no mention of grad school for a change
Tuesday 3 April 2007 | I like a cookie
Dawn on one edge of sky, moonset on the other. Pyewacket waited until nearly six this morning, for which small mercy be grateful. Here with the big red Fuego mug full of my worst vice, the inevitable matcha latte. Curls of steam. Abruptly recalling a dream of being at the Editor’s house with the Brujo, and her serving the three of us vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce in carefully rationed portions according to our respective sizes. Be nice to her, the Brujo admonishes, she just got fired; whereupon I feel alternative surges of schadenfreude, a sort of Nelson Muntz-esque HAH-hah, and also a terrible, knee-weakening empathy, because I know just what that feels like.
Yesterday’s public health experience so pleasant it was almost like a dream as well. The dreaded “Dr. Rosen” turned out to be Melissa, in Danskos and colored socks and a long blonde ponytail, maybe a few years younger than I. I didn’t have to wear a paper gown and I got scripts for allergy medication just by asking for them. Further, she added, frowning at the RN’s handwriting on my chart (”ENSAN? What’s that?”), if I wanted the clinic to manage my patient assistance programs instead of wrangling with the drug companies myself, they would do so—”we have a person on staff who doesn’t do anything else. But by all means keep having your pdoc manage your meds.” I left in a daze of civic goodwill and only $15 poorer—and then took off for the bank, having paid for my appointment with a hot check. Why did I not do this years before? I could have had medical attention since I left the tribal college in 2003. I now have an appointment for a Pap smear and blood draw (to check blood sugar and cholesterol) in May. At this rate, I’ll have all my health care details tacked down and taken care of right about the time I leave town.
The only disconcerting thing about it all was something with which I think probably most readers have had more familiarity than I: the scale. When I tweaked what was going on, I hastily removed as many accessories as I could, shoes and purse, but was still wearing two shirts and two sweaters when I clocked in at…127. 127?! 127. One twenty seven one twenty seven one twenty seven one twenty seven one twenty seven. That’s, that’s, that’s not a weight, that’s an IQ. That’s an A+ on the calculus exam where you successfully worked the extra credit problems. That’s kilometers per hour. And that’s also, apparently, how many pounds it takes to compose one previously waif-like unreliable narrator. That’s me geting my bike fixed, that’s no more crème brulée milk chocolates, that’s me hiking up Cerro Gordo as soon as the junipers stop fucking. Melissa remained unimpressed, even though I warned her darkly about Zyprexa and diabetes.
Speaking of diabetes, I like a cookie—maybe we should give out YuzuMura’s green tea white chocolate fortune cookies to everyone who leaves a comment? I’m also tempted by an offer wherein you get 100 grams of matcha, an electric whisk and a “frother glass” all for the low price of $29! But the truth is I got so many lovely birthday presents (photographic proof to follow) that at the moment I’m wallowing in material excess. —Well, relative excess. I did spend a fruitless couple of hours trying to figure out how I extract the general assistance cash from my EBT card. It’s been backpaid since December, and is now more than enough to pay my rent this month; or anyway that’s what the metallic lady claims when I call her 1-800 number to find out my balance. But how do you get it out of the card? I’d have better luck squeezing it than trying to use it at banks, which is what I did yesterday, whilst tellers picked it up delicately as if it were an insect to ask their colleagues, “Do you know if we do anything with…this?” Then turning back to me, “Yeah…we don’t do anything with this.” I joked with the Brujo that I could use it at Trader Joe’s and simply ask for the entire $840 as cash back with my groceries. “How much would you like?” “Just give me everything you’ve got in the till.”
But everything yesterday, all the errands and the two chapters of the Dying Book and the twenty-five emails and the many phone calls, was given strange depth by the fact of one pedestrian’s death by drunken driver, at the St. Francis and north Paseo intersection. Sarah Williams was walking from her house to Hastings to get a video for her daughter’s school project when Christopher Lavone hit her in the crosswalk with his blue Impreza and then kept going. He phoned the police a few minutes later to say he thought he “might have been involved,” hiding in Tesuque, distraught, wandering around in the woods behind the post office. When they were finally able to test him several hours after the accident, his BAC was around .10.
The Brujo told me all this as we drove to La Montañita for lunch, peering skittishly around us as we went at the insane traffic of our overgrown town. We parked and then he told me the worst part: that Sarah’s partner had grown worried and gone looking for her. He walked to the intersection, found all the police there, and that’s how he learned she’d been killed. I groaned and dropped my head down onto the steering wheel. Not that there’s a nice way to find out your partner’s been mowed down, but—
We walked toward the store together silently. I threw my arms impetuously around the B’s waist. He laughed, disengaging me: “Maybe we should, um, you know, keep our eyes open, and watch for cars?”
“What is it with this place?” I demanded. “It’s like, every other week now.” We began to recount all the drunk driving victims of the winter and spring: “…and then there was that whole family in the van on I-25, when the guy was going the wrong way…and the pueblo storyteller and her sister….”
Traffic calming is just not working, DUI aside; drivers still talk on cellphones, speed in 25 mph zones, screech through yellow and red lights. Residents are dangerously impatient with tourists in rental cars or Texas/California license plates; with an increased vehicle volume and no additional roadway to handle it, nor any way to widen streets; with traffic lights that haven’t been synched since, the Brujo says, 1985. We jockey and jostle for position at intersections because we know the only way to make the next light is to be first out of the gate, and floor it. Even though I signed a pledge (”I set the PACE in Santa Fe!”) and sport an ugly green-blue bumper sticker with a turtle on it, I myself struggle not to speed, not to pick up momentum and go 40 mph down East Palace. Add to all this the potholes no longer worthy of the name—like the stealthy black pit which shattered the right front control arm on my car, $175, thank you, City of Santa Fe—and you have what feels increasingly less like a quaint tourist town and more like an obstacle course.
“2qq,” Pyewacket adds, trilling and licking my nose.
Herself is in India until April 15, and all my many therapists are on vacation; so I aspire to finish the Dying Book prontissimo, my pretties—maybe by this Friday. I have a couple of web jobs lined up for afters, some freebies and some which could conceivably actually pay real cash money, so I’m highly motivated to be done with writing about how suffering arises from our dualistic, deluded failure to recognize our fundamental interconnectedness. In so many ways I am so the wrong person to be penning this thing. But when you see it in its handsome cover on the remainder table this time next year, you can say to yourself, “Self, I know who really wrote that book.” And you can buy the hardback for $3.99 and marvel to yourself that its translucent, vivid prose was crafted by a Buddhistic-claptrap-hating someone who winnowed out hundreds of pages of repetitive horseshit to get to the good stuff, aphoristic gems buried in its turgid, bloated passages like so many sapphires in the mud. May we exist in muddy water with purity like the walrus.
And Sarah was crossing the street at sunset, probably enjoying the mildness, maybe noticing the forsythia or the rosy Sangres. Did she see the blue car? Did she think she could scamper across the crosswalk before it got there? Did she have time to think, What about Bruce and the girls? And Christopher—when he started tying them on before getting in his Subaru, did he have any idea that he’d spend the next decade in prison as a result? “It was not right, in fact it was wrong; but often we all do wrong.” I drove through Santa Fe, to doctor’s appointments and pharmacies and banks, numb with wrongness, playing Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, arise, arise / Mary Hamilton, and the car windows rolled all the way down, despite the fact that this makes my eyes swell up and turn pink and itch. It felt too good, the unseasonable spring heat. I wasn’t about to roll them back up.
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