Once I loved a girl, who perhaps was much like any other girl, and I would marvel at the feeling of her hand in mine, the thudding of her heart and the warmth of her breath. "Don't you think it's amazing that....." I trailed off, uncertain how to express myself. "That we're both alive?" she said.

Of all the things that awaken me from my inner world of abstractions and reverie to the raw outer world of sense and sensation, few do so with such startling force and clarity as does laughter in a pretty girl's eyes.

sometimes, in the intimate company of dearly loved ones, out of habit i disassociate myself and look upon the scene as one peering in from a window. At such moments, proximity, not distance, is the measure of isolation

Dear God, Your world is beautiful. I particularly love sunsets, sunrises, the mountains and deserts, the ocean, Autumn and Spring, stormy days, pine forests, grazing deer in open meadows, the moon, the sun, clear starry nights, and the smiles and laughter of little children. Thank you for everything. --Brian

Junction 114:
Carlights off ribbon on-ramps
to one path converge.

It's funny how grief takes you by surprise.

A friend and I were talking about someone, and the topic of male pattern baldness came up, how it is inherited from the mother's side.

I thought of how my mother's parents always said I was lucky to get their genes, and I remembered how my father's father had a crown of wispy hairs around his head toward the end of his life, how he spent two months with us in our home, too weak to stand unassisted, and one day he looked at himself in the mirror and said musingly, "I'm growin' a moustache... I didn't know I was growin' a moustache! Gotta go down to a barber and get this shaved off."

For days he said this. And eventually, one evening after her work shift, my mother took him to a barbershop.

Following a few weeks of minor physical therapy, grandpa must have been feeling pretty good about himself, because he tried to get out of the car on his own and he fell over backwards. An ambulance came and took him from the parking lot of the strip mall where the little barber shop was. We never took him home again. He spent the next few weeks in hospitals and hospices before passing away.

I miss my grandfather.

have you seen the mountains after the rain? how they fuse with the clouds? The hills take on wild forms in the sudden light, appearing like prehistoric animals crawling across the valley floor. And the clouds in the sky are low and vast, dwarfing the city below.

Notes Written in a Program to a Chinese Moon Festival Celebration:

Tonight I went to a chinese moon festival celebration with my grandparents. I scribbled notes along the margins of the program.

But first, a version of one of the songs from the program: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ23h2MdgHQ

Notes:

"Symphonies can soar to the places dreams have made."

"Does the annual flooding of the Yellow River really roar like the percussionist's drums? Do the silt laden banks then spring to life like the cascading patter of the yuanqin dulcimer?
"I would like to see the Yellow River."

"Can you hear the music of the ancient bamboo flute? Listen. Its meandering tune keeps time against the steady clop-clop-clop of our most ordinary lives."

"When villagers celebrating the summer harvest's end gathered beneath the full autumn moon, did they listen to this selfsame song? And hearing the cavernous yawn of eternity in the voice of some rude country performer, I wonder, did they imagine us imagining them hundreds of years apart?"

Grace is one moment leading to the next.

I saw a band of quartz crystal running through the sky, and its smoky depths were the morning overcast that lingered in the east.

We've grown our produce so unnaturally large, for volume, for profit ratios, for the sheer love of size, that peaches collapse under their own weight before they're fully ripe.


Life's nice. Life's so nice that sometimes it makes me feel silly, like it's so nice that I can't really understand at all how nice it is, and that makes me a sort of figure of silliness, a blessed clown who rides around on his silly unicycle balancing preposterous items on his red clown-nose, and in the shadows beyond the spotlight his watering cross-eyed gaze vaguely intuits that he's stumbled into an unlikely paradise.

It's that time of day when the low-hanging sun seems to hide behind objects on the horizon and the sterling light in the sky springs out from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

conversations with mom and dad

(talking about the little girl I'm tutoring in math)
Dad: "Is she improving?"
Me: "Uh, I dunno."
Dad: "Well, isn't that part of your job as a tutor? To assess progress over time?"
Mom: "Her mom says she's been giving her trouble lately."
Dad: "What kind of trouble."
Mom: "Not doing her homework."
Dad: "Isn't that pretty normal for 6th graders?"
Me: "Yeah."
Dad: "Is she asian?"
Mom: "She's half. Her mom is."
Dad: "What is she?"
Mom: "Indonesian."
Dad: "That's why."
Mom: "Whaat! Just because... you mean because she's always pushing her to do her homework."
Dad: "That's right. More than she wants."
Mom: "Well, sure. All asian mothers do. I had to do that with my children."
Dad: (to me) "For the record, I didn't care if my children went to college or not. I tell people I would have let my children not go to college if my wife hadn't insisted."
Mom: "That's right."
Me: "I actually did think about not going to college for awhile."
Mom: "And I would have been SO upset at you."
Dad: (in a mock-whisper) "I would have been ok with it."
Me: "Yeah, I think it was the best decision for me."
Mom: "Especially because I said you could move away. What a deal, huh? How else are you going to move far away and have the money to do it?"
Me: "Yeah, I guess. It's really hard to make it on a minimum wage job."
Mom: "Although you always said you could."
Me: "Oh, yeah, I think I could've."
Mom: "What was it, that econ project that you and Tim did, where you were supposed to pretend to be supporting yourselves. You came up with some ridiculous budget."
Me: "Right! Ha ha, Tim and I stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning doing that. You were supposed to do it over several weeks, to like, keep track of actual costs..."
Dad: "The cost of food?"
Me: "Yeah. Except, it was like normal econ, because I had been kicked out of AP Econ and Tim quit AP Econ in protest of my being kicked out, so we didn't take it very seriously. I think we went down to the grocery store literally an hour before it closed and Tim was like 'Whoa! Twelve top ramen packets for a dollar! That's like twelve meals for a dollar!' Yeah, even I thought that wasn't very realistic. I was like 'I dunno, I think you should put something else in the ramen. I'm going to budget for an onion every day.'"
Dad: "I didn't know Tim left AP Econ..... to protest your being kicked out."
Mom: "Well, they had just gotten so used to being kicked out of classes together."
Me: "Yeah, it was kind of like a tradition."
[we had both been kicked out of an accelerated math class in grand style the year before]
Dad: "I didn't know you could leave a class in protest."
Me: "Yeah, I think he just went to our counselor..."
Mom: "Mr. B."
Me: "Yeah, Mr. B. He just went to him and asked to be dropped out of the class."
Dad: "Well, maybe your 6th grade tutee's delinquency isn't so bad by comparison."
Mom: (muttering) "I didn't care what anyone said, my kids were going to college."
(conversation continues with Mom talking about how she had to fight to get us into accelerated classes when we all entered the public school system)

i love my dreary inland valley, because on the first cold morning in the Fall the smog clears up and the mountains reappear, as if they were just newly made, and I remember that this place, its narrow geography, the landscape of my childhood, for better and for worse, is as much a part of the earth as any other