philosophy

San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade 2025!

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On the Subway we are wondering how all the groups are going to make a snake costume. We have seen cute monkeys, pigs, and rabbits but are having difficulty imagining a cute snake on our way to the Chinese new year parade 2025.

Coming out of the underground with most of the train, ascending the escalator, we can hear the drums, gaining momentum. The air is festive. It’s friendly all around.

We get to our desired spot and eventually edge our way in to the front next to the fence. Placement at the parade is paramount. At our corner, there are those lining the pavement, others standing on utility boxes, and a bunch of youth on a scaffolding where a building is being upgraded.

As soon as we are in place we begin the wave. We wave at everyone and everyone waves back. It’s agreed. We are celebrating life together. I am waving at beautiful women in beautiful costumes, at little kids playing their drums, at high school and college bands in full regalia with trimmed sashes and white tipped shoes. It is a night of forgiveness. We even wave at the casino ladies and the politicians in red mustangs.

There are illuminated dragons chasing pearls galore and innovative homemade 20’ long snakes. There are cool guys with green rimmed lights on the bottom of their shoes, which make them look like they are levitating as they run through their martial art routine.

The real martial artists are the ones on the scaffolding. I watch them get to the fire escape of the adjacent building. They move up from the first to the second to the third etc. until they are at the eighth floor when the scaffolding changes to a very long thin ladder which reaches the roof. I watch them until they get to the ladder and then I can’t look anymore.

A group of elementary school kids are dressed as Mahjong pieces. It is like the game board is tumbling down the street. I look back up and I can’t see the kids on the scaffolding anymore.

The best fun is to get “kissed” by a lion’s furry eyelash because it’s great good luck. That’s why you have to be up against the fence. I got kissed.

Then the red Lucky shopping cart rolls by. It is way gigantic, so the many people inside it look tiny, like a Gulliver’s Travel adventure.

On the subway home there is a kid in an appropriately sized stroller. He can see himself in the opposite glass. He is waving happily at himself and himself is waving back.

LOVE

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 We were in Barcelona, so we were going out to dinner at nine. We finished around 10:30 and then we walked down to Barceloneta because it was the feast day of Saint John in late June and there were bonfires on the beach. The bonfires would burn all night long. None of us were going home before sunrise.

I was looking for a special someone. I had been single about six months and was still furious that my last boyfriend had broken up with me. What made me most angry was he didn’t have much of a reason. When I thought about it truthfully I didn’t have much of a reason for getting together with him in the first place. 

My girlfriends and I were drinking sangria on the beach and with each glass we got louder. Some people had a beach ball and we began throwing it back-and-forth. Someone made a makeshift fence and we were playing pretend volleyball. A person started drumming on an upside down plastic bucket and someone else started to sing.

It was a joyful scene but I was sad inside. I was so sad that I walked towards the water’s edge and then I walked along the waters edge. It was around midnight and there were so many people on the beach. I felt like I was in a crowded bar even though I was outside. 

I looked around and then I saw him. He was standing in a clearing all by himself looking up at the moon. I recognized him. I recognized in him what was in me. It was like I was looking at the other half of myself. It was strange.

Just as I was thinking that, he turned to me and smiled. At that instant, all of the anger within me drained out the bottoms of my bare feet into the sand. I felt like the stars we’re inside me pulsating new hope home. With that tingly feeling throughout my body, listening to the sound of the sea, moving back-and-forth along the shore, I started to walk towards him with more certainty than I had ever felt before.

He stared at me with a serene presence, and I could hear a voice inside my head that said, “I know you.”  I wasn’t sure who was talking to who.

Bicycle King and the gumball machine

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Once there was a bicycle king. He was the best bicycle person. He had the most authenticity and genuine earnest enthusiasm for being kind and fair to all.

He made bicycles with parts from Australia, France, Italy, China and even parts from the United States. Much attention was paid to detail and the bicycles were like none other and became popular.

The bicycle king was a very likable, lively guy. He had gathered around him 13 employees. No one ever left the job. His employees had been skaters, they had been surfers, and they were musicians and photographers and bicyclists.

The shop where they assembled and sold their bicycles was super cool. It was in an airplane hanger with lots of musical instruments on the walls and black-and-white photographs that the staff had taken of each other. There were flowers around the outside.

The bicycle king was passionate. He was passionate about one thing one season, and the next season he was passionate about something else. However, one object that continually fascinated him was old fashion gum machines full of brightly colored little balls.

He collected the gum machines and had them all over the shop. He filled some with gum. In other machines he put blueberries, grapes, cherries, raisins, peanuts, chocolate covered espresso beans etc. He put macadamia nuts in one gum machine.

The bicycle king and his crew had fake money coins that worked in the gum machines. The macadamia machine was different. It didn’t operate according to the rules. The rules being: you put in a coin and you got out an object.

The macadamia machine after having received a coin sometimes didn’t give anything and other times gave five. It was unpredictable.The bicycle king had the machine thoroughly investigated by himself and others. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

It was the talk of the shop because there was one employee who always got five out of that machine, and no one knew why. It wasn’t about him cheating. It was about something else.

A Bug’s Life

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With all the rainy weather, the ants have come inside. They are all over my kitchen counter. Even when I have nothing that they can possibly eat on the counter, they are running around looking for food. If I do spy a bit of even avocado, covered with ants, I take the plate outside, get rid of the avocado and before you know it, those guys are clean gone.

I once had a spiritual teacher who said that if it was only himself and an ant after the nuclear holocaust he would do everything in his power to make friends with that ant. The statement made an impression upon me. Now almost a decade after that teacher has left his body, I look at an ant and I wonder how can I make us friends.

Ants are not the only evidence of insects in my house. My high school senior son has been doing a report on insects. He has a shoebox with a styrofoam square on the bottom. In neat rows, there is a grid of dead insects with pins poking through them. They hover over the Styrofoam, still as can be: dry, beautiful and intricate.

He has another shoe box of butterflies. I was looking at the butterflies today, and I said out loud to myself, “They are so beautiful, it’s too bad they’re dead.“ In my mind, I heard a voice say, “But I am not dead.” 

I knew I hadn’t been getting enough sleep but still this kind of hallucination was unusual. I’ve never heard voices in my head before. I looked at the box more closely and saw that one of the blue butterflies wings was maybe slightly moving. Then I thought I saw an antenna jerk. I looked around for some kind of validation of what I was seeing but there was no one else in the room. I wanted to ask my son but he was gone at a friend’s house. I looked more closely at the box. For sure the wings were moving.

There was no wind I was inside with no heat and no air-conditioning, no open window or door open. No breeze. I heard the voice again, “I am not dead. You just think I am.” The voice was coming from the box. I looked a third time. The blue butterfly’s wings were definitely moving. I pulled out her pin, and she flew away.

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

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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.

Capitalism gone mad

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I live in a neighborhood that has a name. Which makes it a town within the big city.

In my town, there is a Safeway and there is a Lucky. I prefer to go to the Lucky. I’d rather be lucky than safe.

My son is needing something so we go at 8 pm. Next-door to the Lucky is a Rite Aid or is it CVS or does it make a difference?

My son decides he would rather shop there. I give in even after I explained that the grocery store has a better vibe which doesn’t make any sense to him.

We go into bright bright light. Brighter than bright. The store is Caverness. Huge. There are more than 21 aisles. It seems no one is in the store except my son and I.

We are going up and down the aisles trying to find simple things like toothpaste and Kleenex. We do this for a while.

We are in a vast wasteland desert of commercial products under lock and key passing by empty nail polish displays. It has a scary feel to it like a stranger might jump one in any empty aisle for any reason.

Even the minimally valuable items are under lock and key. It’s a giant store with no one in it. It’s capitalism gone mad. It’s creepy and crawley and suffocatingly artificial.

We finally ask the person at the register where to find the Kleenex and on my way to that I spy something on a lower shelf.

It is a translucent plastic bottle in a certain shape with a certain color blue label and I think to myself “I am out of rubbing alcohol, I’ll get that too”, so I pick it up.

Thank goodness, I have parked a little bit away so my son and I, in walking back to the car, have a chance to mutually acknowledge how strange the situation was.

When I get home, I realize I have witch hazel, not rubbing alcohol.

Christmas Lights

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I just taught an impossible children’s ceramics class today. But no matter. We made a lot of trees. I have a way (based in geometry) for them to be easy for any age to make and they look terrific.

Driving home in the dark I enjoy passing by the houses with the Christmas lights.

Looking at the white lights brings me back 26 years, when my sister died. For the funeral, I flew to her home with her three small children and her husband who was now her widow, and I was shocked to see the Christmas decorations.

I wasn’t sure how something so happy could juxtapose with something so sad. None of it made sense.

I had experienced a week before wanting something 1000% which I had never done before. I had never wished something with every cell in my body. I wished she would live.

But she didn’t and the lights were confusing. There was one kind in particular that I found especially irritating.

A string of white lights and every now and then it went down so that it was three lights in a row one below the next at various intervals. They really bothered me.

I don’t think they make them anymore. I don’t see them anymore. Maybe the electrical wiring was too confusing to survive year after year.

Holiday?

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Holiday?

This is a photograph of H&M on Bay Street in Rotten City, I mean Emeryville, next to Oakland, CA.

The entire store is full of clothing that is black or white. Some articles of clothing are black and white.

Did the holiday season included no colorful clothing ?!

I went in to get a closer look. I did spot a few things in a slightly muted red hue but the “exit” signs are the liveliest things in the store.

The shopping center is bright with white lights. No colored lights.

Everyone is playing it safe. It seems to be the state of things these days, mid November 2024

One third of the US is dressing in white. One third is dressed in black and the third of the country doesn’t care.

Thus we move into the holiday season

Somber and without color.