Phone Calls.

After Saturday's musings about working the night shift, Ben picked up on the theme of thankfulness, which is a close cousin to gratitude. The way I read the connotations, gratitude is almost always defined negatively. That is- we're mostly grateful for things we don't have to deal with. Like living in Gaza, having some god awful illness, being stuck homeless on the streets in some backwater slum in Pakistan, or- well you get the idea. It seems like we're most often grateful for the bad stuff that hasn't happened. Or that has happened. It's an all too common story- something that seems to be a dire misfortune turns out to have some great benefit hidden under the bullshit.

We're thankful, on the other hand, for the good stuff that we do have. Thankful to love someone. Thankful to put in a day's work. Thankful for a day of good health. Thankful for a decent camera, a cool bike.

Anyway.

Yesterday was one of those all day gray fests. Mary rented the Prince Caspian movie. Very enjoyable. I barbequed a steak, and we had a salad with almost no lettuce, because it was mostly avocado, and roma tomato.

See- more stuff to be thankful for. After dinner we did as we always do- came back to the den. Mary reads on the futon, and I start blipping through the various stops in the Coonosphere, and then make the rounds through the other fun places: Lileks, Vanderleun, Hewitt, Robot Japan, and the weather. Then Mary does her prayers, and that's when the phone rang. It was Mary's friend, Michelle from the Buddhist group. She, and her husband were at our wedding, well- what do you expect? We had a Buddhist wedding at the SGI community center, and all of Mary's Buddhist friends were there. And after the ceremony, Mary's friend Irene, and her brother, Charlie held the reception for us at Irene's house. Charlie drove me to the ceremony. And that's why Mary's friend, Michelle was calling. Charlie died last night. Cancer. Last October, his complaint was a sore knee. He was a genuinely good man. Mary called a few other friends, and then we went to bed, and I held on to her. And she held on to me. Grateful to be here. Thankful that my Mary is here with me.

The phone rang again at 6:30 this morning. The boss needed someone to cover the day shift. Right now. Would I rather do that instead of working late tonight at Stephen King Elementary?

JWM

Get Green and Save Gaia Now Or Else!

Oh, holy shit! Did I miss it? Was Gaia hour yesterday, or is it today? I always forget the really important holidays, and this new holiday is probably the all time most important new holiday of all time, and maybe more! Save Gaia hour. What a concept. I'm sure it's gotta' be listed somewhere in the Book of the Dead, or maybe Druids or Wiccans used to do it too, or maybe not! This could represent a new awakening of the spirit of Mother Gaia, communicating to us, her illegitimate bastard spawn that we had better get back to nature before she puts us there!

I've been reading up on life in the rainforest, and it's nothing but tragic that we have become so alienated from from our earthly roots. Think how cool it would be to live in a totally organic grass and mud hut, running around naked, and feasting on lizards, roots, and palm grubs. You could pierce your nose, lips, and cheeks with really for real boar's tusks and bird bones, and make full body tatts out of shallow incisions rubbed with cold ashes. They even have totally natural organic hallucinogens out there, and no uncool cops to bust you for using them. But I digress.

The thing here is Save Gaia Day. We have to stop being pigs for an hour, or maybe throw a party or something. What to do? Maybe I can send a card. No, no. Sending a card would use up energy. So would a telephone call, or even an e-mail... Lemme think- That's it! I'll think some groovy thoughts for Gaia, and that will atone for all the damage my parasitic presence has caused! I'll think of some poor baby polar bear standing there hungry on an ever shrinking ice flow. Imagine there's no penguins- it isn't hard to do. Think of rising sea levels, and half of Upper Tonga under water- the last few indigenous souls crowded on a shrinking sand spit trying to snag some hapless dolphin for the community stew pot. Think of- Oh, wait.

Even thinking takes energy, and the energy I use up thinking was bought and paid for by the suffering of Goddess Gaia. You know- all those tiny oats crushed in their prime. The banana that should rightly have gone to some jungle monkey. The coffee beans ripped untimely from Gaia's womb... No, thinking won't do.

That's it. I won't think for an hour. I'll just sit quietly, and breathe. Except that means I'll be exhaling carbon dioxide, and that's what is causing the polar bears to melt. Maybe I'll hold my breath for an hour. I'm sure Gaia would thank me.

JWM

Station on Mellow. Saturday and Slow

So here we are in the middle of another ridiculously beautiful day. I didn't start anything yesterday morning, and by the time I got off last night I just didn't feel like writing.

I've mentioned it before, but one of the nicer things about this area is the selection of good places to grab a bite to eat. Molcasalsa is one of the better ones, and it's just a couple blocks from here. Normally we start the day with oatmeal. I don't mind too much. Today we were out of oatmeal, which is where Molcasalsa comes in. You can get potatoes, ham, eggs, and cheese wrapped up burrito style in a big warm flour tortilla for 99 cents, if you can make it there before 11:00 AM. It's a cholesterol bomb, but every once in a while you just gotta' live dangerously. Walk on the wild side. Roll dice with the devil, and all that devil-may-care kind of daring that goes along with stuffin' your gut.

Anyway-

John was at the corner, along with a couple of other guys I enjoy talking to. And we hadn't sat there long, when Mike came by with his guitar. He's out of the group home, and staying with his folks again, up in the heights. The guy can play. I've heard him go finger picking through some spidery Renaissance melody, and then slide it into some good ass kickin blues. It was good see him back, and good to see that he's keeping it together. It would have been too easy lose half the day hanging out, though, and I had to attend to the small errands of the weekend. Which now have been attended to.

And I put out enough physical effort last night, that I'm not going hiking today. No. Chicken on the barbeque is the height of today's ambition. The last two nights were hard work. The night shift is always split between two schools, four hours to clean half of the first school, and four to clean half of the second. And since the rooms are cleaned only every other day, they're always in bad shape. And last night I had the late half at Stephen King Elementary, on the corner of Scream Road, and Ghoul Street. During the day, it's shady, and seems more like a park than a school. It sits on a dark corner of a quiet neighborhood right at the foot of the west end of the heights. Built in '57, the place has the architecture of a Chevy Bel Aire. Huge ficus trees brood over the classroom buildings. Everything is up hill. In the interest of saving Gaia, all the outdoor lights have been replaced with those evil mercury vapor, and poison gas corkscrew things. Those bulbs are to light what a microwave is to a barbeque. Just. Not. Natural. After dark, you're always in a tunnel of this harsh yellow glare. Outside the tunnel of glare is the void. You cannot see into the void. To boot, the ficus trees grow some sort of marble sized seed fruit, and spend the evening tossing them onto the sheet metal roofs, so there's always some noise, something skittering away just outside your field of vision. And there's a rabbit loose on the grounds, and you never know when the rabbit is going to show up. Always something out there. But it didn't get me. At least not last night.

And for all my complaining I was grateful to make the push through the night. I got all the stuff done, and left it looking pretty decent. And grateful to be able to do it. Last task of the shift is always to do the door check- walk the whole campus; pull all the doors. I came around the corner of one of the wings, and found three high school age kids sitting in the hallway. I think they were just about ready to roll one up, when I came around. I remembered one Friday night forty years ago, when I sat on this same campus with the same intention. "Hi, guys. I'm locking up, you'll have to go party elsewhere." They evaporated into the void. I heard the clinking of the chain link fence and they were gone.

JWM

Songs, Outlaw Stars, and Workin' Nights

Usually I start writing sometime in the middle to late afternoon, but I got a call for work for the next few nights so here I am, hunting and pecking away at the ungodly hour of nine thirty in the A.M. morning. A call for work. With all the budget cutting and lay-offs and all, I should be grateful to be picking up a few nights. But I'm dreading it. I just got myself adjusted to not worrying about work. Now I have to readjust again one more time all over. I swear, I can find more ways to generate discontent than there are things to be discontented about. It's just the perverse nature of my head. I should be used to this by now.

At the end of yesterday's post I put a link to the song Hiru no Tsuke, which was the closing theme for Outlaw Star. I hadn't heard the song in quite a while- not since Cartoon Network had Outlaw Star on Toonami in the afternoons, and that was eight or nine years ago. It was long enough that hearing it again brought on that odd kind of time warp effect that only songs have. It conjured up the palpable rhythm of the days when Mary and I were newly married, and living in the drafty, opossum plagued garage apartment behind her folks' house. I was carving my way through one chunk of rock after another, sure that the next art show was going be the one that would score me a sale, and launch a profitable career as a sculptor. There was money in the bank, and we were doing fine on what income was coming in. The computer was a new toy. I had found robot-japan on the internet and was blown away at the notion that I was trading notes on Japanese toys with people all over the world. We were having more fun than we realized. But that's how it all too often is. You don't see how much fun you're having until you've had it, and it's over. The song brought it all up in a pleasant mist that still sort of lingers with me this morning.

Even though work hangs over my head like Doom itself. I'll be fine once I get in there, and start moving, but right now it still feels more like a sentence than an opportunity to make some much needed cash. Right now, I have other stuff to attend to. I'll pick this up later tonight when the shift's over...

Which is now. Ten forty six P.M. at night by the computer clock. And working the night shift wasn't so bad. But I still have the song, and the mood it recalls floating through my head. Odd how classical music doesn't have that quality of resurrecting scenes and moods from a particular time and place. I remember clearly when I was an avid classical buff, but putting on Beethoven's seventh, or Mozart's Requiem doesn't take me back to the seventies. Throw on Ramblin' Man, and I'm there. And what strikes me as I'm sitting here is how simple, and how difficult it can be to keep a proper focus on the joys of the present. When you look back everything has that sweet glow of nostalgia, and when you look ahead it's all full of latent potential, and anticipation. The present, in contrast, is always full of the problems of the present. Be here now. It is so very simple, isn't it? But simple isn't necessarily easy. Anyway. That's all I have for tonight. I'm going to take a look at the rest of the Coonosphere, and get some rest.

JWM

More Spitfire Stuff

I'm falling back on an old way of patterning the day. As long as I have the time on my hands I may as well use it. So I made the six mile walk up in the hills this afternoon. Exercise just plain feels good. It clears up the mind as well.

I got rambling on about the Schwinn Spitfire yesterday- specifically the one they sold around 1977. You know- the classic cruiser style balloon tire one speed bicycle. Julie sent a link to her most excellent bike story, and caused me a head slap moment. I was going on about taking long lazy rides on the slow bike, and totally forgot to mention why I bought one in the first place. I got it to ride down the fire roads in the Brea hills.

Like a lot of major trends in my life, my love affair with balloon tire bikes started with a seemingly small gesture. I was out at an auction in Chino. They sold everything from entire estates worth of fine furniture and antiques, to backyard junk. There was an early 1960's Schwinn Co-ed in one of the lots. It needed tires, of course, but otherwise it was in good shape. I bid four dollars, and got it. At the time I had a friend who lived at the very east end of LaHabra Heights. Past his lot there was nothing but a few oil wells, and a Nike Missile site. And the fire roads. I got the notion that it'd be fun to take the old Co-ed, and go coast down some of the trails. It was way more fun than I had anticipated. About that time Schwinn came out with the Spitfire. The boy's bike frame is stronger, and much more stable at speed, and the late seventies version had extra heavy duty spokes and hubs, to boot. I've mentioned this before- that bike was steady, and comfortable at well over thirty miles an hour. There was one spot just past the old missile site where the road ran straight for the better part of a mile. It dropped down the hillside in three long smooth steps. It was a scary fast hill, but that bike rode it like a two wheeled surfboard. This was before mountain bikes, of course. It was like stumbling on to a hidden treasure. Nobody was doing this. And the few people I tried to tell about it sort of rolled their eyes. Nobody was interested in doing it. It was still fun, though.

Anyway.

Oh, yeah- totally unrelated to bicycles- I ran across this video on You Tube. It was the ending theme for the anime Outlaw Star, complete with the odd sci-fi artwork. Hiro no Tsuki.

JWM