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A friend drove up to meet me for half a day today and in that time we were able to once again encapsulate a year of tallying the highs and lows of our lives. Again you find the one you can laugh with, you can see life through a similar lens with, who you feel this great deal of comfort with – the reward for all the toil. Friends – there really is nothing better than having those people in your life that can re-enter your life and it feels like they never were not there.

One of the messages that came through loud and clear to me tonight was prepare for everything – it was delivered as a caveat on weather, but it resonated across every level that I could imagine. I left home with hurricane preparedness at the ready, and got on a plane wondering about any and all possibilities and realized this isn’t my own little obsessive worrying going on, this is a world view – prepare for everything – this is about the reality of our lives. We wake up and over some device whether it is an Incredible, a Curve, or an iPhone or iPad or Laptop, or what have you – we are going to be jarred out of our complacency, forced to pronounce a city name that heretofore was unknown, shocked by yet more depravity, moved by the breadth of humanity and all this takes place before the paper shows up on the front lawn or snail mail comes through a narrow opening into our house.

Modern life. Whoa ho.

I got up at the buttcrack of dawn as my Russian friend likes to call it and got on a jet plane to Los Angeles. In my head, X was playing Los Angeles over and over. Or was it Woody Guthrie’s Coming into Los Angeles? Maybe we are living too long if I have punk and folk tangled and confused in my pea brain. But here I was out West again and wondering once again, who the hell I am? I arrived in the midst of June gloom as the pilot called it – 67 degrees outside and grey skies tinged with brown. Sigh. Where am I?

The car drove and I tackled emails and phone calls and barely looked up except when I saw the driver put on some cheaters and heard him texting. I said, “Ahem, would you mind not texting while you are driving?” Sheesh. He gave me a dirty look between his two pairs of glasses.

Minutes later, we pulled up to the place where I will be meeting over the next couple of days. I had left home grouchy – all of my contact numbers have disappeared into thin air and when I try to add new contacts, it says they already exist because now my phone and Blackberry are one. But the contacts for email don’t have phone numbers so I spent the better part of the other night trying to load in all the phone numbers into my Entourage contacts only to find out they won’t sync with my Blackberry contacts. I wanted to bang my head with bricks.

I checked in and crawled to my room and somewhere between the lobby and the three minute walk to my room the sun came out and when I drew the curtains the light was bright and shining and the blue Pacific ocean was the perfect compliment to the California shore. Palm trees swayed and I plopped my iPod into the player and Todd Rundgren’s Hello It’s Me came on as I unpacked, which combined with being West made me grow misty eyed but then soon after Bob Dylan’s I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met) came on, and I chirped up and walked outside to inspect the arid foliage, the crisp white color of the air, and the blue that was echoing everywhere.

I came back in to get online and as I sit to write this Joanne Newsom’s Clam Crab Cockrel Cowrie – Just look at me, oh whoa whoa oh whoa whoa… is playing and right outside on the grass, behind me, a little kid just popped his beach ball and it exploded like a cannonball being fired and I realize that you get to a certain age and the range of memories, emotions, experiences, and desires have amplified larger than any sea, which means you could go from way down low to way up high without skipping a beat or stopping to take a breath.

And maybe punk and folk are really the same after all, just sung at a different tempo, because weren’t Guthrie and X basically singing about the same thing. Arriving in Los Angeles – knowing it now, knowing it then, and still not knowing it?

My neighbor called to come to the porch and see the double rainbow. It came after a thunderstorm to end all thunderstorms. But there it was in all its glory and two of them to boot. I walked over to his porch with Tin in the Ergobaby and some other friends were there watching the rainbow. They said they had come over because they were feeling down. They bought a condo on the beach in Florida and that was going to be their retirement and in the meantime, they rent it out. Only now they were getting nothing but cancellations. The cancellations were coming in every day and they just heard the oil is nearing their coastline.

So we all stared at the rainbow.

My computer has started to run slow and I think it is just filled up with too many bytes of stuff. My mind has begun to run slow and I think it too is filled up with a lot of this and that. A friend is undergoing a long cleansing and she says she is already feeling more energetic here at day 8. I know that I’m on my way to Los Angeles and I was hoping to arrive after a nice cleansing rain to get the smog out of the atmosphere.

I think my phone went kaput because it had an overload of data and it needed a cleansing and never got one so it pooped out, so to speak.

I think that the accumulation of data, for me anyway, is just starting to make me run slower instead of faster – I have too much information in my head, I have too much information coming at me, I have too much information I need to know, should know, would if I could know, and so I see if anything to be running around in the same place, thereby creating a rut, thereby creating a place where you could drown yourself in an inch of water.

Recipe: a cleansing.

But when?

My neighbor went fishing and brought over some clean trout this evening for us. He said that the bayou he fishes in has not seen any oil yet and that, fingers crossed, it might not. Meanwhile I saw some huge fish jumping out of the bayou today. I saw a great tee in an antique store on Magazine Street with an oil coated pelican that said “I want my life back.”

Right now the temperature is possibly 85 degrees outside. Tin is asleep for the night having gone to sleep with a smile on his face as he said goodnight to the photograph of Loca on the beach.

I told T about the broken angel and she reassured me by saying that nothing in our life is perfect and that is true. The first birthday cake she bought me had a slice eaten already. It’s just the way we roll.

But the weekend is over – how can that be? We went here, we did this, we ate that, we laughed, we cried, we slept, we thought, we loved, we lost, we gained. One weekend and it is over.

Tomorrow is a brand new week. Let’s hope the good news just keeps rolling in.

Just when you think all the news that is fit to print is bad news – something like this comes across your screen – here a breaking alert from the New York Times:

U.S. Discovers Nearly $1 Trillion in Afghan Mineral Deposits

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

The doctor said that Tin should be speaking at least five words at this age (15 months) and everyone said he will be delayed because he is bilingual. His animal sounds count which is good. Today he said Tete (T’s mother), which he has said several times. The doc said he will have word explosions where he will start saying a bunch of words all of a sudden and then again and again. Right now his repertoire is:

Moo

Baa

Arf Arf

zzzzz

(fish sounds)

Tete

cup

I was cleaning up the backyard after the sprinkler and sandbox fun and one of the angels that sits on the stairs fell over and her legs broke off. It upset me because those angels have come to mean a lot to me – I bought one for Tatjana when I met her and one for me and then when she moved in they came together. The whole house was down for its nap and I was up in my office working through my emails and reading some past Ad Ages and I fell asleep. But like a coma sleep where your body is almost wracked with spasms.

In my coma, I had a dream that I was speaking to a bunch of people and a guy from the grocery came walking towards me with a black cell phone and said, “It’s for you.” It was my mother and she said, “Your grandmother is about to be a grandmother again.” That was it. I was puzzled about it all but went on doing what I was doing. Then I went into other dreams. And in another dream, the same man, walked out of the grocery, and walked up to me and handed me his phone. It was my mother. Her sweet soft voice on the phone. She said in a rush of excitement, “Hi honey. Your grandmother is about to be a grandmother again.” And I wanted her to stay on the phone but she hung up.

I guess it was nice to have had a moment hearing my mother’s voice. And maybe the message that my grandmother was going to be a grandmother again means nothing (unless one of my cousin’s is pregnant and I don’t know yet). But what has stayed with me beyond the dream was the sense of innocence and excitement in her voice – that is something that my mother barely lost even at almost 74 years old. When I was vexed with her I called her naive, but it was youthful excitement she retained through most of her life.

I was reading something somewhere about a woman who saw a turtle in the road and went through great stakes to get the turtle back down into the water only to learn that the turtle had been hiking for most likely days up from the water to go lay her eggs in a safe place and that she had basically just f-d up the turtle’s plan. The moral of the story is to ask the turtle what she wants rather than save her.

Since I’ve been in the habit of saving for a good bit of my life, I came to that conclusion without having to be told. Most people don’t want saving, don’t appreciate saving, and might even hit you over the head if you try to save them. You wrestle with these sorts of thoughts all the time – shouldn’t I be doing more, shouldn’t I who has so much help those who have so little, shouldn’t I be the bigger person in this conflict. You end up feeling as if you never are quite serving yourself or others, really, because all of it hinges on the delicate balance of individuality.

I recently had a conversation with a mother who had come to me before for advice and help only to return to the conversation and suggest that I’m wrong and she’s right. I would have never presumed otherwise. In my school of thought we’re both right because we are mothering as we see fit. In this case the turtle had asked me for help and then afterwards told me it was sticking with its original plan. Whatyagonnado?

When the LaLa was designed conceptually it included a plunge pool much like the one I had had in the villa in Bali. Cool, refreshing and just big enough for a little splash around. Well that was the intent anyway and then there was the levee failure, and then I was carrying the expense of this house solo, and then there was the long slow drain on the economy, and then well, you know how it goes, there is grass growing over my plunge pool.

The sandbox has been fun enough to keep Tin interested in backyard events but my neighbor stopped by carting a sprinkler and that was just what the doctor ordered on this hot day. Tin and Ruby whooped it up in the backyard and when it was all over – I needed a nap.