not just circle

2003-06-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

Good Boy

A young man, whom I used to babysit, graduated from Fireman's Academy last night. When he was a year and a half old, I used to feed him scrambled eggs and yoghurt, and then push him around in circles in the garage in a little plastic car for hours. Now, he's a tall, handsome young man, and has graduated from Fireman's Academy.

How many jobs are there nowadays that offer a man actual opportunities for heroism? Plus, we saw a video of their training, and it was so physical - so grounded and concrete. It really reminded me that virtue is in details and in engagements, a phenomenon that only exists in time and space, like everything else we are to encounter in this world. I tend to think of virtue as something disembodied - an idea - but for my young friend, virtue will be borne out of competence What a blessing it is to find an occupation that allows one to make virtue real using tools and one's own hands.

More to think about.

2003-06-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

Something to Consider...

"You cannot practice love. If you do, then it is a self-conscious activity of the 'me' which hopes through loving to gain a result."

J. Krishnamurti - The First and Last Freedom, p.129

2003-06-24T00:29:00.000-07:00

The Pleasure of the Text

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing.

...

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas - for my body does not have the same ideas I do.

...

Pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot... Bliss is unspeakable, interdicted.

...

Can it be that pleasure makes us objective?

~ Roland Barthes

2003-06-22T02:17:00.000-07:00

A Few Changes

1. My mom's moving out of my house and to Washington DC. It's great because she drives me nuts, and I need to be the master of my own home, and she needs to stop spiralling downwards and pulling me down with her. It's not so great because my she helps me a lot with my son, and makes it possible for me to leave the house. I am afraid to be imprisioned in parenthood, and as much as I positively adore my beautiful child, I know I need to get out and feel like I can breathe free. I'm afraid those days are over.

2. A new bike racer is staying with me for several months. He's from New Zealand. I like him, and I think I will enjoy him, but I'm a little worried that I will never feel like I can relax in my house... wear a sleevless shirt, or spend a moment not worrying whether or not I look fat.

3. Suddenly, the travel plans are changed with my team, and they may not take me to New York. When I signed on, making certain races on team dime was to be my payment. All that seems to be changing, and I have heretofore been too reluctant to rock the boat to object. It looks like I may have to.

One thing that remains the same:

I am in love. The time I spend with him is like a rest in a weary land, but sometimes, when I am watching him talk - the tiredness around his eyes - the sound of his voice - his leathery skin - sometimes I feel like I am looking in through the window at beautiful and unattainable things. There is a physical sensation - a tightness in the chest, and long hours staring into the dark. Time passing. It makes me feel heavy and sad in a way I'd never trade because the feeling of love - the quickening of it - is something I want, even if I can't possess. But it's hard to love and do nothing.

2003-06-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

A New Little Plot of Mine:

I've been a journalist for the sport of professional road cycling for a little over a year. I started doing it because I caught a glimpse of something really beautiful in the sport - an opportunity for heroism of a very basic kind, and a chance for men to be men. I have been at it for awhile now, and at first, when I started, I saw metaphors and images of all kinds in it. I saw the poetry of human endeavor, and it thrilled me to write about it - to give it the words it could not give itself.

Lately, I've been a little down, and have lost the thread a little bit - gotten wrapped up in details and skirmishes of different kinds, desires fullfilled and unfullfilled, and mostly. my writing has been losing its fire a little bit - losing the love that made it good in the first place. Now, in an effort to kick start my heart, I want to start a little series here in which I plan to remind myself of what made me decide to do it in the first place. So...

The Poetry of Human Endeavor
Or, Why Cycling is so Great, Pt 1

This charming creature:

Was my first inspiration. Now, obviously he is very handsome, but that isn't why. As a journalist, there's a lot one can't say, and some of that, one might be able to say as a diarist, so I am just going to describe him for all three of you, my readers, here.

From my days as a shy and mousey teenager, firmly ensconced in the social outcast/clever kids tribe, I have been disdainful of athletics, and intimidated by big handsome guys who lead primarily physical lives. As a reader, a writer, and someone who has always been more interested in the life of the mind, its only recently that I have truly found some relation in my own sensibilities to these people who lead lives that differ so hugely from my own, and whose intelligence is of a completely different nature and composition.

GH (above, I'm not putting his whole name here because I would prefer that the bike racing crowd NOT find my website en masse...) won the first big race I went to as a fan. It was a glorious day - all vivid color, speed and staggering beauty in my imagination. He celebrated his victory rubbing his palms together and smiling like a 15 year old boy. Later, his father kissed him on the lips on the podium before he sprayed the photographers with champagne.

Later, when I first started covering bike races as a journalist, my assignments always centered around a very old, traditional European series that begins in April every year, called the Spring Classics. These races are tough, one day affairs, usually lasting just over 6 hours, that are regularly contested in very unfriendly weather, over grueling, old courses in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland.This charming man excels in the Spring Classics, and as I was covering American riders, and he was so often the only American contender, I ended up writing preview after preview of upcoming events in which he was the only subject, and found myself repeating the same list of honors and talents again and again.

Now, this rider's favorite race, often called the Queen of the Classics, is the hardest, most brutal race of all of them - long, trying day in the saddle, usually in a torrential downpour, over kilometers and kilometers of 300 year old cobbled cowpaths little more than a meter wide in places, that rattle the bones and break the strongest wills. It takes a hard man, and more than that, it takes a special kind of, oh, I don't know - maybe it's a resignation, or just a lack of resistance; an ability and willingness to suffer, to even finish. Those that do are inevitably covered in either mud, or a thick, green pollen dust from the surrounding fields, and are often wrecked physically and drained emotionally. This rider has ridden the race 9 times, and has never failed to ride ever meter of it. For the last few years, he has been in the top 6 finishers in the strongest fields the sport has to offer. He rides like a lion - solid, strong, calm, determined, consistent, and utterly unable to give up or give in, sometimes despite terrible odds, and desperate luck.

Faced with the task of writing yet another race preview, I decided it might reduce the repetition if I contacted him and got his comments, and so I wrote to his agents and requested his editorial contribution. A few days later, he e-mailed me, and thus began my correspondence with just such a specimen as I have always viewed with a measure of apprehension and disdain.

His first mail to me, full of tortured syntax and grammer, was nevertheless characterized by a kind of shy ernestness, and though he guardedly looks for the right things to say, there is a sort of unwitting, or maybe just an undisguiseable, openness in his style. A kind of sweetness that I would never have expected to meet in such a creature. A man of few words, he is simple and clear, honest and genuinely good-natured, and at the same time, has a formidable competence and a strength that I can't help but respect. His way of riding his races is his best expression of what he is: consistent, determined, capable. He is beautiful, but not cruelly so, and everytime I have spoken with or corresponded with him, I am struck again by how essentially good he is.

A lot of people say that he won't win races because he lacks the "killer instinct;" that unbreakable will to crush the opposition that is so strong in some. Last year, he told me about losing his biggest race. His mistake was not to have one of his teammates, men who were all there in his service that day, go back to the car and get him a jacket. He got too cold, and expended too much energy shivering and tensing up to keep warm, and he didn't have the power to carry on when he needed it. He still finished the biggest one day race of the year in 6th place that day - on heart, not legs - but he could have done better if he'd been more willing to rule with an iron fist.

Through my involvement in this sport, I have met so many people that are so different from me, and whose talents, virtues and way of being in the world I have never been able to really see or respect - and through them, I am learning that there are many ways of expressing what's deepest and best in human beings, and that some of the most beautiful ways don't have any words, and the feats of grace, strength, courage and determination that are the essential content of the sport of cycling are also essentially silent and ephemeral.

so, I started to write.

2003-06-11T18:40:00.000-07:00

A Quote from my 11 Year Old Son:

"Don't worry, Mama; I know how to cut the cheese."

Don't I know it.

2003-05-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

Just Because:

I can't stop thinking about someone, and no, it isn't Humphrey Bogart.

2003-05-22T00:48:00.000-07:00

There's an especially good feature on McSweeneys:

Titles of Unwritten Essays Jotted Down While Living in Prague in the 90's

My personal favorite:

"Pulp Fiction" and Its Unfortunate Validating Effect on the American Dudes of Prague

Followed closely by:

The Expat in His Subletted Apartment: His Neighbors Hate Him, but He Thinks This Builds Character

Both of them remind me, humorously, of ex-boyfriend Thaddeus, who is now bemoaning his fate in Russia after years of drama and longing for what he then spoke of as his adopted motherland. Man alive, was he ever full of crap.

2003-05-20T17:38:00.000-07:00

I've Had a Visit

...from this man I really love, and it was an immense pleasure. Recently I'd been thinking better of it all - of admitting to it; but even the smallest exposure recreates the whole picture and reminds me why.

We talked, as we often do, about motivations and super motivations - the fact that no one is ever altruistic - everyone has things they want from every interaction, and that people are rarely honest about that. Right alongside that is the somewhat suprising ability he has to hear me edit myself. He always knows when I am not 100% behind what I'm saying, and I really enjoy being seen in that way. It always makes me wonder how much he can see through me, and make me assume that he sees it all.

I also wonder what he takes from it - what motivates him. Obviously, he wants my help with his projects. He wants me to do what I can for him. I also think he enjoys his abiltiy to make me love him, but, I wonder if there's anything else to it.

He makes me wish I were more forceful and confident, and that I didn't constantly second-guess myself. There's a certain kind of romanticism, that I think includes the abilty to believe in ones own feelings and intuitions, that I am no longer at home with, and is perhaps a casualty of my education, of which he makes me regret the lack. It's not that I really even doubt myself, but what I lack is the ability to speak without editing, and to speak out. It's almost just that I am out of practice, but it's also a matter of trust and courage.

I've been lucky to have been able, on some occasions, to reveal myself to him, to show him what is best in me - a kind of theoretical imagination, an elasticity of mind, and a kind of humaneness and generosity of vision when I love. I'm also mousy and timid, a fence-sitter, a fierce self-editor and an obssessive, and he has seen that, too.

So what are my motivations? I want him to know me, and I am enormously satisfied when he does. I want to be respected and to be asked to give the best thing I have. That has happened. I also want him to love me, and I want to experience that quickening of the senses that accompanies a certain kind of draw - the kind magnetism he exerts over me, almost for its own sake.

I live in a desert, and he is like a well. Unfortunately, he is one that I may not draw from very often, nor as deeply as I would like, but a small drink is enough when you're parched. Whenever he leaves, I always feel like I am back out on a long, dry journey.

2003-05-20T01:06:00.000-07:00

Every night, I go to bed alone. It's been like this for nearly three years.

Sometimes I like it. There's a part of me that really craves solitude. The thought of being remote, absolutely silent and to be completely alone is immensely appealing to me, and sometimes, when I crawl into bed by myself, I feel the vastness of the night sky, and my small self floating in my blankets, and it isn't so much that I am happy to be alone, but I feel myself. I feel what I am; and there's a satisfaction in that.

Other times, I get into bed alone and close my eyes only to have faint glow of light from the windows burn through my eyelids. I can't sleep, and I can't stop thinking. Things crowd in. I worry that I've forgotten something at work, wonder if my plans can possibly be made real. I think about the body my imagination has siezed upon, and trace its contours in my imagination. It's then that I lose track of myself and am swept up into comparisons and sadnesses.

So Krishna admonished Arjuna on the field of battle:

Whenever the mind wanders, restless and
diffuse in its search for satisfaction without,
lead it within; train it to rest in the Self. Abiding
joy comes to those who still the mind.

2003-05-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

Rest In Peace:

June Carter Cash died today.

2003-05-15T01:32:00.000-07:00

Now that I've made my blog so pink and feminine, I may as well confess that I have been reading too much Jane Austen just before bed.

Cynicism and experience have made me nearly impervious to the modern version of that story - I am much more likely to mock at than I am to swoon over 9 romantic comedies out of 10 - but there is one brand which still slays me, and against which I am uttterly helpless, and it is the kind that is to be found in Jane Austen novels, with their careful and infinitely articulate social niceties and that sense of certainty and justice that is to be found in a letter, or any profession of attachment where there is honor and sincerity.

When I was 15, I went to school in England for half of a school year. I wore a long, green wool cape, and attended Harrogate Ladies College; a venerable old institution in beautiful North Yorkshire. While I was there, I visited places like Bolton Abbey and York Minster, and it was there that I first fell in love with Mr. Darcy, surely the dreamiest creature in all of noveldom... until I met Mr. Knightly shortly thereafter.

During my brief sojourn in Harrogate, I remember, more than anything, looking up from a worn paperback after reading a sentence like: "It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightly must marry no one but herself," looking out of the window of a train gliding through a perfectly picturesque English countryside of gentle green hills, crossed by stone walls and dotted with sheep, and sighing to myself as I dreamt of my Mr. Knightly.

2003-05-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

The Swimmer
by Brendan Kennelly

For him the Shannon opens
Like a woman
He has stepped over the stones

And cut the water
With his body
But this river does not bleed for

Any man. How easily
He mounts the waves, riding them
As though they

Whispered subtle invitations to his skin,
Conspiring with the sun
To offer him

A white, wet rhythm. The deep beneath
Gives full support
To the marriage of wave and heart,

The waves he breaks turn back to stare
At the repeated ceremony
And the hills of Clare

Witness the fluent weddings
The flawless congregation
The choiring foam that sings

To limbs which must, once more,
Rising and falling in the sun,
Return to shore.

Again he walks upon the stones
A new music in his heart,
A river in his bones

Flowing forever through his head
Private as a grave
Or as the bridal bed.

2003-05-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

The New Look

I'm trying to cheer myself up with a little pink and a bird's nest. I think it's all pleasingly feminine, and I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but I think I will get used to it, and that could be a good exercize.

Starbuck's, Beverly Hills

There's a 55 or 60 year old man who's had a facelift so that the skin on his face is smooth, tight and pale, but his neck is loose, wrinkled and sunworn. A frowsy older woman, densely fat, champagne blonde and with black kohl all around her eyes, wearing a dishwater white cotton cardigan is dipping her raspberry pastry into her paper coffee cup. An almost matched pair of brash Israeli women completely clad in Dolce & Gabbana, with big 70's style fade-lense sunglasses talk loudly in Hebrew. Coming and going: trim girls in gym clothes with bare, tanned bellies and perfectly arranged casual hairstyles; some with docile boyfriends trailing behind them like dull-plummaged birds behind their showy mates. The barrista is a large lesbian with closely-cropped bright green hair under her black Starbuck's baseball cap. She's got silver facial piercings, bad skin and over-plucked chola eyebrows.

2003-05-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

After months of financial crisis...

I'm having a hard time subduing somewhat apocalyptic visions of the future. There's a part of me that stands cooly back, watching the engaged me struggle as things spiral down the proverbial toilet, thinking: it will be ok. It has to be. Behind her, there's another member of my psychic peanut gallery that whispers of being just about at the end of my allotment of borrowed time. What really gets me is how affronted I feel about it all. It's such an incredible, energy-sucking, black hole vortex.

I tell myself I should be free of this panic about basic survivial. If only I had sensibly gone to college to become an accountant, or a nurse, instead of frivolously studying literature and dreaming romantic dreams while reading T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins and sighing to myself... Which is not to suggest that without such a grimly realistic course of study, one cannot find gainful employment, but it's more the whole turn of mind that would have allowed me to be happy with a degree in accounting.

Sometimes I feel like I am in line for a particularly miserable destiny, and that as it all catches up with me, I have only myself to blame; I simply choose wrong, and I always have. Everything I do represents a new wrong decision that cripples my chances for happiness, security and not dying alone as a ward of the state. It would be fine if I were alone in all this, but I feel miserable about the fact that my son has to partake of my black fate. I think my penchant for melodrama and over-wrought navel-gazing is a symptom of the problem.

What a depressing blog this is. If I were an accountant, I bet I'd be funny and clever.

2003-05-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I'm a little sick of it.

My son's school keeps scheduling things that I must attend, or make my boy feel miserable, neglected and unloved, on weekdays when I have to be at work. A lot of the parents there somehow manage to have lives that allow them to attend... but not many of them are single parents living paycheck to paycheck.

My sister keeps bringing her dog over to take a pee on my lawn. She lives across the street, and not a day goes by that she doesn't bring the dog over to deposit its effluvia on my territory.

My mother, who lives with me, and normally holds up a portion of the household costs hasn't been paid in nearly 5 months, and the financial punctuality that I have worked so hard to maintain over the past few years has gone completely down the toilet.

My brother has taken so many of my CD's, that I'm not even sure what he has anymore. What I am sure of: I will never get them back.

My dog keeps burying scraps of food and his toys in my bed. The other day, I found a crust of bread, a piece of cheddar cheese, and the tail of a monkey stuffed animal belonging to my son that he felt needed to be stored in my bed for safe-keeping.

There's this man I fell in love with.

2003-05-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

Why Radiohead is The Best:

there, there
words by Thom Yorke

in pitch dark i go walking in your landscape
broken branches trip me up as i speak
just cos you feel it doesn't mean it's there
just cos you feel it doesn't mean it's there
there's always a siren singing you to shipwreck
(don't reach out, don't reach out)
stay away from these rocks we'd be a walking disaster
(don't reach out, don't reach out)
just cos you feel it doesn't mean it's there
(there's always someone over your shoulder)
just cos you feel it doesn't mean it's there
(there's always someone over your shoulder)
feel it
why so green
and lonely
heaven sent you
to me
we are accidents waiting
waiting to happen
we are accidents waiting
waiting to happen

2003-05-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

It strikes me that I choose to love people who are impervious. I always seem to love a man who is an island, of sorts.

I've been reading a really great book - The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, and there was this really brilliant paragraph in it:

"...just because you are not a roaring egotist, you needn't fall for the fashionable modern twaddle of the anti-hero and the mini-soul. That is what we might call the shadow of democracy; it makes it so laudable, so cosy and right and easy to be a spiritual runt and lean on all the other runts for support and applause in a splendid apotheosis of runtdom. Thinking runts, of course-- oh, yes, thinking away as hard as a runt can without getting into danger. But there are heroes, still. The modern hero is a man who conquers the inner struggle. How do you know you aren't that kind of a hero?"

I must work. I must find a way to burn slowly and steadily. It's high time.

2003-05-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

The thing about Radiohead's new record is that it is really comforting. It feels like familar rooms, and what keeps going through my head is Thom Yorke's beautiful keening voice singing "just 'cuz you feel it doesn't mean it's there," and for some reason even that bleak message is incredibly reassuring.

2003-04-30T15:21:00.000-07:00

Next to me on the plane ride home from Georgia?

A big midwesterner. Blond with bright, glittering blue eyes and a strong jaw, good teeth, and the thick, heavy hands of a farmboy. His hair was cropped short and shiny, as golden as his skin and the soft beard that burnished his cheek; a fine piece of meat. His physical superiority is undeniable, and made somehow even more persuasive by just a hint of the primate in his full lips and thick forehead. He is the possesor of rare and epic natural beauty.

Originally from Stillwater, Minnesota, he tells me that he hates being home, and can't wait to return to Hollywood, where he is an actor and a model. "I don't really have the drive to do film," he tells me, "I'm trying to break into commercials."

In high school, he could not have been anything but worshipped by the girls, and I can imagine him in a football uniform, a flawless, all-American midwestern boy. I can picture a teenage him drinking a glass of milk in a well-kept kitchen while his well-kept mother looks on. What an inheritance! But, he has exchanged it for the life of a model and would-be actor in Los Angeles, and is scraping for work amid all the other pretty boys of Hollywood, who are a dime a dozen.

He tells me that it's a rough business, and since he's always gotten by on his looks, he's finding it hard when there are so many who can match him, that his looks are almost a detriment. They agencies tell him "We have too many like you."

He has been in Minnesota for a wedding, and the time back has made him long for his whoredom in Babylon. His jeans are expensive, and distressed by design, with strategically placed holes and fadings, he wears thongs and a grey hooded sweatshirt - a study of Hollywood's self-consciuos casualness. He's got a tattoo on his left bicep - ocean waves and japanese characters. He is a golden boy, and when he stretches, he rubs his meaty chest with his big heavy paws.

2003-04-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

I'm in Savannah, Georgia, and it's beautiful. There's lots of picturesquely peeling paint and mineral stains. It's got a lushness and sense of climactic effulgence that is going to be bully for my skin.

As usual, I'm staying in a hotel that's literally crawling with guys who are either wearing lycra, or are very accustomed to it.

On the plane over, we made a first stop in Minneapolis and I sat next to a delightfully sweet midwestern couple. They were plain. Plain folks. He has just 'stache and a baseball hat over a sandy brill of hair, a beer belly, and the rough skin of a blue collar man. She had a worn face, very sunburned, and with shoulder length and absolutely perfunctory strawberry blonde hair. He kept his hand on the inside of her short, plump thigh while she slept with her head on his shoulder. They were the parents of freshly beautiful high school girl with impossibly clean skin, who was looking forward to her boyfriend Matt's next game, and talking about an injury that keeps her from twirling baton for the marching band.

Good stuff.

2003-04-19T00:38:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Georgia for a week on Sunday with my bike boys. I love them, but in some ways I know it will be a lonely trip. Last year, there was that sense in which I had a pursuit... someone I especially preferred to see, and now when I go on these junkets, I feel the loss. I wonder if it's him I miss, or just the mitigating factor of there being a grown up on the team - a sharp minded adult. Maybe its just the sharp mindedness I miss.

At any rate, I hope to really find the reasons why I want to be there instead of getting hung up on wondering why someone left the fratboy joke tap running.

Oh, and the new Radiohead record rules, by the way.

2003-04-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

I've been reading some poems I wrote when I was a teenager, and every last little thing was so vivid, and buzzed with significance. I was so emotional all the time, always fretting; always so fraught. Those days are so fast moving and the changes are so rapid. That uncontrollable feeling of stimulation and scratchy vulnerability is not something I miss now, but I have had glimmers of that sensitivity, in times of real engagement with one of my projects, that feels less drunken and richer, and like something to strive for.

Here's one from when I was 17 that even now, I like a little bit:

Heaven in that body
and my body just
This.
Sweet soul music on those lips
and my lips just
These.

Everyone knows my rain day.
Love that ranges over the ferris wheel
with the muse of lyric poetry,
what strange days. Smoking
clove cigarettes while
the delicate surface of my age
chases me down the street.
Grey sky, yellow moon,
spinning colors and clear eyes;
and an angel over my shoulder
with the instruction from heaven
to this body.

2003-04-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

Right Now

My backyard is covered in dry fallen leaves from the Avocado tree. We've had to cancel the services of our beloved gardener, Oliverio, because even though his fees are modest, we are too broke to pay them.

It's my son's last day of school before spring break, and as usual, there was an assembly in which the children presented some of the things they have been working on since the last break; just some songs, poems, and tongue-twisters they have worked up for all of us to see, and as usual, it was much more affecting than I ever expect. The littler children did some Japanese animal songs, the older girls sang romantic songs with just a hint of maturity and pain, and my son played beautiful, lilting tunes on the recorder with his class. Their sweet, safe lives are so undisturbed by the things that plague me.

A man I know from my yoga center has a child in my school, and when I saw him, he gave me the namaste hands, and a blissful, yogi smile, and I just felt grubby and tired remembering that feeling of awareness and consciousness that comes of a daily practice. One day I will return.

2003-04-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

He's Moving...

...and while I don't really feel miserable, there is a vague sense of being bereft that is seeping into everything. It's not like I have any real claim to stake, except that he is so often the bright spot in dreary days. He's cranky, demanding and terrible, but he makes me laugh and I look forward to seeing him more than almost anything else. He lives near my office, and just knowing that when I crossed over to the westside to go there, I was nearer to his house made it seem just a little less torturous to work for the man.

Now, he's moving to the desert and will be hours away, living in solitude with his dogs. He says it will be good for his writing, and that he will be happy, and I hope he is; but I don't know what possible excuse there would ever be for me to drive out there to see him. I mean, at that point I may as well just come out and admit that I am hopelessly devoted.

We'll talk or exchange e-mail everyday. There's always lots of excuses for that - business to take care of, things to do... but, he's moving, he's my favorite, and I'm sad.

2003-04-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

A few thoughts I've had lately:

Richard Wilbur's poem Love Calls Us to the Things of This World is such a favorite of mine.

Boys will be boys... especially when they're 19 years old, or when you get them together in groups. It's not altogether bad.

Love has to have a body.

Even bad Japanese gangster movies can be good if you go with the right person.

I am beginning to understand Camus' "great sob of poetry" that wells up and makes one forget the truth that doesn't need you.

Time is on my side.

2003-03-28T12:05:00.000-08:00

War in Iraq. I'm not for it. I'm looking into re-patriating Ireland via my ability to gain Irish citizenship by descent. Saddam Hussien is all bad, and I would be glad never to hear another story of his feeding human beings into industrial shredders, or torturing children to make their parents talk; but I also can't stand the thought of all that death, and am sickened by the way we can watch the war on TV 24 hours per day, and the way that our super hi-tech military equipment is shown on CNN as if it's a hotrod that shoots laser beams, and oh, isn't that cool? Meanwhile, we sit here in our comfortable world, basically untouched by the conflict and bitching pathetically like I am doing right now. The whole thing fills me with shame, really, in addition to a full view of my ignorance of what is actually going on.

Meanwhile, everything here carries on apace. My son is at a track meet today. My friend's movie showed successfully in a public theater to a crowd of about 300 last night, and I had a lovely time laughing at his jokes and fixing my lipstick.

2003-03-18T11:48:00.000-08:00

Here's the thing: there are some people who just keep saying the things I want to hear. I don't mean that they do it in a pandering kind of way, but that they keep challenging, and keep making me think I have to re-examine my processes, and be more exact, more active and more responsible.

Last night I went out to see a lecture by Dr. Oliver Sacks with just such a person, and felt singularly delighted with the richness of my life. I have been sinking lately. Dr. Sacks said that creative people experience periods of fermentation during which the well seems to have run dry, and that they often mistake it for a depression. On the other hand, my friend tells me that I don't have enough drama in my life, and it strikes me as true that I am firmly ensconced in the safe zone, and lately, in the silent zone. It's time to change that by any means necessary.

2003-03-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

An old friend told me not long ago that of all my verbiage, of all my ways of thinking and talking about things, the one he hates the most is the way I talk about my interest in other people as "science." He says only say I'm interested in other people, when in fact, I'm only interested in myself, and in my own reactions... other people are not the science project, I am.

Once I got over the feeling of being insulted by the notion that there are many things about my verbiage and ways of thinking that he hates, and that is only the one he hates the most; and after feeling a keen sense of unhappiness about the sense that my friend knows something true about me, and hates it, I started thinking about the truth of it. I am immersed in an absolute subjectivity, and all the feelings and perceptions I have take place in the vault of my head.

The feeling that it's all in my head is either very comforting, or very depressing. I can't really decide which.

2003-03-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

Ran across Me Head today... liked it.

I am overworked and somewhat stressed out right now. There's a lot of things that I am treating like a job in the sense that my committment to it must be absolute, and that my work must be such that I am proud to be associated with it; in other words, in a way that I don't actually treat my actual job. The thing of it is, I need to feel the love a little bit more, and I need to be shown the money a little bit more, or I need to cut back. The dilemma is that the things that don't show me the money do make me happy, and the things that do show me the money are nothing but a nuisance.

Furthermore, the thought crossed my mind that all I really want is to be able to stop the pursuits altogether and be boring. It strikes me that in many ways, I am supremely unambitious, and that all of my real ambitions are so gigantic, and so not public. I am reminded of Madame Merle: "My ambitions were so great... It would only make me look foolish to speak of them."

I have enthusiasms for things that take place on this planet, but they are just that: enthusiasms, and often, they pass. It's the same with my loves, though usually a more painful process than simply a wearing out of interest. It's harder to admit that you've actually simply wearied of your love. It's not really love if you weary of it... or so the poets would have us believe.

I am appalled by my complete lack of romanticism. I envy those people who still know how to believe like that; whose souls still drink up the nectar of faith in the ideal. Me? I can't relinquish the ideal, the romantic; but I can't swim in it, as I could when I was younger, and before I read years worth of aesthetic theory and literary criticism. It's my worst fear that I am heartless and that I can't give myself - that love would be too great a surrender.

There's a man I love, who, whenever he hugs me, I feel it in every cell, and the place where his stubbly chin rested briefly on my forehead, or where my hand felt the indentation of his spine bears the sense memory of the contact for hours. When I touch him, I feel him as an animal - alive and warm under my hands. I always feel silenced by him, and the brief moment of those embraces feels infinite. I feel the animal under my hands and I feel my own blood in my veins, but at the same time I feel completely at peace, and satisfied: that moment is completely adequate reason for any number of things I've done.

The trick is to keep from getting greedy, or hungry.

2003-03-03T23:27:00.000-08:00

Sonnet #116, by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

2003-02-28T00:54:00.000-08:00

Now I'm thinking of Ada. When her husband tells Baines that he heard her unspoken words in his head - "I'm afraid of my will. I'm afraid of what it will do, it is so strange and strong. I have to go. Let me go," it sets up her rebirth with Baines - her will chooses life. I guess I'm thinking about what the will chooses, and why... or if that's all bullshit, and if it's really the heart that chooses.

My heart is really such a traitor to have chosen as it has; either that, or my will chooses the thing that some unconscious super-motive has. The thing of it is, that the current choice could not be less appropriate, or inexplicable to me. It is astonishing.

In The Piano Ada's will chooses silence and detachment, but her heart chooses Baines...

2003-02-27T22:35:00.000-08:00

I have a little dog, ladies and gentlemen. That little dog's name is Woodsy.

When we first got him, he was only a couple of months old, and being a chihuahua, he was especially tiny, soft and chocolate brown. Now, at four years old, he is still tiny, soft and chocolate brown, down to his adorable little nose, and all I can say is, who knew I could love a little dog so much?

2003-02-27T14:06:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking more about Isabel Archer. Not long ago, a debate raged briefly between my friend and I about the comparison of Isabel Archer, from Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (as rendered in the film by Jane Campion), and Nora from Ibsen's A Doll's House. His contention was that the two characters are the same, and mine was that Isabel Archer is different through a stronger agency from the start.

Aside from the fact that he's flat out wrong, even just on the basic plot level - because Isabel returns to her oppressive husband and Nora leaves hers - one thing he said was of keen interest, and that was the notion of self-recognition in the works of literature we love most. I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about what might be in Isabel that I can't admit, and what's in the neighborhood of my interest in it that could fall into the shadow... and here's what I think it is: All of Jane Campion's movies, and especially The Portrait of a Lady are about women who will not give their hearts. Ada, in The Piano has been silent since she was a child in an effort to keep her agency in a world that buys and sells her. Isabel Archer gives her heart to her cousin, Ralph, but only when he's dying - not the other 500 times she could have when he told her he loved her in a million ways, and in the end, her return to her husband and refusal of Mr. Goodwood are a return to her own sense of control; she is the mistress of her own fate. In Holy Smoke! the whole film comes to an emotional climax when Harevy Keitel writes "be kind" on her forehead, and she confesses that her greatest fear is that she is heartless.

But now, the question remains: what of Gilbert Osmond, and how did Isabel fall "absolutely in love" with him? Was it an act of will? I say it was - a sort of subconscious act of imagination, willed by her primary motivation, which is agency itself. She tricks herself - and her will and imagination, which are subject to that primary motive are stronger than any sense of conscious agency. Like Ada's will in the piano that drowns her, and then suprises her by choosing to live.

I remember being really shaken by Holy Smoke. I felt sick when she confesses that her greatest fear is that she is heartless. I remember not wanting my then-boyfriend to see the film, because it came too close to the bone, and I didn't want him to know me.

It's strange how some works of art are there just when you need them. U2's Achtung!, Jane Campion, Trent Reznor's full-bore meta-masculine angst... all there at just the right moment. Jane Campion's movies always mark the end of relationships for me; or rather, the moments when I KNOW that they will end.

2003-02-23T01:46:00.000-08:00

Outcome: #1. He was good. Delightful, even. Also, he was very sweet to me, which left me feeling full of warmth and affection. It was really interesting to see him in that environment, with people that he likes and respects. I also met his ex-wife, who was pleasantly suprising, in that she was clearly an active, intelligent woman; beautiful, but not at all like cotton candy. She wrote the script, which was smart, funny and generous about human beings. There was a beautiful line in the script: "she'd never asked him to change, because she never thought he would." That'll stay with me.

It was interesting watching him interact with his teacher - he was all respect and thoughtful listening. After the play, he asked her how he was, desirous of her approval. With the actresses he was vaguely predatory, and simultaneously condescending. His body is full of nervous energy, but he has good control. His voice was really nice, too. Also, (and here's where I'm really going to gush, so leave now if you can't stand it) he looked really handsome. The way his hair sweeps back over that high forehead, and his long neck... his neatness, and the clean soapy smell of his hair and skin when he hugs me are all contributing factors to why I can't really get over it. He is beautiful and I love him. He's really gotten under my skin just by being him, and now, as it often goes in such cases, he keeps getting more and more attractive.

Damn him!

There's really nothing I can do but ride it out.

2003-02-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

Some installments in the freaky self-protrait series...

2003-02-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I am going to see someone I especially like read the lead in a play. To take that one step further, I will see the man who currently boils the blood take on the lead in a romantic comedy.

There are two possible outcomes here:

1. He will be a genius, and will conquer me even more than he already has. He will be funny, charming, in his element and still have that grody leathery skin, silly hairstyle and the tired eyes that crack me so, only I will be forced to add to them a sense that his talents and charms are even greater than I currently take them to be. If that happens, I will likely think of him 600 times per day and will lie in bed at night feeling the hours pass, and cursing the fact that he doesn't love me.

2. He will suck. I will enjoy it enormously in spite of the fact that he is cringe-worthy as an actor, but I will have a hard time disguising my sense of the hilarity of it all. I will be enormously entertained, but it will be like when I loved hair-metal videos in the 80's; I will be laughing at more than with. It most likely won't change the fact that those wrinkles in his forearms, along with the way he rubs his face and whines when he's desperate won't still have their pull, but it may be that his ramshackle charm will come into focus just that little bit more so that I can be one step closer to shaking it.

I'm not sure which outcome I prefer.

2003-02-17T11:29:00.000-08:00

My little monkeys won the Valley of the Sun Stage Race this weekend! Go monkeys, go! It's especially good that they did manage it there, as the pressure is high for them to show themselves to be players, and ready to work hard for their leaders. It's encouraging, and I'm sure it gives them all a big boost.

I got a nice call from a cycling print mag today that wants me to start covering US races and athletes for them! Could be another good step on the road to actually being paid for my hobbies. One can hope.

In other news, I saw a delightful film with my son this weekend, Hiyao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. It was really beautifully dreamlike, in that the story is really non-linear and suprising, but has it's own internal logic the way a dream does. It was really chock-loaded with Jungian significance and felt really rich in that symbolic language. I really loved it, and my son did, too.

It was nice to have a weekeknd without too much packed in, and to spend some good time with my son. He is a very good little man. Things get a little wild sometimes, managing the life and what not, but it was nice to remember how sweet it is to be loved by him.

2003-02-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

I got a call from a very dearly beloved college friend last week. I have't seen him in a few years, and had lost track of his location, but he once lived at my house for a few months, and there's a polaroid of him on my refrigerator that has been there since then. Tall and lanky, with a head of brown curls that becomes more of an event the longer it gets, a wide, generous smile, he is dearly, fondly and frequently remembered for being the kind of person whose personality is so big, joyous and full of life that he lights up a room.

My best memory of him is a sadder moment from college, though.

I was walking between classes, and ran across him on a narrow pathway alongside the student union building. Right in the middle of a messy break up with my then husband, I was really beside myself about how I would manage my life and that of my two year old son on my 20 hours per week, $5.50 an hour workstudy job at the library. I was also in a state of complete panic about the whole concept of divorce. I had sworn to myself that I would never subject my child to the uncertainty and shiftlessness that I experienced as a child, and I was filled with a sense of dismal failure along with the certainty that there was no escape - my marriage could not survive.

It was in the midst of these considerations that I ran into Joe, who, with his usual sunniness, asked me how I was. I was bad. I felt like that expression of scratchy vulnerabilty was impossible to erase from my face. I was barely holding a socially acceptable presentation together, and it cracked me a little bit to have to answer as to how I was feeling. I told Joe that I wasn't so well. Things were tough.

He looked straight into my eyes, and said "I can see it; it's just under the surface, isn't it?"

Something about being seen like that, at that particular moment, touched me in a way that I have never forgotten, and I have always loved him because of that, and millions of other reasons. Later, we spent a lot of time together, eating Campbell's Tomato Soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, and laying on our backs on the floor of his apartment staring up at a zigzag of colored Christmas lights, listening to jazz and talking.

He called me last week to tell me that he is marrying a woman who teaches History to 9th graders. He lives in Seattle and works for a theater there. His voice on the phone is as endearing as it ever was, and he tells me that he and his fiancee want to have children as soon as ever they can. I'm so happy to hear from him, and to hear him so well...

...Only, I'm vaguely disappointed that now I will never be able to marry him myself!

2003-02-14T23:23:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day. I know there's no reason to feel more miserable than usual about my datelessness and the insane affection I feel for a certified very bad man, but I have to say, it does get me when all the migrant Mexican fruit sellers at every intersection trade in their oranges and peanuts for roses and little white teddy bears, and I know darned good and well that no one will be forking over five bucks to give me roadside flowers.

The best I can say for Valentine's Day this year is that my beloved ex-boyfriend went to an assembly at my son's school that I could not make and took beautiful pictures of my beautiful boy. Then, said boy told me that I was his Valentine, and gave me a lovely card made our of a red doilie with an cherub drawn on it that says "I love you, Mama." I guess it really could be worse.

Here are a few of the pictures. That ex of mine is a really good photographer!

I spoke at length to the king of evil today. He had all kinds of assignments for me, and complained about being overwhelmed with work, but he's right where he needs to be to be certain that he never experiences a moment of silence. I told him he was a jackass, and he told me that it took something special to pull off being a jackass.

Which is why I do love him so. That was my Valentine's Day sentiment which shall go no further than just here. I didn't mention it to him.

2003-02-08T20:44:00.000-08:00

Last night at bike camp. It's been interesting.

The boys here are charming - we even have two mute teenagers. One, truly unable to speak, and the other one a punk waiting to grow into his deep voice. He's one for the ladies.

A few interesting things happened this week - we did the chemistry experiment of mixing these egos together. It seems to be a success. We have a star, and I think we all wondered how he would be. The answer is, he's cautious, but nice. He needs the piss taken out of him every once in awhile, and he gets it, courtesy of the team smartass. It works. Overall, they're a nice bunch of guys.

More later.

2003-02-05T12:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've recorded anything here, and I plead absolutely insane busy-ness.

Here, though, is an article against the upcoming war with Iraq by the brilliant, the heroic, Jimmy Carter.

2003-01-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

Oh! and one more thing I am learning about love: it is self-sustaining. It doesn't need you. The beloved is in one's own heart, and in the absolutely monadic objectivity of each soul. How real is the experience of the plenum, and of relatedness. How real is that other person?

I'm a little relieved to find that I still have some theories. I wonder if I would throw them over for the physical fullfillment of my desires?

2003-01-29T15:41:00.000-08:00

So, I'm feeling conflicted about the whole notion of being involved in concrete ventures, like, for instance, a cycling publication. Before I started writing about cycling for a publication, I wrote about the poetry of human effort in my journals, and used cycling as an example. Now, I write about cycling, and it feels so mundane sometimes, and I have to keep explaining to myself why I was interested, because if you compare the sport of cycling with other things I could dedicate my free time to, for free, then volunteering for the DATA organization, or campaigning against the dunderheaded blundering of our dumbass President in the Middle East seem like they might be better concrete engagements.

Part of why this issue arises is that I really do have to spend a huge amount of time thinking about men in tights to do a good job, and don't get me wrong... I LOVE men in tights, but what I really need to achieve is that link between the conceptual things that really interest me, and the actual engagement, and sometimes it feels like I am losing the plot a little bit.

Of course that's my own fault, and if only I weren't so intellectually lazy, those threads would be stretched taut over the abyss of meaninglessness, and I would not be in these straights. The thing is, I KNOW the meaning is there. Sport is like art, in that it is a pursuit of our leisure time, and it is composed of unrepeatable performances of human endeavor. Sport is truly beautiful, and cycling has that drama in spades. It gives everyone a chance to experience those beauties in a way that doesn't tax the mind too much, since those comforting right answers are there in the results.

Even so, I'm pretty sure I believe that there isn't much that's more important than art.

Also, I believe that the truth is in the details and in the conrete experience. Theoretical thinking is entertaining, but action and engagement is where truth resides. The most comforting and pleasurable thing about sportswriting is the way you are really just asked to tell the story of what happened. That's really very good for me.

On this same note, here's something lovely and true I read by Joseph Campbell about what gets lost in times of political strain and war. Sport originated in preparations for war, but with the first Olympic games, became an offering to the gods.

That's a nice transition.

2003-01-27T17:04:00.000-08:00

I'm cranky.

I'm cranky about all the work I have to do, and about how many different people expect me to work my heart out for little more than a pat on the head.

I am cranky about the job that does pay me. I don't want to work with, or associate with nasty, greedy, unkind people any longer. I'm retroactively pissed-off about not being given so much as a CARD by my employers at Christmas.

I'm feeling growly about the man I am smitten with, and am wishing I could simply be over it and perhaps move on. I am weary of attempting to uphold high-minded ideals about the nature of love, and would prefer to throw a temper tantrum until I get my way about every little thing I want.

I'm financially anxious, and worried about my mother, who is ill, and who doesn't have any medical insurance.

Is there any way that every single possible logistical detail could be taken off my hands by the can-do fairies so that I never have to think about any of it again? Could all the work I have to do magically appear in my computer, all filed away in the apporpriate locations with my next key-stroke?

While I'm at it, could I please get about 17 straight hours of uninterrupted sleep, and be woken up on an elfin bower by declarations of undying love from Lord Aragorn, after the battle is over and he is already the king, dressed in kingly garb and with a long sword at his hip? Could I please be as beautiful as Liv Tyler?

If I can't have that, could I simply be transported directly into a fur-lined sleeping bag on the deck of a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps for 7 years, or find myself suddenly in hibernation in a turf-covered house in the frozen Icelandic tundra where all sounds are muffled by drifts of softly falling snow? Could I please live there in a state of almost total isolation, and with a steady supply of nice warm soup? Could the only soul withing a 50 mile radius be a sheepherder with beautiful nordic bone structure and ruddy cheeks who doesn't speak a word of English?

2003-01-26T18:40:00.000-08:00

So, my sister has been having a disastrous relationship with an old friend of mine from college. When I met him, he was interesting, and funny, though always a little bit cold or prickly - someone who never brought his heart to the game - but he was a sweet boy, all the same, and I loved him... not as a lover, but as a person.

Since then, he has spent the past 15 years making as much distance as possible between himself and any kind of meaningful life. He has shrunk down every last part of himself until it's as small as it can possibly be, and lives in a tiny little space, and his heart is never in the game. Enter my sister, (which, incidentally, is what he did, both physically and emotionally) a relatively inexperienced girl with genuine feelings and a soft heart, who calls a willingness to be treated like a doormat loyalty, and whose insecurities seem to be excusing every one of his ugly actions, and let me tell you this: I can't look at it anymore. He disgusts me, and she does, too.

This is more of that emotional engagement that I should really be seeking to cut out of my diet. Why do I care?

2003-01-21T13:16:00.000-08:00

It's a thin line between love and hate, incidentally.

2003-01-19T00:59:00.000-08:00

Reading more Camus. Jesus, is it brilliant.

I'm reading his notebooks about the develpoment of his character Merseault, from A Happy Death, and he writes that Merseault realizes that "Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice, a concerted will... Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness." In this estimation, there are no excuses. My old boyfriend used to tell me that happiness was the result of "righ choices," and that always bothered me; I think it allows too much room for excuses, selfishness and the comparison of choice against choice, which is perhaps anathema to happiness. It's a process that can wind you up in yourself until any true feeling you had is gone.

I believe there are no excuses. To whom can you report your excuse for denying happiness?

My happiness is always in moments of clarity: those sublime moments when the soul descends into the body, and an almost forgetful abandonment comes over you, fearsome and intense, as if the whole of my life had condensed in that one moment, and I cannot hesitate to feel the the pleasure and pain of its absolute solitude. In those moments, I am strong enough to feel my own singularity, and to let my body be my vehicle. It's as if perception is purified by a moment of truth that can only be felt in the pure sunstantive matter of this body in this moment, and it's a moment that is unremarkable; a moment of truth not because it is heroic, but simply because it contains nothing else. In those moments, I am truly innocent of intention.

I have a great longing for isolation and for pragmatic work. I think the loneliness I experience can only be had in crowded places where one is always brushing up against people and relations. The aloneness I desire would have to be a separation, and a convergence with all that is voiceless, before which I would be forced to bow, accepting that my reasons and constructs cannot touch meaning. A place where I would organize my heart to match the rhythm of the days, rather than submitting them to the curve of human hope. My desires.

I love the romanticism of Camus' Existential vision. It's the detachment I seek where all things are imbued with their own profound significance, but nothing pushes or pulls, and the human being is still and silent before the silent face of all that is.

Perhaps it's true that all things are insignificant to the one who is called to this kind of silence, and that person does not need the love of another, which would only fills one with the urgency of survival and fullfillment of desires. Sometimes I want nothing more than to loose the bonds that tie me to other people, to silence the desires that keep me looking after them: my love of them and of myself, my hopes for outcomes that please me... But, there's an escapism in that. Hopes detached from outcomes are bloodless, and love without the specificity of a body in all its fragile violence turns us away from our own bodies, and from the fathomless animal, and the inexplicable substance of flesh.

Albert Camus. Huge favorite.

2003-01-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the choices seem bleak. Bloodless fatalism or, a fool's hope: sometimes it seems like they are the same. Perhaps Camus' kind of empty but fervent hope mixed with an equal part of denial is some kind of middle way.

None of that will ever answer the burning question, or tame the whim of nature; predit the movement of breath and blood. None of it will keep the question from begging itself: Is it fatalist, do do as Camus suggests and acquiesce to the futility and insignificance of my preference - show equal strength in accepting both yes and no? Do I have the strength or the courage? Do I truly love? Can I love without a return? My balance has been compromised, and now my heart and my mind want answers, and as I drift into my own fears, I am remembering my small boat, my separate self, and my solitude.

A practice of prayer, a sob of poetry, a continual conversion...

Happiness and moments of silent truth don't make me write, they silence me. My writing has never been the product of peace, and in a sense, it does not come from my freedom. It certainly does not come from any gnosis, as it would be beautiful to imagine. It comes from my desperation and my need for proof. My need to throw bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, and is itself the proof that my faith is insufficient.

I think faith is an orientation of the soul that is revealed to us only by love: that love begets faith. Love makes anything but faith impossible for us. The catch is that love must be an act of freedom, and as soon as it is married to desire, aversion and fear, it loses the delicat balance and becomes grasping, desperate and enslaved. When love is sullied by fear, it cannot beget faith, and that's why I must question myself. If one falls into desire, into fear, into bondage, one falls out of love.

Faith is the most important symptom of love.

2003-01-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

The last two nights have been spent, until late, in the company of someone nice. Talking about books and art. Today I have received e-mails about nothing but just with little jokes and remonstrances. He called me this morning to tell me about a spelling mistake he made. We are going to a movie on Monday.

I have some hope, and that's probably nuts, but moreover, I have an insane amount of tender feeling, which is even more nuts, and is perhaps a sign of bad judgement on my part... but I am forced at this point ot admit that it isn't a choice, it's a compulsion.

There's a feeling of being stretched and of being half, like there always is when love that lives year round like a vague shadow, pin-points its focus on the specific bones, skin, hair and self of a person who breathes, speaks, moves and is. Last night, he was showing me something in a book, and I leant in next to him, and breathed in the warm clean scent of his skin and hair, and reminded myself: this is love.

This moment is.

2003-01-17T14:46:00.000-08:00

you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure--you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
--that since and if you disappear

solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile

and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep--what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
--what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."

~ e.e. cummings

2003-01-16T00:48:00.000-08:00

Day 7, but I think I'm going to have to break it tomorrow. I have to go to a friend's for dinner and since I fully blew her off last week, I need to show up and be social tomorrow. I won't be able to eat much, but I'll have a little. I feel like I could go on now, though, indefinitely. I am not feeling it anymore, really.

I spent a long, very charming time with the man today. The truth is, I love him, and there's nothing else to say. It's up to me how I feel about that, and I choose to feel all the good of it. He met with my brother about doing music for the film, and that went very well. I think they'll find some good things together. Also, he came to my house for the first time, and liked it. He seemed comfortable, and was very sweet and friendly to everyone, and was not false or acting. Met my mom, and my ex-husband, by chance... After that, we went out for a drink together and talked about books, mostly, and art - what makes it good - what makes it work. The whole time I wanted to put my head on his chest. He laughed a lot. It was nice to see him like that.

It feels so good to feel that... to feel that kind of affinity as if it's part of your body. There's something so good about those feelings that I really just know that I have to be patient, and let what will be, be between us. I can't change the fact that I love him; I simply do, so what must now be done is to find the course of action that allows me to give that and to be happy giving it. I know that I am important to him, and that my friendship is good for his heart. I know he feels that.

I wrote a poem a long time ago, a short one, about being out of love, and it was this:

I wish my loves till had a body -
It was a sweet intoxication
and a balmy dream

to feel myself go silent
but for the sound of him, but now

all the imps are clamoring for a moment's notice

This feeling I have now is the opposite of that - it's that sense of quiet. Love fills me with a sense of purpose, and the desire to improve myself and my relations with others - it makes me want to purify myself, and to be worthy of love itself. There is no clamor, except occasionally that of my desires, but they are not as important as the clean feeling of love. My sister asks me what he gives me... and it's this feeling: the opportunity to feel that and to see that a human being is beautiful when you you see them with eyes like that.

Now if I can only achieve a posture that is stable and free from suffering. I think I can.

2003-01-13T16:10:00.000-08:00

Every person is a huge, uncharted territory.

I've spent a long time using my questions as the sonar that will help me map out the contours of an inner landscape. I have sought, and I think to a great extent, found a spiritual signature. I have been submissive to the body of knowledge I've sought, and will continue to be so.

I had a nice conversation with whosit on the phone today.

Day 5. The hunger is much less intense. It's amazing. Today I feel tired, but I might feel tired on any given day. Incredible, not to have eaten in five days. It seems crazy to say that, but I feel good. I feel sensitive and light, and very clear, though just a little bit short-tempered, if the truth be told... though not unhappy.

2003-01-12T23:38:00.000-08:00

Day 4. I feel good. The agitation of it has gone away, and I feel full of clarity and energy, actually. I did my yoga class today, and it felt great - I felt really able to feel myself and very light. I felt a sense of space in my body and an openness that I haven't felt in a long time.

Also, I feel really pleased by things. A certain person of whom I am very fond says that it's not out of the question that we might go to a movie together, and that is delightful, especially since I have followed my internal directive in not pushing for anything in that interaction. I've also been shown a great deal of confidence and trust by not only the crankster, but by other people whose response to me has been entirely their own.

I feel renewed in my sense that love can be given freely and without making demands in return, and I read something very nice in the Tao te Ching, which is "The way is easy for those without preferences."

Being hungry, having appetites, and not filling them is a good exercize, and one with more than one application.

Also, I saw a film that was staggeringly beautiful, and that film was Joe Carnahan's Narc. Absolutely brilliant in every way. Hardcore, hard to watch, sad and gritty, but so truthful and so deeply good. There is hope!

2003-01-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

Day three with no food, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. Day two was tough: headache, worsening cold symptoms, stomach ache, but I feel fine now, and strangely energetic. I'm amazed by how much advertising on TV is about food, and also by how thoroughly unhealthy all of it is.

I saw a good film last night - The Hours with Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Juliane Moore. It was good. Very sad, and a little melodramatic, but also very truthful about some things. Nicole Kidman was especially brilliant. She's really a great actress, and so beautiful.

Today, I had to go to a baby shower, and it was really interesting to be so deeply in the world of women. Baby shower games, oohing and aahing over pink baby clothes and talking about how we all handled things when our children were babies. I spent a lot of time silent. I love my son, but I think I'm glad to only have one. There are children I love very, very deeply, but that world! I'm not sure I love that world, or that I love children in general.

Maybe I'm just a grump.

I haven't seen my cranky friend in two weeks, and I'm starting to miss him. We are in touch daily, but I am missing the way he hugs me hello and goodbye, and how he gets excited in the middle of conveying some very important thought and as the volume of his voice climbs his diction becomes more and more emphatic and distinct. I'm missing how he looks so tired and rubs his eyes, and the way he sometimes laughs at my jokes... but not always.

2003-01-09T22:37:00.000-08:00

My new computer rules.

Today is the first day of a fast. I hope to hold out for ten days. In that time I'll drink a lemon juice drink, or tea, but nothing else. It seems insane thinking about it, but the first day has been alright; not too difficult. It's an experiment. I want to see what it's like to not feed the appetites, to gain some mastery over the primary urges, and it's good to clean house every once in awhile. I think now would be a good time.

Also, I am attracted to extremes, and it interests me to attempt one. I want to feel the effect it has on the mind to deny the animal. The first physical symptom should be headache, and I feel that coming on, along with a kind of aimless lightheadedness. I'm tired, too; and a little cold. it will be good to sleep.

I've been depressed lately, and it's been a bad week. Some things are very good, and others are worrisome; logistics, mostly. Things that I can deal with, but sometimes I just feel too tired to think about.

Something that I keep thinking about is a thing Cranky told me: that for him, the bike racing, the intense connection with his body and the looming excitement of the next race were all like a rest for him. Like a moment when his brain stopped turning and he could just be. He also said it was addictive. When I asked for more on that, he told my why it was physically addictive, but I suspected that a psychological dependency was even more likely. He's like me... secretive about that crazy stuff, and painting a nice picture for the people he meets. He's good at it, and so am I... But, back to the issue: He said it was an escape, or a distraction. If things got too crazy in his life, he could always count on his body to be strong enough to take him somewhere that was concrete.

Interesting.

I have the sense that we all spend a lot of time distracting ourselves and killing the days off. My brother told me the other day that he thought he might have a problem with anxiety. He said he feels that disaster is looming, even when it's not. I think the reason why is that he is not able to be engaged in his calling... which reminds me of another thing Cranky told me, last week in an e-mail:

"What's really important is that we find our calling. The only way to lead a truly spiritually satisfying life is to always work towards that path. Doing that is rarely the easy road. Even when it comes down to making choices, the right ones are never the easy ones. My own opinion on our path in life is even a bit stronger: I've always felt that if we are lucky enough to be given a gift, for whatever, it's more than a necessary path. It's an obligation not to take it for granted."

It just seems like there are things that get in the way of that - logistical things, or things that one imagines are necessary. Or, maybe just money, or lack of it. It seems like something that is so important a part of one's virtue, something that MUST be done, or both mind and body will suffer, must be somehow attainable. I really need to believe that, and to believe that astonishing things are possible.

Maybe it's the combination of being hungry and tired, but these are some real stream of consciousness ramblings. Oh well. It feels good to be writing them, and good to be thinking them. I have a feeling its going to be an intense 10 days.

2003-01-08T21:49:00.000-08:00

Ok. There's no doubt about it that yesterday sucked. Today had its moments, too. For one thing, I'm still sick. For another, my car repair is going to be ridiculously expensive. I also slammed my fingers in a door, and there still isn't anyone here prepared to give me the foot massage I so desperately want... but today, there is a bright side.

I got a beautiful new iMac laptop, and my new address book lets me put little pictures into it next to my little monkey boys and friends. Also, I had a great conversation with a guy from a PR firm in NY who is going to help me market my team big-style, and I also heard from Mr. Team Boss that the team will pay for my travel next season in compensation for my efforts, which means that I will be allowed to enjoy plenty of bitchin' bike races in person without going to the poor house, and will continue to cement my position in the bike boy industry.

So, although my finger really hurts, and my car is going to take the place of travel in terms of showing me to the poor house, there has been some silver lining today.

I read yet another beautiful thing in Albert Camus' notebooks, and it's this:

"We don't have feelings which change us, but feelings which suggest to us the idea of change. Thus, love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where selfishness will disappear."

Beautiful. I love Albert Camus.

2003-01-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

The Highlights of my Day

1. Woke up sick at 6am.

2. My son woke up with a fever of 102.

3. I still had to drive the other kids in my carpool to school, a 45 minute drive one way.

4. The bank refused to cash my check from Schwab, thereby foiling my plans to buy a new computer today.

5. My car broke down - cooling system - and had to be towed.

6. I left my cell phone in the car... which was towed.

8. I had to wait for hours at a MALL for a ride home.

9. When I got home, I discovered that through some snafu with an old business account not being paid by my employers on time, Pacbell had turned off my personal phone as punishment.

10. I totally forgot about dinner plans with my friend, who is 7 months pregnant and made pasta from scratch for me. I stood her up.

... and finally, and this needs no number because it is truly the final indignity: there is no one at my house who is willing to give me a foot massage.

And that, my friends, is my tale of woe. Now I am off to worry about being able to pay for my car repair until I pass out.

2003-01-06T16:18:00.000-08:00

Look at this lovely picture I found of my dearest professor ever:

Professor Christopher Ricks. He still haunts me, and I can't help thinking sometimes that he would be so disappointed with my terrible editing skills, and for the fact that I've left off my studies. He was always so generous and kind to me, and I loved him very much. This picture almost captures his charm, but he looks rather too well organized. I remember him with his hair a bit messed, and with one collar wing eternally out of place.

But he's lovely. I miss him.

2003-01-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

Feeling a little tired, and wondering how I'm ever going to get the ups and downs under control. That's priority number one.

2003-01-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

This weekend I revisited my DVD of the greatest movie I've ever seen, Jane Campion's unbelievable masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady, adapted from the Henry James novel of the same name...

...what a brilliant film. It's seriously, the most excellent feminist document I have ever seen, and has such a remarkable relationship with the source material. Like all Jane Campion's films, it deals with the strength of a woman's will. In the film, Isabel Archer rejects one suitor, an English lord, because accepting him would mean "giving up other chances," not to marry, but "from life... the usual chances and dangers." Then, she tells another suitor that she will never marry, that she doesn't wish to be a "mere sheep in the flock." When she is finally caught, it's by a terrible man, but her imagination has made him beautiful; has smoothed all of his worst evils into his greatest virtues and has convinced herself that she is absolutely in love with him. Of course he is the worst man she could ever have chosen.

Moving on from that, I went to see some friends this weekend that I don't see often, and they asked the question that is rumored to be dreaded by all singletons: "how's your lovelife?" I told them that I was, in fact, in love with someone, but that he is dreadful. My friend told me that she thought my whole family was a family of women who choose the wrong men, and offered to help me come to a greater consciousness of my choices. (She thinks she has such a handle... but that's another story.) I can't really deny that it's true that not one of us has shown a genius for choosing, but I also feel like the jury's not in on my sister and me. So far we have not succeeded, but only one love can be the love of one's life, and if it isn't found yet, that doesn't mean I won't recognize when it arrives. Still, her comment made me think, and then... Isabel Archer.

At the end of the film, Isabel's cousin, who loves her but is dying of consumption, tells her that he can't believe that "so generous" a mistake as hers can harm her for more than a little.

Maybe that's what love is: a generous mistake; an illusion of the will, or kind of willing suspension of disbelief. Looking back, I have a brilliant career in the exercize of my imagination in just that manner. I can't help but wonder, in the face of the crusty, cranky old geezer that has arrested me, if I'm not letting my imagination make him beautiful in just the way I'd most prefer.

And, if it is, why him?

2003-01-04T22:34:00.000-08:00

Having decided to take the job, (which I'd be doing for love, really) I am reminded immediately of the need for caution. It's going to be a real practice to navigate the Scylla and Caribdes of the ego and self-doubt that characterize my new brother in arms.

I talked to him today, and he sounded more tormented than ever before, and is really and truly living in the vacuum of his own mind. If I'm to truly give what I can, out of a pure spirit of self-lessness, then I will have to very carefully ferret out what he can and can't accept, and cultivate myself very carefully. At all costs I can't let myself be thrown off, not by desires denied or fullfilled.

As Krishna admonished Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita:

They live in freedom who have
gone beyond the dualities of life.
Competing with no one,
they are alike in success and failure
and content with whatever comes to them.
They are free, without selfish attachments;
their minds are fixed in knowledge.
They perform all work in the spirit of service,
and their karma is dissolved.

As much as I love, I have to remember that he is damaged goods, and is dangerous. I have to find centeredness and peace to be stronger in the face of whatever comes my way, and most importantly the strength to release the outcomes.

Albert Camus in his notebooks: "To give oneself has no meaning unless on posesses oneself - or else, one gives oneself to escape one's own poverty. You can only give what you have."

Yes.

Another real question that plagues me is that of balancing a right level of engagement with the detachment that allows one to live amongst people without pain. Talking to people who know and love me about my decision to go forward with the current experiment, some people tell me, YES! Take the chance, while others tell me that it's a kamikaze mission.

The truth is, he is a different kind of person than I am. He is unkind in a way that I am not. He is foreign to me, and has lived a life that has no similarity to mine. Also, There are millions of things about him that are unlovely and vampiric, and that by all rights I should not invite in. Still, if he only hit me in the head, I could keep him safely in the realm of science, but he hits me in the heart, and it almost makes me angry, because it throws me off my balance. I resent that.

In other news, I delightfully dreamed about kissing last night. The delightful kissee was none other than my ultimate cinematic heartthrob, Viggo Mortensen, with Aragorn's hair and beard.

I had my head in his lap, and was reaching around his neck to unravel curls of tangled hair at the nape. He took my hand in his and kissed it with that soft mouth, his beard just long enough to exchange it's roughness for that delicious tickle. I put the back of my hand against his cheek, and was clumsy with eagerness to touch him. Then he leaned down to kiss me, and it was as if I was floating.

I always say, it you can't have a real sex life, be sure to dream of one with the most attractive man you can imagine!

2003-01-03T09:34:00.000-08:00

I've decided to take the job. When he asked me, I started trying to think about how it would work, could I do it, how would we structure it, etc., and he told me "You just have to jump in and do it. We can't plan it all out right now!" and he's right. I have to just take the plunge. One can't live life in fear, and yes has been on my lips since he asked me.

Having made that decision, I am full of happiness.

On that note, there's a brilliant song by Joni Mitchell from her fabulous album, Blue that comes to mind, and it's this one:

All I Want

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be
Oh I hate you some, I hate you some
I love you some
Oh I love you when I forget about me
I want to be strong I want to laugh along
I want to belong to the living
Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive
Do you want - do you want - do you want
To dance with me baby
Do you want to take a chance
On maybe finding some sweet romance with me baby
Well, come on

All I really really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you too
All I really really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you
I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause, applause - life is our cause
When I think of your kisses
My mind see-saws
Do you see - do you see - do you see
How you hurt me baby
So I hurt you too
Then we both get so blue

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Looking for the key to set me free
Oh the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling
It's the unraveling
And it undoes all the joy that could be
I want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun
I want to be the one that you want to see
I want to knit you a sweater
Want to write you a love letter
I want to make you feel better
I want to make you feel free
Want to make you feel free
I want to make you feel free

2003-01-01T23:33:00.000-08:00

It's hard to tell people, in life, that you don't have ambitions or visions of grandeur - that you only want to be quiet and to be able to give what you have.

I remember when I was travelling in Turkey, we took the Ferry from Istanbul across to Bursa, a trip of about two hours. The ferry had a small play structure for children in it, and there were two women, an older one and a younger one watching over a small boy.

Both women wore conservative black scarves over their heads in the more traditional style - not just loosely covering their hair, but smoothed flat over their foreheads and held in place by pins, with the scarf fastened under their chins as well. Their hair was not for public consumption. The older woman was stooped and weary, but stayed near the younger; the younger one was beautiful. Her skin was clear, pale olive with full lips and wet brown eyes. Her voice was quietly gentle and she was graceful and lithe in her long dress.

The boy she was watching over was rowdy and playing vigorously with some older children. His mother's constant vigilance kept watch over him and corrected any waywardness with the smallest gesture. She guided his will rather than imposing hers.

While I was there, I started thinking about the fact that she was an Islamic woman. Her hair could not be seen in public, and she would lead an essentially private life. Her deeds and her service would never be known or published, but would be kept under the sole proprietorship of her husband and children, her parents and kin. Her full beauty would never be seen in the world, and would always be like a secret garden in the harem. The harem, which for us in the west conjures images of amber-limbed saracen maidens dressed in sheer silk, and a sultan in silver-soled shoes taking his pleasure at will, but in their world only means the private part of the house that is occupied only by the family.

Culturally, it's hard for us to imagine that anyone could be happy without a public will, or that the willingness to be of service, especially in a woman, is anything but a martyrdom or oppressed victim mentality, but I'll never forget how much that life appealed to me. Of course, I am dreaming of ideal partnership and a perfect union of forces, and not every relationship can achieve that, but to me, those kinds of trappings do not seem to be such obvious evidence of inequality, nor does a quietly lived, non-public life, or a life lived in the service of those you love seem oppressive.

I say this because in thinking about the work proposed to me by a man that I love, I realized that I could never do it for purely professional reasons. I am not inspired to work by the hope of making a million bucks or being seen as a mover and shaker. I want to work at things that feed my inner life and nourish me on a deeper level. Being able to give my love in service is just such a work, if I can find a way to do it that doesn't embroil me in attachments, but what I never stop hearing from others is: "Yes, but what will he give you?"

For me, the answer is that he will give me the opportunity to give something. Is that an inequity?

2002-12-31T16:15:00.000-08:00

Even more to say, and only a few minutes later....

I want to be romantic and believe in love, but I'm afraid to. I want to believe that a hard days work will net me a just reward, and that if I work to give the purest love I can, that it will be recognized, but I'm afraid to. I told him about the end of my last relationship, the break up by e-mail... and the fact that after three years, I shook it off in two weeks, and he told me that it mustn't have been true love, then, because you can't get over that in two weeks. Of course he's right, but in a way, I don't even believe in true love... or the idea that I do is so buried under the necessary armor.

I'm reminded of Fox Mulder on occasions like this:
"I want to believe"

2002-12-31T15:49:00.000-08:00

The eve of 2003. I feel like I'm on the cusp of some opportunities and chance... the usual chances and dangers, I guess. This man I love, who lives so completely alone with so many others - it's pretty remarkable that from that life he has asked to rely on me. It isn't the declaration of love and eternal fealty that I want so badly, but it is something very sweet and precious coming from him. It reminds me of A Room With A View - "show him that at the otherside of the everlasting why, there is a yes." All kinds of literary iterations of the word yes are welling up - the end of Ullysses... The fact is, I want to do it.

I realized a long time ago that a lot of my writing just isn't public, and that considering a public for it undermines it. It wants no public. I realized a long time ago that I am not ambitious for recognition or money or fame. I want to do work that I value. I want to give my heart, it's as simple as that. I think that I would be good at supporting someone's work, especially work done from that place in the soul that my dear man works from. All I really want is to be able to do my projects in peace, whatever they are. Love is something I can commit the right energy to - but another question is, can I do it unselfishly? Can I do it without wanting something? Can my emotion let him be free? Or, like in the Tao te Ching,

"opening and closing the gates of heaven
can you play the part of a woman?"

To do this thing, I have to commit to it. Commit for my own reasons, and not have requirements other than fair treatment. Love is not conditional on outcomes. I know that right now... but can I live that actively and in service? I do know that I want to try.

2002-12-31T00:51:00.000-08:00

Quality time with the man. It was good. What it boils down to is that he wants me to go into business with him, and has cooked up a way for us to be constantly engaged in some business together. He says he trusts me and respects my talent, and thinks I would be good at it. I'm not sure what he bases that on, but it warms the cockles of my heart to be so well thought of by such a raging mysanthropist who happend to have weaseled his way into my heart somehow.

Of course, the flip side is: will it be awful?

2002-12-30T12:39:00.000-08:00

I had a great meeting yesterday with the boss of my new team. I got a terrific interview with him, and can't wait to publish all the confidence he is showing in his boys. Last year on the team wasn't always a bed of roses, but I have high hopes that this year is really going to be fun. I'm continuing to study up on what is going to be required for me to really stir up some interest in those little monkeys, and I only hope I can do well by them. I have some fun plans... and I think I'll get a lot of support from the boss and all they guys. I'm really excited about the job!

Today I've published the first of a three part interview with my personal favorite crusty, old retired bike racer (man would he ever roast me alive for saying that!). I'm really happy with it, but mostly, it's due to the fact that he is actually interesting and has a lot to say. The people I meet through this gig are so much fun, and I must say, he is my favorite so far.

In other news, my out of town friend has gone to San Francisco for a week of the time we have with him to hang out with his new boyfriend in San Francisco, who lives with him in Washington D.C. all year. I would be bummed, but the truth is, I'm not suprised. It's been fine with him here, and I love him. There's really not much more to say, but that expectations have been lowered to accomodate reality. Optimal distance is being felt out, and it's easier to keep than I thought it would be. His new boyfriend is really sweet, and the first person I've ever seen him with that suits at all; so that's good at least. It's just time for me to divest that situation of some of it's emotion. I really believe that people must have the freedom to be and do what they want, and as much as I want to say "what the hell, Don't you love me?!" I really believe we must simply take what we are given in that department.

On the same theme, I am off to spend some quality time with the man again tonight. I'm looking forward to it, though I know it will force me to think of him 600 times per day for a week to follow. Whatever the outcome, though, it is nice to feel the heart quicken with that feeling of affection for another human being, and I am ready to try to be the yogic princess who can enjoy what is without desire or aversion. What will be will be, and the thing is, what happens doesn't change how you feel.

That's not to say that I haven't made a special effort with my lipstick today, though!

2002-12-27T14:03:00.000-08:00

Embarrassingly, I've seen The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers three times since it came out, and I've enjoyed it more with each viewing. I'm just saying...

...What is THAT about?

It does the heart so much good to see such beloved characters spring to life. It's a world you never want to leave, and it's strengthening and comforting the way the best stories are. What I love most about the films is how much they've brought the theme forward that it's the smallest things - the smallest people, and their decisions to do the right thing that's so important. When Frodo decides to take the ring, though he does not know the way to Mordor, he makes everyone else's path clear, too. It's that small decision, and every step thereafter that makes it possible for evil alliances to be toppled, and for the rightful King to return. I love the sense, in the book, and very strongly recognized in the film, that there is no wasted action, and that hope is in those actions and decisions - it's courage and the willingness to strive for the good, rather than a sense that all will be well.

It's truly an epic story, and like all epic stories, it can give one hope and renewed faith in human strength. It has that sense of feeling not like fiction, but like history.

2002-12-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

I just realized how SO NOT FUNNY I am, and all I can say is: no wonder.

2002-12-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

Today, my best friend is arriving from Washington D.C. to spend Christmas with my family. When he moved away almost exactly a year ago, it was amidst all kinds of pain and unhappiness. He was moving on in life to a new relationship with a man in Washington, and during the months that relationship took hold, my friend withdrew from me. I think in some ways, it made it easier for him to go. In the last weeks, unkind words were spoken, and it all ended in apologies and pledges of love; but there was still damage done, and things that only time and future developments could heal. He had become my sister's roomate, and I really felt traded in for her, and my own insecurities told me: "Yes, and why not? You are boring and obssessive, short and homely; while she is witty, has fancy Hollywood friends, social facility, and is tall and glamorous. Of course he likes her better."

While I'm absolutely certain that all of that is very skewed through my eyes, and has little to do with reality, I can't help having mixed feelings about seeing my friend. He's staying with my sister, and I feel like what once was an important relationship for me is no longer mine, but that things being what they are, I will have to smile like it is.

All of this is exactly the kind of engagement from which one should seek detachment. I want things and I hate things in this interaction, and it's really hard for me to just let things be what they are and love them all, these beloved people, in their reality. My policy of staying far enough away from people so that no matter what, I can still love them, the prinicple of optimal distance, doesn't work so well on my family and those who are like family to me. The truth is, I'm hurt, and I have been for a year. I'm not over it, and it still makes me feel like I'm swimming. The whole thing is a lot less immediate than it was, but it still stings, and getting all the elements back together for the holidays is something I wish I could welcome whole-heartedly, but it's actually something that I know I'll be swallowing for weeks.

On the bright side, the man who cracks me can't even remember my sister's name, though he has spent loads of time with both of us, and she has showcased the twins in total locker room scenarios with him there. I can't tell you how delighted I am by that.

Bottomline: None of this is anyone else's fault. It falls to me to find the equilibrium so that these things can't throw me - so that I can sleep at night, work steadily and smoothly, not be engaged in petty feelings and siezed by obssessions that do nothing but sap my energy.

Cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness. A posture that is stable and free from suffering.

It's hard to know, especially with people I love, how to be engaged in the path of those relationships with the true emotional presence they deserve, and stll be free-standing enough so that petty things do not delight me or tear me up inside.

2002-12-19T22:26:00.000-08:00

This body is an instrument of sensation, and it's purpose is engagement with this world. It's hard to know exactly what the relationship is between the detachment we seek, so that we can be free of desire and aversion, and the necessity to be engaged and to do our duty - to live out our dharma.

I've been reading Albert Camus' absolutely spellbinding essays about North Africa, and one in particular called The Desert, and in it, he talks about finding a truth in the physical world, a great truth before which "the mind is nothing, nor even the heart." He talks about an experience of the physical world that moves him towards a truth and a wisdom "where everything had been overcome," but he is foiled by his humanity and his engagement in it by his need for expression and self, and says "a great sob of poetry welling up within me made me forget the world's truth."

That's what love is.

2002-12-18T21:40:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning that I positively love. It's from Sonnets to the Portugese.

Sonnet XXXII

The first time the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed to soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love! - more like an out of tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
'Neath master hands, from instruments defaced,
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and dote.

2002-12-18T20:56:00.000-08:00

I saw someone that tortures me today.

Yes, him: the man who inspires equal parts of desire and repulsion. He came to my office to give me something, and we cooked up all kinds of new business to do together, which should insure a safe level of plausible deniability for months to come. I got a copy of THE MOVIE and I am going to help him find someone to do music for it and probably work on putting together a publicity campaign. He is the only person that quickens the pulse lately, but sometimes I wonder if that's just because I'm such a hermit, and I spend all my time with my science projects. If only he could have kept to that realm, but he's let me see into him a little, and I like what was in there so much that now I can't stop seeing. He fills me with consciousness, and I need that.

The truth is, it all makes me feel a little bit exhausted, and since it always seems to be going nowhere fast, I wish I could stop feeling the pull. My good girlfirend says "congratulations, you're human!" but I have high expectations for myself that include not giving in to ludicrous emotion. Or maybe I just like to cook up reasons why I'm failing.

I'm reading a wonderful novel called Independent People By Halldor Laxness. It won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, and it's about Icelandic farmers. It's a very absorbing world - very difficult and stark, and it really appeals to me.

I had a thought today, while listening to Jeff Buckley sing "Lilac Wine" in that remarkably beautiful way he does. I was singing along, and I noticed how much it is impossible for me to achieve the clarity and softness of his tone. I can sing along, and I try to feel what he feels with my voice, but the fact is, I simply cannot. People have talents, like singing, and those talents represent a specific ways of feeling, and of knowing. When I listen to him, I hear feeling that I cannot produce myself, and singing along is an effort at communion with that feeling... but the truth is, I do not possess that particular gift, so I am like a tourist in a beautiful land. The physical ability to produce a certain kind of sound is also a passport to that place; and there are other kinds of abilities that are passports to places of their own - but the reality and substantive fact of them represents real differences in capabilities, not just physical, but capability of feeling and of knowing from one human being to the next.

In yoga, you learn to feel elation by lifting yourself - resisting gravity and using the body to feel things that are in direct opposition to inertia; and when I say that I mean both the qualities of inertia, both rest and motion. We had an interesting class this week that started with inversions, went on to standing poses, and finally, deep, sustained and repeated backbends, and ending with an absolutely delicious savasana. What was interesting, though, was how energized I was after the backbends, and how difficult it was to lie still at the end, but before long, the stillness came to me, and I felt the weight come into my limbs, as if my body were sleeping and my mind were awake, and there was a real clarity in it.

Those tranisitions of feeling are available to me because of my yoga practice, and through it, I am able to know something about the nature of the changing world, or prakriti, as it would be named by Patanjali, in yoga philosophy. I can know that agitation can become stillness, that lethargy can change to energy, and that no state is permanent while I inhabit this vessel. The relation of the physical and the spiritual is what interests me, and it's important for me to remember that.

Also, there's nothing more comforting than the notion of endless change.

2002-12-16T12:14:00.000-08:00

Just want to let you all know, I am so happy about THIS MAN:

Go, Bono, GO!! ...and support his cause. It only takes five minutes to send an e-mail to your representatives and to our dim-witted President to let them know your mind on the subject of the African AIDS holocaust.

2002-12-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

I'm excited - and working with a team. I'm really excited about the opportunity to get involved in a new field on a formal level, and to be responsible for the PR fortunes of these nice boys. I'm really looking forward to how much I am going to love them all, and at the same time, I'm anxious about doing a good job for them. When I signed on, it was a small team, and now, with the addition of some bigger names, it's looking like a little bit bigger task. I welcome that, and only hope I can give them what they will so richly deserve over the next season.

To that end, I am studying up on Sports Marketing and PR Writing. I think I have good instincts, and I know the sport and am a good writer... but I really want to be sure I have the nuts and bolts down.

I'm also going to try to write a diary of the experience... I want to really record the daily flavor, sweet or bitter, of what it's like for them, and really use my opportunity to see them. In some ways, it's what I've always wanted - that opportunity to observe and study the subjects up close... It's Science!

Me and my projects!

2002-12-15T22:26:00.000-08:00

Inertia or anything else must be felt as separate, not as part of one's real self which is one with the divine.

~B.K.S. Iyengar

2002-12-15T01:50:00.000-08:00

I saw the film Frieda tonight, about Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera. It was lovely.

Poor Frieda. She suffered, but she was beautiful.

2002-12-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

Two poems by Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.

Love of Certain Work

Traveling is as refreshing for some as staying at home
is for others. Solitude

in a mountain place fills with companionship for this
one, dead-weariness

for that one. This person loves being in charge of the
working of a community. This

one loves the ways that heated iron can be shaped with
a hammer. Each has been

given a strong desire for certain work, love for those
motions, and all motion

is love. The way sticks and pieces of dead grass and
leaves shift about in

the wind and the directions of rain and puddle water
on the ground, those

motions are following the love they've been given.

Some Kiss We Want

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body, Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love-window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

2002-12-15T00:50:00.000-08:00

Committment is an issue for me.

It's hard for me to reconcile myself to my love. The night I saw Sigur Ros, I was with an old boyfriend; someone I still love, but not like that. He had recently fallen in love with a woman who wouldn't have him and spent a day in abject misery before pouring out the whole story of his heartbreak to me. In the car, after the show, he was telling me about a man he knew that had fallen in love with the girlfriend of his best friend and it had resulted in a destruction of that friendship. I told him that I thought that the phrase in love was nothing but an excuse for bad behavior, and that when people said that of themselves, it was usually to disguise some excess or act of stupidity or self-indulgence. I told him that it disgusted me.

All the while, the man I have fallen in love with was in my mind with such a startling degree of physical specificity. The wrinkles on the back of his neck, the texture of his leathery skin, and the way his hair sweeps back from his high forehead. I could see his rough, meaty, brown hands and the blonde hair on them. I could almost feel the way he rubs his tired eyes and hear his voice - soft and exact.

It suprised all my friends that I fell in love with him, and when I first heard them say those words, I bucked. I don't believe in the abandonment of sense that goes with that phrase. I don't believe one has to be the victim of emotion in that way. But, at the same time, I know that I am pulled towards him like the tide is pulled by the moon. I know that that there was no resistence in me; that it was as if that surrender was part of my body; and I know that all I have is the plausible deniability I so carefully maintain to stand between myself and that phrase I hate so much. I am drawn, and it's as if there is some string that ties me to him so that I feel it every time he moves.

Of course that's all romantic crap. But it's true that I can't stop thinking of him, and even though he is hardened and even cruel, there is a tenderness that rises up in me and stretches towards him, and I can't stop myself from the desire to press my cheek against him and tell him how much I want to devour him.

2002-12-14T19:05:00.000-08:00

Slowly, and thanks to the unexampled kindness and compassion of my teacher, I am feeling my yoga return. I talked to one of my cycle boys the other day, about his retirement from the sport, (and in fairness, I should say cycle MEN, since he is no boy) and he said that he knows he will miss the finely tuned sense of fitness that he has from racing. It's similar to what I miss in yoga - just that feeling that you can contact the different parts of your body and speak to them. Just that you know it and really live in it. Getting back to my yoga practice in earnest helps me remember the practice of simply doing. Lately, I've been so much more wrought than I was at the height of my practice. I need to get back there, because I know now that it's unnecessary to feel that way. I think I become really attached to my gloom sometimes, and I need to let it go.

I spoke to the very charming George Hincapie today, and he told me some things about his family and career which were of some interest, but not nearly as interesting as just his manner. I always love to hear from him because he is so straightforward and direct, and so very simple in the best way. He leads a life of action and of concrete doings, and doesn't seem to have many theories. I like that about him. As a cycling fan, I have to say that he is the one I like to see win more than any other. He is so courageous and rides with such perserverence. His single-minded focus is amazing. In my dealings with him, he's always seemed genuinely sweet-natured, and so grounded in his own experience... as if there were any other way to be! I guess that's the thing of it - his relationship with the world is too direct for the kind of delusion that suggests you can be any other way.

I've always lived so much in my head, and I have to say talking to people who lead these lives that are so much in the animal, and whose turning wheels are on their bikes rather than in their heads is so interesting to me. They say such beautiful things sometimes, and with such a pure spirit; I envy them that clarity. I'm always looking for ways to make my cycling articles ABOUT something, as if just the subject itself is not enough, but talking to someone like George reminds me that it is enough - that human experiences and the concrete stuff of peoples' lives are the real pith of what interests me, and makes any narrative worth reading.

It's another reason why yoga is so good for me: it forces me into a relationship with my own animal, and grounds me in my own life and experince. It gives me a really invaluable way of making that experience conscious, and gives me new eyes with which to see other people. It gives me a new sense of the grace of human beings, and a new way to experience that love that calls us to the things of this world... if you know that beautiful poem by Richard Wilbur.

2002-12-06T10:26:00.000-08:00

My dear friend lost his job as a professional cyclist yesterday, at a particularly late and unfortunate time in the off-season. Very sad.

I'm noticing that my record here has become very glum, of late, and I don't think improvement to the mood is in store today, either. The other night, I had a particularly uncharacteristic episode of losing it. I drove across Los Angeles in rush hour traffic weaving and skidding to make it in time for my yoga class, and arrived there absolutely shattered - I felt all this desperation from not being able to make so often - anyway, my teacher, who is officially the dearest man alive, asked me the absolute wrong question:

"How are you?"

So obviously, I cracked. It's been like that lately.

2002-12-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

So, last night there was a brilliant episode of Charlie Rose in which Viggo Mortensen wore a t-shirt on which he himself had scrawled "No More Blood For Oil," and went on a completely candid anti-war, anti-US foreign policy rant. He objects to comparisons of the new Lord of the Rings film to the US war on terrorism, particularly the notion that the US is the good guy in that battle, and that the muslim hordes are the Orcs. Also brilliant was the fact that the show, which was meant to be about the film, did not allow Rose to rebut every point. It basically allowed Mortensen a National broadcast soapbox. Awesome.

Also on the political tip, I used Lance Armstrong's attendance at a World AIDS Day event in Bono's Heart of America Tour to give me a similar platform on the Daily Peloton. I think some people might be appalled, but oh well. People should know that stuff, and Lance, by appearing there, creates that opportunity.

Heart of America Tour:

ABCNews.com: U2's Bono Leads AIDS Day Observances
Daily Nebraskan: Stars Bring AIDS Awareness to Leid
Chicago Sun Times: Bono Issues Blunt Message to Christians
Des Moines Register: A Call to Hearts, Minds

AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa:

DATA: The AIDS Crisis
UNAIDS
BBC News: AIDS In Africa
World Health Organization AIDS Page
Global AIDS Alliance

2002-12-02T15:21:00.000-08:00

Lately, there the strong feeling of having lost the plot on some very important level.

My yoga practice has gone by the wayside in some ways. First there was a knee injury, which developed into serious scheduling problems, and now, I feel like I've just forgotten what it felt like. Along with the loss of that, there's the sense of lost motivation and of scrambling for motivation in terms of the cycle-writing. What was once a fascination with what it means to train the animal so intensely has been replaced with a kind of ambition and hustle that is exhausting to me. Meanwhile, many things have been replaced with a project that really hinges on all that, and I'm feeling a little empty.

Also, I am lovesick lately. Lonely, and hankering after a particularly inappropriate man. He doesn't match me at all, but I do love him. It's not necessary for him to do any particular thing, but the thought of him makes me feel the night passing and gives me the constant sense of being unrequited. I am so tired of feeling that. He's kind to me, though, and I'm useful to him.

Add to that the mundane pressures, and it adds up to low level blues getting stronger all the time...

2002-11-23T21:42:00.000-08:00

One day, after being alone for 32 years with her family, friends, and lovers, she decided it was time to just go.

It had to be someplace cold; someplace isolated. It had to be far from anything that could distract her from the absolute silence and invisibility. She wanted her voice to drown in empty space, and to go down into the roots of a turf covered house, with a root cellar. She wanted to write. Her first poem would be called root cellar, and she imagined the deep, Jungian significance it would have. She would be unlocking the the secrets of her mysterious soul, and in silence and isolation, she would think of it alone.

She wanted cold and snow. She wanted to be snowed in so that all the windows were covered by crystalline drifts of melting white. There had to be a fire and a tea kettle; and a pantry filled with dried meats and friuts, canned vegetables and potatoes. It had to be spartan - absolutely plain, and all would have to be done by hand.

The days would be long and so bright that that she would have to shield her eyes, and the silence would be vast and complete in an epic landscape, so silent, that the smallest sound would be a shock.

Maybe there, in that place, he would stop calling to her. Maybe there he would stop assuming form to silence her, and instead of hearing him, she would hear herself. Maybe there, everything she is would find the voice to whisper to her, and tell her her own name, and the sound of that whisper would take on a significance that could not be ignored. Even he would hear it.

Finally, in absolute silence and in the absence of any other, she would finally become manifest.

2002-02-18T18:24:00.000-08:00

Current Project Roster

~ The Certain Body: The obscured depth of physical experience.

~ The Girl Who Left: Alone-ness vs. Loneliness. Eradication of words.

~ Insanity, Disorder, Romanticism: As compared with what?

...more later.

2002-02-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

I've been neglecting to blog, but here's something that's been on my mind from Albert Camus:

"Brute physical desire is easy, but desire at the same time as affection calls for time. One has to travel through the whole land of love before finding the flame of desire. Is that why it's always so hard to desire what one loves?"

~Notebook V, p45

Just a thought.

2002-01-14T10:18:00.000-08:00

I feel myself slipping back to an inactivity of the soul. When I'm alone, I hear myself, but as soon as the day is filled with places to go, people to say "good-morning" to, animals to feed and care for, rooms to clean, food to cook and eat, I loose focus. It's as if something in me resists engagement with the mundane, and wants to live in the ether. I think we spend most of our lives distracting ourselves from that sense of silence and singularity, and look to things that draw us out of ourselves and into the world. I wonder sometimes if what we think of as psychological health and balance is really a strong ability to turn away from the terrifying fact of our own absolutely monadic objectivity.

We record and catagorize our experiences in a compulsive effort to mean- to experience relationship. Our isolation is the fuel of a perpetual motion machine with a turning wheel of perception and appetition. I always want to be alone, but the truth is, I'm alone right here, it's the only way I can be.

2002-01-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem by me:

Singer

The spangled crown prince returns to
his humble city of
dock workers and shop girls,
ruined face, eyes too black, horns -
begging: "Be gentle with me."

Everyone has seen him naked in
the marketplace
Everyone knows how to attack and
has memorized his defense.
Everyone sees his shame.

He himself feels the blood in
his hands, slippery as grease.
The blood of his
family, his friends
his children and
the enemy.

He rubs it between his fingers.
He breathes desire with
a sensuality that startles him and
looks up to see them stare.

His strength has become too great for
everyday, and he stands
masked, separated, watching and
wary. The innocents,
unsuspecting, offer
sympathy.

How can they know?

The lure of the crowd
the lure of the woman
the dance and the dancer
the scent of salvation and
finally, this:
disembodied, painful loneliness.

January 2002

2002-01-12T12:33:00.000-08:00

Lately, my fondest fantasy is one of almost total isolation in Iceland. I'd live in a turf house, half submerged in the earth on a treeless expanse of rock and tundra. Snowed in in the winter with a cellarfull of potatoes and onions, some dried, cured fish, canned tomatoes. No electricity and a purgatorial trek to the outhouse. I'd live there alone, or, with a tall, nordic-boned man who speaks no English and tends sheep, and provides human warmth at night. Having no one to talk to, I'd become sharpened and maybe even melancholic, spending days in an introverted silence, and just write. There would be nothing to sieze or direct my mind but the details of the daily.

Here's a poem of Viggo Mortensen's that I found quite moving, really:

Home

He's got a deep, abiding respect
verging on idol worship
for where things end up.
There are unopened letters
in his refrigerator, a fake
fingernail in the soapdish,
shoes everyplace.
These things, and many more
leavings, fragments, balancing
reminders of a breeze
from a slammed door-
configurations of sanctified loose ends-
have become a living net
above which he performs
the movements that make
the clock move.

Very nice. Simple and profound. The images of these small thing as a "living net" above which life is performed is really a beautiful one.

The thing about me is that I figure that if I'm not going to write Four Quartets tomorrow, I'm not going to write at all, and my hand is uncertain in drawing, so why do it? That's where I'm going wrong. The stuff of art is all around me, and the making of art is a daily practice, an introversion, a physical act, an experience of being oneself an of performing expressions of that experience. I lock myself into painful silence, and am living proof that, as Albert Camus writes "comparison is the source of unhappiness"

2002-01-11T17:34:00.000-08:00

I've lost my car keys and have been looking all day for them.

Oh the humanity.

2002-01-11T09:46:00.000-08:00

It's my first week on a new schedule of part-time work; two days off per week. I spent it happily in art galleries and museums. Tuesday I went down to Santa Monica's Bergamot Station gallery complex and saw one or two nice things. It's a good place, and inspired me to work. Yesterday, I went to MOCA and the Geffen Temporary Contemporary and saw single artist exhibits of Liz Larner (which did not interest me much) and Douglas Gordon who was more interesting, but for my money, not entirely brilliant. What was brilliant, as usual, was the buzzing energy of the Mark Rothko room, the photos by Diane Arbus and one by Cindy Sherman, and a nice quote from conceptual artist Sol Lewitt:

"This kind of art [conceptual] is not theoretical or illustrative of theories, it is intuitive; it is involved with all kinds of mental processes. ...the idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

Also interesting was the fact that in the introductions to both the Larner and the Gordon exhibits, the making of art was referred to as a practice.

But, back to Mark Rothko: I love the stillness of those paintings of just color. There's emotion, energy and action to them, but they are also profoundly passive. There's a stillness and simplicity to them that is so peaceful. They are only meaningful in an experiential sense, and then only meaningful for the space of that one experience: next time they will be different. They engage time and space in a mute way, and their action is by virtue of a deep silence. I love the courage of art like that. Whatever intention there is in it, it is sort of rightfully left in an unreachable past.

I also got a book of photos and poems by Viggo Mortensen, with a CD of him reading and singing his poems called Recent Forgeries. It's lovely! His photographs and poems are so intimate and personal, and on the CD his voice is the same- there's a pleasing imperfection in the higher registers and something that might be either an accent or an affectation, but it's also wonderfully human. There's a resolute smallness in all of it, and a brilliant sense of pacing. There's the sense that what is valued most is a fine observational instrument calibrated by practice and quiet. It's interesting how, with this bit of evidence, one can draw a thread to his acting work and the sense he gives in his characterizations of a rich inner life; something extra in his characters that isn't and can't be scripted. It's clear that his impulses to work spring from well-tilled soil, soft earth, some stones. His work is genuine and affecting, full of resonant detail, provokes reflection, encourages consciousness, and so perfoms the most essential service art can perform.

I like it very much.

Having said that, there is nothing particularly new in it; nothing that stikes one as an adventurous use of subject matter or media. I'm inclined, though, not to see that as a detriment, but as the source of it's strength. Also lovely is the fact that it does not involve coffee grounds, ketchup, excrement or lurid sexual suggestion, which is refreshing. There's a modesty to it all, too. I get the sense that he backs away from sensationalism, coersion, or self-aggrandizement, and works from the stuff of his life and genuine emotion. That he would be embarrassed to do otherwise. Very nice.

I'm struck by the question of how his public personality, or personal beauty and heartthrob status flavor the reception of it. I read today that the Track 16 gallery, where a show of his new work was scheduled to open with a reception on February 2nd has been swamped with calls from fans who want to see him and don't really care so much about art. It's too bad. Still, I wonder how much more willing I have been to give his work a closer and more sympathetic look because I find him beautiful? I think that I would have liked many things about it without knowing of him at all, but chances are that I might not have given it the time based on surface alone. Is that good or bad? Good, for me, as I've been really inspired by the fact that it is really no more than an honest communication of emotion by a self-taught artist, and it fills me with a sense of possibility, but how must it be for him?

Beauty can be cruel.

2002-01-04T16:54:00.000-08:00

A few words for Stuart Adamson, formerly of Big Country...

When I was 15, The Crossing was my favorite album. My LP copy of it is as worn as the well-loved copy of ee cummings's complete poems I took with me everywhere I went in those same years. The spine is broken, the inner sleeve is torn and stained by brittle and ancient scotch tape. I knew every word, every note, every vocal inflection on this record. I knew it as if it were part of my own mind and heart, and it stirred in me a humanist chord that has never stopped humming.

When I was a young girl, this record taught me to love nothing better than the beauty of human expression, and to believe in the ability of human beings to fill their world and the worlds of others with hope. It taught me to believe in the power of words to express worthwhile emotion, and in the possibility that human emotion and expression could make life shine with dignity and meaning. I put this record on, squeezed my eyes shut against the petty difficulties of my school-age life, and let my heart roam in uncharted landscapes where love, honor, uncelebrated courage, truth, beauty, idealism and true, unflinching romanticism held indomitable sway. Stuart's voice was to me like a lover's voice that fired the mountainside. His music and words made certain that for the rest of my life, nothing without that epic sweep, nothing that didn't care most deeply for only those things that truly mattered, would ever really satisfy me.

Stuart, the writer and singer of so many beautiful songs has left us, sadly; sadly for him and sadly for us. I don't know why I feel compelled to more words. I guess I feel like saying them will go a little way to giving back to Stuart some of the grace he gave me. Suicide is a dark word and I want to say words that warm his memory and celebrate his brightness. The hugeness of his spirit and of his music has always been a beacon and a comfort to me, and no matter what the end of his story, the man who wrote those songs will remain in my heart as luminous as he ever was.

If there is a place of peace after death, I hope that he has found it.

2002-01-02T15:28:00.000-08:00

OK.

Here's the bottom line. Viggo Mortensen is killing me. How's that for cessation of the compulsive functions of mind? How can it be that one man is so magnetically, enormously, gut-wrenchingly attractive? How can his mouth move like that, his hair be the color of honey and how can his clear as water eyes look so full of delicious secrets? On top of that, how can he be a wonderful actor, a poet, a painter and photographer, a father, speak several languages and now be suited up to play my first heartthrob ever: Tolkien's king of Middle Earth, he of the wolf-colored hair, grey eyes and gentle, healing royalty, Aragorn son of Arathorn.

How will I carry on in the knowledge that he will never make sweet love to me, or say my name with his gravelly voice? Sometimes if we ask these kinds of ridiculous questions out loud, they seem less pressing than they did as private tortures, and right now I must admit that the very existence of Viggo Mortensen is burning a hole in my psyche.

But I feel better already for having gotten it off my chest.

2001-12-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

Yogash citta-vrtti-nirodhah

Yoga is the cessation of compulsive functions of mind.

Interesting to combine this idea with the idea of writing.

The plan is to begin a daily writing practice which seeks this cessation; as well as the stability and freedom from suffering that one seeks in a yoga practice.

The most immediate issue that arises is that of committment. I have always found it difficult to commit myself to any one path. Can I leap? What is the relationship between faith, committment and hope?

2001-12-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

not just circle
not just being
(our radience/andmeaning)

~Thom Yorke