Come down here and be my house monk. Course you can’t do that. Kids and all. And I am so much older than I used to be. I no longer look or feel very foxy, although god knows of course that I am a good-looking woman. Some things never change. I was watching Otis Redding at Monterey Pop, a time seemed to last forever, then. I don’t think I could bear to watch it if I didn’t, in some far corner of my dreams, think it could all happen again. Or never ended. Right, and Otis is not dead. He was twenty-five at the time of those incredible recordings. Twenty-five and bursting with a talent it’s hard to account for, with soul and good looks. Good moves. What if someone like that had lived?
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Mark Morford has a column at sfgate.com—the online presence of The San Francisco Chronicle, which in the daily-delivered flesh is getting frighteningly anorexic—about your average Golden Gate Bridge jumper. A single 40-ish male, just like him. Mark always writes beautifully:

I do know that when I cross the GG Bridge these days, I tend to glance over at those guard rails and safety wires with a different sort of appreciation, awareness and sighing sense of wonder.

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Replying to Saturday’s rich harvest of Comments: bmo, clearly you do not live in Berkeley or the San Franscisco Bay Area anywhere, where a phrase like “corporate-generated reality” would draw nothing but a yawn or a pang of nostalgia. No, it’s hard going, being a crackpot nowadays. And remember, I teethed on C. Wright Mills; this conversation is old. Come to California (said in the mellifuous tones of whomever, years ago, said, Come to Jamaica.) (Was it Geoffrey Holder?) (See, the corporation lives like a little yammering spider in my head too.) Read the rest of this entry »

Or that’s how it looked to me, when I came upon this image after the recent non-serious but sneaky, creepy, loathsome little 4.2 quake that lifted Berkeley to the top of its P-wave crest and then dropped it, the whole city, with a nasty bang.

I, however, was in the hot tub, so I cannot personally speak to the nastiness. Others, yes. This one, no. I can only report that any number of people were waked from a deep sleep with that sickening heart thump, This is it. Things aren’t parsed, in dreams, except by their extremes. wonderfully irrational means of dreaming. The joys are beyond bliss, extend forever, and fear feels itself naked, without reservation at all.

What I saw in this map of the faultlines in California—the San Andreas , that long red scar up the coast, and our fault, the Hayward, the short red line across San Francisco Bay—what came to mind was an embrace. Which is an odd thought, for these are the two big nasties of Northern California life, the Hayward considered really ready to go off … yet such was my water-logged image, we here held as if in a nest in the notch of a tree.

We live on, ignoring what cannot be helped and will happen, one day, in some horrible way. For now, I commend unto you the view as I write this …

Doug posts: “I got up this morning to discover that it had rained during the night. Real rain, not just an exaggerated fog. I’m not sure I remember it ever raining in July in the Bay Area, so this is something pretty special. Nice for my garden too, and the cats had gotten really dusty so this has cleaned them right up.”

Au contraire, mon ami. If you had the weather engraved into your soul such as only an unhappy woman stuck in the boonies will have, forever after, you’d know it always rains once in July. I kid Doug, he works here, taking care of such house and grounds as there are. We both live in Berkeley … but the country town of which I write isn’t far away, maybe sixty miles …

In time, however, and in the lumpy bag of space that time drags along behind, rough edges becoming smooth, harsh lines gently blurring …Oh, dear, we are slipping into novel time … where it is long ago but not so very far away after all …

(from The Last Time Anyone Was Happy)

By July, the buildings and roofs and fields and even hearts and hopes had so thoroughly shrunken and dried in the heat— as if we were all some ghostly extension of the prune industry, only it was the sun and the air which dried us, daily, at high temperature, never mind that it felt as hot as the prune driers when they ran—that any thought of rain, the soaking, flooding winter rainstorms, the river cresting at 41 feet, had long since been driven from the feeble collective unconscious of Venada.

Until the July thunderstorm. There always was one, and it always came as a surprise, people saying We don’t have thunderstorms! which we mostly did not, and It doesn’t rain in summer, which it always did, at least once. And there was so much work, in those days, to farm life, to summer. Keeping prune orchards watered and your workers from disappearing after their first paycheck. Dragging out rusty prune harvest equipment with the prayer that it last another year.

In town, the businesses around the plaza were quiet, which made Mama’s tour the more delightful,when their ceilings began to leak. And leak they would. The Bank of America building with its columns in front, its certain undeniable grandeur, set out as homely a collection of buckets and pans as anyone, the redwood planking of their high, vaulted ceiling especially prone to shrinkage in the heat. Plink, plonk. She watched for a while in fascination. We had to make a thorough tour of the plaza, that her inspection might be complete. Not that I blame her. Attractions, then, were simpler, both more enjoyable and hellishly sparse. Boredom so integral to country life that people made no bones about the least excitement. I know Mama’s pleasure in these things reached, touched levels that may no longer exist, in the modern heart.

Mama knew we were good for at minimum one colossal thunderstorm per summer; her deepest pleasure came in watching the spectacle from the safety of her high old bed, where I would climb up beside her—after having unplugged, as per ordered, every cord from every socket, house and barn, her excuse for sending a child nothing more than that handy enfeeblement that appeared on demand and was otherwise forgot.

The Electric—her name for the beast that lived within our walls, I had brought home a chart in third grade that explained it, which she admired, tacked up and ignored—taken care of, we settled in the darkness, surveying from our perch if not the entire universe, then certainly all relevant parts. I hardly knew what fear was, in those days; it disappeared in the company of that old woman. Who not old, to me, not at all. Had no age. For all I knew, that’s what a mother was, and so it is that I remain linked to Mama’s reactions and Mama’s beliefs. Her amusement when everyone else forgot: it always rains once, in summer.

Materialism, a deepening shadow: “In California lore there is the story of a 1940s gang that operated profitably on the sun-blistered highway stretching between Lost Angeles and Las Vegas. The gang would steal orange cones from a street maintenance crew and distribute them in a gentle curve across the highway in the middle of the desert. Travelers driving to Las Vegas were detoured onto a dirt track that eventually petered out in dust and greasewood, and there they would be ambushed and robbed by four men with machine guns and sent reeling back to Los Angeles in their underwear.”