Sep 20, 2011

Here is a place to begin. You are whoever you are, "Sheenasakai" or  "SheenaBaby" , apparently. I have only the screen name, along with the photo of a half-faced, one-eye young woman.The image is reminiscent of the Tai-chi symbol of eternity.  Perhaps, that was your intention.
     And so you threw out this note in a digital bottle, to drift across the algorithms, and in the space of a Max Planck millennium, it washes up on the beach of my interest.
     My interest is memory and here is my question: apparently, you were recently in love, then not. Something happened. Right now on 9/20/11 at 21:59 your revelation is that "love is short, forgetting is longer."  
     But does whatever pain you're in now deter you from falling in love again?  Probably not.  
     This is my point.The forgetting, no matter how slow, is already beginning.  You can't stop it.  In weeks or years, or lifetimes if you are so unlucky, you will lose this memory.  It will be no different than trying to remember a face you saw in the next car on the way home from work today. 
     And then sooner or later you will fall in love again, and it will be long or short but eventually it will falter, it will become a ruin, and worth a visit from time or time or not, but you'll remember the sensation of having been in love and the pain you felt until you forget, and you start all over again.
     This is not an argument against falling in love.  On the contrary.          And you know all this already anyway. I am merely reminding you.  I am merely a messenger whose message will last only as long as the next funding round for this site or until whenever.  
On December 9, 2009 I wrote an entry based on an article I read in a local newspaper in San Mateo.  The article was about a woman named Suzanne Caadium, a Stanford graduate and just then apparently homeless.  She'd also had a run-in with the police. I did some research, found out more about her, and added what details I could.

I've never met Ms. Caadium, but my blog has apparently become a kind of home base for those who know her.  Occasionally, people comment on the original story, or a subsequent one I wrote some months later.

Today, I received this anonymous message:  "This person is sick and needs help immediately so she cannot put her family thru hell any more!!!! Running from the law and your problems is not the answer Suzanne! You are not in the CIA nor any other gov group for that matter, you are a mom who left her children. Get Help.... "

I would only say that if I can help any of the people involved in this case, I would be glad to do it.

Sep 11, 2011

Beyond the planes hitting the towers, which so resembled a special effect, and even the buildings collapsing, the most indelible memories of 9/11 to me were the scenes of people jumping out of upper floor windows. Forced out by the infernal heat and perhaps also by the sheer horror around them. Forced out by what the body couldn't stand and what the mind wouldn't accept.

And so from time to time, sometimes in a dream, sometimes not, my mind holds fast to the thought of the couple stepping out into thin air hand-in-hand, or by the sight of the man in the Drew photo, the 'falling man' portrayed by the performance artist in the DeLillo novel.

Or there is the moment a policeman described to me once. A teenage boy with a gun sitting on stoop. This was in the docks of Marin. The policeman approaches the boy, tells him to put down the gun, but the boy is locked. The cop says what you're trained to say in such a situation. But at some point the boy and the cop realize that there is nothing to be done, the force of destiny or just a broken down mind, something has gone too far, and somewhere in that moment the boy kills himself.

Or the scenes that keep repeating, where you under the surface of the tsunami, where human life is deconstructed, and at the same time blown apart and held in place. the sea's plunder, and in that vast black realm of oil and junk, from a toothpick to a two-story house, inside the real Godzilla, the bodies: patients from the Sendai hospital; the elderly couple whose daughter came to the rescue but couldn't quite them into the car in time; fisherman floating inside their boats; a child inside a car