42

So, I took Sunday off of the blogging committment and I know, somewhere in the middle of the US, a good 1,404 miles from here, a lone head drooped and a lower lip was stuck out at the sight of no Sunday words... yeah right. :) It came to me at 10pm and I was curled up with Summerland by Michael Chabon and comfy under a few blankets and atop ten pillows deep in the recesses of my chilly abode, and I realized as my eyes closed at 10:02 that I hadn't yet blogged and that was o...zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. So, it's all good, you've been there before. Not a Sabbath-associated decision friends. I'll stop

But I did want to recognize in some way the number 42, which is of course the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything for some of us, but hopefully for so many more it's the number of Jackie Robinson who 60 years ago on Sunday broke the ranks of all-white Major League Baseball by being the first African-American player to swing a bat and field a ball with the Dodgers. He's been called an icon beyond sport, an athlete akin to Jim Thorpe who was so good at everything he just happened to choose baseball in which to become a legend. For a kid born in the Bay Area in 1974 when my afore-blog-mentioned Giants had garish uniforms and played in a stadium some said resembled a toilet with the lid open, baseball has always been about hating the Dodgers and everything they stood for, because of course, Southern California was and still is stealing all our water. I knew Robinson broke out with the team when they were in Brooklyn (and really, why would I know anything about Brooklyn, wasn't The Warriors filmed there?), but I didn't care. And baseball in the grand scheme of things today doesn't amount to much considering world events. But my family loves baseball, my brother just received his MLB package and he and his son are scoring games and wiggin' out, and Jackie Robinson deserves a mention, every year, and we need to pay a little more attention to his significance beyond baseball. But that will have to wait cuz it's like 11:50 and I have to post this or else my Mac turns into a pumpkin and that's just no good for anyone. thanks.

...

I don't know what a blog would say today except something that mentioned the tragic shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, which involved 33 deaths including the suicide of the gunman himself. I haven't seen anything on the news outside of my own internet home page, so I don't know if there is sensationalizing or over-reporting going on of this tragedy, the broadcasting-investigations or perhaps even conspiracy theories being thrown around until more news comes to light. For me, innocent people are dead and their families have lost someone today, their friends innumerable.

Compassion. When I heard of this I asked myself how can I relate to something in Virginia, or a massacre, or even the murder of someone close. Automatically I know I can't. But if I consider that Virginia isn't far from Washington DC where my cousin works, or that Virginia is a southern state in my mind and so is Tennessee, then that means something more to me. Then there is the university campus... what if this happened at a more local university like Stanford, or across the Bay in Berkeley, or at my own uni of SF State, down the road. That brings it home even more, what then, who would I know that would be affected? What in the hell could I do then? Compassion. So then I think of my own life as a teacher, both future and present, and I wonder what parents would think about sending their kids to school tomorrow, perhaps anywhere, let alone in Virginia... the fear of this. In Erfurt, Germany, or Beslan, Russia, or Columbine, Colorado (and these are only the few I can remember), tragedies have occurred in schools involving hostages, fear, and in some cases unbelievable violence and death - in grade schools, not just in universities. I have so many friends and colleagues teaching in schools in many countries. And that's where it hits me.

Compassion for the families is all I can squeeze out when I feel the helplessness I feel now in writing about this, the lack of there being anything I can do except pray and give love as much as possible to the people around me and those alive tomorrow. And hopefully not just tomorrow, but the day after that and every day I can, because though my fading memory of this tragedy is inevitable it won't fade for people just like me who, unlike me, lost someone they loved today in senseless violence and ugly death. Prayer and compassion are all I can speak about on a day like this.

A Farewell to Catatonic TV watching

No, really... I'm done. Except now there's 2 hours of Soul Train reruns from the 70s. Look at those flares and those moves! I didn't know they still had that on!

See, I was raised in a house with a TV in every room, so I've known the joy of finding shows worth watching and the drone of having that thing on in the background. And for a long time I liked it, every humming moment. But now, I'm influenced more by people who either only turn the TV on for one show or simply own a TV for its DVD or VHS watching capabilities, and for me, NOT FOR EVERYONE mind you, this is a great blessing. I may be proven wrong at some point but I've been moving toward this for a while - the end of my habitual resistance to pressing the off button on the TV. There are good things on the tele, but I'd rather turn ON the TV to see them rather than keep the bloody thing on until I get to them. Can I hold myself to that - of course I can. Do you care - who knows. And why a blogging pronouncement? Because I was so very fortunate to see tonight:
Steven Seagal breaking an elbow joint,
2008's G.O.P presidential candidates bully their way through pedantic crappy speeches (and John McCain didn't come off nearly as bad),
Kobayashi win a commentated hamburger-eating contest, complete with multiple camera angles and slow-mo shots and a fist-pumping crowd,
Peter Brady and his model girlfriend try on clothes which made them look slim and called it something that would HELP ME,
Harrison Ford star in a movie now somehow showing up on the HISTORY channel,
Fox News and MSNBC simultaneously reporting on the story behind who fathered (the deceased) Anna Nicole Smith's child,
How much my colon needs this pill which will bring my bowels quietly to some kind of peace they have never known before,
Poker, poker bloody damn sunglasses frowny-faced overweight not sexy poker,
Seagal break another dude's nose (same show...had to happen)
Unnamed women awkwardly handle the silicon jelly balls which will soon become their breasts, with the chance to watch it all happen if I stay tuned,
Men battling to get off a bus and somehow find favor in a woman they were making fun of on the bus minutes before,

I know, I could have turned it off, and that's my point, yet you know how short-attention-span theater dictates what we are given on TV. Some shows are there to educate and I would like to watch them (public access, PBS, and Discovery to start), but you have to find them. No matter your taste, you really only have a handful of shows you like, right? I don't offer a solution to anything, because the internet offers a ripe selection and you already know what I am saying when it comes to how much TV can turn us into drones.

But my hope is that maybe we can just spend more time turning off TVs. And when someone says HEY I WAS WATCHING THAT you can ask them WERE YOU REALLY and then they can answer, and I hope that at least half of them can't say yes. A quick yes to looking at the TV guide first to see if something you like is on makes it more possible that one might instead say no to TV and yes to something a little more spontaneous and real-life. We can wake up on our own! Just turn the damn thing off!

And if not, then I am a huge fan of the mute button... :)

A Hero to Myself

I hope he's cool with this, and I think I remember him saying it was cool: today I am posting the words my nephew John Sander Christensen wrote a few years ago. As he has grown older and is nearing teenager-dom, he has gradually come to realize a few realities of his life and has taken responsibility for himself in ways I never could have when I was his age, and these words are part of that. The following words are about back surgery, and for John this was just one of a series of challenges he will come to face, and if you know or will come to know my nephew you will hear his personal story from him in his own words. John is a natural writer, budding musician and one extremely funny and joyful kid. I'm proud to say that he recently won selection to the national Reflections Program photography competition, winning the Montana state title and of course his regional contest in his hometown of Great Falls.

Thank you, buddy, very very much for sharing these words with me when I was there over Christmas... you're my kind of hero and your uncle loves you and misses you, but I can't wait to dance with you non-stop in Oregon this summer at the NorthWest String Summit. WHOO HOOO!!


A Hero To Myself by John Christensen
Back surgery is the worst thing that has happened to me.
"Mom," I said, "Why did you wake me up?!!"
"Remember surgery?" said Mom. Then Mom let me sleep for 5 more minutes. When I got to the hospital I was so scared my teeth chattered. I got in the waiting room and waited with a warm blanket for what felt like hours. Then they put me on anesthesia. Anesthesia is a medicine that makes your senses go numb.

I woke up in my room, tried to roll over and then, "Ow, ow, ow!!!" Mom got the nurse, so I could get a pain reliever. I slept like a log for hours. Then I woke up and turned on the TV and watched all night.

It was so painful because I got an I.V. tube, but it was worth it. Another hard thing was relearning to walk. It was like learning to write with broken fingers, but much more wobbly. I took it step by step. It took lots of practice, time and stress on my back. I hated getting to and from a lying and a sitting position.

Yes, I did have fun in the hospital too. I played a joke on my Mom and got lots of presents and cards. I went home after 5 days. My first meal at home was Wendy's.

I'm very proud of how I made it through my back surgery. It was a lot of pain for an eight year old to get through. Since I was only 8 years old when I did that, it made me feel like a different kind of hero.

The importance of smoked oysters

Tonight, my boys and I revisit some old haunts. We're in our thirties now, and when we were teenagers we would gather once in a while on Ocean Beach, at Stall 24 (or was it 22, or 26 or 28...) and aim our sights on a spot halfway out from the breaker wall to the ocean and make a fire. We would "find" wooden pallets (most likely from Safeway) not too far away, sometimes we would have to "find" wood in other places as well, and there would be a small amount of non-alcoholic beverages and everyone's mothers would be notified that we were indeed safe and sound, and we would feel free to party our faces off on the coast of America. We would sing, invite strange gang members to join us, run around the coast like we owned it and sometimes we would even strip down to our "bathing suits" and feign death and the ocean undertow, crashing into the coldest waves you could imagine.

Tonight, a new crew of people and a mixture of the old guard are hitting the beach again, because now it's legal to have fires on the beach as long as they are made in the pits provided by the dudes from Burning Man, and we'll see how successful old traditions remain in our slightly older and much more legally responsible hands. And finally, we will be able to drink beer legally by golly. :)

Old traditions can't fade. Ever, even if we forget them we are still bound to live some aspect of them. In our friends we find things that we do to be just what we do, but over time they become a good habit and when we get older and take a few steps away from we can revisit our old habits and traditions together and look at how our hair has slimmed, bodies grown huge, but what remains? We do. Maybe we have even added a few new people to our lives, to join the tradition, and some are gone and won't be back. Oysters and brie, choral music played under moonlight, hacky sack in crowded places, frisbee golf, Monty Python marathons, and the fires at the beach are those traditions for me, and in the last decade I've picked up a few more. They will never ever be stupid or lame or outdated, even if they really are lame or stupid to others. We have to fight against the pressure to only like what is 'cool and now' with what we know is really really cool, that which is classic and timeless and can't be outdated. New can be very very good but old holds its precedence in the minds of those who have gotten old too. You can't know that until you've lived a little and know how valuable your traditions are. Traditions are a part of community and as our community grows and we invite new loved ones into our lives and our circle of friends they bring with them their own traditions, and so the world gets a little smaller a ton richer. We only want to share smoked oysters and brie with everyone, a big fat circle of all our friends come together, each with a slice of sourdough and a wedge of brie topped with a small smoked friend, everyone feeding the person to their left. It's good, no?

Because I never have read any Kurt Vonnegut and today he died...

It happens this quickly, that there is nothing except the process of art, and the artist himorherself simply dies and that's it, like everyone else, except we somehow want to understand why that particular life seemed special and important and why so many people care. Sadly the amount of people who care about any death is always so unequal to the number who have no clue at all. Yet we strangely come to why we are human, because we know that no matter our feats or experiences, everything which we love and know and care about - everything, with no exception - will one day die and be gone from the present. Gone, dead, ceasing. And I always meant to read Vonnegut but now I feel like I missed out, I could have been a believer while he was still wandering the earth. He really wouldn't have cared either way, but now the decision has been made for me and it feels like something to mention.

current Rwanda time = 5:31am. When I awoke in Tanzania my first morning back yonder in the summer of '04 I had been asleep for twelve hours, following am unsleepable 15-hour journey from Germany via the Netherlands. That morning was the beginning of a three week exploration of hospitals, schools, wildlife reservations and Maasai villages, and I remember hearing on that first African morning the sound of bird literally perched above my slatted window, which filtered early light into my room, bird and light both alerting me to my surroundings: the pair of wood closets and wood desks and white paint on the walls, the soft glow on my backpack thrown over the opposite empty twin bed with it's top open and spilling its innards slightly out onto the brown army blanket. The bird, though, was like a stork bellowing its call into my eardrum and I swear it was talking to me, and I loved it and wondered if anyone else had ever awakened to the same feeling I had, laying there in my boxers thinking THAT was an AFRICAN bird saying hallo this morning to me, and I'm waking up and I'm in Africa, and I will be in Africa for a few weeks so I better get used to being in Africa because, yeah, I am in AFRICA! As I write, my partner Kelli is about to experience her own version of this, so that over the next few hours my San Francisco evening winds toward midnight and simultaneously her first morning on African soil dawns, breakfast is served and taken, and her first full day awakens and begins. My 9:30am is 6:30pm in Africa. It's good to be here, with her there. And that's where my mind is this evening.

I had a sweet day of indulgence. My brother Dave took me to the edge of Golden Gate park to sit in an airy restaurant with seats outside huddled near to the cypress trees. We ordered a french onion soup with a huge mound of gruyere cheese melted onto wheat bread floating atop the brown salty broth. Then we had a trio of prosciutto-wrapped scallops atop a bed of ziti and red peppers. Then came his sirloin steak and my ham-provolone-artichoke heart pizza on a thin crust. I had a homemade porter, Dave had a tall diet coke, and our waitress seemed to spend a lot of time at our table. We both agreed that, given our smiles and conversation and the way we didn't mind sharing our food, we must have been seen as the nicest gay couple of the day. :)

I put blinders on my Weight Watchers goggles today (and yeah, it's only the third day), because I have no idea really what all was in-and-around those scallops, pizza, steak, soup, dark beer, etc... so I'll call it a 28-point day and pretend for the first time in a while that I am a meat-gorging drooling glutton with a big smile on my face and no energy after. I ate so much I had to lay down for a while, my stomach is shrinking and it feels sooo gooood to know that. But I'm on a mission to get down to my fighting weight again, back to those days when I could run up a mountain and back down again and still feel like dancing on the porch in the evening. Call it Cascades Training. Who needs a well-intentioned but overweight sherpa, really?

Home, landings, day three and still going!

Yesterday, I was at the bar and tonight I am in my small basement room, and a little later tonight a plane lands in Africa so that early this morning the Sahara has already laid itself out beneath and nothing like it will be seen again. The Sahara is nothing to be messed with, it's a brown canvas that shuns other colors and swallows any new form which may paste itself upon the old master. It's also a pretty big sign that you are no longer in Kansas, so to speak... So when the sun rose a few hours ago in front of the plane, what was she thinking as that first African dawn crossed the line of horizon? Did her back still hurt and had she won enough travel Scrabble games up to that point to satisfy? These are my musings tonight.

Today my body and mind are in my home of San Francisco, and today was like a day where you felt the old world coast again, the wind seeking every crevice and flying over your balding head like you were walking on the old sand dunes of the Pacific Coast and the winds drew worn ships to its harbor, back when there was no city here and this peninsula filled itself with scattered and loose outposts of community. The cold wind here is relentless and timeless, subtle sometimes but ever-present, as if you can still smell what it meant to be here at its genesis. I appreciate the history of my home in this city, and these are the last few months when I will be experiencing this so tonight I am indulging myself.

Today was for writing while thinking about Africa, Germany, and Washington state, places I have been and am returning to soon enough. And I think we all must come home in order to say something to that home in writing or action or thought, to recognize the place and situation which created and molded you and to sit awhile and reflect with it, to whatever end. I have always known that my SF home was a place to come back to but not to stay in, that this will be my home and always will be and I'm glad. Now, I am eager to get on with it once again because I feel I am called to be somewhere else. Dealing with the origins of your life allows you to follow more freely the movements of your life beyond.

Tonight I have Belle the mandolin tuned up and I will fiddle on it while I know the plane is landing in Nairobi. Every 9:30am is the beginning of my day from now on.

"Everyone deserves music, sweet music." - Michael Franti

Monday the day after Easter

I have a feeling that if I continue writing a blog a day you may actually come to know something about me, that I will no doubt reveal a thing or two which you didn't know yet, stumbling on my words until a fact comes sprawling out on the pavement from my treehouse door. I sense that tonight already. For instance, I am writing with my shoes on now. I almost never write with my feet not bare.

Earlier this eve: I'm sitting at a familiar bar, a talky pair of men to my right and nothing but empty space and a window to the left, my SF Giants losing again on the television mounted above me with the ocean roaring beyond the windows in the dark behind me. The conversations get boisterous and specific as another round of drinks comes to the right-hand-men, and I remain sipping my lonely beer slowly as the night plods along. It's Monday, and my brain is somewhere else. Hey look, the Giants just lost and the bar has emptied by a few more people, while jazz springs around from the speakers in the background. It's cold in here, like an air vent to the beach across the street is open and no one feels like getting up to close it, chilling the space around the few people in this joint tonight. The bartender walks down to my end and glances at me but I don't look up, and he gladly goes back to the talking end of the bar. I'm down here with the electric dishwasher and the extra glasses, in the darker corner, and tonight I like it. My heart is on a plane headed to Rwanda tonight and all day tomorrow. My eyes feel alert with loneliness which mingles among immense gratitude rather than sadness, reflecting on a missed soul rather than mourning a temporary loss. My brain requested this beer and my body brought it to this familiar bar where we will eat and drink together soon enough, once my heart returns from Africa in early May. Things are where they should be, for now.

I came to this bar not to drink but to write and think and sit and watch people and wonder. When I feel a pulling to write it seems wrong now to resist, and to be here now feels as good and solitary as if the spinning jazz CD were a live quintet in the corner to my lonely left smoking its music in the shadows while I huddle as I do now, listening and scribbling and watching. For now, I am a solitary man living a non-lonely life alone and aware tonight of the simple fact that yes, life is good, loneliness and aching are also good. This beer is good. My Giants, however, are not good.

"You got to learn how to die, if you wanna wanna be alive." - "War on War" by Wilco

A Blog a day, that's all we ask...

I am a Blue Diamond Almond, dull but crunchy, salty and plentiful. A buttermilk sky and a Brahms piano concerto opened my morning today as my father walked his route and I drove by him, honked at him, and exchanged finger gestures jestfully with him. It was a good morning and I wish I had written on it. So, I hereby vow to word-it-up every day till the beginning of May, create a word or too and see why the chips fall where they do and who if anyone is in attendance to hear them fall at all. Too many moments these days are going unwritten, with a pair of journals and a pair of blogs and a side order of scratch paper tucked into books half-read I see that practice takes precedence over thought. And clarity is the answer to everything. Without further ado, I hit the POST button...