Chasing rainbows

I’ve been mulling over a couple posts I want to write during the past wickedly hot week, but I don’t like to type when I’m sweating. It makes my keyboard icky. And meanwhile I’ve had this epiphany that I want to share – so those posts are going to have to wait.

Here’s the epiphany, brought to you courtesy of my phone news feed: sad people and introverts are more likely to suffer from dementia than chirpy little extroverts.

Now when you google “introverts risk of dementia”, it becomes clear that many of the perpetrators of the articles on this subject are … well … annoyingly jolly types. One that I found equates “introvert” and “neurotic”; another said it wasn’t introversion per se that sent your marbles rolling somewhere over the rainbow so much as a tendency to focus more on rain clouds than rainbows, only (the article added) an attitude of gloom was more common among introverts anyway so …

So here is a public service announcement:

Look, I can’t help that I’m an introvert. More than that, I don’t WANT to help it! I don’t want to go to parties and yodel “Ho Ho Ho” and clap people on the shoulder!

But …

I’m pretty sure I can be more intentional about holding the Black Dog at bay.

I googled “How to be happy” – and no, that’s absolutely not a weird thing to do! If it were, I wouldn’t have found answers – and I did – I found many long lists, drawn up by people who take the question quite seriously, of things one can do to become and be happy.

And I noticed an interesting thing. Right near the top of almost every list was one word: Gratitude.

Oh calm down. This is not going to become one of those 100-days-of-gratitude blogs. But maybe a single post on the subject wouldn’t come amiss. After all, today is Independence Day, and although I’m actively opposed to both fireworks and flag-waving, I’m grateful that we don’t have a flotilla of giant spaceships hovering over earth’s major cities, waiting to suck us all up, or blow us to oblivion, or whatever it was they did in the movie … it’s been awhile since I watched it and I may be confusing the story with V … dang, can you believe Independence Day is 25 years old already? Anyway, my point is, I’m grateful to know the Gubmint wasn’t just softening us all up for the Big Scary Reveal when they confessed to lying to us.

And here are some other things I’m grateful for:

Boudicca lives. Last week the Hubbit detected a Smell in the workshop and we thought she had died, but it turned out merely to be some of Angelo’s garbage. I was worried because I hadn’t seen her for a while – she goes a little feral in the summer – but she visited the Cool Dude the other day and she’s just fine.

Apricots. The first apricots of the summer were ready to be picked yesterday, in time for me to take a couple to Wonder Woman, who is about to have surgery, and who was cheered because she loves them.

Hummingbirds. Some of our regular visitors made it through the California fires last year, and came back for another summer.

People who adopt rescue dogs. I didn’t think I’d ever find a home for Bear, and yet I did, and they send me pictures that tell me, over and over again, that no matter what he does he is loved.

The Hubbit. Not gonna lie, he can be a curmudgeonly old poop. But I’m grateful to have him around.

Five is enough to start with. And you know what? It works! Poking through my messy picture archives in search of illustrations for this little gratitude list made me smile all the way down to my bones. So … feel free to make your own list, and share it if you like. I’ll be around, watching for rainbows and available to smile along with you.

GIFs from Giphy.com

Hello again, world…

Hey.

Yeah … it’s been a while. I’m sorry about that.

Look, it’s not that I stopped caring about you. Actually, I talked to you every single day, inside my head. But when it came to writing my thoughts down … I kept getting stuck. There was always just too much, you know? And some of it was so LOUD – first during the interminable build-up to Election Day, and then in the ongoing aftermath. Bad enough to feel anger and disappointment and anxiety constantly ramping up inside me. Worse to feel angry and disappointed at some of the people closest to me – and worst of all when those feelings, as happened all too often, bubbled over in a toxic mess of words and tears and bitter silences.

And then, of course, there’s covid. I guess I should be embarrassed to admit this – a lot of people have died, and are still dying all over the world, and many of the survivors are still experiencing aftershocks, and of course there’s the economic devastation … but this is one place where I choose to be as honest as possible, and so I’m going to admit that on a personal level I haven’t found living through a pandemic too great a hardship. Only a few people I care about got sick, and none of those is experiencing ongoing problems. Having to wear a mask sucked, but that’s over now for us. The stimulus money got us comfortably over a hump that we’d been laboriously climbing for years.

The hardest part – the part I’d have written about, if I’d wanted to add to the noise – was the endless stupid. And even that has been useful, in that it’s given me an excuse to distance myself from people I had ceased to find congenial. I mean, when someone you love takes a dismaying political stance, that can be hard to accept. One wants to feel in sync with one’s tribe, after all. But if you work at it, you can quite often explore your differences, maybe find points of harmony. Or you can agree to disagree, and move on to talk about other things. Disagreements over covid are different. Essentially, either you’re Q, or you’re anti-Q – there’s no meeting of the minds. Sometimes love is enough and you can slide around the issue (while maintaining a safe distance, because that shit might be contagious, people!) Other times, the only cure is full-scale social distancing, wielded like a scalpel to radically reshape your social circle.

The thing is, I didn’t want to blog about any of that. There were already plenty of opinions out there … I had no value to offer, and I didn’t want to add to the noise. But it has felt impossible to write about anything else. The noise, both inside and outside my head, has been so loud I couldn’t hear the cricket-like chirrups and yawps of my small but particular life long enough to catch them and pin them to a page.

Hence, only two posts in the past 18 months.

And oh, I have missed this so much! Every day the small events of life – the challenge of persuading a cow to stand still for artificial insemination, the delight of a new calf, chicks raised and a chicken killed by an over-excited Malinois and hens that trip you up trying to sit on your feet when you go out to feed them. The deep-down joint-aching suckiness of getting old, and strategies for avoiding the alternative. Estrangement from a dear friend and then news of his death. Encounters with homeless people and what happens when you let their peculiar brands of nuttiness into your life. Rescue, of course – dogs, and occasionally cats, that break your heart or your bank balance, and others that make your heart sing. The death of a beloved but long distant cousin and the sheer impossibility of knowing what to say to the people who grieve his loss. Encounters with the Black Dog – who is not permitted to dominate this space, but can’t be ignored if I’m to write my truth. Stories written, books read, movies watched, and weird shit found in my news feed. Gardens planted and the endless war against weeds. Experiments in the kitchen. The fundamental oddness of being married to a hubbit.

So much to yawp. Most of it so trivial … I can’t understand why anyone would want to read it, and yet, for all that, I want – I need – to write it.

So … hello, World. I’m back, I think. Is anyone out there?

Graphics sourced from Giphy.com.

There’s a black hole in my pocket

I lost a friend today because I was late. Well, maybe not a friend … but someone I liked, who I’d thought liked me, blew up in my face to lasting effect because I kept her waiting fifteen minutes.

The incident hurt surprisingly much.

In the greater context of this year’s overall shittitude it was a small thing. This wasn’t a key relationship, and while it’s possible that she’s been pretending to like me while nursing a growing grudge, it’s more likely that she was just having a bad day and I made a convenient target.

The White Rabbit – more than just a fantasy animal.

It hurts that she had a valid complaint that I seem powerless to address. I am always late, and no matter how carefully I plan, how early I set my alarm, how fast I drive from here to there, after a lifetime of trying the best I can do is damage control. When I know punctuality is especially important to someone I can usually, with considerable effort and anxiety, keep my lateness within a ten minute margin, which most seem to accept provided I call when on my way to tell them how late I’m going to be, and am sufficiently apologetic when I arrive. Everyone else is best advised to bring a book – or, if waiting annoys you, start without me – I won’t care. I wouldn’t have cared today when my formerly-friendly acquaintance canceled our arrangement. What hurt wasn’t that she got on with her day; it was the ugly and unexpected intensity of her anger, and my powerlessness to answer it.

I won’t defend a bad habit. Instead, here’s some perspective for the benefit of the model clock-watchers out there, and in particular those whose sanity is challenged by us tardies. (I know I’m not alone.)

First, we know our perpetual lateness is annoying – but as annoying as it is to you, it’s embarrassing and frustrating uto us. You see it as rudeness and lack of consideration; we see it as weakness, a defect, a failure to do something everyone else finds easy. We read books and make lists and watch TED Talks, but it’s like dancing: some people have rhythm; others, no matter how religiously they chant the “one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three” of daily life, cannot keep in step with the minute hand. For you it’s easy – you plan your day, you look at your planner, you know how time and distance and traffic fit together, and everything glides so smoothly into place you simply can’t understand how we manage to trip and stumble every damn time.

Well, allow me to enlighten you. Basically, this happens.

Soft Watch, by Salvador Dali. This is any timepiece I use, at the precise moment of impact with having to be anywhere.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve concluded that I and people like me have hooked a heel on a loose thread in the fabric of the space-time continuum. We, too, plan our days and check our planners. We can figure out how long it will take to get from here to there, and what the time should be when we leave. We understand the different kinds of “leaving” – the kind that involves stopping what we’re doing, and the kind that involves actually driving through the gate. We know to add five or ten minutes for bumps in the road, and what we have to do before we go, and how long it will take to get our shit together. We figure all that out and then we start our day, and that old minute hand goes ambling around in its lazy circles, and some of the things on our to-do list get done and some don’t. And then our electronic planner twitters a warning … and at that exact moment a quantum cowboy blips into being, lassos our deadline, and vanishes with a resounding fart and a clatter of hooves through the black hole inside the clock on our smart phone – which at that moment typically shows five minutes to our scheduled time of arrival.

Arriving presents its own challenges. Quite often, this happens…

Infinite Relativity, by M.C. Escher. How I get from here to there.

I’d like to say my new year’s resolution for 2019 is to be on time, but I already have a full tureen of bubbling resolutions to toil and trouble over before the Hubbit comes home. And while it turns out that I have two months longer than I thought I did – because he’ll likely be in rehab until well into March – that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of getting from where I am now to … anywhere at all. Time and space are tricksy devils, whether you count with a clock or a calendar.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try, mind you.

Yeah, well … seriously, Yoda, you need to shut the fuck up. Go read a book or something. And if you don’t know by now that there’s more to me than one bad habit, and that I’m worth waiting for, then … yeah. Better you leave without me.

Let’s talk. How do you relate to time, schedules and to-do lists? Whether you are a Tardy or a Timekeeper, how do you feel about the other kind of human? Do you ever secretly think Yoda is a self-righteous pain in the ass?

 

Here we go again

I’m superstitious about new year, and doubly so when January 1 falls on a Monday. So it bugs me that I’m not more excited about this one.

No resolutions. Not one. For the first time in my life as a self-aware human being, I am not starting a new diet … giving up a bad habit … launching a new budget … changing how I dress … or in any other way aiming to do, think, feel or be anything other than the person I’ve been for the past 363 days.

No, I’m not depressed. That is, of course I am, but I take mind-altering drugs for that now, so any downward-pressing sensation in my brain/heart/lungs/gut is merely the detritus of feelings past, best ignored until it leaks through a crevice, trickles into a crevasse, and drips into the primordial soup that nourishes my crocodile brain.

 

I’m just … Oh hell, this is the year I turn sixty, so naturally I’ve been doing what many of us do when it dawns on us that the road ahead is shorter than the one behind: I’ve been reconnecting with old friends through Facebook. And I keep bumping into people who are living my life – mine – the one I staked my claim on back before all this adulting started. They went ahead and figured it out – lost the weight, acquired the poise, managed the money, got the stuff, rose as unstoppably as bubbles in a glass of champagne.

Meanwhile I frothed out of the bottle and splashed onto the table.

See, I’ve always thought of myself as the maverick, the joker, the outside-the-boxer who would one day ascend to my full amazingness (by methods undefined probably involving writings of passion and brilliance, but also acts of courage and, of course, wisdom) and astonish everyone who ever didn’t invite me to parties or wrote “could do better” on my report card.

Turns out that instead of a maverick I might be merely disorganized. Turns out that while I’ve been concocting a work history so random that it makes prospective employers flinch and back away, my non-maverick former fellows have, step by patiently consecutive step (or maybe by many wild leaps – how would I know?) made pictures, earned PhDs, transformed communities, invented medical techniques, won awards, walked with lions, built businesses, climbed mountains, published books.

I’m not proud of this part but I’ll tell you anyway: it made me angry. I felt bitter, dissatisfied with my life. Every story I haven’t told, every place I haven’t been, every challenge I haven’t met, every opportunity I’ve fumbled – that was all I could think of as I compared myself with these new old friends. I felt like a mouse in a corner while they were Smaug on his hoard.

To summarize, I’ve been sitting on 2017’s butt and glowering, while 2018 and sixty and a lifetime of wtf-was-that? hurtled down upon me like a drunken locomotive, and really if one’s crawling beggar-like up the steps to Death’s door, dreaming up yet another set of new year resolutions seems … well … a little pointless. (As does unmixing metaphors. Consider this bit as the verbal equivalent of Smaug’s hoard.) I decided I wouldn’t bother to think about it.

But one has to think about something.

So I’ve been stocktaking, wandering through the cluttered warehouse of my life.

Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t have a warehouse. At best, I have a storage unit. And I don’t “wander through it” – I clamber over the old suitcases and cardboard boxes in which I hoard my stash. Heaps here and there are evidence of past efforts to sort, organize and discard old dreams, hopes, plans, ideas, assumptions. I kick them aside and keep searching. This is not a time for sorting; it’s for appraising. Is there anything here of value?

I find concepts unpacked, half-assembled, and discarded. Stories unwritten, half-written, written but untold. Relationships left out in the weather and faded beyond recognition. Promises I never decided not to keep. I find lists – so many lists – to do lists, goals and action plans, names of people I said I’d pray for, great books and extraordinary places. I wonder how much of my life I’ve spent writing lists. Everything I find tugs at me, whispering “Finish me! Fix me! Read me and check things off!” but I yank myself away. Not now. This time is for assessing. Is there anything here that’s complete?

The process is exhausting. I long to find a saggy old chair, wrap myself in a comforter, and lose myself in a book. But not this time.

This time, I look.

And here, and there, and also over there I see the gleam of treasure. It’s not where I thought it would be. It’s not what I planned to collect, yet here it is.

I’ve raised a girl and set her loose to change the world, her way. I’ve made a school and out of it built a family. I’ve strung together words in ways that make me smile. I’ve said “until death do us part”, and I haven’t killed anyone, and we’re still holding on. I’ve taught, and I’ve learned. I’ve been afraid and stood firm anyway. I’ve pulled a lot of dogs out of sad and sent them back out into happy. I’ve planted trees that grow. I’ve loved when I’ve been empty. I’ve forgiven every hurt. I have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched. I have been, and I still am.

And I’m not dead yet.

So what thoughts have you carried with you into this new year? 

 

If

If he hadn’t been there, she’d still be alive.

If he’d been handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and kicked back to Mexico (again), he wouldn’t have been there.

If San Francisco weren’t a sanctuary city, the cops would have handed him over to ICE like they were supposed to.

If ICE were better at its job, it would have had the right kind of warrant and San Francisco would have handed him over despite being a sanctuary city. Actually, if ICE were better at its job he wouldn’t have been in the country at all. Maybe once, but then he’d have been deported and that would have been that, if things were managed right.

If we had a wall…

No, not just a wall. A force field. A dome-shaped shield covering the whole of the United States, and you could come through it if you were a real American or, okay, even someone with the right kind of relationship with a real American, but if you were, say, a rapist or a drug dealer or a Muslim, you’d get caught once, and then we’d inject this tiny microchip into you. Into the back of your neck, say, at the base of your skull … or maybe all the way deep into your brain, and then fix it there somehow in a way that makes it impossible to remove without leaving a hole in the precise part of your brain that you most definitely don’t want a hole in. Like the sex part, or the part that makes you breathe.

And if you ever tried to cross the force field, the microchip would activate and your head would explode – BOOM! SPLAT! – just like that. Now that would be cool – and it would work, too. If they figured out a way to do it I bet it would work.

Anyway, the thing is, if things were being handled right he wouldn’t have been there, sitting on the park bench, and he wouldn’t have picked up the bundle someone left under the bench, and the gun wouldn’t have gone off, and the bullet wouldn’t have ricocheted, and Kate Steinle wouldn’t have died while out minding her own business and taking a walk with her father.

Her poor father – can you imagine? A sunny afternoon, out for a stroll on the pier, and suddenly bang! and she stumbles forward and starts to fall, scarlet flowering on her back, “Daddy, help me!” – those were her last words. The last thing she said to him. “Daddy, help me!” – only he couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe for her.

That wetback beaner bastard murdered her, plain and simple.

Oh no, don’t start with that bullshit. You think him being there wasn’t premeditated? You think he didn’t think about what he was doing every damn time he slithered over the border? Anyway – look – “during the commission of another serious crime” – he was an illegal, for fucksake. Just by being there on that bench he was committing a crime. Oh – it’s not serious enough for you? Read the definition! “Robbery” – what do you think those fuckers are doing, coming over here, stealing our jobs, getting free healthcare, free education, paid for with our tax dollars –

It was murder.

And they let him off with “illegal possession of a firearm.”

What the fuck do you mean, that doesn’t make sense to you either? He’s a felon, for fucksake. Felons are not allowed to possess firearms.

Exactly. He was holding it. It doesn’t matter that he claims he didn’t know what it was. He got his hands on it. That’s possession, even by your own definition.

Anyway, there’s one good thing that came out of it: people are paying attention to the immigration situation and all the illegals. And the American people have finally chosen a leader who will do something about it. We are done with being robbed and raped in our own country.

Yeah, yeah – I know her parents don’t like that her death has been “politicized”. But she’s a public figure now. She belongs to America now, not just them.

We’re all mourning her, not just them.

We’re all mad about what happened to her – and I don’t get how her father can say he’s not mad. Did you see that interview? It was online – just google it. He says he hasn’t felt one moment of anger and he doesn’t want revenge.

I mean, seriously, that’s just weird. That’s not natural.

But, whatever – at least we are angry for her – we care enough about what happened to her to want vengeance – and we have a president who knows how to use anger to get people moving, so it’s worth it, I guess, if you look at the big picture. Because we the people are finally taking America back, and we’re kicking those fuckers out. They don’t belong here.

Except, of course, now this guy – what’s his name – Jose Garcia Zarate – he gets to stay. You can bet he’s happy about that! Only three years for murdering a beautiful American girl.

You know what really sucks? I read somewhere she was going to get married. I don’t know where – you can find it on Google. And she was pretty, you know? The fact that she was young and pretty, in love, and they say she was a happy person – that just makes it worse. You look at her picture and his picture side by side in all the media, and you tell me – which one would you rather have living in America today? I know, it’s probably “politically incorrect” to say, but fuck that – I’m not a snowflake, and I’m not scared to say there aren’t enough nice-looking, happy people in the world. She deserved to live.

Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant and Mexican national, and Kate Steinle, whom he shot in 2015. (Back story)

And that fucker will get three years maximum for killing her, and he’ll serve half that because it’s in California and they’re soft on crime. Oh, you can bet he’s smiling. He was homeless and now he gets an 18-month vacation in a comfortable American prison, with widescreen television and ice cream on Sundays, all at the taxpayer’s expense. Don’t you think that’s better than going back to Meh-hee-co?

And you know California’s becoming a sanctuary state now, right? By the time he gets out the whole state will be a sanctuary for illegals. He’ll never have to leave.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. But if we could just solve the whole problem of illegals and crime…

You know, that idea of mine – the force field and the exploding microchip – that’s not such a crazy idea, right? If they figure it out, I bet it would work. I mean we already have the technology to put microchips in dogs … We could just quit worrying about Muslims and illegals and anyone else who doesn’t belong. Anyone caught hurting a real American, these inner city kids who join gangs, people who backtalk the police – bing bong, they get a chip. Same for illegals. You wouldn’t even need the wall, or the force field – although that would be cool to have … You’d just need something to activate the chip. A radar scanner or something. Screw up once? You get a chip. Screw up twice? Your head explodes.

If I could just figure out a way to pass this idea along to the president… What’s that Office of American Innovation about? If they’re interested in innovative ideas, this one would qualify, right? And for damn sure I’m an American.

With thanks to Tricia … I read your latest post and started to comment, and then my head exploded.

Ok … talk to me. What do you think we should do about all the violent crime caused by illegals?