Thanksgiving and other miscellany

With Marilyn's dogs, Peaches and Sugar, a few weeks ago.
J's garage.
Bandit.
Jake, watching my brother toy with his latest hoopty.
Adam torturing Oliver.
Why the hell do I look so drunk? Because I'm between my brother and Zaur, the crazy Russian.
J and I.
Jake.
Sim.
Seriously, don't ask.

When Tom Metzger poaches wifi

The thing you have to understand is that my dad is an engineer. That means he's very opinionated and that his opinions are always right.

We were at Jonathan's tonight. They were playing around with this hoopty FourRunner that J bought as a project. I was sitting in the garage, messing with the dogs, kinda bored. I pulled out my computer and asked J for the password to his wireless. He gave it to me.

"I would never use that password," my father said. "It's too obvious."

My brother grunted and slid back under the truck.

"I mean," my father continued, "what if the white supremacists drive by and ..."

Say what?

After a moment he trailed off. Probably for the best.

From the New Camaldoli Hermitage, Big Sur

St. Romuald's Brief Rule For Camaldolese Monks

Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish,
The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it.

If you have just come to the monastery,
and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want,
take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart
and to understand them with your mind.

And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up;
hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.

Realize above all that you are in God's presence,
and stand there with the attitude of one who stands
before the emperor.

Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,
content with the grace of God,
like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing
but what his mother brings him.

Guess hot, splashing soup burns

MY MOTHER: A stream of curses, many of which rhyme.
ME: Snicker.
MY MOTHER: What?
ME: I have Valium. One of us should be taking it right now.

Thanksgiving

I'm loving being in San Diego amidst the fam. They're crazy, but this kind of crazy I can (usually) handle.

We (my mom, Adam/Gina, and Jonathan) were at dinner tonight and I started talking about the memoir. I told my mother: "Dad is going to freak when he reads it. You probably won't like some of the stuff in there either."

She said: "You're writing your reality. I don't have to buy into it." She said it in such a calm, confident way. It was awesome.

Today I got my blood drawn by Beyonce.

I walked into the lab and both she and her hair freaked out: "Walk dat way! Over dere! Naw! Dat chair!"

I sat down and she asked my name. "Allison," she said, "gimme dose good veins."

She asked which way my veins go. "I don't know," I said. "Our communication isn't all that great." But Beyonce is cooking punkin' pie for Thanksgivin', so she was distracted. She kept telling her cohort about it, and the more excited she got, the more she slapped my arm. At one point I thought the blood was going to bounce straight out of the vial and all over her updo.

Finally she said: "Yo' done." You can say that again.

Mark Doty, "Heaven's Coast"

I looked up, into the face of a coyote ...

Then from nowhere I thought, He's been with Wally, he's come from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem. This apparition, my -- ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love? Perhaps it doesn't matter. I've never seen one in the middle of the day before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter. Like my seals, the coyote stared back at us, and I could imagine in that gaze Wally's look forward home -- his old home -- from the other world; not sad, exactly, but neutral, loving, curious, accepting. The dead regard us, I think, as animals do, and perhaps that is part of their relationship; they want nothing from us; they are pure presence, they look back to us from a world we can't begin to comprehend. I am going on, the gaze said, in a life apart from yours, a good life, a wild life, unbounded.