Information Blues.

There’s a simple idea someone once lent me but I gave little thought: be here now. It seems obvious but it can be so powerful; I try to keep it armed in the back of my head. Sometimes when I find my mind pulling forwards and back, if I can manage to fire off a be here now the pressure deflates. It’s a magic bullet.

Today as I was riding my bike home I was fretting about the past, wondering about the future; I had no idea where I was. But then bhn cracked through my head like lightning and I noticed the pleasing spin of my feet on the pedals and a blooming magnolia tree. It’s summer and there are too many lovely things to miss any of them.

Monday is Haphazard Chinese night at my house (population: one.) What you do is take that brick of tofu in the back of the fridge that seems to have frozen and fry the hell out of it. Then you briefly steam/fry any vegetables you can find and whip up a garrish sauce.

Tonight the vegetation consisted of:

a pound of wax beans
the heel of a bellpepper
a few florets of broc
and a quarter cup of spinach.

The sauce held a table of plum, a few more of hoisin, a dash of roasted sesame oil, a few drips of lemon, a dash of white balsamic and a drool of Rooster.

I don’t know if Todd knows it (he’s so good at popping off absurdities…) but he once paid me what I consider to be a great compliment: After testing a slab of fried tofu from my lunch he claimed that if he ever hit the lotto he’d hire me as his personal chef.

Yes, it’s Haphazard Chinese night at my house. You can come over; I’ll feed you vegetables.

We just rolled an overripe plum into the road and waited for a car to run it over.

This morning I finished White Teeth. I was sitting at Au Coquelet drinking a large French roast, which seems like a pint of espresso. The book was closing with a crazy structure, a giant hanging equation balanced by anarchy. I kept thinking no, she can’t be doing this as she lined up all of her characters like chess pieces for their own apocalypse.

The plot harrowed me, the caffeine filled my head with paranoid helium. I ate half a chocolate croissant as big as a shoe. I was having Yeatsian visions of the churning gyre; she was making me see hurricanes.

Well, my grounding wasn’t very strong to begin with. Last night I ate popcorn for dinner, and I’ve been spending a lot of time with my associate Josefina Durazo, a level 12 Jedi Guardian. Josefina is really cool, she carries a lightsaber in each hand and does sommersaults, but truly she’s not of this world. Furthermore, I’m either getting a surreal summer cold, or I’ve developed allergies. So I ate a Claritin yesterday and it made my skull feel like plastic.

All of this called for a Tranquility Plan. When I need settling I walk around Lake Merritt and listen to Astral Weeks on cumbersome semi-audiophile headphones. I can’t get over how moving the album is; I can feel my tectonic plates loosen inside as I lean over the estuary bridge and watch cormorants hold out their wings for the sun. There’s a playful teenager with a gray belly who keeps sneaking up behind the adults to bite on their tail feathers. The Tranquility Plan is working.

But look, there on the southwest side, in the ruffian zone where used needles stick out of the trash can: there’s a ghost. She’s narrow and wears clogs, with cheeks like buttercream. There are two ghosts, throwing sticks for a dog, but no dogs allowed on Lake Merritt. My plates are loosened and I’m seeing ghosts as Astral Weeks ends and here comes the beachcomber mix, it’s playing on random: it chooses Straight to Your Heart Like a Cannonball. More Van.

It’s a melodramatic day, I’ve been suspended in a hurricane, seen ghosts and taken a cannonball to the chest. This is not to mention 468 Apache processes or the A’s twelfth inning see-saw defeat.

To put a positive spin on it, you could say that at least I’m vital. I am vital if nothing else.

The red tide is beautiful. During the day the water is murky brown, chocolate cut with rust, but in the night impacts glow. When waves break a ghostly spotlight traces the seam, strobes horizontally in green, shows a subtle fuse. Then stomping in the sand footprints flash.

We spent Saturday night on the beach at Moonlight, burning a packing pallet pyre, celebrating the end of Matt’s twenties. I’m struck by how fast pallets kindle and refrigerator boxes incinerate. The bonfire was greedy; it gave off a wicked tan and barbecued the handkerchief inside my pocket.

Thirty is the new twenty! Geh. Throw it in the fire.

Ah how many beautiful twenty something nights, even eighteen, staring at the bioluminescence, holding hands. When it’s dark enough you can’t see the sets coming exactly, but you sense a wall rising in the distance. Then it topples over green.

I’m thankful for brightness, for my naughts, teens, twenties and thirties, for the little and big explosions. I’m thankful for small observations of beauty, those highlights you share with people who matter.