Photo spread from Italy, with prose

 Pina Piccolo has kindly published a sheaf of my photos in The Dreaming Machine, along with other photos sprinkled throughout the issue. 

Take a close look at the entire journal. https://www.thedreamingmachine.com/ 

 

Disappearances

"S told me that people become attached to the trees next to family member's graves," I said to a woman who was standing next to a stump, looking confused. She hadn't visited in a while. I pointed to another stump nearby. "There's a man who comes to that grave--lots of tatts--I haven't seen him in a while." She said they'd picked the grave site because of the tree. And now, she noted, it's all about money. The late trees had stood in the line of sight between the upper road and the new water feature, its bright gold arrow and sign, "OCEAN VIEW." Two of my favorite trees died for that sign.

 

Jo, who sits at the front of the administrative building, had no idea what happened to S; she's also been texting him. No response. She spoke quite softly. "Gotta watch what you say now; there are cameras everywhere." Smiled, said she was lucky because her camera had no audio.

 

In the conspiracy theorist's absence

Today, three cats lay down in the unmarked spot where S had always parked his beaten up green van. He had names for them.

Design of darkness (to appall)

 

"You're here on a Monday," I said to Uncle J, who was alone at the guard shack. S was not there, hadn't been for days. J was there because someone had to be. I asked if he'd been laid off. J didn't know. "He said that in a year no one who works here now would still be there," I said, "but he said that to me just last week."

Up the hill, Hoku and Ola said that S had been put on administrative leave. They didn't know what that meant, exactly. He and the boss didn't get along, they said. Lilith accepted their attention with benevolence.

 

On our way out, I said "administrative leave," to Uncle J. "Oh no, he's gone. He took all of his stuff with him. Won't answer my calls, and if he doesn't answer mine, he won't answer anyone's." I told Uncle J to take care of himself. Neither of us mentioned the fat envelope I'd passed him recently with Mayo Clinic information about depression and treatment. "S cares about you," I added.

 

I told him about our cat that went from not eating to eating everything in sight. "I guess I'd better start eating again," he said, vape smoke wrapping around his now thin face. "This was all done by design," he added.

Territorial imperatives

1.

 

A young bearded man was standing behind the receptionist Jo at the entrance to the main building at Valley of the Temples. I thought he wanted to say something to her. No. He smiled, looked off toward the mountains. "Men stand behind me," she said with a grin. She lives with men; she likes that. The men are young, eye candy; doesn't hurt, you know. Has arthritis in her knees, her neck, her hands, can't open cans or much else. Men leave you alone. She used to live with women, but it didn't work. "Territory, you know." "Don't take this wrong," she said, looking in my eyes. "But the one woman was a retired professor. She said to tell her whenever something was wrong. But she wouldn't listen. She could talk, though." And then there was the woman with three master's degrees. Also impossible to live with.

 

"I'll keep my degrees to myself, then," I told her. "Oh, we can talk just fine," she said, "but we couldn't live together."

 

 

2.

 

"I'm SO tired," a woman said to the mortician, who was standing near the entrance. "I've worked 9-9 three days in a row." "Why you do that?" he asked. "Because I have three jobs," she said.

 

The mortician said he was exhausted. Always at work. Why? I ask. He answers the phone when it rings; spent too many years in emergency management not to. "It's not an emergency any more when they're dead, is it?" I asked. "Oh yes it is . . . there's a family to deal with."

 

The conspiracy theorist talks love and death

The conspiracy theorist sounded bored. "I haven't looked at the video yet," he said. "The first one was botched so badly, was so clearly fake . . ." We walked away from the guard shack to talk. J is doing better, except when he isn't. Goes to the bar across the street; helps him feel better at first. S's father was an alcoholic, and his sister died of it. He offered a litany of the guys in the cemetery who've been in rehab. One had resembled "those guys you see beside the road, so thin, looking 100 years old." But he met a woman--she saved his life--and he's been clean ever since.

 

S mentioned his late wife, "the nicest woman you could ever meet. I miss her every day." I asked if he'd gotten remarried, as he wears a ring. "Oh no, I knew I'd never get married again, so I kept it on, plus it protects me from the Filipina aunties and their nieces. One of the maintenance guys, 15 years ago or so, offered me $20K to marry his sister in the Philippines. 10K up front; another 10K when the deed was done." He wanted none of that. The one guy he knew who'd married a Filipina woman was crazy about her. But they still got interrogated."

 

I asked S how long ago his wife died. Twenty one years ago Thursday, he said.

 

Meta Lilith story. (Not meta Lilith, but meta story.)

One tale I forgot to tell: "It was that second tomb," he said, "where a guy who owned a hotel was buried." I verified that the last of this line of tombs going up hill used to belong to Ferdinand Marcos, after his brief exile in Makiki, before his body was returned to the Philippines. All the tombs have rooms and roofs; you could house a lot of homeless people up those long staircases to where the views are especially good. "After he died, the family didn't care about his wife, who had a Filipino caretaker." I knew what was coming. "So she gave all her money to him. He comes by in his Mercedes once in a while, a happy camper." 

 

I've always preferred the meditative mode, looking inward to where the outside still impinges, but you can take time to think about it. Wandering thought, as it's referred to in Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, the kind our phones too often mute. A mode that admits both the profane and the holy, like the photo of a muddy patch on asphalt that gleams like "Piss Christ." When I began my Lilith Walks they seemed like side notes. so ordinary that they actually _were_ ordinary. At best, they might be read as allegory. And yet, they're not that. They are the thing itself, this world of greed and death, layoffs and virtual replacements, bullies and wanna be's, tourists and local people, what is seen and what is lived.

 

Maybe the objective story is all I can write for now, when the subjective mind gets too close to public pain and anger. (It's a public / private partnership, like so much these days.) Not allegory but scale, this dailiness the scale I am able to witness without breaking.