Tuesday night I went to a great July 4 party, a casual fundraiser for Pan Left. It was right at the base of A Mountain, where the firewords get launched from. Great music, lots of cool people, and right after the fireworks ended, another summer monsoon storm kicked up and dumped rain. Luckily there were various tent-thingies set up for the party, so the band played on, kicking out CCR's "Who'll Stop the Rain" while many crazy Tucsonans danced with joy at the rare liquid falling from the sky. I got out there and got wet but eventually felt cold and went under the audience tent which soon got moved to be right next to the band tent. Several songs later the dancing turned into mud wrestling. I abstained from that, but it was hilarious to watch and I got some good photos.

James, whose house it was that was hosting the party, was the leader of the band, Pat Riot and the Flaggots. The rhythm section is also in a local band called Golden Alphabet, if that connects to anybody's personal network out there (only 2 or 3 Tucsonans, none of them particularly into the music scene, read this thing, that I know of, so I don't know why I'm bothering, but oh well). Anyway, they were awesome. They had some very creative country/bluegrass covers, like one of "I Want You To Want Me" by Cheap Trick.

Anyway, it was a great last night in Tucson for me. Yesterday I flew to Portland for the start of my odyssey down the west coast. It is chilly and overcast here, but I welcome that now as a break from the tripledigit swelter of Tucson, for a bit (i'll still be disappointed if its like this every day), and I'm so happy to be here. I'm staying with my friends Mykle and Gesine and I'm excited about hanging out with them and all my other friends. My screening is this Saturday at St. Francis Church.

Still so much drama, over the telephone now, soap opera or an imagined part of it continuing, causing worry and fear, then receding, being recognized as wild conclusions jumped to from ignorance of the full facts. Hopes and fears battling to the death with rationales and justifications.

Thank God, or whatever part of us we feel is Eternal*, that she's going to be somewhere with no phones and no cellphone reception and no internet, out in a forest in Virginia, for the next week so we can both get some kind of clear thinking and reflecting done. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Feelings is causing major havoc.

I feel like we're both blindfolded in a huge dark room feeling around for something, I don't even know what I'm looking for (for the door or for her?), and I'm yelling to her asking where the door is but she doesn't know either and she also doesn't know where she is and she keeps yelling out reminding me of that, which just makes me even more lost.

And I always complain about drama and everyone pretty much complains about it but how many people really secretly like it? I bet there's a lot, probably the ones who complain the loudest about it. Maybe I'm even one of them. Maybe it's just another thing to consume, something else to use to try desparately to fill the aching empty howling void in our souls gouged out by our sick society.

Meanwhile during all this distraction I still have work to do and various errands to complete before I leave town in 2 days and goddamit I totally forgot to make a call I needed to make before the end of the day. dammit dammit dammit.

Oh and in other news did y'all know that Rod Coronado's 40th birthday is today?

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* I copped this idea, which I love, paraphrased it from something Ethan Hawke said in the movie "Before Sunset": "They're (some monks he met at a monastery) trying to live with God, or whatever part of them they feel is eternal."

As I mentioned yesterday, Jessica and I camped out in the desert Friday night and then got up at sunrise to gather the fruit of the saguaro cactus. Photos are now on my Flickr page.

It was a really fun and new experience for me. Iconic of Arizona, the saguaro is still a really strange plant to me even after I've lived here for 8 months. In the spring, little green pods start growing on their tops, and then big white waxy flowers bust out, and then the flower dry out and in June the pods turn sort of reddish and they start cracking open. They'll do this until the summer monsoon rains really get going.

So people have been going out and harvesting. I expressed interest in it recently and so Jessica took me to a place she knew. It was really cool and fun, and it was great to be out there first thing in the morning as the sun rose. It's sort of a neat couple thing to do, because it's really a teamwork thing. one person to wield a long pole, usually 2 pieces of cactus rib (the bone-like structures of the saguaro that is left over after it dies and dries up) tied together with twine to form a long enough tool, and one person to hold a bucket. The pole person gently taps and nudges at a ripe fruit pod until it breaks off and then the bucket person catches it. Sometimes the gooey fruit inside comes out as it falls and splatters all over, so in the end we were both spattered with little gobs of dark red goo. It's a pretty sensual fruit - a really juicy pulpy mass about the size of a large strawberry, inside the green-red rind/shell, full of crunchy little seeds, and really sweet, getting sweeter as the season progresses. They also dry out a little and get easier to eat as the summer goes on.

I'm really glad we went, it was a really nice thing to do together on our last morning before we were to part for 30 days. Anyway, check out the cool pics.

Well, it's weird, there's so many people leaving town lately, people I know in the community here. I've never encountered this before, this ridiculous summer exodus. I'm leaving in 4 more days, I timed my departure so I could go to a big anti-July 4 party that should be fun, but I wish I could split now. I just feel deserted and lonely. I have a friend who always tries to hang up the phone first when ending a call, so that she doesn't have to hear that lonely click and then silence when the other person hangs up. I feel like I'm sitting there with the phone in my hand listening to that click and that silence. The subculture, the scene, whatever, just hung up on me.

Reminds me of something Daniela said the other night: "There were times when I thought the Universe broke up with me."

Jessica's gone. She left for Flagstaff this morning. The nice thing is that we spent the night in the desert and then harvested saguaro fruit at sunrise (a really nice and amazing experience which I will blog about later with photos), then went back home and did some more fun stuff quickly and then, she drove off. I won't see her for a month. She's going to a family get-together, then going to the Earth First! Rendezvous in Virginia, and then on a river rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. And after that, when she's back and i'm back, things will be hopefully really really different - at least in my head. If they're not, I fear that I may have to leave Tucson for good. The soap opera is continuing, and at this point I feel like it will be unbearable (There's even a geographic ground zero for the soap opera, it's the hippie-bubble neighborhood of Tucson called Dunbar-Spring - and she just signed the lease on an apartment there! arrrgh!!).

But In a big way, this break is a big blessing. I need to get over her, get over a lot of things that have me in a funk lately, and get on with my life. And this absence and travelling will help with that immensely. Need to get OUT of here and clear my head. and heart.

But for now I have 4 nights to spend alone in her house. Her housemates are out of town too. I moved out of my place yesterday and put all my stuff in storage for my trip. Really needed to get out of that place anyway. That's another whole blog entry. But anyway, it seemed like a convenient thing to do, and in a way it'll be nice, having their place to myself, but it'll be sad, too. In retrospect I should have crashed at someone else's. oh well.

Luckily there's still quite a bit going on around here to keep me occupied. The people left behind are still working away on cool stuff. Dry River has a new space and we have a meeting to talk about the focus of the space and what we've learned from the old location over the past 8 months. There are 2 parties tonite, and then the party on the 4th, another meeting tommorrow night, and of course I have all sorts of paid and unpaid digital chores to do for various people and groups, and some last preparations for my trip. Sigh. If I can just stay busy till I get on the plane wednesday...

I'm sitting on the deck on the roof of this house I've been living in for 7 months, drinking the last mojito I will probably ever drink here and watching a lightning storm out west in the Tucson Mountains. Lightning storms are insanely great here.

shit, it's raining. i better get this laptop inside.

I subsituted the laptop for a guitar, a shitty acoustic guitar that a friend gave me a couple weeks ago. it needs the moisture. i've never owned an acoustic before. It's crazy considering that I first started playing guitar 20 years ago. 20 years. anyway it made more sense to play slide guitar blues while watching the lightning than to blog. now the storm seems to have passed beyond vision.

it's easy to forget that the start of a big adventure is a week away. I'm going to portland, and then all the way down the west coast to show my sad, shocking, horrifying documentary to people in 5 different cities. And to see good friends every step of the way. And to prove to myself I've done enough? To "close" my obligations to this issue? Probably not. But I have to do it, and it will somehow be a fun adventure too, won't it?

The world is so fucked, and yet life is so very very good, as Derek Jesnsen says.

For some of us. Did you know that in India "Since 1997, more than 25,000 farmers have committed suicide, many drinking the chemical that was supposed to make their crops more, not less, productive."?

Well, just to really briefly update anyone who read the last entry and really cares: Things are much better. I am sleeping more or less normally (for me) now, I'm not sick, and I'm not a nervous wreck. Still sad, but at least I can function, I think. Things are weird enough and fluid enough and personal enough that I can't really go into much more here. Let's just say that a lot has been figured out, things are good (much better than they looked like they'd be), but expectations are low, which is keeping me sane.

One thing I can say that I've resolved from this experience is that I really want to make it a priority sometime soon to start taking better care of myself, physically and mentally. When I get back in town in August I'm planning to do a lot of work on things like my diet, excercise, meditation, maybe even therapy. I've been neglecting personal improvement and maintenence of myself in favor of trying to improve the world, way out of proportion to what is healthy, and this has caught up with me in a big way. It's time to find some balance.

I've never really had much trouble sleeping in my life. I know I blogged before about how I was waking up earlier and earlier, but it wasn't really insomnia. I felt healthy, I felt like I was getting as much sleep as I needed or wanted, and I was doing sleep the Taoist way, so, cool.

Well, now I definitely have a problem. Full-fledged can't-sleep-at-all problem. Maybe it's getting better. Last night I actually slept from about 11:30 to 4:30, with a gap of about an hour, or it felt like an hour, sometime in the middle. so, 4 hours. That's not bad. But Monday through Wednesday nights I only got about 2 or 3 hours of sleep. Why? Because this relationship that I've had for 3 months - that I've been annoying you all with on this stupid blog - it's ending. Yes, already. And that is driving me crazy.

(and speaking of annoying, if you're annoyed, just skip it. That's why I have categories on this thing. If it says "Personal" and you don't want personal, just fuck off and skip it, ok?)

All my life I usually zonk out a few minutes after hitting the pillow. It's so weird to now have insomnia. I never had to TRY to sleep. It was something to be resisted, that just happened. But now I have to WORK at it. Last night I managed to sleep better using basically zen meditation and breathing techniques to empty my mind and relax. I'm worried that with so little sleep i'm going to get sick. I always seem to have the luck of getting sick right before going travelling. It sucks. I also have this nervous fluttering stomach thing like, most of the day since Monday. It feels like when I'm overwired on coffee or yerba mate, but I've been drinking almost zero caffeine or maté for almost a week now. So I know this is psychological, and stress related. I have found this morning that it helps to repeat a little mantra about her that I won't write here. Not that it's mean or spiteful, just a truth that I have previously ignored, an idea to comfort me and convince me that it should end and it's ok.

But this sucks and hurts so much. I just want to get over this and move on. Could I just fast forward 2 weeks or so? goddammit.

Yesterday was another late-afternoon monsoon. It was beautiful and it made me really happy. It was kind of cool that the monsoon made it get dark a couple hours early, on the longest day of the year.

It's funny, I think I blogged before, or at least talked to friends about it, that I often wondered how long it would take me to appreciate rain and clouds, like Jessica, who wakes up and looks out the window in the morning hoping to see at least one cloud in the sky. Psychologically scarred by the excessive rains of Portland, I didn't think I would ever get happy at the approach of dark storm clouds. Or I thought it would at least take some years. But no, it took about 8 months. I got really happy to see the monsoon, the blowing wind, the lightning, the dramatic roiling clouds. I rode my bike around in it singing joyously and smiling at the rainbows and the simultaneous sun and rain drops.

I really needed some cheering up. I've been really sad and upset lately. I won't write about it here. It's too soap opera...

I absolutely cannot believe how like a soap opera this little activist community/scene is here in Tucson. It frankly just infuriates and disgusts me. There are these busybodies that make it their business to stick their judgmental noses into other people's business when they have no right to do that at all. It's like other small, insular communities, I guess, like some little rural farm town. Lots of gossiping and moralizing and semisecret recriminations, evil looks at the supposed transgressor as if they wear a scarlet letter. And just downright infantile, immature behavior. When was the last time you've heard of a grown adult couple, children in tow, running, not just even walking, but literally running out of a party when someone that one of them perceives to have harmed their relationship also arrives there? I mean, is this real, or some film set, and I wasn't given the script? WTF?!?

It actually maybe would make a pretty interesting movie. And I do mean movie, not film, if you know what I mean.

I wish I could write in detail with all the names and exactly what has been going on. Maybe someday I will. But I certainly never wanted to be part of it, even though now I certainly am. I remember 6 months ago when i first started becoming aware of it, being so glad I was not in it. So glad I had not acted on any impulses that would embroil me in this cesspool of jealousy and dysfunction. Now I sort of have, I guess, and I am in it. I wish I could write a huge expos