Appalachian Trail

Today, I hiked up to Springer Mountain and a couple of miles down the AT Approach trail. I would give almost anything to be able to thru-hike the entire trail. Anyone want to sponsor me? Anyone want to come with?

Blogs and poseurs

I have learned a lot from blogs. I have been inspired by blogs. I have laughed, cried and goggled at blogs. Today, I found a blog I wanted to punch.

Now, it wasn't a blog that voiced opinions contrary to mine or in any other way pissed me off in a moral sense... It wasn't incendiary, bigoted, maniacally conservative or written by a schizophrenic who had recreationally gone off their meds... It was worse. It was written by someone so offensively pretentious and derivative, I believe that seventh graders the world over would recognize in its faux Beat-generation verbiage a piss poor writer who desperately needs the world to believe that he is, in fact, cool. He is not. No one whose every blog post mentions "making out" (in those specific words) is cool. Not even in this post-ironic world.

Tonight, before I go to bed, I'm going to pray that whatever blog gods may be will spare me from such foolishness. May I never, ever, gaze at my own navel so long that I mentally fall so deep into its abyss that my only recourse is talking out of my own ass.

Just because you've read Kerouac doesn't mean that you can write like him. Nor should you try.

On Loss

My former downstairs neighbors were troubling, at best. When my husband and I first moved in to our Atlanta apartment, we met the folks living directly below us when our cat escaped and made a run for the parking lot. We chatted with them briefly, not enough to determine anything of any real depth about their character. They seemed nice. She had a quick smile, he was the nervous type. But I thought they were nice. Normal. Shortly thereafter, their epic fights began.

Our downstairs neighbors were prodigious screamers. From about 7pm onward, they would loudly fight and I once jokingly said to my husband “Say what you will, their projection is impeccable.” I was unable to joke one night, though, when I heard the woman downstairs screaming for help. I was alone in the building. I called the police and met them outside in my pajamas. The cops knocked on their door, they said everything was okay, and the cops left. They postponed the rest of their argument until the next night. Neither of them ever called for help again.

A word about where I live… My apartment building sits on a hill in a “neighborhood in transition.” It’s what we could afford at the time and it’s an old building with old building problems. Our building sits at the melancholy confluence of owl calls and train whistles. On some nights, it’s tempting to howl along with them, especially when the wind blows in, cold, under the door, around the window frames, through the walls… It’s a place where you are startled by your downstairs neighbors’ arguments, but you are not surprised. When flooding covered the city in brackish waste-water, our building sat above it, untouched. It was almost as if Providence had declared that our sad little home needed no insult to be added to its injurious existence. It is not a place for living. Unfortunately, I found that out.

When I was offered this contract, performing on a cruise ship, it seemed like an almost comical reversal of fortune. I would trade my cramped, sad apartment for a brightly colored ship and endless sea vistas. I wouldn’t have to listen to people screaming their mutual hatred at all hours of the day and night. I would trade a damp, dreary, depressingly gray little life for work and sunshine and relative calm. I left my husband behind me, on land, but even he said, “You have to go. You have to.”

A particular kind of amnesia set in when I boarded. It’s happened to me before: working someplace where the scenery is lovely and I am given the chance to do what I love for a living makes me forget that I have any kind of life other than the one I’m currently experiencing. I don’t call my friends. I don’t email or write or read newspapers or give a damn about the world outside the cocoon of my job. It’s like with each touring job I have a chance to be, if not reborn, at least given respite from the myriad stupid concerns that I pile upon myself.

When the ship arrived in port in Los Cabos, Mexico, I followed my friends to a seaside resort with free internet service and two for one margaritas. Under similar circumstances, who WOULDN’T be affected by the amnesia I described? Who wouldn’t feel that their lives and possibilities were expanding? I called my husband from the resort, stuffing guacamole and chips into my mouth like I was storing them for the winter, and settled in for what I imagined would be another pleasant , uneventful, conversation. My amnesia didn’t last long. My husband told me that one of our downstairs neighbors had died. She had collapsed two days prior and couldn’t be revived. She was a young woman with what appeared to be an unhappy marriage and a wreck of a life. She didn’t deserve to die like that: in that box of an apartment, its walls suffused with anger, with the owls hooting outside.

I went home for a month in the middle of my contract and was told that her relatives were there until the autopsy was concluded and her affairs resolved. On the second day I was home, it started to snow and I came home one day to find all of the remaining belongings from her apartment out back by the trash can, slowly being silvered over with snow. The remains of her life. Of their life together. The end of a marriage, to be thrown out with the trash. I heard from another tenant that, just prior to her death, our neighbor had asked if the tenant would help her get away from her husband. Her life was a wreck, apparently, because he had made it so. He was a junkie, unemployed, prone to tantrums and unfaithfulness. I never saw her family. I never got to tell anyone how sorry I was or ask if I could help or even make a damn casserole and she never got to get out before the wreck caught up with her and pulled her under.

I think that now I will always picture loss and sorrow the way I saw it in the middle of a late-winter southern snow storm: unwanted things, covered in snow, waiting to be carried away.

I love it when my friends are viral...

My friend Brian wrote and stars in the sketch below.  Please enjoy.  Please share.  Please make him famous because he deserves it.

To the believers and the non-believers

Regardless of your faith or lack of it, I would really appreciate it if you took a moment upon reading this to send a good thought/wish/prayer out for my friend Kim who is having to eat one of the world's biggest shit sandwiches right now and does not deserve it.  

And send a really, really bad thought/wish/prayer out for whomever thought up cancer.  Thanks.

Improv Monologue Project

Costa Rica

As with any cruise, I suppose, the ports cam

e fast and furious for some time and it barely seemed like I had time to breathe before we were in another city in another country.  It’s kind of miraculous to go to sleep on the wide open ocean and wake up to 

find that the engines have stopped grinding and there’s a brand spanking new country just off the side of the boat.  It’s odd.  Beautiful, but odd.

Our transit through the Panama Canal took all day, the day after we left Cartagena.  The captain narrated our transit, so my plans of sleeping in and catching the tail end of the canal were thwarted by loudspeaker.  After walking up to the aft deck and watching the Queen Victoria enter the canal behind us, though, I was glad to have been awake that early.  W

e beat you, Q.V.  Suck it!  Off and on throughout the day, I’d sneak up to the top decks to watch our progress and made it back out on deck to see the last lock open to let us through.  I must have stayed out too long, though, because as we passed under the Bridge of the Americas, I was a very deep pink. 

We had big plans for Costa Rica…  A group tour into the rainforest for an entire day of zip lining through the rainforest canopy.  We arrived in Punta Arenas and hopped aboard a bus to travel about 40 minutes out of the city.  When I was talking to friends about this particular trip, I had mentioned that the only way th

e day could be more exciting was if we were able to ride horses.  Immediately upon getting to the start point of our tour, we noticed a paddock full of horses and were told that our zip line tour would also include a 20 minute horseback ride.  I was stupid happy.  Like stupid toddler happy.  I clapped and hollered “YAY!” an awful lot.  Moreover, my irrational tendency towards magical thinking was unfortunately reinforced.

My horse, Blanco, was ill-tempered and rather keen on appearing to work hard while actually slacking off pretty hard core.  While others’ 

horses were surging ahead and getting into petty biting fights, I was in the back of the horseback pack for the entirety of the ride, where I was privy to our guides’ scintillating conversation about cell phone plans.  My rudimentary Spanish helped me to understand that one of our guides really wanted to buy a new phone, but his old one had more memory and a better camera.  Um, yeah.  Glad I overheard THAT.  Blanco responded to none of my encouragements, in either Spanish or English, and was perfectly content to do whatever the hell he wanted to do.

The zip lines, all 25 of them, were incredible and took us through the rainforest canopy.  Halfway through our nerve-wracking downward flight through the rainforest, we stopped at a waterfall with an idyllic pool beneath the falls.  Walter, our deceptively boyish and clean-cut guide (he was a screaming maniac on the zip lines, despite his affable smile and jug ears) asked us if we wanted to swim.  Before he had finished his sentence, half of us were stripped down and cannon balling into the gorgeous water. 

By the end of our journey, we were tired, hungry and dehydrated.  We took desultory photos on the side of a road, waiting for the bus.  We had zip lined through the rainforest, we had swum in a waterfall, and we couldn’t even smile for the camera because we had a deep case of the crabbies.  Sometimes, when your life is an embarrassment of riches, the tendency to behave embarrassingly emerges.  We sighed like privileged brats when the bus showed up to take us back to the zip line base camp (or perhaps it was just me) and rode in silence back up a mountain.

Back at the top of the hill, we sat down to a simple, gorgeous meal of fish (or, chicken or the ambiguously described “meat”) and watched the big birds of prey swoop down from the tall trees into the valley below.  Like avian yo-yos, they rose and fell, soaring on the air currents, and I was very, very content. 

So it happened that this day, amongst a group of genial folks that had been almost strangers to me prior to our excursion, was one of the best that I’ve ever had.  Adventure and peace and beauty and travel and fun and horsies…  I am a lucky, lucky woman.

A quote from Melville:

“And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”  

Now, I don't have the hubris to say that I have a Catskill eagle in my soul, but I do acknowledge that the little brown sparrow of my soul has been given the chance to soar like one at times, and for that I am grateful.

It's a ship, not a boat

For those of you who don’t know, I’m on a boat.  Well, a ship, really.  As my father tersely instructed me when I called him from Miami on my way to the port, “You’re going to be on a ship, and a ship is a vessel that can carry boats.”  For the next four months, my home has twelve restaurants, a pool and a disturbing tendency to shift underfoot when the seas are rough.  Regarding that last trait; I spent the better part of a day walking like a drunk when the seas were declared “moderate.”  God help me and my poor balance if and when we encounter “rough” water.  On a side note, yoga is even harder when your yoga studio has a gentle roll to it.

Yesterday, we stopped at our first port of the first cruise of my onboard contract.  I woke up that morning to realize that the engines were no longer thrumming beneath me and that I could walk in a straight line to the bathroom without pitching side to side, banging into the closet and mini-fridge.  I went up on deck to see our port: Cartagena, Colombia.  I was in South America.  I checked to see if I felt any different.  I was sweaty and hungry, so no, no different.

On the advice of one of my co-workers, we caught a cab to the Old City immediately upon debarkation.  As we drove through the city, in between my dumb references to “Romancing the Stone,” I thought that the city looked like a cleaned-up version of Rio.  The bright colors of the houses looked a little newer and it was notably free of Rio’s ubiquitous graffiti.  It looked a little wealthier, a little more organized.  But then again, I was in a cab, coming from a cruise ship, to a destination that is used to receiving tourists.  The Old City was reached through a high, yellow stucco arch and the buildings beyond were what I always think of when I picture colonial architecture in the tropics.  The houses and shops were painted in all manner of bright colors, their balconies dripping bougainvillea.  We walked through the streets, stopping in leafy squares, buying the ripest watermelon and best tasting limeade I’ve ever had. 

The Old City was overrun with folks whose ships were ported in Cartagena for the day.  We were there at the same time as the Cunard Line’s Queen Victoria, and I hate to say it, but I took an immediate dislike to the boat.  It just looked snooty with its big, swoopy prow and navy blue painted bottom.  No offense to the passengers onboard, but I just think our ship looks friendlier, more approachable…cuter.  I swear, I can anthropomorphize anything. 

The street vendors, hawking dubious “designer” merchandise, must have all cribbed from the same playbook.  Everything every one of them was selling (Cuban cigars, sunglasses, maracas, CDs, paintings) had a “special, promotional price…one day only!”  Billy Mays had nothing on these guys.  Also, if something was ten bucks, you could always talk them down to eight and if you only happened to have seven bucks, they’d take that, too.  I haggled for “Gucci” sunglasses, but I paid full price for a beautiful rosary because I didn’t want to bargain for something religious.  Of course, the rosary salesman offered me three for twenty.  It was a special promotion.  One day only.

I stopped in at a church because I always love visiting churches, wherever I go.  I’m a Christmas and Easter Lutheran, at best, but churches are reliable for their ability to surprise me.  This one had the best postcards I had seen in Cartagena, and a gorgeous enclosed garden full of a green hush and peace.  I took a picture in the garden and a local tour guide thought I had caught him in the picture, so he said “Thank you for taking me home with you!”

When my group stopped to take a breather, I took pictures of a group of men gathered together under umbrellas with manual typewriters sitting on stands in front of them.  They were there to type up official documents for a small fee.  While I was taking the pictures, a man asked me where I was from.  I tried my best to put together a decent response in Spanish, but I regret to inform you that Ms. Pearson’s excellent instruction in junior high has not survived with me through adulthood.  That didn’t bother the man, though.  He spoke English.  His name was Jose, and he had lived in New York a few years ago.  I said that I thought Cartagena was a beautiful town and he said “Yes.  But maybe I think New York is better.”

I wish I could tell you why I liked Cartagena so much, but I just don’t have the right words.  I have moved around the US so much that the general process of getting acclimated to a city is becoming rote.  I can easily adapt to the public transportation, I never forget the name of the local grocery store chain, and I am rarely surprised by my new home.  It’s no special talent to be able to do this; all it means is that I’m totally rootless and almost always unable to answer the question “Where are you from?”  I don’t know where I’m from anymore.  I guess I liked that Cartagena was so foreign to me, so outside my realm of experience, so new.

We left the city in the afternoon, and I hid inside to avoid watching it retreat behind the ship.  We were soon back on the open water, heading off to new ports in other countries.  I know I’ll find something incredible in each of them, I know I’ll be surprised by them, I know my heart will be very, very full when I disembark for the final time, but Cartagena will always be special because it was the first place that took me entirely by surprise.