Everything I Tell You is Hearsay

My mother has been in the process of uncovering some treasures in her possession and sending them along to people who might best enjoy them. To that end, this…

K and the Flyrod

He knows far more about these things than I do. In fact, it would be fair to say he knows entirely more than I do, since I know nothing, and he’s a professional fishing guide. and wild trout advocate whereas I am irrationally, utterly, and totally terrified of fish.

I REALIZE this is irrational and so I did the most sensible thing I could; I went and got a fish tattooed on my hip to remind me this is a stupd phobia. Also because my mother’s nickname for me is Barracuda. This fact notwithstanding, I am usually a very nice person. Even my mother agrees.

Okay, I have to take it back. I do know one thing about fish: THEY WANT TO EAT YOU. They CAN’T, but they totally WOULD if they COULD.

I mean for chrissakes look at that monster

I delivered this information, with all the earnestness I could muster, and I somehow knew, as a fish expert, he would not try and deny this fact. I knew I ran the risk that he might roll his eyes and tell me that is both stupid and also to shut up*.  Even if he did, he couldn’t in good conscience try and tell me they don’t want to eat you because he also knows the one thing I know about fish, which is that they do. Want to eat you.

They just can’t.

Okay, now that I have THAT off my chest. I will go on to say that I admire his dedication to the bloodthirsty little buggers.. I mean beautiful wild creatures. And that I feel fundamentally that wild fish habitat should be protected and that generally we all thrive when we are wise stewards of the land and careful with regard to the watershed. I like going in the river and in a boat. I can and have held a fishing pole and caught a (as is just-the-one) fish in my life, and then bashed it’s brains out on a rock. Then I cried. Not so much that the fish was now dead, as that it had been alive in my hand in the first place and that freaked me the fuck out. As long as I don’t have to touch fish while they are alive and possibly still able to turn on me, I’ll be just fine.

So, I thought, he might enjoy a flyrod in a way that I simply cannot. He tells me it’s actually a pretty decent rod, though it’ll take a slower cast than he’s accustomed to. So, neat!

*For the record, he never did tell me to shut up.

I am feeling it; and how.

I will not explicate the details, but I will say that the most potent feeling I have been coping with in the last few days is this one. That manages to be quite a feat, considering it is in competition with grief, a heart that aches for the woes of my dearest ones, and intense romantic giddiness.

I try not to indulge in the feeling often. To do so is communicated most often as a request to be smited with examples of one’s frailty; to be humbled by force via circumstance. But in the face of what has passed in the last little while, I find I simply cannot rise above, cannot be patient and gracious, cannot do else but feel rage and impotent disgust.

It is sometimes deeply satisfying to say “I told you so,” and sometimes, being right is the worst feeling ever. I can think back on knowing what I have known, having my worst suspicions confirmed, and feel only the frustration with not having pushed harder, insisted more firmly, demanded that I be heard.

And only in this aftermath, while I try to sort through what might come along next, do I have a presence of mind to remember that it is far more important now, to do right rather than to be right.

I’m training for a triathalon. If you know me, you know this because I pretty much wont shut the fuck up about it. I’m fairly nervous about it,  but I’m also excited. I’m not worried about the run, which will be hard, no question, but manageable. I’m not even going to bother to train for the bike ride, apart from making sure I run through all the events together. The swimming however…

I am not a super-strong swimmer, and this event is in open water. It’ll be cold, and there will be a couple hundred other people in the water at the same time. I’m pretty anxious about the shock of the temperature as well as the likelihood of getting smacked in the head by a stray elbow.

And though swimming in the pool isn’t really going to mimic the experience very well, I have little choice when any waterways out-of-doors are running water temperatures that would induce hypothermia faster than you can say it.

I got in the pool last week for the first time this season. I was pretty worried I’d be rusty; uncomfortable and out of breath, but I decided to swim slower than usual and see if that helped at all. Trying to pace myself is something I struggle with. The default seems to be full steam ahead until all steam exhausted. Turns out, this can be a less than efficient way to get where you want to go. A more measured approach, though foreign to me, seems much more likely to help me achieve the results I’m after, which in this case are all about finishing, not about finishing fast.

I must also admit to running into another problem. Once I get into the groove set my breathing rhythm and stroke length, I find swimming kinda boring Laps are repetitive. On a treadmill when I’m running, I can listen to a podcast or music, but until someone invents waterproof headphones, I’m on my own, entertainment wise.

All that being said, my first swim was much easier than I anticipated. I wasn’t out of breath or uncomfortable. I forced myself to swim more slowly than is my tendency, and it seems to extend the number of laps I could complete comfortably. Considering I’ll have to jump out of the water and hit my bike, not wearing myself out entirely in the first event seems like a pretty key thing to focus on.

Slow and steady may not win the race, but I do hope it will help me complete it. Even if I am more of a barracuda than a tortoise.

Having only one eye that functions as it should has a whole host of consequences. My sense of smell is quite a bit keener than average, my verbal capacities are very well-developed, and my intuitive reasoning manages to surprise even me sometimes. It also means I have no depth perception, my balance is seriously compromised, and my spatial reasoning suffers considerably.  Ah, the give and oh, the take.

Anyone who has spent any time around me knows that I am accident prone, I bruise easily, and I fall down. A lot. Not just a lot for an adult, a lot for a drunken toddler. I trip, I misstep, my feet disappear from beneath me and I topple. Usually this happens when I am in the midst of doing something fun. This is not meant to read as a euphemism for “when I am drinking” though it certainly has gone that way, it is simply to point out that somehow, when I am having the most fun, it is also the most likely moment for me to hurt myself. This has become so true that I now have a handy and glib little phrase to trot out when it happens: If I didn’t get hurt, how would I know if I had fun?

One Thanksgiving weekend, some years ago, I was having SO MUCH FUN! A group of the usual suspects had gone to Bend for the annual Deep Fried Turkey and Drinking Derby and we’d gotten a truly lovely house for the lot of us. This was open beam construction, grand kitchen, pool table having lovely. Double doors in the main entry and an apartment over the garage for those who needed extra privacy. Also in the garage was a ping pong table. The inevitable game of Beer Pong ensued, and though I did not play (see above re: lack of depth perception, spatial reasoning) I was enjoying the spectacle considerably. At this point, tipsy and giddy, I realized there was something in the house I wanted at that very moment. At present, I cannot recall what that was, but why I can’t may become clear quite soon. As I raced back toward the house, as fast as my bare feet would carry me, I rounded a corner and sped toward the open of the two double doors. Much to the chagrin of my face, which struck it first at full tilt,  it turned out not to be an open door so much as a plate glass window. My friend Jason, who witnessed this impact from the inside of the door, said as I hit the window and then slid slowly toward the floor it was like watching a cartoon in real life and that he was deeply conflicted between genuine concern and hysterical laughter. The former overwhelmed the latter, and he came outside and picked me up with considerable tenderness and very minimal audible laughter. This is evidence that despite all other facts about him, he is probably a saint.

I managed to give myself a concussion, and a nasty scar on the bridge of my nose where my glasses slammed into my face with all my weight and speed behind the impact. I had a monster headache, was nauseated, and cried for about 4 hours off and on; partly in pain, partly in humiliation, and partly in annoyance that in my concussed absence, some other girl was downstairs singing opera at the crowd and I was not fit to go down there and show her who was boss of that skill. (Hint: Not Her)

On fun occasions I have sustained injuries of smaller scope in both hilarity and severity:

Sunriver August ’08: Faulty sprinkler valve cover collapsed on me during a Frisbee game, sunk to my knee on the run. Scrapes.

Reno Roadtrip August ’08: Giant cinder landed on hand. Burn

Indian Head Beach October ’08: Bashed self in the face with a surfboard on errant wave: Fat lip.

Opal Creek July ’10: Slip and fall during descent to creek for kayaking trip. Broken hand

Clackamas River August ’10: Clotheslined by flotilla. Rope burn.

And I could go on, but there are too many to recount.

This last weekend I had more fun than I have had in recent memory, and so, naturally, I also hurt myself. I had, in fact, JUST gotten done telling my hiking companion

“Wow, it’s so great! I haven’t even fallen down!”

…

Which was clearly a cue for the Universe to Smite Me for my cheek, in this case on my cheek. Accordingly, I slipped as I was clambering over a rock and landed with all due force on my rear end. Hard. My hiking companion was compassionate and picked me up and brushed me off with great facility. He seemed distressed, but I knew that it was evidence of just how much fun I was having.

In the words of Spoon…

Everything Hits At Once

And are they ever right about that.

In this case, and for a change, a considerable portion of events have been good. Really good. One might even say good without precedent. Others have been breathtaking and heartbreaking, and so it all falls together in the way that it will.

My mother, who I love very much indeed, has just lost her longtime lover and companion. He was as ornery a cuss as ever lived. He loved to argue, and most of all, to get a rise out of people. When I first met him, I knew already about his penchant for starting verbal tussles. I resisted his every salvo, ignored his every prodding, until at last he looked me square in the eye and called me Cupcake.

There. Was. Rage.

Ultimately, I decided this wasn’t the worst thing to have someone call you, and I learned to accept his pet name with better grace. He still teasingly called me that, the last time we spoke. He and I were never close, but I know he cared very much for my mother, and even more than that he took care of her, which is something that virtually no one else in all of her life has done. She has always been the breadwinner, the bacon bringer. John loved my mother, at her prickly, vain, harsh, and passionate worst, and in all the days they were together, she felt loved; well and truly, for the first and only time in all her life. I am very sorry indeed that she has lost him.

Other people, close and dear to me, are going through transitions of similar import. They are profound in their mystery, wondrous in the ambient power they exert. Those are not my tales to tell. But they work on me, in their way.

And then my own tumbling; this weekend quite literally. Still waiting to hear if my tailbone is just bruised, or if I managed to crack it. This all entwined with discovery and concordance, bliss and laughing-to-the-point-of-pain.

Amidst it all, I try to keep my eyes open to these wonders; my senses alive to the magic of this moment in time, which is even now, racing away.

Pronunciation:  /ˌsiŋ-krə-ˈnis-ət-ē, /
Function: n

the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality.

I have always subscribed to the notion that there is a universal gravity that works, not only on our physical bodies, but on ideas and events as well. We are called to the lessons we need through circumstance and the longing of our hearts. There is a magnetism that draws us together, and pushes us forward to the truths we most ought to learn, to know.

This force works on all things, but not in equal measure. Some people are stalwart and determined to stay astride the rails they have laid before themselves into the future. Others are more able to submit to the buffeting energy around them; to accept the call and heed the pull they cannot quantify, but can neither resist. Those who submit are sometimes dashed against the rocks; battered against the obstacles that they encounter. But they are also, at times, lifted from the mundane course of things, and exposed to a view of the human condition, and of their own truth, that is singular in its consciousness altering impact.

Time and again, when this state arises, a seemingly inextricable element of the condition emerges; an uncanny trend of correlation, parallelism, and concomitance becomes impossible to deny. That is to say, in the course of events there is a palpable and appreciable synchronicity.

Synchronicity is the notion of meaningful coincidence occurring in the individual mind, the collective unconscious, and with the energy generated thereby, enacted in corporeal reality.

Our friends at Wikipedia say: “Synchronistic events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity.”

This overarching framework can be much more difficult to interpret than the individually meaningful examples thereof; the sudden appearance of a heretofore unknown phenomenon in the lives of several close friends, the concurrence of a newly adopted slang phrase arriving from multiple sources at once.

Or, something like this:

A Life Of Its Own

I have owned my car for months, and cleaned it out any number of times. When I was doing so last week, I started thinking about the nature of magnetism, how and why we are drawn to the things that change us. While I was wandering in these thoughts I noticed, wedged into the seat, a flash of something shiny. I reached down and found two large beads made of magnetite. They stuck to each other, and anything else magnetic. I thought this was both odd and wonderful, to have come across these just at a moment when I was reflecting on the nature of unseen attraction.

My good friend Lyza and I have had an ongoing philosophical conversation about this topic for some years now; we present each other with our empirical data, and reflect on what we think this means in the larger scheme. I decided I would give her one of the magnets as a way of including her, in a tangible way, in this moment. She took the magnet along with her on a business trip just a few days later. She has recently overcome and lifelong fear, bordering on paralysis, of flying. As she sat in the airport lounge waiting for her flight, she took her new bauble out to play with it. She set it on the granite tabletop where it began to swing and turn, seemingly with a life of its own. She found the experience uncanny enough to take a video, and send it my way. Only a short time later, an announcement came from the National Weather Service that the town she was flying into was under a severe tornado warning. The winds would twist and roll, pull and turn, much in the same way the magnet did.

These things, they come together in this way. And it is coincidence; in this wide universe, that is inevitable. But that these things also have meaning, and impact, is undeniable. The forces that draw these occurrences toward us, also work to let them affect us. To, by their very fact, change what we would think, and see, and feel, and know.

–noun

2. habitual moderation in the indulgence of a natural appetite or passion,

Also,

to temper:

via xkcd