reality blurs

from my journal 4/20

I finished the Book of Delights by Ross Gay, and it was an uncanny experience partially because so much of the book is about touching people – how nice it is when people come together, when they touch, when they work on a task or in a community garden with each other. There is an entire chapter on how much Gay likes it when people touch his shoulder, when people he doesn't know dap him, about being in public, in public space.

It's been 39 days of quarantine (but who's counting,) and even watching television or movies feels weird to me – people eating together, taking the train, walking down a crowded street... Was there ever such a time? Will that time ever come again?

I had a nightmare last night that I was at a beer festival – odd because I don't even like beer and would never attend a beer festival. It was summer, and everyone had closed me in against a table. I was wearing a tank top, and I looked at my brown shoulders in the summer sun. I felt hot, uncomfortable, and confused. Why wasn't anyone else scared? I reached for my neck and felt I had a bandana I could cover my mouth with, and I did, but everyone around me was dancing in a perverse simulacrum of "happy spring break."
"Stop!" I started to scream. "Let me out of here!" I told them. But no one could hear me and no one cared. I woke up in a sweat.

People keep saying that things will be different once all this is over, that we won't ever go back to normal, and I hope in some ways we don't. I could live without wasteful beer festivals and streets flooded with trash. I would be sad, though, if I could no longer walk down a crowded street without fear, if I could never hug a stranger or eat off a friend's plate or buy something from a thrift store. I feel unsettled about this, more unsettled than I have in months. It makes reality blur and slip, and the seeming strangeness of things I used to take for granted is troubling.

Posted outside a neighbor's door

Cyclamen in a Pot

Dora Carrington

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

Take a deep breath.

Now, let it out.

Slowly.

Repeat.

Now, smile.

Here are a few COVID-related silver-linings. I mean, it's not all doom and gloom (especially for the non-human world).

LA's air has not been this clean for three decades.

The same goes for Italy and China while in lock-down.

There are dolphins swimming in Venice canals. DOLPHINS.

Mountain goats take over a town in Wales.

Bears and bobcats in Yosemite aren't angry the park is closed.

Sea turtles are happy the beaches are empty.

Burning Man is canceled.

China proposes a ban on dogs as food.

Saudi Arabia is looking to get out of Yemen, citing coronavirus fears.

This may all change when capitalism is up and roaring again. In the meantime, however, let's savor the good things while they last.

On being overtrusted, overbefriended and overconsulted; or, Responsibility

Talent, knowledge, humility, reverence, magnanimity involve the inconvenience of responsibility or they die…

Example is needed, not counsel; but let me submit here these four precepts:

Feed imagination food that invigorates

Whatever it is, do it with all your might

Never do to another what you would not wish done to yourself.

Say to yourself, “I will be responsible.”

Put these principles to the test, and you will be inconvenienced by being overtrusted, overbefriended, overconsulted, half adopted, and have no leisure. Face that when you come to it.

--Marianne Moore

SATURDAY NIGHT POWER QUOTE

It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! ... There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed.

--Henry David Thoreau

Stars: they're just like us, Zoom Passover edition

The best part of Zoom calls is glancing into people's houses. We watched parts of the Passover fundraiser this evening, and I was mostly struck by all the weird and great stuff in celebrities' houses. Some highlights:

Darren Criss's I ♥ NOLA sign

Fran Drescher's dirty dishes

Ilana Glazer's djembe

Richard Kind's...lamps? I don't know what's going on here

Andy Cohen's novelty votives (Jennie informs me that these are novelty votives of himself)

Nick Kroll's lamp

Henry Winkler's incredible array of files

Reza Aslan's many copies of his own book

Isaac Mizrahi's cake platter covered in books

Bette Midler's squirrel statue

Seemingly everything that's in Harvey Fierstein's house

Antonello da Messina--St. Jerome in His Study--1475

St. Jerome's pleasure is also his pain, of course. He lived in a neon-less, wi-fi-free world. St. Jerome's pleasure is also his pain. 

how to bathe

I've bathed almost every night during isolation, all kinds of baths, from short baths with lots of bubbles to a long personal "spa night" with candles and a face mask (the luxurious kind), to Epsom salt baths with lavender essential oil.

I bathe a few times per week even when I'm not in quarantine, but this time has provided me a space to really up my bath game.

I remember reading a diary in college from the 18th century by a woman who had never gotten her whole body wet at the same time. Her delight at her first bath, in her 80s, was palpable. Though Western Europeans aren't necessarily seen as a bathing culture, what surprised me about this diary is that Medieval people absolutely were! It's almost as if, through plague times and religious wars, Western Europeans forgot about the joys of bathing.

As an Eastern European Jew, my people are big on baths – we love a good shvitz, and women are supposed to go monthly to a ritual bath, called a Mikveh. I've been to a mikveh twice: when I turned 30 with my mother, and when Josh and I got married  (who knows if it will reopen again! Jews have gotten through many a plague.)


When I was young, baths were my mother's cure-all:
Have a headache?
Take a bath.
A cold?
Take a bath.
You think you're getting sick?
Take a bath.
Anxious?
Take a bath
Happy?
Take a bath

In many ways, my mother was right: Research has shown that bathing burns as many calories as a 30 minute walk and has many anti-inflammatory, metabolic, and disease-fighting benefits besides. Most bathing cultures do not bathe every night, but I've decided to throw caution to the wind and bathe as much as I like during this time.

Here are my tips for a good bath:

• Leave yourself enough time – don't treat bathing like a shower and try to do it right before you go to bed. You'll want at least an hour to fully luxuriate.
• Get one of these drain stoppers so you can fill it totally up, but be careful you don't overflow
• Add ins are crucial: I use a shea butter bubble bath, but dealer's choice
• Don't make the water too hot. It's tempting, but very hot water can make you pass out or worse.
• Leave your phone in the other room! This is your time. Also, you don't want to drop your phone in the bath.
• Light a candle – it's just nice.
• Bring a book, maybe some mood music. I get most of my reading done in the bath, which means that most of my books are unfortunately water logged. If you are a person who cares about this, bring a magazine.

Finally, here's a collection of open access bath related content from the Met, and my favorite bath-related image: The Death of Marat. Let's hope that we fair better than Marat.

Progress

Yesterday was especially hard. That's all I really have to say. The seeds I planted a while ago, though, are more than sprouting -- the nasturtiums, in particular, are taking off. I love nasturtiums; they're so hardy and colorful, and they have a wonderful spiciness that makes them a treat to add to salads. These ones, little seedlings, look like tiny waterlily pads. Today I went outside and planted some carrots, lettuce, spinach in the area I've been trying to turn into workable soil. Everything's awful, but I'm trying to remember to move around, be generous, take pleasure from small beautiful things.

William Tyler

Just another song helping these days. I love this whole album.

Vt.-Ore. Floor

There's a thousand taverns, taverns in the sky. I just think this song is so beautiful -- elegiac and ribald at the same time, so primo Michael Hurley.

RE: ARE YOU DEAD OR ALIVE 62

This was the email heading that absolutely frightened me about three days ago (sorry if it alarmed anyone at first glance). In a split second I thought I had neglected to reach out to a friend or family member and had inadvertently caused a significant amount of undue stress.

As I read the email I was bewildered but happy to find that it was just a scammer going by the name Kirsten Peterson. They wanted to notify me that two men (an American national named Charles Weston and a Canadian national named Joseph Bevan) had somehow gotten power of attorney over me and had claimed that I was dead and wanted to claim a $30 million USD fund in my name. This fund was now lying dormant and unclaimed according to her and I simply had to provide a few key details about my address, marital status, full legal name, occupation and so on in order to get it.

For the first time since all of this began I felt a jarring return to normalcy, but not the normal anyone really likes or wants. I was immediately reminded of James Veitch’s TED talk about replying to spam and I decided to reply to pass the time.

It amazes me that even in the face of a global pandemic spam emails, phising, and scams still go on. I feel a strange sense of admiration for the people that, no matter what, are set on “hustling” that is to say doing anything and everything to "get that money" during a crisis. In the wake of news stories about people getting their karmic payback for buying obscene amounts of resources (hand sanitizer and the like) only to be thwarted into donating it I am blown away by the human commitment to “the hustle”.

I also recently watched a video from a YouTuber about the practice of “scambaiting” or wasting scammers’ time for entertainment on the internet that I would highly recommend. The video raises some interesting questions about the typical American relationship to customer service scams and what external factors come into play when we engage with scammers. The video left an impression and when I was making my response it made me curious.

All of this to say that although I think the scammer is doing a bad thing which is made even more sinister because it is being done during a global pandemic I still wonder about the person on the other end. I gave a few non-serious answers with the intention of wasting their time but also included a question for the person on the other end (if there is one): how are you holding up? In the absence of a lot of interpersonal connection I've suddenly started latching on to any kind of relationship I can get. I wonder if the looming pandemic has altered their thinking in a similar way, if at all.

PS I haven not yet heard back from them about the $30 million but rest assured I'm going to get that money.

A comment on Genghis Blues

For some reason, I'm not able to comment without adding a URL, not sure why.

Yes, I love the film Genghis Blues, I own the DVD and have watched it many times.  It stirs my soul. I love the part when Paul is drinking water fresh from that beautiful Mongolian river, but the traveler in me is screaming, "No, Paul! This is livestock country!" The group of people that surround him -  the film makers, Feynman groupies, and musicians form this circle around Paul that is really incredible to watch form. Since that movie, I have seen the band Huun Huur Tu, Tuvan throat singers, here in Portland and in NYC a number of times and I've wondered, "Who was the first throat singer to say, 'Oh! I can sing two notes at the same time?'" Probably a tribe member, surviving in isolation, during a particularly boring month, in a yurt on the Mongolian Steppes.

Paul Pena

"Late at night when he cannot sleep, he listens to the world on a shortwave radio. We see his fingers delicately touching the dial, rotating it just a little at a time, seeking stations hidden in the bandwidth.One night he hears strange, haunting music on Radio Moscow. He tracks it down. It is called khoomei, or 'throat singing,' and is practiced in the tiny republic of Tuva, which you can find on the map between Mongolia and Siberia. Tuvan throat singing, he learns, involves creating an eerie sound that combines different and distinct notes at the same time.

For years Paul Pena studies throat singing, just for the love of it. He translates the lyrics using two Braille dictionaries, one to get them from Tuvan to Russian, the other from Russian to English (we are not amazed to learn there are no Tuvan-English dictionaries in Braille). He becomes possibly the only throat singer not born in Tuva, all this time without ever meeting anyone else who knows what he is doing.

Now it is 1993. A touring group from Tuva performs in San Francisco. He visits them backstage and sings their songs--in their style, in their language. They are thunderstruck. In 1995, Pena is invited to Tuva for the annual khoomei competition. He is accompanied by the sound engineer Lemon DeGeorge ("I am basically a tree trimmer"), San Francisco disc jockey Mario Casetta, and Roko and Adrian Belic from Evanston, who are documentarians. They return with this film.

But so far we have touched only on the amazing facts of "Genghis Blues." If the film were only about Pena learning throat singing and going to Tuva, it would be a travelogue. It is about much more. About the way we communicate with music." - Roger Ebert on Genghis Blues (1999)

Paul Pena is an ongoing and ever-surprising source of comfort for me. A long time ago, I think as a young teenager, I saw the movie that Roger Ebert is reviewing above -- Genghis Blues -- in which Pena is an amazingly talented musician beginning to enter a huge world that became deeply meaningful to him as he struggled with depression and physical illness. Pena was the original author of that Steve Miller hit "Jet Airliner," which is always on the radio. I think Pena's version was way better. I don't know. After that movie, which you can watch for free online here, Pena's album "New Train" (which you can listen to in its rambunctious, funky, moving entirety here) became something really soothing to me, even though it's bouncy and energetic. I just think it's a beautiful, feeling album. His voice is amazing. Here in self-isolation with my family, we've started something we're calling "Cheer Hour," where we try together for an hour to do something kind of fun and laughter-inducing. Mandatory fun is rarely fun, but so far this hour has been a spirit lifter. Last night we put on "New Train" and drew bad portraits of each other.

If you know this movie or this album, please let me know, or let me know if you watch/listen and if you also enjoyed it!!