My Chamomile tea smells of dry grass, and cat fur. I let the warm scented steam ground me while I look around for a place to sit in this Community Coffeehouse, which really is a house. I assume I’m in the acute-olfactory stage of coming down off a panic attack, because.I think of how this house smells like Grandma Angie’s, pine cleaner and sweet fried things and hot drinks. I’ve just dropped off Stephen and two of his band-mates at Youth Orchestra Practice. I am here because we got there barely in time, because the caravan of other orchestra moms left for their Meeting During the Meeting without me, because I wanted a place out of the rain and dark to gather my shattered nerves before heading back to the church venue where I left them. I doubt I’ll be missed. The other moms refer to each other variously as “such a strong personality” or “ a real character.” I’m a dumbass who got us to practice late, again, an idiot Lot’s Wife in constant flight from some disaster behind or inside me. Especially when I’m The Mom around these young scholar-musicians, their wit and confidence a constant squeeze at my heart. Even over the Youth Orchestra Mix disc I put in, I overhear snatches of friendly debates over Kumon or Kaplan, rock-climbing or bouldering, online chess or online poker. All the while I navigated through the fog and fluctuating waves of cold fear, hot shame, and…guilt., I think that was what pushed me closer towards my ever-present internal abyss, A sudden thought, ‘That music was just black dots and lines on a page seconds before those kids made it into this fugue”, and I’m down the well, walloped by an icy, side-swiping dread. That’s when I noticed the exhausted old Buick that had been panting behind us for the last few miles stumbled across the slow lane and shudderingly heaved over the shoulder and down a steep embankment. Some of my functioning nervous system thought taking the Downtown Loop instead of getting off at the next exit was a good move. The kids got into practice before the church locked up and shooed me away from the parking lot. I walked past alley cats and trashcans with an old car blanket around my shoulders, Rez-style, before I followed the sign that said Utopia Cafe: Meeting after the Meetings, 7-9. On the entrance path, a snail is waiting,momentarily perplexed by a pine-cone in its path. A man notices me noticing as he steps over it, holding open the door as I walk through. There is a huge sunken room with a round table and a smaller one with the counter I’m sitting at, where a counterman gives a greeting to each arrival before bringing them their drinks. “Scar Clan Survivor in the house”! “Whoa, it’s Crips Who Create!”. Door-opener pats the seat next to him, and I join them. I notice that my hands on the cup aren’t shaking anymore and decide to stay, and get another cup of tea.. I suddenly remember one of the first times I tasted chamomile, the sweet, common weed that grew wild with all the other cats and kids in our yard. I had held onto a cup just like this one a half-dozen times as a child, watching for survivors to crawl out of the cars that regularly crashed through the freeway rail into the ditch behind our house. So that's one mystery solved. In the playlist of triggers, it's a deep cut, I would say, if I had any understanding of music. I join in the prayer for the unknown souls who struggle alone, and then it’s time for Shares and A-Ha Moments. When I say something about not belonging, someone suggests “Why don’t you stay and listen before you decide?” They begin taking turns telling their tender, circumscribed ‘shares”. No fingerholds of beginning, middle or end. As circular and bottomless as the coffee in the mismatched cups in our shaky hands. The one-day-at-a-time pace out of a slippery slope, one unexpected detour in the road enough to reduce you to immobility. No tutor holding a sturdy, unambiguous stairway to the stars. “You play the hand you’re dealt”, I would say, if I knew anything about games with rules. “You have to discipline your thoughts first”, is one A-Ha moment. Stephen would say the same thing. I try to remember the last time I was able to help him in any meaningful way with his homework. A lesson on integers, both of us proud and delighted with the mystery of negative numbers. “-1 + 1 = 0”) Before closing prayer, counter guy comes by with an old-school picnic basket full of day-old pastries. I accept a snickerdoodle twinkling with rainbow sprinkles. A volunteer for the closing prayer hopes that what we heard here is blessed, and that it will carry help to those who need it. A moment of silence again, and this time,I have a ridiculous microvision of a family climbing out of a Buick crashed at the bottom of a deep ravine. I’m there, too, flicking out my lap-robe like a magic carpet over the ditch, where it magically turns into a plank the kids walk across. We sit on the grass and eat delicacies from an old picnic hamper. It’s so ridiculous that I feel quite restored, and give everyone a hug on my way out the door. As soon as I pass the trash again, I am thinking of Daisy Grandma Angie's scrawny black-and-white cat, the lone female of a rotating tribe of twenty or so who only ever produced one surviving kitten. She spent every night dutifully searching further and further away from home to hunt for her little son. When she could no longer compete for the plumpest mice and slowest birds, she raided the trashcans in the first-wives' apartments across Garvey Blvd. I remember laughing at her the morning she came in with an air of triumph and exhaustion, carrying a partially-wrapped DingDong as though it was an antelope. She growled when I took it away from her, and I laughed at her. Oh Daisy, I thought. Blessed are the mothers catching sleep during the day, who summon the courage to ferret through life's trashpiles in search of life's finer things, over and over again, night after night in search of the occasional treasure. The unknown, imperfectly socialized dime-a-dozen domestic scrubs who bring home their best to the child who accepts it as a given, because it is no gift, because it is what we do. I’m not a Mama Bear or a TIger Mom or even much of a Rez Mom. If I am very lucky, I’ll be what I am - the unknown, the unknown actor who resets the game to Zero for my child. I hear before I see the kids let out from practice. Stephen is in the front passenger side, spotting the wrapped cookie with serious hazel eyes. “Is that for me?” he asks gravely, and then takes a big bite.

Let's see if I still remember how to do this.

I had a dream last night  early this morning that Gregor Samsa showed up for breakfast.

                                   I hope someone I know sent this PostSecret.. It's true.


He was sitting at the little ice-cream-parlour table set outside where I go to write in my journal the once or twice a month that I just can't face the internet.

I haven't been able to write. Or read. Or sleep. So I go outside and wait for ducks to land in the pool to seperate night from day.

I had fallen asleep listening to an old writer's almanac podcast. It was the anniversary of the suicide of Virginia Woolf.

The Nazis had just bombed London. She was losing her mind again. "I can not bear the thought that I may never again produce a sentence that brings me pleasure" she wrote, and then walked into the pond.

(I can write my way through war, or out of madness. But if I can't write, I can't live.)


I think I was still asleep when I wandered outside and thought I saw Gregor sitting there. He was thumbing through my Dictionary of Russian Slang, moving his pale lips over Nabokov's notes on the translation of 'cockroach'.

I gave him my fancy Ukranian teacup with the matching saucer. Gregor watched the ducks cruise low in the clotted sky while I rummaged in the pantry for the ancient tin of black tea. A scent like a soiled starched hanky filled the room while it brewed.  I walked across the wet lawn with his tea, spiraled with coils of spoiled half- and -half in the same patterns as the clouds overhead.

"You don't look too bad", I told him, and it was true. He looked like someone bleeding from an internal wound. His hands shook. He sniffed nervously. He cleared his throat repeatedly, but never spoke. He picked up my stale pack of Fantasia's off the table and picked a green one . He tried to light it, but his hands kept dropping the lighter. The cigarette fell open, and he let his fingers scrabble delicately in its shreds, inhaling its scent.

I got up again to get my own coffee.
I was aware of how sleepy I had been.  I went through all my familiar and instinctual motions of intuiting what to feed a waiting guest. All this time, I could feel Gregor's insistence on having breakfast with me.

"He wants me to make his last meal", I thought.

I threw open my refrigerator door like cutting a Tarot Deck. Took out a half-empty jar of borscht, some freegan chopped onions, half a bag of angel-hair coleslaw.

My deepest, prettiest pasta bowl was just the right size. I stirred the onions into the borshcht and sprinkled the cabbage with cinnamon sugar and maple syrup because those Polish men like their vegetables too sweet, and because I could feel Gregor's urgency to eat at a table before he was completely something else. Whatever it was.

I couldn't watch him, but I felt the table shake. I heard little clicking noises as he finished the meal. I felt his pleasure and relief.

I saw the clear, celluloid-stiff points of his wings under his frock coat as he faded away.

A beetle has wings. Nabokov was right.  A cockroach may be an angel in disguise waiting to be fed the best you have.

All the way to work, I was thinking about how I need to get back in the habit of writing again. I wanted an hour alone at a computer, with my thoughts about feeding a Kafka icon metamorphosing into a poem.

I wanted my own wings. Even if I'm feeling like a cockroach myself these days.

Instead, I got seated next to the new 'girl', an old Gulf II veteran with  patchy facial burns that make everyone uncomfortable. She was shy, eager, hungry for talk.

I put aside my need to feel myself capable of poetry again.
 I let my colleague tell me a story of her godmother's house and a recurring ghost and felt sideswiped by something as scalding as flying roadside explosives, as sharp as new-grown wings, as natural, native, and bitter as forgotten food, as long as a sentence that a German diarist might write, hoping that it would give someone pleasure.

(An old post, re-blogged because I just found the one vegan grilled cheese sandwich that does it for me.)


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

When I got back from the gym today, I was starving and grumpy and couldn't find anything to eat, when I realized what I wanted was a damned grilled cheese sandwich. I hadn't made one in so long that for a minute I couldn't remember how.

Which made me realize I was depressed, which is one time I really could use a perfectly grilled sandwich.

The basic grilled cheese sandwich - one slice of yellow cheese between two margarinized slices of spongy square white bread, cooked two minutes each side- has never crossed my lips.

(The only time that version is acceptable, and delicious, is when someone who loves you unconditionally, i.e., mother, or a new trick, preferably when you're still both a little high, has just made it for you.) No, when I say grilled cheese, I mean business.

And when I have pulled myself out of anxiety before, often to minister to someone else's depression, it's amazing how often the grilled cheese cure works.





Now, since I'm in a hurry, not to mention on a diet, here are just a few- For a friend who is still tripping,but wants to drive to Taco Bell-



He's hungry for sensation, not just food. Give him a taste of sharp cheddar while you let him watch the broiler heat up. Set some crisp buttery crackers out on a baking sheet and give him the job of setting little squares of cheese on each one.

Remember, if it looks too big, or too hard to eat, he'll leave and go get a burrito.Open a beer and let him watch you pour it into a cold mug. Describe what you are doing (the cheese makes little sunbursts! wow, what a perfect head on that mug!) and slice up a green apple to eat between bites until he comes down.



For an old friend who is visiting on a spring afternoon-

DOn't get too fancy, or they will think you want them to go home. Put on a pot of coffee, and let it fill the kitchen with good smells. Melt some butter in a heavy skillet, and throw in some diced onions (the pre-cut ones from the store) to add to the kitchen aromas. Cook the onions until they are transparent and the kitchen windows fog over. Distract her with a question about something funny she said ten years ago, so she forgets about leaving. Spoon out the onions and set down two thin buttered slices of wheat bread. Pile each slice with 1) a thin slice of Havarti, 2) the buttery onions,3) transparently-thin slices of a Granny Smith apple, 4) sliced avacado, 4) sprouts, and top with more havarti. Cover the skillet with a glass lid for one minute. Eat with a knife and fork on thin china. Follow with strong coffee to keep her alert for the drive home after all that butterfat.



For your first grilled cheese sandwich after sex - You already know what he likes ; let him see what else you like. Be assertive in your tastes. Butter some dark pumperknickel and toast it in the pan just enough to melt the butter. Shred some jack cheese and toss it with a can of sweet tender crab meat and a flick of grainy German mustard. Do the glass lid thing again - you want the cheese to melt before the bread browns. Cut the sandwiches into triangles and pile them together on one plate. Wrap one up in a checked napkin for him to take home. No one else but you will ever remind him of this sweet and salty smell again.



For your son who has returned home after visiting your bourgey relatives -

He will not accept anything. He will deny he is hungry. He will talk with nostalgia about white supermarket bread and CostCo cheesecake. Ignore him. Heat a can of tomato soup with a cupful of your fresh tomatoes diced into it. Give it to him to sip while you gather the odds and ends of your empty kitchen. Slice up a clove of garlic with a razor and brush it across that end of French bread you have left.Cut the heel into two slices. Drizzle a fruity olive oil over the surface. Now you have his attention. Put the cut bread in an oiled skillet over low fire.

Pile one slice with a mound of olivado (because he 's still part Italian), and spread the other with a slowly-melting medallion of sheep's milk peccorino (because he's still your little lambie-pie). Let him come up to you like a hungry stray tom as the flavors melt together. Shut both pieces up with a basil branch and leave the plate out like a dish of cat food to a stray. Don't be surprised when he asks for another.



Okay, I'm going to go make me a velveeta and weinie toastie dog.



Just kidding. : )

Two things. I. Just. Figured out.

Why why why why why oh WHY, I wondered for most of my life, do people (women....and, men) get their hooks into someone out of love, and then proceed to change every single thing about them? I'm not talking about destructive or annoying habits here; I mean definitive traits.

1) It's because they want someone. And the Someones they want are either out of their league, or not into them.
So they try to make a coalmine canary into a peahen.




And.......,

Why is someone who otherwise seems to like me okay suddenly not speaking to me? He is outgoing to the point of obstreperousness; he regards my reserve as some flaw that needs helping with rather than the essential part of my character that it is. He followed my blog for a few days, and then conspicuosly quit talking to me. I don't know why because he's not talking, and I don't like asking other people to ask why Homeboy is acting however....ugh, gossip. Fuggit.





2) He just figured out how much more interesting I am than he knew, because his gregarious convos are all one-sided. Now he's retaliating with the most interesting thing about him......the mysterious reason he may not be talking to me.

In spite of all that, I feel like humans are pretty cute. We rule, as the saying goes. For now.

Here's more on how we can rule even harder. Help a brother out.

I could use some Heart's Ease. I wonder how it works.

Happy Mother's Day, just in case I miss you all.

Thanks to all who have been keeping me company here. It's nice, isn't it?


I love listening to people who are able to say what they mean and know what they are talking about. That's YOU.


I'll be taking a break this weekend. It's okay to not have to be the one saying something all the time. Times I'm dry, these are the words, songs, quotes, etc, that flow through my head like the email of the latest writer who's got me sprung.

While I'm gone, feel free to read, use, and re-purpose to your content. Or not.

Oh, I just remembered one- "In Russian, 'to be silent' is an active verb" - Alexandr Solzhinitsen.

See you next Tuesday.

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


"Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. "


Gustave Flaubert






"When I'm feeling the audience, I am always swearing, always praying, and always making love". - Carlos Santana





"The Internet is the greatest collaborative literacy project since Gutenberg invented moveable type in the 1400s. It makes everyone who uses it a better reader - and a more effective writer. And it accomplishes this in a form that's become so natural, many of us don't even think of it as writing".



"People are people. And people are problems. But - and this is a very big but - people who are practiced in collaboration will do better than those who insist on their individuality".

- Twyla Tharp, "The Collaborative Habit"



"Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.

He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.

General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer

For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." — William Blake



"Q. - How does it feel to be the most famous sniper in military history? And what is your favorite rifle?"



"A. - Who thinks about what one feels? I paid attention. I did what there was to be done as well as I could. With whatever gun they gave me". - Simo Häyhä



"..don't be like so many writers,

don't be like so many thousands of

people who call themselves writers,

don't be dull and boring and

pretentious, don't be consumed with self-

love.

the libraries of the world have

yawned themselves to

sleep

over your kind.

don't add to that.

don't do it.

unless it comes out of

your soul like a rocket,

unless being still would

drive you to madness or

suicide or murder,

don't do it.

unless the sun inside you is

burning your gut,

don't do it." - from "If You Want to Write", Charles Bukowski



"I thought I had to cut off from my head down to my toes

But heaven knows that I was wrong, I`m feeling again

Holding my breath and holed up in this cheap motel, I feel like hell

I`m holding my own heart, I`m feeling again



When I get that feeling like a bass drum

Pounding til my head is numb

Electric onion peeling within

I got that feeling again" - John Hiatt



"If my election to be your President has proved nothing else, it is that the most important part of my campaign slogan, 'Yes We Can', is the we". - Barack Obama



"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."

Eric Hoffer



" They ain't no notes on a dulcimer. You jes' play it". - Woody Guthrie



"I believe that the first Homo Erectus was a female. She has holding her baby and dancing". - Raggedy Annarchy



"Exquisite orgasms of self-consciousness. That's what it feels like to be onstage with nothing to say. I won't do it." - Jerry Garcia



"I could be his muse, if only he'd let me". - Philip Roth's ex.





(in response to any reported production difficulty) - "Rise above it". - Noel Coward



IN ANY COLLABORATION, NO ONE LIKES TO LET COLLEAGUES DOWN. CRISIS FOCUSES ENERGY. WHEN IT REALLY MATTERS, PEOPLE RISE TO THE OCCASION. - Twyla Tharp



"Who's got the mic that can rock the party?/ YOU'VE got the mic that can rock the party!" - vernacular

Just about five years ago this month, I went absolutely Ophelia-mad over a cybercrush, and, through him, the whole hip baby internet.

We're still friends. :)

I don't get that excited about every single new discovery flowing into my little tide pool, the way I did in Spring '05, when life was just one big sigh and swoon over each new proof of psycho-sexual  synchronisticity in this shadow world.

One thing from that time wears particularly well. IIRC, none of my blog friends at the time liked it. I did. Still do.
I can imagine watching this as a not-completely un-proud Creator looking down at this ingenous blend of editing and mystic participation, in a bless-you-my-children way.

Five years.

It's been good.

Even if it was all me.

Spring is here! It's been great. But then, I crashed from my dogpaddling into an undertow of panic again and again and again for the latest time. Again.

I was feeling like a week of wet Wednesdays among all the fresh wild mustard and saffron-bright daffodils on the freeway offramps, when I decided to gtf over myself and get out and talk to someone. (Pictures forthcoming).

A spry old dude who held the door open for me at a greasy roadside diner told me I looked like Sophia Loren. Heh. Only somebody old enough to remember that name would think I looked anything like her.

Such raw attention, like poetry, is there for those who need it, not those who expect it . It's never what you expect.

And I just remembered that I was a big grown up woman with two years of blogging and five of self-portraiting before I discovered (via 2005-era Buzznet) that some people like big hips.


The Brazilians and Italians, in particular, I remember, had some lovely and poetical descriptions for female forms that flow from economy to opulence.

Good old American 'thick' has never sounded the same to me since.

I can give up being thick and I can give up being anxious, but never at the same time.

I think I just blogged myself into an epiphany. Sorry.

Thick Chicks


Here's to you and the eyes that love us..

This is what I've been doing.

Y'all come - and join in.