:: anne in the attic ::

Create Your Own Countdown

:: Sunday, December 19, 2004 ::

Looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, here, hoping it's not an oncoming headlight. If I can just make it to the end of next week, the work status changes go into effect and I can breathe again. Until then, I'm being dragged through the knothole backwards. Worked six days last week (that's not unusual), and five of them were twelve-hour days. It's trial by fire in the end zone, but I think I can make it. I just finished the bulk of my holiday shopping online this morning, just a few finishing touches to finesse locally. The brother showed up last night, and today we are cleaning and maintenancing his house for new tenants. Well, he is there already. I'll show up later with the vaccuum cleaner and two piping hot mochas to keep us warm in the sub-zero house.

Check out these "Random Quotes" from Pretty Pollution X :
(The "Fun Things I Would Do in My WorkPlace" section is also somewhat amusing....)

One in every four Americans has some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then its you.

Anywhere is walking distance, if you've got the time.

I am in shape. Round is a shape.

If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from?

Never argue with an idiot. He'll drag you down to his level and then beat you with experience.

:: Anne 1:45 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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::BULLETIN::

To all who still read this blog and know the sordid details of my work life for the past three years (and possibly even care)-- the overtime, the long days, the six-day weeks, having no control over ANYTHING: Upon returning from my vacation this morning, I was given the news that as of Christmas Day, I have been promoted! Ah, surely it will be a New Year this time, and I can finally have my damn life back. Celebration is definitely in order.

:: Anne 9:42 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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Blogku

Tried to post tonight.
"Internal Server Error."
Goddamn waste of time.


Blogger just gakked on my latest entry, which took at least half an hour and all the brain power I had left to write tonight, then spat me back a blank screen. I'd tried to highlight and copy the paragraphs right before they disappeared into oblivion, but it was not allowed within the editing venue. I'm furious, as this is the second time they've lost a big one as I've gone to publish. I used to think it was the universe hinting that there was something I needed to rework before it aired to the public, but now I suspect that it's just Blogger's ineptitude.

:: Anne 11:35 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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Sometimes events coincide with music discoveries in such a serendipitous way. Not that the events themselves could be considered good, but they are woven haplessly into the audio-visual tapestry of my memory in motion. The movies I create in my head are often set to music. The frames jump and skip and are sometimes out of focus; there is nothing to be done about it, the ravages of time on my faulty recall. I can't see it so clearly anymore, though I am trying. I am trying to catalog the things that will be lost -- nuances of a time, mostly, a child's biased and narrow memory.

Recently a school newsletter informed us of a change to the grounds that levelled a place I used to go for hours and lose myself in music. The drawing room in Ellen Browning Scripps Hall was converted into a student study center. It was where the boarders gathered three evenings a week while we waited for the double doors to open into the cafeteria which, for those Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, was converted to a sit-down dinner, a series of round-table assigned seats with our resident faculty each heading a table. There we learned the rituals of formal dining under dimmed lighting and had the chance to know our teachers and our peers in one of the mandatory venues of adulthood social graces. While we waited in the drawing room, the buzz of conversation was often lightly accompanied by one or both of the grand pianos, as many of us preferred the drawing room to the practice rooms and would conveniently practice right before dinner. In the time after afternoon sports and before dinners, I often found myself alone there. After dinner, after evening study hall, weekends, I spent much of my free time there. I loved being alone with the volume, the acoustics, the space. It was elegant, several floor plants thriving in the California weather, large Asian rugs spanning the spaces between couches and chairs, the picture window looking out onto Rohr Terrace. These things I remember so well, I could draw the room-- it's doors, the halls around it, Diedre Breidis' quarters somewhat removed yet near enough to hear concert hall echoes of the piano notes through the halls. k.d. lang's cover of "Helpless" plays over the demolition of this beautiful place. I would have wished to walk through it once more now, but it's not to be. It's gone, made ugly and antiseptic, like many of the liveable spaces were as the old boarding school was converted into a day school years ago.

Now the rooms are empty at night, devoid of the laughter and antics of the healthy, tan California girls who walked the halls, roamed the grounds after hours, snuck out to Jack-in-the-Box at midnight, or down to the beach, a mere three-block stroll from Prospect. Abandoned now. The architecture of Irving Gill still has an easy familiarity for me, as it became my home away from home... which, at the time, seemed more constant than anything else. It was where I grew up "as few people I've seen do as well," said a favorite teacher of mine once.

She is in Portland now, teaching high school science classes at an alternative school only two blocks from my brother's new apartment. I have walked his dog on the school grounds, which doubles as an off-leash dog park after hours; I have probably trod on the same soil as she. Funny. When she taught me, it was music. And I adored her. So I am torn. Maybe I would just like to remember things as they were, not disturb the goodness therein.

I am off work for a week now, my last vacation of 2004. It's booked fairly solidly, a tight balance between work and play. Already I am looking toward the one after.... is this how it goes, as life becomes so much more complicated, always looking ahead and missing the present? Feels like I'm always fighting that impulse lately.

:: Anne 9:40 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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I am at a loss over what to say about the results of our national elections. Bush re-elected, gay marriage banned in eleven states.... How can people be so selfish and stupid? Our corn-fed, xenophobic little nation is sitting on its fat corporate butt and pillaging other countries under the guise of false threats. And then about-facing, Bible in hand, telling other people that their love for each other is wrong and will not be allowed, or recognized constitutionally-- all the while teaching hatred and intolerance to their own children in schools that have no funding for art, music, or anything else pertaining to the beautification of souls. All right, I lied: I'm not at a loss over what to say; I'm just too pissed not to spout off.

Besides the losses on national & state levels, there are those within that won't seem to dissipate. Projects spurned, hopes dashed, wills thwarted. On the flip side, treasures recovered, hearts warmed, truths discovered. One cannot be weighed against the other; they simply are what they are, the workings of daily living. One takes them all or one takes them naught. For now, I am still willing to take them all. It takes but one shred of beauty in a fleeting moment to string me along for another day, week, month. And I know it's worth all of it, just some days take more convincing than others.

All in, people, all in. Time to take stock, figure out the next move. We're not done yet.

:: Anne 1:12 AM [smartass remarks] ::
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Just want to mention some brilliant verbal gems from my current favorite film, "Laurel Canyon:"

1. "My clock is fucked." -- Jane.
2. "I was sublimating you." -- Sarah.
3. Nearly everything that comes out of Gloria's mouth in the hospital, but especially "You don't understand naked -- naked is inner."

If I am to acknowledge that a significant portion of my daily life requires sublimation, then I should clarify. My social ineptitude is such that I often do not trust in my own responses, so I may shroud them in give-a-fuck attitudes and other risk-removing devices. But if you keep people at bay long enough, they just might give up on you. The social dance is an intricate and complex combination of steps. And it is certainly not my forte, but how much am I willing to trip and fall in order to lay foundations and put myself out there? I guess I should just learn which situations are okay for me and which are not. Dances are decidedly not. Nature walks are. It's frustrating not to have better intuition about these things at this late date in my life. But in many ways, I feel that I am just now awakening to how I am in the world; for so long, I didn't actually have to BE in the world, not really. Hard to explain, but I've always been somewhat removed from it. Now, though much of my life still occurs within the confines of what I have built, there are factors that cannot be ignored, and push me head-first into an unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable arena.

:: Anne 4:04 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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Sometimes it's hard to come to terms with how utterly insignificant my life is.

:: Anne 11:07 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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The feeling I have been having trouble describing lately comes to me now as this: a heaviness of soul. I don't suppose I know what that means. Guess I'd better get on with my life's work. I do know that I'm damn glad to have other Virgos in this life; each one I come to know is important to me. References to "God" & other such arrogances aside, I honestly do not kid myself about this: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of my spiritual and intellectual journey, I may stand before you holding a body of knowledge that I have acquired through my life experiences thus far. But it is you all who are my teachers in this. When all is said and done, you peel away the tough layers of these experiences and gently turn me to look at the simple truths therein, to accept and know what has become of me. I thank you as I try to find ways to return that in kind. A well-deserved Happy Birthday wish goes out to all the hardworking Virgos in the world.

:: Anne 11:52 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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Yesterday the oval Jiffy Lube sign spun on its aerial axis like a too-bright bean against the charcoal sky, a sky about to open up and release rain in biblical proportions.

Today steam rises from the streets in pockets of sunlight in an alternating rinse and dry cycle of relief upon the desiccated straw-colored grass.

Only yet August, the very first inklings of Fall arrive in small signs: a solitary vermillion birch leaf, drunken yellow jackets stumbling among fallen green apples, a slight odor of satiety, a feeling of having been too long in the sun.

:: Anne 7:52 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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Sometimes it's necessary to maintain radio silence in order to know what to say next. It's less a matter of nothing to say than of a careful sifting through of the incredible mass of thoughts, musings, experiences. It's also a matter of time and energy. For the next two weeks, I am granted somewhat of a reprieve in the form of an 8-hour-a-day limitiation. In September, that will be relaxed into a 10-hour limit, followed by a full release in October. Thank you, Dr. B. I am hoping this means a return to many of the projects I've had to set down for a while, including this one.

In the studio, there are several projects in various stages of rough drafts. I'm itching to polish some of them, hoping to ideate and create some more, with time on my hands. I can't seem to find the song I want to cover next, something from those years I played with James a lot. It was by a local band called The Detonators. According to research and websites, they are still around, I guess.

While walking through Home Depot this afternoon, I may have discovered that the familiar scent of the Mount Shasta KOA may have something to do with an unknown array of wood and cleaning supplies. There are some things I feel I will never know about my own past, and I can't seem to shake that off.

In the meantime, sleep is rather elusive. I suppose the vigilant could surmise that from the time stamp on this post. Ah, the new democracy of blogging, an accessible forum of expression for all. More thoughts on this at http://www.blogger.com/knowledge/2004/08/eats-blogs-leaves.pyra

Soon, the morning bicycle commute will require a sweater. The air will clear from the late summer harvests and burnings. Next, the leaves will begin to turn. Then for about three days, usually after the first truly cold snap some time in October, the brilliant leaves will flutter down and swirl through the air and surround our every outdoor move in one last reminder of where we're headed, where we've been. So soon.

:: Anne 2:22 AM [smartass remarks] ::
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...And the smell of the redwood forest of Mount Shasta is still with me, so familiar-- my birthplace, my home. So the question occurs to me: Did I return to say hello? ...Or good-bye? Either way, I've been gone too long.

:: Anne 11:25 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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Some post-"Pilgrimage to California" road trip musings:

Thirty-year-old memories, like the bubbles in blown glass, are distorted, permanent, deeply embedded, hand-hewn. The human element had its effect long ago, and now time slowly erodes them until the dust can be simply blown away.

I think of the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious," in which the main character suffers a perfect memory for every detail of his existence, his experience. At one point, he expresses a difficulty in having the same name for "a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile)" as for "[the same dog] at three-fifteen (seen from the front)." On some level, I would have to agree on the propriety of incorporating both time and perspective into our nomenclature, specific as we already believe it to be.

How else could I explain that the house at Robert Court, seen from all sides in 1969 at the four-year-old height and comprehension, is not the same as the house seen from the front in 2004 at the thirty-eight-year-old height and comprehension? Yet it is the same house. In the same place. And parts of the old memories fall together easily, some of them normal, heartening, others eerie and somewhat alien.

Perhaps now, as an adult, I wonder what my life really was like back then. I'd like to go back and take a closer look-- not to affect or to change circumstances, but just to observe them, to know them better. What am I forgetting? Have I lost something integral? I want to know. It's kind of why I went back. Guess I didn't quite know that when I left here.

Not knowing the alternatives, I think that I am grateful things went the way they did: it's the only way I could end up here... now. Perhaps that's a bit fatalistic, but with the twist of choice, of the possibilities of many paths which always lay before us in the potential. In a way, Kirk's life ended early so that mine became as it is today. I would thank him for the choice to have a child enter his life, if only briefly, and for sowing the seeds for my life in just the way that he must have. And, when I finally made it back thirty-five years later, for showing up on cue.

:: Anne 9:35 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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There isn't even enough time within a day to describe how much I am required to do these days. And just how taxing it has been with no time for my spirit to run free. All of my time is spoken for, my energies promised.

While I seek to escape an excess of external structure, I am delving into another kind within, as I continue the work at hand in my head (now there's an image). Before the pencil can be raised and the notes transcribed, there must be a basic construct. Primarily, there's the arrangement of another artist's song at which I want to try my hand. But always in the background, my own work clears and blurs, like I'm trying to read sheet music lying at the bottom of a busy swimming pool while standing at the surface.

I have a vision of standing near the edge of fantastic green cliffs overlooking the wild ocean, not a structure in sight, the life around me sounding itself, Whitman's "barbaric yawp." Soon. I will go there, go where. I am nearly suffocating here in civilization.

"'Nature' is what we call the world around us when we sense that it is alive." -"Nature" on PBS

:: Anne 10:52 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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I think I understand now why Jay Gatsby threw those parties. Not so much to encourage people he didn't know to like him, but rather to create a situation where he enjoyed himself, drifting between the different mini-cultures that cohere within gatherings. It was about experience. Yes, boredom, but I think he had more going on inside than most realized besides the desire for Daisy.

What brought this on? Perhaps my own desire to spend time with others in various experiences. There are, of course, certain things that I will do alone, want to do alone, such as this upcoming trip to California. But I seek a balance between my need for solitary pursuits and my want to share good company and life experiences: a balance so delicately wrought, it seems. It's not easy to find those superlative horses, as the parable goes, and life is too brief and too dear to spend it with those who do not mesh with a person's values, ideals. I think it was Emerson who said that the first criteria of high friendship is the ability to do without it. I love that-- and I translate it to mean an impermeable autonomy, a sense of self that is strong enough not to be compromised by any relationship. And that is what I seek in others, along with certain politics, and perhaps a list of basic values. We all do this, I think, but more intuitively. I mean really, who else with whom to share the experiences you value most highly than ones who are likely to appreciate them as well?

:: Anne 6:29 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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There may be a pilgrimage in May for the first part of my vacation week. I have conjured old ghosts and pieces of memories that need to be completed somehow. It looks like a road trip to California, with apologies to my Seattle friends. This is not so much a relaxing pleasure trip as a compelling documentary of curiosity and partial memories. I am not sure if it will really happen, but I will do my part in preparation, in hopes that the universe will offer the rest. Aside from the cameras, I plan to go alone.

These days I am also learning about goodbyes. There are so many kinds, it seems. And I never seem to learn how to do it well. Each time I am faced with one, I begin again from ground zero. Instincts call me to flight, and sometimes I listen. Practice, in this instance, does not seem to matter much at all.

:: Anne 11:14 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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Last night I dreamt of spiders. All kinds, but mostly big ones, dark ones. My mom and I were on a road trip together, and one of the places we stopped was a hostel that was kind of under construction. The deal was that if you wanted to stay there, you had to pitch in a little with the construction. When we parked our car, it was inadvertently right over a "spider pit." (Where do I come up with these things?) The spiders were angry, as they were guarding white marble-sized silk balls full of eggs-- lots of them. And when we got inside of the half-finished hostel, there was quite a jockey for bed space, and we ended up in a very spidery area. The little buggers were fast, too, and they could jump. It seems the spiders were bothering me more than mom. We were discussing driving on down the road when I woke up. I haven't had an "icky" dream in a while, so I don't know what's up with that. Tomorrow, mom's driving in and we're going to work outside for a bit, but I don't think that warrants scary spider dreams.

Yup, it's vacation week #1 for 2004. I've actually accomplished quite a bit, though not as much as I wished. Guess I had to come to terms with the fact that all I wanted to do just wasn't possible within the time frame of one week. Not and do any kind of socializing. I've managed to get the music studio together, made some worthy hardware purchases, I hope. I've also connected with a few folks, so I don't feel totally isolated. Mostly, I've been letting the creativity ooze at will. With a dedicated space for that, it's so easy just to walk into that venue, sit down, and do it. That, after all, was the idea. It seems I may have some collaborators as well. I want to release my expectations about what happens in there, let go of too much structure; sometimes the greatest things occur unexpectedly.

:: Anne 8:47 AM [smartass remarks] ::
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Happy Birthday to my little blog, which is a year old this month.

After a week of chilly mornings and sunny afternoons, the crocuses have opened fully. Like small cupped hands, they seem to offer up some small hope after the storms of winter. I've been working in another area that has what I have called mortuary homes, for their architecture, their vertices, their quiet, careful expanse. Their straight and sombre lines are offset by the twisted branches of the curly willows. When in these areas, there seems to be room to move inside my head while I work, room for my thoughts to wander or pause. And they do. It seems my songwriting has picked up some (as it seems to do in February, my month-most-hated).

I finally ordered the new computer I've been researching. It's a powerful machine with a mean clock speed, a double RAID-1 drive, 2GB of DDR RAM, Audigy 2 sound, and a nice big, visible-from-across-the-room flat screen monitor. This is the recording studio, a dedicated machine. In a week or two, it will arrive, once they have built and sufficiently tested my custom demands. Anticipating this new addition, I am busy preparing appropriate space -- clearing, cleaning, arranging. Will this be the final tool, I wonder, the catalyst of time and space that will allow me to finish the work I have begun?

Through others, I am also in remembrance these days. There have been losses all around me, and I step carefully among them, sidestepping my own as I acknowledge theirs. What a dance it takes to do this. I will not say the word, for it does not do justice to what goes on beneath. But Ericsson wrote that it is what "makes us look for a face in the crowd, knowing full well the face we want cannot be found in any crowd."

:: Anne 10:22 AM [smartass remarks] ::
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What is the wisdom of the moment? William Bell said it best with "a smile can't hide a broken heart." Everywhere I turn these days, people are coping. There are those who try to keep the volume down, who cope in quiet desperation; and then there are those who cope all over themselves, it seems. Is this just something that comes with adulthood, that a person learns to recognize the pain in others? Mom? Dad? Or is this race of women and men encountering such sorrow that their predecessors could never have known? Either way, I feel it heavy in the air. Approaching storm? Perhaps the barometric pressure has us all on edge. But I think it's the times that's weighing us down. We all have the usual progression of human life to carry, that's nothing new. But we've accelerated our culture such that now it's that much more possible for many wolves to be at one's door all at once. Instant access to everything: pleasure, knowledge, information, communications, commerce, danger, disease, imminent disaster. It's all at hand. Do I sound like a doomsday prophet? I guess it's more like a theory of the melding of time to space to thought, where it feels like every moment of the past and every iota of history and fact rushes up to meet you and travels with you, your own personal internet hovering just above your head like some binary aura without a shadow. Only, it does have a shadow -- a conceptual one, which is cast only by its potential: good or evil, your choice. These days we can do everything faster, more thoroughly, to the nth degree -- and I fear that probably, eventually, somebody will. Is it really that surprising then, despite the brilliant experiences and joys our inventions have afforded us, that we are such a depressed nation? All of this from a self-confessed techie, and very possibly a flunkie in matters of the heart.

:: Anne 7:48 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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A thin layer of snow covers the skylights of my house, muting what little light the grayish winter days have had to offer. Since the New Year, getting around has been like skating, trudging, and plowing.

As I have been coccooned and doing battle with this winter's plague of flu, my list of things to do grows in my hazy head. January is when I look toward Spring with all of my might, pushing forward, trying to avoid various seasonal ruts and such. It seems there's never room enough for the people and things I wish to experience in my small life. Reach for something, and I have to let go of something else. In order to go toward one place, I must leave another. A transitive state, simply moving. It is a hope I harbor that the choices I make will also choose me.

:: Anne 4:10 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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