Hartford and Vine

Yesterday my boss came in to the watch commander’s office and saw I was working on this piece.

“What are you doing?”

“Working on this piece.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a digital photograph I took. I’m playing around with it in Photoshop.”

LONG PAUSE

“What is it?”

I explain that it’s a picture of little plastic people and toy cars that I set up and then took pictures of and then altered the pictures until I was pleased with the effect, etc.

“Okay.” He says. “But why do you do it?”

“Uh…it’s a hobby.”

“Oh.” He looks at me like I have three heads.

“Like duck hunting.”

“Oh….”

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Like I was from Mars…

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The Blue Tutu

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Sometimes despite your best intentions, things go all wrong.

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I would reach them. I would hold and comfort them, but they stay a foot away.
Out of my reach.

It is a bitter distance.

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Too little sleep. Three hours last night. Five the night before. Five more ten hour work days ahead before the next break. My eyes are hoarding sand and little metal fragments in their sockets, and they won’t turn them loose.

I need to wring out my spine.

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Our daughter left a note (calling us by our FIRST NAMES!) explaining that she understood that she didn’t like being around us and we didn’t like being around her, and that from now on we’d maintain minimal contact until she was out from under our thumb, etc.

She is fourteen.

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I love this little portrait of her.

“Nel mezzo di camin de nostra vita…”

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I am not insane or depressed.

I am not.

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Delaying, Moment by Moment

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I am in a fit of work.

All I see, I see through a lens. I have no other language available to me. I work on an image- set up, shooting, then tinkering, tinkering…until the image comes into its own and an ethereal light washes over the whole of me.

Print it, scan it, gaze at it, put it away.

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Begin.

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My hands shake like I have had too much coffee. Which I have had. What is not work flows by me as a stream of blurred images and unremembered conversations, noise and clutter. Only through the lens does the world come into focus. A small world, but one of my own making.

Although richer, somehow, than I can come to terms with.

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I am finding my way towards a language.

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Stumbling. Errant. Haphazard.

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I must hurry.

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They Are Most Excellent Mathematicians

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Today is spent in preparation.

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We must face our fear.

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Catching The Thing With Feathers

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I love my daughter. When I see her or think about her my heart swells with an intense joy. Right now, and for the past year or so, she can’t stand me. I need only to be present, or worse, to speak, and I become the recipient of a withering gaze and a cutting remark.

What’s nice about this love for her is that it makes me nearly immune to her scorn.

I know it’s real, I know it’s how she really feels, but I also know that it’s temporary and necessary, etc. So it bums me out, but it doesn’t really touch me. I still get all googly when I see her.

But for right now she’s also kind of more enjoyable to be around in the abstract.

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It seems to be true that we are really living in a samsaric realm. It’s a little bit harder to see when you happen to have been born whole, born to parents who love and care for you, born into a family and a home, a functioning economy, with no obvious physical deformities or grave mental defects, gifted with your five senses, not beaten, threatened, starved, continuously raped, or hacked with machetes or have bombs dropped on your village, etc.

I mean, from this vantage point it just swirls around the periphery: it comes in through the electrical outlets of your home, via television and radio and internet and in the daily newspaper and the weekly magazines and it passes from hand to hand and mouth to mouth at work and in the streets. Like contagion. The disaster virus. Somewhere else the machetes swing into the night. Somewhere else the car bomb explodes as you are walking your children across the street, carefully, watching both ways for traffic. Somewhere else the men come in the night and hold you down as they rape your wife and children before hacking your arms off and cutting out your tongue. Somewhere else the men come into your cell and close the door behind them and they come at you again. With their tools. With their empty eyes and their stone ears that are deaf to your cries for mercy.

It doesn’t really touch us most of the time.

Then it does. In all its many ways. Intimate and intensely personal, it worms its way into your own body or the body of your beloved. It takes your old life away and gives you something else in its place.

It tears away the curtain you’ve been holding up in front of you as protection from the endless pain of the real world.

Raw. Real. Unendurable.

But we somehow manage to patch up the curtain in time and hold it back up. Sure, we can see through the tears and holes, see a lot more than we did before, but it’s nice to get that curtain back up there nonetheless. A little more comfortable. A little more secure.

It sometimes seems like we are abandoned children, starving for food and for love and left to dig in the garbage for our survival. Sometimes we happen upon a scrap of food, or a piece of clothing that we can wrap around ourselves and we beam with joy and happiness. We know then that the universe loves us. We do a little dance in our glee.

But this is not quite correct. It isn’t.

Because the truth is also that this world is a wonder of wonders. It is jampacked with beauty and tenderness and quiet pleasures. There are wide, clean beaches where you walk hand in hand with your beloved and the murmur of the surf washes over you and the whole of the sky puts on a heartbreaking display of wild color, for you, for everyone, for free. There is touching the body of your beloved. There is the taste of fresh fruit. There is art. There is science. There is everywhere a man laying down his life for the life of a stranger. There is compassion. There are miracles. I myself live in an endless parade of them, blessings and miracles raining down upon me like a wild summer rainstorm, drenching me and taking my breath away.

I am loved.

I am loved.

I am loved.

Yesterday I met with a friend of mine who’d left the Sheriff’s department a year and a half ago to go to Iraq as a private security officer. With Blackwater or one of those operations. This guy is a former Marine officer, a fifteen year SWAT cop, boxer, martial artist, weapons expert, etc. He had trained his whole life for combat and had never really gotten into it. No shootings, no wars, etc. He had terrible timing that way. And he was always, always, always looking for it. He had no humor, no sense of perspective, no room for anything but vigilance and anger.

He was a terrible person to be around.

So he came back last week from Iraq. He was completely transformed. When I saw him I was stunned by this light coming off of him. He looked like Jesus Christ or a saint or Buddha. He said he was changed. He said he was calm now, for the first time. He said that he understood things much better than before. He described his time in Iraq, the eerie unreality of it, how it seemed to him like he was in a movie about hell. How he and his team did things time and time again that he could not believe. How there were no rules. How death came regardless of your training and preparation. How there was no protection from it. How it was capricious, how his own body and his own mind were no different than a piece of brick or a cow or a parked car- nothing magical, nothing special about it that would somehow spare it from destruction.

Etc.

This guy, who’d been a mostly terrible person to be around, had gone to a terrible place for the worst of reasons, and he had found his salvation there. He’d been opened, touched. Transformed.

The mechanisms are variable.

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It is my fervent hope and prayer that this day brings you peace and that it does not leave you untouched. I pray that you are attentive today to the myriad small miracles that are hidden all around you. I pray that something cracks open the tough shell, either from the outside or from within, and lets a little light in. Or lets it out.

Somehow, both.

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“For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly.”

– don juan

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The Crossing

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Everything is converging. The forces that have been aligning are now massing on the border. At night the men can hardly sleep for the discordant murmur of the voices, the clank of iron that echoes across the lowlands. It gets in their ears and burrows deep into their hearts. In some it stirs fear, but in all of us it creates a deep unrest.

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We would all welcome the warmth and cheer of a fire.

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Tonight our seer cast her bones into a circle of dust and peered at the result only briefly before sweeping the bones back into her leather pouch. She muttered something under her breath but only walked away when I asked her what she had seen.

I fear we have come to a difficult moment.

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Kip by Avedon

Peace out.

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Does anyone else have prescient nostalgia?

I have this condition like a motherfucker. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with longing for this exact moment, as if I am visiting it from thirty years from now, looking back on it and missing it terribly.

The cool part about it is running around and hugging everyone you see, just like Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life!”

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“Hello, Bedford Falls!”

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Those Mai Mai in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Man alive.

Did you hear about them on NPR yesterday? Kabila’s government armed them as part of a “local peacekeeping group” to help repel invaders from Rwanda in the late 90’s. They liked being armed and after the Rwandans were mostly taken care of they kept their guns and started taking over all the little villages they could.

In the villages they took over, no one was allowed to wear clothes. There were strict rules about what foods could be eaten and which days they could be eaten. Disobediance was punished with death.

They became cannibals.

They believe that they are immune to bullets. The name “Mai Mai” means “Water Water.” They got this name from chanting “Mai Mai” as they attacked their enemies. This powerful magic chant turns the enemy bullets into water in the middle of the air.

There is now another local group that is trying to fight the Mai Mai. They are not armed with guns, but with “Batons Magic” (imagine a french pronunciation here).

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This is happening right now.

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I don’t mean to say by using the African subcontinent as an example that these kinds of things are only happening “somewhere else.” There is shit going on right now in one of your neighbor’s houses that would flip you right the fuck out.

Unless you are that neighbor, in which case, knock it off, you’re creeping me out.

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In The Garden

We make our own world.

We make our own world.

We make our own world and then sleep in it.

We stew in the juice of our own concocting.

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One part of my job now is to handle citizen complaints and take phone calls from the crazy, convoluted, and pissed off. It is a wonderful way to get into people’s heads and to inject yourself into their dramas. So many angry, angry people. They want the cops to come fix their problems. One thing I always tell them is that we can’t do that. We can write down everybody’s name. We can say what you told us and say what the other person told us, and we can sometimes take one or two folks to jail for a few hours or even a few weeks sometimes, but we can’t fix the real problem.

Sometimes I’ll let them ramble on and on to get it out of their system, then ask them to boil down the problem to a single sentence. Tell me what’s wrong like I am a little kid. Simple words. Then when they get it down to that form, I’ll ask them to keep repeating it to me.

Sometimes after ten or twelve repetitions, they stop and sort of shake their heads. “Huh,” they say. “I guess maybe I should do something about that myself.”

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Ah-ha.

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Okay, so they never really do that.

But wouldn’t it be nice?

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The real lesson in these kinds of interactions is always a personal one. It is all just a mirror that I hold up to my own dark soul and peer into. Am I any less blind? Any less willful and petulant? Don’t I want a mommy and a daddy to come unfuck the big mess I created? On some level?

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Sometimes you get to help someone who is really just getting screwed by a situation or a person through seemingly no fault of their own. Then the job feels pretty good.

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Shouldn’t everyone who carries a stick to hit people with be a poet or an artist?

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Shouldn’t every poet and artist carry a big stick with which to hit people?

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This Way To The Circus

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Our daughter is home. She is more beautiful and more truly a wild creature than I can keep in my head, that is, her physical presence obliterates the mental image I have of her, smashes it to pieces.

She has brought her friend Sky home with her for the week. As insulation from us on some level, but it will keep her happy.

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Last night was my mother’s birthday/welcome home for Em party. Our friend Catherine showed up out of the blue looking for a place to crash, so there was a house full of people there. My brother and his wife and their two kids, Yolie and I and Em and her friend Sky, Mom and Jim…it was nice.

I have a very hard time at gatherings like that. I get uncomfortable and kind of withdraw from everything. My inner French Poodle becomes agitated.

It is very off-putting.

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Mardi Gras is coming up for San Luis Obispo. A couple of years ago we had a big riot, so once again we are all gearing up for a massive deployment. I’ll be leading a company of twelve deputies for the weekend, only one group out of some three to four hundred cops that will be in the city.

It’s usually a good time. We hang out with the college kids and have a blast, then if it gets ugly we start kicking ass. But mostly we just have a good time. Last year we played some ping-pong in a frat house for a while. Got our asses kicked.

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Lately all I want to do is my art. And meditate and do yoga. And lay on the sofa with my wife and the bulldog. Go for long, long, long walks.

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Is that so wrong?

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So Street

Last night my beautiful wife and I went out to dinner at Robin’s. It was really nice, good food and all, but we both noticed that the sound of everyone talking was too much for us. A baby crying off and on, the two teachers at the table next to ours talking break room shop stuff; it was driving us crazy.

Man, are we spoiled.

Lately all I want to do is listen to silence.

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We get to have our daughter home this week! Tomorrow we banzai down to Los Olivos to pick her up in the morning, then we get to keep her for a whole week!

I’m so proud of that kid. She can’t stand me right now, but I know it’s just a phase, part of her figuring out how to be independent. Like she hasn’t been working on that since she popped out of her mom.

Anyway, she is full of light and love. Everywhere she goes the sun follows. Birds come down from the trees and sit at her feet, chirping and cooing gladly. Deer eat from her hand. Grizzly bears roll on their backs to get their bellies rubbed.

She is a wonder.

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She has a boyfriend.

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Patience.

My big shortcoming. I struggle with it daily. It shows me such an ugly, stupid side of myself. Driving is terrible. I have a hard time letting go and “going with the flow.” I am convinced that I should be able to direct the movements of every vehicle around me so that maximum efficiency is created.

My wife hates my driving.

She used to say I was a terrible driver. But now she says I drive fine, she just hates the way I do it.

Ouch.

Here’s one thing I do that I love:

I am the creator of “Isolation Zone Driving.” Every day I commute along the two lane highway One between Cayucos and Cambria, about fifteen miles or so. As we approach the place where the four lanes narrow to two, I space myself between groups of cars, either speeding up madly to pass a group, or slowling dramatically to let a group pass. The goal is to have no visible cars in front of me or behind me in my lane as I drive the fifteen miles.

Often this requires that I pull over and let cars pass me. Or if I’ve got room in front, I have to speed up so that no one gets in my ‘zone.’ Overall speed is irrelevant, even forward progress. All that matters is that the road is “clean.”

So. That’s a little bit weird.

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I’ve got the day off. I’m shooting pics and doing artwork. The dogs are begging to go for a walk, but it’s been raining and I am steadfast in my determination to continue fucking off.

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Aye, Wobot! is a wonder. That guy kills me.

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