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Winter Fog

Dr. Renik I Presume


November 21, 2012

I am mostly baffled at what fuels my desire for a rendezvous with, Owen Renik, a H.S. classmate I haven’t seen in 54 years, and who I honestly don’t recall having had one conversation with, ever, or indeed even a shared activity, ever, altho I was surely aware of his existence, viewed him as of a different class, almost waspy, and a competitor. He was not from my neighborhood, i didn’t “hang out” with him, and I knew nothing about him other than what he looked like and what I projected onto him, which at that age I expect I saw as somehow “known” by me. And although I would proclaim I am not that attached or attracted to most of my high school experiences, nor to my high school cohorts, the fact is I have gone to the 10th, 20th, 30th and 50th class reunions. Dr. Renik has not, and I did not ask him why, although my guess/projection is that his h.s. experiences and mates are of little to no interest to him. And I “imagine” I get it.

Nonetheless, I am interested in meeting him, and in attaching a real person to his name and face, and I have worked on making it happen over email for about a year, telling him of my interest in meeting him and how I’m often out in San Francisco, and him suggesting that when I was next out here to let him know and he would put some time aside for me.

Here’s what I knew about Owen Renik before our rendezvous … nothing. Here’s what I “know” after our rendezvous at a very lovely lounge/bar in the neighborhood of his office around Sutter St in SF.
He is currently a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society. He was editor and chief of the “Psychoanalytic Quarterly” for a decade and Director of Training/Associate Chief of the Mt. Zion Hospital Department of Psychiatry. More than that he is the father of two girls/women, one a pediatrician in S.F. and the other a geologist, living in Texas, where Owen’s current woman/partner is. Neither have children and although he recognizes it would be a lovely experience to have, he is not attached to the notion that if it doesn’t happen he will suffer. Indeed, although I understand there were times in Owen’s life when he did suffer, and was confused, his overall experience of his life is that he was/is a remarkably fortunate man who lived a nice life. And on this one occasion of our meeting I found him to be as lovely a man as you are likely to meet. Fit. Trim. Nice haircut. T shirt and sport jacket. Works out. Girlfriend in Texas. Daughter in Texas. Other daughter pediatrician.

What The Stones Say

We stones don’t speak very loudly
Start there.
And although we can yelp and scrape
And bang into one another as well and as loudly as most matter you’d know of
The fact is that stones are mostly quiet
Introverted some would say
Not like creatures with their mouths open and life cycles measured in milliseconds
No, we go back before the stone age, waaay back,
Part of the molten age
After the gas age
When all was one blended brand
Before the Great Differentiation
Before air, before water.
Before I was whole
Before I was broke
Mostly quiet
Often wet
Rolling a lot and for a long time
And getting better at it
On a beach somewhere
Recently deposited
After many long journeys
Well rounded
Attuned
Mobile
Maybe even curious by now
Aware of the heat of the sun
And the cool of the night
The soft of the sand
And the soft of the hand
That lifts me
And numbers of my kin
And brings us to something called home
And arranges us he says
In some design he says
That is absolutely unintelligible to us.
But it is nice to be resting again
And I seem to be in contact with other stones
Who also came home with me
From the beach.
I like change
And I like rest.
And just bein’ a stone is alright with me.

Ubud

Naturally we have no idea how to find the guesthouse we have booked in Ubud, but this too has been our way in Bali, and so far, other than the fact we are from time to time truly lost, each wrong turn has brought us more pleasure and delight than the last. That Joy and I travel so well together is a gift and I cannot imagine any other person who I could be so lost with, so disoriented and even truly stuck with on a occasions, who I would feel more comfortable and less anxious with than Joy. Besides, Joy is immensely strong, reasonably prudent, mostly fully aware, AND she does eighty percent of the navigating and all of the driving.
Once we’ve arrived in Penestanan and gotten a general sense of where our guesthouse is we leave the car, grab all of our luggage, computers, electrical equipment, and Joy’s travel guitar, and head a kilometer up and down narrow paths that no car can traverse to the guesthouse.
It’s truly a jungle here, no longer in the breezy mountains, one degree of latitude off the equator, sweat pouring off us, rain falling sporadically but hard, the vegetation teeming, hanging, crawling, covering, rising up united in its patent desire to conquer every square inch of ground, air, sunlight, soil, and dead branch that will support it. Plants grow in the moist air itself, floating like feathers, twisted and twirling, embracing space with arms spread wide, wrapped in love as it were, with life, and with the desire to manifest themselves.
The guesthouse, however, is drab, stale, darkly moist, and covered with green lichen. The stones in the flooring are loose beneath our feet. The lights are not working. The housekeeper cannot find our reservation. There are no empty rooms. The owner’s wife appears. We are served coffee. Karja himself is found and arrives to deal with the situation. He keeps guesthouse reservation records in his computer. His lovely wife – who is not computer savvy – keeps parallel records in a wet and wrinkled guestbook. Karja has been living in town, away from his wife and the guesthouse, because it has been more comfortable that way given the emotional difficulties their twenty one year old son has been having, something Karja and his wife are very open with us about, some form of bipolar disorder, some rage filled possession by demons and ancient priests commanding the son in ways that frighten and confuse him. The family has consulted the local shaman and healer, who has advised that the son quit graduate school and let the past inhabit him, to go with the flow as it were, unafraid. The boy has moved out, taken his father’s car, apparently gone to Denpasar. His parents are hopeful and concerned. Who wouldn’t be?
But back to the matter of our accommodations. The wife has rented out our room. There are no rooms otherwise available here. It has grown dark. The mosquitoes are out. Karja has a brother. The brother also runs a guesthouse. It is behind the supermarket in town. We can stay there. Karja’s one-eyed father will go with us, show us where the guesthouse is. Everything has been taken care of. So we again load up all of our luggage, computers, electrical equipment, and Joy’s travel guitar, and head a kilometer up and down narrow paths to the car. Karja’s father sits in the back seat and points left and right. We get to the supermarket. The father finds the brother who leads us down a set of narrow steps, up a set of narrow steps, down a dark shoulder wide path between concrete walls, up steps, down steps, using our camera flashlight apps to help guide us, we walk and walk, over tiny bridges and flat stones, ultimately arriving in a compound bordered by wet and swampy rice paddies and a free standing two story home with a living room, fully equipped kitchen, stove, refrigerator, downstairs bedroom, upstairs bedroom, working fans, mosquito netting, hot and cold running water, and a veranda. It is silent but for the chirping of frogs and other creatures of the night, the moon emerges from the clouds before the rains begin again. We are in the most private and beautiful of settings that we could ever imagine, paradise in Penestanan. The guides have spoken.
In the morning we walk into Ubud, which takes about thirty minutes. There is no place on earth like it, Provincetown on steroids with temples in a sauna, Polo shops, upscale restaurants, health food stores, aged hippies, the last of the beat generation, long hairs, scantily clad western men and women, tourists from every corner of the globe, gift shops, art shops, junk shops, massage parlors, gelato shops, yoga studios, crowds, traffic, coffee shops, my god even a Starbucks, and all somehow with a Balinese flair. Not somewhere we want to hang out in for long, although the restaurants are actually good, we see two separate Balinese dance troupes, one of which Joy dance’s with, I have the video to prove it, the Blanco Museum, the monkey temple. Entertainment. But the real surprise and real pleasure of Ubud for us is in the outlying neighborhoods, of car-free lanes, small outdoor indigenous restaurants, quaint guesthouses, immense quiet, beautiful vegetation and stone work, running irrigation ditches, and, of course, our little palace, which we stock with beer, wine, cheese and crackers and where I can comfortably write and do yoga under the mosquito netting and Joy can play her guitar.

Bali

Bali is clearly not the Bali of old, of the time before Bali was “discovered,” before Balinese women covered their bare breasts, before Ubud became exaggeratedly hip, before skyscraper resorts arose on the beaches. But Bali is still uniquely Bali … Hindu Bali, volcanic Bali, village Bali, sacred Bali, Bali with roads up and down mountainsides and along mountain ridges that rival the incline and hairpin turns of any twisted narrow roadway you have ever travelled on or dreamed of, with statues of gods and goddesses at every road juncture, before every bridge, in front of and inside of every home … all receiving gifts of flowers and incense daily … all a reflection of the genuine spiritual awareness and beliefs of the Balinese who walk with such great grace, their loads balanced on the tops of their heads … or precariously on their motorcycles …or somewhere in their hearts we cannot see.
We rent a car in Denpasar, that being a far less expensive option than hiring drivers and providing us with a much greater range of exploration options, especially since as a practical matter public buses in Bali might as well not exist for short-term travelers. So what if we go around in circles for literal hours trying to get out of Denpasar headed in the right direction toward Sideman … or that we spend hours inching along in mountaintop fog so thick and dense, so obscuring of our vision, that the best we can do is try to follow the faded white line on a wet roadway so occasionally steep that if we pause we cannot proceed up in first gear, the tires spinning madly, but must back down to flatter ground to get a running start. Joy does all the driving.
Sideman is well off the main road, in the mountains, amidst rice terraces and lush forest. From our guesthouse we branch out for day trips, most notably to the Besakih Temple, the most sacred of Hindu temples in all of Bali, which is built on the south slope of Mount Agung, the highest mountain in Bali and still an active volcano, having erupted about fifty years ago killing 2,000 people, its lava flow missing the temple by mere meters, but the spirit of the mountain resting quietly on the day we visit.
The bulk of our time in Sideman is spent taking short walks to swimming holes and across foot bridges over various rivers and on long steep rides up and down mountainsides, the only way to get from village A – with its particular vantage points, rice terraces, and temple(s) – to village B, with its particular vantage points, rice terraces, and temple(s). We happen upon festivals. We join pilgrimage walks. We spend a lot of time just marveling at the scenery, drinking beer or coffee at some roadside stand, trying to talk to the smiling people and admiring their children. We leave Sideman reluctantly.

Village in the Clouds

Village in the Clouds is truly a unique venue and very much the love child of Josep Triay, world class ultra-marathoner and son of Majorca, Spain. Originally conceived as a retreat by a wealthy Chinese merchant from Denpasar, a top Balinese architect has designed the buildings that sit high on a mountain overlooking valleys and rice terraces and from where on a clear day you can see the ocean about fifty miles away. The resort is very high end and can only accommodate about sixteen to twenty people when fully occupied. During the time we are stay there we see only two other overnight guests, lovely forty-year old women, also from Spain. The food is fantastic. The setting is fantastic. We walk to small shrines deep in the mountains. We try to walk to visit a popular hot spring but get completely lost and end up riding without helmets on the backs of motorcycles to get there and whose owners take us through village after lovely village to see UNESCO recognized rice terraces that are truly stunningly beautiful. We ride the bikes for a couple of hours. We pay the drivers five dollars each and they kiss our hands in gratitude.
Josep also runs a “Freedom School,” where village children are offered English classes with a Spanish accent, a few random other subjects, and Balinese dance. We visit the Balinese dance class, which Joy joins in. It is lovely to see young boys and girls separately learning the highly stylized dance footwork, hand and finger gestures, eye and head movements, and facial expressions.
On our last evening at Clouds before dinner I offer a yoga class that Joy, Josep, and the two women attend. Afterwards we all dine together. As with every meal at Clouds the food is fresh and this evening good wine is flowing and post dinner conversation is warm, candid, passionate and political. Josep suggest we have breakfast together as well. His mother has mailed him homemade Majorcan olives and prosciutto and he will instruct his Balinese staff to produce a classic Majorcan breakfast. I cannot begin to describe how delicious it was.
And this is the way it happens for us in Bali, a cornucopia of good fortune. Still, we take our heartfelt leave of Josep, Marisa, and Assun and head toward Pentestan, the village next to Ubud, where we will be staying at the guesthouse run by Karja Wayan, a renowned Balinese artist who has studied in Tampa and who has even visited Boston and the Cape. On our way to Ubud we stop at a spectacular botanical gardens (turn left at the big corn statue – no really, a big ear of corn statue in middle of road, twelve feet high and proportional) and also buy orchid cuttings that travel in a plastic bag through customs in New Guinea, the Philippines, and California and are growing now in my kitchen.

Life among the barbarians

I live among barbarians
People who fart at the dining room table
People who eat cows
And kick dogs
Business account executives
Wasting the gift of time
Negotiating abstractions
People living apart from one another

I hide from them
In the woods and the dunes
In alleyways and tents
Trying to move in obscurity and safety
To not rattle the rows and rows of opened cages
To not awaken their eager indifferent war machines
Their hungover stupors
Their trigger happy play
To not awaken their collective anger
And mythic gods
To not care about tit contour shaping brassieres
Golf scores
Relative wealth
Some daily disaster that passes as news
While all that is good and free is ignored,
Taken for granted, not acknowledged
Not honored
Not even seen.
Life among the barbarians

© 2016

Pig Roast – circa 2010

The long awaited pig roast unfolds, not exactly as scripted, but deliriously lovely in almost every way.  What was not anticipated includes my sister’s and nephew’s early arrival, without whom this roast absolutely could not have happened, not given the fact that a butterflied 160 pound pig presents some real problem in the realm of physics, fire, and balancing.  Unanticipated also was the amount of time it took for me and some of the greatest minds of my generation to fashion a wire cage strong enough to hold the pig in place, and the amount of heavy grade wire I’d have to cut to fasten the top and bottom of said cage, and the number of nicks and cuts I have all over my hands, and the burns on my fingertips, and the pain in muscles I don’t usually use, in my hands and fingers, my back, and parts of my mind. 
Most of all, although I anticipated all manner “disaster,” from rainy weather, to no one showing up, to the pig being undercooked no matter how long I cooked it, to the pig falling apart, or falling into dirt, or getting up and flying off on big Pegasus wings, none of these events unfolded, although three surprises awaited me. 
One was being left alone all day with the pig while all of the other humans entertained themselves in other ways.  Just me and the pig hanging out on a glorious fall morning and afternoon.  Hour after hour unable or unwilling to depart her side, to abandon my watch and my responsibility for this pig, my pig, and this gathering, watching the fire, tending the fire.
Then there was my forgetting, or not knowing, or not anticipating how much immense pleasure it would give me to share this adventure and this pig with Sam, and how his very presence excites and inspires me and puts a big smile on my face, and that we were able to share in this experience.
And third, though not least, what happens when you’re cooking a pig a solid three feet above the coals, and you are humming your cook-it-slowly-thoroughly-and-long mantra, and quite unthinkingly, while straightening up the yard, raking, and collecting down branches, all within sight of said pig, you take a small fallen oak tree branch that has lots of dry brown leaves still attached and in an idle offhanded way throw said branch on the low flame high heat coals, whereupon said leaves foreseeably burst into flames and said flames reach up to the downside backside hide of the hog, which until that moment has been steadily dripping 100 percent pork fat oil onto the hissing coals, when the actual flame from the burning leaves reaches the skin of the pig, and the entire pig is almost instantly engulfed in flames, a horrific sight.  And as I stand there transfixed, thinking the flames will burn themselves out, in fact they do not, and rather than die they contribute to a napalm-like fire of immense and seemingly tragic proportions, the entire pig encased in flame, feeding the fires with its dripping fat, dripping so much fat the entire skin of the pig is encased in a big oil rig fire, a runaway well that cannot be capped, and even when I remove the heat and flame source beneath the pig, the skin continues its burning in a vigorous, wind whipped independent fire, my entire pig quite literally entirely engulfed in flame, which, after a time I come to realize is not going to go out of its own volition without first consuming the entire pig, and I have to secure the garden hose and seriously spray the pig in an act of firefighter daring do, while simultaneously beating down the grass fire that has started all around the grill racing toward the shed. And thus it goes, my morning and afternoon alone with a lovely enough mammal who was alive and breathing the fresh free air two short days ago, and then had her throat cut, and was eviscerated, who drove home in the front seat of my car wearing a hat and a seatbelt so I could use the fast lane and came to rest three feet over a very very hot fire, and was transformed from living flesh and bone and organs that worked and lived, into meat cooking over a fire, and then into the very humans who consumed her, and honored her, and remember her in ways few of her kind are remembered,  once alive and now a part of me.

Death Factories

Heavily armed police are everywhere.
The Pentagon provides these servants of public safety
With surplus offensive weaponry
The clock is loudly ticking
The Military Industrial Complex
doing well everywhere
Well-armed, well paid. 
Thriving in dysfunctionality  
Caught in a whirlwind of ill chosen choices
Toilets flushing shit into oceans by the billions
garbage everywhere
Many hungry and homeless
The hint of German accents in times of war
Of truly mad men
Unfortunate men
Presidents, generals,
corrupt corporate executives
unwilling to return to the dream time
unable to sing
in the wrong place at the wrong time
like a creature trying to find his way out of a pitch dark room
you can hear their shuffling pace
as they trace the outline of the wall
with their fingertips
bumping into chairs and bureaus
edging past windows and closets
trying to find a door which opens
to reveal the earth as she is
hurtling thru time and space
east to west
spinning deliriously
the hint of light
a bird so clearly wounded it has to be dying
by the woodshed
laying in gray and blue and soft white feathers
fluttering in leaves and twig
in darkness
to die
before the nuclear power plants kill us all
outdated, leaking, toxic
destroying the planet
poetry, music, song, dance
lost as midwives to unpredictability
humans unable to solve these problems
placing the death factories precisely where they will do the most harm.

Sunrise


The choice
Was stark
Sit at my desk drafting legal memoranda
Or go to the beach
To watch the sunrise.
The dog was very clear,
Wise some might say.
The boat with the red light on
Moving silently across the horizon
had also gotten the message.
The seals
The solitary fisherman
His baited hook sailing thru the air
The cigarette dangling from the fisherman’s lips
The brilliant colors
The couple hugging
Seagulls
A photographer
An infant
The dead creature the dog was rolling in
The hopes and promises inherent in the spinning of our planet
The spinning of the dervishes
The spinning of the hook

I count
as far as my eyes can see
North and south along the border between earth and sea
Between sea and sky
One hundred footprints
reminders of one hundred journeys
One thousand stones
rolled here by ancient glaciers
And restless seas
Stretch marks visible on their distended bellies
The light that travels ninety three million miles
To brighten the dawn
The first glimpse of mother’s face
The first taste of mother’s milk
Knowing what warm is
What winning feels like
How joy thrives in acceptance
The papers still waiting on my desk
The words unwritten
The thoughts unformed
Geese traveling south
Our earth spinning eastward
The black dog and the white dog playing
Glad the seasonal restriction on their presence has been lifted
Labor Day a distant memory
The fishing line cast
The tide retreating
The illusion of time
The growing space between the sun
And the distant sea’s edge
No longer daybreak
No longer dawn
The day upon us
The magnificent seal
now paused on her journey
To stare at the foreign shore.