Home again home again, jiggity jig!

If your catholic, the week preceding Easter is an inconvient time to die. There are far too many offical services to have a proper funeral. My grandmother's will be nest week, Monday. One week after her death. I must go home this Friday (I can't afford not to be paid by the job I never wanted). I'm going to miss it.

Not that I'm big on funerals. Rather small in fact. I've never onced mourned her death. I don't belive there to be any truth in finality. Especially where death is concerned. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Change occures on top. Bound eternaly to expectation. Existing only in it's light. Somewhere deeper, we're always the same. Somewhere that expectation gives way to interconnectedness. Nothing changes, just flows. As it should. As it always has. And my grandmother begins where she left off.

I would have liked to have been there, though. For no reason other than to support those members of my family who are big on funerals. Hugs and backrubs. Despite our diffrences, I hate to see them saddened.

At the same time, I'm eager to return home. Come Friday I'll be back to my communal family. Back to the smilling faces that support me. Resting and recouperating. And begining to prepare for whatever is next. By looking towards nothing...

Today it Sn0WeD!!~

Today at 2:00pm CST, My grandmother died.

I've been spending considerably more time online here in St. Louis. There's little else to do during late nights, while my grandma sleeps. Thanks to the wonderful world of unix shells, I've been able to get some things accomplished. Regardless of the old Presario with a 33.6 modem.

A quick telnet into the well and all my email is accessable. With a nice fast and clean text interface (Up with Elm, Down with webmail!).

A little SSH to my very command line friendly hosting provider, and I can do a bit of web site maintinance. Most notably the quick and painless installation of MoveableType 2.0.

Had I left my Mac on at home, I could even organize/clean things up there.

Happiness is simple, networked, elegance...

I just wrote a big long post about being back in my old neighborhood. How the way people live interacts with sence of self. And then my grandma needed some more medicine. All of that doesn't matter so much. It's all just thinking things through to an extreme level. To make up for not knowing whats going on. Just another distraction. Only of the internal variety. Everyday all over again in everything.

I don't like to see her suffer. But she's choosing too. At least I think she is. I only wish I knew why. Sometimes I think she's scared. Only because everyone is. I don't have any other evidance. I wish she wouldn't be... along with everyone. But I haven't yet figured out how to say that to anyone. I just wait, and watch, and try to keep her comforatable while she works whatever it is out herself.

I woke up this morning in St. Louis, MO. 7:30 AM - 20 degrees. A far cry from San Francisco. I'm here, because my grandmother is dying. She's right behind me. Half sleeping. Half whatever it is you do on liquid morphine. Half something no one can understand but we all will eventualy. I'm here for her. To give her medicine. To hold her hand. To provide whatever comfort I feel I can. I'm here for the rest of my family. To maintain a smile. To distract. To look after. To remind them of what's important in the midst of emotional overload. To provide whatever comfort I feel I can. I'm here and it's very different than there. And it's difficult. I'm here and I'm not sure where there is for her. And I couldn't be anywhere else.

It's a little past midnight.
She fidgets between fits of heavy breathing, in her sleep.
Three more hours till another dropper full of forget it all till it's all over.
At least I hope that's how it works.

I think I'm loosing my tolerance for the cold. When I was younger, I hated long sleeves. I wouldn't wear them - Even in the middle of harsh midwest winters. I arrived in San Francisco in the middle of winter. The first thing anyone did, was complain about how much longer it was going to be wet and rainy. Having come from -40 degrees and snowy, I loved it.

One year later, It's 46 degrees. I'm sitting here in a flannel shirt and wrapped in a comfy fleece blanky. Hands cold and considering some hot tea. Maybe even socks.

As usual, bed would be better. But I can't stop listening to new music. Themselves - Thems My Peoples may be the best song ever. It's beautiful. I've only figured out about 75% of what Dose is saying. But I know it's all Love. I couldn't possibly ask for anything more.

I get nervous that people might not want to cry
and the only color - that dance alone - left my brain - is yellow.

Or something like that.

I love the walk between Amoeba and my house. Haight Street is full of colors and windows full of things and sidewalks full of people. Girls in tight pants scurrying along to spend $80.00 on a shirt. Girls in dirty pants sitting angrily asking for change. For the same reasons. Good food smells everywhere. Then turn left. Downhill on Masonic. A few blocks of comfy quiet homes. At the bottom, the Panhandle. Quite possibly the worlds biggest neighborhood park. One block wide - Many long - Simplicity bumping into the squiggly wanderings of Golden Gate Park. Then up hill. Past homes and schools. Into baby blue sky with clouds resting on roof tops. Trees leaning overhead and little purple flowers following your feet. At the top, what may be San Francisco's only strip mall. Built into a parking garage. Or maybe it's the other way around. I can never tell. Either way, it's always empty... and a cut through the back, up some stairs, down a hallway (past babies playing at Gymborie) and around the corner - brings a beautiful view of the city. From that front side second level parking lot you can see Pacific Heights all the way to Downtown. Pastel houses, green parks, and sky scrapers. With a handy ledge to lean on. Then it's across the street for a quick stop at Tony's Cable Car Drive-In. Fresh French Fries and a banana shake. A few blocks more... the pink Church of Love. The projects basketball court. A liquor store on every corner. ...Finally stoop, red door lock, hallway, and I'm home again. New music in hand. Head full of emptiness. And I wonder how I could ever bear to miss this.

Now you can download some of my photos at iStockphoto.com.

Along with the upgrade to OSX - came iPhoto. For those of you not familiar, it's Apple's digital photo management type application. It allows you to download images from your camera - then view/sort/somewhat edit them. I'm liking it more and more. Aside from some interface gaps, it works fairly simply. After taking a lot of pictures today, It was nice to come home from work and flip through them all. Dragging and dropping into my own little albums... Assigning keywords with single clicks. It wasn't much like using a computer. Which what using a computer should be like.

It's not that there isn't anything worth writing. I just don't want to write it here. And I want to tell everyone...... that I have nothing to say. I'm consistently torn between comfortable company and singular silence. And confusing the two. On one hand I know exactly what I need. On the other, I haven't a clue. In the middle is something simple. Yet each moment pollinates questions. Even without the intent to answer, the shear number is overwhelming. Once you find the proper way to push, everything gives. Leaving little solid to hold on too. And here we are again, at letting go. ...As if we've never left. The whole thing rings of nothing new. Similarly said at some such time, repeatedly. I see it in the words you speak and the manor of my own methods. I struggle to define it without the distraction of a name. Between myself and the people around me - I wander, wonder, and welcome what I can not know. And here we are again, at love. Maybe the secret is to leave it at that.

So I'll try....

This child was sleeping in the street at night with a tiny puppy. Next to him a scale, and a sign in English - weigh yourself and give me some money please.

Thailand Photo: from Justin's Links

I've been busy.
But it seems as though there's nothing worth writing about.

I installed OSX. I like it. A lot. Unix and MacOS together at last. It would be nice to have something newer than my rev a iMac to run it on, but it gets the job done. Installing and configuring took a lot of time. Enjoyable but somewhat lost.

Now I can work easier and faster.
I think I might leave my computer off.
For a few days at least...

I re-established loosening connections with two very important friends. We spent Saturday evening enjoying each others company. Which is worth writing......but........ who knows..

Drivin in circle occurs when life gives you no options. Your left stranded, empty handed, in the same place your last found - Antipop Consortium

The Zen Center was a nice break. As always. A momentary mixture of doing nothing and everything. Today we had pudding. Swiss Miss. It went over big.

"You guys hungry? We've got some pudding?"
"Pudding?! Can I get two?!?"

It isn't very healthy. But there's something very nice about the whole exchange.

Fuck a president. Nominate peace for dictator. - Antipop Consortium

Tomorrow I go back to work. It's been better since I almost quit. Better is a long way from good.

And I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. Things are good. Real good.

Just off.

Maybe I've been smiling too long.
Maybe I should just go to bed.


Excerpt:
In the house, her friends were talking about here:
  - `Is she going to die?'
  - `She's a very sick girl. She only knows how to do two thing: When the sky's black, she lies across the sidewalk's length so th cars don't run her over. She indicates it's day by lying across the sidewalk's width. People, since they're forced to step over her, have to talk to her. I think she's lonely.'
  - `Why'd she have an abortion?'
  - `All she ever used to do was read books.'
  `You're right,' the Leftist, who refused to drink in pubs, replied. `She had no relations to other people. She didn't like them and she was aphasic.'
  The Liberal: `If she's evil, we must be evil too. No man's an island.'
  `What about women?' asked the feminist, but no one listened to her. While the Leftist, who never listened to anyone but himself, answered, `Books or any forms of culture're so dangerous, for they turn people mad, for instance Baudelaire or other pornographers, only our upper classes must be allowed to indulge in them.'
  As he was stating this, Don Quixote was crawling into this room. `I've had a dead abortion,' she said, trying to explain to her friends so they could love her, `I mean: an abortion by a horse. I need you to take care of me.'
  `It's because,' the Leftist, who always had to explain the world to everyone, replied to the knight, `when you were a child, you read too many books, instead of suffering like normal children. The horse isn't responsible for your abortion. Literature is. You have to become normal and part of this community.'
  In order to make her part of a community Don Quixote's friends dragged her toward her bed, which was a mattress on the floor, but just as they were dragging her across the floor, they saw that she didn't have any wounds. They didn't need to care for or lover her.
  `My wound is inside me. It is the wound of lack of love. Since you can't see it, you say it isn't here. But I've been hurt in my feelings. My feelings're my brains. My feelings're now nerves which have been torn out. Beyond the hole between my legs, the flesh torn turned and gnashed, inside that red mash or mess, lies a woman. No one ever ventures here.'
Her friends, aghast at femininity, determined to burn it out.
  Meanwhile, Don Quixote, having found the only true remedy for human pain, fell asleep.
Don Quixote - Kathy Acker

Good Night.

Last night, two fellows from Fitch came to Kinkos. They desperately needed to get a large number of oversize color prints. We didn't have the paper. Our anyone on staff trained to use the HP 5000 printer. So we told them "No problem".

After many misshaps, we managed to get paper. Actually, we managed to send one of the guys to Sausalito, to pick up the paper himself.

I've been officaly designated the guy who prints oversize when there's no one around who knows how to print oversize. Slowly but surely I've been learning the printer - mostly by doing things three times in a row.

The Fitch fellows where printing up a presentation. It was for a new Japan Airlines identity. The needed to be on a flight early in the morning, to go and present it. The colors weren't matching... which is pretty much the most important thing for a corporate identity. In the course of a few hours, I think I managed to learn everything there is to know about color matching on an HP 5000. They were a bit stressed, but undertanding throughout. It was kinda fun. Printing things out... looking through Pantone swatches... matching things up. It reminded me very much of my former coworkers. I got to work directly with enjoyable and intelligent people. I learned something new. Solved a problem. And in the end, the customer got what they needed. It was nice... and far and away the best experiance I've had at Kinkos.