A funny thing happened on the way to the G train this morning.

But first this: I was 16 on my own, on a train in Italy, listening to an eclectic mix of music on my walkman.  Appropriate to the time, the mix included Nirvana, and inappropriate to my age it also included Pavarotti.  As the initial swells of the tenor's Nessun Dorma played I looked out the window...I felt so alone. So in love with being alone. With the tumult of  adolescent thoughts swirling within, I looked out at Italy rolling by and saw a sign, it read: Modena.

I did not take this. But it's pretty, no?

Pavarotti's birthplace.

A sledgehammer couldn't  have put it more succinctly: Helen, you are exactly where you should be.

I felt that same rush of realization at 19, reading Howard's End when I, again on a train, rolled into Waterloo Station just as I read that the character, Margaret, was doing the same.

Later in life I met a quirky guy who told me not to ignore such things. That to celebrate these coincidences, revel in them, write about them, read into them, is to live your life like a poet.  An echo to an earlier lesson that being beats doing. Being beats doing. (An ethos that to this day has ruined me as a writer, prolific in the blankness of my pages.) Being a poet, beats writing the poems.

I did take this. Somewhere by Harris Ranch on the 5.

Driving up the 5 freeway - LA to San Francisco - one brutal summer day, I had a thought and with it, a crushing feeling.  Preceding the road trip,  I had engaged in lots of asshole behavior...I'd hurt people who didn't deserve it and on the road, I had hours to think about the ruin I had wrought.  The San Joaquin Valley - the fecund agricultural heartland of California - was brown, bone dry...like my little dust bowl heart, the stupid poet in me said. Cracked. Unforgiven. Woe is motherfucking me. And through tears I fancied myself this lonely romantic...I am that horned beast leonard cohen sang about.  That's me.  And as if the universe needed to put a finer point on the matter,  an 18 wheeler truck flew by hauling what this all actually was.  You are not dirt, Helen, you are not good enough for dirt.  You, Helen, are a wrecking ball, capable of knocking down buildings, you stupid stupid girl. Havoc, is a euphemism for what you do.  Look at this wrecking ball. Reflect. 

As a poet one has no choice but to accept these judgments.

The universe can be vague at times, but not on that day. No, on that day she was one blunt bitch, all up in my grill.  And I cried four more hours until I arrived in San Francisco and rested/wrested my sorrows into a glass of whiskey.

But getting back to the original point - the universe was telling me something else that day, aside from the pity party I was all wrapped up in, the universe chimed in with a sign. That wrecking ball on the back of that flat bed truck was telling me... Helen, you are exactly where you are and maybe even need to be, but this is where you are. Deal with it.  So I did.

Whoa. I digressed there a little bit. 

The G train is exactly a 10 minute walk from my house.  I make it longer because I tend to walk while reading a book or magazine or listening to podcasts.  I do it to block out the madness of all the construction going on around me.  The Atlantic Yards was a disused train depot but is now fast on the way to becoming a basketball arena and I have to cross it daily.  Its hard to block out a basketball arena being built in your eyeline...but I try.

I'm 3 months away from being 35.  Lost are the romantic notions of being and doing and looking through the rosy tint of poet spectacles.  Long settled are my wrecking ball ways.  A stasis of comfortable living and pay checks and summer holidays cloud the yearning for these things.
Everything is sort of alright.  But this morning, as I ambled toward the train that would take me to my desk job, I was reminded of my former life of 'being a poet'.  Stevie Wonders's Golden Lady shuffled onto my ipod and I looked up, smiling, because how could that song not make you smile...and I looked into the store front I was passing. A book caught my eye...Little Stevie Wonder.

And I thought about all those little moments...growing up into me, when I let it all in and how I was shocked by the coincidences and how I felt like I was living in the verses of a poem.  And I was reminded that if I kept my eyes open, I was still right there in the rhyme and meter of it all.

Anyway, I was late to work.  But fuck it. I'm a poet.

Gif This.

A fictional account of meeting my mortal enemy on the London underground.

Mortal enemy perfume

Entering the underground I catch a whiff of your scent, $80 a bottle.  An obscene thing for a man.  It makes my muscles tense, but I force myself to take deep breaths, imagine it's someone else wearing that nauseating perfume, make an attempt to associate that smell with someone else.  But, then I see your short hair, your glasses framed face, your skin bronzed by your hometown's wearisome insistence on year round sunshine.  You notice me too, almost simultaneously,  and the dance of mortal enemies begins.  A sideways glance and a brief contemplation of should I acknowledge and then, yes, and you do too.  A slight nod, but nothing more.  And then you are gone and that wave of everything  I have ever done before this moment that has put me here comes sweeping in.  How much did I learn from you and our subsequent denouement?  Where in the future does this tired dance end?  Who is the stronger one that says enough?  I have seen your face before, and it looked at me with love, didn't it?  Then you said you'd like to rip my teeth out - words so filled with fury I've chosen them alone to put on the epitaph of our friendship.

Nicole - not my mortal enemy, in fact, quite the opposite.

And the carriage on the underground that separates our bodies is a hollow place.  I sit down and cannot eat my sandwich.

Luckily, this never happened and I, in fact, do not have a mortal enemy.

Back when I used to work in Santa Monica

not the guy, but this came up in a google search for "giant dreadlock guy"

In the early 2000's I used to work in Santa Monica.  Right now I work about 500 feet from Santa Monica. These are different times, but only slightly. 

Back then, there was this guy who used to sit on a bench outside the 7-11, the one on the corner of Colorado and 7th. He was homeless, battered by the only element LA knows - the sun.  This leathery man, who never removed his coat, even on the hottest of days, had allowed his hair to form into a dreadlock.  One gigantic dreadlock, cultivated over many years, growing down his back intertwined with the realities of rough living.  His point of view never changed.  He just sat there on the bench, staring.  He was there the days I'd buy my lotto tickets and the days I'd buy slushies and the days I'd buy flaming hot cheetos.  He was even there the day I bought sushi and Billie Jean King, of lady tennis fame, was standing in line behind me.  He was always there.  Walking by him, I never lingered looking, but I would always steal a glance at that rope hanging off his head.  It looked caked in tar.  My own hair, invariably clean from morning showers, blew gently on ocean winds. His dreadlock just laid there, and seemed alive and dead at the same time.  Maybe I was projecting because in that time and place I too felt alive and dead, at once. 

What I really mean to say is - street corners are a good place to see shit that can't live indoors but are not exactly wild either.

That is all.

An Allergy, explained.

This morning Woody BLEW MY MIND.   He told me something about the Banana Equivalent Dose, a concept that places in scale the dangers of being exposed to radiation. I liken this to using your hand to measure the size of something or maybe the price of a McDonald's Happy Meal to measure the local economy or maybe using the size of Texas to measure the Great Pacific Garbage Patch . (Twice the size of, by the way).  So when someone throws a number at you, in terms of radiation, you know whether to laugh at it, run like hell or just curl up into a ball and await your motherfucking fate.  One banana - 130 Bq/kg, or roughly 19.2 Bq (520 pCi) per 150 g banana - You can laugh at this...eat it for breakfast with impunity. You can say something like this: "HAHAHAHAH 19.2. HAHAHAHAH. So what. Pass the god damned coffee."

But then, let's say you are a former Russian spy, and you've just sat down to eat some sushi in the West End of London and in the past you've made some serious enemies, the kind of enemies that run countries, the kind of countries that jail people who look at them funny and give football teams to those they hold in favor.  Let's just say you also order some green tea with your sushi and someone has put traces of Polonium-210 in the cup, or about 20 micrograms. (Micrograms are REALLY TINY grams.) Right there, you've got about 2 Gbq (to sound science-y say "two giga bequerel"). This is equal to about 104,166,666.67 bananas.  Brazil, a fucking huge banana producing country would work from  January 1 to about March18th to produce this many bananas. 

Somewhat related to all this, here is a picture of me in Brasilia. The capital of Brazil.  But I digress....

In other words, if you are exposed to 2Gbq of radiation, you should just curl up into a ball and and whimper quietly to yourself.  Or do as Andrew Litvinenko did and shout down Russian dictators from his death bed.  Either way, its curtains for you.

And either way, that is a fuckload of bananas. Perhaps more than you'd be able to carry into a sushi bar without being noticed, no matter how stealth you were.  So, in summation, good call evil agent of dark forces unknown. 

One last thing.  A Brazil Nut has a higher concentration of radiation than an average banana.  In fact, it's the most naturally radioactive food with activity levels that can exceed 444 Bq/kg.  If I ate 1 kg of Brazil nuts I would die.

Offensive Nut

Not due to radioactivity.

I did want you to think it though....that is what is commonly referred to as a "misdirect".  No, I would die because I AM ALLERGIC.

A thank you is in order.  Today's post would not have been possible without Woody and his Beautiful Mind style mathematical stylings.  For his trouble, I am going to post a photo of him surfing in Costa Rica. A very important country in the banana exporting business.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Woody Strassner, El Banana Assassin

Lady Violence

I spent yesterday morning in Emily Kwong's dentist's chair.  (Do not confuse this Emily with my Emily Kwong.) The reason for this unscheduled visit was to repair a cracked tooth, due to an accidental, but violent, keychain to my mouth situation.  On top of that cracked tooth, I also had a fat lip - my second one in a month.  Conclusion: no one is careful with Helen.
PS here is a photo of Dylan and Brenda. 

You Don't Know Shit About Dolphins

I sent out an email to a select group of friends about 3 minutes ago asking them to email me ANYTHING they knew about dolphins, just from recall.  While I wait for them to respond, I'll tell you what I know.

• Like humans, they are mammals. 
• They have blowholes. 
• They can leap out of water. 

That may be about it.  Really.  I mean everything else I can think of is more of a feeling I have about them...like they are super cute and seem like they are having fun jumping around and if I ever saw one up close while swimming in the ocean, I'd freak out because I'd think it was a shark.  I am going to ask Woody what he knows. (Woody sits close to me at work. He is a generally agreeable person. As a surfer, he may have relevant data. Let's see.)

• They are smart (no evidence offered)
• They are the only mammals that have sex for recreational purposes, humans not included.
• They protect humans from sharks sometimes (sounds like a surfer's tall tale)
• They communicate with each other
• They travel in pods (editors note: this is their collective noun - POD. A group of owls is called a Parliment. A Parliment of Owls. A group of crows - A murder of crows.  Lesbians - A pack. A pack of lesbians.)

That is a nice amount of information. Thanks Woody.  You get a picture in today's blog for playing along.

JenDM has responded with some dubious information, she claims that all dolphins are gay and that they prefer it bareback. Hmmm. Let's not dismiss this data outright, but let's not take it as gospel.

Ritee also just replied, saying that dolphins are smart. This is the second "smart" I've gotten. This
automatically makes this true. (FYI - She doesn't even know Woody. ) Also, she says that all the dolphins at Sea World are on Prozac.

Juli says: They are grey. Definitively, this is all she can say. Unfortunately, she is wrong.
  

Ok. That's all we know, collectively.