it's kind of funny

It's kind of funny, being here in Anacortes this week shopping and cleaning and gardening and cooking in preparation for this weekend's west coast pre-wedding barbecue in honor of my brother and his fiancee. (I should say my absolutely adored brother and his absolutely lovely fiancee.)

It's kind of funny in part because this is my baby brother, my Nater Tater, who has become in some ways more adult, more grown up, than I can ever imagine feeling. And it's kind of funny in part because this west coast pre-wedding gathering is what I kind of always imagined (when I ever imagined such things at all) would be my actual wedding to a certain young man several years back. And it's kind of painful, this shopping and cleaning and gardening and baking and making gallons of gazpacho and bringing gift bags to the hotel where the soon-to-be-in-laws and siblings are staying and all the rest of this crazy hectic wonderful beautiful family- and friend-filled weekend.

It's kind of a funny thing, this feeling of being so overwhelmed with love and happiness for someone so dear as one's brother, and yet also and simultaneously feeling a little bit heartbroken.

I guess as long as the hummus and gazpacho and snickerdoodles and black-bottomed cupcakes are well received tomorrow, I'll be all right.

for j.

working hard

chair, or, where i spent the first two days of my summer vacation

underbrella

independence day, federal way, washington

sign for nathan

mj

I didn't cry when I learned Thursday evening that Michael Jackson had died. To be honest, I didn't really give it all that much thought. But then I got to work yesterday morning and Erica and I were reading our various Facebook updates over each other's shoulders and we got to my friend Ben's most recent entry. And I sat there in my office, abruptly stunned into tears at the realization of what we've lost, of what he meant to some of us.

I know that there is already controversy and discord in the ways that people are mourning or not mourning the death of Michael Jackson. To some he was an icon, an idol, a force of nature, the King of Pop. To others he was nothing more than a pedophile, and undeserving of any accolades or grief. To still others (and I counted myself in this category) he was mostly a creepy picture on the cover of National Enquirer, pasty and noseless and strange and very, very sad.

But then I read Ben's entry and now, for me at least, Michael Jackson will forever be the person behind the song that got Ben through. And, in my mind, that's enough to make him a hero.

Ben's memorial is in four parts, given the restrictions of Facebook statuses, and he has been kind enough to give me permission to share it here:

"PART ONE I did not talk for two years. I went to college after my mother passed, and I did not talk to anyone. I made no new friends. I didn't talk about classic '80s movies, politics, the genius of Prince--nothing. I was scared to connect. New relationships equaled new possibilities for hurt. There was a bar at the end of the street that had dancing every night. One night a month was all '80s music.

"PART TWO Although it's from 1979, they'd always play MJ's "Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough." It's impossible for me to describe how this song made me feel, but I guess I'll try. It was, and still is, pure exhilaration. That intro still sends a shiver through me that makes me want to jump up and down!

"PART THREE Those six minutes are filled with such joy, fear, and excitement. I could compare the feeling that I get when I hear this song to slowly climbing up that first big hill on a roller coaster, but it was really so much more. I guess I'm trying to thank MJ somehow.

"PART FOUR Through MJ's song, and for only six minutes, this scared, lonely, fat, and angry kid was able to feel alive, and, most importantly, SPECIAL, at a time when I was convinced that I was anything but special. MJ always was dramatic. He died on the 15th anniversary of my mother's death. He didn't have to do that--I would've always remembered him anyway."

(Ben Bloom, 6/26/09)

Also my favorite MJ guilty pleasure: Smooth Criminal. And when I was nine or ten, I was a little bit obsessed with We Are The World. We had the record. I listened to it, a lot. I mean, just how much more adorable could Cyndi Lauper possibly be, anyway?

let's talk republicans, c street, abortion, & beirut (the band not the city)

Let's talk Sanford. That would be Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina, GOP Superstar and once upon a time potential 2012 candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. Too bad he blew that political capital (among other things) south of the border this past weekend, hobnobbing with a hot young thing (well okay, 43) in Buenos Aires instead of spending Father's Day with his wife and, you know, kids.

And what name did he mention as helping him deal with this torrid affair over the last few months? C Street. That would be the name of a D.C. rooming house for a good old boys Christian political organization (or something) known as the Fellowship or, alternatively, the Family (seriously!). They wine and dine together, and give each other marital advice and good Christian counseling when it comes to having extramarital affairs. To greater or lesser effect, apparently, given that dear old Mark thought it would be a good move to take a tax-payer funded holiday to Argentina (though he has since announced he will reimburse the State for his booty call costs). And then have his staff lie about where he was. When he should have been maybe, you know, governing.

Another member of the so-called C Street Gang? John Ensign. Yes, that John Ensign. Clearly they need better counseling. Or chemical castration. Or, what the hell, let's go all out and make it physical castration, at least for these morons who so adamantly oppose certain other people trying to have normal, healthy, happy marriages.

And yet another stand-out member of C Street is the one and only Tom Coburn (my personal favorite in this little bag o' bad boys). That would be Tom Coburn, junior senator from Oklahoma, OB/GYN who believes not only that all abortions should be illegal (though unwanted sterilizations are good to go), but that all abortion providers should be put to death (except, presumably, himself, despite having performed several abortions in the past). (No word on whether the women choosing to have the abortions should also be put to death, though it seems pretty infantalizing to not give the women equal responsibility -- what, it's all the doctors' fault? But I suppose it's hard, even for this blowhard, to argue that over a million women a year should be executed for wanting to end their pregnancies.)

That would also be the Tom Coburn who opposed the Democrats' attempt to expand SCHIP, a government program to provide health care for children, but recently proposed founding an "Office of Unborn Children's Health." Because, as everyone surely knows, the unborn should have access to government-funded health care but for the already-born, that's called socialism, and thus very very bad.

On another note, I've been a little bit obsessed with Beirut recently. That would be Beirut the band, not Beirut the city (though I did once love a book by the name of Beirut Fragments, and which was in fact about Beirut the city, and probably pre-existed Beirut the band). This current obsession is a nice change from the last couple weeks' preoccupation with Damien Rice's oh so tragic love gone wrong songs. I've become a sucker for bands with stringed instruments, horns, or, apparently, an accordion.



Also: Postcards from Italy, Ederlezi, Elephant Gun, Gulag Orkestar, My Night With the Prostitute

a lost art

I was looking for the cassette tape of my father's Barnard memorial service the other day to give to a friend to transfer to some other, more permanent, medium, and in the process came across a plethora of old mix tapes. And I was kind of blown away, sitting there on the floor in my living room, by these dusty piles of tapes (some with cases, some without, some labeled, some not, some with wonderful artwork, some with nearly illegible handwriting), and by the people they embody, and by the quirky bits of poetry embedded there:

Blood is Beauty: the Empowerment Mix

I Hope you enjoy this mix of SONGS! (Love, Ben!)

Midnight Mix

Tears can be Beautiful but Anger is a Gift

Thunderstorm Mix

Tape 1 Mix: Pray to the Sunrise

Fall 2002

Music That's Better Than The Crap You Listen To

December 1997

Tanuja the Alien

The "Ode to the Dark One..." Mix (Radiance of the Sun to our Eyes... ; Dark Side of the Moon to our Mind...)

Em Mix

Evolving Robots (Fuzzy Sets/Fuzzy Logic; Indeterminancy of Translation)

Emily's Tape (Tape for Emily - Sad Side; Tape from Julia - Misc. Side)

Tape 2: No Label

It's BOILING in here But You're Only this Big

I Don't Want To Live On The Moon! (A mix for Emily)

She's Gone Insane In A Way But It Suits Her - Winter Mix 1994 (Shiny Happy Side A; Rusted Grouchy Side B)

birthday pics

(Thanks, Katrin!)

voices

"Imagined voices, and beloved, too,
of those who died, or of those who are
lost unto us like the dead.

Sometimes in our dreams they speak to us;
sometimes in its thought the mind will hear them.

And with their sound for a moment there return
sounds from the first poetry of our life --
like music, in the night, far off, that fades away."
(C. P. Cavafy)

family, or, a funny thing about facebook

Paul and I are now Facebook friends. I'm not sure how or when it started, but I think it was that I somehow ended up on his sister's email list a year or so ago, and then in turn found her on Facebook, and then their mother found me on Facebook, and then yesterday I noticed that my brother and he are now Facebook friends (and so it goes, and so it goes).

So I sent him a friend request last night, and he accepted. (What follows here now, highly subjective and probably not all true, is what I remember best, and what I still carry close to my heart, and why I find it so soul-satisfying to be connected again to Paul, however slightly, however tenuously, and where these thoughts take me.)

Paul is one of my cousins, you see, and many many years ago, going on a quarter of a century now, he was probably my favorite cousin in all the world. (And when one has had at various times over the years, by blood or marriage, six uncles and eight aunts, give or take, there tend to be a fair number of cousins.)

It was Dana, Paul's big sister and a whopping five years older than me, whom I idolized as a little girl, and who taught me to play Uno and who introduced me to the world of Duran Duran and Bon Jovi and the '80s in general, and the cousin who's hand-me-down clothes my parents were hard-pressed to get me out of. But it was Paul, a mere two years older than me, with whom I ran around in the fields and the tall grass surrounding our grandmother's cabin in Sunlight Waters, near the town of Cle Elum, in the vast great middle of Washington State.

We chased grasshoppers and chipmunks in those fields around our grandmother's A-frame cabin (built by hand by our grandparents, my parents, various other friends and relatives -- oh the stories I grew up with about the building of that house!) and fought over who got to sit in the rusted tractor seat perched on a log at the end of the driveway.

We dropped water balloons onto the heads of unsuspecting passers-by from the deck overlooking the front porch and chased each other up and down the spiral metal staircase to the sleeping loft above the main living area.

We spent hours, whole afternoons, entire days, at the Cle Elum Country Club (appropriately on Clubhouse Road, maybe a twenty-minute walk from our grandmother's house, past trailer homes and decrepit cars and rusted metal swingsets and the house with the red-headed daughters with whom I sometimes played and piles and piles of old tires and mailboxes mounted in rows on weathered wooden posts alongside the road -- decades later my then-boyfriend and my brother and I drove out to the old cabin, just to see it, just to make sure of it, despite it's having left the family years before, and the then-boyfriend, New York City boy to the core, looked slightly flabbergasted and said he bet there was a lot of organized dogfighting in the area), which consisted pretty much of an outdoor pool (home to entire imaginary worlds) and an indoor pool table in an otherwise large empty room.

We went for long walks in the winter snow (just the two of us because we were big kids then, though I remember following in Paul's footprints, step for step, still too little to go my own way) and played in the black of the windowless upstairs bathroom with glow-in-the-dark yoyos, telling each other ghost stories of our own making.

There is a picture, one of those old rounded-corner photographs in one of our grandmother's (now my mother's) photo albums, of us sitting side by side in two plastic inflatable children's chairs. The picture is taken from behind us and we are looking forward through the window of the cabin's front door, looking out at the porch and the fields and the woods and the mountains and the whole world in front of us, my blond towheaded self in sharp contrast to Paul's bright orange mop, and we are leaning in towards each other, and I like to think that we are whispering or giggling, sharing some secret joke between us.

This is all, as I said, going on a quarter century ago now. Our grandmother, matriarch of that A-frame cabin in the seeming wilderness of our childhoods, passed away when I was nine and Paul was eleven. I know we saw each other after that, perhaps as late as high school, perhaps later though probably not, but these earlier memories are the strongest, are the ones that I wrap around myself, around my notions of the past, of where I, of where we, come from.

Paul and I are friends now, Facebook friends, and we are all grown up and living our seperate lives on opposite sides of this vast country. And I don't know what that means, if anything at all, yet there is an unexpected comfort in the notion of being once again connected to him, to his sister, to their mother, to my brother and our other cousins and family friends, however deep or complex or simple or superficial these connections may be.

I was talking with Erica not too long ago about the strange Facebook phenomenon of connecting or being connected to practically everyone we've ever known, in whatever context that knowing may have been. We were talking specifically about 'defriending' people, about paring down these relationships to the ones that really matter, and she said something that has haunted me, something about the idea that even though the tens and hundreds of Facebook 'friends' might not all be people we are close to now, there is a certain sense of safety, of personal history in what can be a very frightening world, in having a network of people who care, or have cared, about what we have been doing, how we are doing now, where we are coming from.

Of all of these connections, outside of those immediate friends with whom I most interact, it is the family ties that I find most satisfying, even if it is just knowing that they are there, and reachable, not lost in the distance of childhood or dependent on family funerals or weddings for reconnection. Facebook and all those other networking sites seem to me, in a certain light, to be a modern incarnation of that interconnected family kind of thing, and even as my sarcasm-laced outlook demands mockery of these sites, there is an unarguable part of me that loves them.

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