Gelsen Goblin

JM, Gelsen Goblin, 10.28.07

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What it's like

JM, After a tagging, 10.28.07

"No, you can't go in the garage; too many germs! I have to bring the paints out so you can show me which ones to use."


JM, Sisters: A time to sew, 10.28.07

"You should get a passport photo before you need a wig."

~

The Overnighter

JM, Fernando at Taix, 10.27.07

We spent a lot of the morning together. I had a sazerac at the empty bar. I plunked my DRF down and Fernando stuck with his Daily News consensus charts.

War Pass looked great in the BC Juvenile. Midway through the final turn, Fernando and I looked at each other and said, simultaneously: "Wire to wire."

I went away, and came back a few hours later, when Taix was officially open. And it turned out in the afternoon that in the BC Classic Fernando and I both had a feeling about Tiago.

That feeling turned out to mean nothing; it's not unusual for both of us to be wrong, but it's something to try to understand.

° ° ° ° °

I don't have memories of many big horse races over the past fifteen years that don't take place at Taix. The triple crown races and the Breeder's Cup are the biggest days of the racing year, and throughout them my unwitting companion has been Fernando, Taix's venerable Argentinian Saturday bartender.

Fernando has been at Taix since the sixties, when the restaurant would close between lunch and dinner and some of the workers there would slip off to Hollywood Park in between. He's a good fan of the horses and also of World Cup soccer; in a couple of weeks he'll wrap his vacation around a soccer match, Argentina v. Colombia---and yes, that match is in Bogotá, a fact that is merely incidental to Fernando.

What could it possibly mean that we were looking for some kind of outside hope, and both ultimately landed on the same longshot? Fernando also backed away from Street Sense, while I did not; his radar must have been up, and that's a clue: he's not quite as much of a sentimental fool as I am. Nonetheless, he and I both can hope against hope; and by this point, in retrospect, Curlin looks like an absolute villian of a horse, first nipping Street Sense in the Preakness five months ago, and then getting stronger all the time, even while Street Sense faltered on occasion. And so, there it was: the hope for an outsider, founded.

Yesterday, on television, Curlin's shoulders looked even more developed than ever. In the mud, a horse that gets the lead down the stretch, when everyone is digging, usually holds it; only the jockeys get goggles. But Curlin it was obvious would have won if the race had been any length or on any condition at all.

Depressing. I told Fernando I'd see him before his vacation, and slipped out.

° ° ° ° °

The broader question is: Why should there not be heartbreaking horse races this year? There has been heartbreaking everything else.
~

non est disputandum

JM, Ruined: Brand Library, 10.25.07

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De gustibus non est disputandum. Saracenic (?) Brand Library is architecturally tasteless but it is admirable anyway. The fact that it functions as a public library is what makes it admirable.

3534 Larga

JM, Concrete Stamp, 3534 Larga, 10.23.07

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The stamp is fifteen feet west of the entrance to Jill's Paint, Atwater.
~

redondo beach

JM, The Truck with the Flames, 10.19.07

I got home and she was on the phone, this time to Laura again. I put the water on in the backyard. She said, "Let's go for a walk." She grabbed Cruz's hand towel.

We knocked on Cruz's door. "Here's your hand towel you gave us when you gave us the quiche!" "I even forgot I was missing it!" "I don't know if that stain was there!" "I'm sure it already was!" "That quiche was great! You're crust was great!"

Then we walked down St. George. "Take a photo for me of the truck with the flames," she said.

We walked up the reservoir hill and then turned around and came back. I moved the hose in the back to the roses, then I watered the rest of the yard. When I came inside I put on Horses. She started dinner, taking another call, this one one from Lucia. She found a bottle of white wine to open, and I opened it. Then we sat down at the table with dinner, and talked about friends, layoffs, relatives, music, bills.

"Put the album on again," she said as soon as it ended. Then when redondo beach came on: "I like this song. I remember it from this summer."

There are fourteen med and vitamin bottles on the kitchen counter. It was the first day since early August that she didn't take any pain medication of any kind. I like redondo beach too, but I like gloria better.

The Overnighter

JM, The Roost: Mort à Crédit, 10.28.07


JM, Dave's: Turf Race at Bay Meadows, 10.18.07

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In between points, many points, a while back, I squeezed in a visit to The Roost to catch an inning, any inning. I was sitting next to Rory, who has had a Titian beard for life.

Rory knows Pooch and Pooch has been in the hospital for two months but seems about to get out. So Rory and I exchanged some good Pooch stories. (Pooch, Rory tells me, is 84---his wife died earlier this year).

My favorite was Pooch telling someone, "I'm not serving you because you're drunk," to which the patron said, "You only say that because you're sober," baffling Pooch into pouring him another drink.

The Roost served an old fashioned with what appeared to be a used maraschino cherry. Rory pointed it out to Michael and Michael stood by his product.

I left hurriedly. I was busy.

There was an octogenarian woman with an oxygen tank at one of the tables at The Roost.

° ° ° ° °

At Dave's, there are neither oxygen tanks nor bitters.

° ° ° ° °

Insomniac anyway, but lately I think I'm entitled. The pattern has been three nights of two hours of sleep and one night of nine hours of sleep. The pattern has been to find new things to worry about and to lay in bed as long as possible before getting up, which is precisely against prudent insomniac advice.

I do understand maintaining general silence, but---well, we're not that way. When we feel like talking, we talk. It all doesn't make sense without sharing a little. "Silent to all except those who know" is the way I describe it. Another: We don't promote, but we don't hide either. It's so much there, another dimension, mostly a dominant one.

° ° ° ° °

The refrain that keeps rising like a trout is, "I'm probably showing more character than I actually have." I think of the distance between my words/actions and what goes on inside my head on any given day and there's no question, I'm showing a better me than I in fact am.
~

Ecclesiastes 3:4

JM, Sisters: a time to mourn, 10.15.07

Of all the books in the Tanakh, קֹהֶלֶת (Ecclesiastes) is the one I've contemplated more than any other. Yet when I have read Ecclesiastes 3 before, I've read it as though the times for living, dying, mourning, laughing, weeping, dancing, and all the other things we do as humans were long, slowing unfolding parts of life, with long transitions, and copious stretches of time for, indeed, every thing.

Yesterday I understood a little differently: there are times for mourning, weeping, laughing, dancing; there are times to sow, to reap; for love, hate, war, peace---all within a single day.

Maybe it was also like this in the time of Solomon and Homer; but certainly our experiences are more compressed now. It's contemporary life, with its mobility and gadgets and impatience, that has enabled us to connect all these emotions within shorter and shorter times, to pile them on top of each other, to drive from a cemetary to a dance hall, or from a health food store to outpatient oncology, or to laugh while there's war, or to be angry one moment and love the next. Even our ordinary days are full of extraordinary differences. Enjambment is a defining quality of contemporary life.


JM, Sisters: a time to laugh, 10.15.07

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Having fun

JM, Bird on Rodney, 10.14.07

Today I gave a sermon to some finches. I went into the backyard and they flocked about me, some in the rose tree in the other yard, some in the walnut, and some in the honeysuckle. I first noticed how prevalent they were in the neighborhood a couple of years ago, when Lisa Exit gave us a feeder for Christmas; they crawled all over it for a few months, until the squirrels overwhelmed the feeder in the spring. I have to remedy that situation.

I don't remember everything I told them, but I do know that I concluded by telling them to keep having fun.

° ° ° ° °

Then, while Lynn went with her sister and another nurse to see a movie, I went to Forest Lawn Glendale. I parked under an Italian Stone Pine and read for a while. I called Lisa Exit and we chatted a bit.

While we were talking I saw two teenage girls, laughing, having fun even while tending to a grave. One head was a medium blonde and the other was henna black. I asked them about what they were doing. It turned out they were tending to the grave of the mother of the medium blonde. The mother died when the daughter was four. There were some vague memories of her. Both girls at the grave were beautiful.

Looking down, I was alarmed to read the deceased mother's dates---1956-1993. So the bereaved girl must be 18. She said she was in college. We had that kind of conversation that goes quiet and reverent for a moment and then gets a little more fun, and with lots of wellwishing at the end.

° ° ° ° °

I went home. Lynn and I drove the car halfway to Palermo, then walked the rest of the way, picked up a sandwich, and came back home. We were talking about Deleuze and Guattari, about the becoming-female, the becoming-animal, the becoming-imperceptible, and about how these concepts are more interesting and more ambitious and more relevant to our psyches than, say, anything Freud or Oedipus have to offer.

Then we suddenly saw the above bird on a jacaranda tree on Rodney, across the street from the apartment in which Lisa Exit and I used to live. In fact, maybe a dozen or so years ago, I even can recall looking out our old window and watching jays in that very tree. I took the photo, and told that bird too: keep having fun.

Lynn laughed. She doesn't mind it when I sermonize to birds; why should she mind it when I talk to a tree-painting of one?
~

Silk route

JM, Home, Home Again, 10.8.07

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When Lynn and I came home Monday, a young but largely ailing silk floss tree that hadn't bloomed in the whole time we've been here put forth a defiant first offering. The bloom obligingly faced the house; Lynn noted it first.

Then she went to the bedroom and took out all her silk scarves, some of which will cover her head this fall. We counted eleven of these; she's prepared.

For many years and especially since last spring, I've simply let the madness of the outside in, and galloped along. Now, suddenly, I'm being asked to become the damaged, dangerous, sword-wielding one-eyed king; I'm being asked to take up my powers and spells and wounds and make them all work for our small tight tribe.

Frayed leaves in early autumn, with a nearly incongruent first flush of magenta; we see another bloom too, readying itself.

Mermaids

JM, Bev's backyard, Hermosa, 10.2.07

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Au revoir Hermosa. Here's a poem about the place from a few years back.~

A margarita

JM, A Margarita, 10.2.07

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~

October

George Inness, October, oil on canvas, 1886

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Time and space are large, enormous, every day they are. Each day's route alone is herculean, worth documenting; the boulevards that have been with you all your life are not only ever useful, but ever dependable; though the buildings change, the idea of "Fountain" or "Venice" or "Vista del Mar" does not, not really, over the decades. Stopping for a taco here or there; it is all the same, there is just more of it these days.

There is some concern, but seems I can endure Pancho, Steph's cat, one who is both skittish and affectionate.

There are phantoms in the Inness painting---I would have to look, but I believe he was most notably an October painter---when you think of him, you think of paintings like this, greens being slowly overtaken by yellow fringes, beautiful but held by time in a tight grip. Melancholy but beautiful anyway.

Painting is at LACMA---it was acquired for them by Michael Quick, who did the Inness catalog raisonné. "They'll be referring to the Quick numbers," he once told me.