Pretty view of Jökulsárlón...a lagoon in Southern Iceland filled with calved icebergs.

Please do us all a favor and visit Iceland Eyes and Blue Eyes cause this blog's out of commision for a few.

 

Ha!

this location is in sure need of a prettying-up. haven't used it in years. go to
Kara instead...

I think I've done it! Finished the thing! though Þóra vinkona says ending an essay with the word 'Death' is kind of trite. I'll see if I can't figure in 'Resurrection' instead.

Valentína brought me breakfast in bed on MommyDay last Sunday. My mother told her about it on Saturday, about how my sister and I used to bring her breakfast in bed and such. Vala wanted so much to do something for me, but she didn't really know how to go about it. I endedup helping her set up the tray Sat night, then stayed in bed Sun morning while she poured me cheerios and juice. (do you want coffee, mamma? I know how to make coffee in the coffee maker! but we didn't have filters, so I said I'd rather have juice.) She had a little trouble carrying the big tray, so I helped her the last few steps. I got the cheerios, juice, a vitamin, a little package with jelly beans, and a chocolate egg. She made a card for me with a morning joke...it was a little cartoon with a mom and a girl. The mom's in bed, so the girl says 'Wake up now!' In the next panel they are both standing. The girl says 'I am happy' and the mom says 'You are dugleg' (you are a good girl). The final panel is just the mom, and she says, 'yumm, sexy chocolate.' (!) After I ate we played Go Fish on the tray, in bed. Great Mother's Day!

By the way, Valentína drew a picture the other day with three women standing side by side, each in different fancy, flowing dresses. They were each thinking 'He'll pick me' referring to the prince who was walking toward them. there was a table behind them with two chairs and a kind of still-life bowl-with -fruit on it. I asked her if she'd heard a story with the characters in her picture in it. She thought, then shook her head. Why then is it so familiar? Could it be that my daughter has been reading the Iliad without my knowledge and is hiding the fact from me? The prince is Paris, and the three women are Athena, Aphrodite and Hera: the Goddess as virgin, lover and crone.

She knows.

You know, what a change of affairs! I swear to golly, that whole Uranus Transit thing is just amazing!

Seems us Libras have passed on the Luuuv Torch to all those Scorpios out there. Right before our very eyes the world has changed...
The Drunk are sober, the Sober drinking and the Sleepy are waking up.

A girlfriend is facing the reality of censoring her Blog entries to keep from offending others who are not necessarily making the same life choices that she is making. These others are new people in her life, people she'd like to develop good and lasting friendships with, but who are maybe not fully ready to accept the world outside their own P.O.V. So, edit her own life or be deleted from another's? How important is it, after all, to share the details of one's life with hundreds of faceless others if one person close to you gets injured? Then again, no one is forcing anyone to read anything...

So: Truth, Too Much Truth, Omissions, Hints, Cyphers, Code, Fiction, Curiosity, Voyeurism, Approval, Control, Blindness, Vision.

You choose.

Our goldfish are swimming in a murky green sea. Time to change the water! They're funny little guys. They come to the front of the bowl and stare at me in the mornings when they see me moving around. they di it again around dinner time. Like little orange puppies with wagging tails. They just hang out side by side and stare until I come to feed them. When they see me lift the blue fish food container they get all excited and go to the top of the water and blow bubbles. Then they get all sharky and pretend the food flakes are surfer boys and they are cool Great Whites going in for the kill. They stalk up below the target slowly then snatch it! with their powerful jaws and dart away. Then they resume their hunt with grace and speed...
Sometimes they have races around the tank, and sometimes they make a racket by thrashing about in the marbles at the bottom. Often times they just hang out blowing bubbles at the surface. They've been with us for nearly two years, the little devils! Mio the Cat will only drink water from their tank, no matter what else I offer him. I think the adrenalin rush of having a giant predator staring down at them every day keeps them fit and alive. Also, the fact that when I need to change their water I just pour it out into the sink, forcing them to fight against the rushing current like salmon going upstream to spawn. Them I dump them in a small bowl with their old aqua, scrub out the tank, refill it with cold glacial tap water, pluck them out of the old muck and free them into their new clean home. They live extra exciting lives. Extreme Goldfish! XXX!

All the blood in my body has gathered in my head, with just enough pumping into my fingers to let me type and flip through my research tomes. After four + hours typing my toes are like some unnecessary foreign concept; like frozen things dangling from my brain stem for which I've forgotten the purpose. I am eyeballs and neurosynaptic processes and ten blue fingers and a cold nose. If I turn up the heat while I write I get sweaty palms and drenched underarms. Go figure.

I think I'll go to the pool and sit in the steam bath.

Ommmm

more than half-way there !

By the Way

If you Don't know who Bob is Yet

(god spelled backwards is dog, but Bob spelled backwards is...Bob!)

Then you are a Pink

Or you haven't had a chance to Meet the Man

World's greatest Salesman (and top model too)

Find your inner SubGenius and

click

Here

Then choose Sacred SubGenius Writings

Then the Book of the SubGenius Intro, etc

and remember: The more Slack you give, the more Slack you get Back

So, what was going on was that the newcomers, usually called Beaker People, were dragging bluestone dolmens from Wales to the Salisbury Plain and erecting them inside the existing circular trench at what is now called Stonehenge. In a third phase, the colossal sarsen stones were moved to the circle and added to it.

Ta Daaa....!

Does anyone else think its weird that I am not allowed to put more than one space between words with this dang blog thing? Is this an HTML issue?

Re: Hel and the thng about women taking the kiddies away from daddy...despite the adjusted 16% pay difference between men and women here in Iceland and despite the long rows of grey men who've run this country since always, despite patronymy (taking the father's name), Despite All That, We Live In A Matrilineal Society. Not quite a matriarchal, but a matrilineal, society. We have the babies, we get to keep the babies. Tacking on a man's name is just giving him some credit for the teaspoon of sperm he contributed.

(With all due respect for my Father, Þórir Ásvaldur Pállson Roff, who has contributed Much Much more to my being.)

But think about it.

I just figured out that extra spaces between words don't show up on one's blog page. That's why everything's been so blocky on my site. If you could only see how I've really been meaning to express myself...

Oh, (sigh) .... never mind.

I feel so misunderstood (as she drapes her forehead with a whitened, limpen hand)

Today is a Luuuuv day, Moon Venus Trine Jupiter. For me its an essssssay day.

Note: figure out what was happening in Britain between 1500 bc when the Danaans arrived and 400 bc when the Belgic Brythons invaded.

Then write write write !

talked to Gunnar rafvirki on the phone...he's the one who di the wiring in my apartment downstairs, and he's going to do some more handywork for us soon. Anyway, he just got out of a two-day jehovah's witness conference and was unnaturally pumped up and chatty...had his feelers out...you've had visitors from our group recently, haven't you? its really important to talk with others about god, and find god...

I put on the easy charm-voice and said, how true! It's quite interesting, really...I seem to be really creating my own religion with all the studying I do...I'm quite content with it

...and changed the subject !

(Here's where Scarlett says, We simply can't have the hired help proselytizing about their gods all over the house!)

By the way, for the curious, a qualifier, as mentioned in the previous blog, is one who qualifies a person to be a romance / sex / love addict. Most of the people I know are r/s/l obsessed, and of them the great majority are romance-addicted.

I am. I wanna be adored, and all that. Look at me, luuuuuuuuv me, ooooohhhhhh, he loooooooked at meeeee, he's gonna saaaaaaaave me, or I'm gonnnnnnna saaaaaaaaaaaaaaave him. We're Super Heros, gonnnnna saaaaaaaaave the World.

As one sweet girl said, luuuuv, luuuuuuv wiillllll tear us apaaaaaaart : the obsessive's theme song. But, like I said to the Bus Driver/qualifier ::: I just don't Trust you. Like you've got shifty eyes or twitchy fingers or some spooky dark secret I never, ever want to know about. Like he's a suspicious character now. Like I can't trust him to follow up on his own words and actions. Like if you look at him a little bit sideways you see he's really a cardboard cut-out, like a bad J. R. 'Bob' Dobbs.

And as I look around me at the world of men, I just wanna say, Come on Baby, look me in the eye and show me what you are really worth....!!!

This girl's got a life !

Valentina slept over at school last night, and us parents showed up at ten for breakfast with the kids. Shey sang some songs they had rehearsed, summer songs. On may 15 they're going to spend two nights in the country...only a twenty minute drive from downtown but might as well be the Outback as far as they are concerned. super fun, can barely wait, praying the excellent weather lasts for the next wo weeks so they can really live it up út í sveit.

So, had a run-in with my qualifier...I've decided he's partially retarded, socially at least. He came to visit us on Monday, was a nice visit, though he's always either on or off; laughing with Valentina or shutting down lengthwise on the sofa. And be careful not to spook him!!! (I probably spooked him...I always do one way or another. W hen I'm not spooking him he's patronizing me. boring) So, on his b-day on Thursday we called to wish him happy happy and stuff. No answer. No reply. Second time. No call back. He's got caller ID, he knows its us. Send him a textie just to satisfy V and me. Nothing. Like we don't exist.

So I took caller ID off today and called, he answered. its me I said, Hey !! Hi !! How are you !! all spunky ! Wondering if you're alive, no response. Yeah, I'm here, great, spunk spunk! We called, wanted to sing for you. Yeah, oops, color me bad guy and all that. Its cool, its just a matter of courtesy, we're in a fragile spot, you and I, trying to find a friendship now...you know. Then he gets defensive, I'm not buying into that whole have to respond to everything thing; if I don't feel like talking on the phone, I don't do it; and I'm super busy. I know, and maybe its the American in me... Thanks, he says. Thanks? for what? For calling on my birthday and for being mad at me. Thats just it, I am not mad at you, and I don't want to be put in the position I'm in now, of not trusting you. Its just that I'm so busy and I didn't have my phone with me... Yeah, ok, that's great, hope it goes well, but I just don't trust you, I say; and its hurting V, too, wondering why you don't call back like normal people do; so I don't think we are at a place where we can be in contact; we are disfunctional together; you see it, right? I say. Well, ok, he says, all shock-chipper. So, we care for you, but let's just drop it, ok? we're not ready. Ok, yeah, ok, ok, oh, bye. Bye.

Hadn't even Seen him in four months, and before that once, a whole three months had gone by. Over a year since he left me, and its not at all functional. too damn bad.

BUT, I've got other things to do with my time than babysit his pathologies. FareTheeWell, tyger.

Oh, and that Greek Isle is sounding more and more tempting............................................

Summertime....summertime....summertime

Thanks to KrystalUnnur and KobbiKlown for thier hospitality last night. Great party, great music, pretty people just barely behaving themselves. Fruit hung from the lighting and smiles everyone, smiles! Joel stuck a peeled banana in that guy's ear. 'I feel like sticking this banana in his ear,' he said, and so he did. We all laughed. Hel was there and Lenin and the Fop and the Poet and of course the Ubiquitous mr tintin and his butterfly, whom he tried in vain to catch with his ripped net. Tao and Hunter and Elf and the Technoboys and that guy with the really big head. At the circus were Marta and Diljá and Sylvia and Marcus and Lord Byron and Senor Lopez and Herra Beads. Also the one I'll call Eeyore, cause its always raining on him...he even had a wad of cash and his phone stolen from his coat last night. When he found the phone in the hands of some drunk girl who was just trying to make a call, he was so ecstatic to cut his losses in half that he nearly cried. Of course, who'd keep thirty thousand in an open coat pocket on a windowsill in a bar like sircus at two in the a.m.? Someone who's looking for a reason to whine, perhaps...Dropped in to say hi to Handsome, who's just in from Portugal, then it was goodnight.

Sauntered home fresh and clear at a reasonable hour. Nice to see the sights and actually be able to see the sights in all their shab and glory. Valentína, who was with her friend Emil Kári last night, is going to a sleepover at school tomorrow night. Super Duper excited is she. Tomorrow, also, Fred (say it in French, please) is having a soiree, and I'm invited. Bien! In the meantime, maybe the beach today, maybe not. Then writing tonight and all day tomorrow. Mon dieu. C'est la vie!

Au revoir, Marie

This morning after taking Valentina to leikskóli, I had some visitors. Emil showed up first, then Isabella, and then the Egyptians. I brushed Emil's hair out on the sidewalk, then Isabella's. The Egyptians went inside and hung out on the stairway, then the others followed. When Míó showed up I asked them all to leave. I escorted them to the front door, and all six of us hung out for a while on the steps. We're cool cats.

So back to normal. Erich's somehow freed, at least in my mind, and maybe its time for a new cycle to begin. He's been this dramatic haunting presence, this ghost, for all these years. He showed his face through a sleeping Cooper one night (that was extra spooky-wierd!) and Einar felt him hanging around. 'Someone doesn't want me to be here,' he'd say when he spent the night.

I went on a long walk last night after dinner. At one point I stopped and listened, though there was hardly even a kitty kat on the move. Into the silence I whispered Erich, and the street light in front of me turned off ! I asked him to please let us both move on; twice-seven had passed, a fortnight of years, time for a dawning again. I smiled in the darkness. The voices of two girls merged into the scene, then their footsteps. Just as they reached the lamppost the light turned back on, flooding them in sudden brightness. I was invisible, and content.

We could walk through this world disconnected, or not connecting, if we choose, though for some its an absolute effort of will. For some, patterns of events are constantly presenting themselves as part of an unseeable, greater whole. In moments of suspended time the mind is freed to experience memories of the future, as well as of the past. Robert Graves calls this proleptic/analeptic thought; Henri Bergson describes moments of pure duration, unencumbered by real-time mapping of experience. I could determine that a streetlight has no relevance to the word I whisper nearby, but in that absolute moment, with no one else around, I knew I'd entered a timeless state. I accepted it. We connected.

So, on with life, new seasons, new leaves on bare trees. I dreamt I picked a daffodil and I gave it to ... who ?

Last night I dug into a drawer and found an old sketchbook full of clippings and pasted-in letters from long, long ago. Pictures of Erich, and two notes he wrote me. The one I posted below is written on a Denny's napkin and the blue ink is run with tears, though as Hel pointed out, it looks like it could be from the persistent rain he writes of. He was on his motorcycle that night, and we had argued. I was pouty and desperately glad when he came home.

Within a couple of weeks of that night we were in the same arguement again, him wanting to go explore the world and me not able to tolerate the idiots he was hanging out with. I had pushed everyone away, friends and family, and was stuck in a world of biker skanks and dealers, of obnoxious half-wit scum-girls and tweakers. Erich was so restless, and not just from the speed. He sensed that there was more in the world than what he'd been offered, and he wanted to taste it all. He was a very beautiful, very tragic figure; tragic because of the softness of his voice and because of his light blue eyes and because of the specific and delicate way he used his hands. Those hands had clutched at the redwood decking behind his mother's house when he was eleven and his older brother dosed him on LSD and left him home alone and Erich lay on the deck on his back for hours while the horrors of his young imagination crawled over his body and tried to bore into his skin. They never really left him. His mother was an alcoholic who jaundiced and bloated up to twice her size when Erich was a teenager. She was incapacitated, stuck all fat and yellow on the couch while he had to fend for his younger half-siblings, buying food and trying to keep them in check. His father seduced and married a girl Erich went to high school with, who'd had a deep crush on Erich for years. She, Linda, resented them both and hated me. Helmut also tried to take Tanya, Erich's girlfriend before me, seducing her into his bedroom where Erich caught them. Helmut was powerful and handsome, and the war between father and son, well, it was somehow primal and proud and violent. I know he loved Erich, but his sense of competition and his judgement were too much for Erich to bear. Erich truly truly truly only wanted Helmut to be proud of him.

Yet if we believe in Free Will we should say that he had the choice to change his path, to not end up a drug abuser, a high school drop out. Yes and no. Helmut always told Erich that he'd have the family masonry business one day, but that Erich had to work hard for it. So by fourteen years old he was working summers as a hod carrier, hauling piles of bricks on a poled pallet up ladders and over distances all day long. His young body got hardened by it, and he felt proud before his father. But the construction world in California is hard-core, and within a few years Erich was snorting speed, sticky yellow Sonoma County peanut butter crank, with the brick layers. It gave him power, made him one of them, and deadened the voice inside him that screamed to get away from the business. He hated masonry, resented his father for making it seem like his only option, and at the same time had to make Helmut see his stamina and his worth. By seventeen he'd left high school, distrusted books and teachers and all the things that were supposed to help him out of the life of manual labor pressed upon him. They had failed him. It doesn't take much for the system to abandon a person. So when Erich stepped just a step off of the prescribed path, he was forgotten, let go. He was a blue-collar laborer by the time he was sixteen, and by seventeen an official high-school drop-out.

He was a handsome and clean-cut man. He was always, no matter how deep into the underbelly he probed, always in clean black 501's and clean socks, clean under his nails. He stood like a hero, like someone who will protect the innocent, though the way his right foot pointed to the side gave him a balletic grace. He was not tall, maybe 5'10'', and when I first met him he was muscled from working with bricks. He had a serious chronic back injury that his doctor told us was too common in young men who begin laboring when they are still growing. He was on Workman's Comp, had to go to physical therapy, though he eventually gave up on that. I tried all I could to help him keep his back appointments and do his paperwork, but I think it was a reminder to him that he had failed as a mason. I think in retrospect that he was dyslexic, because even the things he wanted to read he gave up on. He didn't trust books. When we took the motorcycle apart to change the head gasket, I had to read the manual to him. He was 23 when he died.

I fell in love with him from the very moment he looked up and into my eyes. His soft voice and his miles and miles of pain in beautiful sky-blue eyes. I knew I had no choice but to walk a path with him, though I would come this close to my own destruction. I remember the way he looked at me as I waited for my father to pick me up and take me away from the life we were sinking in. He stood over there, sorrowful beyond description, knowing we had gone too far and that I wasn't coming back. He cried and I saw his lips shape my name as I got in the car and let my father save me. On the way home I cried and I asked my father how come it hurts so much to do the right thing. He said, you'll see him again next time, María mín.

They went to the hospital and stood watch until his parents were able to show up, my mother and father did. I was in Iceland, trying to escape and to forget how broken he was the last time I saw him just before I left the country. He was speeding, tweaking, drinking forty-ouncers and smoking pot in between it all. Had been for the four months since I moved out. He was so thin, his eyes so clouded, though he tried so hard to focus on me and to see me. We exchanged jackets, I gave him the leather and took his flight and all the smells of him that lined the smooth black nylon. I held him, but his body was so restless and thinned that it was almost impossible. He told me that he loved me, and I told him that I loved him too. That was fourteen years ago, almost to the day. I can't remember his birthday. It was almost his birthday when he crashed. He was a Taurus.

He came to me one night in a dream. We stood on the second-storey balcony of the apartment complex where we lived and delved into each other's eyes. I asked him if he was ready, he said firm and softly, yes. I walked up to him and pushed him over the railing. I looked over and saw him lying there, just below me, on his back with blood streaming out around him, and I knew he was dead. I gasped out of the dream, sat up in bed at my grandmother's house in Reykjavik, and started to sob with the reality of the dream. I killed him. He came to me. The phone rang and my sobs caught in deep fear in my chest. Amma answered, and I knew from her tone as she called to me that my dream was true. And it was. He was broken and bloody in the hospital, dying, held alive. The only phone number on him was to my parent's house, and María do you know how to reach his family? María, you have to try to remember, we have to reach his mother and father, you have to remember...and somehow I did, I remembered a list in a drawer and they called and Helmut and Erich's mother, and they came to the hospital, my parents were at the hospital and stayed there until he went away.

I raged at the mountains and at the ocean and at Erich for leaving me here alone, I raged and drank whiskey and cried and stumbled about Reykjavik with all my innocence gone and a whole life of never seeing him again before me. Years later I tried to find a grave or a memory of him in his home town, but it was as if he never really was. He has a son, Gabriel, with Tanya, was her name Tanya? He is a teenager now, wondering who his father was, and I don't know if Erich ever even held him. He was so proud to have a son, he had a photo on the refrigerator. He and Tanya probably thought the time would come for them to meet, someday, someday.

I was his last hope, his angel. The good girl, maybe strong enough to pull him out of the black hole into which he'd spiralled. But I wasn't so good and I couldn't resist tasting his dark side for myself. I wasn't strong enough to save us both, so I chose to save myself.

here is a memory
he is risen

Madia
I'm Really sorry for the way I've been acting this Past Week. It wasn't my intention to ignore you. I just like to feel I'm important and I have important things to do. Plus I can't stand to just stay in the Apt day in and day out Because it makes me feel like I'm missing Important chances. Madia you are the very most important part of my life and If I lost you it would be the end of me. No joke.

I'm sitting at Denny's, the one by your folk's at 4:30 in the morning and its pouring rain outside and All I can do is think about you and how much I love you while it rains. Will it ever stop so I can get back home to you I think its stopping. No its raining again. Oh well I'll go anyway

I'll be with you soon.

Hug Kisses & Love

Erich

I had to go

he died four months later

He who bends himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity' sun rise.

William Blake

Kiss Joy !

I haven't used this blog thing to dish about my personal life very much. What I do mention is usually in code. And that's not really in the spirit of the medium. Hel , who gets ca. 150 hits a day says that when she's got troubles her hits rise in relation. Everyone likes trouble, and if it could be happening to the person next door all the better. I haven't had a lot of trouble, not anything worth whining about (with due respect for Hel's whining), except when Momsie got hospitalized in February. It was a true drama for a while, but she pulled through. Of course. But that's, I guess, the kind of cliff-hanger stuff people like to read...anyway, it was too sacred and scary a thing to trivialize for others on the net.

Of course, tons of teensie, tiny things have happened to me and my posse in since I started this blog ramble. We've met broken princes and sloppy dogs and heard all sorts of flattery and excuses. We've all done fairly well in our occupations, our kids are fat and happy, and no one, not Hel nor Fía nor Bella nor Mags has faced any real tragedy. We've taken risks with our hearts and our art, and have had to take no for an answer sometimes, but we're whole and stronger for it all. Girl1, who stayed in my attic for a few weeks, has finally flown off to Cuba and Rose has looked her bottle in the eye and decided to stare it down. Good moves. We seem to rise and rise and rise.

Then there's the chosen few who can't seem to behave themselves. Mostly boys, boys we like and love. Boys like tintin who had to text me misinformation, at the expense of others, and who gott caught in his own jealous trap. Ooooh, he was angry last night when the circle of his irresponsibility closed in on him. Scorpion in a corner with a broken stinger. Sad. But he's found himself a cutie girl who'll pet him and soothe his pride, and everything will be ok again in SmokyTown.

Hello world (special greetings to all in Kalifornia)...today was a tortellini with bleucheezveg sauce day, a steambath and long walk in the warm wind day, a half flag day (who died? I asked. Oh, yeahm, Jesus.) Reykjavík stopped today, except for the few brave cafés serving lattes to those who cannot go without. I found mine at Solon.

Picked up my Tarot deck for the first time in, oh, three months or so. Hello cards. Any messages for me today? Yes, three goddesses, as a matter of fact. ( It's a goddess deck.) 3 Major arcana: 0 = Beginnings, Tara 14 = Balance, Yemana 6 = Love, Venus I think I'll take the hint.

today is the first day of the rest of my life...I have always and never been here. new eyes.

I'm connected

I'm dedicated to the White Goddess

She rules my life right now

Masters Thesis 20% done and growing every day

Horoscope says my great luv day is next Monday, that everything will fall into place and I'll have romance in bloom

Ha

Goddess and child are all I forsee before me

And I think that that will have to do

Hellllllloooooooo again.

going ADSL in a few days

connected

Were we a widdle gwumpy yesterday, M ? Hope today's treating us better. And I think it is. There's that concept quote that keeps astonishing me: "when I say that every lesson is the first lesson it does not mean that we forget what we already know. It means that what we are doing is always new, because we are doing it for the first time." From Dancing Wu Li Masters, great book on quantum theory and metaphysics.

The first time. So, though we follow a set routine, there are constant variables: the temperature outside is not exactly what it was yesterday, our hair is certainly not exacly the same as 24 hours ago (degrees of bedhead) and we have a day more of knowledge and history behind us. yeah, yeah, yeah. But think about it...each moment, each time I raise a coffee cup to my lips or type the letter M is the very first time I've ever done exactly that in the time and atmosphere in which I'm doing it. Brand new. Memories of lessons learned, but thats purely for survival's sake. Keep a record of concepts (fire is hot, water is good, sleep is need), but trash all the rest of the things you think you know.

You Know Nothing !

Each moment that something completely new doesn't happen (like each moment that an earthquake doesn't hit) is in your recollective favor, because you are able to feel a sense of knowledge, understanding of patterns, security in the familiar.

Each moment is brand new, and if we chose to, we can see the moment as part of a greater whole, find a place for it in the grand picture with the acceptance that exactly that has no precedence and will never happen again.

Wise eyes see through time.

week pause plus a few days...just hadn't the vim vip and vigor to write, or really just need to get my ASDL hookup cause waiting for a response from the remote computer is not something i HAVE THE PATIENCE FOR EVERY DAY. Even right now, I'm finally lined-up and now my charming kid needs my total attention...which she doesn't when I'm not on line.... Oh, hang it. I'll write next when I write next.

Otherwise, all is well in SmokyTown.

M

Sweet day, though still grey here in Smoking Town. Valentína and I met Thor and his little Gabriel at the town lake this morning and gave the swans, geese and ducks as much bread as we could toss (the pigeons got to nibble on missed crumbs but the newly-arrived yellow-eyed grebes were too shy to take part in the feast.) The four of us walked and talked...Vala held Gabríel's hand (he's two) and made sure he didn't bolt out onto streets or fall on broken glass. We went to Kólaportið, the flea market, where the kiddies got ice cream, and we wandered about in a familiar daze - we've seen nearly everything in Kólaportið a thousand times before. Then we went to look at the big fishing boats at the harbor. Gabríel pointed and said skip, sigla! sjáðu vatnið! and stuff like that. Valentína proudly watched out for him, so we were able to hang back a bit and chat, always a pleasure with Thor. By half-past noon the little one was giggling and falling on his bum, which is the international kiddie sign for nap time, so we all kissed each other goodbye (G tried to kiss V lots of extra times, but she shied) and they drove away. Good day. Good people. Wave goodbye til next time...

Today is Pabbi's birthday ! Happy Birthday Daddy-O ! His name is Thor Roff, and he's a man's man, with a distinctive touch of grace. Natty dresser, always clean shaven with a good splash of Ralph Lauren Polo for scent. He has tons of great ties and has an affinity for slightly crazy socks (which I seem to have inhereted). He's a business man, a representative, a man who convinces you to his point of view by sheer, true belief in what he's talking about. If he doesn't have faith in an issue, product, opinion, person, he has no dealings with it. That way, you know that an endorsement from Thor is the real deal. He's an excellent judge of character, can spot a weasle or wolf a mile away, and has a way of intimidating all my gentlemen callers from the get-go. He plays the drums in a band and sings in a smooth tenor. He knows cars, preferring Audi, Peugeot, Bmw, five-gear stick and an occasional turbo-diesel, thank you very much. He drives everywhere, and the super-highways of California are his personal Indy. Last I heard, he was buying Mom her Jag, which he says she deserves (and he's right). He was in the Navy, was a frogman, sailed the Mediterranean and ports abroad. He's a gentleman and a force to be reckoned with. I suppose it took my mother, a power in her own right, to stand up to and beside this man called Thor. He's a hard act to follow, and I've had to accept that the average guy out there is nowhere near the man my father is...I'm a typical Daddy's Girl. Happy Birthday, then, to the man who taught my sister and me the meaning of pride and self-worth, of dedication and perseverence and honor, of respect. Who taught us to look beneath a rock to find a salamander, to fish crawdads, to right a sailboat out of which we'd tipped, to camp and ride bikes and peer deep into tidepools for hidden beasts and hermit crabs. Who's firm commands were not to be ignored, who stood up for us against injustices and held us in his lap while we watched Wild Kingdom together. Who let me help him lay the cement for the new patio though I was only six or seven, and who showed me how to hold a hammer when I was only five. Who let us climb trees as high as we could, but made us figure out our own way down again. Who made me learn to drive a stick and check oil and feel the rhythm of a car's engine. Who is so proud of me for all the things I accomplish, though he may not realize that he set the standards by which I view this world. Thor Roff is a Pieces, born in the Year of the Dragon, and, truly, the grandest man I've ever known.

Til Hamingju með Afmæli, Pabbi Minn,

I Love You

Þín María

Lots of super duper funny looking people out and about today...maybe it was the high grey skies casting a mean, blanched pallor on everyone's complexion. But honestly, there had to be more to it...there were trolls and lumpies and gawks all over the place. Valentina and I walked about all day in a daze, checking out the wierdos. Safe at home, I have an urge to cry for the twisted and jumbled, odd and ever fascinating beasts that we are, we humans.

Regarding beasts, a rogue steel-grey Great Dane loped free above Grjótaþorpið today, disturbing traffic and creating a quiet havoc. Here in this miniature city where dogs never run free, it was akin to seeing an Elephant in our midst. Huge dog. Fascinating.

Had a feeling all day long that something is going to happen, or should happen, or that some message is trying to come through. It makes me a little spaced out and woozy. I'd like most to curl up under my down blanket and go to sleep so this feeling of waiting or listening doesn't tease me anymore. Maybe I'll do just that...

Yep, watched the Soprano's on Monday...when one has only one TV channel and that one channel is state-run and when it only broadcasts between, say, five pm and midnight (if you're lucky) then one does one's best to stock up on the few juicy items shown each week. But like I told Valentína, people come before TV...her Daddy called on Tuesday and she told him in an patient yet exasperated voice that she really was busy watching a program, thank you very much (it was Gilmore Girls, a show I had fun watching last year but that seems so strained now; actors who had fun last season running over each other's lines with Nick'n'Nora-style witty banter just seem tired now, like they'd much prefer a cuppa chamomile tea to the ubiquitous coffee everyone in Star's Hollow is supposed to be addicted to.) Anyway, Valentína's a little life-hero, so she sucked it in and chatted with her Pabbi for a few more minutes before ending with a polite, Let's do Lunch and goodbye.

I'm writing my Master's Thesis at the University of Iceland on The White Goddess, by Robert Graves, a man I'm sure is sipping ambrosia with the polyonymous Muse in her Triple Aspects as we speak. I've chosen to crank it out in a few months instead of dragging the subject about for many seasons, which, I'm told is the norm. Actually, given that I bought the book in 1990, and have been reading it for the past twelve years, I suppose I have taken my time, so to speak. Anyway, Hel tells me that I'm being watched to see if I fall flat on my face for trying to write 70 pages in such a short time. Nothing new, but I won't. The material is intense, true and fascinating, so I feel more than compelled to write about it. I have to, actually. Not just because my parents, who have supported me and believed in me all these years, have already booked tix to the Homeland for my graduation, but because One Doesn't Deny the Goddess ! How could I offer myself to her as scribe then turn my back out of sheer laziness? Think about it, what kind of writer's life do you think I'd lead if I bailed on the Ultimate Source of Inspiration for the sake of human comfort? I don't think I'll take the risk of finding out...

I dreamt the other night that I was to get married but the groom, who I had only met once, was not showing up. It was held at my parent's house in Cupertino, California, and though it was only nine in the morning and only two of my girlfriends had arrived, the priest performed the whole ceremony. I wasn't really paying attention, though. I was complaining that no one had shown up yet. Then, around elevenish people started streaming in. We had to enlarge the dining room. I was placed up front, facing the priest, but I kept having to field phone calls with Thor's phone (not daddy Thor), assuring people it was ok that they were late, etc. Then Elizabeth Taylor showed up with an elderly lady, and they were both dressed in some kind of Victorian costumes. Liz looked haggish but proud. Then the priest started the cermeony again and I cried out, for god's sake, the groom isn't here yet! Everyone, have champagne, have hors d'ouvres, mingle! Then the phone showed two missed calls, one from my intended, though I didn't recognize his name (Daniel L.lenier, or something). I called him back and he apologized for being late, and I said don't worry about it, because I didn't know him anyway. Then I woke up.

It's 22:22 and I've gotta go...Soprano's on TV and you know, TV means Everything to Me...Ha Ha. But really, I'm outta here...write more tomorrow.

Oh, and I think the Blue-Eyed dream thing is having a kool resonance...something's happening...stay tuned...

OOOhhh Spooky.....I just remembered that I dreamt that I was going blind, but instead of loosing my sight to darkness, I saw blue shiny packets of light which blinded the lower part of my eyes...pretty blue light, shiny like foil and cellophane, shooting out from my bottom eyelids, totally distracting and a little scary. It was like X-men Cyclops's laser vision, but I didn't have any ruby-lensed glasses to stop the flow. What could this mean !!!!

Bunny's back, or actually Cat, because I'm sitting here with kitty ears on my head and there's no one to see how cute I look ! Valentína's gone to Akureyri to visit JoeDad, so it's just me and dirty Mío, who's the real cat in the house. He's alllll white and rolls around in the dirt and there's no way to keep up the fur maintenance, so he looks like a total deadbeat. He gets away with the skunge look because he's the King of the Neighborhood and because Isabella, who lives next door and who's got a fluffy bombshell appeal, is his girlfriend. If you've got the right pussy in your pocket, you can get away with anything !

I tried to disappear, but it distinctly didn't work. I'm not talking about going away or about hiding in my apartment, but about being so There that no one sees you. I'm thinking also that as we are basically tiny sacks of water separated by vast distaces of air, we should be able to be see-through. Don't tell me that what you see of a person is the combined total of all their mitochondria and DNA strands...cells are translucent, if not nearly transparent. Anyway, it didn't work, the whole disappearing thing. Everyone saw me yesterday, and I saw everyone. Jesse, that infamous painter I know, had it figured like this: the best way to not be seen is to wear the most obnoxious outfit possible. No one will look at you. So I'm hauling out the clown suit for tonight...

Or not. And what's with wanting to be invisible? I've spent years not being noticed by the "right people" and now I'm a ubiquitous part of the life here in 101 Reykjavik. People greet me who do not even know me, because I greet people whom I do not know. It's a Kalifornia thing. I like the neighborhood ethic, the ' we're all in this together ' kind of tribe mentality. I have no complaints, nor any reason to want to be invisible. It would just be nice to experience the world without inherently changing the dynamic of a situation by my presence (which we all do and can never avoid.) Fly on the wall stuff is what I'm talking about. Anyway, enough of that. I'm here, I am a force exerting 13.7 pounds of pressure per square inch outward against the atmosphere and I think I'll go ahead and keep on doing just that.

One day a little bunny said, Goodbye, I'm going to be an Indian. And he wandered by the streams, through the trees, to a secret night dance where all the animals of the forest gathered. He danced all night with the deer and the bear and the squirrel and the owl to the beating of many drums. At daybreak he rested, then followed the rising sun back to his home under a great oak tree and slept.

Goodbye, I'm going to be an Indian.

I will turn invisible, I will whisper my words, I will watch the world slip by one moment at a time. I will fly to where the truth is told and listen there on a tall rock for the secrets of the moon, and the wind-borne teachings of the heart of the universe.

And each day will be a new day, for the same river will not twice touch my feet though its name stays the same.

I will be an Indian, and I will sit quietly in the center of my soul.

Flaming Lovers is done, see Lucy's Muse. My exercise in pure old fashioned smut. My warning stands, though: If you can't handle it, don't go there. More words here tomorrow...

Pretty Monday, sunshine, folk strolling about. Hints of summer and endless days, lounging about on the grass at Austurvöll, kiddies everywhere, bare toes. But it's still March, it's Bolladagur...I made cream puffs from scratch. Strawberry jam and whipped cream, melted semi-sweet chocolate on top. Yummsie! And no complaints from the kid. She's the ultimate judge of things in this home.

It's crucial that I sautee the fish pudding now, so ta ta. Have another cream puff!

Today at Arbæjarlaug I saw a real life big American reading a hardback novel in a big ziplock plastic baggie In the Hot Pot.

Today's question: What's up with That ? You fill in the details.

Some recent issues garnering a What's up with That ? (true stuff from the lives of people we know):

The I'll call you tonight, Ok?...(and doesn't)
The You're fired for slacking off but you have to work here for three more months...(and that'll stop the slack)
The I'm not moving out of this apartment except by force... (though I'm the one who gave notice that I'm moving out)
The I really want to kiss you so I'm not going to... (mind-boggler)
The I got drunk last weekend so I can't come to your party (cheap shot but deserves mention)
The You seem a little sad, have some Prozac (some choose coke and booze instead)
The You're the best thing that's ever happened to me (so I've got to be alone / find someone new)
The If I visit you on Tuesdays, that's a relationship (but weekends don't count)
The It wasn't broken when you bought it, so I can't help you (but as soon as its out of the package it falls apart)

Of course, everything is relative and for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Keep on keeping on.

Kiss someone you know, just because.

Smile at the odd charms of the human animal.

Talk to a duck.

Toss a party.

Make that call.

Sleep and dream.

Hi baby, god, I've missed you ! I've been so busy flattening my pillow after this weekend's amazing party. The run-down:

I'm a gangsta bitch, Soprano's-style, Friday night: big hair, all that eyeliner and fulled lips, gold party dress, but this is Iceland so I've got tight shiny vinyl pants on too, my ubiquitous cowboy boots and a tan uber-fuzzy high-collar, cropped fake fur. It was Birch's party, and Gansta was the dress code. When I left The Stick, where the party was, and strutted over to AleRoom with Hel to meet Fia and Jack, what was once a get-up became me looking like a wannabe from Seal Falls. But I rode with it, played the part, and kept on having fun. Circus, 22, and dancing. After-party on the way home then to sleep for a few hours.

Saturday's here, its time to do my Own Party: the Þorrablót. I'm out the door at noon, buying fire water and rugbread, flatcakes, sharkcubes and the like. Stiff cappuchino where they are best, at Koffeeroaster, and I'm all set to prepare the spread for the night. By nine the table looks good, candles are lit, and all that's left to do is have a little red wine with Girl and wait for the rest. No one ever comes on time here. Girl lives upstairs, so she doesn't count. Then the Mediterraneans come, Spaniards and Italians, lots of wild dark hair and deep accents. One doesn't need to cater much to them, just give them seats and ashtrays and a space in the fridge for their beer and all is well. Then came the two little-known blondes with bright red lipstick, giggling and pouring some more Captain Morgan, texing about to find the next party, etc. And then, it all started: the party was on, the doorbell didn't stop ringing, the first tentative fingers plucked up a flatbread-with-pate, the one rule was if you take the BurningWine, you must eat Shark as well. Pretty Elf came with her sister and bro-in-law, who came with Champagne. The Meds took over one side of the apt, holding an Intl court with loose tobacco and DAB beer, while the pretty native girls and a good few young handsome specimins sat at the round table over there. The Usual Suspects littered the kitchen, dipped into the homemade Sushi, stayed comfortably close to the rum bottle. I chatted, introduced unknowns, suggested topics, greeted guests at the top of the stairwell, made more sushi, and smiled, smiled, smiled. Then Charming Thor came with Brits: SteveJournalist and LisaPR and Joel with a two-syllable name and a distictly N. American accent, and to everyone's pleasure, two fat bottles of Smirnoff, thank you very much. Lisa, Steve, Joel, this is an official Thorrablót...here is your shark, here is your liver sausage, these are examples of the local wildlife, (and later) may I offer you a fresh California roll? Enjoy ! and they did. Meanwhile the kitchen is brimming with renewed acquaintances and pleased-to-meet-you's, do you have any mixer ? (the answer was no...drink it arctic style, my love). There was the secrets and makeout room, little used, but available to all. And only one glass broken the entire night. No rogue smokes, very lovely, classy, courteous guests Alive with laughter and vodka, the hearty drinking Black Death straight from the bottle while chewing shark like gum. Steve layed Tarot for the uninitiated, Charming Thor got out the Red Bible, relating all and a one to each other, and I threw the Magic Eight Ball into the party trix mix. Soon Meds sat on the floor, Rose arrived with kisses for everyone, Girl2 was pouring her heart out to Girl1, the sisters were charming everyone, Lisa with her Brit Wit kept conversations going, I found a frozen block of Coke in my freezer, so we dumped it into a jug and poured vodka over it, let it sit to chill, and had Coke Martini's, lightly tan with a hint of sweet. Music was brilliant, food disappearing, beer down to a few hidden cans, bottles empty and it was time to stream into town. 2 a.m., goodbye apt, left Bella and Rafe to blow out the candles, long party line to The Stick, crashing into the place with fueled vigor, blending into the crowds, merging and disappearing, splitting off to Koffeebar, to Circus, to sites unknown...til four, til five, til six and where's the after party, the night can't end, find your partner, do-si-do, keep on dancing at the End of the World, church bells ringing, find a pillow, where's your bed, hold someone's hand, smile in your sleep, kiss the wrong girl, pass out, stagger home, confess, make love or a phone call cause party over oops Out of Time.

If you were there, you know what I mean.

See you next time.

M

Gonna have a party on Saturday ! A Þorrablót which, for the un-Icelandic and those not in the know, is a seasonal thing. The old calendar broke the year up into many little seasons, each maybe, um....five or six weeks long, I think. We are in Þorri now, the deep winter season, and the great tradition is to hold a Blót, or party, to eat up as much disgusting pickled, dried, and mashed-together food as possible. No, really. Sheep's balls and head, blood-soaked fat sausages, stinky old shark bits, dried fish, and the hard-core national drink: Burning Wine (Black Death). I think it was probably a kind of Head Count in the old days; you know, how many of us are still alive after the darkest days have passed kind of thing, and also a big huge Razz at the Gods (get drunk, flip them the bird, and yell HA ! I Survived !!!) Anyway, here, at my house, a deep-winter party on Saturday. You're welcome to join us, if you can.

Bella and I thought adding some modern foods to the lineup would be a good idea, since no one cares much for the traditional fare. Oh yes, I'll have a little dish of stinky shark and a token bottle of the potato-fennel liquor, but we thought we'd try to start a new set of traditions. Sushi, for example. I'm going to go the the shore and fish some seaweed out of the Atlantic, steam some rice, add a cucumber and a bit of avocado and make Kalifornia Rolls. Yum !

By the way, page 8 headline in Frettablaðið today: Driver in Jail Drove Over Bicycling Spaniard. One never knows, do one ?

genetically modified tobacco...nicotine free...not so popular in china, they say. the chinese want their dope. read it in Wired. The Pennsylvania Amish are farming the crops, noting that there is nothing in their religious code restricting the production of GM crops, just the use of heavy machinery in the reaping of those crops.

Odd lot, those Amish. Horse drawn buggies, etc. in the grand old US of A. We always forget here in Icelandia and the rest of the world that the Americas are home to all sorts of funky peoples. We think of the US as breeding ground for Average Dumb War Prone Joe, Sexy Virginal Poppett Stars, and Big Black Gold Laden Rappers, forgetting all the Normals, the Amish, the Montanans, the Alaskan Salmon Farmers, the Star Bellied Tree Climbers staving off lumberjacks, the Alligators, the Squirrels on telephone wires, the Phd Park Rangers, the Black Bears and Nerds.

My ex, a nice guy and good father, hates the US for its policy. He's a rebel punk Icelander who works with the broken, troubled and mentally disturbed, a walking protest against war mongering US speaking white guys. Yet he went to the States with me, California. Must have been love...and what he saw of institutional life, i.e. how the disabled are cared for, did little to change his mind about America. Yet he loved the landscape, like I always will, and made friends from Everywhere. I kept trying to tell him that Everything is Possible in the US, that there are people fighting every day to make sure that those Ten White Men Who rule the country are kept in constant check, that there are Amish and Tree Dwellers and Plain Ole Country Folk who have no truck with the Institutions of the US, and newcomers who praise the States for the freedom they coundn't find in their Dictatorial old worlds, and People like my parents who left the socialized security of Iceland to play the American Dream with diligence, hard work and honor (and who made the dream come true), but in the end it was too much for the both of us. We are armchair fighters, my ex and I, and we found no joy in being poor in Northern California. We moved back with our little girl, split up for personal reasons, and now see the States as some kind of unfathomable Other. We forget about the Amish, the Survivors, and those who have found a better life in the Vast United States.

As a final thought...think about what would really happen here on Earth if an Alien Race arrived. Could we band together, all of us, the Dinkas, the Maori, the Norse, the Mongols, the Incas, the etc...after all we all have the potential to have two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth and four limbs. One Heart.

storm's over... mummsy's sick, though. having a bronchioscopy today. camera down the throat, into the lungs, biopsies, tiny pictures of bronchioles and little forests of fungus that have invaded her alveoli. 82% Oxygen in her bloodstream...not near enough so she's got one of those nose tube things patients on hospital dramas always have. Dr.s say its not TB, not Cancer, not Pneumonia. Some Valley Fungus thing.

fungus. incredible stuff. can grow to be miles long underground. Acres and acres wide. functions with algae to create lichen...result neither plant nor animal nor fungus anymore. heavily stocked with curative properties. reindeer grass. fjallagras. Hope my mummsy will be well soon. hard to be so far away.

Islendingabok, where I can look up everyone I know and see just how they are related to me. Everyone's related at the sixth to seventh generation back, right around the 1700's. I am from the Long Family, descendents of Richard Long of Sussex, England who found himself on a pirate ship, landed in Denmark, then was posted as a merchant to the wilds of southeastern Iceland in 1810-ish. Mrried a native, had babies. He's my great-great-great grandfather. But when elders doubt my lineage due to my shoddy Icelandic, all I have to do is reference Mr. Long and I'm in like flynn. It also helps to name drop Beck, another arm of my family tree. Christien Beck of Denmark, thank you very much. So far I'm most related to friend Hel , which is nice because we are very family, if you know what I mean.

Urgent business calls me away. ta. M

super windy, super wet, super february in the air...but this year I am going to have some parties to help me through the Þorri season. First a little girl tea party for Valentina next sunday, then maybe a big kid party the weekend after. two of my cute girlfriends and I are going to try to hold a fleamarket thing next saturday in an apartment that used to be Magga Búð, or Maggi's Store: a corner space that was for a long time a neighborhood shop and before that the first toy store in town (I think that's right) We'll sell some clothes and stuff.........oh, yeah, remind me to explain the stuff behind stuff some day: Stuff we know and Where's my Stuff and do we Really Need All this Stuff?

When it rains it pours. I am wondering where my mysterious eagle flew off to, and in the tense hours of waiting I seem to be sending out a kind of distress call (a kind of beacon rather than an SOS) ...lots of friends are kind of showing up and having contact, and its a little sad because, though very happy to hear from them, when I see '1missed call' on my cell phone or '1 message recieved,' a little flare of hope ignites, and then its not who I truly hope it will be...with all respect for the Eagle of course; he is a good man in a complex life. wish him well...

Stormy weather makes me smile. I'm smiling...

Did you know that if you take a common sea sponge, cut it in half, put each half in a blender and add different colored dye to each then strain the resultant mush through a fine strainer into one common dish, that the sponge, within about a day, will reassemble itself into ints original form, and be almost perfectly evenly two-toned. A sponge. Think about it.

Think also about this...I wrote some bitchy pistil on net servers yesterday and go figure, today I got access on my first sign-in try. I'm tempted to stay logged on for a millenium because I feel so lucky to have connected and I don't want to risk it never happening again.

I like that last statement as a metaphore for something else, for some kind of social or romantic state of being. Kind of a 'plugged in / never gonna let you go / party til you drop / stay tuned / love you forever and ever' kind of sensitivity. It also, in that context, sounds scary and desperate and codependent and clingy. Afraid. Do we need to disconnect sometimes? Log off or let go or say goodbye? Run ourselves through a blender and trust that we will reassemble in the right state? Probably, because the overhead of staying connected permanently is absurdly high. Unless you have High Speed Modem Capability, which requires an up-front investment and a set monthly charge. Metaphore that, if you can !!!

I'm gonna go get my daily fix at Michael Lutin's place. see ya later, alligator.

Such spotty blogging on my part...I'm sure I've lost the interest of millions of potential readers...blame it on the "free" net provider I'm signed up with. NEVER get a connexiion from home anymore. Always some PPP error, etc. Or Server Not Responding. It's usually at night that I feel the urge to write, and as such I can't use the library...its closed and I'm home with Valentina as is. I called Íslandssími, the folk who provide free Internet tenging for Íslandsbanki customers to see ablout ASDL service and they said, sure, ok but it'll cost you 3.500 a month and you need to buy a starter kit for 15.900 (modem stuff) because you have a laptop. Oh. And of courseit costs me 200 kr. per minute to call their net experts to find out why they are unable to PROVIDE ME WITH WHAT THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO PROVIDE ME. I guess I shouldn't complain about free stuff, but why do I have to pay them (or actually their rivals, Landsími !!!) to wait on hold to finally have a professional tell me that they are experiencing difficulties or the like. Hmmmmmmm. The system. So, there go future hopes and deams of being a frequent-flying blogger. Sometimes you just want to find that rustic cabin in the woods, throw away your cell phone, drink fresh water from a stream, pee in a little ditch, slaughter a sheep while praying to the great Goddess of bounty, dry the meat for winter and wear the skin for warmth and run with the horses. Or at least feel like you can Trust the System to Not run You in Circles.

Maybe I will toss my cell phone, though. Maybe. Or maybe not.

The system. Pieces tacked on to obsolete pieces, so that there's never any hope of renewing the lot of it. Tape over an old flaw, plaster on top of that, then forget it ever exsisted until the entire infrastructure shows signs of instability, them try to rip open the plaster and the tape to find the flaw and realize there are too many flaws so cement it all over and try to forget again. Leave it for the next generation...Oh, Ayn Rand said it better in Atlas Shrugged. Or Terry Gilliam in Brazil.

The thing is, there is always a back door, always. Always some way to get what one wants from the system with minimal payout if one is dedicated enough. Ask the right questions, listen well for codes behind the answers and exercise Patience. Having done the desk job/customer service thing in the insurance world, I know that those who play their cards right get what they want. (By the way, the insurer will Almost Always ultimately pay out claims, though one has to be sure not to actually Break the Law. You will get found out. Adjusters are a wily lot, private detectives dedicated to not only finding out the truth, but to not spending money that may show up as their Christmas Bonus...and they hear a lot of rubbish. A Lot !) so, there is some back door to the whole phone scam thing. Or maybe I will enhance my powers of concentration and send out psychic messages to the people I want to communicate with. And use friends' phones for those annoying business calls I have to make every now and then. Just reject the system, send smoke signals and letters in the mail. Read my astrology not on the internet but in magazines. Write on paper with an ink pen instead of with a keyboard. Maybe. But first I'll search for the back door. wish me luck.

nothing of note except the usual...all good. the handsome man exists in real time, though one must be patient and careful, etc. patience in love matters is not my forte. go for the gold or give up the fight is my pattern. but listen, its always like many years later the one who turned away turns to face one again and then its too late. whatever happened to ´seize the day,´ carpe diem and all that? but we're all a little spooked, i think, having seen the world and hurt, and we would like to trust without obligations. and recall the Goddess...she does not suffer domesticity kindly. so maybe the essential energy we are feeding on is one of inspiration without the accompanying death of spirit which comes of admitting to security in love. but, and, regardless, furthermore and beside the fact, i still and always believe in love and will have beside me a man of quality, poetic death or no.

thursday in reykjavik. the sun comes up around ten-ish these dyas, but the dark mornings are not a problem. they just kind of seems extensions of the night before in a way. I've been on an odd sleep plan all fall anyway, sometimes bedding down just after Valentina goes to sleep ( nine, ten o'clock), sleeping for an hour and a half, then waking near midnight as if fully rested, and staying up til 2, 3 am. so a black morning is not so odd. its the afternoons that get me...

In the library. Trying to find out all I can about the path my life is taking, via all sorts of false prophesies and astrology websites. I'm in a curious position, having been in the right place at the right time to meet a mindboggling person. A man, no less. Sea Eagle. I can't write anything about him because I'm too afraid of jinxing things. I'd like to touch his cheek. I hope he doesn't disappear like all the rest. (and they do, they disappear and they are nowhere and our universes separate and we live parallel until years later when they look at me with regret for having let the separation happen. then its too late.) please don't ask me more about this man. he's like a beautiful and fragile bauble, or at least our connexion is. just wish me well.

Do you believe? he asks. I do. I believe that if there is a god in a throne in a heaven, his mother stands above and behind him, and she is the true force and power. She is love and destruction and truth and life. And you? I do not believe in god as judge, in heaven or hell, but in the ultimate cycle of rebirth and the natural process of death in living again.

Robert Graves writes, No Muse-poet grows conscious on the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident...The reason why so remarkably few young poets continue nowadays to publish poetry after their early twenties is...that something dies in the poet. Perhaps he has compromised his poetic intergrity by valuing some range of experience or other - literary, religious, philosophical, dramatic, political, or social - above the poetic. But perhaps also he has lost his sense of the White Goddess: the woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was a Muse, turns into a domestic woman and would have him turn similarly into a domesticated man...The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual 'other woman', and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks in every mænad's and muse's heart.

consider that.

the kid came back ok, safe n sound and happy as a clam. mommy's happy too, as she made some new friends this weekend and went to see Two Towers. love legolas, aka orlando bloom. and though dirty, dane viggo was also a chunk of hunk. too much slow tree and not enough of the elfen Queen, though. and sad elfs, as in arwen, are surely not as much fun as the really spunky kind. bella pointed out the tendency to eyeball closeups in the first movie and kind of ruined the second one a little because she was too right...eyeballs everywhere in middle earth. big blue yards-wide eyeballs spacing out under evil influence or raging with determination. some were scared and others lovetorn and watery with tears. check it out for yourself when the film goes to video.

foggy in iceland in january. must be the pole-flip thing causing all this mad weather. did the poles already flip? does anyone know? i'm certain my life has done a somersault but that could be due to a thousand other factors. anyway, i'm not complaining.

getting started on the masters thesis...the white goddess, yesterday and today. is she still validated? i tell my girl that she is god's mom, and even god has to listen to his mom. kind of puts the 'jealous god' thing into perspective...he's like a little kid not getting what he wants, his set of human toys won't do what he wants them to and a lot of them want to let a whole 'nother deity play with them. pissed off seven-year old. and mommy spanks him, in the grand old childrearing tradition. think about it.

Just put Valentína on a plane to Akureyri. This time was harder than usual, she clutched on to me at the airpot gate and cried a little. Of course she never lost her cool, but the emotions were very surface and I had that pang of mommy guilt tinged with a fear that she was having some kind of premonition...maybe this is the last time we'll hug. Maybe her big, connected-to-the universe brain is registering some future horror. Maybe... Anyway, she's just about to land in the north where she'll get to play in the snow with Steinar and feed Valur's horses. Of course nothing is going to happen...knock on wood. sjö, níu, þrettán.

The thing was, we had to wait three hours at the airport, the little tiny Rvk airport and we ended up having a grand old time. We always do on adventures. We know how to make games out of the least likely resouces, and in the dead moments we have conversations about people and planets and how water is made (-see, there's these things called molecules, which are a lot like that toy you were playing with the other day, and one kind is called oxygen and the other hydrogen -ohh, oxygen and hydrogen -yeah, and when one hydrogen hooks up with two oxygens they mix together and make a bigger thing like the toy you were playing with the other day, but its so small you can't see it. lots of those bigger things together make water. -what's for dinner, mamma?) That's how I explain water except in really choppy Icelandic and with plenty of hand motions.

Today at the airport we ate sandwiches and a donut, colored in her coloring book, looked at postcards and found ones with pictures of places we've been (memories flooding over us), talked to strangers, put on makeup in the bathroom, had a lollipop, played catch-and-tickle, bought something out of a toy vending machine, fixed our hair, and laughed a bunch. I held her in my lap while we waited for the boarding call and I guess the excellent time we were having together was something she didn't want to have end. Me neither, but I'm old enough now to realize that the good things always do and that's why we are so glad when we discover them again. A bitter person is, I suppose, someone who doesn't even bother enjoying the good because of its imminent ending. But where one thing ends another is of course beginning. Now Valentína is on an excellent adventure of her own, something I won't get to ever know, and she'll be a little sad when that ends too.

And who knows what will happen to our little kitty on her weekend alone. Go see Two Towers with Ásdís ('goddess of the gods,') read more book, maybe go on a long walk in the new permafrost. Probably no dancing, but maybe a coffeehouse visit or two. Eat food. Linger. Vacuum. Write.

Happy Weekend to All. etc. and goodbye for now.

today is the day your life will surely change...

but i've still got some sniffles and the world seems to be just out of communication-reach, so its really just a day to start a new book. sometimes theres a bubble around me, keeping me from harm and keeping things out. on days like this its no use trying to burst the thing from the inside. i just have to relax into it and see where i end up floating to. maybe i'll land all gossamer and soap-glossy on someone's fingertip where i'll perch a few moments before poof! disappearing. most probably i'll simply wake up tomorrow in a new reality more user-friendly.

tip for the day...don't fight it. and don't ever send boys text messages. its old. and its the really hard way to flirt. remember the old days when you just bumped into him and how pleasurable that was...its too easy to push things now. let it all go. don't sms. don't call. just be.

Ok, ok, ok, I'll write something. It's january, alias is on tv, I've got a little itty bitty sore throat from all the singing and shouting over biggi's beats on friday and from behind my kitty whiskers on saturday. Once again, a long, kidless weekend. lots of pretty girlfriends all around, shaking up the menfolk with their sly sweet smiles, dancing to dj's and storming parties in Kopavogur just for the thrill of it. Alva was soo tired come six am saturday, but she earned the party, having eased out of fall quarter with lots of great grades and thousands of masterly words for posterity. She left the dancehouse with a smudged kat nose, six painted-on whiskers and cute ears still firmly in place. walked home slowly, musing over how much fun she'd had, again, and how good it would be to slip sweetly into her bed, albeit alone.

this has been a season, a serires of memories we'll remember as Fall 2002, and all the parties will runtogether in our minds, becoming one collective concept. We were there, we played and kissed the boys, they smiled for us and told us we were pretty, we kept on dancing, hours and hours and the sun never came up to break the spell. We slept all day and shined all night. skál for us! We kept our cool and stayed on track and made great friends, but now...

now we retire for winter. frost is here, red noses and reality...

weekend in the country, two girls and a boy, hot tub, great dinner, good music and brilliant northern lights. barely made it back into town, radiator troubles, which was all part of the fun. now is essay time in skool, so blogs will be spottier than usual. or at least short. Valentina calls...m

(By the way, Lucy's Muse is for mature readers, those who accept that writing erotica is a part of what I do. I can't edit that site for the prim and unprepared, so please be warned.)

Brilliant weekend, lots of love and truth, hugs and happy people, karaoke and pretty boys. Thank Mouse for her Saturday dinner gig and thank myself for my long Sunday walk in the rain. Led Zeppelin, Cocteau Twins, Propellerheads kept me company as I trekked out toward the water then back into town. Sat at Kaffibrennslan where I began my Ode to H, a love story circled with silver rings and with a sad sweet ending.

Black Burger, double cappuchino in a whiskey glass, and seven pages later I left to visit Hrund. Mío, my snow white cat, walked with me to her apartment then showed up an hour later meowing outside the door. We invited him in, but what he really wanted was for me to walk in the spooky midnight wind with him. So together we stole down the hill, to the lake, then up again, maybe a kilometer all together. When I said, Mío, Bye, he stopped and let me walk away alone. The little witch in black with her pure white Bowie-eyed cat. It's quite a sight.

Valentína needs me to help her find something now, though I'm not sure that she even knows what it is we're to look for...

Oh, remember to watch Alias on RUV tonight...Sidney's cute and kicks ass. And more on Lucy's Muse by tomorrow.

Had a glugg party this weekend which was a success. Everyone fighting for the wine-soaked raisins and blood-colored orange slices. I bought more than enough booze and, ironically, everyone came with their own as well. If I hadn't stocked up well no one would have come with anything...you know how things work out that way. Everyone laughed and smiled and had a good time, and I had such a great time preparing for the gig that I think I'll do it again in December. Wanna come?

Weather news: super hvast outside. Garbage cans are tumbling down the hill and pretty much every single leave on every tree and bush in town has been stripped away. Kári er mættur...

So, I guess I'm not a stalker after all. But it took the hand of fate to confirm that for me: there he was, in my path as I walked home from the library. So I just asked what I needed to know ("are you dissing me?"), got an encouraging answer, then kind of slugged him in the chest for not replying to my email. He confessed to procrastination, and I suppose that'll have to do. A couple of cute SMS conversations later, I'm convinced that I play hard ball, you know? I go in for the kill, type of thing. And I always have. Kind of a "it's now or never!" attitute towards men, like I'm not going to waste my time with vague emotions. But since I'm still officially single, something might be wrong with my plan of attack. (nice choice of words: attack!!!) So, instead of creating a romantic drama complete with heros and lovely leading ladies and castles and monsters and great danger overcome by true love, I think I'll just be clear and mellow and nice to myself, and to him. Leave the mythology to Lucy. She does it so well.

Read Astrology Zone for a full-scale overview of the month. The woman who writes it has an honest and comfortable tone, and seems to know her star charts. I also recommend Michael Lutin for daily fixes. He writes for Vanity Fair, glossy mag to the rich and elite. His new daily postings are usually up by one or two pm, Iceland time. Live by it? Nooo. But fun to pay attention to. Check it out.

So I'll try out the whole slow and steady thing, see how that goes. I'm here, I rock, I've got things to do, no rush, time stretches out in all directions and its ultimately how one lives each minute that counts. I'm not going to live my precious hours doubting my senses, doubting others and creating mystery where none exists. There are enough unanswered questions in the world, like whats smaller than a quark , and where to blue whales birth their young to keep us wondering for a lifetime. Some things do not need to be mysterious. Sometimes it pays to simply ask the burning question: ertu hrifinn af mér?, and accept the answer as it comes: já.

no comment

Helloooo world. I'm back in the hotspot, flashing my attitudes in your general direction. What have I learned in the past week?

It is good to clean out the closet and toss what doesn't fit anymore. Any closet. All closets.

I am beginning to accept as the norm that things simply don't go as one plans. And the nice thing is I am now pleasantly surprised when they do. It's like a bonus.

I am also learning that technology can rob a moment or realationship of its potential. See Magga's page for a sweet pistil on the evil SMS factor. I have been running around emails and SMS's and msn when what I'd truly like to do is simply kiss the guy. I suppose in the olden days there were formal letters and chaperones and thousands of courship rules to keep two people from diving too fast into each other's arms, and now all we have is electronics to keep us a safe distance for a decent amount of time. And I suppose as well that there are too many crazy people out there, and that we need to sniff each other out any way we can before exposing our souls. It is possible to hear a voice through text messaging and if the voice is sweet and funny and kind of sexy then maybe one can move on to an actual phone call. If it's porno slut guy or bad joke Joe, then we can cut our losses before having to suffer through real talk.

It was a relief when I finally made the phone call to the guy I'd been texting with. He didn't answer though and I muttered "damn!" even as my fingers raced to text him a disclaimer ("just, you know, calling to say hi...") I leaned on the SMS to pull me through a potential embarrassment. Maybe I was going too fast. What if he was sitting with his buddies laughing about how chicks always want to talk, etc. Aaak! And as I pushed the send button my phone rang. It was him and he sounded glad.
"This is the first time we've talked on the phone," I said.
"You're right. This is a big step!" he replied, only half joking.
We had a good twenty minute talk and I went to bed pleased with my audacity.

Now, after meeting this weekend and making noises about wanting to meet again, I'm stuck in another spot. I called Sunday night with a reasonable excuse (as if a person needs one!) and he didn't answer. That's where caller i.d. comes into play: I knew he'd see that I'd called and thought he'd call me back. He hasn't. After two days waiting, today I made a desperate gesture. I sent him a sweet email giving him my hotmail address "so we can chat if we're ever on line at the same time." No return email from him! Double Aaaak!

What have I done? Now I'm an e-stalker! God! Ok, maybe he dropped his phone into a deep pond and never saw that I'd called and maybe he's been offline all the later part of today and hasn't gotten my mail yet, but God! What is the world coming to? Life was simpler when one called, got no answer, left no record of having tried, waited a decent interval and tried again, being all prepped each time to pretend this was the first time one had dialed the number. I'm lost in the twenty-first century courtship dance: no one ever showed me the moves.

Til tomorrow, then, ta ta (and lets keep our fingers crossed that worst case scenario - he's dissing me - isn't the true one.) m

Found him, just where I was told to find him by those who know the system around here. Not a ghost, but a real live man with grey eyes and two silver rings and a smooth strong body. And, I think, some unfinished business with me...

So this is officially it. I am tired of reading my own words and knowing that others are reading them too, keeping track of my emotions and states of mind. I'm fine, all is good, I have other things to do with my time than write about my life.

I have work to do!

Lucy will still be in process, but even she needs to pull her head out of her ass. I'm drained of sentimentality. Now I want things I can touch and I want to see the results of my efforts. Thanks for your consideration.

move along now, the show is over.

m

The death of the author is the birth of the reader. Writing is a little death; once the word passes from consciousness and onto the page it is no longer owned by its creator. It lives by and of itself, often unrecognizable to the very person who created it.

I have been waiting for phone calls all my life.

I can't find you. You are a ghost, or a figment of my imagination. I think I recall grey eyes, two silver rings, a smooth strong body. Are you real?

Prove my doubts wrong and find me again, like you did the first time. I have no power but to keep slim memories warm by blowing gently into my cupped palms. I gave you the power.

Use it.

hös

Still on strike

(Though I've started a Lucy blogsite. She rocks, though only fiction. She represents the mythical side. She lives for kisses and for the awe in a man's eyes. Lucy is not immoral, rebellious or obsessed. She is the only one of us who still holds hope precious in her strong hands.)

Lucy's Muse

My poor archives...I'm never writing again. I hate it all!!!! blah blah blah, words, thoughts, feeeeelings. More words. I wonder if they're hiring at Esso.

July archives lost, now found

It has come to my attention that I've been writing about the weather all too often. Here's one last mention: It's cold.

Otherwise I'm dry on things to say. Something's quietly working itself out. The knots are unraveling and patience owns the day.

...........

Think about the path that took you to where it began: the flow, the longing, the hesitation, the act.

She needed you and you were there.

Two silver rings.

For in sex we merge, give way, become one with another, allow ourselves to be caressed, pleasured, enfolded, allow our sense of separation to dissolve. But in sex we also feel our impact on another, see our own faces reflected in another's eyes, feel ourselves confirmed and sense our power, as separate human beings to make another feel ~Audra Lord

shhh......whisper. a magic thing has come and we musn't scare it away.

call
her
muse
an inspiration
never captured
nor sucked dry
becoming bore or
wife, but live as fire
sweet, mist cool
garden dark
to be touched
first discovered
revered, admired
licked, turned and folded
open to fingers, questing
mouth seduced, held firm
let fall, hands in
clay hair, wise eye
palms touch
and langourous breaths
merge. she is reunion
silk body born
as Venus for
precious
few then
fade

The weather is crystal clear and frosty these days. Today I'm at home reading Steinbeck and avoiding the world. Not from any kind of apprehension, but rather from a kind of cozy feeling; today I like my home and I love the light that shines in on these short fall days. I'll go out later this afternoon, maybe windowshop or drink a cappuchino.

I am reading To a God Unknown, the first novel Steinbeck got published. I have a deep sense that I've read it before, mostly because the story's hero, Joseph Wayne, has a deep connection to his land, his California land. His brother Thomas has a kinship with animals. I think that I read this story when I was young, and that it affected me, I identified with the brothers' understanding of things not human. I seem to dimly remember feeling like I wasn't alone anymore in loving a tree or talking to a squirrel. The women of the novel are sensualists, giving deeply of their full souls and strong bodies for the men they loved. I think this book formed a part of me, made me fear less my inherent identification with the god in all things.

The wind blows outside. I think I will stay longer in my apartment, until I feel the absolute urge to feel the sea air on my skin. That's the best feeling: emerging winter-dressed from a cozy, stuffy den into the bright frozen air. the first sting of cold breathe, the braced cheeks, the hint of glancy sun which sparkles the eyes more than it warms the skin. Yes, I'll stay inside a while longer and eat some cappelini with pesto.

I haven't written in three days. I've had some things to do, things which required concentration and bare honesty and left no room for emotions, true or indulgent. All the little lingers of thought, the wisps of history and sentimental yearnings are directly grounded, put deep into the rich earth at my feet. And last night I felt the first hint of growth from the fed soil: a pretty plant with thick, off-white blossoms tinged in mauve arrived in my private garden. I knew that I was the plant, that it represented some part of me which was finally ready to bloom again.

On a more practical note, I have set up instant messaging, both through yahoo and msn. My msn adress is mariaroff@hotmail.com and my yahoo is mariaroff@yahoo.com. I also set up a home page, though it's not nearly ready. So, bye for now, more later. m

Shiny Monday, quite unlike a week ago. Now crisp fall is in the air instead of just-failed summer with its muggy-warm grey low sky. This morning the sun peaked over Hengill just after nine and speared the high bands of clouds with golden rays, as it should. Walking to the university after dropping Valentina off at playschool, I breathed in the bright air and felt good. Fall has always been my power time, and maybe that’s why I was so dismayed last week to come back here from California and find the island in a depressed, neurotic shambles. To give myself the room to feel Autumn’s power I have avoided the grumbly, unwashed and downtrodden people whom I know. I don’t feel particularly altruistic toward whiners and the undernourished and I don’t want them damping my natural high.

Instead I called on people who I don’t know well but would like to know better; I encouraged Valentina to invite her girlfriend over for a Saturday night sleepover,and I tossed a bunch of junk that’s been cluttering our home for too long. No patience for redundancy, no room for useless objects. And believe me, I’m not done yet! I realize, however, that I have to take it slow and steady this fall. When all my upswing is used by New Years I end up having a terrible time in the months after. February in particular. I am going to plan a trip in February so I don’t end up sitting on my bum in the dead of winter whining about my hopeless future. I do it every year and my poor mother has to worry and comfort me each time. Maybe I’ll go somewhere warm. Anyone for a winter trip to a Greek island?

So, this morning on the way to the university library I passed by an odd sight: on a small island in the center of a pond which marks the southern end of the town lake and in the water surrounding the island were white cutout figures arranged in a circle. Each figure was about five feet tall. The five figures which had been propped in the water had stylized black line-drawings of naked men on them, all facing out from the island. On the island was a tight grouping of three cutouts with female forms drawn on them. They stood shoulder to shoulder and above their heads was an open sided box with three clear hearts hanging from its top. The triple goddess and her five consorts, representing the original five seasons of the king consort’s life and passage into death at the end of the natural year. Five is the number of labor, five being the number of fingers on the hand with thumb. The men guarded the threefold goddess, virgin, mother, crone, upon her sacred Angelica-grown island. To perfect the image, a dead duck lay her head at the feet of the Mother: sacrifice of life for the eternal. It was a fantastic sight, especially as the sun’s rays broke through a high cloud bank and uplit the whole configuration.

Here’s another oddity from the Lava Rock: over two thousand Scotsmen in kilts converging on Reykjavik for a three day revel, centered of course on a soccer match. They won, 2-0, and I was actively thankful to be tucking in little girls on Saturday night instead of being out and about, surrounded by drunken, BVD-less Scots . I did get a chance to talk to a few on Friday evening at a cafe,and it was actually refreshing to be hailed in a friendly fashion, motive aside. It reinforced for me what it was that made California such a powerful experience this last time around: friendly people; eye contact; unconditional smiles; aimless small talk without obligation. Here on the island it’s just not done that way. I usually get a fair amount of small talk because its in my nature as a Californian to start it up, and with a warm face I can sometimes get shopkeepers and such engaged in casual conversation. In general, though, Icelanders don’t work that way. Walking through the library this morning I nearly crashed shoulders with more than one person when walking through tight aisles because neither one of us was going to slow down or step aside. I’d do it CA, and would also here except that Icelanders don’t. And to survive here I am taking on the cold individualism of the native people. It’s easy for me because it’s in my blood, but I’m not sure this intense, icy personal powertripping is what I want to highlight in my life right now. I’m not saying anything new and you know, I also appreciate the privacy available here. You are offending no one by not having a half-smile propped constantly on your face. That’s refreshing. I guess I need elements from both worlds. I suppose I will always need both.

Helga Lilja messaged me last night, asking me to write down some of what I’ve recently said about men and women in conversations with her. I’m not in the mood right now, but I’ll toss out a few points that have recently come up:

1) Men! Get fixed!
2) If women would just stop getting pregnant all over the place they could truly rule the universe. One child: One adult is the perfect ratio according to the Celestine Prophecies, and even that’s a challenge at times. In less Malthusian terms, Never Assume Your Marriage Will Survive Past The First Three Years Of Your Child’s Life.
3) Men, in their defense, can never fill the expectations women have of them these days, and women all too often withhold the one thing men truly need from them in the first years after a child is born. Sex Matters!
4) If a woman is ready to let her man be a man, and not just a luggage-bearing nanny, then it may work.
5) If men are dogs I’d like a german shepard ( though no true Germans need apply!) A thoroughly quality beast.

You know, I love men and I’ll never understand them. To me, they are an endless source of fascination and power. One day a man will look me boldly in the eye and take my hand and walk with me to the top of a green and wild hill and we will face the world together. I believe that. In the mean time I bear my own unique power which protects me from the evils of the world. I would like to stand with another and no longer alone.* I do not need a strong male in my life but I know he’s coming and I will feel proud to place my hand in his.

I dreamt last night that RR was showing me a beautiful house, all white and garden courtyards and that I had a german shepard with me.

Sunshine, no fear, be bold. m

*I am not figuring Valentina into this because she has her own life path and I may only have as few as ten more years of her constant presence in my life. She cannot either supply all my adult needs though she questions why I would need a man in my life when she is more than willing to hold me tight.

just so we don't think we're new to this, here's a piece from 1993:

It’s all qualified from the start so no one gets hurt. They want to have fun, they say to each other after telling stories of their scars and births. We won’t hurt each other, we just want to touch. She says it to justify taking off her clothes, so he’ll see she’s not the emotional type of woman. He says it for a quick getaway in case he loathes her smell or starts to fall in love, but mostly so he can touch her smooth skin for the first time. Where would these two get if, both beautiful, they claimed from the start that this could possibly be love? Would they take their clothes off? Would he, scared, escort her to the door? Would she think he was a liar and a fake? Would they find a way to dissemble their words and fuck anyway? No one knows the future, but the used and users can guess it too well.

He kissed her so deep as she sat wondering if she could love this man, pretending ambivalence. The kiss sang true. She was willing to embark on a crazy affair, if only for fun. No one gets hurt, no one falls in love. But , like a woman, she hoped anyway and at that moment he tasted her soul.

They never kissed quite like that again.

oh, what should i write, should i write. copied 1600 words from a journal from two years ago. I'll paste in something from then. Oh, what to write, except that I am going to grab the golden ring and toss in into the clown's mouth with my own wit and skill. Just watch me. the truth has kicked in and it reads: no more poor me. no more tears, no more poverty, no more lounging in the past. just lots of knuckling down before the keyboard and writing a new future with flair. you'll see.

From September, 2000:
A few words for posterity or for the me I’ll be in a few years, having lived my future:
He calls me elskan sometimes, says I love you and I giggle cause its so cliché. His sentimentalities are true, he does not lie. But one night as we sat on the Alva couch I took his hand after he closed his eyes. I could tell by his stillness that he hoped for some meditative communion. I closed my eyes too, let my new-lit cigarette linger and sought to bring him into my psychic garden. But something stopped me. I looked about my inner space and silently asked who is here? A force was disturbing our simple moment. I quickly circled protection, letting his form be guarded too, and looked toward my sky - who are you, what do you want? And imagine, there was darkness in my garden, I was pulled into my own earth as if into a whirlpool. I stated a firm no! , stopped the questioning, rose from the ground and left my garden. Who, please, has enough power to manipulate my space? Am I so weak? Is the warning so determined to be heard? Someone was trying to dissuade me from the tiger, the lover who lay in my arms.
I opened my eyes just in time to see the tiger smile in cosmic bliss, as if he’d joined with me in some psychic sexuality. I closed my wary eyes, I saw a cloth-like band of my soul wrapped into him and I pulled it out. I felt manipulated. I retracted that which reached out to him. I opened my eyes again to see his bliss expanded; he was breathing in a rush, like he’d been touched there by a lover’s fingers. I thought, whoever he’s communicating with now, it’s not me! I waited patiently, suspicious, like he’d been faking it, ilike it was all a charade. Heed the warnings! Don’t fall!. Will this be worth knowing a year from now?

Back to today. I'll say it's worth knowing! That's the very same tiger who I've been mourning the loss of for an unbearable amount of time. Who it was warning me, I don't know, but even he felt a presence here in my aparment which was hostile toward him, no matter how cozy we felt with each other. Pull out now, before you get addicted to his coming when you always know he's going to leave, too. I even wrote, after first meeting him, "Is it possible to need something which had no existence a fortnight ago? Yes, heroin; a tall dark stranger." Like a junkie, I had my withdrawls: six months of pulling the fabric of my being out from the tangle of our year and a half together.
He said to me once, "If you find out how she came to exist, you will probably know how she’s to disappear." Maybe he was talking about Lucy, or about the part of me that Lucy personifies. I don't remember. But the She I was with him came into existence by the sheer force of his will. That force has been denied, and that woman fades into the history of my heart and my words. Goodbye.

Wow, that was amazing! I just wrote a long and beautiful piece about my relationships to the men I was so angry with in the entry from yesterday and it all got erased. My connection failed and I wasn't able to post and publish. Damn! There is no way I could write it all over again, so here's an outline:

I am not so angry, nor so sad. I am disappointed but disappointments are directly related to expectations.

Joi called to apologize for oversleeping and for scoffing at me. I thanked him for giving me renewed hope in men.

My father is a strong and proud man who has given so much to his family. He has helped me when I've needed it and a few days of dissention between us cannot ever diminish how much I respect and love him. I gave him the biggest hug I could when he dropped us off at the airport and then gave him another. All is well.

Einar has never pretended to have much to give me, at least since we broke up, and he has no obligation to me. He is totally absorbed in his studies and I have to truly let him go. He is a good man. I feel now like I have finally moved on. I wish him all the best.

After twenty years, Rob and I will always be connected, regardless of other circumstances in our lives. I respect him for not sabotaging a real-time relationship for a romantic weekend. Seeing him so beautiful and spiritual and healthy was overwhelming! The short time that we had to spend together helped to open up some warm part of myself that I had forgotten or have never truly known. Now an ocean and a continent separate us, but he is here in my heart, always, and I long to see him again soon.

And I think I need to mention one man who has not disappointed, but was rather a pleasant bonus to my trip to California: Adam. I've heard Rob talk about him for years now, so meeting him finally was easy and comfortable. We talked all sorts of philosophy during the two times we met and he was chivalrous enough to escort me to town when no one else was available. I tip my hat...

This is nowhere near as fabulous as the piece I lost to some electronic glitch. Now no one will ever know how great it truly was...In all honesty, though, I do feel like a new phase has begun in my life and I am ready for it. I wonder sometimes if being here on this arctic lava rock is a way for me to hide from challenge or from success. It may be, but here I have been able to heal myself after a chaotic early adulthood: find my strengths and mend my flaws. I need Iceland, it's in my blood. But I am starting to feel the pull of the rest of the world, the lure of warm places and new faces. I want to keep opening up, like a flower in first bloom, and not hide here because its a safe place to be a poor artist...have laptop, will travel! til tomorrow m

Ok, ok, seeming a bit moody lately. Mom called and mentioned it, "Are you a little down, Maria?" and I replied, "Maybe, but that's why I write: to get it out of me and move on." A good response from someone who's just woken up!

I can quickly describe why I was down: aside from the fact that my soul is just now completing its arrival from California, three days after my body, I was disappointed by yet another man in my life this morning. My ex-husband overslept when he was supposed to pick up Valentina for her acting class, then sounded all "dude, what's the big deal?" when I finally woke him up an hour and a half later. Grrr! That on top of Dad telling me to "chill out, for god's sake!" when I politly asked him not to do 90mph on the freeway onramp, then not talking to me for a day and a half when I firmly pressed my point ("I don't let anyone drive this way with me. Anyone!") Add in the mix a nice dose of "Oh, Maria? Yeah, Maria...hey, uh, what's up, duhhh" from someone once dear and now clearly not concerned with remembering me, ("Do you do instant messaging?" he bothered to ask as if he'd finally found a medium in which to communicate with me when phone, texting and email don't seem to suffice.) And of course there's the big one, the one where I got dissed in favour of an 818 ("She's really nice.")

The injustice of it all! Men falling down all over the place! The floor is littered with broken promises and hollow egotism. A woman has to step over the rubble and keep on keeping on, trying her hardest not to trip over the lies and puppy-eyed apologies with which men try to appease the angry, beautiful and all-powerful Goddess.

And a day later, one from my soul:

It´s been noted that our souls are immense, and that our puny bodies are nowhere near big enough to contain them. I suppose thats why wind on a hilltop or waves on a pretty beach seduce us: the immensity of the elements mirror our souls and call to us in voices too grand for human ears. We know truth and beauty but do not have the voice to speak them clearly. We own eternal strength but cannot lift a finger to change the course of time.

What's written below comes from a frail human heart inside a breakable mortal body. I sense the grandeur, the rhythms, the exceptional and have been blessed to see glimpses of the marvelous in my life. And I suppose I'll cry each time the moment fades from view. It's like watching a spectacular sunset that must always end; we are one with the eternal for as long as it lasts, then left with the memory of having seen the miraculous. We have lived and lost: the joy we feel is replaced by sadness. Being human, though, we are always hopeful that some day we will feel the joy again.

I'm home, in Iceland, and this is from my heart:

There was this weekend, just after my birthday where I pretended I was twenty six and I am really thirty four. It didn’t matter, the age, because I am still thirteen going on fourteen, two decades ago. What happened was not at all what I expected and I sit thousands of miles away trying to decipher what has become of me.

Were you there too? Sad girl finds beauty, etc. Lost loves reunite if for only a hug. Who We Were Before Everything Happened To Us rises like a movie in front of us but we can’t grasp onto it.

Don’t you get it? I am so alone and you were a dream and a possibility, something that might save me or give me comfort and you found someone else in the time it took me to get to you. Like a soldier who asks his girl to wait, and lives, survives, because he believes that she waits by the shore for his return and in the time it takes him to find her again she has promised half her heart to another. She needs constancy and comfort, she is not to blame. But poor man who’s trudged and survived all these years for the warmth of coming home to find its been taken from him.

I am not a man, and cannot understand men. I am poor girl who’s seen beauty and has had to walk away because no one has stopped me. I am her who’s got a plane ticket to a rocky island where I’ll be alone on a hilltop aware that there is more, barely able to reach it.

Some say it’s fate; that if it isn’t, it was never meant to be. What of me, though, and all my love? Where does it go if no one holds it precious, if no one holds me so that I can keep making more, so that this hard world can be softened by smiles and touch and care?

You can’t leave me here! I call old options and they have nothing to give me, they are as dead as they should be given the monument of what I’ve felt without them near me. I can be alone, but how can I forget what I saw?

Love thyself, and I do. If I can see my beauty, though, why shouldn’t I want to be near another as lovely as I am, and as true. Do I live and die knowing what I have to give without being able to give it? oh, ache, oh, sorrow, for not being at the right place at the right time!

Can you hear me? Do you see me in your dreams? Does anyone miss me, as in She should be here and she’s not? Because I’m nowhere and everywhere and I need someone to hold onto me so I don’t fade and I don’t fall apart. Are you there?

Sweet woman, she is loved and she is so alone.

testing, testing

Alive and well in Brentwood. Iceland on Wednesday...

Was that a little depressing, that which I wrote last? All is well in Cupertino, California on this the ninth day of our vacation. It is still just below 100 degrees and we barely make it around the block on a noontime walk. Though oppressive, I am actually enjoying the heat; we stroll and saunter and drink lots of water. No running, no hustle. Went swimming the other day in a California pool. It's always amazing to want to stay in the water beacuse it's too hot to get out!

Tonight is my birthday party: pizza and cake and ice cream outside on the patio, with PowerPuff Girls(aka Stuðboltastelpurnar) plates and napkins. I'm the Powerpuff girl with blone hair and ponytails, Valentina is the redhead witht he red hair bow and Mekkin will be the dark haired one (I don't know their names. boo hoo.) Now I have to go paint my toenails for the gig. Later, dude. m

I used to be Madia. Madia Alva Roff of Cupertino, California via Pacific Grove and the lovely nation of Iceland. I've returned to my island to bury my fingers deep in black sand beaches and to smell the wild thyme in the warm summer sun. To see northern lights and drink pure water from my kitchen tap. To raise my Valentina to be fearless and true and to read the weather in the great open sky. To write.

Everything I ever said or wrote is true if only because the souls of words have substance. The motions of typing, my fast fluttering fingers, push the air in concentric ripples, ever expanding, and the breath of speech puffs ghosts of thought into the subatomic mass. Other realities, fragile forms like clouds, are dispersed with grace and merge anew with my words and thoughts entwined. I am an active force in this morass. I change the world surely as I type.

* * * *

This life is a possession that Lucy seems to scoff at. She holds her head high with false pride, her shoulders break through the mists of reality, she breathes the ether of ironic discontent. She plays charmed to be useless, accepts a prop’s life, smother a whore’s smirk at the fateful lust of men. She reads Fitzgerald, Austin, School for Scandal, plays a room as if she’s richest hoping fact will follow her fantastic fancy.

On good days she is a charm: eldest, wisest, strongest of the pretties, exalted for the very wisdom into which she collapses on lonely Monday nights. We see her breaking now; watch her as she gazes out her window high up on the hill, her castle turned tower. She searches the night for a star or dancing northern lights. But though her heart is cold with broken hopes the night air does not hold the chill strength to summon waltzing talismans. She sees only darkened haze, the warm lights of someone else’s family home beyond the glass. In her worst moments Lucy’s eyes flood with tears of disgrace for her own incation, for all the pride with which she’s tried to feed her daughter and her soul. She damns her fears, the falseness of her standing with the young women who surround her. She moans for her stiff inability to show her hurt, to be for the length of a phone call true enough to admit her diminishing without the raw violence of self-pity soiling her voice. See Lucy brew tea that numbs the tongue, hoping it will deaden as well the knowledge of despair seeding inside of her.

Lucy’s pity writes itself on paper. Tears sprinkle about her; her eyes swell with a loathing for her own weak spirit. Her only therapy is words and even they are tinged with some grey remorse. Each scrawl wrung from her pen rents her wounds to bleeding. Her one last hope is her gravest pain. She writes:

<Please, let sleep wash me ashore in a world in which I win my will. Each second more, blanketed by darkness, head on a rocky down pillow, each second more that I lie awake I am stoned by thoughts of what I haven’t done to ease my burden. A phone call not made, help not requested, a form not filled in. The egoistic faith that a wished-upon star will bring me wealth, that a few moments lotused in meditation will make me choice in some stranger’s eye’s. See me cry because I used to believe that the sheer power of my wanting, the blinding strength of my will would lead me on. Yes, I broke the chain of diligence in a freefall search for serendipity. I once believed that I, bold young woman, held a magic sway over my own destiny. And now watch me sob, as I smell the rot of my own abandon. If I was once ready to accept that my brilliance had a hand in coincidence, I must now know that my blackened, tar-stained pain holds the same sway. Now it is exactly odd and right that what I touch rusts before me and gold is only part of some brash young harlot’s hopes, some brazen girl I dimly find inside of me. I used to believe.

Some say, my dear, that there are only so many tears we need to cry before we heal. Your hurt is so fantastic in its self-awareness, Lucy, that you will hardly recover while you insist on describing its every detail. Some say also that each breath, each beat brings us farther from our past and that therefore we must exhale into now, let ago be so. Can you use your words, broken girl, to breathe your past on to paper; can you fold the page, send it away, enter your now, find a middle source of strength and pride, stay alive a few days more until the price of your labor has paid the soulful debts you feel you owe?

Tonight the Black Watch bar in Los Gatos (the cats), a small enclave of extreme wealth tucked into the hills just south of Cupertino where my parents live. The bar itself is slightly renegade, with a heavily tatooed doorman and biker flavor unexpected in such a conservative town. Yups and moneyed pups love to frequent the Watch for its earthy flavor; they pass the doorman with a gruff coolness then go inside and order Cosmopolitans and other fluffy drinks. One gets the feeling that the bartenders are relieved when someone orders a plain old beer. Katrina and I went together. We are sisters-in-law with much in common and a whole family between us. Ater a Heffeweisen and Guiness respectively, we bumped into some friends of hers and joined in on a game of darts fueled by kamakazis. We played the poor relations, asking questions about how darts are scored and so forth then resoundly kicked their dart-trained asses. We were superstars. Another beer or two later and it was last call and time to go (2 am though a Friday) so we slid out onto North Santa Cruz Avenue and into Katrina's car (as designated driver she of course avoided the booze...!) Home now, typing in my old room which is now Dad's office, I am reminded of how nothing has changed except the long-awaited riddance of the desperation which charged me ten, fifteen years ago. Finally I am through waiting and searching for something to happen in this valley. It never will. I left because I sensed that it never would. Time stands still in Los Gatos, in Cupertino, in California. I go on. Life here stays the same.

Today in the USA: raking leaves in our bikinis, Vala and I, in the sun, in mom and dad's backyard. 25 degrees celsius, takk fyrir, and gangandi 'ikornum in the trees and on the wires which cross behind the yard. Later it was lunch in Santa Cruz, on an open deck by the small yacht harbor. A small brown starling shared our french fries and, of all things, a Great Blue Heron (of stork-aett) settled in a tree not far from where we ate. After lunch we hit the beach, Natural Bridges beach, which had a natural bridge (ala Dyraholay but smaller) until the mid-eighties when it fell to storm and crashing waves. The massive rock which still stands just off the beach is home to a hundred pelicans who preen with their extra-long pouched beaks. The beach seems to slope down into the water, seems below sea-level, so that the Pacific Ocean becomes like a great blue blanket under which one could crawl to cozy and to sleep. Valentina and I splashed and played and laughed and drew greetings in the sand for the sea to take and send to those we love who are far away. Tonight we will eat American steaks, rib eyes, and drink a fine velvet red merlot from Australia at Addy and Dan's house. more later on tiny baby boys, American courtesy and the new verve, soccer practice, and television, television, television...M

On the home front - a photographer should be coming over any minute now to take my picture for Líkaman og sál, the little magazine which goes with Samuel which is a kind of soft porn glossy. I won this competition for an erotic short story back in spring and it will be published in the next month or so. I wrote it in English, and the editor required a translation into Icelandic to print it, so a friend, Roald, has seen to that. I haven't read what he's written and I've taken the view that his versionis another, separate piece of work from the original; in other words, a collaboration. This will be my first published piece and it is kind of humorous that it's deep sex stuff and not something that I'd necessarily want my parents to read. I wrote it in early 2000 and in a sense it can be seen as a work from my Lucy Phase (described in more detail in the previous postings.) I don't write much erotica these days, and actually am just having fun with words and wordplay.

The funny thing about this blog is that when a person checks out my site for the first time they are reading my now in the most recent entry, then are in a sense traveling into my yesterdays as they scroll down the pages and dive into the archives. If I explain something here, in this entry, which refers to my future or to future entries, the explaination will become sequentially lost in the past as soon as I create a more current blog. Technically, a person would have to start in the archives, form the first entry and work their way up to today to get a true picture of the progress of my life. I doubt many would do that.

I suppose it would make more sense to create my own web site to showcase my writings and use the blogspot the way most people do, for short, up-to-the-minute entries on current affairs and cool links. Regardless, I enjoy having a medium to write in. By the way, for those interested in reading the untranslated "award winning" erotic story, it is in the archives, from July. It was the second thing I posted on my blogsite. Enjoy.

Oh, and we are going to California, Valentína and I, on Sunday, so I won't be writing for a few days. Take the opportunity to dig in the archives for more light reading. - M

(Aside)

I've found a stack of papers I wrote in 99-00. Most of them revolve round Lucy who is tracing her path through life in spirals. She is crude, beautiful, alone and curious. She is searching for the pattern into which she is weft and learning how to be a human along the way. She stares at clouds. Cats follow her. She knows how to say goodbye.

((Aside))

Look in the archives

(that simple moment before a knot of humans dissolve into their surroundings, leaving a path for her to pass unobstructed.)

In truth, Lucy was lonely. The same glow which compelled men and women to know her was like a force field or a bubble which kept them at bay. Friends seemed to circle her, to try to to spiral into her. To come closer without ever quite reaching the core. She was certainly beautiful and even charming but there was some secret about Lucy that kept people from coming straight at her and if she tried to open herself to others they invariably shied away. The warmth which radiated from her was at it's heart a burning passion that very few could withstand and Lucy knew it. She showed facets of herself, gave enough to keep her friends interested, turned her aura like a disco ball, letting others reflect in her in bursts but never shining her full gaze upon them.

One night at the local a young man stopped her as she crossed the room.
You are cruel, he said. She looked at him with wonder.
Excuse me?
You are cruel and beautiful. He looked hurt. He glanced at her as he spoke, then shoved his hands into his pockets.
Please tell me what you mean, Lucy asked delicately not wishing to disturb his nerve.
You move about as if you know something that no one else knows, he burst out. You are so beautiful and no one is allowed to touch you! No one can come close to you. You are cruel and perfect and no one is let near. It's wrong!
Lucy swallowed, breathed it all in, tried to accept the anger and the truth of what he said. She waited to catch his next glance then held his eyes.
Have you tried to touch me? she softly questioned. And in a flash of contact he understood a tiny part of what it was like to be Lucy, alone, rarely touched. He quickly lowered his eyes, shook his head slightly and walked away.



Lucy writes:

Tell you what I'd like best...fur wrapping my body, covering the mistakes and blemishes, unsighltly pores, veins. Fur as a cat's, sleek glossy, each fiber embued with rainbows like an oil slick. Fur for petting so that people will pet me, will find me irresistable, will reach out enchanted by the glamour of my rich pelt. Then I'd be in heaven, I'd be in a comic book with a tail balanced behind me. Or no tail. Just me. My slender form already trained in the feline ways with a golden coat of fur for you to rub your cheek against, smooth. Fur for an erotic flare and to wear all winter for graceful cover.


Once again in theory (then we're done for the night):

The facts lie otherwise. Men fear absorption, women don't always want to be impaled. But the facts preceed the union, facts found in lines, in text, in the scripted romance that leads to nude joy. Does the average man want to fall in love? They say so, scoff at any idea that they wouldn't be able to handle being lost in a woman, blinded by a burning core. Beware, of course of melting....
Some men feel the need to expose that core, decode the alarm systems to rip open the belly of the soul and steal a glance at the ethereal glow. Some men are even more like thiefs who steal a way inside. The risk is always in the burn.
And there are of course women who milk men dry; who, once given the taste of a man's power demand hungrily for more, ravenous when denied a pure injection over and again. Man has no time to recharge, is left dry, sucked and hollow while woman rides the crest of his high.

I find romance in an honest kiss.
Watch out! This is how we trip, fly out into voids of wonder, searching streets for pure colours, seeing you in him, in her blazing parka, walking where we wouldn’t in hopes of meets. Silly fancied girls write melting text across the sky in clouds, call upon world wise goddesses to message our longing to a boy’s green eyes, to a tall man, to Adonis, to romance, to the elusive male ever busy, never knocking, calling for a forgotten phone or the key to a secret left deep in a sheepskin rug.
A girl’s romance from a concrete body, teen’s desire from and age old soul. But there has to be hope, must be something in a glance or move to suggest we’re not fools for trying to wish in the wind. Men are caves, a woman’s whisper echoing hollow in the occupations of their space. Or men are stone on which we wind our veils of seduction, all too stable for the gauze to sway.

From 2000, the Lucy stories

Lucy went dancing the other night, ditched everyone at the bar, flew out the door and into the night, the lure of techno irresistible. She paid way too much to get in but freedom has a price and this was the perfect freedom: four am bodies, people she maybe knew but couldn’t be bothered to focus her gaze upon. Four am crowd, swaying, sidling, sweating, she pushes past them to the basement stairs, takes the curve, descends, footsteps times to drum and bass. Bodies writhe, she wiggles past the center dance floor into a corner formed by a massive speaker and a wall. This is her element. Lucy’s fingers twitch, hands begin an arc to the subbed melody, her hips jut, the slide a slow grind. Lights pulse past their orbs til they truly are the music; they are packets and waves, her hips are waves, Lucy is the music.

Oh, a man she knows emerges from the black mask of dancers. Blonde, a man she knows, a man from a long time ago or at least a few years. He’s flirting with her now, she’s recalling the time she fell out of his bed, drunk, out of his single bed as he tried to manoeuvre her into the next position. He’s riper now, soft, confident with maturity rather than ego. He isn’t an old man, but he is a chunk of history, and now he’s dancing, smiling right at Lucy, the famous winning smile. He takes her hand and places it firmly upon his crotch. Lucy looks up at him, her hand resting on his brown leather pants and the rock beneath them. Only a hint of surprise cruises her face, surprise that of all men he should be the first in her life to pull this move. It fits, though, as all the other subtler tricks have been used by him in the history of their acquaintance. And words do not suffice. They have little to say. He communicates his needs with succinct accuracy in this gesture. She pulls her hand away.

Minutes pass. Words are useless in the din and fray. She is flushed with sound, he is still there, a body, a man she once licked with his smooth tan skin and his smooth green eyes. He made her feel so small in those days, she so new and mute in a compact city. But now he seems to see a woman in her, has accepted that she defines the erotic air in which she pulses. He takes her hand, walks her to a corner, leans close and asks her what she wants. A wry smile flirts across her lips. She looks down then glances up to him with those cunning sweetheart eyes. They nail each other’s gaze. The claim again a waft of passion which once surged freely between them, before husbands and wives when they were puppies, kittens, the world a store of future worth. They reclaim those days when they were each other’s secret goal. What do you want? he asks. She doesn’t answer.

Ahh, Lucy, why can’t you turn your face fully up to his? Why can’t you ask for the kiss you know perches just there on his lips? Why after all these centuries do you blush at the glistening complement in his eyes? Does it matter much that men don’t change? Can you not simply accept the rule and definition which guides them, let yourself be kissed, held, fondled, treasured for a few hours until the urgency is met and man again becomes the functional beast, you the tolerated prey? Why do you shy at the knowledge that tomorrow, after the spell of sound and beer disintegrates into a hazy Sunday, this brief dark corner affair will turn into a tale of conquest. Can you not define your own epic out of the raw look, the charge and throb which grows now between your bodies? Do you have to know so well that you will always end up alone, my dear? And don’t we all, Lucy? Turn your lips up to his! Whisper past the crashing din that what you you’d truly like, what you want, is to feel him charge upon your hesitation, take the kiss you cannot give, grasp your reluctance in his paws and help you to melt into his lust if only for this secret hour as if the future rode upon your union.

But Lucy says nothing, says no with her eyes and with a soft caress upon his cheek. He sees and lets her proudly walk away, through the bodies which part as if her soul commands it, past the bar and the dreamy revelers, the doorman, the last strains of music and into the bright Sunday morning light.

Jacob Thor Nater is my new nephew's name. We'll see him in just over a week. California here we come! I'm reading Steinbeck now, short stories from a collection called The Long Valley which is Salinas Valley, California, a place I know well. The way he describes the summer fogs and the crashing ocean below the high Big Sur cliffs makes me long for my landscape. I've always known that the essence of Northern California nature is a thing which will always pump through my veins, will always have a strong physical pull on me, but my memories of beaches and Sierra mountains and redwood giants comes from my youth, in that innocent time before I realized that spooky, dangerous things menace the beautiful California wilderness; that rapists go camping and thieves will steal your daypack right off your beach towel the minute you dip your toes in the ocean. Of course there are plenty of unspoiled spots to drive to, but my naivete has vanished like summer's morning fog in the noonday sun.

So, perusing the library shelves I happened upon a slim, square hardbound book printed in 1911. At the Feet of the Master, it was titled and it's thirty-odd pages inspired me to see the world with new eyes. It was nothing that I haven't heard or read before, yet the book itself, so old and carefully held all these years with it's linen pages and front photo plate protected by a crisp sheet of rice paper helped me to see the timeless nature of man's search for a reason to be. Reading it was nothing like reading a featherweight paperback self-help/alternative work if only because the book itself had substance and history.

Valentína, of five years on Earth, and Karítas, slightly older, need their spaghetti now. More words later. M

The basics: my sister and her husband have a new son! Born September 2, 2002, the year of the Horse. An evening baby and a polite, if fashionably tardy birth. Congratulations are in order! Mekkin has a brother, our family finally has a little boy to balance all the intense female energy we've radiated these thrity-five years. In just under two weeks we'll be in California, my girl and I, to see the bundle of joy. We are hoping for a lack of disasters and terrorist acts in the meantime and for the duration of our stay. Maybe an Indian Summer will heat our days so we can come home to our island radiant, thank you very much.

Here on the island is what we call óveður - unweather. Thrashed trees spew leaves and rain splats against windows disgracefully. We university students cozy into the library to study, to read, kept warm by the inherent energies of the books which surround us. On this second day of the new school year we watch each other from over the tops of our tomes; we see each other saunter past the bookshelves, disappear from view then reappear in quiet aisles. We camp in comfortable blue upholstered chairs, shoes off, feet on a matching ottoman, book in hand, or we hunker into cubbied desks to spend a day learning. yet we always spare a glance at those who slip near-silent past us. Some faces are familiar, some new. The school year has begun. We are hopeful, we are ready, we are brave.

Thursday, seven a.m., there was a lovely, well-lit fog in town. The diffusion of light was such that an aura of the magical twinkled in the laden air. It was gone within the hour; a golden sun eased the mist away then shone from a late-summer blue sky. Though a gola now sweeps between the two hills of town, it is a warm wind. Even the shadows hold some linger of heat. It is not a day to sit in front of a glaring screen or hang in bank lines, so out I go into the last days of summer. I will walk the shore path and let the wind lift my hair and press my clothes to my body. I'll nod to passers-by while musing on the beauty of it all and then I'll find a perfect stone to sit on, to sit still as all occurs around me.

Valentína's away so I'll go into town for coffee. Wwalking past the town lake I'll try to talk to the geese when no one is looking. I'll probably meet a cat and if it is belled I will take the bell off and put it in my purse. I will go up Main Street and Bank Street to Baths Way then turn up on Smith Lane to reach Kaffibarinn. There I will sit with ÁV and drink a double capp in a whiskey glass. We'll joke and greet friends and ask about the weekend coming up. Who has plans and whats to be done and where to be: gallery openings, gigs, happenings and dinner do's. Some men will be drinking happy hour beers and will be drunk by ten o'clock, carousing by eleven and desperate by midnight. ÁV and I will finish our capps then leave for home where he'll go upstairs to his flat to cook noodles while I attempt to nudge a meal out of leftover rice and spices in my flat below. I'll do the news and a sitcom or two on the telly and he'll make music for an hour or two. Then maybe we'll pop back out to Kaffibarinn for a late capp and groovy dj tunes. Just before one we will both eye the clock then look to each other and nod in agreement. Time to go home. We'll chat on the way about tomorrows plans and which men would be right for us, then we'll say goodnight and tuck into our bed to sleep sweet and dream.

It seems as though the world is upsidedown, or at least that logic and continuity have chucked it in. That which made sense yesterday doesn't necessarily now, and time-tested words of advice have little relevance. For some this means that people who were to be permanent fixtures have disappeared or are fading, or leaving, or dying.

For others dramatic change that was to happen Now! isn't; they may have pushed the Sysiphean boulder up the hill yet it doesn't roll, neither forward nor back. For these people effort shows little reward right now and patience is all that is left to ponder.

For a few wonderful events are sprouting where they shouldn't, and the act of having denied all advice and reason up til now is paying off in excellent ways: they find that the only truth is the one which lies point in the center of their being, all other voices be damned. The reward for their integrity is bountiful and seemingly out of proportion to their efforts, though in truth it is far more difficult to find, listen and hear one's own voice than any other challenge we face. The voice is true because it is of the soul, of the universe, of God and Great Mother; it is synched to the hum of the stars, and throbs to the pulse of the oceans. It comes from here in the belly and not from our hearts and not from our heads. It is the sound of everything whispering as one.

There are no rules. If there is a box, its corners can be smoothed and rounded until the box is your soul, existing outside your body, protecting you, advancing through the world just before your body to sense the way. The body is fragile, the soul is indestructible. Its source is the center, the vanishing point of the being it contains and it is pure and true and in rhythm with all that is. There are no rules, just the endless flow and merge of souls uniting, parting, flowing of course like a river around rocks and falling like a river falls from heights in turmoil and churning disarray, yet always one. Its been said before.

Now though, especially now, assumptions are futile and efforts are not relevant to outcome, so all we have learned seems to not matter. Chuck it. Step brand new into the next moment expecting nothing, ready for anything. For some the pain is over, for some it is just beginning and for others the clock has seemed to stop. Change is upon us, so find your center and ride the tide.

The seagulls arrived about a week ago. One evening at home I heard the raucous squawking of their arrival, and watched them fly downtown from my balcony. They were a few hundred strong, a flock of seagulls announcing their coming with style. Sweeping into Reykjavík from parts unknown, they've brought an intruder element to life at the city lake. They harass the local mallard population and scare the greebs. The grey geese tolerate the seagulls though they seem to resent the endless screeching. Geese bite grass so the fact that the gulls dive bomb proffered bread, snatching each torn bite before the genteel ducks have a chance to nibble, doesn't bother them. Those of us who frequent the lake understand the disruption and do our best to toss the bread well, letting it land just in front of the chosen duck so only a polite bend of the neck is needed on their part to eat the snack. The gulls still heckle but at least they are unable to steal from the residents of Tjörninn, the little city lake.

On the way home from hlb's I saw them circling just higher than City Hall which sits lakeside, toes in the water. Gulls in the sky, like gliders, riding a stream; they gather and fan, so solid and super sure of their finesse in the air. This flock of perhaps a hundred had an objective, a destination; one by one theyslipped out of orbit and took a draft westward. I stopped walking and followed their flight, marveling at their agility and strength. Then I sighted what it was they were so interested in: a man far away, on the other side of the pond giving a pride of geese some bread. One by one I saw the gulls drop, white wings still spread, to the grass and insinuate themselves between the man and the geese. I shook my head at the merciless intensity of seagull greed, and walked away.

As the feeling fades I'm hard pressed to remember its origins.

When I mentioned in the last entry that I got a message from god I meant it, and I'm going to share it with you, reader. It's called Interview with God and was sent to me courtesy of DoubleR, who'll be surfing in Fiji for a week in September. Check it out, the god thing. It's lovely.

I don't seem to have written much on Iceland and I think I should. I should also mention that my dear friend HL has a charming day-in-the-life blog in action, and I should take this opportunity to thank her for introducing me to this blog thing. It's like a diary but there's that extra element: someone may actually be reading what I've written. Ultimately, though, I'm writing for myself. (Hi Helga!)

Regarding writng, I'm a little disappointed in my own tone. I seem to ooze a kind of cynicism toward men and toward, perhaps, individual truth. I read a wonderful short story by Guy de Maupassant, entitled "MadameTellier's Establishment," which evoked such joy and warmth in me. I wish so that I could find in my writings the sense of honesty sans pessimism that de Maupassant was able to encourage in his tale. It's about a bawdy house and the warm, true and loved prosititutes who live and work there. Read it, read de Maupassant. Maybe I have a hard time seeing human interaction in a positive light because humans are so damnably flawed, with no follow-through and little joi de vivre. At least the ones I know (excepting you and you and you.) My world seems to have gotten smaller, so I stare at the clouds for hints of continuity and passion. Even the clouds pass on, though. Especially the clouds.

It's been bothering me, the last line of the last story so I've changed it and no one will ever know the difference, except me. Two fascinating messages came to me in my hour of need. One was the daily report on the heavens and earth by Michael Lutinand the other from god himself. It seems I'm reliving phases of the past and being offered a chance to redeem it from a tangle of time and individual memory. I feel it; odd pulses and a squeezing and a tendency to lounge about, letting memories whisp across my cheek and whisper to me. I have no wish for them, though, and would like my present back. Time will tell. Goodnight.

I was a little nervous about booking flights to the US in September, but John Travolta spent the night here in Iceland as part of his promotional tour for air safety, so I'm feeling safer. he's a good man and a damn fair pilot I hear. I still have, though, lurking inside, a feeling that the US will be closed for business, doors locked, sometime in September and either I'll have the forfeit the thousand bucks I've charged for plane tix and we'll never get off this island or we'll get to the states and get stuck inside. But I believed in the Y2K scare, so I'm probably just a paranoid antiestablishmentarian. More later.

Day eight. The lion roars, we dry away cancer and enter the end of summer. Romances flourish and fade under velvet pewter skies, pairs find passion in the light and theirs is the love of fabel and song. Short, warm, wet thyme-scented summers on the tundra-covered hraun coax a quickening of spirit as the year lunges into its death. Mount the beast of august and grab full the mane; leap into the celebration of autumn's arrival and the passing of the sun's season!

ALVA GOES CAMPING

This past weekend, the first in August, was camping weekend here in Iceland. Known as verslunumannahelgi, or merchants' weekend, it was traditionally a time for shop keepers and traders of all kinds to shutter their windows and take a vacation. Since merchants are city-based creatures, the logical thing to do for a vacation was to skip town and head for the tundra. They packed their families into cars and buses, made sure everyone was equipped with a wool sweater and a pair of rubber boots and converged onto a few predesignated campsites to enjoy a three-day holiday. Once friendly families found each other, their waxed-canvas tents were erected in circles around a central fire pit and the festivities began. Someone always had a guitar, a harmonica, an accordion and nearly every male adult had a bottle of Black Death or vodka. The wives pretended not to drink yet always had thermoses handy to fill the women's cups as they unpacked the grill meat and coleslaw. Children ran wild, falling into mud puddles and cracking their heads on nasty old seesaws. Families disintegrated, reformed into pods based on age, sex and ability to handle inclement weather.

For tradition has it that it always rains on verslunumannahelgi. If you are drunk you don't notice the wet and the cold. If you are a teenager bad weather is a perfect excuse to find an empty tent and cozy in it with a willing partner. If you are a brave teenager you've swiped a half-full bottle to keep things extra heated. If you are a spunky kid nothing is going to stop you from exercising the freedom you find on this weekend when your parents are too carefree to remember to scold you or feed you or dress you better. If you are a wimp you whine to you mamma and end up chastised, ignored and miserable. This weekend represented liberation and middle-class pleasure, when the formalities of town life were dropped and anything went. Songs were sung through the night, praises were shouted for the appearance of the sun and lovers united under birch trees and amid the pungent wild thyme.

Much has changed since my father went on his first weekend to the largest of the gatherings on the Vestmann Islands loaded with three bottles of booze and two sandwiches which he promptly lost. Today's events are less bacchanal, more child-centric, which reflects the era we are in. Families still load up and travel out, but it's SUVs pulling trailer tents and house wagons which line the roads out of town. Gas grills are brought along and pre-marinated steaks in thick shrink-wrap, yogurt in serving-size containers with individually wrapped plastic folding spoons and baking potatoes in foil inside plastic on a Styrofoam tray. Teenagers are given their own camping area because its accepted that this is their weekend to get falling down, vomiting up drunk and there is little adults can do to stop it. Last year at an 'alternative' event called Eldborg, ketamine-fueled rapes were the theme for the young set. A couple of filmmakers recorded the weekend, with its thousands of teens and twentiers and number of great bands, then showed the two-hour edit in theaters. There was a general feeling of disgust, even among the participants of the event, when the film was shown. As one popular and smart young hip hop celeb here in Iceland said to the crowd at a different event this year, "I was at Eldborg last year and Fuck That! Take these t-shirts and go jack off instead of raping. Have some respect!"

So the teenagers have their own camping area at some of the events (there were about six big events scheduled this year, scattered throughout the country. Each event has a line-up of performers and each charges on average $40 to $50 per adult for the weekend.) and at others they are simply tolerated or avoided. How this weekend came to be a drunken sprawl for underage drinkers is a mystery. Most adults have no more than a few beers or some wine these days and are busy keeping their younger kiddies happy for most of the weekend. People wear expensive rain slickers and buy cotton candy for their sugared-up pre-teens; dazed adults wander into snack areas and suck back coffee and Coke. Everyone flips through their glossy programs to see what is on offer next for entertainment. Kids whine, teens throw bottles, parents yawn.

The merchants' weekend has been commercialized and scheduled. I went to an event at Galtalaekur which was originally organized as an alcohol-free alternative to the drunkenness of other festivals. It rained buckets but it was very well organized and peopled with energetic performers who sang well into the night. Between my girlfriend, her brother and myself there were six kids with us in three nylon tents, two of which leaked at the zippers. We had two one-use grill with us and lots of hot dogs and chips. Our kids had to be pushed off to the playground when we first arrived, they were hanging around us as if they didn't quite know what to do with their freedom, but by Sunday they were barely to be seen.

We had a good time, though Helga Lilia and I agreed that the next time we think of camping with families it will be purely based on the weather and not on some pre-scheduled festival at $50 a pop. We are both dismissive of these kind of suburban pre-fab events, but we thought we'd try for the kids. And it was, in general, fun. At the massive bonfire on Saturday night there was an exciting fireworks show, though the appearance of three or four policemen who backed the crowd off from the blaze (though it was impossible to get closer than twenty feet away due to the heat) was more oppressive than the heat of the flames. Excellent performers charged up the main outdoor stage, though rain fell in heavy, uncommon drops for most of the weekend. We made the most of what was on offer then left when the wetness was simply too much of a nuisance.

We got home yesterday and today the sun is shining, which is good because now I can dry off my tent before I pack it away for the season. I'm glad I experienced verslunumannahelgi, though I think I'd have liked it better in a wool sweater around a nice campfire with a guitar plucking out old Beetles tunes and a warming rum in hot cocoa nestled in my palms. A few families, a few good songs, cozy card playing and an old-fashioned waxed-canvas tent with enough poles and strings and stakes to drive a person crazy setting it up. Maybe next year we will try for something more personal and leave the packaging behind.

How do you become aware of a deep passion, once it has taken hold of you, if not by perceiving that the same objects no longer impress you in the same manner? All your sensations and all your ideas seem to brighten up: it is like childhood back again.

“When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.” Henri Bergson 1888


I was told a story yesterday, memory from childhood sweetly loaded with symbolism. The narrator, the man I loved, was slowly slipping away from me. Our world together was becoming tarnished by neglect; the frustrations of daily obligations to work and survival were encroaching on our adventurous love affair. He pushed himself so hard to succeed that all else got left behind. I hurt to see him struggle. I missed our love dearly.

We sat together in his car when he told me the tale. Fate had brought us to opposite sides of a revolving door at the same moment. Our eyes had locked, the doors slowly turning between us, until he finally stepped in and circled through to me. We greeted one another with respect then completed the arc out to his car.

The story he told me was of a key, an apartment key with a white elastic band threaded through the hole in order to hang the key from a child's neck. My friend is six or seven when his mother presents him with the key, places it over his head and tells him that she must go out for a while, but that he shouldn't worry about being locked out of the apartment. She kisses him on the forehead and goes to her errands.

As he is playing in the hallway of his building, he hears the sounds of someone crying. It is a girl from the floor below his in the apartment block. She is dressed in pink, with long blond hair and is crying because she is locked out of her home. The little boy heroically produces the key from inside his shirt and smiles proudly at the girl. She leads him downstairs to her apartment door where he valiantly lifts the sacred key from around his neck and proceeds to jam it into the lock where it properly sticks fast.

When I first met this man I was a sad girl in pink sweaters with too-blond hair. He came into my life when I needed a hero most and produced a key to my future happiness. Our time together was like the walk to the little girl's home, filled with a knowledge that we were on a sacred journey together, a journey to unlock the door to a safe and wondrous realm. And our parting began when my hero found that his only key didn't work, when he imagined that he couldn't save me through gallantry, that he had no more resources at his disposal. That he had, as a matter of fact, made things more complicated by his presence.

I like to think, though, that the little girl in pink thought then as I do now, that it didn't matter about the key. That they were still on an adventure together, that now they could play, make up their own magic, be together. I imagine that the little girl laughed while he blushed in shame and that at that moment she wanted nothing more than to hold his hand.


As free will can be said to be of the moment alone, and not an act of deciding the future or claiming the past as one's own, then to exercise free will one must be at all times present, aware, alive. The soul asleep feels only hope for a potential future and regret for an unfulfilled past.

A venue! Like a new blank book, white pages waiting. Feel the paper, choose words well. Here we type but the rush is the same. No time to scrawl, though. My day waits.