Honestly didn't expect this much. Guess that's what you get for being a Christian in denial (that's for you, Casi and Cliff....)

Thoughts?

Spent a lovely, though far too brief, afternoon at the beach today. The 'event' that brought me there was named "Ghost Kites," wherein many mad and inspired people built their own kites out of randomness and took them to meet the skies. Unfortunately (and very strangely...considering it's San Francisco) the skies (every last one of them) failed to supply ample wind, so the kites mainly mingled with the sand. While the kites and the sands got to know each other better, the mad and inspired people made even madder and more inspired music. I brought some sandwiches.

My brother Steve mind fucked us with his flubaphonics. For the uninitiated, flubaphonics basically consists of a few heavy-duty balloons, various lengths and styles of pipes and horn pieces, a handful of mix-and-match PVC valve pieces, a few simple bellows, some well-placed rubber bands, and a remarkably deft and beautiful man named Steve. The sounds that result from this curious collection of parts are nothing short of appalling. The balloons are attached and periodically inflated via the bellows, and as they slowly exhale, they send channels of air through the myriad of criss-crossed pipes. Because the channels intersect in places, the competing gusts of air distort each other somewhere in the middle before coming out at their inevitable open ends. This is the second time I've heard Steve perform live, and both times have been extraordinarily memorable. I have (or had, until I recently sent my copy to another brother of mine) a CD Steve made with a friend of his that couples the flubaphonics with piano and violin. I've been using it regularly for meditation and ritual, and sometimes just to fuck with the neighbor's dog. It is my ardent wish that one day every one of you will get to experience Steve Dye and his unaccountably amazing acoustic accoutrements.

Also among the maddies was a particularly out there, excruciatingly skinny, profoundly disturbed little white kid whose instruments were a shoddy nylon-stringed guitar and a snare drum tossed on the sand. He ran frantically about strumming simple chords and screaming at the top of his lungs, until finally, after about twenty minutes, he climbed to the top of a handrail atop a fifteen-foot concrete structure, threw the guitar onto the beach, then threw himself down on top of it. They both landed right next to the abandoned snare drum, at which point he stretched out on his stomach and had what can only be called a musical tantrum, banging the drum with one fist and the guitar with the other, until finally he curled up into fetal position and buried his head in the sand.

A good time had by all. Then I had to go to work. But not before a dear friend of mine reminded me that it's okay to have seasonal down-times. Fallow, lack-lustre times are essential for the restoration of vital nutrients. Quoth he: "It's okay even to be a little sad for a while. It never lasts." I needed that.

Went to work, cut my finger. Badly. Almost left to get stitches, but changed my mind when I considered what it would be like to wait at SF General Hospital on Saturday night of Halloween weekend so an intern could put a single stitch in my skin. Now the area around the wound is blue. I hope that's not a bad sign.

I haven't posted in a very long time...

Today is my birthday. Generally, I'm not a big birthday-celebrator. However, I have been singularly looking forward to this birthday pretty much all my life. Since I could talk, I've been saying "When I'm 23, it's going to be the best year of my life." Obviously this remains to be seen, but I have a hunch that the simple fact I've been asserting it all this time may damn well make it so. Amen, as they say.

My birthday has never been an excuse to party--I rarely broadcast it at all; but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary. Having one day out of each year that is uniquely significant to me affords me the ability to really reflect on myself and my developments... and I'm delighted to say that I am genuinely satisfied with who and where I am. I'm not in school, which is okay...I miss it exactly as much as I don't. I'm not on stage, which is a travesty. The more I live away from performance, the more I understand its imperative in my life. I am taking myself to new levels in some slightly unexpected quarters: I am in excellent shape relative to any other time in my life. My love affair with my bicycle is the most successful and exciting relationship I've ever had...I constantly amaze myself while I'm pounding the pavement, rubber-side-down. I'm also writing music...music that has genuinely startled me. Somehow I simply grew out of "trying" to compose--at this point, it's just happening. The tentativeness that has marked my creative endeavors for years now has begun to dissipate in this new-found process of music-making. I'm nowhere near the point where I'd feel comfortable performing my zygote pieces in public, or even for those I'm most intimate with. However, I know I'm making music that will ultimately NEED to be heard. And that's pretty damn thrilling.

I long for my dearest friends and family. YOU authenticate me. I'm in the right place at the right time. I have SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES kicking my door in. But DARLINGS---I miss you.

Cliff, you big beautiful man, I miss you daily. Fritz, you genius of a phenomenon, I kick myself every day for being so little a piece of your past. Casi, my rock, I'm so glad to know you and to know that we can kick it astrally any time we want...it's just that those times are too few and too far between.

And as for YOU back HOME: Sam, you're a wonder. I wish we could wander together as freely as we could so long ago. Spicer, Flaccavento, you genius fucks...I want so much to count myself as a collaborator with you. IAN...my inspiration, my brother. There's so much every day I want to share with you. Chad, my best friend...you are still the song I sing to myself when I'm alone. And there's so much more.

Marie...I told you once that one of my greatest regrets is the fact that we didn't become closer when we had the chance. You are as much a kindred example to me as any sister could be. And Joe...we're birthday brothers...I wish you two so much happiness it hurts.

Toby, my Toby. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, we know eachother fiercely. I MISS YOU.

AND THERE IS SO MUCH MORE.

To all of you: Thank You. I am where I want to be, and you all share the credit for bringing me here. I love you.

Here's to 23. My PRIME!

Love,
Heather

Well, I have a new addition to my "things I can say now that I've never been able to say before" archive:

I've been laid off.

Everyone is livid, but no one can change it. Hey, at least they were courteous enough to call and let me know on my way to work this morning that today is my last day. I mean, they could've waited until lunchtime, and then I really would have been screwed out of having another job lined up...

It's a good goddamned thing I'm such a talented motherfucker, or I'd be deeply concerned for my welfare. Fuck You, Corporate America. Hooray for Heather, the best employee ManPower will never have.

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My trip home for Christmas was a lovely success. So glad I managed to see all of you--though some too briefly, as always.

Now I'm back at work, back in the swing of things as they say. But I'm happy: I rested peacefully last night in my comfy loft bed, my tea is hot and strong, Dream Theater is playing dutifully through my computer speakers, and the chilly rain outside actually makes me happy to be cloistered in my little fluorescent closet, snug as a bug in a padded room.

This new year ushered in a whole lotta promise for me: I'm poised and ready to attack my self-betterment on all fronts. And I'm certainly in a good environment to do so. I am so grateful to be the adventuress I am--so grateful that I'm capable of seizing opportunities regardless of the difficulties that surround them. In the midst of many uncertainties about my living arrangements in the not-so-distant future, I am yet confident that I am on the right path and destined to continue righteously onward, perhaps not uninhibited, but successfully.

I love you all. You authenticate me.

~H.

Seven years and counting...

Happy anticipation of The Doom, loved ones!

California mountain-top experience. Behind me is the Pacific.

"[...]the ultimate gift for the man who has everything"

Pan's bitchSyrinx: There is an ENORMOUS jackhammer behind my building, mercilessly pounding a fifty-foot concrete rod deep into the earth, dust puffing off the top with each blow. For some odd reason, it made me think of you...

Acacia: The bones. Weren't. Sheep bones... (aaaaaaaaaa!)

Divine Swine: Speaking of bones, I've got one to pick with you: the funny one. I'll be seeing you soon, ser. (Yes, you read that right.)

42: Wanna have a sleep-over? Like, around the 27th?

Gram(-): Yes, you're invited, too.

Monsieur Bim: In my dream last night you were wearing the most incredible pair of boots I've ever seen EVER--they were, among other things, thigh-high, phosphorescent, and rocket-powered. Can I assume your new kicks have arrived?

Voice of the Gods: When will you be back in San Francisco? (You're aware that I live here now, right?) I see much whimsy in our future...

peace & noise: (this is SUCH a delayed reaction:) MANUSCRIPT? GIVE ME MANUSCRIPT! (Still know my SLC email? I still have it...let me know how to contact you to give you my new mailing address.)

zaaaarrrrrrrrrrwin: will you be around A-town for the holidays?

EVERYONE: I'll be home for Christmas. You can count on me. Please have snow and mistletoe. And PLENTY of free time.

N is for Neville, who died of ennui.

2001-11-30 - 3:30 p.m.

Woman of mythic fortune...

realize what it is you have.

Perhaps you envy me as I do you;

Perhaps you lack the strength.


Woman of every blessing I desire...

Be gentle with his heart.

Do you know how to touch him as I did?

Does he touch you as he touches his canvas?


Treasure the Mountain, oh hated woman of all delight,

To be so loved, so capable of loving.

Build his House, one brick at a time.

And when the rain beats on your window, know it is I.

Me. Last night.

Wandering home from work, my head filled with excitement about the concert later in the evening, my glistening copy of Feast for Crows tucked under my arm, a random fellow stopped me on a busy street to ask me if I was going.

Me. "Going?"

He. "To the booksigning. Tonight. In the upper Haight."

Me. *jaw dropping* "You mean..." *holding the book up in front of me* "HE'S HERE?"

He. "Yup."

That's right. I got to see George R. R. Martin in the flesh (and the beard!) just a few blocks from my house. Now, don't get too excited: unfortunately, I didn't have time to wait in line for the booksigning (whimper), but I did get to stand directly in front of him (albeit some thirty feet back) and make Meaningful Eye Contact with him for a solid hour. He looks like an age-whitened five-foot-ten bespectacled Gimly. His weapon, should he wield one, would certainly be either axe or mace (or both). He's beautiful and, of course, very funny. And the event itself wasn't nearly as congested a geek fest as it could have been, although when what was intended to be the last question during the q and a turned out to be an inquiry into the specific number of wild lions living around Casterly Rock (eliciting whispers of "Ohmygod...NERD" from many locations in the audience), our dear Author had the grace to accept one more question. ("Since that one was so...easy," he said with grace.)

When I left there, I ended up on a bus with the intention of stopping at home for a bite of dinner before making my way to the concert. Unfortunately(?), I managed to completely miss my stop due to the fact that most everyone around me on the bus had likewise just come from the booksigning, and the flurry of conversation that ensued was enough to make me miss not only dinner, but the stop for the concert, too! Much back-tracking on foot followed, but I finally got to the bar, intent on being a cheap date due to my lack of stomach contents. It worked. Four beers saw me blissfully through a really enjoyable show...I danced my heart out and soundly beat the hell out of a couple of guys in pool. When I was getting ready to leave, a fucking beautiful lady asked me to wait a moment so she could join me, as we were going the same way and heading for the same bus. We walked and talked and caught the bus together. As we approached my stop, she took out one of her business cards, penned a number on the back, handed it to me saying "Here's my cell." Thanks, I say. It only occurs to me later that such an offering is actually kind of strange given the level of interaction we had...and the place was a lesbian bar... Mmmm...maybe it's about time I find out what I'm made of. Can I handle an Older Woman? *tummy flutters*

Anyway, barely made it to work this morning...but I'm looking forward to an AWESOME weekend. I'm starting to really really like living here...

Mmmm...one of those mornings. I woke up ten minutes before my bus would leave, feasted on a breakfast of a too-quickly-drunk pint of water and a couple of Excedrin(TM), engaged in the perilous activity which is "BUS MAKEUP," and still ended up shelling out cash for a cab to take me the last leg of my commute.

But for all that, (as predicted) I woke with a slight smile on my face. And if I think just enough about the events leading up to my ridiculous attempt at a morning, the smile broadens...

Leonard Cohen is a god of mine.

By clicking this link, you agree that I am not liable for any damages that may be suffered in the process:

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Doug. I love you, man.

Where would you go first for your last stop on Earth?

Whoa...starting the new job as I type.

So far, my instructions have been to sit down (in one of those space-age ergonomically designed office chairs, no less...which happens to match my black-and-brown scheme today) and play on the computer until the rest of the receptionist clan shows up.

Cool.

In the dream there is a house, huge and paper-thin. It is the bluish-grey of a cold northeastern sea-sky against a sky made of exactly the kind of pinkish-orange translucence that fire would be if it was cool to the touch. It seems to be built of wood barely thicker than the faded coat of paint clinging listlessly to it. Comprising its first half-level is a jungle of frail stilts, through which can be seen only sky, senseless because of its position on the ridge pole of an old, unwooded mountain, generations away from the sea. Looking at it from here in an audible absence of sound, it seems that it has always been, that here on this unassuming mountain the house stood silent and flaking at the dawn of time.

Two full levels rise from the stilts, made almost entirely of windows all the way around. I can see a figure moving about the lower of these. It is shadow against the fleshy-tumescent sky beyond, with no discernible features, but I can see in its mannerisms that it is a she, and she is a child.

With what is unmistakably a tremendous and structurally impossible pressure, a third attic-story crowns the frail wood with stone and shingle. There are no windows here. In hindsight, there must have been a chimney, though the visual memory of it fails me. It seems, on the contrary, that nothing could escape from the confines of this squat fortress brooding atop the brittle tinder box of a house beneath it. The sense of its weight is the only thing about the whole structure that allows my mind to encompass it as a thing-in-the-round, as something other than an immense postcard image from a sender who meant no kindness in sharing such a picture.

{"They are Vampires...they must be."}

Having glimpsed the house thusly, I am immediately transposed in the way of dreams to the journey I took to arrive there. An open-air vehicle, filled with the intimated presence of certain dead relatives, winds its way along that country dream-road I've been down before--the one irrationally reminiscent of the suburban streets I once was lost in on the way home from school, too young... I am describing aloud to myself the nature of the house we are approaching, not its structural elements as above, but the goings on of its inhabitants. While a family of ageless children live in the projection screens and televisions of the wooden levels, the upper monstrosity is occupied by a clan of robed old men, dusty and musty and strangely silent, for all the words that spin about them...perhaps the fire in the hearth is speaking? Perhaps the mechanically-reproduced voices of children below take on the timbre of mature voice-boxes when filtered through wood to stone? (...)

In this moment, (we) are there within the wooden walls, which are painted so dark they are like the absence of paint, the color of what the exterior blue is not, the other side of the scrim. I am watching on a screen (a window from the outside) embedded in a shelf of not-books a little boy who is seeing himself as he looks to me, framed and somewhat contorted by a convex lens. Three years old. He is dissatisfied with the way someone has dressed him. I hear his thoughts through his eyes, which seem to breathe.

My godmother, psychic sister, is troubled. It is she who insists they are vampires--the strange silent men in their lofty fire-lit cave. My father, ever the optimist, ever the mediator, ascends to meet them and dispel my godmother's--and my own--suspicion. I see him there in the huge pupils of a girl's pixelated eyes, pupils the not-color of the walls, revealing the scene above and concealing secrets of their own.

He stands among them, suddenly a darker man than he really is. His hair is restored to its richest youthful black, but his skin hardens as if with callus, and adopts the yellowish grey thereof. A massive, gleaming menorah stands behind him, dwarfing him and making him look half a child. The men look at him through their eyelids. They are listening. The words have hushed. He interests them, that much is obvious from their posture. After a time they turn--as if one being with many heads--their blank faces to regard me through the girl-child's increasingly sad eyes. A moment, a beat: I am rapt, half-terrified with a feeling of cold...then they turn their attention back to my father with a collective gesture of approval and welcome. I exhale, unaware until then that I'd been holding my breath. The menorah seems to grow a bit taller in the flickering light, my father a bit smaller.

The girl shakes her eyes slightly, as if in a dream, and she turns her back to the camera. I look away to see my father returning, looking himself, from an unseen stairwell. He beams. "The Clayton Society," he is saying "has asked me to sing at their next Lighting. Fascinating men, really. But come now, girls...vampires?" He laughs our fears away in that easy manner of his, that never-condescending, almost godly-assuring way he has...

I am suddenly unconvinced, and just as suddenly I find myself surrounded by the men themselves. The separate dimensions of the stone level and the wood levels stretch, constrict, and combine into one reality. The men are regarding me with open eyes. The screens have gone black. A fire crackles where the little boy once was. The menorah looks smaller and rusted.

I become focused and charged, like a lawyer in a television drama ready to destroy the murderer on the stand. I will prove they are monsters...I will break them down! I release a flood of perfect rhetoric; it washes over the seated figures, playing with the lines of their old faces as the sea changes the sands. "It seems to me you can't leave the house!" my voice is charged with logic and accusation, like when I was sixteen, knowing I'm making The Point to end the debate, waiting for the cold-blooded killer to burst into tears and repent.

One bursts to his feet, robes billowing. He begins screaming a defense, but he talks too fast. He becomes eerily comical as his words turn to gibberish, but I know he IS saying something, something frightening because it is unknown to me. One of the Others stands over him and he falls, rambling, to his back. The Other wraps his fingers over the babbling mouth, and with an audible wet pop surprisingly lacking in horror, removes the recumbent man's face.

He stands with the inanimate flesh in his right hand, and he makes eye contact with the most silent, the most impassive, of the bunch. I, too, look to this man, still seething and greedy for a reply. One eyebrow raises on his timeless sand-face...perilously slow...a countenance of knowing worlds I shall never glimpse...

"And where is it, my child, that you think the House ends?"

I live with a boa constrictor named "Pumpkin." Pumpkin's owner is, so far, the only roommate who officially likes me. John seems to be entirely ambivalent about me. Then there's Paul, who is not yet, shall we say, fond of me--although I like him very much. He shared his Port with me last night and told me stories of the time that he shagged Neil Gaiman's girlfriend.

Here I am, in San Francisco..eating Falafel and using a computer in a lime-green cafe.