spiritual awakening

Current mood:pensive-ility

so, i've been going to these AA meetings ...

sounds like the setup of some crazy joke, right? except its not funny. i've been to three in the past week, which is way more than i ever thought i would go to in my life. i mean, if i could figure out how to manifest negatives in my experiences, i would say that that is about 50 more than i ever expected to go to in my life. but there's this reason, right? a very very good reason. which is also the same reason that i will probably find myself at many more meetings. but that's not the point here. because that's none of your business.

the point is that i was surprised, shocked even, to realize that i was having a visceral reaction to the idea of AA based on the way a fucked up drunk man treated me thirty years ago. i mean, sure, that man was my father, and he got plenty of mileage in my life, even though he bailed from the moving car 24 years ago, only to be heard from when he disputed everyone's general idea that he should pay this thing called "child support." so, walking into the first meeting was like asking to be punched in the gut. which it was, in a way. and walking into the second and third meetings were like getting this special insight into why you were punched in the gut in the first place.

because suddenly i have this idea of what my father was going through, and i suddenly understand why he became what he became. i still cannot forgive him, though, for the abuse he perpetrated after he found jesus mixed up in his sobriety cocktail. mental manipulation became his favorite toy. but i can understand a little, now, how he got that way. why he got that way. it makes sense.

he chose one doctrine over another, one way of life over another one that was most certainly killing him, grinding him up whole. but the transformation couldn't erase the fact that he was, generally, not a very nice man.

sheesh.

i feel bitter tonight, and tired. so perhaps i'd best leave these thoughts for another day. except that i found his pictures on flickr, pictures my sister told me were up there so long ago. he's still working to help his fellow alcoholics give all of their responsibility over to a higher power. but i was surprised how little i felt, looking at current pictures of this man who had, really, done so much to make me the survivor i am today. and then i looked closer at one image, one where he is wearing short sleeves, lounging behind a bleached blonde with a plastered smile. on his arm he has a tattoo. a triangle in a circle, the emblem of alcoholic's anonymous.

branded indeed.

so this institution, this group of meetings that declares itself free from association with scandal, movements or political affiliation, is forever tied up in my head with my own particular brand of trauma, even when i feel most distanced from that trauma. i don't doubt that it does good things for some people who need it. it's doing good right now. but i'll have to pass on being anything more than chaperon, ally, tourist.

it's the very most i can do.

passing zone ends

Current mood: contemplative

ugh.

i am sitting in the bookstore, after hours, and i am experiencing crazy culture shock from the fact that last week i was in poland. in fact, last week at this exact time i was on a plane. coming back. and when the plane landed at SFO, the one polish family that had come all the way from warsaw with me began to applaud. and it saddened me, the quiet that met their applause. because in poland, when the plane lands, and the voice comes on to say that you made it safely, the people on the plane clap for those who have worked so hard to get us there alive. but in this country, no.

so, the applause started, enthusiastic and unintimidated, and quickly died. and we trundled the rest of the way to the gate in silence, waiting for the seatbelt light to go out, so we could jump up and run away as fast as we possibly could.

and i was there for only two weeks this time, but got to experience the polish version of car culture, which is ridiculous and insane. how can you be sure that you won't crash and die when you pass that truck at 150 km/hour in a blind turn? you can't, and that tells me something, too.

and basia brought us to the jewish cemetery in her village of okuniew, 10 minutes outside of central warsaw. well, it HAD been a cemetery, but vandalized over the years, so our quiet visit entailed sighs and gasps as we tripped over the remnants of headstones, piled cut rocks with the suggestion of hebrew tapped into their surfaces. fucked up and haunted. scary with heaviness, with all that had happened there. and the mosquitoes took out their revenge on my legs, bites that became mutant lumps that have yet to fade.

and marysha told us about our great uncle, and the circumstances that kept him from dachau. the chances and seconds and bits of luck that saved his life, and how the lives of others were not so lucky.

and then there was the drunken priest, and the showers that disappeared in a storm of jackhammers, and the chapel of skulls, and the woman who saved us with blankets on her floors, and the black market, not so black anymore, and the spiders as big as your head. and the vodka. and being in a car, really, feeling so removed from it all. sigh.

it was laden, this trip, dripping with discoveries, weighed down by the past of so many wars. and now i am home, and still adjusting. it took me days to realize that i could stop concentrating on the words i heard around me, that i automatically understood them. but i am ready to go back, so soon. really.

there is a time limit on all that we do. we are not moving fast enough.

Currently reading: The Scar By China Mieville Release date: 29 June, 2004

goodbye, blue monday

i am sitting in the back room of modern times, the front door locked, occasionally disturbed by the rattling of confused shoppers who don't realize we close early on sundays and are trying as hard as they can to get in. i don't usually work on sundays, so i am confused as well. and it is still sunny out, which puts my head into a tailspin, just prior to crashing.
i am trying to remember how to not be so insular, how to spread myself out like tentacles and actually pay attention to other peoples' lives. i am tired. and i forget how to be a good friend.
i forget how to be a friend at all.
i feel like there are only so many times you can tell people to be patient, to hang in there, that i still love the hell out of them, that i'm just a little disconnected, just a little ... um ... anti-social.
completely anti-sociality.
social-ness?
whatever it is, i appear to be against it.
so when i make a phone call now, my heart leaps into my chest, and i am almost afraid. of what? huh?
that someone will pick up and still care about me?
or that they won't.
and my jaw buzzes with healing, as i finally got some damn health insurance to deal with all the things that are very wrong with my mouth. dental-wise, that is. just the other day, a very small lady told me about growing up in san jose as she shoved a squealing sonic something-or-other under my gums until my very short nails almost tore up the insides of my palms with the grasping reaction to the pain. it was the kind of pain that got worse as it went on, strangely so. at the end she had to periodically distract me with the regular ol' pointy scraper thing before delving back in with the squealy gum-shredder.
i know anyone bored enough to read this far is absolutely cringing by now.
but you're hearing this from the girl that has had so much dental work that i almost fell asleep during my first root canal.
for reals.
and this is why, despite my dedication to the idea of abstaining, i have been drinking a lot the past few days. fucked up, yeah. but when aspirin/ibuprofen produces the kind of allergic reaction that sends me to general in the middle of the night, gasping for air, i take my painkillers where i can. anandi gave me Tylenol with codeine, but i am wary of it, and of the seeming flexibility of my allergic reactions.
what's the point of all this?
guess i'm just tired of drinking alone.
so maybe i'm ready to stop with the moping, and the hiding. maybe i will pick up if you call, and will actually take you up on the invitation to go drinking in the park because it is one of those rare times when san francisco nights actually mimic the warm summer nights of where i am from. originally.
maybe i really do love you. even if i don't show it. not nearly at all.
yes.

full tilt nerd ... alert! alert!

Current mood:friendly

my sweet jesus, why did no one tell me that the san franciso public library has thousands of local historical photographs ACTUALLY ONLINE. shit, i just did a search for "women sewing" and got the most amazing avalanche of images. i can't stop looking through them. this is dangerous; pandering, as it does, to all my nerdiest desires. photography and history and san francisco. sigh.

like the time that annie and i went to the SFMOMA to see the exhibit of photography from just after the 1906 earthquake. it seems that that was a banner time for fledgling photographers, as the science was not completely ... um ... scientific yet, and suddenly there was a ridiculous need for documentation. for us, total crazy head-exploding nerdiness. a very short woman had to keep following us around to warn us, again and again, not to touch the glass, yes, even if it is glass over the photograph and not the actual photograph. and a second later we would scream, "look! they totally dodged the sun's rays into the shot! it's unreal! and the sun looks ridiculously big!" then, touch touch, yell yell, waah. and a second later ...

but that's how i found out about the captive airship, which i still cannot believe actually existed. it makes me drool, just a little bit. George Lawrence, a photographer from Chicago, figured out a way to send his camera into the sky, using balloons and kites and piano wire and some sort of remote shutter trigger. he had perfected this method before the 1906 quake hit san francisco, and leapt into action to document the wreckage. It was a big contraption, and one wonders how it was able to stay in the air. but the most fascinating thing about it is that the prints are contact prints, the negatives put to paper to make an image, no enlargements required. the detail is amazing. drool.

you can google "captive airship" and see some of the images, but nothing compares to seeing the prints up close and, yes, touching the glass, as if the wonder requires touch to be complete.

and if you wanna join in the local photographic orgy, check it out

Currently listening: Rock and Roll Music By Elvis Costello Release date: 01 May, 2007

if you think you're it ...

jesus.

it's been a long time since i've taken stock of where i am. i didn't even have a welcome-home party when i got back to san francisco. that seems wrong to me, as if i am not really here without that ridiculously-important ritual. richard and i were joking today about how i should have one when i'm ready, even if it's in a year. some people will not have even realized that i've been here the whole time, so when i say that i got home in march, they will just nod and say welcome back.
maybe i was just afraid that no one would show up.
it's really hard for me to come to terms with some aspects of my life here in san francisco. such as the friends that i've lost. even if they are still in some semblance of my life, they are far away. even if they live down the street, i can't touch them. it feels wrong, bad, unfixable. and then there are the ways that i cut myself off from people, from everyone. i've been cranky and isolated and unreachable, by choice. i've been sick with the flu and sick with hermit-y fetal-positions.
right now i am sitting in a closed and locked bookstore, listening to the luxurious 5-disc CD changer (and it DOES feel luxurious. what is an ipod, anyway?) and refusing to budge. there is something romantic and calming about having this much access to books, but in some ways it makes me kind of crazy with wanting. sigh.
but i can hear every word of what people say as they pass by the locked door. that glass wall seems to amplify. laughing upwardly-mobile-types drink their way past to the next bar, walking out of the corner store when they don't have the organic type of american spirits, as the badass woman who works there barely looks at their exit, but yells "have a nice night! goodbye!" after me as i leave, as if she could not possibly send me enough happy welcome-ness. i could still hear her a few doors down.
so, whatever. "i'm lonely as can be..." the beatles sing. kimya dawson says she needs more time to think. "if i wanna leave you better let me go ... "liz phair demands. and i nod and keep typing

just a short, sweet primal scream.

ugh.

for some reason my head feels like a brick this morning. maybe its the drambouie. i was left alone in the house last night with a bottle of the thick sweet stuff, feeling a little more sad than there was reason for. bad combination.

but i have been sad a lot lately. i'm leaving here in three weeks. got my ticket two days ago, just before we were told that my mom's surgery couldn't happen until mere days before my flight and that she wouldn't be getting out of the hospital until the very day i was going. fuck.

so, part of the reason that i came here is up in smoke, and now we have to try to get someone else to commit to taking care of her when she goes into the hospital in march.

any takers?

rock on, maiden lane

a week ago my mom and i went down to bridgeport, CT, about a two hour drive away, to pay our respects to her father's grave, and to see if we could figure out where he used to live. as a young priest who had recently emigrated to the US, he had parishes in new york, new jersey, chicago, and, finally, bridgeport, an industry town that used to prompt me and my siblings, on the occasions that we passed through on our way to new york city, to plug our noises and yell about the oh how stinky. it doesn't smell like that anymore, or at least not that i notice. maybe almost ten years of exposure to that special san francisco sewage smell has inured me to such things.

or maybe it's the development. we learned about that when we decided to check out maiden lane first, the address in my grandfather's early bridgeport diaries. after a near-comical turn of events, in which our car was caught on the wrong side of a police barricade, a grumpy cop told us we were going the wrong way. he turned us back in the other direction, towards downtown, and we turned our map upside down. a few blocks later we found ourselves on a straight shot to sky scrapers, the immediate area around us consisting of fenced off weeds and trash, one remaining house crumbling amidst the wild growth on each side of the road. our directions had us befuddled (damn you, google maps!) so we turned right. the wrong way. after thirty blocks or so we realized it was the wrong way. so we turned around, again. crossing back over the main street, we landed on a spit of land, ending in a large, industrial wasteland of some sort or another. the waste of weeds and fence grew up all around. the only street around ironically named california. maiden lane seemed to have disappeared.

on returning home, after an amazing tour of my mother's old neighborhoods, i wrote the city of bridgeport to find out what the hell. i was told: "This section of the Steel Point Peninsula is the site of a Major Development project called Steel Point. Any homes in the area were leveled to make way for the development project ... you will see Maiden Lane has been cleared." apparently completely. there is no evidence that there was ever a street there.

we have since found out that while grandpa jacob lived on maiden lane, his church was on that very same california street, around the corner. it seems everything there has been torn down, as well, since all we found was ramshackle boat clubs and shacks. added to the surprise we got in nearby stepney, where we found one of my mother's childhood homes is now a vacant, overgrown field with a no trespassing sign hanging from an ineffectual gate, it kind of made us more than sad.

yeah, i know, been a long time. things get torn down. but i guess we're feeling the weight of having put off this research until now. if we had gone to poland just a little bit earlier, we could have met some of my mother's cousins before they died. if we had started looking into my grandfather earlier, we may have been able to see where he once lived. hell, if we had looked into family history back when we lived on the same coast as each other, we may have been able to talk to my great aunts and uncles before they passed away. not that they would have said much. they were known for being taciturn.

this is all in my brain because today we went back to bridgeport and spent four hours in the history room of the bridgeport library, trying to find the exact timeline of jacob's residences, and to fill in some holes in my mother's memory. those history rooms are amazing, awe-inspiring things. aside from finding the addresses and neighbors and best friends of my grandfather, i was able to get copies of ship's manifests, listing the departure and arrival of so many of my relatives. my great-grandfather was only 16 when he made the long sea voyage to new york city. we haven't figured out, yet, how he met my great-grandmother. or even how my grandfather met my grandmother. he, like my own father, was married once before, to a volatile woman who threw his clothes out the window. my grandmother was born in america, brought back to poland before she could talk, and moved back to the US again at the age of 22. somehow their paths crossed.

we have shreds of evidence. ideas of how they felt about each other, how long they knew each other. like the picture of my grandparents, standing in the side yard of the house in stepney that has now been returned to nature. there is a note on the back, in his hand, that loosely translates to "me and my old lady." we're beginning to realize the depths of his sense of humor. that picture has been to poland and back. he sent it to his brother, in torun, poland, who's daughter gave it back to us. crazy.

so, maiden lane is gone. and the house on garder road is gone. and so many relatives are no longer around. and the history room can only tell us so much. not to mention that i only have about 6 weeks to help my mom with this and all the other things i'm here to help her with. she goes in for surgery soon. and there are still so many things to get in boxes.

but it helps, this research. we're learning so much. because while we're researching the history of others, we're writing her story. and maybe mine.

in the meantime, tomorrow is my day off, to hang out by myself and write letters and get my head together. i've only had one of these since i've been here, and i ended up squandering that on episodes of laying about, squooshed between bouts of doing things for my mother. and i'm not counting the three days i was wicked sick, and just lay, immobile, watching the first season of 24. awfully entrancing piece of propaganda, that 24. so now i'm going to get the fuck off this computer and go do something completely unproductive, to celebrate. hello, playstation.

jeeeezus christ ... whatever

Current mood: drunky-face

i'm currently sitting in the dining room of my mom's house, a wee bit drunk, thinking about time and space. like how this town feels almost like sandpaper on my skin, but also not. i was talking to my oldest friend in the world a few days ago, trying to explain our difference of opinion about this place. and i realized the heart of the difference. he lived here as an adult, as a person with a job and a car and a girlfriend that wasn't me, able to drink in all of the bars that card too strictly to let the likes of us in a few years before. i left this place an 18 year old bag of emotion and fear, very rarely to return. and i realized the problem i have with this here and now stems from that. i almost don't know who the hell i am here, as if the person i was erases the person i am, as if the emotion and angst and unbridled joy and deepest of sadnesses of the past negate the experiences i've had afterwards the minute i cross the town lines. does that make sense? i hope so. at the very least, it does to me.

so it's important, to me, that he is here, this oldest friend in the world, a person who knows me inside and out, who can see through all the bullshit i spin, but also knows when the hell i am dead dead serious. it's important to have someone that is so close so nearby. he didn't understand, at first, when i was trying to explain this phenomenon. he said, "but everyone you knew is pretty much gone. close by, yes, but not where they were. the people are not the same, so what is the problem?" but it's not the people. it's the physical space that sets me back. granted, the people make a slight difference. but i know now that even if the buildings were switched all around, even with graves street gentrified instead of full of house parties, even with joe's pizza so overrun with customers, and even with downtown even more crowded with boutiques, this place does something to me. it takes me back, to a place i'm not sure i want to be.

but, really everything is ok. i'm just glad to put a diagnosis, of sorts, to the uneasiness i have about this place. and i'm overjoyed that there is someone here to hold my hand, to take me for drinks, and to tell me to stop being so damn emotional. that it's all going to be ok, after all.

old friends are very often the best.

new occupation = feeling sorry for myself

Current mood: foggy and tumbled

now if only someone would really pay me for it.

it's almost one am, and i'm feeling that sort of frustrated that seems like invisible arms firmly squeezing your appendages, so even flailing about to get rid of that excess energy is difficult work. somehow i can't get warm, either. the heat's on, i'm wearing so many layers that it may explain my inability to flail about, and i even found my hat.

guess i shouldn't have opened that last beer.

i spent the evening cleaning slides of my parents' honeymoon. my photographic obsessions have collided with my need to save every last bit of history having to do with me or anyone i've ever been affiliated with. so, cleaning dirty, thirty-year-old slides, and putting them in archival sleeves. i have a bit of a fixation on these slides. as a young'un, my mom asked us please not to mess with them. i remember that clearly, mostly because forbidden things are the most interesting. i assumed, when i got to the age that i needed to formulate an explanation, that it was because they are fragile, and young fingers like to touch everything they can. now i think she said such things to spare us the spectacle of seeing my most-probably-naked father, reclining, wrapped in a sheet, holding a can of budweiser on his bare belly. such is the stuff of nightmares.

my father holds an almost mythic position in my mind at this point. the mythic position of a hydra, that is. or a murderous, gigantic cyclops. i haven't set eyes on the man for something like 23 years, a fact that i never cry over. i almost wish i had never known him. but when i come across him in images, like i have so often tonight, i experience a shock of recognition and disappointment that throws me. it's almost like seeing someone in person that you have grown used to through the mediated images of television or film. up close, they are just people. and usually surprisingly short.

pictures of my father as a young man are even more shocking. clean cut, in suit and tie, overcoat thrown over his arm, pipe clenched in his teeth, he seems so unlike the small bit of actual person that i remember. and most definitely not the person my mind and so many years of absence have redefined him to be. how can that be the same person? what the fuck's going on here?

i get the added shock, now, of knowing that one of the boxes of slides i cleaned are actually shots of him with his first wife, in somewhere like morocco. i don't know if i knew before that my mother was his second wife. perhaps. but when she told me a few weeks ago, maybe for the second or third time, it totally surprised me. my memory is not what it once was, but i'm pretty sure i didn't know that.

i guess the marriage didn't last long, and the divorce was quick. but it adds fuel to the fire of that surprise perception, that my father was (is) just a guy. a really, really fucked up guy.

these are the thoughts running crazy circles around my head tonight, as i wander back and forth, frustrated by, well, everything. i'm afraid the winter has gotten to me, despite its persistence in being a surprisingly "warm" winter. snow has fallen exactly twice in the month and a half that i've been here, the first time dusting the air for about a half hour, the second time calmly falling for hours, with only a thin layer of white on the highest points of things to show for it.

nothing is really as it is supposed to be.

ass-backwards

Current mood: phlegm-y
jesus christ. i spent an hour last night constructing an intelligent update to this space, filled with literary genius and subtlety of tone and, yes, enough drunken angst to choke a good-sized horse. not that i would want to choke any sized horse. i'm a pacifist, and a vegetarian to boot.

but, anyway, i hit post, the button that would send my words into the aether of this interweb, and it did, alright; so far into the aether that they will never to be seen again.

dammit.

but it was all about how all the letters i've been meaning to write have been writing themselves in my head, while my body runs around doing everything else and i can't seem to get enough time to myself. it's a little frustrating. and it was all about tough new england women, and perceptions of regional loyalty, and how i miss san francisco. particularly, how i miss the queers and the perverts and the nellies. but, at the same time, it is good and important to be here. if only i can find some time to sit down and write letters.

cosmo found an old typewriter up in the house in blandford, the house where i spent the first five or so years of my life, on and off. we can't tell who it used to belong to, my uncle charlie, or my great uncle tony, or any number of other relatives who have recently passed on or moved away. cosmo fixed it and oiled it and bought me a ribbon. he's a good egg. so, i have this beautiful old typewriter at my disposal while i am here. typewriters don't erase your words while you're still composing them. they don't hurt your eyes, or annoy you with their incessant hum. so, what the hell am i still doing here, online?