Fortnight

So, tomorrow (Friday) marks the end of the second week of Sophie's recovery from her wisdom teeth extraction, and it appears that she's turned the corner. My poor baby girl suffered so much for so many days, but she's rallied and is eating again, has stopped having so many seizures (sometimes more than six, seven a day), can walk a few steps, has great eye contact and has even smiled. Knock three times. 

I am relieved. I am so very grateful.

I'm also a wreck, the proverbial ashes after the Phoenix has risen. I've probably made that cliched analogy 5,432,897 times in the last twenty or so years, but it's the damn truth. I am wasted. Sleep-deprived. Out of my gourd stressed. One of the highlights of the fortnight (how often do you hear the word fortnight these days?) was the early morning that I staggered into her room to check on her and came upon a scene straight out of a horror movie. There were ANTS marching along her windowsill and across her bed and onto her face and into her ears and mouth and nose and braids. I'm not kidding you, Reader. Hundreds of ants. She was asleep and stayed asleep (I imagine she was not just asleep but post-ictal after having a silent seizure that I wasn't aware of), even as I frantically brushed the ants off of her, stripped her, lifted her up and lay her on the floor, ants crawling all over me, then, as I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of Windex with vinegar and started spraying down the windowsill and the bed and then stripping the bed and rolling everything up and bringing it to the washer and then running to the hall closet, grabbing the vacuum cleaner, climbing onto the bed and vacuuming everything. Sophie slept on the floor the entire time. It was about 5:30 am, and while I thought about waking The Brothers, I decided not to -- they'd probably only stopped playing a few hours before that dreadful game that every kid is playing, and let's just say that there are some things, some entirely insane moments of this caregiver life, that I want to spare them from remembering. When I was done vacuuming, I picked up Sophie from the floor (yes, I picked her up in a kind of squat that you see those Olympians do with barbells) and carried her to my bed. Then she started to have a seizure, and I effectively dissociated in a similar fashion in my mind as I'm doing here on the screen.

I can't remember if it was that night/early morning or another one that I called my friend Sandra in New York and wailed, but she helped me as did you and you and you (you know who you are). This community is everything. Thank you.



So, what else?

I can't go without mentioning the absolute shitshow happening at the border of our country. Would that we've reached a turning point today when the AG actually quoted from the Bible to justify the practice of separating children from their parents and That Sanders Woman reiterated the Bible to justify the fuckery. I'm not quoting any more Bible verses here except to repeat what my son Henry yelled when he heard about it. You could probably pick out any Bible verse and twist it enough to say that Jeff Sessions is a POS. Amen, son.

It should now be the turning point where we take to the streets and storm the WalMart where those boys are housed, help them out and throw the POSPOTUS and his Mafioso into it with all their supporters and enablers to live in to the end of their days.

And where are the GIRLS?

Honestly, Reader, can you even make up a story more Amerikkkan than illegal brown children being housed in a former Walmart -- a shitty megaMcstore, an altar to money and exploitation that has destroyed communities, sells mostly processed food and crap to the suckers who shop there because it's cheap and whose owners are revered for their wealth? That the Powers That Be are claiming God has ordained this -- well -- my god.

Call your representatives and demand that this stops NOW. 

Click here for other things you can do NOW.

MMXIV

graffiti artist unknown*** 

Today's no different than yesterday, really, other than it's 2014, four new numbers, a new year, an imposition. Dirt lies in three pyramids in our back yard -- some of that dirt, I'm certain, unearthed for the first time in nearly a century. I fancied something discovered while the men were digging -- pottery, perhaps, or arrowheads, some fine bones, a skull, even oil. The men filled plastic buckets with big brown clumps of it, and they filled wheelbarrows, trundled it toward the pile. The men smile when I come out to stand at the edge, look down. They wear long-sleeved dress shirts despite the heat and the swing of the pick-ax. They speak no English. I imagine they have only recently crossed the border from Mexico, picked up clothes at a Goodwill. They are the Italians and Irish of yesterday who built the bridges and mined the minerals, lay the tracks and dug the wells, raised the buildings, built the country. The pyramids in my backyard are dirt. There are rocks and roots. The clay pipe lies exposed at the bottom of a seven foot trench, the dirt around it clean of anything primitive or even civilized. The trees that grow alongside the trench are a deep green. Their secret is their roots, twisted and preternaturally strong, or naturally so. They've crept through dirt, worked their way through cracks in clay, pushed into man-made cylinders, a relentless search, reaching toward water like fingers and eyes toward light. They've nourished themselves on waste, channeled what's left back up through wood and out toward branches and leaves, thick and glossy.

It's a new year, and we're fourteen years into an age. Our minds are thoughts, our thoughts are thoughts, only, just.










***Henry and I saw this on La Brea as we walked home from breakfast yesterday. Henry thought it might be Banksy, but I doubted it. What do you think? Anyone know? Steve Reed?