The Furious Spinner

Nearly midnight. The almost full moon shines down from the black sky like a pearl street light.

Feel kind of foggy, energized and exhausted all at the same time. You know the feeling? Many of you have had the experience of caring for someone who is ill. Or taking care of yourself. Or trying. You know how I feel. Or don’t feel. I try to be present for it all, but sometimes I just can’t so I eat or I zone out and watch TV. Or I just go away. But I’m trying.

More and more I am changing my mind about "think globally, act locally." That has been my motto for so long. I still absolutely believe we need to keep the planet in mind: that is a given. But I think that it should be "think locally, act locally." Not in a parochial way. Not to isolate ourselves. Let’s make the world we want right here and then it’ll just spread out, like ripples in a pond. Or some such thing.

It is easy to send money to aid someone in another country. Come on. It is. I've done it. There. That's my good deed. And so much the better and so much more the good deeder because I ain't gots much moula. What's difficult is looking our neighbors in the eyes and having an honest discussion about what we want for our world—and listening to what they want. And then working it through. What's difficult is getting up to our elbows in the mess of humanity. Right here in our own backyards. It's frustrating and satisfying, and I wonder if it’s the only way we can make a real impact.

Life. Ain't it grand?

Wednesday Linda called me from the hospital. She had had a reaction to a shot—or she was reacting to stress after Serena's accident. In any case, I went and got her and brought her home. We stopped to pick up Serena who still can't drive. It was just about 7:30 p.m. I thought about Cindy Sheehan and the vigils all around the nation. And I thought of Mario pulling weeds all by his lonesome at the school.

I took Serena and Linda home. The two of them wobbled around the house, both so bruised and battered. We joked around about it. On my way home, I stopped at the Gathering. Not many women were there. We sat in a circle and began talking about developments. One woman was married to a developer and she thought it was a great thing. "We're a bedroom community," she said. "We want people from Portland to come here, don't we?"

"We're not a bedroom community," I said. "And no we don't want people from Portland here if they want to strip the land and turn us into a suburb. We want to retain the rural nature of our town. We like the animals wandering around town. We like the green spaces. If we wanted to live in a place with a McDonald's, Fred Meyers, Cosco, we'd live in Portland or Vancouver."

"Can't we have just one fast food place?" one of the women said. "A Subway maybe?"

"Why does it have to be a chain?" I asked. "You can get those kinds of foods at one of the restaurants here."

Sit down and have a goddam meal. Why does it have to be fast? I'll tell you why. People are embarrassed to sit down and let other people see what they're eating. Why?

"I've noticed there are not a lot of fat people around this town," she said, "being someone of a certain girth, I've noticed that."

"No offense," the developer's woman said, "but in this town you can have a trailer sitting next to a beautiful home. That’s just tacky. They need some zoning."

I'm thinking, who the fuck cares if one house is sloppy and one isn’t? I kept going over pictures in my mind, trying to find a place in town where a trailer was on a piece of land.

"We have zoning here," I said. "Not like Carson where they can build a nuclear power plant next door to you if they want."

"Well we didn't buy here because of that," one woman said, referring to the “trailer” issue. "We had to think of property values." So they bought in a town a few miles away. I call it the Stepford city. They created it when the dam flooded out the old town. Everything is neat and tidy. Not a blade of grass out of place. They mow and spray and mow and spray. And when mosquitoes hatch, they fog the town. It's kind of eerie.

It was an interesting discussion. I felt manic. As if my voice has suddenly been set free. One woman who had only met me once before said, "So Kim, you're such a nice quiet person and you spoke out at that meeting?"

I said, "Oh honey, I'm not nice or quiet!" I got up and kissed her hand. Everyone laughed. One of my friends said, "No, she's not nice. She's obnoxious." I laughed. Later she apologized to me. "Why?" I said. "I take that as a compliment."

This morning I took soup to Linda and helped her get ready for the senior bus which would take her to Vancouver (an hour away) for her shot. Then I went home and looked over my novel, making check marks where I will add stuff or where I need to make changes. In-between phone calls and visitors. All of us trying to figure out how best to help Linda. Be with her. The Linda we loved is disappearing with this disease. And her family seems oblivious. She has one brother who lives an hour away and never visits. Another lives back East and he flew all the way to Portland for a wedding a couple of weeks ago but then he wouldn't drive another hour to see Linda—who could not drive to see him. She wept, believing they hold some grudge against her. They will never ever love her the way she wants to be loved. I don't know if any of us is ever loved the way we want to be loved. Certainly very rarely by our own blood families. And of course they can't love us the way we want to be loved because we don't love them the way they want to be loved.

Ain't love grand?

Cindy Sheehan had to leave Texas, I'm sure you heard. Her mother had a stroke. I knew the Republican smear machine was powerful but this is going a bit far. (I kid the smear machine.) I wish her mother well. I turned on the news off and on all day. All anyone was talking about was that serial killer whose name I won't mention. I didn't watch. I always turn that crap off. Why give a psycho attention? I did listen to Jack Cafferty. My guess is his tenure is just about up on CNN—although I hope not. He just reamed out the media for spending the last two days covering this killer. I thought, "Go Jack!" I'd like to see him anchor one of these news shows instead of these kids who don't know their ass from a hole in their head.

OK. I've lost the thread of this, if there was one. I is tired. I don't know how Linda does it. Two days of hospitals this week has wiped me out. My dreams have been weird. I dreamed I beat the shit out of my father last night. Weird ass dream. The night before I had a long complicated dream, but in part of it, I was running from a storm and I started to go under the old oak by my house (in real life). Then I thought I might get hit by lightning or the wind might knock one of the branches down and it would hit me, so I didn't go that way. That morning when I went outside, I noticed a huge branch had fallen from the old oak. We hadn't had a storm or any wind but there it was.

Isn't that odd? A coincidence? That morning Mario's post had an oak tree in it, before he knew my dream or saw the oak tree. Synchronicity?

There you go.

'nite. 1 comments

1 Comments:

I'm always grateful to read your posts. Thank you. And blessings.

By  Inanna, at 7:20 AM  

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