apple zen

I’m eating an apple that mostly tastes like water. The outside is almost as seamless as plastic, but for a brown indentation like an eye or a navel, where the apple turns in on itself. Inside my head, I hear myself chewing the peel and the crumbling white meat. Hook bottom teeth into the upper edge of apple. Make my way around, biting off the shelves where the white shows under red. The puncture noise of sticking my teeth in, then a slow sucking as the sound closes. Scrape and then shut. I try to avoid the dent, but I bite the edge, and then there’s a cross-section where I can see the brown seam running from the surface all the way to the core.

 

I woke up around 3 am last night. I’d had 3 milligrams of melatonin before bed at around 11:30 pm, but it probably wasn’t enough. When I woke up I thought about not having a job and needing money and not being finished with grad school applications. It was all breaking waves and glass. I couldn’t get my mind to quiet down, so I practiced meditation: breathing to fill the place below my navel and letting thoughts go by without attaching to them or getting pulled under by them. After fighting to just watch for a long time, I felt my mind go quiet. White silence. I didn’t know there had been chatter before. The big thoughts still passed through, but they stepped softly, like they were trying not to wake me up. I slept in that thin quiet place, the line that lets me come to the surface.

more city clinic (fall 2009 visit)

This morning I got my results  back from the HIV test. I don’t have it. No word on the Pap smear. The man who gave me the results was a somewhat pimpled middle aged and short guy with a high voice.
“How about your sexual activities?” he asked at the end. “Are you safe? Use condoms?”
“Yes” I said. He ran his finger down the top of my chart, over my name.
“Correct date of birth” he said.
“Yes.”
He said, “Looks like it’s negative. On the Pap, it says pending. No news good news.” He said that twice, once then, and then again when I was leaving. Told me to check the website again early next week.

The first room he’d shuttled me into had a man in a white jacket in it behind the door, sitting in a chair. All he did was stare up into my face when I came around the door. Then the nurse guided me out. “Oops there’s a patient in there!” he said. “Sorry! Go into that room.”

BART conversation

Tyler said, “Above us, where we lived, was a tree farm.”
“A tree farm?”
“When they put in a new shopping center or a business, they want to put some trees next to it, and they don’t want to wait for the trees to grow. So they grow them on a farm, and then they dig them up, and they plant them again as baby trees.”

———————————–

He told us his motorcycle had been parked in Russian Hill, but when he went back to get it, someone had put up a special event sign less than 50 feet away, so the motorcycle was towed. He said he went to some government office to sign papers and get his motorcycle back: “Anything I said to anyone there, they just said ‘Yep’.They said $366 please. Like it was nothing. And I said ‘Jesus!’ and the woman said ‘Yep’.”

noise

Alamo Square Park: Thin spray of sound from cars passing north and south on Scott Street. Whipping blades of a helicopter beating the sky into soft peaks that break and run. A white truck with a snub nose backing up. Higher helicopter, another one, rides its droning up down: fish on a hook. I can’t hear the bicyclist riding north, but I can see the fat triangle tread on the tires. Sound of wind clapping over my ears. Dead grass rubbing together, crushed when I move my foot. Blue car, grey car, penny-colored car come by. Car starting at the top of the street. Bubble of voices. High kid’s voice–little girl with black hair clinging to dad’s chest, looking back over his shoulder. Car bumping over something in the road. I feel how heavy the wind is when it changes direction and pushes from the south for a moment, instead of from the west. Doorsopening sounds of tree branches dipping in the wind, creaking. Construction at the corner of Hayes and Scott. Someone pulling bumping a plastic trash can on wheels up the concrete steps to his apartment, one hand behind his body gripping the handle, and one hand on the railing. Warm plastic and cold metal. The approaching layer of bus noises: brakes are a key turning: the open scream locks into silence. Red-haired guy walking on the sidewalk down the hill from me. Sound of ball bouncing off the apartment buildings around him pulls the ball to his hand from the ground. The paper I’m writing on licks up when the wind blows. I hold it down with spread fingers. There’s a truck idling at the corner of Hayes and Scott, turning a cud of noise over and over in its geared stomachs.

light

Light that makes the cars stand up like teeth. Light that drools over their windows. Light that smells stale, lays down in solid blocks beside the solid length of afternoon. Light on the willow tree’s branches. The tree is 30 or 40 feet tall and you could see each leaf if you looked long enough. Light that doesn’t blink. Light that melts and pools in a hard waxy white shine on catalpa leaves. Light that absorbs light, hurts to look at. Feathery bushes springing light like a leak. Light the grass scatters when the wind blows. Light that drops its shoulders when the afternoon is over, when the shadows have no structure. Monet painted nothing but light, light that held him up like bones: broken and supple, long, stippled, fractured, whole and holy.

At Cafe du Soleil with Erica. Through the window, the sky is mostly grey, close-grained as iron, stretching to thin blue in places over the near apartments. The asphalt street though is bright and a tree casts a shadow over a parked car. The sun is coming from somewhere, but I don’t know where, I can’t see it.

well.

I’ve been working on trying to get a job, so I haven’t been posting for a while. I’ve got a bunch of writing waiting in the wings that’s going up today and tomorrow!

city clinic.

The man who drew my blood wore a silver-spangled studded black shirt, shined shoes, and had long curling gray hair in a thin ponytail. He said How was your weekend? I said pretty good. I told him I had just moved from Chicago. He said he loved my scarf and I said Thanks as the other nurse was taking my weight and blood pressure. It’s hand dyed I said and realized only later he thought that meant I dyed it myself. He took my blood, told me to make a fist, and tied a rubber tube around my upper arm. I need resistance, he said. Fight with me here, he said so I pulled my arm down to make the tube tighter. Good, he said Now make a fist and hold it. The important thing is to keep breathing. That’s what makes your blood flow. He said You might feel a pinch and I felt my skin pucker around the needle as it went in. He kept talking and I was grateful. He said Every time I go away from San Francisco I love to come back. Even when you fly in and go over the bridge. It’s a bubble. I said, Yeah there’s really nowhere else like this city in the country. I said I left Chicago when it was the same temperature as here and it’s getting colder in Chicago now. Going to start snowing.

Jan. 2009: J’s friend.

“Two things. The first one being that there was this concrete tunnel that I used to sit in and the boys would come over and I’d”–pantomimes lifting skirt–”show them my, yeah..and it was like ‘Don’t do that again’. And the second thing. I was playing by myself on a playground and these popular girls run up to me and they’re like ‘Can you help us write some notes? For boys?’ and I was like ‘Friends!’ So they said things like ‘Brittany likes David’, ‘Brittany wants to marry David’–Brittany was one of the girls–and I wrote one saying ‘Brittany wants to have sex with David’. So then we stuff all these notes in part of the jungle gym and then some kid finds them later and goes running up to the teacher who reads them and says ‘Who wrote this?’. And my friend Brittany is like ‘Her!’. And the teacher was like, ‘Come with me’. I got in so much trouble. I had to talk to the principal and they called my mom, and when she picked me up from school she yelled at me and called me a slut and told me I’d never do anything with my life and that I was a total loser. Now whenever I bring it up she’s so guilty, she’s like ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry I said those things’. And I never had any friends at that school again. It was a religious school and no one would be my friend because I had a potty mouth.”"Two things. The first one being that there was this concrete tunnel that I used to sit in and the boys would come over and I’d”–pantomimes lifting skirt–”show them my, yeah..and it was like ‘Don’t do that again’. And the second thing. I was playing by myself on a playground and these popular girls run up to me and they’re like ‘Can you help us write some notes? For boys?’ and I was like ‘Friends!’ So they said things like ‘Brittany likes David’, ‘Brittany wants to marry David’–Brittany was one of the girls–and I wrote one saying ‘Brittany wants to have sex with David’. So then we stuff all these notes in part of the jungle gym and then some kid finds them later and goes running up to the teacher who reads them and says ‘Who wrote this?’. And my friend Brittany is like ‘Her!’. And the teacher was like, ‘Come with me’. I got in so much trouble. I had to talk to the principal and they called my mom, and when she picked me up from school she yelled at me and called me a slut and told me I’d never do anything with my life and that I was a total loser. Now whenever I bring it up she’s so guilty, she’s like ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry I said those things’. And I never had any friends at that school again. It was a religious school and no one would be my friend because I had a potty mouth.”

burning man microstory #1

Dave lay shirtless in the hammock and drank beer after beer, swinging steadily. He told us about a time he took Ecstasy in Austin before a barbecue: “And I was just laying on the couch, I don’t know how I got there. I was on the grass outside and then I was like ‘Whoa I’m on a couch’”. He said “They told me I was laughing a lot. I don’t remember anything. I watched TV for a long time and it got dark. I don’t even know how I got in there. They were like ‘Hey Dave you coming to this barbecue?’ and I said ‘I don’t think I can get up’. They knew as soon as I got to the front door. I don’t even know how. They opened the door and they were like ‘Dave are you rolling?’”