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August 29, 2001
The Angeleno Flower Cycle, Coda: A Vigorous Game Of "Why God Why?" In The Alta California Savannah
written last night
I have exactly twelve hours left to be at this antipodes of the country, this blissfully ignored nether end of America, the toejam between Hollywood and Vegas... this place where people who just want a decent life without winter are clogging the valleys until the overflow spills into the unzoned tracts of the foothills and chaparral... I am here, with the window open and the desert cool raising hairs on my arms, listening to the same music -- the Gurdas Mann, the latin ska, the Byrne protégés, Mongo Santamaria and Aram Khachaturian and other classics -- and the music sounds better at this remove from the nocturnal heat of New York.
Is that right? Can weather really make music better? I was up in Eaton Canyon today with an old high school friend, and I realized I was busier looking around and seeing things than I remembered being when I was younger. I could be misremembering. I blame it on computers, all this visual focus. I forgot to smell and climb things, and stick my toes in the cold water. (It's not true, though, that I was all about the other senses when I was younger, that's a misremembrance. I was all about looking out over the Valley from Henninger Flats at night and fondly thinking it was my own jewel box, try as I would to exchange it for the daytime jewels of New England in autumn.) Sometimes I think I would move back to Pasadena just for the smell of bay leaves and sage at night, and for the smell of the sea only an hour away. Can a smell alone make a place worth living in? Heaven knows the smell of urine and cab soot makes me want to run away from New York some days.
My father wants me to come back to the family business. My friends show off their small but pleasant apartments in Silverlake, and smile shyly. I think I am making a life in New York, but am I enjoying myself? Sometimes I catch myself coming off the subway with my shoulders up around my ears from stress. Is being able to walk to a canyon enough to make life satisfying? Am I only content here because I can take a free ride on my parents' and grandparents' affluence? What the hell am I supposed to be doing with myself?
* * *
I was thrilled to arrive at the airport and find Sylvie, Robert, and Chris there in assorted hats, carrying a sign that read "GEORGE" and looking blank when I approached them; I had fun watching Sylvie mug and dance as I stuck my headphones in her ears and introduced her to new music; but the best memory of this entire trip, hands down, was watching the whole family unwittingly ladle spoonfuls of flavored body paint, which Sylvie had bought for use with her boyfriend, onto their sundaes.
Posted by me at 2:10 AM | Comments (1)
August 28, 2001
Re: Not To Mention The Rose Of Jericho
See, we need to get you familiar with the corporeal being of bougainvillea. I don't know, maybe you've encountered it as a houseplant -- that's not what bougainvillea is all about. Bougainvillea, left to its own devices, is a force to be wrangled with. It's the kudzu of the Southwest. It has thorny vines which choke out anything in the way, making a riotous cascade down any surface they've climbed.
The blossoms, left to their own genetic entropy, are pitch-perfect fuschia, while the tamer varieties may be orange or purple. For all the ferocity of the vines, the flowers are thin as paper and delicately veined, like a cat's ears. Each blossom has three petals. Dry one, and it will turn to powder between your fingers.
I've always liked the contradiction of bougainvillea, much as I like the way an opal's flaws make it beautiful. The flower was a totem of much of my early poetry.
Posted by me at 2:16 AM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2001
Remodelling
As you can see, I'm redoing the DSWJ at the moment. Believe me, it's not going to look like this for long. The remodel is intended to make a distinction between the mindless link propagation and shorter observations I sometimes do -- those will now go in a separate column from the main stuff, either on the left or elsewhere. The affinity links may also move. The frames may (blessedly) disappear at some point in favor of something less ugly. And yes, I'm going to do something about stylesheets. Soon. I've also asked Ariel to do me a logo for the DSWJ. All this and more coming soon.
Posted by me at 6:06 PM | Comments (1)
Anarcho-Hibiscus
Sylvie and I went out on a cool feminist walk and we talked about how we hate 99% of the women in this country and we talked about models for marriage and we talked about c0ck and we talked about what to do with ourselves, in the grand scheme of things, and she was talking about how she decided not to be an architect because she didn't want to be one of these people who makes steel cable and fiberglass things which fall over but look great doing it, and I laughed and a couple of minutes later I couldn't remember the word Architecture so I said Archaeology, whatever you call it, Anarchy
and she reminded me that earlier we had been looking at the yellow hibiscus by the pool and I said I want an hibiscus to put behind my ear because I was high on being home and high on the smell of bay trees and high up in the foothills anyway and Sylvie said What is Anhibiscus anyway? and we figured if Anhydrous is something resistant to water, Anhibiscus must be a garden resistant to hibiscus
maybe it is full of whiteflies
Posted by me at 2:20 AM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2001
Failed Celebrity Encounters #8
James waits until after "Lisa Picard is 'Famous'" to tell me that in the ticket line, he was standing behind Wallace Shawn.
Wallace Shawn! I say. Do you know who his father was?! and am instantly smitten with migraine-force deja vu from the movie.
I have nothing to say to Wallace Shawn.
What surprised me more than anything else, James says, is that the voice is real.
Posted by me at 2:58 PM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2001
Typing and Light Housework
I'm considering finding myself a job in an afterschool program again this school year. I'm finding I'm no longer motivated by the desire to actually impart information to kids; I've lost all my romantic notions about that. That process is so mitigated by the nature of your employer, and the required curricula, and the families of the children I work with, and ultimately my own personality and that of the children that I simply can't simplify it enough to convince myself I am doing nothing but good when I do it.
Still, it's the only part-time work I can think of which is constrained enough in its schedule and not utterly demeaning. I called my friend who has some connections in other programs. Here's what the first thing on my mind was while I was doing that: I need to keep learning how to handle kids. And the thought that followed that was, Because I'll have to eventually anyway.
I don't often fall into this trap. I don't wear a lot of makeup, I play with computers, I sit with my legs apart; I think I've got a pretty good, practical grasp of queer theory. But occasionally I still fall into a certain hopelessness and tell myself that no matter how much I want to devote myself to my career, I will still end up with a husband who will not do his share of the child care, probably not out of any sense of proper roles but simply because of how his own family worked. He may end up drawing the line at a certain workload simply because he feels he's entitled to a certain amount of time for himself, and I'll end up shouldering the rest. Maybe it's because I grew up with a divorced mother who was the daughter of a single mother, but I just have this feeling I'm not going to be satisfied with how anyone else wants to raise my child. Despite any amount of negotiation with my partner, maybe I will want to do it my way.
And then other times I go back to thinking I'm not going to have children at all. The more recent me is listening to the people in my peer group who say it's immoral to bring a child into this fscked-up world, that there's too many out there already. The me from earlier stages of my life says, Babies are gross, and what's the point. I want to raise a really good frisbee dog instead. And looking over the last year, I think, god, there's so much to mess up, and I'm not a stable enough person to do it right.
Posted by me at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2001
Misuses of Data #305,756
Drinking wine makes you smarter!
Posted by me at 9:59 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2001
Why There Are Looney Tunes Branded Minivans
While I was teaching an elective on media monopoly at the workshop this summer, the discussion frequently turned to "synergy," or the "beneficial" mutual ownership of diverse products by large corporations. (Before companies were so keen to put a positive spin on this phenomenon, it was known as "horizontal monopoly.") A great example of synergy is Seagram's ownership of not only booze and soft drink properties, but also record labels and amusement parks: the synergy here is you have your band play at your amusement park at events sponsored by your brand of booze while your sodas are being served, or whatever.
Another example of synergy which I'd always thought completely nonsensical is the Chevy Ventures Warner Brothers Edition Minivan. This was a minivan sold in 1999. It was heralded by the media as the cutest thing since babies 'n' kittens, and by Warner Brothers itself as the beginning of a glorious new partnership with General Motors. The van was plastered with pictures of the Looney Tunes characters, and featured a VCR in the backseat adorned with a picture of Bugs Bunny.
This looked like Time Warner was stretching it: How much extra profit could you reasonably expect to make by tying your cartoon to the success of a minivan? Aside from the fact, of course, that you'd earn your automotive partner the undying consumer loyalty of the American Ghetto, where childhood is considered meaningless without your characters beaming their goo-goo-eyed approval from every available surface of the cradle, the kitchen, and the body.
Well, something we should have seen coming is that Time Warner was extending the offer of featuring Chevy products in their movies. But good old Papa Levin -- I call him that because the man owns rights to some of my former articles, many of my favorite bands, and now, with AIM, the main means of communication I have with my friends -- is one shrewd businessman, and I found the ultimate answer to this confusing piece of synergy in one of Danny Schechter's columns, "Long Live Chairman Levin!", at MediaChannel: he says the "key" for Time Warner's future success "is to 'take advantage of demand, which they will be doing with new DVD technologies and what's called a "digital dashboard"' for cars." (itals mine.)
I tell you, they're sneaky fscking b^stards. You didn't know there were ulterior motives when they stuck Tweety Bird on your floor mats, did you? You didn't know yet that you were going to have -- no, lie, cheat, and steal for -- a fully integrated multimedia system in your car! Well, they did, and now before anyone else has had a chance to earn a decent living off making this new product, they own it. So much for free enterprise.
Posted by me at 4:41 PM | Comments (0)
Termite Television
Browsing the Paper Tiger Television (they're an activist video collective) link list, I found the Termite Television Collective's Life Story project, in which people have five minutes to tell their life story to the videographer. Onward and upward with alternative TV!
Posted by me at 3:58 PM | Comments (0)
August 8, 2001
It Also Said, "The Other White Meat"
I’m home, waiting for packages to be delivered. The blast of a truck horn sounds down in the street, so thinking there’s an off chance it might be the mail dude, I head downstairs.
What there is is a funeral, a huge funeral, at the Jewish parlor across the way. Men everywhere in yarmulkes. People double-parked all along the street. And a trucker, whose truck is emblazoned with the words “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Pork Loin,” is laying on his horn because he can't get through.
“Have some respect!” yells an older guy across the street. I wonder if the advertisement is on his side of the truck too.
Posted by me at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
August 6, 2001
Failed Celebrity Encounters #7
Just as the poodle I'm walking squats to take a dump...
along comes John Goodman, heading up Columbus with someone I didn't recognize.
I have things planned that I would say to Joel Hodgson, or Denise Crosby, or Ben Stein (I think I'd spit in his face), or Steve Martin (I'd ask him to dance), or Bjork (I'd ask her to dance too -- come to think of it, there's a lot of celebrities I would ask to dance if I happened to see them around). But I had absolutely nothing planned to say to John Goodman. It might be that I have nothing to say. Why does it feel so strange to come to this realization?
He's big, though.
Posted by me at 8:48 PM | Comments (0)
Testimony of the Hibakusha
Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Yahoo provided links to testimony from survivors.
I have been deeply concerned with atomic warfare ever since I was very little. I have always had very vivid and surreal nightmares about atom bombs being dropped on my house or neighborhood. Sometimes I don't remember what they're about, but the hyperreality of color in them and the lingering sense of sadness they leave leaves me with no doubt as to their subject. Even though I know how many terrible things can be done to people, I still think this is the worst. I can't really justify why. When I consider which causes I would abandon absolutely everything in my life to struggle for, if there was an instant need, this is the only one I can think of.
Posted by me at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)
Letter: To Know Is Not Enough, We Must Dance
Maybe things are exactly as they do not seem: Out with the dog on his last walk of the evening, just before one a.m. As I approach the bare face of the school, a hulking figure shambles into the sidewalk in front of me. He's all hunched, and I'm a little concerned for my safety... then I steel myself, and then I'm more concerned that he just not make comments at me or leer... and as I jockey around the sidewalk, trying to maintain a distance and keep the dog from lurching into him, he mumbles something incoherent, which in a moment becomes clear: Take care of yourself. Get home safe.
I went out to Central Park today and talked with S.K. Thoth (I am not going to link to him yet, I'm feeling a little posessive in this pre-pitch period). I'm ashamed. From the other end of the tunnel, seen through a swirl of Lindy Hoppers, yeah, he had looked like a yodelling weirdo with a fiddle and leg bells, and I don't think any of us enjoyed giving our lungs a workout in a rogue cloud of incense. And yes, while I'm giggling behind the duck blind of my computer, this guy who sings about an imaginary continent in a made-up language makes an easy target. When am I one to ostracize, though?
I didn't really have to ask many questions. A solid-built weekending Latino with a couple of kids squirreling around his knees was asking him plenty. First, what was his performance about? Something about the Hero's Journey, a search for self. Thoth explained, as he would again later, that the fantasy world he writes about is a metaphor for his own life. I got the impression he's not as immersed in his fantasy world as the website implies.
"I call this a school," Thoth said. "I'm learning much." Well, what had he learned today? "It was a musical thing, this time." Since he has long since abandoned formal schooling on the violin, and never had any in voice, it's up to him to make progress. "There's nobody to ask, how do you do this next?"
I don't brook any of this bullshit about cleansing spaces with sage smoke, or feng shui, or ancestors speaking to you directly. I grew up with a father who took us to Caltech parties thrown for Mars flybys and put a plaque on the door telling proselytizers and salesmen we were happy the way we were, thanks, we'd seek them out if that changed. I trust very few things which haven't been affirmed by scientific inquiry -- love, for example. Yet here was this gold-loincloth-clad guy I'd taken for a lunatic, who had my trust by the end of an afternoon because he left formal learning behind.
One thing I should tell you about myself: yes, I love my high school and everything it gave me, love good teachers and academic communities, knowing which ideas build upon older ideas and how; I'm proud of how I did, still puff up over my AP and SAT scores and the A given to me by a gruff old English teacher who never gave 'em out to anyone. But I have great respect for autodidactry. I went to Hampshire because I thought I might miss something important if I didn't try to stake my life on it. In my first year there I invested a lot of my energy and self-worth in this idea, Non Satis Scire. (That's our motto.) The poem the line comes from says, "To know is not enough/ we must do." The president of the college likes to jaw on about questioning being the necessary compliment to knowing. Passion, compassion, moral rectitude, or rejecting everything completely out of hand based on paranoia or utopianism are other possibilities suggested in the actions of Hampshire's student body.
I still don't know what makes enough. Creation maybe. Juxtaposing completely unrelated ideas and seeing what happens. I just wanted you to know that love of autodidactry and loyalty to the academic establishment are having an ongoing fistfight in my head. (Maybe I've already made this clear to you. I don't know why I feel like I need to defend myself to you. aside from the obvious, I guess.)
Watching Thoth I can see what he has taught himself. His body knows how to draw a single long note out of a violin while spinning in a circle. Not something that comes without practice. His feet know, like a tap dancer's, that when you strike your heel or toe or whole foot against the ground, they make different sounds. I could see him experimenting with the bellied-out drain cover, trying out the effects of an unintended crinkle noise its corner made as he stomped on it.
And no, this is not going to make him a lion of Wall Street -- not something you care for anyway, nor do I -- or untangle the mystery of the Big Bang. I'll tell you this much: he knows when he's about to fall over, and can stop himself. The man has turned his mental powers towards knowing how much space his voice can fill, how many steps he has to take to get to the other side of a room. I watched him and listened to him and wondered if maybe we're wrong, maybe we're not supposed to be solving all these problems that go on outside ourselves. Maybe we're just supposed to figure out exactly what these bodies which our brains are stuffed into can do.
Posted by me at 2:44 AM | Comments (1)
August 1, 2001
Forum: The Big Questions -- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
The workshop counselors from the 2001 sessions spent two nights together in a retreat in the Virginia "mountains" after everything had wound down. On our last night together, after the dishes had been cleared, our director spurred us into a discussion along the theme of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which many of us had read during the course of the workshop. It got really interesting, so I took notes, which follow. They're really, really sketchy notes. I've oversimplified drastically: for instance, I wrote down at one point that one counselor said "Arranged marriages work," when he'd actually gone on for a few minutes about how he watched a number of relatives in India work through successful arranged marriages while he watched his own parents' marriage fall apart. I do wish I'd had a tape recorder. Despite the perfunctory and re-creative nature of my notes (imagine a little subtitle blinking "DRAMATIZATION" at the bottom of the screen) I hope I managed to capture some of the beautiful metaphors and turns of phrase this roomful of writers was generating on this topic. I think this'll be semi-not-for-attribution -- I'll use initials.
Nobody else rose to the director's bait right away, so I struck out with my usual position -- half devil's-advocate and half jadedness -- that love is just our civilized excuse for hormones. That drew the usual fire. I said it was a social construct. The head counselor, JJ, disagreed.
JJ: Gus is making it political by saying it's a construct. I think it can be seen through the lens of queer theory: there's a lot of societal expectations.
Me: Yeah, I think it's fluid, like gender, too.
JJ: We expand on and complicate this idea of love as we grow older.
Director: Unless we describe love well, it's this huge abstraction. I think we need to be specific.
JM: Everyone has their patterns. Like, I keep falling for girls who I think are flirting with me, but then I find out they don't really mean it.
LT: Yeah, I have my patterns too. Sometimes it's like, Next victim! I think it's OK to love if it's not good for you. I don't think love is always a good thing.
JJ: I have a high-drama pattern, but I've been experimenting lately with pacifism in a relationship. Equality. It's a cultural thing, wanting love to be violent.
JM: It's like what we were saying about art earlier. Can you do it when you're happy? I think people are drawn to negative portrayals of love.
LL: I know this poem about a woman who's married, but she stays up in her room dancing with herself while her husband is downstairs watching sports. He comes up and sees her, and he says, Poor baby. Then it flashes forward to them in bed that night. He rolls over and hugs her, and says Poor baby again. And she says that's not what she expected, but it's enough. I think it's important to love yourself.
At this point there's a general awareness that our youngest counselor, CR, hasn't said anything, so we prompt him to speak.
CR: I have no place to talk, I have no experience.
JJ: Didn't you say that you feel like a student of love, that it's something you learn from?
JM: I don't think I've ever been in love.
LT: Who has? (Everyone but the boys raise their hands.)
JJ: Who's been haunted by past loves? (Most of us raise our hands, even the boys.)
Dir: The Greeks made distinctions between three kinds of love -- Eros (erotic), Philia (brotherly), and Agape (divine or transcendent). Useful distinctions.
The term "soulmate" is brought up.
LT: My aunt thinks she divorced her soulmate. She's remarried and raising a family with someone else. She still talks to her soulmate, she has his art up in her home but it wasn't something she could build on or do anything with.
Me: I think the term soulmate is dangerous. I have this sociologist friend who says we expect all these ridiculous things of our partners -- that they will financially provide for us, agree to raise children in the same ways, be our perfect lovers, the people we're most comfortable living with.
SS: We get all these messages from the media.
JJ: Love is romanticized so much in our society: something you'd die for.
LL: A lot of it has to do with timing -- when you get taken out of the oven.
JJ: (smiling) Burnt.
RB: (also smiling) Crispy. A ripeness for certain things is necessary.
CR: Do you think people deny love that might be good for them?
(This comment makes me really uncomfortable, and so I go out to the back porch where the smokers are for a few minutes. When I return:)
RB: My motto is never live economically. I don't want to draw lines around things, prioritize, set aside time.
Dir: Why is it presenting itself now if it's untimely?
LT: Maybe I don't want to learn any more about myself. I need to process.
LL: Can't you process and learn at the same time?
Me: No.
LL: People don't normally stop what they're doing to process.
On unrequited love:
LT: I think it only ever happens that one person loves more than the other.
Me: One spooks, upsets the balance.
LL: I'd rather be the one loving more.
JJ: That can be a powerful position, loving more. You can fsck someone up by loving them hard.
RB: I've done that. Thought about him only in relation to me.
DL: As writers we have this terrible problem of scripting how we want things to play out in our heads.
RB: It has to be different in a long distance relationship. In this relationship I have, I don't wake up in the morning and wonder if I still want to be with this person. It would freak him out.
JJ: I like thinking about love as a correspondence, a literacy, the ways we have to read one another.
DL: That's always a crazy one, how you desperately want them to read you.
RB: We haven't talked much about loving yourself.
JJ: That's most important of all.
LT: I can't stand having someone else influence my daily routine.
JJ: Rilke says a true lover is one who guards their lover's solitude.
Me: Absolutely. Love is greedy, we have a hard time with that solitude.
DL: To not always demand.
JJ: Love isn't separate halves, but planets orbiting each other.
LT: Hey, that exists in astronomy.
Me: Binary stars.
JJ: No halves.
DL: By the age of fifty, you become resentful of your spouse's intrusion on your life.
Now we notice that VN hasn't spoken, and encourage her to contribute.
VN: Love is something you do, not something you feel. Monks aren't in relationships, but they still think and conduct themselves as if they have this incredible capacity to love.
LT: It's important to listen to V when she talks. (Laughter)
VN: Some people are easier to love than others... I stole that thing about love being a verb from bell hooks.
DL: Some people constantly fsck up.
JM: If you think you're in that group, raise your hand. (Many hands are raised.)
LL: But verbs can affect their direct objects.
JM: I don't think we're always in love when we're in relationships.
LT: Relationships are when you're trying to figure out if you're in love... Sex is underrated.
LL: I don't think it's underrated.
LT: It's a way to get to know someone.
JJ: People communicate differently -- sight, hugs, touch, words. I don't mean to make a stereotype, but I think queers use eye contact because they can't speak up in public. They'll look back knowingly. And it's a rush -- like, Oh, sh!t.
DL: I think eye contact happens more when I like someone.
LT: Or less.
LL: Our pupils dilate so we can take in more of them. We say less because we're worried they'll turn us down.
DL: I think I've been told or said I love you in the most desperate of times. It's a tactic.
* * *
LT: What are you attracted to?
JM: Everything.
LL: When is it love, then?
JJ: When there's a tension.
JM: I don't believe it's love unless it's mutual: otherwise it's painful.
LT: Who said it wasn't painful?!
VN: Like [the director] says, there's so many different kinds.
Dir: Maybe one makes another one effective. Makes another level of love possible. You're able to take that risk.
Me: Makes polygamy a good idea!
Dir: (hedging) Polygamy's on... a certain plane. I don't think of it necessarily as romantic.
Can you be in love with more than one person?
DL: You'll hurt the others.
JM: I think it's possible, and love can hurt.
Me: I think we need to keep in mind this is culturally defined. There's lots of cultures where people have multiple spouses. I've heard a critique which says Mormon polygamy is pro-feminist.
DL: We need to listen to these women.
JM: If love doesn't need to be mutual, what's the line between love and obsession? Constantly thinking of a person...
DL: is in itself controlling. You're objectifying the person.
JJ: If love's a correspondence, it has to be mutual.
Me: Is all unrequited love obsession?
JJ: It's not real -- you're fabricating the person.
DL: If it becomes requited it requires some kind of alignment.
LL: I hesitate to say it's not real.
JJ: Your perceptions of that person alter over time. Not truly talking to someone -- you can't live alone in your room.
VN: Can you love someone who's no longer alive?
DL: My gramma does.
LL: Jack Gilbert has this poem How To Love The Dead -- if you can love her without politeness and delicacy, love her like a wolf's hunger...
DL: Love becomes such a part of you.
Me: I don't want someone to be that much a part of me. I watched how my grandma got after my grandpa died.
LT: Didn't you say you wanted to get married?
Me: Well, yeah.
LT: I just don't want to be legally bound to somebody. That seems like the worst possible way to deal with my love.
LL: Love's like a mirror.
VN: When someone's no longer physically present you can still sort of feel yourself being loved by them, their love reflected off other surfaces. The people who are still alive... reflect the person who's no longer there.
DN: You love how they affected you.
JJ: Shrapnel.
DL: Some people say ghosts are in smells, and I think I agree. Thick memories that aren't really resolved: that's what [a former counselor] sees ghosts as. Unresolved energy.
LL: Not negative, though.
JJ: For me, it's like things I was left to resolve on my own. Things that lurk up out of the shadows.
Dir: I think ghosts present themselves at important moments. They come to me almost like carrier pigeons. They don't necessarily make sense right away. Before I make a decision, they appear.
Me: I have a friend who calls that God. She says she hears him in things her friends say, quotes she reads at opportune moments.
DL: Is loving the dead unrequited or inappropriate?
Dir: Literally or figureatively dead?
(long pause)
JJ: We were saying there's something superficial about unrequited love.
LL: How to keep it healthy.
(pause)
Dir: Well, you keep on living, for one thing.
DL: If you become sad, I think you have to let yourself dance with that ghost.
Dir: Every loss is a reversal for the next one. That's how we know how to grieve. Elizabeth Bishop says there's an art to losing. I think that's all there is to it. It's inevitable, isn't it? You're going to lose what you love one way or another. If that's the end point, isn't this all about preparing ourselves? I don't mean that in a pessimistic or negative way. I think there's something to the adage that the way you live is the way you die. Dying from it will not be so foreign or unexpected. That may be a romantic idea. One person may die from testicular cancer in a very different way from someone else.
(pause)
Me: I had a professor, Michael Lesy, who always used to say everything's either about sex or death. I think he's full of sh!t. What about birth? I think food is way up there, too; it's also a natural drive.
JJ: Food is about love and loss: it's there, and then it's not.
(pause)
Dir: The loss is harder when I don't want to let go. Letting go was the next door opening. the act of dying is an act of love itself. So the next act of love can enter your life somehow. I have never been present at a death myself, but I have friends who say they've been humbled and privileged to be at another's death.
Me: Does being present at an act of state-sponsored murder count? (everyone looks aghast) I mean, I used to work for the Humane Society, and I watched this guy put down a litter of kittens one day. It was terrible, like the needle sucked the life right our of them. One moment it's a kitten, the next it's a scrap of carpeting.
RB: My grandfather died in the middle of a dance. His heart stopped. I think the woman who had asked him to dance must have felt terrible, but it was fitting. He'd had a steak and a couple of beers. Everyone agreed it was fitting. We found out afterwards that all these women he hung out with were in love with him. It made it really OK for me.
(This all follows a long day of haircuts all around. I decide I want my hair cut.)
VN: Haircuts are an act of loss.
JJ: Haircuts are an act of transition.
JG: Anyone want a chocolate tortilla?
Posted by me at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)