Saturday, January 2, 2010

a question of anonymity


new year's in berkeley full of emotion. guess we have to get out of town to loosen up and face new challenges. afterwards, chico felt like heaven.

it's the trees. the feeling of things being on a manageable scale. also, just the right amount of invisibility. freedom: the balance between being irresponsible and in demand.

my landlord/retired therapist says, 'at least three satisfaction-with-life studies (for parents) say the curve drops lower as kids age, the bottom at their children's puberty.' i'm so bewildered why people have children. i just don't understand it. am i missing the parent gene?

of course, i've always thought evolution expands us in different ways. the unmarried serve as an example of independence. they teach. they take care of orphans, the nuns and priests. the intermediaries.

you see, not everyone born ordinary. often the oddballs go gay or into poetry, into wandering and philosophy rather than parenting. it's as if the whole human gene-pool requires many different characters and abilities. we're we pure and all one, we'd die out in an instant.

so, here we are, one of the crowd yet not too invisible. i remember the boarding-house in new zealand where men seemed to be disappearing without ever existing. how do you make your mark? or is it necessary?

i'm vanishing into my past. how do you hold on? this weekend visited

http://www.amazon.com/Avatar-Theatrical-Release/dp/B002VPE1AM/ref=sr_tr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1262503753&sr=1-1

and

http://www.amazon.com/Chris-Don-Story-Leslie-Caron/dp/B001KZOUXW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1262503814&sr=1-1


whether our lives epic or purely personal, they make a contribution, if only to those close to us. as james joyce wrote, 'history is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake."

house-sat for laurie this new year's:

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/laurie

continuity becomes precious.