More about Houses...and Plastic

As I sleep I pack boxes, load them onto trucks, and stand at the doorways of houses. When I wake the dreams slip beyond my reach. Since the quake in Japan, I think of houses during my waking hours too. All the houses lost. The people homeless and weeping. The piles of rubble. Man made materials melding with  earth and ocean. The toxicity of so much that man has created and Mother Nature crushing it all to bits. How so much of our stuff is unnecessary.

The son of a friend of mine has a tiny house: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wills-Tiny-House/104607962954040.  My friend and I traveled for months when we were twenty years old, our belongings on our backs. What I owned then wouldn't even fill the wall unit I have in my living room now. I have only a fraction of the stuff I had when I was married. I walked away with only what I wanted, and it still filled a small moving van.  

35% of fish in certain parts of the Pacific have plastic in their bellies. The earthquake and tsunami is a human and ecological tragedy of immense proportions. I try not to buy plastic. I haven't drunk bottled water in two or three years. Orange juice sometimes, but mostly I just eat the orange. Thank god, wine and gin come in glass bottles, but the Greek yogurt I like comes in plastic. 

I'll be heading back to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a month-long writer's residency in a couple of weeks. The last time I was there I met a writer/photographer who was working on a book documenting the ingestion of plastic by giant albatrosses. This is not an excerpt from her book--it's an article I found on the internet. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1193130/Pictured-The-astonishing-collection-everyday-plastic-items-swallowed-single-albatross.html.  Just one albatross.

I knew a collie once whose nose skin was peeling off. It was an allergy to a plastic dog dish. http://www.vetinfo.com/dog-nose-problems.html

Why don't we just stop making plastic? Maybe we just can't "man up." http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MensHealthNews/bpa-linked-sexual-dysfunction-men/story?id=9048200

I'm going to step up my personal anti-plastic campaign. 

And maybe I'll start dreaming of Tiny Houses made of wood like the one that Will built. 

Dream Houses and Vistas

You'd think I was homeless the way I dream of houses. A couple of nights ago in a dream, I emerged from my bedroom to find my neighbor in my entryway with her cocker spaniel. She was smoking. She can't smoke in my house, I thought. She can't have her dog in my house. What will my dog think? My dog, Layla, was asleep on the patio, so I guess I'm more territorial than Layla--in my dreams, anyway.

In last night's dream, I was at the house of a writer I know. He was living in a house that Mr. Ex and I used to live in (in some dream life, I guess, because it wasn't a house that Mr. Ex and I really lived in.) It was a fabulous hillside place with views and a big terraced back yard. As we climbed up the hill through the trees  and got ourselves situated in the large kitchen with its windows that opened to a view of the city lights, I said, "It's not so bad losing my posh house, as long as someone I know lives in it." There were lots of geek chic artist types at the table and everyone laughed. The writer's wife was frying mini-burgers and arranging them on plates with an array of garnishes.  We passed them from person to person around the huge wooden table while one of the other guests gathered up the plates from the first course. "I was hoping, though, that a visual artist might buy this place," I said. I nodded toward the side window. Out there beyond a row of bamboo was a stash of architectural salvage--old cornices, one of those fabulous Egyptian heads from the Vista Theater, elaborate wrought iron pieces.
"That would be me," the wife said.

Mr. Ex and I really were homeless once. After our drive from the midwest to California in June of 1975, we figured we'd find an apartment in San Diego easily. I was performing with a summer commedia dell'arte troupe, and we had a few days before rehearsals started. We'd saved up money for a deposit by camping all the way, but San Diego was expensive and there was nothing in our price range, so we lived in our tent in a campground in Chula Vista. After a couple of weeks, we answered a "roommate wanted" ad and moved into a brand new condo with a guy named Barry. The place had smurf blue plush carpeting, and Barry didn't like it if we left a section of the Sunday paper on the floor. The newsprint would rub off on the new carpet, he said. Mr Ex and I had pretty much nothing then. We slept in our sleeping bags on the floor. I had an antique trunk we used as a night stand for our alarm clock and our books. We stashed our  beat up styrofoam cooler in a corner of the patio. It was a long road from living in a tent in Chula Vista to a posh house in L.A.