So this is what 8 hours a day feels like

Squash blossom cephalopod
I got you in my feelers

4th of July

earthpig and ratmonkey on tour in bolinas

Earthpig and Ratmonkey

"So I guess you'll have to marry the Ratmonkey,” Stevo said with resignation in his voice.” As with anything concerning me, this blog would not be complete without the frame of reference my rat friend provides. Ratmonkey and Earthpig, two great friends and explorers. Moonwatchers and shuffle race champions. Helen and I found one another and talked all through a night and into the next morning over eight
years ago. We drove my little VW pickup to see the sun rise on a hill in Soquel and it looked like a dancing egg so we danced along to the slow dawn and knew without thinking that we would find a lot of sunrises together. Last weekend we ran into an old friend in Aptos Natural Foods, and were pleased with how we seemed. There was no need for him to ask if we still saw each other.

The shuffle

End of this month and time to shuffle my things once again. Moving into a real house where I'm going to commit to being in one place for one year and pay a deposit and loll around on clean vintage couches and stretch on gleaming hardwood floors. There is a garden and there are bulk grains to share and a casual dinner making rotation. Step one to being a real person is a real place to live. Looking for real life all the time, and ready for a closet/bed/kitchen/garden. What luxuries. Although I do hate the moving shuffle because it reminds me how ornery I'm getting in my old age.

Take chai?

Tea heavy with cardamom, milk and honey. It is summertime in Oakland, and this neighborhood is covered in roses that bloom in exaggeration of themselves. I'm selling blueberries for a living again, loading up the little rabbit with all the business of the farmers' market and entertaining visions of blueberry fairies for children and their parents.

Warehouse

This time it’s a warehouse in East Oakland. Between the BART train and the cargo train, there are old tracks as a physical memory of how this place used to turn out steam trains and they run right through my kitchen. This time I knew from the beginning I couldn’t make it work, that seven blocks from the BART at midnight was too many and too deserted for me and my handbag to be walking. I knew that the roads would yield too many flat tires for my bike and found the kitchen’s as dirty as the house I escaped in January. I am filled with tears three nights in a row breaking at the same time, falling into bed with my lover who asks me what is wrong and knows at the same time and a refrain that does not please me, “Is there something I can do for you?”

I want, desperately, I say, to live with Travis and Sunshine and it is light at the end of the tunnel possible and now it is established, we will move at the end of the month. It is a year commitment that I am more than ready to commit to it is a year of settling that I am looking forward to. I want to have a garden where I get to see plants I planted grow.

China

4 March 2008

You are in China, and it is obvious from the very border, exploding with the industrious mega-growth gripping a nation which is unfathomably big. 15-story buildings at every moment of construction. The border officials ask you if you speak Chinese with an air of expectancy. The rifle through passports as if they were in some way suspect, you suppress a cough and surreptitiously wipe snot away from your nose - you have already lied on the questionnaire about your proximity to birds in Northern Laos and whether you are suffering from these symptoms. Eventually you are stamped with the first of the extraordinary red ink and waved back on the city bus, minus the two Russians who had been the only other Western travelers on your bus from Oudomxay, Laos.

The immediate and overwhelming changes in the landscape are dominated by sweeping vistas and scale of agriculture, both enormous and impressive. The road is much better and superhighway is in the works across the way. A man will slide into the seat next to you for a very brief while, but still long enough to smoke 5 cigarettes.

Out the window young women are wearing fake Gucci hot pants and boots, rhinestones sparkling. They walk arm in arm past tractor-engine wooden carts piled high with yellow watermelons. Everything is in Chinese, except irrelevant and strange translations on advertising banners.

The landscape grows more spectacular, lush above the Mekong River. It is dark on arrival to Jinghong, which is first announced by a neon-lit bridge - lights running up and down the towers, a rainbow spectrum on the sides. Unlike the previous week spent in the isolated village of Muang Noi, the lights will not shut off at 9:00 pm with a sputtering of the generator. You are already certain the China will offer itself as the most psychedelic of countries on your trip to Asia.

Off the bus and bags dumped unceremoniously into a white hotel room you are half-starved and looking for the first real meal of the day after 7:30 am sandwiches at the bus station. Turn left on a cutty alleyway and look inside to see a a young girl being instructed in a traditional flute with a gourd as its base. To the right is a stadium with lights fully blasting and heading back to the main road when 2 loud explosions ring out. You drop and grab your lover as if in reaction to gun shots. It is a moment before realizing it is the beginning of an intense display of fireworks directly overhead. Professional pyrotechnics detonate very close to the surface of the ground and are the most awesome you've ever seen, brilliantly colored in the warm black of the night. "Because China invented that shit," you'll say at the dramatic conclusion.