Saturday Morning Beach Report

Pelicans at Hollywood Beach

 There were surfers and many Saturday morning beach walkers. I was alone though when I spotted  the man walking with his bike at the water's edge. I'd seen him the other day swearing at himself, at his bike, at the universe. I kept my distance. I think he's the guy with the eyepatch that I had a conversation with some months ago. He wasn't shouting obscenities that day, but was definitely on a bit of a rant. He told me the sun wasn't really the sun. It was a fake sun launched into the sky by the military. He told me the military was controlling the tides. That we were all being watched. He told me he'd been shot in the head, and that he had terrible learning disabilities and chronic pain. He didn't frighten me then, exactly, though I was wary and aware. This morning I had a bad feeling as soon as I saw the guy wheeling the bike. There really aren't any bike riders on the sand, so I figured it must be the guy with the eye patch, and I headed the other way just in case he was still raging.

A dark sail in gathering seas.

June gloom makes for strange beauty these mornings on the sand. I could have walked for hours, but I have things to do. Little things, big things. Like filing away more papers in my mother's file box. Like trying to convince the insurance company she's dead so she won't be paying her premium, like scrubbing the last of the wheelchair scuffs off the walls. I have the final draft of my estate plan and will to read, home maintenance chores to keep the ever howling beast of my HOA at bay. But I took a moment away from all that to learn how to teach Siri to call me by a new name. My Siri, by the way, is a guy with an Aussie accent. And he now calls me "Oh Wizard of Many, Many Jobs."

Report from Pillville: Pillville Squared

The man who loves me has been in the hospital all week for a myriad of reasons relating to his chemo and radiation. It's felt like this around here:

And it would be swell if some giraffes or trapeze artists swept through here about now.

But instead my mom and I had an encounter with a man walking his personal mental health high wire in the podiatrist's office. He swept in without an appointment in a cloud of perfume wearing an obvious coating of make-up, talking about his gout and how he needed to get it taken care of before he was sent off to active duty in a submarine to deal with Putin, which he was entirely well-suited for because he was in an elite unit that was super-secret and had more expertise than the Navy Seals---AND he was a marksman/sniper. And the poor guy has cancer with metastases and has to have chemo, but the Army needs him. He kept telling my mom she looked like she was17, and that they should waltz.  Oh, and he played classical violin, but he was happy, too, as a rock musician. Holy shit.

And if that didn't make my hair stand on end, my entire do stretched to the ceiling when the doctor got out the sharp instruments, and I suddenly came to my goddamn senses and realized her INR (this has to do with blood coagulation) levels had for some reason skyrocketed  (which I had just discovered when I returned home and tested her while juggling (more circus imagery)  my lunch after visiting the man) and I divulged that to the podiatrist who very gingerly clipped her toenails and sent us home.

And all the way home I pondered my lack of humanity and how I must perform these days as the Amazing Woman Who Must Split Herself in Two. Step right up and watch me kill the emotional me while the administrative me is a fucking assassin filling out forms and searching the Internet, but don't ask me to smile at you.

And if I told you I once saw my dead father in my kitchen (no, not his ghost, but him in the flesh) or that I spent 10 months encased in a plaster body cast, or that I once let a North African immigrant pick me (and a friend) up in a Paris train station because we were penniless, and that we rode out to les banilieus with him and that he made us dinner and didn't rape us and that the only running water was in the courtyard of his apartment complex and that I still remember his name, or that I once spoke, through an amazing coincidence, to the son I gave up for adoption when I dialed information because he worked for the phone company, or that I auditioned for a crappy TV show singing and juggling while wearing a bikini, or that I saw the entire main street of my college town burst into flame because the moon set it on fire and everything merged into oneness, would you think I  was crazy. No doubt, right? The line is thin sometimes, dear readers, and I hope this man was actually "crazy" and does not have cancer. Because cancer is a bitch. And so am I. But so is mental illness. And I don't want that for him either.

So I made spaghetti for dinner for my mom and me. Spaghetti is comforting. And I feel comforted. We talked about Chelsea Clinton and how she is pregnant, and we both expressed our wishes that Hilary does not go all grandma on us and still runs for president. And that was fun spaghetti for the head. Spaghetti. Confetti. Giacometti. For some silly reason, I now feel like rhyming.

this is me

And in contemplating the passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez this evening, I think it is worth noting that sometimes life is actually both magical and real. Really.