Art and Chaos

Somewhere over the western continental United States
2018

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love, 

William Blake

When I meditate and lose my breath and go to thoughts they are like tendrils in some dark soup, like fish swimming by, my hook vain. I make them clouds to float, to find my breath again. My thoughts, my brain. I flew back to Los Angeles from Spokane. I looked out the window to see what appeared to be an ordered universe -- neat squares, rectangles and the occasional parallelogram colored in rich browns and greens with wispy clouds floating above. It might have been a brain, thoughts packed tight. In service to breath, become clouds. And then right there, a branch cutting through, tendrils, neurons, synapses, whatever. Threaded through and broken. It's always about the brain, isn't it? Sophie's brain and mine. The word riven. The word wisp. 




Have you been listening to our podcast, dear Reader? This week's episode, Art and Chaos is with the brilliant artist Mimi Feldman. She is the mother of a young man who has schizophrenia. I think it is one of the most interesting conversations that I've had in my life. I feel humbled by her experiences and enriched by her story. I believe fervently that people's voices -- the telling of story -- connects us to one another.

Read about and listen to Mimi's story here.  I promise you will leave enriched beyond your imaginings.


If you have been listening to Who Lives Like This?!, what do you think? My partner Jason and I are having so much fun doing this, but our intention is to also build a real community. We need your help. We're not making money, but we'd like to continue to build the podcast and the community and improve the quality and -- well -- continue doing it. If you're so inclined, please consider supporting us through Patreon. You can pledge as little as $1 a month!

Here's the link to Patreon.

Henry and Oliver took me out to dinner for my birthday -- Henry on the last night in Spokane where I left him to begin his second year at Gonzaga, and Oliver here in Los Angeles, last night.

I know ya'll like my sons almost as much as I do, so here are a couple of pics:

Seeking Position

Experienced freelance writer looking for work. Experience includes several ghost-written books of non-fiction, medical writing, healthcare writing, personal interest articles for The Los Angeles Times, marijuana.com, Spirituality and Health Magazine and contributions to gratefulness.org and OnBeing. Personal work published in numerous literary anthologies and journals. Micro-memoir published by Shebooks in 2015 and available for purchase online at Amazon for a ridiculously low price. Skills include editing, proof-reading and an uncanny ability to mine story from seemingly ordinary things and lives, and don't we need stories in order to live?

Website with CV and all relevant publications is here.


Salary negotiable.

Hitting Jesus

Street Art
Los Angeles

I almost hit Jesus today. Of course at first he came as a Man. I mean -- I didn't know he was Jesus or think he was Jesus. He was a man riding a beat-up bike on La Cienega, and I was driving my car toward a sick friend's house near the airport. I was bringing her a pastrami sandwich and some french fries, planned to stop and get a grape soda. He had long black curly hair and brown skin. He didn't have a shirt on and his pants were dirty and rolled up, but I think that was so they didn't get caught in the spokes. He darted out in front of my car and it seemed purposeful, not like a death wish but more to get my attention. There are days on the streets in Los Angeles where it seems like you narrowly miss death more times than twice (because haven't we all narrowly missed death at least once?), and today was one of those days. You've got to really concentrate when you drive in Los Angeles, but you can also daydream, and it's easy to get complacent when the cars are backed up and you're moving forward by inches. It's a little like going to mass, when you're kneeling and sitting and standing and saying the prayers but you're also thinking about what you're going to eat when you get home or whether you'd rather be the saint that defied everyone and was burned as a witch or the one who carried Jesus' cross on her back up the hill. Escaping death would include nearly killing someone else accidentally as well, because let's face it. Life as you knew it would be over if you accidentally hit someone with your car. I jammed my brakes and looked straight at him, a curse on my lips, but then he looked at me with his dark brown eyes and I knew it was him. Jesus. I'm not religious, you know. I don't even believe in God the Creator. I say I believe in Love, but that sometimes seems forced. As a Catholic child, I was certain that Jesus would come back dressed like a beggar and fool everyone, but I also fantasized about living in an orphanage on cold English moors, so I'm not reliable that way. This all happened in an instant -- the man on the bike, me slamming the brakes, a curse on my lips that was really Jesus! and it was him. A psychic hit, is what I call it. Because why the hell would I have thought the man was Jesus if he wasn't? Isn't that the way he's coming again? Or is he just out there, biking around with no shirt, his pants rolled up to avoid accidents, making eye contact with the needy.

The Spider and The Fly

It's popular today to let go of your story, or to stop your story or to rewrite your story. Yoga teachers, self-helpers, mindfulness people -- everyone, it seems, believes that our stories can hold us back from whatever our true purpose or intentions might be.

I've always felt uncomfortable with this, perhaps because I've woven a dense one. A thick story that I'm living by, a web that I've woven, sticky and strong, full of flies. Do I have to tell a different one? Is it holding me captive?

The poet Mark Nepo wrote that sharing our stories -- even over and over -- as they continue to press upon our hearts -- is sort of like chanting a mantra whose truth is, finally, released. His take on story is quite different in that it is by repetition that we find release.

I'm mulling these things as I tell my story -- here and elsewhere. The story that you know and the story that you don't know and won't know. I'm the spider and the fly.

Waiting

There are days like today when the waiting seems more than ridiculous. The waiting seems not only interminable but insane. We waited for The Neurologist and then we waited for Blood-work. We'll wait for results.

We've been waiting -- for what? -- for twenty years.

The desire to flee, to shove the baby under my arm, the toddler into a backpack, the child onto my back, the young woman into her chair and to just run the hell away is so strong that to fight it would be death.





I did an interview with a journalist this past weekend who is writing a story for National Geographic about the vaccination "debate." They wanted to cover the story of a family who believed in vaccinations and whose child had a negative reaction to a vaccine and therefore decided to delay their other children's vaccinations. I consented to the interview because I want to change the tone of the "debate." In response to a few questions, I pulled out some old documents in Sophie's medical file and found a small journal that I had kept beginning in January of 1995. I don't think I've looked at it in eighteen years. Sophie was born on March 8, 1995. On May 3, I wrote this:

I had a couple more entries and then this:

The rest of the journal consisted of precise notations of seizures and medications and every tiny little bit of behavior that we noted and noted and noted as we waited for things to get better.

I pulled out Sophie's vaccination record for the journalist as well -- that hideous yellow card buried in a file at the back of the file cabinet. I was stunned by the progression of events. I've never written about that, but I will. Wait on that.

Ironically, the past few weeks have turned my inchoate fear into a strengthened resolve. The journalist asked me whether the CDC or Powers That Be could do or say anything to sway me to agree to vaccinate my children by their dictates. I said, No. I said that they could continue to work on vaccine safety. They could do studies on the long-term health of the unvaccinated (it's been my direct experience that my two boys' health has been extraordinary compared to the general health of my friends' children and I'm curious to know whether this is an accident or something to think about in an immunological sense). I said they could acknowledge the risks of vaccines, and the many children and adults who have suffered from them, like Sophie. They could wait before whipping the country into a ridiculous fervor. They could disengage themselves from The Business of Medicine. They could acknowledge their mistakes. They could make amends. As for the herd? I said, Bless their hearts.

Jackson and Joni

Chinatown, Victoria, British Columbia

The two of them have been visiting me frequently for over twenty-five years. They live in my head, their stories pushing against me, waiting. I see them taking shape even as I drive, as I shop and chatter, fold clothes, fill out forms, wipe away drool and pluck errant hairs. They live with me.


Jackson is Chinese and worked as a waiter in a tiny Chinese restaurant in Carrboro, North Carolina during the early eighties. He was tall for an Asian man and very thin. He never smiled and nearly always stared. He permed his hair for me, gave me orders, deflected the wrath of the owner and the chef. He was inscrutable except for when he whispered. You are like Bond girl, he said, for your eyes only.

Joni was from a suburb of Chicago, perched on an orthopedic chair behind a modular desk in the center of the research department at J.C. Bradford and Company in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. She had been dumped by a married man whom she had followed down south. She lived in an apartment with a tiny white dog who had traveled with her in a Greyhound bus with his very own suitcase. She was forced to find work, had landed here, the receptionist, the mistress of phones. Her hair was high and bottled blonde, her skin porcelain covered in beige, her nails precisely manicured. She wrote in a tiny script on pink message slips that she slipped into marked slots on a black plastic turntable. She wore tight pencil skirts and even tighter sweaters. I sat behind glass in the office directly across from her in the late eighties. She disapproved of me, I'm certain, because I was in my early twenties, beautiful, a businesswoman who earned far more than she, attached to a young man, a life ahead. She frowned when I twirled the turntable and pulled my messages out. They piled up while you were out, she said, for that long lunch.