crowd control, and it's about teachers jumping through meaningless administrative hoops in order to meet legislative mandates. A teacher's politically mandated curriculum teaching hours leaves little or no troom for actual meaningful teaching.

In addition, to become a credentialed teacher is now an expensive, time-consuming, meaninless pursuit, harbinger of things to come, namely, dealing with bloated school beaurocracy. Compound that with overcrowded classrooms, lack of funds for basic classroom needs, and poor salaries, no wonder new teachers are leaving the profession at alarming rates.

Thanks to government lip service, our children are becoming increasingly illiterate with little or no critical thinking skills, let alone, basic job skills—and they are America's future! Public education needs massive state and federal funding incentives ASAP to save the current generation from being left behind, because, Mr. Bush—and you are not  MY president: My president would give more than lip service to education, he would nake it a top priority.

Your lack of foresight and negative legislative actions have all but crippled what once was the best education system in the world. Sadly, these children are the victims you have left behind with your policies and they will be our future citizens of tomorrow. Alas, they will inherit this future.

Lesson Learned: Vote

If there was a lesson to be learned, the presidential election of 2000 taught us that every single vote literally counts. Some cast votes were counted incorrectly and some chads were pregnant, spawning an election where, several days after the polls closed, we still didn’t know who our president was. It proved to be a bad omen, and here we are, four years later, convincing friends to vote in 2004.

There’s a saying, Friends don’t let friends vote Republican. Here, in the Bay Area where, where the majority of voters are liberal, we’re preaching to the converted. But what about preaching furhter afield, what about family? What do you do then?

Like a dark secret, lately many of my liberal friends are confessing that their families are staunch Republicans. I have never before admitted in public that my enormous ecelctic, whacky family too is Republican to the bone. As in Orange County Republican. We have more than our fair share of laywers, judges, policement and doctors. 

At family gatherings, politics are always a hot subject. One of my earliest memories is of my grand uncles and aunts pounding the table, whiskey jars jumping in unison like amber soldiers. But you can’t divorce an entire family. I tried that for a few decades but it only isolated me from my roots. I mourn those lost years of self imposed exile when many of my relatives died.

There’s a popular anti-Republican joke set in the Midwest, where a Republican teacher asks a class to raise their hands if they’re Republican. The whole class raises their hands except a lone student, Mary, dissents. She claims that she’s a Democrat by virtue of the fact that both her parents are Democrats.

You wouldn’t find me raising my hand in that classroom either though I’m from a family where both my parents are Republicans. And their parents were Republicans. And that’s about as far back as it goes. Most of us are newly arrived to this continent.

And when I don’t know which way to go, I flip a coin, freewrite (photo)

Yes, it’s come to this, flip a coin when stasis sets in. John the Ambiguous was always a great one for a coin toss. Have a kid, get married, whatever impasse flummoxed him was reduced to a 50-50 chance. 

A good thing that coins aren’t built like dice to increase the odds. Otherwise, we’d be all day setting up the parameters and permutations for radical changes in life. Or not. So once we were at Casa Bombeck in Chiapas, he flipped a coin either we go to the Lacondon, jungle, or, the Mayen village of Chamula. We chose our coins carefully. The Quetzalcoatl head came up on the antique five peso coin. Feathered serpent grinning at our feet. 

And so we rode green horses into the jungle, to the village in deep in the San Cristobál Mountains where gringos were still an anomaly. When I showed him the coin, the old man at the Mayan church took a shine to me, it must’ve been the aguardiente he was sipping—for strictly religious purposes. 

He gave us a personal tour of the church, which was once Catholic and the floor was strewn with pine needles. Their sweet smell unreproducible with chemical scent, the rafters draped with bolts of calico cloth, and all around the walls was an army of obscure saints all wearing smoking mirrors on their chest so that a worshiper saw themselves in the saint’s image. Self affirming. I recognized a few of the saints, but saw my face blazing on the pectoral mirror of each one.

The old man set up a small portable altar on a shoe shine box with Coca-Cola, copal and aguardiente. I put the Quetzalcoatl coin on the altar and he was pleased. We had somehow broken through the culture and language barrier. By that action, none of us having any language in common, other than the language of the oppression between us. All of this came down to a toss of the coin. The ringing sound of destiny on the floor. We never know what the wish was, or what it offered up.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

Up with the chickens, freewrite

Rising with the chickens is not exactly my cup of tea, nor is it within my parameters unless the night is long, and the craic is good and and the idea of bed is but a distant thought. Of course, when the moon is full, it tends to confuse the chickens who will cluck all night long, and lay eggs under the moonlight. The roosters are plum-tuckered out by daybreak, having nailed everything in sight for the past 24 hours. They stand on the fence and beat their wings, but can only manager rough croak, more like a toad than a fowl.

I met a Scottish dancer at the Clan Gun banquet who is studying avian science, nothing exotic like herons or snow snow egrets, but poultry science. She said she loves chickens. I like them fried and baked, barbecued, fricasseed, but not live beneath my window at night during a full moon. They nice enough to look at nestled in the trees weather in Key West where there’s a wild wayward chicken for every resident, or the wild jungle fowl that roam the streets on the backside of Kauai’i. With their brilliant feathers  they’re like exotic ornaments. I’m reminded that chickens came from China, so it is said, but it must’ve been a long time ago by way of the silk road because they’re central to so many cultures whether Roman, Celtic, or Mayan.

Once I had to take care of the neighbor’s chickens, we began with 40 chickens. but as the days passed, the flock grew smaller and smaller. The sly fox in the henhouse, such a cliché. It could’ve been a raccoon, I suppose. One moonlit night he polished off half the flock. The neighbors were distressed, having named all 40 of them. And when they returned home, they were only nine chickens left out of 40.

We always wanted to hypnotize the chickens, draw a circle and put their beak in the center, or flip them upside down and stroke their bellies—but catching them was the biggest challenge. We weren’t up to when they were all nearly as big as we were, and were not above chasing us or the dogs. Come daylight, they were fierce as tigers, but in the darkness they were sitting ducks.

Me, I liked slipping my hand beneath their feathers, to feel that promise and weight of eggs, warm to the touch, some eggs were the color of moonlight and others, the color of the sky, and some were speckled as if strewn with shade but the egg timer went off and that’s the end of this freewrite.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

Wandering the backstreets, freewrite

Wandering the unfamiliar backstreets I find the path always goes forward. I find forgotten pieces of myself in the alleyways, on those secret paths etched by children and pets—they go with impunity to places where grownups fear to tread. Like a jewel, memory is triggered by a particular bend in the road, a certain slant of sunlight, kindled by the odor of a season. 

The way the sun struck my face. I analyzed it—hot, humid, like spring, but fuller with a promise of harvest—that rich heat similar to spring, but more laden. Indian Summer coats the skin with humidity. We’re not used to it here on this coast. Florida, maybe. And I am transported back by the dappled light, myriad sun circles spread on the ground like small vanilla wafers.

The old cat wanders by, sniffing each circle as if it were elegible for treasure. He stops, sniffs, with mouth slightly ajar—flehmen. It’s as if he too were transported by memory, having taken the backroad himself. We bask in the late afternoon sun. His dark coat lies flat, full of static electricity, sparks flying under my hand, but the sun outshines the light of his fur during these long drawn out dog days of Summer.

8/27/2004 Writers' Group

Pulses (prose poem) (Why did Google flag this blog entry as a server redirect error again?)

The old one bent over the fire feeding the pulses, one at a time into the cooking pot. End of summer, and the green beans that bolted and grew towards the sun in the hopes that the great beanstalk in the sky would find them a ladder to the heavens, were unceremoniously shucked, their corns tossed into the stew pot for the evening meal. This evening, the next—it didn't matter. It all wound up in the same place eventually, thought the old woman. Her gray hair hung down in thin ropes, like bedraggled feathers. Soon she too would go the way of all things. The fire popped and hissed. She watched the film rise from a crack in the wet wood. Stranded bugs did a frenzied dance on the rotted log she'd used for starter wood. She marveled at their amethyst color, so like the bauble of the Chieftain, who was always yammering on about his own self importance. The hot bugs curled into tight balls, and rolled off right into the coals like berserker warriors leaping into the fray. She was still puzzling over last winter's tale about a dragon, his mother, and the dragonslayer. Something about bears. No, that wasn't it, the warrior was more like a bear or a wolf. The last moon of summer rose over the new mown grain. the ache in her bones spoke of another story trapped in the silence of the earth. Soon the teller of tales would return to the village and pick up his tale where he left off. And, the beans, or their remains would turn up in the pot until they too dissolved into yesterday's stew, harboring the last of the summer sun in their skin. She hoped that this winter he would finish the tale so she could put the story to rest. But she worried that the dragon’s mother might be lying in wait for her during the longest nights.

8/24/04

Berkeley

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134th annual Scottish Highland Games approacheth

As Indian Summer approaches, we'll be roaming in the gloaming in kilts and gossamer gowns at the Caledonian Club's 134th annual Scottish Highland Games in Pleasanton this Labor Day Weekend—should anyone care to join us for any or all festivities.

There will be a royal pre-Game Pub Nights on Thurs., the 2nd (and most likely on Fri., the 3rd as well, I imagine); responsible revelers are staying over & slaying pints at the Pleasanton Holiday Inn. (Less crawling involved.) Main Street Brewery, opposite Pleasanton Hotel, north side of Main St. Around 7, Isla St. Clair, Piedmont Highlanders Pipe Band, dancers, fiddlers NON. Or just follow your ears and dust off your favorite mondegreens. (Forgo the Atkins Diet for the Monty Python greens and uisca diet).

Rumor has it Neil O'Neill, Himself, the Man so Nice They Named Him Twice, will sing a few national anthems to help open the Games on Saturday morning. We need YOU, a rousing, randy chorus for the unofficial Scottish National anthem. The words are pretty simple: you just pull your lips apart and yell "Who?" during the appropriate chorus. "....and stood against him.. WHO? Proud Edward's army..." (Longshanks, that is...) Qua? you might ask? Wallace fought against him. (see pix bellow)

So dust off your candent royal Stewart togas, paint your faces woad blue, warm the cockles of your, erm, your pipes, shoot your television, quaf a few brews or uisge beatha and see some real live action at the Games.

Beware, however, if someone asks you to stand in for the polish caber catcher. To go hunting for the wee lost haggis, you'll need a flashlight, extra batteries.

Oh and by the way, for you newbies, don't let your sporran dangle its participles. The sgian dubh is to be kept at all times in your knee socks. It's not a good idea to goosestep in a kilt either, for, as you know, nothing is worn under them (other than blue ribbons). Everything is in perfectly good working order. Or, it's a Loch Ness monster and it's waiting for you (or ewe, depending upon the Scot's particular, peculiar proclivities). However, though patent leather shoes for the lassies is perfectly acceptable, mirrors are definitely out.

Missive from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal

It looks like we left the Florida Keys in the nick of time. We returned from the Dry Tortugas in the middle of a huge storm. Little did we know that it was a precursor to Hurricane Charley, (it must've been post-Hurricane Bonnie) and it was very impressive. 

We had wild indigo seas for most of the 70 miles to the Dry Tortugas, and strange, calm, green, glassy seas as we returned to Key West. Flying fish, sea turtles, and sea birds were all riled up—even a suicidal amberjack tried to land in my arms as I stood at the bow of the ship like a masthead in order to avoid all the poor wretches retching all over the place inside the cabin.

As for Hurricane Charley, this morning, the eye of the storm passed over Fort Jefferson, situated on an atoll, some 22 acres barely above sea level, with blustery 125 MPH winds, after wreaking havoc last night in Havana where it made landfall.

Fort Jefferson's sixteen million bricks, myriad arches laid by Irish workers over 150 years ago, how will they hold up in the eye of the storm? The tiny drainage channels in Dr. Mudd's cell, the man who tended John Wilkes Booth, useless in this rain. The moat, a frail buffer against rising seas. 

Letter from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal

Kirk y Mari,

Fort Jefferson was mindblowing; 70 miles of sea, the last third of the journey was rough, open seas, with 2-4 foot swells, the sea changing from green to turquoise to indigo to black as a squall hit. I kept thinking of those Cubans fleeing the island in little more than rafts. 

We were going 26 knots (30 MPH) and it took 2.5 hours each way. A raft, at the mercy of the tides & wind would take forever. Hemomgway was strandede here for 17 days, they fashioned a raft to get back to Key West. You could tell when the water got deep (aside from color) when the lobster pot floats disappeared, there were thousands of them, everyone going nuts on opening day of the season.

Anyway, you can also fly here, maybe a saner option, and avoid getting seasick. But you don't get to spend as much time here. Next time I'd skip the dolorous fort tour & head for the water ASAP. We didn't get any quality snorkeling in as the storms hit, and lightning & H2O don't mix. 

We did get some time in when the storm blew over but it wasn't sunny, and so we didn't get to see the colors. We got to see jumping conchs though! Who knew they could jump on their bright orange pseudo foot? And here I thought they were sedentary stationary objects. Not.

You know, I absolutely HATE Duval Street after dark! It's LOUD, with bad musicians blaring from every door. Neil didn't play any gigs after all, Open Mic is on Wed nights, and everything is sewed up tighter than a tick anyway.

We'll see you all sometime this late aft./eve. We want to see Susan first after her class at 3:30 to say goodbye. It's a long drive from Key West to Key Largo.

Besos y abrazos, M&N

• Hurricane Charley, Mile Zero, Highway One (photos)
• Confessions of an iPod Roadie
• Letter from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal
• Missive from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal

Letter to Sigrun in Iceland (Helgar the Horrible)

Icelandic Horses in the rain mic@vikinghorse.freeserve.co.uk
Sigrun,

Alas I have no photos of Helgar the Horrible, who by this time is probably in Icelandic horse heaven! He was a gelding, not a stallion. I suspect that's why he was allowed to come to the US in the first place, no danger of gene pool problems.

He was unusual, some of his behavior was unlike that horses. Closer to pony or donkey behavior. Unlike the donkeys, he was not revengeful & didn't carry a grudge. BUT you never knew quite what to expect from him. He wasn't as wily as the Shetlands. Boy was he sometimes thick-headed: both metaphorically & literally! He once tried to take me right through a water tank. Guess physics wasn't his strong point... We never quite knew what made him tick. He was pretty enigmatic. Sometimes his brakes didn't work right so we never knew what to expect....

He was surefooted...except whenever he had a momentary lapse with physics, that is. He never needed shoeing, his hard hooves were like flint. You could ride him all day long and he never would tire, no matter how steep the mountain, and believe me, we rode hard. We took our assorted ponies, horses, donkeys and an occasional lonesome stunted (dwarf) bull calf named Mr. Smitts out for miles over the steep coastal ridges of Marin County, Northern California, as far as Point Reyes national seashore, and Bolinas (from Forest Knolls)... (we called the bull calf that because he was smitten by our Shetland ponies, and didn't know he was a bovine... which was downright embarrassing in the spring when his hormones began to run... he'd hop up right behind me, and the danger of being impaled in the back by his horns was...but I digress.)

ONE'S SULLEN CRAFT

It was fair great meeting in the Marin (F)art & Garden parking lot even if your are the landlord in the Seagull and Anna is nowhere to be found because you've eaten all the apricots in the tree like thieves in the night and what was left but unripe peaches and you know what kind of bellyaching ther'll be if we'd et those and the bird has flown while we searched for Chekov's cherry trees--and how many times did he rewrite it? A lesson to persevere one's sullen craft.

EGRETS FOR SINEAD

Where the sun is shining, and the sky is that incredible cerulean when you stare straight up at its infinite blueness, and you forget everything only to have an egret enroute to the lake cross your trajectory and you remember it's in the city after all: the distant pounding of surf, the cars on the freeway while I hold vigil for my cousin in hospital, a victim of that same stretch of road. With shaking hands, I made three silk scarves, the gutta forgiving. Roses, egrets, orchids, sky emerge from the void.

MAYDAY: HOLDING VIGIL FOR SINEAD

National Birthdays freewrite

By the dawn’s early light, we are counting syllables, and singing Anacretontic verse, odes to the battle of Baltimore. Bal-ti-mor my granny would say, parsing out the Irish word, the great house of Bel (not Bal), the god of fire. Bel, as in Belgrade, Beograd. No bears here, just the last fires of summer, approaching Lugnasadh and waiting for the fire hill signal on every hill, the signal to alight the Wicker Man’s annual burning—custom pre-dating the rocket’s red glare by several millennia. But everything follows what came before it. In this, nothing is original. They say the bombs bursting in air over the deserts of Baghdad were like an early Fourth of July. We celebrated the war on St. Patrick’s Day, and the Irish community was up in arms, the holiday having been usurped, and sullied —his birthday? Who knows. But it became that after the poet died. What so proudly we hail. Where do we all hail from? My brain is on fire at the twilight’s last gleaming beneath a full moon, a blue moon—to herald in the birth of a nation with all its bigotry and glory, Cassandra-faced and blind, smiling with false grace to the new dawn. Call it Fahrenheit, 911.

7/2/2004 Writers’ Group

Blue Moon, Broken Chad freewrite

Wide-open, anything: blue moons in July, birthdays of good friends, of a nation, out of Iraq, Saddam’s continued arrogance, Bush’s too. Speaking of broken chads, they even have a name for it, Chad. And Bush is Bible beating the south into submission, seeking parishioners to vote. It’s going to be that kind of close. Anything to do with conflict of interest? It took an act of Congress to put God into the Pledge of Allegiance, the dollar bill, and into the national anthem, which was once a drinking tune called Anacreon. The original subject: makes love, not war. Anacreon was a poet of Greece who fled fromCyrus the Great. I envisioned that he fled to Thrace, because he, like Homer was no fighter. He flung down his sword and shield and fled to live in another day. Many other days in the courts of Polycrates. He lived so long that Heradotus, who was forever trying to stick one foot into the same river twice, commented upon it. 85 years! A marvel. But Pliney (the Elder?) says he choked on a grape stone. Grape stone? Cherry stone? Pits? Chads? The chad of the grape, voting for vino, no fish here, just wine, and women and song. But that’s how it was, pleasing the despots and tyrants, give them what they want. Nubile maidens and lads and popped cherries. That’s what Anacreon lived to write another day for, and then Thomas Moore translated him, a song written to Anacreon, time traveling across the centuries to settle in and find a new home. Oh say, can you see? As the rosy-fingered dawn rises to the rocket’s red glare….

7/2/2004 Writers’ Group

Eugene Ruggles 1935 - 2004 (photo)

Gene Ruggles  and Shirley Kaufman in Petaluma

Gene Ruggles was an old friend of my mom's from North Beach. My mom, she got around, sometimes she'd bring her City friends home to meet my grannie and me in Forest Knolls. Gene Ruggles and my grannie got on like a house afire. She would make Irish sodabread and brew a pot of strong tea liberally laced with Irish whiskey, which she kept hidden in the bedroom closet, for Gene.

They'd talk of things Irish and politics until the sun slipped behind Mt Barnabe to bathe in the ocean. Then, when the stars studded the sky, my mother and Gene would stagger down Arroyo Road, half-lit, to Sir Francis Drake Blvd. more than a mile away, and hitch back to the mysterious City. Sometimes I wonder what they talked about as they wandered down that dark country road to civilization.

TYGER, TYGER

TYGER, TYGER

The moon’s tears splashed into the ink dark lake,
a harvest of light rippling the sky
She leans down, offers it up to the stars.
They say Ithuriel’s spears watered heaven with his tears.
They say Blake saw God in an apple tree when he was four.
He spent the rest of his life looking up in the orchards
But God was busy saving Ireland, the land of saints and poets.
And the fey world fled with their celestial constellations in tow
to take root in Blake’s orchard. The apple fell far from the tree
and flourished in Avalon, Anglesey, the Isle of apples.
Amid the oak groves, druids climbed towards the sky
harvesting mistletoe with golden scythes under an equinox moon
But this island was their last stand, their last resting place
Before the Romans drove them underground for good.
They became fossil stars trapped beneath the skin of the earth.

6/04, 9/08

Oh what a beautiful morning freewrite

Sigh, I’d like to think everything‘s going my way, like in the song, but sometimes it all feels so hard, so futile. Last night I slam-dunked the book on women’s depression. I didn’t seem to fit the major categories, but I answered six of the 10 warning signposts, which, according to the author, puts me in the definitely depressed camp. Let’s see: am I in the major league or the minor league? 

With self-help books, the bases are always loading, and it’s always spring training camp at the box office—as we are a nation that legislate happiness for all—indivisible, even. We are so preoccupied with our own petty unhappinesses, it’s a national pastime. There is an entire section dedicated to self-help in the bookstore. Instead of being positive, we are perennially positive that something must be wrong, and we’re on the verge of either going into, or coming out of depression. We are all hanging 10 on the stasis shelf of unhappiness. Personally, I view it as an indulgence of extreme self narcissism. 

And then I thought of how we live in such uncertain times—ever since 9/11, our collective perception has changed, to say that of the middle ages milieu, or should I say, mayhem as 3/4 of Europe died of the plague, and if not the plague, then the crusades polished them off. It’s a wonder that we were able to re-populate and replace ourselves as it were. Obviously, the survivors did not live a monastic life, they were like the newly introduced rabbits, populating themselves to kingdom come. After all, someone had to fill the churches of Christendom, lest the infidels sweep across the steppes in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. 

Today Neil asked one of his students to play Maria in West Side Story, the Juliet scene, and she said oh no, not me I am too cold. She was the niece of the president of Afghanistan, and she said if that scene were to happen in my country, if some Romeo snuck into my courtyard, I would’ve been beheaded. She said so matter-of-factly, that she could no longer react. She felt nothing at all no depression, no reprehension or horror as she views us as the infidel in this country, where happiness and justice are legislated for all, but not from within the war zone.

6/4/2004 Writers’ Group

If. Whatever's burning up your mind, freewrite (Merrill Gardens journal)

And so they asked me, it was my turn, and I had asked them to ponder on "if." A hypothetical question, but also a loaded statement in a rest home. Especially when asked if you had to live your life over. By asking them probing questions, I was asking them to not only to delve into the past, but also to share their souls with each other. 

Many of these folks had lived together for years and still didn't know each other's life stories. I thought, these were the lucky ones, the ones who lived charmed lives, an ambassador, a designer, a concert pianist, and an organizer. What emerged, was that each, thinking the others life was more glamorous than their own lives. Envy. 

One person chose to say her life was perfect. She was content. Another devalued her life experiences. We all gave her a mouthpiece. And another added her story to the collective invisible pile, as if the laundry of the soul was laid out to dry on the breakfast table. 

Then it was my turn. They called in the chips, and here I was, 3 to 4 decade younger than there, feeling valueless and fragile and the Oldsters were telling me that I still had plenty of time left. But I was not convinced. 

Madeline Bedal from Montana, who took just turned 91 wasn't with us. I miss her terribly, as she is my touchstone for the residency. She, who was a kindergarten teacher, who became legally blind, who thought she had nothing of value to contribute, told us extraordinary stories of her pioneer childhood, enthralled us.

I savored those bittersweet precious moments as we made plans for the future, knowing that nothing is really certain, not even the next time that we will meet. And we met fully in the moment and made plans anyway. These senior citizens and I are sharing our life stories. I told them that it felt like I had a roomful of grandparents, and they all smiled and laughed. We reaffirmed each other's existence.

Enroute to the senior center Alene (?) and I pass the scene of an accident, a young man being lifted up on a gurney all cerulean and blue, the colors of the sky. His car looked like in overturned beetle. An SUV had run right over it. I wondered would he make it.

I couldn't help but think of my cousin Sinead emerging from her own darkness, thankfully oblivious to her ordeal, her memory having been wiped clean, her slate blank, so that she couldn't bear witness to the darkness that she had experienced. She fought back. She fought back the darkness, not ready yet. She  began to remember and she raged and raged against the dying of the light. She did did not plant go gentle at that junction of "if."

6/4/2004 Writers' Group

• In the rain without an umbrella, freewrite
• Madeline Stannard Bedal Chapbook
• Della Madeline Stannard Bedal obituary
• EGRETS FOR SINEAD