Month: January 2025

Leaving HOME

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From my studio west facing window, I see an overly abundant apple tree. An overly abundant Myer lemon tree is outside my east window. Their branches bend to the ground with fruit. I live in the hills.

Leaving home to go to the corner store or the art store or the subway station, I go downhill past the new age church which used to have cars lining the road for blocks and blocks on Sundays. I wind further downhill past the Catholic church and the Catholic school. I avoid this around 8 am and 3 pm.

I go down past the huge historic cemetery which used have wild foliage on the edges. Now that is manicured and cleaned up, hardly any deer cross the road; however the deer sign still stands in it’s bright yellow.

Continuing to go down, the cemetery morphs into the country club golf course on both sides of the road until I get to the closed art school and open art supply store.

Leaving home in another direction, towards the swimming pool, I take a left at the end of my road. Just after I go under the pass and before the light, I take a curly sharp right and end up on a big freeway. The freeway takes me to a tunnel which has water it it year round.

If I pass by that curly right and go into the town I will find two groceries, a post office, several cafes, a dispensary and a giant CVS that no one is in.

All of these getaways parallel Highway 13. 13 can be a lucky baker’s dozen or unlucky. It is the earthquake fault line. I live where it is all going to rumble. Seeing LA’s fires, I know northern California is going have that quake. Maybe not when I am around but it’s going to happen. 

Until then, I drive these roads. I take caution and ride through the part of the tunnel that is less wet. Why is it always wet? 

Day and Night

| betweenstops

There an element in the mind that can keep me up at night. Not all the time, but sometimes. Anything almost can do it: taxes, old boyfriends, current work competitors, regret long lasting towards my mother. This last one can especially go on forever as she left her body years and years ago so it’s a no ending one sided conversation. A way I torture myself, I suppose.

In the daytime, all this disappears. No such psychic monster exists on waking. It’s as though the light of day has washed it all away.

There’s an in-between, however. YouTube helps in the middle of the night. If the thoughts become too overpowering, I turn the power over to the phone. I can listen to anything, anytime. My favorite is High Fraser reading Agatha Christie. It’s amazing how many people he can be in an audiobook. I love him.

Sure, maybe murder isn’t a great springboard into the unconscious world of sleep and dream, however Christie has no sex, no violence, no gore or torture. Mostly just intrigue in rich people’s houses.

I could listen to someone on YouTube who is spiritually enlightened. Lord knows there’s an infinite quantity. Problem is I have been on the spiritual path for so many decades, that the path has worn to dirt and walking on it creates clouds of dust which make for hazy vision.

I never saw my school at night. As a child, I left school at 2:30 and I made it home for dinner. We all did. We went to our friends houses or the park. Judy had a long haired dachshund and I had a short haired one. She was my best friend and her house was between school and my house. When time came, dinner bells sounded and mothers yelled. Judy’s house on Winterberry and my house on Maryknoll weren’t too far apart and I was a fast runner in those days.

Only once in 2nd grade did I see my school after dark. It was lit up for a book fair. It was magic. I got a book about dragons and I felt omniscient as I’d just learned to spell.

Now kids are in aftercare till after dark during daylight savings time. No magic in that.

Later as a young adult, I enjoyed pools at night with the round white light coming from the walls underwater: Magic. Walking hand and hand on a golf course under the moon: Magic.

Now, as an older adult, I sit in the hot tub very late at night hearing the owl say “who?who?who?” Magic.

Medical Money

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I’d had the same assistant for 5 years. He was a 25 year younger than me soulmate. He anticipated what was needed. He was never sick, late or on his phone during class. However, all things come to an end. “You’ll never find another Joseph” everyone said and I knew they were right

My next assistant Ann, was late, was sick and talked on her phone in class but she was OK.

What I can offer someone is just gig work. To post a Craigslist ad for help with a gig is $10. For help as a job is $75. I need someone to help Monday, Tuesday & Friday for 2 hours each afternoon. It’s 6 hours a week and even though I offer a way better than average hourly wage, it’s not gonna pay your rent.

The crazy thing is on Tuesday I teach 20 kids in a public school. I teach an afterschool class. Just an hour. For that hour myself and my assistant must have a TB test, a fingerprint scan, liability insurance, and most difficult: take a course and pass a test about children being neglected or abused. It’s a lot of fun.

Imagine the prospect of getting someone to jump through those hoops for a few hours a week. And yet there are people who need this job. Recently the best man for this job is a cheery 36 year old from Africa. He’s way overqualified but is in a pinch.

He jumps through all the hoops and only has the TB test to go. Seems simple, right? Not so. The only place you can get a free TB test is in the Village Free Clinic. It is the only free clinic around for many towns.

Everywhere else charges anywhere from $100 to $300 to get an office appointment with a TB test. Highway Robbery. The test itself only costs $5.  The Free Clinic only does the TB tests on Thursdays. It is mobbed. Cherry can’t get in. 

My friend said she used to work for a startup that did insurance billing for doctors and they horrifically would try to charge $100. for a bandaid and $200 for Advil.

When Saturday Night Live mentions Luigi Mangione  on weekend update, the audience immediately cheers a loud “Yaayy!!!” and Colin Jost makes eye contact with us in the fourth wall and says “Woooooo…”     And I’m right there with both of  them.

In an insane world, what’s sane?

Fire!

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In 1991 my ex-husband’s Oakland house burned down when I was walking around in San Francisco on Valencia Street with my friends. Pages of burnt books were falling on our heads. By the time we made it to Market and Castro there was a big TV store and through the street store window we could see all the fancy TVs. Every single one of them had live footage of the Oakland Hills burning.

Not long after that, I married my husband and moved to the new house in the Oakland Hills. The winds get very strong up here and when they get violent, the electrical company turns off the electricity and we get loud alerts on our phone. An alert is what you get before you get an evacuation notice. The alert says “hey, you might get evacuated!” more or less.

I don’t just have a ‘go bag’ I have it all figured out. I know what I can get in my Honda Fit and how I would pile it in there. I’ve got it written out because I know from my friends who’ve been through this; it takes 20 minutes before you get that evacuation notice and your house is burned to the ground.

I am now watching from Northern California some of the most expensive real estate in the world burn to the ground in southern California. L.A. City of the Angels. Pacific Palisades before and after images resemble Gaza and Ukraine. The whole entire thing looks like fiction. Except it’s horrifically real, and happening to people and places I know.

I heard of one man who is an artist like me. He is in his early 80s and did not want to lose his life’s work. Mostly he had accepted the situation. However, just one painting he wanted to save so he walked out of the house with it and the hurricane level winds used it as a sail to lift him high in the sky, and then drop him down breaking a few ribs.

I heard another story where a newsreporter was interviewing a woman who couldn’t talk for her sobs watching her house about to burn. She was most distressed because she had chickens and ducks in the backyard. The cameraman took pity on her and ran back there and got as many chickens and ducks out of that backyard as he could before the thing went up.

Holding a saved chicken, she could then talk a little bit. She held onto that chicken as if it was keeping her alive. Funny thing though, most people eat chickens.

Graffiti

| betweenstops

Risking one’s life to express ones self

Here I am trying to drive to San Francisco with thousands of other people.

It’s a very very foggy day. Not foggy in San Francisco foggy in Oakland… 

I mean in a way it’s probably good. We’re not going quickly.

 I have driven this road thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, maybe hundreds of thousands of times 

and I know the buildings that should be there but instead of them being there it’s just a light soft gray large space of nothingness. 

I am in a freeway parking lot. I’m sure you know what I mean.

So I have time to look at the graffiti on the side of the freeway in a way that I’ve never had before. I’m stopped in front of the tags.

I’ve always held a lot of admiration for graffiti artists. 

Sometimes you see graffiti in places that are inexplicably difficult to get to.

 Almost makes you wonder if aliens put them there… Or angels… Or are there people that can somehow hover in the sky with battery packs or I don’t know.

Anyhow, these guys painting on the side of the freeway have easy access. 

There’s a teeny tiny little space where they can put their young bodies and write something on the side wall. 

One person wrote a word, which I’m guessing is a name, in a newly invented calligraphy with fantastic ability… The person could be designing fonts, the visual is compelling

Anyhow, next to the word/name the street artist wrote “art meets crime”.

I Love that. 

What is the 6 million dollar banana sold recently at Sotherby’s as art, if not a crime against all people working hard for an hourly wage?