Getting ready- small, agile laptop. Online backups we hope we can access. Installing server on laptop to run dev sites. Drinking water.
Nathaniel Clark
static on the psychic radio
Prepping for China
Skeleton of Christmas
Sitting in the semi-dark of Lucian’s room, playing with a wordpress app for my new “smartphone” (a title no object deserves when it requires so much instruction and direction), reviewing family, christmas, music, and food in my head (in that order).
Seeing the armature of xmas in a vision and it’s dark, silver and purple and blue. There are other layers- esp. that 50s-tinged jangly postcard and toy skin so close to the surface that it often masquerades as the true face; however, there is (for me) a soft gloaming, a purple shadow on snow, an infinite refraction of a lamp when seen through a web of ice-rimed branches… That is core.
Interesting because this feeling is tied to an environmental vision, not a domestic one.
Floating…
Trying to pull off the cobwebs of sleep, leftover from the long and spine-scraping weekend. When Iryna is sick, the whole world is off-kilter. Sleep was the first sacrifice. Yesterday, a nice “day off”, was confounded by an overtaxed nervous system and a rogue stubbornness daemon that encouraged me, through delicious whispered promises, to bang my head against the walls and bookshelves. Coffee, while tasty, was furtive and reticent to lend a helping hand, preferring to nestle quietly somewhere in the more saurian parts of my brain- kept my heart beating, but that’s about all. I guess, in retrospect, that *that* was still pretty useful, and I am grateful, but when your hopes are for heaven while your body drags on the earth, that is a subtle form of hell.
Now, we (the daimon, the coffee gnome, the white noise ghosts, and the shadows-of-promise) are left with a disembodied feeling. Like a dream where you don’t notice you’re floating until you start trying to walk, and then you look down to see your feet pedaling uselessly in the air, a few feet above the ground. Good Morning.
Stray Thoughts from the Edge of Citizenship
So, those in the know know that today was Iryska’s Citizenship Ceremony … we were both running on a wave of coffee and adrenaline over a deep and wide sleep-deficit (like, Mariana Trench style), but coasted through in fine form and now my loveliest love of all time is a full-fledged U.S. Citizen, with all the rights and responsibilities the rest of us Natural-Borns take for granted or piss away in a middle class, angsty drug moan. I wrote some thoughts, with no particular sense of style, whilst I sat in a highly uncomfortable seat in the Civic Center balcony. and here they are:
The dais is flanked on both sides by 90’s style LCD projectors casting a zoomed-in view of a flag waving in ultra-slow-motion, making it sort of undulate behind white, drop-shadowed text that reads “Celebrate Citizenship” and other such happy bites. The large but mismodulated speakers pipe out tinny but quite identifiable patriotic songs- i can hear “God Bless America” on repeat, midrange jacked up high to float over the dull bass roar of the crowd of citizens-to-be.
I notice that most everyone has a rather large entourage with them. One man, rather than an entourage, seems to be wearing an American Flag cape. Actually, it appears to be a beach towel, brand-spanking & colorfully new, stars and stripes and all, draped over his shoulders. From this distance, I can just make out that he has tucked it into his polo-shirt-collar. I admire this, grinning so much the kid next to me stares at me with huge brown eyes.
I have told this story in the past, to at least a few people: I used to drive by the San Diego Civic Center and see the plastic letters on the backlit sign spelling out ‘Naturalization Ceremony’. It always gave me a deep conceptual kick to imagine a dense, half-sweaty, cheap-cologne-and-perfume-and-cigarette musk-ed crowd, standing, hands raised, and forswearing allegiance to foreign potentates in unison.
I see Iryshka walking, off to my right, looking tall and elegant in the legs, flowing a little (a benefit of the wide flare of her stylish pants) – & looking more than a little ‘cute mouse’-y in the head & shoulders region as her nerves make her head bow and her brain swim a little, I am sure. Part of that worry must be the Russian preoccupation with paperwork, and part of it assuredly is my wife’s willingness to give herself over to worry as a sort of primal, driving, state-of-mind (I think she gives in because the nature of worry produces a repeating cycle of thoughts, forcing her to check and re-check and re-re-check (ad infinitum) and so she comes out the other side with everything- INS paperwork, for example- in order). She’s sitting now, her head still bent low, sunk a little between a flat topped Pacific Rim type and a balding man whose skin is the color of my morning coffee. I am hoping she feels a little calmer now that she’s passed through, successfully, the first gauntlet of officers stamping paperwork on collapsible tables.
There are a huge number of people here, more than I expected. I am a little surprised and how unremarkable, in total, the ethnic mixture is. I mean, it *is* mixed, with veils and burkas and dyed cotton wraps and silk shirts open over 6 inches to the chest revealing gold crosses in wiry tangles of black chest hair. There are hooked nose, snub Bjork noses, skin the wondrous color of shiny coal, skin the color of soft beach sand, skin the color of Baltic mists. I see large white beards, low cut cleavage, tight skirts, crumpled old suits, pot bellies, skeletal wrists, and a gaggle of small US flags poking out of peoples’ breast pockets. It is mixed, it’s just that this seems to be the normal street melange of San Diego anyway. I am saying, it looks pretty business-as-usual for a stroll through downtown. Not, let’s admit, Prospect Street in La Jolla, or on most of the beaches north of OB, but surely when we’re trolling for Ethiopian food down on El Cajon Boulevard.
It is difficult to locate Iryna again, as the seats all around her fill up. I do find her, but her two flanking gentlemen have disappeared for the moment, so it took a little extra.
Well, that was all I was able to scribble in the notebook. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the ceremony, most particularly when they went through the 98 or so “host” countries and had the soon-to-be-former-citizens stand, to the applause of their families, friends, and others who shared their origins.
The deep rumbling oath was all that I had dreamed it would be, and I knew that when it was over, Iryna would turn and blow me a kiss- and she did not disappoint. My lovely new citixen (which is my typo, which i will keep, since it calls to mind a hybrid citizen-vixen). I went outside to buy her a coffee (well, we were both quite exhausted [another story]) and handed her her first caffeinated beverage as a full fledged honored-and-responsible, child of the United States. It wasn’t too great, this coffee, but then — few symbols are magnificent in their own right. It’s the idea that counts :)
So, my most crazy, out-of-body-and-mind, arc-of-a-falling-star, without-reservation-but-with-abandon, congratulations and love to my wife, Iryna Clark, who I love in ways I never thought I might, and ways I never knew I could, and who confirms every day that I made the best choice of a terrestrial lifetime when I married her. Welcome to the USA! Live Free or Die!
wonderful days, these
There is much to tell you, gentle reader- much more than I have time for this mild subtropical morning in San Diego. But I shed the warm blankets of blogging-laziness to announce one thing: Thursday, June 22nd, saw the unanticipatedly-kind CIS official smilingly stamping Iryna’s passport- and Katya’s by physical association- with the “Green Card” stamp. My wife and stepchild- Conditional Permanent Residents!
I tried to find an image- via Googling- of a Green Card to jazz up the post with an ‘visual’, but the sites & images that came up were, let’s say, sketchy. And if it takes more than 35 seconds of Googling, it probably isn’t worth it. But there is nothing to worry about- words still have the power.
More to say, more to say… but I am sitting at the Del Mar table, sipping coffee, and the day begins to move towards sunlight and activity. So I can do this for only a little bit; but a vast arc of hope and expectation has come to its conclusion. It is in the nature of these things to not pause, but open up the doors to all the other activities now required, and we tend to forget the singularity of this moment.
The last thing that I want to say is that Katya is telling me that she dreamed about blowing a giant gingerbread man’s head off with a machine gun, while in the girls bathroom of dreamland….
and speaking of beauty
on the East Coast, this is already fact; on the West Coast, there is still about forty minutes… so I sit on the cusp of my two month anniversary, happily wedded [though too often separated] to Iryna Clark, born Kotlyarova, and formerly Zinchenko. It is with pleasure that I overlay my name on these former ones.
This picture, shot by my mother, is first official [by paperwork, though not by vow] portrait of Iryna and I as a married couple. It was cold. I had been nervous (refer to the water in hand). But while pinning the flowers on my lapel, and seeing Iryna with the much-coveted nosegay (oh there is a story there), my heart sang; deeply into the dinner in Little Italy and on into an elated drive up north. I can see with stark clarity the dark umbers and cold-browns of the corner of Manhattan, on into the Bronx, as I sat in back with my new wife; it reminded me of so many bus-rides I had taken throughout the northeast- always alone, book or sketchbook in hand, looking out the window, musing, wrapping my thoughts into the clouds. How strange, how far the distance from those times, and what a milestone of memory. I am too tired and screen-struck to explain the fine nuances of it, but the core of it is fairly easy: I was rippled-through with potential, with the striking open of new vistas, with a new panorama laying itself out before me in the soft purple and crushed-leaf shadow of dusk. I loved being married, which is one of those things I always expected to be surprised at and was only surprised that I wasn’t; that is, I loved it thoroughly without clinging to any remainder.
The length of this two months has been measured in hardships not related to being married- in fact, it is this marriage that enables some sanity whilst the rest of the environment contorts with ambiguity and flux. And I promise you, all you people of the world, that I will bring such joy and happiness into my wife’s life, bring such light to her days that all the days before will seem in shadow.
So goodnight; or, if you’re reading this Iryna- good morning. And Happy Anniversary. I love you