Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside…

I am writing this from Dillon Beach, CA.

There is a house here that we have rented many, many times. It belongs to--bear with me--the family of the first wife (deceased) of my father’s college roommate and fraternity brother. Technically this is the second iteration of this house. The original house finally just got too dilapidated to keep up, so they razed it and built a new one. The new house has all the modern amenities, so there’s not really any reason to complain about it, except that I do miss the smell of the old house. It was kind of ocean-y and slightly musty/mildew-y and dusty and unique, and if you try really hard there’s a certain place in the downstairs hall where you can still catch a whiff of that in the early hours of the morning.

It’s nostalgic. Fight me.

I mean, I also enjoy that slightly decaying estuary smell, so read into that what you will.

The nostalgia goes farther than a smell, though. My parents honeymooned here in 1979. We vacationed here many times during my childhood. I had my ‘Golden Birthday’ here when I turned 13 on the 13th. (All of that was in the old house, natch.) We spent Christmas here two years ago, our first experience in the new house.

I plan to retire here. Not to this specific house, obviously, but to Dillon Beach nonetheless. Just me, and the fog, and the ocean, and a rescued greyhound. Or two. There has always been something about this particular beach that has enthralled me, completely independent of the people to whom I am inevitably shackled when I’m here. It’s moody. It’s insistent. The tides are temperamental. So are the crabs. They stare at you with their little beady eyes and dare you to stick your finger in their little hideouts in the crevices in the rocks.

Don’t do it. Just trust me on this one.

Dillon Beach actually has some amazing tidepools. The unfortunate part about them is that they’re really only accessible and impressive during a zero- or minus-tide. The lowest the tide got for me these last few days was about a 2.5, which is sadly insufficient for proper tidepooling. I was able to ogle some lined shore crabs and plenty of hermit crabs, and tickle a few anemones, but the giant starfish were out of reach. We had dolphins on day one--four or five of them quite close in--but we only saw them that day. Two dead jellyfish, dinner plate sized, were rolling around in the surf. Lots of broken shells, kelp bits, and other assorted oceanic detritus. Birds. Surfers. Fishermen.

Wave noise.

Still, I persisted in going out at the low tides to sit on a rock, stare at the water, and just try to breathe. There’s something about the overwhelming and constant rumble of the waves that lends itself rather nicely to quieting the mind, though we all know from last week just how sparklingly successful I am at that at any given point. It helped, though. Sort of. Until I’d get distracted and start looking for crabs, anyway.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Pacific Ocean in more northern (or southern, depending upon which way you travel from the Equator) latitudes, it is FUCKING COLD. People surf at Dillon, and they swim, but it’s not as though it’s particularly comfortable. Also, you’re taking your life into your hands, as the place is a hotbed of Great White sharks and if they’re feeling curious or hungry, you’re likely to end up as shark chow. No, thank you. I only go in about as far as my knees, usually, and that’s plenty enough aquatic activity for me, thanks. I’m sure as a child I threw caution to the wind and frolicked merrily in the waves, but older and wiser me would prefer to keep her limbs intact.

Since it’s still summer for a couple of weeks yet, the weekend of our visit saw the beach parking lot full to bursting with beachgoers and their kiddiewinks and their dogs and their assorted beach paraphernalia. I honestly don’t remember ever seeing the place so packed. Of course, knowing my parents, we only ever came up during lower traffic times. Dillon used to be a tiny podunk unknown, but the whole little village has changed immensely over the years. The tiny store got a major facelift and carries all the frou-frou-lah-di-dah brands now--all organic and local and whatever. The ‘resort’, which used to be a row of dilapidated cabins interspersed with spaces for trailer or RV hookups available to rent, is now much more uniform manufactured cabins. You have to pay to park at the beach now.

The post office still looks like shit, though.

Even with this (really very mild) gentrification, I love the place. I love its quiet and its unpredictable weather and its layer of sticky salt residue. I love its isolation. I love its quirkiness.
 
It’s my place.

Monkey Mind vs Monkey Mouth

I have trouble quieting my mind. Most people do. Everyone extolls the value of meditation from the metaphorical rooftops, but they usually fail to tell you how excruciatingly difficult it actually is. Even if you practice. Even if you go to a class specifically geared toward that sort of thing. Even if you have an app.

My brain runs on a minimum of two tracks at once. This, believe it or not, is a vast improvement. Prior to my ‘mind meds’ my brain was the equivalent of a squirrel in front of a quickly approaching vehicle; everything was everywhere all at once. It was a mental Grand Central Station up there, trains coming in and out at an alarming rate, all bound for different destinations.

If two trains enter a tunnel, each traveling at a different speed having left the same point of departure at different times, and one of them is carrying carload after carload of angry crows and the other is hauling a giant rainbow umbrella, sixteen tons of biodegradable glitter, a baby alligator dressed as Mickey Mouse, and a partridge in a pear tree, at what time will the trains reach Poughkeepsie?

Full disclosure, I just gave myself palpitations writing that. That used to be my brain all the time. Now it’s more like, “I’m listening to you talk about the company re-brand, but also making a mental grocery shopping list for when I stop at Trader Joe’s on the way home.” Much more manageable. Thank you, modern medicine. But there are still times when my rails open up to more trains of thought, and sometimes the normal two can be pretty frenetic, and that’s where the whole ‘learn how to shut it all up’ comes in.

And I’m lousy at it.

I have the paid version of the Headspace app, and it’s a great app. (I had been using the free version of another meditation app, but I had to switch because the woman who did the talking had inconsistent consonants. Take the word ‘feet’, for instance. Sometimes she would enunciate the ‘t’ at the end, and sometimes she would glottalize it, and you never knew which one was going to happen and I became hyper aware of this and started listening for linguistic variations instead of breathing. Yes, I know. But it was super distracting!) Anyway, Headspace is fine, as long as you stick with it (and I don’t because I’m lazy) but it still doesn’t solve the problem even when I am using it religiously. I know that the whole point is supposed to be tuning in and noticing when your brain goes down a rabbit hole and gently pulling it back and repeating that ad nauseum, but I’m terrible at it and I get mad at myself which defeats the whole purpose of the exercise and then we’re back where we started.

::throws up hands in disgust::

To a point, though, I’m grateful to have this particular problem isolated quite literally in my head. It’s one thing to have a racing mind. It’s another thing to have it all come out of your mouth non-stop.

I’m talking about the ol’ verbal diarrhea. The incessant chatter to fill the space where blissful silence could exist instead. People who were inoculated with phonograph needles. (Hoo, that’s a reference the youth of today won’t comprehend.)

I’ve known plenty of chatty people in my life. I don’t actually mind it, to a point, because it means that I don’t have to do the talking myself. I have a couple of friends that I can just sort of switch on and let go, and they talk until they’re done, or until I say, “Hey, you’re exhausting. Can we be done now?” And they’re lovely and they get it and they stop. Well, mostly. There’s only so much one can fight one’s own nature. So no, I don’t mind a degree of ‘monkey mouthery’. What I do mind is when Chatty Cathy can’t (or won’t) read the room. Then we have a problem.

A problem I would ideally solve with a pair of socks, or possibly some duct tape.

Moral: I need to be better at closing my mental train depot from time to time for regular maintenance. Focus on the breath, Faz. Just keep breathing. Acknowledge the 10:37 to Neverland, but don’t board. Don’t follow the Questing Beast. Do not pass ‘Go’, do not collect $200.

And we’re breathing...and we’re breathing...and we’re breathing...

-ose

The biological suffix -ose is used to form the names of sugars. You know the big players: fructose, glucose, sucrose, etc. When you see it on the label on a food package you know what you’re in for--sweet stuff.

What you may not know about the ubiquitous -ose, however, is that it is a two-timing weasel of a thing hellbent on making my jeans too tight.

Yes, like many people, I have a relationship with sugar which at times can be positively unhealthy. I crave sweet stuff. I overindulge. I frequently say “Damn the consequences!” only to be reminded that the consequences are really quite damnable.

I have been known to eat cake icing straight from the tub.*

I know it’s not good. Well, it tastes good, but it’s not so good in the long run for, I don’t know, pick a clinical study.

“Just try to avoid it.”

“Find alternatives.”

“Quit cold-turkey. It worked for Oprah! ...That one time…”

Avoidance, you say? Well yes, that’s an option. Avoiding overly-processed foods with myriad added sugars is definitely a good way to cut down on one’s sugar intake. This is my preferred method, and for the most part it is reasonably successful. You are still able to indulge in naturally occurring sugars like those in fruit, which helps curb the cravings. The thing is, when you start reading the labels, you begin to realize just how much sugar gets put into everyday staples you might not have thought about, like bread. If you’re eating a good whole-grain-type of bread regularly you’re likely to cancel some of that sugar out with the fiber in the bread...but that’s only if you’re not me and you don’t get depressed and eat a stack of toast as tall as your head.

Alternatives can be a slippery slope. You can trade out your processed white sugar for coconut sugar or beet sugar or other natural sugars, but you’re not actually getting rid of the problem. You’re just sticking a ‘natural’ label on it. It’s misleading. Sugar substitutes can help, yes, but personally I don’t find them to be much good for anything other than putting in my coffee. I know they say you can bake with Splenda, but I find it to be sweeter than actual sugar, so between the two I’ll pick plain old white sugar for my chocolate chip cookies any day.

I don’t know how ‘cold turkey’ came to mean what it does in regard to nixing habits. Did the Pilgrims look at each other on the fifth morning after the first Thanksgiving and just go, “Fuck this shit, we’re not eating any more of that damn bird”?

Many of us take comfort in food. We eat our feelings. Society revolves around food--we eat at every major milestone party in life. We eat at every non-major milestone party in life. Food brings people together. Have you ever seen a movie where a character dies and someone doesn’t bring a casserole to their grieving widow/er?

Seriously. It’s always casserole. Why is it always casserole?!

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that food is more than a means to stay alive. When we were killing mastodons with our bare hands, no one was thinking about cake. Now that there are no mastodons to kill and Joe from down the street drives for DoorDash, we can have cake at 2am if we want it. Food is plentiful, quick, convenient, and full of stuff that isn’t great for us, but we blame the traffic or the kids’ soccer schedule or just being tired and we eat what we can get our hands on. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great, either. Well, it’s pretty terrible if all you eat is processed crap. Try a salad. I promise it won’t kill you.

As for me, food is definitely a way to express my feelings.

“I love you, therefore I am feeding you.”

“I feel like shit, so I am going to sit here and cry and eat ice cream out of the carton.”

“It’s your birthday! Let’s get drunk and have cake!”

Hoo, there’s another one--the amount of sugar in alcohol. Well, we’ll leave that for another day.

Moral: I need to be better about my sugar consumption, and am therefore outing myself as a sugar addict. I’m going to be better!

::walks to fridge::

::grabs Rainbow Chip icing she had delivered via friend last Friday night when she was drunk, and a spoon::

What? I’m not going to let it go to waste.



*Yes, yes, I know, I know. But my Friday nights my entire first year of college consisted of the six-hour BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries, a tub of Pillsbury vanilla, and a spoon. I was super exciting.

Never Break the Chain

I have successfully started an ongoing, play-when-you-feel-like-it tic-tac-toe game on the whiteboard in the office break room.

I drew up the grid, threw an X on it, wrote “O’s Move” at the top, and went on about my day. I honestly didn’t expect anyone to actually play, or if they did, for it to continue past one game--but it’s still going. We’re well into week two and somehow the novelty hasn’t worn off.

Do you ever start something just because you feel like it, in the hope that it will continue after you’ve moved on to something else? I’m not talking legacy planning or anything, I just mean weird little things like holding the door, and then the next person holds it, and on and on and on until you’ve been home from the library for three hours but they’re still going strong over there.

It probably never goes on that long, really, but you know what I mean.

A while back I started doing something a little more meaningful than tic-tac-toe in the hope that whoever followed in my wake would pay it forward. It started as a sort of hybrid offering to the Traffic Gods to ensure my safe passage and just something I thought would be a nice gesture. Whenever I have to drive over a toll bridge, I pay for the person behind me.

I don’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter if the car behind me looks like it miraculously survived being in Dresden during the war, or if it’s a swanky BMW being driven by some dude who looks like the poster child for the jet set, they get paid for. It is always my hope that whoever is behind me will take the opportunity of the unexpected boon of having their way paid to do the same for the person behind them and so on down the line. In a perfect world it would go on forever. Obviously that ideal outcome won’t ever come to pass, but it’s a nice thought.

I think.

I mean, it’s a significantly nicer pursuit of a chain reaction than those gawdawful chain emails that used to be a thing back in the early days of the Interwebz. And before that, they came in the mail. Like, the actual mail. On paper. In envelopes. With stamps and everything! Actually, I encountered an instance of the old pen-and-paper style chain letter having something of a resurrection not too long ago. A friend’s daughter who was six or seven at the time (this was a year or two back) got one in the mail--the actual mail--but there was a twist to it. Instead of the usual ‘send this to seven thousand friends by the next full moon or you’ll never get that date with Brad Pitt you want so desperately’, this one was stickers. I mean, it was catering to the under-ten crowd, so stickers are way more appropriate than celebrity crushes (and it’s not like any self-respecting modern seven-year-old actually knows who Brad Pitt is, anyway). The premise was Pyramid Scheme 101: Send six of your friends six sheets of stickers each, and in six weeks you should have thirty-six sheets of stickers! At least it was similar to that. Anyway, my friend is sitting there telling me about this goofy thing and I was like, “Please tell me you’re not giving in to this nonsense,” and she said, “But she was so excited to get something in the mail!”

At that point I gave up, because how are you supposed to argue about an excited six year old and a bunch of stickers?

I can’t help thinking about the Butterfly Effect--except in my mind it’s the Sterling Archer version:

“[The] Butterfly Effect. You know. A butterfly in Africa lands on a giraffe’s nose, the giraffe sneezes, that spooks a gazelle, the gazelle bonks into a rhinoceros, and the rhinoceros blindly stampedes into a phone booth, calls New York somehow and says, ‘Hey, go kill this idiot Ron for a suitcase,’ because the rhinoceros speaks English.”

It’s certainly a more interesting version than, “Elizabeth has to cross a bridge so she pays for the car behind her, and then they do the same, and so on down the line.” If I could get hold of a butterfly, a giraffe, a gazelle, and a rhino, maybe I’d start trying to instigate good deeds that way myself.

Or, you know, just carry on as I have been and not get banned from the zoo.

But where’s the fun in that?

And then everything happens at once.

I’m just going to apologize right now--this week’s post is going to be short.

Last Wednesday, Blossom (my pink-eyed Marten fancy rat) had an attack of exacerbated mycoplasma. There can be a number of reasons for this, and in the past, when this has happened to one of my rats in such a quick and dramatic fashion, we have taken a quick trip to the emergency vet and let them go. Timing didn’t allow for that this time around, which turned out to be a blessing. I pumped Blossom full of antibiotics (I keep them at home) on Wednesday night and went to work Thursday morning, fully anticipating the dreaded vet trip on my return Thursday afternoon.

To my utter surprise, when I got home on Thursday I found Blossom not curled into a ball, fluffed up, and laboring to breathe, but sitting at the bottom of the cage eating a piece of kibble, looking at me as if to say, “Hi, Mom. Why are you home early?”

This is highly unusual. I was floored. I have never had a rat bounce back like this. Now, this is not to say that Blossom is completely out of the woods--far from it. She’s still on the meds and her breathing is shallow. If you listen to her chest you hear the congestion, the rasp. She’s making a honking sound. I know we don’t have much time left, but as long as she’s eating and acting more or less like a normal rat, I’m going to let her go on as she is until it’s obvious that something needs to be done.

I’m really grateful to have the extra time with her.*

And then, just as I’m settling into the idea that I’ve got a while longer with Blossom and the world is tilting back onto its axis, some pathetic excuse for a human being decides to indulge in a ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ exercise at the Gilroy Garlic Festival.

Gilroy is my home town.

At this point, everyone I know who still lives in the area is accounted for. At most recent count (Monday 7/29, 9am-ish) three were killed and fifteen injured.

Was I surprised that this happened? No. Sadly not. Not in this day and age.

Do you know what did surprise me, though? How immediately angry I was. I still am.

Fucking. Livid.

This is going to take a while to process.



*Sadly, Blossom got worse on Monday, 7/29, and I had to let her go. My everything hurts.