seattle

 I have been thinking a lot about Seattle. I was interviewed yesterday by a woman who is part of the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Project. She was at Shan's memorial and asked if people wanted to be interviewed about their time in Seattle. I sent her my email and we set up a time. 

In preparation for the interview, I looked at the CC Grains online group and there was this picture, among others. I'm guessing that this is sometime around 1980 or so, since I started working at Grains in the fall of 1979. This doesn't look like winter. No one has enough outwear on and it's not raining. So maybe it's early spring or the fall. 

I was looking at the FB group to try to figure out how many women were in the collective. The woman who interviewed me said that she'd talked to someone who was at Grains, whose name I didn't quite remember. I wanted to have some sort of list of who worked there and doing it from memory was sketchy.  On the group page was a post from Margaret Bartley who was interviewed by someone else for some other project, maybe about left groups in Seattle or maybe about the Seattle Workers' Brigade specifically. In the interview Margaret says something about the collective being 18 women, but I think that was it at its peak. My memory has it at a lower number, maybe around 12 or so, but maybe that's the size it was when I joined. 

The interview reminded me a lot about the Seattle that I knew, the Seattle of the late 70s and 80s. It would be hard to make people in their fifties or younger understand how poor a city Seattle was then, how sort of marginal. Boeing had a crash sometime around 1976 and Boeing was the main employer then, before software became the city's money maker. Someone I knew bought a house for $10K. A similar size house would go for close to a million now, probably. Broadway had a couple of bars and a lot of little necessary businesses like cleaners, laundry, a pharmacy. There was the Hadassah, which was the Jewish used clothes store. There was a Fred Meyer, but it was much much smaller than the one currently there and didn't sell food. There was a movie theater, places to get breakfast, nothing fancy. For all that Seattle is a sort of foodie place now, there weren't many fancy restaurants at all. The co-ops were small and local.

I keep trying to tie this up with some grand summary insight, but all I have been doing these last few days is remembering. Remembering what it felt like to walk around in that rainy city. What it felt like to bicycle the 14 miles to work and back on Saturdays, the long haul up Denny Hill. What it was like to have my own small apartment. How I felt standing on Madison, looking around to see the Olympics, the Cascades, and Mount Rainier on one very very clear day.

two years later and I'm in Fresno

our backyard

 And I'm retired. And we own a house. A house that the gardeners are busy around as I type. A house that apparently came with a cat. A cat that has moved in, but who would like to go out occasionally. 

It has been, as they say, a lot.

Buying a house in the middle of a pandemic is not a thing that I recommend to anyone, ever. We were extremely lucky in our realtor and extremely lucky that we bought when we did. Prices are going up and up still and there's not a whole lot out there apparently, (This appears to be nation-wide, not just California, but California is insane. We did plan to get a house before I retired and the plan was to do that before I turned 70, so that I would get the full SS. The rents kept rising in the Bay Area and it was clear that there was no way that we could live there and have anything like a house. I am pretty flexible about neighbors and noise, but Laine is more sensitive. But to be honest, I don't know how I'd do after years of not having someone completely audible a wall of sheet rock away. 

A house is what we both wanted and a house is what we got. We also got a completely new landscape and a new context that I am still trying to understand, close to a year later.

But why fire up this blog after two years, especially since I'm not writing about anything particularly urgent. It's because I needed to read someone else's blog to get ready for a writing group tonight. That got me thinking about blogging, which is a way of procrastinating about what to say about the thing I had to read because I really do not know where to start with that.  Blogging is where the personal essay of the 21st century took root and now it's kudzu across the internets. Every style piece, lots of opinion pieces, interviews, what have you, that get published, sometimes in legacy media  - all of these are personal essays. Is it bad? Sometimes. It's hard to use your experience as a lens and either be so deep in your pov, that you completely whiff on how an audience who is not you is going to read it. (The recent Heather Havrilsky thing on hating her husband was one of those.) The other way of not working is for the personal part to be a transparent hook with only an minimal relationship to what you are really interested in saying. 

Blogging has been great for me because I don't expect anyone to read this. It has always given me a place to stretch out and to discover what the fuck I am thinking and sometimes what I am feeling. It gave me writing practice, which might have been important for the writing I'm doing now which is short(ish) fiction. 

Which is why I'm in this group tonight and why I have to read and reread this long ass post so that I have something useful to say about it in four hours. It's a memoir. I don't much like memoirs. I rarely read memoirs. That's one problem. The other problem is that the piece rambles and meanders and there's not a particular point to it. It's a description of a difficult Easter. The narrator has to go and see her stepfather who has broken his hip and is in a rehab place. He's also beginning to suffer from some cognitive decline. The narrator's mom usually goes along, but she is blowing it off because there's something more fun for her do to where she is. There's some humor about her partner and her relationship with their kid, but most of it is the slog that the day must have been. There's also a simmering resentment which is never far from the surface in these pieces and I've been reading them for a couple of years now. 

In than way, maybe it's a success? It is close to unbearable to read. I think that one useful thing I can say is that the emotional center of this is in that dialog and that maybe that's where she can do a little more to show what he's looking like (I'm guessing confused) as the back and forth go on and find some way to mark her growing frustration.

Maybe.

I am not sure it will help. I'm not sure what help she actually wants. She's been working at this memoir for a number of years now, in workshops, in groups, with coaches and it never seems much furtherer. I suspect that is because the reason she gives for writing it, wanting to be published, is different from the reason that she actually writes, which is to talk about her life, the good things, the disappointments, and how hard it is to care for a mother and stepfather, who didn't care for her when she was a child. This is a way to express that frustration and anger. Feelings that she only lightly covers with self-deprecating humor. 

I am not going to bring that up.

I am going to ask questions, then many point to the dialog as something to zero in on. 

A thing that writing groups have taught me is that people write for all sorts of reasons and most of us have no idea what is driving us, only that we are, one way or another, driven.

hanging in and sitting down

 

 This is a random picture of Morris Dancers from the Solano Stroll in 2019.

It's here because I usually like to have a picture that goes with a blog posting, but there's no way for me to illustrate what's on my mind at the moment because it's a thought. It's a judgement. It's a weighing in on something that bothers me and that something is a little abstract and a little layered and so here's a nice picture of people doing a fun thing on a sunny day to get me started on something that is not very much fun, though the day is sunny and full of smoke.

Today I got a link to another blog post from someone I've known online since around 2005, which is centuries in internet time. We have never met in real life. I don't expect that we ever will. I know her writing and have bought at least one of her books. She's a poet. So it was interesting to see that she'd written something that wasn't on FB, since she's been ill and moving and had generally a lot going on. It was a long post, but up near the beginning of it she dropped an acronym I didn't know. (There are so many acronyms I do not know.) There was a hyperlink, so I clicked it. It went straight to a LMGTFY. 

I was furious. Like I would have googled the damn thing on my own if the link hadn't been there. I stopped reading the piece and went back to work. After a while and after I'd googled the acronym, I went back and read the entire post.

It was very good. It was long and covered how we (meaning people we, not left we or right we) simplify things in politics. How we like easy answers to things that are anything but easy. It talked about Medea and how tragedy is always about characters that cannot change, that it's character, not destiny that dooms us. It was about her recent breakup and how that has no simple answers either and that to take the simple answer of calling her better off without the ex is no support. It ignores what the relationship was and who she is. It was really good and I was glad that I had read it.

I nearly didn't. I was that angry. Did it make sense to be that pissed off at something that may have just been a joke? At something that might have been her impatience at having to explain something for the umpteenth time to people too incurious to find it out for themselves. I have no way of knowing what she meant by it and really no way to ask. So I got over myself and read past my anger and found something that I will think about for a long while. It was because I had internet decades of trust built up and that trust paid off.

Sometimes we need to wait past our first reactions in this asynchronous, complicated conversation that is social media. It doesn't matter whether our reactions are driven by hurt, anger, or a sense of justice. Sometimes it's better to sit for a bit, find something else to do. It's better to sit with ourselves, with our feelings and ask what I want from that next thing I type. Who am I talking to? Why is my voice necessary? Is it necessary now? 

The answer might be that I need to respond and that my voice is necessary. But it's rare that it's necessary right now and at this moment. You can always take a moment.

having time to like it

A couple of weeks ago I went to see William Gibson. It was one of those readings where he read something from a new work [then there's an interview by a Mother Jones editor; then some time for a Q&A. I stood in line for over an hour to get my two books signed. He's holding my copy of Count Zero. I bought it over 30 years ago.

I've been listening to Kate Bush as I drive around running errands. I probably discovered her about the same time that I started reading Gibson, sometime in the middle of the 80s. I remember the first time I heard her. I was in a brewpub up north of UW in Seattle. They had a menu on the wall with the different beers arranged on coordinates like hoppy, malty, light, and dark. It was big bullseye on a cream colored wall. I was probably drinking some ale or other when "Running Up That Hill" started playing. I don't remember whether I asked the bartender what it was, but I know that I went out and bought  Hounds of Love and The Whole Story which has "Wuthering Heights" on it. Anyone who thought that Bronté's weird, Gothic work should be a pop song is the artist for me. From then on I've bought every album Bush has put out.

Likewise I've bought every piece of fiction that Gibson has published since Neuromancer. Sticking with an artist over a long time shows how they change. The work, though always recognizable, shifts focus, emphasis, ambition. The concerns of a young person evolves into the interests of a middle aged, then nearly old person. Growing older with artists is an unexpected gift. Their interests grow and shift, but there's always something recognizable there, something that is familiar, right next to the thing that is new, unexpected.

Maybe when we get older we're able to understand things with greater nuance, with broader and in more complex contexts. There's always a constant, in us as readers, as audience, in the work. We often love now what we loved then, even if we and the work are no longer quite the same.

When Gibson was finished signing my books, I thanked him for years of pleasure. He smiled. He thanked me too.

hire a professional

It's a tale of two photographs. The top one was taken by Peter Souza, White House photographer for the Obama and Reagan administrations. The bottom one was taken by someone at the meeting. It might have been a professional. It might have been Kellyanne Conway from her notorious perch on the couch to the left. 

The top one is dynamic. There's a lot of shadow, but it's balanced by the light on the faces of the mayors (who were meeting with Mr. Obama.) Notice that even though he's got his back to the camera and is in shadow, he's the focal point of the photo because he's who everyone is looking at. It also helps that he's moving.

The bottom one is static. Everyone is standing around having just put on their taking-a-picture smile. There's a big band of darkness across the center with the men's suits that just sits there because it's pretty much balanced on each side and on the top and bottom. Although Mr. Trump is at the center of the picture, he's not really a focal point. He's hardly in focus, being not more than a peach point with a red tail. The second photo also does a poor job of rendering the different skin colors well, unlike the Souza, where there's variation in the different tones of the people in the picture.

Souza has been doing this for years and it shows. He knows how to compose a picture, how to give it drama and weight. The second picture is the pedestrian shot that anyone, really anyone could do on their cell phone.

If you want a high level of performance, if you want expertise, you hire someone who has experience, who knows what they're doing.  The Trump administration hasn't gotten around to hiring their official photographer apparently. It's as if they didn't care that every aspect of this work is better when you hire a professional.

a friend that year

It was some short story I read years and years ago. One character says to another, "We were friends that year." That has always felt like one of the saddest things I've ever read. Of course friendships change as we change, but the idea that they are somehow temporary saddens me.

I've been lucky in my friendships, I think. I have friends that I've known for more than 4 decades now. We're not the women we were when we met, when we were so young, but the women we are now are still friends.

The woman,in the photos to the left was a friend. Helen died a few days ago, after fighting cancer for more than four years. She died at home, with her brother and sister and an old friend. People who had seen her during this final illness said that she was fighting until the end. She would.

She was one of the reasons I moved to Seattle in the first place. She told me about a studio apartment in the building she lived in ($100 a month!) She told me about this job at the women's natural food collective. She and I used to cook together, nearly asphyxiating ourselves with some overheated spice mix from Paul Prudhomme's first cookbook. We watched gay male porn together (awkward). We talked about books and movies and gossiped about the insular and drama-laden lesbian community in Seattle.

Helen was one of the co-owners of The Wild Rose, the lesbian bar where I worked when I was going to the University of Seattle. Helen and I would stay after the bar had closed up and play those table top video games, Pacman and one of those Pong things. We lived in the same building until she and her partner bought a place out in the Central District.

Our friendship didn't really survive my leaving Seattle for graduate school. It was hard staying connected to Seattle and I'd heard that Helen was relaying this false story about me. Gossips gossip and I shouldn't have been hurt that being out of town meant I was fodder now, but it did.

I haven't talked with Helen in something like five years, Haven't seen her in closer to a decade. I don't really know where I'm headed with this, but she had been a friend that year and I am sad she's gone.

seasonality

In case you hadn't noticed, 2016 has been the worst. It led off with David Bowie dying in January. Then Alan Rickman, Maurice White, Vanity,  Patty Duke, Merle Haggard, Prince. Muhammad Ali, Elie Wiesel, Gene Wilder, Bill Nunn, Leonard Cohen, and last weekend, Leon Russell.

(Miss Clio died in there too.)

Gwen Ifill died today. I heard from an old friend that a mutual friend is dying. Other friends are facing other health challenges. Someone I've known since I was five years old died suddenly earlier this year.

This is what getting old looks like.

It feels like fall, when one day the trees are full of brightly colored leaves and then there's a storm. Overnight, there are only a few stubborn leaves left, hanging on the the branches while the rest carpet the ground. So I'm approaching that fall day with all of my friends, hoping that we will be those bright, stubborn coins of color, until the heart of winter.

cooking

I've been thinking about my grandmother recently. My dad's mom died in 2001. I can't remember now whether it was before of after 9/11. I'm inclined to think it was before because her coffin was covered in lilacs and you can't get them all year round.

She was my favorite grandmother. I probably saw more of her than my mother's mother. We lived with her until I was about three. We drove into NY to have dinner many, many Sundays. She was funny and did crossword and other puzzles in the newspaper.

One of the big things we shared was a love of cooking shows. I would come down to visit when I was in graduate school in upstate NY and the two of us would watch them together. This is back in the 90s, so the food networks hadn't taken off, but there was plenty to watch.

I inherited her set of Time-Life cookbooks, her toaster, and a common kitchen knife she used to use. It's bigger than a paring knife, but a little less slim than a boning knife. It comes in handy for lots of little cooking tasks.

And there are her recipe cards. She had a pile of them, tied with a piece of aging gold-covered elastic, which must have come off some gift or other. The handwriting changes, not to mention ink colors, so I think she was doing these over time. Some seem older than others, but I have no idea when or why she wrote these down. Was it memory? She had been a cook for a family living up in Pauling NY, when Pauling was the country. That was before she and my dad moved back to the city and she got a job with the city that she kept until she retired.

She was a good cook.

A much plainer cook than her sister, my great-aunt, who made the first paella I ever tasted. She was a very good cook of comfort food. She has a lot of them on these cards, recipes for cakes, stews, blintzes. She's got about five different BBQ sauce recipes.

I don't know whether she ever cooked any of these things or if they were placeholders, they way that someone now will pin a recipe, copy a link, or bookmark a page. I have recipes I've never made. To be honest, I haven't cooked out of more than five of the Time-Life cookbooks that I inherited, either. Having them on the shelf reminds me of the pleasure she took in food and in cooking. They remind me of her.

When I started this, I didn't know where it was going except that I think about my grandmother often. Just last week I mentioned her in interviews with some students I'm coaching at El Cerrito High School. I miss her still.

incurably informed

The title comes from Pat Cadigan's Synners, a cyberpunk (is there a cyberpunk anymore?) novel about interconnectivity and relationships and AI. People figure out how to connect neurally to the internet, a virus gets into the system and chaos ensues.

The "incurably informed" are the people who survive the virus and have to figure out how to live with a new reality. My reality is about the same as it's ever been, but I was feeling incurably informed a couple of weeks ago.

I can blame it on the political season, which has been fraught. There was something new in the mix for me this time around and it was social media. In 2008, the time I spent online was in the comment sections of blogs. Although you get to know people through their comments -  their styles, preferences, prejudices, and so on - they weren't intimate places. It was easy to get into fights or disagree, but it didn't feel personal. Social media, especially Facebook, is different. It feels extremely personal.

I've been a member of a private FB group for four or five years now. The group is majority white, largely over-educated, with an age-range from about 23 to 70 or so. For the most part, it's been a great place for discussions of all sorts of things, movies, comics, music, books, politics. This summer has made it a less great place. More people are on edge. There have been a number of blowups and I found myself waking up every morning, checking the feed and feeling angry and anxious for hours. But I would keep checking in throughout the day, sometimes commenting and sometimes not, but there would be this undercurrent of tension, as though I was simmering.

The public FB page wasn't much better, The private group had always been a refuge from the stuff that people posted there. I know people, am friends with people who believe in chelation therapy, who are intensely and publicly religious (I am an atheist), who are terrified of all GMOs, who repost discredited memes. I have one old friend who posts lovely images, but she's an outlier there.

The refuge was less a refuge all the time, so I decided to take a break last week. I took FB off my phone and tablet.. I took the URL out of the saved bookmarks and I stopped logging in a week ago. it was hard at first. Social media was where I went when I was procrastinating about work or avoiding making a decision. It was also where I got most of my news. The first days were a struggle, but by midweek it was ok and by Friday, I wasn't really tempted.

I got a lot of work done. I have been less angry (and believe me, if I had been on during the Democratic convention, I would have been a tower of rage). Today I was going to go back and right at this moment, I'm not sure I want to dive back into the scrum.

what to do on your birthday

I never know what to do with these marquee birthdays. I spent my twenty-first birthday in the bedroom I grew up in, drinking tequila and looking at a book of Bonnard paintings. I spent my thirtieth riding around the Olympic peninsula with Cathy Dowd, watching it rain and listening to the scrape of a busted windshield wiper and Bruce Springsteen on the 8-track. I can't remember what I was doing for my fortieth, but I was in Ithaca. My fiftieth, sixtieth, and now sixty-fifth have been made much more celebratory, because of Laine, who has a sense of occasion. Still, I don't know what to do with the idea of these supposed milestones.

So on the 14th, I decided to stay off social media. I finished a terrible book that morning, then did what I told myself I was going to do. I read my first two journals. These books are a combination of workbooks (I was writing a lot, a lot of poetry) and diary. They cover from early in 1973, probably February to maybe December 1976. It's hard to tell. I was not very consistent about dating the entries. Partly that was deliberate. The younger me thought dating entires was pretentious. I have no idea why I thought that, but I wrote it down. But I suspect that I didn't date things because I often wasn't exactly sure what day it was. And because I wasn't very systematic.

I was high a lot through 1973 and 1974. I made some of the most important friendships of my life in these years. At the same time there are names that I barely remember and some I don't remember at all. The phone numbers are usually only seven digits long,

I had horrible handwriting. It gets better and I begin to print occasionally starting in 1974, but at the start? Nearly completely illegible. For all the idea of a journal being a private place to record thoughts, these early diaries are exercises in misdirection and obfuscation, as though I wasn't able to say things clearly even to myself.

Now I have very good handwriting. I am a bit more systematic than that young woman. Maybe I'm marginally better at writing, at least to myself, what actually going on rather than some allusive opacities. But I am still not good about talking about my feelings. I am still likely not to be all that direct where emotions are concerned, though so much better than then.

It amazes me how busy I was, reading, writing, trying out a million different things, a dozen different selves.

I wrote a friend from that time about the journals, telling her that I still had the journals, my first good cooking knife, my copy of Borge's Labyrinths, and a Melitta filter holder. I should have added that I still have that woman just past girlhood too.

coaching in El Cerrito

For about a month I was a slightly shell-shocked unemployed person. Then I started being an unemployed person who wanted to have something to do. So I volunteered with the WriterCoach program. I've worked with them before, 2011- 2013 or thereabouts. The program is in schools in Albany, in El Cerrito, and in Berkeley. It all started in Berkeley, with a bunch of parents. The idea is to support students by coaching them, not by being assistant teachers, but by helping them get their ideas on the page, by listening to them about their challenges in school and out. It is the opposite of copyediting or correcting student work. The whole goal is to build a relationship with the student that allows them to open up and write more easily (or write at all).

I like doing it a lot. I liked doing it back a few years ago and was happy to be able to volunteer again.

Of course there was a two day training, which was sort of fun and sort of boring, but had a remarkably weird guy there who is going to coaching in some poor Berkeley school. He took off his shoes. He wiped his neck with the weak tea in his water bottle. He interrupted a lot. I was sitting next to him and he managed to take of 2/3 of the table, an unhappy marriage of manspreading and girl training. Somehow it's always easier to shrink back than push back.

At any rate, I coached for the first time today. I'm a sort of substitute because I joined late. I had two students today M and S. I'll probably keep working with M, but S's regular coach will probably be back next week. They are both great young men, but very different. I coached S second, but I'm going to talk about him first.

But before that, let me talk about the context. El Cerrito High School is a lot like this part of California. From their website: "[Our] student body is diverse, including 28% African Americans, 27% Latino, 21% Caucasians, and 24% Asian. Approximately 20% of our students are Limited English Proficient and 13% are designated as Gifted and Talented. Approximately 11% of our students qualify for Special Education services and 50% of our students qualify for the free/reduced lunch program."

So a lot of minority students and a lot of poor students. It's a big school, about 1,200 students. The class we're working with is a ninth grade class, so this is these students' first year in high school. The classroom is packed with desks, packed with students. And most of the students are POC.

Most of the WriterCoach folks are white. In our group of about fifteen coaches, there are two people of color, me and another woman, who is also African American.  This has been true for every group of coaches that I've worked with, majority white, maybe a couple of Asians, maybe a couple of African Americans, rarely any Latin@ or Pacific Islanders. Most of the coaches are of retirement age, though there is a sprinkling of younger people.

All the coaches come to the room where we're going to work about the time that classes are about to change. We get our students' folders and wait to walk up to the classroom together to collect our students. We walked up to a chaotic classroom (each of them has been) full of students. Some are chatting, some are sort of paying attention to the teacher, a young African American woman, some are just hanging out. We stand along the walls until all the coaches are in the room. The each coach introduces her/himself and calls out their students' names. We tell them which one we're working with first, which second. The students stand up and then we all walk back to the place where we're coaching.

S, my second student, is one of the easy ones. He came in with a ton of ideas about the assignment. He grabs his pencil and starts writing, but the lead is down to a nubbin, so I give him my pen, and he's off to the races writing about healthy eating being a right and what that means. (The class had just watched Food Inc.) Every so often he stops and we talk about what he's written. He asks me about the differences between they're, their, and there. Then he goes back to writing and I make notes on the coaching sheet that he'll take off with him. S is a big, confident boy. On the way to the coaching room, he made a deprecating comment about not being a writing person like his mom.  I asked him what that meant and he laughed and said someone who writes a lot, so maybe his mom is a blogger or something.

He may not feel like a writer, but he has the sureness and easy fluency of someone who knows that he can put his ideas down on paper, even if he gets a cramp in one hand from writing a couple of paragraphs.

M is not like that. He's a little guy, maybe a couple of inches taller than I am. He slouches and doesn't always look directly at me.

Before we headed up to to classroom, the site coordinator came up to me to tell me about M. She had coached him last week. He didn't have his assignment. He didn't do anything. She says something about him, "not having any light in his eyes."

When we're walking back to the classroom I ask him whether he likes this school. He says he's new here, hasn't been there very long.  I ask where he's coming from and he says he's been in a lot of schools.  He says he likes the fact that his friends are at El Cerrito High. He doesn't like the police there, who apparently stop and harass the students. When we get to the coaching room, he doesn't have anything ready for the assignment, so I ask him to read the prompt. He reads ok, but when asked what the prompts means, it's clear that he doesn't quite understand what he's read, so we talk about it. We break the sentences down in smaller pieces. I wait for him. I don't push. By the end of the 30 minutes, he's got about five sentences. There are two completely different essays here. One is a reasonable response to the prompt (food is a right), but the other is a response to the movie Food Inc, itself. It really bothered him to see the cows and chickens slaughtered. That was the thing that stuck with him, not healthy eating, not the way that big corporations control what we eat, but the suffering of the animals. He talked about how they would do that to humans if the tables were turned and this clearly bothered him. (He's not a vegetarian.)

I tell him that he's got two different essays and that if he has the time, he should develop them both because his reactions were what the teacher wanted to read about and that including the emotional reaction as well as the thing asked for is fine. I gave him the notes I had been taking and told him that they were his to work with.

So here's this emotionally sensitive boy that the site coordinator, who is a nice woman who cares about these students, said had no light. Afterwards she said she was happy that I had gotten him to write something. She meant it.

I was angry about this earlier today, but now I'm sad because I don't know what it takes for people to see the students they work with clearly if they're not the easy ones, if they're not Ss. How do we keep out that hairline of pity or lowered expectations? I wish there were more POC in the coaching group.  I wish we all weren't so old and sure that our understanding of the world is what we should be sharing with our students. (I overheard a number of coaches telling the students about the evil of commercial food production.) I wish that M wasn't so drawn up against the world, but I'm glad I get to work with him.

spare parts

The first week after knee replacement surgery is a haze. Pain meds every six hours. Weak attempts at exercising the new joint and incredibly swollen leg three times a day. It turns out that they weren't kidding about the effect of narcotics on the GI tract. And reading anything more complicated than a thriller is impossible.

The second week, the new knee moves better and hurts less. Pain meds every eight hours and walking around pushing a walker isn't so hard or as tiring.  Then it's twice a day for the pills and I went to the movies to see the new Star Wars.

The third week, I'm home and doing a lot more for myself. I feel better enough to feel bored. I can read with a brain again, so I'm reading the incredible A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I had tried to read in the hospital, right after surgery, but couldn't keep the different characters apart, even though James makes each voice distinct. Laine and I hang out. Sometimes she's watching tv and I'm reading. Sometimes we watch Netflix together, like Tangerine last night. The swelling is down so that my left side looks nearly normal-ish.

I was trying to get out of having the surgery until the month before. Earlier this year, like back in March or so, I had started using a cane. My left knee hurt that much. Then I started working out, concentrating on my leg muscles. Then I stopped using the cane (mainly because it is a nuisance to travel with). Then I tried to talk my doctor out of the necessity for the operation, but she said that my mobility would just get worse and worse.

In retrospect, I don't know what I was afraid of. That something horrible would happen on the operating table (it's not a table, it's like a very accommodating bed thing). That I would have a stroke? That it wouldn't work somehow? That it would hurt?

Well, it did/does hurt. But Kaiser is on it about pain management.  Nothing has been unbearable for long, not even the one night in the hospital, when it hurt to think about moving that leg. The team at the hospital was reassuring and answered any questions I even thought about having beforehand. Knowing what was happening and what would happen helped a lot. Having a good and cheery physical therapist who tells me I'm doing great helps a lot.

But when it comes down to it, I think it is that I thought (and my friends thought too) than I was too incapacitated. That I had been too inactive for too long and that recovery as going to be long and slow and hard and incomplete. That doesn't seem to be true. Maybe I can still make withdrawals on a lifetime of basically great health.

Whatever it is, I couldn't have done it without the support of two retired friends who volunteered their house and their time to be my rehab residency or without the support of the the world's best gf. With them, I can be here at home, bored out of my mind, watching a cat watching the turkeys promenade through the side yard.

a world of _

Last weekend I went with a friend I've known for close to forty years to see the Mark Morris Dance Group at Zellerbach Hall on the UCB campus. It was a good performance. The first half were older English songs and some comedic songs by Ivor Cutler, the latter full of odd juxtapositions and surreal imagery. The second half was a lot of Morris thinking his way through the pas de deux or couples dancing which was interesting and lovely in parts.

The audience was fill of white and grey haired people, my age and older. This happens more and more. Sometimes I think it's just because you tend to notice more people like you than not. Sometimes I think it's because of when I'm usually out in the world, times when it's only the retired or unemployed tooling around. When we rode BART from the airport Saturday night it was full of young people because it was Saturday night, you know? 

With the Morris performance though, it's likely because most of the people there discovered Morris when he was a young choreographer and they were young or youngish too. There is a way that we can move through the world surrounded by people of approximately our own generation, sharing an aesthetic and world view, a world of geezers.

I saw the Vice News documentary on IS earlier this week. It showed a very different and oddly homogeneous world too.

A world of men.

I mean it. I think I saw maybe two veiled, shrouded women in the entire documentary and in one case, one of the sharia law enforcers told the woman's husband, not the woman, that she should have a thicker veil. It's a hard world for me to understand. In an abstract way,  I can sort of understand the romantic appeal for some men. Here's this unambiguous, all-embracing war against evil. What I don't get is wanting to live in a world so restricted and so reduced. It is a world of strict laws and stricter punishment. It is a world with only co-religionists and a limited number of them. It is a low information world, where reality is strained through the interpretation of other men. It might be a safe world, but that safety comes at a huge cost.

A cost that some are willing to pay.

I wanted to link the video because I think everyone should see it, but it's gone now.

images

So this weekend Laine and I took a mini-vacation down the Monterey coast. We stayed at a not very fancy motel on Fremont (where all the not so fancy hotels hang out), went to the Monterey Aquarium late Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday morning (one of the benefits of being members).  We also found a nice brew pub, an ok breakfast place, and discovered that one of our favorite places had come back from the dead. I haven't lived down in the area for more than nine years and so it was fun to see what had changed and what hadn't.

When we were at the Monterey Aquarium, I took a lot of pictures with my phone. I've only had it a couple of weeks, but the iPhone does a much much better job of taking pictures in low light and decent video than my old, recently deceased Samsung Galaxy 2. Like this photo of squid.

Or this of jellies.

Lots of people bring their cameras and phones to the aquarium to take pictures of the animals and their families in front of the animal tanks. We're all in each other's ways with all these pictures.

At first I was going to write this huffy post about people taking pictures that they'll never look at again and rail about how people take flashes in the rooms with the animals even when there are signs all over the place telling them not to do that.

I was going to sound very high-minded.

I was going to be very wrong.

In my office at home I have boxes of pictures that my great aunt kept. I have another box from my grandmother. I have two boxes of slides from my dad that I'm maybe halfway through digitizing. All of these pictures were animated by the same impulse driving the people who were in my way or making flashes or just being annoying at the aquarium.

We all want to remember. We want to remember that good time when we were together or when we were having fun or when we saw something new or something beautiful. That it's digital now and that everyone with a phone can do it makes no difference.  And maybe its even better that there's this relative democratization of picture taking and family portraits. It's good that everyone can have their memento of that great time. That everyone can do this:

what it means to write

This past weekend, Labor Day weekend, Laine and I spent time with a bunch of friends, many of whom write. I admitted that I had this blog and two people asked me why a blog, especially since I don't have a ton of readers. (My readership may have jumped up to five after this weekend.)

I mean, I could just write things in longhand, in a journal and leave them there. I could write on a computer, print them out, hand them to Laine to read. (Or not) I could just write on a computer and leave the writings on a hard drive, where no one would ever read them, but nearly nine years ago, I started this blog.

If I think about it, I think that I made this quasi-public place to write because it would make me think about an audience. Thinking that I have to write to someone, means that someone, even if imaginary, has to understand what I'm writing. This enforces a certain sort of discipline.  I have to be clear, if I have the assumption that someone is going to read this and won't have a chance to ask me what I meant.

But to be honest, I use blogging as a place to think. I found that insight in a 2007 observation when I was apologizing to who knows what for not blogging more.

I guess that if it's a place to think, the person I should apologize to is myself. And I should do it more often.

on an imaginary hero

“She still has her mother. She wasn’t experimented on as a child. She can laugh. She has real friends. She even wears a dress every once in a while.” – Olivia Dunham in Concentrate and Ask Again

This is a blog post I should never publish. There should be some lower limit to nerdiness, but I have been obsessed with Fringe for months.

(Spoilers follow.)

Fringe played on Fox from 2008 to 2013. It was originally supposed to end after the fourth season, but fan pressure produced a fifth season of ten episodes.  There’s a natural end with the end of the fourth season, but the fifth season has its own logic and fits as an alternate ending to the series.

There are a lot of alternatives in this series, which is part of its charm.  I once called it “The Garden of Forking Paths” for tv and I wasn’t wrong[*]. Part of the appeal for me is this idea of different endings, of variant lives. But at the end of the day, my interest centers on Olivia Dunham. It’s not that she’s an FBI agent. It’s not that they don’t sex her up (at least after the pilot and maybe the first third of the first season). I think what fascinates me is that Fringe shows the making of a superhero from a flawed human being.

Because, seriously, Olivia is fucked up.

What makes her a superhero is also what helps fuck her up in the first place and she is never quite ok, despite reaching a happy ending. This is a time for PTSD heroes.

She’s not my first. My first sympathy for this sort of hero showed with my choice of Batman as my favorite DC hero. I like Green Lantern’s power the best and that oath (“By Brightest Day or Darkest Night, No Evil Shall Escape My Sight . . . . .”).  Still I have always felt something very compelling about the Batman.  Here is a boy who sees his parents shot down in front of him, who grows up committed to fighting crime. He’s not all right. He can’t be. And everyone knows it.

Miller and Burton and Nolan and Arkham’s Asylum

Lots of people have interpreted Batman. He’s actually a pretty cheery dude in the original Detective Comics from the 1930’s. But that’s sort of DC’s original style. As we move into the end of the twentieth, the Batman is more treated as a disturbed guy, from the mildly neurotic version by Tim Burton, to the flat-out psychotic in the comics of Frank Miller and Grant Morrison. The latest iteration (Nolan) is less obviously unhinged than the Miler or Morrison Batmen, but probably a little more nuts than the Burton. In all cases, here is a man who has suffered immense trauma as a child, who grows up to be a functional, even exemplary, in some respects, adult, and is immensely damaged and fragile.

This is the template for Olivia Dunham.

Magic and How it Doesn’t Help

“Can you make him stop hitting me? Please?” – young Olive Dunham, Subject 13.

Her powers come from a magic potion, called Cortexiphan, but what makes her powerful is childhood trauma and how she’s coped with it. It’s a unique combination of love, terror, and control. Olivia is the abused child of a mother suffering domestic violence. And even when the abusive partner is out of the picture (because 10 year old Olivia has shot him[†]), everything is not ok.

Her mother dies. Let me tell you, that is no fun at all.

My mother died when I was 12 and I feel the repercussions of that event 50 years later. The worst about losing a parent for kids like me is the responsibility that descends way too soon.  Childhood ends with a parent’s death. But Olivia’s childhood has ended long before that with an abusive stepfather that no one is protecting her against. She is the one who protects her mother, however inadequately. There is no one who will save her. It is this knowledge and this isolation that makes her who she is and the superhero she will become.

 The Other Cortexiphan Subjects

They can’t cope. No, really. Presumably, there’s nothing in their lives that make them have to be as tough as Dunham, as resilient, and eventually as powerful. It’s not clear why it’s this way. I mean it doesn’t have to be after all, this is just a tv show. Still it’s clear that exposure to Cortextiphan had bad effects on the lives of all of the children in the tests, but only Dunham manages to come to control and survive the talent.

Becoming

“ I don’t know what’s happening to me, what I’m becoming. I’ve got this power inside me that terrifies me because I don’t understand it and I just, I just want it out.” – Olivia Dunham, Brave New World I

“You’ve had the power all along.” – Nina Sharp, Brave New World II

The immensely insecure, complexly uptight Olivia Dunham comes into her powers, becoming a much greater figure than her more normal alternate world counterpart. But it’s not easy for her. Nothing is ever easy for her.  And she doesn’t want this. She wants a simpler life. She doesn’t get it for a while.

By Brave New World II, Olivia can catch bullets and power the merging of universes. She’s a pawn in the great game William Bell is playing. She can thwart him, but everything hinges on her finally, finally believing in her own powers and taking that leap into the unknown (or at least unseen) with Peter. She has to trust and she has to act.

That act doesn’t quite wrap things up all by itself. Like September’s prophesy foretold, she has to die and is brought back by Walter to end Bell’s monomaniacal new Eden. That handy Cortexiphan makes it possible for her to come back and have the family she’d wanted and feared.

In season five, the game is reset.

Something new is going on in season five, which is about loss and reconciliation.

“Simone, you have a gift. You can see things other people can’t.  I don’t doubt that . . . . . It’s simply an anomaly. I know that because I’m an anomaly. I’ve moved things with my mind. I’ve lit things on fire. I’ve caught bullets midair. I’ve seen things that people only dream about. I’ve seen the seams between universes ripped apart; things that humans shouldn’t see. People make up explanations; assign meaning to things without knowing because it’s reassuring. It’s comforting. But I can’t do that, because I know too much.

It’s all just numbers“ – Olivia Dunham, The Human Kind

Olivia says this to Simone, the head of a group living on barter of industrial stuff in Litchfield. She’s at low ebb here. Peter has inserted the Invader tech into his head and is moving away from her. Etta’s not long dead.  What she has is her sense of duty and the will to keep doing regardless of what or how she feels. It’s the strength of the abused kid again, pushing her through the hardest stuff because there is no other way but forward. This is not all of her strength, but it’s the core of it.

Ending

The final season is all resolution, but to make it happen, Olive has to cross worlds and crush an Observer. But to do that she takes a final massive dose of Cortexiphan.  This is what power costs, but she also sees (shows us) the ends of some might-have-beens and closes off the alternate universe stories.

In theory, the drug is burned out after those last jumps, , but there’s enough left to make a final crucial move. Is this the Cortexiphan or is this the hero? She pulls the electromagnetic energy out of a city to crush Windmark. I say hero.

The end, what’s the end? The real end of the show is about sacrifice and love, though not romantic love. Olivia isn’t actually at the center of the story for season five, even though what she does is crucial to the final destruction (prevention) of the Observers.  What she has become is complete. She knows her own strengths. She has a place in the world that she’s made. She can stop.

---

[*] ”The Garden of Forking Paths” is a Borges story about a novel that explores all the possible developments of a plot. It’s wonderful, and like any Borges, well worth reading.

[†] Olivia says that she shot him, but didn’t kill him in season two. In the season four universe reboot, she had killed him.

in Houston, at Creating Change

That is not the picture of a conference. That is a picture of Houston from the 19th floor of the Hilton Americas.

It's also flipped because I took it on the camera on the computer and it thinks I need a mirror image (probably because most people use this to take pictures of themselves and these need to be flipped to be recognizable.

The reason it's a picture of the Houston skyline on a cloudy day, rather than a picture of the people attending Creating Change, is characteristic of the conference itself. At the beginning of the conference, before the keynote address Sue Hyde, the conference organizer, asked people not to take pictures of attendees without their permission. This deliberate protection of the attendees has two sources. The cynic in me ascribes it to the hyper-touchy-feely, New Age, hippie culture of The Task Force. But the part that is not a cynic recognizes that people come to Creating Change and expect to be safe here. There are people here who are not out, as lesbian, as gay, as trans*, at home. Maybe their boss doesn't know. Maybe their family doesn't know. The last thing they need is for someone to post their picture on Facebook or on some blog. The internet is so permeable, there's no knowing where an innocently posted image will end up.

This is a huge conference for the Movement. There will be 4,000 people here this weekend. (I thought that was enormous, but the nice bartender from our event last night told me that there's an oil conference coming in next week that will have 16,000.) There are hundreds of workshops and caucuses and institutes. I hardly go to anything. This year, I even meant to go to something yesterday morning, but felt crappy and spent most of the day in bed.

This meeting functions at several different levels at once. It attracts a huge number of young activists who fill the hallways and stay up all night. The funders are here, so there are a bunch of meetings between organizations who have money and organizations who want money. There are people hustling for their own businesses. (I talked with one yesterday.) There is a ton of networking and maybe that's the most important function.

This morning I heard someone playing the ukelele in the room next door. That room was the transgender youth reception room. It's open most of the day and despite pretty good soundproofing, I heard shouts and laughter off and on all the time I was in my room. People are here from all over, so some people will only see each other here, for four days.  It could make a huge difference in someone's life.

I bet it does.

I also bet that I have never seen so many skinny jeans/pants in one place.

when you heard it

This evening I was sitting in a Peet's in San Francisco, having a quick cup of coffee before a meeting started. As I was sitting there, checking mail, I heard the barista singing, "Stop Breaking Down" as he was working in the back, cleaning stuff. From the style, I could tell that the version of the song he'd learned was the Rolling Stones from Exile on Main Street.

I could tell by the phrasing. It's the first album I'd heard the song on too. I must have listened to it hundreds of times the year it came out. It's still probably my favorite Stones album, even though it's messy, has this dense, druggy production.

A few years after Exile came out, I bought a couple of records of Robert Johnson's music, King of the Delta Blues I & II. It had come out before Exile, but I hadn't really started to listen to blues then. It has the original (as far as I know) version of "Stop Breaking Down" on the second volume. Johnson's take is faster and funnier than the Stones: His vocal is more eccentric.

It's weird to think that I was the same distance from Robert Johnson's recording as the Peet's barista is from the Stones.

Earlier this week I was thinking about music and its context during a staff meeting. My organization is going to have a reception in Houston at the end of the month. I'm bringing a wi-fi speaker, but I told everyone that my musical tastes are not reliable enough to be the DJ.

It's the truth. I would put stuff like Poinciana on it and 21st century Bluegrass and funk and maybe even some electronica. I would be the only one enjoying myself. So one of my colleagues volunteered to bring her surefire four hours of Motown.

People will really like that.

It's the truth. Motown is pretty universally liked across race, age, class, and any other line you can think of.  The odd thing (to me anyhow) is that most of the people who love Motown, know it only as oldies music. Most of them weren't born when "Where Did Our Love Go" hit #1. I probably heard it first on a transistor radio sitting on someone's window sill. Or maybe I heard it at the beauty parlor on one of those interminable Saturday mornings, as I was getting my hair straightened. It was just summer music.

I don't know why the big hits were always released in the summer. It seems as though that still sort of happens. When I heard the music that's now known as Motown, though it might be from Indiana (Vee-Jay), New York (Atlantic), or Memphis (Stax), it was just soul music or R&B.  Calling it all Motown makes it an artifact. It's fixed in time and space. No one makes music that sounds like this, unless it's a quote or ironic. Even if someone hearing it for the first time loves it, there's no way that there aren't all these associations and cultural echoes built right into that first experience. They will never hear it as just one thing out of many on a lazy afternoon.

tours - grand and otherwise

It's been over a month since we got back and being in Europe is receding into memory's rearview mirror. I was going to post about the last stops - Dubrovnik, Corfu, Santorini, Mykonos, and Athens. But them I started thinking about tourism more generally and then I got back into my usual habits and so I didn't post anything at all.

Let me think about tourism.

From a bunch of historical fiction I've read over the years, I've gotten then impression that it was once essential to every rich, young, European man's education to take The Grand Tour. That meant hitting all the capitals of Europe by coach with an entourage or at least a tutor. The idea was that exposure is educational, that someone would come back with a broader view of the world, more cultured, or at least with some swag.

Now is not all that different, though travel is available to more than a tiny percentage of the population. People from all over the world come to Europe to, well to do what exactly? Some people spend long periods in a single place and try to get a sense of a particular culture, society, how people live. Others do a tour, by train, boat, or drive to see different cities, different countries. There's all that history. There are all these cultural markers. And so there are tons of us trooping dutifully through and over them.

The picture above is the Acropolis. It was a cool drizzly day. (It began to rain in earnest in a few hours. we got drenched.) There's was a crowd. Admission is 12 euros, about 15 - 16 bucks. There were people in loosely gathered clumps who were clearly on a tour together. (Guides hold little paddles overhead to keep their flocks in order.) There were families and couples and singletons. We all trooped up to the top. The marble on the top was nearly glassy with rain. It was strange to walk on the mainly red marble that was the matrix of the surface, not tiles or flagstones.

What do we get by standing on these places, in front of these things? What do we get by taking pictures, often selfies, at these sites?

I don't think it's education. To learn something takes more time than an hour or two, takes more focus than reading the helpful signs in multiple languages (but nearly always English). I think at its worst it's acquiring experiences, which is never bad. At best, it's making connection to people who, in most ways, were exactly like us.

trogir and split

Trogir and Split are both UNESCO Historic sites. I'd never heard of Trogir, but Split. The moment the guide said Diocletian's palace, I knew where I was.

One of the most amazing books written in the 20th century is Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She wrote it just before the beginning of WWII. It was published in 1940. It's about a trip she and her husband make through Yugoslavia.  It's a huge book, over a thousand pages. She mixes history, politics, economics, traveler's notes, and personal anecdotes in a way bloggers only dream about. She's opinionated and some of the things she says seem incredibly dated now. But she's insightful and writes with so much engagement with the places she's looking at and a sharp analysis of how Europe is coming to war.

She talks about Diocletian in the section on Dalmatia. He was a Dalmatian boy who went to Rome and made good. He rose to be a general and then they made him emperor. He ruled from age for to age 60, retired in one piece, and moved back home to Dalmatia where he built this palace and died ten years later.

West wrote, "It is not, of course, remarkable as an example of Roman architecture. It cannot hold a candle to the Baths of Caracalla, or the Forum, or the Palantine. But it makes and extraordinary revelation of the continuity of history. Once passes through the gate that is squeezed between the rubbisheries on the quayside straight into antiquity. . . . the vistas have been filled in with people. Rather less than one-fifth of the population of Split, which numbers forty-four thousand, lives in the nine acres of the palace precincts; but the remaining four-fifths stream through it all day long because the passages which pierce it from north the south and east to west are the most convenient ways to the new parts of the town from the harbour."

This is still true and there's a huge market on the east side of the market.