2007-02-05 - 12:55 a.m.
For the most part just drifting around in an aimless mailaise, periodically shot through with a lightening of revelation--that�s how I think I feel. It doesn�t feel like grief, exactly, although I can�t think what else it might be. It�s really just remaining in a world that�s changed significantly, yet not dramatically or traumatically. Something here makes me think of the opening pages of Steinbeck�s The Grapes of Wrath (a book I think I really should read someday, yet who really has the time?), where the dust comes creeping in. It is something that looks like a problem, or that it might be, but it increases so gradually that none of it is significantly alarming enough to stimulate any kind of action until suddenly it becomes almost too late. THEN the whole world is wrecked and people find themselves in a broken-down flivver piled high with people and belongings travelling Route 66, having thrown themselves to the mercy of their vague hope that they can find a new paradise in California, in BAKERSFIELD (my God).
I find that I can�t really plan anything, any more, and really haven�t been able to for oh so many years. What happened to all that? It seems that I can operate in only sudden, last minute moves, and only then in a hope to save my skin. But we have all the resources...shouldn�t I be able to PLAN better? Apparently not. I don�t need inspiration, I have that plenty. What I need is motivation, because that leads to action, whereas inspiration leads only to dreams. But nowadays, I don�t even seem to have the energy for dreams, let alone action. What has happened?
It was a very wierd weekend, starting with Friday. Kate said, �it was a full moon,� which explains it to astrologically-minded Kate, but I say it because you know what kind of a day that might mean.
The first wierd thing--a woman came in to talk to Kate and after the woman left, Kate came to me and said, �That was Mrs. D that we have been talking about, you know, that adventuresome family.� The D�s were one of those people for whom the world truly is their oyster. My boss says that Mr. D. travels the world playing whatever sport is appropriate at that particular time in that particular location--such as when he wants to play golf, he goes to a course in the highlands of Scotland where golf was invented, or if he wants to hunt some kind of animal or catch some kind of fish or eat some kind of food or buy some kind of carpet, or trade some kind of diamond, whatever it is, he goes to get it at the very source or wherever those things are the very BEST. And while there, he makes some kind of business deal, such as opens up a investment bank branch or buys a seat on the local stock exchange or contemplates buying a boxcar full of some kind of mineral, whatever deal will make him some money.
But I saw the woman that Kate was talking about and said, �What, that�s Mrs. D....not who I THOUGHT was Mrs. D?� Because I have been talking to the D�s at various school functions, people whom I THOUGHT were the D�s (although thank goodness I never called them by name!) and while they didn�t tell me about the golf and the hunting and the investment diamond mines, they DID tell me about the crossing enemy lines in Afghanistan or dodging rebels in Burma or staying in ice hotels in Lapland or, the latest adventure, taking a submarine down to view the wreck of the Titanic (which only about five other people in the country have ever done)--that MR. D did but not Mrs. D, but now Mr. D wants to do it again, this time with his son. It�s extremely dangerous (just the kind of trip they like)--the glass in the window of the submarine has to be six inches thick and if a tiny pinhole crack appears in one, the water will come in and explode your head like a 357 magnum bullet to the brain.
So, if I hadn�t been talking to the Ds, then who had I been talking to? I had to find out. Well, I knew the librarians would know, because the woman I thought was Mrs. D used to volunteer to help in the library and I used to talk to her there whenever I saw her.
The librarians knew immediately, �Oh, you mean Mrs. D, boy you are right, they really are adventurers!�
Well, as it happens, while they don�t have the same name (as my maintaining their privacy by using only the first letter makes it look), there IS a reasonable similarity, in that the �D� that begins both names is a preposition in a romance language meaning �of the�, in the case of one family, the preposition is in French, and in the other, the preposition is in Spanish. But to confuse matters, one of the women is from a Spanish-speaking foreign country, but her married last name is now the one with the French preposition. And since I had never actually been formally introduced to either family and only had to make an attempt at figuring out who they were, I am, perhaps, justifiably confused. Plus, I�ll bet that neither one of them has the slightest idea what MY name is (although I COULD be surprised about that)!
So, as it turns out, both families are extremely adventurous both in travel and in capitalism, and, as the librarians told me, the ones I had been talking to have the practice of opening up hotels everywhere they go (so I am now guessing that the ice hotel in Lapland where they stayed was one that THEY had built).
I don�t think my conversation with the librarians had been very long. However, after having my answer as to who these people were, I ran back upstairs to clarify for Kate the names, only to find several school officials running up and down the stairs with walkie-talkies, Kate�s office filled with paramedics, and one of the teachers moaning and lying down on the couch in Kate�s office, being attended to by all these paramedics (Kate, in case you might have worried, wasn�t hurt, but was only the one whose office had a comfortable resting place).
This poor teacher who had suddenly been laid low due to the onset of excrutiating pain (right during that brief interim in my conversation with Kate) was determined to be suffering from gallstones that his body was attempting to pass (through the bile duct, I think). Strange things happen very quickly.
Well, things settled down for a bit after the paramedics took him away, but then a little later, the constant sound of sirens could be heard. Even though our own campus had been host to several fire department emergency vehicles that day, none of them had blown their sirens, and these sirens had nothing directly to do with us. After a while, we learned that a fully-extended crane had somehow fallen across the north-bound width of the 405 freeway just this side of its interchange with the 101 freeway. Bad news for everybody. I have a book of lists, called The World�s Worst, and I take a perverse pleasure in seeing on that list that the world�s WORST (busiest) freeway interchange is the 405/101 (and the world�s second and third worst are other 405 interchanges), which would happen to be the very interchange that I would use twice a day in my work commutes except for the fact that I NEVER use it due to its being entirely impassable. I won�t ever use that interchange even when I DO take the freeway to work (I exit the 101 at Sepulveda and then get on the 405 at the Galleria), which I hardly ever do. I will only take the freeway if I leave for work no later than 7:00 (virtually never). If I leave any time after 7:00, I take Mulholland the whole way instead. It�s pretty bad when a curving road that runs along the spine of a mountain is faster than taking a freeway (it costs me half-again as much gasoline when I take Mulholland instead of the freeway), but such is the way of freeway travel in Los Angeles in the 21st century.
This accident CLOSED the north-bound side of the world�s busiest freeway and we were approaching rush hour. But first, for us, is the �school� rush hour, when schools let out somewhere in the vicinity of 3:00. Where our school is located are five or six OTHER schools, and the freeway exit to us is the very next one after the 101 interchange. So this crane may as well have fallen across the top of all six schools.
I had tickets to see a play at UCLA that evening, so staying around late at the school was no problem, I would have done that at any rate. My normal pattern concerning seeing these plays at UCLA was to work late, then drive south to West L.A. and have dinner at a coffee shop (Jeff: Dolores), and then go to UCLA for the play. From 4:00 when work was over to an 8:00 performance, there was usually a lot of extra time. However, this time with a traffic problem, I decided to not stay quite as late as I normally would; although I didn�t expect it to be much of a problem as the freeway was closed for north-bound traffic and I was travelling south.
I would have helped with the kids whose parents had been delayed, but my help wasn�t needed as such parental arrival came in dribs and drabs, so I did other work instead. However, I decided to leave for dinner at 5:30 and as I did so, I could still see school staff there and lots of kids still not picked up. Imagine that a freeway closing could delay the arrival of some parents for more than two and a half hours!
Once I got off of the school campus, I could see why. Practically every surface street (and particularly Mulholland) was packed solid with bumper-to-bumper cars. I decided to not chance the south-bound freeway at all, and certainly not Sepulveda (and the traffic informaiton on the radio said to avoid Sepulveda at all costs) but planned to take Benedict Canyon all the way down to Bel Air. However, just getting from the school to Benedict Canyon took up 45 minutes. It was Mulholland that was so bad; once I got to Benedict Canyon, it was relatively smooth sailing all the way down to Sunset. However, I didn�t want to chance going to dinner in West L.A. and decided to just park on the UCLA campus while the getting there was still good. I remembered that the campus was loaded with places for students to eat, so why not just eat there?
I had no luck finding any place to eat on campus. I didn�t know the campus lay-out all that well and any place I found from nosing about was closed. Finally, as time was running short (and it is a pretty huge campus to wander around on aimlessly), I decided to ask about eating places at an information booth, manned by college students. They told me that every place was closed. �Friday night,� they explained.
That didn�t make SENSE, but they in the campus information booth ought to know. (DID they know? Well, once I got home and looked up UCLA Restaurants on the Internet, I found several restaurants all over campus and even close by that were open, so I don't know. For the next play, I'm going to chance it again. So much for asking for help.) Well now, of course, I suddenly got VERY hungry. There would be a reception after the play in which there would be a lot of party-type food, but I needed something NOW--at least something to tide me over until after the play.
As I walked back to the theater complex, I found along the way various compounds loaded with vending machines. While most of the machines were of the soft-drink, bottled water, and junk food variety, each compound did have one machine stocked with more substantial food that could be heated in a furnished microwave. Okay, that would have to do. But rather than get food from machines down there in the central campus area, I decided to use the machines in the vicinity of the theater.
Thus began a sort of comedy of errors (if that comedy hadn�t begun much earlier in the day).
I got to the bank of machines close to the theater complex and found the one that had the more substantial food. I studied the machine a while, trying to figure out how to work it. Apparently you were to push some buttons that would make the stack of lazy susans inside the machine turn and present to you various food offerings. After an interminably long period of time, I found a button to make the interior turn. Roast beef sandwich, oriental rice bowl, oriental noodle bowl, hot rib sandwich, Cup o� Soup. I finally settled on a cup of Hormel chili. $1.75. I fed two one-dollar bills into the machine and then studied the machine very carefully to see how to make my selection. I seemed to be standing there forever, under the disinterested watchful eyes of a couple of students who had also come there to eat. It got so that my delay was unacceptably embarrasing to me, but I simply could not figure out how to make my selection, what series of buttons to push or what method identified that I wanted this Hormel chili on the third wheel from the top. The students that were there seemed to watch me droop-lidded like a group of frogs on a lily pad. I half expected a fly to zoom by and one of them would quickly unfurl a sticky tongue. Despite their torporous dumbness, I found that I couldn�t put their watchful presence out of my mind and finally in desperation, I asked one of them for help.
The guy that helped me turned out to be kind of nice, more or less. At least, he showed me what to do...you simply slid open the door you wanted and the machine subtracted the price from the money I had put in and dropped me back a quarter in change. I pulled out the cup of chili before the door locked on me, or in some other way prevented me from getting my food. I grabbed out the chili and then the door slammed closed. The guy who helped me sat back down.
I now searched for the microwave oven, but to my dismay, found none. I turned back to my helper and asked him if he knew where they had the microwave oven. He pointed to a gaping void at the end of the bank of machines. �It used to be there,� he said. Oh. No microwave oven.
�Well, it won�t be the first time I�ve had cold chili, I guess,� I said, trying to keep my spirits up. �Now all I need is a spoon.� However, the spoon I wanted, the spoon I SHOULD have had, was safely lodged in the now-empty slot in the locked-closed machine where my chili had been. If I had only known, or had the tiniest bit of extra foresight, I would have figured to find the spoon in there behind my chilli and would have pulled the spoon out along with it. I noticed several spoons dotted throughout the machine in otherwise empty slots. Surely I wasn�t the first patron to make this mistake.
For a moment I figured that maybe I would just get something else, too, such as a rice bowl and grab ITS spoon (because surely cold chili wasn�t going to be enough), but then I saw that I had nothing less than a $5.00 bill, so admitted defeat in the adventure and slunk off to eat my cold chili with my fingers in some furtive, animalistic place.
The chili wasn�t half bad, actually, and the fact of it being cold made it more possible to eat with my finger--it clumped together in chunks and, of course, wasn�t too hot to dip a finger into. The chili spice was more pronounced in the coldness of the food. I told myself this was good preparation for the collapse. �Note to self,� I continued, �stock a hatchet among my emergency supplies, for hacking into vending machines after the fall.� Then I mused myself by comparing my personal qualies as a person against so many other people�s. I actually am a sort of helper/guide, and an anticipatory and assertive one, at that. I see what needs to be done and give warnings, too. If I had been the one sitting there at the table in that compound of vending machines and some later-middle-aged man in a coat and tie were standing there so long in front of the vending machines, I would have immediately surmised that the man was a stranger on campus and didn�t understand these machines. (Sure, I could have been a professor, but if so, I would have understood those machines by now.) I would have understood this, because I would remember my own confusion when I first confronted that obtuse machinery. So instead of watching him dumbly, I would have stood up and offered myself to him. �Oh, these machines, it took me forever to figure them out!� I�d say, chattily, saving him from any potential embarrassment. As he turned to look at me, if his eyes responded with welcome, then I could continue with my easy instruction. �You just slide the door you want right open...which one did you want, the chili, oh, don�t forget to pull out the spoon, but warning, you might not want that one, because somebody stole the microwave oven last month so there is no way to heat the chili up.� Give a person the WHOLE story, don�t just sit there and wait for a plea for assistance, and even then give only a partial measure. In such a case, I might have even offered guidance as to where another bank of machines (THIS time with a working microwave oven) might be in the vicinity, and would help the man figure out if he could afford the time or effort to get there.
I was impressed by the Good Samaritan story how the Samaritan not only rescued and clothed the injured man, and took him on his donkey to an inn, but ALSO paid for several days worth of food and lodging and EVEN planned to come back in a few days to pay the innkeeper any extra money that might have been needed (and then, of course actually DID come back as he said). The point there, to me, is not so much the financial generosity (although that certainly counts), but the COMPLETENESS of his care, not missing a detail and expanding it forward into some future time, too. Now that�s really taking care of somebody. Can�t we do that today, too? Or were those lessons only for Biblical times?
After I ate my cold chili and washed my hands in a nearby restroom, I bought a cup of coffee from the vendors set up in front of the theater. The large urn of coffee wasn�t ready yet (the boy making it explained that they had been much delayed due to the traffic, which I, of course, understood), so while it brewed I shared with him and the girl there with him my story of the cold chili, which much amused a middle-aged couple of gay men who had also come to the play, had missed dinner due to the traffic, and wanted, at least, a cup of coffee, too.
Lots of people arrived late to the play due to the traffic, and the couple who sit next to me (we get the same seat season after season) complained bitterly how long it took them to get there. Ironically, they live in the neighborhood of the school where I work (in fact, the man says that the founder of our school gave him swimming lessons when he was a boy), so they had had to take the same packed-solid Mulholland that I did, and they also took Benedict Canyon down to Bel Air, but they had tolerated it much less than I did, because they DID go out to dinner in Westwood, a dinner they had to rush through. They felt very sorry that I had missed dinner entirely.
The play, itself, was wonderful, although many people walked out during intermission. It was Sunday In the Park With George, one of the most marvelous plays ever written by one of the most marvelous theatrical geniuses ever, Stephen Sondheim. But the play is described as �challenging� to audiences who expect to see a linear story and don�t understand or won�t accept this structure of �pointilism� made as a theatrical cognate to the painting style of George Seaurat, the play�s subject, whose impressionistic style of painting consisted of colored dots that were meant to shimmer and combine by the eye and in the brain. Even the music tends to be challenging, as there are no �hit� songs as such (although Barbra Streisand has recorded two powerful and moving versions of two of the songs, �Putting It Together� and �Move On�), but flashes of themes that one recognizes as incredibly beautiful, but which are hard to put together into something one ordinarily thinks of as a "song�.
Sondheim did that even MORE in the also amazingly good Into the Woods, which, while for sure having singable songs (again, Barbra Streisand recorded the mind-blowing �Children Will Listen�), also has musical passages worthy of eternal heaven, but that you can�t pull out and easily play off the CD when you want to. Basically, in order to enjoy those moments, you have to listen to about twenty minutes of music in which those entrancing sections are embedded. I, myself, now find myself on a mission to find a copy of the CD of Sunday In the Park With George just to hear again ONE phrase from the long opening song, in which the artist�s model Dot is mostly complaining about the rigors of posing (�sweat is tricking down my neck�, etc.) but then steps out of herself and sings �I love him when he is painting� in the most beautiful melody imaginable. I can�t explain it, I don�t even know if with CD in hand I could even demonstrate it, but when the actress on stage at UCLA sang that one musical phrase, to take a quote from a bumper sticker about the Rapture, my theater seat was in danger of becoming unmanned.
Apparently this CD is now out of print, at least, based on amazon.com that is selling much-used copies for over $35 and the only new copy available among their vendors is being sold for $100 flat. Yikes. It would be cheaper to buy the DVD of the taping of the Broadway show, but reviews say that Bernadette Peters was not in good voice for that particular taping and the point of getting this music is to hear her in good voice. Is it worth $100 to hear her sing this one phrase of �I love him when he is painting�? Maybe.
Of course, there�s much more on there than that. The clever lyrics are amazing, too. The only clever lyric that I remember though, is, �the puddle where the poodle took a piddle�. And I want to hear again the grandmother say, �The only things worth leaving here on Earth are children or art.� I don�t have children, so I damned well better leave some art. And it was all I could do to keep from crying in public with the performance of the show�s last song (although there in that setting and in that audience, crying would be allowed). What can I say...if that song doesn�t speak to someone, then that person just doesn�t matter. Not to me, anyway, and I am fairly feeling about just about anybody. But as time goes on, that is changing.
Then came the reception, for which I was famished. Huge disappointment. Whereas normally they have a pretty good offering of party-food, this time they had next to nothing--ONLY a pile of tiny cheese cubes (with no crackers or bread) and tiny little one-inch squares of what are they called, alligators? No satisfying of my hunger HERE!
However, on the good side, this was the first time I had ever managed to find anyone good to talk to at these receptions. Too many snotty, overly-critical theater-fags. But strangely enough, this time several people there were really very nice. I was happy to run into the guys with whom I had gotten the coffee at the beginning. Of course, they both had LOVED the play, as they should have. One of them works for the Center Theater Group, so he knows good theater. Unfortunately, they weren�t season subscribers, so I might not see them next time. However, I will keep an eye out for them.
Okay, then I crawled my ravenous body to my car and headed for the Silver Spoon, that stays open until 2:00 A.M. None of their specials appealed to me, so I made the mistake of ordering from their main menu and really ordered something I should not have: chicken stir fry. I was drawn to the chicken and the rice. This dish had in it only six ingredients, of which there ended up being three that I don�t like and a fourth ingredient that was all but inedible. The three that I didn�t like were green peppers, red peppers, and garlic (which was so overpoweringly heavy that I had to count it as an ingredient). The dried up rocky chunks of chicken were all but inedible. That left only the rice and about three tiny mushroom slices. (I can stand garlic in Italian cooking, but in Chinese cooking it just about kills me--something about the violent and vicious way it combines with sesame oil, I think. Anyway, I detest it.) What�s this all about, God? Did you just NOT want me to eat, tonight?
I went to bed fitfully and slept late.
I had been excited about Saturday morning, because I was going to the frame shop to pick up four things that I had left there to be framed that I was most eager to see. It looked like Monday I was finally going to finish the decorating of my office by putting up on the walls the things I was going to hang, four of which were now ready at the framing shop.
Last week was the first time I had ever gone to a framing shop, something I had considered way too expensive for practicality. But this time I had three pieces of genuine aboriginal art, two of which were collectable paintings by known artists, the third a beautiful hand painting on a piece of cloth. The fourth item was a large trompe l�oil mural (that looks like looking out an open window at an Italian coastal cove scene) that was meant to be stuck on a wall as wallpaper, but which I didn�t want to permanently attach to the school�s wall in my office and wanted the framers to stretch, instead, like a canvas, on wooden framing sticks. I explained how the excess edges of the wallpaper could be folded back onto a canvas-stretching frame.
I figured the concept of what I wanted and the owner of the shop was a genius in pulling out just the exact framing materials that not only gave the effect I was looking for, but also hugely enhanced the beauty of each work. Frames for the two aboriginal paintings, a glassed-in black shadow box for the aboriginal cloth painting, and he recommended attaching the mural to a slab of foam board so it was something I could hang, or take away, which I thought was a good idea.
It was all expensive, (close to $400), but as I had brought in over a thousand dollars worth of art, I guessed that $400 wasn�t too bad.
So, I couldn�t wait to go pick up these beautiful things.
The first thing they handed me was the shadow box. It looked beautiful until I discovered from where they put on the hanging wire in the back that they had framed it upside down. I had explicitely explained which way it was supposed to be, and even explained WHY...in retrospect, I guess I should have taken a leaf from a surgeon�s book, where they actually WRITE on the arm or leg which one they are to operate on, I should have pinned on a tag that said THIS IS THE TOP or something. Well, while disappointed, I didn�t say anything. I figured I could fix this myself, which I did, today, by unscrewing the two wire-holding screws and putting them where they belonged. No big deal, really, but something I shouldn�t have had to do.
Next they handed me the tromple l�oil window mural, glued to foam board with a frame of 1 x 1 bracing sticks on the back. When I looked at it, my spirits fell--I couldn�t BELIEVE what those dumb fucks had done. They hadn�t cut off the excess margins (that I had originally thought would be folded back like canvas) but had glued the entire THING on the board, INCLUDING the part number and item description in big letters across the bottom, like this was a poster. What on earth were they thinking? It seemed to me so obvious that all that descriptive crap written across the bottom was meant to be cut off and that this thing was supposed to fool the eye into thinking it really was an open window looking out at this scene, an effect that is effectively destroyed by letters at the bottom spelling out �Part Number A5789765, Italian Cove Scene Wallpaper Mural�.
I didn�t say a word, but my demeanor suddenly got extremely chilly and unhappy and if that guy had the slightest level of sensitivity, he might have picked up on the fact that this was a VERY unhappy customer (especially in contrast to my extremely enthusiastic demeanor when I went in there last week), but he yammered on at how he thought it was best to glue on those bracing sticks and for me to be careful, that the thing was still fragile, while I ignored him completely and contemplated throwing the whole thing out in the trash.
I�m not quite sure why I didn�t demand that they fix these things or at least lodge my complaint, but I guess I was so shocked by their demonstration of incompetence that I didn�t want them to have these things in their possession another second, or that I thought it would be too much trouble and arguing to get them to accept that they should fix these things for FREE and I sure didn�t want them to earn one more filthy nickel from me. At best, all I did to them was simply take my stuff and walk out of there with my chilling attitude and went without a word at all, so they missed out on all the wonderful praise I WOULD have given them if they had done a good job, plus of course, they will certainly forgo any repeat business I may have in the future, and all the people who visit my office will notice this art and will be treated to a story of where they should NOT go themselves for their framing needs.
At this point I�m not sure how I will solve the problem with the mural, or know when I will have the energy to even fool with it. I guess the sticks in the back will have to be ripped off and the offending bottom will have to be carefully cut off with a foam-board knife, all of which will endanger the art on the front. I paid all this money because I did NOT want to have to fool with this work myself.
But for now, I�m going to hang that piece with the writing still on the bottom of it and tell everybody about it and then solicit solutions.
I�m sorry to say that the whole disappointment of this sent me right back home to bed, where I only stirred to read, yet everything I read depressed me even more. What I was reading all but convinces me that the planet is almost entirely peopled by evil, cruelty, selfishness, or stupidity, and has ever been so. And this, with ever-more depressing reading no matter what I picked up, continued into Sunday until I could barely move enough to eat.
So it really was yet another weekend wasted with depression, feeling emotionally disabled as I described at the beginning of this piece. I feel that I am suffering from a peculiar combination of absolute loneliness and displacement (that "how did I end up on such a wrong planet" feeling) while craving even more �getting away and seeking solitude�.
I�d love to take a sick day tomorrow, yet I am not sick and I feel worse here at home than I do at work. Tuesday is my birthday, but instead of having people tell me happy birthday and giving me birthday cards and maybe even taking me out, if anyone does, I feel like going away somewhere clean and empty of clutter and distraction and just relaxing in the quiet solitude of my private aloneness.
I guess what I really need to do is reconnect with my center and find clear direction once more. And yet I am bothered by the upcoming property-distribution, house-cleaning, estate crap that we all are going to have go through yet NOBODY wants to right now. How are we going to manage to schedule a time when we can all get together when it�s always been nearly impossible to do so even in the best of times? One sister says to forget doing it all together, that each one should go up there on our own time and schedule whenever it�s convenient and take what we want and do some portion of throwing out and cleaning up--but I think THAT�S a bad idea, particularly that �throwing out� part, as we have already learned that one person�s garbage is another person�s treasure. Let�s hold off on that �throwiing out� part for a while, okay? And take what we want? That presumes that nobody wants much, or wants what somebody else wants. I think what everybody really wants is for all of it to just go away (with some kind of a check magically landing in our respective mailboxes). But it ain�t gonna happen THAT way.
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