You can drink.

The part of me I landed on since even before Maryland I have pretended not to see but it's sitting here finally staring back at me.  This happens some days your one-eyed blindness comes a-reckoning.

There is fine gray rain-light in my back room at Ocean Pines.  The quiet truth is you can't go back again.  If you know me you know words flex in and out and taunt and haunt my head, you know fire propels and burns my guts and runs my legs and doesn't let me settle, you know the arrows of these things draw electric on my skin and you know the deep quiet places I like to disappear from it all into mellow trance and stare.  You also know there's a shine that transmutes everything and illumines the muscle of my heart and leads me and that most of all for this heartlight I will and do forsake all.

My father leaves for golf after coming back for a rain jacket.  It is near 60 out today.  My mother is on a plane to Mexico. Miles from here my cousins are in cozy nests each with their loves and this of course is the only thing that makes sense.  I try not to be jealous or misunderstand.  The first beach boy I ever loved has wrung me up and washed me out which is exactly what I came here to let him do.  All of it is past now Kel, can you be past it, too? HOME.  Where I stand it sits out like a soft grassy tump just above some fast moving blue waters.  They are crystal clear.  To write this makes me also see the Ocean City pier.  There is above it a sky that is soft and pink-yellow with the warmth of a season-worn sun.  The waters are tracking and quicker than they've been in a long time and yes, that's it.  I don't have to cross them, and that is what it is to stand here.  Because you can go back you can go back over and over and again to the many dark falls just behind you oh but to stand here, on the grassy tump with forested woods thick and deep just steps away from my feet--and so many cliff sides on the shore to the other side.  You also don't have to.  You also can just sit shoreside, and breathe.  You also can scoop handful.  You can drink girl, you can drink.  My god this thing will move you, you can let it, can stop the canvassing and cutting of jungle vines can stop all the bloody poison you keep ingesting in your veins.  You don't have to cross these waters again because there's no place else left to go. You can jump in, right here, and let the waters wash you through.

Or you can just stand, too.  Stand in this peace awhile, on this sturdy ground.  Appreciating the scenery.  The where you've been.

An act of love

Boom-shaka-laka he says, and turns, keeps talking, good choice--more a mutter under his voice.  He is responding to my breakfast sandwich order. The woman next to him with the hair and eyes we would've called hipster ten years ago but is just Youth now is wringing her body, a posture you have to be near enough her to feel or sense rather than see.  Squirming.  Trying to contain her energy.  We used to call it wilen--trying to hold that feeling in.  They are jolly, inside-skin-sweating, barista-caffeinated in that contagious way that saturates me so completely I have to sit down and write about it.

To write, to just say: I witness, I see.  And also I guess, for some of us anyway: Yes, I also have been…

...A barista, a million 5 am mornings the slim shiver ice slap to the face brutal as breath in the morning coming in from the Bay.  Get the lights on and newspapers out for the Pines retiree locals who'll be here by 8.  Espresso grounds airborne or on your hands actually infuse your skin, that high-wired trigger volt there even if you don't drink, gotta go gotta go gotta move keeping going what to do nowwww.  Brown-eyed hippie boy and his broad shoulder townie friends, Natalie's Comfort Food blueberry muffin smells, how smells actually fog your glasses, December mornings walking in to Play it Again Sam's, start the slow drip 7am, senioritus and early-caffeinated-sobriety thirteen years ago in my college town.

I have been…

...I leave the rehab early this morning.  Two clients I used to work with, back.  One strung out again, one almost half a year clean.  The same jittery barista-body wringing-energy in them.  One from tweak, one from the joy, the life force, the vitality that is wordless but throttles through you in a rush of yes I can.

Hope is a funny thing, its wavers and disappearing acts, its suddens rushes and returns.

There are so many people in this coffee shop that the line doubles itself in front of the door.  Of all the things I have been hope is the most important of them all.  Boom-shaka-laka guy never doesn't use his barista high to connect with me, and every other customer, to give them a smile.  I remember that.  Each moment, which could be…an act of love.

In most moments, a choice.  In a million different things.  HOPE--which most finally is a thing to be...

Muscles that are strong enough

The rain of course, which is a million different creatures depending on who you are relative to the space you inhabit.  This morning it is skeleton fingers on the sky light six feet above my head in the little loft where I sleep--reminding without it we are dust but with too much this canyon could wash away.  As life, a terror or a blessing as well as the washing fluid dance of every nuance in between…

So the rain wakes me at 3:30 on a morning when I need to rise at 5 to leave for school.  And it is peculiar, how the body remembers.  I lay here and for no seeming reason recall December in 2004.  I'd been asleep in my old bed at Ocean Pines.  My boyfriend at the time was in the twin bed beside me, we'd pushed them together to sleep close.  We were living in Oregon on the coast to make money after traveling for five months and had made a harried, stressful trip home for the holidays.

I remember waking up from the most saturated sleep and sighing and thinking, ohh, it was all a dream.

Then waking came, and reminded me that no, I had a return ticket waiting and the rainy season in the mossy Suislaw and the tides of the Alsea rushing in and out to the Pacific were where I would return.  I didn't have a job and neither did he.  We were in that in-between space that feels like life at any minute will bottom out, that panicky place of potential free-fall.

It was just on the other side of following through with everything we'd set out to do--travel North America and live on her land, sleep in the forests, honor nature as our host and our home.  We were faced next with Now What~and it didn't feel good.

Of course, as life does, it moved on and we did with it.  I got a job, so did he, it was hard to cut heart strings when the time came and we travelled on.  But that body memory.

The oh it's not a dream…I got to do this now and don't really know if I can, march all the way through.

How muscles that are strong enough to do the marching actually come from the journey, the steps you take one by one, to get you to move.

Movement itself is the conditioning, what makes you strong.

That's what the rain brought today.  Makes me wonder what's yet and about to come...

You know, like from Peter Pan?

I left Jan's and had tacos then got Starbucks and got on the road.  On the 73 the veins in my forehead were so thick I think you could jump them like rope. Like tangle them out from underneath my skull bone or apart from the muscle up there and use them for sidewalk games.  That's what traffic feels like.  Trying to untangle the jumprope jarble from my brain.

I'd been so calm too--what the hell is all this red brake light on the toll road?  The whole damn reason they make an elitist toll system through the rich part of south county is so entitled brats like me don't have to deal.  Just eww.  No I didn't actually think that last part that's just me making fun of the southern cali-chick in me. Elitist.  Entitled. White.  Bratty-ass.  Chicken.  Me.

Anyhow.  I really do have issues with road rage but I haven't in a long time.  The way the 73 runs up and down the coastal hills is like a smooth finger along the backbone of the land and feeling her long slow in then out--up then down--breath touches me in that inside place that hummms with quiet rest.  The moon fat and white to my left. I love that stretch of road.  It's why I originally moved to Laguna. Almost three years ago now…or anyhow come May. I had to take the toll road for an ESL conference to San Diego and was wowed by the rolling canyon up-downs.  Green expanse this side of the 405 with no construction and dirt hiking paths?  Woah what is this magic land?  I didn't know a thing about Laguna.  I'd only been there once, and that was dancing.  And it was dark.

Jan said some stuff near the end of our session though and I guess it pissed me off.  That's the part that challenges me as a therapist.  My job isn't to tell you what to do, or how to think, or any of that.  My job is to help you feel understood.  Truly seen, witnessed for what's true in you.

In this way you get to become stronger in who you really are.

And my point today to my therapist was that Wendy, you know like from Peter Pan?  Wasn't just the mama in that story. She didn't just play the good girl role, in fact she got to explore never having to grow up, too.  She got to have all the same fun as the lost boys and Peter Pan.  And that's a hell of a lot fun…So it's not all just stunted, to be enchanted by Never never land.  It would be if Wendy didn't know all the subtleties of her role.

But if she does?  Does that mean Never never land is still in control? If Wendy is exploring parts of herself, a conscious choice of subversiveness?  I got all triggered because I didn't feel like my therapist heard my point.  I told her as much, and now I am sitting here wondering: so is it Jan's job to align and hear where I, speaking for me back then, as a wild grl Peter Pan teen, stood?  Or to challenge adult me now?

And is there truth in her point, since I'm pissed?  That I still love for the enchantment to take control?  And if that's a role she's gonna take with me, to challenge me--how do I feel about that, working with clients, challenging them?

Is it something I'd want them to leave with…to have bulging out their brains?  I trust her, a lot.  And am willing to ride this to see where it leads.  I drove to see my clients, with that rope-vein jumping like nuts outta my head.  I chose to just focus on a secret I know about, which is were all crazy, just working it out in our own ways.  And working it out or covering it up or whatever we each do looks different for us, each and every one.  All of us have our own very unique styles of crazy-management.  It's a wonder we make it from day to day.

Tonight I for one am happy that at least for today, I didn't ram in to the back of any cars.  I actually laughed at myself freaking over a couple brake lights, running those up-downs, grateful to have a bank account, a means to afford a fast track, the little unspoken gifts that made it so I wasn't in traffic on the 405.  And now, it feels good--I like how you're there waiting for me, like you used to be, sweet ol familiar blank screen.

Repost: In Memoriam.

(original posting, september 2009.  So I can feel connected this far away from home during Hurricane Sandy)

Suzette had this raspy voice and a laugh entirely unanticipated. It used to shoot out of her mouth and hit you in your chest then explode up your neck and down your back, cacophonous echo blast of megaphone and hot air.

She worked the Fool the Guesser one stand up from me on the Pier.

In September the tourists went home, it all sort of started when Felix came in early August which was also the time I kicked Kevin out of the house for the PCP. This left us, Suzette and me or the hot Tico Kiki who was way older which then meant like 35, with lots of time to holler back and forth to each other on our mics. Hurricane Felix was a big one and I got on the local news screaming kooks go home--the reporter was on 9th street, three up from us where the old deadhead house was, we learned from them early on where not to buy our drugs. Jerry died that summer, it was almost omen-ic: Deadheads by then couldn't be trusted a lot of them were tweakers, everybody knew. I imagine the reporters edited me out, we didn't have a tv so I never knew. We didn't even know the hurricane was coming. I got off for my afternoon break and came home for a puff or jay and a swim or some food hopefully someone had some otherwise it was soft-pretzels from the Pier for free the only place I could surely get hooked-up. Sparky was the only dude around though, he was a squatter one of those 9th street kids. Besides Black Mike and Little Kid, the only ones still down to hang after I kicked Kevin out, there was Sparky. Sparky I never trusted cuz of the deadhead squatter thing but we still hung cuz my roommate thought he was the shit. He never had anything to offer he just came looking. We had nothing though since Kevin and the boys went, nothing at all. So instead me and Sparky just took a swim and it's the only time I ever remember the Ocean slamming me again and again like a hard wood board. I swam hard but never never got to a place where she was settled and smooth so I could just float and roll. Like I said the Hurricane was coming but we didn't know. No one else was on the beach though! Mom somehow got in touch with me and said to put all the stuff on the floor up so really that just meant my books and music on the lowest shelf. The pots and pans earlier in the summer, since we didn't ever wash them, all got thrown out.

After Felix it was all different. Like I said, then it was just Black Mike who slept on the couch every night and also suggested we each sleep with a little switchblade under our mattress. Which is funny to me now, cuz like cousin Joey says a weapon will end up getting you in even more trouble if you dont know how to use it. And I for one, didn't, no one ever taught me how.

But luckily we never had trouble. Kevin moved out, he and his boys trashed our house broke windows and the outside porch lights and tagged all over all our shit, then Felix came and after that everything changed. The alleys were more quiet, there was a lot more of the large grey sky. And when the sun was out it was ethereal again, funny yellow glow. I didn't know it yet but that was the summer I first started to learn: there are tides that come and they move as one and they bring a certain power all their own, and they effect us all.

And the earth is where and how we learn.

By September it was cool already I had the greatest snaked Hoodie I lived in with holes down at the edge for my thumbs. Everyone was gone. Just 14 years ago, that's all, but OC didn't have the condo weekenders it's so full of now. Even my aunt and uncle and grammy who lived summer here were gone, they had to go home to the county to teach school.

Which meant we ditched 6th street for my family's house at the Pines, the girls and I, because it scared us being alone like that with just the beach rats who were hating on us and the ghosts that we heard again and again--no lie, the old fashioned player piano music or loud foot steps upstairs on the outside deck when for sure no one was there, or even the radios in our house that would go on without reason sometimes. Local folklore said the Broadripple on 14th, and our place too on 6th, were the original Bordellos from back in the day. It was mid-1800's that the town came to be. But Wikipedia says the original Pier burned down in a fire in 1994, which isn't true, the fire happened in the winter of 1995, winter after Felix, I remember because we drove over that winter to see. The fire took Morbid Manor and the waterpark, too; I smoked pot everyday in Morbid Manor in 95 then got to ride the water rides for free since I worked there, ran a betting game for the same guy who did Fool the Guesser, Suzette Kiki and me. And that fire took everything, all that, down. 1995 last of the Pier and the Manor, the Riptide Park and Jerry, too.

So me and Chrissy who worked Morbid Manor and loved a guy, Johnny, started hanging at the Pines. It was cool and vacant in town and I learned all at once to love September, the sheet clear blue sky, the white clouds puffy and bright as a smile. The way the water looked suddenly so navy blue. September, goddamn I learned to love you.

Suzette invited us over for for spaghetti that's how I found out she was into selling and smoking crack. She got arrested later that winter which I learned the same night as I heard about the fire at the Pier. It sucked cuz she had a little one, I dont remember his name anymore he had brown hair with flints of yellow curl, he was three-years-old. Guess he'd be 17 now hope he's not in jail. That night over spaghetti when I first found out about her drug of choice, it was the first time I ever got that gut-twisting sweaty-necked premonition-chill. It was September, the streets were flat and empty but she lived all the way downtown so the air from the inlet was coming off the water and was damp with a terrible cold. The sky was low and hung with thin grey clouds.

Addiction is a hell of a fucking disease.

In September now I come here every year weekend after Labor Day and have a reunion with old friends. Last night we were up to 3, boardwalk, dancing, talking, laughing and lots of quiet on the cool, white sand. Round 2am I walked past sixth street, Kevin is dead, I'm 9 years clean.



Everything is changed. And also, September, the clean earth and shushing sea, is just the same.

Repost: Wistful and grateful on the night before I go to grad school to become a therapist...

(original posting 5.13.2009
Choptank, MD)

About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.

“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.

Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in.  When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”

One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.

Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.

I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.

I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.

Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.

It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.

Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.

The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.

So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.

That dumb happy headless fury

It's been 17 years since I've seen this kid and we talk for hours each time one of us calls.  It just goes on and on.

He lives in Hollywood now and he knew me when love was easy as giggling.  My heart was whole and pure once and I trusted it and never gave it's direction any doubt and this was that last and final time, before the feeling of broken or thinking too much, before I felt afraid.  We talk for hours, we laugh until I have no breath and have to take my sunglasses off to wipe at my eyes.  We talk about Kevin and the memories are so tender at the edge it makes it hard for me to believe I ever let myself stop feeling that way.

We were kids.  He tells me he remembers when we first met when he was 13.  That I was with Konan at the Fractured Prune.  This makes sense, they had the best donuts in town and Ko and I were going up the alley by that age to buy cigarettes at the Quality Inn from the machine.  They cost a buck then.

I tell him about when I first met Kev.  I was 12.  He worked the Beach Club back when they still had video games.  He bummed a smoke.  Kevin's been gone 5 years.  Last week was the anniversary and that night I put a pic up of us on FB not knowing it was his memorial day.  I got teary when Ryan told me yea Wednesday was his date I thought you knew that and then we wowed low and quiet for a minute sure as we  have been a few different times that Kevin's the one reuniting us.  Then we told more stories and laughed and sniffled some more.  Ryan was his best friend.  I asked him remember that time you guys came up to a rave with me and we stayed with my mom and you never broke Beavis and Butthead the whole entire time and ma thought there was something wrong with you two?  We laugh that hysterical crying laugh that only the oldest friends do.

He tells me stories that happened in the years in-between.  I can literally see them.  I can see the faces Kevin made, his wide or black star eyes, see the postures Ryan took as he gives me each detail.  He's a story-teller and a carny and most of all one of the old school beach boys and talking to him is like finding a part of myself I knew for a long time was real but then eventually one day just decided had been made up all along.  It's like proving myself right after convincing myself for so long I wasn't.  A feeling of peace that matters finally and only to me. I just never ever thought I could talk about this stuff again.  Not with someone who was so immediately right there.  I feel so grateful.  I feel so living--in this certain kind of brand new way.

Kevin James was my friend since we were 12 and my love for a little while during a time that most people call the best summer of their life.  I loved him.  We shared the sweetest innocent romance and it was the last good and pure thing I ever had.  It was too sad and too far gone, too hard to think of til now.  I loved him with that dumb happy headless fury we love with at 18.  The memories are endless and I didn't even know they were there, all lined up side by side in some lost little corner of this sorta busted heart.   Who knew?  I feel him live as if he were here.

Life is funny.  That's all.

Me and Ryan, 1995

Kev and me, 1995.  Ocean City, MD.

The ding of my typewriter bell

Thinking about living on Truslow Road, 2006. I'd ordered my boyfriend a 6 CD-set of folk songs from the Smithsonian Institute, which has archived recordings of every folk-movement you can imagine, and we were listening to it on our new record player, in our living room that had no television and furniture that we boasted was all second-hand.  We didn't have the internet. Or a laptop, yet.  I didn't even have a car.  Just rode a six dollar vintage bike everywhere, that I'd gotten at an auction in the middle of farmfields outside town.

It's because I am listening to Spotify, this nostalgia, to an Al Jolson and Benny Goodman playlist because Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris made me all romancy and wanting for the twinge of myth to sit in my hair.  But counter to the beauty of that film, the nuances of yesteryear and the wanting, the pure, lovely human wanting that it pigeons...what I am doing right now by thinking back is instead reveling in how satisfied I currently am.

I would love to hear some big band on a nice static sounding turntable, have no doubt.  I would love the tinkle sound background murmur of cocktail drinkers and laughter.  But I am equally thankful that my other option--internet streaming Spotify--brings a similar magic to my life.  The aesthetic is different.  For example, why I am willing to drive 25 minutes to Long Beach to buy medicinal herbs in bulk to make oils and teas and salves, instead of just settling for the already made stuff at the organic markets here in town.  There's an intuitiveness to that for me, the hands-on steps, the moment to moment allowing of the instinctive nature to lead the process.  In the same way I'd love to own a record player, breathe the dust of the paper album slip, feel the grease smudges on the cardboard while fingering the choices one by one.  Feel the easy way the vinyl latches on the spindle.  Hear the sound dust makes, settled between the grooves.  If I could, I would be typing this by twinkling lights on the grape arbor in my own backyard in this sweet small town.  That noise that just echoed...?  Permanence.  The ding of my typewriter bell.

But that means I'd miss the music right now, how it lightens my mood so that I have a small smile. The simple, practical beauty of writing right now, the discipline of using my craft, spending time with the words by just letting them out.  Hitting a button and instant audience.  The enticement of this.  Or the way the air from the open window on the skin of my forearm feels right now--dewy, cool, like the grass does at dawn--and too the way it smells just as sweet.

And that's the difference between now and then.  I struggled endlessly with being where I was, whatever that meant.  And much as I struggled with valuing the joy of the present, I too pitied and even righteously resisted change, and especially technology, which is what made me think tonight of back then on Truslow Road.  I was classically extreme, believed still as youth will that to be one thing entirely eliminated my capacity to also be something else.   Those folkway recordings--songs that were over fifty years old, on CD--were some of the only CDs, other than EPs released by our friends, that we listened to that year.  The funny irony, to be to snobbish even about CDs!  Everything was on album.  That to enjoy inspiration, to be moved by aesthetic or moved with a process, I thought it also meant I couldn't enjoy what was available through convenience.

Definitely not the click of enter on Spotify anyway.  I actually have an IPOD now!  Even if I'd been in Woody Allen's time travelling roaring twenties car and I came forward by just a few years and peaked my future myself, I NEVER would've believed that back then.  An IPOD would've meant losing my edge!  Ah, to value the integral overlaps of my own inner diversities.  This act of being still, present, to the all the parts of who I was and who I am.  It opens to movement and eases me naturally along.  This is delight, right now, in how I converge.

This time moving all the way through

It's so easy, the easiest way indeed, to be "depressed."  What I mean to say, to live inside that autopilot function.  I woke up this morning at Bebe's after a day of rain.  Rain like soggy riversides, rain on everything, trees made of rain, air-rain breath-rain rain in your speech.  Rainy Ravens rain day, we watched football and ate potpie at the local bar called Blue Heron.  I processed all morning first, rain cry, for the poet all things round the labyrinth again.  Chestertown a weepy sigh.  Bebe's house is made of magic, since I'd come then gone again she re-arranged so everything glows light now.  In the Cazadero Mountains I did magic for two weeks and you can not do magic with fifty people for two straight weeks and then not see the energy of all things when you get back.  So high so high.

I met two fairies they live in Cazadero tucked behind the woods.  They have friends with a cabin where I may indeed go.  Eager for warm potlucks under the deep redwoods.  The writing is ready, the hearthands of my skin digit processors are ticking.  I think about Jon at Vipassana so far south, I want to tell him his Giants made the Bowl.  I think of Gracy and my brother and sister-in-law both away at new job trainings missing the first mobile motions of their little girl.  I miss her it feels terrible but I am alright, alive, where I am meant to be.  Sad words reflexive, they are how I smile...

Meaning it could be easy to be but I'm not depressed. I'm brave enough to express all the way through!  Bebe helped me.  I learned so much at training, 9 hours of class a day and at times up to two of ritual, at least.  We'd learn then process by going out to play.  There was a time in my life when I had a home and a community and a partner, peopled through by what we'd built on our love.  Permaculture, holy permaculture took me back there again so for two weeks my heart is what my eyes were on.  Poor little closed door. I watched it surface then hide.  Surface tweaking then blocking reeling hide again.  How could I have let so fully go of who I used to be, where did the man go who helped so strongly grow these roots of me? I watched.  I kept learning and playing.  Trancing ritual praying. I am good at loving everyone, I am good at loving myself.  But my past, that bridge back there, back to me, I am good too at keeping that blocked.  Tight and closed.

O Bebe, who helped me.  Today I woke in her big sweetness, bed lush warm cabin hugging me and all the dripping trees and air outside.  I knew it was time, here I am circling again, this time moving all the way through by willing to go back.  I can open to let go, that's how to fuel the moving on.  I chopped kindling in the rain, added wood to the fire, heard it crack and cackle and came happy with the words and the morning back in to my whole life again.  This fire different here, not like the woodstove I learned when he taught me once years ago.  And Gillian sings, and Brandi sings, and these are words I eat whole to taste my own words yet unspoken but starting the first movements of dance in my mouth.  Sacred tongue.  Brandi, back again, and gillian O poet gillian poet women who I love...and I would really love to hear your voice sometime to close a little distance in my mind...


I'll go back to Cali where I  can sleep out every night...

O time.  Blessed time, the revelator.

Of course a dance party broke out

It would have been easy to stay in bed with Erin and watch the entire third season of Bored To Death, sleeping half the time and with a lac-of-sleep headache the rest.  Grease nap.  At Double T the day after the party stories, when everyone's punch-drunk still and easy to make fun of, made breakfast fun.  I like Christmas week, always have, when I was a teacher or intake counselor and even last year at the coffee shop I had off and could travel and that's how I used to get my kicks.  Being on the road Christmas week.  Now, I'm just on the road, all the time. 

There's something to the clouds the last two days.  On the drive up 83 to Pennsylvania my mom said it's a cold front, all I know is the clouds and the colors up there keep capturing my attention and then next thing I know I'm engulfed, staring out the window or above the trees.  The gray and the blue and the white.  It's so striking, I forget it's Christmas and just think, Maryland, this is so your sky.

Em and Nicky were home from the farm too and drove down from Connecticut last night.  It was raining and balmy on the streets of Baltimore, Em was shaking it at me through the window from out on the street and of course a dance party broke out.  Sixty some years ago in a basement on Church Street in Brooklyn Park my grandparents started having Christmas parties for their brothers and sisters and all their friends.  My dad and all his brothers and sisters raised us kids on black and white pictures and stories from then, the dusty liquor bottles behind the sheet in the corner, the train that ran the floor on hand connected tracks.  Shiny shoes one pair a kid lined in a row.  It's a long time away from that little two bedroom house with the 9 people in South Baltimore, my brother and I still do what we can.  Our parties have people dancing on the bar and dancing outside, smoking in the streets.  According to the aunts and uncles, Grammy's and Pop's had them dancing in the basement under the stairs and sometimes, on the roof.  Singing at the stars...

Reunion Weekend

My bed here is the most comfortable I've ever slept in, but every so often I can't help it--I want the floor.

I want the floor like when I was little, when my cousins, all eighteen of them, were babies and it was cots in the living room and blow up mattresses on the bedroom floors.   When my Grammy, when even my Pop was still alive.  Breakfast would go for hours, the uncles all were still full of testosterone enough that the basketball court was theirs and bets would start the night before.  The bathtub when it was dark out and time to come in would be full of water the color of dirt, and I would go to sleep sunburned with tired legs but still happy because when the house is full of family and bedtimes on the floor even sleep turns in to more time to play.  This house, now my father's house, was our family house, my grandparent's house, the beach flophouse for dad and all six of his brothers and sisters and every one of their kids.  It's family reunion weekend, today's family reunion day, and that's how it used to be.

Today was beautiful, soft, easy-going.  There was food on the grill most the day, a nice breeze, relaxed horseshoes under the shade of tall pine trees.  Lots of sweet relaxing in low-sat beach chairs.   It was the first reunion that didn't have lots of little kids. Just two little ones of my second cousin Bern, from Newport News, her grandmother was my great aunt Frida--my pop's sister.  Pop and Aunt Frida are both gone, so are the rest of their nine brothers and sisters.  Besides Bernadette's kids it was just my cousin Joey's son. Joe was born in Africa to my dad's sister, and raised in Germany, and just moved here to Ocean Pines with his wife and fifteen month child.  The first, for our clan, of the next generation.

And so life goes on.    We have additional bedrooms in this house now, but even so my two aunts and their husbands and the kids live a street from here and my uncle and his wife and kids live over on the other side of town.  I sat at the head of the table next to dad last night when we kicked it all off with steamed crabs and corn on the backporch here.  It was a mellow night, the aunts and uncles early to turn in.  Dad's the oldest of his generation, I'm the oldest of the next.  I looked out over it last night a long while with a swift awareness: time is passing, it is a joy, it is bittersweet.  I wish the house was still uproarious, loud and full of laughing squealing little kids.  And I am grateful too that I am adult, with so darn much love to show, and a place no matter who's around that will always be home.

Cheesesteaks, beach days. Weitzels.

Today was a chicken cheesesteak day.  I can't explain what this means, but trust me, it's more than just being hungry.

When I was a kid there was a sand on the floor plastic-seated restaurant on 51st street called Weitzels.  We went to the beach on 50th.  My mom started going to Weitzels in the early 70's, when her grandparents still had the big farmhouse and little cabin boarders across from Decatur, when Route 50 was a two-lane and the land next to the high school was a peach grove.  My pop, dad's dad, when he was still alive got grilled cheese with tomatoes for dinner.  Grammy, his wife, would let me drink chocolate milk.  And on certain beach days--the long kind--six, seven, eight hours of salt and sun, sand stuck between the lining of my suit and skin, total dried-out white-blond hair shiny cheek satiation...we'd get Weitzels for lunch.  I always got cheese dogs.  Mom and dad and the aunts and uncles all got cheese steaks.

Weitzels closed some years back, it happened while I was living in Oregon because the following summer when I was home again and it was summer and I felt not myself living up in Chestertown in the hot Marilen mug I found out it was gone, and I felt distinctly like someone had stolen something from me, that powerless dark feeling that embarrasses you a little with its strength. 

This morning by 9 I was on the beach hoping for an hour of waves before the guards came out.  The waves were knee-high and breaking on the shore, but the reason I didn't get my board from the car was the wind.  The waves were blowing fast towards the inlet, or south, and choppy as hell.  Otherwise it was clear blue out, and gold, from the sweet June sun.  I planned on staying til maybe 10 just getting a swim and some heat, but fell right in to the easy, laid back groove.  Four and a half hours, thoughts of my novel and poems whispering at me, I barely willed myself to leave and only really did because what I wanted was what you're supposed to eat on a glorious day with nothing but dried skin and saltwater hair.  I wanted a cheesesteak, the chicken kind, and not cut up breast meat but with shaved meat that soaks up all the grease.

Turns out Mitchells, the mini-mart we used to go to when we all lived on second street in a place that's long since been condemned and torn down, still has killer subs.  And breakfast, too.

It's a hard life, I know.

Good beach day?  Mom asked when I walked in a half hour ago, that subtle satisfaction on my face.  There was a beach chair in the front yard so I knew where she'd been all morning.  Ma I just had the best chicken cheesesteak is how I answered her.

You did you little devil?!  She grinned large.  And I was just about to ask you if you wanted to go get one, too~

Lunar Beltane. One Love Perspective.

Google or bing have brought 12 hits to my blog in the past four days via the search words lunar, beltane, or new moon.

It got me to thinking.  When I was younger growing up at the beach in the summer there was a certain kind of local beach rat.  A morph of Slayer/punk rock kids who got drunk, got in fights, cussed out tourists and in general were rotten menaces as well as some of my favorite people.  I started smoking in the alleys off the sand with them at like age 11, and stealing beer before we could drive.   No matter how hard core though, regardless the drunk middle of the night piercings at the skate shop downtown or the kids-from-pennsylvania's-house someone stole all that pot from, no matter who you are or were or how you define yourself, the beach makes it so you can't escape the one mighty power bigger than you. 

I mean, at the end of the day isn't that what we're doing living here?  O holy ocean, where I watch and learn consistancy:  all that is rises and falls--every day there is the sameness inside of change.

I was coming off acid, I was 18, I was sitting in the dunes at the surf spot on 48th and the high itchy grass was squiggling up my legs.  The sky was grey and big stretching in a way that I could actually feel:  there was a pull to it, as if the energy was getting collected for something. 

Days later came a hurricane that I first saw written in the sky.

LSD or not,  it is a bottom line:  all things are connected.  This isn't mythical, magical, political or sacrilege.  It simply Is.  The same as certain foods give the ecology of your body heart burn or make you sleepy or fill you with fuel, this is the same as the ecology of the earth and its cosmos.   The house on your street delivers water to you from a local treatment facility, that water came once from the sky, where it was sucked up on the air out of the respiration process of the trees.   The trees in your yard, the farm field with feed corn growing a mile from here, they wither or wilt or become buoyant and green from the chemicals that enhance them and the hydrogen and oxygen molecules coming in and out of Your lungs, from the heat and light energy, the mineral and vitamin full fuel our life system calls the sun.  The new diner on the block with the sewer grate under the tire where you park and the pigeon picking at the gum wrapper on the cement outside, those runny underdone eggs on your plate and the potatoes with not enough salt--out of the chicken- feed pecked off the earth, the tubers grown in dark dirt, the eggshells full of calcium that will add nutrients back to the land...so you are, so you sustain.

From the oneness amoebic with gills for respiration we rose up, and back to the oneness each and every one of us, regardless our after life beliefs, will go back.  And the larger secret: Of the Oneness, we still are.  There need be no other truth than this, indeed to this grl it is simply Sacred as it gets.  We are one we are one we are one, at the end of the day chemically, molecularly, with skin trained to catch a back draft of spring wind or eyes only set on the tv, we are one.

So to be a wild woman, to be one versed or with inherent or even learned understanding of this oneness is to be of the wise woman ways.   It means the ego, that funny neuron-fired lapse of luckiness that makes one aware so deeply of his own belly button hole, really in the grand rapid flash of all things gets no more than a milisecond of say.

That sans the wirey brain's programming, the negotiations with yourself through whatever routines or practices or beliefs required, unnecessary, there is the still place, same as the trees or the earth, the pigeons or the chickens, the farm fields or the ocean, and it is within.  It is the same, but different, no more or less an impact though.  Each a microscopic sliver of the holy whole.

There is no truth that is single, single truths eliminate every other part.

The ocean teaches this:   the way the waves rise high, run in a certain direction, come with a specific wind.  She will tell you the weather if you learn to train you nose, your eyes, your skin to be open to such things.  How the tides roll so fat and wide, a roll I always feel in my stomach, when the moon is closer and closer to full.  The moon with the magnetism so strong she pulls at the water, pulls at the water which is part of the very blood, of the very magnetism you generate inside and outside of you.

There is no truth that is alone, there is only the All, that Is.  Our funny human ways of up and down within this process.

It is hailing out right now, ice balls popping like movie popcorn off the green bucket of my front lawn.   The air is buoyant in how it sits and lifts, and cool when it shafts in on a breeze.  So oneness is:  a process.  All things are, all that is, Is.

In the middle of the night, Monday into Tuesday May 17, the moon will be at her fullest, right around one in the morning here on the East Coast or four in the morning out West.  She will reflect totally the light heat magnetism of the sun, who is in the part of the sky that long ago was named Taurus.  This part of the whole, Taurus the Bull, brings to us a fixed but charging energy meant to bring matter in to form.  Your deepest yearnings will be about how to manifest--your deepest pangs will come from resisting the building process.  Not going, in other words, with the flow.    

The light will shine brightly on all that is.  Beltane is the conjunction of spirit and flesh:  bringing Life in to forms you can see.  As the moon readies and reaches her peak (only to diminish and disappear again) what is it, from within, you will see?

In the trunk, in the attic.

The fortune I got last night said rest was restorative for emotional and physical health.  I rolled my eyes a little and tossed it in the center of the table with the trash.  It was Laura's birthday and her fortune was perfect and auspcious for her new-coming year.   I focused on that instead.  Remember Gac, that slime stuff from the nineties?  That's how I felt Saturday morning.  Like sludge.  Sludge body, sludge brain cells, sludge muscles sludge blood, sludge Kelly totally conformed to the sheets and the bed.  There was no part, not one of me that was even capable of getting out of bed.

Whatever, out of bed I went and about two tables in at the big hotel by the sea the poetry light came on, so like every other genius-waitress ever there was I scooted in to an obscure corner and on my carbon-copy order pad stashed notes and poems all over the page.

This is killing me, I told my mother, the long hours and having again and again to subvert the impulse to write.  I texted Sean last week, in a moment of terrified frenzy, and begged him:  please can I just come straight there to Tennessee when I get on the road and hole up in a room while you and Jamie work during the day--and I will work, too?  I will write, I will write oh god, for days straight:  I will write.

My brother is amazing of course he didn't blink and all I can think is, days with the words and nights with them and their pregnancy.  How much luckier could I get?  Tyler came over yesterday in exchange for beer and pancakes.  He moved all the heavy shit down from the attic: this was what got shoved in the hot dark and dusty corners up there when Brandon and I split up Anngar farm, the bauble trinket stuff and some furniture and keepsakes I didn't have the heart to let go of back then.   80% of it is now boxed and ready for the girls from work to go through before the final trip to Goodwill and the local thrift stores.  There is nothing quite like knowing all your remaining belongings will fit in a 6x5 space.

I went through the trunk I got when I was 18 from the five and dime in Fells Point.  It holds mementos and scraps and I needed to make room.  I added a framed pic of Sam playing the banjo.  Wearing overalls and shirtless and of course no shoes, he was in the backyard at Truslow Road.  A flat black frame with three slots went in, one slot is Cades playing drums in the basement of WAC, one is Josh singing and one is Walsh on guitar, all from the same day.  Lots of little cards and quotes and pictures, too, from Chesapeake College and Katie and Beth and Paul and Kelly and others.  And a little dish I bought once in Seattle with Brandon, and a vase I bought in Delaware the last date I ever had with Josh.

In the trunk under some folders one flat box was tucked and fitted like a beach chair settled in the mud:  Inside the box on the top was Molly, pictures of her from that first trip Brandon and I ever took--to New England when I got sick after lunch on the coast in Mystic from bad clams and Katie's family took care of me, and then we drove all day to get to Molly's parent's hundred-year-old stone cabin on the sound in Ellsworth, Maine.  They fed us lobster out of the pot and pancakes cooked in a cast-iron griddle on top of the woodstove.  Molly took us to scavenge tide pools that afternoon, rowed us out in her little rowboat, taught us words like whorls and periwinkles and dog whelk.  There was a whole envelople of letters and songs Red Chevy Joe wrote me.   This stuff went in there years ago, before either of them was dead.  It didn't even pang my heart, Molly suffered so much and Joe's funeral was enough in November to remind me:  all things pass.  Kelly asked me late Saturday night if looking back on Chestertown was shocking, like seeing that whole other life lived that isn't me anymore did it make me stop in sudden question like woah, what happened?  It did, for a while.  But now, not really.  All versions and visions and incarnations change and re-change again.  It's all I know for sure.  Sure, like the notes from Mike Shue that were sad to see, notes from Geometry class when we were 15, there can sometimes be a pang.  Like it is now, literally right now: Jack Johnson on the radio singing my first ever Brandon-song, it beats a liquidy ache just a second but it is the twinge of life and thankfulness, the twinge of living:  I am living!  This is it!  The gentle acceptance of what is.

I have forgiven myself.  I didn't even consciously know it was something I needed to do, until the ushering moment that it happened.  It was a slow usher, nothing ecstatic.  Just an outbreath, a slight shifting, a barely there shaft of light where there wasn't darkness before but just a nothingness, an absence. 

Now it's peace, and readiness.  And looking forward--to the words, nothing else to be but poet-me and gypsy wild woman me, and nothing to do but write and love, and rest!

Of two worlds, my brother Sean and I

Today I am reading Maloutas.  The Whole Marie.  She slips me effortless as a stream in to the poetry, the poetic dream.  The inside-imagination place stunning as it is sacred, the place where it all is: what could be.

It is an ordinary day, like all others that mean something to me:  I exhibited choice. Choice not just in my approach to the day but also, for Wednesday is my Sunday, my last day of my weekend, in what I would do.  Not just how and who but what.

Today I will be poet, I get to be one hundred percent me-poet-me. Engaged in the act of the dream, engulfed.  The poet dream, the miraculous consciousness.  In bed.  Today, I will not get out of bed.  The books the blank page the candles and oils burning the cozies the blankies the coffee, o the coffee, and me.

I've been out of bed five times.  The poet's life is tough, this is the silver grain, this is the seed that falls from the grail.  I love to be engulfed!!  I only ever want to be engulfed!  Even if it hurts to pull myself out again.  Even if Narnia and the traces of her magic wands linger in the fingerprints left on my work apron, my work clothes, my work tucked behind my ear up in bobbypins hair.  The fingerprints how they pain me.  This is the gentle, furtive discipline.  Knowing when to say when--knowing when to say it is time to give to the seeds, to palm them in repetitive warming, to crack them from the hull, to till their bed-ground, to lay open.  In 2008 at this time I thought the dream Craziness, illusory, not real. Thought myself half-mad and on my way to proving insanity wasn't worth it by fighting it every step of the way.  YIKES.  No one tells you the dream is what you give to it, the madness what you take away, or refuse.  You have to define that landscape for yourself.

The half and half.  I've been out of bed five times today, up for three hours and yet to write, til now.  When I first woke the waking was whole and real. With the inside peace, that all-knowing perspective place of knowledge, that round calm room easy to see as a door, opened.  The understanding, congruent feeling there sometimes is upon waking, the creation of which we have no control.  In the middle of the night I dreamt of my brother, it was raining out and what woke me in the center of the dream was the most delicious, monstrous thunder and flashes of lightening outside white as a beam.  Our first spring thunder storm. This part was real, not a dream.  Then when I woke from the thunder-sleep the rain in my dream had washed out the side of the house, and Sean and I were falling down the side of the rain-wave, floating, waving to the other, laughing at the oncoming crash.  Why haven't you talked to me? I was asking him.  Then I was awake it was morning and I wanted to write, nothing more in the world was there except to write, and not my book but from the poetryplaceallllday, but also there were all my dreams and I had to talk to Sean.

He texted this morning Nate Dogg died.  Turns out he dreamt about me too and in his dream he asked me wutsup with you how come we haven't been talking which of course meant we had to talk, and now.

I love him so much, my brother.  We are very, very different.  He is in a corporate job and in June of last year he and his fiance moved 2000 miles away in order to pursue the growth of her corporate position.  They live in an enormous brick home in the suburbs of Memphis the kind with interior decoration and an inground swimming pool, they married this past fall in a huge fancy affair, they are now expecting their first kid. And this is it, the half and half.  None of that lifestyle is part of me, but that life and those who people it are, and so on my slip-slide in to the poetry dream this morning I called him back because this is what it is to be de dos mundos or "of two worlds", the first world is the inner, the poetic dreamworld where myth is real, and reality bendable, and world number two is where most the other people always live, the topside world of responsibilities, obligations, where also our relationships and heart-ties lay.  I have an enormous amount of relationships and have always put a lot of myself in to my work.  It is a hard walk to keep the line of--being of two worlds.   I talked to my brother strongly, clearly, he is the only one now that I've told about all the inner quiet things happening.  The hopes, the action.  The topside realities blended with the inner poetry visions, the alchemy.  The blending of both worlds, the manifestations of my true dreams.  For most I dont have the energy or clarity to speak it all out, but I told it best I could to him, I told it all.  Likewise my brother, the man I admire and look up to most in this world, told me his. 

Sean and I were suburb brats raised in a coosh lifestyle, playing 'intendo and crossing the swingset and riding BMX bikes and hanging with the many other kids like us in the neighborhood.  Kickball in the deadend and playing games I'd make up like murder mystery or war games that would take us for hours out and about on foot.  Just miles away was Baltimore City, hon, its highrise projects and kitschy thrift-lovin stoop-hons and blue collar factory workers corner to corner from the other.  In the early 90's hiphop gave way to gangsta rap, 92Q and V103 out of the city were hot and here is the miracle of how poetry, the poetic dream does. I was becoming a drug addict then, just starting, and Doggystyle was Sean and I's shit and it felt so real!  All that funk us white kids were nodding our heads to, without even knowing it was the very soundtrack miles away in our own city.  Playing out from the bathroom boombox, shaping us and shaping me and our popular culture sure as we shaped it.   I watched 8 mile last night for the first time in a while, the battle at the end gives me chills.  That movie was supposed to be 95, the year I graduated highschool. Biggie and Mob Deep are all over the background while they drive beater cars and puff blunts and dream of some day.  I did that same shit in 1995.   But I went back to my coosh life at mom's at the end of the day.

I love that Nate Dogg, all these years later and from way different places, is where my brother and I meet in the middle of those two worlds.

Here is my fave most recent clip of Nate D. Be sure to check it out, 1:28. Listening today I realized what I always loved most about him, how his baritone voice was low enough to serve as a baseline interlude.    Ahhh god just hearing him makes me hottt

Also, for good measure.  A little Snoop Dogg, original shiznet for dat ass~
RIP Nate D (fb users go here)

Bryant Gumbel made me teary.

What's on my mind this morning is redemption.

Ever notice on facebook how half the posts are fierce single-sided rabbles about whatever issue.  Then the other half are fierce other side single-sided rabbles.  They all slur and blur, emotionalism all over the place opionated anger or blather, or opinionated intelligence, or rhetoric, but either way from one single side they stand and pundit and believe themselves to be the only right way and therefor there to be a way that is WRONG.

This started on Sunday for me, which was a classic Sunday of the type I've not had in a while:  reflective to the point of wistfulness, one of those grace days that reflection, rooted in deep contentment, without any reason just showed up and was bigger than me and sort of all I could see.  You know how that goes, suddenly clarity is delivered not with sharpness but softness, so that an eye full of the exact ground you're standing on is delivered unto you, to the point of leaving you literally stirred.  You can't plan or create those experiences.  That's what happened to me Sunday morning, I was behind the snack bar at the big hotel doling out coffee and pre-packaged breakfast sandwiches and mostly, watching TV.

I love HBO and Real Sports is what was on, it compelled me with its stories of course as that is what HBO is so damn good at story-telling. The opening piece was about Victor Conti, he was the steroids guy who sort of really blew the whole issue of performance enhancing drugs wide open some years back and made it permanently a contemporary issue.  He's out of jail now and working with and getting seriously impressive results from a host of young professional athletes.  Of course everyone is questioning the integrity of his approach, of course people are blatantly disdainful of the success of his clients.  After all, there are chemicals and enhancement agents that are entirely undetected, who's to ever say he's not back in the same old dirty game?  And how ultimately to prove he's not?

The next piece was about Tyson, and his pigeons, and the emotional maturity he's undergone since the tragic death of his little girl.  It was sad, and my heart twisted some, even though I remember the disgust I felt watching live the blood clot out from his mouth when he chomped Holyfield's ear; the rage I felt being young just barely finding my girl self when the rape charges were all over the headlines.  And he tells this story about the first time he ever punched someone, he was a kid raising him self in Brownsville and some asshole older kid breaks the neck off one of his pets, an alley pigeon.  And Tyson's like ten or whatever and cracks the guy in the face and is thus redeemed on the streets as a toughie.  No man I wasn't trying to box I was defending myself is what he tells the Real Sports guy, and then within something like a year from that he's been in juvie 38 times yadayada.

And so, what I am thinking about is redemption. 

The core of which, in my own life, has been tolerance.

Allowing others room to be themselves because sometimes your nursery school teacher really was right:  it's just better to be kind than to be right.

Look I'm not excusing biting someone's ear off in the middle of the heavy weight title fight.  I'm not even saying to knock out the asshole who broke the neck of your pigeon-pet, I mean that comes down to what happens in the moment it's presented as anyone who's ever entirely on instinct found themselves suddenly having to physically defend someone they love knows.  And that is it. Who's to judge the decisions we make, particularly in that no one decision ever is separate from the cosmology of motives which daily create who we are?  The cosmology of motives which since the first day of every living breathing one of our lives has been dictating us by one simple means:  we like to feel good, we try to avoid feeling bad.  We, us human species, all have that in common.

Honestly, I dont care what people think is basically what the one young athlete said in response when asked what folks will say when they see he's being trained by Victor Conti.  Paraphrasing, he continues, people who know me will know and trust my decisions, otherwise people are just going to think what they want so why bother worrying.

Here I am all weepy, watching of all things Real Sports, Sunday morning, grateful as hell for the people in my life who have shown me time and again the room I've needed to be human.  What would I have done, where would I be today if I'd stayed on the path that I started somewhere around the age of 14.  I don't know why I was able to make the changes required to re-invent my life but I do know I couldn't have done it without the steady support of friends and family who loved and believed in me.  At times that love even looked like shutting me off or out, in order to force the idea that I had to be the one to take responsibility for myself to change my ways.  But without those same people being willing to give me a second chance I wouldn't be who, or where I am today.  Of that I have no question.

We'd all do better to practice this: tolerance.  Who is so inhuman as to be without fault, who has never hurt another as direct result of their shortcomings?  To be human is to stumble and mess up which is what happens when you live.  It's in fact what makes us so wretchedly alive in this every day walking waking world.  I am thankful for the life I've led, lately wistfully so, that it's taught me enough about me and my humanness to allow others also the chance to be.

Poem. Groups.

I will remember this: that
was the winter I ate only brown rice or
met friends for deals in town beside the
beach on weeknights. And listened to
Iron & Wine which is not like Neutral Milk
Hotel I think to myself bc in college when you
first listen to Neutral Milk Hotel
or Elliot Smith
you still think I’m the only one.
There was a group of us. This
group we worked together
it was in a restaurant.
And we made light out of one
another by going dancing and
drinking and sharing our likes of
certain music, sushi or fancy shoes.
It was a cold winter, it was dark
and that is what we will say: we
made light out of each other. For
each other, for our selves. We
became good at showing up to
shine on the other from within.

Years later I will liken them to
other groups. A single member who
maybe I will run in to at the club this
weekend while dancing or maybe next
time I’m home at the grocery store with
a cousin probably not tho hard to say.
Groups I used to drink underage with
get high bum smokes or sneak out. Groups
I listened to Elliot Smith with or sat under
bridges with listening to ourselves sing
the whole ordeal of getting clean. Groups
once likened to other groups long
gone other groups I once lived beside
the ocean with went barefoot with once took
short cuts through alley ways with laid on
our backs in the sand together
groups that years ago in the summer
when we didn’t need to make light
joined me after midnight so we could swim.

Spon Down. Glorious Day.

In the sunshine the coffee steam is the same as light rays and reminds me how I used to sit on the bed in the corner of Dave Williams' room the guys on guitar or drums and I'd watch the incense play.  Complete, totally absorbed.  Total absorption.  I used to sneak in at night through the window in to his room.  The metal feeling of rail scrape when I'd hoist my self over and through.  That one time his mom waiting for me.  That pic of Weibe with the beast in his hand, but it's from the mirror and the lights way down so the room looks yellow or orange. The instruction of smoke and still and wavering and blending and one becoming another becoming only one.

I am thinking about California and the sun.  I am thinking about Paul in snow up to his knees.  I am thinking what it would be like to study Anusara at Beth's feet for weeks.  I am thinking about Kiva Rose and We'moon and poetry.  I am thinking about the moon.  My Pandora reset itself or for the first time ever I had to sign back in and my station La Luna, la mama de las estrellas was the only one left.  It was just right for the morning, walking dad to the car still cold earth yawning.  My blue soft bathrobe three sizes too big.  Kissing him goodbye his two big bags of health food cooked up for the week.  I felt like his wife and am happy to be how did we get so close, when, awww to grow up.  I pick up my pen.

Did Erika get on here I think?  There is now a piano station on my Pandora it was prompted a gift given I say yes.  This is how she writes.  Piano she told me once at one of our meetings at her house.  She is my hero.  I let the piano music play it is what I used to listen to on my alarm, classical, when I was a very very little girl.  In the room in the old neighborhood with the two kinds of pink on the walls.  Where we lived with Brian and Little Sean.  Janice.  When we had hamsters and Sean and I would fight and also cuddle every morning.  My toychest with the red painted hearts.  The cabinet that kept writings and stickers not dishes or dolls.

I love coffee and bring some home from the coffee shop for the days that I dont work.  When I do the  real work the writing work the showing up the poetry and play only work that counts.  Days like today fingers clicking in the light from the window the light the plants get first then me the gold light the light catching all the steam.  I am happy.  I will call grandma later when I sit in the driveway in my beachchair like I did all summer I will wear my long johns and sweatshirt and jeans and a beanie and gloves and sit under a blanket when I go out there today.  My neighbor what will he think he takes cardio walks everyday smokes his cigars sometimes if he's really happy he even waves.  He's known me I him since he first retired me in 8th grade tiny cutoff jeans perm in my hair and later that summer, sneaking out.  He knows a lot more than he's ever let on, and far as I know never said word one to grammy back then to Tim or Mary or mom or dad.  All the all the all the cars in the driveway over ohsomany years, the late night back porch noise sometimes music sometimes fights.  Pungent smells ha the smell of weeds.  When I see him today I'll wave maybe he will or wont maybe like me he's sun effective and will wave so much he raises a little from the earth enough like me to light up from within just as the moon.

The new song I discovered on my new reset-Pandora with the one station the same The Moon, mother of the stars is what I will today on my other blog.  It is a theme song resplendent oneness, oneness of me here you there song separate but together us as one.   Oh what a day, glorious... 

Wild Women Wisdom: De dos mundos. Which IS Life.

Erika and I met in grade school.  She was in band and I wasn't because of some bad shit going down at my home, that's all I remember about our real young connections.   Red and green plaid jumpers thick as cardboard, white button-downs peter-pan collars and cable-lined knee high socks that were soft kellygreen and that I used to collect the knits off of to make my own little version of fuzzball friends, because in the eighties they had these pom-pom stickerhead things on big feet that my Catholic School gave away once a year as some incentive for some scholastic long forgotten thing, and I thought they were the cutest little creatures ever.  By middleschool it was the words--stuffing sheets of frazzled loose leaf thin blue lines in to one another's hands under the desk in Ms. Fouse's class.  Maybe this only happened once and I remember it because of the adrenaline scar--doing something we weren't supposed to be doing in the back of class.  The trick light that put on in my eye.  Erika's large curly cursive and the characters with all the traditional old-fashioned names.  My loosely-costumed accounts of people we both went to school with, making stories out of the lives of people we knew.

I was a bitch as a teenager, suppose I still am or can be.  Erika and I were teens together too but I wanted nothing to do with her because of her friends.  I was doing drugs by then had pink hair and black cat eyes, purple combat boots.  I drove junk yard cards I'd buy from my granddad's brother for a hundred bucks and thought I knew more about real life than the pretty preppy girls that she was one of.  My dad lived in California and we didn't speak.  I was tuff.  At least to me.  

Every January I think about these things, I think it is because my parents sat Sean and I down in January and told us they were splitting up.  Dad'd been living in Manahtten by then for three months so really it was just about them having to say the words.   That was 1989.  It sucked.  In January the past several years my pop and I spend his birthday weekend together at the beach, except that for now I live at the beach and it is January already and mom is in Mexico for the month and so he and I have been together just us when he comes down every weekend.  We are watching the series Weeds together, the dvd goes in after the Ravens game ends and then we just scream and laugh and look at each other with shocked expressions slack-jawed speechless but in giddy commiseration the dark humor and insinuations in our eyes.  That's dad, who used to cover for me when I was a teen and he'd come home from Cali for the holidays or for the McMullen gatherings.  He came home this Saturday empty-handed after looking for a replacement pan of mom's that I burned up accidentally.  I didn't ask him to but he did it and we didn't need to discuss that it he was trying to find a new one so that mom would never know.  We cuss and laugh and shake our heads over what we see on the TV.   He's taking my suggestions about changing his diet.  As of last night he'd lost 12 pounds.  We bitch about not being able to eat steak and the fluffy breads and creams together and the sugars we love so much.  When he's not looking I sneak candy bars and fries, tacos with creamy melted cheese.  We are so alike.

There is a pyschic term that I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves.  It is de dos mundos, or of two worlds.  And to me this term is about the angelic, the demonic acts of not only the holy creatives, but further and even more importantly of those who embark on the authentic path.  Which I guess really is the most creative thing one can do.  The older I get the more I realize it is this, this Real Work that matters most--all else, all acts of art and creation thus evolve out of the struggle for ourselves, evolve out of the substance of who we are and those strides we take towards that person.  To be of both worlds is to take the devilish plunge:  to walk through the day by day topside world of work, family, friends and to likewise be willing to, at the same time, go inside our burrows, the tired winter pockets of gnarly filth or snuggly warmth and pull back the boulders we put there and investigate the little chemical nightmares or dreams that wait with knowledge for us behind all of that.  The knowledge of our roots, of our healing, of our true-selves that inside of each and every one of us look like the devil sitting there.  Those sad or scary or numb or deadened spaces are full with vitality and angelic lifeforce if we persist persist persist to shed light on them and winkingly clean them out.  Erika is my writing partner now, my solace, my only shining angel lately and I told her last week on the phone--ever since Joe died the week of Thanksgiving I haven't been able to write.  I told her the stories of what was emotionally consuming me with each tired step I took as the holidays washed us over.  Erika too had hers.  We agreed, it is time now only for stillness and reflection, it is this de dos mundos, this Real Work that right now in the darkest part of our season truly counts. 

But it is hard to be here at the beach supposed to be writing, and not.    And it is funny to me, and maybe at the end of the day why I write is because life is just so damn miraculously-fucked-up-AND-amazing that I feel I need to mark my own holy amen proof of appreciation of it all--but here I am, January again kicking it with my dad at the beach in his home, laughing and living with him in the topside world.  And inside in the inner terrain circling back over the old old tracks with all the faces of him and me then, too, all the little demon-angels and angel-demons that live inside.  And this precious funny fusion.  Which is life... 

From When I Was Wild. OC & Coming Home.

It was spring time I was fine you looked finer with your brown hair long then and the body you still took care of we were eighteen I had bleach in my hair and a checked blue shirt tied at the belly I wanted to say was gingham, but was not, we were suburb not country kids and you took me on a picnic under the power lines so I tried to play the part.  It was hot for the spring and the pot made it so we couldn't tell was that just the heat or was that melting in our minds.  You loved Jesus but wouldn't admit it, and late at night we'd get in fights because it was a misogyny thing afterall for you who secretly didn't trust his mom, who thought the world was going on fire because the women were aloud to speak again the weird thing is you an Only Man back then...only one never turned on me but loved me better when I got to use my tongue.  Voice people, this is about voice not sex.  But we did that too didn't we, the hot kind the teenage kind wicked and innocent out back in the car at parties or the church parking lot or the one time under the tree in the graveyard on acid our bodys seemed so big, then small, our arms wavery my breath its own language echoing off the red coming off the trees.

I wore dark purple lipstick then, or red, and had the hottest little body remember I used to show off my tatoos.

There were all those others at the beach, it was never easy for me to talk about that.  Part of it was how I hurt you when you and my one friend went off walking down next to the ocean.  That was the night, or more next morning on the boards yellow mist of sun trying to make up its mind am I heat making dry this water or light making clear this new day from the dark that I knew that I was different for good that I had made my choice, without meaning to.  Seeing what I was capable of.  As if you'd ever cheat on me.  You know that night--two of the four guys I was smoking with are dead now?  We were on acid then, too.  One of them I never even write about.  He was a mean little fuck, we used to get drunk and I'd run my mouth and the one night over in the Meadows at that one place when they were living with RayRay we had a flinching contest where I let him hit me hard as he could, as long as I got to hit him back, and again and again we hit one another and I stood and took it all 108 pounds of me thinking I was a man.  And that was the choice, there were always two in me la santa y la diabla, and that is the night I ran off with the devil holding my hand.

God damn did we have fun.  I heard from someone on the periphery back then this week--this happens enough, private messages thanking me for this blog--that I would say it happens regularly and so thank you all publicly for reading it makes me feel so, so good and this is a shout to all you private ones reading along, and a specific story just for him.  I remember you and some others were living uptown on 143rd doing the more mellow surf thing I only made it up there for example when Jesse or Kareem came to town because hidden in someone's wet suit was all the drugs!  And anyhow one day I was off or likely just on break from hot assing on the mic to Big and Meth and Tom Petty and The Dead up at the peir (Jerry still alive in the beginning of that summer, dead by the end and vigils on the boardwalk and the 9th street squatters house still there, near where the old, old old Chat Street used to be) and you walked in I think with Mike?  and we were in the middle of an all out indoor water gun fight, blue plastic dollar store beach sand buckets filled to the top with oozy automatics and us shooting water or late at night emptied-forties malt-liquor straight in to our mouths...The boys all shirtless only wore only baggies that summer that's how you knew the local rats downtown, so I was always like fuck it I'll just wear my bikini all the time!  You who was always on your own buzz keepin it so chill had the most shocked look on your face when you walked in the house--front door always wide open bedroom me and Fannon's then me and Kev's once Brian moved out always closed
--and then it broke, the shock and you smiled like I'd never seen before a light of joy and radicallness breaking out straight from your mouth.  You grabbed a seat way on the side of the room one of the bros tossed you a beer and then of course did we proceed.  That might of been, but likely was not, the same watergun fight that wound up across the street running the outdoor halls of the Americana sneaking around corners and hiding behind doors when I camped out upstairs at the dirty frat guys (I used to stand in the alley out back and cus those fuckers out all the time even back then clear to me down the center how we were different and stood on different lines) on their front porch and waited until Jeremiah gave up and then dumped an entire bucket of water on his head when we was walking back surrendered to the apartment.  Remember that shit?  We kept a baby wading pool out on our front porch to chill in and would add ice in the afternoon to keep all the beers more cold.

Hahahaha.  I live here again and barely ever think of that stuff, those times anymore.  Fannon gone, Kev.  Blugh Kev.  Phil... 

Una Santa, y Una Diabla.  The poetic imagination and living our own myths.  Last week I was chilling one night over with these friends of mine, hanging out with this girl from the county but who I never knew back then only met down here at the beach, an old friend's friend.  I got to telling stories and of course because I am writing so much again and also because I am a McMullen and all those all those all those late night convos as a girl, or around the table basement at Grammy and Pop's or any single one of the aunts and uncles the Jameson and laughter and warm remembering every time, because of all that and because of my myth, my heart my spirit where the saint and the devil collide I am a wild women, full of the spirit and the ancient forbidden gnosis which is just know-how which, common sense people is just know thy self,  this wisdom business that penetrates so deep within.  And so for all of that of course I am storyteller, La Cantadora she who knows.  And so chillin last Wednesday late night, and Saturday too I got to telling some stories of my own, I have a lot, and a lot of them some of the most important ones are from the beach they all, so much happened right here.

So without meaning to I am gathering bones again and doing it near the ocean in the northeast wind under the winter sky.  It is so important, this archeology, these bits and pieces scattered everywhere it is the real work it is the poet's work it is the work always always always of recircling the brave warm or coolly shadowed places we continually label or even disregard that when we are still live deeply, live on, within.  In the end these are known and called by that most powered word of words, home in the end I choose not to go with the howl scowl on my face but the wicked happy satiated smile of she who knows that peaceful all-knowingg grin, so right now today and tomorrow's today and each and every step I take I say Amen.  Amen Amen.  This is all real and really happenening, this is life it does and it did.