like a rolling stone

First you've got to get in the shit. And then maybe you can come back and sing it. (Keith Richards, Life)

This quote makes it sound like Keith, at 66, has pulled out of the game. Evidence pro: He wrote an autobiography. (It tolls for thee, Keith Richards.) Evidence contra: he's talking with Mick about getting together for another round. (Though Stones reunions have kind of become like my grandpa's college reunions, in that the number of people who find these events significant is rapidly decreasing.)

My faith in medical science might be overreaching, but I can't help protesting against resignation so early. Writing a book called Life at the age of 66? From Keith Richards, especially--the amount and intensity of what he has survived should promote a sanguine expectation of staying in the shit, at least for another ten years.

Or could it be that he's tapping out? Maybe he's eager for the blanket and slippers.

Socrates asserts that the unexamined life is not worth living. (Most distinctly in the Apology, if you wanted to know.) But does unrestricted examination qualify as a life? He didn't say the "unexamined self", you notice. If you stop being the self you were while you were living, life keeps happening around you. You have to keep up if you're going to examine it. Socrates also said that he only knew that he knew nothing (Republic). Does that not indicate that life well-examined should result in doubts of your examination's validity? ἔμοιγε δόκει.

The smart guys in school used to infuriate me with the way they sat apart from everyone, discussing in mutters and making notes in their Moleskines, responding only to each other's remarks during class discussion. Once satisfied that you're on the right track, you stop looking around, and you're liable to miss things. God help me if I spend all my time on hindsight, at the expense of seeing.

Is it unavoidable that we should live only the first eighty percent of our days, and resign the last twenty percent to examination? Couldn't we do both forever? Or is that privilege reserved for heaven?

the truest sentence you know

i asked K to remind me to write today. it won't just happen on its own. there is prayer, and there is faith, but there is also faithfulness, which is work. i mean to have some discipline.

she reminded me. she cheered for me. i sat down to work in the sun room.

it has been raining for days--a nuisance and a miracle, in this part of the world. the hills look like mountains, when it's raining. it makes a voyage out of going to work at six in the morning, so that it's almost a pleasure.

the sun room is full of tobacco-stained light. the couch is full of pillows and a blanket. fresh off the impetus of K's cheering, i stand in the doorway and think, "how did i get here?" i don't understand.

ernest hemingway said that the cure for writer's block is to write the truest sentence you know. but i have never yet found that sentence. does that mean that i don't know what i believe? how upsetting--i might have writer's block forever.

after an hour or so, as i stared at the retarded grunts i had accomplished, shades fell over my mind. i went to sleep.

i woke up feeling as if years had passed. i woke up staring at my Bible. and i thought, "i need to understand." i can't write until i do understand. i'm going on strike.

there's a verse i read a few months ago in jeremiah that says "let him who boasts boast in this: that he understands and knows me."

writing is the most boastful activity that i know. i'm pretty sure that is why i don't tell people who i am--i feel that i don't deserve it. and i don't understand anything.

i pulled myself off the couch. in the other room, K is sleeping on the other couch. her hair is splayed across the pillow. last night she went to the emergency room, one more time. i don't understand. i shake my fist, though timidly, at God. i don't understand. and i need to. i can't write fiction until i start understanding something about life. this isn't a strike. it's a handicap. i'm crippled, so it doesn't matter if i want to get across the room or across the world.

i've found the truest sentence i know. but it hasn't cured anything except my ambition.

magic words, vol. 10

Those who pride themselves on not being shallow run the risk of drowning in themselves.

according to c. h. spurgeon...

"Twenty miles onward is easier than to go one mile back for the lost evidence."

sometimes prayer is like those souvenir coin machines. you put in your twenty-six cents and the gears start to turn, and the arms and levers begin to pump behind the glass, and you watch as the whole mechanism churns and creaks, and you try for a minute to find where the penny is. but the trick is practiced and ancient, and it hides the penny from view, and with nothing else to look at, you become engrossed in the mechanics, in the shine of the brass wheels, in the size and strength and intricacy of the parts necessary to melt and press just this one, insignificant coin. you start wondering about who invented this technology and why--was it only for entertainment value, or does it ever perform some greater task? was this a source of genuine wonder for people at an earlier point in history? how much of it is really for the sake of pressing the penny, and how much is just for show?

and then the gears stop, and the penny drops out, and you look at its stretched and flattened backside longer than the newly embossed side, because more fascinating than what the penny has become, is comparing that to what it used to be.

why life is funny

it's one of the more obvious statements you can make, and i'd discourage its use. but sometimes the truth of it presses so heavily that you have to either laugh, or scream, or exhale it. life is funny. it's a fucking gut-buster.

not long ago, while i was in the middle of a busy afternoon at work, i learned from a coworker that i had somehow become the center of a really pristine little scandal, as childish and cute and nearly innocuous as a kitten yet to be declawed. it remains an utter mystery to me how this rumor ever got started, since i tend not to confide in coworkers. i traced it from my source to her source, the floor manager, who informed me of the breadth that this scandal had reached--"everybody knows about it," she told me, "everybody's shocked."

"it's not true!" i told her. it was so untrue that i was laughing as i told her.

it's all one, her shrug indicated. "well, everybody thinks it is, and they're shocked."

i learned that her source was the general manager, with whom i have the most spartan of all my work relationships. his speculation was the funniest part of all to me--if i had anything of an intimate nature to confide, i would sooner whisper it in the ear of the geriatric pervert who sits in a camp chair on the sidewalk outside our building, sipping old-fashioneds and listening to smooth jazz while assessing the curvatures of women passing by, than to my high-strung, machinistic GM.

so i enjoyed another hearty laugh and assured her that it wasn't true, at all, and that if she heard the rumor again she should let the tattling parties know the latest and final word on the subject. i thought about telling the other person that the rumored scandal involved--because, of course, there was another person--but i decided against it; i simply hugged it to myself.

upon leaving work, which i did just as the sun was setting, i came around the corner and saw two men working on a boat. this sight was remarkable not only because it was on an urban side street, with no bodies of water larger than a parking lot puddle for thirty miles in any direction, but also because the boat was an arresting hue of turquoise green, and the men were an oddly matched pair--a guy of about forty with strong shoulders and sandy hair, and an overweight Asian guy with protuberant moles on his neck and a certain cast to his eyes that i took to suggest some feebleness of mind. (first impressions are necessarily judgmental.)

i liked the color of the boat, so i let my head turn to admire it as i walked past. of course i smiled politely when i met the eyes of these men working on it. but as i passed, i heard, "hello! excuse me!" i turned around and the feeble-minded Asian man lumbered toward me.

(i can't help it--i thought, "rabbits!" and felt a little bit of panic--blame it on john steinbeck.)

"what's your name?" he asked me. his voice was deep and thick.

"my name's bird," i said. "what's yours?"

"kingsley," he said. in addition to his moles, he seemed to have a few polished wooden claws, as long as my little finger, protruding in a pattern from the base of his neck. i can't explain that one--i didn't want to stare.

but he was staring, like a puppy at a pork chop being dangled over its head. "you're a beautiful woman," he murmured to me.

i almost started to laugh. "thank you," i said. "that's kind of you to say." and then i felt about ready to pop, so i turned around and booked it to my car.

i was trying to explain this to a friend i saw later that day. i said, "life is funny," but when he asked me why, i couldn't tell him--not completely. i couldn't tell him that i have spent my life feeling inconsequential and ugly, and to be confronted with big Lichtensteinian scenes indicating the contrary was absolutely ticklish to me. my insecurities were the backbone of the whole story, the canvas behind the Ben-Day dots; without them, the story was incomplete.

this is what turned life's funny on its edge, that summer evening, when hilarious began to be ironic, when the petals fell, when the rust spots started to show.

how we appear, and how we are treated, are delicate and dangerous things, to be sure. but the things we cannot bring ourselves to tell are the most dangerous of all. they are weapons we can only use on ourselves.

magic words, vol. 9

"What was your mother? A lioness!" (Ezekiel 19.2)

left behind

i can remember this piano recital that i performed in, as a kid. i was probably eleven years old. we had just moved to a new city and i was studying under a teacher whose approach was way more intense than any i'd encountered before. he wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and always a white oxford shirt and pants that appeared as if he'd slept in them. his hair was black and unruly, and his body was lank and sort of unwashed-looking. i can remember seeing the cavity of his pale chest through the nearly transparent shirt, and thinking, "what kind of man is that?" he had two kids, little wisps of black hair and olive skin that better resembled their Taiwanese mother, with whom he invariably bickered if she made a rare appearance. the kids, too, he would maniacally hustle out of the practice room whenever they ventured down to spy on his students.

i can't remember his last name, which i'm sure is what i called him by. i know his first name was david because i would hear my mom discussing him with my dad, as in "bird doesn't like david very much" or "david's students do competitions and get scholarships." she was right in both instances. david's students were mostly little prodigies, the kind that TV movies get made about later, cipher-faced urchins whose fingers ran like those wind-up Matchbox cars, and stopped as abruptly when they were through with their concertos as if they'd run into a wall. and i did not like him.

he always seemed occupied by something outside of my piano lesson. i can remember that he never looked me in the eyes. his arms would windmill broadly as he shouted "more! more!", in direction that i was supposed to play louder, and then he would hunker over like Quasimodo and murmur "less! less!" it seems to me now that he was more occupied with the technique than with the song itself, though i couldn't have said so at the time. i would only have said that piano lessons were a drag and that mozart's fantasia in d minor was not, and was unlikely ever to be, a personal favorite.

fantasia in d minor was the song he elected for me to play at the recital, which meant that not only did i have to be good at it, but i also had to memorize it.

i'd been through dozens of recitals by age eleven. i didn't get stage fright, and if i messed up the performance it was because i got distracted or bored. i liked the applause, and the cookies at the end of the event, and i always brought a book to read during the ages and ages it took to give the rest of the students their moment in front of the camcorders. nonetheless, i dreaded this recital because i really hated playing fantasia in d minor, probably for no other reason than that it was in a minor key and had some tricky runs that david's ungentle persuasion had set me against ever playing correctly. if i got the fingering right, the rhythm was off, and if i fell into the right rhythm, my fingers buckled like a foal's knees. and the pall over the whole affair was that i didn't care, and felt the guilt that i ought to.

the recital was in the small auditorium of a high school or community college. there were dark blue velvet curtains, and the piano was not as grand as the one in david's studio. i sat beside my mom in the back rows, and propped my feet up on the seat in front of me; as the first pocket-sized soloist took the bench, i opened my book. i don't remember anything else--what i had been made to wear, what book i was reading, how i knew when it was my turn, or even setting my fingers to the piano--until i was about sixteen bars into the performance.

i can recall the slow revelation, as i was playing, that this was not only a piece, but a song. i saw that it was a very lyrical and emotional song. without knowing what in it was moving me, or why it never had moved me before, i suddenly felt myself caring about the space between the phrases, about the pressure with which my fingers fell from one note to the next, and wanting urgently to express a "more" and a "less" that had nothing to do with windmilling arms and the inscrutable lenses that shied from a direct gaze. suddenly, i wanted to know what the music was trying to say, and convey its voice faithfully. i wanted to agree with it, to cooperate in making the beautiful thing hidden in the notation i had memorized.

but then came the long, cascading runs; my heart sank. i hadn't cared, and i wasn't worthy to play them right, and they were going to let me down now--justly, because i had let them down. i limped down the network of intervals, shuffled through to the end of the piece, took my perfunctory bow with the browbeaten attitude of the prodigal son, and went back to my seat.

i found out later that the recital had, in fact, been a competition, and that david had told my mom i should have won it if i'd practiced more. as it was, some eight-year-old Taiwanese kid took the scholarship money home. my mom asked why i hadn't practiced more.

i told her, "i did practice. i just don't like him."

also, i wanted to say, i hadn't known there was money riding on my performance. and i hadn't known anything of what mozart or d minor meant, until it was too late.

resting restless

It was a strange day, full of puzzling gifts, occasioned by helpless gratitude. So I had to wander. I woke up just before sunset, not knowing that I'd fallen asleep, and I felt the imperative inside me. I tied on my worn-out shoes and ran from the house.

I walked eastward, up the hill, over the freeway bridge. The sun was turning everything the color of ripe fruit; all the windows looked like stained glass. I smelled about twenty different dinners as I wove between 26th and 28th streets, and I saw the TV sets playing flat faces in flat colors. Across the ravine, the park had turned into Shangri-La, black and mysterious.

I love going out to wander when I know I'll be caught by the twilight. When the day exhales its final breath in a haze of car exhaust and jasmine fragrance, when the lights in the kitchens come on, when I can walk down the yellow line of the street with impunity, when the streets are so quiet you can hear people playing the piano from blocks away.

It turned dark when I turned on 30th Street and headed south, doubling back on my route rather than going in a complete circle, because I wanted to see the same neighborhood from a different angle. The bars were opening up; the back patio of Station Tavern was lit with a string of bulbs and children were playing under the tables; couples were walking their dogs. I saw a church for lease--a Mission-style edifice in white stucco, with green frames on the doors and windows. A jeep passed me, playing ranchero music at a respectful volume. The sky was lapis blue, like the time I got lost in a suburb of Buenos Aires, walking for miles trying to find my uncle's church, certain only that it was somewhere east of where I'd started from. The sky kept getting darker and darker blue, but it never turned black, not even when the stars were all out. And then I found that I'd passed it, and I turned back around and came in through the front door, and one of the girls ran to tell my uncle, who betrayed his relief only through the slight widening of his eyes when he saw me.

When I turned west again on A Street, I saw a square loft built over the roof of a house, and then I was on the terrace of the Cooles' house in Castle Comfort, in Dominica, in the Caribbean, surrounded by palm trees and banana trees, eating stewed breadfruit and tomatoes, smelling the sulfur that bubbled under the hillside as the dormant volcano began to pulse in the evenings, listening to the tambourine-punctuated music of the church at the bottom of the mountain, as their nightly revival meeting gathered steam. I saw Dr. Cooles dipping packaged wafers in his decaffeinated instant coffee, murmuring in assent as Sandra told me things about their life there, and the life they had left behind in England. I saw the faint light illuminating the spines of their thousands of books, ranked along the indoor walls as thickly as the vines that climbed around the house.

And as I came to the crest of the hill and began to make the descent toward 14th Street, I was suddenly in a place that is not past, but somewhere forward. I was on a porch, a wide front porch with low eaves, and I was bending over something--maybe a stereo, because the music from Buena Vista Social Club was playing. I had a white dress, like the one I tried on yesterday in the store, and my hair was tied up in the same scarf I was wearing, and there were earrings dangling under it like unripe fruit. There was light inside the house, and I was waiting for someone to come out, to join there me on the porch. I stood up and looked inside to see if someone was coming yet.

I love walking over the freeway at dusk, or at night. Any bridge is a good place when the sun goes down. It's a place to be still and absorb the motion of something else. I remember the Williamsburg Bridge at dusk, and also the Pont Alexandre III. No matter where I am, or where I am in my head, a bridge at nightfall feels like home. I can't, for the life of me, tell you why.

Something wonderful must be happening tonight, because in my apartment building courtyard, someone is playing the harmonica.

defouler

She wanted to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, but it's too early to tell. She asked if the baby was tall. The technicians laughed, and said we won't know that for a long time. M asked if the father was tall. She said, yes, he was. Then, said M, it's a good chance that the baby will be tall. And we were all quiet, watching the strange, unlikely wink of a pinpoint on the screen, which the tech told us was the baby's heartbeat.

Francine's baby is ten weeks old. Do people count the age in utero? Like, three months from the baby's birth, will he be a year old? Or she...will she be a year and nine months on her first birthday? I don't know. I haven't thought much about things like this. M was trying to translate words like "effaced" and "diaphragm" and "internal os " into French, and I was sitting by, trying to picture them in English and coming up with nothing.

I've never cared. Women get pregnant, I watch them blow up and wear cute clothes, I go to their parties and watch them unwrap more cute clothes, and then I get their birth announcements in the mail. They bring the babies to church and show them around--I admire some, I've worshipped at least one, and most of them I am polite toward.

But now there's this little brown baby whose life I am a little bit responsible for. Who knows what will happen a few months down the road, but for the present, I haltingly translated it out of the abortion clinic and into an ultrasound machine. Here's something spooky for you--the projected due date is my birthday.

My French-speaking skills are best personified as Quasimodo. Looking at the butterfly-wingbeat improbably representing the baby's heart, I thought how altogether absurd it is that my crippled language skills allowed us to see it.

I didn't mean to get into this drama, this Lifetime TV special. I just wanted to practice French, to regain the sophomore-level fluency that I'd attained a few years ago. Meeting with Francine a couple times a month was cheaper than taking classes somewhere, and I thought it might have the side benefit of letting her get out from time to time and help her feel a little more at home in America.

I bought her a coat for Christmas and felt uncomfortable about being viewed as some kind of patron, so I asked her to pray for me about my difficulties at work. She grabbed my hand in the car and lofted an oration that could have taken the unclean spirits out of Benny Hinn himself.

Two days later, my manager at work stopped treating me bad.

Two months later, Francine asked if I could take her to the hospital. On the way there, she pulled out the paperwork with a Planned Parenthood logo stamped on the top.

She met some guy "en route"--just some nobody that she ran into at a bus stop or on a corner, while she was taking a walk. "Prendre l'air" is the phrase she used, "decouvrir la vie un peu." Taking the air, rediscovering life a little. They went to a restaurant, then they went to a hotel. His name was Mike, and he was black. That's all she knows. She's never seen him since and doesn't care to. It wasn't a big deal, she said. It was a little "defouler." It relaxes one, it's amusing. It's just a little fooling around.

She called me while I was at my friend's birthday party last weekend, saying she was in pain and wanted to go to the hospital right then. I didn't know if she meant go back to the abortion clinic, or if she needed the emergency room, or if she was just being emotional. I went into the bathroom and collapsed on the floor, sobbing strange, unlikely tears that came as heavy and cleansing as vomit. I can't do this, I said. I'm completely alone and I don't know what to do and I can't even talk to her about what she wants to do. I can't shuffle this responsibility off on anybody, and I can't just drop it, either. I came out and my friend, whose birthday it was, began to comfort me and exhort me. She said, you can do this, you have everything you need in Christ. And, like Francine, I sucked it up and said, you're right. I can.

Do we all do this, or is it just me? Just blunder into other people's lives for our own amusement, our own enrichment, thinking we'll give a little to them of what they need and take a little of what we want. A little "defouler" that unexpectedly leads to "le coeur qui bat", the beating heart. My French is improving, no question.

Francine was afraid to have this baby when she first told me about it. "I'm a refugee, I have no job, I have no money, how can I have a baby?" she said to me, over and over. But today, while we were talking with the counselor at the pregnancy center, she smiled with more warmth and vulnerability than I've ever seen her show. She wanted most of all to have a picture of the baby. They gave her the ultrasound photos and asked, "Who are you going to show them to, first?" She handed them to me and said, "Á toi."

I'm irresponsible, I'm barely making any money, I can barely get on time to the places I'm supposed to be, I forget to call and show up. I didn't plan on this. I don't feel ready for this kind of commitment.

How can I be the kind of friend this woman needs?

miracle chains

the fall, which led to the garden, which led to a few new friends, which led to more gardens, which led to a niche at my workplace, which led to writing, which was an answer to prayer, which led to unexpected encouragement, which might lead who knows where, which leads to faith.

the fall, which led to depression, which led to fear, which led to courage, which led to hurt, which led to prayer, which led to despondency, which led to ill health, which led again to prayer, which led to the dream (i suppose), which led to fear of a different kind, which led to prayer, which led to conviction, which led to dependency, which leads to faith, which might lead who knows where.

effusion

there is here kind of a lot for you to dig, today.

today represents several months--at least since last summer, when things began to change. when things began to take an organic shape independent of my plans. kind of like taking a ruined espalier off a tree and letting it do its thing. the tree might not be straight or symmetrical but it gets a gnarly shape that sets it apart from all the others.

what brings me to this fever pitch of excitement is two things. one is that i've started writing in a semi-official capacity for my place of business. you can find the link to it here, if you want to have a look.

well, really what makes me excited is that a coworker saw me typing away at the company blog and blurted, "you're a great writer." nobody told her to say that. i didn't even know she was reading it. she's not one of my teachers or one of my parents.

i said the worst possible thing in response--"no. really?" i sounded like i was fishing for more compliments. but i was really stunned to hear her say it. it was almost like hearing a guy say "i love you."

which brings me to my second reason for excitement.

...no, no. no.

what happened was that last night i had this dream wherein i was set upon by a couple of demons in the form of rabid animals, one on either side of my bed. in my dream i was watching myself over my bed. they bit my neck and my foot, and it really hurt, and in my dream i thought, "these are demons and i have to rebuke them in the name of Jesus." this is not something i think about often, or ever. i rebuked them and they let go, but i was really scared to stay asleep so i launched myself out of the dream, which, if you've never tried it, is a lot like swimming to the surface from very deep under water. i talked to my housemate about it and we prayed together for a little while, because i was really kind of terrified to go back to sleep. it was a strange war of skeptical reason and holy fear--i didn't want to make a big melodramatic deal of the whole thing, but i really didn't want to go back to sleep. i also didn't want to pretend i'm stronger than i am, and not ask for help.

as we prayed, i got a pretty strong sense that the dream had to do with my addictive behavior toward love.

there have been two occasions in my life--one a few years ago, one very recent--that my heart got a little broken. in both cases, the breakage was not the guy's fault at all--it was mine. neither guy asked for it, neither guy hurt me on purpose. in fact, they were both polite and respectful to an unlikely extreme, especially considering their own personal addictions.

but there's something in me that absolutely splintered over both of them, in spite of all my reasoning and efforts at good humor and good faith. i haven't figured out what that is yet. nor have i figured out why it took that terrifying dream to help me out of the most recent heartbreak. it's just that when i prayed along those lines--for release from the occupying pain of those relationships--i felt peaceful enough to go back to sleep. and when i woke up this morning, i felt clean again, for the first time since the end of last summer.

what shall we say in response to these things? if God is for us, who can be against us?

not even we can be against us.

i feel all giddy, like a second-grader on the first day of school. even in the sordidness of the last few months, there have been so many good things God has wrought--involvement with some groovy social activists, playing in the dirt with community gardeners, weird and wonderful friends emerging out of unexpected corners, small children, old people, sunsets, dances, conversations, ideas, connections. adventures, i'm saying! those are my absolute favorite, and ever since i took off the espaliers, i am not even lying, every damn day has been an adventure. not always a good one, but still--what a killer way to live. whose idea was this?

it wasn't mine. i had plans.

love resists being the object of addiction. it won't let you lean too heavily for too long--it pushes you back to stand on your own feet. it makes you use your own lungs to breathe, and your own eyes to see. what good are we when we're absorbed in someone else? people may love being worshiped, but nobody really loves the person who worships them. only God is that magnanimous. he's the only one who can afford to be. he can make us fit to receive just what we'd have always wanted if we'd known it existed.