The Dishwasher's Tears

Pale Green Sea

2008-07-21T18:54:00.001-07:00

I am fighting off some allergies or a cold or its just the cumulative effect of breathing the Big Sur fire smoke. I feel poorly.

Wah.

I bought a bike from this guy named Boon. Craigslist, man. Fiddy bucks and I'm stylin' all over town on this sweet ride.

How you gonna beat that?

I dunno.

think I'll paint it black.

First, though, I gotta lie down a while.

Crap.

Working Notes

2008-07-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the mathematics work against you. Sometimes the odds are all wrong. It can be less simple than it appears.

One of the real foundations of my work as a cop is Occam's Razor.

All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.

See also, 'looks like a duck, quacks like a duck...'

Sometimes, only rarely, but sometimes it is much, much more complex.

It can create a kind of crisis. I mean to say that I am actually experiencing somewhat of a crisis, an existential crisis, as an investigator. This is what I do. It is my endeavor. I have dedicated myself to it and you may mock me for it but it is a serious thing to me. I have never believed that I am entirely equal to the task, but have always felt that I was at least no worse than most and better than some at it.

I have approached it with care.

I strive to make the case. I put them down. I do it right and I put them down and they stay down when I do them.

But from time to time a certain set of facts arise that test the entire structure.

Which facts I am not able to articulate.

It is not easy to make a place for doubt. For contradiction, for a kind of large-scale quantum fuzziness in the day to day workings of the world.

But there are times when this becomes a necessary thing.

Hill Top Motel

2008-07-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

May you be happy.

May you be at peace.

May you be calm.

Namaste.

Cultivating Bliss

2008-07-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder if "cultivating bliss" isn't the wrong approach. I think that would be my wife's position on the matter. If you are trying to be happy, there is a measure of falsity to the endeavor. It's not organic, but imposed.

Therefore, suspect.

Certainly any attempt at cultivating bliss that insists or tries to insist on bliss being some kind of constant state must be suspect. But given a field that is barren and weed-choked, is there not some benefit to clearing away the weeds, amending the hard soil with compost, and planting some vegetables and some flowers?

That's what seems a better approach to me.

Still going to be worms and gophers and rabbits and birds, and not enough rain or not enough sunshine sometimes.

But go on out there anyway.

Pull a few weeds.

Prop up the tomato with a little cage for it.

Get a floppy hat and a book and a drink and go sit out there.

Listen to the birds!

I am an anxious creature. I'm always after it, like a dog with a bone. I can't barely sit still for three minutes in a row, but you're lucky to get any real work out of me. I'd rather pace and whine, wring my hands.

Peace like a river in my soul.

Not hardly.

But at forty three I am learning, by god. The great blessing of growing older is the way things moderate. I mean emotions primarily. I know if I feel bad I'll feel better in a little while, even if conditions don't change. My mind just can't keep it up forever. It'll get distracted by some other condition, start obsessing about that instead.

I am not my mind.

I am not any of the things I am so convinced are me.

I am some other thing altogether.

So are you.

The tearful dishwasher made this for dinner:

Zuppa di pesca alla Romana and a roasted beet salad with caramelized onions, feta cheese, and toasted pine nuts. A bottle of Castoro Zinfindel to go with.

A hard little loaf of crusty whole grain bread.

This is the kind of meal, when you are stove up somewhere dying all alone, you'll say: "Well, at least I had that for dinner one night."

That shit was good.

Namaste.

My Small Compassion

2008-07-12T08:24:00.001-07:00

One of the benefits of living in this samsaric realm is that there are many, many opportunities to exercise my small compassion. Everywhere around me is an endless Las Vegas casino style buffet of suffering and everyone is piling up their plates with the many various dishes that so delight them. There is grasping after things, there is selfishness, there is blindness and anger and greed and hatred and bad actions. There are all manner of ways to increase our suffering and the suffering of others.

It is on vivid display everywhere I look.

So, good for me.

This means that it is very simple to find opportunities to help.

Ah, but it is never as simple as it seems, is it?

Because I sort of have to put down my own plate first, don't I? Step out of the buffet line and maybe wake up a little bit to exactly what I am doing in this big old Las Vegas casino buffet line anyway.

What is the effect of all of these plates of prime rib and piles of shrimp and egg rolls and chocolate cakes and bacon-wrapped filet mignon medallions and mashed potatoes and gravy and lime jello and ice cream and brownies?

More happiness?

Perhaps not.

So, maybe first get out of line.

A good place to start is with compassion for myself. This one is difficult. It really is. Luckily, I have many, many opportunities to get it right. Just today there are boundless chances.

One thing I can do if I have difficulty generating compassion for myself is to notice when I have a compassionate thought towards another suffering being. When I notice that I am stirred in my heart at the plight of someone else's suffering, then my heart is open. This condition is beneficial. This is the condition that makes possible the expansion of my compassion. It enables me, if I am patient and look clearly and deeply at the surrounding conditions, to expand the specific feeling of compassion I am experiencing toward one suffering person, out to the general suffering of everyone else, myself included.

This can work in both directions. Even the shadow side of compassion for self, which could be called self-pity, is capable of opening the door to greater genuine compassion. Feeling sorry for myself is a pretty common experience for me: look how much I am suffering, look how difficult things are for me, look how I don't have enough of what I want and I have too much of what I don't want, look at how I keep making these stupid decisions and wrong actions, look how unfair it all is, etc.

The key is to see that I am not alone. We are all of us suffering. We are all of us deserving of a great compassion, for things really are difficult.

"There, there." I should say. "I know, I know."

My guess is that by extending the compassion I feel towards others, even if that feeling is infrequent and felt only dimly- extending it to my own self acts as a balm to my suffering. And extending the compassion I feel towards myself, even if dim and infrequent, to others who are not me, also acts as a balm to the suffering that exists like dark matter all around us.

We are all of us dancing the same dance.

I am trying to work this out in my own mind and to practice it in my own life.

I don't know if it works or not.

What I do know is that my compassion is small. It is weak and underfed. Like a wild dog that lives on scraps found in the garbage. It is small, and skittish, and ugly, and will run away or bite you if you come too close.

But maybe I can coax it out from under the porch with a bowl of clean water and something good to eat.

Maybe if I just sit here and act like it's no big deal, I can even make friends with it.

Namaste.

Round Three

2008-07-10T05:52:00.000-07:00

I was reading this buddhist guy yesterday and, you know, emptiness, non-attachment, blah, blah. But impermanence. Saying how we suffer so from the effects of it. We want things to stay the way they are, want not to lose what we've got, on and on. Tremendous suffering from this misunderstanding of the impermanence of everything. But he points out, without this condition of impermanence, your child will never grow up. Or the seedling will never become the plant, which will never fruit, so you can't eat of it.

We should be glad for it. Make a place at our table for it.

I am struck dumb with simple gratitude. Like old Lester Burnham when he was lying there bleeding out on the kitchen table.

It's hard to remember how good we have it nearly all the time.

Namaste.

After The Fourth of July

2008-07-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

*

I fester at my desk and refuse to do
the task at hand. Again, I am my own
worst enemy.

Reading in the Times today about a guy
who had a heart attack, I heard
my own mortality speak to me
in a clear voice not unlike a bell.

The coming days. Still all I think about.
Making plans but mostly anxious
I’m about to get caught out in the charade
of my imagined competence.

I am better when cobbling
something together or wrecking it
with my mute hands. Like Dugan, I’ll take
my own skewed walls and bent nails
over the clean lines of some
better builder that is not me.

I crave plain food and
the image of a particular woman,
walking away from me
or standing at a window,
one hand touching her hair.

I squander these long days of summer
gnawing the bone of my plentiful stupidity.
Jaw sore, teeth worked loose, blood
on my bruised lips, I refuse to quit
until I get
to the dark marrow.

*

Hurrying Past The Bad

2008-07-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

I fail and fail to accomplish the simple act of being present for what is and instead spin up the big machinery of my worry, the slapdash contraption of my hopes, the dark sea of fear. All these imaginary planets of a cosmos not yet congealed, but maybe, maybe visible.

Bereft of the present moment and its particular disasters, laid out before me, the only feast I'll ever be invited to.

How I struggle in an imaginary wind, wrapping my coat around me, hurrying, always hurrying to some future door that will never open.

When will I simply sit and let what light there is fall on me?

Not yet, not yet.

The Innkeeper

2008-07-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight I made grilled salmon with lime butter, and orzo with garlic and kalamata olives. A bottle of some Australian Sauvignon Blanc to go with. The old lady's in the kitchen doing the washing up.

I'm sick with the pleasure of it all.

Plus, I might have ate too much.

I have been doing art and doing art and doing art. I have been doing a lot of wandering in the wilderness. Not much in the way of intentionality or vision, just putzing around until the emotional wire starts to hum.

Sometimes it goes, sometimes it don't.

If it don't, I won't keep it.

It it does, then I don't much care what it looks like.

It must speak with its own voice.

I am enjoying learning how to cook. I love prepping the ingredients, chopping and cutting and squeezing and mashing and warming and browning and crisping and boiling and steaming and wilting and charing and smoking and grilling and frying and baking and broiling and skewering and patting dry and crusting with salt or pepper and gathering herbs from the garden and pounding garlic in the pilon and tasting and mixing and plating and then and then and then

EATING THE MOTHERFUCKER!

Also, the wine is good.

Also, the company is good.

For a guy who grew up on McDonalds and fried baloney sandwiches, the discovery of real food is a minor miracle. (Not that I'm knocking fried baloney sandwiches. There is an art to them.I get a lot of goddamn pleasure from them.)

Not that you give a fuck, but here is a Jack Gilbert poem that just about sums it up:

Going Wrong

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up

the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful

and alien and cold from night under the sea,

the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.

Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,

washing them. "What can you know of my machinery!"

demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly

and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,

getting to the muck of something terrible.

The Lord insists: "You are the one who chooses

to live this way. I build cities where things

are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live

with rock and silence." The man washes away

the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.

Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts

in peppers. "You have lived all year without women."

He takes out everything and puts in the fish.

"No one knows where you are. People forget you.

You are vain and stubborn." The man slices

tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish

and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,

laying all of it out on the table in the courtyard

full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying

on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

I don't know what it means to live the right way, but I am coming to an idea of how to live in a way that means something to me.

Namaste.

Dragon Dance

2008-07-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

We are all ghosts.

We have yet to figure it out.

Walking around, we think we're never going to leave this place.

It's always been ours to do with.

Where are they all, those who have gone before us?

They are in the restless murmuring of the grasses and the hiss and wash of the sea.

We are like unto the dead ourselves.

Busy at who knows what.

There's nothing for it:

we're all for the boneyard.

Before The Storm

2008-07-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

The last we seen her, she was out in the green wind, gathering up her hens.

Sometimes I think it is that I have a great and abiding love for humanity in general, and it is just the individual example of it that I have such poor regard for.

Then other days I am certain it is the other way round.

I don't suppose I'll ever get to the point where I feel the same about both sets of data.

Which can be good or bad.

If I were brave I would give more.

I am not yet there.

I was thinking the other day about this guy, he was crazy. He fought with his father and his uncle and he hit his mother in the mouth and busted up a bunch of windows in the house. They called the cops a bunch of times to take him to mental health and every time it was touch and go.

One day, I got the call out there. He had busted his uncle's nose with a rifle butt and cracked him a good one on the side of the head and the uncle left out of the garage bleeding and dazed. They called up and hunkered down at the neighbors house.

I got there, its a little old paraplegic man sitting in front of the walkway. He's telling me how the kid inside is a good kid and all and I don't need to go in there all cowboy and bust him up. He's a good kid. So I point out I just want to get him outside and get him and everybody else a little bit of help, calm things down some.

The cripple says I can't go in.

We go around and around for a while, and I know he means well. But eventually I have to go and pick him up bodily and set him in the back of my car. I don't want him to get hurt.

He yells out something awful.

I feel about this big.

When I'm buttoning up the cripple, old boy comes out and stands on the front porch. He motherfucks me a good while, standing there screaming bloody murder, his arms akimbo, shaking like a furious newborn and as purple as one too.

I move up real, real slow. Kind of whispering into my mic, 'hurry up, now.' The new kid is my back-up and I don't know about him yet. He is a skinny little computer geek college boy, but he seems alright. I guess we're both about to find out something.

Old boy is shouting now he's gonna end it all. Go run up his room and blow out his brains with the same rifle he took to Uncle Bob a minute ago.

I'm edging towards him, my hands up like I'm settling a spooked horse. He's eyeing me and edging back towards the open door.

I can't let him get back inside.

Just then I catch the wail of a siren down the block, and I can hear that old Crown Vic engine moaning deep and loud. He's got his foot in her good, and that makes me glad. Old boy hears it too, though, and in a flash he's got through the door and trying to slam it shut. I get my boot in there and throw in my shoulder for good measure. He's a beefy old boy, but he grunts some and the door gives. I reach in and grab a hold of some part of him and latch on and thats what drags me on in as he tries to lumber on into the depths of the house. We do a little dance in the hallway, and that's when I kinda notice that one wall of the hall is regular old dry wall and doorways, and the other side is floor to ceiling glass that opens out to a eight or ten foot drop-off into some bushes. It's real pretty. Modern looking.

Old Boy's got me in a bear hug and his red and purple face looms over me. His green eyes are wild and now they narrow to slits. It is fixing to get bad is what I'm thinking. Then here comes the kid, all ninety-eight pounds of him, and he's screaming and running to beat the band and he just flings himself at Old Boy's back and mounts up top of his head and tries like mad to pull it off. Old Boy spins like a wounded bear and now all three of us are teetering toward the vast expanse of glass and I figure we go about four, five hundred pounds between us and we don't none of us have brakes and now I'm just kicking like mad at his pins, trying to knock 'em out from under him and eventually I get a good shot in at the side of his knee and I feel it and hear it at the same time. He gives way and we all go down and then it's nothing but assholes and elbows for a good while. We manage to fight him to a draw until the other guys arrive and get him all packaged up.

Afterwards the kid was grinning from ear to ear.

Shit, so was I.

Happy fourth, everbody.

Lost Boy

2008-07-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm making a seafood curry and vegetable biryani.

Plus I got a bottle of 2005 Castoro Syrah to go with.

My wife is so damn lucky.

Last night I dreamed that my brother and my father were holding me down in blacksmith's shop and trying to cut my left leg off with a giant pair of steel shears.

On the wall of the shop were all these drawings of horseshoes.

All different kinds.

I want to be compassionate. I want to do good things.

I don't want to waste the little bit of time I have.

More wine!

One thing I'll do is write you off too quick. The other thing I'll do is not write you off quick enough.

I got both speeds.

Today I did a drawing of Ted Danson's tall non-fat chai latte from March 13, 2004 and gave it to someone at work.

Gotta spread the love.

I don't have many friends. The ones I still have, they learned to keep trying.

Isn't that sad?

***

Namaste.

I hope you are happy.

A Momentary Kindness

2008-06-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that compassion gets right down to the nub of what it means to be worth a shit in this world.

Go to them.

Hold their hand.

Say something.

Say, "there, there."

Just keep saying it. That's okay.

You got a straw? And a knife? Maybe you can perform an emergency tracheotomy and save their life. But if not, you can at least hold their hand and say, "there, there. It's okay. Everything is going to be okay."

Even the last thing, if that's what it is.

Ah, the world is peopled with heroes. We are all of us capable.

We are all of us capable.

Of, at least, a small compassion.

I am the grateful beneficiary of ten thousands kinds of love. I am showered with it, though I claim to be parched and dry.

I am awash in love and so are you.

So are we all.

Getting It Out of Her

2008-06-28T16:13:00.001-07:00

This bad weather will not relent. The mood here is foul, bitter. The whites of our eyes have gone tinged with sulfur and spidery red lines. We speak and black feathers spill from our lips. If we pass too close, we leap back from the shock of blue flame that jumps the gap between our hard bodies.

Rub our arms and move by, wordless.

My body smells like decay. All my fluids have quit me and my eyeballs scree and clatter in their sockets.

It hurts to look and clapping them shut is worse.

Ah, listen to me.

Everwhere is the disassembly at work. Folks go to sleep in the dark and when they waken all they know and love is gone from them. What dark arts are concocting a drink for you now? You know not.

You know not.

Or, worse, you do and are right now downing the bitter liquid.

How it burns going down.

It seems the sweetness of the world has fled, and the golden light of dusk. And what tenderness has been between us. What passes for tenderness now?

We tend to our wounds in silence.

I make too much of it.

Everywhere it is much worse than here. My troubles are but small.

There is no one I need to bury, nor mourn for, nor slay, nor quit.

We are all of us in this small boat still making for shore.

Though it seem distant.

Though the sea remain indifferent to our pleas.

We are yet making our way.

Namaste.

Peace be with you.

This my earnest prayer.

I Will Tell You About The Time There Were All These Snakes On the Island

2008-06-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

My wife's friend is having a melt-down. Her marriage is busting up and she is driving the bulldozer and weeping all the while and also singing.

I have taken some time off to deal with my kid who is doing bad stuff and how.

I got a noise in my head like its a hive of bees in there. Plus smoke.

Do you smell burning feathers?

There are lots of moments of happiness, still. They sprout up like weeds through the cracks in a sidewalk. Stubborn and a little bit sad. But there they are, all the same.

We watched "Days of Heaven" the other night. I never tire of it.

"He seen how it was. She loved the farmer."

In the end, we should be good. To each other, to ourselves as well.

I'm trying.

My Old Man

2008-06-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else I guess, I got a complex relationship with my old man. Maybe that's not true. Maybe it is as simple as we pretend it is. I don't know.

In a world where I'm like to cut you off at the knees soon as look at you, my old man gets a free ride. He's done his share of stupid, selfish things, but I don't have a bone to pick with him. He's given his love freely, and he's been what I always wanted to be in a man.

Whatever that means.

My own road as a parent has been a revelation. Of the wildest, deepest, most disturbing joy. Watching the way my own shortcomings bind and wound my child. The illusion of happiness, and happiness itself.

Grief and bitterness.

Consternation.

In the end it's all indistinguishable from love.

Injured No. 1

2008-06-09T14:29:00.001-07:00

You must refuse nothing, for you will have it all.

In a down cycle of late. Couple of months. Lost in work, lost at home. Moments of happiness, sharp knives of beauty, and lots of chewed aluminum foil.

I have to go off for a while and it is going to storm and we are all going to be drenched.

Even a dark journey takes you somewhere.

The Mac is dead. Long live the Mac!

2008-05-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

The iMac had been acting a little wonky.

So I ran out and bought a new 500g external drive and Leopard and ran back home and tried to install it but all I got was a dreadful "beep, beep, beep!"

They call it a "catastrophic hardware failure."

I call it "Go back to San Luis Obispo and spend another fifteen hundred dollars and get a fucking beautiful and amazing new iMac.

Goddamn amazing.

But.

I now need new Photoshop or I can do no art.

Ka-ching!

Also, all my work is now trapped on a dead drive. My guy Rick Auricchio says we can pull it off the dead machine and it should be fine. The mother board is dead, but the drive should be okay.

Right?

It is Mother's Day and I made the mad knitter some waffles for breakfast and then we drove out Vineyard to Chimney Rock Road and went to Justin Winery for lunch. Stinky cheeses and asparagus omelette and a forty dollar half bottle of the 2005 Isoceles.

A full bottle of it managed to make its way home with us.

The picture above is from the side of the road.

Also, my daughter is being really nice to me!

Self in Trial

2008-04-27T15:25:00.001-07:00

Long dry spell, broken.

Real life is wheeling and wheezing around me like a nightmare merry go round, caliope music grinding away, scary clowns leering from all of the painted ponys.

One of them took my popcorn.

Thing about this job is that every time I think I'm pretty good at it, think I been around a while and can draw a pretty good bead on most folks, well, I tell you what. I get knocked right down on my butt.

It's good for me.

Humble pie.

I am in trial right now, been going on three weeks and we are maybe half way through. I can't go into detail, but it is a circus and not the main event but that sideshow tent where the two headed calf and the half-snake, half-woman and the rubber man hang out.

Remember in those old westerns, the shoot-out on horses? One old boy will get shot and fall off, but hang up a boot in the stirrup and get dragged off down the street behind the spooked horse, big cloud of dust behind him?

How I feel.

But in the midst of it all is a calm center, filled with love and light. I got wife and home and kid and dogs and money in the bank and food in the pantry and my arms and legs and sight and touch and what's left of my sense.

This too, this too.

You should see the damn backyard right now.

It done bust out in flowers everywhere.

Namaste, y'all.

Blindman

2008-03-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

If you have to go out into the desert and shoot shotguns for four or five days, do so. It will cleanse the soul and align the eye with the heart for the time when killing is at hand.

But I would not recommend going on the day of your wedding anniversary.

I have recently returned from just such a trip. Men in desert tan and O.D. green and digicam and black with their various shotgun set ups standing on line and letting loose double ought buck and one ounce slugs and Federal Tactical Flight Control and Winchester Super X.

Select slug drills from the 35 and the 50 yard line.

Close contact drills from the 3 yard line.

Head shots on hostage-taker targets in 1.5 seconds from the 7 yard line.

Malfunction clearance drills.

Etc.

Shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting. Faster and faster and more accurate and more accurate still.

A measure of contentment.

I derive a certain satisfaction from knowing that I am a lethal being. There are more lethal beings on this planet (my little brother being a case in point), but I can hold my own against a hefty portion of them. It is in the hands and the eye and the back and legs, but it is also and more importantly in the dark heart.

It takes a killing heart to get done what needs doing in this world.

What I also love is moving from the world of skill at arms to the world of art.

What is one without the other?

Where is the glory of god to be found?

In the act of creation and the act of destruction.

Because you will be destroyed, you can destroy.

Because you have been created, you may create.

What I know is that my wife is the dead center of my world. Yes I am a man and what comes with that. Yes I am a cop and what comes with that. Yes I am a son-of-a-bitch and what comes with that.

But I know what matters in this life.

And above all it is her.

It is her.

My little brother says to me on the last day of the desert shotgun class:

"My goddamn hands feel like I've been crushing gravel with them."

When I got home, I had to spend an hour cleaning all of the blood off my gun. From my own little bitch fingers.

There is a lot of sharp edges on these guns.

I shoot the Benelli M1 Super 90. It is a semi-auto 12 gauge shotgun. I have put eight rounds of 00 buck downrange in less than four seconds. It is like having a portable shitstorm in your hands.

Seriously, you don't stand a chance.

I shot a "Distinguished Graduate" on this course. Two of the guys I was with shot the whole thing "clean". Perfect. Not a round dropped. Not a flaw.

I missed that by one round.

There are some serious operators out there.

I know that I buy into a certain kind of bullshit about what it means to be a man. What it means to hold your mud and to carry your weight and to do what needs doing.

I know that.

But still.

Monochrome Sea No. 1

2008-03-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

34x 34 inches

Housepaint, paper, charcoal, fiber, wax on canvas.

"You have one day."

They always issue an ultimatum.

Yesterday I made the tower of babel in ceramics class. I will show it to you when it is finished. It is so coool.

My wife makes stuff like it just pops out from between her fingertips.

'pop!' a bowl

'pop!' another bowl.

'pop!' a crazy plate.

'pop!' the cathedral at Notre Dame.

She are an artist.

When you are sixteen you are supposed to come home late and all fucked up and high and then say

"What? What? What?"

"I am not high!

I am not fucked up.

I'm going to bed!"

Right?

I dunno. Some reason today, I'm having a great time.

Namaste.

Intersections

2008-02-29T15:46:00.000-08:00

this is a painting that no longer exists.

I got up and went to work and came back home sick after only two hours. I have some kind of cough.

It brings me to my knees.

My wife is obsessive compulsive, like me. But different. She does art. Art. Art. Art. Art. Art. Art. Art. Is it art yet? Let's do it some more and see if it is.

She takes something and makes it art. And then she puts some art on it again. And then once more. Or twice maybe.

Over and over and over.

She is knitting socks of late. Intricate and mysterious and warm and colorful and vibrant and, yes, odd.

I am instant gratification man when it comes to art. Or almost anything. Give it to me now.

There. It's art.

Next!

I watched Tom Hanks in Castaway again last week. There is this moment, right before the plane he is on smashes into the middle of the vast Pacific ocean, where Mr. Hanks is in the airplane lavatory, trying to splash some water on his face in the tiny stainless steel sink. He pats the water off his face and then holds up his thumb, which sports a band-aid.

Slowly, grimacing, he peels it off and stares at the injured thumb.

In the blink of an eye he will be smashed up into the overhead, then flung around in the belly of the plane, then smashed into the sea, nearly drowned, nearly eaten by the screaming turbine of the wing-mounted engine, and then cast adrift in a tiny, leaking life raft in mountainous seas in the middle of a storm in the middle of the night in the middle of nothing.

After that, he doesn't think about his thumb any more.

It's all about perspective.

If my life lacks sufficient stark terror, I tend to obsess over my little injured thumb.

"Ooooh. It hurts."

Anxity.

2008-02-25T17:32:00.001-08:00

There is a method for disassembly. There is one for assembly. There are myriad others in between.

I am a stranger to them.

The most beautiful thing in the world is the world itself.

What more does one need?

There is the thrill of glimpsing the vast timescales of the geological processes. The vast numbers of years and ages and creatures. Not to mention the galaxies. The worlds and numberless stars and numberless experiments made in no one's name at all.

We are all grist for the mill.

make no mistake about that.

yet we are given the beauty of a sunset. of the sea. of our own flesh. of kisses and numberless kisses of our beloved.

riches rain upon us like disasters.

we are all of us undone.