One Small Plant

I used to have lots of plants that I cared for and watered and kept in the sunlight.

Now I have this one -- a succulent. It sits on the ledge in my back porch, where it catches the maximum sun in the second half of a day. (When we have any sun, that is. Lately there has been little.) Today I watered it using my favorite coffee cup -- a Giants cup one of my kids gave me.

I hope the small residue of coffee among the water didn't disturb my plant. I drink very little coffee -- about half a cup four days a week, max.

When I was still young enough to have fantasies and dreams of the future, I used to imagine I would live in a place like Napa or Sonoma, with acres of land planted with crops -- maybe grapes but also others.

And most definitely a vegetable garden and fruit trees.

There is something deeply satisfying about growing food crops and also beautiful things, like this little plant. Since I got it, it has at least tripled in size. I imagine I will eventually replant it in the backyard.

Back to my fantasy: I imagined there would be a house, where my wife and children lived and played, and a small building out back, where I would write during the day, returning to them at night. I thought I would write books, great books hopefully.

I'm not sure when, but at some point my fantasy died. I realized I would never be wealthy or lucky enough to live a life like that. I'm just fortunate, due to the rent control, to live out my years in a shabby, inner-city apartment. And to work in a media company well past the age my father or grandfather retired.

My Scottish grandfather reached an age, maybe about mine, when he refused to pay any further taxes. He just stopped filing, saying he had paid enough. I do not know whether his income at that point -- probably social security -- was large enough that he owed any anyway.

But he made his statement.

I know how he felt. I mailed in my taxes yesterday -- thousands of dollars. I wonder what the government would do to an old man like me if I decided to stop paying all of that money out. I would rather give it to my children and grandchildren.

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My Own Kind of Poetry

Taking today "off," which means I am working from home with a light schedule. It has been a very bad period at work for me, what with being micro-managed and undermined repeatedly. I cannot afford to quit this job, so I won't, but it is making me miserable and I am so happy to not go to the office for four straight days! But my morale is now very low.

***

Someone I love deeply is struggling with an addiction issue and he is now in a treatment facility. I can't call him and can only hope he calls me at some point or someone else who tells me how he is doing. I found out last night that he has a very close new friend -- a girl -- who probably helped him seek help. I hope to meet her soon.

At times like this, I think about other people. How life is a struggle for all of us, one way or another and perhaps on many levels. Struggling seems to be the human fate. I read about these rich, powerful men who abused women and now face possible jail time. That seems justified. All I can think about is the damage they have done to peoples' lives in the pursuit of their wealth and power. For what they have done they deserve to lose their freedom.

Perhaps anyone who seeks wealth or power is corrupt on at least some level. Maybe the entire capitalist system is corrupt.

The world is being destroyed. Climate change is now palpable. What will it take to convince humanity to save this planet?

We had a light rain the other day, which I discovered when I opened the door to walk to work. As I arrived at work, a colleague told me it was the "marine layer" that was responsible. He is about my age and really had trouble pronouncing the words. I helped him finish his sentence.

These days I also have trouble getting the words I want to say out. I fumble with that a lot, which is immensely frustrating. But every now and again, in a conversation, I can succeed in producing my own kind of poetry.

There are visual cues. I was reviewing my online video producer's latest work yesterday. It is a video of volunteers who safeguard children walking to and from schools and day care centers in the Tenderloin, a rough section of San Francisco, with many drug dealers, drug users, homeless people and mentally ill people on the streets.

The volunteers go first and move all of those folks to the side (most move voluntarily), saying "the children are coming through." Then here come the kids, young, beautiful and free as only children can be.

Afterward, the street people resume their positions.

There is a visual poetry in that, which I described to a group in a separate meeting, where we were talking about "calibration" in an audio report.

So much about all story telling is calibration -- pace, sequence, and conscious choices about how to tell which details when and how.

My video producer started his video in slo-mo, then hit real-time speed, before closing out in slo-mo. So we experience the clearing and resuming of street positions twice in slow motion like a sandwich, with the children walking in real time as the substance of that sandwich. It is a visual technique that shapes how the viewer experiences the story.

You might consider that a form of manipulation, but what is a storyteller to do?

If you think about it a while, it strikes you that it also very like the experience of human life itself. We start out as babies, virtually helpless in very slow motion, only able to cry -- and as we age, we revert to that state, only able to moan.

In between we live in real time.

***

My youngest came home from college last Monday night and we had a nice talk the next night. She seems happy and so mature, at age 19. As I was speaking with her, I was living in real time. At the center of the sandwich.

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