Postcards from Prison

YrSiteSuxBalls enjoying his birthday gift (the "Flying Fuck" remote helicoptor from ThinkGeek)


I don't write here anymore.

I do, but I don't hit 'publish'.

All of my most diligent blogging came as a direct result of feeling, being, marooned.

Messages in a bottle.

The very first comment I got (automatically erased, thanksalot haloscan)was from an admin for a site that got email into Camp X Ray. Postcards from Prison.


All I ever did here, I see now, is to say the same things over and over from my cell.

I'm burning the fat of inner resources. I'm lonely for the people who I can't get out to see. I'm going crazy with the people who I am forced to mixed with. I want something better than this.


Nothing has changed except that I've somehow learned how to talk to the folks, as my grandma used to admonish me when I was shuddering at the site of the souls in the waiting room on Honor Rancho Visiting Day.

Say hi. Share and expand on something you have in common. Be real. It blows away the people you don't want as well as keeping your wavelength open for the ones you do want.

This blog is now, more or less officially, the halfway house for that uncle you used to go see in prison who is out now and you don't know what to say to anymore.


Let's go to a circus. Or have a barbecue. I'll be first.




Happy Birthday, Muzzie. I love you too.

To be female is to 'hear the cry' - Rumi

Jessica Reeder's Nevada City Bird's Nest babies

Yes, it really does mean 'birdsong'.


I got that from the brain-damaged only son of a brilliant Iranian physicist. Jon, his only son, was the star of our Autistic Disorders improv group at _________ High, back when I was an aide there, around '99 or so.


I just got back from walking around the mall looking for a gift for my own only son and new man, who will be turning 21 next month.

Not a good place to practice avoiding 'all or nothing' thinking. Everything feels like a possible referendum on our relationship. Engraved Tiffany cufflinks? Cabochon-embellished absinthe flask? And then there's all the scrapbook and digital gift boutiques with the implied demand that I make him something homey and motherly and artisany.

Just for the hell of it, I cruised the sere lip of the L-strip where we used to have our shave ice cart, to earn the money to send him where he is at this moment living the paradisical life of an L.A. intellectual surfer.

I waited for a memory to overtake me. I wanted to start crying again, like I always seem to do when remembering when Sonnyboy and I used to be best friends. All I could remember was the day three young men came stumbling and joshing up to my counter and grandly ordered the biggest thing we had. The tallest one paid, or tried to, with a Mall Gift Certificate.

"Happy Graduation, Benny. I thought you'd never do it. Love, all your Mama's friends".

It was for fifty dollars. There were a blizzard of different-colored signatures on it.

"You guys just graduated?"

"Yes, ma'am!", tall one said, mentioning a name tied in the public mind with shootings and outbreaks of ringworm and athlete's foot.

Those three rough, desperate-looking dudes, all fit to burst with pride about finishing something as elementary as a Stockton public education. All of them were damaged in some slight physical way; there was one with a scar pulling up one corner of his mouth, another breath-takingly gorgeous mixed-looking kid with a birthmark the shape of the Crab Nebula on his cheek, and the 6'5", 140-lb. leader of the pack, with an incongrously innocent smile and a slow, hooded lazy eye peeking under his wild orangey curls like a tomcat hiding under a bed.

I gave them all the biggest thing we had. I read the palms of them all, hoping to make Sonnyboy jealous or to attract paying customers. (It didn't work).

If the courage and heart I saw in those rough and sweaty palms could be packaged, I would put it in a Tiffany-blue box and engrave it with all their names for Sonny-boy's birthday.

"Tell me your names, I want to remember when you're famous", I said.

I don't remember any of them. I don't know what happened to them.

I remember their fortunes, though. And I remember thinking that they would never feel as close to each other, or as rich, as they did that day, eating shave ice in a small-town mall with someone else's mom on the first day of their real-world lives.

Something about Iran that isn't watching that poor girl dying in her father's arms

"I can live fifty years in France and my affection will always be with Iran. I always say that if I were a man I might say that Iran is my mother and France is my wife. My mother, whether she’s crazy or not, I would die for her, no matter what she is my mother. She is me and I am her. My wife I can cheat on with another woman, I can leave her, I can also love her and make her children, I can do all of that but it’s not like with my mother. But nowhere is my home any more. I will never have any home any more."

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis




Her name was Neda


from my Twitterstream

Does anyone know how #NEDA's family feels about her being this year's Kneeling Kent State GIrl/Oklahoma City Bomb Baby?
about 3 hours ago from web


Don't ask how I know, but if you've ever had someone die in yr arms in the street, you might not be eager to offer them as mascot about 3 hours ago from web


*****************************************************

Poem for the Rooftops of Iran




***************************************

Someone, in the 'trending topics', mentioned the name of a non violent Islamic activist/martyr named Gaffir Khan


...I have one great desire.
I want to rescue these gentle, brave, patriotic people from the tyranny of the foreigners who have disgraced and dishonored them.

I want to create for them a world of freedom, where they can live in peace, where they can laugh and be happy.

I want to kiss the ground where their ruined homes once stood, before they were destroyed by savage strangers.

I want to take a broom and sweep the alleys and the lanes, and I want to clean their houses with my own hands.

I want to wash the stains of blood from their garments.

I want to show the world how beautiful they are, these people from the hills, and then I wan to proclaim: “Show me, if you can, any gentler, more courteous, more cultured people than these.”





Me and Pansy on the front page of Featured Avatars about Iran.



ندا = "Neda" - voice;call;birdsong;vibration.



zoecelloDear Iranian protesters...a song for you. ♫ http://blip.fm/~8la8n about 8 hours ago from Blip.fm

*********************************************************************

It's father's day.


Summer's here.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

Iran Can Haz Cheeseburger Plz?


Watching the news from a beach house, through a passed-around laptop.

Why USA not help free us now?

June is for brides

Not much makes me feel happy these days.

I'm like the old blind jenny-mule turning the cane-grinding wheel in an endless circle.

Circles contain other circles. I forgot that.


The moon was sorta circular last night. Like I felt.

Hoops are circular. They force a rhythm on you, force you to complete a circuit.

S'all good, like my little trainer boy says. I promised him I would 'keep up our momentum' during this week I took off, sick again, and look what I found. A sacred hoop.

Slaves in Egypt invented hoop dance from twisted weeds and vine. Keeps your spine all warmed up for when you need it, nah'm'sayin'? It dances you, as my preschool class used to say. Yes.


I gave Husband a tassel-dance for his birthday. The Hun asked me what made me think of that??? "Well, we had been so snappish with each other the day or two before, I kept wondering what we were hassling about. I really hate the word 'hassle', and hated having to think it. So I thought, what rhymes with 'hassle'? I asked ChaCha, they aimed me at etsy, and the next thing I knew, I was shimmying along with Miss Indigo Blue's tutorial."

Turns out I'm a natural at tassel-twirling. I never would have known had I not got into a giant bitch-fight with my boy and then laughed at myself for it. Circles. Cycles.

(I hate CEBV and its symptoms not only because it comes in cycles but also because the sores are so imperfectly circular. ) That should probably go on a Post Secret.
A torn, circular one.


I am having the best time helping two old lesbians plan their wedding. Sooo in love, those two, and not one date night, one prom, even one drunk underwear-photo sesh in their combined history. I'm helping to silly them up by their July nuptials.


Not many things make me cry while I'm dancing with giddyiness. This did. Enjoy

Hannibal and Myshell's wedding from tonje Nordgaard on Vimeo.

Panic Disorder is Incurable. But, so is life.

Sonnyboy is taking a year abroad in Costa Rica or Madrid.

I can't get to Berkeley alone without hyperventilating and collapse.

Unless I take drugs.



I'm not going to take drugs.


I'm paralyzed.



Drug Trial by Craig Erick Chaffin
I

Everyone has their own peculiar price,
not quantifiable in currency.
When my hypodermic grazed your vein,
you confessed yours.
It was not exorbitant
so I withheld the serum
a moment longer before
pushing the plunger.


II

You saw rattlesnakes mate in the arroyo
tangled like hoses, braided
like black ropes for a day,
utterly vulnerable in the grip
of love or instinct.

Indians say this sight
grants second sight.

You saw your victimhood
cupped like a cross of iron
in the hollow above your sternum,
cold, rusted from fear,
dangling from a chain
of misinterpreted
coincidence.

Self-knowledge
is a dangerous thing
and can't be granted
by a single vision.

III

Spoke a prophet with his head on a platter:

"To stand for something,
to protest abortion or the destruction of wetlands,
to remember the Holocaust or the Alamo,
to disagree with farm subsidies
or campaign against clear-cutting
helps focus minds dulled by tolerance,
not a virtue but a courtesy--
like ignoring someone's body odor
in an elevator-- which makes it
perfectly moral to say,

'I understand and accept what you are doing
though I find it utterly abhorrent.'

Blessed are those who have found their cause:
gun ownership, preservation of historic buildings,
the fight against leukemia or for hemp:
whatever we are righteously incensed about
restores our passion for goodness,
however misguided."

Beneath the empty platter
the world moves
like ancient women
gathering fuel in vacant lots.

IV

The gut-ache of youth,
super-caffeinated though
socially melancholy, is beyond
the generation previous,
confirmed by body-piercing,
black leather and ghostly skin
as if in preparation, not for a prom
but for a funeral.

You must have cancer of the throat
to sing for them.
Pain sustains them.

Blessed are the pure,
if only driven by glands.

V

Seeking the river's calm
you stretched before the television,
dreaming of a Winnebago
and Palm Springs,
when suddenly you heard:

My sheep hear my voice and my voice is on TV.

Was the sound inside or outside your head?

No televangelist with cockatoo hair
came to explain, so you wept like a sinner,
fearing you were the Christ,
everyone was their own Christ,
and this was too much for you
so I injected the antidote
out of pity for all the lies
you need to make life tolerable.

(Untitled by Simon Pais-Thomas from Flickr)


I surprised myself with an old story I stashed in a secret blog months ago.

It was a good one. I want to buff it up with an emery cloth and send it off somewhere it will be a pleasant surprise for someone who needs it.

I'm too shy to post it but I ran it through Portwiture so I could show it to you.

It looked just like this.


Tomorrow I'm going to wake up early and pick cherries in my black cherry dress.

It always feels like a postcard from prison to a VISTA volunteer

...when I write to my furthest-flung friends who know the unedited me the best, and yet, they think I'm pretty strong and free too.

We all have the same world outside those imaginary bars we clutch in love and fear.



The Hun to me, last weekend


I love it that you read Sun Tsu and Machiavelli when you're having a
bad day. Most people eat ice cream and watch Oprah. Even in your heart
of darkness you're still about five levels more advanced than anybody
else! Still I'm sorry it's a bad time. Don't forget to find some tall
grass to lie in and experience the spring chartreuse before this
weekend's impending heat wave turns it all brown. Now is the time to
put on hippie skirts and wander about meditating on daisies.
Machiavelli and Sun Tsu might not understand but they may deign to
approve, in an intellectual way, of the effect of nature on a woman's
heart.





Chartreuse Thursday, by moi


No use to weep inside and scream outside

Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding


(As much of my life seems to be dedicated to making people feel comfortable with themselves, I really only truly despise people whose life's goal is avoiding discomfort.)


Live Uncomfortably

Happy Birthday, Harvey Milk

Randall Mann's "The Mortician of San Francisco" ,a formal sestina from the point of view of the gay mortician who reverently and conscientiously prepared Supervisor Milk for eternity is not available online.


Last night was the anniversary of the White Night Riots, which I actually remember. People tore up the streets in outrage over the lightness of murderer Dan White's sentence - five years, the absolute legal minimum.


I was still in school, still had my own problems. Like now. Everything has changed except what I was thinking (why don't more people riot when things be bullshit?) and the way I feel (wonderment over the inherent nobility of caring for a corpse; daydreaming over a great man's last thoughts)

Here, caught in my net, quite by coincindence but quite apropros, a film by Chris Milk (norelation) of a daydreamer's last day.


Gitmo. Take a stand, President Hope, please, so if I drop dead today, I don't have that in my last nightmares.

Last Day Dream [HD] from Chris Milk on Vimeo.