the pelican

once more with feeling

yet to come

saw that it must be magic on a cardboard sign today. a street guy on the mall. it must be magic.

well magic or no, tonight my cookies are crap.  sugar cookies. sugar trees. make them almost every year. made the dough about two or three days ago and wrapped it and stashed it nicely in the fridge for the grand rolling and cutting tonight. they are a favorite. a crowd pleaser. normally do a powdered sugar and lemon juice sort of white icing snow on them. multi-colored tiny ball sprinkles. but tonight oh tonight my cookies are crap. they just splatted out on the sheet in a flat splodge and burned. not enough flour not enough baking soda i don't know. maybe it was all the correct combination of ingredients but my energy just somehow killed them. yes it sounds grim but it kind of feels like that tonight. it's just seeping out of me just below the surface.

i mean it's true it's true that my dad died in december. more than half my life ago now, it is, as of this year. and true it was a year set up a bit like this one. of course holidays are always supposed to be magic. supposed to be special. supposed to be for children. but i don't really need any excuses to feel sorry for myself. yeah that year haunts me a bit, but so too do some holiday years of my childhood i suppose. i don't know. i mean i guess it's getting me worse this year than most. it's a haunting of sorts. don't need no holiday ghosties hanging round but got 'em anyway. past and present have visited so far today.

the future is yet to come.

and i was just lecturing someone to lighten up, you know. quit being such a scrooge i said. let go of it all. don't make yourself so miserable. criminy you have so much going well right now you just received an award and why do you have to make it all so damn dismal? why insist on being depressed at a holiday time and ruin it for everyone else?

there's this pressure, see. this pressure to make it a special time for everybody. and there's this sense of responsibility that it's all up to me me me.

want to have good holidays. want to make them nice. want everyone to have a good time. want to be a good santa. want to make sure everything is done.  want everyone to be happy. want to make a good dinner.

and it's so cold out right now. it's fierce cold. with snow, although technically it is too cold to snow and so it's all this powdery poofy stuff. but lots of it. and i think man i would not i certainly would not want to be homeless right now.

and i worry about the little guitar player with the sweet voice and bad teeth i wonder how he makes it, what he does. i mean i know hanging out on the mall is his day job and he is there rain or shine, warm or cold, every single day. he sings sweetly and smells of woodsmoke and dresses in layers and i think maybe he lives outdoors. he seems to always be nice and patient with  desperate sorts and other guys with cardboard signs who want to set up next to him on the mall. and he limps he walks with a cane he is so thin and he sings so sweet. i guess he gets to be the tiny tim of our story.

yeah it must be the magic said the cardboard sign.

so the roads were slippery and the driving was tense. and have to go by the liquor store to get champagne and beer and red wine and maybe maybe a single malt for my boss. i mean i want to give him something. he's into the single malt thing he is and he appreciates a good thing and he's such a nice man and he saved me he did he saved me from doing tax litigation for oil and gas attorneys or some such similar fate when he hired me almost on the spot and he gave me a very generous bonus and i haven't even been there a year. and he's smart and he's funny and he bought a bunch of acholi beads for his family and friends and he gets it and he does good things for people. he's a good attorney he works on the side of the angels. he helps injured people. and so i want to get him something. want to give him a little something special. don't want it to seem too pretentious. don't want it to be a brown nose thing. and this other attorney in the office came to see me and said i was the lead dog now how fast i did that how fast it happened that i was just this class action paralegal on a case that would end within a couple years and now i'm office manager too just like that just like that lead dog he said lead dog and i thought wait a minute i thought i was stuck doing all the crappy piddly stuff that nobody wants to deal with i'm the doormat remember and he said lead dog lead dog and i said yeah heh heh have seen that t-shirt that says unless you're the lead dog the view never changes. brown nose brown nose.  but i do want to give my boss something. say thank you. i mean he's a good guy. one of the best and i just knew it when i met him and he practically hired me on the spot and it's one of those things. so he gets the single malt and who cares what they all think, right?

oh but the jealousies and the nonsense and the office politics the office politics and i just want everyone to get along i do i do but you know i get my digs in sometimes too i do and i do know better and here i find myself with a couple rocks in my hands and i know i sure as heck am not without sin no sir. and i just want to be the peace maker i try i try but sometimes i feel like the double agent i mean i hear it all i get all the sides i get the gripes and off-side comments and whines and the different perspectives i get it all. and then i've got my view of it all too you know, and it is by no means without a certain amount of judgment too.

and oh but i have been critical of everything and everyone around me lately too. just been on this kick. and in the midst of it i'm bitching at someone else to dump the scrooge routine and get on with making the most of the holidays and enjoying the people around them and being grateful.

like, we've got all this stuff at work. candy and cookies and popcorn and fudge. piles of it. from vendors and clients. festive food. poison perhaps, but happy festive poison. cinnamon gummy santas and egg nog taffy and chocolate covered pretzels and peppermint chocolate bark and nut covered toffee and gooey chewy caramel globs. none of it is truly edible but we all stop by and snack on it nonetheless. and we all know better and we're making ourselves sick and we're all on highs and lows of sugar rushes and diabetic comas but we got to stop by and sample another bite. desire.

and i've probably spent too much money. and i've probably overdone. and i don't know what i'm going to feed the family when they all come over. and i don't have everything wrapped. and there's so much to do so much to do. doubt. chaos. worry.

and a good friend a very good friend i love and care about well she just tells me she's got lymphoma. Hodgkins i think she said and then they just recently pulled some lump out of her leg and it's melanoma as well. and she is healthy. i mean she is the epitome of health or so it seemed but no apparently not and i think no no can't quite deal with this. but get this, you see, her lover, her friend, her most volatile and explosive relationship, her heart's intensity, has taken her own life. was in pain. left a message that she was called home unexpectedly and she's gone. and she says it's all ok. she says this is how it is supposed to be. it was right on time. and her note was not full of despair. she got the green light and decided it and she says Emanuel says death is like taking off a tight shoe, see, and it was how she was how she lived her life and now she is gone just like that and i can't or i don't i mean i can't get my mind quite around that can't quite see it as a good thing. i mean i know her life was hers and she took charge of her own end and that is her right it is isn't it her right? i believe it is. and she was so beautiful and smart and i knew her from the meditation center and she found ecstasy everywhere and she loved to chant and maybe it's a good thing maybe she was sort of samurai and it was all honorable. and it was not messy. she left instructions and notes and money for cremation and she was not sad she was joyous and ready to go. and yet and yet and yet i wonder and i know she was alone but then aren't we all in the actual moment isn't that the illusion at its peak isn't that the final experience isn't that when the realization the mystical union isn't that when it all makes sense and peace is made and what if she did do that on her own terms just like that? can't rationalize it really maybe it's not a mind thing but a heart thing and she had a big beautiful heart. i just don't know. but want to wish her well on her journey and hope my friend, my newly diagnosed sick friend, is going to be able to let her go as well. but i think she is.

and my dad died at christmas but it was not a suicide per se.  no it was not a suicide in the immediate choice and yet somehow i wonder sometimes i wonder i mean he waited and waited and i hadn't gone to the hospital to see him for about a week, didn't really believe it, couldn't really see that was the end.  he had been in a motorcycle accident in august, and was hit by car. blood clot in his leg. bad clotting going on  but sent home. eventually clots in his lungs. first heart attack in november, but it was mild. then he got pneumonia. i didn't really believe it, he could be such a hypochondriac or so we thought we thought but have to wonder if that was it i mean he smoked so much he drank so much he ate raw red meat he was a newspaperman he drank bourbon i mean he was a freaking republican. and for me it was always love and war with him, love and war and love and war. and when i got to the hospital on that last day he said i love you with all my heart and i said me too. and then i got strep throat after the funeral and it was the big blizzard and we got two and three feet of snow and i couldn't go home couldn't go home couldn't get up into the mountains for christmas the roads were closed and i was stuck down at my apartment in denver with strep thoat and my dad was gone and i was alone.
 
and tonight my cookies are crap.

and i opened up the little window on my advent calendar today at work and it was of two angels holding up the world and it made me cry.

and i just hope the skinny little guitar player with the limp and the sweet voice is somewhere warm tonight.

because the holidays are supposed to be so special, so precious, so full of all the good things.

and there are hungry ghosts everywhere. and it feels like the whole world is torn open.

it is not just single digit cold outside right now it is windy. and i can feel the freeze seeping through the floor and the windows and the walls.

just been too caught up in the chaos to even understand what's been happening. have been incapable of seeing the love in all of it.  

but i think i remembered it now. so many things to come to terms with, to make peace with.

and peace on earth begins with me.

and i have had a significant dose of the past and the present and the future is still yet to come.

it must be magic.

posted by: limine at 21:38 | link | comments (7) |

to bead

oh where to begin

as if there could be a distinct beginning to it all.

i mean it's just not the sort of thing the reality creating set like to acknowledge you know, thinking happy thoughts fingers in ears la la la la. oh it's a bit melodramatic. oooh. isn't that so saaaaaaad. oh i've got my own problems to deal with. well whatever.

however the bead party went extremely well. sold everything. poof. every last bit of acholi beads. quite the hot item these days, and a good cause.

but it's the energy of the beads that was so intense. wore them to the office at work the next day and received quite a bit of attention. it was as if the bead women were with us. their energy. their being. their desire to survive and will to live wrapped and wound so tightly into each psychedelic spiral coiled bead.

the situation is almost impossible to fathom.

picture a handful of women and children, tyring to survive with AIDS, tearing glossy magazine pages into tiny strips to roll on toothpicks and make into beads. women whose only other work option is to break rocks into gravel by hand for the equivalent of about a dollar a day. women whose children are dying and the ones that manage to live are forced into the army or made into prostitutes. tearing up glossy magazine pages. to make beads. to survive.  

pictures of candy and quiche and salads and cakes and appetizers and cookies and recipes. pictures of homes and automobiles and boats. beautiful celebrities. brides and business suits and happy children. colorful toys. dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and cuisinarts. luggage and purses and shoes and jewelry. plush rugs and coffee tables and sunken bathtubs. dishes and crystal and silverware. satins and silks and velvets and sequins. people getting plastic surgery. people shopping in malls. people flying kites. sailing on boats. toasting each other with champagne. riding ski lifts. people who are happy because they have prozac and viagra and rogaine and nicorette gum. a world of cruises and birthday parties, picnics and horseback riding.

mirrors of what must seem like some foreign incomprehensible  unimaginable glittering materialistic shimmering ghosts. the magazine sort of life that appears so glamorous and beautiful, so shiny and appetizing.

advertising. like a semi-scummy glintzy surface snapshot of culture.

to be flipped through. suggestions to entertain you to flash at you to ask you to desire desire desire stuff want stuff need to eat stuff. the freedom to consume.

tearing. shredding. cutting. carefully peeling pictures of other lives into little strips. little strips of hope for another day of medication to help keep them alive. for enough food to eat the next day.

it's beyond words.

it's beyond explanation.

it's beyond perspective.

and it makes my chest hurt.

to wear the beads, the beautiful beads, is to carry the lives of these women into work with me. into the coffee place on the corner where i get my steaming hot three dollar non-fat soy chai. past the kite store where i always find good presents for my eight year old nephew. past the art co-op. past the bookstore. past the bakery with the magnificent cookies where i buy my lunch salads. past the smiley guitar player into whose case i occasionaly slip a couple dollars. into the building with the polished tile where i listen to the musak while ride the elevator to the fifth floor yeah she's got a ticket to ri-hi-ide and enter my spacious office and type at my computer and read e-mail and talk on the phone and listen to co-workers' anxiety about menu plans for the staff holiday ornament exchange. and i look outside at the side of the mountain and the sprawly mellow village below and the early morning sun hitting the flatirons.

yeah.
 
and criminy you know just like everywhere we got the gripes and the petty office gossip and the concerns and the special attention and the jealousy and the competition for cases among the paralegals and the second class citizen angst of the legal secretaries and and and and. and it's not as if any of that stuff isn't real. except it just isn't.

so the energy of these beads is just doing something to me. maybe i'm writing this from a rattled perspective. maybe maybe it's pure amazement. maybe it's more than a little touch of guilt. maybe it's gratitude. maybe it's compassion. maybe it's love. but it's something.

because there's just something about the coiling the wrapping the spiral nature of the beads. so much time and effort is put into these strings and strings and beads. so much worry. so much concern. so much hope. thoughts. ideas. dreams. the feel of human touch, the touch in touch with its own survival. the careful even wrapping. laughing. talking. crying. a part of these people, a gentle reverberation, a rhythm, a conversation, a communication, is in these beads.

but more than all that, there is this sense of something. this connection with something fragile and tenuous and beautiful and frightening.

it's something alright. it's a certain kind of awareness.

i hope i will continue to remember this awareness, this feeling, even when i'm not wearing the beads.

but maybe i might just need to wear them a lot to remind me. yeah that's it.

they are so beautiful.

and so very purple blue.

posted by: limine at 19:43 | link | comments (12) |

smoked salmon cheesecake

ah the beauty of it. the bounty. the extravagance. a special holiday luxury. pardon me while i whirl away briefly in a certain amount of sensual pleasure.

rough day at work today but resting now with smoked salmon cheesecake gently baking in oven downstairs. ooooh baby. rich rich rich and creamy. holiday party food, ya know.

so now just back from the land of serious earrings, turquoise blue sparkled cowboy hats, endless layers of aztec incan mayan pueblo graduated patterned tea towels, psychedelic painted saints on punctured tin mobiles and rainbow sequined cowboy boots. yep, that's right. santa fe.

did the decadent thang and high-tailed it out of dodge for thanksgiving. just got out on the highway and headed south watching the rocky mountains melt into not so rocky mountains and then foothills and smooth rolling waves of sagebrush. down down down we drove leaving turkeys and green bean casseroles and candied yams in the distant dust and never looked back.

stayed in a dee-luxe hotel way beyond our typical motel 6 budget on some on-line promotional dealie. we were the economy car in the valet parking with plastic bag and backpack luggage, squeaking my ratty tevas with the hole in my sock against a shiny tiled lobby and leaving melted m&m handprints on the polished brass door handles. we were right downtown old town santa fe with the churches and the adobe narrow hilly windy rounded irregular shaped pedestrian blocks.

so many great restaurants packed in around galleries and gifty shoppes and hysterical historical wild west wooden board covered sidewalks. there's this slumgullian rainbow mix of colors and cultures and creatures and crap. red and gold coyotes and mosaic tiled running horses and twisted psychedelic lizards and turtles and pottery and paintings and paintings and paintings and photography and sculpture and handbags and postcards and jewelry and geodes and saints saints saints and crosses everywhere.

underneath everything is this beautiful and true dominant native american pueblo bass note presence which is sort of semi-smothered in a thick layer of imposed spanish colonialism, generously sprinkled with mexican highlights and huge thick chunky chunks of catholicism, while the whole thing is slathered in a wild west cowboy green and red chili sauce.

last time we ended up in santa fe completely by accident, and after a spin through bandelier national monument and this weird los alamos government thing with a ufo feeling amidst the ghosts of ancient culture cliff dwellings, we dropped down into the land of the oldest churches in north america and churches and churches and cathedrals and miraculous staircases and then we stumbled our way into the awakening and it was as if we had become caught up in some sort of cosmic spiral vortex.

this time one day we went to albuquerque to this fantastic circular underground native american pueblo cultural museum and then we scrambed up the side of a lava rock mountain covered in ancient petroglyphs smack in the middle of a subdivision. the next day we wandered around town and looked in galleries and went to the indian market where native people line up alongside the walls of the governor's palace on the plaza with their jewelry and pottery and beads and goodies displayed on blankets in the snow.

and then oh then we ate at Paul's. on marcy street. oh it's the place. blue corn crab cakes. saffron boulliabaise. cheesecake brulee. pear and pinon tart in coffee anglaise. oh my oh my oh yes yes yes.

yeah not our typical thanksgiving but oh so very very thankful.

so got an acholi bead party tomorrow night to sell some beautiful necklaces made by HIV positive african women out of strips of recycled magazines. very cool. and a good cause. and so i have been designated to bring the incredible edible smoked salmon cheesecake:

4 1/2 tbsp butter

1/2 cup dry bread crumbs

3/4 cup grated gruyere cheese

1 tsp minced fresh dill

1 medium onion, peeled and minced

28 oz cream cheese

4 eggs

1/3 cup half & half

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 pound smoked salmon, coarsely chopped (i just used lox tidbits)

preheat oven to 325. butter an 8 or 9 inch springform pan, using 1 1/2 tbsp of the butter. in a small bowl, combine bread crumbs, 1/4 gruyere and minced dill. toss to blend and sprinkle in prepared pan, tap to coat evenly. put in the fridge whiule doing the rest of the stuff.

in lidded skillet, melt remaining butter (3 tbsp) and add minced onion. cover and cook until the onion is soft and clear (stirring periodically).

blend cream cheese (i leave mine on top of the stove while the oven is preheating and doing everything else, so it gets nice and soft) until smooth. you can use a food processor or mixer. i just use a fork. add the eggs, the rest of the gruyere, the half & half, and the salt. blend and cream until smooooooth. stir in the cooked onion and all but about 2 tbsp of the salmon. pour into the previously prepared pan.

top with remaining salmon bits.

put the springform pan in a larger roasting pan with enough water to come about halfway up the sides of the springform pan. bake for an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and a half. turn off the oven and let the cheesecake cool with the door ajar for an hour. then move the pan to the rack and cool at room temperature before removing the sides of the springform pan. store in the fridge, but bring to room temp for at least an hour or two before serving.

oh yeah.

you can actually eat this in a wedge like a piece of cheesecake, but it is intense. i'm planning to put it out at the bead party with crackers and breads and little toasties. capers are a great garnish or optional condiment offering.

don't know from whence this recipe may have originated. i got it from a law firm receptionist. it's a great thing to bring to a potluck or buffet sort of spread.

but just try to keep five cats out of it.

posted by: limine at 23:32 | link | comments (2) |

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