Moving

I've been trying to find a half-ass decent place for us within the permutations of what we've got going: a dog, a kid, the need to stay in Berkeley for said kid's education, a budget. It's a giant pain in the ass. The only places around here, it seems, are 500-square-foot two-bedroom apartments that are tiny and cramped. Man, am I sick of this shit.

Today's revised paragraph

We proceed as a family, three now, a triangle rather than a square. Death is a shape-shifter. They don’t tell you that, whoever they are. Our square felt cozy, homey, even as it was fragmented and jagged. Our triangle feels more tentative and broken. It’s the new normal. You’ll get used to it. Take it day by day.

Today's writing

What we don’t know is that something lies in wait. Something bigger than all of us combined. Something chemical and reactionary. Heat and light, ignition and flame. Nothing we can flee to extinguish. Something trained to teach surrender. 

MacDuff's Pub, Tahoe, 2011

 

I miss you, Mr. Baba

 

Pieces of a morning

• Awesome white-girl meditation
• Coffee in my Cafe Du Monte mug
• A candle called Chai.

From CONFLAGRATION

We climb out of the car, gather our bearings. It’s been a long drive. Ross takes the bags. I grab Sid’s leash. He gets up, stretches slowly. He has grown older, old. It wasn’t that I didn’t notice. I have. It’s that I didn’t want to see. I veiled my vision; I kept my attention at half-mast. I was too busy with my phone, my computer, pounding out stupid real-estate copy that never, ever changed. Meanwhile my dog was aging. And my son –

My son –

Easier to close your eyes. Easier to keep trying to pull higher themes out of a laundry list of qualities handed to you by a client, a bloodless task. You’ve climbed the ladder. The view is your reward. Rich shit like that. Sometimes my own writing makes me want to hurl all over myself. That’s not the worst feeling, though. The worst is when you just don’t give a holy good goddamn. When you’re so disconnected. When your life feels like something framed on a wall in front of you.

This morning's writing

Saint Orres doesn’t loom or hunker. It simply regards. Highway One, the Pacific Ocean, cars wending their way along the rise, brush tattooing the slope on which it sits. In California, brush is a fuck-you to the environment, a fount of fire. Yet you see it everywhere. Such is the arrogance of this state.

Missing

This face, this home. Always, always with me.

Happy Father's Day

 

Lauren Hough, "Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing"

The fundamental misunderstanding of depression is the idea that the suicidal want to die. I didn't want to die. But some misfire in my brain treats existential pain like a dog reacts to vomiting: Fuck it, I'm gonna dig a hole to die in. Even on a good day, my brain will point out a few easy ways out: Take a hard left in front of that truck. It'll be over before you feel it. But when it's dark, when I'm hopeless, I'm just white-knuckling my way through the nights for no reason but instinct. 

Revised paragraph

Jenner is a beautiful wide spot in the road held softly by the Russian River and Pacific Ocean. A sign tells us the population is 136. There’s a perceptible shift when we hit town limits. The air here is cleaner, the environment quieter. There’s a certain slowness here, a pace endemic to small towns that fail to exceed 150 souls.

We're seeing them in July

 

Thank God I'm a Country Boy

 

2016

 

100 percent

 

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Kettle set to boil

Marcus has lately been comparing me to water just about to boil. When I was bitching about needing sleep the other day, he said: "Even boiling water settles down to simmer, Toots." (Or something of that ilk. Yes, we call each other Toots.) 

It's an apt metaphor. 

Lafayette Reservoir

 

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