music: Blind Faith- Blind Faith
I’m pleasantly surprising myself as of late. It’s pushing 1am, I’m still awake with a full school day tomorrow, and moreover I’m just getting home from birthday celebrations at a karaoke bar. (Side note: it was my first time at a karaoke bar, and somewhere in between “Livin’ On A Prayer,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” I was floored by the power of music to bring complete strangers together. I’m sure the alcohol helped too.) So all this in and of itself is quite surprising on several levels, but speaks volumes about the corner I’ve been turning in relation to my relationship with my job (more on this sometime very soon). It also indicates a shift in my priorities and a refocusing of my goals, namely that in the midst of a life of service to those who desperately need it, I am giving myself permission to loosen up on the reins, relax, have fun, treat myself nicely. It’s hard, but I’m getting the hang of it.
The real highlight of the night came just after, when I was suiting up to go home earlier than most. I am required to be on point at 8:00 AM tomorrow, after all, and just being out for a little bit on a Tuesday night is a significant accomplishment in my book. But as I was just about to peel out and head home, I get a call from my friends Adam and Rose, who had just liberated over 300 pints of ice cream and were planning on giving them all away to the good folks on the streets of San Francisco. It was more legit than it sounds; Adam works in a food store and they had to throw out their stock of ice cream because of power outages. Instead, Adam grabbed it all and thought it best to spread the sugary wealth. They needed some help pushing the wheelbarrow of ice cream around, and requested my presence. I live a life of service to others, after all, and felt obliged to help. I rolled west on Haight and ran into Adam, Rose, a fairly full wheelbarrow, and a small crowd of ice cream connoisseurs. The three of us spent about 45 minutes emptying the wheelbarrow and putting ice cream in the hands of anyone who would take it. We got some folks who were to streetsmart and wary for their own good, but most everyone we ran into was very excited to score a free pint of ice cream. The range of folks was astounding: bargoers, homeless guys, convenience store clerks, bus drivers, couples on their way back from dinner, even police officers. Everyone wondered why it was happening, what was in it for us, whether it was stolen, and the like. We found that people were much more likely to take the ice cream if we were eating it as well, which was just fine. I was smiling and laughing the whole time.
I was taken back to younger and simpler days, summers spent in the parking lot bazaars of music festivals and Phish concerts, back to an ethic cultivated at summer camp, back to a more innocent and idealistic mindset where talking to strangers is encouraged, giving is commonplace, and the moment is what matters most. I’ve gotten very wrapped up as of late in my supposed obligations and in being careful to take care of myself so I’m able to meet those obligations. This fall, Missa Toss would frown severely on carousing in the streets until the wee hours with school the next morning. I still have obligations and things that need my energy and attention, but I’ve recently placed myself on the top of that list. Tonight, thanks to a serendipitous phone call, what I needed most was to give out free ice cream to some of the people with whom I share my city.
When the wheelbarrow was emptied, Rose and Adam opened the back of their truck, revealing two more times the amount than we gave away. They rolled out from the Haight to the Mission and the Castro. I, still having to teach tomorrow, went home with some frozen party favors, but I think I gained far more than ice cream. I’m still smiling.
“and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” -John Lennon
music: Sigur Ros- Hauf/Heim
There is something about this time of year that tears at me, rubs me raw, makes me very unhappy on several levels. I’ve spent the past week or so in an irritable, discontent headspace that has colored this so-called vacation in unsavory ways. I’ve been discouraged, restless, exasperated. Full of energy, but without direction or purpose. Craving solitude, but quite lonely. That I have had the chance to catch up on sleep and have had the time to feed myself properly, and that I know that my affect inevitably dips during the final weeks of the calendar year have been my saving graces.
Why does this happen? What is it about the so-called “Holidays” that drive me to wish myself a million miles away from my own life? This year is not an isolated event, not by any stretch. There is something intrinsically…depressing about this stretch of time, and as I sit in the middle of it for the 29th time I can’t say it’s gotten any easier to wade through the murky waters that are the Holidays. This year I spent a good deal of time trying to dissect the subject with the hopes that I could arrive at a meaningful cause for such a downturn in my flow.
First and foremost, to my analysis, is my birthday on the 24th of the month. There are the mini-explosions of existential meltdown that accompany me turning one year older, and those steady reminders of my limited time on this planet do not really cheer me up. I should be thankful on my birthday: thankful for my health, that I have made it through another year, thankful that I have had opportunities most people do not have and have enjoyed relative good fortune, thankful for my mother who allowed herself to be sliced open such that I could breathe air for myself and bask in the light of the world, thankful thankful thankful. Instead I find myself quite the opposite: discouraged. Discouraged that youth is quickly becoming a thing to be spoken of in the past tense, and that whatever divine clock that keeps track of the rest of my days as David Taus is moving inexorably towards zero. Because of the date on which I was born, my birthday is overshadowed by someone else’s birthday — most people have heard of him; he was nailed to a cross about 2000 years ago — and because of this other guy and the special brand of spirituality he preached the country decides to whip itself into an economic frenzy, buying buying buying consuming consuming consuming consuming. This generally happens to coincide with travel to family far away or exotic vacation spots, so as a result most everybody I’d like to spend my birthday with is elsewhere, predisposed with the great American spirituality of capitalism. I’d like to have the option to drown myself in some degree of consumerism, to at least take myself out to a moderately nice dinner on my birthday, but in the greatest of ironies I find the rest of the world has closed for business on December 24th. I am really left to myself on my birthday, and try as I might to see that solitude as a gift, I struggle mightily.
Secondly, and hardly coincidently, is Christmas. If I were someone who celebrated the holiday, or even had the option to be part of the culture that celebrates it, I might see it slightly differently, but I’m not so sure. As it is, Christmas is the party that I am not invited to, but everyone else is And the whole universe reeks of Christmas: decorations in the store windows, muzak in the elevators, sweaters and velvet stocking caps on the populous. Christmas becomes part of the common greeting between strangers, becomes the reason to do this and that, becomes the excuse to do this and that. It’s inescapable, and from my vantage point on the outside, its existence and role in the country’s fabric is largely one of economics. Christmas is pitched as that other guy’s birthday (not me, the other guy from 2000 years ago), but the funny thing is that all scholarly analysis tells us that he was born in the spring, and in a different city from what the holiday purports. Furthermore, the jolly fat man in the red suit, his entourage of reindeer, and the presents he drops has a connection with the foundations of Christianity that is tenuous at best. And the kicker, even in the age of environmental awareness, is that celebrants of this spiritual occasion take it upon themselves to cut down upwards of 30 million trees (remnants of a pagan solstice rite appropriated by Christian missionaries) and put them out on the curb a week later. What is left of Christmas, then, is buying, giving, consuming, expecting. I wouldn’t want part of it even if I had the option, but just being surrounded so completely by Christmas is enough.
Beyond that, the natural rhythms of the planet are screaming “Hibernate!” to most large mammals this time of year. It is the coldest time of year, the time with the least amount of daylight, and in many places the time when the first snows hit. My instincts have most definitely been to crawl under my blankets and wait it out.
And this year certain specifics have made my December quite difficult. I have every hope that these circumstances will work themselves out in January (more on this late-breaking story as it develops), but the hurdle between now and January is to wait out the Holidays, which make for a period of stasis in all my efforts to rectify what has been dragging me down for the past couple months. So I keep to myself, weather the onslaught of consumerism, phototropism, existentialism. It’s been difficult, and especially so because I never really had the chance to solidify New Years plans that I am excited about. Those close to me who I would choose to share my last day of the year with, are far away, already committed to something I am not a part of. The drop-back plan, which is turning out to have incredible amounts of potential, is a pilgrimage to Yosemite. It is an attempt to contact that which inspired me to come out this way in the first place, an alternative to the inevitably mediocre party I might attend in the city with one-offs and acquaintances, and a means by which I can take stock of all that has happened in 2007 and clear some mental cobwebs for the start of 2008.
2008. I welcome it grandly. It will prove to be a most interesting year, full of incredible transitions and potentially some big decisions that will divert my life’s stream in significant ways. But not yet; I first have to get through The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. With this much struggle, I expect some really significant progress.
music: Bob Dylan- Blood on the Tracks
What can you depend on absolutely? What in this world is so rock solid that you’d never give it a second thought and always count on it being there? Quite literally, I suppose that rock ranks pretty highly on this scale. Not the music (although that has always been there for me as well) but the geologic substance. The stuff underneath our feet. The stuff upon which our homes are built. The stuff that makes the dinosaurs look like wet-behind-the-ears newcomers to creation. For my entire life I have taken the earth beneath my feet completely for granted, assuming that it would be strong enough to support whatever weight i might pile on top of it. All that was thrown into question for the first time last friday, around 4:40 AM. I was shaken awake - again quite literally - by an earthquake.
I’d felt minor tremors since moving out here, but they were mostly weaker than the sensation you might get from standing next to the highway as tanker trucks fly past. I also remember thinking as a kid how ludicrous it was to build and enormous city right on a major fault line. (I’m still not completely over the apparent oversight, but now that I live in the Bay AreaI can understand why people would want to put a city here.) This one was worthy of some attention, a 4.2 on the infamous Richter scale, and centered somewhere in the Oakland hills. Nothing like Japan’s quake of last week, but enough to wake me up and completely freak me out. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds start to finish, and all my books are still right where I left them on the shelf, but it was enough to make me reconsider my relationship with the earth below.
We humans take a lot for granted. It’s a mental adaptation, I think: were we to consider and reconsider every single variable we might encounter during the course of a day we’d be paralyzed, unable to properly weigh the relative risks and rewards of certain actions and interactions to the point where we do nothing at all. through some incomprehensible calculation, the human brain has determined it a very safe bet to assume that the ground isn’t going anywhere. This allows us to walk upon it, dig holes into it, move piles of it from one place to another, build things upon it, get on with our lives. But assuming something to be a very safe bet isn’t any sort of guarantee that it is 100% dependable. And out here, near the San Andreas and Hayward faults, “very safe bet” looks something like a major rattler every 25 years or so. The last one, baseball fans will remember, was in 1989, which means we’re overdue. Suddenly our assumptions about this essential consideration shift. I’m beginning to pick this up. What do I know of it? I’ve been living in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts for my entire life.
I was not overly concerned for my safety, but the earthquake freaked me out. Like being caught in a mountain lightning storm, coming face-to-face with a bear, taking a small boat over serious whitewater, feeling the sting of a -40 degree winter wind, or being sucked under by a Pacific wave, an earthquake reminds you that nature does not carry one speck of concern for my individual well-being, and that I need to be incredibly respectful of its power. The earth is a dynamic entity, slowly shifting and morphing. Continents move, given enough time. Sometimes the earth feels the need to high-five itself. Sometimes the earth belches out its insides. Sometimes the earth needs to readjust its crust a little too quickly for human comfort. But the earthquake also made me reconsider my operating premises. What do I take for granted? What do I assume that maybe I shouldn’t? What am I prepared to deal with? How will I act when taken completely off guard? And what, when it hits, will shake me wide awake?
music: Grateful Dead- Europe ‘72 d.2
July 1, 2006 was a day long in the making for me. I’d been scheming about packing up everything I owned and driving from Boston all the way to the Pacific ocean since I returned from a three week trip in Dinosaur National Monument three summers ago, since I started graduate school, since I started this weblog. And now that it’s done, and now that I’m down from the high country and the long walk between Sequoia and Yosemite is behind me as well, I’m able to put two enormous checks on the life list. Life since July has been dynamic, challenging, rewarding, and vital. The place in which I find myself currently is completely staggering as well-there are warm, sunny days and cool, foggy nights, I zip around town on my bicycle, moving from the beach (5 minutes from my doorstep) to coffee shops, dinner parties, bocce tournaments in the park, and free concerts at very regular intervals. I am reconnecting with old and new friends, sometimes even running into friends I haven’t spoken to in over 5 years just by chance. And the ‘job’ i’ve taken is equally as appropriate: my office is a National Park and my duty is to take school groups around sharing an appreciation for the natural world and certain scientific knowledge. I am living a life low on obligation and responsibility, and high on hedonism and experience. I also am allowing myself to linger in transition, not make any large life decisions or movements (other than a solo cross country move, of course) and unencumber myself to enjoy life more and worry about it less. There is a little voice in my head that quietly reminds me from time to time that there are greater things to which I will eventually dedicate myself, but for the time being I’m having quite a time. I also think that certain decisions upcoming will be more permanent and have a greater impact on the trajectory of how I spend my time on this planet, so between a very serious and dedicated life of service as a teacher and those decisions yet-to-come, I’m finding my groove. Even my migraines have all but stopped.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
It is quite real, I must assure myself from time to time. But I am still enjoying a bit of a honeymoon period in which I have the flexibility and financial cushion to not buckle down out here and dig in. But there will be a point sometime soon where I’ll have to confront reality on a much more mundane scale, where I’ll have to start making enough money to support me and my few extravagances (which means actually working), where I’ll have to start making those tough decisions and stop acting from such a…selfish? standpoint. My time in San Francisco has been exclusively that of the wayward traveller, the hiker and adventurer. It just may be sustainable to do that but chances are greater that at some point the grind will catch up to me. But it hasn’t yet, and that’s just fine.
California is a place of extremes. The tallest mountain in the lower 48, the lowest and hottest valley, the largest trees in the world…oceans and volcanos, earthquakes and traffic, wide open spaces and multicultural centers…this is a place like no other. And it’s strange to think that I live here. Maybe this is one of the places where it’s OK to mingle fantasy with reality to a degree. It is noticably different from Boston and the East Coast, but how far will that carry? I’m curious to find out. I’m out here for the forseeable future, the pace and focus of my life has changed a great deal, and although I terribly miss some things about who I was a few months ago I am very glad for the change.
Open your eyes, look up to the skies, and see.
And on that note, I’ve noticed that my activity here has lessened as of late. It could be a function of this life shift, that maybe the weblog was meant to be a document of my thoughts during graduate school and teaching, and now that my environment is quite different this isn’t as immediately relevant to my day-to-day. Sometimes I feel like Bobby (with whom I apparently share a city now) about this whole business. While it’s good to keep in the practice of writing I find myself with less and less that is worth saying publicly (or less and less desire to say things publicly). Like my realtime experience, I think virtual Taus on the Internet might need some refocusing and adjusting. And like the currents i’m currently riding, I’ll wait to see what happens, what I’m feeling like in the near future, what will inevitably motivate me one way or another. But in the meantime I’m having fun with it and surely am not stressing over it.
Any way the wind blows, doesn’t really matter to me.