Since turning forty, some things have become clear to me. For example, that bachata music is beautifully overwrought, like the kind of poetry you can write in Spanish—like this one, for example, from a book of poetry for Puerto Rican schoolchildren :

Madre mía, hoy es tu día
y yo te doy mi alegría,
que es lo que te puedo dar.
Madre mía, yo quisiera,
que tu pena fuese mía.
Qué más puedo desear?

“My dear mother, this is your day, and I give you my happiness—for that's what I have to give. Oh my mother, I wish your sadness were mine. What more could I desire?”

Or this, from “Itinerario para náufragos”—náufragos meaning “the shipwrecked”:

Vivir el movimiento que habita las palabras,
conocer la apariencia, amar la soledad
de los frutos caídos y que, ahora,
con la luz de la tarde
desvelan el pasado en las ruinas del tiempo.

A sorry translation: “To live in the movement that inhabits words, to understand the meaning of surfaces, to embrace the solitude of fruit that has fallen—and now, with the afternoon light, they keep the past from sleeping among the ruins of time.”

This translation is lame partly because I’m not sure how the infinitives in the first two lines fit with the third person plural in the last. But who cares! What is this about? I have no idea. I just find it strangely stupendous. I’m moved by poetry in Spanish more than any poetry in English except maybe Walt Whitman, because he, too, gives voice to the most vague, exalted sentiments in unrestrained, unapologetic flights that sometimes choose not to return, leaving you high.

On the other hand, I’ve been clued in to the value of balance. Such an ordinary thought--banal even. I was wondering the other day why I intermittently fantasize about a totally different life in which I’m one of those people who search out props and necessary items for movies, or scientific operations. In a book I read I learned that this job has a name. It isn’t “procuring.” Anyway, it boils down to hunting for interesting things in a new place and then buying them with someone else’s money. Perfect for me. In my other life, I participate in a floating household that tries to maintain a high degree of self-sufficiency, give voice to its creative longings, earn money, and raise a small child far from most of our friends and family. And things break. Like, relatively important things. Or someone gets sick. Someone gets in a snit. What is wrong? I used to blame it on the boat, lack of money, bad food, isolation, whatever. Now I realize those are just excuses. Deepak Chopra spoke to me in a dream. He said, This moment is perfect. And I said, I like that better than This Moment Bites. And I said, When we feel crazy, let’s shout—silently, if necessary—OM! And he said, Do whatever you need to do. And I said, Deepak, it actually works!

I was watching a short film made by The Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet in 1941. It was intended to help management improve the sales technique of its workers. I learned some interesting things. I learned that car salesmen used to go door to door. They'd even show up at construction sites to try to sell the foreman a new truck. I learned that the salesman is supposed to drive the car first, before he lets the potential customer get behind the wheel. I got a clearer sense of what people meant when they said, “It's a man's world.”
    In one scene, an unsuccessful salesman is saying to a co-worker, “I just don't seem to get the hang of this business.” And I could hear that standard expression when it was still fresh and slangy, but not too much so. How the hang of it felt to say, how it described a new way of seeing. The way something hangs. The salesman tests it out in his tongue. It describes his confusion, his inexplicable inability to get why his marks just won't buy.  “How is this engine different from the Plymouth?” one potential customer asks. “Well,” the salesman chuckles, caught, “I don't know how it's different. I just know that the Chevrolet is better.”
    It's hard to remember that the people in the film are actors. In one scene, the dealership manager sits with his father on the old man's porch. It must be summer. The old man is wearing a white handkerchief draped on his head, dispensing sage, hard-earned advice about how to responsibly train your employees. The men are so earnest, so clear in their emotions, each one telegraphed precisely to the viewer's reptilian brain.
    Since I started Fear Grin Editing, No Job Too Big or Too Small, I have, thanks to a friend on the inside, been able to penetrate to deeper levels of the publishing business that I ever could have made it to, much less known about, before. Maybe I'll get some work out of this. If nothing else I've had occasion to reflect on corporate America. From here it seems a strange world filled with mirrored doors. Leaded gas. Carbon emissions. Global warming. And in the face of all this there is the beauty and order of human culture. In this case its beauty is unsustainable, it sets itself up in opposition to the natural world, and it is no less compelling for that. Some part of me adores the generous curves of the Chevrolets, the high-heeled shoes the wives wear, the stilted voices of the salesmen. I look at the strange world of people and I think, surely one will figure out a way to save us. And if not, what can we learn by dying?
    I remember reading an interview with a Buddhist priest—I can't remember his name now, something long. It wasn't his original name. He was an American. And this guy had it. Yeah, I'd call him enlightened. The things he said didn't make you feel comfortable, but at the same time, they were oddly reassuring. When the interviewer asked, “What do you think happens to the individual consciousness after death?” He responded, “That presumes there is an individual consciousness.” And so I feel hopeful. I feel hopeful about the order of things. There is some rightness to all of this, some inexplicable rightness. And if I have some spare time to get depressed, I look up at Tallulah's portrait of herself in my arms.

Walking alongside the market in Papeete, its high-ceilinged acres, I glimpsed tiers of mangoes, unattended, on tables in the dim warmth of late afternoon. I went toward them, stopped, stood waiting for someone to appear. “Tiare!” a voice called from the shadows, and in a moment a vision burst forth, one arm upraised, fingers snapping as if the aisle between the clusters of mangoes were the runway of a Harlem drag ball. “Oui?” she inquired with a moue, a raised eyebrow, having caught all the laughter in the world, just barely. So radiant that I stumbled over my words, trying to explain that I wanted some mangoes, not too green. She chose three for me, palpating them gently, putting them into a plastic bag. As she disappeared again the way she had come, she called to me over her shoulder. “If you want them to ripen quickly,” she said, “keep them in the shadows. Les fruits mûrissent le soir." Fruit ripens at night.

Moorea

In another life, I would like to be or know J. Lam.
Taken on a trip to Papeete in attempt to extend our visa.
Success.
Monday afternoon among the pineapple fields.


A scene from my thirty-ninth birthday.

Nuku Hiva

Before coming here I was hungry for news. What was it really like? I wondered, consuming the messages from friends and acquaintances who’d traveled this long way. But no, what was it really like? Of course there’s no singular answer to such a question. Dogs in the street with full udders, hundreds of chickens—huge, mild grapefruits, custard apples and frangipani. It’s laughable to think one could answer such a question on the basis of a week’s acquaintance. In this village of less than two thousand people there are many drag queens, who wear lime green tap pants and kitten heels, who have darkly penciled eyebrows and run the local grocery store and the pension. There’s obviously a different understanding of sexuality here and I want to understand it better.
The money I dispense like brightly colored pieces of paper and shiny bits of metal. On one of the larger bills, some highly decorated guy, some naval officer, sneers as if saying, I’ve tasted the women, and, if I must admit it, a few of the men, and they were délicieux, selon la manière primitive d’une île isolée. His hands come out of the empty space in your pocket holding a small glass of absinthe and a Cuban cigarillo.
The sea is soft, not too salty, and there are plastic bottles and beer cans in the weed-choked stream that flows into the bay of Taiohae. The air blows down over those verdant volcanic peaks like the sweet damp breath of a dragon sleeping on the other side of the island. I like such cheesy similes. I’ve been reading children’s books about mythical figures and I appreciate their simplicity. Clear answers, not too much information at once. Because otherwise, the vivid, hydroelectric force of arriving on the other side of the world, future unknown, might pour in.
At bedtime we lie in the forward berth, the rocking of the boat jingling the cutlery, knocking the books together in the shelf, and rolling the baguettes against each other so that they churn up crumbs across the countertop. The ineffable force of the universe soothes us. We watch the clouds silently obscuring the moon, that sweet dragon’s breath on our skin. In a couple of weeks, we’ll move on.

The people who raised you, siblings, if you have any--they have stuff. Maybe they have objects, things saved for sentimental reasons, still kicking around. Regardless, they have other things--accumulated emotions that have collected in a deep pool from which all can freely draw.

But I can't really talk about those things right now. As for the objects--the other day I came across a diary I had kept sporadically when I was an adolescent. I received it from some family friends for my eleventh birthday, or "for my birthday 11," as I inscribed it.

Excerpts from my diary: "I really hate Townley because she bothers me." "I got the Clinique bonus with English Pink lipstick and the Lancome bonus w/ some liquid eyeliner." "Don't be cute!" "I have an obsession with Adam. Of course, forget that. Forget that. It's so ridiculous. Don't even think about it. Dave I don't really care about now. I used to like him so much I think. I can't really remember. Anyway, who cares. More later."

Adam and I got married, but otherwise I don't want to relate to this petty, obsessive person. In my last entry ("DEC 30 I think 1986") I conclude, "I can develop myself from within and try to have a beautiful personality. It's very difficult though."

Paging through albums, watching ourselves grow up, my sister paused at a photo of our family taken in Lynchburg, Virginia ("I wish I had friends in Lynchburg. I hate my teachers they give us so much work"), where we'd moved after our parents' divorce. We're in the dining room of our house. She must be about twelve. She looks like she's eaten mushrooms and they're starting to kick in. I'm standing behind her with my arms folded over my chest, wearing dark glasses. Our mom is giving the camera a lovely smile.

Where was I going with this? It's really hard to think.

Those other things, the things I can't talk about, are trying to come in.

I can hear my mother, full of hearsay and popular opinion. The phone rings after polite hours for phoning have ended and she speaks in a flat, tired voice, so I know who it is, and then hangs up abruptly. Memories are like granite over which the days flow, but it's hard to know anything for sure. If there's anything to know for sure. My grandmother's house still smells like a dog that died years ago. I saw a photograph of her as a child. Her hair is bobbed and she's standing on a split-rain fence, calmly watching the photographer manipulate those unwieldy glass plates, balancing there without moving.

after witnessing Cheli and Nick's wedding in the nearby town of Valle, we look at pictures and eat jumbo shrimp

(Aside: some thoughts upon returning from Cheli and Nick's wedding.
Driving with our new Italian friend Marisa [above, gray hair] is a death-defying pleasure. Gripping her beer between her knees, she shouts at another driver, “Puta madre! Tomalo en el culo, cretino!”

“‘Fuck you’ es normal,” she explains a moment later. “So I mix it up and say ‘Take it in the ass’.”

Anyway, Italian is fun. After eating the lasagne she has prepared one Saturday evening, we vow that we’ll make another Italian dinner soon. I suggest that we serve one of my favorites, pasta Caccio y pepe, which I guess I mispronounce, saying something like “Cazzo y pepe.” That would be penis with pepper.)


beach boogie

ready to roll

We thought it was time to have some professional photos done. We got dressed up, got our hair and nails done. We went with the “artistic” black and white package…

A design triumph in San Diego

It seems to have an almost Medusan quality.