lychee

the only thing you have to do, is die.

plants.

i planted two lychee seeds (pips) in a clear, cubic vase with two scoops of potting soil. the soil was sitting in a large plastic bag, folded over, on one corner of the deck. i couldn't remember the last time i had intentionally touched dirt, or touched it with the intention of putting it to use. i felt like i was freeing some kind of black but wholesome magic from a rubber body bag. dirt, soil, in a bag, kept in the corner.

i filled the vase, pressed the soil down and was reminded of tamping espresso. manipulating earth, pressing natural matter into itself for a desired affect felt a lot like praying for the first time in years. pushing dirt into a vase evoked tactile memories -- hands pressing clay, plunging into barrels of dried legumes, smearing red clay on my chest. dirt -- even the kind that comes premixed and aerated -- is a kind of mana ingredient like blood and anything with potential energy -- a womb for life, an egg, chlorophyll. it is nothing and everything, common and miraculous, filthy and sanctifying, dark and magical.

i stopped. i can't plant these seeds without reading a how to. i need to google "planting lychee seeds" before i continue. spliced into my dirt euphoria was this idea of not knowing how to plant seeds, an awareness of how long it had been since i'd purposely touched dirt paired with the shock of not really knowing how to plant a seed. was the seed too dry? should i soak it first, suspend it with toothpicks in a glass filled with water and set to bake in a windowsill? had i waited too long between the time i pulled the seed from the lychee and now, and what about this pot, was it the right shape and size? anxieties that would rattle ancestral chains and made me wonder if basic respiration would someday require directions.

instead, i pressed a forefinger near the center of the vase -- just deep enough to leave an inch above and below the tips of the seeds. i guessed which end should go up and which end would sprout roots. i had no knowledge of lychees, their seeds, or basic horticultural experience aside from sprouting beans in first grade. what i knew about them came from picking them up at chinatown stalls on canal street in a blue plastic bag that said 'thank you' at least a dozen times. from mantle to core, lychee anatomy begins with a hot pink geometric helmet, a pale membrane, and a phallic layer of middle jelly around a mahogany seed. the seed is ornamental, something that should be kept and not discarded.

i dropped the seeds in the holes and covered them with dirt.


curiosity ensued.

i googled it.

several variations on planting lychee seeds -- water the soil, don't water the soil (water the gravel beneath the soil), give it plenty of air to breathe, choke it with saran wrap and rubber bands, high humidity, low humidity, full sunlight, cool dark and damp.

my lychee-planting method -- however ill-conceived or unresearched -- followed intution and best guessery. before this morning and several thousand mornings before it, someone had to guess which end goes up, how much sunlight is necessary and whether to water the soil or the gravel long before the days of saran wrap, rubber bands or google. maybe ignorance is the new final frontier.  

soundtrack

on a standard stroll through the park i found this *everyday exotic* view of the conservatory of flowers. i like the chipped-tooth, torn edge of the fence and the branches straining for a peek at the great white nipple that houses first class flora, conserves them.

i remember being six and sitting in the passenger seat of a bright yellow ryder truck with the windows down, listening to tracy chapman sing revolution and crossing the golden gate bridge with my dad and my sister singing along. 

it sounds like a whisper
and finally the tables are starting to turn

i thought of the lines cut into a pond, with sisters and skates. how many lines are recut--rigid against new lines and directions, rejecting right angles, covering the surface with oblong laps and figure eights. over and over the same lines until the surface is scarred with overlapping lives -- five-fingered reincarnations of the same dizzy girl on the same solemn pond, year after year. i thought of my dad singing american pie, playing his guitar alone in every basement i can remember:

oh, and there we were all in one place
a generation lost in space
with no time left to start again

i want to write a love letter to my generation. weeks before i finished graduate school, nyu discovered an indian burial ground beneath the fountain in washington square. native american holy land, desecrated by decades of poets, students, lovers, dealers and sidewalk chalk. the famed graduation ceremony at the replicated arc de triomphe would be canceled so the fountain could be moved into alignment with the archway, by a matter of inches. exceptional circumstances, a year suspended in construction, redirected pathways, undesirable detours, and a city built on bones -- all harbingers of a new soundtrack. we set out early, only to find the road signs painted over with hot tar, to deter the invaders. stamped, soaked, dried and processed for a world that didn't exist, we stepped into a ring of tigers with handfuls of daisies. and as they told us, as all good christians should know, nothing is new under the sun. but the events of the day are recaps of past lines cut into a frozen sea, towers falling at rapid speed -- a dramatic mock-up of cataclysm. quietly offed and sent downstream, mine are casualties of a revolution. water-carved canyons cleared the canvas for a new order,  where death was a prerequisite for life. and the gifts of death are the great lakes, the urgency to act and the atoms of stardust in our bodies. cutting and clearing the old to allow the new to emerge -- to be a part of an evolution -- is the organic fate and folly of the ones caught in the crosshairs of a new cycle. we aren't the last, we're the sacred mulch for a more fluid and amorphous disorder -- a place to love and belong once it's finished. in the meantime, we keep reaching for the fallen railings of then:

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn't play.


.outside the conservatory of flowers.

adios mariposa

mother

the next time someone asks me what i do, i am going to ask them, when?

the next time i ask someone what they do, i will follow it with, what else?

a human's capacity to burn up the things that humans create constitutes that human's value. who are we outside of that?

the next time someone asks me what i want to do, i will tell them "i want to be a lighthouse".

i have a friend in yemen, working with usaid. he sent me a long, instructive email outlining the chicken + the egg conundrum associated with finding a job. he is helping yemeni people transition from a turbulent past into a turbulent future -- problems that money and weapons can solve, problems that money and weapons conceived. humans are tools used by their own tools, solutions to the problems they create. problems are not opportunities, they are problems. so many mantras are geared toward denial of emotion. you aren't sad, you are disconnected from true self. you aren't isolated, you are temporarily removed from your essence.

where is truth in all of this?

the inside outside nature of our world becomes religion--it becomes rote--because it is never questioned.

i'm thinking about hope versus expectation.

what are we taught to expect from life? how much of that actually comes true?

if you do this, if you are good enough, if you persevere, if you kiss enough ass, you will get where you want to go.

and where you want to go is also preordained.

try to think outside of institutions for a moment...if someone asked you what you would like to be when you grow up, and you aren't thinking within the confines of institution, would you even know what growing up means? let alone, the concept of being some thing?

i've been thinking about hope in love. being asymmetrically conditioned to believe in expectation rather than hope leaks into every aspect of being. take relationships for an easy example: think of the last relationship you had that ended in disaster or tragedy. was there an expectation that was unmet? or a hope that was mutually undefined, mutually forsaken? perhaps there was both. expectation is man made -- a synthetic construct that stems from stories made up in our minds about how a person is meant to behave in certain circumstances. the rules for living are defined from an early age, with very minimal derivation from what is dictated. who benefits from these rules?

today i went to church. there was coffee in the lobby, with a sign that said, "strong coffee. you are welcome to enjoy it in sanctuary". the rules of sanctity, of decorum, of church and sanctuary were thus broken. i sat in the chapel, children were wandering the aisles, and two of them brought me gerber daisies in appreciation of womanhood -- specifically, motherhood. the sermon was about the gift of motherhood. i thought about being a mother -- something i have given up on as a prospective milestone in my life. i wondered why motherhood was such a mark of honor, aside from the obvious "days are long, years are short" mantra that mothers have to recite in order to avoid infanticide. for a woman, within the confines of institution, a child is not just a symbol of human propogation, of mankind being promoted through the sacrifices of womankind. it has become an individual status symbol. if a woman is married, a child in a stroller signifies value. someone valued me enough to choose me as a mating partner. i have been entrusted with the propogation of a socially competitive member of our species. a child born to an unmarried mother also boasts something -- despite the stigma. her attraction, her temptation, is a two-in-one shame and a glory. or, it is evidence of a lack of education. someone somehow somewhere failed to inform this woman. or, she took the information and ignored it, leaving ignorance as the gateway to the survival of humanity.


fewer women are having children now. why?

what if, instead of parents, everyone had a mentor? what if, instead of adhering to socially or religiously mandated expectations, people adopted mentees and cared for them the same way they cared for their own or prospective children? to foster the growth of just one other human being -- regardless of whether or not they came from your reproductive DNA--to create this buzzword/verbal bullion/award-winning element called change...is it all a matter of demanding individual accountability? fidel castro saw education as a compelling alternative to imprisonment. he also predicted that by the mid 1980s, education would be unnecessary in cuba because cuba's population would be so educated that simply living in cuba would be education enough. that the children of an educated cuba would be naturally exposed (not entitled) to adequate education. maybe they would not be competitive in a globalized world. but what are the virtues of a globalized education? as long as hegemonic ideology abounds, as long as headlines are dominated by agenda, a globalized agenda is only euphemism for the ability to afford a peek into the control room of a faux wizard, one who wishes to propogate rules that serve its own narrow agenda. how brilliant to farm humans through a conveyor belt of beliefs that serve a minority? that rob them of humankind's only hope for survival, and that is independent and uncorrupted thought and insight.

what are we taught to hope for? is hope discussed in school? is hope implied, or is expectation the currency of compulsory "education"?

i ask people who go to high school and junior high, what did you learn today? the answer is invariably, "nothing". i don't chock this up to hormonal disinterest. i think the people that are currently being educated are not being prepared or encouraged to lead. they are being discouraged from thinking outside of pre-approved religion. a religion of creation, consumption, and status.

how cool would it be to visit an earth filled with humans who believe or know only what incidental and informal education has taught them? humans unchained to ideas that build false constructs that seem to satisfy needs for survival while destroying hope for true existence?

what if we were unconcerned with development. what if countries were not defined by their level of "development". what if development itself did not look like a steeled industrial machine. what if millions of people sharing one toilet was unheard of, because someone imagined a better way that didn't step on any financial agendas, if the way your body and soul felt every single day was more precious than any other commodity?

air, space, sound, silence, health -- the things that are irreplaceable and sacred, sell for more imagined wealth than anything else. quality of life. backward people. modernity. we cannot look eachother in the eye. we reject the religion of our parents. but we have nothing to replace it with. what is less absurd about using man's random choices to explain social and global phenomena than using ancient deities to explain the seasons, the existence of an afterlife, the lots dealt to men in this physical life?

in this return to the green, to whole foods, to using recycled grocery bags, to the rich hijacking sustainability as a mark of eptitude...where is the return to original thought? why do we still value "higher" education as the key to a better life?

the key to a better earth lies in this distinction between hope and expectation.

what do we hope for? what do we expect? what was expected of us? what is hoped for for us?

what do we do as a matter of course that builds hope? what do we do as a matter of course that fulfills expectation?

as science is eroded by truth -- and humans recall their roots in magic, in the inexplicable and the incalculable, maybe we will allow for hope to be a more widely accepted pasttime, instead of amplifying expectation as the shortsighted solution to unforeseen disaster.

it's what lies in whitespace, in the silence between the notes, in the words that aren't spoken and the forgotten topics that will elevate humans from formulaic chains to the infinite realms of pure existence.

when the words that we speak create a texture that can be felt and make the eyes of the listener engage and recall a more primitive rhythm, we can begin to make the paradoxical journey -- a forward movement that requires a dedicated return.

unschooled

lately i've been thinking about institutions and experts.

some of the smartest people i know did not finish college. in fact, to imagine them sitting in a university classroom is to imagine smog teaching a field of lilies a thing or two about purity.

i want to be unschooled. i want my mind back. i want to be able to imagine without wondering if i'm right or wrong. i want to know who i would be if i could forget everything that i think i know.

everything is questionable, even questioning itself.

writing has become harder than ever. i question every word i put down, question my authority on any subject i write about. approaching a subject, picking up a pen, typing a paper has been institutionalized as an academic or personal affair. if hours have not been logged, certain formulas adhered to, it is usually garbage. in rare cases, when a text or work of art is so subversive, it can skip a few steps. but with that comes jail time.

i was in the grocery store and i thought about the movement of people in the room, in the world, doing ordinary things that seem strange when examined. anything unpredictable or off the rails of what's expected is immediately noticed. then there is a reaction. then there is a consequence. and the unpredictable action doesn't have to be harmful in order to be abhored. it only needs to be counter to what everyone else does, to the institutions in place. i put a bottle down on the bread shelf and garnered a filthy stare from an old lady carrying a basket. i felt a thrill of liberation. i thought, maybe i need to break some rules--maybe even some laws--to feel my own agency again. what are we all so afraid of? how far are we from being reined in? who benefits from this automatic programming? it is psychologically numbing.

being unique is a marketable commodity. as much as people tend to march in line and to avoid subversive behavior, they are also hungry for ways to differentiate. nonetheless...words are usually automatic, even if they're all your own. responses are rehearsed, reactions archived in memory, derived from soap operas. this is how i act when this happens...this is how i act when he says that. layer upon layer of learned behavior beginning with institutions that were in place before we got here.

the people who change the institutions are unpopular, at least in some circles and for some time. i thought today, how easy it is to go to jail. i thought, how much of what i do and think are not actually from me?

questioning institutions is the new black. the people who do it well, however, go to jail. or they make a lot of money.

just like the brilliant people whose imaginations are pristinely unschooled, those unbound by preexisting opinions (rules) break them. and in so doing, institutions are eroded. and the people who worked hard to build them are the same ones who have the authority to punish the ones who did not.

it's hard to write when your words just look like silly string on a straight line...what's the point? it's just another programmed behavior and not the primitive eruptions of an unpolluted mind. most of that is conditioning: thoughts about who "should" be writing and who should not. who are the experts, what makes a person praiseworthy, who the public trusts with prestigious titles.

you write to prove a point. you drive to get somewhere. you eat to have energy. you work to survive. you run to be healthy. you love to find meaning. all purposes like flashcards with a front and a back, a question and an answer. reasons for everything and still, nothing makes sense.

what is the value in forced compatibility? if you do not fit within a given framework, is it possible to break the frame and paint a new picture without getting caught?

alembic

E got a promotion, so we went out to celebrate.

we took the 33 Sacto. + cherry to haight, where we met em and van. em used to be a professional organizer -- she has firsthand stories about hoarders-- mostly men--people who could not be separated from towers of keepsakes, squalid crap bonanzas. her boyfriend, van, is studying library science. when we arrived, he looked like mr. rogers from the waist up, saturday morning cartoons from the drawstring down. em introduced her cat, jezebel, who matched the color scheme in the living room (gray, white, lime green). van's cat also greeted us -- a gray velvet conniver known as copernicus.

me: do you use his full name every time you call him?

van: no, his nickname is fuck ass.

we pryed van away from his take-home final and walked down haight in search of a bar called alembic.

van: you know what i can't stand? when people use digital terms in place of traditional words like, 'the four of us should find a time to interface about this issue'. '

E: right? have you ever hugged someone and said, "yep, i'm downloading this..." someone used the wrong tense of 'marinate' in a meeting today...'let's let them marinade in it for a while"...
 
alembic was packed.

em: alembic. leave it to san francisco to name a bar with a word that no one knows.

van: it's a tool used in the distillation process.

we stood in the clogged lane between the bar and the wall ledge where drinks passed by on damp trays, dirty looks exchanged, geometric prints on sheer tees, a man with a beard longer than the hair on his head.

the drink menu had a [23] in the upper left corner, and each drink had a paragraph describing the history of churned butter or porcelain china.  

i ordered the gilded lily (complete with gin and a drop of gold) em, the love in vain (finished with a dash of orange bitters) van, a white russian.

no white russians, only vice grips. van settled.

vice grip: ¾ ounce araku rum
coffee liqueur
3 ounces brachetto d’aqui, chilled
2 ounces porter foam

van: you know what i hate about being a so-called "grown up"? that you can't do certain things anymore because they're "inappropriate". for example, i'd like to just jump up and sit on the ledge here, but you know i'd be asked to leave, or it would just break and fall off the wall...

E ordered a manhattan, told a story about his friend in ohio who used to make infused vodkas. cherries, sugar, brandy in a jam jar.

we sat down, in the corner. i faced the room, E sat to my right, van on my left, Em on the far left.

E ordered the entire appetizer menu: truffled popcorn, cheese platter, olives, sliders, potato chips and meyer lemon aioli, olives, shishito peppers. Em described her boss as a woman who is on a liquid diet but is, nonetheless, 300 pounds over the legal limit. she drinks potato leek soup for lunch. her first name is an adjective (with the vowel purposely reordered to spell mysti). i hoped her last name was a noun. and it was: a type of fruit.

van also has a boss. after checking a book out to a kindergartener that turned out to be a story about two male penguins that find an egg and raise the resulting chick. the kid's parents were inflamed. van was told by his boss that he must be informed, read: know what every book he scans and hands to a child is about.

the cheese inspired inappropriate references, anti-table talk.

E ordered a bottle of rose, which we drained over talk of hometowns. all refugees from some non-coastal town where dreams get squashed by religion or PhD's bag groceries... all generic and familiar tales of shelving shabby origins for a more glamorous spot on the map.

we left.

the 33 squeaked to a stop and without a farewell, E and I rambled down arguello.

we need to get you a bullhorn and a director's chair. and we still need to bake you a cake for mother's day. x

animal

clarion

field trip to the mission.

dolores

swingle

"Just touching base +"...."Just wanted to touch base to"....

the jcc had individual screens on each machine...a guard who half-assedly glanced inside the car when we pulled into the garage, pastel schedules with mind/body classes, wine specials in the lobby. E fell off the elliptical machine -- the drawstring on his vibram shoe unfit for indoor activities and all of its crevices, pulleys, plastic shields and foot plates. for a moment he just laid there, unamused, his back arched along the snailhump of the machine's rear wheel. a large plastic cover fell off and rolled to a sad cradling wobble on the floor. E ambled to his feet, ignored the damage, and found a new machine.

 a girl with a lanyard placed a sign on the machine within minutes "This Machine Is Temporarily Out of Order. We are aware of this situation and an attendant has been notified. A technician will be remedying the situation shortly. Thank you for your patience". perhaps a first line of defense against riotous dawn-loving gym goers? and "remedying"?? inbox gained a 1, hugged by parentheses, subject line: so gd funny!!!! focus on this. get this out of the way first, then find out what is so gd funny!!!!!

E picked a machine 11 treadmills to the left, where he could still see me in the mirror. occasionally, he would speed up when he saw that his up down up down had synchronized or fallen behind mine.or maybe he saw nick the trainer, his secret crush. he had a towel, but when the sweat dripped he used his hand to swat at in a malarial stupor.

the (1) burned brighter...what is so gd funny!!!!!! ?

"Just touching base + seeing if you might have some time next week..." might, may...should "touching" and "seeing" really hold hands in the same sentence for an unknown entity?

click.

smelly trees! smelly trees in boston...a common spooge tree...all interspliced by text-inspired "ads by google".

this tree seems to be really popular around greater Boston. it has 5 white petals on each flower and the leaves look similar to this alternate drawing. the worst part is that while it's flowering, the tree smells like semen or vagina, depending on who you ask. what kind of tree is it? it's definitely not the Chinese chestnut

make it conversational, casual, friendly...don't overthink it. don't second guess and start splitting verbal atoms.

Don't feel bad. I was recently at a friends house and smelled semen all evening, finally realizing it was that damn tree. One of their housemates had taken a branch of the flowers and put them in a vase. They looked like the ones in the third picture from turgid dahlia's post.

click. reply. HAHAHA so what are the sperm trees actually called?? "common spooge tree" ha.

send.

oh.my.GOD. gym brain. distraction and laughter. too many windows open closes one big port cullis. possibly nails it shut. maybe it sounds editorial. maybe spooge is an actual tree? consulting google... Also known as “the spooge tree”, because its blooms smell like semen. Using an annoying and invasive intruder to take out another annoying and invasive intruder…that’s absolutely brilliant.

no redemption.

The Web's Bitter Afterbirth. Cruel.com's squeal sequel, worshipping coarse & offensive satire, the ridiculous and subslime in ...

maybe she's from boston. maybe this is a google query she has been dying to investigate -- and look, research is done and delivered. maybe spooge means springtime where i'm from. some clever explanation, some anecdotal reasoning for saying "spooge" to a perfect and professional stranger is in order... Scientific name: Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle.