Wednesday, January 15, 2003

One of my favorite things about Maisky's recording of Bach's 6 Suites for Cello is that you can hear him breathing, hear the bow moving across the string. While those sounds aren't part of the composition, they are part of the music, and it makes it so much more visceral and real. 1:21:29 AM

syzygyguys.com is up! Wow. And so it begins. Another old journal piece I read today talked about the beginnings of the Global Youth Science Education Exchange, which is now actually happening, as International Youth Science Camp, as a result of an appropriation, ironic but highly appropriate, from the National Security Administration. Those were heady days, and I wrote about how heady they were, and how fascinating it would be to look back on us, those pioneers, up in the mountains. Of course, like the early Christians, I thought it would be the next day or the day after that it would come down, like the second coming. Although once Darrin started devoting actual full time work to it,  I think one of my cautions was that it would take a long time to get it sustainable, especially with a paper tiger board at the National Youth Science Foundation. So, I won't write any heady words here about Syzygy, or predictions, but I am excited at how the world seems to float me when I take the simple step of putting up my sail. As Heman says, "To the journey, every door brings another adventure." Skeletor, beware. 1:12:08 AM

The local Catholic Church has a sign, with little styrofoam cross headstones on it, 180 abortions every hour in the U.S. Everytime I see it, which is at least once every day, it doesn't take much mathematical acumen to feel an incredible sense of relief. I'm starting to think of anti-choice as the ideology of choice for peope who aren't very good at math. I drank a gulp or two of a cabernet sauvignon tonight that, while it didn't make me weep, maybe just because I was in public, made my eyes water with ecstacy. A 1999 Corison Cabernet. This, if nothing else, makes me want to be rich. Or at least have the wealth to buy wines that make the most beautifully redolent cassolette seem like tripe, literally. I think some of the most orgasmic experiences I've had have been the smell of wine, or a field of wild black raspberries, even, and especially with the buzz of bees and the scratches of thorns. This tasted flat, almost offensively cheap merlot as it hit my tongue, and then opened up into berry and leather and oak and earth as I gave it some air. And I looked up at Rick with tears in my eyes, trying to hide them, and said simply, "Good." The simple, the universal word works better than any contrived verbiage when you enounter the sublime, the divine. If I were Pentecostal, which means I probably wouldn't be drinking the wine in the first place, I think I may have spoken in tongues. Why even bother? I can still remember the smell of that 1989 Sinsky Cab. I think I might have exchanged a monastic life for just a case. Wow. That half a bottle the table left me is probably worth a month's tips. Speaking of speaking in tongues, I remember doing a basic proposal for the Catholic Charismatic Society one time. Rosemary, I think her name was, laid her hands on me when I left, and almost knocked me to the ground without even touching me. I remember my dad telling me a story of his first healing ministry, after working alongside Ron Delbane, learning about his touch, and finding himself, the neophyte, pushing a petitioner's head down with the power of whatever power that is, whatever you name it. And the humor in the tale at Church of the Holy Communion, my Dad's little Episcopal church in Lake Geneva, when someone said De Colores after his sermon, after a Cursillo weekend at the church, and the reserved congregation thought someone was speaking in tongues. I am also thinking tonight about the time Aunt Sara and Uncle Robert, my godparents, visited us in Peoria (I could never get their aunt and uncle roles right, maybe because of the alphabetical ordering challenge - I still have to conciously sort it to this day, Aunt Robert and Uncle Sara makes more sense in my ordering system, which has nothing to do with the trappings of gender.), and I made a little shrine to myself in my room, where they were staying, with all my report cards and awards, wanting them to really, really like me for all the things I felt I should be liked for. And my Dad, around that same time, buying me a little plaque, that I thought was really lame, saying, "Be you, let the true you shine." And now, screaming in the car on the way home, in my Jesus year, maybe appropriate for a resurrection, a rebirth, that I GET that. That's the take away from Jamie, that I never would have gotten if I hadn't been so AMPED up on selling her, that applies to my life on so many deep, deep levels. Especially with all the business stuff coming down right now.  I am best when I am just me. Not the extrinsics that attach themselves, but do not define me. That's why people trust me, love me, not because of anything I do. They know, something I haven't been very successful at identifying in myself. I'm not lucky. Or tricky. I'm me. Which is enough. Jennifer couldn't figure out, at first, why one of her customers wrote "Nice piercings!" on her check. Stu immediately lost it, saying Ben is crazy. She got it later, and I couldn't keep a straight face, which I never can. Hers wasn't as funny as playing into people's own suspension of disbelief, like writing for weeks "Great Pen!" or "Love the pen!" on Christina's checks after she came in bragging about how great her pens were. She would show those checks to everyone. I wish I could have pulled that one off infinitely, but I'm too transparent when confronted directly. Or the time I wrote "Love the tall, bald guy. Love, Missy" on Nick's check, after he'd been talking all night about the hot girl at his table. He totally bought it. I only wish I'd had time to write down my cell phone number, and create a fake message for him. Because he bought it in his own mind, before any mischievous pen hit paper. We all have our mythologies, in our lives, our days. The fun is finding the ones most plausible to each individual in that moment, as if words scribbled on a restaurant check have any transformative meaning. Which they might, as a body of work. Archer commented that he thinks that all of my random notes and ideas scattered throughout files and drawers and desks and the car might, pieced together, provide some universal truth. I see them as jottings, memory paths, but it might be fun someday to gather what is probably by now a fair number of words and thoughts and see what they are. I write them so I don't forget, but once written, they're gone. 1:01:25 AM