Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Oh Our Mother the Earth
Oh Our Father the Sky
Weave for us a garment of brightness
May the warp be the white
light of morning
May the weft be the red
light of evening
May the fringes be the falling rain
May the border be the standing rainbow
May we walk where birds sing
Where grass is green
“Song of the Sky Loom”
--Tewa American Indian Prayer
************************
bOTTOM Line is, too much wine and too many unfounded hopes offline shown and espressed by someone for whom alll estimations have been suspended.
I feel like Sappho, doing her diary for Granta that her daddy, the cause celebre and nominal of it all, will never be pinpointed.
a tout a l'heures--
Katie
PS Earl, knowing what you know, why the FUCK would you have risked it lest you failed to see your own value, every chance you got, and on principle. You fucking rotting fuckhead, you.
Oh Our Father the Sky
Weave for us a garment of brightness
May the warp be the white
light of morning
May the weft be the red
light of evening
May the fringes be the falling rain
May the border be the standing rainbow
May we walk where birds sing
Where grass is green
“Song of the Sky Loom”
--Tewa American Indian Prayer
************************
bOTTOM Line is, too much wine and too many unfounded hopes offline shown and espressed by someone for whom alll estimations have been suspended.
I feel like Sappho, doing her diary for Granta that her daddy, the cause celebre and nominal of it all, will never be pinpointed.
a tout a l'heures--
Katie
PS Earl, knowing what you know, why the FUCK would you have risked it lest you failed to see your own value, every chance you got, and on principle. You fucking rotting fuckhead, you.
Saturday, January 01, 2005
The Fiona Story
And here is the memorialization of my story of Fiona...
November 2004
Katie Parmeter
Fiona
There is a beauty in the frankness of a city pound facility. No fancy rules or questionnaires about home visits, socialized vs. feral, what are your expectations as an adopting human, how would you respond if she barfed up your houseplants, would you let her hunt garage rats. At a city pound, by god all that’s needed is to stand behind someone in a pair of green Dickies with a poop scoop in her hand, and look eager.
Her face, as it was when I first brought her home three months ago, now assails me every morning as I boot up my computer. Arriving home that night, both of us safe, warm, decompressing from the trauma of change, the air became full of that very narrow but deeply hopeful certainty that only new parents and adoptive children display. She opened one eye at me blearily, purring, gulped a can of food, and fell fast asleep on the sofa throw, in relief, I hoped. I got out the camera.
This routine of taking baby pictures, I know is the ultimate in mother-cheese. I feel it strongly suspect in myself; and it exposes me in ways I find distinctly uncomfortable. Single and childless these almost thirty years since puberty, how real, how ephemeral is this “mother” feeling? The choice to be single and childless was more circumstantial than deliberate in my life, but the changing faces of intimacy that is its result have produced in me a skeptic. How tenuous will this new bond be, I think, looking down on her. Can I start this kind of family again? I already feel the power of its absence in effigy. I suffered that three years ago, in the sudden and inexplicable death of Pysche Artemis Clytemnestra, the lavender Siamese, with whom I had lived for fourteen years. I had waited yet another full year until the thought of bringing blood responsibility back into my life did not immediately catapult me into the day I sat outside the veterinary hospital with a box of ashes in my hand, doubled over through a 45-minute onslaught of howling tears. How is it, I wondered then and now, through my fear and guilt and anger, that people can toss off the loss of a pet to a single woman as somehow less devastating, less emotional than the loss of any human companion?
Yet something had compelled these trips to the adoption shelters. I’d noticed lately that the iterative brutality of corporate life and its revenue-driven, cube-farm cannibalism had begun to exhaust me; that I would come home from ten hours of work to do absolutely nothing, night after night, until collapsing into bed. The gym held little attraction, as that meant increased effort and its associated body-size anxiety, when it took all the effort I had to haul my ever-spreading ass into city-acceptable clothing and make it into the office each day. Dating meant nothing lately but more confusion and pain, battling with intimacy issues that astonished me in their ferocity; the massive programs potential companions seemed to have developed to be as close as possible to a stranger with the least amount of interdependence or risk. The social paranoid indifference of the young, and its cheerful young-workplace “drive to revenue” hostility seemed to be transforming my competitive drive into a yearning for the softest, the least complex of pleasures—those, instead, becoming the most seductive draws on my energy. Down pillows. Loose jeans. Good mattresses. Rain on wet pavement. Desultory food, thick coarse bread soaked in handmade dipping sauce; peanut butter on Nutella; barley soup and reruns, short stories instead of epic, Booker-prize winning sagas. Silence; movement through curtains; morning winter light. After ten years of dating wars and workplace warmongering, I found myself passing over connections and events causing any rapid upsurge in adrenalin, and choosing, instead, a sort of pleasure-stillness. And then one day, I found myself remembering my pleasure in the unspoken companionship of The Cat.
***
She chose me, really. My last stop on a fortnight-long pilgrimage to shelters and volunteer adoption caravans was at the Berkeley kill shelter on a hot Sunday afternoon. Down a path behind the welcome office she lay in wait in a kind of Quonset hut populated by normal adoptees and the quarantined orphans in a back room, behind locked glass. Her cage was the first to the right on the way in, but I didn’t notice it until I was about to leave. So much searching, holding, watching and listening had left me in a fog of sensory fatigue. They were all beautiful; they were all hopeless in their ugliness; they must all be adopted immediately; all of them were changelings, wrong, listless and foreign. Maybe I should rethink this, maybe it would be better to come back next season, maybe I would be clearer, stronger then about… then I caught movement in the peripheral vision to my left. A crowd of little blonde girls in pink socks stood, giggling, in front of the last cage. I peered over their heads. There she was, tousling her sleek black boy crate-mate, knocking over the water dish, pacing impatiently, pawing through her bars at the outside world.
The 4 x 5 index card lodged into her cell door said she was a silver tabby born in the month of Aries, discovered in front of the building one morning in early July along with twelve others. This meant she’d been in the municipal tin zoo here for almost a month. The card also said that she’d been treated for calici virus which was probably why she hadn’t been put down. Unless the illness is terminal or lethal, the City makes an effort to bring kittens to normative adoptability before the clock starts ticking on their room rates.
She was the last unknown cat I touched. I reached out over the giggling pink socks and unlocked her door. Sitting in my hand looking startled, she reached up and batted my earrings. Next she wrapped her mouth around my gold chain, trying to liberate it from its captivity around my neck. Her soft breath rasped in my ear, hoarse and insouciant. Tickling, not-so-much-tickling, a feeling maybe-not-so-much-decent, goose-bumped its way up one side of me and back down the other, like an express tactile elevator. Suddenly she leapt; and perched her tiny 13-week-old self on my shoulder, licking the side of my face. Nose in hair, nose in ear, nose on nose. Nose everywhere, her mouth, heavy and soft, insistent. I became a 14-year-old at a junior high school prom, all trembling new appendages and helpless worship.
In twenty minutes I’d filled out the Green Dickie paperwork and left, heart thumping like I was mobilizing for inscription into some kind of Catmother Brigade, eyeing the empty carrier in my passenger seat and ticking off a supplies list for home. Off she would go the next morning they said, to get fixed. As the five o’clock San Francisco pinstripe whistle blew the following day, I found myself hurtling towards El Cerrito in rush-hour traffic, cursing and sweating East Bay “I Can’t See Beyond My Volvo’s Bumper Stickers” driving, to fetch her. The vet reminded me that she was still coming out of anesthesia. I signed more paper and peered down into the cardboard box at a silly, grinning green-black drunken bobcat-minisailor and got, again, weak in the knees.
We strapped ourselves into the Miata and began what has been for me the sweetest and most rewarding love affair of my adult life. From now on, I work for cat food; and Fiona is my jealous, ADD-riddled catmistress.
She has a face framed by white mascara around the eyes running down into sledding black tear ducts, an Egyptian albino. Cheetah stripes fan out in broad Vs from points just below her eyes and chin on either side, traveling past a perpetual catmouth smile and up, to her very large, even for a cat, ears. Her coat is thick, short, glossy, green-black, marked with long silver and white racing stripes; then abruptly turning under, those same stripes making their way like the ribs of a ship in downward whorls of dot-dash, dot-dash to her underbelly, a Morse code of secret tabby desire. Raccoon rings wind around her tail and narrower rings, like a tree’s, circle her fore and aft legs. Her feet are sooty black on the bottom with tufts between their toes, sticking straight out. She has coarse, silver-grey eyelashes which jut like brushfire at bobsled angles from heavy, long lids. The end of her nose and the tops of her paws are tawny gold; when she bites, cleaning, into her legs, tiny gilded foothill ridges of muscles rise on the outside of each nostril, startling me into memories of trips through Sonoma County. She is so very hard not to watch because her pattern, against any backdrop, is so complicated--to me, who is so used to the creamy, distant beauty of a pedigree cat. Fiona is real life-- a Dr. Seuss pattern of cat-thought, a rhyme you never would have dreamt, a feng shui of cat harmony you never believed possible, risen up in one’s life as a challenge of surrender on the singular basis of desire. Like any love affair: like any art.
Only furrier.
She has the worst breath of anything I know, smelling of old fish and damp leather. She shits like a trucker and makes no bones about being very pleased at the results. She has a small, oft near-silent, burbling creek cricket voice, nothing like the long ghoulish moans of our family Siamese. She wonders when I cry, pats my cheeks with paw-pads, claws carefully retracted. She doesn’t like to be dragged to bed at night, but I will discover her there at 5:30 in the morning playing pinball with my torso, using the pillows and the mattress as her flip-bumpers. How she knows it’s 5:30 without variance is another mystery. Back at work, with a passing glance at my screen saver, a colleague reminds me that a cat’s brain is the size of a walnut. But at home, I open my eyes to find Fiona watching my face with the care of a scientist at his Petri dish. Her eyes are nothing like mine: they are liquid, ringed in old gold and sometimes young green; they have a huge, tilted dark-almond, alien cast like those Tshirt drawings of thing sighted in New Mexico. She has a seemingly limitless number of eyelids; as she settles, I watch them close one by one, like the doors of James Bond’s Lamborghini.
One of her favorite things is to lie crooked in my arms like an infant while I’m standing or walking, with her head trailing down my arm, ears and nose pointing floorward. Watching the world pass her by, inverted. She sits for hours at the screen door to the back yard, transfixed by squirrels and hummingbirds, burbling and pacing at neighborhood cats visiting to sniff noses from the other side; yet if I put her in her harness and attach her on a long leash to the yard furniture, she sits for a minute or two, then walks back inside to strike her pyramid pose on the floormat, watching from the safety of the living room. She likes, in the aforementioned inverted way, to be involved in the application of my makeup, my responses to emails, my closet searches for matching shoes on frantic mornings, my trips in and out of the storeroom and into any box or dresser drawer. I have learned to do many things one-handed. While she has three different kinds of food and a water dish by her catbox, she prefers that I take a moment to fill a little glass spice cup on the living room table with water as well, so that she may enjoy a sip or two whilst watching television or simply on a drive-by through that part of the room. If the cup is left empty, she never mentions it.
But above all her waking talents lies the absolute gift that Fiona has, of sleep.
She falls asleep watching my face. She falls asleep, watching nothing. She falls asleep, upside down; underneath and in between anything, everything, head wantonly lolled aside. She falls, she falls, she falls; asleep, asleep, asleep. Her body becomes part of whatever supports it; I can’t keep her from jello-sliding down onto the floor, into the cracks of the sofa cushions, off my computer chair, off my lap, in the falling asleep that she does; and in the infinite trust she seems to have that sleep will solve it all. How does a shelter kitten, dumped at the door of the Berkeley City Pound with 12 litter mates on the 4th of July, learn that sort of trust? Where was she, before I came to know her? Who taught her that sort of specific-gravity love, that mystic fellowship in the cult of release?
The best falling asleep that Fiona does is something that my mother now requests we perform for visitors, the same way she used to announce some brilliant precocity of one of her children, like the throwing of the oatmeal spoon at the wall, or the making of the famous Gargoyle Beet Face while eating mashed vegetables. This catwoman, this Fiona of mine, is a complete belly rub junkie, an absolute slave to the trance to which the underbelly gods send her. Fiona absolutely mainlines touch . I’ve never had a cat which didn’t hate being touched anywhere near its abdominal regions; Fiona is an absolute whore to it. I plunk her on my lap facing me, and we commence. She lies on her back, head thrown, pointed as usual at the floor, looking from my angle as if she’d been decapitated by sheer lust. Her front paws form a praying mantis-like “M” underneath her chin; she catches and holds my moving hands to keep them at what they have started. Once begun, there is no going back; her applehead reels in sheer ecstasy. She, I have witnessed too repeatedly to exaggerate, truly swoons. Her face goes back and forth, head tilted, shoulders writhing towards the ceiling; neck muscles given entirely up in dance to some mnemonic chant only she can hear, like a besotted seventeen year old at a Victorian drawing room contra, or a hooded snake to its charmer’s recorder. Up and down my hand moves her fine, wild belly hair. Her frosty hoarse purr rises like warm mist, unsettling both our laps. Her head goes back, back back until you’re frightened for her safety, at least, and for perhaps many other things. Her back legs splay like a roasting chicken’s to either side of my thighs; her mouth opens, jaw slack. Sometimes she doesn’t even retain the presence of consciousness to slide her eyes closed; they transfix, half-open, upon some ancestral silver tabby vision quest I’m certain, off in the distance. We all watch as once again, Fiona channels the Feline Perpetual Queen of Wanton, Slavish Disarray. I hear her steady breath; feel her heart beat under my hands. Deep snores rise and fall inside the little matchbox chest. She sleeps, within seconds. Watching from the other side of the room, my mother’s face lights up in recognition of this pure abandon; Fiona’s ears twitch at her ringing laugh. We both delight, and dwell, in the baby-fearless carelessness of it all; in its memory, in its connection to our own. In my family, the women are always in favor of any form of reckless, pure abandon. We know it as an expression of the instinct of abundance; we know it as the first tendril growth-call of all things living. This must be how Fiona and I have found each other: as trans-species members of the Church of Endless Desire.
She sits for her evening wash as I write now, supervising, her spaceheater catloaf self framed in the triangle of my crossed legs. Her paws hold hostage the hand that does not write, closely monitoring the hand does. It could, after all, become a giant spider—or an instant play date--or both. She sighs deeply, tucks her head between her tail and one paw, the other still holding on. Now almost fully grown, Fiona is a plank board across my lap of steady, ever-constant kinship. We have come, day by day, to trust each other implicitly; to know what the other has to offer; and to welcome it, early and often. She has, indeed, become my certain family.
And just that steadily, we go on.
And here is the memorialization of my story of Fiona...
November 2004
Katie Parmeter
Fiona
There is a beauty in the frankness of a city pound facility. No fancy rules or questionnaires about home visits, socialized vs. feral, what are your expectations as an adopting human, how would you respond if she barfed up your houseplants, would you let her hunt garage rats. At a city pound, by god all that’s needed is to stand behind someone in a pair of green Dickies with a poop scoop in her hand, and look eager.
Her face, as it was when I first brought her home three months ago, now assails me every morning as I boot up my computer. Arriving home that night, both of us safe, warm, decompressing from the trauma of change, the air became full of that very narrow but deeply hopeful certainty that only new parents and adoptive children display. She opened one eye at me blearily, purring, gulped a can of food, and fell fast asleep on the sofa throw, in relief, I hoped. I got out the camera.
This routine of taking baby pictures, I know is the ultimate in mother-cheese. I feel it strongly suspect in myself; and it exposes me in ways I find distinctly uncomfortable. Single and childless these almost thirty years since puberty, how real, how ephemeral is this “mother” feeling? The choice to be single and childless was more circumstantial than deliberate in my life, but the changing faces of intimacy that is its result have produced in me a skeptic. How tenuous will this new bond be, I think, looking down on her. Can I start this kind of family again? I already feel the power of its absence in effigy. I suffered that three years ago, in the sudden and inexplicable death of Pysche Artemis Clytemnestra, the lavender Siamese, with whom I had lived for fourteen years. I had waited yet another full year until the thought of bringing blood responsibility back into my life did not immediately catapult me into the day I sat outside the veterinary hospital with a box of ashes in my hand, doubled over through a 45-minute onslaught of howling tears. How is it, I wondered then and now, through my fear and guilt and anger, that people can toss off the loss of a pet to a single woman as somehow less devastating, less emotional than the loss of any human companion?
Yet something had compelled these trips to the adoption shelters. I’d noticed lately that the iterative brutality of corporate life and its revenue-driven, cube-farm cannibalism had begun to exhaust me; that I would come home from ten hours of work to do absolutely nothing, night after night, until collapsing into bed. The gym held little attraction, as that meant increased effort and its associated body-size anxiety, when it took all the effort I had to haul my ever-spreading ass into city-acceptable clothing and make it into the office each day. Dating meant nothing lately but more confusion and pain, battling with intimacy issues that astonished me in their ferocity; the massive programs potential companions seemed to have developed to be as close as possible to a stranger with the least amount of interdependence or risk. The social paranoid indifference of the young, and its cheerful young-workplace “drive to revenue” hostility seemed to be transforming my competitive drive into a yearning for the softest, the least complex of pleasures—those, instead, becoming the most seductive draws on my energy. Down pillows. Loose jeans. Good mattresses. Rain on wet pavement. Desultory food, thick coarse bread soaked in handmade dipping sauce; peanut butter on Nutella; barley soup and reruns, short stories instead of epic, Booker-prize winning sagas. Silence; movement through curtains; morning winter light. After ten years of dating wars and workplace warmongering, I found myself passing over connections and events causing any rapid upsurge in adrenalin, and choosing, instead, a sort of pleasure-stillness. And then one day, I found myself remembering my pleasure in the unspoken companionship of The Cat.
***
She chose me, really. My last stop on a fortnight-long pilgrimage to shelters and volunteer adoption caravans was at the Berkeley kill shelter on a hot Sunday afternoon. Down a path behind the welcome office she lay in wait in a kind of Quonset hut populated by normal adoptees and the quarantined orphans in a back room, behind locked glass. Her cage was the first to the right on the way in, but I didn’t notice it until I was about to leave. So much searching, holding, watching and listening had left me in a fog of sensory fatigue. They were all beautiful; they were all hopeless in their ugliness; they must all be adopted immediately; all of them were changelings, wrong, listless and foreign. Maybe I should rethink this, maybe it would be better to come back next season, maybe I would be clearer, stronger then about… then I caught movement in the peripheral vision to my left. A crowd of little blonde girls in pink socks stood, giggling, in front of the last cage. I peered over their heads. There she was, tousling her sleek black boy crate-mate, knocking over the water dish, pacing impatiently, pawing through her bars at the outside world.
The 4 x 5 index card lodged into her cell door said she was a silver tabby born in the month of Aries, discovered in front of the building one morning in early July along with twelve others. This meant she’d been in the municipal tin zoo here for almost a month. The card also said that she’d been treated for calici virus which was probably why she hadn’t been put down. Unless the illness is terminal or lethal, the City makes an effort to bring kittens to normative adoptability before the clock starts ticking on their room rates.
She was the last unknown cat I touched. I reached out over the giggling pink socks and unlocked her door. Sitting in my hand looking startled, she reached up and batted my earrings. Next she wrapped her mouth around my gold chain, trying to liberate it from its captivity around my neck. Her soft breath rasped in my ear, hoarse and insouciant. Tickling, not-so-much-tickling, a feeling maybe-not-so-much-decent, goose-bumped its way up one side of me and back down the other, like an express tactile elevator. Suddenly she leapt; and perched her tiny 13-week-old self on my shoulder, licking the side of my face. Nose in hair, nose in ear, nose on nose. Nose everywhere, her mouth, heavy and soft, insistent. I became a 14-year-old at a junior high school prom, all trembling new appendages and helpless worship.
In twenty minutes I’d filled out the Green Dickie paperwork and left, heart thumping like I was mobilizing for inscription into some kind of Catmother Brigade, eyeing the empty carrier in my passenger seat and ticking off a supplies list for home. Off she would go the next morning they said, to get fixed. As the five o’clock San Francisco pinstripe whistle blew the following day, I found myself hurtling towards El Cerrito in rush-hour traffic, cursing and sweating East Bay “I Can’t See Beyond My Volvo’s Bumper Stickers” driving, to fetch her. The vet reminded me that she was still coming out of anesthesia. I signed more paper and peered down into the cardboard box at a silly, grinning green-black drunken bobcat-minisailor and got, again, weak in the knees.
We strapped ourselves into the Miata and began what has been for me the sweetest and most rewarding love affair of my adult life. From now on, I work for cat food; and Fiona is my jealous, ADD-riddled catmistress.
She has a face framed by white mascara around the eyes running down into sledding black tear ducts, an Egyptian albino. Cheetah stripes fan out in broad Vs from points just below her eyes and chin on either side, traveling past a perpetual catmouth smile and up, to her very large, even for a cat, ears. Her coat is thick, short, glossy, green-black, marked with long silver and white racing stripes; then abruptly turning under, those same stripes making their way like the ribs of a ship in downward whorls of dot-dash, dot-dash to her underbelly, a Morse code of secret tabby desire. Raccoon rings wind around her tail and narrower rings, like a tree’s, circle her fore and aft legs. Her feet are sooty black on the bottom with tufts between their toes, sticking straight out. She has coarse, silver-grey eyelashes which jut like brushfire at bobsled angles from heavy, long lids. The end of her nose and the tops of her paws are tawny gold; when she bites, cleaning, into her legs, tiny gilded foothill ridges of muscles rise on the outside of each nostril, startling me into memories of trips through Sonoma County. She is so very hard not to watch because her pattern, against any backdrop, is so complicated--to me, who is so used to the creamy, distant beauty of a pedigree cat. Fiona is real life-- a Dr. Seuss pattern of cat-thought, a rhyme you never would have dreamt, a feng shui of cat harmony you never believed possible, risen up in one’s life as a challenge of surrender on the singular basis of desire. Like any love affair: like any art.
Only furrier.
She has the worst breath of anything I know, smelling of old fish and damp leather. She shits like a trucker and makes no bones about being very pleased at the results. She has a small, oft near-silent, burbling creek cricket voice, nothing like the long ghoulish moans of our family Siamese. She wonders when I cry, pats my cheeks with paw-pads, claws carefully retracted. She doesn’t like to be dragged to bed at night, but I will discover her there at 5:30 in the morning playing pinball with my torso, using the pillows and the mattress as her flip-bumpers. How she knows it’s 5:30 without variance is another mystery. Back at work, with a passing glance at my screen saver, a colleague reminds me that a cat’s brain is the size of a walnut. But at home, I open my eyes to find Fiona watching my face with the care of a scientist at his Petri dish. Her eyes are nothing like mine: they are liquid, ringed in old gold and sometimes young green; they have a huge, tilted dark-almond, alien cast like those Tshirt drawings of thing sighted in New Mexico. She has a seemingly limitless number of eyelids; as she settles, I watch them close one by one, like the doors of James Bond’s Lamborghini.
One of her favorite things is to lie crooked in my arms like an infant while I’m standing or walking, with her head trailing down my arm, ears and nose pointing floorward. Watching the world pass her by, inverted. She sits for hours at the screen door to the back yard, transfixed by squirrels and hummingbirds, burbling and pacing at neighborhood cats visiting to sniff noses from the other side; yet if I put her in her harness and attach her on a long leash to the yard furniture, she sits for a minute or two, then walks back inside to strike her pyramid pose on the floormat, watching from the safety of the living room. She likes, in the aforementioned inverted way, to be involved in the application of my makeup, my responses to emails, my closet searches for matching shoes on frantic mornings, my trips in and out of the storeroom and into any box or dresser drawer. I have learned to do many things one-handed. While she has three different kinds of food and a water dish by her catbox, she prefers that I take a moment to fill a little glass spice cup on the living room table with water as well, so that she may enjoy a sip or two whilst watching television or simply on a drive-by through that part of the room. If the cup is left empty, she never mentions it.
But above all her waking talents lies the absolute gift that Fiona has, of sleep.
She falls asleep watching my face. She falls asleep, watching nothing. She falls asleep, upside down; underneath and in between anything, everything, head wantonly lolled aside. She falls, she falls, she falls; asleep, asleep, asleep. Her body becomes part of whatever supports it; I can’t keep her from jello-sliding down onto the floor, into the cracks of the sofa cushions, off my computer chair, off my lap, in the falling asleep that she does; and in the infinite trust she seems to have that sleep will solve it all. How does a shelter kitten, dumped at the door of the Berkeley City Pound with 12 litter mates on the 4th of July, learn that sort of trust? Where was she, before I came to know her? Who taught her that sort of specific-gravity love, that mystic fellowship in the cult of release?
The best falling asleep that Fiona does is something that my mother now requests we perform for visitors, the same way she used to announce some brilliant precocity of one of her children, like the throwing of the oatmeal spoon at the wall, or the making of the famous Gargoyle Beet Face while eating mashed vegetables. This catwoman, this Fiona of mine, is a complete belly rub junkie, an absolute slave to the trance to which the underbelly gods send her. Fiona absolutely mainlines touch . I’ve never had a cat which didn’t hate being touched anywhere near its abdominal regions; Fiona is an absolute whore to it. I plunk her on my lap facing me, and we commence. She lies on her back, head thrown, pointed as usual at the floor, looking from my angle as if she’d been decapitated by sheer lust. Her front paws form a praying mantis-like “M” underneath her chin; she catches and holds my moving hands to keep them at what they have started. Once begun, there is no going back; her applehead reels in sheer ecstasy. She, I have witnessed too repeatedly to exaggerate, truly swoons. Her face goes back and forth, head tilted, shoulders writhing towards the ceiling; neck muscles given entirely up in dance to some mnemonic chant only she can hear, like a besotted seventeen year old at a Victorian drawing room contra, or a hooded snake to its charmer’s recorder. Up and down my hand moves her fine, wild belly hair. Her frosty hoarse purr rises like warm mist, unsettling both our laps. Her head goes back, back back until you’re frightened for her safety, at least, and for perhaps many other things. Her back legs splay like a roasting chicken’s to either side of my thighs; her mouth opens, jaw slack. Sometimes she doesn’t even retain the presence of consciousness to slide her eyes closed; they transfix, half-open, upon some ancestral silver tabby vision quest I’m certain, off in the distance. We all watch as once again, Fiona channels the Feline Perpetual Queen of Wanton, Slavish Disarray. I hear her steady breath; feel her heart beat under my hands. Deep snores rise and fall inside the little matchbox chest. She sleeps, within seconds. Watching from the other side of the room, my mother’s face lights up in recognition of this pure abandon; Fiona’s ears twitch at her ringing laugh. We both delight, and dwell, in the baby-fearless carelessness of it all; in its memory, in its connection to our own. In my family, the women are always in favor of any form of reckless, pure abandon. We know it as an expression of the instinct of abundance; we know it as the first tendril growth-call of all things living. This must be how Fiona and I have found each other: as trans-species members of the Church of Endless Desire.
She sits for her evening wash as I write now, supervising, her spaceheater catloaf self framed in the triangle of my crossed legs. Her paws hold hostage the hand that does not write, closely monitoring the hand does. It could, after all, become a giant spider—or an instant play date--or both. She sighs deeply, tucks her head between her tail and one paw, the other still holding on. Now almost fully grown, Fiona is a plank board across my lap of steady, ever-constant kinship. We have come, day by day, to trust each other implicitly; to know what the other has to offer; and to welcome it, early and often. She has, indeed, become my certain family.
And just that steadily, we go on.
This is a hopeful exchange, shared from someone on Craigslist, this first day of the year. And I think that it's gone ok so far, so I wanted to keep it for posterity. Love and kisses.
What a lovely man you are, indeed! How did I get so lucky, to find this correspondence on the first day of the year. Thank you so much for having the tolerance to plough through that thing. So much everyday magic we forget to remember, so many things we stop noticing. To encourage me in this thing that has meant so much to me and gone neglected all my adult years...for the sake of the almighty paycheck. You have scored a big win there, though I may never know more--you have done a very kind and good thing with yourself this day, Mr. Marshall.
That in itself was a beautiful New Year's Day present; and so, thank you again.
Mmm. The plasticity of the Californian. Hm. Well, I'm hesitant to be more precise, in some ways, because it's like criticizing one's family--I did, after all, consciously choose to be here. For many reasons...and one of them is absolutely the aesthetic element.
First though in celebration of your kindness, I’m lighting the candles and the incense and turning the lights on of the Christmas wreath one last time. If we are to have a literary moment, one must set the mood appropriately I think.
Yikes. I run the risk of being overwhelmingly sentimental--but no matter.
I guess what I mean is that I was raised in a place where brains are valued over beauty, although it was there also believed, at the time I lived there, that one's beauty was displayed in one's brains. In a way it's like a sailboat--"yar" is not only because she is made of teak and her lines, sharp and sleek; but because of what she can do when she moves. And where I was raised, there was a starkness to life that beget that kind of appreciation.
Here, in California, we have so much natural beauty all around us and in Northern California, even more, in that many artists have chosen to live here and the legacy of this area is to focus on something intangible. Yet what I've found in my late arrival (I was already grown, 26, when I moved here the first time) was that the only thing that seems to be truly considered an asset to another is the value that one might bestow visually, or sensually, to another's life.
I come from a family that has inherently a lot of symmetry, physically and mentally--athletes, artistic souls, extraverts, people who "hold court"--charm is abundant and so are looks. My father in his youth looked very much like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen. I'm not exaggerating. My mother is dark Irish, an aloof and haughty beauty--she has the fine lines of a thoroughbred racehorse. And her I.Q. is you know, well, up there. My father now lives in La Jolla with his second wife, the successful CEO of a biotech company, and she, his muse and manager--my mother lives in Walnut Creek, having taken mystical vows a la Contra Costa County, and living the life of a semi-communal acolyte in a Sufi community.
So there was a lot of pressure on me to succeed--both externally and internally. But that measure of success has always been what other people thought.
I was born in Colorado of very young parents and we all soon moved to Michigan, where my mother divorced my father, remarried and we lived in many small sometimes rural, sometimes semi-urban, communities in the southern half of the lower peninsula until I graduated from high school. By happenstance therefore, I wound up attending school in some thirteen different districts, but I managed to keep my grade point average up and graduated third in my class. Then I went to the University of Michigan and studied communications only the psychology of communications, not the communications of mass media, although I did take some journalism and expository writing classes. I also developed a second major (because there was no curriculum for one at the time) in Latin American Studies and then lived in Costa Rica for two years where I taught English to children in a small private elementary school near the Nicaraguan border. My minor was in women's studies. What I sought, I can't say now, exactly. But it was a path of soul, not money--and because I had cut myself off early on from my father's direction and support, I was able to design my education as I saw fit, for better or worse.
So I guess what I mean is that Californians seem to value only what can be seen--and although they make a big deal out of the "mystical" power of the unseen, at least up here, they did, before the dot.commers came along, they do not, ultimately, choose their connections based on what my Midwest values would call, the lasting, unseen things. They seem to choose based on what is prettiest--the shiniest, newest things; the things that others will admire and be covetous of.
As my beauty fades and I grow older and ever more conscious of life in its second stage, that of wisdom and marking, that of the absolute essentialness of forgiveness and tolerance, of understanding what lies beneath and building a life that sustains it, I become afraid that I will be left behind as immaterial and unworthy of attention; because, indeed, I will not, going forward, be the beauty that I may have been once--yet I know that my beauty as a person cannot but deepen, if I try hard enough to build it. And I know that from now on, who I am will be what I have deliberately built; for the luck of the young is beyond me now. What I remember, then, is what mattered to me before. The loyalty of friends. The depth of connection of family. The continuity of life. The steadiness of true. As in a line, of a ship perhaps, that is true; as, indeed, in the depth of beauty, that really means "yar." The trueness of beauty that has had to work hard to become what it is. And that, my dear friend, is a beauty that folks in the Midwest and perhaps, your New England, come to know. As we watch the seasons change and we say hello to the same neighbors, over and over again. Something that a young Californian may never believe, means anything.
I have blathered enough.
What would you tell me, if you were free and willing to tell me anything, about who you are, and where you've come from?
Because, in fact, you can; because, in fact, I am more curious about that, than about myself.
Cheers,
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 2:10 PM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
It was way beyond writing nouveau and you maam are very, very modest indeed. It sounded very much like it came from your heart and soul.
Where in the Midwest? Please define the plasticity of Californians. I am not exactly sure what you mean although I do see a distinct culture here around the Bay.
Thank you for sharing Fiona with me. Yes, I am sure it is difficult to share writing pieces but at least we still retain the anonymity of airline passengers. It was really well done, really.
Katie Parmeter wrote:
Writing nouveau! Yay. A new kind way to describe what I do.
Okay. This is a piece I worked on, and am still working on, for a writing class which I took recently. If you're not a cat person you may nod off. I won't mind. But this makes me far shyer than showing you my face, that's for sure--
I don't think I *can* sell myself anymore. I am naturally a promoter by personality, being Irish and born of many teachers. But I've gotten to the place in my life where how I present becomes a risk-reward ratio exercise; and having grown up in the Midwest, I also have a heavy sense of skepticism when it comes to the plasticity of the average Californian value system. Or what I perceive to be its plasticity, anyway.
In my life I have loved many things. But their beauty was always a private matter, and one that shone more deeply for me than, seemingly, anyone else. Beauty is found in many ways. We are all terribly flawed; we are all, hopelessly beautiful.
here is Fiona, then.
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 1:14 PM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
Hi Katie,
Yes, the face lives with the rest of me in Emeryville.
I probably lean towards prose and as far as young writing, let's just consider it "writing nouveau" which seems to pass in wine terms. I would really enjoy reading whatever you would like to share.
I am not fearful of you. Hell, I do not even know you and you look tame in your photos. Interview might have been a less than accurate word selection. I think it relates to what you wrote about selling. I would like to try hard not to sell someone and just let natural Bob shine on through since sooner or later, we all rise to the surface. (Sales is not my favorite part of my job if you could not tell)
It is very nice speaking with you. It is a bit cold but I also saw a wonderful rainbow over the Bay this morning which was very encouraging.
BOBKatie Parmeter wrote:
Hi Bob,
that is a good rest of your face! Does it live nearby?
*Are* you interviewing for a first date? I'm flattered; I come, myself, into these conversations with few expectations. But that seems a reasonable one; there is no reason to fear me, though, or be nervous about me. I am as home-grown and real as they come.
I've always loved the word "yar." "She is yar." Some day, I'd love to be yar, too.
35 years is good, and sound.
I would leave corporate america for anything likely, probably, given my experience with it; but more precisely, I hope to leave it for something that taps into where I am happiest, which is among books and music and dance and laughter, and teaching and sharing and all things root--wind, water, mountains, color, light, sound, smell.
I would be happy to share my writing with you. It's still very...young, as writing goes, I must warn you, though. Are you a poetry fan, or do you tend more towards prose? I could offer either--
thank you for the lovely reply, this cold, bright first day.
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
Hi Katie,
Well, Oakland is certainly in the space time continuum. I wonder where we fit in the larger spritual continuum. Might make for interesting conversation.
I like your aspirations for the New Year. Where are leaving corporate America for? Have you written much and would you share some of your writing with me. I have a latent desire to become a writer. I am not sure where that is coming from and it is very recently discovered. Mmmm ... well, we will see.
So, a little about me. I am a designer and marketer of furniture and have a quest to discover original, fresh designs in a somewhat static industry. It is great fun and even leaves me gainfully self employed at times. And it makes for periods of lots of travel and then lots of recreation. Good for sailing.
I have a classic fiberglass ketch which is loaded with teak. I find her to be a bit "yar" and is actually a sister boat to the boat I first learned to sail 35 years ago. (35???? ok I will not be in denial .. it really was 35).
I love the Bay area and originally hail from New England although I have worked in Northern California for many years. I feel sometimes on these initial e-mails like I am interviewing and in fact, I am interviewing for a first date. How am I doing?
Bob
PS Please find the rest of my face attached.
Katie Parmeter wrote:
where am I? I suppose you mean in the time-space continuum we know as real. I live in Oakland.
What a nice face you have! At least, the side of it that I am looking at.
I love to sail. I am a dilettante, though; and have only sailed on others' boats. I did crew once long ago for a sailing club but was still very much a learner when that ended. And once I dangled with my foot in a loop at the end of a rope in the Gulf of Mexico off a sailboat; and that was most excellent. I also have crewed in rough weather on the Bay, and that is most most excellent of all.
My hopes for the New Year. Wow. Let's see.
I hope to get my MFA in creative writing.
I hope to be happier.
I hope to manage my physical life more adeptly.
I hope to leave corporate America.
I hope to write something which brings me deep pleasure in the reading of it.
I hope to bring deep pleasure to groups of people who seek something, like children, or other writers.
And here I am. Or one of me, anyway.
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 8:17 AM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
Good morning,
I would like to share all that you would like to share.
I suppose we could start with where are you, do you like to sail, what are your hopes for the New Year.
I am attaching a picture and I would be delighted to see who you are as well as read what you write.
Thanks for the kind note,
BobKatie Parmeter wrote:
That was a sweet message.
What would you like to know about me?
What a lovely man you are, indeed! How did I get so lucky, to find this correspondence on the first day of the year. Thank you so much for having the tolerance to plough through that thing. So much everyday magic we forget to remember, so many things we stop noticing. To encourage me in this thing that has meant so much to me and gone neglected all my adult years...for the sake of the almighty paycheck. You have scored a big win there, though I may never know more--you have done a very kind and good thing with yourself this day, Mr. Marshall.
That in itself was a beautiful New Year's Day present; and so, thank you again.
Mmm. The plasticity of the Californian. Hm. Well, I'm hesitant to be more precise, in some ways, because it's like criticizing one's family--I did, after all, consciously choose to be here. For many reasons...and one of them is absolutely the aesthetic element.
First though in celebration of your kindness, I’m lighting the candles and the incense and turning the lights on of the Christmas wreath one last time. If we are to have a literary moment, one must set the mood appropriately I think.
Yikes. I run the risk of being overwhelmingly sentimental--but no matter.
I guess what I mean is that I was raised in a place where brains are valued over beauty, although it was there also believed, at the time I lived there, that one's beauty was displayed in one's brains. In a way it's like a sailboat--"yar" is not only because she is made of teak and her lines, sharp and sleek; but because of what she can do when she moves. And where I was raised, there was a starkness to life that beget that kind of appreciation.
Here, in California, we have so much natural beauty all around us and in Northern California, even more, in that many artists have chosen to live here and the legacy of this area is to focus on something intangible. Yet what I've found in my late arrival (I was already grown, 26, when I moved here the first time) was that the only thing that seems to be truly considered an asset to another is the value that one might bestow visually, or sensually, to another's life.
I come from a family that has inherently a lot of symmetry, physically and mentally--athletes, artistic souls, extraverts, people who "hold court"--charm is abundant and so are looks. My father in his youth looked very much like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen. I'm not exaggerating. My mother is dark Irish, an aloof and haughty beauty--she has the fine lines of a thoroughbred racehorse. And her I.Q. is you know, well, up there. My father now lives in La Jolla with his second wife, the successful CEO of a biotech company, and she, his muse and manager--my mother lives in Walnut Creek, having taken mystical vows a la Contra Costa County, and living the life of a semi-communal acolyte in a Sufi community.
So there was a lot of pressure on me to succeed--both externally and internally. But that measure of success has always been what other people thought.
I was born in Colorado of very young parents and we all soon moved to Michigan, where my mother divorced my father, remarried and we lived in many small sometimes rural, sometimes semi-urban, communities in the southern half of the lower peninsula until I graduated from high school. By happenstance therefore, I wound up attending school in some thirteen different districts, but I managed to keep my grade point average up and graduated third in my class. Then I went to the University of Michigan and studied communications only the psychology of communications, not the communications of mass media, although I did take some journalism and expository writing classes. I also developed a second major (because there was no curriculum for one at the time) in Latin American Studies and then lived in Costa Rica for two years where I taught English to children in a small private elementary school near the Nicaraguan border. My minor was in women's studies. What I sought, I can't say now, exactly. But it was a path of soul, not money--and because I had cut myself off early on from my father's direction and support, I was able to design my education as I saw fit, for better or worse.
So I guess what I mean is that Californians seem to value only what can be seen--and although they make a big deal out of the "mystical" power of the unseen, at least up here, they did, before the dot.commers came along, they do not, ultimately, choose their connections based on what my Midwest values would call, the lasting, unseen things. They seem to choose based on what is prettiest--the shiniest, newest things; the things that others will admire and be covetous of.
As my beauty fades and I grow older and ever more conscious of life in its second stage, that of wisdom and marking, that of the absolute essentialness of forgiveness and tolerance, of understanding what lies beneath and building a life that sustains it, I become afraid that I will be left behind as immaterial and unworthy of attention; because, indeed, I will not, going forward, be the beauty that I may have been once--yet I know that my beauty as a person cannot but deepen, if I try hard enough to build it. And I know that from now on, who I am will be what I have deliberately built; for the luck of the young is beyond me now. What I remember, then, is what mattered to me before. The loyalty of friends. The depth of connection of family. The continuity of life. The steadiness of true. As in a line, of a ship perhaps, that is true; as, indeed, in the depth of beauty, that really means "yar." The trueness of beauty that has had to work hard to become what it is. And that, my dear friend, is a beauty that folks in the Midwest and perhaps, your New England, come to know. As we watch the seasons change and we say hello to the same neighbors, over and over again. Something that a young Californian may never believe, means anything.
I have blathered enough.
What would you tell me, if you were free and willing to tell me anything, about who you are, and where you've come from?
Because, in fact, you can; because, in fact, I am more curious about that, than about myself.
Cheers,
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 2:10 PM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
It was way beyond writing nouveau and you maam are very, very modest indeed. It sounded very much like it came from your heart and soul.
Where in the Midwest? Please define the plasticity of Californians. I am not exactly sure what you mean although I do see a distinct culture here around the Bay.
Thank you for sharing Fiona with me. Yes, I am sure it is difficult to share writing pieces but at least we still retain the anonymity of airline passengers. It was really well done, really.
Katie Parmeter
Writing nouveau! Yay. A new kind way to describe what I do.
Okay. This is a piece I worked on, and am still working on, for a writing class which I took recently. If you're not a cat person you may nod off. I won't mind. But this makes me far shyer than showing you my face, that's for sure--
I don't think I *can* sell myself anymore. I am naturally a promoter by personality, being Irish and born of many teachers. But I've gotten to the place in my life where how I present becomes a risk-reward ratio exercise; and having grown up in the Midwest, I also have a heavy sense of skepticism when it comes to the plasticity of the average Californian value system. Or what I perceive to be its plasticity, anyway.
In my life I have loved many things. But their beauty was always a private matter, and one that shone more deeply for me than, seemingly, anyone else. Beauty is found in many ways. We are all terribly flawed; we are all, hopelessly beautiful.
here is Fiona, then.
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 1:14 PM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
Hi Katie,
Yes, the face lives with the rest of me in Emeryville.
I probably lean towards prose and as far as young writing, let's just consider it "writing nouveau" which seems to pass in wine terms. I would really enjoy reading whatever you would like to share.
I am not fearful of you. Hell, I do not even know you and you look tame in your photos. Interview might have been a less than accurate word selection. I think it relates to what you wrote about selling. I would like to try hard not to sell someone and just let natural Bob shine on through since sooner or later, we all rise to the surface. (Sales is not my favorite part of my job if you could not tell)
It is very nice speaking with you. It is a bit cold but I also saw a wonderful rainbow over the Bay this morning which was very encouraging.
BOBKatie Parmeter
Hi Bob,
that is a good rest of your face! Does it live nearby?
*Are* you interviewing for a first date? I'm flattered; I come, myself, into these conversations with few expectations. But that seems a reasonable one; there is no reason to fear me, though, or be nervous about me. I am as home-grown and real as they come.
I've always loved the word "yar." "She is yar." Some day, I'd love to be yar, too.
35 years is good, and sound.
I would leave corporate america for anything likely, probably, given my experience with it; but more precisely, I hope to leave it for something that taps into where I am happiest, which is among books and music and dance and laughter, and teaching and sharing and all things root--wind, water, mountains, color, light, sound, smell.
I would be happy to share my writing with you. It's still very...young, as writing goes, I must warn you, though. Are you a poetry fan, or do you tend more towards prose? I could offer either--
thank you for the lovely reply, this cold, bright first day.
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
Hi Katie,
Well, Oakland is certainly in the space time continuum. I wonder where we fit in the larger spritual continuum. Might make for interesting conversation.
I like your aspirations for the New Year. Where are leaving corporate America for? Have you written much and would you share some of your writing with me. I have a latent desire to become a writer. I am not sure where that is coming from and it is very recently discovered. Mmmm ... well, we will see.
So, a little about me. I am a designer and marketer of furniture and have a quest to discover original, fresh designs in a somewhat static industry. It is great fun and even leaves me gainfully self employed at times. And it makes for periods of lots of travel and then lots of recreation. Good for sailing.
I have a classic fiberglass ketch which is loaded with teak. I find her to be a bit "yar" and is actually a sister boat to the boat I first learned to sail 35 years ago. (35???? ok I will not be in denial .. it really was 35).
I love the Bay area and originally hail from New England although I have worked in Northern California for many years. I feel sometimes on these initial e-mails like I am interviewing and in fact, I am interviewing for a first date. How am I doing?
Bob
PS Please find the rest of my face attached.
Katie Parmeter
where am I? I suppose you mean in the time-space continuum we know as real. I live in Oakland.
What a nice face you have! At least, the side of it that I am looking at.
I love to sail. I am a dilettante, though; and have only sailed on others' boats. I did crew once long ago for a sailing club but was still very much a learner when that ended. And once I dangled with my foot in a loop at the end of a rope in the Gulf of Mexico off a sailboat; and that was most excellent. I also have crewed in rough weather on the Bay, and that is most most excellent of all.
My hopes for the New Year. Wow. Let's see.
I hope to get my MFA in creative writing.
I hope to be happier.
I hope to manage my physical life more adeptly.
I hope to leave corporate America.
I hope to write something which brings me deep pleasure in the reading of it.
I hope to bring deep pleasure to groups of people who seek something, like children, or other writers.
And here I am. Or one of me, anyway.
Katie
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Marshall
To: Katie Parmeter
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 8:17 AM
Subject: Re: Sailing, Snuggling, Hugs and All - 46
Good morning,
I would like to share all that you would like to share.
I suppose we could start with where are you, do you like to sail, what are your hopes for the New Year.
I am attaching a picture and I would be delighted to see who you are as well as read what you write.
Thanks for the kind note,
BobKatie Parmeter
That was a sweet message.
What would you like to know about me?
Friday, November 19, 2004
October 21, 2004: The Trip to Humboldt
Hey bunnies, Just wanted to report that I am here in the mysterious Redwood jungle, dining and sleeping in what is touted by AAA as a "four diamond" bed and breakfast which I engaged for the bargain price of $150 a night. Here's the thing: it is lovely, all hardwood Tudor and sobriety and terrace paths, but I'm in the "lounge" for "hors d'ouevres hour" which is actually brie en croute and some sliced fruit, thank you very much both of which I can prepare quite handily, drinking an $8 glass of wine and thinking, 'what the fuck?' the wine is lovely I'll grant you and yes, the "Spectator' picked this particular place as a "wine lover's paradise..." but sorry folks, what I see is a gravel driveway off the 101, which noise one can indeed hear from one's private "terrace;" there is absolutely no smoking no how no way anywhere ever, and I quote, literally you have to walk off the Benbow Inn's property to smoke or be subject potentially to a $125 "deep cleaning" fee, we're talking at the river's edge, on the golf course, in the swimming hole, it matters not; and the Eel River is so low that there are algae warnings out for pets and swimmers. Pluse spider webs cover everything, not that I'm particularly squeamish. So...would it be the rack of lamb or the tenderloin steak; or the probably-farmed salmon that I'm about to throw down $30 for, which makes this a "four diamond" hotel? All being so endemic to the area.
Have I also mentioned that although the Tudor is four storeys and outlying terraces and cottages etc etc, all albeit quite lovely esp. if one is wearing ankle-length linen and a large tea hat, and carrying a croquet mallet, there are neither elevators nor wheelchair access of any kind, to the Inn or the dining room--even though there is blue-stickered parking everywhere? So...a person would, what, have a kegger in the parking lot or a whatayacallit, tailgater party that thing you have out of the back of your pickup before the game, if one happened to be in a chair as is my gran et al., whilst the rest of your party ate rack of lamb and drank cigar-free merlot? Eh?
what the sheiss, imho. True bullshit back-slapping!!
Nice food, impeccable manners...and pure hype, beyond that. This is not sensitivity-enhanced,/unique quality--this is sort of generic-service elitism at its finest--with hollandaise on the side...
Pretty place. No doubt. But who would I bring here that fit within its narrow margins? I don't, that's for sure...they say the Eleanor Roosevelt and Clark Gable stayed here, Jeannette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Lord Halifax...okay which of those most excellent iconoclasts didn't smoke, have pets, or at one point or another, find him/herself with access issues?
They do have a video library and a fireplace...but no ramp, seriously, and since when do I want to sip cognac, bask by the fire in my duck print khakis and pinstripes...then walk 500 yards to the freeway exit to have the smoke?
Christ!! California is idiotic!! this is not "gracious living;" this is positively Orwellian.
Plus the Mets won and shares are down 26 cents from last year.
Ko then, sigining off--I just hope the Pelican Inn, a closer Tudor in Marin and of equal repute vis a vis cuisine, isn't the twin asshole to this persnickety needle's eye P.C. belligerence of a country club thingie.
Off to the thrift stores in Ferndale. I'll let you know what tomorrow's like, here at the edge of the Lost Coast.
Hey bunnies, Just wanted to report that I am here in the mysterious Redwood jungle, dining and sleeping in what is touted by AAA as a "four diamond" bed and breakfast which I engaged for the bargain price of $150 a night. Here's the thing: it is lovely, all hardwood Tudor and sobriety and terrace paths, but I'm in the "lounge" for "hors d'ouevres hour" which is actually brie en croute and some sliced fruit, thank you very much both of which I can prepare quite handily, drinking an $8 glass of wine and thinking, 'what the fuck?' the wine is lovely I'll grant you and yes, the "Spectator' picked this particular place as a "wine lover's paradise..." but sorry folks, what I see is a gravel driveway off the 101, which noise one can indeed hear from one's private "terrace;" there is absolutely no smoking no how no way anywhere ever, and I quote, literally you have to walk off the Benbow Inn's property to smoke or be subject potentially to a $125 "deep cleaning" fee, we're talking at the river's edge, on the golf course, in the swimming hole, it matters not; and the Eel River is so low that there are algae warnings out for pets and swimmers. Pluse spider webs cover everything, not that I'm particularly squeamish. So...would it be the rack of lamb or the tenderloin steak; or the probably-farmed salmon that I'm about to throw down $30 for, which makes this a "four diamond" hotel? All being so endemic to the area.
Have I also mentioned that although the Tudor is four storeys and outlying terraces and cottages etc etc, all albeit quite lovely esp. if one is wearing ankle-length linen and a large tea hat, and carrying a croquet mallet, there are neither elevators nor wheelchair access of any kind, to the Inn or the dining room--even though there is blue-stickered parking everywhere? So...a person would, what, have a kegger in the parking lot or a whatayacallit, tailgater party that thing you have out of the back of your pickup before the game, if one happened to be in a chair as is my gran et al., whilst the rest of your party ate rack of lamb and drank cigar-free merlot? Eh?
what the sheiss, imho. True bullshit back-slapping!!
Nice food, impeccable manners...and pure hype, beyond that. This is not sensitivity-enhanced,/unique quality--this is sort of generic-service elitism at its finest--with hollandaise on the side...
Pretty place. No doubt. But who would I bring here that fit within its narrow margins? I don't, that's for sure...they say the Eleanor Roosevelt and Clark Gable stayed here, Jeannette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Lord Halifax...okay which of those most excellent iconoclasts didn't smoke, have pets, or at one point or another, find him/herself with access issues?
They do have a video library and a fireplace...but no ramp, seriously, and since when do I want to sip cognac, bask by the fire in my duck print khakis and pinstripes...then walk 500 yards to the freeway exit to have the smoke?
Christ!! California is idiotic!! this is not "gracious living;" this is positively Orwellian.
Plus the Mets won and shares are down 26 cents from last year.
Ko then, sigining off--I just hope the Pelican Inn, a closer Tudor in Marin and of equal repute vis a vis cuisine, isn't the twin asshole to this persnickety needle's eye P.C. belligerence of a country club thingie.
Off to the thrift stores in Ferndale. I'll let you know what tomorrow's like, here at the edge of the Lost Coast.
Abortion Dream
Had a dream that I was in Italy and had an abortion. Unexpectedly. Well, I guess that's redundant. I don't remember chunks of it now; but it seems like it started out where I didn't know what was wrong with me. At the end, all the family was there including people I didn't recognize. They came after the procedure was over to stare at me while I tried to find my clothes and check out. It was winter, people had on long camel-hair reefer coats and gloves. The atmosphere took on a festive air. There were three big staionless steel tables in the main room covered with sheets and people in my family were pointing at the speculums and other instruments like they were museum artifacts, handling them and murmuring to each other. I told them to stop. The bill came, by that time almost everyone had left; and it was $200. There were two different ways I could be billed, one less expensive. Uncle Steve was there and as he was leaving he was saying something obnoxious, guilt-ridden, in that way he does which to him is love and pain at the same time. I screamed, "Leave me the fuck alone! I'm grown up now!!" and as the swinging doors were closing I heard him say, "grown up, yes; mature, no." Then I woke up.
In the dream the father was never revealed. The setting was "authentic;" no rooms, only curtained cubicles in big cathedral-like main areas. The nurses in little jumpers with nun cloths on their heads. Everything efficient and matter-of-fact in the most Catholic country in the world. And the only person giving me grief was a member of my own, areligious family. There was some anxiety; some just basic excitement because of the exotic locale; and then guilt. But I didn't want to leave, somehow; I wanted to stay, and have those women take care of me.
Had a dream that I was in Italy and had an abortion. Unexpectedly. Well, I guess that's redundant. I don't remember chunks of it now; but it seems like it started out where I didn't know what was wrong with me. At the end, all the family was there including people I didn't recognize. They came after the procedure was over to stare at me while I tried to find my clothes and check out. It was winter, people had on long camel-hair reefer coats and gloves. The atmosphere took on a festive air. There were three big staionless steel tables in the main room covered with sheets and people in my family were pointing at the speculums and other instruments like they were museum artifacts, handling them and murmuring to each other. I told them to stop. The bill came, by that time almost everyone had left; and it was $200. There were two different ways I could be billed, one less expensive. Uncle Steve was there and as he was leaving he was saying something obnoxious, guilt-ridden, in that way he does which to him is love and pain at the same time. I screamed, "Leave me the fuck alone! I'm grown up now!!" and as the swinging doors were closing I heard him say, "grown up, yes; mature, no." Then I woke up.
In the dream the father was never revealed. The setting was "authentic;" no rooms, only curtained cubicles in big cathedral-like main areas. The nurses in little jumpers with nun cloths on their heads. Everything efficient and matter-of-fact in the most Catholic country in the world. And the only person giving me grief was a member of my own, areligious family. There was some anxiety; some just basic excitement because of the exotic locale; and then guilt. But I didn't want to leave, somehow; I wanted to stay, and have those women take care of me.
Friday, January 30, 2004
The Bed
The Story of the Bed Platform Assembly (excerpted from a note to Mom, the Bed Advisor), or The Rough Love of the IKEA-Consumer Relationship:
yes well. Turned out the tools were supposed to have been in the box with the damaged footboard. The manager, a woman mine own age, let me stand there in the middle of customer service and rant and rave and rant and rave until I was done. I felt like hugging her after. I think the only thing at that point I said which had any rational merit to it was that the folks pulling things from the warehouse area needed to have a description of the exact contents of each box so that one can actually tell where the pieces are supposed to be, and the customer can if she likes actually open them up to check each box's contents against said list. But I guess that would be TOO MANY WORDS FOR IKEA, WOULDN'T IT.
I managed to pound two of the wooden pegs into the wrong holes of the footboard, okay, do you know what happens when you pound wooden pegs into particle board?
THEY BECOME ONE WITH EACH OTHER.
So I ripped one out using pliers with sheer force and the other came out in pieces. There I was cursing again the name of all that is unholy and Swedish and reliving the moments in Customer Service when I was standing in front of the spare hardware buckets staring at the wooden pegs and thinking "I should get a few extra of..." lalalalalalalalalala and then your brain gallops off onto another thought, like a gorilla in the mist...
'member how heavy those side panels were? Well to shove them into the headboard and footboard you really have to have two people, to get the wooden pegs matching and aligned on each end. So I found a beautiful use for all those books I don't give away...I propped the leetle fuckers up on either end with Billy Collins and Sylvia Plath so that they were flush with the holes, braced the headboard against the sliding glass door with "Mirrors of Ancient Womanhood" and then stood behind the footboard dorsal side due south like a pack mule and back-kicked the shit out of each side of the footboard until it jammed itself into the sideboard and further on into the head.
Now *that* drawing was definitely not in the IKEA instructions. by the time I finished I was down to camisole and socks, sweating and screaming at everything that did or didn't move the way I told it to. And my left hand is not working right for the seventeen THOUSAND tiny tiny screws I had to tighten into each side of the underframe, FOR NO APPARENT REASON because those you know those weird aluminum braces that Y-ed out like a fan from the main support beam? They don't support fuckall once you get the bed together, so...okay why was I forcing pinhead screws through holes that hadn't been punched large enough to handle them again?
I have spoken.
If anyone needs me, like a Chinese fortune, for everything until further notice I will be IN BED.
The Story of the Bed Platform Assembly (excerpted from a note to Mom, the Bed Advisor), or The Rough Love of the IKEA-Consumer Relationship:
yes well. Turned out the tools were supposed to have been in the box with the damaged footboard. The manager, a woman mine own age, let me stand there in the middle of customer service and rant and rave and rant and rave until I was done. I felt like hugging her after. I think the only thing at that point I said which had any rational merit to it was that the folks pulling things from the warehouse area needed to have a description of the exact contents of each box so that one can actually tell where the pieces are supposed to be, and the customer can if she likes actually open them up to check each box's contents against said list. But I guess that would be TOO MANY WORDS FOR IKEA, WOULDN'T IT.
I managed to pound two of the wooden pegs into the wrong holes of the footboard, okay, do you know what happens when you pound wooden pegs into particle board?
THEY BECOME ONE WITH EACH OTHER.
So I ripped one out using pliers with sheer force and the other came out in pieces. There I was cursing again the name of all that is unholy and Swedish and reliving the moments in Customer Service when I was standing in front of the spare hardware buckets staring at the wooden pegs and thinking "I should get a few extra of..." lalalalalalalalalala and then your brain gallops off onto another thought, like a gorilla in the mist...
'member how heavy those side panels were? Well to shove them into the headboard and footboard you really have to have two people, to get the wooden pegs matching and aligned on each end. So I found a beautiful use for all those books I don't give away...I propped the leetle fuckers up on either end with Billy Collins and Sylvia Plath so that they were flush with the holes, braced the headboard against the sliding glass door with "Mirrors of Ancient Womanhood" and then stood behind the footboard dorsal side due south like a pack mule and back-kicked the shit out of each side of the footboard until it jammed itself into the sideboard and further on into the head.
Now *that* drawing was definitely not in the IKEA instructions. by the time I finished I was down to camisole and socks, sweating and screaming at everything that did or didn't move the way I told it to. And my left hand is not working right for the seventeen THOUSAND tiny tiny screws I had to tighten into each side of the underframe, FOR NO APPARENT REASON because those you know those weird aluminum braces that Y-ed out like a fan from the main support beam? They don't support fuckall once you get the bed together, so...okay why was I forcing pinhead screws through holes that hadn't been punched large enough to handle them again?
I have spoken.
If anyone needs me, like a Chinese fortune, for everything until further notice I will be IN BED.
