A good book makes you pause and think along the way about interesting concepts or your fundamental beliefs, but a great book has you held captive, internalizing every bit of the journey, conscious of both your own journey and the journey of the narrator and living in the space where the two intersect. Squirming, weeping, gutted, and scraping yourself off your butt with a spatula, only to take your book with you to the bathroom, to pee, like a new mother does with her just born infant glued to her breast. Wiping lochia from your raw, stitched, bleeding vagina, hovering with a wadded up tissue by achy quivering muscles over a salty stinging sitz bath, spasming painfully, half numb from frozen menstrual pads, wondering how your life could possibly carry on the way it had before, the previous day, the way it had in the previous years since your own emergence onto the planet.
I had to put Wild by Cheryl Strayed down at page 169. I have a child who needs my attention and my own writing to do, but I will finish it before the other six books on my nightstand.
From Dogtown to Helltown and not a decade too soon...
Took a walk with my dear family on the beach and realized I am in fact a beach person. I have had this realization again and again in my adult life, but it never ceases to surprise me. Growing up on in a one bedroom apartment on one of the busiest, dirtiest, most congested streets in America, I feared going outside. It meant contending with sarcastic hoots and hollers from teenagers peeling in uproarious laughter, sneers from men who liked little girls, and confusing conversations with lost foreigners seeking directions to destinations all across town. When I was my son's age I had a lemonade stand out front and someone hurled a large Gulpie at my head from a car while the traffic backed up in front of me. I couldn't see whose deep adult voices laughed joyously through my tears. When I forgot to lock the front door, strangers would walk in asking to use the bathroom or the phone. People would leave their Slurpies and hamburger wrappers on our front step. Over the years we called it our front porch, first in earnest wishfulness, grateful to have found a place to live after years of couch surfing, squatting and house sitting. Later we called in our stoop in irony until the irony faded and it was a porch to us again, even though it was just a concrete slab.
Our step was public landscape, like a curbside or a park bench on which to sit and put on shoes, to scrape dog shit off on, on which to lace up inline skates. We were there to serve the needs of beach-goers, to bribe parking spots from, to entertain, to steal planters, geodes, and garden ornaments from. At night men would yell at their girlfriends and call them whores as they argued out front. Occasionally, there were gunshots at night, sometimes I was home alone glued to infomercials like a lifeline to the outside world. Often coworkers would pass by sloshed and someone would vomit in front of our kitchen on my mom's desert rose in the middle of her succulent garden. By day, sandy families in soaking clothes wrapped in equally drenched towels with diarrhea dogs in tow, would drag their empty coolers and boogie boards, propping them up against my front door while they loaded their cars and left piles of trash in the sand all across our beach in their wake. In the 80s you couldn't walk three feet without stepping on tar, a syringe, a used condom or a cigarette butt, usually all four.
On Venice Beach, I scurried down the boardwalk like a scared mouse on quads, darting around the manic tourists stuffing melting slices of Ray's pizza in their mouths as they gaffawed at homeless pirates pushing crafts and street performers escalating willing crowds' applause with shrill crescendos or base hip hop beats. Vying for pocket change and cash money in swaggering jumpsuits, naked in chains, or dressed like a Gandhi ninja walking in a James Brown like ecstasy over glass. The smell of perfumes, churros, nag champa, and overflowing dumpsters filling the air and mingling with cheap orange chicken kabobs or Italian sausages drowning in watered-down relish splatting on the hot bubble gum and firework stained asphalt street below.
Venice Beach was in its afterglow, with its noisy steroid-induced hubris. The chaos of oily Blue Blockers-clad, banana-sunblock-smothered tourists sweating through their headbands and leg warmers in slow motion gaping at hanging T-shirts with Bart Simpson catch phrases and swarmed by MC-Hammer-pants wearing Alladin Jedis on skateboards. Crisscrossing through stoned window shoppers irately yelling nonsensical tirades strung together by expletives.
By my 20s the beach was cleaner and I came to meditate there, soaking up the beauty of an empty beach in the middle of the night. Now, even living a mile from the beach might as well be a landlocked mountain range to my mermaid soul. If it weren't for my connection to the ocean, the constant presence of constellations and the moon's rise and fall, I might never found the angels or been initiated to this work. The sumptuous fluidity of the undulation like a belly dancer's abdomen, the evocations of heaving rip tides like mini Bermuda Triangles, the crashing of waves like shamanic exorcism, all coexisting in an elaborate rhythmic dance.
Sometimes, all it takes to heal the body or spirit is immersing your self in the moonbeams or the darkness, the churning ocean waves, the inimitable sands. The vast wisdom and oneness of the universe permeates the pebbles, imbues the air with a holiness that is deeply enlivening and fortifying to the soul. The earth is truly our mother. This becomes obvious when you lay face down, half-orphaned, half-broken, on the naked earth. She holds you, siphoning away sorrow, cradling you to her bosom. Three deep breaths of her ionizing sea air and one primal moan into her stony sand, may lead to a sedated state of bliss. Ten minutes buried in the sand, or floating on your back gazing at the tapestry of heaven may be all you need to remove suffocating ropes of despair or a gnarly web of sticky disenchantment from around your sacred human vessel.
Tomorrow night I do my monthly deejay spot on Ptown's Outermost Radio. I plan to venture into more pop diva territory. May even go experimental Puddles Pity Party on your ass. So tune in to 92.1 WOMR-fm in Ptown, 91.3 WFMR-fm in Orleans or streaming at womr.org from your electronic device. We have now partnered up with Radio Free America, so you will be able to hear my Pandora's Jukebox shows at anytime pretty soon. Watch out, it's a creeper.
