By Beauty Damned

Wiping the Dust Away

It's always so hard to know where to begin, whether a blog or journal entry, or a thing that might actually change your life. Where to begin...

Well, there is certainly no shortage of intriguing news, but everyone knows about all that stuff, right? I don't have to tell you about Virginia State (why are news outlets showing pictures and videos of this murderer acting like he is a badass, waving his guns around?); or the race/gender uproar since Don Imus's verbal diarrhea (almost to be considered a positive event if it happens to end up bringing the myriad issues of race and gender to our social consciousness to be dealt with); or Alberto Gonzales testifying under oath about the US Attorney firing scandal (whatever "oath" means to him, I'm sure that he's got his fingers crossed behind his back and he's already written a legal brief which pre-exonerates him for perjury by executive power and discretion of the president almighty). The media continues to be cunty, Oprah continues to hold panels, and our government continues with its lies and corruption. All is right in the world.

But in the one part of the news that actually brought me joy today, it's sunny in Brooklyn and it's Friday. Fridays are good, even for a person who doesn't have a real job, but the sunshine is what is truly momentous. I hope it doesn't go away too soon.

Okay, so I said it. I don't have a real job. Not anymore. I gave it away, and it was the most liberating thing I've ever done. Being a legal secretary had become such an ingrained part of my identity that leaving it has given me the opportunity to have a different identity - one that I like better.

I spend my days studying for and attending classes, writing stories and poems, emailing with people who are important to me, taking care of minor business, and not least of all, mourning my brother Josh.

I think about Josh everyday. I look at pictures of him and his artwork everyday. Everything reminds me of him. I am wearing one of his black hooded sweatshirts as I write this. His words and his art are the doctrines and the powers that propel me. He has become a god to me. I dream of him, and sometimes they are happy dreams where he still lives and we are together and sometimes they are terrible dreams where he dies in my own arms. He gives me the greatest strength I've ever known, while at the same time, I am experiencing a magnitude of grief that feels like all of the loss I've ever faced, combined and concentrated into one impenetrable thing.

Eloise
Diane
Tyler
Nick
Petie
Jimmy
Ivette
Howard

JOSHUA

Losing him feels like losing everyone at once. Everyone and everything. And being given something else in its place. Something that I'm still learning from and figuring out and processing constantly.

It has been very difficult to write about losing Josh because no words can do justice to the way it feels. I think a huge part of me is still in a state of shock and disbelief, even with the proof that I've seen and the truth that I know. A huge part of me just can't accept that this happened. The other part of me knows that I have no choice. The reality of death is unwavering. It always has been. Since I was four, I have felt it there, I have known its presence and realized its inevitability. Now it has become like an old, familiar specter that sweeps in and out, always taking someone that I love with it. And one day, it will be me sweeping through that doorway in its clutches. And you. Sorry.

Another level to it is how private mourning is. It is so true that everyone deals with death in their own way. For me, it's been very hard to say exactly what happened, even out loud, but especially on the internet. I still don't feel that humanity is palpable enough here to support delicate grief and sadness. Perhaps the web is still too cold to convey real life, and death is just one more novelty. But I'd like not to believe that.

My sister has done a couple of beautiful websites commemorating Joshua's life and work. Please visit them:

joshlove dot blogspot dot com

and

http://picasaweb.google.com/dreampretty/JoshLove

Let him touch your heart and your mind. He had extraordinary gifts and great moral and internal strength and fortitude. I am changed by the principles that he lived by and the genius that he left behind.

So do not speak today, nor tomorrow, or the next.
Contemplate a maze, then a painting, then a puzzle of glass convex.
All at once, you will see all of the pieces connect.
The drawbridge will be opened for you, then.
And you must then depart.
Carrying the truth in your possession.
It is your life's dependence.
It will be your art.

-Joshua Carreón, "Mother to Son"

P.S. Happy Four-Twenty all you stoner blackbirds. Smoke a good one for Josh.

Rainy Day Tales

Our much media-hyped nor’easter has arrived with gale force. Okay, well maybe it has just arrived and it's not all that dramatic, but it is not pretty either. Gosh, I want to have a picnic so bad I could throw a fit! I must remind myself that it's this way every year in April. New York is ready for spring but spring isn't yet ready for New York. Our pale eyelet dresses and wedged espadrilles will have to wait.

In Oregon, Kathleen and Emily and I would go on picnics and camping trips even if the weather was frigid. We got so antsy about spring arriving that we just started without it. One February day we had a picnic at the edge of a graveyard near Emigrant Lake. It was windy and cold and dark gray, but we had the best time despite the weather. We ate sandwiches and laughed about being the only ones stupid enough to have a picnic on such a crappy day.

That reminds me of another time around then when Kathleen and I went camping in February or maybe it was March. I couldn't have been more than 16 and she 18 at the time. We parked the car alongside part of the Pacific Railroad called Tunnel 13, a straight tunnel that leads from one side of a mountain to the other. In the 40s there was a major train robbery right there in Tunnel 13 and a bunch of people died. A couple of the robbers got away and were never caught. I had a book about the incident. We loved to go there and walk through the mile long tunnel (the train no longer traveled it as far as we knew) and explore the creepy abandoned railroad office that was tucked in the woods, out of sight from I-5. We found all kinds of intriguing treasures in that dusty office; ancient stationary with scratchy old technical notes and thick glass bulbs of various colors, green and blue and red. We could park the car, walk right through that practically endless tunnel and down into the valley on the other side, and eventually find ourselves on my family's property. We did that, wandering the land and stopping to eat lunch. We had some wine that was homemade by a family friend. It wasn't very good, I don't think it was made from grapes, but we drank some anyway.

By the time we got back up to the tunnel it was too dark to walk through it. Way too scary. It was sort of spooky during the day, even though there was a tiny light on either end, so at night it was just not even an option. I gathered wood and rocks for a fire and Kathleen got into her sleeping bag and laid on her back, looking up at the millions of stars. She said, "Thanks for being the husband." That's when we coined that term with each other. Whichever one of us is doing the hard work gets to wear the title of "husband." For example, when we went to Costco recently here in Brooklyn and bought a boatload of stuff and she loaded and unloaded everything into the car and again, right to my door, because my back was all out of sorts. She was being a great husband. Now I feel like we are two old ladies though we're barely at the cusp of thirty! We've done so much together.

So that night we got the fire going good and we ate magic mushrooms and we had the most peaceful, lovely time out there like two little peas on a remote hillside, our own secret place. Not a chance to see another soul. In the morning, we woke in the frost. Outside of our sleeping bags the air was white and bitter. The fire was out and the beautiful midnight sky was gone and it was so, so freezing. Our sleeping bags were covered with a thin layer of icy dew. As soon as we peeled them off we were hopping around to get our feet into our shoes which were ice inside. Our fingers burned cold as we rolled up our sleeping bags, teeth chattering the whole time, literally chattering in a way that I never thought could actually be so literal, clacking together like castanets.

We finally managed to get our stuff together and walk back up to the tunnel's entrance. I can't say exactly how long it takes to walk through it, but I recall it being about 45 minutes that day. Could have been an hour. We were so relieved to get back to Margaret, Kathleen's gold Taurus. We drove down the hill, not far, to the old green mansion on Hwy 99 where we shared a bedroom in a house with 7 or maybe it was 8 other roommates. It felt like the coziest place on earth that morning. We each took a hot shower and then we climbed under the covers of our beds, side by side, and I am almost sure we said in unison, "Boy is it great to have a warm bed."

Impeach Bush

Since I pretty much ceased updating completely over the last several months, quite a lot has happened. I've been reluctant to write in public for reasons that will all come to light eventually. Sometimes I literally feel like a clam that just can't open. This is unusual for me, as you can imagine. But things have happened that I still don't quite know how to put into words. I trust that I'll find a way. For the past year I have faithfully written in a journal nearly every day and experienced the satisfaction of filling one after another. There's a lot to be said for the privacy of that activity. I've always been wary of trivializing the sacred things in my life by making myself too transparent here.

A less intriguing thing that happened; my webhosting expired briefly and I had a small panic about losing my domain. Of course it took me all of two minutes to reinstate my service, but I realized suddenly how much I've written on this damn blog. Holy god. It is a bottomless well. Scrolling through my entries over the past few years, it's almost overwhelming to think that I've emoted and expressed so much. I have put so much energy into this little domain, this tiny apartment within the internet complex. It feels like that. Like a place that I've lived in, a house within my house, where I've accumulated words as if they were possessions and storage space is virtually endless. And then there are the comments of readers that are a story of their own, my words prompting their words to come and join the fray and make this thing a living, changing place. Sometimes it's been a really weird, crazy fucking place. I have to tell you... I have been doing this for even longer than the archives show. And something keeps drawing me back to it. I keep believing that it is worth something, though I still can't quite put my finger on what that is! It is the life within my life. Some other manifestation of my existence; a place of safety within a most public environment. How is that possible? I guess it's entirely possible if it's a total illusion.

So, what's up?

What's everybody writing about these days? Cul? Just as I suspected, still kicking ass and taking names. Sandy? Where did you go? Cupie lives. But pretty much everyone on my original blogroll is history. It's kind of weird when I think back on the beginning of blogs, what it was like being one of those people right after 9/11, who got online and started venting like crazy. It was a blogging tsunami. Everyone had one. The battle of words was epic, yet unity somehow still reigned. Because we were all using our right to just speak freely and say what we thought and hash it all out, all of the problems and frustrations of the world, all of the things that we are passionate about coming to the surface in a way that was almost therapeutic. We actually read each other's blogs back then. Checked up on each other, even those that we considered enemies, just to see what everyone was up to, what people were mad about today. That's gone now. Maybe it's just because we were in our infancy and we acted like infants, not yet having the maturity to stop bouncing off the walls, or maybe we just got tired. But there was something to it.

The Progressive Blog Alliance still appears to be cranking a bit. My dad is still dispensing relevant (and hilarious!) information and commentary at Ragingblog.com.

But there is a feeling that many of us have set aside much of our outrage - or at least stopped venting about it all the time - because it just became too great to shoulder. We weren't seeing our words making a difference. We haven't been heard, because George W. Bush has not been impeached and our treasury is still bankrupt from the cost of a war that still does not have a foreseeable end. He has held his position as if he were a king, overruling the will of the people with his agenda, ignoring massive protests, stifling democracy with egregious lies and corruption, screwing every last American to the bone. When will we be heard? When will the protests be heard? Why is this man still our president? Why the hell is Dick Cheney still the vice president? Why the hell is Alberto Gonzales our attorney general? After everything we've seen! People! How can anyone ignore what these men have done? That is something that we should continue to ask loudly. I know it's hard and you feel like a broken record and it seems so dramatic, but we have to continue to demand that sanity and justice prevail over absolute corruption. I am serious. I know a lot of you are willing to pull the lever on your easy chair and wait it out until 2008, because you feel like you can hold a potato chip in your ass until then, but don't. Just don't. Don't stop caring. If you have a blog, say it with me now, Impeach! Impeach! Impeach! Write your representatives today!

Do you hear me Senator Schumer? Do you hear me Nancy Pelosi? I know you already said that ridiculous thing about how you won't try to impeach, but we both know it's not too late to take that back. Come on! Hilary Clinton? What's your real deal? Are you going to make up for your failures or what? You guys really need to get it together and take care of some business. I'm not feeling your commitment to putting an end to the bullshit that we've had to endure in this country for the past seven years. I'd really like to see that commitment. Impeach. Impeach. Impeach the Bush Administration.

That's all I have to say.

Well I've probably got a few other things to say, but I had to get that off my chest.

Looking For You

Looking For You
By Maria Carreón

Take a seat here
Ice and vodka slide in glass across
A single, undivided
Slab of wood
One slice down the middle of a massive tree
Rested upon by unbridled troubles
Vexation and
Calamity
We could collect tears in buckets like rainwater
pouring down from a leak in the roof
A napkin from a stack and
A pen from a stranger's pocket
Help to work out the problem
There is a door, but
It can’t lock out the things I have seen

A sidewalk stretches
Down to rocky edges
Of eastern waters
Where my urgent call is
Swept to the other side
On a filthy wind
Boats glide
This island to
That island
Bridges suspend above the choppy waves
Turnpikes and
Expressways
Freeways and
Highways run between
Tollbooths with
Sweet or surly operators
Factories exhaust diabolical jet-streams
Of black smoke and flame
Industrial wastelands fester
A stone’s throw from
Glittering rivers
Hickory, hemlock and ash
Blanket Pennsylvania
Spindled charcoal trees
Like coarse black hair on the
Wintry back of Chicago
Are you out there with the
Motionless cows
Big sky?
Rolling hills and
Apathetic windmills
Hundreds of hotels and motels
Spilling over with
Seedy propositions and
Unconquerable self loathing
Faces of anguish
Faces of bliss
Dreams of mercury and steel
Wishes hinged on dandelion fluff
Various realities that morph with
Each gust of salt out of Utah
Every aggressive wind
From Brooklyn to Santa Monica
Exalts my declarations of grief
Where are you?
In the Colestine Valley
Dipping far below the California Interstate
Tucked beneath the dirt of our childhood
Among the wildflowers and star thistle

Whizzing over
Row after row of corn and wheat
Drifting past a thousand and one clouds
Crossing patches of ice
Tumbling in tunnels of dust
Living among the stars

[Copyright 2007]