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STORE CLOSED. GONE FEISING.
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Jul 26, 2007 7:02 pm
1099 Views
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All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
-- James Thurber
I realize I’ve been silent for…jeez, must be two weeks now. In my world, that’s reason to check my pulse: a kitty who hasn’t posted anything for two weeks might well be roadkill.
I’ve been working like a maniac lately. When the alarm rings at six AM, I toss a cat or two off the bed, brew a cup of tea, and start winding up the day’s winch. Head down, I’m writing project workbooks, scanning through scribbled notes, taking calls, making calls, working deals, feet tapping reels under the desk. Fluffing my feathers, peacock-style, there is strutting and a certain amount of bluffing required to achieve my goals. Nostrils flared, I’m sniffing for tasks, collating them, assigning them, escalating them, checking them. My life right now is about tasks. What’s real, what’s a roadblock. What’s cake and what’s fairy-dust. By four PM most days, my arms are aching from keyboarding.
By the time I let my hair down, my brain is fried. At sunset, I spend time staring. I can still manage to look out my window and marvel at the brush of purple flowers nodding their heads in the wind. I am still conscious enough to admire the wine country summer; the Italian pines, the hedges that sprout, red-tipped, towards the sun. There is a small bell hanging outside my window; according to the legend of its Navajo maker, when it chimes, it speaks of opportunities coming. I enjoy its pure, hard sound.
However, at the end of the day, I find that my head is pitifully empty, disconsolate, a classroom with all its pupils gone. All that's left is a manic adding machine that is prancing by itself; a device from the Beast's castle, come alive, maniacally spewing perfectly-balanced sums, ticking off numbers of tasks completed and correctly classified. Frequently, it won’t stop; sometimes I imagine myself taking a baseball bat and smashing it to bits just to achieve silence.
Work, we might say, is going well. It’s a manic, 21st-century definition of “well” – but well it is. My job may be fine, but that's not the issue; it's my head that I worry about.
Numb from calculating, my brain has lost most of the English language. I can't string two sentences together to save my life; instead, I resort to watching images, digesting colors. Not only are the word-elves silent, I heavily suspect that they moved out. My idea-bin is empty. I have taken to visiting blogs -- to interact with your ideas, to touch your creations, to find a magic bean to make the word-elves come back.
And, for all that, a tired Kitty is still jubilant these days. Can’t tell you exactly why; he’d have to shoot me: but let's infer that there’s a fella in the world who has brought a spark to Kitty’s eye and a certain swish to her groove. He knows who he is; there's no need to go telling tales. There’s a quiet comfort here that makes Kitty hope she’s come up trumps. It’s not something you talk about, being a lady and all (though I do think it’s why the word-elves moved out....their jealousy manifests in their snitty silence...).
Then, there’s that third part: I’m dancing again. Kitty kicked some ass this week in dance class. She's been working those leg muscles. We are also feising this weekend, joining 600 other dancers and a dozen musicians. Liz and I dance the Mother-Daughter two-hand on Friday night, followed by solo competitions and a Saturday night ceili. Will we win? Don’t give a shit. Will we have fun? Guaranteed. Even if it’s nothing more than the Seige of Ennis with forty of my closest friends -- barefoot, giggling, glasses of wine and stumbling our sevens and threes -- we will have a rare oul time.
Silence. Jubilance. Dancing. I cannot imagine three more wonderful things to have in your life. It’s summer. I’m still working that separate-boxes thing, and I really do need those word-elves back. If you see them, tell them Kitty needs to see their little behinds home. Vite, vite. No excuses.
In the meantime, it's time to close the store for a bit. Time to savor the summer.
Kitty’s gone Feising. I’ll be back when I’m back.
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Dance In The Kitchen
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Jul 11, 2007 11:26 pm
1032 Views
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The priest has said my soul's salvation
Is in the balance of the angels
And underneath the wheels of passion
I keep the faith in my fashion
When we dance, angels will run and hide their wings.
-- Sting
I need to dance. It is a physical, aching thing.
Usually it is a need to write that drives me; words, giggling, tripping, playing tag in my brain; entire novellas written and discarded during the course of a walk, a bath, a trip to the market.
Of late, the word-elves have been quiet; in their place is music that threatens, Jumanji-style, to consume me. Steps are nattering at my feet. I cannot concentrate. The Glasgow Reel is running through my head, slick, beautiful ribbons of sound. Adrenalin pumps through my veins. Rally-bang, rally-bang, rally-bang, step-step STAMP, step-and-treble-back, rally-back, rally-back…. A sassy sprite with a seductive fiddle is licking the inside of my ear. I can’t make it stop. It’s all I can do to breathe properly.
On the kitchen floor, my battered hard shoes appear to grin at me. I could swear I saw them move.
I twitch if deprived.
I am twitching.
I have danced for ten years, but I have not danced competitively since October of 2004. This is no penury; I simply realized one day that I didn’t much care for competition. It’s one thing to get up in a little black dress and show off your pretty reel; as a matter of fact, it’s breathtaking to be 46 years old and have someone hand you a two-foot-tall trophy and congratulate you on a win. However, it’s quite another thing entirely to find yourself on stage dancing next to some puffy, wheezing, overweight 40-year-old with red spots on her cheeks, squeezed into a garishly embroidered dress and reliving her childhood in a seven-pound wig and tiara. (Suddenly, I am transported; God, do I look like that??? Have I fallen into a circus for old people? Are all those people in the audience laughing soundlessly, thinking, Look At The Heifers…..)
It's enough to make a kitty lose her groove.
Then there was the time when I was matched against Seamus Gallagher in the hornpipe. Standing still, in his trousers, he’s a nice-enough-looking young man, probably 35 years old -- but hit that eight-count and by God, he launches like the Space Shuttle. Completely out of control, a jangle of missed rhythm; legs flying like a mad demon, he looked for all the world like a rabid setter. I experienced a moment of actual fear; I envisioned tracks on my face from his hard shoes. (And worse, what if his slobber was infectious, and I started to dance like that???)
All in all, Kitty decided that competition was not what it was cracked up to be.
When I began teaching dance, the need to compete slowly receded. Satisfaction became afternoons spent flying across church hall basements with a flock of six-year-olds. Up-two-three-four-five, point-point-point….floating with the children, I became a mother duck sailing the river, ducklings mimicking my every move. Competition lost its luster: who needed to risk colliding with a mad dog when instead, I could help make dancers; at every class have a hand in the creation of perfectly crossed feet, ear-kissing trebles, leaps that hang in the air forever?
Last week, I brought nine dancers out to dance at an Irish wedding. Nine dancers, the spiritual significance of three times three; it's a secret I keep as my own private blessing to the bride and groom (the Catholics would no doubt object to such a Pagan reference). The youngest, my tiny Róisín, is twice a champion, just eight years old. Her face is past angelic; as she takes the stage in pink and gold, you can hear the crowd take a collective, audible breath. She sets her head; the power of her attitude is almost a physical sensation. As the fiddle begins to drawl, her shoulders snap back, and as she starts, one feels a silent slap of thunder crackling the air.
Kathleen follows her, draped in ice blue; eighteen and coltish; breathtakingly slender, five foot eight and legs all the way up to her neck. The leap into her hornpipe starts with her foot over her head and elicits a soft cry from the crowd; her rhythm is so perfect that no one’s eyes can tear themselves from her feet. Next is my own child, rosy-faced Liz, dancing hand-in-hand with young fire-headed Cian, teasing the groom and his sisters to the floor to dance the reel. The pavilion is a blur of costumes; the bride’s virginal white; the red of the wedding party; the dancers a violent hurricane of pattern; satins and sequins in circus colors. My teeth are chattering in my head; I need to dance. It’s not just me twitching now, it’s the entire crowd, all 170 of them.
Philipino, Irish, Mexican, African, black, white, yellow, red….the fiddle caught us all, and the dancers closed the snare. We are one world tonight. No words are needed; sound and movement unify us in one electric moment.
Tonight, at this wedding, we achieved seisun. Now, for those Irish scholars in the audience, I don't think I'm using the word right; it's a noun. However, I've seen it used every which-way. "Seisun tonight." "Porrick O'Maleideigh was seen at the Mucky Duck last night, sitting seisun with the locals."
What is seisun? Well, it’s mostly about the music. Seisun is to a musician like water is to fish. Like breathing is to people. I have only heard it explained well once, and, oddly enough, by an American, Don Williams, in his famous tune Louisiana Saturday Night: “Well, you get down the fiddle and you get down the bow / Kick off your shoes and you throw ‘em on the floor / Dance in the kitchen 'til the morning light / Louisiana Saturday night”
When the music plays and the dancers dance, words suddenly become garish. They get in the way. They are bit players, garbled attempts to explain the unexplainable. Seisun is about feeling the earth move; about breathing, about living the life of the moment. Maybe that's why it defies definition: it is about that all-consuming moment when you are alive all the way through.
Later that night, at home, the kids went for ice cream. I rustled through my quiet kitchen, still dressed in my finery. The house was blessedly silent except for the tapping of my heels on the hardwoods. Passing the hall mirror, I caught a quick reflection of a dancer. Long legs; the quick flash of a summer dress.
Mine. It was me. My reflection.
It was a dancer. Not a heifer. No spots on these cheeks.
The hair’s gone gray, but it doesn’t matter. It’s that same girl. The one that’s always been there.
I kicked my heels off.
(“Well, you get down the fiddle and you get down the bow / Kick off your shoes and you throw ‘em on the floor / Dance in the kitchen 'til the morning light / Louisiana Saturday night” )
It was my turn. I finally danced.
I’m going back to the competition. Going back to the sweat and fear of stepping on that stage, knowing that the bitch from the Smythe school is going to try to run my ass off the stage; and if it’s not her, it might be Seamus Gallagher and his rabid band of setters.
Let them try. Bring it on.
Kitty's back.
And she brought her groove.
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Life Retrograde
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Jun 28, 2007 7:14 pm
1076 Views
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When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
-- 5th Dimension, Age of Aquarius
People are, quite naturally, skeptical about astrology. While I am fairly clueless about exactly how planetary influences could possibly affect my daily life, I do know that there’s something to it. No doubt about it. There’s just too much coincidence for there not to be some validity to it. Just from a statistics perspective, it’s impossible to ignore how often the astrologers are right.
After almost 50 years on the planet, I firmly believe two things: a) there is nothing new under the sun, and b) we are nowhere close to having learned it all yet. Somehow, skeptics aside, the same laws of physics that rule the magic of torque and gravity, tides and glaciers, are also responsible for conducting the orchestra of the planets. If I drop a hammer, it will hit the ground (and hopefully miss my foot). If Mercury goes retrograde, communications will start to go south. Somehow, they are related.
Fiery Mars, dreamy Neptune, life-and-death Pluto: I find myself compulsively tracking their movements through the heavens. And, when Mercury goes retrograde, I progress from “compulsive” to “obsessed”.
For the uninitiated, here’s the nickel tour: Mercury rules communications; also short journeys, reasoning and possibilities. Contracts. Email. Romantic lost weekends. The fastest planet in our solar system, it circles the sun every 88 days. About three times a year, based on the relationship it has with the Earth, it enters a retrograde state: put simply, from Earth, Mercury appears to be moving backwards, away from us.
The results? Messed-up communications. SNAFUs. Missed calls. Confusion. Journeys interrupted; foggy reasoning. People who are attracted to each other suddenly go shy. Talk to those in the astrological know, and they’ll tell you. Expect confusion. Delays. And whatever you do, don’t sign a contract or get surgery. You could be dealing with the fallout for months.
The last time I had a really bad retrograde Mercury, it was April of 1992 and I was getting ready to move a 250-person office in downtown Los Angeles. It was a Wednesday evening; I was supervising the installation of phone circuits in the new space when the Rodney King riots broke out.
In the next days, what was I grappling with? Oh, nothing much; just how to put a telephone switch on the back of a truck and move it four blocks down the street. In the middle of a riot. Communications? Short journeys? Nah, must be coincidence.
(We didn’t move the office that weekend. But, ever since then, every one of my friends and colleagues who were involved in that move keeps the Mercury retrograde schedule close at hand. Tattooed on the inside of our eyelids.)
This time, the Mercury Ret is in a water sign. Over the last few days, Mercury has been backing away from Earth, backing out of its home sign of Gemini into emotional Cancer, the home-body. And my latest....what? Journey...across the country to talk about installing...what? A call center...is interrupted by...what? Rain. It’s a rich irony. There is no coincidence. In the last fifteen years, I have become a believer.
I’ve made it halfway home; the last leg of my journey was cancelled. As I sit here in the middle of the country, surrounded by floods, I know that I am actually quite lucky. All around me, people are losing their homes. What could that possibly feel like? Families in this area have lost loved ones; people who were alive on Monday are dead today. I think of my own family, my amazingly capable children and their extended support network, tucked into their dry, sunny home, and I know that it’s just the roll of the dice – simple, albeit astronomical odds – that they are safe and alive.
The travel agency has booked me into a hotel to wait for the airports to settle. Flights are overbooked or cancelled; there’s no getting to California until Friday night. I have everything I need. I can do my job from anywhere. I’m not hungry; there’s indoor plumbing, two TVs, hot and cold running water, a hot breakfast, workout room, microwave mini-pizzas and a plastic geranium. A garbage disposal. I have a toothbrush, a computer, sticky notes and a highlighter. Clean sheets, a king-size bed, mouthwash and air conditioning. There’s a fireplace, for Christ’s sake. A fireplace.
“Ugly Betty” is on, which usually sucks my brain clean out of my skull and leaves me in hysterical laughter on the floor. Tonight it’s just not working.
I don’t want to watch TV. I don’t want to work out; I don’t want to relax. I want to go home. I want my kids; I want my birds. I want my white-iron bed and my soft green quilt. I even want my stupid orange cat Squeaky who usually is the biggest irritant in my day. I would give a lot to see his flat prizefighter’s nose on the other side of the living-room window, meowing silently for me to open up his private worm-hole and let him into the house so he can continue tormenting me. I sit here on the sofa, nibbling sullenly at my mini-pizzas, flipping the channels, and I see the TV weatherman droning on and on about the dire predictions for more rain.
July 9th, Mercury goes direct. So, it’s not all that bad. Only eleven more days. Eleven more days of interrupted journeys. Eleven more days of hit-and-miss in the chat rooms; eleven more days of go-slow and pausing to re-read emails before hitting Send. There’s not much to be done except enjoy the downtime and hope to hell I can keep my mouth shut before my evil Sagittarius tongue gets the best of me.
Maybe I’ll even have made it home by then.
Anyone taking bets?
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The Sun Stands Still
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Jun 21, 2007 9:01 pm
923 Views
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Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language. – Henry James
The sun stood still today. It has done that, twice a year, since the beginning of time – and, at least since we have had a common language, we have called it a solstice: sol is sun, and sistere is to stand still.
What a thought.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere it’s the longest day of the year, while our opposite numbers in the South are experiencing their shortest day. Either way, the sun is literally standing still for a moment, as it gets its bearings and starts moving the other way. Yin, yang – and, any way you look at it, balance.
I walked the Paradise Canyon trail this evening and noticed once again the startling blue overlay of the flowers that grow in our golden hills. Like Provence in the South of France, the colors of the earth show themselves brilliantly when you narrow your eyes and let them go out of focus. The blue, layered as it was on gold, on green, startled me today. Sunflower colors; wine colors. This is why God invented eyes.
Soon it will be midsummer. In the midst of Kitty’s nightmare travel schedule, we have agreed to cull out a day to visit the ranch this weekend. It’s part of my separate-boxes therapy, my attempts to find balance. It’s agreed: Saturday night, we anticipate a midsummer’s night dream: the soft, sweet purple-yellow dusk over the mountains; thirty-mile vistas; Lizzie's sweet Arabian mare, cantering softly through her last circuits, kicking up the soft dust as she snorts and pulls. A glass of wine before we brush her down; one last Lollyplop and she’s turned out for the night.
Smelling the sweet summer air, other wistful thoughts tug at my senses; Puck’s sweet mischief; memories of May Day, Beltane. Maiden memories; sleeping in the haystack, bodies entwined under the full moon.
If my hair were still brown, it would be ripe with golden highlights now; as a young girl, my freckles would have been in full bloom. But I am Maiden no more; nay, as Mother, trending Crone, I accept the sweet lines by my eyes. I watch my children cantering the ring, and know that the Horned One will come to me again one day, in guise fitting his status as King.
It is no longer so simple. However, whatever his name, be it Finn MacCoul, Brian Boru, Robert the Bruce….or, more likely, and more welcome, a simple, loving man of flesh, waiting to sniff the warm air and touch my brown hand….I know he will come. Someday.
When the children run the horses this weekend, I will refrain from the temptation to throw my leg over Treasure’s back and put her through her paces. She will no doubt be relieved. It is, after all, my turn to rest.
Instead, I will cross my booted feet on the picnic table and toast the stillness of the sun, as is appropriate, with our perfect Napa whites. Wherever you are, take heed now: it is the Solstice; time to mark one more winter, one more summer. The turning of the wheel; the passing of our days.
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Kudzu and Crackberries
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Jun 20, 2007 1:21 pm
789 Views
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Ce souvenir je te le prends.
Des souvenirs, comme ca j'en ai tout le temps.
Si par erreur la vie nous separe,
J'le sortirai d'mon tiroir.
-- Les Yeux Ouverts (Dream A Little Dream)
A business trip: three days on my own.
Ironically, the business trip has become a form of vacation. Three days with just half a load; three days with just myself and my work to focus on. No cooking, no requests for money, no empty Coke bottles cluttering the counter, no unrecognizable smelly things in the laundry. I look forward to these trips, because for that blessed time span, the physical separation of space and time means I am permitted to live just one life instead of two. The noise of daily living dulls to a quiet hum. Things stay where I have put them. Messes find no place to thrive, and toiletries magically remain lined up in neat rows on the bathroom counter. Returning, a quieter woman, I am inevitably reminded of the constant need to achieve, and sustain, balance.
I flew cross-country Monday to start my Walkabout through the Worm-hole, and was greeted by my business associate April at our hotel in Johnson City, Tennessee. As I check in, I am reminded of Blazing Saddles, the famous Mel Brooks movie in which everyone in the town of Rock Ridge is named Johnson. Which Johnson was this, I wondered aloud, and what life did he live that got a town named after him? Of course Johnson had to be a man, April replies; if Johnson had been a woman, the town would have been named for her Christian name: like Virginia City, or Charlotte. Indeed, or like Mount Wanda; one of my favorite hiking haunts, named after John Muir’s daughter.
April, who will manage the network team on my project, is my alter-ego. Having worked together for years, we are peanut butter and jelly; Aplets and Cotlets; cookies and cream. A younger version of myself, April is also my mirror. We are both intelligent, beautiful, fit, organized and opinionated – and, as my reader has guessed, not lacking in any form of ego whatsoever. We finish each others’ sentences and have the exact same squawk of dismay when idiocy is encountered. Singly, we are terrifying; taken together, we are frequently greeted by “Here comes trouble”, or “Does the President know you’re both out at the same time?”
For all that April and I are alike, we have one key difference: April’s life is ruled by electronic devices. Laptops and iPods dangle from her person, and her Blackberry is permanently attached to one hand, her attention obsessively controlled by its every belch and snicker. Kitty, on the other hand, disdains watches, left her cell phone at home, and prefers a paper map to GPS. I overcame my own Crackberry addiction sometime circa 2004, just before it consumed the last thinking part of my brain and threatened to overtake my life. At the time I swore that I would never again be enslaved by something smaller than my head.
I still get the shakes just thinking about it.
We've just arrived and already our days and nights are upside down. My body is running somewhere between two and three hours behind and is suffering from an uncharacteristic lack of sleep. To make matters worse, we face a 2.5 hour drive into the wilderness before we reach our destination; this necessitates our leaving Mr. Johnson’s lovely city at 6:00 AM. April protests: as a night owl coming off a Monday night midnight cut, she’s had three hours' sleep. Kitty tells her to suck it up: her own body thinks it’s 3AM, and she’s the designated driver. April at least can sleep on the way.
The day is a success beyond our wildest imagination. There are exactly four people there to greet us at this immense, 50,000 square foot facility; in the midst of renovations, we move without locks or limits within a silent hulk. The site is in great condition and the April-Kitty team executes flawlessly. April holds her hand out, requesting magnet lifters like a doctor requesting scalpels, pulling up the raised flooring to inspect the state of the cabling. Kitty measures racks, counts servers and identifies walls to be removed. Backplanes are photographed; conduits measured, model numbers recorded, alarm and badging systems identified and logged. Our site guides, three young, polite gentlemen, have gotten over their initial distress at the commanding presence of these two aggressive (“bitches” – yes, we get it all the time) uh, women; obligingly, they have caught our fire and enthusiastically walk us through the enormous generator housed at the back of the facility, describing its attributes with what can only be described as a lover’s caress.
Driving back to Johnson City in the late afternoon, I have finally lost all sense of time. The day is overcast and the drive through lush, rainy primeval countryside is disorienting. Though we have met no Pappy McGees on this trip, we have noticed a frightening lack of sentient life; drives through small towns reveal neatly swept porches, shuttered storefronts and brightly lit gas stations – and no people. Outside of other drivers, I have literally not seen a single soul. I am not sure if I have fallen into The Stand or Atlas Shrugged. The feeling is eerie; I am still waiting for the ghosts of Civil War soldiers.
While I negotiate signless backroads through forests choked by kudzu, April sleeps in the passenger seat. I am happy to see her finally rest; thankful to have her alertness, her audacity and her bright energy on this project. Beside her on the seat, her Blackberry chimes out periodically like Scottish war pipes; urgent calls to action; to tasks not completed, decisions not made. Roads not taken. As I reflect on my own double life, the days as competent director, the nights as tear-wiping mom; dance teacher; bill-payer, I wonder which of these realities will win out: that of the soft, rain-drenched earth, miles of kudzu blanketing the new-growth forest, or the frantic cadence of the Blackberry, singing the corporate song of deeds undone and lives not lead.
Hanging with April for these three days has opened my eyes. As with all Crackberry addicts, work invades her space around the clock. There is no sacred time; there is no difference between sunrise and sunset, no honoring of the rituals of night. As I watched her sleep, my wish for her – and for all people – is that one day they discover the need for honor, for separation, for ritual, for sacredness. Today, she is too young; too eager to show the world that she can do it all. Tomorrow, perhaps, she will find the reason to honor her own journey.
I hope I have the opportunity to be there when she does. Returning home this morning, I vow that my own life will receive its overhaul. I already have the foundation. I will accept no Crackberry as the Boss of Me. I already know that health is wealth, and that eight hours of sleep every night is critical if I expect to be Alert And Vertical when I reach centegenarian status. But I must remember to never relent. This is a fight to the finish; I must continue drawing boundaries. I must continue forcing my double and triple lives back into their respective boxes. Stop and create real spaces between my working life and my living life. Actively honor the sacred.
Yesterday, our young hosts burbled happily on about the opportunity their future offers, opening similar, new facilities under the Southern Cross. We acknowledged the competencies we celebrated among the five of us, and together, dreamed a little dream of assembling this same team....
And that’s all it took. Kitty’s mind was off again, laying cable in Aotearoa, hearing Maori songs in her ears as she punches down cross-connects; searching for manhole covers among the pebbles of Franz Joseph. Feeling the morphine of technology’s clean precision rise up in my veins, I had no choice but to succumb once more to the lovely, erotic tension of my beautiful double life.
I wonder if there is kudzu down under.
I sure as hell hope not.
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The Secret Life Of Chat Rooms
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Jun 16, 2007 9:06 pm
528 Views
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I went out on a Jesus Run the other day. If you’ve ever done Body-for-LIFE, you know what a Jesus Run is: twenty minutes of wishing Jesus would come and take you away. In reality, it is, indeed a run: a fast warmup followed by three sets of increasingly agonizing intervals, followed by the Grand Prize: five minutes of death-rattles, little pink birds tweeting around your head, and a terrifying sense of the Grim Reaper overtaking on the right. If you survive that part, you fall into something akin to a leper’s lurch, limping past your fellow park inhabitants, lungs coming apart, unwillingly returning from the edge of the River Styx. And then it’s over.
The good thing about the Jesus Run is that it forces you into meditation. There’s little alternative; after all, if you focused on what was going on in your body, you’d have to kill yourself. So, last week, after I’d had a particularly unpleasant time confronting a number of Neanderthals in one of FF’s chat rooms, I indulged in a Jesus Run in a dry, 101-degree California summer heat. At eleven o’clock on a June morning, little Mexican ladies were setting out a picnic in the park in celebration of school closing. By the third circuit, I was interested to notice that they had started dancing the jig in my peripheral vision. By the fourth interval, they had disappeared; instead, I heard my chat roommates from the night before, jeering from the trees. Through their catcalls, and the overload of oxygen and ThermoDynamX burning in my system, I discovered the truth.
The average “advanced” chat room – say, one where everyone has known each other for donkey’s years – isn’t much more than a virtual orgy. A group fuck. A global form of masturbation. If you’ve ever read The Sexual Life of Catherine M., you’ll know what I mean. After all, few – if any – of the people you know in your real life are present. Somebody’s laid out on the table, and everyone’s taking turns. You don’t know their real name; you don’t know the color of their eyes. People couple off into flash chats, but voyeuristically, few can help themselves from eavesdropping on the main event.
Now understand, I don’t say this to eviscerate anyone. It just is what it is. We’re all humans, after all, and this kind of behavior is part of our nature. In 25,000 years of human history, I have to believe that at many points and in many cultures, “real” orgies either were or are a normal and accepted form of behavior. Just because they are not accepted now does not mean that we are not still the rightful descendants of our pagan forebears, and are not continuing to adapt our thinking to meet our very human needs.
The chat room is, in many ways, a modern adaptation of the orgy. By chatting, we can keep the group fuck going when society forbids the real thing. See, you can’t get AIDS in a chat room. You can’t be labeled an adulterer. There are no scarlet letters being handed out; nobody can really prove that you even exist. In most cases you don’t actually know these people, so if you wake up with a hangover, wondering what in hell you said last night, you don’t have to worry. After all, you can always change your handle and come back as somebody else. And, if you discover your YIM archives full of garbled sentences and misspelled ramblings from some guy named Hellahorny, you are simply cued that regretfully, you need to change your YIM ID as well. Messy, but doable. And, if you think about this properly, you appreciate that, unlike your forebears, you didn’t have to go to jail, you didn’t get tied up and dunked in the lake. Not only was there no financial consequence, but amazingly, you’re still alive! Bingo. End of problem.
I once took the Mensa test and failed at 96%. That’s right; according to Mensa, Kitty the college dropout has a higher IQ than 96% of the population. Don't get me wrong; it's not nearly as glamorous as all that, though it is kind of fun to know where you stand. (Oh, and BTW: 96% is not good enough to join Mensa; you can’t be a Mensan unless you top out at 98% or better.)
That 2% is what I call my “naïveté”. Those of you who know me personally understand that we can be scorching along, having a grand old high-level discussion on molecular physics, when suddenly, Kitty falls off the planet. Your last piece of brilliance went straight over her head, and you could be speaking Slovak for all she’s still with you. After spates of pure genius, Elvis has suddenly left the building. Call it a vitamin deficiency, or Kitty’s Neptune in her 9th house, but there you have it.
(Of course, a simple question like, for example, “did you understand what I just said?” would cause everyone involved to realize that Kitty isn’t truly naïve; she’s simply a sentence-and-a-half behind you. She didn’t leave the building; she’s just still processing. Her mind is exploding with the possibilities. After all, she’s a dreamer, and probably had more to say about the thought that went before. Sadly, however, most people won’t stop to think that way. Instead, she’s naïve, or she’s slow on the uptake. All sorts of stuff gets made up, when in reality, an additional 30 seconds of wait-time would have made the difference. Voilà the 2%.)
OK, where were we? Oh yeah. Naïveté.
Naïveté often comes at me like a boulder to the back of the head, and the other night was no exception. There’s nothing like thinking somebody’s been sweetly playing marbles with you, only to discover that they stole your cat’s eye and took it to the group fuck. For the very private and safety-obsessed Kitty, such a thought is a frightening, little-girl-lost occurrence. You think you’re having a private little tap-dance with ten or twenty of your closest friends, and suddenly you’re on stage at the Albert Hall, buck-naked in the spotlight with Michael Flatley on your left hand and no reel in your feet. You haven’t eviscerated anyone – you’ve been eviscerated. You’re being served up on ten or twenty plates; gossiping old ones and jealous young ones, obfuscates and innocents alike: all are having plates of Kitty Stew.
What a shitty feeling.
Of course, it probably didn’t really happen like that the other night. No doubt I made at least some of it up. Most likely, nobody was really having my liver for lunch. However, most of you will be nodding your heads, swearing it’s happened to you too. I’ve even been there when someone thought they were being eviscerated, when I, with my own eyes, saw no such knifing. No stew was being served; their liver was not present in the onions. So I have to think that maybe we do make it up. This stuff probably never really happens, and it’s more a matter of amino acids, indigestion, tides and high-pressure systems. Ah, physics again. It actually makes much more sense that way.
In the long run, it doesn’t really matter. Nobody’s going to write about it in the history books. The only thing that matters is in our own selves; where it matters that it does hurt. We can at least take comfort in the fact that it happens to all of us.
In my case, I responded by going South, to Santa Clara. I called up the Tall Man, an old friend of Kitty’s who can be counted on to give me shelter when I am wounded. Tall Man doesn’t talk much; he acts. After an evening of old movies and catnaps, I recovered. While my ego was still tender -- and it still is -- at least I was renewed.
See, like Freddy Mercury taught us in Bohemian Rhapsody, nothing really matters. I believe that every chat room IS a group fuck, to one extent or another. Yes, people get hurt – and that’s the way of the world. So next time the knives come out, I’ve already decided: I’ll strip my clothes off myself, slit my own belly, and join the feast.
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Walkabout In The Worm-Hole
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Jun 15, 2007 9:56 am
640 Views
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As my Aussie friend Michelle would say, I’m officially “going walkabout”. Can’t tell you where, however. I’m afraid if I do, the people of that great U.S. state would hang my sorry ass.
I have the privilege of working for a big international company that does all sorts of wonderful things across the world. I’m not being facetious; it really is a privilege and they really do wonderful things. I’m incredibly lucky to have satisfying work that occasionally ends up having a direct impact on humanity. My current project is to reopen an office complex, one that thrived through the ‘80s and was shut down in 2001, leaving a ghost town behind it. Bring it up to 2007 code; DS3s and routers and servers and switches. Get it ready to employ 400 people.
Though my day job is in the technology sector, I am secretly a dreamer, a wordsmith; the soul is a poet’s which, out of practical necessity, is carefully hidden from my business peers. I thrive on the dichotomy; the two sides of Kitty: one who dearly loves the clean elegance of protocol label switching and optical networks and Big IP and SONET rings, and the other who gets lost in word pictures of crazy shade-shine dancing under blue oaks that shimmer on the golden hillside. What I love about my day job is that I get to experience people and concepts from a rich variety of sources: all of them feed my secret imagination.
The place where I’m going next week is three plane rides and two and a half drive-time hours away from my California home. If not the Asshole of Nowhere, then it’s at least the Armpit. I knew I was in trouble when I went to book the trip and experienced several interesting moments when it appeared that You Can’t Get There From Here. Let me get that straight: in America, in the twenty-first century, we cannot find a path from Point A to Point B. OK, if there’s no airport, then what are our options? Worm-hole? Floo powder? Book The Flying Dutchman? Here was a savory dichotomy for Kitty’s imagination: we ostensibly built a technology complex there a mere thirty years ago, yet no Homo Sapiens walk upright in the vicinity.
As it works out, the journey itself will take an entire day. It starts at 3:30 AM in Oakland and ends up somewhere in the Eastern time zone at 9:00 PM….and we’re still 2.5 hours away from our destination. I saw a piece on Iceland recently, where getting to the ruined village of Erik The Red was three helicopter rides and a day’s walk from civilization. I suppose that it’s only fitting that this place where we’re going to reconstruct the newest technology for a Big International Corporation is about as accessible as the spot that launched the discovery of America.
We’ve been advised that when we finally arrive, cell phones will probably not work. Someone will meet us to escort us the last half-hour to the site. (I have an unwelcome vision of being led on a descent into the veritable Colon of the Universe by Pappy McGee, in dirty wifebeaters, scratching his fleas, his yellow, gap-toothed grin wrapping around a slobbery, pre-English patois.) In this place, we ostensibly will find a sprawling office complex, originally built in the ‘80s, when it was a bustling hive of activity, employing hundreds from the surrounding area. All folded and shut down in the early part of this century. Employees laid off. A town left to die. And it’s our proud duty (no facetiousness) to resurrect this building and get it ready to become, once more, a bustling hive, bringing employment to 400 individuals, and Hope to many more.
I have visions of discovering Machu Picchu. Jurassic Park. Highway 66. Humvee rides through roads overgrown with vegetation. Raptor attacks. Civil War soldiers stumbling out of the mists. More people with no teeth prizing fat jugs of moonshine out of drunken hands. Echoes of fiddlers and gunshots. And then…..as everything goes fuzzy….a fairy ring. Hobbits with wild eyes dancing in the moonlight. Sword fights and horses neighing in the distance. Waking up twenty years later under an oak tree in the threads of my business suit, surrounded by broken jugs labeled ‘XX’, one battered high heel still dangling from my foot.
Wish me luck, my friends. I am on the adventure of a lifetime. If you never see me again, contact the authorities at Area 51 and request a search party. I’ll be willing to bet that when I see you again, it will be on the battlefield at Culloden – or maybe in Ile de la Cité, with Jacques de Molay in flames in front of us.
With a splitting poteen headache.
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The View from The Cat's Eye
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Jun 13, 2007 9:33 pm
541 Views
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You
Who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by
And so
Become yourself
Because the past
Is just a goodbye
Teach
Your children well
Their father’s hell
Did slowly go by
And feed
Them on your dreams
The one they pick’s
The one you know by
Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.
And you
Of tender years,
Can't know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so please help
Them with your youth,
They seek the truth
Before they can die
Teach
Your parents well
Their children's hell
Will slowly go by
And feed
Them on your dreams
The one they pick’s
The one you'll know by
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you will cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.
-Crosby Stills & Nash
You run your own life. You choose your journeys: the child sprinting through the woods, whooping like a wild Indian, cannonballing off the cliff into the freezing Thornapple. Stolen 6:00 AM limo rides down Pacific Coast Highway, best friend at your side: California girls, heads poking out of the moonroof, hair whipping behind you, eyes streaming with the cold, watching the sun rise. Later you join the sweating, frenzied wisewomen who, bewitched by the beat, spring up to dance the reel; dizzy, wild ceili swings, feet flying on the grass while Flogging Molly’s relentless tempo pounds under the blazing sun. Swing a little more, little more, o’er the merrie-o, swing a little more, on the devil’s dance floor…..
You drink the wine and drink in the air; you take the risks and you take a stand. You make love and you make the best of it. And somehow, audaciously, ripe with life, against all odds and despite the world’s protests and the rank unfairness of it all, you end up curled in the sun, kitty paws stretched out in sleep, and, savoring all your nine lives, come to no bad end after all. Surrounded by ladybugs; a little dust in your fur, a little lazy energy left over to scratch your own back and enjoy the lengthening shadows of the failing daylight’s last wistful touch.
This is LadyKitty, and mine is the view from the Cat’s Eye.
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