what we talk about when we talk about love:

Tim: Langston was great on the bus and at school this morning. I ended up playing with his little friends for a few minutes. It is so much fun to do that. With the bus, Langston is always so excited to leave the house haha It was really hot, though, and we were both sweating.

Me: I'm so glad you two had a great morning; these are the things you're both going to remember. Like in American Beauty, when the father remembers his life, all that love and beauty, so much it hurts. Those are the greatest moments to live. I have memories of going to mc Donald's with my dad and Nick. Nick and I would split a hot cakes and sausage, and we alway had to trade off who got to eat from the lid and who had to eat from the plate. We each got an orange juice, and my dad would sometimes let us have a sip of his coffee.

Tim: yeah, nobody will ever be able to take those memories away, and despite how little they are, they mean so much. It's because kids often have a higher capability of happiness. Kids can be happy with so little, and despite their whining and complaining, they truly are satisfied. I think as a parent we get to relive that happiness through them. Riding a bus, for example, is mundane, but because of Langston, I am allowed to return to my childhood and that feeling of happiness. Only, as a parent, the gift might arguably be better. Not only do I get to relive those moments of childhood and happiness, I get to experience the kinship with a son. I feel for him and for myself because I can relate to him while also experiencing something new. Then, I also get the experience of kinship with my father by coming to a realization of how he must have felt and had that same enjoyment, and because I can realize what he did and felt and had, I have a better appreciation for and understanding of him.

Me:  absolutely. kids are absolutely transcendental. wow. yeah, man. that is so so much better than Salinger's philosophy. yeah, man. that's beautiful.

Andy Warhol, LeBron James, and the necessity for mindfulness in all things

Maybe it's Andy Warhol's influence (you know, he said, "Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?"), and maybe I think about all that too much, and read far too many biographies on that time in modern American history, but I think it's true.  

In union with this long-standing belief about people as machines, I've been thinking about LeBron James a lot lately-- how he calls his basketball career his craft, and he treats it as such. I've been thinking a lot about how he plays, how mindful he is about the energy on the court. How he assists when the assisting is good, but when it isn't, he becomes everyman. He never succumbs to gravity, at least not on the court.

There is a lot to be learned in that. 

Tim talks about basketball as this longstanding history, this David and Goliath story, that is simultaneously constant and ever-changing. A few days ago, on the way home from the YMCA, he was explaining to me how when he gets on a court, alone, he can envision the entire game he's playing. He envisions the players, their moves, and he responds to it all.  It's like a tangible transcendental meditation, which, at least in Tim's case, makes that outlet a necessity. 

I've been thinking a lot about that too lately, and I think it applies to the machine-- the LeBrons and Andys-- that ability to know yourself so well in relation to a craft, that you can easily press through the weight of anything. So much so, that you don't even feel it. It's like everyone else is just a ghost passing through; there is no way you can succumb to negativity because you have absolute mindfulness. You know the vision to be so true, and because of that truthfulness, you know how to make it real. 

That's kind of beautiful. 

Pressing further into this idea, Dwayne Wade is currently an ABC broadcaster for the NBA finals, in which he talked about how LeBron takes care of himself better than anyone (which I think, especially for Wade, is admirable). I thought about that for a while: the kind of confidence that comes with knowing your body so well, that you can trust yourself to make your visions a reality. Knowing your body so well, that you consciously and truthfully know how to read yourself, and the adjustments you need to make to your game to have longevity (a la Tim Duncan).  

All this thinking comes down to one thing, really: why is that only admirable in sports? why, when someone does something to improve their health and mindfulness, is it seen as shaming those who don't? 

An example of this phenomenon: yesterday, my friend explained to me that she had to leave a facebook community because they said she was fat-shaming and supporting the patriarchy. Her offense: she posted a photo of her cousin and her cousin's husband. Both had been 300+ lbs and lost over 100 lbs together. In the caption, her cousin said, "losing weight together has made our marriage stronger."

The thing is, I don't understand when personal experience became the banner of the absolute. I don't understand why it seems necessary to constantly emphasize a world of absolutes when most all of us live between them. And more than that, I don't understand the necessity to control every single thing that exists outside of us. 

In this patched together mentality, it seems to me that if we were more mindful of ourselves and our own strength and character, then we would have far greater success in creating our future realities. It probably goes without saying that we'd be happier because we'd be more self-reliant. Modernity has been constantly constructed on self-reliance (thank you, Elon Musk), and mindfulness appears to be far more compatible with progress than forcing absolutes. 

the mirror of heaven and memory.

When I was small, I collected music boxes. I had two favorites: 

a music box shaped like Noah's arc (the paint was vibrant and textured, and each layer of the arc spun, and each animal nodded or smiled or waved it's little animal paw). 

Noah's arc has always been my favorite story, even though it's against man, even though the gravity of God, the gravity of society, the gravity of being the outsider presses down, it does not matter.  Noah saw outside of the singular. He had hope to press on; when I was eight years old, this meant something horribly true to me. The idea of an endless hope, despite the crushing weight of such a cumbersome devastation, is still the penultimate vessel I cling to, only following the idea of being good.

My second favorite music box is the first one I ever received, and the song it plays, "Kitten on the Keys", either makes me cry or gives me that surging feeling of a transcendental grief. The music box is tiny; it's porcelain, and it's hand painted; it's numbered to prove it's limited, to prove it's special. 

When I was six or seven, I found the order by mail ad in either the back of my Great Aunt's Reader's Digest, which I used to take to Kinder Care (only to be horrified by the traumatic and true cautionary tales of children climbing into sewers and getting lost for days, only to be found because a single finger was seen poking through the cracks in a street).

The only other place I could have seen it was in the back of my mother's Family Circle magazine, which I would look through when she braided my hair in the mornings; which ever it was, she was there, because she heard me say that white, painted kitten with the pink bow at it's neck, playing the piano, was all I ever wanted. And when I opened that small package on Christmas day,

I could not believe that I had received all I could ever imagine wanting. And maybe this is why Christmas makes me cry. The moment I received that music box, I knew it would always make me think of my mother. Even at seven, I imagined the pain such an object would cause me later in life.

I knew this to be true because when I was five, my great grandmother gave me a tiny, glass frog, in a tiny, plastic case. It had a tiny letter about being kind and being patient. That tiny, glass frog was the only thing I could ever imagine wanting; it was hope before Noah's arc was the hope, but I lost it, and then my great grandmother died, and I was equally devastated by both these things because as a child, I knew that one caused the other to happen. 

But I did not know which was the effect of the other. Even now, I still dream about finding the frog, and when I wake, I search the hidden caves and dressers of my parents' house, sure that I will find it at least once more, at some significant moment, in one of these days.

When I imagine heaven, it is close to how the end of American Beauty goes, once Kevin Spacey knows he's at the end, and it's the starry sky, it's boy scout camp and yellow leaves;

it's the wonder of lost days and profound memories.

When I imagine heaven, it's the hollow of a tree in a dense forest that's never dark. The light is always blue; it's always green, and the fog is not frightening. Inside the hollow of the tree is everything I've loved and lost, all the beautiful parts of the world that made me, and every other tree is full of the beautiful parts that made everyone else. We visit from tree to tree; we talk about wonder and good things. The dark parts don't matter; this heaven is human; it's organic and pure and deep.

When I imagine heaven, it's space and time travel; it's the truth that the universe grows more infinite everyday, and that infinite wonder grows by each day that passes on earth; each sun that sinks beneath the wire of trees is then shelved in infinite space. We are shelved in the beauty of the stars, the unknown dreams of vibrant magenta and green cosmos. 

We are infinite, and heaven is endless because we can press through our past histories, the parts we lived and the parts we wish we had; the moments we turned down, revisited and seen. Marley on stage, full of bullet holes during a protest rally; the dark rooms I wish I had walked you out of. We turn the moments over; we change them; we live in them for years. 

We pull our children through, show them who we used to be before,

well, before everything. 

Losing My Edge

I've been submerged in baby land for nine days now, and it's done. I drank the juice; I've changed my name; I bought new Nike Airs. I now use my arm tattoos as memory devices, for the sole purpose of remembering the last breast I fed Langston with.

I'm not hip anymore. I want to go out, do things, you know, but I haven't gone out for a drink in almost a year, and I don't care. 

I don't eat sugar either. This gets me going. 

I love my post pregnancy body. Seriously. I like my shape; I've lost 24 of the 34 pounds in baby weight, in nine days, and my belly is close to flat again; Tim is amazed. I feel like a super hero, like my body is this wild, wondrous thing. Every morning I wake up, it's even stronger than the day before. 

That gets me going, 

but that's a bore. I hung out with Langston all day. I opened all the windows for the storm. I bathed him, put lotion on his skin; all his homemade blankets smell like him. 

I cleaned the house; I wear micro shorts and button ups, clothes I did not wear before. I'm never lonely; I work even more,

all of this gets me going, 

but I know it's such a bore. My husband is the sexiest man alive, even more so now that he's a father, and he makes these jokes that slay me, jokes that make me laugh for days.

Last night, I fell asleep at 8p, and I woke at 2a to find Langston in his bedroom, and my husband asleep on Langston's bedroom floor, all so I could sleep and they would not wake me.

So I woke them; I brought them back, and Tim told me about his and Langston's battle of will over bottle versus breast milk, and how one wanted it more, so Langston took the bottle, and I got to sleep in.

All of this gets me going,

but I know it's such a bore.  I think Tim freaked Langston out with that bottle last night because today he keeps gorging himself on breast milk, spitting up repeatedly, and then he makes his monster sounds, begging for more milk until I distract him with other things like

rain clouds and rattles, punk rock songs I still love, sung by me, in a slower melody than I sang before. Everything is sensory;

It's technicolor. It's straight forward, it's deep, it wants to right itself constantly. It's rhyming picture books; Tim's bear voice, his songs on the guitar. It's all a bore, but a world different than before.