four

Little Elle can climb. Little S. can tumble. G. can run and scream and put the fear of god in you and D. swims like a shark.

(sigh)

It drives me crazy when I tell people I have four daughters and they look at me like I am some poor dumb guy who doesn't stand a chance.

They repeat after me: “Four?”

I hate it when they say “four.”

Four.

Foooooouuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Seriously, it makes me crazy and I wish they would stop the parroting. "Yes, I have four daughters. Why? Is it written somewhere that having four girls is bad?"

Seriously. I want to punch them. I mean what are they saying anyway?

I also hear this one a lot: “Four daughter is a lot of work.”

?????????????

My favorite responce to this is a line a friend of mine gave me: "You go from man to man to a zone defense."

It is better than the cynical, derisive comments that I want to say:

“You poor stupid bastards, you don’t have daughters, do you?”

Daughters are awesome. I wish I had twenty and I am so, so, so glad I had four.

They make me laugh, they make me cry, and most of all, they make me glad.

There was a time when I loved three… but four is the magic number.

reverence for

Listen! Listen! The king is in the counting house, counting out, counting out. The king is in the counting house, counting all the money. One. Two. Three. Four. All ready?
Looks like we made it
Or I thought so, till today
Until you were there,
Everywhere, and all I could taste was love the way we made it.
Well, you're a fishmonger! You're my everything, you are my sunshine, you're old and grey and full of sleep. You're my pickle-faced, consumptive Mary Jane!

Boredom, sleep and full of pain, “you don’t sleep well, do you.”
“No, I never do.”

You have to read this.

[rant]
There are things that we take for granted, things that we celebrate because we are so proud of who we have become. We allow ourselves a certain pride because there isn’t anytime in human civilization when so many have lived so well, knew so much, had the opportunity to live so well… what complete bullshit.

Where is the authenticity? Ok I am completely saturated in Television and Internet and media and I know so much more than my father, or my mother or more than anyone else in history (except that this is hubris and there are so many people who know so much more than I do)

“Today's amature knows more than the experts of one hundred years ago. “ Absolute nonsense.
[end rant]

One. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-three.

Eyelids flutter. The mind achieves a kind of focus. “I know this. This is so familiar.” Mindfulness is replaced by awareness. I am, and I am, and I am. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

So incredibly bored with ourselves that we seek to be entertained all the time. “O.K. world, Wow me!”

Monday. Tuesday. (so predictable) Wednesday (profound insight) Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. Thursday. Thursday, FriSatSunday.

Those of us who know are scored by our elders as knowing only what is vapid and banal; what I did what clever, but clever by regurgitating what I have heard over and over and over until everything I know is merely a convenient truth and everything I say is (yes clever) not what I mean.

It is impossible to say exactly what I mean.
We who are tired of the sarcasm, of the arrogance of the ingenuous criticisn of life that has become so ubiquitous.

O.K., O.K. I get it. The world is bad. Life is evil, consumerist or greedy or self absorbed. But there is also something very simple at the root of this. There is a voice within the voice. There is a point at which criticism stops cutting and start sounding like a pained, helpless moment of endurance for those who treat plan old human troubles and emotions and with reverence and conviction.

There is no longer a why.. nor is there a how. Modern. Post mOdern. These definitions no longer seem to fit. We find outselves levitating in the moment wondering if anyone is noticing and wondering how this moment could be possible. (The levitation, after all, seems natural)

I am not an arrant god, nor was meant to be.

Profound truth.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Mirror games

So, if you are a patient, faithful reader, you will know that one of my big “discoveries” of the past year has been that my brain is not trying to kill me. Rather, my brain is working extra hard to try and figure things out for me, look at the really hard, painful stuff of my life and try to make sense of it. It’s hard. It’s uncomfortable. Most of the time I don’t want to see it. So I blame my brain for my… well for my shortcomings. My brain, it turns out, is not trying to kill me. Who Knew?

If you are a patient, faithful reader, you are still reading.

Favorite movie quotes.

One. “A spear” and two “it helps, it really helps.” One is from “Apocalypse Now”, and the second is from “Harry Potter: Prisoner from Azkaban”. Why bring them up here?

Imagine if you will the shock I experienced when my life long companion, no, not my wife, but the voice inside my head, turned out not to be my enemy but my friend.

“A spear” Chief Phillips looks at his mortal enemy and realizes that it was not his perceived foe, but a random act of savage violence, that would end his life.

“It helps, it really helps” Professor Lupin offers Harry a piece of chocolate after his first dementor attack. Sometimes the simple creature comforts are cures for those things that ail us.

You know. I spend a lot of time thinking about the things that are wrong in my life. I think about fame and fortune and everything thing that goes with it. I want them all.

One night in college I had a lot to drink. I stumbled back to my dorm room and slipped into my bathrobe. I was about to turn out the light when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was dirty. My hair, unkept. But the more I looked, that more I became engaged with the image of myself. I stared until all I could see where my own eye looking back at me and still I continued to stare. My vision blurred, my eyes waters and still I continued to stare, I could see the faint red lines of the veins in my pupils. I could see them pulsing. I could see the pock marks on my skin, the hairs in my lashes. I have later discovered that this kind of intense focus is not hard to arrive at, but at the time, perhaps because of excessive drink, I thought it was amazing.

“This is who I am” I thought to myself. “This is me.”

I have to tell you, I am pretty sure I went through the same kind of experience when I was thinking about the way I thought about myself. “My brain is not trying to kill me!”

Neither is a vision of who I am.
Remarkable.

Recently I rekindled a relationship with a friend of twenty years. I won’t go into the details here but at the end of a recent conversation, my friend pointed out the similarities that existed between us then and now. “Some things have changed and some things are still the same.” Eerie. It is funny but, in a moment I realized I am so much more than these parts.

Damn it! Now I have to go back and reevaluate the whole thing all over!

Sarama

Someone has stolen the sacred cows
and hidden them among the mountain caves.
They dwell on the far side of the river
that separates the world of gods and men
from the world of demons.

Prophets have told of the decline.
We either live in an age of poverty,
Or one of great abundance.
There is hardly a distinction
In the World as Will and Idea.

The Panis have stolen something of ours.
“These are the cows which you desire,
lovely lady, having flown beyond the ends of the skies,
who would give them up to you without a fight?”

It is hard to imagine a people
who have no language of their own.
Harder still to imagine the vanquished
Who have never known battle, only prayer.
Does modern life have a place for poets?
For Homer? For Goerthe?

“Your words are no armies.
Your evil bodies may be proof against our arrows.
But where you go we will follow,
Where you hide you will not be spared.”

There is little reflection. Oh Muse!
You are as fickle as the night,
As constant as the dawn!
What we admire we lavish only in its decline.
To do else-wise would impede your progress.
We criticize what we cannot hope to understand.

what if's

I like the “what if’s” of life. I used to have a teacher, actually she was the principal of my grade school that would say “uh-uh, no what if’s.”

How sad.

What if the sky was pink and the oceans were lemonade.

What if I had a better job, and why don’t I go get it right now.

What if people treated each other better, or if government had a better mandate for the people or if religion taught individual salvation, what if sandwiches were the reward for the well lived life, what if, what if, what if.

What if I added olives to my marinade?

What if I drank another beer?

What if I told that S.O.B. off, like s/he so desperately deserves.

What if I tried to be less angry, more hopeful, less sullen, more joyous, less proud, more proud.

I think what if’s get the lawn mown. Get the trash taken out. Get dinner made and get us out of bed in the morning.

If I had a chance to go back in time and finish that particular conversation (there are so many) I would tell her, what if’s are the things of dreams, the imagination of children, the aspirations of adults, they are the reason we live, the reason we die, why we try and fail, and why we try and succeed.

Dog Daze

I can’t help but sit here and think about all those novels set in the deep south that begin with a description of the long wearisome heat of summer that bears down on the mind and the senses. Something about women bathing before noon and gentlemen wiping the damp from their foreheads with a yellowing handkerchief. Every one of my pores breaks out in an absolute panic each time I set foot outside. I am like a deep-sea diver descending into a foreign land, my sweat like a layer of armor against the elements.

Yesterday S. and I were the pool where I fished a dead cicada out of the water. “What is that?” she asked.
“A cicada., the trees are full of them.”
“Why” she asks, not so much to further the conversation but really more to say “I have nothing at all to say to that.”
“Listen” I say “you can hear them all around us.” The trees are full to the aching whine that is the distinctive sound to the insect.
“I don’t hear anything.”
Incredulous I point to first one group of trees and then the next. “There” I say “and there. No?” Nothing. Like a pungent aroma that seemingly vanishes within minutes of first detecting it, she has managed to pushed the sound out of mind and memory till it has become completely undetectable. “Nothing at all?”

Cicadas aside there is a kind of meditative stillness to the long, hot, dog days of summer. Total immersion creates a kind of restfulness that monks achieve after years of contemplations. Standing in my make shift studio in the garage, the banter of my mind is silenced by the drone of the fan blowing against me. Paint stiffens in the heat and the wet bristles of the brush begin to wilt. The eye darts from canvas to canvas making spontaneous decisions in an effort to out pace the heat.

PINK