Summer special: bad cold. Drowning in my own natural secretions -- and mindful of my own oft-repeated maxim that the body breaks down when external stresses pile up that you can't -- or won't -- pay attention to...
Had dinner with Anne Marie last night which was very pleasant. Anne Marie and I started tai kwon do at just the same time. She went on to get a blackbelt; I dropped out at green when I started working as an RN and landed swing shift. I made an attempt to start again -- that awful Roger Bliss interlude! -- but was too fucked up emotionally to get it together. The allure of crypto-millitary regimentation is still strong: in May, I enrolled Robin in a local dojo and it's been a positive experience for him, so positive that this week I recruited Sidney, the bonsai warrior princess, to join him.
Sid is a really interesting kid. She's patented the iron will thing -- learned to ride a bicycle in an hour, screaming at her mother, "I will do this," where most kids have to be coaxed. Jeannie, her mother, has never quite known how to deal with her. Sid was the daughter born after Jeannie ended a late-term pregnancy when doctors found an abnormality was found that would have made the unborn baby a developmental nightmare. Hard decision for Jeannie who was living in Missouri at the time. (Missouri is the state that uses the word "infanticide" instead of "abortion" in its pro-life legislative agenda.) The heartbreak, the guilt, the logistics of finding a provider who would perform the procedure, all of it added up to an obsession to replace the baby and Jeannie set about getting pregnant again with the grim determination of a general plotting a military campaign.
The pregnancy was not an easy one. Jeannie had sailed through her other three pregnancies without a problem but had intractable morning sickness with Sid, non-stop vomiting, dehydration, weight loss. At full-term Sid defied all induction attempts and finally had to be delivered by Caesarian section. Jeannie was sick for weeks. From the start, Sid behaved like an avenging goddess, extorting constant placation from her exhausted mother whose attentions never seemed to sooth. She was an everyday baby around other people, cooing and gurgling on cue, but she had it in for her mother.
Sid grew into a willful and determined toddler, one of the few people who could successfully stand up to the mischievous and beguiling Robin. Jeannie became one of my closest friends. Karma aside, I always figured what was going on with Sid was that she had a tremendous abundance of physical energy and never got a chance to discharge it all, to wind down to the blissful ground zero of physical exhaustion and tractability. So she's a natural for karate.
Jeannie accompanied us to the dojo yesterday and watched with a combination of amusement and horror as Matt led the children through their paramilitary exercises:
"Are you ready for your karate training?"
"Yes SIR!"
"How are you all today?"
"Good SIR!"
"Turn and face the flag! Bow!"
"When they get to be purple belts, they kidnap the kids and take them to the compound to begin their militia induction," I whispered to Jeannie.
She laughed. "It is a little ... creepy."
"You know, kids really go for the crypto-fascist stuff. They have a real fascination with control. And Matt's a sweet guy. Watch and see."
Matt is a sweet guy with his gawky, duck face and his utterly supple body. Ben once watched him run up a wall and do a cartwheel on the ceiling. Amazing grace.
The incredible Erica, of course, had played sensei to me and Anne Marie. At that time Erica had none yet begun her dizzying climb through the Charlotte Weinberger corridors of the-woman-behind-the-man influence, she was still hetaera in training but the signs were all there. She was the first woman I knew who wore seductive lingerie under the basic jeans and tee-shirt uniform, she painted her toenails bright crimson, she wore twin gold rings on the little fingers of each hand. She could do a jumping side kick higher than her head and when she flexed her toes in warm-up exercises, the arch of her foot was extraordinary.
"Do you still do karate?" I asked Anne Marie.
She sighed. "No. When I started living in San Francisco, the commute got to be too much. It killed an entire evening. I miss it though."
I miss it too...
In other news: Maria made me an insulting offer for contract work: $50/hour which is about half my consultant rate. My first impulse was to say no. My second was to panic. I have a family to support and money is money. The spectre of that night manager job at the AM/PM mini-mart loometh. The real issue for me is that I feel strongly that she's a psychic contaminant, a Kali emanating chaos and unrest and I want to protect myself against that. But I also want to pay the rent and PG&E bill. And she's not going to stay in business much longer -- the new business model she's trying to pitch is ridiculous. The glamour factor to the New Media has vanished. The only way to get a foot in the door with a corporate client these days is make the very first words out of your mouth, "I'm going to make you a shitload of money." In any media business, programming is always the number one cost center. So she's going to walk through the door, recommend that these potential clients make a huge investment without any clear iteration of what value they'll get in exchange? Fucking dumb. Milk the cash cow while you can, right?
But can I make myself porous enough to write the novel while I'm still in regular contact with Maria? That's the first priority now. And I don't know the answer.
Robin, being chased by Sidney, on the Hopkins beach. The Hopkins Marine lab was actually built on a Chinese cemetary -- where is Stephen King when you really need him? I like this photo because it's an inversion of the Goethe-ian maxim: "The eternal feminine leads you upward."
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