words

Batman Lizard

Beach kid, tiny little hoodie, gooey face, waiting for the movie to start: “Did you see this?”

He holds out a broken seashell.

Me, admiring it: “That’s…shiny.”

Him, earnest: “No, no, no, no, I mean yeah.” He stares with deep concern, first at the shell, then at the movie screen, then at me again. “It’s wet. So it’s shining cuz of the movie screen.”

I wait.

His brother, grabbing it. “This is like, oh my god, it’s so pretty.” Handing it back, they hold it together, up to my face, wait for an adult to finally see something. I know now that their language is their vision and I can no longer speak it. They know this, too, but in their sadness and kindness and hope and frustration, keep trying to help another big dummy see what’s beyond her grasp.

I try.

“Once I found a lizard,” I tell them, “with half a tail. She didn’t run away because she was cold. She had cool eyes and markings, just like other lizards, and her tail maybe grew back. But half a tail meant she was in some kinda danger once. She fought a lizard war.”

Enormous eyes. “Like a Batman lizard.”

I nod. “Like a Batman lizard. She was broken differently from all other lizards.”

A longish pause. It gets awkward. The little brother runs toward the ocean and falls down on purpose, to break the tension. The boy who found the shell eases, breathes and jerks his head toward projector noise. He drops his shell in the sand to wipe the goo off his lips as the movie begins.

Killing a Southern Belle

Helping a friend unload amps out of the back of his van and into a dark theater, I looked over the street at some serious blue in the air. Magic hour mist glows cobalt in LA. “Look at the blue,” I said, pointing. Killing a Southern Belle was blasting out of the van windows, so my friend couldn’t hear me, but he turned around anyway and repeated back, “Look at the blue!”

I mean, it was very striking.

“I’m done panicking now!” he shouted over the music. Reaching in the passenger side window, I turned it down so I could hear him. “Blue is better than scared,” he added quietly.

I never thought of him as a panicker. A thinker, but not a panicker. He was kind of my hero in this regard, being able to think without panicking. “Blue is way better than scared,” I agreed. “What were you panicking about?”

He grinned. “Everything! Turn Elliott back up.” I did and, listening, he meditatively took a guitar in each hand, then put one down to light a cigarette, calm as all hell. I tried to find the panic in there…couldn’t.

Sudden screaming brakes, then two cars collided next to us, slowly crunching together, their metal pliable with the force of impact. We watched, as did some dog walkers, a couple matching jogger ladies and a cyclist. The cars slowed to a stop but no drivers emerged, nobody did anything. “Just when I was starting to feel safe,” said my friend through the smoke around his face. “Trying to, anyway.”

“Safe?” I asked. We all know people who are born safe, and others who are helped along by kind childhoods or boring lives, but does trying to feel safe work? The cars sat, scrunched together on the pavement, half a tire up on the sidewalk. The dog walkers sat, too, the joggers slowed to a stop and the cyclist took off his helmet. Witnesses to an accident, they had become sidewalk people. “Yeah, safe,” said my friend, putting his cigarette out on a guitar case and lighting another.

“Write a safe set list,” I suggested and he nodded, then shook his head. “An unsafe set list’ll give me bigger muscles.” He smiled and rolled his eyes. “I’m such a pussy,” he added.

“So am I,” I told him, which is true. Silhouettes of passengers in the dented cars wiggled around. “But we’re safe.”

He dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and ground it out with his foot. Taking a second to look at me like I was nuts, he lit another cigarette. “Ya think?”

I guess what I meant was, if we aren’t safe, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t say that; he was on his third cigarette. We watched the car accident still life and I wondered what the repercussions of panic might be. An impression of safety seems necessary in order for some of us to do the right thing. Not just when we feel like it, but always. Keeps fight-or-flight style self protective measures in check. So is morality a luxury? We ask it of everyone, but there are those who seem ill-equipped. “You’re right,” I told him. “We’re not safe.”

“Nobody is.”

But it doesn’t matter, I thought.

We squinted into blue as the two drivers climbed out of their cars, both on cell phones. The dog walkers and dogs moved toward them. I’d assumed the cars contained shaken, annoyed people, but really, no one had even honked a horn in this accident; two metal boxes just melded. The drivers shook hands and laughed. A cop pulled up, waving. She was smiling, as were the sidewalk people. Also? My friend, whose three half-smoked panic cigarettes lay on the ground at his feet. I picked them up when he grabbed his other guitar and ran into the theater to practice unsafe songs in private and grow stronger muscles in public. I don’t even want to breathe, sang Elliott in the van.

I don’t either, I thought, taking a deep breath.

Power Prayer

Yesterday, a woman sitting across from me with beautiful, Star-Trek-prom-date hair, suddenly stood up and tore a piece of paper off the wall next to her desk. “I’ll be right back,” she told me. I waited and listened to Pink Floyd, then Cat Stevens, then Stevie Wonder on her radio. Very superstitious/writing on the wall.

When she returned, she sat down and handed me a copy of the Power Prayer, tacking her own copy back up, crooked, as before. “Are you a happy woman?” she asked me. “No matter what happens?” I shrug nodded. “Like me,” she smiled. “Stay happy.”

Good advice.

“When friends ask me how I’m ok?” she whispered so the person in the next cubicle couldn’t hear, “I tell them it’s easy: Satan is cruel and Jesus is kind, Satan is shallow and Jesus is deep, Satan is money and Jesus is worth, Satan is lust and Jesus is love…you know? Satan is nothing and Jesus is everything.” She twisted her mouth up. “It’s not religious. They can choose their own words.”

I nodded. I raised my children to find goodness in all people. “It’s there,” I promised. “In everyone.” Which is true, but it’s bad advice. I should have kept them safe.

The woman with shining, woven hair watched me quietly as I read:

“I declare that no evil shall come near my dwelling, my family, my work, my body or my thoughts…Satan, take your hands off God’s property”

Gravely, she held out a dish of Hershey’s Kisses. “Want some candy?”

❤️

What if there was no spotlight shining down on standing in your truth? No photo ops, no one watching, no shared anger. What if your belief system quietly faded you into the background? How strong is your stomach for that?

Americans generally aren’t cut out for it. We like attention. Or maybe we just think that because attention-seekers make noise, block our view.

This particular mindfuck comes with a reward, I think, but it means being willing to miss your flight in order to hang out in the airport lounge: be in between. Maybe even nowhere if that place exists. I love people, always have. I can find something to love in everyone, for some reason. So can you, probably; we like to huddle, collect each other. But people can distort a cause. Flag-waving obscures clear vision. It’s so…self-conscious. About them, not their truth.

Individuals are interesting and substantive, though. When you focus on others instead of the effect you have on others, they make an impression on you. Their flags and fists fall. The fuzzy buzz of humans doesn’t go away, it’s just clarified. Issues are like money and weight: too little or too much and you become unhealthy, unbalanced.

In our town, there is a ghost Ferris wheel. One that washed away in the hurricane of ’38. We all know it’s there but we can’t see it, which makes it so special, so beautiful.

A Strange Porch

The cingulate gyrus connects the limbic system to the cerebral cortex; a little like our animal selves speaking to our super egos. Still mysterious to us. The pictures we store, the flashes of insight and technicolor faces…how do we determine which shine the loudest? Of all that thrusts itself into our line of sight, which invites us around the block and onto a strange porch? A porch that may one day become familiar: lucky short term memories become long-term movies. What’s inside that house? For now, just a dream. We are intellectual animals and all that lies in between. The tiny, almond-shaped amygdala can bring back a whole summer with the smell of candles melting on a birthday cake under honeysuckle. When the bees flinging themselves at white and yellow petals buzz into that summer’s best song, you are lost in time. And who are you if you don’t know what time it is?

“Wormholes,” coughed a surfer this morning, as we stared out at the waves, too choppy to ride. “I don’t know,” he wheezed. He’s the only surfer I know who smokes Marlboros instead of weed. “If the past is a memory and the future is fear and hope, they meet here. Now. Which is then…nothing.”

“Which is then everything,” corrected the yoga instructor to my left. She is a yoga instructor, after all. Very into Being In The Moment. We’d just been lamenting the co-opting of our disciplines by shallow douchebags. Her point being that yoga was once a spiritual practice that has been shopped for and bought by people more about tight latex leggings and tight latex buns than compassion or mindfulness, though they love, love, love to use the words compassion and mindfulness. “They co-opted those, too,” she sighed. “Now they’re worse than meaningless.” I told her that music is in a similar place, but if you know me at all, you’ve already heard me rant about this, so I won’t say any more than: shallow douchebags.

“Small world, big picture,” murmured the surfer. Not much left to say after someone says it all.

So what about the memory movies that are overlaid? This beach, dizzy with a thousand home movies, all three of us watching sand stretch the concept of a brain sitting inside a skull. No story is about you. Your own stories are a colorwash, an honor of participants, flying in the face of personhood. Get invisible. There is no self, only an observing will. Must be why we bristle at the idea of a consumer culture. We know it doesn’t suit us, doesn’t work, an ill-fitting latex garment, squeezing the breath out of us. Yoga was breath and now it’s shoppers. Music was breath and now it’s fashion. Nah…not gonna fit. Times will change, depth will return in the boredom and frantic of groping for the next big thing. The shallow douchebags will wander off and leave us to get work done in peace.

If we have to measure ourselves, we measure what energy we have to give. The idea of measuring what we get doesn’t suit, doesn’t work, doesn’t fit, can’t breathe. We don’t disappear when we give up our selves, we finally happen.

When you watch the summer’s best song bees bang against their honeysuckle, you aren’t in your story, the melting wax is. And the buzz. The crazy sugar water between those petals is in the bees’ dream. But the sound of a loved voice is in yours, calling for your attention. And when you turn a corner onto a new block and climb the steps to that strange porch, well, you are the watcher that wilts or lifts according to the timbre of that voice.

Is there pain? Can I help?

Are we laughing now?

When the sand plays my home movies over the waves, I’m the projector. I only appear to help someone else colorwash their sand: a walk-on and then a walk-off in someone else’s dream, while peering around another corner in mine. Yesterday, I stepped onto that strange porch, pushed open its screen door, finally inside that house, now no longer a dream but an afternoon. Long-term movies grope backward and forward through time, clean of hope and fear.

What time is it? I have no idea.