Drove last night through a cloud come to earth. Weather.

It rained for many miles. All grey, the edges of things blurred. Everything looked the same. Up and over the pass it rained but it was as if the higher I drove, the closer I got to the cloud’s natural home, the less giving the grey masses felt.

Past Snoqualmie, the rest stop at Indian John, all wet and standing water. But then the road down onto the high plateau and the weather tired. The rain sputtered out close to Ellensberg and the world took on contours and colour again.

By the time I crossed the Columbia, the roads were still damp, and the earth smelt life a giant white mushroom but the clouds had retreated back to the sky.

Still, they were there. The moon rose unnoticed, even its light was indistinguishable from the general haze of neon celestial reflection.

I slept at a rest stop, under a sleeping bag in the back of my car and woke just before the sun crested the horizon. Ripped open, the clouds were, where the waning moon pushed through high in the southern sky. I awoke on a long slow breath.

Today is the psychiatric assessment, and a (probably not very pleasant) road sign for my 13 year old niece and yet I was more relaxed than I have been in months. The source of the gift of a contented sigh? A gift of cloud, rain, light and silence probably.

When I unfurled and left the car to go get hot water, I found a folded $100 bill clipped under my windshield wiper. Odd the world.

I am in Vancouver. I will be here for less than 24 hours and will return for a psychiatric evaluation and disposition hearing for the 13 year old mentioned in the last post. Imagine a life broken irreparably at only 13. Everything she had is now gone.

Tragedies.

There will be a life from the moment she was first locked in the ward, sure. Most of us never get to really experience so immediately the consequences of our actions, and in some ways I can see that this is a gift to her. At least since she is a minor, her record will be sealed once she reaches 18, but at only 13 she now must muster the will to change, to accept responsibilities most adults cannot bear. While possible, the chances are extremely small that she will make it out of this alive in any way that matters.

The damage a 13 year old enraged foot can do to a windshield can sometimes end in beauty. Unfortunately for the owner of the foot, I suspect the beauty will not be hers.

taken by peardg

I am in Spokane, in the motel where I always stay. Asleep still are my son and one of my nieces. I have already been out to get my coffee and some bread, cheese, fruit, etc for breakfast. Apple juice for the niece, and coke for the son.

I am sore from walking yesterday, the powwow at Riverfront was being set up and I was looking for another one of my nieces. She of the Washington School of the Deaf. It turned out that she had already left for the Reservation with her dad. Nevermind. I’m going up there this morning.

Still, I was glad I walked the grounds. It’s been several years now since I lived here and so there is a an almost ethereal quality to my walking here. I went by my old apartment to gather some seeds from a kind of Lunaria that grows here. It has bigger, whiter seed pods than the kind that I’ve seen up in Vancouver so I am going to plant some at home. I was there just after dark and the stands that I went for are at the edge of a badger’s wood. There are coyotes near by too since it is within easy reach of the river. And I visited the witch’s house. Her place is always really beautiful and verdant.  But it was the powwow grounds that really seemed dense with the past and the odd thing is that I’m not much of a powwow person. Love stick game because of the songs but powwows have never been my favourite. Still this time it was different.

I suppose it is because Thyra is dead and she used to be a part of this powwow. Walking around was a bit like walking through the liminal zone where the shades and living intermingle. I kept “seeing” people that were once busy getting ready to dance, or sitting together in their camp chairs talking, and through them would hustle the current powwow workers setting up for grand entry at 7PM.

Today should be interesting because Wellpinit powwow is next weekend and Thyra’s camp is being set up today on the grounds. I’m heading up there in about an hour to exchange one niece for another. I’ll get a chance to walk around Wellpinit powwow grounds then. I’ll also go get some mugwort and buckbrush that grows near there.

I need juniper too and every morning when I burn it I suppose it will continue to keep the shades fed and therefore the memories sweet. At least I don’t use blood like Odysseus, and like Homer (I presume) I know it is a story, even if a compelling one.

I slept in my car last night, the first few hours not far from the Columbia River, the next an hour or so west of Spokane. The air moving down from the Cascades brought some low clouds but far above them were the stretched gossamer of high plateau moisture. Jupiter hung sparkling below the barely waning moon, the sky was so bright it glowed a shadowed blue, and I missed being homeless.

I have been under a doctor’s care of late and am heading out of the city for a few days as a kind of therapy. The fact that I am also accomplishing a family task is no never-mind.

Are you like that? I feel so much better when my time is being well spent. Just sitting is something that is really hard for me to do. I can take a book and be OK with it, or my beading, but to sit without a goal, without a task?

My niece is deaf, and the task is to go get her and take her over to the Washington School for the Deaf for her first week as a boarding-school student. She is super excited to be in a place where everyone can talk to everyone else and as tasks go, apart from the long drive, it is an easy one. I am heading out a few days early (she has to be at school Sunday night) so that I can go up to my favourite mountain lake, swim, sleep and just sit. The thing is I am also taking my beading and my notebooks and a few books of poetry.

I wonder if I will ever again be the kind of person that can go somewhere without something to do?  I used to be at one time. When I went out on the road at 16, hitchhiked and walked until I was 19, I went with a hairbrush (really long hair) as my main luggage. There were books during that time, but mostly, when I’d read them, I put them down for someone else to find. I read Darwin, and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, and Mao, and the Sumerian myths, and even the Bible. I remember thinking then, in fact some really important understandings came my way during that first 2.5-year trek, but I also remember long periods, long, curved roads when all that I was really aware of was the world around me. The only tension I had then was hunger and sometimes cold.

I guess that the real challenge would be to find a balance between the two states. To once again be able to pick up a task, but then just put it down for someone else to pick up.  The critical thing here is to be OK with the probability that some of my tasks, should I put them down, will simply not get done. I am sure there are the sodden remains of books out on the road somewhere, that, once I left them behind, no one ever picked them up again. And the stakes are higher now. I mean if no one ever picked up my old copy of Flatland? But what if I put down the task of making sure a lost child gets found?

After my ineptitude with respect to my recent attempt at relaxation (otherwise known as ending the futz), the next day I returned Ludlum to the library, his masculine melodrama unplumbed, and picked up Poetics of Imagining Modern to Post-modern by Richard Kearney. I just seem to be in a space where the novel cannot participate. Poetry works, and non-fiction of a specific sort, but not the novel.

All I really did for the evening of the futzing post is drift along on a undercurrent of ennui, went to bed, slept, woke snuffling, then spent the next day (yesterday, after the doctor’s visit) drifting, less futzily (nice word don’t you think), on a mixture of poems read and reread, snoozing at the beach in the shade, drinking iced coffee, and beginning Kearney. Sometimes bad moods just have to be let alone to blossom – even if what you get is a milk vetch, dandelion or morning glory vine.

Today has been much of the same. I had a meeting this morning that went rather well, but after that I went to my favourite Greek Taverna for a take-away breakfast (fava beans in a tomatoe-garlic sauce, tabouli and a little black olive tapenade) mixed with some bread and iced espresso (sweet) from the pâtisserie a few doors down – oh my the wonders of being human, having a little money and living in Vancouver. I zoomed off to the beach with my food, sat in the shade, ate, drank and (re)read Sylvia Legris’ iridium seeds (gorgeous!).

After that, I went to another coffee shop, tea this time and Kearney. Hours worth of a lovely breeze, mixed sun and shade, pleasant, mostly smiling faces, an interesting book and no obligation to speak.

The wondrous world of a several-day futz.

Normally this has not been an issue for me. Not really. I am pretty focused about some things and I like to work, but usually I can find a novel, or a shady patch near the river on a warm day and just drift. Usually at night too, on nights near the full moon, I can just pretend the human world is not as nastily mundane as it often is, but of late, well, no.

I got a Ludlum spy book from the library today in an effort to find something simply entertaining and remove myself from my query of “thing” and “imagination” but so far it is a no go. Talk about nasty and mundane – perhaps the world of spies was not the best choice of light reading material. What I really was waiting for was a novel called Starter for 10 by David Nicholls but although it is in transit to my library it has not yet arrived.  Oh well.

I have a god-daughter that believes in fairies so perhaps a trip to the bookstore for a gardening primer on butterfly plants? Did you know that fairies happen to like the same plants as humming birds and butterflies? Who knew?

I could go to a place where I know I’ll get into a silly “philosophical” argument with someone so that I can see them retreat into some form of “well I have the right to my opinion” stance. But that’s kind of mundane and mean so maybe that wouldn’t be any better than Ludlum is proving to be.

I could go see The Expendables and watch all the destructo-boys do their thing on the big screen. (Just thinking about it causes a suspicious tightening in my jaw so maybe not.)

I could just hang out and wait for TrueBlood to come on.

I could go outside and bead.

Too bad I’m not a drunk or a prescription addict. This wouldn’t be a problem.

Meh.

Maybe I’ll just go back to thinking about imagination. Funny that thinking about it in an abstract way is having a deleterious effect on its functioning. Would one consider that irony?

While this is a political/environmental message, it is really well done. The narrator’s voice, for example, is perfect.

via Wimp

The nastiness around Proposition 8 has generated quite a few public displays from the more mean and venal people in the US. This guy Perkins (from the Family Research Council) seems to be a typical conservative Christian right-wing political and cultural activist. He opposes the standard things – homosexuality, abortions, sexual education for youth, etc, etc. According to the wiki site he also seems comfortable utilizing the Klu Klux Klan’s support base. No surprises there.

It’s also no surprise that he can’t actually argue and that the attorney David Boies (since he can argue) makes Mr Perkins look the fool. So when I went to Dispatches From the Culture Wars on Science Blogs and started to watch the clip, I wasn’t surprised to find myself shaking my head at the foolishness of it all. What I do find continually surprising (surprisingly so) is the deep painfulness of it. I can never watch video like this straight through.

For example, at 1:15 when Perkins cites abortion as a legislative parallel (Roe vs. Wade) and he says “abortion was no where near the political issue that it is today when the court interjected itself in 1973 to this issue.” “Interjected itself?”  Excuse me! (I paused the clip there, and went to clean the bathroom.) Ms McCorvey (she who was named Jane Roe) wanted to make a decision about her pregnancy and Texas’ anti-abortion laws denied her that right. She took it to court. The court reviewed the case (and reviewed it, and reviewed it). It went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Justices made a decision.

That decision is the whole point of the presence of the court system in the US. Its purpose is to be there to adjudicate arguments in a reasonable manner in line with the laws of the nation. The use of the word “interjected” in Perkins speech implies that the court insinuated itself into a place it had no authority or standing and that is exactly what it does have. Anyway, this is an example of why I find stuff like this so very painful.  It is also when Mr Perkins lost any chance of swaying me to see his side of things. I respond to patently emotional manipulation with irreversible scepticism.

So when (at 2:55) Mr Boies is asked to respond, you see that head-titled wide smile, and I understood that smile to say (what an idiot, this is like shooting fish in a barrel). I felt included and a part of the coming judgement upon Mr Perkins in part because Mr Boies never said anything like that. He relied upon his smile, his mild gesture, upon understatement. He acted as if he trusted me to make a sensible decision. Mr Boies’ strategy is much more effective than Mr Perkins’. Both are emotional, but at this point Mr Boises has not made himself look like a fool so I am at least willing to listen.

Then Mr Boies goes on to list the problems with the speech of Mr Perkins. One particularly interesting bit: in response to the claim that the judge ignored social science data Mr Boies says (3:02) “cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do.” Nice. And a normal response to unsubstantiated claims – produce the evidence. “There weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science.” There are a few really good lines in there. One of them was “The witness stand is a lonely place to lie.” and “We put fear and prejudice on trial and fear and prejudice lost.”

The transcripts (or as much of them as I have read – and checking the site today it doesn’t seem to be loading) bear out the contention that there is no evidence of harm to society offered by same sex marriage. There’s also a wikipedia article on Perry v. Schwarzenegger that lists “findings of fact” and the supporting evidence (with references so you can go check it out). Those findings (and facts) are pretty interesting. You can read the complete list of facts here (starts on page 54, ends at page 109 – there are 80 0f them).

After defining what marriage is and isn’t, the section “Whether any evidence shows California has an interest in differentiating between same-sex and opposite-sex unions” (starts with fact 42), decimates the idea that same sex marriage will harm society. In fact the facts show the opposite.  Despite this, I have no illusions that Mr Perkins (or the people he represents) will change their minds. I mean there are still people that think allowing interracial marriage was a mistake.

At 4:22 the host asks Perkins to give “us some evidence as to the harm that would be created by allowing same sex marriages.” Mr Perkins goes immediately to the harm done to children raised in a same-sex household. He then conflates no-fault divorce with dangers to children and implies that same-sex households offer the same dangers to children. (Pause button – my kitchen counters and cupboard doors got a good soapy wipe-down.) That seems to me to be an argument for promoting marriage amongst same sex people. If marriage (and the commitments it fosters) support healthy children, then any state should want to make marriage a viable option for those couples who want to (or are) raising children together.

Boies responds at 5:29. Same smile but here he is gesturing more emphatically, at least at the beginning. It’s as if he is responding to the tension created by Perkins’ reference to the stereotypical fears of those it does not understand or want to include in the concept “our nation.”)  He points out the fallacy of the no-fault divorce aspect of Prop 8′s proponents’ arguments. He then cites the existence of studies in other countries (Canada being one) and other states that demonstrate that there is no harm to society by allowing same sex marriage. He ends with the contrary, that empirical studies of the last 20 years show that allowing same sex marriage promotes stability and reduces harm.  By the end of his speech his arm gestures have calmed, and of course so has his audience. It was really nicely done, whether conscious or not. Take the irritation and upset caused by Perkins and undermine it (and him) by both fact and gestural calming.

How does Perkins respond? At 8:25 he uses the “interjecting” technique again and ties his idea of traditional marriage to “the history of the human race.” (Walked the dog.) Jeez. Fail, dude. Fail.

My final comment on this is about Brayton, the blogger responsible for “Dispatches From the Culture Wars.” He says “Boise absolutely destroys Perkins. It’s not a close call who wins.” While no where near as silly as Perkins’ attempt at emotional appeal, it does situate the dialog between Boies, Perkins and the commentator as a skirmish with a clear victor. That isn’t actually true because Perkins’ appeal at the end hoping for a “sane” decision from the Supreme Court and his concept of what it means to be human (and the non-empirical history of the species that was woven to support it) will not change. The “win” will not stop the cultural civil war ongoing in the US. Brayton’s comment is a fist pump celebration for a nice move on that part of one of his team’s members. It has no more relevance to the actual state of the war than a football fan’s yahoooooooo when one of the opposing team reveals his momentary clumsiness.  I get the rush, but the thing is when Prop 8 first passed in California, it was exactly the same feeling that the proponents (e.g. Tam) felt in their “victory.” I got that too. The sense of victory Brayton felt is also, just about as meaningful.

Reason can never win in a contest against emotion. At best reason can be used to foster one set of feelings (self-preservation and economic desire are good ones) that are in opposition to another set of feelings (fear and stereotyping, for example – a constant for mean and venal people). Boies’ masterful use of non-verbal emotional signals along with the constant verbal reference to reason and fact is a good model. There was no fist pumping in evidence.

By the way, it took me almost two hours to be able to watch the whole 8 or so minutes. That’s how painful I find this. Still, my bathroom is now much cleaner. So are my kitchen counters. And the dog is walked and the garden watered.

via Dispatches From the Culture Wars