Bunnies. Now more than ever:

Yeah, I know: baby Holland Lops on the Internet.

But if you're having a week like mine wherein you've considered severing your femoral artery and/or viewing Dane Cook's stand-up, watching bunnies frolic ranks as a sentient choice.

Today is Charles Bukowski's birthday:

I've been celebrating by writing all day. And, of course, by getting blind drunk and nailing a once-beautiful woman with a now slightly large ass while the neighbors wail and break things.

And I offer my McSweeney's piece from 2004, "If Charles Bukowski Had Written Children's Books":

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/bukowski.html

The Whore Who Snored

Why is Grandpa Heaving?

The Years Will Fly Like Hummingbirds and One Gray Day You'll Die

Love Turns to Crap Like a Sandwich

The Alley Cat and the Wounded Dog Share Scraps of Bird and Dung

Uncle Hank's Sack of Empties

Wishbones Come from Chicken, Harlots Come from Hell

The Park Bench Where You Eat Your Lunch Will Be Your Bed Someday

Give Up Now


And, also, a laudatory and wry feature Roger Ebert wrote on Bukowski last year and posted again today on Twitter:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/pages-for-twitter/remembering-bukowski.html

Rest in peace, old man.

"Men can counsel...

...and speak comfort to that grief which they themselves not feel."--Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."--Iris Murdoch

If I take up meditation and choose...

...Bill Murray's line from Groundhog Day, "Morons, your bus is leaving" as my mantra, will it defeat the point?

In varying degrees, about New York:

1) Ephemeral New York ponders the lesser-known glories and horrors of New York. Richly curated; one of my favorites:

http://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/

2) I don't want a mosque at Ground Zero for the same reason I don't want a church or temple at Ground Zero: religion, along with poverty and illiteracy, fuels most wars and is a huge element of this one. Honor the 9/11 dead and their loved ones but keep the locale secular.

And for the record, I believe in an omniscient deity. But I don't think he/she/it/what-have-you thinks treating our existence like a team-choosing playground soccer match is a swell plan.

I've been writing the past few days straight...

...and because I had to scan photos for an upcoming feature, I went on a scanning bender.

While it's been a creatively invigorating summer, the rest of it, for reasons obvious and less so, has been difficult. Really enjoy that I'm writing the most I have in three years and it's been good to rendezvous with friends. The flip side is that the constant writing and deadlines aren't improving my health and the person I most want to spend time with, I can't.

So it was good to delve into pictures of better times and remember that they do come 'round again.

My condensed take on the week's news before I meet two dear friends for coffee:

• I've said this before, but unless gays stir plutonium into the mix, there's no way they're going to fuck up marriage as much as straights have. (Though, presumably, GLAAD isn't going to adopt this as a talking point.) Incredibly happy Proposition #8 was ruled unconstitutional. As for the yammering about judicial activism, as my mom (a retired attorney) put it yesterday, history has demonstrated repeatedly that the majority gets it wrong, i.e. with segregation, for example. That's why we have high courts.

• Not to get all basket-weaving, but if you remember being a little girl and hating that almost everyone in power was a white Protestant dude, Elena Kagan's confirmation resonates that much more so. Congrats to the five GOP senators who voted to confirm her and Senator Nelson, Democrat, from Nebraska, I get that you stuck to your convictions when you voted against Kagan. Your convictions, however, are inherently sexist.
  

Interviewing Mom and Dad today...

...for an upcoming piece.

Easy part? We're super-close.

Downside? If I fuck this up, I'll never hear the end of it.

My new essay, "The Mirror Maze", is at...

...The Nervous Breakdown now:

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/ldremousis/2010/08/the-mirror-maze/

Things are both more and less real tonight.

Again with the yin and the yang:

We celebrated Dad's 77th birthday and Mom and Dad's 46th anniversary (which was recently) in one big joyful amalgam yesterday and there was much banter and sumptuous food and it was a splendid, rejuvenating afternoon. (And my brother, who is reflexively hilarious, made one of his funniest comments maybe ever, but I'm not going to repeat it here. Also, he told me something deeply sweet, but that remains private, too.)

Today I can barely walk, which is hardly unprecedented, nor a big deal in the scheme of things. But in the last few hours I've read there were three more robberies at gunpoint near here, that my beloved Steve's Broadway News (a longtime Seattle lynch-pin) has closed, and that due to lack of funds, one of the city's largest shelter networks is broke and that 400 more homeless persons will have nowhere to go by the end of this week. All of which, in varying degrees, is horrifying.

A day in which an iced decaf americano and writing will have to do the trick.

On my way home:

Certain things are returning to normal.

Dropped by the Seattle Weekly offices late yesterday afternoon to turn in the updated freelancer contract. I'm completing my newest essay for The Nervous Breakdown right now and I received another assignment from Nerve that's due soon and all of this pleases me tremendously. I've always derived great joy from my work and know how lucky I am to say it and mean it.

Feel disoriented and dislocated most of the time, though, and it's compounded by those who want this to be something it's not. And, of course, by the fact I don't leave the house unless I'm properly dressed and when I'm out with others I say reasonably funny things and present an approximation of a person who doesn't know irrefutably that part of her is dead, too.

But the writing is going very well and, as I said, I really can't emphasize how grateful I am. The rest will follow eventually, I know.

From top to bottom:

After I left the Seattle Weekly offices and started heading northeast, I saw this poor creature on 1st Ave. and Pike in front of Pike Place Market. As Seattleites know but others might not, this is one of the city's most populated intersections, with constant, dense traffic and ceaseless pedestrians. The horse seemed weary and crushed. I loathe these companies: animals shouldn't be ridden on city streets.

Free skates offered on Harrison in between Belmont and Summit. Bemused by the sign's text message spelling ("sk8s").

A few yards further down the hill on Harrison, an absolutely stunning flower. One of my guy friends once teased me the reason he loves me is, "You're not one of those girls who knows all the names of plants and makes a big deal out of it." Which is true, though in this case I wish it weren't. A gorgeous creation simply springing from the ground.

Oh, Twitter:

It's not yet 10:00 a.m. PST and I've been recommended by two colleagues and excoriated by a racist porn actress.

Doing my job right, I suppose.

The latest on the XMRV retrovirus...

...and its potential danger to the blood supply.

From the Wall Street Journal, July 26th:

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/07/26/fda-advisory-committee-to-hear-about-xmrv-working-groups-research/

Break out the Doc Martens! My new Seattle Weekly piece on the book Grunge Seattle...

...and the author event tonight at Moe Bar is up now. This one's online only:

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/reverb/2010/07/book_signing_with_justin_hende.php

I'm unsure why Oliver Stone aligns himself...

...with the left because if the hateful things he spewed came from the right, he'd be apoplectic. Under the auspices of presenting history from an internationalist point of view, which is honorable, he attacks Jews, which is deplorable. Stone proves it's possible to be a well-read idiot:

http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/oliver-stone-jews-dominate-media-19557?page=0,0

Getting drunk off dessert:

My new post for KOMO 4's Capitol Hill blog:

http://capitolhill.komonews.com/content/starbucks-olive-summit-soon-booze

One of the galleries nearby frequently hosts live music...

...(despite the fact they're not zoned for it, but okay, fine) and in the summer, when all our windows are open, it sounds like the stage is in my living room.

In a city that has launched so many great and good musicians, I keep hoping I'm going to hear an incipient Death Cab or Blue Scholars or Visqueen.

So far? A sonic approximation of dogs fucking cats, only not so interesting.

You think it can't get worse re BP but it does:

They had disabled the rig's alarm system a year before the explosion.

From today's Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072302515.html

Two things I've heard repeatedly in the past nine and a half months that are completely fucking true:

1) There is a shared language and sensibility among those who have been through it, a shorthand, and it helps sustain you.

As I've written of before, TJ's was the 30th funeral I'd been to. (I have a large family and social circle and it stands to reason the more loved ones you have, the more you will lose. Also, because I learned from my mom how to respond in crisis, over the years others have asked me to accompany them to their loved ones' funerals and, of course, I did.)

I was familiar with grief and loss but had never experienced anything remotely as powerful or catastrophic as TJ's death, including the loss of my health when I was 24. Just as my life is organically divided before and after CFIDS, so it is with his death, only a million times more so.

And as I've written of dozens of times, I've been incredibly fortunate and moved by loved ones, colleagues, acquaintances and near-strangers who have reached out to me. I'm tenacious by nature, but there have been days I've thought the force and near-ceaselessness of the pain would break me. And it's then someone who has lived through it (and with it, as it takes different form in time but never goes away) says, as if on cue, "One day his death won't be the first thing you think of ten seconds after you wake up" or "It's the little things that'll catch you off-guard, like seeing his favorite foods in the grocery store" or "At this stage you feel like you're not going to get through it, but you will" or one my favorites, sent by a dear friend in all caps, "FUCK ANYONE WHO EXPECTS YOU TO GRIEVE ON THEIR SCHEDULE" and I feel loved and less alone and understood and, perversely, lucky. Lucky to have such insightful people in my life.

2) Within hours of receiving confirmation of TJ's death from the Chelan County Sherriff's Office, both my brother and one of my best friends, Tim, each of whom have been incredibly kind and empathetic--unfortunately, they'd each experienced horrific loss--warned me there are individuals who barely knew the dead but this won't stop them from seeking attention for knowing the dead, even if the connection was tangential, because they are strange and sad and they think this is the only thing for which they might receive attention and they will revel in it.

My brother and Tim were right.

What it means to have CFIDS:

At my high school reunion on Saturday evening, I stood for five hours. I used the cane (I've been back on it since April) and drank plenty of water and moved around in the course of the event, obviously, and had eaten lean turkey and veggies before my friend picked me up. When you look at the photos, I don't look sick and, indeed I received several compliments that night. (I only mention it as it relates here.)

It's now 3:10 on Wednesday afternoon and I've been able to leave my home for an hour and forty-five minutes total since my friend dropped me off later Saturday night: Sunday I made it across the street to pick up dinner and an iced decaf americano, returned and ate in bed; Monday I ran errands on Broadway and in 45 minutes, the symptoms hit so severely I barely made it to my last stop--oh, irony of ironies--at the health food store to pick up more high-grade multi-vitamins; yesterday the pain completely immobilized me--and if you know me, you know I have a very high tolerance for pain--and I could barely sit up, much less get dressed and leave here. I'm clothed now and about to depart to the south part of the neighborhood on an errand. I'll need the crutches to get there.

Like all of us, I have issues. Discipline is rarely a tripwire, though. During the aforementioned block of time, I've read the book I'm reviewing for the Seattle Weekly, nearly finished said (admittedly short) feature and completed half of my latest essay for The Nervous Breakdown. I sent off a new list of pitch ideas to Esquire.com, returned emails, cooked meals and unloaded the dishwasher. Next month makes 19 years since I became ill and I've been vastly sicker than this. And again, if you know me, you know I have perspective: a close friend's sister has brain cancer for fuck's sake and I just read another piece about the seemingly endless war in Congo--a mother saw all three of her sons die in front of her--and I only have to look at the schizophrenic man who lodges himself at the outdoor tables at Top Pot during the summer to know the boundless ways in which I'm lucky.

My health just isn't one of them.