the day before Thanksgiving

On the day before Thanksgiving, I took myself out to breakfast at a Mexican restaurant near my apartment. This was my version of a Thanksgiving meal.

Los Portales turned out to have mediocre huevos rancheros. Mediocre and over-priced. I was the only customer in there around 8 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.

When I ordered and said 'Huevos rancheros", the guy waiting on me said "Hablas Espanol?" It tickled me that he could tell by the way I pronounced huevos rancheros that I was fluent. Salvador spoke to me in Spanish after that. He said that as soon as I walked into his restaurant he could see that I was 'buena gente', good people. The guy definitely has the hospitality gene. He was so eager that I like his food, his culture and, I think, him. He flattered me over and over. He kept coming over to talk to me. It was wonderful.

Salvador is on wife number five. He told me about each of his wives, all of his six children and all of his grandchildren. Each of his wives was beautiful, even the one gringa he married. He never had kids with the gringa. All of his daughters are beautiful, too, but he is most proud of his son. His son is as big and as handsome as his father, I was informed. And the son is so smart! But what does it matter? All his children are beautiful. It was so lovely sitting there in the tacky, plastic booth watching the love in his eyes as he spoke of his family. Salvador was looking forward to seeing his whole family the next day for Thanksgiving. His wife does the cooking at home.

As he chattered along, he also kept peppering me with questions about me and my life. Soon he knew that I have a daughter in the hospitality field, that I just moved here from Seattle and how I happened to speak Spanish so well. Usually I tell people it is because my first lover was a Mexican, because it is gets a fun reaction. I found myself telling Salvador the whole story, which is that I majored in Spanish in college, reading and writing in Spanish for four years and studying at both a Mexican university and one in Bogota, Colombia. I am fluent in Spanish for good reason.

Then Salvador asked me if I knew any songs in Spanish. This is the first time anyone ever asked me that. I told him that I knew a couple. He coaxed me to sing them. And I did. I sang two songs and all the verses I knew. I was pretty good.

Salvador excused himself to answer the phone as I finished my last song. He came back in a few minutes, singing to me as he approached, a long song with many verses. It was a beautiful, dolorous song that captures something about the Mexican spirit. "No valle la vida" he sang. 'You are crying when you are born and crying when you die'. He sang the song with a show of emotion and a deep, quiet power. As I recall it, I am wondering if I imagined the whole encounter. I tried to take down the words but Salvador stopped me. He said that next time I came in, he would give me a CD with the song.

I am going back there tomorrow, with my laptop. If Salvador doesn't have the CD, which would be just fine, I am going to write down all the words to his song. I am sure he will be willing to sing it again.

thinking about food

When my daughter was still in my life, she had an eating disorder. Her relationship to food, to sustaining her body, to keep herself alive, was broken. Over the last few years that I had Katie in my life, I believe her eating disorder caused her quite a lot of suffering. To a lesser extent, it caused me quite a lot of grief as well. I realized, as I tried to please my daughter around the complexity of maintaining our shared lives, I realized that feeding one's child is central to the act of mothering. So how do you mother a child that does not wish to eat? Someday, maybe, I will write more about my perspective on anorexia-bulimia.

I mentioned Katie's eating disorder to give a little context to a comment she made to me once after she had gotten very sick. "People think anorexics hate food, Mom. The truth is, we love food. We think about food all the time. We want it all the time. It hurts all the time that we can't have it. We love food."

I have thought about Katie's statement that anorexics love food a lot. In the past few years, I have worked hard to change my eating so I can manage my diabetes. My success is measured once or twice a day by testing my blood glucose. Days, weeks and, even, months would go by in which I would carefully follow my nutritionist's guidelines but no matter how carefully I ate, my blood glucose levels stayed high. It was very hard to deny myself carbohydrates day in and day out only to read on my glucometer that my blood sugar was still high.

I did lots of exaggerated things to change that blood sugar. For one whole month in the summer of 2004, I swear I didn't eat any carbohydrates. Welll, there are carbs in dairy. Carbs, for readers who don't know, turn into sugar once they enter your blood stream. Fruits are carbs. Bread, pasta, pastry, starchy vegetables are carbs. My nutritionist told me that there are more carbohydrates in a bagel than I should ever eat in one single day, ever again.

here's something on my mind

I saw Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo on Saturday. SFMOMA is doing a small Herzog retrospective in conjunction with the Kiefer show. I am so eager to expand my thinking about Kiefer that I show up for the Herzog films, although I show up with some reluctance.

About ten years ago, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis did a comprehensive retrospective on Fassbinder in conjunction with the Joseph Beuys retrospective. Day after day, for most of a month, I spent my evenings with Fassbinder. Before each film, I would roam the Beuys exhibit. It was a highlight of my amateur, art-loving life.

I would love to capture the fineness of that Fassbinder experience. I fell in love, anew, with the medium of film.

What SFMOMA is doing with Herzog is just not the same. They are only showing a handful of Herzog films. And the Herzog movies are spread out. Showing up every couple of weeks does not have the same impact of daily movies.

I am wishing I knew an art historian or two that could help me think about the art world's fascination with Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Kiefer and Richter are widely considered the two most important artists working today. Both German. It must be significant that 'the two most important artists working today' are German. Off the top of my head, I think, of course, that these artists are examining, on our collective behalf, the legacy of irrationality played out by Hitler. The stream in human consciousness that made a Hitler possible is a stream within us all. It is easy to assume that 'the two most important artists working today' are working through this stream on our behalf. Is this a hopeful thing, to examine genocide from WWII? Does it heal the stream?

I have a lot to think about. Maybe that's why I've been writing so little.

Fitzcarraldo.

It is an amazing movie about an opera lover, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (the locals call him Fitzcarraldo) seeking his fortune in old-time Peru so he can build an opera house and bring Caruso to perform. A crazy, Irish dreamer. Business men are making fortunes all around Fitzcarraldo. Watching Fitzcarraldo yearning to join their ranks made me think of how I imagine semen seeks to penetrate the egg. I imagine sperm rushing out of a man into a woman and then hurrying into her vagina, on autopilot, seeking the egg. What becomes of these determined cells when they do not find an egg? What becomes of their determination if they find an egg but do not penetrate? Today I am thinking I understand what becomes of semen unable to implant: male energy. Sperm unplanted.

Fitzcarraldo is a fascinating movie. Fitzcarraldo buys an old steamer ship and drags it up a mountain and down the other side to another river. To make the movie, Herzog literally dragged an old steamer ship up one side of a mountain and down the other. Is art a good enough reason to destroy part of a rain forest? Like failed sperm, Fitzcarraldo's ship does not achieve his goal. He is a failure once again. But Herzog achieved his goal; his movie was made. Did Herzog achieve penetration?

During the whole movie, I was thinking about some of the monumental art created by males. I was thinking of James Turrell's big desert project and Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty'. Donald Judd's Texas town thing.

I tried to think about monumental art created by women but, so far, I can't think of any female artist that uses the earth on a large scale to reveal her vision.

Mount Rushmore (well, we won't call it art but it is a monument to the unplanted sperm, eh?). The pyramids were surely created to sate some male ego, not a female one. Skycrapers.

What makes an artist like Herzog want to drag a steamship up one side and down the other? What drives a guy like Turrell to devote many years of his life creating an installation that has him carving up the earth? Why wasn't the earth good enough the way it was? What leads a single human being to have enormous visions and then to set out creating them, even if it means altering huge chunks of the planet? What's going on?

What was going on inside Hitler when he began to nurture his ideas about genocide? What made it possible for him to ever think he had a right to make his ideas real? What makes any of us think we have a right to create the lives we wish to have? And where does the line between our individual self and the collective get drawn?

I love Fitzcarraldo's quest, to have an opera house in the jungle. What is more romantaic than opera in the jungle?! I love Herzog's quest, to create monumental art. I love Smithson's Spiral Jetty.

I think, however, that this male energy to conquer and dominate has to be checked. I don't think it is very far from dragging a steamship up the side of a mountain to make a movie to fighting wars for oil.

Well, I'm running out of time. . . have to get to the pool. . . but this is one of the things I'm thinking about this week while I cannot write.

I don't mean to imply that there is something wrong with this male energy. I am wondering about it, that's all. Maybe stilling this energy instead of relentlessly unleashing it into the world is what males need to do to serve the human community. Maybe everytime a proud male thinks of a gigantic project, he should go on a silent meditation retreat until he gets over it. Maybe the human race can't afford all the conquering anymore.

upon awakening

I woke up thinking about the time I went out of town for a month, with my car sitting in Minneapolis. When I got back, it would not start. The college kid who lived across the ally from me came over to help. He sprinkled a little gas on my carburetor and the car started.

For several months, I have spent most of each day writing. When there is no keyboard at my fingertips, I am writing in my head most of the time.

On Saturday, someone said something to me and I have been unable to write since. The few lines in this post, for example, have been taking me a long time. Normally, words fly out of me faster than I can type and I type very fast.

I'm trying to sprinkle a little gas to get myself going.

a new character in my internal reality

I have to think this through, of course, but it came to me in the pool this morning that a new character has emerged inside of me. Wonder Man. I have to do my research, of course, but, off the top of my head, I am thinking "Why Wonder Woman but, to the best of my limited knowledge, no Wonder Man?"

Wonder Man is wonderful.

an interesting dream

In the dream, I was saving a little girl from danger. The chase to save her was a bit chaotic.

Then the girl disappeared into a building, maybe some kind of temple. But it could have been a dance studio. She ran in and disappeared, like a rabbit into an unseen rabbit hole. I followed her into the space, I went from outside to inside, and I was in a cavernous room with a nice wooden floor. Most of the walls were all windows. One interior wall was solid. The sunlight streamed in softly, with no glare, very nice.

The little girl that I had been trying to save was gone but there was a miniature person in the room, a person the size of a large baby, maybe an eighteen-month-old. This person was Asian. At first, I admit, I thought it was a baby. While I still thought it was a baby, this creature rolled all over that wooden floor. The sounds it made seemed to be a combination of language and anxiety-laden shrieks. The small creature would roll, stop, utter a bunch of sounds that may or may not have been language, and then the creature would roll some more. Sometimes this being would also sail through the air, ping-ponging off the walls and ceiling, just as it rolled along the floor. Think three-dimensional zigzags. Red neon light rays seemed to hang in the air for a few moments after this creature has winged by so the room had a misty sense of faint red light rays, fading away gently.

The movement of this creature, especially the light rays, was fascinating. It was also vaguely frightening. What kind of creature was this? What had happened to the little girl I was saving? And why had I stumbled into this odd scene?

Finally, I sent word, by kything, to another woman to come see what I was seeing. By thinking thoughts, I could communicate to other people by simply directing my thoughts where I wanted them to go. Madeleine L'Engle called this kything in A Wrinkle in Time. I kyth a lot in my dream life. Also, I believe, in my real life, that our thoughts send out real vibration and that, more or less, we are all always sending thought vibrations out from ourselves to the world, to the people in our world. This thinking, of course, is not always done in language, especially in my dreams. In this culture, most people want to slip into the fallacy that all thoughts take place in language but, of course,they do not.

"I need for you to come see this," I told the other woman in my dream. This other woman was also trying to protect the little girl. "This is so weird. I need someone else to come see it." I had a painful yearning to have someone else see the odd Asian creature shrieking, bouncing and zinging through the room. I wished to be validated. I did not want to be alone in the weirdness.

This other woman came to me. As she approached, I said, in English, "You just had to see this," and I gestured towards the moving being. I did not want to be alone in the face of the odd zone I was in. I was so glad she came to be with me.

As I said 'You just had to see this", the creature came to an abrupt stop. We saw that it was a miniature man, not a baby. The man spoke to me. At first, the sounds he made were incomprehensible. Before I could signal that I did not understand, he began to speak to me again, this time in Spanish. In Spanish, he said, "You are in my domain now. You will speak Mandarin or Spanish or I will smite you." As this small being spoke, he seemed to tremble with power. For just an instant, I thought he was angry with me but as I focussed on the way his being seemed to vibrate, I realized that he was so powerful that power just coursed through him. He didn't turn on this power vibe: it was just who he was. When I had this realization, it soothed me. I know this dynamic well for I am a very powerful being, I quite often give off greater charge than I intend to. Sometimes I am just radiating power and people, of course, project their own meaning onto the power surge. I have never understood how to manage this aspect of my being. I wanted to capture this dream to remember a coupole of aspects of the dream: this is the main thing I wish to remember. I want to remember that the miniature Asian man's whole being trembled with his power. I want to remember the subtle, visceral reaction I had to it: at first, I felt fear, just for a brief moment. Then I realized he was not angry, just being his powerful self.

When he told me I could not speak in English in his domain, I began to speak to him in Spanish. We were not speaking with our voices. We carried on the whole conversation without using our physical voices. We spoke silently, sharing thoughts back and forth. In Spanish thoughts, I asked him if I could explain to the other woman that she could not speak in English. He said I had to explain it to her in Spanish. "She does not speak Spanish," I said. "That doesn't matter. You cannot use English."

Next, I turned to the woman and said, in broad, badly-accented Spanish, speaking with exaggeration, "Tu no habla English". . . I said English to make it sound American, instead of pronouncing it 'inglez', which is much softer than English. "Aqui", I said the Spanish word for 'here' broadly again, and I gestured to the ground, to indicate 'here', "No inglez aqui". She understood me well enough.

"Where is the little girl?" I asked the very little man, in Spanish, without speaking with my mouth. Silently. He was, perhaps, twenty inches tall.

"There is no little girl. She was a daemon I created to bring you here. I want to see you."

I wish I could go on writing and tell you why he wanted to see me but the dream ended.

I have seen this tiny, Asian man before in my dreams. A long time ago, perhaps twenty years ago, I met him.

In this other dream, I was walking on a rising slope, in a soft, hilly landscape. The area was lush and had an aura of abundance. Flower-covered meadows were all about. Small, beautiful homes doted the hills. Birds sang. Butterflies fluttered. The sun radiated. I was deeply happy in a fine, mellow way. With each breath I took, I seemed to breath in a rich contentment that emanated throughout my being. I was very happy.

As I came over the rise, I saw that there was a structure that looked out of place. The houses that doted my landscape were curved, blending into the roundness of nature, made out of clay. This structure at the top of the hill was wooden, with sharp corners. It looked ancient. The wood was weathered and gray. It looked as if a gentle breeze could break it apart, as if nothing held each piece of wood to the next. The little building was small, a few feet wide, a few feet high, with a door to one side. Next to the door was a tiny, Asian man. He was gesturing to me, beckoning me to enter the portal.

I was drawn to the man, not the portal itself. I gave no thought to going through the door. I was so attracted by the little man's energy that I would have done anything he asked me to do. I thought that when I crossed the threshold, this man and I would still be together and I would find out something about him.

Once I crossed the threshold, however, the ancient man and his ancient, wooden doorway disappeared. I was in another lush, verdant landscape but one very different than the soft, rolling hills I had just left. I was near the top of a very high mountain, with a full range of gigantic mountains unfurling as far as my eye could see. These mountains were sharp and craggy, with patches of green. Some of the mountains were obscured from view by layers of mists hanging in the air. I could see clusters of homes dotting this landscape, too, giving me a sense that this world was alive with people.

I was disoriented. One moment, I had been walking in a familiar, soothing landscape and the next moment I was in another world. I turned back to ask the little Asian man why he was showing me this but that was when I learned that both he and the wooden portal were gone. There I was, on a new path, with nothing to do but go forward.

In this morning's dream

more and more

More and more, I am confused by everything. I feel cut off, on the outside. I am a spy in the house of normal. Yes, one might query, what is normal anyway? Indeed. I can tell you, only, that I am not normal, I am not whole, I am not like other people.

This time of year is most especially alienating to me.

Other people seem to have their lives, well, peopled with people. Conversations, luncheon parties, plans. But me, I spend my days alone, in a kind of silence. Things are never really silent here inside me because I am always talking to myself. But people rarely actually talk to me.

I have a lot of fine encounters with people at bustops and in coffeeshops. Why? Because this is where I intersect with other humans. I don't see people in their homes. I don't make dates to get together. I go along all year mostly content with being alone virtually all the time.

But this time of year, I begin to bleed. It starts, of course, with Thanksgiving. Everyone, yes, everyone who knows me, knows I have been alone on Thanksgiving since I lsot my daughter but no one has invited me to share that day with them. From my perspective, I feel like there is some magic elixir that other people know about that makes them worthy of face-to-face.

I have lots of friends who read my emails. And a very few who write them back to me. I have friends who read this blog. People love me.

But somehow, and I know I am to blame, I am always alone.

There is something about me that others can see that I do not see that says "Stay away from her, leave her alone, she is not an object for your attention of affection."