love & empire

This article is just one of a hundred other like it – this grand announcement that investing in real estate isn’t a good option anymore. No really? Also. Was it ever?

The whole conversation – the horror of ridiculously rising real estate values and inflated mortgages that has shorted middle class families;  the decade-long  American hard-on for square footage and that crashed without delivering satisfaction;  the maiming of sub-prime mortgages – an idea that was meant to help put the people into reasonably priced, much-needed homes  – all of it makes me nauseated. When did everyone start thinking of their home as real estate?  When did every single thing we do in this world become some sort of investment.  I bought a name brand purse last week – told myself it wouldn’t “lose its value.”

This is bullsh*t.   Read Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace.  Money can’t buy love or luck or identity or sense of place. Money doesn’t make us grounded. We say we know this, but we don’t.  And what we need are homes, all of us – and not investment options.  Where will our children live when we can’t house them? Where will we live when we are old? Who are we if where we live is just another declining investment option?

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I saw a movie I liked last week, Cairo Time. A very slow, restrained love story that features the city right alongside the lovers.  Very beautiful and simple. Grown-up love.  The critics are panning it because not enough happens, and they’re not wrong – but they’re not right either.  The city scenes reminded me of East Jerusalem – the light, mostly, but also the Arabic script on everything, and the crooked streets and haphazard traffic, the tiny cups of sweet coffee, the wild colored clothing hanging out of windows and draped beautifully over bodies. I think written Arabic is beautiful -  I like the curliques – so sensuous and graceful Read the rest of this entry »

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All the way to Annapolis and back yesterday: up to the house, then to storage for bags and bags of gear, then over the Bridge, hooked up to hands-free, itouch, GPS, son playing Kid Cudi, then sleeping hard in the car just like he always has, every since he was a baby – so much easier to drive in a bigger car, my principles about fuel efficient cars ebbs just a little more everytime I survive the New Jersey Turnpike.  At the Academy dozens of bronzed, confident young men, driving power cars up to Bancroft, unloading boxes of uniforms, thirty inch flatscreens and play stations in the unchanged hot white summer light off the harbor.  Dinner with ex, ex’s wife, adorable, table-dancing twins, son, weird how the reflexes for handling a toddler in a restaurant are still there. Then the ride home my gawd, that effing turnpike, at least there wasn’t any traffic on the bridge.  Started thinking about buying lots of  jewelry (Pieces of a Girl) and hand bags (Kooba) and craving Jamba Juice around exit 15 (Ikea anyone) – a sign of health (vitamins, hand-made, non-ugly things)? Or another form consumerism? I just want to live happy while I’m still young.

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I found this list of book ideas in my journal from 1993 – the one I kept when I lived at Fort Drum:

Sleep and High Places, a story of a lookout mountain park ranger

A story set in or around a beauty parlor

A story about an unwed mother/gay person

A story about a beautiful mother of five who met her second husband while dancing

A story of one woman’s love for her friends

A Vermont country mom

The story of an abortion and a birth

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I never really stop craving this color.  I had a shirt in this shade in high school – one of those ’80s type, crew neck, but sort of blousy things with an elastic waistband, and white vents under the arms – a look my daughter is now wearing.

Summer. I realized I’ve been bustling – but in a nice way: jogging out there with Liz Gilbert and the sheep and hens, doing work, hanging out with son, writing, making lists, trying not to get Lyme disease from watering my parents plants, listening to Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow in the car, sleeping ’til nine, eating junk, seeing friends, packing up, unpacking.  There’s been too much fighting and the thing with my arm kind of sucked, but I think I’ve pulled out of the tail spin.  Pleasegod let it be easy cruising now. Would love to take off my seatbelt.

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First, there is sun, year-long.  Failing in winter, pale, weak, sad and then, suddenly strong -a moment! glory! maybe a week, and then lapsing into sorrow again, sometimes ’til March, even April, he hides, pouts, forgets everything but his own weakness, his lowering. In spring he wakes a little, and then grows glad. He starts to sing, an hour or two, then the day long, forgets the past, and his song turns everything golden and rosy.  He has always felt this way. He is the sun – what is this talk of gloaming.

Summer he is all aces.  Loud, bright, hot, excessive.  Wake up! Wake up! Grow! he says Grow! Grow! Play with me!  People rise up, drink in his energy. Sometimes he shines so much that the fragile tendrilled things of the earth droop, the lavendar, slight pink, and faint green, the things of subtle scents.  They try and fail each day: droop, slump, pull up, try again. Grow! says the sun, can’t you see I’m shining! Then, in autumn the sun is proud. Look what I have done, look at the heights we have scaled, look what I have brought to you! See? I am sun.  And I always will be.

Then comes December.   He remembers, then and the dread of it floods in to hurt him, and make him slant.  His world aches with him, clings,  tries to hold on to him. Fails.

Then, there is moon. Read the rest of this entry »

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“The poem, as Joseph Brodsky once pointed out, is really about shame–about how cultures are infected by overwhelming feelings of shame, their “habit-forming pain,” and seek to escape those feelings through violence.  What drives mend mad — drives them to psychopathic gods – is the unbearable feeling of having been humiliated.  The alternative, the poem says, is not to construct our own narrative of shame and redemption, which never really comes in any case, but to follow our authentic self-interest, which means being in touch with the reality of what is and is not actually possible in the world.”

from Adam Gopnik’s Through the Childrens Gate about Auden’s “September 1, 1939“

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Things to do with pain: 1) Offer it up as something I share with all sentient beings – if I carry a little bit, then maybe someone else has to carry a bit less.  2) Try not to whine so much and bore people with details. 3) Try to think about what color it is. 4) Try to think like an athlete “pain is weakness leaving your body,” says my son. 5) Use it to motivate me to be stronger, more fit, to not take my olding body for granted. 6) Enjoy how vicodin doesn’t really cut the pain, but makes me love everyone soooooo much and make me so grateful for how great life is, isn’t life so great?!!

I’m failing at most – see #2 (writing a blog post!?!), #3 (no idea). Sort of hanging in there with the others.

But # 6 is awesome. I love you so much!

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My God, the flowers.  Luxury and simplicity – begonia, impatiens, rose, lavendar, hydrangea, lily, posy. I drink tea, I sun myself, I pray a little, I jog a little, I wander this quiet house, this home of brick and wood and glass.  Then, the flowers – two months old, two months to live. Transient, fleeting, fragile, yet there’s something – consider the lilies of the field.  It’s not that they’re nothing and we’re something. It’s that they are something and we’re…we’re different – maybe we’re more fragile, maybe we need more of God’s care.  Consider the lilies of the field – they grow without us really, they don’t need me, or doctors, or meaning. Or to find beauty.  They are beauty.    I can’t say what I mean. I should be able to say what I mean.

I write. I wish I could write.  I try to write.  What a silly madness it is to try to be a writer.  I just want to swing in a hammock and look at the flowers.

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A big change from Fort Tryon Park – an easy jog, listening to Eat, Pray, Love – which I like best, not so much for the story though it is nice, but because of Elizabeth Gilbert’s friendly voice.  Like having someone along while I run so I’m not lonely.

B had made homemade pesto by the time I got home, a harvest from my mom’s herbs, we’d both watered her beautiful, everywhere flowers, washed all our clothes in her big, white, clean easy washing machine.  Her house seems huge to us, we get lost, can’t find each other when we go looking – for a teacup, a question, wondering about should we go to the beach.  I miss being close up to him like in NYC.  I like the quiet and ease and comfort that is everywhere here.

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