Virus Days

I Don't

I don’t understand death.

It’s not the nanosecond discontinuity between here and gone, being now and never again, on and off; it’s the shearing of the connections: not the connection you and the deceased had during your joint lives, but the connection between you and your idea of him, image of him, feeling of & about him; it’s the shearing of your own mind, your understanding of the world and how it works, the severing in your sense of the composition of daytime, the image-presences in your soul, the chambers of your mind’s heart.

The death of a friend is also a death for you, sometimes such a cleaving you can barely stand. The gap between the knowledge of loss and the sense of pain can take an enormity to cross. But the loss of balance is instant, the cause is invisible, and there’s no physical or mental understanding to be had.

RV & I met Rick at Clarion in ’81. Coming from Portland he put the idea of Portland in our heads, and when we went looking for air quality better than L.A.’s, knowing him gave us a point of focus. We came to both a city and a friend.

Rick was a gentleman as well as a loyal friend. He had a pixie-ish sense of humour and no truck with interpersonal chicanery; he was stoic about his health issues and generous with himself. When I was laid off in early ’98 and he was recovering from his first major surgery, we’d go for gentle walks in his neighbourhood, looking at the warehouses nearby, their gear and tackle and trim, talking of this and that and nothing in particular, enjoying our ability to be mobile and our lack of significance. He ran a little market in remnant sales on Saturday mornings in addition to the family business, just on his own initiative, and the competent and unassuming way he did it and spoke of it left me admiring him immensely. He took his obligations seriously. He was the sort of gentle man you forget exists when the news is what it is. He was very private; even though his sense of humour had a very wide perspective he was pained at conflict. He was the kind of man who keeps the world going and adds to its store of goodness.

Rick was one of the co-founders of Gobshite Quarterly. We sit daily and nightly at the old tasting room table from the family’s wine business; we sit on some of those chairs. Occasionally he’d come to visit them, but not often enough. We last met him in spring this year in a small bar on N. Mississippi. Every time we pass it we say, “That’s where we saw Rick,” and, “We should call him and get together.”

We will remember him when we open our wine, ordinaire and otherwise. Because goodness and good friends should be remembered.

The Tercel, August 1985-February 2014

And so the car has.

It's running very rough, they said. They said they had no problem with shifting, so that might be clutch issues. They replaced a spark plug and found it made no difference. They suspect the chugging/choking on acceleration may mean it needs new carburettor parts, but they can't get parts for it now. Nor even a new carburettor. There's [something] going on with the right rear throttle, it's been leaking gas, that's why the spark plug was all gunked and carbonned up; it needs a new engine, Even then they couldn't say how long it would run –

And so the small & faithful car.

It was a piece of the Pilbara, imported whole from Japan in 1985 when Lang Hancock was selling the haematite percentage of whatever he looked at. I drove it to work and the laundromat and wherever we needed to go: the years we lived in L.A. it took both cats to the vet every time they had to go, took us to Dangerous Visions and A Change of Hobbit on Saturday afternoons, to San Diego to SF conventions, to LosCon every Thanksgiving; here it's taken the cats to the vet, my husband to hospital and home again –

Some asshole of an off-duty sheriff collided with it in 1987; the paint under the window from that repair started to peel, in layers, a couple of winters ago. I've been trying to keep the mould from settling into those jagged, layered edges. It's supposed to rain again over the next few days. I was hoping the rain would dissolve the goose-droppings that appeared on the roof and windows last week.

Moving up to Portland. At the border the road-surface changed: much rougher. My first gig was in Beaverton & surrounds, a set of jobs so miserable I considered a small twist of the wheel from the top course of the Marquam Bridge. Except I couldn't do that to the faithful blue. It was its faithfulness that was heartbreaking.

Because I was using the so-called Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway a family of rattles came to live in the hatch-back door. They stayed while I drove to Lake Oswego for one job and to Fairview for another. They're there still, along with the scattered star-pits from stones hitting the windshield.

A kindly mechanic recommended slightly larger tyres. The window- and door-seals opened. The inside got wet in rain, and then car-washes, designed to deal with vast SUVs, became too brutal for it. I took to washing it by hand, once or twice a year. By then a little gentle pot-scrubber was needed to restore its cheerful heart. The petrol-gauge stopped working; I've run and filled it on the trip-meter since 1997; the heater/cooler fan only runs on settings 3 and 4. But the heater worked well, breathing a cave of clarity at the window-line so I could crouch behind the wheel and peer above the dash-board on winter nights (ice, snow) just enough to start the interminable commute again... The hydraulics for the hatch-back stopped working; the lining of the interior roof sagged; the interior plastic moulding above the window became brittle and broke and dropped unexpectedly; over the last two years I put small pieces of the car into the rubbish-bin on my way through the garage when I got in of an evening.

In its old age our commute shrank to 6 miles. It was the parking lot that was the danger – a long stave of scrapes down the driver's door – clearly from an SUV, the scrape clearly from a bumper-bar, that high... I was horrified and frightened and furious; the door would start rusting this winter. So, because the street was clearly, actually safer, I parked there. Someone must have left some sort of metal container on the hood at some point, waiting to drag it into the trunk of the vehicle parked in front of me; they scored the paint when they dragged the metal thing away. The street was also where the car acquired the goose-droppings.

I'm meeting friends for lunch, and there's some urgent mail for the Post Office. There's no other way to get to lunch and the Post Office easily and now.

On the way to the garage on Wednesday the car choked a couple of times while semi-trailers bore down on us from several directions. That was a very vivid experience.

I'll drive it to work today. I'll come home and take the 2003 Thomas Guide out of the pocket in the seat-cover that looks as though goats have been at it – we bought those in 2002, the day of the Gobshite launch at Looking Glass Books, when Looking Glass was still downtown, at Taylor and 3rd, opposite the lot that hosted Daniel Duford's vandalized sculpture a couple of weeks later.

I'll take the hand-drawn maps out of the glove-box, (Ann's house, Barbara's, Grace's). I'll call the insurance company and take the keys off the key-rings: the spare, my husband's, and then mine.

There was some samurai wisdom I read somewhere or other once, which said, approximately: when one is confronted by an overwhelming force, one will be overwhelmed.

The universe is an overwhelming force.

Update: June 8:
But it sold well at auction, much better than I'd hoped. So instead of wondering if it felt abandoned, cut off from its people for no reason, cast out among strangers (carefully not thinking of a cube of scrap metal on its way cross the sea, the splintering, the crunching, tinkling/shattering/grinding), now I can smile because it will be refurbished, restored, re-created by someone who appreciates its stout heart, its patience, its loyalty.

David M. Koch and The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies (NOVA)

The Monarch butterfly migrates northward from high points on the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico in three stages. Three generations, living about two months each, each migrate northward before dying. The third generation reaches southern Canada. The fourth generation of caterpillars migrate southward through the eastern United States, taking about two months, eventually arriving at the species' winter shelter in the Sierra Madre. The first three generations live about two months each; the fourth lives about nine months.

In that area of the Sierra Madre the indigenous people welcome the butterflies' return each year with a festival incorporated into the Day of the Dead. The butterflies are said to be the returning spirits of their ancestors. This has happened for generations, the people, who are small farmers, the forest, and the butterflies co-existing in a balance. This part of the forest has been made a National Sanctuary.

One of the last points in the documentary is that this forest is now being logged to such an extent that it and the butterflies are now both endangered. The World Wildlife Fund pays locals to be informal wardens and prevent the logging. But the trees are cut down in the middle of the night and, as one of the WWF wardens said, "You don't want to meet these people. They will kill you."

On its face this didn't make sense. There had to be a third factor in this situation that NOVA hadn't mentioned.

Why is there so much more logging now? The WWF warden said that it was people "who couldn't meet their needs" who were doing the logging. So – very poor people.

As a result of NAFTA and its own corruption, the Mexican government stopped giving subsidies to Mexico's small farmers some years ago. As corn prices rose because the U.S. government subsidised ethanol for fuel, poor Mexican farmers were priced out of the corn market. The market in white bread and noodles, the cheaper, less nutritious subsitutes, is largely owned by Archer Daniels Midland.

This is missing third factor.

NOVA went nowhere near it – Archer Daniels Midland is a corporate underwriter of PBS, the entity which buys NOVA nature documentaries.

During the opening credits there are thanks to corporate sponsors of NOVA, among them David M. Koch. Who at the moment is doing his best to destroy both the butterflies and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which airs material from PBS).

On its face this doesn't make sense. There must be some third aspect.

In the film there is one very short sequence where a butterfly is caught in a spider's web. The wings are caught and stuck, splayed and beautiful and helpless. The butterfly is effectively paralyzed. And then the spider comes and wraps the butterfly up in its own organic cling-wrap, and hauls it off (up, out of the frame) to be eaten.

That's what David M. Koch was doing, along with many other corporations / billionaires, sponsoring programming for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Paralyzing it, keeping it unable to utter certain truths before moving to defund it entirely (wrapping it up in a complete lack of budget), and hauling off (up, out of our frame of reference) to be dissolved.