old friends

Re-encountering lots of people lately -- Joel, Meg, David C., HH. Walt via email. Klaas to come. JSV visited last weekend, but I wouldn't call her a long lost friend. We hiked the Estero trail on Sunday because the Tule Elk trail was very windy and JSV didn't have a shell. The young cows came up very close while we were sitting on a hillside eating lunch. They just wanted to get a look at us, I guess.

white sunday

I'm having a Sunday morning on the couch. The  sky is white, the fire is on. I've had coffee and and a tangerine, but nothing else because my stomach is in turmoil after I ate potato salad with LEN yesterday afternoon and then lasagna at KW's. I can't figure out how to change the temperature reading on the remote from centigrade to fahrenheit. So I might finally learn how to convert in my head. I can still remember the time when we were going to switch to the metric system and we were watching slide shows at school and I was very anxious that I wouldn't understand how to measure things. And then the metric system went poof. Oh, Jimmy Carter, how we've disappointed you!

I am still deaf in my left ear. I don't like that. But I do like the clouds we've had this past week. I stopped at Pier 54 on my way in to work the other day and took a quick photo with my phone.

You can't believe how lovely it is sometimes. You don't feel you deserve it but you are grateful and you hope it continues for at least a little while. It's important -- to me -- to feel the edge, the end somewhere on the horizon. Not too close. Not yet. I'm not ready, and I will probably never be ready. I read that Hugo Chavez's last words were "I don't want to die" and it made sense to me. I am anxious about disappearing; sometimes I can barely get a grip on myself. And I have moments of lacerating guilt about this joyfulness in the world as it is. I suppose you can't help but feel guilty if you think for a minute. It doesn't do any good, of course. In fact it's very selfish to set other people's misfortune at a distance, on the horizon.

In my better moments, I agree with Roger Ebert:

We must try to contribute joy to the world. 

it never occurs to him

I was thinking about D and his dark feelings: anger, resentment, frustration. You can see them taking him over -- he enjoys it, in the Lacanian sense. He doesn't say "I am upset about X." He says "You have done X to me" or "You never do Y for me." He seizes on whatever you say in that moment and if you don't say anything he falls back on things you said weeks ago. Everything is converted into fuel, in an I'm-rubber-and-you're-glue kind of way. He tries to wound you because you've wounded him. You start out trying to defend yourself, then you feel petty about defending yourself, and finally you see that you have to stand back and wait until the wave of feeling runs aground. You start to lose empathy, you end up losing respect. You feel guilty (he makes sure of that) but you need to move away, out of range. And he can't understand why you are abandoning him. It must be painful and bewildering.

That's how I see it, anyway.