Hear What They See

Monday, May 31, 2004

Dreamy

If I could have any wish in the world, this would be it: The Stegner Fellowship. What a dream...to live for 2 years, committed soley to the act of writing, as "artists, intent upon practicing and perfecting their craft." Wowee zowee. Working with Tobias Wolff, of course, would be too cool for school.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 3:41 PM

The Story of She Who Doctors Chickens

My husband rates the movie Little Big Man as one of his all time favorites (I think he said in his top 5, at least). I can't pin my finger on the why of it, but the first time I saw the movie, Dustin Hoffman's voice just about drove me crazy. It grated on my eardrums and I could hardly watch the movie because of it. Silly, I know, but there it is nonetheless. Anyway, we watched it again not so long ago with a group of people. I liked it better this time, I suppose because I could steel myself against the high-octane sound of Little Big Man's voice. There are some classic lines in the film and the way Hoffman's character culture jumps is a parody and a paradox.
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About 10:00 on Friday night there is shrieking outside and I recognize the terrorized cries of a chicken being attacked by something. It stopped abruptly and I didn't think anymore of it; I couldn't really tell where it was coming from. There are about 5 houses within a block of each other that have chickens. It's not zoned for it, though it's never really been contested since every house in this neighborhood used to keep chickens back in the days when people needed their eggs and ate them roasted on Sundays. My sister is 1 of these 5. The shrieking starts again, about 15 minutes later and this time I'm pretty sure it's coming from my sister's yard. I try to call her on the phone, but there's no answer. I run into my parent's house.

"Where's Haili?" I'm still holding the phone, my pajama legs riding up my shins.

"She went to Napa." They're watching Daredevil.

"Well her chickens are getting eaten up, did anyone lock them up?" I hang up the phone, Haili's message voice cut off "...message at the tone..."

"Oh shit!" Daddy pushes himself out of his chair.

"Oh no, oh Christ on a crutch!" Mom lays on the couch, her eyebrows tilda'd on her forehead. Her chest, it is sunken on one side under her nightie, no prosthesis to fill the emptiness beneath the fabric.

"Godammit, shit. I forgot all about them." Daddy's looking for slippers, for a flashlight. I run back out to our place, trying to find a flashlight and run over to my sister's house behind Daddy.

The shrieking has stopped. A raccoon is treed in the corner of the yard, against the fence. I heard the scrabbling of claws before shining the light between the limbs and the leaves, two yellow dots looking down on me. I am pissed. "You little cretin! You thankless creature." It's the same raccoon that gets fed every night on the back porch, eating the dry cat food, leaning on the screen when there's no kibble already in the dish. "Shoo you little shit!" He looks down on me, doesn't move. There are only 2 of 4 chickens left in the coop. Daddy and I look around the yard but see no sign of chickens except for tufts of feathers sprayed here and there. I am angry as I look, the yard is a mess, the peach tree beside the coop cracked in half because it was never cared for, cut back at the beginning of winter to prepare for the spring. We leave, my arms and shins scratched from the high weeds and prickers, the untended fruit trees.

I go back to get in bed, Tobias Wolff's Old School cracked to the first page, Dave talking on his cell to his brother. I'm irritated because he hasn't offered to help, just watched me racing around like a chicken with my head cut off. Ten minutes and the shrieking starts again. "SHIT!" I peel back the covers and start running, yelling to Daddy, "It's back! The chickens are still alive!" We're running down the street again, up Haili's driveway, into her back yard. The shrieking stops and the raccoon is back in the tree. He doesn't wait for me this time to tell him to shoo. Daddy and I search the yard again, this time turning up a hen under a persimmon tree, hunched in the dirt, still and stupid. I reach for her, touching the feathers on her back, but she squawks and heads for the corner of the yard.

"Head her off at the gate!" Daddy's around the tree, shining his flashlight the opposite direction of the hen.

"Where is she?"

"Over there! Jesus, Daddy, by the composter, over there, shine your light over there!" My impatience colors my voice harsh and bitchy, the anger and helplessness I feel rolling around in my belly like tar, sticky, black.

"Oh! Oh dammit." He trips and I careen the other direction, trying to get the chicken cornered so I can grab her.

My feet itch; there is hay spread all over the chicken yard and I can't move the gate. "Why the hell is there hay all over the yard?"

"Haili spread it out."

"Why in the hell did she do that?"

"I don't know. There she is, she's in that corner."

"This yard is the biggest piece of shit mess I've ever seen. Godammit!" Vestiges of the old garden I used to keep in this same yard, seven years ago in another life married to a different man. The garden I kept and escaped to, away from his indifference and thirst for "lotsa money" and big cars. The composter, it had long since morphed into a chicken roost during the day, in the shade of the plum trees beside the chicken coop that Edi had built when I first wanted chickens. Back when mom was diagnosed, when I thought having fresh, organic eggs would help in some way, any way, to keep her alive.

The hen is going toward the coop, to the space behind where we won't be able to reach. I grab her back but she slips beneath my hands. I grab her legs and yank her. Her shriek is loud as murder. "Shhh! Shhh! Shh! Shhh! Sh!" I'm whisper-hushing her, putting a hand beneath her chest, her heart flying in her chest, pulling her toward me so I can lift her and feel for damage. The 2 chickens in the coop mutter and call while the hen in my hands cries without struggle. Daddy is behind me, shining his light on her. I dropped my flashlight, the round light weak under the muffle of hay. I hold the hen against my chest, and feel for wetness. She has blood on her beak, her comb may have been swiped, and some feathers are missing above her wing, but I can't find anything else.
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It happened again that night, one more time, after we'd rescued one chicken, all the shrieking and running over to my sister's yard, Dave coming with me this time. We found the last chicken, ripped and mauled and alive.

I don't know why, but I have the stomach for blood and injury when it is right in front of me. I squirm when it's in movies, I refuse to watch it on television, those live-shot videos of cops getting gunned down, of elephants dragging people around like rag dolls before they are shot and killed. But if I have the real deal in front of me, something takes over and I put aside the distress. I caught the last chicken, wrapped her in a towel and took her to my parent's house. Under the fluorescent light of the kitchen, I assessed her damage and knew she'd probably die. There were no vital organs exposed, but most of the skin from her back was gone, along with the feathers, the fat beneath the skin exposed and covered in dirt. She had a tear to her backside that looked as though it may have ripped in half the bulby part where her tail feathers should have been. I clipped away the wing feathers that were touching the exposed flesh, as well as any feathers near her rear. I don't have a background in animal husbandry, but it seemed reasonable that she'd need to be cleaned to avoid infection. I used hydrogen peroxide, the only thing I could think of since I didn't think I could hold her under the water faucet. Chickens are pretty amazing. She was in obvious pain from the bath, but Daddy held her down, the peroxide bubbling over her flesh. She couldn't control the pain reaction and she crapped all over the box she was in. But she didn't make a sound. I smoothed antibacterial ointment on a cotton pad and laid it against her back and set her in a laundry basket with a clean sheet. The rest would be up to someone other than myself. Dave watched me, fascinated that I would take over such a duty.
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The next morning I called people who had more experience than I'd had with chickens. A vet in Petaluma, a friend from church, a neighbor down the street. They all said she'd need to be killed. I looked over at her, alert, standing in the laundry basket. I sure as hell wasn't going to do it. Haili was there, listening to the conversations. Daddy and mom were gone, who knew where. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew neither of us was going to cut the head of the chicken. It would cost $70 to take her to the vet in Petaluma. I helped get the hen ready to put in the car.
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"I'm really proud of you sweetie." Dave and I are making our bed.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, the way you doctored that chicken. Like Snake Woman, the wife of the chief in Little Big Man. But you're She Who Doctors Chickens. That'd be your Indian name." I laugh, smoothing the duvet over the bed.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 12:43 PM

Monday, May 24, 2004

Off to See the Wizard

This is the last business trip for awhile, I hope. But I must admit, hotel beds are so much better than our uncomfortably soft double.

Blue sky peeking through. I suppose it will be warmish today. I hope I haven't melted my company laptop in the trunk of my company car on company time...

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 8:13 AM

Sunday, May 23, 2004

World Without End, Amen.

It's been years that I've been trying to write the story that grandma set in front of me. It has been slippery and wily, a story that eludes the cast-about-net and my grasp. Grandma had a habit of telling a story a few different ways. Sometimes you never even knew you were hearing the same story until she came to a part that you'd heard before. So you'd stop and ask her about the difference and she'd say that this was the story, the real story, and it made you wonder what the one before had been or the one before that.

But it occurred to me today that stories are a lot like maps. They are geographies of human experience. Like almost every destination, there is more than one route. Getting to my front door isn't confined to one way. I can take East Napa Street to 3rd. Or head a few blocks south down Broadway before turning left on Patten and left again on 3rd. Or I can go further down Broadway and turn left of Chase or MacArthur and go around a back way. Any route I take will eventually lead me home, but they're all different in their own way.

I stand at the end of the world she created. Her geography, it is a terrain like no other. The soles of her feet, they were well-worn, intimate with the dirt and the rocks and the paths she'd traveled. She knew the short-cuts and the back ways, she knew when to turn away and never look back. She was not going to get caught like Lot's wife, frozen on the plain of her escape from a land that had nothing left to give her. She didn't believe her memories could bind her, and mostly they didn't. But perhaps that's where we all end up at the finish. Bound by memories we'd left buried at the foot of the valley oak, long ago when the knowledge of their existence could undo us.

In the end she did believe in something bigger than herself. She did believe that her memories had not been forgotten nor that she was the only keeper of their flame. In the end, she asked a priest for forgiveness and for Last Rites. At the end of her map edge she looked off into the unknown and guessed there was something there, something bigger than herself, vast and incumbent, that would bind her stories together and bring them home.

The map edges overlap. Our flood plains and hillsides coincide, but where hers ended, my middleground picks up. It's here that I am now, here feeling the end of her life under the blanket of fallen leaves and pine needles beneath my feet. At the foothills of her mountain, I am the horizon that she saw off in a distance she could not measure. I doubt she wanted to. The untold, to her, wouldn't have been such a bad thing. The promise, the expectation, that would have appealed to her. The purety of faith, it would have made the memories worth bearing again. The burden of history would not have felt so heavy. It would guarantee, for her, the longevity of her story.

I'm not sure how to grasp the silver-scaled tale of her life. But I'm certain our overlapped edges cannot be separated. The dirt of one constitutes the other.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 4:59 PM

Saturday, May 22, 2004

slipping

You can slip into places like these without ever realizing how in the world you got there.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 4:52 PM

The Art of War

I've been intermittedly keeping track of the Abu Ghraib debacle. I was reading an article in the newspaper left at my door at the DoubleTree, a milk toast story of the legal proceedings going on in Baghdad. There were grainy pictures, quoted versions of abuses, and trivial bits of info that said nothing. It was interesting that the newspaper story ended with a quote by the man on trial that the prison guards and personnel had been commanded by intelligence to continue whatever they were doing because it was working and the prisoners were talking.

I snorted. So typical. Stop the story where the real meat of it begins.

[SIDEBAR: I should explain that my views, from the perspective of an innocent bystander, depending on personal sway, would be considered liberal by conservatives and conservative by liberals. People tell me that this is normal, that "everyone's like that" but I would have to beg to differ. I don't necessarily find myself on a middle ground so much as an underground, where the inhabitants seem few and far between. My introduction to this unseen space began just a couple of years ago, but it is only now defining itself as I've begun to listen more seriously to what before seemed like ranty-sounding hyperbole from my husband. END SIDEBAR]

I was unfamiliar with the 2400+ year old Chinese text by Sun Tzu, The Art of War until just a few days ago. I have read it for the first time today. There are other internet sites with commentary, but the link above is the basic text, which I found fascinating.

It's telling that few people read ancient texts like these any longer. Or even know about them. I didn't and still don't and it is with a growing feeling of frustration that I realize how much my upbringing biased me (...we all say this and try to buck against it, don't we?...) toward certain belief systems. Anyway, listen and read as the Greeks are tossed around in conversations. I guess it's the business of name-dropping intelligentsia-style. I like reading some of what the Greeks rhetoricked about. Gives your brain a little vroom, vim & vigor. But let's face it, the Greeks are so PC. Something tells me Sun Tzu isn't exactly PC. The tip off to this possibility was made apparent by the title of his masterwork, The Art of War. I could be wrong, though...maybe it is cool to talk about Sun Tzu too, in which case I'd best be pointing the finger selfward for intelligentsia name-dropping.

Sun Tzu's Chapter 8, Variations in Tactics is compelling. In part it reads,

1. Sun Tzu said: In war, the general receives
his commands from the sovereign, collects his army
and concentrates his forces...

...3. There are roads which must not be followed,
armies which must be not attacked, towns which must not
be besieged, positions which must not be contested,
commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed...

I guess a distinction of "sovereign" needs to be made, so I'll say for the sake of this writing that sovereign refers to the person(s) in power. I'm not referring to a President, but to those who actually are in power, for whom I believe our President and all of his predecessors (with the possible exception of Kennedy and a few others) and successors have been puppety figureheads. This is a role without regard for political persuasion, meaning principles of liberalism and conservatism have no bearing. It is a role where Clinton & Bush are cut of the same cloth. A contradictory-seeming weave, no? But impossible? Nah, I hardly think so. Such contradictions of thought or belief sweep back through our human history, so wide and so far, that we are mostly blind to them. The contradictions seem separate and equal, when in fact they are connected and equal.

Men of strategy have always been around, for as long as wars have been waged. About 2000 years after Sun Tzu wrote his Art of War, the Italian Florentine statesman, Nicolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince and later his own book of the same title as Sun Tzu's, The Art of War. My husband commented on the connection to me, I didn't see it myself, but I studied Machiavelli in a while ago in Italy and after today reading Sun Tzu, the correlations between the Chinese general and the Italian statesman are fascinating.

That's enough politiking for me.
It's so time consuming.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 12:31 PM

Global warming, please.

The exhaustion is settling around my shoulders like an ice cap, impenetrable and numb. This month is almost over; perhaps I'll breathe again on June 1. The conference I co-spearheaded with my old boss Anne went off without a hitch (well, mostly), everyone raved and marveled at the "amazing amounts" of creativity and work that went into the whole thing. We worked our tails off and I got rousted into dressing up as Henry the 8th and (strengthened by a Guiness) speaking before the crowd of 150 in a British accent for 20 minutes.

I don't guess that insurance types are accustomed to extroverted bookish types (that seems like a paradox, somehow) running their Financial Services Conferences for them. Anne & I ping off of one another like no other twosome I've ever seen in this company, at least not in our zone. We drive each other bananas. We are just enough alike to ken and yet our differences are pronounced enough to make each a compliment to the other. But we do have our moments. We were yelling at each other in my hotel room right before I was supposed to dress up in the Henry costume. She had me in tears and threatening to forget the whole thing and let someone else deal with this shit. She always remains rational; I am the emotional one. She backed off and I cut-out and taped my paper mustache and beard to my face, wiping the tears & globby mascara from my eyes. The ink of my impromptu facial hair was still wet from the deskjet I'd hauled to my room for exactly this sort of last-minute hoopla. I was afraid the ink would smear since my nose was running, but I just sniffled as we stomped off down the hallways of the DoubleTree. I don't think anyone noticed the stuffed-nose tinge to my British accent; perhaps they thought it was intentional.

I got pulled out of the meeting at one point by my mostly-but-not-officialy-retired boss who gave me the mediocre performance review. He told me with all the changes coming down the pike that I would need to change my schedule. Since he doesn't have a clue what I do half the time anyway, I don't think much will change. He told me I would need to learn the business model for our agents since he doesn't want to bother having to learn it himself since he's so close to retirement and he's lost all the other people in our office who knew how it worked. Funny thing, that, because the only reason he wants me to leanr it is because he wants to make sure our agents produce lots so he can travel to London next year after he retires based on their production. I, of course, get no bonus or travel incentive to learn any of this crap, but I guess it's good for my health...oh dear, the attitude is creeping into my words... He told me Anne is not my boss and I ought not to commit to doing projects unless I ask him first. I pointed out that I'd presented the whole thing to he & Randy 2 months ago and got the green light. He told me how disappointed he was in me for "talking to others" about my performance review (it got back to him, of course...whatever, like, I'm so shure) and if I felt I didn't deserve it I should have talked to him. I just nodded my head and looked concerned and then proceeded to give a very heartfelt commentary on the difficulties for "young people today" living in this "over-inflated" area of California and how I would need to and had indeed begun to look for employment in a different part of the state or country that was more affordable and didn't he think that was a good idea and did he have any insight to offer on how I might go about doing that within our company? I suppose he may have recognized the fact that I skirted the issue of my blabbing to others, but he likes being asked for help and he got off on that tangent before he knew what hit him and then the meeting let out for a break and it wasn't brought up again. I love meeting with my boss.

What a bore. There I go again, bitching about work.

Here's the breakdown:
I go to bed between 11:00P-12:00A every night
I wake up at 6:15
I leave for work at 7:00A
I commute and arrive work at 7:45A
I leave work between 8:00P-10:00P every night
I take a shower, brush my teeth, get in my PJs, and hop into bed when I get home
Repeat

I am an ass. I spend, at most, 2-3 hours with my husband right before bed. I have no other life outside of work. Weekends are spent trying to catch up with 5 days of mail, phone messages, and sleep.

No f*cking wonder all I write about is work.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 10:59 AM

Thursday, May 20, 2004

80's Hair Band

My outlook of late reminds me of just that. Scorpions or Cinderella or Bon Jovi. You know, a whole lot of screeching lyrics and love ballads, striped spandex and AquaNet...a bad attitude with an impotent bite.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 1:00 AM

Sunday, May 16, 2004

Laziness Is A Jackass

I will blame laziness for my unblogfulness. Though I find lazy to be an adverb within which it difficult to identify. But I'll say that. For the sake of ease. Which sounds lazy but really just implicates all of the bullarky that's been going on for the past few weeks since I returned from St. Louis.

Funny thing about laziness. Its itinerant nature is paradoxical. Because it is wayward. It seems like laziness would stay put, you know? Not rock the boat by moving around. But it does. It ambles to and fro, affecting the ground beneath it like a molten fungus.

I called my boss a jackass in front of 3 witnesses. I suppose that was dumb. No, it was dumb. But I don't suppose I really care. He retires after 37 years at the end of September, but he has a bunch of unused vacation, so he's never in the office especially now that he's finished building his new million dollar retirement complex in another state.

My cohort (let's call him my mini-boss) has just interviewed for, been chosen for, and accepted a lateral position in LA to get the blazes out of Dodge. Another guy in the office who has been the financial services dude, is being terminated at the end of June. So, my boss is unofficially gone, my mini-boss will be gone, and the FS dude will be gone. That leaves yours truly in the office with no one but our secretary for company.

It's insane. To make matters worse, my annual performance review just came up and I was told (verbally, which should have clued me off from the start that maybe I ought not to put much stock in it) that I had received the "highest" score. There are only 3, with 3 being the highest. I talk to my boss the one day he happened to be in the office 2 weeks ago and he hands me a print-screen of my review. It makes no sense because it's not written in English but in Human Resources code. Every time we started to talk about it he was interrupted by the phone guy who was getting him a new cell phone, his wife who was trying to coordinate when she would pick him up after his cell phone was figured out, and the regional office communications coordinator who was called in from her office 20 minutes away so she could try to get his cell phone programmed for him. It hits me at 6:00 that night as I'm sitting there reading through the on-line Human Resources company website that explains how the performance reviews work that not only did I not get an actual performance review, I didn't get the highest either. He gave me a 2.

Hmmm.

I'm sitting there, knowing I'm going to be in the office for another 2 hours, knowing my 12 hours days are spent working for 11 1/2 hours solid (I usually manage to sneak into the conference room for a 1/2 hour to eat lunch and read), knowing I put more into my job than 90% of the people who have my same position companywide, and he gave me a 2.

Huh.

I of course burst into tears and felt like a rabid skunk. I wanted to through a big, screamy tantrum, but there wouldn't have been anyone there to witness it anyway being as how it was 8:00 and the janitor hadn't shown up yet. I sent a very diplomatic email to my boss and mini-boss asking them what I needed to do to improve my performance to get a 3. Mini-boss and I have a pretty good business relationship. He was nonplussed and talked to the boss on the phone. The boss told mini-boss if I felt I didn't deserve a 2 then perhaps I ought to find employment elsewhere. Why bother with constructive comments when crappy ones are so much easier?

Hmmm.

I cried for 3 days straight.

Dave asked me if that was going to make me realize that I didn't need to work 12 hours M-F with additional hours on weekends. I would like to say yes, but I it is almost impossible for me to sit back and coast. It drives me crazy. There are so many things that can be done, so many things that people could benefit from, so many things to learn. And there ought to be a way to make all of that worth it just for yourself and for others. But when your boss is clueless, or maybe just doesn't care it's a challenge.

Our pastor reminded Dave when he told him about it that "God is our ultimate Boss. If you put your faith in humans, you will always be disappointed. So don't. Remember who's really the Boss." There was a time I may have said that was a bunch of bunk. But I am getting to the point where I see the wisdom in those words. Most people are flawed and insincere. I look at people who have faith. I mean the real kind, the can that isn't shaken easily. They place no bets on anything created by humankind. Materially, they don't always have much, but gads, if they don't have a contentment I see lacking in most people. It's stunning.

I can't call myself faithful. I strive toward understanding the nature of faith. But I can't say I am faithful. I am upset easily by other people, I struggle with trying not to care. I wish I could say I answer to the Boss (no, not Springsteen) rather than a boss, but I'd be lying if I said I put more stock in God than human endeavors. But I wish I could. Then a 2 would be irrelevant and my lips would be guarded against speaking, calling someone a jackass.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 2:56 PM