My mental circus, inside and out.

Emma will tell the story of the bed, depicted below.     It was time for a new bed, mainly because there have been visitations of a few extra hundred pounds of human being on top of her full-size walnut antique spindly bed that creaks like MAD.  Emma will put this bed in the guest bedroom so that she can monitor the activity of any amorous couples who happen to stay over: squeak squeak squeak squeak ahhhhhhhhh. 

So she feel in love with this John Muir platform bed by Amenity (maybe just because it was called "John Muir"), but it was WAY expensive and there was no way she could get it up her narrow staircase.  So she send an image to her dad and said, hey, can we build this, and he said, hey yeah, we can!  So the $2000 bed was built for $250.  Emma's dad made a blueprint and everything.

Emma had the pieces of the bed laid out in her bedroom and she was drilling it together when her friend, M, appeared.  M said, "Emma, what are you doing.  Surely in your position you can afford to BUY a bed."   Emma has also been a getting a lot of this lately from Horsh, "Emma, surely, in your position, you can afford to have that brush removed from the back of your shed, or Emma surely in your position you can have somebody over to repair the elliptical machine instead of doing it yourself."  It's really a class thing for them.  Once you've achieved a certain class status, you're supposed to get your nails done and not have your lily white hands grubbing around.

Well, yeah, maybe.  But Emma has always felt that a full life requires building and fixing things engaging in acts of world repair.  This no doubt comes from her dad, who often had sports cars taken apart out in the garage.   It's zen and the art of home maintenance.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 21, 2008 00:06 | link | comments (1)

Platform bed Emma and her dad built from birch planks.   A two-day job. . one for cutting out  and  setting the screw holes, one day for assembly and  finishing.  Cool, eh?

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 20, 2008 00:27 | link | comments (2)

It's that deep part of summer in Emma' s town.  Hot, humid, a time for dozing in the afternoon.  The sounds of bees and air conditioners.  Emma went out to the bar with her neighbor, Helena, who runs the local Move On chapter, and Mona, an old friend.  They got to talking about neighborliness.  Mona lives in one of these new suburbs, the kind that have names like Hyde Park or Nottingham Woods.  Hers is called "Hawk's Nest" and all the houses in it are built by Mayberry Homes.  The houses are pleasant though very tightly packed in. Mona said that the builders called themselves Mayberry Homes because in their consumer research they had found that home buyers wanted. . well. . Mayberry.  Opie and Pa and probably especially Aunt Bee.   The irony is that Mona has never met her neighbors.  She knows that one of the university administrators lives across from her, a woman who comes home every night at 1am and turns on a light for ten minutes.  This is the only sign of her.  The geese are more friendly.  Mona lives with her very elderly mother who spends her days watching the geese teach their goslings to fly out on the undeveloped, marshy land bordering their backyard.  Mona and her mother are more attached to the geese and the muskrats on the pond than their mysterious neighbors.  Emma has often driven through this neighborhood and seen no sign of human life, though the yards are all neatly tended.  There appear to be children, from the playground equipment in some backyards, but she has never seen children.  There are decks on all of the houses with nobody on them.  It's like someone set off one of those neutron bombs that wipe out all life while leaving the architecture intact.  It's Mayberry after the apocalypse.

Emma's and Helena's neighborhood has more signs of human life.  People go for walks, amble around in their yards doing the gardening, greet each other, sometimes plow each other's walks.  But Helena says that there is a pocket of the neighborhood where all the math professors have lived for twenty years and have never been inside each other's homes. 

Emma has heard of other corners of local neighborhoods where everybody knows everybody else's business--they spy on each other.  This is the opposite end of the Mayberry dream, the nightmare the Stasi might like.  Emma wonders what they would think of that white convertible parked in her driveway twice a week all night.  Or the times balding Horsh rides up in his leather jacket and his Honda motorcycle, which the kids think is a sure sign of midlife crisis

Being home for the summer for the first time in many years, Emma is thinking about the quality of neighborliness, what the ideal neighborhood would be like.  Empathy and tolerance, that's what Emma would like to see in her neighborhood.  She wonders sometimes what would happen if somebody just busted loose in her neighborhood, decorated it like one she has seen in the poorer part of town, with huge Aztec gods painted on the garage doors, dozens of mobiles hanging on the porch, and a ton of garden gnomes and yard "art."  In that part of town, the part with peeling paint and dusty yards,  people sit out on their porches with music blaring through the living room windows, greeting each other.   Down by the river, old guys stand around together fishing, staring down into the current for hours. They don't seem to need to talk.  Emma wonders what they see, what they think about. Those are racially diverse neighborhoods; whereas Emma's street has only one black family.  There are probably fewer in Hawk's Nest.

Emma's neighborhood often seems like utopia to her.  But it does have a repressed quality about it, an averageness. Nobody wants to damage the housing value, and that is determined by averageness.  There's nothing too startling or out of the ordinary.   The grass never gets over 6 inches high.  There are no emotional displays or loud talk.   Creativity is expressed only through gardening, or painting one's house seafoam instead of beige.  Since she really loves her neighborhood, Emma wonders if she herself is like that.

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 18, 2008 20:36 | link | comments (2)

A few weeks ago, high winds from a tornado came tearing through Emma's town, twisting and uprooting many huge trees.  A friend at her meditation circle said that she had bought a condo for the woodsy view, but twelve trees were ripped out by the winds.  She said, "That was my lesson in impermanence."

Emma had planned to travel this summer, but for various reasons, including her own negligence at preparation and planning, has resulted in the blissful opportunity to just stay home.   Her own trees survived, though the neighbor's porch awning was smashed.  And parts of the garden are magnificent because of the rain, the lavender, the dogwood.    Emma is feeling much less need to prove that she is somehow different, somehow extraordinary, all delusions of the self anyway.  Everyone in the neighborhood putzes around in their gardens, expecially the seniors. . .there's an Obama meeting down the street tomorrow. . people have peace signs out on the lawn.  There was the brief appearance of a McCain sign but it was quickly disappeared.  A woman in a wheelchair walks her small dogs every morning.  Mothers come down the street pushing strollers.  Twice a week, Emma goes over to Horsh'ssmall apartment (weird, given how wealthy he is) and has sex for four or five hours, whcih is somewhat exhausting for overweight, midldle-aged people like them, so they've had to ration it.  Horsh, being a complete workaholic, doesn't want to go anywhere except to serve as a marshal at a local golf match. . Emma has no idea what a golf marshal is or does, but it all sounds very Republican.   And hilariously, Horsh made a comment to Emma when she happened to  wear a skirt that he preferred that to "proletarian jeans."  It's all highly amusing, the incongruity of it, but that, as Freud said, is the basis of all laughter.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 25, 2008 21:17 | link | comments (2)

Last week, Emma went to the National Conference on Media Reform with her son, his girlfriend (who is about to go off to Northwestern for a graduate degree in journalism), and her friend Gerry, one of those people who channels a lot of native anger into politics.  Emma's son says that Gerry watches too much Air America where the participants throw around their conspiracy theories in an echo chamber.  So Gerry, who has ideas, spent time chasing Ariana Huffington around trying to get an ear.  Emma wonders why part of the left has degenerated into conspiracy theories, especially as she was observing one woman who kept trying to grab the mic during the panel with Catherine Crier to preach about the 9-11 conspiracy.  You don't really need to waste your time obsessing about a conspiracy theory to see what is wrong with America: greed, hatred and delusion.   Anyway. ..  it is well worth watching Bill Moyers give the keynote.  And the lineup was fantastic:  Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman, Phil Donohue, the guy who founded FAIR.   The conference got the attention of Bill O'Reilly (not surprising, since there was plenty of direct O'Reilly baiting going on) who called the attendees a bunch of loonies.  Hard to see Moyers as a loonie.

Emma felt obligated to blog about that, given all the talk about the people taking the media back and making it more democratic.

Other than that, it is summer.  The days are gorgeous.  Emma is well-fucked.  She has discovered the wonders of texting on crackberry, err, she means blackberry. The garden is growing.  The neighborhood is idyllic.  A black man may be the next president. The kids are preparing to move out and finally start their own lives.   Wow, good karma!

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 16, 2008 20:52 | link | comments (2)