May - July 2003

Slowing Down or Speeding Up?

Me & Time.

Both.

After a month of café afternoons where the Blank Book Muse remained silent, lips pressed & arms crossed, interspersed with work days that made me wonder anew if offices drive people crazy...

Dad had his surgery. It went very well. The tumor came out clean. His kidney wasn't involved. He was awake in the afternoon & so on.

Then the next day, Wednesday at 3 or so, I got a call at work: Bob telling me that Dad had had a cardiac arrest.

Dad may have sustained adrenal insufficiency but I haven't, and from that moment until, I think, Friday (day before yesterday) when we found dad present enough to (almost) finish sentences— I have been in

· hyper space

· the hospital zone

· mortality overdrive

I wrote the chronology in my spiral notebook journal, but I think the odd bits belong here.

Like how I had to tell everybody I knew well enough to exchange even chit-chat with, just "how I was" & why. How I was surprised to find that "I'm sorry," which everybody said, seemed beside the point.

How I felt, when dad was unresponsive on life support, that I was in an altered SoC—that it was sacred space. And maybe that's what it is when we are in the presence of death, or life in the balance: we have drawn near the mystery.

How all that stuff taped against his skin, esp. on his face & the tube forcing his mouth open really bugged me. And I knew I couldn't control my empathic-identification.

How I felt filled with compassion for everyone.

How little things set me off. E.g., a nurse's aura.

How I got so speedy, I lost 2 pounds over night.

And how I would be shocked & horrified each first time (first time I saw him intubated & unconscious, first time I saw him awake but not all there) & then accustomed/accepting by the next time.

Today Dad is 84.

15th Ave «Bux 5/4/03

Part

Death do us.

Take mine.

—and that's not all.

*

We don't need vanishing cream. It all vanishes, creamed or no.

I run my comb through my hair and do not leave. Says here: the hole is greater than. The grater has more holes than. Little bits are -icles. To be fussy is -icular.

And I, weeks later, wonder why I brought/put it up (There). I mean—what did I mean?

Something about fractions (from "fracture" - broken bits) & also about goodbyes — sweet sorrow.

I wouldn't call it that, not when you are contemplating/regarding our ordained end. When it's someone you love. For me, it was an ASC I'd have to call the extremity of tweak, physical, steadied by—what was that mental/spiritual thing—the Anchor of Is. (Here you are, this is ordained.)

*

But, ha ha fooled you/me, Dad has recovered. (So will it be easy next time? Will it be the same or entirely different? It will seem complete.)

Dad remembers nothing of being at St. Clare. Little of being on dialysis. Odd though—all his travails have left him rather sweet. Gad, he's going to be a Nice Old Man. Well, all those prayers: no wonder we got a miracle.

OW«Bux 5/26/03

How Many More Times

The start of a new song, reminding me of an old song that, playing today, reminded me (once again!) that if you subtract the music, my life makes no sense at all.

Though one could argue. No one who loves music (good music, of course, I know g. from b.) would. Ever.

It was an old REM song that reminded me of—good old days, hardly. Those old days of Intensity of Feeling. Of getting up to dance. Of something so exalted that nothing can compare. Except love (thinking cat here). Noticing that my dreams have been coming back. Without nature around to bend me over with my haunches in the air, my dreams are all thwart & deformity: trying to get the help desk guy to remove my skin tags—and what skin tags they were—like a blistered sunburn.

So the eternal does return, only different every time. I remind myself that I've lost a bunch of Bad Stuff too: cramps, migraine headaches, [umm what else?] longing? The poignant, obsessive kind...which in retrospect seems sort of interesting.

Well, yes, in retrospect, my aching hips & back & ankles will probably have their own raffish charm.

15th Ave «Bux 5/31/03

Bring Me the Dipstick

I want to check my dip.

Oh OK, it's plenty deep, my dip, almost as deep as the furrows in my—forehead? Soil? No, my upper lip. I've got pleats like my grandma's

*

I've been thinking about the dead today, along with (alongside of) what's wrong with American culture. Twenty-five words or less.

Then, walking [at 7:30 p.m. in the heat of full summer—already, amazing], wondering why I feel off balance. Trying to figure out what this feeling of unbalance consists of—it's a sort of shaky (like nerves) uncenteredness. Or muscle laxness. And I wonder if it's related to the pain that stabbed inside my left ear (3 or 4 little pokes) earlier. It's the sort of feeling that makes me think – chi. My energy field or life force feels out of whack. Or maybe a blood sugar thing?

*

So hot that all I did until 7 was go to the Capitol Hill library to type a little notebook & get rubbed widdershins by the new librarian, an officious brown woman. Customer unfriendly. It's a whole different place, whole different clientele. I feel like — an alien. (Sur-PRISE.)

I'm an alien, watching the estival-festival. Parade of humanoids half-dressed in odd & odder get-ups. Big behinds, big shoes, egg-yolk hair, tattooed arms, legs, chest, necks. Et cetera galore.

Bway «Bux 6/7/03

Snapping Turkle

Designates an animal of the class real beasts that might as well be mythical, as far as I'm concerned. Also whipoorwills (sp.), nightingales, jaguars, coatimundis, but not coons or possums. They are all too actual.

*

With the sun making silver glaze on all the railings, the hoods of the cars, the leaves, and the bald heads on Broadway, I am discombobulated (de-composed) by a deaf, retarded guy who yells. I mean he's just talking but he doesn't modulate his voice. And then.... weak week-end. No pleasure in what I look forward to — all week, while sitting & stewing in my boredom at F&F. I have moments of explosiveness. And nobody—I mean nobody—understands. Saturday Lee calls (while I was having breakfast!). Liz calls, but I wasn’t in a chatting mood. A kid tries to shove in front of me at the Safeway. I resist. Walk away wanting to box his ears. I type & consolidate the 01 notebook, email a page to David Wright (about him), he who never responded to the synopsis of OD&D & probably won't respond to this. That's fine, I'll continue to look past him on my rare visits to the downtown library.

Broadway «Bux 6/21/03

Fast Forward

Nothing much to say, I've been vetting the 01 notebook draft at the cafe lately. Why I've been typing up that notebook...2 or 3 reasons, none very good. It keeps me from agonizing over my Writer's Block.

If that's what you call a Disinclination to trouble yourself when there are no rewards to be had. “Block” has the virtue of brevity. And sits on the same end of the teeter-totter with my grudges (against work & unlovely home & various lacks).

But yesterday as I sat marking pages in the front window of this Starbuck's, trying not to listen too obsessively to Tex (who actually talks, asks questions, & so on—can tell he's not from Around Here), while eating a large, artery-clogging piece of cheap QFC cake & idly watching the sidewalk parade (on a mostly sunny Tuesday eve), a woman walked by with her tot attached to her left breast like a parka hung on a hook. I mean whole (big) breast out there—not flopping in the breeze only because 2 year old was holding it steady.

And I said to myself—Wouldja look at that. I gotta start sketching in my book again.

I also wanted to record the jumpy little blonde with the cell phone, almost wetting her fashionable pedal pushers because Tex answered the store phone instead of jumping right to her something-something Americano.

Back to work tomorrow. OHE again: 3 days a week.

Broadway «Bux 7/16/03

Imperial March

Strange cross-fire at the Starbuck's counter. Verbal, intangible. Or another word—you can feel: one of the guys is teasing the rust-haired girl. She doesn't seem amused. I suggest a song for him, but she's not amused by that either. I withdraw. He does too, going off duty. She & the remaining guy exchange looks. The cafe at 10 to 7 is full of sheets of fire. There's a fattish blonde of certain age reading Sunday paper, 3 Japanese who have spread their bags around in an inconsiderate Asian way, loading up an empty table with their shit. Then Hilda comes in & my afternoon is complete.

*

All day I hid inside from the heat & hated Seattle (the town) & my poverty. Went out briefly to see a hummingbird & get a paper (the paper was planned, the bird a lovely surprise).

Oh, now it's Marcus—but it's Sunday. I have nothing to limn, nothing to dissect. Discuss, etc. The crawly feel of sweat dripping down my scalp. Not many cats out. I suppose they are off lying in the shade. I sat in Volunteer Park & corrected 01 notebooks, sitting in the grass. That wasn't bad.

15th Ave «Bux 7/20?/03