Late night cleaning

I was scrubbing my toilet around 11:00 p.m.— don't ask, I do that sometimes, clean the house at night— and I started thinking about the Southern Poverty Law Center's Anti-Muslim Inner-Circle: a list of far-right, ultra conservative activists who have ratcheted up the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the past few years. Two on SPLC's list, Pamala Geller and Robert Spencer, were mentioned in Anders Behring Breivik's 1,500 page rant, which was posted online shortly before his killing spree in Oslo. 

As I cleaned, I wondered if any of the ten listed ever scrubbed out their own toilet? Did David Horowitz—who was once a Marxist, and now hater-of-everything Muslim and everything liberal, who runs the David Horowitz Freedom Center and, this is only a wild guess, was instrumental in coining the term, "Islamofascism," and Pamela Geller, who has captured the imagination of nationalistic, anti-Muslim followers worldwide in her black-hearted Atlas Shrugs blog— ever bend over to scrub? Probably not, for if they did, they might not be spewing such bile into the blogosphere, where they wield an inordinate influence amongst their ilk. If they cleaned their own shit once in awhile, I reasoned, they might be a little less provocative with the hate speech, a little more humble with the accusations. 

But you have to admit, Muslims make the perfect "other," like Jews of yore. Along these lines, I was surprised to learn that anti-Semitism among the far-right has fallen out of favor, replaced by hatred for Muslims. Geller, who the NYTimes and other media outlets have linked to Breivik's actions, denied any responsibility for the killings, calling any criticism of her, "patently ridiculous." But words have power as we know, and intolerant, furious, hate spewing words seem to have the most power of all.

What is amazing to me is how alike the anit-immigration, anti-tax, small government Progress Party, of which Breivik was a member, is to the Tea Party. Although no longer a force, the Progress Party served a small contingent of Norway's far-right, and, well, this profile fits the Tea Party, doesn't it? Breivik soon dropped out of the party and went on to develop his own ideas, the outcome of which we know. But we see it now in the GOP, in bed with the devil, standing on their principles— uncompromising, unwilling to listen or to reason; they announce their views as the only true religion. If you squint, the Tea Party could almost be the Progress Party, pre-Oslo, before Breivik lost his mind.

To Whom It May Concern:

To Whom it May Concern:

I will get right to the point. Please, and you know who you are, do not encourage me to draw. Not that I don't like your comments; in fact, your comments make me weep with joy, but I'm weak and undisciplined and your words go to my head. I come home after work and get out a beer and if I can afford it some good scotch and round up my colored pencils, pens and charcoals and make a mess. As I sit there in a haze of alcohol and lots of pencils, it occurs to me I should be attempting something useful, like setting up my new IPhone which I've had for over a week, but have yet to record a voicemail message or transfer my music or email or photos (pitiful I know). Or continuing in this vein, I should be looking for a real job like I keep threatening, instead of dragging my ass home every night at 10:30 and staying up to all hours...drawing. 

So I put away my colored pencils.... but then something catches my eye, and I can't help myself again. 

For instance, on Monday, in the Health & Wellness section of the LA Times, the focus was on service animals. I had just written about a service dog whose job it was was to make his master laugh. What caught my attention this time, and which I didn't know, is that there is very little oversight for service animals: anyone can buy a service vest online and slap it on their dog, or, as Karen Ravn wrote in "What Service Animal Means," slap it on their "cats and rats and parrots and ferrets and llamas [!] and iguanas [!] and at least one snake." This was too much; the next night I had to spend a few more hours drinking and making a mess, the results of which I present to you here. 

I know I should probably end by saying thank you to those whose kind words have gotten me to this precipice, but please don't take that as an invitation for more encouragement; it's the last thing I need. 

Yours sincerely,

The Rat's Nest

Service Animals in Focus

A Train full of Crazies....

We'd taken the Gold Line downtown on Saturday night, an uneventful ride, but on the way back, a few hours later, it was a whole other trip. Among the late night wanderers with nowhere to go, we sat with a train full of crazies. 

I'd first noticed the couple on the platform at Union Station, the dog rolling on the ground, with red sunglasses on his head, and his master, a hipster in a gray porkpie hat. 

The dog, a beautiful velvety tan pit bull, was a service dog, wearing the official blue vest, but his master treated him like a clown. The dog was the man's therapy, I heard the hipster say, to keep him entertained, to keep him laughing. The dog attracted attention like crazy, and so did the mutterings of his master. As they walked through the car, the dog dragged his muzzle across the sweaty laps of passengers who reached out to pet him. All eyes were on that laughing dog; once seated, the dog fell asleep under his master's feet, his day job as a clown done. 

At the other end of the train, a middle-aged woman in a makeshift hijab talked in tongues. She sat with her arms across her body spewing nonsense syllables, religious incantations of her own making.

When some kids made fun of her, she pulled her scarf over her head, covering her face entirely, and repeated those sounds even louder—she wasn't going to be intimidated. She carried on as though her prayers would really protect her. Between her incantations and watching the laughing dog, my head pingponged back and forth from one end of the train to the other. 

I know it's rude to stare but on this train wherever you looked got you in trouble. Seated directly across from us was a Dodger's fan with severe OCD. The  kid wore a Dodger's ball cap, a Dodger's jacket and underneath, a Dodgers T-shirt. 

He looked kind of normal, except for his repetitious counting, his fingers striking the palm of his hand, adding and subtracting, accompanied by him mouthing random numbers, as he too might find an answer. From Union Station to his destination in Chinatown, he never stopped counting.

One sees the deep divide more clearly on the Gold Line at night. On one side of the cliff, there are those of us who have cars, riding the metro to "take" public transportation; it's an effort but at least we do our civic duty once in awhile. 

On the other side is the "public," a wide swath of humanity who use the metro as their only form of transportation. Call me naive, but there seem to be more riders these days. Among the normal and hard working who pay the high fees to get to a job, there are those—and at night you realize just how many there are in this city of widening gap between rich and poor—who ride the metro because they have nowhere else to go....and no place to sleep...and nothing they own....and no one to stop them from going crazy. 


Update: On July 18, the LA Times published a complete guide to service dogs in their Health & Wellness section. What caught my attention was the mention that anyone could order a service vest online, making it easy for some to get creative and anoint their own pets—cats, rats, parrots, llamas! iguanas and one known snake—for therapy. Makes me wonder if laughing dog wasn't such a dog...

A Tale About...

Once, there was a Crow...

and Crow would caw whenever it sensed danger...


CAW, CAW,


One day, it looked down from its perch, and saw a....

Coyote...

 and Crow cawed and cawed.

Coyote's appearance meant that food was coming, and so, other animals were on their way too.

Skunks. CAW CAW


and raccoons and possums. CAW CAW CAW


But mainly, 

Coyote. CAW CAW CAW CAW CAW


Crow looked down from its perch and saw, too, the old witch who fed the Coyote. She lived in a green house, with a green hedge and a green car, and whose complexion was a little green. 

She didn't feed the little children she kept in the oven, but she fed the wild animals that came to her door. She loved the animals more than the little children, and more than her neighbor, who had asked her not to feed the wild animals. 


At one time—about a week ago—the witch had told her neighbor that she wanted to have a good sense of community; the neighbor hadn't realized that what she meant was a community of wild things.


The witch whispered sweet nothings to the Coyote, as Coyote waited for its meal. She told the Coyote to be a good boy, Werden ein guter Junge; then cautiously she approached, while Coyote looked up at the bowl she held in both hands. 

They understood each other; one was wild, and the other, lonely, or crazy, or both.

The neighbor stayed hidden behind the hedges, because she didn't want the Coyote to bark at her; also, she didn't want to be turned into jello by the witch. She knew that witches can do stuff like that— turn bones into halva, or turn coyotes into humans.

End of story?  To be continued...CAW CAW

Weekend in San Fran

The first thing I did when I got home from San Francisco was pull out Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. When my friend Lu first handed me the book, I didn't know how to look at it: I'd never gotten San Fran as a city; it was too small and too big at the same time, too baffling in its hilly and divided neighborhoods. It also brought up memories of passing through in the seventies when the Mission District was a scary run down 'hood and Haight Ashbury had turned into a needle park. Some good memories too, like Green Gulch Zen Center—again, my guide Lu—and Tassajara Bakery on Cole Street, which, if you've never tasted Tibetan Barley Bread you might not get the reference, but sadly, it's too late; the bakery closed its doors in 1999.

This visit was different, though; I saw the city for the magic, infinite city that it is and opened Solnit's book immediately. It's a series of atlases around which she and a bevy of artists/writers/cartographers dissect the city, a city whose demographics and history have changed as much as any great city in the last 40 years. She writes about getting her sources from great books, but also from "living atlases,"  misfit characters who she interviews extensively: "I live among...these books. I also live among ghosts. For better or worse, the familiar vanishes, so that the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain. After the great 1972 earthquake, Managua, Nicaragua, lost many of its landmarks; people long after gave directions by saying things like, 'Turn left where the tree used to be.'" 

And that's what this book is like—getting the perspective of ghosts, hobos, migrant workers, thieves, queers, Zen masters, trees, fish....

My own understanding is slight, but on this trip, I came to translate the city (plus Oakland, not the wasteland I expected) in my own way. Bear with me, dear reader, and then read Solnit's book for true illumination.

Rat's Nest basic understanding:

Castro

and

The Castro

The Guggenheim

and 

The Gap at Union Square

telegraph

and

Temescal and Telegraph Ave District, Oakland
(great art, restaurants and thrift stores found here!)

Tenements, NYC

and

Luxury Apartments, San Fran

Mill with sheep

 and

Mills

As part of the Middlebury Language Program at Mills College, 

signs in Arabic, French, Spanish and Japanese appear across campus.

No sheep.

In Shifts

(follow up to post on 6/3)

  

I don't know why I'm afraid to talk to my neighbor Thea about the commotion next door; perhaps because I talked to her last year about feeding the feral cats and skunks and raccoons and nothing came of it. My fear comes, too, from the fact that an old woman can be sharp edged as a knife, dangerous as a steel trap and unyielding to the point of chicanery. 

Don't get me wrong; my neighbor is a wonderful woman, but the busy schedule of the comings and goings of various animals has gotten out of hand. Something has to be done:

7 a.m.: Breakfast, Coyote, table set for one
7:30-8 a.m.: breakfast, seven skunks
noon-3: brunch, six rowdy crows
5 p.m.: supper again for the coyote, although in this part of the country I think you call it dinner.
5:30 p.m.-until dark: skunks in shifts, the occasional possum and raccoon

The point of my argument (to make her stop setting out food) must be in the interest of the wildlife she's feeding. I'll say in a soft spoken manner, "Thea, you're not helping the animals; you're making them dependent on the food you give them. What will happen when you're not here?"

Who will get to the bowl first?

Why would I not be here? she'll ask.

Pause, What then? Am I to say, at your age your headed for the big ballpark in the sky; anything could happen. But I can't say that; it would be too cruel.

Well, what if you get sick, I'll say. What will the animals do?  The coyote might become aggressive and attack some unsuspecting child or small pet; maybe jump over the fence and bite me for interfering with its supper. 

She'll shake her head like last time and say she doesn't agree with my assessment.

I'll say, Okay, you win; let the skunks fill up the afternoon air with stink, let the coyote become a stalker, let the crows caw to their hearts content. I give up, I give up. 

And she'll say, you see, what a lovely talk we've had. I'm glad we understand each other.






But it didn't go like that. When I called her at noon to talk about the problem, she was all good graces; she said she had wondered herself if she was doing the right thing. As a child during the war, she lived on the edge of a forest, and it was only natural to feed the animals during winter. I gently reminded her, an abundant harvest is always available in sunny CA; there's enough little voles and moles to fill up Dodger Stadium. She said so herself: "I have to remember this isn't Germany." So, she agreed to stop. If she couldn't feed one, she wouldn't feed any. She promised, no more food. 

But I feel a little guilty that she won't have the animals to feed. She's lonely up here on Mt. Washington since her husband died five years ago; her daughter lives in Pennsylvania and comes out only a few times a year. It must give her pleasure to take care of so many small creatures. I wonder if I've done more harm than good. 

Neighbor Thea with her daughter Karen, who lives back East.

Will I be like Thea in my old age, leathery and lonely? Will I do anything—no matter how misguided—to feel so needed?


P.S. Woke up this morning and noticed three bowls in her yard, and a possum lurking about. What the...??

Black and White

and a little blue...

Mountain Tapir, Los Angeles Zoo

Eagle Rock Blvd. and El Paso

 Window display, Walker St.

 Flyer on Varick St.

 Abandoned barn, Canajoharie, NY

Barack Obama, Occidental College, 1980

(photo credit: Lisa Jack)

Jacaranda Trees, Occidental College, 2011