anywhere

when we were younger

and in new york-

and dragging Christmas trees over our shoulders

through the snow covered west side,

and passing out in the park

barefoot after two bottles of afternoon merlot,

and building tables from doors

and dreaming of interactive poetic image based art shows,

and excited about hanging your photos in that cafe,

and hungover conversations over brown rice meals at Zuni cafe

and long shifts at that restaurant for old white people

on the upper east side:

who argued about nonsense and never tipped adequately,

and the hostess who invited me to her place

and locked herself in the bathroom,

sliding incoherent notes under the door,

until I lost patience and let

her notes pile up in silence,

and your apartment where those sunflowers

that were meant to symbolise our dreams

wilted and lingered for longer

that we expected- I wanted to be Jack Kerouac,

or was that you,

and I was meant to be Ginsberg.

They’re both dead

but we are here:

timezones apart-

bald and grey,

staying connected through text messages

about push ups

and this subdued yearning,

listening to Childish Gambino

on my daughter’s toy headphones,

because I can’t be bothered to buy

things that might bring joy-

painfully aware that no poem,

at least not one that I might write,

will make any difference

to anyone.

Anywhere.

The second craft beer

on (a school) Monday night

is making me nostalgic (again):

is this the best that friendships can do?

Years of emotional investments

only to return biweekly

animated .gif and inflatable hearts?

Everything is Fiction

My night after I got home and put the kids to bed and did some prep work for my classes tomorrow, included a healthy dose of self-induced rage absorption as I followed a twitter link to an ignorant racist clip of Bill O’reilly spouting off about how black people are too stupid, crude and entitled to ever be successful in the American Capitalism model. It actually raised my anger threshold to “white-knuckle,” and subsequently put me in a pretty toxic mood. Which was ironic since I had a pretty great day at school working with students learning to read non-fiction about topics as diverse as the creation of the universe, Columbine, the possibility of life on other planets, the effects of eating meat, and the Salem witch trials as an example of how society treats women it doesn’t know what to do with.

Did I mention I teach grade 8?

I grabbed a glass of wine and watched an episode of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee to help alleviate my fury. And now here I am. Sufjan again. This time Wednesday night. The days are a blur again as I plan and teach and meet and think and write and rest and speak and watch and give and take and carry on and on.

The cool part, or the weird part or the irony or whatever you want to call it, is that my classroom during the time I actually teach kids is the place and time that I am the least tired, the most focused and the most present. The blur happens outside and around those times. The planning meetings, the lunch time breaks, the after school chores, the taxi rides home- this is what adds up to make the blur. But the core. The center holds.

…


the things you love are contagious:
tend them with care,
prepare them for others.
the more you give away
the more you’ll grow.

…

Remembering the days in Central Park. Sundays with the hats and the sunglasses. Bottles of wine and hungover snacks. Anja would bring her chihuahua and Ari the frisbee. I laid in the sun with my shirt off, mildly aware that I might be deemed too skinny, but my skin was tan and I had forceful eyes and that had always been enough. The people of the city sprawled on the great lawns, reminiscing about the previous night’s adventures in the alleyways and bridges. Teachers, actors, designers, waiters and financial planners- all we had in common was the privilege of wasting a day in reverie.

…

everything is fiction
and you’d do well
to believe every word of it.

Mess Of My Life

It was raining as we drove to school this morning and the sky was lit like a silver dream- various shades of whites and blacks and greys and tinges of burning light reflecting off the wet concrete, made me reminisce about other rainy days and nights:

Like that one Christmas Eve, way passed my bed time, driving down fourth street with my mom, looking for parking to do some last minute shopping at Macy’s. The windows streaked with rolling raindrops lit up like tiny globes filled with rainbows.

Or that Saturday when I was nineteen or twenty and still working at the Bank of America in Corte Madera, hair bleached blond, eyes droopy with late nights, and still they gave me my own desk to open accounts and manage people’s money. We were popping into work to pick up my paycheque and 10,000 Maniacs sprang from the CD player in my old trusty blue VW bug. The heater barely kept us warm, “A cold and a rainy day. Where on earth is the sun hid away? A cold and a rainy day I shiver, quiver, and try to wake.” Emily​ smiled at me as I ran back into the car trying unsuccessfully to avoid the rain. We were happy and in love. Things were working out for us. For me. I was so grateful that she was there with me, running such a mundane errand. We had no plans and nowhere to be. No one to be. That night we would drink with the gang and fall asleep in each others arms listening to music in the mess of my life. Years of distant infatuation and unrequited love and pining had resulted in late night showers, early morning kisses and rainy day Saturday errands.

I’m in my tiny house in Mozambique. Training ended weeks ago and it has been raining everyday since training ended. The roof is made of zinc and the rain sounds like a machine gun pelting bullets upon my head. The sound is so loud it cancels out the thin sound of Elliot Smith’s voice on my tiny tape deck. I am alone and brave and scared and full of adventure. A mattress, my thoughts and a guitar my only possessions of note. I pull a garbage bag over my head as I run to school; I didn’t pack rain gear for a two year stint in Africa- I arrive to my classroom which lacks doors or windows or desks, so the kids stand around a giant puddle in the center of the room and we stare at each other unsure of what we are meant to do. The rain turns the land into a series of rivers we must navigate back home to suffer our own nights in the darkness. Somewhere out there, there is a flood that will wash out bridges, towns and force women to have babies in trees. The food in town is running out and I’m excited, because this is what I signed up for.

…

I woke up this morning so tired that while I was making our bed in the darkness I felt so dizzy I almost fell over. I thought about calling in sick to rest and finish my reports, but knew it was easier to just suck it up and get through it. I thought about how my body has been through so much more when I was young. I wondered if I still had “it.”

I was reminded of the days in San Francisco- I was working at three restaurants- Pier 23, Rumpus and Kulleto’s. Combined I worked well over forty hours a week. I was taking twenty credits to get my BA in Creative Writing. Busy writing cliche stories and reading Nabokov and Mary Shelly. Most nights after work, I would join my crew for post work drinks at some bar in North Beach, draining our hard earned tips into pitchers and shots. I’d stumble home well after two am on most nights, ready and up for classes the next morning by nine or ten. After lunch, I would do whatever school work I had and be back at work at one of the restaurants by five. This was my schedule for nearly two years and I somehow survived till graduation.

In New York when I was in my late twenties, I was earning my master’s from Columbia taking twenty credits and working full time at a high needs school in The Bronx. I would wake up before six and take a train and two buses to work, over an hour away. I would teach my ass off in an environment that made me cry on most days. After taking the train back home through Harlem, I would take a nap then work on any assignments that were due that week. I would eat dinner and be in my classes on most night from six to ten. On nights I didn’t have classes I attended International Socialist Organisation meetings to discuss the relevance of Marxism in the 20th century. Nights were spent staying up late chatting with Ari​ about films, books, and life. Weekends at brunch with Mairin​, Risa​, Greg​ and Dara​ . Whle weekend nights we raged against the dying of the light in the various NYC bars.

So yeah, even at forty two I think I can interview for a new job, take kids to Kenya, teach all week and write eight million report card comments and run a 10KM race.

Like the B-Boys say:

Soul fire
Soul fire
And we ain't got no water
We don't got no water

Time for living time for giving
No time for making up a monster to sell
Time for living time for giving
No time for breakin' out a lie to sell

Sometimes Sleeping

I had a hard time staying awake today. It was a drowsy fast moving cloud, slow moving thoughts, just keep your eyes open a bit longer kind of day. I felt a bit guilty as I floated in and out of consciousness. Guilty because I could have been marking a few straggling papers. Guilty because I could have been entertaining my kids. Guilty because I could have been helping Mairin​ unpack and sort all the groceries for the week. Guilty because I could have been reading or playing guitar or even watching a movie, but I really couldn’t keep my eyes open.

The most exertion I was able to muster today was a ride to lunch- veggie burger and XIPA from Brewerkz. We were the only ones there and it felt a bit like a Zombie Apocalypse with refillable root beer. We forgot to ask for no straws and they brought four to our table. Made me think about a headline I just read where in 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.  That is a few years after peak oil, now that should be quite a show. I will be seventy something; I wonder what that will look like. The girls will be the age I am now. I don’t like to dwell on the depressing stuff, but on lazy sleepy Sundays sometimes the shit comes crashing down.

…

For some reason the snow on the Eastern seaboard is making me miss New York. I always loved NYC in the winter. Well, that is a total lie, I hated it when I had to wake up at 5am and take two busses and a train to teach in the Bronx and I would step in puddles and the classroom would be so over heated that we couldn’t breathe, all 38 of us in the room, fresh off the boat,  and I would run outside and smoke cigarettes in the cold in between classes and cry on the train on my way home, because it all felt too big and too hard to fix.

But I did always like the fresh snow in Central Park. The whole city hushed under the blanket of white, while down on the lower east side, we crammed into bars with blaring jukeboxes, small crowds huddled outside watching the snowflakes fall, intermingling with our upward clouds of smoke. Still somewhat young and fresh and alive in the most exciting city in the world as we were slowly erased by the snow.

….

It’s strange when you try and document your daily life, and you realise that it is all pretty ho-hum. Even your thoughts on it become unoriginal and predictable. How many years have I been saying the same old stuff? Years of tweets and blog posts and Facebook statuses contemplating the same old thoughts. But then in a few weeks, there will be an upturn when I will realise that this stability is good. I think I was even writing about that last night.

I needed a rest today. I needed a slow day. I love these quiet weekends alone with the family, sometimes sleeping.

Ahhh, who knows? This one doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Might be time for a good book, a full night sleep in preparation for the big week ahead. I hope Sarah Palin gives another speech this week. I really enjoyed that last one.

Lessons Learned:

• Live your life as responsibly as you can, knowing you will never get it all right, and rest when you need it. 
• Nostalgia doesn’t always have to hurt. Sometimes it’s just a fleeting memory, like a snowflake meant to only last a brief time. 
• Some nights the words must be hard earned and etched out of the granite of your mind, and even then the diamonds are not always to be found. 

1. What are your thoughts on the state of the world in 2050? 
2. Share a memory of a place you loved to love. 
3. What’s something you do that is hard and does not always yield the results you wanted?