Back home after an insane weekend with old friends a couple hours north in a rented house on a Point Reyes ranch. I can't stop crying, not from sadness but as a result of my depressed and abused system. Twenty minutes after leaving the ranch I vomited four times out the left passenger door. Relapse and recovery. On the brighter side, friend Cole came in early last week and we toured the city on bike. We looked at art and ate burritos, talked about music and went to a Kurosawa movie, met up with friends and went grocery shopping. On Thursday more friends came in then on Friday we went up to the ranch. So beautiful and calm. Sheep and a swampy pond. Home to the Strauss creamery, which happens to make my favorite yogurt and we ate dinner. Joked and made jokes, smoked cigarettes and drank. On Saturday we went hiking up to Bass lake and beyond to a water fall by the beach. Followed by drinking. Followed by multiple layers of hangover. I wouldn't have it any other way, but only once a year.
Tomorrow I leave for Kentucky to see my uncle, cousins, second cousins, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. On Friday I leave from Kentucky to go up to Wisconsin to see mother, step-father, aunt, aunt's wife, step-brother, old friends, and my dad. I'll have four full days so it's not much time but enough. I come back here a week from Wednesday and start school on Thursday. Much to do today to get ready to go and be gone and be ready to come back. Unlike last week I will have my computer and will be in touch. In the meantime, here's a Kimiko Hahn poem from the June issue of Harper's. I found it on a scrap torn from the magazine while cleaning out my bag this morning:
Tomorrow I leave for Kentucky to see my uncle, cousins, second cousins, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. On Friday I leave from Kentucky to go up to Wisconsin to see mother, step-father, aunt, aunt's wife, step-brother, old friends, and my dad. I'll have four full days so it's not much time but enough. I come back here a week from Wednesday and start school on Thursday. Much to do today to get ready to go and be gone and be ready to come back. Unlike last week I will have my computer and will be in touch. In the meantime, here's a Kimiko Hahn poem from the June issue of Harper's. I found it on a scrap torn from the magazine while cleaning out my bag this morning:
Xenicus Longipes
The four known species of bush wren in New Zealand
are, by now, endangered or extinct.
Possessing trifling tails and wings, none fly far—
instead they hop and dart
in whatever undergrowth scrapes the landscape.
Those on Cook Strait's margin of rock
entirely lost the capacity for flight
and in 1894 were destroyed not by farmers,
hunters, pet traders, rats, disease,
natural disaster or want of food—
but by Tibble, the lighthouse keeper's cat.
Oh, what we think we need to survive kills others:
I have consuming need for my beloved, he knows—
and I hope he is not sorry.
