home, where?

i just got back from seattle.
actually, i made plans to go to seattle before i realized that it was the weekend of the anarchist bookfair, and that we were leaving sf the day of the big 5-year-anniversary-of-the-war protest. 5 years ago i sat on a couch in santa cruz, where i was trying to build a different, rather cursed life, and watched my friends shut down this city. my once and future city. and its easy to feel useless, when you can’t even remember to be in town when your friends are taking to the streets, and that you should be with them.
and it was the first bookfair i have missed since i moved here 10 years ago. it was the first i actually refused to table at, even if the refusal came in the form of new addresses and disorganization and absolutely no idea what time it is. it’s ok, if once you realize that you’ve missed the deadline, the relief you feel is tremendous and the most relaxing ever.
still, i have trouble, now, realizing that march is ending.
how can i keep track of time through a relatively arbitrary outside force like the anarchist bookfair?
how ridiculous is that?
still, it was amazing, when i realized that my phone was ringing, and that it was wheels, and that she was calling to say that she couldn’t find my table and where the hell was it?
its important to be constant, sometimes. its important to remember what time it is.
but sometimes its important to say i am in seattle with my brother and my mother and that is more important.
yes.
so, i will probably be tabling at the anarchist bookfair next year, despite the capitalism and the gross and that one guy who keeps telling us that we can’t cut peoples’ hair, its against some sort of health code violation.
i’ll be back, if only to break that health code violation.

actually insane

Current mood:tweaky

now i am definitely fully procrastinating, sitting here, still at work, computers have been taken advantage of, the event has been posted, there is no reason for me to still be at work and not at home working on my zine. right?

i am really excited about this brand new thing coming out in something like 6 days's time, but i am reminded, again, that i really do not do well with deadlines. i set a deadline for myself, set a party to celebrate this thing that should be done, and then i had to move it a week later, and still it is not done.

it will be ok, though, it will be alright.

just when i thought i would be getting up to leave, to go home and work, annie made a fresh pot of coffee, so i guess i can blame her a little, right?

no, not when she is supposed to be illustrating my words and i've given them to her in fits and starts, small, sweaty bundles of smudged type, little by little.

so, i can't blame her. and i really wanted coffee.

but, yeah, come by modern times thursday the 28th. there will be a zine done. there will be wine and food. and, most importantly, there will be phil playing music and making us all happy.

7 pm. come early for hugs.

i’m a real boy now!

Current mood:foggy-ecstatic monkey

whoah ...

there's that certain brand of waiting for something that makes it seem absolutely unreal when it happens; unstable and not quite all there. and then there is the brand of waiting for something that seeps so fluidly and effortlessly into being a reality that, even if there is an event demarcating the change, its hardly noticeable. then there is the kind of waiting that somehow encompasses both of those elements. that is how i finally, after a year and three months of dedicated service, became a collective member of modern times bookstore. with absolutely banal and everyday wonder. or with a head full of uncomprehending fog and a shrug of my unsurprised and barely affected shoulders.

i was offered the job yesterday, and it is true that things felt different around the store today. for one thing, everyone was relieved that i had finally been offered the job. i had not only been waiting for a year for the opportunity to be a fully "actualized" employee, but i had been waiting for over a week, since the last staff meeting, to get the offer. if it had not been for the inopportune words of the departing staff member, i would not have been so antsy. but, eschewing collective secrecy and even good security practices, he barely got out of the meeting before announcing, "i think they're going to offer you a job!"

sigh.

anyway, i am now the new (and first) stock management member of the modern times team. huzzah. give me a hug.

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