California 2013: Sense and Sensibility

Alaska is known for its beautiful and rugged landscape, a fierce (and sometimes violent) history of gold and lumber-pillaging and is still the choice setting for much fishing, hunting, and the famous Iditarod. It also boasts a compelling wildness tipping point that is more fluid than most other places in the United States: bears that wander through grocery parking lots and moose whose hulking bodies mist morning backyards. 

The natural environment offers challenges in weather, accessibility, fierce beauty and formidability. It might be one of the reasons why the people that I’ve met who have lived there are some of the most interesting individuals I have ever run into. I’ve met them on dance floors and midnight at a hotel hot tub, at motorcycle bars and video arcades. They are vibrant, friendly, and in the chorus of the universe their voices are probably the most bold (and possibly slightly off-key).  Perhaps this is why I would like to go to Alaska someday: to be away from the things of man, to be close to people who affably clash with expectation, and to encounter a place that is still a little wild. I’m jealous of my friends’ summer sojourn there.

But right now I live in California, which is perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is the land of Neptune High School, celebrity politicians, and people who have never even heard of salt damage to their cars. Flowers bloom year round here: Godetias, miniature hollyhocks, baby blue eyes. The bodies here are well-yoga'd, creative, vegan restaurants abound, and a motorcycle can be a practical commuter vehicle.  I admit that I read my friend’s warnings on Facebook about possible pipe freezes this winter with a certain degree of smugness, as though I, personally, had discovered this coastal paradise, like my arrival here was a badge of some sort of achievement that I had earned by clocking time over the past three decades in soggy or more gloomy climes.

But life has a way of straightening you out, reminding you that no matter how extravagant the sunset or how well-lit the highways are by banks of rippling, golden mustard flowers, that you are just as foolish as you have ever been. I will admit: this has been an unwieldy year for me so far.

I purchased a motorcycle: a red 2006 Kawasaki Vulcan, a great starter bike. It is like falling in love, it is like the first few months of college, I am having an undeniable romance with motorcycles: reading poems and books about them, listening to stories from older, more weathered motorcyclists at my coffeeshop as though they are handing down legend, smiling at the cheeky motorcycle quotes that I find:

“Four wheels move the body.  Two wheels move the soul.”

“The perfect man?  A poet on a motorcycle.”

Lucinda Williams

“Life may begin at 30, but it doesn't get interesting until about 150.”

note: I don’t think I’ve gone over 40 yet on my motorcycle yet. I haven’t even taken it on the freeway

A few weeks ago, I went on a short weekend motorcycle road trip with my boyfriend and another couple (not on my bike). It was so hot that my female counterpart wore a bright pink tank top while she was on the bike for that entire first day – no jacket required (note: Phil Collins reference intentional and would also like to acknowledge for my parents that this is not the safest choice – I won’t do that, Mom). We drove North through Anderson Valley, a less populated and less commercial wine country where the tastings are free and there are no corkage fees, we stayed overnight in Boonville (a remarkably small town, but with enough personality to merit its own language). Over the course of about 36 hours together we tasted more than five bottles of wine and ended the day in a garden drinking down cold hard cider from a nearby farm. We tramped through high-grassed meadows in our motorcycle gear only to strip down to our bikini bodies by the river. We traveled back

to the Bay area down the coast in the booming sunlight: the beaches of the Mendocino coast are an odd mix of West Coast and East coast: slightly gray and weathered, foggy bogs creating dunes of cherry brush and large rock outcroppings that offer dramatic coastal viewpoints. We parted ways after we broke up a chocolate chip cookie that we ate at the delta of the Russian River while an outdoor jazz band played covers of “We’ve Got the Funk.” It was a weekend full of stampeding herds of pleasures.

And yet, I had spent the better part of the Spring in distress, feeling stunted in many of my pursuits, incredibly cut-off (even left behind) from some of my best friends and most of my recent history, and a whole host of other unhelpful reflections.

No one tells you what a hard thing surviving your own mediocrity can be.

This was me in the Run For Your Lives
Zombie 5K Obstacle Course (but is
also a pretty good approximation
of my springtime
emotional state, too).

I asked my friends to forgive me: “forgive me if I am too glum, too concentrated on our inevitable self-destruction as a species, on talking about how we’re trampling the planet, or talking about my own failings and sadness.”

Suffice to say that I spent a few months under water, trying to convince the people close to me that “yeah, I was bummed, but things were manageable, that I was fine.” This, in some part, was a lie. For the most part, I’d be more comfortable being naked in public than I would be letting you see just how much I resemble a sobby, red-eyed, greasy sloth on a bad day. But stay with me here for a moment and you’ll see why I'm going to bother to mention it this time around.

I’ve spent a lot of time diagnosing that feeling when it’s cropped up throughout my life: the wrong blend of chemicals in my body, childhood experiences, new birth control, a need more exercise, less sugar, terrible jobs (past tense), terrible relationships (also past tense), maybe I needed to create a list of daily affirmations and say them to myself in the mirror, maybe I needed to get out and make some new friends, maybe I needed to get back in touch with old friends, too much TV, not enough TV. The list of things that you are doing wrong or could be doing better for your own good is seemingly endless, but there is one thing that has unswervingly paralleled with a better mood.

Writing.

Tree tunnel near Point Reyes, CA

When I am writing. Even if it’s just in my journal or on this blog or a few lines of poetry, I realize that I am healthier when I am organizing my thoughts line by line progressively down a page. In the months in which my journal is full and my blog is updated and I’ve spent some time researching and typing, I spend less time at the bottom of my own well. It had not been happening enough.

Which is why I rebooted an old pledge that a friend and I had made to each other: one poem a week. Each week, I send a poem to a friend of mine and she sends one to me and (if nothing else). In this way, I’ve made some room for creative productivity in the middle of the rest of the business in my life. And the difference has been remarkable.

I also started doing yoga four time a week, drastically improved my diet, and bought a motorcycle and the change has been remarkable. 

That is the dramatic montage version of making all these choices: it does not show my grumpiness over giving up my morning coffee or the withering looks I’ve come to give scales, but I am happy to report that all of these things have set me up for a very promising summer where I am looking forward to motorcycle adventures, road trips and reunions with some of my favorite people back East.

On the eve of my birthday I took a ride through the rolling headlands that boulder right into the Pacific ocean. It is glorious to be at the edge of America with the surf that comes in threatening undertow to humans and their dogs alike: a bit tumultuous. It is also wondrous to be in the month of April and lie on a black sand beach in the 80 degree heat. Generally I associate my birthday with damp, cold mornings and sunshine threatening to break through the clouds, but not beaches and motorcycle rides. It’s a feeling that I could get used to.

They say that smell is one of the most powerful generators of memory and not just sense memory, but emotional memory. In April, I woke up on a Monday morning and rode through the streets of waking Oakland (men in blue overalls constructing yet another watchtower-like hospital building, an officer uncommonly casual and reading the paper in his car) and was overwhelmed by how much the heat of the streets and the coming day smelled like Rome in the throws of summer. Whatever pall had been on me slipped off just a little as my sense memory catapulted into hot weather and the perspective offered by history. 

It was the same thing hiking down the hill to the beach the day before my birthday, invited by Jason* whose talent are many. But surprise, recreational botany is such an underrated and unexpected talent that it takes a special prize in my heart. Down we go on perilously, ready-to-tip log steps laid into the cliffside and with each step, he reaches his hand back behind him, handing me small crumbles of leaves and ferns that he’s crushed between his thumb and forefinger and telling me to smell, illustrating the landscape not just with information, but with perfume:

“California sage,” he announces as my lungs bellow with a white, lemony fragrance, “it’s not a true sage, but it’s one of the natives that you find along the coast.” Another few steps, “Yarrow. Now that’s a magical plant,” the smell is rotund and almost floral, “it’s good for wounds and was once used to treat soldiers in battle.”

He invites me to reach out and touch a bud of orange bouncing in the hillside breeze and I pull back my hands to find them strangely tacky. He smiles and says “sticky monkey flower.”

I don’t identify much with my astrological sign, but one quality of Taurus that has always seemed embarrassingly accurate is their sensuality, an almost feline love of tactile pleasure. In this way, a ride down to the ocean is a riot of delight. It is ocean spray, citrusy perfume, the crash of waves, some hazy horn sound like a dial tone on the water in the distance, the hot sand in comedic avalanches under my bare feet – an unstoppable collision of sense after sense.

It is almost healing and I am convinced that this is part of what appeals to we Taureans – it makes the flinty, sparking neuroses of intellect go quiet for awhile. Of course, no great insight or philosophy is achieved in this time, but it is a welcome pause from a lifetime rooted in self (even selfishness). One is more a part of the slippery cave water coming down the bluffs, the roar of wind along the highway, or the rush of clean, sugared smell of opening fresia blossoms. Sometimes it is better this way.

###

*"Wait! What? Who's this Jason person?" you ask.

"Oh yeah," I reply, "I'm dating a man named Jason."

Strange Currents

Two costumes deep and nowhere to wear them. A few bags of check-out counter candy run-off in a last minute panic that trick or treaters were going to come by our apartment door. I may put on my Angela Chase costume all the same and eat Almond Joys with Jordan (heheh – Jordan) while we watch Hocus Pocus on the pull-out couch. This will have to be enough holiday for now, because keeping pace with multiple lives is an exhausting business: work, writing, French class, cooking, fires on the beach, old friends coloring the west coast with an odd sort of implied time travel. Maybe I’ll pull it together for late-night Halloween karaoke. It’s possible… but I doubt it.

The kitty surveys her carnage.

The cat has eaten my Mac cord.  Literally must have swallowed pieces of it while I wasn’t watching, because not only is it in chunks, it is substantially shorter. She is a strange bird these days – racketing from room to room like a furry, white comet making little chirruping noises as she goes. She follows me while I fold clothes, clean the mirrors, look for my keys and she finds various perches from which to observe and evaluate my behavior. She is tolerant, if not affectionate, but oddly more involved and invested in the goings-on of the apartment than she ever was back in Seattle. And now she’s eating electrical accessories when they’re plugged into the wall. I worry about her.

I worry about all of my time on a motorcyle, too. In my experience, the most dangerous thing about being on a motorcycle is also one of the best things about it. Not the speed or the risk, either. It is the quiet of it. Not, certainly, the quiet of the engine or the wind that harasses even the most smartly buttoned leather coat or the roar of other irritable cars on the road – the internal quiet. Without music or conversation, there is really nowhere for you to spend time but in your own head. On a long enough ride, you can take some truly meditative journeys and find yourself at the top of Mount Diablo a bit surprised at having arrived on a peak from which you can see most of the surrounding country. One considers the validity of one’s contribution to her job, the state of climate change, whether our democratic process has really imploded, if living up to one’s potential is actually that satisfying, the regrets of past conversations. It is possible that you speak of this to no one.

Traveling to Pittsburgh in the fall means pumpkin carving and friends and the smell of leaves that reminds me of a brick-buildinged campus that is almost a decade in my rearview. It means that people I love have made a small child that has the most perfectly pink lips. This small human and I looked at each other: me, considering the first very tenuous weeks of her life that brought her here to my lap and what it will be like for her to grow up in a generation that has always known Facebook. I wonder what her prom dress will look like. Her trim little shoulders seem to shrug when I sit her upright on my thighs and frown over these thoughts.

Sandy in Nantucket, MA

Much of my family (real and chosen) is back East – scattered from Maine to Massachusetts, New Hampshire to New York. They stayed away from their windows and hoarded water in their basements with a resigned New England air as Hurricane Sandy pummeled the coast this week. My mother lost power quickly enough, even though they never cancelled her classes that she taught at school that day. My cousin on Nantucket Island sent photographs of water flooding the port and Main Street and surrounding the lighthouse of Brant Point. My pregnant cousin is still without power, ferrying herself and the rest of the family to the community center to periodically recharge their phones and shower. It is possible that they won’t have electricity before the election on Tuesday. A close friend’s basement flooded waist-high in Brooklyn and their car bobbed down the street and away.

With my hair like this...
it hurts to look at me.

These are the things that I’m thinking about on my couch while wearing a plaid shirt and black leggings, wondering whether it’s really a complete costume if I don’t dye my hair red. I’m thinking about the disparate driftwood of experience that is making up the lives of the people I know, feeling (as ever) a bit overcome.

Look, it’s a strange year and we’re caught in strange currents. Nearly everyone I know is living their life at a higher volume than they’re used to; making bigger moves and maybe vibrating at a slightly higher frequency as a result. People are moving, quitting their jobs, writing their novel, buying houses, having children, sitting in hospital waiting rooms, falling in ill-advised love, and going back to school. Maybe it’s 2012 and there’s an enormous prophesied bird-dragon headed right for us, maybe I’m in my thirties and so are many of the people that I know and love, and we’re going through those big life changes that we’ve been hearing about all these years. Or maybe I’m thinking too much. Maybe it’s not all as connected as it seems. But troubling as some of these realities are, I like thinking of my life as more comprehensive and inclusive. The boundaries between me and you don’t feel quite so linked to geography that way.

Last Saturday a small pack of East Bay kids crossed the bridge and headed for Ocean Beach: three scientists, an architect, an ex-theater kid, and a socially ungainly writer who would be the oldest person in the group. We dug a hole in the sand and built a fire that evening.

I’ve never made a fire on the beach (though I’ve certainly spun fire and watched fire spinning by sunset before on the shaded, well-trafficked beach of Golden Gardens in Seattle). But simply watching a flame swallow branches and old cardboard is better than most forms of entertainment that I pay for (internet, film, shows, museums). It is a pleasantly primal experience to hold a stick and marshmallow near a flame and watch it brown. The fire stays in your clothes for days afterwards, causes you to lean into strangers, share blankets, lick your fingers of small dabs of chocolate. It feels more permanent than most things in our commercial break world.

Just another pack of strangers discussing the weather, politics, stories we’ve loved, times that we’ve been left, nicknames we’ve adopted (by the way, I now refer to Jordan as “zombie”), all edging around the borders of vulnerability wondering what’s too much to share or say.

But what if nothing was too much and you could just say what you meant at that moment? What if you could tell strangers that you were lonely and have them put a blanket around your shoulders? What if you could tell the girl with the glasses that you think she laughs better than most of the people that you’ve known in your life? Maybe you could talk about what faith is like, where it gets lost, how difficult trust is, how grateful you are. What if simply saying things out loud felt like a solution? Perhaps that could be California in October.