Chains

"I can still hear you saying you will never break the chain...." Fleetwood Mac

The clouds move in and the day moves on into the late afternoon. There is little going on at the moment, and I am left to the company of my thoughts. I am traveling in my mind back, as I always do, to the beach. I need to walk the cool sands and feel the wind wash my body of the anxiety and stress of the week. The green grey water is thundering up to the cliffs and the foam washed over the rocks and sand. I sit crosslegged on the cement-pitted platform at the Sutro ruins and pull my sweather-coat tighter around me, head bowed into a big, wooly buddha ball. There are grains of sand blowing past me, tumbling like tiny boulders into the cracks and valleys of the damaged concrete. Rust bleeds out from the the old rebar and bolts that held the girders in place at the old bath house. It runs done the bones of the concrete, spilling out onto the rocks below. The wind is picking up, howling now at the sandstone to the left of me, wearing away the packed sand wall and tiny caves with it's watery breath. The sea spray flies carrying the gulls that are crying out the message of rough water and the arrival of the first storm of autumn. Part of me breaks away and cries with them, keening.

Here is the next task. I am at my desk once more, back from my mental hiatus. The need to go to the place as a child runs to it's mother for safety and comfort. I've done it for decades now...more times than I can possibly count. In this time, I let the sand slip through my fingers in the wind. It's time to say good-bye.

Office Warning!!! Blood Red Nail Polish, Caffiene, Chocolate and Aspirin

Yep!

Those four things were all I needed today (and yesterday) to get by.

I wore black. It's a daily staple for me. The only fashion addition to my black hair, black jeans and black sweatshirt was blood red, frosted nail polish on my fingernails.

Something has happened to me on some level that has attracted me to the color red. I'm not sure why there has been a sudden change in my liking of the color. I absolutely loathed up until the past year. Red has also been a hellish color on my eyes during migraines....especially red stop lights. The old stoplights, before they changed to led's, were real killers during a migraine. The light would stab through my eyes straight to the brain like a hot poker.

I was 7 years old and having my first migraine while in the back seat of my father's 1957 Chevy Bel Aire. My father, grandmother and I were driving back from San Jose up the El Camino Real to our house in South San Francisco. The intense feeling like my head would explode and my eyeballs fall out on skewers was even more excruciating everytime my father pulled up on a red stoplight. It literally made me nauseous. I've hated the color red ever since.

Rummaging through the bathroom drawers, I found a bottle of OPI Rock-a-pulco Red polish. I decided that I had to paint my toenails....next my fingernails. It was an impulse...boarding on a sudden obsession.

Normally, I dislike red polish a lot. I purchased this bottle for a job a couple years back and for some reason kept it around. I don't wear polish. I am not a fruffy sort of girl, never have been. At 51, I doubt I will be. Staring at the jewel tone bottle, I was almost hypnotized by it. Somehow, there was a certain "just-killed-an-antelope-with-my-bare-hands" appeal to it.

Then an epiphany!

Red...It 's a warning...."Stay away! Brightly colored animals are usually poisionous! She's in "raw meat mode"....LOOK OUT!" I was sending a message. ..Period!

No, Literally...Period! Danger, Will Robinson!

Oh, yeah...I don't need the full moon to go full on howling and get furry.

My husband is well trained. He knows that when I say "raw meat mode," steak miraculously appears from the store. Barbequed, preferably (if that's what you want to call it). Some people have debated that it's even really cooked at all. Ok, I'll be honest. Take the cow, run it past me and I'll carve a hunk out of it as it goes by. I like it seared on both sides just long enough to kill the cooties and that's it. Throw it on the plate bleeding and we'll call it good.

Yesterday afternoon, the migraine tried to emerge. Caffiene...a warm Coke and 2 Excedrin did the job. The migraine abated a little, back to it's little cave. A hot cup of coffee (TRUE Nectar of the gods! despite what the alkies will tell you.) and two sinus tabs kicked it the rest of the way. It's the only way I survive the hormone headaches during the periods my doctor is suprised I'm still having. Believe me, Doc, if it were in my power to shut'er down...don't ya think I would have?! Trust me...this is no joy ride for me or anyone around me during these episodes

Chocolate...even the crappiest type right about now could be the invisability cloke that hides you from the by the big, bad she-wolf. Held out or just thrown on my desk from a distance like a hunk of meat at the zoo, chocolate could be the destraction to momentarily occupy me enough not to completely notice the other crap you could possibly be pulling around my desk that would normally get you killed very quickly.

In this office golf game, you're getting a momentary gimme.

Grab the ball, people, and fucking run!

Harlequin

Dance the masquerade

Calling,
pulling,
sailing away on your soul
you are
helpless
to pull away

Don the mask
and you are what
you have always longed for
release
comes
in
a
breath

a scream

biting the bottom
of your lip
until
it bleeds
to keep it in

but you can't
are not
allowed
to

lick
of the whip
cracking
the air
cracking
the skin

laughter in
the pain
joyful
in the knowing

it's
all
in
your mind

Exploding Rodent

My office smelled like skunk on Monday morning. Heavy, thick odor clinging to everything. Ok, polekitty must have been around again this morning. It's getting towards fall and somebody is looking for a nice hybernation spot. That's cool. It happens every year at my office since we have a farm area right across the street and the river bottoms past that.


What was not cool came in the form of a walk through the printroom to get my morning...oh, GAWD!!!! What the hell is that?! Jesus! It smells like rotting mackrel! I mean the funk was overpowering....breathtaking!


Walking further into the foggy ooze, I made my way back to the lab and the breakroom, where Lo! and Behold! Our lab manager is sitting eating egg rolls.


I'm carrying on like a demented woman at the top of my lungs (the considereable sized ones they are) about the stench. I assume it's coming from his breakfast.


The morning goes on....and so does...


The FUNK.


It now has a name and is taking on a life all it's own. It prowls the bowels of the lab and the back offices, weaving itself through the clean air spaces and fumes of berry scented Lysol. It waits for the unsuspecting victim to enter the breakroom.

One of the dirt lab guys wanders in and places his mug in the microwave. He presses the button. It happens. The FUNK has just come back to life and is moving rapidly once again throughout the office, gagging everything in it's path.

We have just discovered the lair of the Funk.

The door opens and with it every dark, grey-green, noxious cartoon cloud you ever saw on Saturday morning. The Ghostbusters Weinie monster has nothing on this. Seriously. It has attitude, strength, and the ability to make even a former forensic photographer puke.

The lab manager wades bravely into the cesspool of decomposing mackrel stench to find...exploded rodent.

Yes, sad as it is to say, some poor little mouse had crawled into the back of the microwave and played "Pop Goes the Weasel."

The microwave, carmelizing mouse and all, now sits forlornly on the floor, unplugged, and away from offended noses and unwitting button pushers. It is being moved to its new home...outside the back lab door to the dumpster...where, hopefully, it will stay until it's burial at the Lockwood Landfill. Taps is gently playing...somewhere in the land of the mouse king.

Wouldn't you just love to be a fly on the wall when the unlucky dumpster diver plugs this bad boy in?!

Open Letter to Vince Young's Mother

Dear Mrs. Young:

I am a mother of two grown sons. When they were children and fell or got made fun of the last thing that I did was coddle them. Sure I would pat them on the back and wipe away tears, but I also turned them around and told them to get up and deal with their situations...whatever they were at that time. I gave them advice. I didn't shield them. I didn't protect them from the blows they were inevitably going to get as kids. I wanted my boys to be able to go out there and tackle anything that would and will come there way as children and now as adults. They've done well.

Mrs. Young, the absolute last thing that your son needs right now is "Momma Coming to the Rescue." Do you have any idea exactly how bad you have made your son look? If he can't handle criticism, you just threw the gates of hell open for him and told the public to eat him alive.

If he has psychological problems he needs to get help....you need to be supportive, BUT from a distance. Let him fight his own battles as a Man. All that a mother or wife does at this point when she speaks to the media is to embarass her son/husband. That could also have gone to Kurt Warner's wife a couple of years ago.

You should also be very thankful that he has Jeff Fisher as his coach and not Bill Parcells. If he pulled any of this with Parcells he may very well never play another down for the team, let alone see the lights of a football field again.

Mother to Mother...Mrs Young you need to SHUT IT!

It was difficult to collect the thoughts I wanted to write. Difficult because me heart bleeds with it everytime I try. Raw and open and still bleeding....my blood flows into pools painting pictures of things from the past...a magic mirror changing and shifting in the tidal waves.

I think I have found it, again.

The words flowing and pounding against me, out of me, mouth open with the taste of seaweed and salt on my tongue....screaming with the voice of an albatross causht in the wind and suddenly being pulled upwards on the drafts

I am bound to this place as surely as if I were anchored in the rocks...waited down with chains of my own making that slowly turn to rust welding themselves to my bones.

Collecting pieces of the pictures in my head along with sand dollars and pebbles that will go into a jar on my side board in the desert. I long for the sea and the City. Long to see the ghosts shifting through time on the streets before me, before the shops and houses I walked on years before and walk on now.

I cling to the small bits of glass, stone and shells like a rosary to spell over and over...a lifeline to who and what I was and most surprisingly, still am....slowly releasing into what I will become and where we will be again. I am obsessed with it....only admitting it now....as a lover that has run away out of desperation and aching for return. I have run away too many times in my life and now realise I need run no more.

Acceptance is strange and familiar...looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing the child reflected back. My child was curious and bold, unafraid of climbing the dangerous rocks and walking the edge of the Marina walls while my Grandmother screamed out in warning. The sea was always below me and before me....the grand tightrope walk.

I went back to the hotel room that night sick and nerve shattered...wishing silently that I hadn't come this way...it was foolish and silly....throwing up all the years of fear and insecurity....purging my body and soul of the constant running from who and what I have always been....running from my Grandmother's boogie man...the wino in the bushes....running from self-imposed pain and my own reflection. I shed it off me as a skin and looked at it in wonder.

Why?

Habits die hard when you finally cut them down. It writhed and clawed out from within me as my stomach churned and spasmed in pain. A beast within tearing its way out one way or another...everything subsiding once I looked at it and ran my fingers through its fur and called it by my own name. I accepted my beast.

Exausted, but at peace, I fell into sleep next to Tony wrapped in the soft weight of the bedsheets and his scent. I drifted into sleep like a child.

I am going back on my terms....unafraid to climb the stairs and unlock the door of the house on the Marina that has always been mine....but only....only...if I wanted it bad enough.

The child is coming home.

Sutro and the Past

Walking the Fog

We walked the fog

weaving patterns within

the tall grasses and dill

looking for bits of glass

bits of brick in the rubble

of my father's dream.

We walked

on narrow walls of concrete

rust forming jagged teeth

framed in skeletal jaws

bathe in sea water and silt

Sea birds screamed against the rising tide

raising memories

my father telling me

gulls were the souls of the dead...

Today

I believed it.

We walked the ruins

old Sutro's past glories

whipping up the mists

bathing our faces with that same water

that fed in from the tides

moving

through the tunnels

pulling and pulsing

arteries of the huge pools

pumping millions

of gallons

of sea water

still

filling the tanks

during the day

and then

into the long

chilled

lonely nights.

The ghosts walk

slipping through the green depths

gliding past the pump house

unseen

holding a brittle hand to your face

catching warm breath

in cold fingers

as you pass by the brick stairs

leading to no where.

We walked

the dark

the mist waiting

lurking

for us

at tunnels end

the booming

of the surf

pounding rock walls

crashing on the staircase

washing brick and sand

down cliff faces

pummeling our hearts

with its heart beat.

We walked the fog.....

San Francisco, CA

Monday, Auugust 11, 2008

Copyright 2008