the Mount Madonna Meditation Center, Santa Cruz Mountains

Began Hannah Sward’s memoir yesterday (postponing the reading of Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage). The fragmentary, episodic narrative is told in a child-like voice — works! It is deeply enthralling. The story oscillates between a father/poet who, when not running off to ashrams, reads his poetry in bookstores (impressive, though self isn’t sure how he makes a living) and a free-spirited mother in Florida who cycles between lovers and makes a living by selling tie-dyed shirts.

Baba, the new guru with the knotted beard, has inspired my dad to move across the continent to the Santa Cruz Mountains to live at his meditation center, Mount Madonna.

In the middle of winter we arrive at San Francisco Airport dressed in fur hats and wool scarves. A lady in a sari meets us. I don’t know if there will be other fourteen-year-olds.

I am given a Sanskrit name, Sumitra. It means ‘friends of all.’ Dad is Jai Per Kash. Even Alina and Alex can’t pronounce their new names. We have a cabin with an outhouse up a trail. The first night I stepped on a slug the size of a banana. Now in the night I pee in the bushes. We eat tofu with brown rice, no spices, homemade unsalted granola. I want sugar and meat and to go home.

This first Sunday we go down the mountain to Watsonville to chant and do laundry.

— Strip, a Memoir by Hannah Sward, p. 40

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #234: MESSAGES

Thanks to Wind Kisses for hosting this week and for coming up with the awesome prompt, MESSAGES!

Here are a few “message” pictures from self’s archives, all places in California:

• sign inside a restaurant in Mission San Miguel Arcangel, California Central Coast
• sign in the lobby of the San Jose Convention Center during Adam Savage’s SilCon 2022
• Fro-yo cup, downtown San Luis Obispo
• Sign commemorating the original Facebook Headquarters, Emerson Street, downtown Palo Alto
• Traffic sign, Kasten corner of Main Street, Mendocino Village

“Ship, Are There Any More Cookies?”

The ship You Sexy Thing has its own agenda! It is programmed to deliver the putated hijackers — the owner and staff of the Last Chance restaurant from TwiceFar Station — to IAPH (the International Association of Pirate Havens) but it has secretly decided: “not until I learn how to cook!”

Because, the whole time, Thing has been absorbing lessons from the chef and has been experimenting with meals, and then recording the emotions of the crew as they partake of its meals — hunger, pleasure — and this has become Thing‘s addiction.

Self feared, the first time she realized Thing had agency, that the book was entering HAL 1000/2001 Space Odyssey territory. Who knows, it still might veer that way. In the meantime, the crew has discovered that they have a stowaway: one of the twelve heirs to the Empress of the Hive Mind, a 17-year-old who was shipped to TwiceFar Station in a crate — Quel mystère! Good thing the chef decided to open the crate, just before the explosions that destroyed the station!

When One of Thing’s Passengers is a Five-Star Chef

This book is a wild ride!

P. S.: “It” is the ship. “Niko” is Nicolette Larson, proprietress of the TwiceFar Station restaurant Last Chance (Self’s brain keeps thinking of the singer with the same name, which is distracting)

Perhaps a good baseline would be to serve the meal that it had planned, and then elicit their feedback as thoroughly as possible . . .

It said, “Tell me what you want to eat. Then tell me how you want it presented.” It allowed the place settings to sink back down into the table’s surface, then the table decorations and napkins as well.

Niko said, “Very obliging of you. I would like a class five plant-based protein soup, spiced with flavonoids, toasted coriander seeds, and ground cumin at a ratio of four parts to five, and containing chickpeas or another class four legume. With that I will have class twenty-seven not milk and a plain wheat-based bread in cracker form. A simple white porcelain bowl and plate with basic human flatware.”

— You Sexy Thing, p. 101

Party in Fort Greene: Still Story #3 in SAFE PLACES

Loving the narrators in this collection — so far, all young women at loose ends, unsure of themselves and mostly just going with the flow.

This narrator lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Not too sure what she does for a living, but she makes enough to pay a very cheap rent, and to watch movies by herself. She meets a young man named Paul, and he invites her to a party at his place.

The next night I was in Fort Greene. It was less than two miles from Williamsburg, but I had to take the train to Manhattan and back to get there. Paul’s apartment was in the basement — cavernous with almost no light.

His roommate Ralph answered the door: “Oh hey, come on in. Paul told us all about you. Hey Paul,” he yelled, “she’s here.” It was the kind of party I hadn’t been to since high school in Portland: eight people sitting around with beer, listening to loud music. They even wore the same clothes: concert t-shirts and black pants, flannel shirts and Levis. The music playing was punk from the late 70s: the Jam, the Clash, the Buzzcocks. The friends — all guys and one loud brashy girl — were all jovial and trashed. “You want a beer?” one guy Mickey said.

— Safe Places: Stories, p. 35

“Fortune Tellers in Williamsburg” — Story # 3 in SAFE PLACES

Thank you, University of Massachusetts Press for publishing this book, self is enjoying it sooooo much!

My friend Farhad called me last year because he was sick from headaches and vomit, and no one knew what was wrong. No doctor could cure him. I read his leaves and I said, “Farhad, you will die in seven months if you do not stop eating so much lamb.”

Thursday Doors: Mendocino

For the second year in a row, self spent Christmas in Mendocino. She loves being in the tiny, picturesque village clinging to the headlands off US-1. Her favorite doors/haunts (L to R): Mendocino Chocolate Company on Main (the main store is in Fort Bragg); Corners of the Mouth organic grocery (in a re-purposed church, on Ukiah); a vintage store in downtown Fort Bragg; and the Garden Bakery, in an alley next to the Great Put-On clothing boutique on Albion.

Posting for No Facilities’ Thursday Doors.

Top Dialogue, Percival Everett, THE TREES

“How is the chili?” Jim asked.

“Do you like chili?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you will hate the chili. Catfish or burger?”

“Cheeseburger.”

“Do you like cheese?” Gertrude asked.

“Burger.”

“Wise choice. And what about you?” she asked Ed.

“Catfish.”

Gertrude came back with the food.

“That was fast,” Ed said.

“Luckily we’d already caught the fish,” she said.

Cellpic Sunday: Local Patisserie

Thanks to Journeys with Jonbo for hosting the Cellpic Sunday challenge.

A few days ago, self met a friend for lunch at Mademoiselle Colette, a local patisserie. They offer salads and soup of the day, plus croissants and brioches. Not to mention the most delicious cakes!

Love the little Christmas trees. She just had to take a picture.

Sentence of the Day: The Terror

Surgeons Stanley, Goodsir, Peddie, and McDonald recommended to Sir John that the men’s diet be changed — fresh food when possible (although there was almost none except polar bear possible in the dark of winter, and they had discovered that eating the liver of that great, ponderous beast could be fatal for some unknown reason) and, failing finding fresh meat and vegetables, cutting back on the men’s preferred salt pork and beef, or salted birds, and relying more on the tinned foods — vegetable soups and the like.

— The Terror, by Dan Simmons, pp. 70 – 71