Friday, October 1, 2010

Autumn on the Farm


We were repainting the barn when hints of color began to show on the hill.




And the color in the meadow (about a week later) is just shockingly gorgeous.




And then there is this character to greet us when we come in. Biscuit looks like a cat doll. Ooh, I love him. He already love to cuddle, but the cooler it gets, the closer he gets. Sweet fella, him.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

And Just Like That . . . She's Gone

Hannah True Jocius is no more, Hannah True lives on.

Without going into it, let me just say it is a huge burden on women to change their names, identities, personae -- from single women into someone's wife. If any of my friends ask (I do not push this on anyone), I would say keep your name. Why give up everything that you've dreamed of, worked for, everything you've been to take another name? I feel incredibly lucky to love a husband who wants me to have my own name and my own achievements.

I've been told that my previous in-law family wants to erase me from their history -- fair enough, even though you can't change history. Whatever the truth is, it's nice to not have to carry that name around with me anymore.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

What I'm Listening To Now/ September Mediascape



I have to make a confession.

Every month Christian steals my ipod and puts a new mix on it so I have a new mix every month for the past two years. I love it. It's a labor of love (my friend Sheila says if it's not a labor of love it's just labor) but it's also the only way I hear a full spectrum of tons of different songs. Left to my own devices I would latch onto a handful of albums and listen to them over and over. But these mixes give me lots of different songs to listen to over and over and over. I think the term for people like me are "latchers:" we find songs we love and work the tar out of them. That being said, here are the songs I'm lovin' on now:

Sleigh Bells -- Rill Rill

Quasi -- Rockabilly Party

The Hold Steady -- Hurricane J

Karen O and The Kids -- Hideaway (Oh man, it makes me cry)

Buffy Sainte-Marie -- Helpless

The Roots -- How I Got Over


Podcasts (available for free on iTunes)

The Bugle (From Times Online.uk) -- The Daily Show's John Oliver and his comedy partner Andy Szaltzman give the rundown on world news. Be prepared for Andy's puns (they are horrible).

The Pod F. Tompkast -- Paul F. Tompkins plays the (thin) conceit that it is nighttime on the internet and anything can happen. And if you are at all interested in what might happen in a creative collaboration between Andrew Lloyd Weber and Ice-T, take a listen. He's a comedian at the top of his game.


Television

We've just wrapped up True Blood Season 2. (I don't want to hear anything about season three -- yet.) We've got other shows lined up: Season Five of The Wire, Weeds and Big Love.

Books

I'm into The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillian and Mark Twain. I'm trying to figure out different techniques of local writing. Christian and I are reading Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon together (okay, he reads while I do bake or do yoga) and I love Pynchon's take on those two. Or rather, I love Christian's take on Pynchon's writing.

Last and most importantly, there is a review of Christian's book! And on a pop-culture site, no less! Very cool indeed.



Friday, September 10, 2010

Book: Tokyo Year Zero






            It’s no secret that I am intensely connected with Japan. I lived there for three years, and that experience imprinted on me a love for and unending questions about the place. It is one country about which Westerners feel comfortable making gross generalizations. These are usually along the lines of “Japan is such a crazy/zany/weird place” and suggest that all Japanese people have agreed to abandon good taste and morality. How else to explain a video clip where the young members of girl group Morning Musume (Morning’s Daughter) strap ham to the tops of their heads and poke their noggins through holes in a wooden platform where a hungry gila monster runs loose? The girls, of course, deliver cochlea-shredding screams before they duck away; the last girl standing is the winner. This, like the many other such clips, leaves me a bit empty. It’s not that I don’t laugh; on the contrary, I’ve heard Morning Musume and I’m rooting for the gila monster.  What bothers me, rather, is how this clip and its ham-headed hi-jinx fit in to the American conception of Japan.

            Upon hearing that I lived in Japan, I get the usual questions. Do you speak Japanese? Did you speak it before you went? Did you ever see a vending machine selling girls’ underwear? Isn’t it really crazy there? (Yes. No. No. Not really.) What gets me is that by the third or fourth question we are already in Wacky Japan, land of Beer-o-mats and ass-warming toilets, and perhaps, for the historically minded, sumo-wrestling geishas. Wacky Japan, well, it just isn’t as wacky as most people would like it to be. Japan is, in short, a foreign country.  They do things differently there. The Wacky Japan line only dumbs the place down, brackets out its history and the intricacies of it culture: the nation as carnival sideshow. I mean, have you seen those rockabilly haircuts? Compensated dating???!!!

            So it will be no great surprise that I have been disappointed by books I’ve read that have been set in Japan. The Japanese characters are flat, or the whole cast is imported from America. Movies don’t handle a Japanese setting much better: while I love Lost in Translation, Japan is only a backdrop, a place where Americans discover themselves while Tokyo and her citizens are merely background – an entire city relegated to white noise.

            When my husband quietly put Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace in my reading pile I was a bit apprehensive. An English author writing about immediate post-war Tokyo? There was a lot of room for disappointment; these waters have plenty of shipwrecks in them.

            Tokyo Year Zero is, at heart, a murder mystery based on the very real serial murderer Yoshio Kodaira. But it cannot really be called a mystery  or even thriller because the reader is too far inside Detective Minami’s head to create adequate cat-and-mouse tension. Peace deploys his skills as a novelist quite nimbly: the very first thing you read is a stream of consciousness flashback from a soldier roughly outlining his departure for Manchuria with fragments of other memories mixed in. Peace’s choice of names (there are detectives named for all points of the compass except East) and locations (the main police stations are near the Imperial Palace – the empty heart of Tokyo, off-limits to the common Japanese) are all carefully chosen.

            For the most part, the reader follows Detective Minami as he stumbles through a murder investigation. At the same time, the reader sees Detective Minami’s mind as he stumbles towards a psychotic break. Peace employs the best use of repetition that I’ve ever seen: the ton-ton hammering of post-war Tokyo rebuilding, an entire city as a building zone with noise spilling everywhere; the scenes that Minami replays in his head, trying to make the ending come out right; the omnipresent loss of family, home, identity, structure, jobs, food. It’s remarkable how much Peace achieves with technique alone. I guarantee at some point you will attempt to bracket out the noise markers, and that will put you in the same frame of mind as Detective Minami, our mentally disintegrating anti-hero.

            Something else Tokyo Year Zero does especially well is address Japanese atrocities in China. Kodaira and Minami are both veterans who served time in China; both are confused at how their brutal behavior on the mainland earned them medals while U.S.-occupied Japan wants nothing to do with them. Peace does not spare his characters from reckoning with their deeds and the reader is not spared the details of those atrocities. The characters deal with their pasts in different ways, to be sure, but the consequences of their acts remain with them. While Peace doesn’t linger on the Chinese survivors, he does hint at their outcomes by setting up a parallel structure with a Japanese brothel where abandoned women try to eke out an existence stripped of any human dignity. Peace does not put Japan in the zany box, but treats both wartime imperial savagery as well as post-war turmoil with careful regard. I have to say again that he delivers a master class in repetition, elevating it beyond gimmick into something new altogether.

The fans of Wacky Japan, who celebrate the Naked Festival and Engrish, bring a certain post-modern ironic humor to the table, but precious little else. There are plenty of websites that chronicle craziest things about Japan from a Westerner’s point of view, but these are purely anecdotal – good for a chuckle but not much more. What adds to the conversation is an understanding that Japan is yes, at times, weird, but also serious. Light and dark. Horrific perpetrator and nuclear victim. Peace seeks out one of the hardest, saddest moments in history and somehow draws out a novel, and an exceptionally well-written one at that. No ham hats required.


Saturday, September 4, 2010

A Weddin' Story



Oh, happiness! Yesterday was our one-year anniversary.

I had told Christian, way back in early days of our relationship, that if I ever got married again, the fella would have to pull out all the stops, every bell and whistle, and surprise me. I didn’t really think of it again.

I should have known something was up. He started the day with something men usually never say: "let's wear our favorite clothes today!" He was so excited and convincing that I totally fell for it. Our friend Vivasvan was visiting and we decided to take a drive upstate and have lunch at the lovely Dorset Inn. I did think a proposal was a possibility, but usually people get proposals when its just the two of them and we had our friend with us. So the whole drive up I’m chatting away to Viv about Vermont and the scenery and all that.

When we finally get to Dorset, Christian gets out of the car and says "Hey, I need to talk to you," and he shows me a marriage certificate. Unbeknownst to me, he arranged all the paperwork, a pretense to be dressed up and a justice of the peace named Mr. Squire to meet us at the Inn. 

Christian looks at me and says "you want to go do this now?"
Stunned! He pulled off the biggest surprise by totally skipping the proposal that we both knew the answer to and going straight to the wedding.


We stood on the village green, in-between the Dorset General Store and the Inn. Local carpenters and workers on their lunch break could see us and when it was clear we were getting situated for a wedding ceremony, someone cued up music:
Just a small time girl livin' in a lonely world
She took
 the midnight train goin' anywhere . . . .

"Don't Stop Believing" by Journey blared out from a truck and became our wedding song. I’m not a big fan of that particular song but I love that it came to us unbidden and unplanned. After we kissed, people watching from both sides of the green whooped and hollered and came over to wish us congratulations.

Me, Christian and Mr. Squires.







Christian even got rings. He took a page from our friends Andy and Lauran and got a retaining ring and a locking washer from the local hardware store. Even though I now have an antique sapphire and diamond ring, I still sometimes slip on the retaining ring. Christian has gotten lots of compliments on his ring over the past year.

The three of us had lunch at the Inn, and decided that the only difficult bit of eloping is telling all your friends and family. 









So we dressed up, drove a piece north and got hitched. It was a beautiful day. And a complete surprise. 





And that is that.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Friday Bill Murray



I think you are going to have a good weekend . . . .
Also, I think I may have found a kindred internet soul in our love of Bill. Where is Bill Murray Hiding? is a blog that attempts to chart Bill's habit of turning up in expected places.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Ears and Eyes

What I’m Listening To Now

(Songs)

Honey Dove (2002 Version) – Lee Fields

25 to Life – Zola

Shadow People – Dr. Dog

FFunny FFriends – Unknown Mortal Orchestra

The Fire Thief – Hem

Fried Chicken – Rufus Thomas

Soul Street – Eddie Floyd



(Comedy Podcasts -- available for free on iTunes)

You Look Nice Today -- OPNWDE

Kasper Hauser – This American Life 1 & 2



What I'm Watching Now

(YouTube)

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Have You Ever Noticed That A Moose Can Look Like A Retarded Horse? (Part 3)

8/5/10 1325h

Arrive at Orgonon, Wilhelm Reich’s estate and museum.

I suppose since I’ve done the reader a disservice by alternating sleeping and claiming wakefulness through WR that I should take a moment now to explain about Reich.

This is the second part of what Laura calls the Equal and Opposite Sexual Utopias Tour Summer 2010. The first part was Sabbathday Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. Shakers believed—believe, I guess, since there are still three of them—that each human could find God within him- or herself; they were—sorry, are—celibate to the point of separating the sexes; women worked inside and men worked on the farm, they bedded down in gender-segregated dormitories, and ate and worshiped on different sides of the room, as though church leadership thought there was a serious case of The-Cooties-On-The-Loose. Within the church hierarchy men and women were equals; as one ascends the ladder of religious hierarchy in the United Society of Believers – the actual name of the Shaker religion – one cleanses oneself of the Cooties. Other Shaker things they had to do included: confessing sins, striving towards perfection, separating themselves from the non-Shaker world. Their no-procreation policy goes a long way towards explaining why there are only three of them left. The other source of possible converts – orphans – dried up in 1960 when Federal laws prohibiting adoption of orphans by religious groups forced Shakers to stop plucking the low-hanging fruit.

You may be surprised to hear that there are any Shakers still, such are the archaic notions  attached to them. They belong to a time before Gore-Tex and cup noodles, a time when cutting-edge technology was germ-free milk. But three are alive and they are kicking back at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village. The ladies that do the tours and manage the gift shop make it clear that YOU WILL NOT MEET THE SHAKERS during your visit at  Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, while at the same time repeating, insisting, really, that it is a working village even though the Shakers are too old to do the work, because the Shakers have always hired out help from the community to do the work that they cannot perform. There are hired hands performing farm labor, ergo it is still a functioning farm. If you are really determined to Shaker-gawk, the meetings are open to the public, so you could worship with them on Sundays, but you cannot say hello to them on the tour. Both Christian and I are surprised that there aren’t more aging hippie divorcées joining up, since it’s all like communal and pastoral and everything. Kids had their own dormitory and their own work where they grew flowers and made bouquets and stuff.

Shakers were into equality and having their primary relationship be with God. They weren’t into getting down and dirty with each other; Reich on the other hand, was into equality and super-way into getting down.

The first thing you need to know about Reich is that he is out there. A look at the local promotional materials in the cabin’s Welcome To Rangeley three-ring binder, you’ll learn Reich was a “researcher” who was doing “energy experiments.” This leads one to wonder whether he perhaps invented the electric car. What it means, in fact, is that he thought he had discovered the primal life force—seriously—the cosmic energies of all life, which he called orgone. Much like the midi-chlorians that make a Jedi, orgone charges all organic matter and is present in the very atmosphere. Reich fled Europe in 1939 and moved to Maine in 1942, which is when he built Orgonon, an observatory, library and lab on 160 acres amidst Rangeley’s lakes to study the cosmic life energy. He also started building orgone accumulators—to collect the stuff—boxes that layered metal against organic matter, with wood on the outside and metal on the inside. The accumulators could pull down orgone from the atmosphere and, well, accumulate it into concentrated  energy, like a bullion. The idea is that if a person sat in an orgone accumulator everyday for a certain amount of time they would be cured from cancer, illness and become generally more healthy and revitalized.[1] When we showed up the next day and asked to sit in some accumulators the staff member who greeted us told us that the orgone accumulator is not a magic box, you have to sit in it every day, thirty minutes to an hour for weeks at a time to see results and that everyone thinks they will sit in the accumulators for a long time but they always leave after five minutes. The four of us scoffed at such lackadaisical treatment of the orgone accumulators. He left, we sat in some accumulators and after about five minutes of sitting in silence all of us left our boxes. While we tried to exit quietly, we were stopped by the same staff member who turned out to be the assistant director of The Wilhelm Reich Museum and Infant Trust. What followed was an intense conversation, where we first convinced him of our genuine interest in Reich, after which he admitted that he didn’t use his box, he made a blanket that he sleeps under, using steel wool and sheepskin for the layers of metal/organic material., it would boost the immune system, cure illnesses like cancer and stream the positive life force directly into the body.

The other thing you need to know about Reich is that he is really important. W. Reich worked with Sigmund Freud and was a well-respected psychoanalyst in his early working years in Austria. He hightailed it out of Germany in 1933[2] to Scandinavia, settling in Oslo until 1939, when he came to the U.S. Reich connected Freud and Karl Marx, postulating that a person’s neurosis came from not just their relationships with their mothers, but from all aspects of their life – the physical, sexual, economic and social conditions that shape the lives of individuals. Essentially, a poor rural fisherman is going to have a different set of living conditions and neuroses than a city-dwelling wealthy shipping merchant.

Then there is transference. Freud’s description of a psychoanalyst is someone who acts as a blank slate so that, ideally, the patient will project their own neuroses onto the analyst, shedding light on the therapy that needs to be done. At the same time, this dynamic fosters patients to transfer strong emotions – from a relationship with a significant person – towards the therapist: the patient falls in love with their therapist. Freud thought he could make use of this phenomenon by analyzing the transference. Reich came along and said Hey, if we are getting love transference from our patients, we’re also going to get hate transference, as well. Our patients friggin’ hate us. No one had considered that yet.

See? This was a really smart guy. He influenced lots of people like Saul Bellow and Yoko Ono[3] and psychological developments like primal therapy.

OK, so maybe even his important ideas were way out. Reich’s work had always been concerned with human sexuality and he believed that good sex was a fundamental part of the healthy life. That’s not a mind-blowing statement today, it’s a generally accepted truth. But to get specific: Reich thought that pent-up sexual energy could cause physical blockages in the body – in muscle fiber and organ tissue – and he called these blockages “body armor.” Of course, a super-strong orgasm could shatter body armor because it would release lots of sexual energy. Theoretically, a person that could regularly release enough sexual energy through orgasms could keep themselves healthy. On the other hand, if a person denied themselves orgasms, the armor would become hard and stiffen, causing neurotic and physical illnesses. Reich isn’t talking about your workaday orgasm here, he’s talking about skin-meltingly transcendent orgasms that pulse throughout the entire body. He sets the bar pretty high for pleasurable orgasms.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Reich’s enthusiastic praise of orgasms is addressing only the ladies. After all, women and their desires – or lack of them – did capture the interest of psychoanalysts from early on. The tumescent penis seems to take care of itself, its demands are simple, and ejaculation, even in the most unpracticed of hands, is all but guaranteed. Reich flipped the concept of frigidity on its ear by saying that what passes for the male orgasm – ejaculation – is a pale version of what men could have. Sure, Reich thought that most women were frigid, but that wasn’t exactly news since most Freudians took that as given. But Reich thought that most men were frigid, too, and this mind-fucked his male colleagues, who thought they had one up on the ladies.

What Reich really wanted was for all people to be free, non-conformist, totally in touch with their genitals (sorry), able to have teeth-knocking, eye-crossing, body-throbbing orgasms that kept them healthy and happy. (He totally preferred the boning cure to the talking cure.) Reich started tracing sources of repression and realized that repression starts in infancy and childhood. While he could coach an adult into therapeutic sex as a kind of analysis on the fast-track, W.R. really wanted to find ways to not repress children to begin with, to prevent the initial body armoring that laid down the pathways to neurosis.

Reich left Europe because at some point it became a less than welcoming place for Jews, even less for horndog Jewish psychiatrists. The road through Rangeley has signs for the turnoff to The Wilhelm Reich Museum and Infant Trust, the symbol for which deserves a dedicated page on accidentalpenis.com, but wouldn’t get it because the symbol is purposefully phallic and to date there is no penisonpurpose.com.


8/5/10 1335h

Tour begins. Tour guide takes us to a small room to watch a film on Reich. I fall asleep as soon as the room darkens and the electric waves of the television roll over me.

8/5/10 1336h

Christian presses his leg against mine to wake me up. I nod vigorously to show I am alert.

8/5/10 1337h

I fall asleep again. Repeat the above entry.

8/5/10 1338h

Christian gives up trying to keep me awake.

8/5/10 1400h

Video ends. I feel the damp spot on my shirt where I drooled and become embarrassed.  Tour guide collects us to go into the house.

8/5/10 1615h

We’ve seen the observatory, office, nap room, library, the paintings that Reich made as well as his paints and brushes. We’ve heard about his efforts at cloud-busting, by which the Wilhelm Reich Museum and Infant Trust actually mean rain-making, and have seen some of the cloud-busting equipment, which employ orgone energy to work. Reich saved the Maine blueberry crop of 1953 with his cloud-busting technology.

The tour has ended but we dither still. I ask one of the tour guides if there is an orgone accumulator we can sit in. She says that there are some boxes down in the Student Laboratory, which is now used for staff offices. If we go there tomorrow at ten am and ask nicely, someone will let us in and we can sit in the accumulators. We drift over to the W.R. gift shop where a woman who must have been past retirement manned the cash register. I ask her what she thinks about W.R. She smiles shyly and says “oh, he was before his time. He was right about a lot of things.” I nod and she nods. After ten seconds of nodding she adds “like about cancer and cloud-busting and all.” Christian buys a book and a postcard. When he hands the cashier his credit card she smiles (again, shyly) and says “sometimes I steal these by mistake.” He signs the slip and after a small hike to WR’s tomb we all pile in the car to head back to the cabin.

8/5/10 1705h

As we turn out of Orgonon Laura spots berries. We pull over and the four of us practically run to pick wild blackberries and blueberries. The hills around Orgonon are loaded with berries, and no one minded us there, picking and eating until our tongues turned blue. I had a Feeling I’d never had before, some simple happiness in the serendipity between our human needs and the lands’ offering in a place that still feels wild. Because that part of Maine is an Old New England, all forests and beasts and witches. It feels unknown by man¸ unknowable. And still, there is this happy moment.

We pick almost a quart of blackberries and blueberries. We stop at the Rangeley I.G.A. to buy Grape Nuts ice cream on the way home.

8/5/10 1745h

Arrive back at cabin. We all change into bathing costumes to swim in the lake. Except I do not swim in the lake as I had been recently tattooed and fear there might be something in the water that could make the tattoo infected. I tend to err on the hypochondriac side of health issues, suffering from the variant of hypochondria that causes me to think I may have horrible diseases but will never admit when I am actually ill.

The three swimmers report that Rangeley Lake is dark but clear and warm. I take some notes on the porch and wave at them from time to time. We drink some cold beer and watch the sun go down. The Ducks return for their evening visit but leave quickly. I suppose we are more of a morning spot for them.

8/5/10 1955h

Chowder-making begins. Christian does some culinary magic and produces one of the best fish chowders of all time. We all agree: it is awesome. 


8/5/10 2230h

After a lengthy discussion to decide the evening’s movie, we watch “Wanted,” mostly because I told everyone I really wanted to watch it.

Despite my best intentions and after thirty minutes of demonstrating my commitment to watching the full film, I fall asleep.








[1] As in, every day for an hour for six months.
[2] In a truly impressive move, Reich left in March 1933, just two months after Hitler took power as Chancellor. What was it that prompted this sibylic fleeing of fascism? He read the newspaper. More specifically, Reich read a newspaper that published a scorcher of a critique on his book The Sexual Struggle of Youth, in which he was vilified for being a Jew and a communist as well as being a ladies’ man (true – though he was not raised in the faith – true and true). After reading the excoriation, he put the paper down, called for his mistress and their suitcases, packed and they rolled up north the next day. In this act, Reich confirms what all writers fear: negative reviews do mean that They are out for you and you should leave the country.
[3] He is not, however, the one to blame for breaking up the Beatles.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Friday Bill Murray



He sets you up to knock 'em down. Yes, even here I still have my crush on Bill Murray. Commitment to silliness ranks high with me.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Have You Ever Noticed That A Moose Can Look Like A Special-Needs* Horse? (Part Two) (*Thanks to Heather for the correction)

 
8/4/10 1900h

We meet our friends Laura and Andy at the previously agreed-upon location on Main Street in Rangeley. They are just as concerned about food as Christian and I are. The four of us could be described as food and drink enthusiasts, chowhounds. We walk the handful of blocks on Main Street to pick out the restaurants we would consider for dinner. There seemed to be three kinds of dining establishments in Rangeley: sports bar & grill, established older local restaurants – a pizza joint and a diner – and new eateries. Correction: one new eatery.

The four of us decide to go the rental cabin first and come back for dinner. The cabin perches on a steep hill over Lake Rangeley and is quite charming. It has the right amount of lakeside Maine hokiness: wildlife-themed upholstery, sturdy wood furniture, wallpaper featuring a family of black bears playing in front of a log cabin without tipping over into campiness. After the business of deciding bedrooms, unpacking cars, opening windows, and a general freshening up, we head back to Rangeley ready to eat.


8/4/10 2015h

This is a pleasure: going down the blocks, reading menus one by one , deciding where to have dinner. The pleasure is in weighing the options, seeing how creative or uniform the menu is, whether a restaurant can re-invent a dish. Duck Fat (in Portland, Maine), for example, uses duck fat to fry their fries. A staple of the menu redone, and so delicious too. All of us hope that there will be a culinary revelation at the next place. Or the next place. Or the next. We even have a phrase for a menu that looks promising: “There are a few things here I wouldn’t mind putting in my mouth.” (yes, really.) We decide that the new place looks the best.

The new place was very new. So new that the staff didn’t seem sure of what to do. For example, we ordered olive bruschetta and received brie and anchovy bruschetta.  The food and drinks were all fine nonetheless. I didn’t mind putting a few dishes from there in my mouth.

8/4/10 2200h

Arrive back at cabin. Since we have come to Rangeley to visit the Wilhelm Reich estate, Christian proposes that we prep ourselves by watching a film he brought named WR. We all agree and, after reading some byzantine instructions posted on the refrigerator regarding various remote controls, the DVD begins.

I fall asleep almost immediately in a padded arm chair whilst sitting up, head drooping.

I was informed the next day that Christian walked behind me and quietly suggested that I might be more comfortable stretched out on a bed. I apparently turned my head, Exorcist-like, and said “I’m fine” and promptly resumed snoozing. Why is it when one is caught dozing one protests no no no, I’m not sleeping? As far back as I can remember, I’ve never heard anyone cop to it, Yeah I’m sleeping and it’s awesome! I’ve tried to tell myself that I should just be an adult about it and not pretend to be in a conscious state when I’m like unconscious. That is, if one is capable of pretending while sleeping. I don’t claim superpowers of consciousness, I just wonder how much the dozing mind is connected to the part of the brain that tells the mouth to say I’m awake, I’m awake.

8/5/10 0745h

I drive to I.G.A. Rangeley. I buy: 1 gallon milk, 1 bunch (5) bananas, 1 lb strawberries, 1 pint Maine blueberries (placed next to the California blueberries, absolutely insane, I know), 4 single-serving size yogurts – 2 peach, 2 pomegranate.

8/5/10 0825h

Coffee making begins, press-pot style. We've figured out that the press pot is really the best way to get the full flavor of the coffee bean. But you have to start with a decent coffee bean to really enjoy it. I like something along the lines of a café au lait, and I probably drink the equivalent of four cups of coffee in a long morning, two in a regular morning. But this is vacation, so this is a long morning. Christian and I drink our first cups in weathered Adirondack chairs on the lake’s edge.

Then, quite suddenly our first meeting with the Ducks. Ducks do not get enough credit in general for how fast they can move when they want to move. There is a Mother Duck and five almost-adult ducklings. They are different shades of brown: light and dark, very pretty. The Mother Duck has some kind of algae hanging down from her bill and the Almost Grown Ducklings try to eat the algae off her bill. It gives the strange appearance that the A.G.D. are wrestling with the M.D. The Ducks storm the banks, squawking, toddling around our chairs and close to us – they are not scared of humans– and scavenge around for a while before plunging back into the lake swimming on. I wonder how the Ducks schedule their days.

More coffee. Breakfast: fruit, yogurt, homemade granola that we brought. Andy and Laura wake up. The four of us effortlessly manage a sweet harmonious state of slowly getting ready for the day and doing other stuff -- reading, talking -- both solo and in pairs and trios. More coffee, some nibbles.  

The decision is made to go to lunch, buy groceries and then to Wilhelm Reich’s estate. Since the shops closed early and we might dither at the estate at the end of the day, we thought it best to get all the groceries needed before we went to the estate/museum.

8/5/10 1145h

As we come into Rangeley proper, we see there is a craft fair on Lake Street, just off Main Street in the middle of town. It stops us all in our tracks. We instantly move dithering to the top of the day’s agenda. It may be a small craft fair, but just the same all four of us drift towards it, as though the beaded toe rings and wooden wind chimes were singing sirens.

In the very back corner of this craft fair I found something I have wanted for at least two years and have never seen: a foraging basket. Picture a basket more tall than wide with a sturdy base, the top an open oval, with backpack straps. Some might call it a papoose, but to me it’s a foraging basket for fiddleheads, ramps, kindling, the sorts of things I find deep in the woods behind the farmhouse.

Foraging basket purchased and wearing said item, we leave the craft fair and do some shopping. There is a fancy-pants grocery store on Main Street where we buy a few foodstuffs. Over to the fishmonger’s for fresh haddock, back to the cabin to drop off, everything. We stop at a small barbecue stand for lunch (because revelatory cuisine can be anywhere and this place had very good hamburgers -- he put bacon in with the ground beef), and, finally to Wilhelm Reich’s estate.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

This Word Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

This blog is about bad kanji that people get tattooed on themselves. Most tattoo parlors have books of kanji with terrible, really horrible translations. I've seen them myself and I feel bad for the people that get these nonsensical kanji tattoos. I don't even know how to feel about the people who claim they have researched their tattoo kanji and its just . . . gibberish.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

August 6, 2010






There is only one August sixth a year, and I’m glad this one has past.

For the most part I live my life. I have moved on, as some obliviously cheerful people put it and yet on the evening of August 5th I still have to reach out to hear my parents’ voices. I consistently miss Mother’s Day, but if I do not call my mother by evening on August 6th we would both feel empty. August 6th  is the measure by which I gauge how far I have come or not come in grieving my sister.

1:20 am on August 6, 2007 my sister Sarah, age 34, passed. Funny euphemism, passed. It’s what you say when you can’t say died. The truth is, she had glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer. She died from it.

You don’t hear about this often enough. People die. It is part of the that cycle: your body ceases to function and goes on to (possibly) become nutrients for plants and the animals that eat them. Humans in turn eat the animals and suddenly there is a food chain. The general is easy enough: people die.

But the specific? There is a term that begins to name the specific, “actively dying.” That means the body is shutting down. When a person dies in this specific way, of this specific cancer, the brain shuts down the body in a haphazard fashion. Body fluids flood the chest and lungs producing a breathing sound that makes the living quake. The death rattle—the doctors say it is painless, but it doesn’t sound painless. Recognition, higher brain functions, movement are gone. The heart is beating at 150, and still the blood barely circulates. All that is left is the inert body and crackling breath, slower and slower, then a sigh, and … over.

Too much? Yes, probably.  

A different specificity: Sarah did not die alone. My parents, an aunt, an uncle and I were in the house taking turns by her bedside. It turned out, my uncle was on watch when it happened; he held her hand, smoothed her hair and told her she was beautiful (that is the way I imagine it). Rattling went to whisper. She stopped actively dying and simply died.

It’s still not clear to me what you do when a person that defined your life leaves forever, a sister, someone you expect to be with you the rest of your life, someone you fight with, compete with and still cheer on.

I thought that perhaps this August 6th would be different. It was, but not in the way I had hoped: I wanted to be able to tell funny stories, give a toast, honor her by having adventures with friends someplace new. Instead I cried until it became an unsettling sob. Christian and our friends held me and comforted me, each in their own way. This August 6th is different only because grief hit me in the evening instead of the morning. That’s not much, but it’s still a little different from last year.

I ache for my sister; I wonder where she is now; I wish I had been a better person when she knew me; I wish she could see the turns my life has taken. I wish she knew Christian.

I wish, I wish, I wish.






















Sunday, August 8, 2010

Have You Ever Noticed That A Moose Can Look Like A Retarded Horse? (Part 1)

 
There is so much to write about these past few days that I actually don’t know where to start. We met our wonderful friends Laura and Andy in Portland (Portland, Maine that is). We met in a cooking bookstore and then had lunch at Duck Fat and yes, we had potatoes fried in duck fat and yes, they rocked.

The four of us went up to Sabbathday Shaker Village which is the only living Shaker community left in the U.S. There are three Shakers living there on a functioning farm – lots of help is outsourced – and living the Shaker life. Our guide, a middle aged lady in culottes, with a white mock turtleneck underneath a gingham checked cotton shirt that she constantly re-adjusted and then tightly wrapped around her stomach. She told us that the last three living Shakers were there. She also told us that Shakers are responsible for creating perma-press and circle-saw technology. I imagine that some of my readers might not have seen a Shaker village, but they are these little pockets of loveliness: hand-made everything, purpose-built structures made for meeting, eating, living amid enormous gardens of flowers, herbs, vegetables and orchards. It’s just too bad they don’t believe in procreation or these villages might be peopled and still functioning rather than becoming museums. That being said, I adore the slogan of Sabbathday Shaker Village: “The Fruitage Will Never Fail.” They were referring to their massive apple orchards, but I think I can apply it to our eight trees as well.

We kept heading north to the Rangeley Lakes Regions to the cabin we rented for a few nights. Rangeley Lake is beautiful, and we got some gorgeous pics to prove it. Even more of a boon, the little cabin was perfect: hokey enough to feel like a country lake cabin and nice enough to feel comfortable. And it was right on the lake, we had coffee down on the shore in the morning. The water was perfect: warm and amazingly clear. There was a wee family of ducks that liked to hang out on our little cove. It was funny to see them scavenge, then get worried they have lost the group. So they would waddle-run over to check on the group before their scavenging led them off again. They are really sort of into group harmony. I liked them an awful lot.

You might be wondering why we chose Rangeley for our little vacay to which I will say “Wilhelm Reich.” And more on that soon.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Well, I Never . . .



I thought we lived in the middle of nowhere. I mean, this photo is civilization for us: look, a wall! But we finally got back from Rangeley, Maine. And that is the middle of the middle of nowhere. And that was just one little spot! Maine is huge! You can get miles from the middle of nowhere into the outer space of nowhere!

No wifi, no cell phone coverage (I don't have one, but our friends do and they had very spotty coverage). It's not like the this part of Maine went off the grid: it was never on the grid. And even though I don't have a cell phone and fast forward through all the commercials on TiVo, it felt really good to be totally out of reach. Oh, and the night sky was amazing.

But I'm back to my Vermont home and more is soon to come.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Maine, Here We Come!

We are taking off for Maine for a coupla days. This will complete my eastern seaboard tour 2010 (except Florida, Georgia and South Carolina), and I couldn't be more thrilled. In the meantime I'll be writing posts so there will be plenty when I'm back.

Oh My Word. Maine. Another state I never thought I would get to!
And off we go . . . .

Some Pictures From The New Camera


Yes, there is a new camera in my life. It takes excellent pictures and is a handy-dandy little thing. So now that I figured out this thingy, here are some long promised and long delayed photos.





If there is one thing you oughta know about me, it's that I love cheese. In all forms. I'm not that picky. But going to Grafton Village and finding their cheese-making place made me super happy. 
God I love cheese.


Watch Hill, Rhode Island. I am salty.


Outside the BBQ joint in Statesville. I'm on to you, Christian. 



Also outside the barbecue place. And possibly one of the best signs ever.

We’re A-Going To The Fair


Christian, Sal and I went down to the Pownal Fair the other day. We don’t do a ton of community-based entertainment, but no one misses the fair, right? It was really kind of lovely. The first thing we saw was a DJ, perhaps in his fifties or sixties. It was hard to place his age with the voluminous, thick black and white beard that enveloped his face and reached towards his belly. To say that this beard was his defining characteristic would be an understatement. To say that this man knew what he was doing with one turntable and a microphone would also be an understatement. He was the Pied Piper of Pownal for the evening. The children of Pownal gathered around him on the dance floor as he played Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas. The kids, obviously dropped off by their parents and perhaps encountering the instruction to “dance” for the first time in their lives, were flinging their small bodies every way possible. When a song stopped, the Beard instructed them to “keep dancing, keep moving.” At another break in songs around 5:15 pm, the Beard announced that they were gonna keep dancing straight until 6:30 pm, a feat that had never been accomplished before. The kids revved up again and began moving: they thought they were about to break a world record. When their energy flagged, the Beard would pass out prizes which was enough to keep the small dancers moving and motivated.

Clearly, this man, the Beard, had a twofold duty: (1) to entertain the children so their parents could walk around without being pestered and (2) to make the same kids as tired as humanly possible. I think he was accomplishing both things handily. Or at least his beard was.

Walking past the DJ, we saw the field where the tractor pull had taken place; trucks were loading up the last of the tractors and taking them home. Tented booths housed bingo, hand-made jewelry, stuffed animals, feather boas, and princess outfits.  The lines for cotton candy, lemon ices and ice cream were starting to stretch out into the walking lanes.

Then, judging from the beeline I made to the booth, I decided to play some bingo. I can’t tell you why, exactly. It was a decision that surprised me as much as it might surprise you. From the other people playing bingo I can say that I am really too young to play seriously. But they had those ink markers and I wanted to use them to stamp on a bingo card. Here are some things I learned about bingo:

It goes way faster than you think it will.
The announcer is really hard to understand.
Someone almost always gets bingo before you.
You will start buying more cards to have more chances at getting bingo even if you don’t really want to.
The prizes at bingo aren’t all that great.

I spent my two dollars – the amount I told myself I could spend – and left. I met up with Christian and Sal on a little grassy knoll with other Pownal families where we all watched the Beard enforce his dancing regime on the kids. And after a spell we left.

And that, friends, is the Pownal Fair for 2010.


Monday, August 2, 2010

What I'm Listening To Now

In Our Talons -- Bowerbirds

Kick Drum Heart -- The Avett Brothers

What Condition My Condition Is In -- Bettye LaVette

Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart -- Whiskeytown

If I Had A Boat -- The Holmes Brothers

Shadow People -- Dr. Dog

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Saturday Bill Murray



Oh Bill, how do you capture these moments so perfectly? This is how my back feels.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Night Driving

My husband is my hero. Not only does he find amazing restaurants everywhere we go, but he drove all night from Hickory, NC to Pownal, VT. (He found a barbecue joint in Statesville, NC that had signed head shots of Ronnie Milsap and James Franco. How about that?)

My tattoo lady is Margaret Moose. I cannot tell you how pleasurable it is to say that I have a tattoo lady. She’s a wee bit older -- maybe in her fifties -- with long salt and pepper hair, glasses that she constantly pushes up, and three lifetimes worth of stories. She has my favorite Hokusai tattooed on her arms. It’s a woodblock print of some octopi lovin’ on a lady, called The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. I don't know what Hokusai thought women really wanted, but it's the first mass-produced cross-species image of sex that I know of. (Feel free to correct me there.) But going to the Mooser, It’s like getting a tattoo from an aunt who dropped out of polite society and now hangs out with other tattooed, pierced and bodily-decorated folk. Her tattoo space also doubles as a gallery, so she has art hanging in the spacious reception room, in opposition to most tattoo parlors that have framed versions of the tattoos you could get, random drawings, and pictures of large-chested women. When you go in the back room, there are paintings on the wall, Japanese paper screens and noh masks on the wall.  She has a table and chairs so if there is a person waiting for their friend or loved one, they can easily sit and chat. The Mooser is a great talker.

I also like Margaret because she does great Japanese tattoos, but there is more. When we met she asked what all tattoo artists ask: what do you want done? I told her I wasn't sure. I wanted cherry blossoms and koi. But I wanted the most beautiful Japanese tattoo she could do and she had my full back to work on it. It didn't phase her. She asked for some time and then drew it straight on my back. I love that she was inventive and open. That she realized I didn't want to dictate every aspect of the tattoo. I worked hard to find one of the best tattooists on the east coast and I wanted to set her free on my back. She was down with that.

From past experience I’ve learned I can sit for a solid three hours, four if I’m fidgety and have to take lots of breaks. For some reason, having food in your tummy makes it easier. The Mooser finished about most of the tattoo and I have just one sitting left! I'll be glad to have it done, but I will miss the visits to her shop.

Partly because it is the aftermath that is crazy. I don’t know if you’ve been tattooed, but there is an adrenaline rush about fifteen to twenty minutes into the tattoo. It hurts less, you feel more relaxed, kind of happy – all of that. Actually, these brain chemicals can be really addictive and that’s why some people keep going back for another tattoo here, and here and there. The Japanese call those sushi tattoos: lots of little pieces that don’t add up to anything. But back to the aftermath. Immediately after the needle is put down, I always feel like I am floating a bit. But then comes the crash, sleep that will not be put off or denied, followed by general crankiness and confusion.

Anyway, Christian saw that I was in no position to drive, despite being pleasantly stupefied. So he drove. And drove. And drove. He drove through the night. The whole night! And we arrived home the next morning. We’re slowly readjusting. We need some good sleep. When I drive at night my depth perception disappears and for some reason I also had double vision that night. I couldn't focus.

I’m back to gently rubbing in Aquaphor into the parts where the Mooser needled in more detail, which means I have a wardrobe of three shirts since the Aquaphor can get messy and sometimes my back is still inky/bleeding the first day or two. It's usually tender for a week or so. Let's all hope for some quick healing. I'll get pictures up shortly.


Wednesday, July 28, 2010

You Can Convince Yourself Of Anything

I’ve said it before: getting married is something I almost never do. I mean it. I’ve been married twice. In almost thirty-four years, it’s only happened twice. The first was as big a to-do as I’m ever gonna do; the second was an surprise elopement. God, I love surprises. For some people, it’s once down the aisle and that’s great. For some it’s none, and that fine too: not everybody wants to be married. For me, second time is the charm.

It’s that second point that I wanted to write a little about. My parents have been housing the physical remains of the first wedding: my heavily beaded gown, pictures, my planning files – those sorts of things. Since my sister was in the wedding – and is no longer in this world – my mom pulled all the photos so I could sort through them and take the ones with my sister back home with me.  So the gown has been sold secondhand, the files have all been tossed (who needs a list of caterers from the outer banks, along with notes on their availability from 2004?). But the pictures . . .  damn.

I’m stopped in my tracks by these pictures. Because – from these pictures – I  can tell that the man I married was not really happy the day he married me. In picture after picture I am giggling, laughing, posing and he is staring at the ground or into the distance. I am constantly smiling at him while he looks away with what I can only describe as a sort of zoned-out stoicism. In many of the photos he has his sunglasses on. There is one picture of the two of us, alone and standing apart with my arm fully stretched out resting on his shoulder. We are literally an arm’s length apart. I remember the moment well. It was right after the ceremony and he turned and asked something along the lines of What did we just do? And I said It will be alright.

When the Big Bridal Book of Photos came from the photographer in 2004, I convinced myself that the querulous man captured in those photos was really happy. I have some of the excuses right here: you see, the sun was in his eyes which explains the sunglasses. He was overcome with emotion and put on a straight, hard face so no one would see how close to crying he really was. But looking at these photos I see clearly that he wasn’t happy.

So how do you live your life knowing you are convincing yourself of something not quite true? Or do you live your life knowing that some things aren’t true, but don’t get bothered about it? Either way, here is the truth in this case: I convinced myself that he wanted to be married to me. He might have convinced himself too.

The pictures tell another story, one worth a million words, some of which are separation, divorce, remarriage.


Monday, July 26, 2010

Ways To Hide From The Heat In North Carolina

Hack reporters do every summer on the local television news:
"With a heat index of 110, how will you beat the heat?"

It's a stupid question. Either you have air conditioning, in which case you use it. Or you do not have air conditioning and you have to go to places that do have it. Like movie theaters or malls. But there is no beating of the heat: Mother Nature makes it damn clear that she is Boss Lady. It is only with the advent of air conditioning that people have thronged to places that were previously considered uninhabitable by civilized society (like, say, Florida).

So, let me be clear. Humans have no say over the heat, humidity and heat index. There is no fight night, no battle between Heat and Humans.

The question should be "With a heat index of 110, where will you hide?"
Besides the aforementioned movie theater and mall,
A dip in any body of water: ocean or pool.
Vast amounts of frozen custard
Sod houses (my mother swears by a good Soddie)

By all means, leave your hidey holes with me. I will keep them safe.

I am the unreliable witness to my own existence