I am going through old journals. This is an exercize I think those of us who keep journals should do periodically. What inspired this is a recent trip that Meyshe and I made to a storage facility where the last of the unclaimed properties from my mother’s house have been sitting since the house was broken up in June of 2021. That is, not coincidentally, when we were summarily kicked out of the house by the successor trustee (and that’s another story). (Rue the day).  That same successor trustee wrote a general email to the family telling us to select what we wanted from the storage locker because the time had come to decide what to do with the remainder: Sell, recycle, donate, land fill.  We’d meant to rooch through the boxes earlier but all of July was a heat wave (happy birthday to me) and when it’s above 80 degrees I’m in danger of heat prostration. My window of comfort gets smaller and smaller as I get older. I imagine eventually I will have to be stored in a climate controlled museum. That or compassionate mummification (it’s a new thing). After the heat wave we had a house guest for a week. She came to see her guru Amma making her first global tour since before the pandemic. Over ten thousand devotees from all over the world convened in Oakland’s Marriott Hotel (The Marriott, for all your spiritual needs). When our friend left and got home she called to inform us that she’d come down with Covid. I guess over ten thousand people in an enclosed space where total trust, reduced social distance and hugging is the culture has its inevitable down side. So we were then in self quarantine for a week. By the time all that had been digested and passed, we’d forgotten about the whole thing until a final call was issued. So I sent our regrets and explanations asking for an extension.

To gain access to the locker we had to punch in the code to open the outer gate. After that, a code to get in an elevator. After that, a three dimensional combination lock designed by a bored sadist. And then when we’d conquered the lock and opened the door I realized I should have brought a flashlight. We (meaning I) have gotten so used to flipping a switch for light. Very well. We had to drag boxes out into the hall to get to other boxes to drag out to get to other boxes. There was really nothing in that locker that anyone but sentimental family would be interested in spiriting away which made the codes and locks even more of a pain in the ass than they’d originally been (the retrospective pain in the tuchas). But see here. This is what I found.

I found a box full of rehearsal tapes with compositions of mine that I thought were lost forever to the 1991 fire that burned up the house and thirty years of my creative work. So here were a few miles of footprints recovered from emptied history. I’ll have to take them to someplace where they can translate them into contemporary technology. I found two large-format photographic portraits of myself taken when my producer told me I needed publicity head shots. I didn’t like having my picture taken. I am not photogenic. I remember hating those pictures, so I put them away immediately and never looked at them again. I thought I was so awful to look at. And there I was in my mid twenties staring up at me in my mid seventies. A shock. I was gorgeous. Stunning! Damn. What a waste of self loathing. And I found a box full of old journals that I kept from the time I was ten. This was all a jolting and enlightening slap of time capsulitis and made for restless nights, too much recall and some festive sessions with my therapist.

Anyway, that is why I am going through old journals, not the ones from my childhood, but the ones that are weighing down the bookshelves now. I’m compulsive, maybe obsessive compulsive which would give me a new acronym to toy with: OCD. Add that onto the PTSD that I’ve grown so accustomed to. It used to be that one’s name got longer with honorifics, certifications, awards, degrees and generational suffixes. Now one’s name can become longer with diagnoses. So proud!

I picked a random journal off the shelf. I opened it up to Sunday, January 10, 2010

If left to our own devices, without the benefit nor the hindrance of civilization and its technological trappings, would women go off into a safe cave, or at the foot of a spreading chestnut tree and squat to give birth? Would other women go with her to steady her and catch the baby? Would the father have an inclination to follow the guardian of his progeny and help out, or would he be entirely uninterested? Indeed, would he be even dimly aware that he’d taken part in anything of enduring interest to him after he’d awakened from his post coital nap? After the baby had passed into this world, would the mother naturally bite off the cord and tie a knot? Would all those present whisk away the afterbirth, stir fry it with trotters and return to feed the exhausted mother? Small carbon footprint, indeed. Or would the mother instinctively gnaw on the after birth herself, then devour the whole thing because of an inexplicable savage hunger that overwhelmed her following the instinctive baby inspection?

Toes: check

Fingers: check

Head: check

Ears, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth: check

Limbs: check

Genitalia: check

Accessories to all: check

Breathing: check

Heartbeat: check

Nails: check

Lungs: check

“Whoa! I’m famished! Hey, this looks good!”

What have we lost of our core, bare, basic selves because of the encompassing noise of civilization, society, culture and ……… elementary school? Do we need to know this squatting, fucking, gnawing, raw ancestor? Or is the ancestor alive and well within us anyway, even though we have a silk handkerchief perfectly folded, peeking out of our breast pocket, a powdered wig, elevator boots, aspirations toward nobility, correct schooling and can (and do) say please and thank you in several hundred different languages? Should we run from the grunting hairy long pig, and get as far as we can? Or do we need to face this squalid doppelganger in order to instruct ourselves together to put down the club, sand down the fangs, clean under the fingernails, read a book, practice compassion, generosity, pacific ways and perceptive inspired pursuit of elevation? Does love come naturally? Is invention and innovation a contrivance? Do we in fact think too highly of ourselves? A lot of our own privately conjured gods and Gods think we do. This is why they strike us down.

In a public place, I was drinking my tea and a family with two tiny toddlers plus one extra mother with five year old sat nearby. Little kid is snurtling. Father is dissatisfied with everything and everyone, the snacks, the tea, the prices, his wife, his wife’s children and his wife’s friend and her child. They attempt to placate Dad, then humor him. The snurtling toddler squirms in his chair. He can’t see above the edge of the table so he gets up on his knees.

“Sit down,” his father orders.  He sits. Then he creeps up on his knees again.

“I said sit down!” He sits. Not for too long.

“Sit down or I’ll spank you!” he bellows. Heads turn. The mothers all say, “Uh oh!” in baby talk.

“I said ALL THE WAY DOWN!” Kid sits, snurfling.

“Behave yourself!” he threatens. But the kid can’t see.

Whose behavior needs adjustment? Well, if he’d only eaten the afterbirth, he wouldn’t be so ornery.

Men!