insomnia

in which I am not expending enough energy during the day, happily sitting on my butt tending to the (very few) needs of my Pop who has just had a rather large but benign tumor removed from his neck. It was getting in the way of his arm mobility, and having wedged itself between the major arteries aiming for his brain-muscle was now conquering the uncharted territory of his spinal cord. we're at the Mayo Clinic in MN. yesterday the surgeon was peering at the filligree of nerves and the wet membranes of spinal fluid. today Pop, having previously fortified himself with kayaking and broccolli, is still, as always, walking faster than me through the hallways.

otherworldly. the hospital bed ate him for a day, with its teeth of dials and switches, it's vacuum attachments, it's rails of buttons, the sheets that blended to his gown and the crease of semi-recline that sucked the trunk of his body into a voluminous white nothing, just his toes at one end and his brown speckled hawk nose at the other. How he substantiated so quickly is a mystery to me, but here he is again, eating fish, peering at me over coffee, just like in Thailand when we rambled around in the opposite climate. In the six am morning of, he sips at his cup and says well, of course there's practically no risk of death with this operation, but all the same, I've lived a very full life, done everything I want to do and much more, and if I were to die, it wouldn't be my choice, but I wouldn't be afraid...

i've been reading a collection of native american prose and poetry. often a life is just and meaningful when it is lived in accord with the messages of dreams. dreams and vision are compulsive. directive. I was reading and article about insight, the neurochemistry of it, and how it occurs usually after a prolonged impass. the surge of beta waves that register on the cat scan within a space of alpha (often associated with an unclenched state of mind). How the region behind the forehead is like the conductor, but the regions that register activity at the moment of insight are all over the place and particularly in the right brain. where do dreams come from? I was at the "Bodies" exhibit in Seattle- I asked one the the docents where was the seat of the soul. He said, to my immense astonishment, the pineal gland. (since it has no other known function, apparently) . On the body diagrams of the nervous system at the hospital, the pineal gland is missing. (so was the clit from the bodies exhibit). Why is my soul not located in my appendix?is that reserved for soul food? that's where the hungry ghost is.

all I know is that the fucked-upnest thrill seeker I've ever met in person wore a pfd when he jumped off the bridge. I know that I still dream of him. and he is not the only one I dream of. I know that the one I dreamed I was marrying has forgotten me. I used to dream that I could fly. I have dreamed that I led the revolution. I dreamed that ropes let me float below the wide blue sky. My father had a moment of intense insight at an est training session when he was about my age: he had voluntered to get more involved and so the trainer was insulting him and berating him for his density in answering this simple question: where am I? there. where are you? here. nononono, let's try again- where am I? there. where are you? here. we're not getting through, are we? where are you? ... . . . . there. he says he could feel the synapses in his brain all firing at once. ... where am I? here. you are here and I am you.

it is 2:20 in the morning, and he, over there, is blowing feathers into the air- exhale, inhale. pho, whistle, pho. and I, over here, feel no closer to the next dream, but I will try again, all the same. oh, to sleep like an old man jest a tich worn out from surgery. He rustles, what is he dreaming?

good night, you over here.

sustainable usda?

petition here for healthy roots to our food systems- get off the sauce of high-fructose corn syrup as one of the many reasons why this country is fat, not phat. have you seen "supersize me"? remember all those dots that he connected? here's a beginning of how to disconnect them and get our bodies and minds healthy again--

ding dong the wicked witch is dead!

(and I scored a paying job for two months) Oh it is such a beautiful day!! can you just feel the air clearing up? oh yes, there are storms, but the man at the helm says you can do the difficult thing, you've done it before. Harry Belafonte says without you, the man will fail. You!! Me! I am needed! My man praises the makers of things!! Me! Baby, talk to me! I am on this ship! I am not hiding in the anchor locker, curled up in piles of rusty chains. good god in heaven, I have been so depressed for the past eight years, you have no idea. Why do I take these things so intensely? Maybe because that murdurous administration seemed both unstoppable and condoned? I made serious inquiries into the viability of studio work in North Europe. before that, I investigated graduate school in Australia. moving to Portland lifted my spirits for a time but still, it has taken years to settle into a measure of emotional security. I've been living on the fringe of reason and teetering at the brink of willful self-destructive obscurity ... forgive me, I am young. passionate. exciteable, depressable. I thought our trust could not be restored. I thought consumerism had a death-grip on our country. I feared the military machine would decimate everything I hold dear, with the media cheering on. And purely personally, I have bemoaned the gradual devaluation of elegant craftwork in all its forms. No, Rome was not built in a day. Barney Frank thinks the recovery will kick in six months before the next election. but I believe that this dear man has arrived in the nick of time to give us the straight jive on what we need to do. The system of destruction is so vast and so rooted in our assumptions that it is an astronomical task to bring justice to the earth, other countries, cultures, creeds, but I have nothing better to do with my little life than to engage. Damn the torpedoes, Captain! Full speed ahead, and I'll throw the pots!

"and since it was already the mount, it didn't need the sermon"

- John Gilgun from his poem Clay right there on page ninety-four of the newest Studio Potter in which I too am honored to have a published little bite. (they didn't publish my website address, though, so if you're looking: treadlehead.com is where it's at, but it's almost a mixed blessing that they didn't print it because the site is in such need of remodel that it's embarrassing.)

it's a gorgeous issue- Chris Gustin's belly wrapped in opaque vellum- yum! Gwendolyn Yoppollo breaking it down like I never could, and I'll be chewing on Hunt Prothro's anti-treatise for a while. And here's a kiss for Denise Gackstetter, who is an excellent yoga teacher, I can attest.

I have been enjoying a silent retreat for the past twenty days. No phone, no news, not much email. minimum contact with people, little music. read Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind by Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran early on and didn't really end up reading much more than that and new yorkers, even though I had intentions of doing nothing but read, write, meditate, yoga, make pots and cook a little. At first I was all rigid about it- up at 6, yoga till 7, sit till 8, tea, work, clean, lunch,nap, read, all planned out. HA! maybe I was jet-lagged but I was dreaming wild dreams, waking up at 1 am, wide up till four, then falling asleep sitting up. In the studio, I had this great design idea for evolving the lickable plates, but quickly found that I needed to do a lot of recycling and deep cleaning which turned into making saggers and flower pots out of old messed-up clay, and then the weather was suddenly 50 degrees and sunny so I was outside hacking away at the garden, and in the process I decided to turn my filthy attic into a living space so I scavenged ship-lap fir boards for that project and up-ended everything - everything- yesterday found me upstairs in a tool belt squatting beneath the rafters heaving stepping-stones of teeter-totter boards encrusted with a century of dirt around so that I could walk on something so that I could lay out, at long last, a permanent floooooor.

how did up at six, yoga till seven, sit till eight turn into fir floorboards flying in a windstorm?

at a certain point, I found a phrase to describe what I was trying to do- "clean the filter". of my noggin, that is. all the noise, the analysis, the fears, the ethers. all the self-ness. all this energy that I've been spending trying to Figure It Out and using crutches to walk through mud-bogs. dumb. not regret-dumb: in the video game of life, you have certain tools, certain points to cash in, certain handicaps, and I did my best with what I had. I'm just saying I think I'm through the worst of the marsh, and ready to resume kicking ass. who knows, maybe at this level, I have to battle Kafka's cockroach, but hey, embrace the man within, right? no, I think I'm done with existential crises. I'm not an intellectual, and I don't really want to be. I am happiest when I am making things. material things. not idea-things. I am happiest when I am bringing the material to its beauty- a vision that I had of myself in the attic was sweeping a belt sander over the floor for hour after blissful hour, watching the grain come back to life. and then rolling the urethane over it, aaaaah- rain in the desert.

it's part of a much bigger question- what kind of a leader am I? how and when do I step up? I think it is inevitable in the coming years that there will be a watershed moment (maybe tomorrow on Inauguration Day!) when we as a people need all those capable of leading to really step outside their comfort zones and do the thing on peril of death. Even the ones outside The System, like me, and the ones with monkeys and the pirates and the queers- everybody. I don't know how many people have described me as bold. I'd say bull-headed to the point of stupidity, but hey- I love to make things but I have other gifts as well. what I'm trying to do is make the space, physically and metaphorically, available. scrub the brain-filter. scrub the floor. dust off the charisma, iron the forehead, shake out the soul, lets roll, baby, lets roll!

japan part the second

I have been remiss in my writing duties. Please forgive me- I have been ignoring my computer. I hope everyone is well and looking forward to the new year and particularly to a change in the weather in DC. Hopefully this global warming will effect some contructive communication between Isreal and Palestine as well. Ps, if anyone is looking for a potent global advocacy group, check out Avaaz.org.

more about Japan. Well, let's start with Thailand, where I met up with my Pop for a few days. We bonked around like two kids without a care in the world. Knowing that he plans on retiring there puts thailand in a whole other perspective. He bought and remodeled a little shop-house. One of those very narrow four-story affairs with the wide open shop below, and space for untold multitudes above. So now these garment workers are his new neighbors, the pepsi-bottle washing station next to the ferry dock that you get to by walking through the park where the usual couples and bums hang out will be familiar territory to me. I will grow accustomed to hearing him respectfully and firmly tell the cabbie to turn on his meter. I look forward to the short ride down to the local seafood place with three servers for every table who hover from the second you sit down through the minutes it takes me to figure out which perfectly prepared delicacy I will have today. But I don't mind because they are so sweet, and one little ahh, lady? In his pink polo shirt, is always helping me pour my beer before I'm ready. What is it today pop? Deep-fried shrimp with melon and mayonaise? (I'm not saying this one was good). The constant green papaya salad? Or my new favorite- a whole cracked crab the size of a dungeness baked in a big earthnware pot in the juices of some dark green vegetable, chunks of bacon, and glass noodles. There's probably tamarind or something in there too, it was sweet and fatty and green and deep and we ate it twice in the five days I was there.

Then we ran off to Pattaya, to visit with our friend Lo who is working as pr manager for this unusual hotel called D2. Check it out if you're going to Pattaya- great architecture, but it wasn't open when we were there. (not to mention tourism was down 70% because of the protests). I had an interesting adventure that evening involving licking icing off the birthday girl at an SM club. They don't do SM very well in Thailand- it doesn't jive with Buddhism. They don't fundamentally get it, so they look great in their cheap plastic clothes but it's just like the strip teases, not much in the way of soul. Think of all the high-heeled boots- some ladies (and it's this way in Japan too) look like they own the place, but a lot of ladies just can't figure out how to walk in heels- they're all wobbling around on the stilletto, or duck-footed in Japan. Very incongruous. As an aside, my friend Isaac has a great theory about why the ladies develop a duck-footed walk: they wear these boots, right, and last year it was all about the legwarmers up on the thigh, and then really short skirts. But then half the time they're on a bicycle, and it's cold there in winter, so they bicycle with their legs together... to protect the parts, I presume.Together we went hunting for a mercedes- at some point, Pop had taken the bus from Bangkok to Pattaya, dozed off, and awoke just in time to see a building with a glass front flashing past the window, with a really sweet old mercedes looking forlorn inside. He made a quick note of where he was, best as he could, and we boarded the same bus together this time, with a map and a notepad. Down off the interstate, he thought way too early, but there it was, a creamy yellowish green 1955? sedan. We took copious notes of major landmarks the rest of the way (“20' plastic chicken”), and retraced in a car the next day. There she be! Dirty, flat, tired, and stuck but in pretty good shape considering. Better than the 1930something jalopy outside that had the nests of many different creatures protruding from panels and torn seats. The owner was a kind man, an enthusiast who ran the tire re-treading place next to the dirty old showroom, and we ended up following him to this other place where there was a slightly newer almost as sweet chocolate brown one with a cream top. That actually ran. My brother would have been loosing his stuffing with excitement. Pop and I daydreamed about taking that car on a road trip up to Laos. In Japan, my fantasy extended to a full-on trip through Laos, China, and Korea. Then a ferry across to Japan, then through Japan, all the way exploring strange subcultures and writing a book. So that's what I'm saving up for next!

And you know one of the many reasons why I wanted to do that road trip slowly that way at some point in the future? Because I was hurtling at 300 km/hr on the Shinkanzen, which isn't even the fastest train in Japan. It's kind of like that rushing loudness in a jet plane just as it is about to take off. But for hours. But then you're at the whole other end of the country, and it's only just barely noon. But then I was trying to get to these tiny towns famous for their ceramics, right? So then I'm on a bus, or a slow train, or a subway and then a slow train and bless their hearts, most of the conductors were as thorough as possible in directing me, showing me timetables in Japanese, enthusiastically repeating the same word that I still didn't understand, but I'm sad to say that the usual travelling mishaps applied and I rarely had enough time in the places I visited. Somehow I had to balance time alone looking for great pots with time in Kyoto with my friend, not to mention that sleeping on his futoned floor was free, and sleeping on a bed of rocks in an empty youth hostel dorm in Hagi was fourty-five clams, and the museum was still closed the next day. But somehow I had an absolutely wonderful time, pretty much everywhere I went. From Tokyo to Hagi to Karatsu to Nagasaki and home to Kyoto, I met such warm welcoming people everywhere. A couple that I met there invited us to their house for dinner the night before I left, and what a delightful eve that was- It was them- she from Oz, he Japan, Isaac and I, and another couple, she from Japan, he Canada. We got to know each other, prepared food, snacked on prosciutto and drank plum sake, talked, listened to excellent music from etherial to jazz, and talked some more over a meal of oden (and long afterward too). (this is the 7-11 version of oden, which is full-on scary: Oden is a wintertime meal that involves a stove in the center of the table on which is placed a big covered pot of broth. In batches, there are a wide variety of items thrown into the simmering broth- tofu, veggies, bits of fish and oysters, that hard jelly stuff, bits of leafy veggies, and then you fish it out into a medium sized bowl in which you have put a little ponzu (citrus sauce), and in this case, shredded diakon root which is a mild radish. You put all your yummy things in the sauce, and eat it, making a pit stop at your rice bowl. Isaac and I cooked this at his house too, less fancily, and also had pickles- I love it- I am going to do it here for a dinner party sometime really soon. I have many specific memories of that night, but I think the sweetest memory is thoroughly of the heart- I was, quite honestly, a little bit shocked at how strong and unburdened the love was that evening. Within the nugget of each person was contained the paths of life that led to their presence there in that room on that night, as is so everywhere at all times- wherever you go, there you are, ya? But something about the chemistry of those people at that time was right on- a little node of energy along the path- zzzt! I carry on but it's a reference point- the way he laughed, the way they ribbed each other, the gentle question, the long warm goodbye- group hugs, and the way she held me so long, looked into my eyes like reminding me ....

so here are a few photos more: a painted door within a painted room the door to the anarchist bookstoreand the store called "maps n porn", tokyo

a wall in Hagi

this was the most breathtaking art I've seen in a while- way down there at the shrine are some glass steps- they look a bit like they are ice. and then you go around the side of the hill off to your right, and the guide hands you a flishlight. one by one, you pass through a tunnel in the ground about 18" wide, straight, smooth concrete. this tunnel is about 30 feet long and the second you enter it, you hear a thrumming sound. then you emerge into a dirt cave, completely dark aside from the light glowing down from glass stairs ascending ahead of you up into-- into-- well, you can't get there, but you can imagine- the temple? what's in the temple? white light--- and thrumming.

I must write you about another fantastic exhibit that I couldn't photograph. In Tokyo, I went with my new friend Nevena to the something opera center which is a fine arts center, and they had an exhibit devoted to light called light insight, and another called open space. So among the pieces was a dark room with an orb inside it- after letting your eyes adjust for a few minutes, you could see the light emitted by cells impoding. and there was a room in which you put on 3d glasses and could operate a CAD machine projecting its image onto a large screen that curved around you. and there was a little eyeball stencil thing that flash-burned the word LIGHT into your cornea, and a special camera in room that took a photograph of your eyeball, projecting it on the screen, and then supposedly through an analogue it could read your thoughts, and people responded to the image in real time via the web. but my favorite was a 50 square foot gravity pad, which read your gravity/mass as you moved on the panels and then projected via GPS how your gravity was effecting everything around you. this is a tombstone from this amazing huge cemetary in Tokyoand this was not in the cemetary

these are for the clay dorks: this is Takashi Nagesato's woodsplitter- that disk rotates around in the bearing clamped around it, bringing the chisel business end down every second- looked like I worked very well, in the right hands.and this would be a filter press in Bizen, but I got chased away from the areaand a very tidy kiln in Bizen- I have a bajillion photos of this kiln, if anyone wants to see them