Information Blues.

I started a dream journal. Then my dreams stopped: I’ve only had four in the last two weeks.

Last night I dreamt I was being sent to the Vietnam War. I was living in a barn out in the country playing Commodore 64 games, but this coming Friday I knew they would come to cart me off. It was the kind of dream that lingers on a single feeling, fixates so long that it feels inescapable and therefore real. An uncomfortable set of truths: primitive side scrollers, golden fields, coming doom.

This afternoon as I was returning home from a trip to the hills on my bicycle, a man pulled up to the stop light at Grand underneath 580 in a 70’s brown Japanese muscle car blaring disco. It was a driving dance beat, and he started playing the trumpet intensely as he waited for the left turn signal with the windows down. It reverberated a long time beneath the concrete underpass.

When I got home I ate the last coconut/chocolate chip scone, one champagne mango, and a bowl of leftover peanut sauce noodles. A Sharp-shinned Hawk was flying in the sunset light; he was so handsome in dark mascara and banded tail. He perched a long time on the bell tower of the church on the corner, leaving occasionally to fly a lap around my block, buzzing me in my crow’s nest by the window.

It’s difficult to write about desire. It requires so much context, so many careful disclaimers. Yet it seems like a tantalizing challenge to me.

I consider myself a feminist, but there has to be some way to balance that old Women’s Studies 10 philosophy with what I learned from Muddy Waters:

I’m a man
I’m a full grown man
I’m a man
I’m a natural born lovers man
I’m a man
I’m a rollin’ stone
I’m a man
I’m a hoochie coochie man

That’s right. I’m a man. But it took me quite a while to realize this was awesome. At first I thought it was too default, generic, too much in the center: almost everyone are men. Hence: screw men. (And a pinche guero man on top of that? Who needs to hear from you?) But you can’t escape who you are, as chemistry surfaces to remind you…

(Well, some people can escape. But that’s a different essay for another blog.)

I don’t want to escape. It’s summertime, and it’s quite nice to feel my blood boil. How can I convey how much joy the sight a beautiful girl can lend me? It zaps me right in the center with adrenaline, it swirls the mystic clouds that surround my heart, spins my head with vertigo. To observe the symmetry and contours is breathtaking, for this is one thing I think I’ve realized: men are hard wired to savor shapes. And every one has their own set of shapes that zap them. We are connoisseurs of geometry in motion, how women are assembled and how they move, frames slowing to a ridiculous lightning zoom: the sight of her reaches me.

It’s a startling emotion. It feels like witnessing a moment of (somewhat unfounded, or at least untested) debilitating divinity. It can make your whole being clench up as you mutter to yourself, “Holy shit!” and this is all you can really say, yet you really mean it. You may become entranced like a dog staring at the treat his owner is holding. Then your eyes cross with lust as you crave more hints, more details! Every texture may beckon like Alice and her rabbit hole: you’re overcome with curiousity, you need to know!

Control yourself.

So then it’s almost as though as a (single) young man in the summertime you are vulnerable, that every lovely girl may hit like a bomb going off. That shopping at Berkeley Bowl, one of the best produce markets around, where lovely, healthy people come to purchase vital things to make them shine even brighter, can be a harrowing and invigorating experience.

All hail the summer, when imaginations burn, to remind us it’s extra nice to be alive.

I’ve got a chiltepin chile plant growing in the kitchen. Whenever I water it three earthworms come out the bottom of the pot; they like to chill out in the sink for a while, then I reintroduce them.

I had a vivid dream a couple days ago: thousands of Azure Kingfishers were diving for fish.

Yesterday as I climbed Redwood Road with 40 miles in my legs it seemed like I was in purgatory. It was 6pm and an unseasonably cold fog covered the ridge; nobody else was outside. Everything was still as I was left to dwell on my stiff thighs and plateaued heart rate, crawling up into the mist. I wanted to be home but 16 miles of cold rolling hills lay in my way.

Yet coming down the first descent above the watershed I saw the most beautiful display: over a stand of bays hundreds of barn swallows were flying loops. It was as if they were celebrating, throwing an aerial party in the fragrant trees.

Today had me feeling mediocre. See, I was up til 3:30am walking around Maraudon with the hui. That was a bit of a mistake, but it was fun; it cleared my head out.

At the end of a brittle day I might hedge, not ride my bike as intended. But I’d given myself enough leeway already, I’d decided to assassinate elementals until the wee hours with my friends, to sacrifice Thursday to potential mediocrity. It was time to get stern: I had to take it back.

Liz Phair was playing my head as I climbed Butters Canyon. I’d forgotten about Liz Phair for a while, but a girl reminded me. Liz Phair is a type of guilty pleasure but I like her, she’s a crass wrapper around a tender heart. In the summer heat the watershed smelled good! Thickets were warming with a scent like sarsparilla. My legs felt great, they were ready to go, so I clamped on to momentum like a vice and rode up Skyline through Joaquin Miller Park where I saw a teenage turkey vulture sitting on a log, bright in the sun. His head was cherry red.

When I finished climbing I started rolling. Trees passed like a fast moving picture. I turned corners and suddenly the view was open, I could see the entire bay, then it was gone. It took me a while, but now I realize (like Doran) that the Berkeley/Oakland Hills can be a past time. How else might you better spend your afternoon than rolling along the east bay’s spine, tracing the Hayward Fault through the trees?

I try to remember I’m lucky every time I reach the top. I’m not always going to be able to pedal my bicycle a thousand feet up! I’m not always going to live in Oakland, with easy access to picture perfect rides. I often wonder if the people living up there in their fancy homes know how lucky they are, to live with a view that is a constant piece of art in motion. Sometimes I feel lucky that I can’t take it for granted, I have to work for it, so that every time it’s striking to reach the top. It’s hard to make it up, but I seem to crave that difficulty (which sweetens the reward.)

Now I’m sitting around on the couch in my underwear with a half buttoned corduroy cowboy shirt, streaming the A’s game on my computer through an open proxy server in Oklahoma with all of the windows open. And there are black beans wailing in the pressure cooker.

To borrow my own phrase, half satisfied feels pretty good.