Bougainvillea triumphant!

It's Memorial Day at work, and I've finished my week's post at my clinical blog. I just tried to write the part 2, intending to describe the relationship of awe and depression treatment, but it sort of fizzled in my brain. Like you started into the city thinking you knew the route, and then, less sure, started guessing about the roads, then stopped perplexed in front of a taco store that sells stun guns. It's best in such circumstance to admit defeat, so I gave up and reflected on the view out the sliding glass window. And again, I am heartened by the resurgence of the bougainvillea, nearly killed by the frost.

This is the B in March:And the B in late May:

Apparently, because its roots were in the ground and not in a pot (i.e., exposed to all sides), it survived, though it looked dicey.

But life comes around.

I've been doing these weekly walks with residents here, the "Discovering the Community" group, and I've noticed myself being an advocate for awe. And I'm really feeling it, how amazingly complex and diverse the life is even this little funky neighborhood in the South Bay. If you carry the image of Mars (not even the Mojave, which is bursting with life in comparison) as you go through your common day, the astounding quality of richness really pops out of what is otherwise a "typical day."

Like with this bougainvillea bush. It's probably one of a thousand in this area, common in these terms. But as far as we know, there's no B bush for a million miles around this little planet, not on all the solar planets, not in the space between or the floating rock belt, just here. And it's taken, what, a billion years to rise up from a few sticky amino acids to even challenge the late winter frost of the Peninsula for it's chance to keep living.

It sort of reminds me of great athletes, or musicians, or therapists for that matter. You watch them perform, and their greatness is not presented, it just emerges from their ground of being. A tremendous amount of effort, energy, and work has gone into structuring that ground, but the expression does not have a self-consciousness about it. It sort of just happens.

Like my B-friend out there. It's accomplishing something--surviving the frost, and merely being alive--that given the forces arrayed against it, and the opportunities to die from one thing or another, is quietly astounding. It's as if the universe juggles fifteen balls with its feet just as a matter of course, with the simplicity of walking, and just gives a little frown and shrug when you point it out. "Well, ok, but what else am I going to be doing?"

So give it up for the bougainvillea!

Fetchez la vache!

OK, so at the very end of my life, regardless of whatever I've done wrong, of how many hurts I've inflicted, of however many screw ups I've made--well, to put it this way, regardless of the sum total of my inflictions, afflictions, derelictions, righteous convictions about my multitudinous crucifixions, and even, and finally, my stingy refusals to offer benedictions...truly, no can take away the fact that I ran a 12K race in a cow suit. And that regardless of how the Grand Assessor might tally up my qualities and find me utterly common, he cannot say that many can claim such a laurel. In fact, if you put it context of the span of all of human history, back to when the human brain was a walnut of fatty-tissue sitting on top of an engorged reptile brain stem, then the number is so close to zero as to effectively be zero, and therefore, statistically, impossible to do. Yet, as you can see in the photos, I did it! Which inevitably leads us to the reality that, by running as a Guernsey cow, I have, undoubtedly, achieved the impossible. Wow.

So, I just checked the results, and I posted at 1:15:02, which shaves off 1 minute and 36 seconds from my first 12k race (Link to blog entry)! Out of about 35,000 registered participants (there were 25,000 unregistered freeloaders), my placement was 5010 overall, 3787 for men, and 1081 for my division (not sure which that was, perhaps "gradually aging dudes"?). Age grade was 45%...email me if you know what that means.

(And I just read that a 53 year old man collapsed and died at the finish line, the 5th death in 12 years--rather morbid statistics. A young man in 2003 died of dehydration, which just seems stupid considering that there were water stations every 1/2 mile or more.)

I had a very fun time, and a pretty good race. My knees are not doing as badly as after the last one, I think because the new shoes are better and I'm more aware of running heal-to-toe. The race itself was perhaps to running what miniature golf is to golf, a lot of running around furry animals, naked people and miscellaneous slow-moving detritus from the cultural semi-conscious. One found themself running on sidewalks a lot, as for some reason the main street was sluggish except off to the left side. If you wanted to actually run, you had to go off roading.

Really, the race is something to make you proud of the Bay Area and San Francisco in particular. All freaks welcome, very mellow, supportive, appreciative of each other. There were live bands all along the way and many impromptu DJs, in houses along the routes, in the back of cars, and in rolling wagon thingys. My favorite was in GG Park, a group of 5 musicians dressed as Hassidic Jews, called Mushugga Beach Party (website), playing traditional Jewish tunes with a surfer bent. And they were all, including the woman, wearing long black beards. As always, I only had eyes for the drummer...

We had lunch at our favorite crepe house. No one commented on the cow in the corner.(All photos courtesy of my lovely wife, Heather Ussery-Knight. Contact me if you are interested in art-rock events, bar mitzvahs, or farm portraiture.)

Un Nuevo Papa

Benjamin Alexander was born at 12:40 pm, Pacific Time, in San Francisco, with Mama Robin pushing for a record mere 30 minutes. This picture of the proud and tired Papa James with a totally zonked out Benjamin was taken about 3 hours later. Apparently B-dude got a bath, a bit of sunbathing under the heat lamp, and then figured he'd had enough of the wide world and promptly konked out. He didn't wake the whole time we Heather and I were there.

As with all great events, it had an utter commonness to it. But there are two kinds of the mundane, the one where what you are relating to is felt as an object denuded of the sacred, and the one where your experience is so deeply saturated with the sacred that there's just a big sense of connection. All the hype about birth and life and etc., well, being there with James and Robin and B-dude and Rainie and Heather and Carrie and the hospital staff, it seemed so obvious and so wonderfully un-cut off from life. Like, oh, here life has done it's thing again, without effort, without specialness (in that first sense of the mundane), with an unostentatious depth.

And for me, having know James for so long and through so many phases and changes, that depth had a personal dimension that felt, again, not special, but connective. In seeing him in all these changes, and knowing many more will come, there was a sense of communion with that which was flowing through him and us and the whole scene. Quite beautiful in its commonness.

My prayers and deep best wishes go out to one of the planet's newer occupants. May all his challenges give him soil to grow in, may he learn the value of giving, may he understand his lack of specialness in a way that brings deep joy and security.

Scuba!

In about January, Randy, my old buddy from high school and junior college, contacted me out of the blue through a clinical ad I have posted on the web. Having last seen me in would-be film maker and would-be writer modes, he was surprised to find me a psychotherapist. Me too. We had dinner, after 15 years of being out of contact, and made a date to go scuba diving, which he's been doing for years. (Heather and I were certified during our honeymoon in Hawaii about two years ago.)

So finally, after we settled on a date (Cinco de Mayo) and he booked us at Point Lobos just south of Monterey. The site is a state preserve, so they only allow a handful of divers in each day. We piled everything into Randy's truck and headed south from our house, on one of those San Francisco days that make the Minnesotans weep. We had some serious chatting, and a remarkably amount of memory cells were pushed into activity--old men suddenly tasered out of their lawn chairs--giving forth details gone unthought for decades. For instance, we came up with the reading list for a science fiction literature class we'd taken together at junior college, a class I not only didn't remember, but didn't remember I'd taken with Randy. In fact, I'd forgotten that we were at JC together at all. It's amazing what's tucked in the folds and fat of the human brain. After some navigational problems, we arrived in Monterey, and collected our rental equipment at a dive shop on a pier. It's where many of the scuba shops do certification dives with students, so the calm water was littered with clumps of bobbing heads, like sea weed with snorkels. (I'm glad we finished our certification in Hawaii, where there were actually fish to see.) Randy's been diving for years, so he knew all the lingo, what to get, what sizes, etc. I stood by trying not to look too newbie-ish, and then got distracted by Maggie the dwarf Australian Sheppard, who rolled over and let me scratch her belly. Aww, dogs...

Point Lobos is a little cove with several reefs buffering it from the main part of Monterey bay. There's patches of kelp all around it, but not as thick as I'd feared. We spent at least 45 minutes suiting up, checking the tanks. Randy had brought along several other wet suits, and Heather's was a bit tight (if sexy), which was manageable until she got in the water. Apparently the suit, in that cold Pacific water, got even tighter, such that she was having trouble breathing. She decided to sit out the first dive, and then swap my suit and go back in with Randy.

So, after switching fins (broke mine), and adding more sandbag weights (too light to actually sink in the water), Randy and I set off, swimming quickly down to the bottom and out towards the reef. It struck me that I had no fear of big scary animals, and the same was true in Hawaii. It's simply not the creepy feeling that is conveyed in movies; there's nothing at all creepy about being underwater. Whatever archetypes exist out of water, when staring off from the shore, dissolve once you go under. Just more critters living out their lives, pretty simple and explicit.
That's something that had deepened from my first non-shore contact with the ocean, being a kayaking trip on Richardson Bay (Marin County). Then the diving certification in Hawaii, and two weeks ago whale watching, all of it has shown me that the world doesn't just stop at waters edge. I'm not really sure how to say it, and I suppose there's a bit of embarrassment at realizing and admitting that I thought the oceans were somehow a totally different world from the air-breathing realms. When you're underwater, it's just more life. And in fact, except for the coasts and reefs of the world, apparently not actually a lot of life. The image of the oceans teaming with all colors and shapes does not seem to be true; much of it, on top and below, appears to be desert. And according to Randy, down past about 100 feet, there's not a lot of life either. So life is only teaming in small and narrowly banded sections of the ocean. Otherwise, it's wet earth.

But we saw a bit more than wet earth. In the cove, there were orange starfish all over, and pale purple coral, frondy like certain ferns. Randy showed me a sea slug the size of a small bread loaf. Otherwise it was rocks and sand, and you could only see maybe 10 feet in front of you. He navigated in front and I trailed along behind, trying to manage my buoyancy correctly so I wouldn't crash down on the plants. He said the seals came and played with them last week, but today, they stayed up on the shore.

Apparently with the cold water and the exertion of getting into the water, we both were breathing heavily, sucking up the oxygen such that we only had 20 minutes total in the water. And at that, on the way back to the entry point, when we entered shallower water (about 17 feet), I began ascending and couldn't stop it. I saw him down below me and tried to descend, but a few feet later he was gone in the mucky water. I popped up on the surface, and began swimming the couple hundred yards to the shore, thinking I saw him come up a ways a way. Turns out he was freaking out on the bottom, thinking they were going to have to drag the cove for my body. I didn't see him till I reached the boat launch and could tell that he was back where I popped out of the water, looking and diving until he saw me waving to him.

He later explained that under about 20 feet, the water density and pressure increases so that buoyancy is easier to handle, but above that, you become more bubble-like, and without enough weight to compensate, up you go. I was able to manage initially because we swam straight down and stayed below the 20 foot mark as we swam out to the reef. It was hopeless on the way back. An interesting note is that on the Hawaii dives, I wore only 14 pounds. Here I could have worn another 10 pounds, up from the 30 pounds I was wearing.

When we got out, Heather had decided she was too tired to go back in, so we commenced to rinse all the equipment and change clothes for the trip back. It was a lot of work for a short dive, but Randy said he thought it was going to be a learning dive anyway, and that this sort of stuff just happens from time to time. I was happy with it. Enjoyable company and getting to do something, and see a part of the world that an incredibly small percentage of the population has experienced.

We ate at a grungy Chinese restaurant in Monterrey, then headed back to SF, continuing the chatting and reminiscing while Heather dozed in the back of the cab.

Free hugs!

This is just incredibly sweet.

Visit to the Wine Country, Dour Dancers, And Vomit...Without Whales

Last weekend was Heather's birthday, on the 19th. She's an Aries. They butt into things, with their heads. A lot. They typically have curly horns, that are hard. She lost hers in a pokerf match in Burbank. I think to Brad Pitt, the cheatin bastard.

We stayed up in a B&B up in Sonoma, a bit outside of the main square. It put the fun in funky, but like arsenic and old lace sort of fun. Like, the owners seem ok, but you're out of scream range of the local houses. We had the Mural Room, a cool place on the bottom floor of the main house, with our own sitting porch and an adjacent sitting room done up like my Auntie V's apartment, except on sort of a burgundy infused acid. There was a scary doll in the closet.

Sonoma put the bourg in bourgeois. But in a kind of downbeat way. And Mexican. But with Frenchie sort of things. So like a working class Mexican bourgeois with Frenchie leanings, and like cheese. We had some great cheddar at the cheese shop. I don't really like many other cheese but cheddar. We walked around and saw two roosters on the square, apparently lost, filling us with pity. Heather took a picture to document the sadness.

After a very nice dinner with the B&B-owners-who-don't-apparently-eat-their-guests, we visited Jack London's old ranch up in Glen Ellen, a little north of Sonoma. James and I had visited there many many years ago, a pilgrimage for the English majors (and therefore frustrated writers). There was less angst on this visit; most of my young-man travels with James are tinged with that angst, like sepia photographs, except in the color of angst.

Beautiful place, so Californian. And what a character London was, an unresolvable tension between the adventuresome individualist and the Utopian Socialist. I would have liked to have him as a neighbor, but probably not a boss. There were a lot of rules for the workers on the ranch. It must have been awkward to be the J.K. Rowling of your day, and a socialist. His house burned down somehow. The Russian students' chaparone thought it was arson, though others believe it was oily rags. I think it was the Masons. Every bad thing that's happened to me has been because of the Masons. Or the Knights Templar. Or the IRS, except they're really just the KT in ties instead of metal shoes. So I figure a bad thing like that must follow similar logic as in my life.

It would have been a majestic house. It had it's own stag party room, which makes you wonder.

From there we went into Napa, which put the work into working class. It was like that area in a beautiful, ornate fountain where all the silt and gum wrappers collect, near the drain. The guide book described it like a sacrificial object, thrown to the dogs that the rest of the community might exist in grape splendor. Which reminds me that the Book also said wine growing in the valleys was destroyed by bug-pestilence in the 40's, and only returned in the 70's. We also learned a new word, or rather, as Heather clarified, a new use of an old word: "appellation," defined as a wine growing region. E.g., "We drove through the Sonoma Appellation, consuming the vinyards with our eyes, eating salty cheese and whistling sad sea shanties, thoroughly uninebriated."

We took a jog back through the East Bay, to that toxic box called IKEA, and bought Heather a crafts table, then home for a little rest before heading out for a dance performance at the ODC theater. It's very curious when dancers pretend to not have a body. Which is one way of saying I sat there cocking my head like the RCA dog. I really wanted to like it. Heather thought that the artists were just young, which I can accept. I guess I just like my dance a little more...feral.

I broke the news to Heather late that night that we'd be doing a 6:30am start, which might be analogous to informing a priest that the Papacy had just past a law saying catechism must be done in the nude. But she's a trooper, and up we went and got on a fishing charter boat at Fort Mason, along with 20 other unsuspecting souls. Out we went, under the Golden Gate, along the Marin Headland coasts towards the Faralon Islands. The naturalist guide was Ka-RA-Zee about her sea birds. Not birds. SEA BIRDS. I tried to talk to her about parrots and she glazed over like I was describing how to gap spark plugs. I didn't know you could have such discreet categories of affection with animals who share all the same bits.

Sea sickness. What a lame term for such an awful condition. Six hours or so of feeling nauseous, wanting to throw up but can't. Trying to find some place of relative comfort, some little crack in the oppressive cliff face of suffering that leads through to a quiet place with dripping water. That turned out to be sitting on the front of the boat, near the center line, and staring at the horizon. Or in the cabin, near the heater, head down and dozing. Everything else was near vomiting.

And no whales! Where were the god damned whales. We saw twenty varieties of birds, including a boad-stopping puffin, sitting in a little dip of the ocean doing nothing, while the naturalist shouts, "Puffin! It's a puffin!" and I see a black blob with a red attached blob. Well, we did see the Faralons, a small cluster of rocks and birds and a few sea lions, and two houses for the scientist wierdos who stay out there weeks at a time. But no whales. We did see the tail fin of a porpoise, trying to escape the boat full of green-faced gawkers.

Still, I'm glad we went whale non-watching. The ocean is amazing out there. There's no surface--that's what really sticks with me. The plane of water that you see on the beach simply does not exist. It's an abstraction, or a visual mean of the million data points. But on top of it, there's just a constantly shifting rising and falling, dips and hills, curves and infinitely subtle shades of metallic black waters. And a sense of power in even the mild waves we encountered, so great and impersonal and yet not not you. They seem to be the non-personal part of you, so there's a deep familiarity there. And there's a desolation that I would not have expected, like in the desert but more uniform. Not at all apologetic or sinister, just empty and inhospitable. You're welcome to participate as you like, to swim or float or drown, as you like, it's all taken in stride by the ocean.

We staggered home and read the rest of the day. I finally dug into Zodiac by Neil Stephenson, a very different take on water. A good read, very much the product of someone raised on films. It's one of those books you think, "Why hasn't that been made into a film?" Then sleep.

(You can read Heather's account of our trip by clicking here and here.)

Jung

Carl Jung, desk surfing.