Shhh.

Well hello there,

I've been reading through recent facebook posts and trying to determine if those who habitually post positive thought messages-- of the dream it, see it, be it variety-- are actually getting any more done in their days than I am.  They post on facebook more than I do, and the more time I spend on facebook the less productive I am.  Really.  No joke.  But, maybe those affirmations get their engines going?  Maybe they're actually dreaming, seeing and being to fulfill their hearts' greatest desires?  Could it be so friggin' simple?  No way.

On the tail of a tale I shared with a new friend, about a humorous experience I'd had in a brief courtship with a local music store's rock band workshop, the new friend suggested that I imagine the appearance of perfectly compatible musicians, anticipate their cool roll into my life, and then wait patiently for their arrival.  I didn't question her or push for the specifics required to see the plan fulfilled; I just laughed.  She related a story of a woman she'd met who subscribed to the Oprah-advertised idea of "The Secret."  Since watching a video that discloses this secret, the woman no longer has any trouble finding parking.  Who knew that the solution to life's greatest mysteries would provide such advantage?  My friend was quick to include, "and when Sue can't find a parking space, she simply goes to another store."  Ah, the secret is revealed.  Its power thrives in the concession to its fallibility.

The secret, I think.

I looked up The Secret and read through the five pages of its eponymous book offered for free on its site.  The ancients knew this shit, I understand, from Plato and Socrates to Da Vinci to Einstein.  And now, a bunch of motivational speakers and life coaches peddle it.  I didn't get the impression that they do much else, unlike their illustrious, secret-keeping forebears.  As best I can tell, it's all about magnets.  Not ball bearings.  Magnets.

So, does it work?  Should I start laying out irresistible Reese's Pieces now to attract agents and book publishers or at least a couple of paying gigs to me?  Or is that not enough?  What if I combine it with witty bon mots on my facebook status update?  Maybe I should also surround myself with kitten art so I remember to hang in there.

I suppose there could be something to the idea of imagining great success, but really.  Isn't it all just a major distraction?  And if you can't imagine yourself crushed and mangled by the possible downside of wish fulfillment, then I think you were just raised in a more functional, power-endowing way.  And that, in the end, is probably the greatest secret, except, it really isn't one.  It's just fate.

But fate doesn't sell.

The hard part?

Maybe the hardest part of finishing this bitch of a self-assignment will be finding the peace to do so.  What I'm finding here, in my nicely appointed workspace with an unbeatable view of the bay, is that all the personal shit interferes much more completely when there isn't the monetary incentive to forget it and get some real work done.  Jobs are a great palliative, I think.

Or maybe that's all part of it.

All I know for sure at this point is that it sucks to wonder to the exclusion of all rational thought whether the quick and gusty wind outside will take me back home before I have a chance to get a first draft done.

Knowledge defiance

At this point in my life, I'm not doing much.  Most of the time, I'm trying to finish this novel I'm writing. It's about kids who die.  It's occasionally funny.  For about seven hours a day, I spend most of my time either writing it or wondering whether it'll ever end.

Okay, I'll concede, I do some other stuff.  I swim and do yoga a bunch.  In the afternoons, I like to melt dark chocolate and pour it into molds so I can arrange for my own flavor fantasies, like peanut butter or cherries or basil ganache, rather than pushing my immature American taste buds to accept so much citrus flavored chocolate.  On Mondays, I attend a jewelry class wherein I've made a fistful of rings but only finished one and it's a tad big for my portliest finger.  When the mood strikes, I may pack it all in and scramble through the sand-laced wind to hunker down at a table by the window at Maranui down the road.  If they've got it, I'll order a sticky date cake and eat it over a period of two hours or until the cafe closes at five.  I'm very good at savoring.  I also clean and cook and and obsess about money and hang laundry to dry so my obsession doesn't paralyze me.

In between all this, I ponder.  I sit myself on the edge of our living room with my feet on the deck and my ass in the house and I settle in for a long think.  It's time well spent, I think, because I'm pretty sure it's healthy to have a nice bit of thinking under a sky that's as ever changing as the ocean underneath it.  

But wait, there's more.  I almost started volunteering but I didn't because I don't really want to help someone file papers when I could be making chocolate, smelling half-dry laundry or even writing.  I almost played drums with a ragtag team of musically challenged adults who claimed to have never heard The Pretenders, but I backed out of that one too.   The reasons should be clear.  And recently, I contemplated a course in massage, figuring that the money I've spent on my education to date really should not be compounded by any further pursuits that won't bring some sort of recompense in the door.  After careful consideration, I've postponed the massage course as well since, well, really, I am trying to finish a novel and I'm only four months into my six month window for its completion.  That, and I'm still unsure if I want to touch anyone who might ask for me to do so.  I kind of like having a say in the matter.

I say all this because I've been thinking all day about the persistent and seemingly increasing unwillingness of the American mainstream to take a moment to have a really good think.  Or, maybe I'm jumping to the wrong conclusion but everything I read about the upcoming U.S. elections and the various policy issues hamstrung by the partisan rigor in all political conversation leads me to believe that the nation's cumulative ability to reason has jumped the shark.  We should be nauseous and ashamed to hear Senate candidates who celebrate their willful ignorance of the Constitution just as I am nauseous and ashamed to hear the continuing demonization of last year's successful attempt to begin health care reform for the population.  The fact that the faces of so many of those who protest the goal of ensuring access to care for everyone are bloated and flushed doesn't help with the nausea.  Apparently, the deficit of thought has helped to annihilate self-interest as well.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I should just book a flight to DC to revel with like minds at the Rally To Restore Sanity.  But, I'm a skeptic, and an optimistic one at that.  I think it's gonna take more than a rally to oppose the knowledge defiance in my fair nation.  It's going to take education, stability and above all, a great, big huzzah for moments spent in quiet rumination.  Spending as much time as I do sitting beside endlessly crashing waves, I can promise you that the contemplation really doesn't get old and doesn't seem to be capable of excess.

(Dis)connected

Over drinks a couple nights ago-- a deathly sweet caipirinha for me, a beer for my friend-- I wondered aloud about the necessity of remaining connected to my American political roots.  The musing was intended to be playful; I could no more easily surrender my deep dissatisfaction with governance than I would give up my mother.  While both may frustrate, they each infused my blood with its liveliest catalysts.

The consideration came in response to my friend's easy, proud confession to her limited knowledge of the willfully (blissfully?) ignorant antics of the Tea Party movement at home.  My friend earned her stripes in one of the United States, like me, but after making her way for seven years on this small island rising like a benign mole on the shadowed edge of the earth's plump, round bottom, she's converted her stripes to a more flattering, less restricted print.  I like her color choices these days as well as the long strand of pearls she wears, maybe to commemorate the bits of wisdom she's come upon since exchanging the grime of LA for the captivating view of the snow-capped peaks of the South Island from her kitchen window.  Maybe home is where the view is, where such mesmerizing outlooks aren't sullied by the paralyzed will of representatives too enamored with their power to recall their mandate.  Maybe my friend is home.

In the back room of the festive Brazilian bar, folks in business casual learned salsa to quiet music.  I checked on their progress while my friend attended to drinks and found them impressively competent.  Rather than opting for beer and a bench, they'd chosen to stiffly sway their hips in Dockers and pencil skirts.  They followed instructions well and everyone moved in time.

When we reconvened our conversation, my friend urged me to let it all go.  "It isn't relevant," she advised.  "Better to know the sale price of wool."  When I attempted to explain that a hefty percentage of my identity-- that part controlled by the cynical but enthusiastic animus compelling my blood on its course-- had been dedicated to the hyper-vigilant observation of and subsequent bellyaching about all the wrenches tossed flippantly into the poorly maintained works of our government, the one we'd been born under, my friend gave me a bewildered look and said, "I don't even need to understand that anymore."

Well, no, she doesn't, because, as we discussed over the rims of our glasses, moaning about John Key, the somewhat conservative Prime Minister of these fair bumps in the ocean, is like complaining that the ocean outside my window is just too loud.  While he ain't riding his bike to work to generate power for his grey water-producing washing machine, he's probably more capable of pushing a Democrat's agenda than the current House and Senate in the U.S.  My friend then encouraged me to forego American media.  I thought about the menagerie of Kiwiana I could introduce into the time and space left over by the abandonment.  I could learn to make lamingtons; I might figure out how to carry my 12 foot paddleboard in the wind; I could solve the mystery of the sizing of women's pants; I might even make a friend.

Of course, all of that will probably come in time.  I think my residency application will require the icing of a lamington as well as a cold water plunge.

The truth, however nerdy it may be, is this.  Seeing the rhetoric of the most recent batch of political aspirants looking to wrest control of the country from the current cohort of sticky-fingered pocket-divers, I'm unwilling to look away.  I may be inconsequential and distant (in either order), but I'm a witness.

A candidate for Senate from Kentucky is charging up his base by calling up the President's gaffe prior to his election about middle Americans holding tightly to their guns and religion.  The candidate is calling on guns, religion AND ammunition.  For what?  To shoot someone?  Who does he want killed or severely injured and forever traumatized?  Or is for the whimpering, liberal puppies who seek to restore social justice without asking if it ever existed?

Other congressional candidates are lauding their inexperience in the political world as their highest qualification for the job.  Even those who do have experience in the political world are denying it.  Democrats and Republicans alike wave their corporate CVs as proof of their ability to "grow jobs" while they make ridiculous statements like, "people who have never been in the business world-- they don't know how to run a business."  Again, my whipping boy of the moment: Rand Paul.   Does he think that the converse in this situation doesn't hold true?  Do people who have never been in the political world know how to run the government?  And by that, I mean, the government as it exists today?  With its three co-equal branches and mind-numbing administrative largesse stumbling all over its own girth to confront the svelte corporate beasts who would rather see it all privatized?  (And don't get all excited that maybe the companies could do it all better; after all, they're the svelte beasts, right?  They're only so trim because they don't bear the same responsibilities to all of us as the government does.  They're the childless women, the carefree bachelors.  They don't have to care about other people's kids.  That's what government of and by and for the people is supposed to do.)

None of this is to say that folks without prior experience can't do the job, but shouldn't it be a prerequisite that we see some sort of policy know-how and maybe an understanding of our system of government that demonstrates passage of tenth grade civics?

Oh well.  Maybe my friend is right.  It's all irrelevant from here.  And maybe it doesn't actually matter if we pay attention or not, bear witness or not.  What's becoming more clear is that while the Democrats did a good job of inspiring voter participation in 2008, the Tea Party has trumped them in 2010 by turning possible voters into viable, if foolish, candidates.  Good on them.  That's they way to take over government.

Maybe then, I'll look away and commit to disconnection.  I would probably grieve a little first.

Happy to be here.

The weekend was long and that was enough in itself to make it sweet.

The Foxton windmill.

These days, a weekend isn't as attractive for the break it provides but the company.  And the prospect of a long weekend, with someone, got me all antsy to slow down time, to make it endure, so we could see the heights and verdant valleys of the country without rush or worry.  It also meant another road trip, this time up the North Island on State Highway One to Rotorua.  

The One follows a path that snakes out of Wellington under the eaves of old wood and modern glass box houses perched on the hillside, swings on steep cliffs over the rambunctious Tasman Sea, turns inland from the western Kapiti Coast and weaves through tiny towns with more welcome signs than people and more sheep than anything else.  The towns abruptly disappear with the rise of the arid plateau, smeared like a warm palette by the brown and magenta brush that surrounds the active Mt. Ngauruhoe volcano.  This is the military training site of New Zealand but there's very little evidence of any environmental impact by the army's activity.  Beyond the volcano, the road descends toward Lake Taupo, a huge body of water resting on a winding shore of floating pumice stone.   Just north of Taupo, the steam starts to rise and the sulphuric stink of the earth's gassy belly overwhelms the smell of cut spring grass and evergreen.  Clusters of swollen, grassy bumps litter the hillsides, contusions caused by the restless fault lines intersecting and clashing beneath the region.

Rotorua is the navel of the island, a geologically hyperactive spot that makes clear the ongoing gestation of the island.  Thermal pools boil the sediment that exploded skyward in the last volcanic eruption and rained over the newly created crust that resurfaced the land.  Lakes of effervescent surface water colored by the blood red, purple and hard-boiled yellow of ferrous oxide, magnesium oxide and sulphur send noxious steam into thriving, anachronistic fern gulches.

We wandered paths beside the pools, spotting tiny fumaroles that spit hot bubbles underfoot.  We stared at mesmerizing mud pits roiling at a high boil and sending balloons of mud six feet in the air before they popped and smattered the surface.  We got used to the smell and ultimately bathed in hot sulphur pools.  Afterward, we felt silky soft and unworried about body odor.

Beside the insanity of the earth's gastric functions, Rotorua offered a carnival, black swans and their fuzzy, ugly ducklings, absolutely decent Mexican food at Sabroso and a fantastic place to stay at the Regency.  Fireworks burst after I finished my margarita and families spilled onto the sidewalk to watch.  We ate breakfast watching teenage boys practicing their haka on a street corner and we raced each other on tubular recumbent bikes hanging on a monorail.  (I was one second off the record for my age group.  Watch out Sarah Jane of Australia: I will best you yet.)  When we left, I wished there could have been a resort dance or ice cream social to celebrate the time we all got to spend together milling around the friendliest caustic place I've ever visited.  We could have compared adjectives for the smell and the relaxation it seemed to inspire.

Wai-o-tapu.

On the long road home, I thought a little about the cows I'd seen collapsing on their spindly legs to nestle into the long, green grass in the afternoon sun.  I wondered about the little lambs with their long tails that scurried away from traffic toward the belly of their mothers.  The sun had set slowly over a vast field burnished by the late light.  I remembered that coming home from a road trip used to mean traffic on an interstate moving angrily toward a place usually less beautiful than the vacation offered.

This time, we returned to our house on the ocean at high tide.  The waves were loud against the deck and the salt smell was everywhere.