Seattle Welcomes Centrist Joe

Over the last few weeks, I have been doing so much cooking and baking I've had to re-think whether it's taking over my whole life (I could be doing more important things, such as writing), or if I should drop that dream and open a bakery. I already know what I would name it, too: The Lucky Puffin Bakery, after my much-worn and much-loved nickname. I do enjoy baking so much. I can kick baker's butt too: from carrot cake so moist that a couple notches moister and you could almost drink it with a straw (those are Phil's words, not mine), topped with a perfect cream cheese frosting; to zucchini bread and gluten-free scones made with coconut flour. If I'd started getting fat I would have stopped long ago, but instead of gaining weight I've dropped some. I badly need this to come to a screeching halt, and I'm at a loss as to what will stop me. At the moment though, I can think of one thing that just might.

Centrist Joe jetted into town this evening. Joe C. Smith came hauling books, political magazines, and enough DVDs for a multi-day movie marathon. He also arrived with enough intention to will mighty Mt. Rainier to uproot and plant itself in Oregon. That is, he came to get ME -- WHAT? -- to go in with HIM on a book about how political gamemanship is leading this country in the wrong direction, and how the place we need to be is in the center.

His area of expertise is American political systems, campaigns and elections. My "area," but certainly by no stretch my strength, is political philosophy and psychology. At 12:30 AM while whisking a steaming saucepan of key lime curd (I tell you, I need to stop), he told me we need to stop waffling, pick a subject we can both put our weight behind and simply begin writing about it.

What, oh what, have I gone and done? I thought I had married a sweet engineer and convinced myself that, within certain limits, I was in for an easy and steady married life. But that sweet engineer happens to be bestest of friends with a young and ambitious and frighteningly clever political scientist who won't leave me alone. I'm flattered. I'm utterly fucked.

2 Years Later and Headed Nowhere

I think I wanted to shoot myself in Half Price Books today. While browsing I ran across a new edition of Thoreau’s annotated journal, “I and Myself.” Having worshiped the great writer as a youth, I was reminded of the person I have always wanted to become who somehow managed to bury herself alive under a giant heap of excuses. I think I need to dig her out soon before the person I am, lonely and unable to take the affliction of normalcy a moment longer, decides to take a splat off the Lake Union Bridge. Alright, I’m not contemplating suicide, but for a person of my temperament and idealism, living this way is as close to emotional death as one can come.

It’s been happening on and off for most of my life, but perhaps I first began to rock in the lull of mediocrity when I visited the opthalmologist’s office a couple months ago to get my eyes checked. A large floater had suddenly and mysteriously appeared in my field of vision while I was hiking the Enchanted Valley trail over the Memorial Day holiday, and had stayed with me ever since.

“It makes me not want to read or write, or do anything,” I moaned to Phil after getting home from hearing a rather dismal prognosis.

“Blind men and women play the piano and walk tightropes all the time,” he said. “And you won’t pursue your passion because of a single eye floater?” He was incredulous.

Sitting at my computer writing this, it strikes me how I’ve always known what a lame crock of shit that excuse was, and all the others since, which I have so carefully filled to the brim and which could stack and fill a whole stadium floor to ceiling. I can’t get up early enough. No one would read what I write. I never have the time; there’s always laundry and dishes to be done, meals to be prepared, jobs to go to. How would we live? I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

For a single irrational moment, which one might actually consider a blip of sanity amidst the insanity of a too-civilized world that’s trying to kill me (Orwell), I am putting aside the necessities of living to measuredly consider what could be possible if I let loose my marbles and and went a little crazy. Not inebriated-and-staggering-down-the-street-in-tattered-clothes-shouting-invectives-at-everyone crazy – that’s for later, when I'm finally a published author -- but crazy in the sense of being possessed by a mission so powerful and a passion so all-consuming that I am driven not by necessity and practicality, but by what I’ve always wanted to do but keep putting off for the future that will never arrive.

Before I slink back into excuse-production, let me consider my fortunes. I live in a beautiful home in Seattle with a husband as close to perfect as they get, by a world-class university with all its libraries filled with as much collective knowledge as I can access to my heart’s content, and a beautiful office full of books and natural light and a big oak desk that begs me daily to sit down and write on it. What would I write about? My life, which is just as interesting as that of the young gentleman who pulled his car out of the library parking lot this afternoon and almost ran me over with it. He didn’t apologize, and the reason for his behavior could fill 20 pages. Anne Lamott said two things about writing that have always stayed with me: (1) Anyone who is lucky enough to have survived to the age of 18 has enough material to write about for the rest of his or her life, and (2) Spit it out. A shitty first draft is always better than nothing.

I wonder how many people have stopped to think about what could happen if they hit the pause button on life as usual long enough to realize they don’t need to be afraid to have what they want.

With that, my real life awaits. I have a past life to write about and a shitty first draft to spit out.

A Day of Serendipity

My biggest complaint when I eventually meet the man upstairs is going to be that there just weren't enough hours in a day for a person to really live. I slogged through work (granted my job isn't the living hell so many others seem to have to suffer), made it to 5 pm and I was out the door to go to a class, which I had to sneak out on early to head to Wallingford for the monthly Amnesty meeting. I got to fight back tears as I listened to the speakers describe human rights abuses by the Chinese state against the people of Tibet. The meeting ended around nine, and by this point I was buzzing on a triple latte and simply NOT ready for my usual bedtime. With empty paper cup in hand I walked over to 15th Ave to wait for the 48 bus, and as I got to the stop I saw an older black man leaning against a garbage can, slightly hunched over. He appeared to be dozing off. As I went behind him to throw my paper cup away I noticed a weathered-looking leather bag plugging the hole where the opening to the trash can was supposed to be. I awkwardly cleared my throat and asked him in a friendly voice if the bag was his. He woke up. He moved his bag. We had a conversation. I was in for a shock, though, because the man with the leather bag was Zaid Abdul-Aziz, former pro basketball player for the Sonics.

I wound up heading home with a signed copy of his recent book in my hand and a whole slew of incredible stories. Hearing them made my mind spin.
"You are truly an accomplished man," I said.
"No, no," he laughed, shaking his head. "I'm just a brother from Brooklyn." I replied that if I ever make anything out of this life I suppose I had better remember to tell everyone that I'm just a sister from Seattle.

As I got on the bus, he asked me if he could be completely honest. I said sure.
"You're not like other Asians!"
Huh?
"They do this little jog when they see me. They run away. And they don't even know me. You didn't do that little jog."
I really wasn't sure what to say to that. What do you do when you see another human being who is just trying to live? Just like you?

I'm coming to realize myself as the oddball who fearlessly talks to every stranger on the street. Most of the time this is really not a bad thing. But I suppose I should be a bit more careful lest I find myself in a situation where that little jog might become necessary.

By the way, you should know about this terrific coffee shop on 2nd Ave called the Mosaic, located in the basement of a church with excellent espresso and run entirely by guilt-driven donations. Okay, with Amnesty hosting its meetings there now, LOTS and LOTS of guilt-driven donations.

The End of Outside

I finally managed to hit the wall today during my first 4.2 miler around Greenlake in weeks. Weary of staying mired in my toxic state for so long, I laced up and went outside, and once I started I couldn't really stop...for one thing, I credit the fact that I'm eating again, but really just getting myself out the door simply to face the world seemed to take forever. I'm slowly coming to the realization though that it wasn't the world I was avoiding but myself. I'm almost afraid of another mental or physical roadblock that might prevent me from continuing to move.

A little voice in my head -- and I know for a fact that it's not the one I've been hearing for the past few weeks -- tells me to keep moving. Hard as it is, I'm learning to listen to that one instead.

Today, unlike the other times I've run, I didn't take music with me. But for whatever reason I had Duncan Sheik's "The End of Outside" going through my head all the way around the lake and back to my doorstep:

Should I say I'm sorry, for what I'm going to say
I guess it's way beyond me,
to sleep with yesterday
I want to see my future
I want to know my past
The everlasting present
Is that so much to ask?

The Illusion of Ownership

I've been reading the first volume of Derrick Jensen's tome Endgame for the past week. I am certain that I agree with his premise, but am not so comfortable with his prescription. He argues among other things that civilization as we know it is killing the planet (this is a definite duh, but significant nonetheless). He says that all nonviolent means of attempting to undermine or alter the course of a fundamentally undemocratic and physically destructive system is like "using the master's tools to take down the master's house," which is simply not a realistic proposition. He says that the only way we can confront the system is to quit waffling and just destroy it. I'm not sure if I agree with him yet.

But I agree with him on a great many things already; especially his critique of property ownership in a society based on capitalist consumption. Consumption wouldn't be possible without the seizure, destruction and conversion of the natural world into products to be bought and sold at a price in the market. The rules of the market are such that power flows in specific directions, intuitively based upon what each of us want or need. "The premise of private property," says Jensen, "is that each of us has something that someone else needs or wants. In a society based on private property rights, those who are able to accrue more of what others need or want have greater power. By extension, they wield greater control over what others perceive as needs and desires, usually in the interest of increasing profit to themselves." Makes good sense. Elsewhere in the book: " To want to close the [Mexican] border to people yet leave it open to the theft of their resources (importation is the preferred term in polite society), is to show that your alleged concern over population is nothing but the same old bigotry and exploitation. I don't want you, but I do want the coffee grown on land that used to be yours.

What struck me while reading this is that we leave admission of the primacy of resources out of our political discourse. "Notice the language," says Jensen. "Overpopulation, zero population growth. How different would it be if we spoke instead of overconsumption and zero consumption growth? This shift wouldn't happen, of course, because zero consumption growth would destroy the capitalist economy."

We have indeed become experts at shrouding our everyday speech to the point of impotency. We do this in ways that only make sense to us because even the slightest shift in wording would awaken us to the reality that the changes we are failing to make on a large scale are linked to the suffering of millions across the globe. Live and let live, we keep saying. What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours. But what if what's mine was never rightfully acquired in the first place? What must I do to ensure that the process of acquisition doesn't harm others? Do we dare quit hiding behind the statistics of population growth or sustainable development and look at the damage caused by the economic way of looking at the world?

Politics > People.

That was some serious emotion behind the immigration bill that tanked in the Senate today. Setting aside the obvious effort on the part of the President to salvage what credibility he's lost with Americans because of his failures in Iraq by approving this bill, it is perhaps the one measure backed by him recently that I actually found sufficient reason to support. Which is why I was puzzled by Democrats when they started sounding off all these populist-sounding concerns about mistrust of government and how the American people wouldn't buy it even if the president delivered on his promises of tightened border-security and amnesty for illegal workers. It's a plausible concern: would the promises of the measure have materialized? While it's hard to say, any bit of hope for illegal workers and their families got sacrificed on the altar of power politics. It cut two ways.

1. Dems used it as yet another excuse to make Bush look like an ass. (Like this was even really necessary).
2. We're racist and who can't face up to the fact that we don't want to share our resources and rights with people whom we don't perceive as deserving to belong here.

Try as it will, Congress can't escape the 8 pound gorilla in the room. Which means that this issue gets blissfully frozen for the time being only to start up again at fever pitch once the problem get so big as to threaten to swallow us whole. Ignoring it seems tantamount to coping with an illness by pretending that it's simply going to go away.

Why We Shouldn't Ignore the Poor

I had an interesting encounter with a man on the street this evening. I'd just gotten out of an appointment with my therapist/counselor after an hour of rehashing old childhood memories which could be used to explain some of my current struggles, some of which were so painful to dig up that I'd spent the whole last hour suffering from a bout of leaky-faucet syndrome. At any rate, I guess I wasn't looking my hottest after that, but I was pretty dry-eyed by the time I'd hit the street so as not to announce to the whole world that I was feeling like crap. Pioneer Square being the characteristically poor neighborhood it is, I reacted with no surprise when a young black man in a baseball t-shirt walked up to me and asked me if I could spare some.
"Two dollars?" he asked. His accent I couldn't quite put a finger on.
"I'm sorry, I don't have any cash on me right now." (I truly didn't). "Plus I just started working after 6 months without a steady job, so I feel ya. Sorry."
"Let me tell you something about money," he said. Oh god, a penny lecture from a homeless person who thinks he's better than all the money grubbing status-hounds who trounce through downtown after work. "Money carries you, that's all it does. If you handle it just right, it lifts you up and gets you where you need to go. And I really hope you get there."
I blinked. That certainly was not what I had expected to come out of his mouth. Who was this person?
"You've nice eyes," he said. "If I had your eyes, I'd cry every day."
"What's your name?" I asked. Now I was smiling.
"Vladimir."
"I hope you get there too. It's funny you say that. I was just crying a little while ago." The faucet already was leaking.
"Maybe we'll meet in heaven, then," he replied, reaching out to give me a hug. "Just love, girl. You'll conquer the world."
And you already have, Vladimir. You already have.