picture of the day


two of my favorite people: rem and carrie, back when they were a compound phrase (rem-and-carrie). wa christmas party that took place in a february of yore. (also must acknowledge the wonderful wally in the background, talking to rem; wally is getting married and living in the bay. he is missed.)

what part is your favorite

a question for myself. my answer? poems for april. i just re-read them. they are like a collection of me. things i love. things i cherish. some of these poems transport me right back to where i was when i first read them. some of them represent the very core of me.

i know this is all precious and twee. i don't care. it's a phrase love affair.

i'm reading heart, you bully, you punk which is a phrase love affair, too. the plot? nothing new. the territory? familiar. the words? they seem to twirl and spin. i'm reading it for the phrasing. and, yeah, okay, the story too.

can you tell i'm procrastinating my long drive home?

my favorite is hitting the stretch between ventura and santa barbara at sunset. purple hills, sherbet sky, darkening to purple sky and invisible hills. so black they disappear.

my vicarious photoblog, opposite directions/circles, matrix

as stated many times before, woodencracker takes the pictures i want to take. meaning... the little bits of slo town i love are always ending up on his blog. i love him for it. they are little snapshots of things that wouldn't mean that much to someone living far away, but for me it's a taste of home. lately you can see a bit of the wall of the art center. the building my company almost moved into (and it hugs chorro creek and is right downtown) and my favorite sushi restaurant (tho the picture doesn't quite capture the deliciousness of this particular restaurant). i gotta get a digital camera. i might ask my dad if i can borrow his for a month.

i'm still in o.c. will attempt the drive north in a few hours. me and millions of others. how long do you think it will be stop-and-go on the 405 at LAX? my money's on 45 minutes. how long will it take me to inch north between ventura and santa barbara? i give it another extra 30.

driving past ventura always always always makes me think of spencer. i hate it when people aren't your friends anymore. :) maybe he was never my "friend." but anyway. years can go by, a decade even, and you will still miss certain people. i miss spencer.

a long time ago, when we were in between being "friends" i think, we kept trying to meet up. i would call when in sb and would just miss him. he'd write and i wouldn't understand that i was supposed to write back (sometimes i think i take "adios" too literally). twice he saw me on the 101, stopped in traffic, amidst hundreds of cars. what are those odds? he said he realized later we were just going in opposite directions. i guess that is right.

other weird things... how people in your life come and go and yet you continue to circle each other. i circle watson. watson cirlces me. he used to park his truck at griswolds and ride his bike into town. i live right off the bike path (right where it ends) and work right behind (and i mean directly) from where he parked his car. yet we never saw each other.

i love this. i hate this. life is such a little dance of electrons. what are we orbiting?

(wow. that was some tangent).

meanwhile, saturday night my dad, janet and i watched the first matrix. yesterday we went to see reloaded. it was my second time to see it and i liked it so much more the second time. almost all of it i liked this time... except for the muddled ending, but i am willing to give them that. i am willing to overlook. i read opinions on kottke.org. i read carsten's take. and after the movie yesterday my dad and i had a great — tho short — talk on the buddhist parallels. just as i am sure certain groups of other people are discussing other parallels.

here is my parallel scoop:

the christians say, "he's jesus; he's jesus."
the literature students say, "it's a quest film; it's a quest film."
the comicbookheads say, "he's superman; he's superman."
buddhists say, "he's me; he's you."

101 to the 405

i love driving. i love early morning drives. this morning did not see me leaving as early as i would have liked, cuz i'm learning that i like sleeping in just about as much as early morning driving. anyhow. i digress. road tunes: tenacious d.: very good for the morning giggle; soundtrack from kissing jessica stein: very good for the early morning sing along (i go through phases, by my current favorite on that is devil may care.... i would love to sing this sometime but don't know what key it is in; so i will call it the key of krall); and the latest from laura love. god, i forgot its name again. i suck. this cd is good good good. it is not cohesive, meaning if you like eating from only one cuisine at a time, it may not be for you. the girl's all over the board. but i love this cd. if you can go for groovy-yodeling-celtic-afrocentric-bluegrass with a lean to the left, run, do not walk, to purchase this.

i'm in oc. there are a million things going on in slo town — beer fest and the blues fest, not to mention housewarming at shane's. but it's a three-day weekend which can equal awesome kickback time with my dad and janet, which might be more rejuvenating than slo-town-comes-alive. or maybe not. :)

i need to return most of my bookbuying purchases from last night. it nearly totalled two hundred smackers (which i didn't mention last night; yeah, there were more books involved than the ones i mentioned). i hang my head in bookbinge shame. maybe i can find a meeting for bookbuyers anonymous.

and the difference between me and macker (i mean besides the bible, the beauty, the brains, and the never cross-posting to two different lists at the same time — the loser) is that he has no shame over the overindulgence of books. well, that and my books are waaaaaay more interesting. ;)

note to kb: start slow. let your blog percolate to the top. it might take a couple months for it to find its rhythm. let it crawl before it walks. you are loved.

note to tissa: get thee to raindogs and pronto. there is no time to waste.

lola from nola

mama's got a brand new blog: .amy

she was the first online person i ever met. five years ago in new orleans. my dad lived in new orleans at the time and when i planned a trip out there she and i made sure to catch dinner. it was a locals-only fish joint with abita brew (.amy's favorite) and a water's edge view of some bayou (or was it lake pontchartrain?).

in the hallowed halls of [dw], she was the queen of sass (before i knew tissa) and held all the boys captive online with her wit and her unabashed love of all hair-care products. somehow this jelled into a male-aphrodesiac that sprinkled magic pixie dust all about her. i forgot why we called her lola at the time. this morphed to lola from nola. but, much as i was coined emdot, she became dot-amy (i take credit for the nickname). read her and weap fellas.

and i was being so good, too

rzzl frzzl books. i keep trying to get away from them. and i already know the answer (library). (but the hours suck). (i need a late-opened library).

a couple of years ago i swore off books.

don't get me wrong, i love them. and our love affair started young and has outlived alla my other relationships. i started my own library at age nine. carefully cataloging all of my favorite tomes, so sure that all of my friends (current and to be, because at a very young age i was still certain that everyone would eventually be my friend) wouldn't want to miss the delicious sentences, the beckoning plots, the circus stanzas.

at twelve i volunteered damn near every day at the public library (and ahem that would make me a genu-wine geek).

and at thirteen i became the snobby reader. meaning, if it didn't catch me in the first two pages, if not the very first paragraph, i couldn't be bothered.

luckily for me that still kept me surrounded by new bits of prose and poetry.

unluckily (disluckily, aluckily, nonluckily) that left many fabulous reads unread, as well.

around the age of 28 i decided my books were sheer clutter and i've spent years now paring down. paring down. and paring down again. until i just put myself on a book ban that lasted damn near two years.

somehow the damned ban's dam (sorry; i'm weak tonight) cracked a fine hairline and over the last year books have been slowly trickling in. nonfiction here. nonfiction there. nonfiction nonfiction nonfiction. fiction. fiction.

now it's become a deluge. i've got three rather good-sized bookcases and the third is going to have to go the way of the printed page instead of the way of the wine rack, as it so had hoped.

today's purchases:
dry and heart, you bully, you punk. see! i couldn't even decide on one.

better than astrology

learn about your true self: the starbucks oracle.

Overheard

marya: it works! we just didn't wait long enough for the search results.
jb: you know what that calls for...
marya: a beer?
jb: it's not noon yet.

eyes on the inside

carsten, who put some blood sweat and tears into it, gives you his take on the matrix...

random, strictly random

read tissa to find out how clever she is and what a catch she's found in nunu. i couldn't agree more. the boy gets points and stars and universal purrs from all females in the galaxy. * life seems to be heating up for the bean queen. * carsten's moment of glory is out for all to see and me and dan went to partake in the matrix mahem this weekend. i thought it was really good. okay, true, a little corny in parts, but overall awesome. we both feel the need to "buy the book" in order to understand/comprehend/ruminate/taste all little philosophies spouted off during the film. * yesterday was my mom's birthday. we went to big sur, and then drove right past it zooming up the coast to santa cruz and even a little further than that. we had to stop when hunger called. lunched at the cash house which was only so so, but there was a cool looking church up the street and i am very bummed that i didn't snap a picture.

i'm the only person i know who wants less web traffic. i'm upset that my site comes up when you type my name in google. oh well. i had four years of semi-autonomy and i do understand the beast on which i publish. sigh. i was just hoping it would pass me by.

i miss everybody. i'd like to go to berlin to visit carst. i'd really like to do that. i'd like to write a book. a travel journal. a song or fifeen. go climb a mountain.

ramble.

the good news is that mercury is leaving its retrograde momentum tomorrow. i can't wait until tomorrow. i'm very tired of the retrograde. i wanna go full speed ahead.

what a week it's been

can i get an exhausted sigh? i knew i could. i am wiped out. pooped. done. dog tired, yo. heh. but there is good news. and the good news is that i have three brand-spankin' new blogs for you to peruse:

what to expect? they are all so cleanly new...

sweet dog k
i say that sweet dog k will be full of her own private obispo... stories of mama cat and her boy, h.b. sweetdogk was my colorado travel pardner and is one of my very best friends. a real sweety in the grand scheme of sweetness. and also one of the bravest people i know. she might shed a tear, but i swear to god she will win in the long run every single time. the girl is made of steel. and yet remains all heart. how nice is that?

random tissa
tissa is sass, sass and more sass. if she sat next to me at work i'm sure my blog would be filled with one overheard after the other. also, expect excellent online shopping tips and stories of her boy nunu who will eventually kill her for spilling all his beans. she is an avid emdot reader — which of course gives her instant credibility. she dances hula and can fold a mean, and i mean supermean, origami crane. or three.

white space oasis
mizz oasis is the hip hop hipster of the great midwest. she lives in the coolest house in town, and has one groovin' life. i might want to switch lives with her. she had a gnarly car crash that included an iced road, a steep embankment and her brand new beetle and lived to tell. we shed a tear for her car. and celebrate that she's here to tell the tales. PLUS, she actually met andrea scher. i told you she was cool.

open access

woodencracker, the sneaky little monkey that he is, was war driving down the streets of san luis and found a lot of wide open spaces. and either my house couldn't be accessed or he was kind enough not to publish it. :)

what i love about wc's site: we share the same san luis. his pics make me smile because they tend to be of my neighborhood or of my haunts. the world is small and slo is but a speck of small.

about blogging... or life in general: from ikat

ultimately i think self-expression should be primarily to please oneself and if someone else sees or reads your work that is irrelevant / aplause is great of course / i loved the moment the first year i lived on the mesa when i found the barrel cactus blooming her bright pink flowers out "in the middle of nowhere" with only me to admire and adore and yet she wd bloom anyway / and i thought yes yes yes — katherine h.

okay, and now it's really not that bad

i love it when you are [simon & garfunkle] weary, feeling low and from out of the wordwork come a bastion of believers-in-you. that is heart-swelling. ;) i feel lucky.

meanwhile, i had a great weekend. i spent mother's day with my father (and plan on spending father's day with my mom). my dad is wise. and sometimes full of shit [grin]. but mostly wise. and he gave me new glasses with which to see my reality. thank god. i needed that. we had a really nice, mellow, kickback weekend. we watched hockey, some boxing, and a snippet of the lakers (he caught more than me). and with janet we watched ice skating (wow. there was a lot of tv time this weekend). we talked a lot. we watched catch me if you can. he made excellent refriend-beans-and-eggs burritos (reminder to self: get the beans recipe; it was awesome. and janet made salmon to die for). we talked more. and more. and more. he's a good dad.

and i feel very thankful to have the parents i have. blessed is actually the word i would use. very blessed. to have both of them.

okay, it's not that bad

my boohooing had one good affect: i got a phone call from katej. i've known kate for five years. she lives in the winterest part of canada. okay, perhaps not the winterest part, but damn near. she's part of [dw], my little cyber-enclave. and tonight she called me to make sure i was okay. and when we hung up — after almost an hour — she said, "now do you have my phone number? just in case...."

we talked and laughed and laughed. and in between the laughter we hit on some real things. like how life actually gets rawer as you get older. and i said how if you let yourself think about it you would cry every day. and not because it is sad so much as it is just tender.

i mentioned that i grew up in a small town...

kate: how big was it?
mar: oh, less than ten.
kate: ten?
mar: ten thousand.
kate: i thought you meant only ten and i would say that is smaller than the town i grew up in which had 150.
mar: that's not a town; it's a neighborhood.
kate: well it was a village; it might only be a hamlet now.

i talked to timothy, too, who also had words of advice.

he said, about my recent struggles... "you know, "x" isn't the same as it was when it first came into your life."

and that is cryptic but it was lightningbolt clear when he said it and it is so true.

and i wonder how many of us go through life clinging to things that aren't what they were when they first came into our lives?

i'm sure i could write that more eloquently, but that is going to have to do for now.

xoxo (for kate, etc),

it was a fucked up week, yo

okay okay, party foul. i know i cannot get away with the "yo" of yore. oh well.

overheard

dan h. was typing...

dan (typing): d a n i l
dan: i can't type worth a damn.
mar: you can't type worth a dan

American Good Intentions

So violent in achieving nonviolence
A journey to the moon and the discovery of kundalini
Spiritual testimonials and presidential promises
Law and order and militant monasticism
Colorful gurus on sale at the A & P
Buddhologists
Rosicrucians
Masons
Zen profundity
Benevolent Protective Order of Elks
Electricity by the megawatts
Potential children discover potential parents
Virginia aristocrats
New York Jews
Mississippi is a meaningless noun
Idaho with its potatoes
Cape Kennedy with its moon
Washington, D.C., with its clean-cut
Chicago with its notorious Mafiosi
Telegraph Avenue sells Himalayan art in Berkeley
Canadian internationalism a cheap copy of the U.S.'s
A franchised Ugandan dictator
Black
Yellow
Crimson
Purple
All are primitive jokes
White cons black into grey
War is an opportune time to create peace
Nationwide respectability fails to include street-trained dogs
Oath of Allegiance violates a sense of humor
Yellow cabs roar through skyscraper canyons
Urban jackals patrol the streets crying red white and blue
Officials entertaining foreign dignitaries
Are busy apologizing for the presence of radical demonstrators

Wide as American inspiration
Profound as American patriotism
Protector of the free world
Praiseworthy
Questionable
Dignity is the object
God save America, our karmic sweet home.

Chogyam Trungpa, May 1972
First Thought Best Thought, pp. 14-15
copyright Diana J. Mukpo

insights on fear [from life of pi]

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know it. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. — Yann Martel, Life of Pi

colorado mini picture fest



allison and her par amour robin, posing amongst the denver buffalo. kristin in the birches. (okay, those aren't birches, but she is a bertsch so it is fun to say). one of the many elk in estes park.



as goes every trip i take to boulder, every single day i find myself at the boulder bookstore. great books, great journals, great dark chocolate bars, and the best americanos in america. well, i think. the other great thing about pearl street are the amazingly good buskers. this trip we got to listen to some great street bluegrass. if you click on the picture you'll see miss kb off to the left.



tulips on pearl street. beds and beds of them. blocks and blocks of them. pictures and pictures of them.

overheard

rem: i hate it when people think they know shit. that is my pet peeve.

vic chesnutt & m. ward... overheard

last night we had the distinct pleasure of seeing vic chesnutt and m. ward in the most intimate concert. about 65 tickets. a room the size of a living room. i sat maybe 5 feet from vic's guitartist. maybe it was 4 feet. it was the second to the last gig of their three-week tour. it was... lucky... for those of us in the audience.

between sets vic mentioned how much he had enjoyed touring with matt and that he was sad it was ending. this was while he and matt were setting up their instruments for the first song.

"Matt, " Vic said, beginning a sentence. "I mean [short pause and then an emphasis] 'M.'"

We cracked up.

And then they talked about who Vic would be touring with next, Andrew Bird.

"Is that his real name?" asked Matt.
"No, it's Andrew Lizard," said Vic.
"I thought it was "A," said a voice from the crowd.

The audience cracked up. And after another very short pause Vic said, "A. Bird."

Maybe you had to be there.

The voice from the crowd was none other than the recently moved out, Dan. And then he was on a roll. I think he shouted out two more quips before Vic's set started and I was a little worried we had a heckler on our hands.

Matt was great. His vocals... so soft and scratchy at the same time. He whispered his thanks into the microphone. He took his guitar from lilty and ditty-ish to driving fast and furious and sloppy strumming. Sometimes sonorous. Sometimes discordant. Mesmerizing.

I wasn't a Vic Chesnutt fan going in. I'd heard his name for years, but had never heard his songs. Glen Starkey, our local music critic wrote a glowing interview — warning the readers that he was an unabashed fan. Still... I didn't go in with huge expectations. But soon I realized that we were watching something really great. At times his set dragged a little, but he still kept the audience. His vocals (probably no one will agree with me) reminded me of Bowie. His style a little Jonathan Richman-ish. Not that I was trying to peg him and his style... but I had both thoughts several times. I bought his latest CD Silver Lake for the song "In My Way, Yes." It is a beautiful song.

the cozy fog... the late spring rain

we had no winter this year. well, technically, yes we went through the months designated as winter. but the weather never seemed to match up. but spring has been wet and sometimes even cold. such as today. heavy, thick clouds that reach the ground. i love it and with absolutely nothing planned this weekend (due to rain cancellation) i'm looking forward to a cozy weekend. i've got a great book to read and lots of new music to listen to.

overheard

jeremiah (jb) was an unknowing ghandi... and blossoming mlk jr at a very early age

jb: i also realized that if my brother threw things at me and i threw them back that he would have a new weapon waiting. so i stopped throwing them back and the war was over.