Bitter Buttons

Bitter buttons and crooked corners.

Scrapbooks slathered in regret and remorse.

Spider cracks along the laugh lines and cockroach coughs.

Lemon drops. Apple pops. Grape gravy. Plum aspic.

Pruning my plum and lowering his raisin.

Sun kissed and moon slapped; whipping up a froth of metallic whiskers.

A band plays corncob harmonicas with odes to muskrats and kittens.

A crown of thorns and a throne of beige snow.

Long johns pulled down market by a Macaw named Fresca.

Fuzzy peaches envying sleek melons thumped with pride.

Foul language and fowl words aped by a choir of parrots.

Some Notch Along the Curled Road

Which remnants of the journey
do we choose to revere and which
will we try to push aside with the
hope that they will decay and dissolve?
Despite our best efforts, the ugliness
of expired passion will never disappear.
It will return, perhaps in the guise of the drunk relative
always arriving early and being told to leave the party.
At best they are recycled, warped
and distorted and carried forward for
our next dash on the treadmill of dysfunction.
Looking into the next pair of eyes,
the broken windshield of regretful journeys
reveals the road ahead that we could drive blindly.
We can do our level best to strangle
this latest epiphany until the next oncoming collision.
Mired and wired by cold realizations
and blanketed regrets, what we've escaped always
welcomes us back to its musty, familiar den.
Many new routes are awaiting that will collect this debris,
deny its provenance, embrace it
and then resent it. Each can ignite new passions
and obscure loss. But the tug is always there of
the hope of your father standing at the edge of
the garage door, a baseball mitt in hand
and a never realized dream he dares you to catch

(Words - Junk Thief 2010; Images - Gregg Biggs May 1977)

I'm Here Tonight

Missing the Bow, thinking about how I should be doing a lot of things in life differently, thinking about the brevity of life, thinking about changes, thinking about and doing not enough yoga, thinking about not thinking so much

Interactive Thursday: Before I Die

I would like to accomplish at least three of these five things, and they are not necessarily my top five things:

* Run a coatimundi ranch.
* Learn to play the bandoneon.
* Gain true fluency in Spanish and French...and Catalan, Japanese, Quichua, Gaelic...
* Spend a year in Greenland.
* Die peacefully at an old age in the bed of my tastefully appointment penthouse in l'Eixample Dreta of Barcelona, Poulenc playing in the background.

What's on your list? (This isn't a tagging blog or a meme post, by the way.)

24 Hours and the Letter R

Vulnerability is not a common theme on this site, but it is sounding like an incessant gong 24 hours after the parting at West Portal and words that should have been iterated in 2001 are aching to be released. In 24 or maybe 12 or less hours this will all subside. At the moment, however, the uneasy bliss of a September morning early in the current century screams like a siren that longs to be chased. The distance between two enormous slices of loss is not protein but an enormous vacuum that leads into an abyss not yet worthy of glimpsing. My hands reach heaven-ward and touch la Belle Epoque, and then my arms cross in lingering disdain. The time for change approaches. It is enormous and inevitable. Sorry for this diversion. I promise to be silly and vapid come Monday morning.

Taking Back V-Day

More often than not, Valentine’s Day has been a non-event for me. Even when I’ve been in a relationship, even a positive relationship, it’s really not been too significant. And there have been plenty where the day has ground in the pathos of my eternal solitude fostered by my hideous appearance, dysfunctional personality, advanced poverty, bad hair and general lack of marketing skills. Other years I disdain it with haughty superiority and resting content that there is no human male on earth worthy of my companionship, brilliant mind and earth-shattering good looks. One year, as a particularly disastrous relationship was in its infancy, we went to see Leaving Las Vegas and then had dinner at Denny’s. Me: Chicken Caesar; him: some fried/barbecued thing that got all over his face and light-colored pants.

This year I am unusually at peace with Valentine’s Day – neither resentful of it nor feeling that it is forever out of my reach.

For some reason, the song below has always made me think about the day – a song that celebrates something very concrete but just out of reach. It shines a light on the the revelation that despite having been boiled in anger and pickled in cynicism, there is still hope and, more importantly, desire.

I first saw this show during its original run in 1970 with my incredibly hip grandmother who during the eight years she was a widow – 1967 to 1975 – took me to Manhattan where we saw almost every major show of those seasons. Company was one that most resonated with me, one of the last shows in which the music and sensibility were firmly grounded in the times. Plenty of others have since attempted to do that with missteps, but this one felt like the final line of a tradition that began after World War I and fizzled in the Nixon Administration. Plenty of shows that followed would have their share of great moments and songs, but they would never be central to the American psyche the way those were.

The 1970 production of Company had the odd casting of Dean Jones – of countless Disney movies of my childhood – in the lead role of the swinging, sometimes half naked in bed, sexually ambiguous bachelor, which was very distracting and disconcerting.



Even odder was seeing the show 36 years later in 2006 with Raúl Esparza (I just love lisping on that “z” in his name) who was born the year of the original production and was a revelation in the lead role of Bobby. Some people felt he overdid this finale. (The couple in front of me whispered, “Any more vibrato and that poor queen is going to explode!) When he literally screams "mock me with praise", the dissenters and devotees definitely split. The song resonates with me the same way it did three and a half decades ago but with nuance and freshness that he brought to it, most importantly reminding me the amount of hope and fear that I harbor and balance in equal measures today. Once upon a time, when my grandmother took me to a string show that ran from Coco to Pippin to Chicago, the sound of musicals beat close with my heart. It has grown more distant, quaint and irrelevant over the past 20 to 25 years. After five years of dealing with illness, dying parents and others and the general dread of loss, I find I am at such a radically different spot than I was in 2003 when this all began. The thought of Being Alive resonates again this year, in which I can once again embrace that heady mix of ambiguity, fear, longing and optimism, that sound makes Valentine’s Day a holiday I want to celebrate.

Things, Want, Promises

I was digitalizing "Turkey Lurkey Time", but ultimately this lyric has been really speaking to me.

Tell me how long must I keep
WANTING THINGS,
Needing things, when I have so much.
There are many men who have much less than me,
Day by day they make their way.
And they find more in life thank I can see.
Tell me,
When will I learn to resist WANTING THINGS,
Touching things that say "do not touch."
People that I meet seem to think I am strong,
They don't see inside of me.
So they don't know I'm weak and often wrong.
Tell me,
Why must I keep
WANTING THINGS,
Needing things that just can't be mine!
(yes, WANTING THINGS, that just can't... be... mine...)

Dark Spot - The Trilogy of Ds

An asteroid swung by today but didn't stop. Doubt, dread and death -- the constant and certain trilogy -- swing through in orbit, usually so distant but so often distracting my focus. Even when the view is perfectly clear, I manage to miss it by trying to see what is behind it.

A friend, not that close and across the bay, died earlier this month, the news not arriving until yesterday, grinding in the reality of the relative distance. He was one of the first people I met when I moved here. The intent to get to know him better was always there but clearly not the will, always stymied midway between here and wherever he is now.

Lately I've been sweeping out remnants of people long departed from my household. They're so long removed that the ghosts put up no fight to leave, yet I manage to waste too much time wrestling with them in a battle they have no interest in winning but still manage to pin me to the floor.

There is always a dark spot, a straying asteroid to leave a threat or a temporary blemish that will fade and leave the slightest scar, visible only in the most intense light under the gaze of a judgmental star. It seems only my own gaze passes such judgment these days, using eyeglasses that are not even mine.

Now they say the asteroid that hit Siberia a century ago wasn't nearly as large as they once believed, but it proves that even the smallest object can cause great damage. Today's dark spots, large and small, are already spinning away. So why do I dread even the smallest pebble in the darkness, knowing its capacity to pierce and destroy? Having wrestled ghosts and swept them away lately, I can, amazingly, see the horizon that I longed for before they even arrived. None of those brilliant hues have faded, and they feels closer, no pebbles in view for the moment.

Eve of the Muertos

This week, the weather in San Francisco is -- in a word -- perfect. The temperatures have been hovering around a glorious 55 Fahrenheit, what I consider to be just about the most ideal temperature imaginable. The skies have been nicely overcast until late afternoon when there is an hour or so of sun -- about as much as I want in any given day -- and then it clouds over again. There is a hit of rain in th distance, but it has not come with the exception of a few sprinkles. The only thing that makes me regret that I will soon be crossing the Pyrenees towards the Mediterranean (my heart flutters just putting those two geographic wonders in a sentence with the first person singular) is that I will miss the Day of the Dead celebration a couple of blocks form my house, definitely my favorite SF celebration that puts such pointless nonsense as "Pride" and Folsom Street Fair to shame.

Fortunately, the weather there will be almost the same as it will be here.

Nearly Smashed Pumpkins

California's faux autumn hues seem charged by smoke from 500 south. We walk with near guilt, our ground having a slight layer of moisture, our canyons free from flames for the moment. Anticipation pumps me just between late afternoon and dusk, longing for something that mid-autumn California sunsets manage to dangle to summon up something that so cleverly intertwines with a mix of motivation and fear. I can't help but wonder what all this will look like barely two weeks from now as I return to certain routines yet eager to erase them and strive for something completely different. It's out there I am sure, sometimes almost visible in my own reflection in the windshield of an ancient Volvo that I want to drive me away.

Catalonia Countdown

Seven days, seven hours to go.

Written on the Walls and the Road

How many of my days forever lost sitting in muddled dread... ...that a monster will arrive in my mailbox, yet it never came.
How easily I fell into such a funk.
I let time, weather and neglect take their toll before light returned and I left these furnished rooms to stroll out the door.
I look at faces on the street, but they all seem to be the same.
Oblivious to a growing hunger that even I can not satiate.
The rhythm is there, but sealed and shrink wrapped.
Yet it beckons, piercing like a diamond needle in the ebony vinyl night.
"Rats," I mutter, muffling my rodent-infested rage that simply scurries, nibbling away at scraps as night approaches.
My thoughts wander back to sticky, sweet fields of corn...
...that empire I left behind so many decades ago.
Do I even remember that name?
And can I be transported back to such grace by the most random smile from a stranger on the street?
We can save the daylight a few weeks more until November arrives, but I know what happens as those sparkles command the sky at twilight.

Befuddled diamonds, or are they just glistening glass to cut at our tires?
I try to ground myself in the aqua marine shapes ahead... ...convinced that it is for me they reach.

(Inspired, in part, by the great archives of Reya Mellicker's Gold Poppy)

Timon of Tuba City

If my presence here next week is less than usual, it's partly because I'll be at the locale above. Perhaps I should take some heirloom tomatoes for the journey. Do they count as part of the carry on gels and liquids.? I can't remember.

For those who don't remember my last journey through this state, barely more than two months ago, it is a place that reminds me of my favorite character chronicled by Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, a once glorious party giver who went on to become a sever misanthrope before going mad in the desert. A pivotal scene in the play is when the once generous host throws a water banquet for his fair weathered friends who are expecting the usual display of opulence he can no longer afford. The play has meant different things at different moments in my life. I keep coming back to it, expecting to find meaning that may never have been there. Typically simultaneously discredited and revered as Shakespeare's most challenging, weired, incomplete, and profound work, I find that I cannot push it away. At once fearful of it yet also intrigued, like German tourists walking in fascination into Death Valley with fascination or like the characters in Eric Von Stroheim's Greed, staggering in the heat with bags of bounty but not a drop of water to drink.

Feeling Nina Then and Now

Many days I curse myself and YouTube for the unholy alliance and waste of time the two of us have squandered away more often than I’d wish to reveal. Then I come across something like this post that was up for a few weeks about a year ago and then not available again until recently.

One of the things I feel blessed for in this life is having seen Nina Simone live three different times. Twice I felt cheated for her overpriced, obscenely short, indifferent performance. Exasperated, I asked myself: How could I have worshiped this woman who just put on the most trite performance I've ever seen? Then once it was a near religious experience. In many ways the same show, but something was just slightly different. Was she mad at the audience, America, life, herself, racism, the lack of progress in social change, the cruel joke of life, the fact that it was so short?

In this clip, she takes a song that many have called one of the worst pop tunes ever written, makes a stab at it, trashes it, deconstructs it, reconstructs it, and then rises with phoenix-like bombast to make you uncertain of the trip you’ve been on and where she is taking you is hard to describe. How she manages to hammer out so much from something so slight over the course of ten and a half minutes restores my faith in her and life. About five minutes into the clip, her vocal reaches its apex, when you go from laughing at the lyric to thinking, just for a second, that its truth and simplicity are so brilliant that no one to date had the insight she has to dive in and bring out the writer’s truth. In the few seconds there where the camera zooms in, she lets out the words "...feelings like I never had you..." you are experiencing a performance that is nearly equal to the summary of the entire career of Bette Davis or Meryl Streep. So much condensed, real emotion transported onto a shaky little lyric, reminding us that the words really don't matter as much as what you feel when you sense them through such an artist. Then she launches into a Keith Jarrett-worthy passage of keyboard invention before ending our journey, not quite sure where we’ve been but certain we’ll never be quite the same again.

Uh, I guess you might guess that I've forgiven Nina for those two bad concerts I saw. Were they really bad after all?

Special thanks to Lauren of Mindful Things whose own posts of other Nina tunes inspired me to search this clip out again and making me grateful in a deeper way to be alive and having been in the same room with Nina when she walked this earth.

UPDATE: Kusala's comment questioning whether this was really from the DVD 0f her 1976 Montreux concert or from the film the film Supreme Sorceress motivated me to seek out the two DVDs. I found the former, from which this clip actually originates, but not the latter which I'd also love to find. Having it on the bigger screen and superior sound sytem is a vast improvement but also saddens me that I'll never see Nina live again. Yet, I find myself singing out to the void and hoping that she know that I have "fellings like I never lost you..." Oh, I can't even say the rest since she makes me feel it for real in my heart.

Affirming Contradictions

In your journal list your contradictions. Don't try to justify or correct them just now, simply list them. ..

Ew, I always hate this exercise. I already know most of them.

Perfectionist -- Pack rat
Privacy obsessed hermit -- fame and attention whore
Perfectionist -- typo slinger, speed writing freak
Vegan -- sushi addict (and not just avocado rolls)
Perfectionist -- sloth
Pacifist -- foul mouthed, road rager screaming death threats behind the wheel
Buddhist -- Christmas schlock addict

Okay, the entire perfectionist thing is really getting at me this month as I am not travelling until after Labor Day and have been embroiled in both work and personal "time to get the systems in order" mode. July was strategic planning month at work and it sort of spilled over into real life, as in trying to answer the "what's it all about" question. I'd had that question answered once after a massage in Bali and on a mountain in Nepal, and it was that it was about being in that moment.

Now August is sort of the "tactile planning" month, mapping out specific dates all that I plan to accomplish between now and June 30 (work fiscal year end, and usually a personal turning point). So the perfectionist and slob are sort of crashing against each other right now since it requires having piles of projects and things to be sorted all over the JunkPlex. As single person abodes in San Francisco go, the JunkPlex is pretty spacious, but any pile of "to do" stuff is always crazy making for me. And it seems that the place is usually at its tidiest once I've packed my bags, ready to head out the door for a long trip. If I burn up on a plane crashing into the Rockies, the people walking into my place would be deluded into believing I led a decidedly orderly, perfectly organized life. Well, that's what I'm always moving towards, but the wheels required to turn it to that point move so slowly.

[The photo does not relate precisely to the post, but we'll say it's JunkThief about to be crushed by the churning wheels of perfection. Actually it's part of his latest experiment of channeling some of the works of Cindy Sherman. Needless to say, he's very dissatisfied with it since it's far from perfection, and he may abandon the whole project. Bleh, bleh, bleh.]

Seeking the Familiar at the Meeting Point

When I was in grade school, a favorite ritual to put myself to sleep was to circle my bed with my menagerie of stuffed animals, each with very specific, long names and assigned personalities, and I would pretend that we were camped in some remote part of the wilderness. I conjured up the howls and shrill cries of bears, coyotes and wolves surrounding us, taking comfort in our safe mobile cabin as we savored our protected corner of a hostile universe.

Since I spend a third to half of each year on traveling, I often conjure up that distant memory and am still compelled to find that tiny corner of safety and comfort amid the transient, chaotic waters, skies and horizons that I navigate any given week. In the midst of a crowd of annoying fellow travelers – such as the enormous, sweating man in the middle seat on the SFO-Denver flight on Monday – I close my eyes, take intentional deep breaths and go back to that place, the proverbial home at the end of the world to borrow from Michael Cunningham.

In my many travels, the recurring revelation or, more appropriately, reminder is how little I need in life I need to feel grounded. I feel greater affinity with the mobile house plant than the grounded sequoia since I too can easily take my roots to whatever destination my currents plants me. It has been years since anyplace has felt glaringly foreign, except for the supposedly familiar landscape of my native Midwest. The people I grew up with seem so far removed from any of my current realities, and the local landscape itself bears little resemblance to what is lodged in my memory. It felt as alien when I was growing up there as it does now – such as this and next week as I am stuck here for a conference. The sprawling development, oppressive mixture of unrelenting hot days and chilly over air conditioned venues leave me dizzy in this nature denying environment. I despise the heat and when indoors feel like a fading head of iceberg lettuce left a week to long in the display case at an Albertstons.

Gong through the long process of losing my parents and now dismantling their estate makes these trips even odder. Since putting the house on the market and fairly much emptying the place through an estate sale, their place seems increasingly odd and alien. All that is left that suggest any semblance of habitation is the bed my sister has left for me to stay over the weekend. She even took the care to pull out a few familiar, welcoming items such as the above featured butterfly quilt that likely covered me as a tot conjuring up those mobile home fantasies.

Home has certainly ceased to be a place that involves welcoming parents, even if I hold onto it in my memories. I’ve made relative peace with return to a house of my own where all that greets me besides the cat are stacks of mail, a litter box begging to be emptied and furniture begging to be dusted or brushed free of fur. When I have had a mate, a common sign that things are nearing their end are how I am greeted upon return from a journey. There are few things as humbling as knowing that your significant other is somewhere in the city to which you are returning while you take the shuttle to the offsite parking or public transit, making the final steps to the front door as the only sound heralding your return is the lonely whirl of the wheels of your suitcase echoing into the late night air. The only thing worse than returning to a musty, dusty smelling house is one where every system of order you left behind seems to be awry as you look for evidence of your presence being violated during your journey. My loneliest moments have not come during passages of solitude, but during those dysfunctional days of a relationship when a step through the door spotlighted every reason it was time to fly solo once more in my own nest.

Having made that journey so many times, I am lately finding myself wanting more than the overflowing litter box and stacks of ValuPack coupons and pre-approved credit card offers welcoming my return. The prospects of being home for an extended period of time are slim in the years ahead, but I find myself longing increasingly for the face that lights up as I near the meeting point at the far end of the United terminal.

¿Y nada más?

Although I don't have plans to suddenly make this site about that, over the weekend I ended a three to four week (I actually wasn't keeping count) dating cycle. I couldn't even say that it fizzled, let alone blew up or crashed. It was just mutually clear that it had gone as far as it was going to go.

Were we to run into each other on the street tomorrow or two years from now, I suspect it would be civil. I would not even rule out resuming where we left off if the opportunity to do so. But I am neither longing nor fearing doing that. Is that a sign that there was nothing there to begin with? Perhaps. Does it mean I'm ready to move on to the next person? Yes. Does it mean I've been dating more recently than in a long time? Yes. Does it mean I'm going to go into details on this site? No.

Monday I arrived for what will be a week and a half long strategic planning conference. Gasp! That's a long time to feel you're held hostage in the middle of nowhere I'm sure I won't be dating anyone here since there is nobody here but coworkers. I'm definitely not interested in that.

Something in the Air, But What Is It?

JunkThief departs TiBeCa to visit
ghosts in his old Soho neighborhood.

Barely 24 hours into this visit to Manhattan and not much more than that to go, and something simultaneously familiar and totally new is tugging at me. It’s one of the strongest feelings I’ve had in a good decade. The abbreviated lunch with my ex W_____ didn’t even trigger it, and I’m not fully sure what did or what it is.

Every time I come here, my heart and head both ask what insanity keeps me in California with its bland niceness and nothing to complain about and nothing to rave about. (A stifling subway ride back to Midtown did remind me of some of the things that I do prefer about California.) When I lived here, California was always intriguing but never seductive. More than a decade there it is familiar but not the place that fuels my dreams.

All of this sounds like I may be feeling the familiar pressure to move back here, and there are now few obstacles to keep me from doing so. But is it the right choice? Compared to Buenos Aires? Or Geneva? Or Chicago? Or…or…or…

It may be none of those things. All I know is that it’s been hitting me like a ton of bricks with great urgency, demanding to be sorted out and acted upon with passion. I have hints of what it may be about, but I also feel it is still a great mystery. In short, something that is almost there but threatening to slip away from my grasp. I’ve survived well on instinct and impulses much of my life but have lately prided myself on my sense of providence and planning. All of these things seem ready to collide.

Back in the comfort of home, I am not sure how this will sort out. But I feel the pounding drumbeat of change that I’ve ignored for too long, and it won’t rest silent this time.

World War III

One of the odd comforts of working with my sister to settle the material aspects of our parents’ estate is coming across unexpected treasures. Yesterday she discovered a rubber squeeze toy bulldog that was a present on my first birthday and I have not seen it in 30 years. Last fall we came across a stash of letters written during my parents courtship. We had found similar letters of my father’s parents’ protracted courtship from 1909 to 1910 three decades ago.

It was especially disconcerting to read language I never heard my father use around me when my mother was alive but began using to describe her after she died in 2004 and he was alone for two and a half years, dealing with Alzheimer’s.

Walking along Valencia and seeing Toni Morrison’s Beloved in a book stall, these words he wrote to my mother when she was in New York and he in Dallas came back in a flash as dusk arrived.

December 29, 1947

My dearest Miss H_____________

Well, here it is 6:15 p.m. and there is no one else in this lonely office but me and the porter, sweeping and dusting in the distance. I hope you do not mind that I am working on my typing skills by writing you. This certainly is not something I would ask the girls in the secretarial pool to type out. I must say it feels so lonely down here, cold but not as brittle as I am sure it is up there. I can’t help but think of both of us, my beloved, in these big cities alone and waiting to be together. I count the days.

I do not know what to make of that silly family of mine. I write and call, but it seems they do not have the time for me. Oh, you don’t know what it means to get your letters. They are a light in this winter.

Last night Larry and I went to see the new movie “The Bishop’s Wife.” I thought it was quite good, with very good writing and acting. I know you and that you have probably already seen it and can write me a long treatise on the mistakes that I did not see in it, but I will look forward to hearing what you have to say.

There is something I have wanted to write in my past few letters but have struggled with how to state it. I know that you hear all the talk that there will be another world war, and this one may be even bigger than the one we thought would end them all. It seems that this time I would have no choice but to serve. That is something we cannot ignore, and I want you to know that if that happens I would not expect you to have to wait for me to return. The covenant we have made still means everything to me, and I want you to know that it is only you that I want, but I do not want to think of you ever having to be the widow. We will have to wait and see what happens, and I hope that I never have to serve. I just want you to know that you are my beloved, and that my life has been blessed if it was only what we have shared the past 12 months.

That war never came, they married ten months later. My mother spoke of them doing a lot of ballroom dancing during this period, something that, like the language in this letter, I never witnessed them sharing together in my life time. While this letter came up in my mind as the sun was setting and objects were vague in the distance, I was sure that I could see them waltzing in a world that would never witness another global war. And then the image faded into darkness.