I biked with Jen and Mikko from Embarcadero Bart in SF to Commonweal Garden in Bolinas.
Here's the story of the day: As we biked up to the Golden Gate bridge, I couldn't help but think of how epic it looked. The green hills on the other side gave me the feeling, strange as this may sound, that the bridge had been built yesterday. It gave the feeling of the grandeur of its completion in the 1930s, of how it must have felt to have a bridge to those verdant hills where there wasn't one before.
I've had a couple conversations in the last several months about suicides on the Golden Gate bridge. So when I got on it on my bike, I was going to stop at some point and look over the edge and kind of imagine what I would be like to jump. I noticed that there was no fence or barrier of any sort which would make it really easy.
A kind of little golf cart-esque car was heading towards me on the pedestrian part of the bridge and I had to stop to let it pass. As I was stopping anyway I looked over the edge and saw the water. It didn't really look as high as I thought it would.
A cyclist right next to me turned and said to me, "We just saw a guy get up on the railing and jump off!" I was like, "No way, you're kidding, seriously?" And he was adamant that he was serious. I still thought he might be fucking with me until I actually *saw the body* floating in the water through a crack in the bridge's railing. I couldn't fucking believe it! A second earlier and I would have actually seen him jump! That would have really made me question if I'm living in a dreamworld where my thoughts manifest events.
If he was dead, that was the first dead body I have ever seen. It was surreal.
The bike trip was awesome. It actually was easier than I thought. We went along the 1 which skirts the coast. Beautiful.
I want more bike trips. Seattle to SF this summer?
Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet! I just got an unemployment check in the mail. They haven't sent one in so long I was getting worried that I'd have to work!
I did start working though, and it was good. I got a job as a strong-backed laborer for a Permaculture landscape installation. So I get paid $15 an hour to dig up a lawn, sheet mulch it, and put soil on top of it for gardens. It is satisfying work -- in fact I've done it for free tons of times. Sweet to get paid for it.
In other news, last Wednesday at RDNA we skinned a fox. It was really strange and awesome. The way it was done, I would've never thought possible. It was a really key experience. The kind where after it, you see things differently. If you want, I have a pictures -- but you don't want.
'It would feel really strange if my house burned down. It would be an erasure of a place totally embedded and layered with memories of growing up. I never wanted to lose that house, I really love it. Losing it would feel like I've entered into a whole new phase of my life, a total severance from my childhood, a potlatch of so much accumulated stuff and memory. And a deletion of any future dreams I hold about that house and neighborhood.'
What really makes me get emotional is little details. My uncle told me they were about to make chile rellenos, and the peach cobbler was almost done. Such an innocent, mundane, sweet intention -- the ingredients for those sad chile rellenos, and the almost-done peach cobbler, would burn as the kitchen burned.
Now they're part of an indistinguishable ash pile that contains every single memory invested in every pore of that house. The hideaway below the stairs where I used to go and eat candy, the tiny lower compartment of the upstairs closet where my brother and I would go "on vacation," the glass walls where I would race rain droplets. All my melancholy, hilarious fictional stories that I wrote as a kid -- "The Cookie I Found in a Dumpster," the autobiography of a dying pumpkin, war stories between planets or frogs. It makes me sad that I can't even remember that many of them, but they were all so good. Whenever I cleaned my room I would find the stack of them that my grandfather saved for me and gleefully read a couple of them and laugh. And now they're ash, along with my journals of Laos and Thailand, Sweden, China, and the "the ledger" I kept off and on all through college that was scattered with little granules of insight. My first journal, that I started in Waldorf school with one-sentence entries, and in which I later raged against my fifth grade teacher for making me write and recite a poem. I did happen to bring up here the journal Arline made me in Chile, inadvertently saving it from cremation. The one she more recently made and sent to me, I left in the house. Those were permanent choices.
My photo album of Chile, my favorite down comforter, my teddy bear that I named Ewok, my huge shelf of unread books including those beautiful Exact Change Press ones like Hebdomeros and Bayamus & Cardinal Poluatuo, my freaking Star Wars fan club membership card. My computer I built in high school a used for seven years. That huge landscape painting Jose found in a dumpster and I was going to bring up here and stencil on. The antique mate gourd I got at the flea market in Parque Constitucion. Random things like this are going to be popping into my head for a long time. It's not that I'm that attached to them. It does, of course, feel lightening to lose all that stuff in one quick stroke, no decisions made, no picking and choosing. I just want to nod to each item of memory and meaning and say Chao, que te vaya bien.
Blogspot seems to half-work in China. I can't actually read my own blog or see what it looks like, but I can post. So check out orienting.blogspot.com every week or so for an update on what I'm up to here.
