1. A ghost whom we’ll call “The Thirsty Ghost” has a particular obsession with drinking water.  Like a cat weaned too young who’s forever trying to suckle on your coat sleeve — it’s a hopeless case.  Because your coat sleeve will never become a cat’s nipple.  Likewise, the ghost’s thirst and the water it seeks do not coexist in the same world, so they can never meet.

2. Speaking of meetings, there’s a ghost we call “Missing You,” who comes back to keep an appointment he missed a few hundreds of years ago. He stands at the crossroads, waiting for his lover. She also waits for him, in the same place, hundreds of years before. Where she waits are horses in muddy streets and ox carts full of vegetables. Wild children run past her, calling each other names. Then the road is empty and the mud hardens to ice.

Where he stands are lonely asphalt and neat sidewalks, occasional cars passing, then a bus with load motors and rattling windows, then silence.

The lovers do not meet.

We would like to believe in a concerned deity who conspires to let the one lover feel the other across the divide of hundreds of years, who lets them feel one other’s presence, and lets the first ghost drink his water.

But this concerned deity likewise does not arrive.

3. Were this deity to exist, he lives in a third place, a garden high on a plateau by a meadow on a mountain, somewhere the lovers visited once and then promptly forgot. There, he grows cucumbers and salad greens, and plays an endless back and forth war with the rabbits.

4. Let’s return to the first ghost, the thirsty one. We see him drinking the water.  He has trouble manipulating the glass.  When he seems to get a grip on it, the water runs through his empty gullet, the glass full of water is tipping into a void and splashing on the floor. He tries different water, tea, wine, spirits.

The spirits actually work for a while, because spirits and ghosts exist in neighboring realms. And then they stop working, and it is even worse than before.

Really it is quite hopeless! But how can you explain this to the ghost? Because he can plainly see others, the living, who can pick up the same glass and drink. And to his eyes they seem undeniably gratified! They pick up the glass with what seems like thirst. They grunt while drinking and then put down the empty glass with a glazed look of satisfaction in their eyes, and then they promptly go about their business and seem to pay no mind to the water until the next time they drink from it.

How can you tell the poor ghost that they do not feel the thirst he feels? How can you tell him that they do not enjoy the gratification he craves?

You can’t. He carries with him the bright shining light of his thirst and it illuminates heaven with its light. But if he ever figures this out, if our thirsty ghost ever stumbles on the truth, and opens his eyes, he will cherish his thirst, and follow its light to the garden by the high meadow, where he will commiserate with god on the difficulties of keeping a garden by a meadowful of rabbits.

Photo Credit: Antonis under Creative Commons license

I was part of an entourage of young men and we were following a woman whom I could  see only occasionally far ahead of us in profile, her face beautiful and determined in a way I associate with movie stars or marble statues. We were in a line like ducks or grade school students and she was leading us through a wide palace room, alternating red and white tiles stretching to a wall as distant as the horizon.

And at the far end of that room was another line of people, parallel to us, moving in the opposite direction.  Iin that line were men and women, spinning and dancing and clapping sticks and chanting, all wearing grass skirts that swished in the air. The sound of their clapping and chanting reached us faintly, and with with a slight lag that dissociated the sounds from the movements.

“Next will come the cocktails with the miniature umbrellas in them” I whispered to the man ahead of me.  All I could see of him were the two lines of dark hair that ran on either side of his neck from the bottom of his hair line down below his collar.

Almost at the same time as I spoke it,  I could hear my joke repeated, as if over a loudspeaker system.  I was at first appalled by the crassness of it and the disrespect, and then appalled to realize that it was me who had said it.  I am that person.

I was immediately spun out of the line and became a perfectly round egg, which a neatly manicured giant handwas dropping gently down a clear plastic chute like a gumball in a clear plastic spiral dispenser.  I rolled down, gathering speed and then, as I half expected, I was in a complete void.

I may have been moving at infinite speed, I may have been suspended, perfectly still.

My last thought before entering this void, which lingered for “what seemed like an eternity,” was that my contrition had been genuine, my remorse full-hearted and quite complete, and that this must count for something.

Now I was reborn. I was a young man stepping out into an aircraft hangar or factory floor with the assurance of a pilot or an engineer.

I knew all at once that all the wishes I had ever wasted on some alternative circumstances of life or character had been granted.

If I had wished for a family rich in accomplishments and affection, that was my family.  To have discovered my vocation and passion early enough to devote myself to it: granted.  Complete love of a woman that she might reside in my heart and I in hers: that was my fiance.

I also knew that all these were all just consolation prizes, a slight lessening of the sentence of having been born again.

Photo Credit:beggs under Creative Commons Attribution license

Sandbar

It was a thin island of sand and sometimes the waves came crashing onto it from one side and sometimes from the other.  I believe it began as a bridge and then became an island which I was crossing.   I was coming from somewhere and it was reasonable to assume that I was still on my way to someplace else.

I put my coat and my computer bag down in the dry sand roughly midway on the island, where the waves coming from either side wouldn’t reach. I took stock of my surroundings.

The sand was mostly level with slight undulations. No landmarks I could discern except for a cinderblock hut at one end that was painted a dark green.  Parks Department, I presumed. The water was of a bright swimming pool blue that grew darker further out from the island, but somehow didn’t seem to get any deeper.  Wherever you looked you could see sand beneath the surface of the water.

There weren’t many people, just a few stragglers here and there randomly dressed, some for summer, some for winter, some wearing what seemed to be costumes or else the exotic clothing of wherever they were from.

I had expected there would be more people.  I looked down at the khaki pants that I was wearing and the fleece vest over a threadbare blue oxford shirt.  I felt a tinge of anxiety.  Where was my coat? My computer? Over there, on a rise of sand where I could see it. I didn’t need them now, but later I might.  It seemed like moments ago I was in crisp cold air and snow like dust suspended on sunbeams.  As I thought of those moments they became real:  snow, air, the smell of cold.  Except for the ache of knowing that there was not here and that then was perhaps better than now. Yet that ache was consoling in the same way as the suspended snow, that wasn’t there, was consoling.

Gradually I returned to sand and an empty blue sky above and ocean on all sides.  Sound of the surf as waves hit the island first on one side and then the other.

A man came towards me, wearing a barrel that was suspended from his shoulders with stout leather straps. This looked like the beginning to a bad joke.  I was going to ask him where he was from.  I was going to ask if he had stepped out of a cartoon from the 1930’s, make light of it in that way, but then thought better of it.  Wearing a barrel was such a cliched costume  he might be aware of this and feel self-conscious about it. If it even was a costume.

The man had a wide, open face and beefy arms and legs. He was blinking in the bright sunlight in a nearsighted way that made me think he might have lost his glasses.

– How’s it going?

He turned toward my voice with an eager smile.  I smiled back, a little more coolly.  I didn’t want to let on, but I too was secretly thrilled that we would be able to speak. Up to this point I hadn’t been sure if there would be any speaking.

– Hello, hello!  His accent sounded vaguely Irish.
– Hey.  Nice outfit.
– Thanks! He hooked his thumbs under each of the leather straps at his shoulders, rather proudly I thought, like he was waiting for me to admire the outfit in more detail.

I obliged, noting first the thickness of the fullgrain leather of the straps, nearly as thick as the sole of a shoe and dyed the bright red shade of pork strips in a bowl of Wonton soup.  These straps were affixed to the wood of the barrel with brass rivets, and as I was noting this I couldn’t help but note as well the clear, polished, fine-grained oak planks of the barrel itself beneath the hoops of bright copper that bound it.

– Wow, that is really some barrel you’ve got yourself there, I said, now with unfeigned admiration.

– Yes it is, he said simply, and for the first time he looked me level in the eyes.  As I met his gaze it seemed the sound of the surf had receded in the background.  He suddenly looked neither old nor harmless.

–You see, he continued, I was poor once.  Dirt poor.  And when I was no longer poor I promised myself I would never, ever have to walk around in a ragged, tattered, broken-down barrel ever again.

It began to dawn on me right around then— the consequences, I mean, the awful inevitability of consequence — and, I don’t know how else to phrase it — my heart sank.  And the pain of my heart sinking that way was still much too much to bear, so I summoned all the willpower I could summon — think of snow, of crisp air, maybe wood smoke this time, smoke held aloft as if pinned by narrow beams of cold sun coming through trees.

Soon I had forgotten whatever it was that had first made me feel bad. The man in the barrel was waddling away from me in the direction of another straggler. I felt sleepy and disoriented, but also a little anxious, like this was a cocktail party and I was suddenly bereft of drink or conversation partner.

–Here you go, a dark-skinned woman in a bright blue dress said as she handed me a coconut that had been opened at the top and filled with some frothy liquid.  What do you want to talk about?
–I’m Kevin, I said gratefully.  What’s your name?
– My name is Grace.
–Where are we? I asked
–Oh that, she said.  I can’t really say, since I’ve been here the whole time.
–You’ve been here the whole time? I repeated stupidly, hoping it would start to mean something.
–Yes.  Nice of the rest of you to join us, by the way.

There was something both sincere and cutting about how she said that.

And right at that moment two waves came crashing simultaneously from either side of the island and met in the middle, overlapped actually, obliterating my coat and the computer bag with my computer in it.  I ran toward the spot where my belongings had been and I was up to my knees in warm, swirling water that sucked the golden sand out from around my toes.  I was vaguely aware that it was a beautiful, pleasurable moment and at the same time I was in a panic about my computer.

It was all I had left, and it was gone.  Grace was gone as well. I ran toward the dark green hut at one end of the island.

There was no door, just an L shaped little corridor like the entrance to an outdoor bathroom.  Inside it was dark, there was a desk, and behind it stood an attractive woman in her forties with curly dark hair, wearing a light brown uniform shirt and a dark green skirt.  Behind her were lockers and storage bins, neatly arrayed.

My computer, I gasped, it got washed away.  The woman responded in Italian.  My computer, I said again, this time gesticulating with what I considered to be the universal hand gestures for “computer.”  Gradually it seemed she understood, and she informed me, via an elaborate pantomine of gestures performed to the tune of melodic syllables, that my work permit would have to be re-processed to allow for a change of profession.

– No, I insisted.  I can retrieve the computer! I just have to find the bag! I need a snorkel.  A diving mask.

These concepts I conveyed by speaking the words out loud accompanied by an increasingly fluent interpretive dance.

The woman sighed good naturedly.  Diving-a mask, she said in her accent.  Snor-kel.  She turned around and began rummaging through the neat lockers and storage bins to the rear.  Divinga mask.  Snorkel.

I knew it was only a matter of time before she would find these very items as if by magic and hand them to me with a patient smile.  I had a glimmer of realization that my computer was worthless, now that it had been underwater, and that anyway I had no need of it now, where I was.  Where we were.  But even as I realized all this, I felt again that queasy pain in the center of my chest.  It was as if I was squeezing a frog to death in my hand and at the same time I WAS the frog; so I stopped squeezing and promptly forgot.

The woman in uniform rummaged patiently through her equipment and started humming a pleasant melody with melancholic air.  Now it was as if I could hear her thoughts.  There is nothing he can do, she thought, thinking of me.

She had seen it all so many times before.

Photo Credit: Stella Hartmann under Creative Commons Attribution license

Entrance to the Actual Cabin in the Redwoods

I’m in a cabin in the woods as I write this.

Cabin, redwoods, the Russian River rolling slowly and somewhat dryly by. Only April and already the water feels thick, too shallow in most places to swim. But I found a path to a bend in the river by the Bohemian Grove, the famous place where Kissinger and Bush (I and II) and other aging frat boys of the Skull & Bones set would retreat to piss against real redwoods and take a break from despoiling the very same environment that they could savor here even while drinking themselves silly and pissing on it.

But back to the actual cabin. As I mentioned, I’m posting this FROM my cabin in the woods. Cabins in the woods these days are tending more and more to have internet access. Not to mention plumbing, heating and electricity. So not only could I bring work with me, work could follow me where I went. Isn’t that great? In the first 5 days after I got here I was launching 2 websites that were supposed to have launched before I left.

My OWN deliverables had all been on time, of course, but the deadline of my leaving town had inspired everyone else on the team to prolific productivity, thus causing us to miss the deadline. Or had just woken them up to getting done what ought to have been done. But who am I kidding? I’m usually the one that’s a beat behind the music. 500 years after the invention of mechanical clocks, we have all collectively internalized clocks; I think we’ve gone further and collectively internalized the notion of setting a clock forward 10 minutes knowing we’re always running late and still managing to run 10 minutes late on top of that.

On the bright side, also during this first 5 days in the woods, I wound up helping a filmmaker do a last minute proposal for online outreach, a proposal which she wound up writing me into. I had been meaning to explore all of this with her for months, and then the grant opportunity arose at the last minute, we went for it and made the deadline. Sweet!

But I had come out here to work on some fiction, a sustained suspension of day-to-day concerns. I thought of it as not so much changing air as changing light. If you want to study the stars, you need to get away from the Sun and the Moon, or else the stars will be invisible to you. Another way to look at it is I had come out here to bore myself into writing more.

I was lamenting this fact on the phone with my friend Amy the other day. Oh, did I forget to mention? I get pretty good cell phone reception at this cabin too.

As I described all the work that had followed me out to this idyllic spot, I realized I had made more progress on the day to day productive work in those 5 days that in the weeks before. In other words, coming out here to focus on writing had given me an opportunity to make incredible progress on the day-to-day stuff. There was no denying it. Fran Liebowitz once said that if not for writing, she would never get around to sharpening all her pencils and dusting her furniture. Or something to that effect.

But this was more. Maybe we were on to something. What if this could be a strategy to becoming more productive?

Choose a spiritual or artistic endeavor on a higher plan that whatever you’re currently trying to accomplish. As you bring your concentration to bear on this new goal, the universe will tempt you with opportunities that you formerly, actively and in vain, sought out. While looking fixedly at your new, higher goal, and pretending to focus on that one, grab greedily at the old opportunities the universe offers while trying not to let the universe notice what you’re really doing.

But isn’t this just procrastination? Or even the doctrine of deliberate, conscious Procrastination expounded by my former student Nick Scoullar. Nick invents some incredibly highflown, ambitious project — for example a novel about Spanish-speaking polar bears — in the hope that he will procrastinate from that task and accomplish whatever really needs to get done.

No, she maintained. This is more than just a game between you and your own mind. You’re fucking with the universe in a very deliberate and conscious way.

My mind reeled at the possibilities of this radical new strategy. “Don’t you think that the universe would get… angry?”

Amy’s laugh, even over the tinny cell phone reception, sounded kind of throaty. “Sometimes the universe might like to be teased. If it’s done skillfully. In fact, she might be grateful and even…. generous.”

I walked out among the redwoods, contemplating their swirling knots and hollows and bark, the great limbs and forelocks of some stately gods that might have inspired Bourdelle.

Rather than feeling serene, i was all stirred up as I got back to my cabin, and back to work.

I am Blue-ish

If you live in San Francisco, chances are you know about “Cafe Grattitude,” AKA “Cafe Attitude,” a vegan and mostly raw restaurant that serves exquisite, expensive and somewhat pretentious dishes.

It’s a wonderful place, really, and the food makes you go Zing all the rest of the day. It’s a great alternative to the Eggs and Home Fries based brunch that plunges you into a coma from which pots of coffee can only partly revive you.

My only qualm with Cafe Grattitude is the way things are named on the menu. It’s very precious. Every dish is named “I am….” and then an adjective that is luminous and new agey. For example:

“I am Honoring” = Nachos
“I am Elated” = Enchiladas
“I am Insightful” = Spring Rolls

So in ordering, you verbalize a positive statement about yourself and put it out to the Universe!! Get it? It’s so life affirming!! Much better than being in a diner in New York and saying “Yeah lemme get a scrambled egg on Rye, thanks.”

The name of that one would be “I am Impatient and Do You Have a Problem with That?”

Today at Cafe Grattitude I ordered the Chocolate Mousse, which the intensely smiling waitress translated for me: “I am Magnificent.” When I got the check, I thought of a new name for the dish. I wanted to tell them they could call it “I am Paying 8 Dollars for a Chocolate Mousse.”

But did I tell this to the Cafe Grattitude staff? No I did not.  Would that be because…

“I am Chicken Shit?”

A shaggy dog story...

Conversation with my friend Bob.  “What is the most trivial reason you ever broke up with someone?” Bob asks me.   I think back on a girl, let’s just call her Gabriella.   She was smart, which I like.  She was well read,  politically aware and ran a non profit. She also was a Sunday New York Times kind of a nerd, which I like.  She was sarcastic and energetic in a way of a kid racing to climb up into the treehouse.  But then there was her dog.

I think I broke up with her over her dog.

It was large, shaggy and not very sharp.  It stayed in her bed except when I came over, when she would exile it to the living room.  It barked in a very loud,  compulsive and random way that was kind of autistic.  Once in the middle of the night I was walking naked from the bedroom to the bathroom and this dog jumped up and start barking loudly just inches from my tchochkes, which promptly fled the scene and didn’t come back for days.  Well, not really, but almost.

Back to Gabriella’s dog, let’s call her Dolly.  Gabriella had to let Dolly out several times a day into a yard that was smaller than the dog was.  Dolly was more like a kind of sheep, really, a farm animal but without a farm to frolic in.  Sometimes Dolly’s poop would stick to the long shaggy fur around her butt and Gabriella would have to clean it.  I watched as these events unfolded, trying not to pass judgment.

“Maybe you could trim the hair around the butt?” I suggested helpfully, and Gabriella thought that was a good idea, so she did.  Now Dolly the dog looked like a cross between a sheep and a baboon.  I was looking at the Dolly one day, trying not to pass judgment, and Dolly looked back at me and for a moment the hair parted from around her eyes and the veil of incomprehension was lifted:  Dolly saw me and I saw Dolly and Dolly  looked back at me with a look of dim and murderous hate.

Not long after that, Gabriella and I broke up — mostly, I think, on account of her dog.

“That’s nothing,” Bob responds distractedly.  “I once broke up with a girl because of her ringtone.”

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/puck90/
Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved

Dried valerian under Goðafoss in Iceland, November 2007

Found Wikipoetry?  The text below is from the Wikipedia entry for Valerian, a medicinal root. It reads like something out of McSweeney’s magazine or George Saunders.

I quote it at length, for posterity, because who knows how long it will endure in this eerie form:

The name Valerian comes from the Latin word valere, meaning “to be strong or healthy”, generally thought to refer to its medicinal use, though many references suggest that it also refers to the strong odor.

An explanation for the theory regarding the etymological reference to the strong odor is that the herb was also known as “Phou” or “Fy” in antiquity . «Phou» or «fy» is describing a common expression of the peoples of the European continent when smelling a dried Valerian root. According to folk belief this medicine could turn everything painful into good. It was therefore called “wenderot” or similar in Germanic language groups, meaning the root that could turn things bad to good. Domestic animals, pets, especially cats become ardent when they smell the herb.

Is this some wikipedian who channels an ancient nordic shaman?  A case of herb-induced prose?  I have traced the moment in version history when the apocryphal author appeared, but all that can be known of him or her is an IP address that hails from Lillehammer, Norway, north of Oslo….

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_(herb)

Honey, we trashed the house.

We’ve moved yet again.

Extensive market research with unwilling focus groups has confirmed that “Monkey Tea,”  as a brand name for a blog,  conjured up such associations as:

• a liquid in which monkeys have been soaking
• vaguely racist
• compost tea
• a Marx brothers’ movie
• the “URL with a smell”

In spite of the many fond and innocent reasons we had for choosing this name in the first place, we’ve decided to move our more reputable content about sustainability and social media over to… a different place… over there. We’d tell you what that new URL is, but that would create a link between this (disreputable, unreliable) site and that (pristine, professional) one, so we won’t.

So for actual content about sustainability and social media, please go there.  For random observations, free associations, and embarrassing revelations, stay here.  If you want to buy the domain name MonkeyTea, leave a comment below, I’ll make you a deal.

-k

Photo Credit (Creative Commons License):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carquestguy/199036836/

A story about a regular guy who comes to a crossroads in his life and imagines a path not taken, which then haunts him until he follows it to its logical and liberating conclusion.  Yes, this could be premise of some hollywood treatment featuring Tom Hanks or Gwyneth Paltrow,  but no.  It’s part of the series of spoken word performance from The Moth –  old-time storytelling where  musicians and writers and actors and the occasional ordinary mortal will tell a true story, of about 15 minutes duration, without notes.

http://feeds.themoth.org/~r/themothpodcast/~5/497957568/moth-podcast-50-tom-weiser.mp3

Honey, we trashed the house.

MonkeyTeaPicker.wordpress.com has been shortened to MonkeyTea.org.

My friend Bob Gower always says “Less is More.” And I ask him “But isn’t More sometimes Better?” And he says “No.”

So there you have it.

monkeytea.org