"In 1937 I got my first look at California when I opened at the San Francisco World’s Fair and I said, ‘This is for me.’"
Claude Bell
She writes! She wrongs! She cries in the shower (only sometimes)!
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I am stymied by my lack of technology. O, 2003 Powerbook! Lo, hand-crank Blackberry! Aye, iPod 3rd generation (so many buttons)!
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OMG! Karl Rove uses "jk"! →
A dream lunch with Karl Rove. Does he mean “dreamy”, as in talk about Twilight and braid each other’s hair and Bedazzle some Keds? Maybe share an order of fries (I’m on a diet)?
Oh, Karl. I want to put all of my commie love on you in a Christ-like way. I know you love America because you are so kind and honest to her people. Teach me how to love. Show me, because I’ve been brainwashed and I don’t know how. Be gentle. I’m scared.
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A year ago today
A year ago today, I was in New York. Having only moved to LA a few months before, I was constantly flying back for producing gigs. A year ago today, I was on set producing a shitty commercial for a shit product with shitty people, including this asshole director who, as far as I’m concerned, can go to Hell, fucking himself the whole way there with a thorned dildo infected with the herp. But I digress. That’s where I was a year ago today.
A year ago today, my brother was walking to work, as you do sometimes when it’s a gorgeous morning in California. As he did every morning because he didn’t have a car. A year ago today, my little brother, three years my junior, was walking to work on a beautiful California morning when a car rolled up behind him. He turned around. Two men, their faces hidden by scraps of cloth, opened fire on my little brother. They shot him three times and left him for dead.
No one helped him. He cried out in pain, but doors were closed and passers-by kept walking.
He didn’t die.
With bullets piercing his upper thigh, his shoulder, and his chest, he knocked on the door of an elderly neighborhood man known as El Chino, the lone Chinese resident of the barrio. “Oh shit, man,” El Chino told my little brother, “you got fucked up.” He paused. “You want a cigarette?” My 28-year-old brother took the cigarette and smoked it as he waited for the ambulance. Once he got to the hospital, everything went to shit as it does once the endorphins surging through a freshly-shot body die down, and my little brother was, as I understand it (and admittedly, I don’t totally), in a coma, in ICU, near death, recovering, battling pneumonia, dying, battling a staph infection, dying some more, on the mend, discharged. In that order.
He was shot a few blocks from the house we grew up in, from the house my parents, up until a few months ago, still called home. Hours later, two detectives knocked on the door to that house and told my parents their son was the victim of a drive-by shooting. He would be found in a hospital under an alias. His assailants were never sought, never caught.
He spent more than half his life in a gang. He was jumped in at 12. I remember doing laundry and finding the blood-stained shirt. While I was president of every club in high school, balancing musical theater nerdery with a 4.2 grade point average, he was in a gang doing gang-y stuff. The fall of my senior year, he ran away from home and was gone for nine months, living with the gang in the barrio a few blocks from our home. There were MISSING posters - his face, his olive skin, his piercing blue eyes, no smile. They were hung. They were distributed to homes. There were conversations with blank-faced neighbors. No one helped. I remember the phone ringing in the middle of the night, answering it, and hearing small, shallow breaths. I said hi to someone, to silence. He was found the night before my high school graduation by the police. My parents took him to a hospital to be treated for depression. Days later, he was shipped off to stay with relations in Texas, one of whom was a police officer in Fort Worth. A few months after that, he was sent to a Christian military school for bad boys in Missouri. My mom and I visited, and I remember eating Arby’s and waiting in the car for my mom to fetch him, because I was wearing pants instead of the required floor-length skirt and wasn’t allowed on campus. He completed high school in two-and-a-half years with high honors, ready to be matriculated back into society. He came home, got a job at McDonald’s, was promoted to equipment manager, and gave my mom the shiny pin he received for excellent service. He was 17. I was 20. It was over.
No, it wasn’t. We didn’t think it could get worse, but it did. He said he was out of the gang, but he wasn’t. I remember the first time visiting him in jail. I was expecting an orange jumpsuit. He wore gold. He was waiting for me behind the glass. I sat down and picked up the phone, just like TV.
We both laughed. We’d been here before. We laughed when I visited him at the mental institution, only then he’d been wearing a hospital gown and slipper socks. We laughed in Missouri when Mom drove us off the school grounds, sitting the back seat together fighting over fries. The first words are always the worst, because behind them lie a cascade of tears. So usually I bullshit or say some smart-ass line to get things started.
“Oh man, you fucked up this time.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Tears welled up in my eyes, but his eyes stayed a clear, crisp blue.
The next 11 years spun my brother through two county jail runs, two state prison stints, the birth of his three children, the threat of a third felony and a life sentence, and, finally, shot for dead in a run-down neighborhood where the residents shut their doors and covered their ears. My brother was always a victim where his police record was concerned. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time led to encounters with the police, which were parole violations. His felonies were a series of technicalities. The one thing he was ever truly guilty of was being in a gang. It sounds like bullshit, like the pathetic defense of a naively-duped sister, but it’s the truth and it’s sad and it just makes the whole story even more nauseating than it already is. But I digress.
There was always stasis before the shock, a calm before the storm. A year ago wasn’t any different. Things felt cool and right. He had his children and he was working and he was in school and he was helping my parents around the house. And then he was shot. It was just like TV: I was the woman in the bathrobe, speaking to the reporter while crying, “He was just starting to change his life around, he was doing so well.” And he was. I think. I thought. I don’t know.
A little less than a year ago today, I was sitting in a hospital room with my brother, alias John Doe. He was complaining about his morphine drip and how there were no good movies on during the day. He was sick of Jell-O. He had no idea who shot him. He wasn’t still in danger. He’s not going to leave the area. He wasn’t scared. I nodded and smiled and left the hospital and climbed into my car and hit the steering wheel and sobbed for the umpteenth time about a man I knew so well who was a total fucking stranger to me.
Today he’s still with us. Today he’s a son to my parents and a father to his children. Today there are the tattoos and the scars and the remaining bullet that cannot be removed because it is two millimeters away from his aorta. Today there is a stasis, a calm.
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Gaborone, Botswana. 2007. Once upon a time, traveling was so important to me. I don’t know what happened. I want it back.
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96 New Reasons To Love Star Clusters
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“Ninety-six clusters of stars in the sky…. Ninety-six clusters of stars… You take one down and pass it around…” Do you need ninety-six new reasons to love astronomy? Then you’re going to want to hear about all the new discoveries the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory has made. Read on…
An international team of astronomers has taken observations to the next level with their discovery of 96 new star clusters which have been hidden behind the dusty cloak of interstellar matter. By utilizing sensitive infrared detectors and the world’s largest survey telescope, the intrepid crew set a new record for finding so many faint and small clusters at one time.
“This discovery highlights the potential of VISTA and the VVV survey for finding star clusters, especially those hiding in dusty star-forming regions in the Milky Way’s disc. VVV goes much deeper than other surveys,” says Jura Borissova, lead author of the study.
(via universetoday)
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When my parents moved into their new home a few months ago, they found a broken gravemarker in the garage, left behind by the previous owners. My mom likes it - she thinks Nellie is going to keep a watchful eye on our family, so the marker sits in the front yard.
30 years ago, when my parents moved into my childhood home, there were crosses stenciled in ink above every doorway and window. Perhaps this should have been taken as a sign, but my parents were young, barely 20 when they settled into the little tract home on the edge of a once-lovely suburban neighborhood, a neighborhood that, over time, was slowly and quietly overrun by gangs. The house always had a negative energy to it, and one’s heart felt heavy walking inside. The rooms were stifling, and the hardships my family experienced while living there were exacerbated by the feeling of suffocation by the environs. I was always terrified in the house. Some of my earliest memories are the feelings associated with being gripped by fear at bedtime. The dark panicked me my entire childhood. By senior year of high school, I’d learned to stay up through the night to avoid the pitch-black, sleeping through classes during the day. This was when I really became a writer; creating stories to waste away the hours until dawn, when I felt safe enough to take a quick disco-nap before zero period, radio still blaring, bedroom door open, hall light still on.
My mom would often see ghosts in the house. Sometimes they were the spirits of loved ones: my great-great grandmother used to visit my mother when she was pregnant. But, more often than not, they were strangers, occupants who shared the house with us. There was one who was attached to me. It was a young man with longish blond hair, in his early 20s in another time. My mom would find him sitting at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night, watching me while I slept. When I left home at 18 to move to New York City, he vanished, only returning when I would visit. I never saw him, but I’m not surprised he was there. Something was always there in that house, hovering above/aside/within, and it wasn’t until I moved out and on my own that I began to understand the power of the energy of a home. I remember my first night in my dorm room. I was living off East 10th and Broadway in a hundred-year-old building that was once a hotel where Mark Twain lived for a spell. My roommate had not arrived yet. There was some unfamiliar noise - the streets were muffled but they were there, alive and blazing, and the building yawned as it settled. I turned off the light and stared at the ceiling, head on the pillow. I felt nice. I felt safe. I fell asleep. In my 13 years in New York, I lived in a number of places, many far older, creakier, and haunted-seeming than the tract home on Pine Drive where I was raised. The happiest place I ever lived was on State Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. It was a four-story brownstone divided into two apartments, and my roommates and I had the top two floors. It was 150 years old, with large planks for flooring that creaked with every step. There were small mice in the walls that scurried about. The levels were slanted, the lode-bearing wall having been tweaked with in an ill-fated construction project. But it was a house that was happy, and as you entered the front door, you felt her smile. It was downtown Brooklyn in a neighborhood where the bodegas still had bulletproof glass at the registers but would cave to gentrification long after I’d gone, where young and single females clutched pepper spray and moved quickly through the night to get to the safety of their homes, where the halfway houses spilled open after dark and the occupants gave in to the demons they’d spent the day battling. It was a neighborhood that lurked with trouble, and my home was its heart of gold.
On a recent trip to my parents’ new home, I was taken aback by how light and lovely walking through the front door, into the space, felt. My parents waved from the kitchen, each roughly 35 pounds lighter since moving. They were smiling. For the first time in my life, I am watching my parents experience true joy, the burdens of the hauntings of their former home long gone. I am watching them laugh, I am watching them bloom, I am watching them look forward to all that life has to offer. I know how good this feels, and my heart sings for them.
Take care of them, Nellie.
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
