Sharpied

I woke up today with a telephone number Sharpied on my arm: 916-498-8452.

The sun was exactly where it usually is in my bedroom in March, and I got up and woke up my 16 year old and he hauled his always tired in the morning body to the shower. My wife had been on call all weekend (midwifery's least favorite feature) and was fast asleep. Our house guest met me in the kitchen on his way to a 14 hour day of work on Liz's new office, more drywall and carpentry, and off he went. Craig our friend and renter poked his head in and asked me how it had gone, and it was then, right in the middle of scrambling eggs and toasting bread and making chai, that I remembered the number.

I'm in my fifties, late ones at that. Married, and for a long time at that. So this isn't the kind of number one might have in one's twenties. Or thirties for that matter I suppose! And it wasn't the kind of number you write on your arm to make sure you know who your ride is from some giant event, or who the designated driver is and how he might be contacted at last call.

No, it was the legal support number from Occupy Sacramento. I"d written it down partly because I did a nonviolence training in the Rotunda corridor at 5:30 (the building closes at 6 and the many CHP officers were getting ready to issue a dispersal order to the couple hundred people still in the building). And of course I also wrote it down in case, as can easily happen, the police aren't too picky about who wants to be arrested at a civil disobedience action, and who would prefer not to be, thank you very much.

I'm going to grade papers now - back to mundane reality - and then talk more about the action, and what I felt and learned, and some thoughts on Occupy 2.0.

Perfect Day day part 1

Some days are like words spoken lightly; ephemeral, they float off. Perhaps they are stored in the memory's body fat, accumulating until a host of everyday days are burned off by some wild bender.

Some days, you wake up and suddenly it dawns on you (yes that was a terrible pun): now THIS is going to be one of those days. And sometimes they are.

At 10 am on Friday I was sick. I knew I wasn't going skiing. Even though the snow is new and fresh and calling in the way only snow can call. At 1 pm I was wavering. Maybe I'll feel better. At 4 I was packing. At 6 I was in a car on my way to Kirkwood. At midnight I was at altitude, ready for that strange sleep I get: air different, sleep light, easily disturbed, rarely more than five hours, and then waking up one eye at a time. How am I? Groggy like a boxer losing in the fifth round? Elated with breathing the rare air, light on the earth?

Wake up to rituals of fending off certain illnesses: netti pot with salt, zinc in capsules, doing that thing that person told you to do to imagine getting better. Then breakfast: the fresh ground coffee brought from the flatlands, the eggs with the right salsa, juice and toast and eat it at the kitchen bar on a high stool in front of the computer. Make the new playlist for that day because you have a feeling it might be one of those days. Mixing, listening, talking to Ian about writing and Pete about skiing, cleaning up, finding every bit of ski gear right where you left it.

Leave the house with this playing in your helmet:

Endless Reverie (Zaman 8 Remix)            Azam Ali                       

Innocente (Falling In Love) (Mr. Sam's Remix)            Delerium Feat. Leigh Nash           

Big In Japan            Alphaville                        Forever Young

love letter to japan            the bird and the bee           

The Answer (Feat. Big In Japan            UNKLE           

Young Forever (feat. Mr. Hudson)            Jay-Z           

Joan      Talvin Singh           

Cities On Flame With Rock and Roll            Blue Öyster Cult           

(Dawning Of A) New Era            The Specials

Don't Go Back To Sleep     Vision II- Sprit Of Rumi/Graeme Revell

Star Shpongled Banner            Shpongle                       

Always            Blind Pilot                    

Vibrate On       Augustus Pablo & Upsetters           

Man in the Street            The Skatalites

Our Lips Are Sealed Dub            Fun Boy Three


Step into the brilliant sunlight, another bluebird day, and hoist the skis and the boots. Three, four hundred yards to the lift, as the lungs get used to the effort and the body shifts and it occurs to you that you aren't ill, in fact...the opposite. The mountains are forever, and this life is not, unless this moment is forever, and the mountains as well, and all these bipeds doomed to die, and their muddles and fears and glimpes of eternity.