One of the reasons I like being back home is that I get to hang out with my father. Today we made some lunch and wandered around his neck of the woods; there’s a deeded coastal access trail very close to his house where you can go out onto the headlands or down onto a little beach. Since it was so beautiful today, it was awesome to be able to get out of the house, breathe some fresh air, and ramble with my father.

His garden is certainly flourishing; he’s got plants exploding all around the house, with lots of flowers which were wide open to drink in the sun today. We harvested some produce from the garden for lunch, and I ate some of his peas; I do have a fondness for peas fresh out of the pod. It’s interesting to see how much he’s shaped his garden, which was pretty minimal when he moved in. He used mostly rejected free plants which no nursery wanted, coaxing them into health. Despite his constant battle with the deer, he seems to be doing ok in the garden department; although the gophers ate all of his potatoes, apparently.

My father and I are similar in a lot of ways. We’re both surprisingly inflexible, for such liberal people, and we both really like set, dependable schedules. Stubbornness is also a trait that we both have, along with a certain amount of reverse class snobbery. We can also be surprisingly blunt, sometimes, and we often make social gaffes despite being otherwise pretty on it and observant. I noticed today that we both also get on reading kicks, where we track down every possible book on a subject and read about it until we’re exhausted. I think that my father is a bit more compassionate that I am, which is presumably something that comes with age, and I’m much more hotheaded and impatient than he is, something that I hope will settle down with age.

Wandering along the coastal access trail, we were talking about all sorts of things, as we usually do, but the inanity of owning land came up. It is kind of strange, isn’t it, to think of “owning” the Earth. “Leasing” would be a more accurate word, I think. He made the point that the commodification of land has really changed our society, perhaps not for the better. Even if we do see and recognize that, I doubt it’s going to change; we’ve gone too far to go back now.

For those of you who don’t know what deeded coastal access is, it’s pretty neat. Essentially, California recognizes that beaches are something which everyone should enjoy, and so the state has a law which ensures that trails to the beach stay open to the public, even if they are on private property. These trails are built into property titles, so when people buy land, they do so with the understanding that the public can walk on their property.

As you can imagine, rich people who buy oceanfront property resent this, and a lot of coastal access trails are actually illegally closed off. The trail that we used today is on a piece of land which was bought by some rich lawyers from the city a few years ago. Initially, they tried to close off the land with no tresspassing signs and a high fence; to their surprise, the community fought back. Thanks to the efforts of a few people, the trail is now open to the public, although it’s lined with aggressive “no trespassing; private property; stay on trail; we’re rich self righteous fucks who never actually come our vacation home” signage.

Despite that, there’s something deeply satisfying about using this trail, not only because it opens out onto a beautiful headland and the ocean today was blue and sparkling and perfect, but because my father and I got to thumb our noses at the idea of “owning” property, of controlling rights to it, of refusing to get to know your neighbors. The people who own this house learned to their cost that communities still mean something in some parts of the world.

Do you ever think that you could have been an entirely different person?

I was lying awake in bed last night, thinking that maybe I should have gone to medical school, to become a cardiac surgeon or a neurologist or perhaps an emergency physician. I suppose that I still could, but I feel like that’s a door that’s closed to me now, that every day more doors close and my options become fewer and narrower. Maybe I was meant to be a cabinet maker, or a postman, or someone else, and I’ll never know. Perhaps in some alternate world, I am a cardiac surgeon, doing my residency, or I’m apprenticed to a cabinet maker, or I’m taking the bar exam. Maybe I’m actually doing something worthwhile in that other place.

It’s hard to think of a single defining moment when the choice of who I would become was made, but rather than a series of choices ended up creating me. Not necessarily my choices, either. Maybe if I’d gone to school somewhere else, I would have had a passion for physics and become a scientist. Or if my father had pushed me to play music, I would have become a concert harpist. Perhaps if I had been born with different neural pathways, read different books, taken different classes.

For some reason, today I feel like a nobody. I don’t feel like my presence on Earth has had a positive impact on anyone’s life; like I haven’t made any great changes in my society or contributed, in any way, to human existence. Perhaps it’s the equinox causing an existential crisis, as I know that they days will get shorter and colder and darker like they do every year while I remain the same person. Perhaps I think that with five billion people on Earth, a few of them are bound to be losers. I mean, it’s just statistical fact.

Maybe, I think, maybe I should get a second bachelor’s degree in biology, and maybe I should attend medical school and become a doctor. “Why aren’t you a doctor,” my Chinese mother says, and I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like I am crippled with debt which overshadows all my choices now, like I can’t go back to school because I can’t afford it, I can’t pursue any dreams at all because I have trapped myself. I don’t know why I’m not anything.

I have to say, if this is what being grownup is, I want a fresh deal of cards. I don’t think I want to stand pat anymore.

In my dream, the Sardine and I are walking together in some sort of murky underworld. I find it hard to pin down any features, as the world seems to slide away when I look at it. I find that if I look sideways, just out of the corner of my eye, sometimes I see strange, twisted trees and misshapen rocks. Everything is grey and foggy around us, and the path seems to be made of oystershell, or maybe bone, so it cracks underneath our feet. It is cold and clammy, a dark chill.

Either I have grown very small or the Sardine has grown very large.

We do not talk, the Sardine and I, as we pick our way along the path, but we are hand in hand.

I am reminded of the scene in The Horse and His Boy, when one of the characters walks through the fog and the darkness with Aslan by his side. Unbeknownst to the character, Aslan stands between him and a great abyss, ensuring that he will not fall while the two discuss philosophy, and right and wrong.

“‘Who are you?’ asked Shasta.

‘Myself,’ said the Voice, very clear and low so that the earth shook: and again ‘Myself,’ loud and clear and gay: and then the third time ‘Myself,’ whispered so softly you could hardly hear it…”

The Sardine does not appear to be afraid, and I wonder why I am afraid. Of the darkness? The cold? The slippery world which defies my quest for boundaries and hard, crisp edges which I can grasp? I think, in the dream, that I am afraid because I think that we may be the last people on Earth, but I am not sure, because this dream seems to be confused with other dreams, like bright ribbons of fortune cookies kept in a keepsake jar.

The smart thing to do is to start trusting your intuition.

My intuition says that this is my dream, and therefore I ought to possess some measure of control over it. I wonder if I can will color and shapes into being, or if some greater danger will be revealed if I brush the fog away. Is it better to live in a cloud of uncertainty, or in a harsh light of reality?

“Perch,” I say. “Tuna. Salmon. Monkfish. Squid.”

“Yes,” says the Sardine, and then the fog is melting away and I have slipped into consciousness. Dreams always feel so insubstantial and meaningless when you wake up, despite the fact that they may have terrified you or felt heavy with symbolism. Upon committing them to paper, they seem even smaller and less important. The note in my dream diary says:

“sardine. Fog/squid? Narnia, Dante,, seashell/bone path. Very grey, myself, Myself. mirrors [or maybe minnows, my handwriting is challenging to read at the best of times], reality vrs. blissful ignorance.”

As I think on my dreams during the day, I find that they change. Is this because my mind slowly fleshes out the gaps in order to create artificial bridges of meaning, or because my mind remembers? Sometimes I find the memory of a dream strongly triggered by something like a scent, a sound, or a sudden moment, like deja vu with pieces of a puzzle clicking together. Sometimes this happens at awkward moments, and I feel like I have gone away for an instant. I wonder if people notice, or if a moment which feels like an eternity is really just a few seconds?

Quan lo rosinhols escria
ab sa part la nueg e.l dia,
yeu suy ab ma bell’amia
jos la flor,
tro la gaita de la tor
escria: “Drutz, al levar!
Qu’ieu vey l’alba e.l jorn clar.”

Je n’oublie pas cela le deuxieme anniversaire de ton mort est aujourd’hui. Je suis seule sans ton sourire, ton coeur, ton compagnie. Je veux un plus de moment avec toi, mon ami. Je sais tu attends-moi, mais parfois je pense je suis prêt maintenant. Prends moi, j’ai peur sans toi.

Je suis si seul, je sais ceci maintenant. Je n’ai pas foi, seulement tristesse. Quand je pense à a toi, je regrette tout, je ne regrette rien.

Jusqu’à la prochaine fois.

I snapped awake this morning, like someone had pinched me. It was so sudden, so abrupt, that I rolled over to check the time. 8:12. The cats stirred at the end of the bed, and Loki came up to me, optimistic, kneading the comforter.

“Hello Loki,” I said. “Today is 11 September, 2007.”

I feel awkward, thinking about the events of six years ago. There are lots of things I could say, but I’m not sure how many are appropriate, or relevant, this morning. Whether you’re American or not, patriotic or not, something changed for a lot of people six years ago. While I normally charge into political issues full steam ahead, and there are a lot of political issues to think about this morning, it doesn’t seem….right. Or respectful. There’s a human issue this morning, and in it I think that there is hope. My own part of the story is small, only a fraction of the great whole, but these collective stories make up a complex narrative, and within that narrative I think there is a sort of hope.

I remember where I was, when I heard; I’ll bet you do, too. I remember looking for information, any information, and ending up on CNN, watching the same video over and over again on my laptop. It was grey that morning, not quite foggy but oppressed and overcast, and we were in our robes listening to the President on NPR and watching the same looping image. It seemed like such an ordinary morning, dew on the grass, deer in the drive, a wild turkey skulking furtively across the lawn.

Something about events like this makes us seek other people out. Perhaps it’s a sort of affirmation, or an obscure need for comfort in the collective hive-mind. But I do remember that we got dressed, and we went into town together, although we didn’t really know where to go. I remember going to Headlands, which was quiet and somber, and then ending up somewhere else, watching television with friends and strangers, the same footage on every station with shocked television announcers murmuring. Talking quietly amongst ourselves, glancing up whenever someone entered the room to shake our heads, no, no news.

Strangers all over the world came together, and I think that’s rather interesting. People watched the same images on their televisions, stood in varying weather for candlelight vigils. For a few hours, it seemed like the whole world was coming together, without thought of politics, race, creed, class. The impoverished stood with the wealthy, while Buddhists prayed at Christian vigils and I watched an ungainly pair of office buildings collapse with an Iranian on one side and a Brazilian on the other.

It would seem, occasionally, that humanity really is capable of overcoming huge hurdles to unify, even if only for a few brief moments. If only, I think, we could set aside our differences more often and unite to accomplish a common goal, or to mark respect for an event; think of all the great things we could do.

The first thing I knit was a red scarf, made from angora yarn which was extremely fuzzy and the very devil to work with. Like most projects I embark on, it took me only a few hours to make the first 90%, and then four days to do the remainder.

I’ve been knitting for around seven years now. You’d think, after seven years, that I would be some incredibly bad ass knitter with amazing skills, but you would be wrong. Like most things I take up, I knit intermittently, when the feeling strikes me, so I might spend 40 hours knitting one week and then not pick up the needles for three months. But I really do like knitting, when I do it.

I started knitting because a friend of mine was working on a scarf and it looked interesting, like a hobby I might enjoy.

“Can you teach me how to do that,” I said, and she got out a pair of needles and some worsted weight yarn and spent 15 minutes explaining how to cast on and chuckling as I ended up with a huge pile of tangled yarn which her cat promptly attacked. After about three hours, I managed to cast on a small row of stitches and knit a little sample. The stitches weren’t terribly even, and the whole thing was a bit damp from the cat chewing on it, but I had knitted something. Then she showed me how to purl, and another three hours later, I was onto shaky rows of ribbing.

With my newfound skill, I decided to knit the aforementioned red scarf, and I equipped myself with the necessary needles and yarn. My father chuckled when he came home to find me knitting on the couch, but within a few months he was trying to enlist me to repair his holey sweaters and knit socks. (I have yet to attempt socks. They scare me.) I also began to acquire yarn, and needles, and now I have a big trunk full of knitting things, which is rather nice, as I have lots of yarn to play with when the mood strikes me.

There are a couple of reasons I like knitting. I really enjoy the sense of producing something, starting with skeins of yarn and ending up with a hat, sweater, scarf, shawl, gloves, whatever. I love watching the project develop, feeling it get weighty in my hands. I also really enjoy making things for people, and I find that knitting is sort of like a form of meditation, for me. It’s an art which requires patience and an attention for detail, two traits which I do not have. I always feel like my personality improves when I’m knitting more frequently, because it forces me to be more slow and thoughtful.

A lot of work goes into a knitted garment, as anyone who knits knows. For those who don’t, have more respect for the hideous sweater your grandmother gives you every year, I tell you what. A sweater is a serious investment, let alone something monstrous like a throw. When you have cats, knitting gets much more challenging, since they will contribute to the project, whether you like it or not.

Knitting seems to be the hip, trendy thing to do these days. I am far from a hip, trendy knitter. I don’t make skull sweaters, or artfully color-coordinated scarves. Most of my projects are actually kind of lopsided and malformed, due to my inability to follow directions with any degree of complexity. I think that it’s good, though, to test my patience and abilities with projects which I often wind up tearing up. The meditation and the benefit are in the act of knitting, not in making something which someone else might recognize as a garment. And I would like to point out that I was knitting before it was trendy. So there.

Every now and then, I come up with something which looks rather nice, and I usually give it away. A few times, I’ve been commissioned, so to speak, to work on projects for people, and I’ve had fun doing that. By no means do I fancy myself a real knitter, casually producing epic and amazing projects, although I do admire the serious knitters of my acquaintance. The process is the product, and I rather enjoy that. I like to take a break from my often manic and panicked personal existence to focus on the feeling of yarn in my hands, a developing pattern taking shape while Loki steals my skeins of yarn.

Some day, I might even finish that fern lace scarf I’ve been working on for two years.

When I woke this morning, I saw a bright orange spot on the ground by the back fence, under the peach tree. I was curious to find out what it was, so I threw on some shorts and wandered cautiously outdoors. The spot proved to be a peach, orange with a faint red blush, soft and smelling deliciously peachy. I picked it up, brought it inside, rinsed it, and took a bite. The skin of the peach was a bit thicker than I’m used to, but the flesh was sweet and creamy and soft, until I hit a ferociously bitter spot which caused my entire mouth to pucker.

“Pftcha!” I said, while Loki played with the peach pit.

I was going to give the peach a 9, until I hit that bitter spot. Now I’m trying to separate out the sweet delicious part of the experience from the bitterness. I’m tempted to give it a 10 for so closely imitating life, which often seems sweet until you suddenly realize that you’ve been chewing on a bitter portion and it’s tainted the whole experience.

I also decided today that it was time to give up tea bags, a great personal weakness of mine. Really, the only reason that I use tea bags is because I really like Constant Comment tea. But there are a number of reasons not to use tea bags, starting with the quality of the tea. Many tea producers cram broken tea leaves, stems, and, er, other stuff into their tea bags, since it’s not as noticeable. The finest teas tend to be set aside for loose leaf use, since consumers pay more attention to their loose leaf tea. In addition, tea bags are really wasteful, since they are often individually packaged, and you end up throwing out a lot of stuff for one cup of tea. Also, bagged tea is more expensive.

By giving up tea bags, I’ll be drinking better tea, saving the environment, and spending less money. Of course, I’ll also have to give up Constant Comment, but I think it’s worth it. I swung by Down Home Foods today and picked up some Orange Spice tea, which certainly smells viciously orangey. I’m hoping for the best.

In further food news, astute readers may remember my Mexican Chocolate Pudding adventure. Today I made a variant on the recipe, with Ghirardelli cocoa and Baker’s Chocolate instead of Ibarra. I added a dash of ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chili powder, and the whole works is chilling in the fridge right now. If I can resist long enough to let it set all the way, I think it will turn out really well. The cocoa and baker’s chocolate are certainly going to make it much more chocolately and rich, which is awesome. I cut the sugar in the Joy’s standard recipe by about half, so it should also be deliciously bitter. Hooray.

My next pudding project is going to be a layered chocolate and coconut pudding for the next time Baxt, Petey, and I have dinner. I have, needless to say, high hopes.

So, I was peacefully lolling around in bed at an indecent hour this morning, sleeping off a late night frenzied bout of reading, when my sleep was profoundly disturbed, and I was jolted awake. Normally, my sleep is disturbed by one of the following: a cat jumping on me, the sudden smell of poop followed by furtive litterbox scratchings, my father knocking on the door, the incredibly loud and never ending house construction, or my insanely loud neighbor tromping up his stairs, idling his truck three feet away from my bed, or blaring nonsense into his phone. Oh, or screaming children, which appear to surround me on all sides. Why am I not living in the woods again?

This morning, however, it was a different sort of thing that woke me up, a shuddering, jouncing, windows rattling in their frames moment of utter disorientation. It felt sort of like an earthquake, but not quite right, and the cats had their ears laid back but they were holding fast on the bed, which is not earthquake behavior. As my consciousness flooded in, I realized that I had literally been shaken awake, but not by natural means. Instead, someone had their car speakers turned up to excruciating volume, and they were driving down the street. The shaking continued, actually, for several blocks.

Now, I like to listen to the music a little loud, myself. But this was…out of control. I don’t actually understand how someone could be a passenger in that car without their ears exploding. It was painful for me and I was separated, at one point, by multiple buildings. I actually woke up when they passed directly behind my bed, and for a heartstopping (literally) moment when I was waking up I thought I was dying. That was the only rational explanation my sleep deprived brain had for what my body was experiencing, because the bass was literally so high that it caused my heart to stop beating.

Now, I am fairly certain that noise over a certain decibel level is actually generally prohibited in town, and especially in vehicles. Loud music, after all, is really distracting (see My First Traffic Infraction for details). So, I am assured that this person would probably be cited for driving with their speakers turned up that high, were they ever to be caught by a cop.

However, I suspect that they turn their music down when they are in more cop-trafficked parts of town, for precisely that reason. Much to my chagrin, I also suspect that this person lives on my block, because this isn’t the first time that I have experienced this problem.

This, then, begs the question of what I want to do about it. One part of me is highly tempted to charge out in my bathrobe and note down their license plate the next time this happens. (I say “charge out in my bathrobe” because this person always seems to go by when I am sleeping or just getting out of the shower.) I suppose I could call the non-emergency line at the cop shop and report them, in the hopes that the cops will be able to nab them. I do, however, feel slightly silly calling the cops about it, especially if they have already received complaints. The DMV? You can report reckless driving to the DMV, right, so why not attempted manslaughter by bass? Ah, such just desserts if this person experienced the long arm of the DMV in the form of a license revocation letter.

I am also tempted to just charge out in my bathrobe and look menacing, but unfortunately when you are five feet tall on a good day and plump every day, it’s sort of hard to look menacing. Like many curvaceous ladies, my menacing stance is often perceived as amusing, which actually serves to make me even more furious. Let this be a lesson to you who would laugh at the short and fat: there is nothing angrier than a short, fat girl who is being laughed at because she is angry. Don’t go there unless you aren’t particularly fond of your limbs.

My other alternative is a bit more…Slytherin. This alternative involves stealthily taking note of said vehicle, and then finding out where it parks and cutting the speaker cables. Ultimately much more satisfying, and probably much more effective.

What do you think? Sometimes I feel like I am turning into an old person. I can’t wait to have a lawn to tell kids to stay off of!

In my dream, my father and I are driving at night through downtown Fort Bragg, on our way to somewhere, only Fort Bragg has changed, radically, into some sort of hybridized version of Tokyo on Victorian steroids. I can see the shapes of towering imitation Victorian buildings, like downtown Healdsburg, with wide sidewalks and incongruous cherry trees raining blossoms onto passerby. The trees are festooned with white Christmas lights, I almost expect it to be snowing. Every business is lit up with huge plate glass windows that seem very out of place with the architecture, but most of the sparkling altars to consumerism are hidden by mobs of people, milling at every corner, a wedding party flashes by in the windows of a suddenly ground-level Bistro while a gaggle of school girls giggles at an almost unrecognizable Laurel Street, and I see a row of old fashioned cars.Horrific vision of our overdeveloped future, or run of the mill nightmare?

“Stop,” I say to my father, “let’s see what’s going on,” but he doesn’t acknowledge the vision outside at all. He is bent on our joint destination, and we abruptly find ourselves in a landscape which resembles rural Ireland, rolling dark hills to the ocean with indistinct white blobs that might be sheep and a single rambling white gravel road. We reach a crossroads, two roads and four directions, and get out of the car.

“It’s here,” he says, “I know it’s just here,” he repeats, and he casts about in the gravel and peers up at the crooked road sign. “It’s supposed to be here, the crossroads.”

“What are you looking for,” I ask, standing awkwardly next to the car and shivering in the sudden cold.

“It must be here,” he insists, and he starts to dig.

“What?”

“It’s a box,” he says, “a box with the answer to the riddle inside.”

“Ah,” I say, and I start to look in the gravel, too, before raising a hand and crying “accio box,” and it comes to me, small and wooden and damp, cracking. It was once inlaid, I think, and precious, and now it smells musty and worthless, gobs of dirt clinging to it and rubbing off into my hands.

We open the box together and I see three rusting skeleton keys and a broken and warped piece of wood which once fit into a nest in the box. My father looks at me expectantly and I look into the box with the growing realization that I am supposed to understand what it means, what’s inside, how to use it, and I look back into my father’s face.

“I don’t know,” I say, “I’m sorry,” and I shrug helplessly.

“It’s all ruined,” he says, and we stand there in the darkness looking out over the ocean, white gravel road under us glowing like it’s on fire.

I have a confession.

I can’t really swim. I know, I’ve been writing all these posts about going to the river, and I might have one up sometime soon about the Great Ocean Adventure, but I can’t really swim. I splash around, for sure, and I can dogpaddle with the best of them, but in an emergency situation with water, I would be pretty much fucked.

Yesterday we went to milemarker [redacted] on [road]*, because a friend of mine was just getting into town for a brief visit and we wanted to go to the river and it was a readily accessible spot. I went out early with another friend, and we crashed around in the woods for awhile because he charged up the wrong path and I didn’t correct him, but we made it there ok. It was a good day for going to the river. It was a good day for charging naked through the woods looking for logs, too.

I had actually woken up thinking that a river trip would be really nice. The weather was sunny and bright, and it would be a shame to be stuck indoors working all day when I could work at night. Which is what I have been doing, since the weather is so awesome. But I pledged to myself that I would work, unless someone called and said “let’s go to the river” and fortunately someone did.

I have a whole system at the river. First, I apply sunscreen to the visible parts of my body and I lie in the sun until it becomes almost painful. Then, I take my clothes off and put sunscreen everywhere else, before lying in the sun some more. Next, I charge full tilt into the water and splash around. My friend thought it was really amusing when I pointed out that I can’t actually swim, though. He tried to teach me all these fancy swimming strokes, and while I appreciated the effort, I really do just like splashing around. I don’t mind going out into deep water, and I can hold my own for a little while, but actual swimming is beyond me. I also noticed today that I have developed the alarming tendency to sink like a stone, and I’m not sure when that happened. I used to be a floater!

When everyone else arrived, the boys set about building an impressive engineering structure from mud, while the girls lounged on the bank and read. This is pretty much par for the course with river trips, and is part of the fun, with all of us periodically decamping to the water to splash around, play water tag, and what have you. I showed people how, if you hold really, really still, the fish in the water will come nibble on you. I think they are salmon? I assume they are salmon. Anyway, if you hold still enough, those little fuckers can really bite you. It hurts.

“Man,” someone said at one point, “this is really what I wanted to do with my day.”

And he was right. It was exactly what I wanted to do with my day, loafing in the water and then coming home tired and sated to work through the evening. The last week or so have been really, extraordinarily frustrating for me, so it was really nice to just space out at the river with my friends, thinking about nothing other than the apricots in my bag and the book I was reading. The river is one of my favourite places on Earth. I think that if I had a choice in it, I would probably buy property next to the river before I would buy property next to the ocean, since I love the thought of just running out into the back yard and taking a swim. Or, I guess in my case, taking a splash.

*What, like I’m going to give away all my sweet swimming spots? In your dreams.