I've been frustrated as hell with Radio and Salon for months now (sorry sorry sorry for the absence), so I'm finally making a move. It's not finished yet, but here's a link to the new site: www.kateingold.com. I'll have Broken Windows over there along with info about the art and poetry I'm working on (and a CV, yadda yadda). I hope to have it up and running in the next couple of weeks.

We went down to NOLA a couple of weeks ago and S passed his oral exams. We ate gumbo and fried chicken at Jacque's place (Dunbar's is still closed :<) and scrumptuous malt chocolate chip ice cream at Creole Creamery, a little slice of heaven right on Prytania. Some of our friends have left forever. Some are consumed with finding stability in a city that's still lying in pieces. It made me sad. We came back and voted early and now we're campaigning for Tammy Duckworth who very well might beat that sorry ass opponent of hers. More to come, I promise! Meanwhile, take care y'all.

What a very sad day

11:04:08 AM September 2, 2005

The view from the plane.


The healing dirt of Chimayo. Palm-sized wooden chapels wiith sliding tops specifically to hold a scoopful of holy dirt are for sale in the gift shop. The chapel was privately owned until the 1920s when a group of residents bought the chapel and gave it to the archdiocese. Besides the dirt-chapels, the gift shop has the usual archdiocese fare: plastic rosaries meant to look like gems, cherub-faced figurines, clear plastic holy water squirt bottles, empty.


A wall of crutches as testament to the healing powers of the dirt. Gabe and Julie said that years ago there were written testimonies lining the walls. Now there are pictures of police officers killed in action, images of la virgen de guadalupe, and these two, a photo of a soldier holding a M-16 and a Pocahontas saint, complete with fringed leather and a large cross over her shoulder.

I've been in New Mexico since Saturday but it's only now that I have found time to write. The first two days I spent in Albuquerque with my step-nephew (he's only four years younger than me so we call each other "cousins") and his wife at their new house on New Mexico's last golf course on the outskirts of the largest suburb of this state's largest city. It's outrageous, really, that there are golf courses in New Mexico. But then there are so many outrages.

Saturday night we went to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra at the rodeo hall of the state fairgrounds. The "orchestra" is a seasonal group; they pop up for Christmas, tour the country, then disappear again. Imagine a Pink Floyd cover band playing Christmas songs in 1983 with the newest laserlight technology. No, it wasn't pretty. In fact, it was so bad we left and went to see Syriana, which was good, then snuck into Aeno Flux, which was terrible. One good movie sandwiched between two truly mediocre entertainments.

My step-nephew's wife is a resident orthopedic surgeon at New Mexico's county hospital, it's only level 1 trauma center. She got off work early Sunday morning and after bagels and cream cheese and Starbuck's (there's always a Starbuck's...) we headed up one of the mountains of Sandia National Forest for a view of the city. Up top there are trails and a cafe and a gift shop sandwiched next to a stand of radio and cell phone towers, a clutter of barren, manmade trees surrounded by evergreens. The views were spectacular; the city, home to a half a million people, spreads out and then disappears, leaving only desert and scrub beyond it. We left the mountain and had ordinary Chinese at a restaurant stuffed into a suburban strip mall that could have been in southern California or the outskirts of Chicago, or the ring of New Jersey half-circling New York City. They are ubiquitous.

I had planned to stay in Albuquerque two nights, but I decided to head to Santa Fe early so I could go out to dinner with my friends Gabe and Julie and some of the other artists who Gabe has met at his residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Yesterday we had great fun: spectacular breakfast at Pasqual's on the plaza, then we drove up through the "high road" toward Taos, stopping at the sanctuary in Chimayo with its hole of holy dirt just off the chapel, then headed up to Taos Pueblo where for $10 each you can tour a staged pueblo village with adobe walls covered in adobe stucco, each structure with wood beams jutting out just below the roofs. We decided not to go in; S had warned me that it was a Disney pueblo and not worth $10. Walking around were three saffron-robed monks wearing matching saffron knit caps and plastic sandals. One had athletic socks on with his sandals, and on the side of the socks was "USA." In Taos we ate green chile soup with flour tortillas and drank coffee while we window-shopped. On our way back to Santa Fe we stopped at an "earthship" community, a collection of houses built into the earth with walls made of dirt crammed into used tires and covered in plaster. The houses are completely off the grid and use a water recycling system. Inside are jungle plants and geraniums (it's possible to grow your own food all year long, they promise) along tilted vertical windows that also heat the houses. The way in which they were "earthships" were that they seemed to have traveled in time from 1972, their rounded walls decorated with broken glass mosaics and "gaia" pronouncements. The technology was interesting, but we all thought the houses were ugly ("fugly" in fact!) and that it was possible to build beautiful homes with recycled and renewable resources that are off the grid. Ugly isn't a requirement. Is it?

We had dinner with a couple Gabe and Julie know who have a three month old baby. Jeremy is a sculptor who works in steel. He creates objects with steel sheets, heats them to 2000 degrees, then takes them out and blows air into them so they puff up like pillows. Then he has them powder-coated. Gabe told me he has shown his work in London and New York. He bakes them and blows them in his driveway, then carts them to be painted and shown. They usually weigh a couple of hundred pounds. The day before Jeremy had baked brownies and three different cookies, which we ate and ate before heading to Gabriel's for border Mexican, soft flour tortillas and mild salsa.

It's been Chicago cold here and today Santa Fe is covered in its first snow. Today I'm at the Aztec Street Cafe, a small independent coffee house on the other side of the river from the plaza that offers free internet. Just off the main room is a "smoking room." Whenever the door opens a waft floats towards me. There must be twice as many people in there as out here, and also two dogs. The dogs seem anxious to get out. I don't blame them!

I've talked to S twice since I've been here. He wrote an essay for Operation Truth's Vet of the Week feature. I'll let everyone know when it is up. He's back with the special forces and a little bored. He left his books at his remote base further south and they've only been running short daylong missions. We're down to 65 days, I think. Soon, soon soon.

I keep telling myself, "tomorrow I'll be able to write," and then tomorrow comes and my waking hours are consumed, again, by this sort of incredible ceiling project I've taken on. Right now I'm sitting in the living room, closed off from the rest of the house with two sheets of plastic taped to the perimeter of the large opening that leads into the kitchen and dining area. Above me the dog drags her bone, still horribly loud because the living room is a whole other project. In the bedroom, the contractors are putting up drywall after taking down the old fiberglass insulation (hence the plastic sheeting) and putting up the new insulation, a wonderfully soft and non-toxic blue jean fluffiness that is, honestly, cuddly enough to sleep on. Outside the earth and sky are both white, blindingly so, from the seven or so inches of airy snow we received yesterday afternoon.

Tomorrow I fly to Albuquerque to visit my friend Gabe who is giving a reading in Santa Fe. I'll also be seeing my step-nephew and his wife in Albuquerque. I'm excited about the trip -- finally time away from the house, finally time to write (at least I hope so) -- though still I'm anxious about it because of the neverending ceiling. I want it to be done so I can get back to things.

I have talked to S several times this week, including this morning. It's so wonderful to hear his voice. He's back with the special forces crew, where he gets to sleep in a heated room and has wireless internet access. Plus they have a new civilian chef (no doubt through KBR) and he is from Lafayette, Louisiana and he cooks creole. What a treat! We're down to 69 days by our count, and though these last months are moving so slow and have been in every way as difficult as the first, they are the last months, something we're both thankful for.

I have a running list of things I want to write about. Hopefully I'll find the time in the next few days. I miss it so.

If you read nothing else today, read Patrick McDonnell's piece in the LA Times magazine. Be warned, though. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

We've already lost the war because it's not winnable. When will Bush notice? And how many more will have to die before he does?

I'm sleeping better now that I'm in our basement, and perhaps it's the snow that gently drapes across the city now that helps too. I have our house to myself for a few days while we wait for the insulation to come in (we're using recycled denim insulation from Arizona), a welcome break from the last few days of constant ceiling activity. The contractors are great (how many people have ever said that?) but it's still hard to have people who need attention in the house day after day.

S and I have talked a few times the past week. Not today, but that's because he's back at his backward base at the craggly edge of Pakistan, the base that just two days ago began to have running water again. We talked about our marriage and our relationship, in part because of something I wrote to him about. I didn't share it here; it was too painful, the entire experience, and too personal. This painful experience I haven't written about was prompted, in part, by something I wrote on this blog. The entire experience made me think of the destructive potential of this chronicling of my life, and it made me nervous -- could I inadvertently destroy everything that I care about with my writing? That question scares me, in large part because I don't have the answer.

I think of blogs differently than I do of books. My blog attracts friends, of course (and some of you I've never met in person though we're still friends), but more often my readers are stumblers, people who had no intention of ending up here. If they stay around, sometimes it is because they share a kinship with me, but sometimes it's because they are voyeurs who come for a week or so then disappear back into the cyber ether. It's scary sometimes to think of it that way, how what I write here may be read by someone who doesn't care at all about me or S or anyone or anything I care about, and in fact might hate all that I love. Books are different than this, I think, because they involve a commitment, a pact, from the moment you put out the cash to buy them. If that commitment, that pact doesn't work out in the first hundred pages, the book is put down and forgotten, but the intimacy remains because something drove you to buy it in the first place. It wasn't just random google-chance. I think if I were to write a book about this year I would write about all of it, even what I've held back from sharing here because of the intimacy a book offers.

Yet still I write. And still here.

Today Zach posted about what he's done in Iraq, the regret he feels and whether anyone can be proud of him. His post made me think of the heaviness of what it really means to own your actions, the good and the bad, and how regret is part of the deal as soon as we are forced into the world as a tiny, bloody mess. It made me think, too, of how destructive the entire idea of "pride" is, and how false. How many lives have been lost from that one idea? It's heartbreaking to consider.

Last night I had the JOT workshop again, and a writer I'd never met who is battling cancer came for the first time in months. He shared this incredible short story about a pilot forced to land on top of a mountain because of his own mistake. He'd failed to check the plane over before taking off, so when several fuses were blown causing him to make an emergency landing, his first thought was how he'd have to record "pilot error" in the log book. The pilot managed to fix the plane himself and fly back home, only to fall asleep and dream of landing on a mountain top. It was seeped in a quiet sadness, this story of regret. Since the ultimate disaster was averted, it was also a story of how we can save ourselves sometimes, even when we're the reason we've ended up on the mountain top to begin with, and even if what we've done continues to haunt us in our dreams.

I've just started reading Salvador Placencia's The People of Paper, a novel that's being promoted as "magic realism" though it seems more like "mythic realism" to me with its story of an adult bedwetter yearning to free himself from the pain in his heart and his young daughter who eats limes whenever she can. I'm only 40 pages into it and already there is regret, for that is the one constant on this crazy journey, I guess. I suppose some people never feel regret. Some people are sociopaths who feel nothing for anyone but themselves. Others are so hardened against regret they feel nothing at all. Some people are so overwhelmed by their regret they destroy themselves because that's the only way they can rid themselves of it. I think most of us worry about the shards of glass we leave around us.

I wonder if it is regret that makes us feel more tired as we grow older, and why we sleep less. There is so much more to rework in our minds in those early morning hours, actions and conversations and emails to rewrite after the fact, impossible as that is.

When I read Zach's post about regret I thought about one of Thich Nhat Hanh's lectures on time, about how the present is made of the past just as the future is made of the present. He lectured that the past can be corrected by the present moment, which I took to mean that our actions today can make up for what we've done in the past. If we pay attention to the present moment, Hanh argues, we not only take care of today but also yesterday and tomorrow. I wonder if that is the way to work regret out of our dreams, to get off the mountain top for good.

Sound is like water. It will seep through any opening and find its way into a room unless it's stopped or "decoupled". This is why when they replace my ceiling they have to seal the edges with soft, plyable caulk, and why the walls and the ceiling can't touch. If they do, the sound will simply travel through the walls and enter into the room, no matter how many sound clips they've used to separate the ceiling from the joists. It's a delicate job, this soundproofing. If it's not done correctly the entire enterprise will fail.

I feel like that painful experience, the one that went from blog to email to regret so quickly, was like sound traveling through a floor and hitting the joists then the ceiling and the walls. It seeped through and affected not just my relationship with S but also my relationship with my mother, and when she and I had our argument over it all last Sunday (which we made up quickly because we can actually see each other, unlike the days of emails it took with S since we haven't seen each other in months, again), I desperately wanted to be alone and away from everything. I had this overwhelming desire to flee and be quiet, but since my house has been far from peaceful the past four months, I felt like I had nowhere to go. I went to the zen temple for their afternoon service, something I hadn't done for over a year. It's more of a 'beginners' service, with chairs instead of cushions and a question and answer session afterwards instead of a lecture. It's already dark at 4 now, especially when the sky is muffled with cloud cover as it was last weekend. I went up to the main room and it was cold and lightless and the cushions were still out from the morning service. There was only one other person there, a woman seated on a cushion in the back. I sat on one of the cushions across from her and after about ten minutes I realized that there would be no service at all. The woman left and I sat there in the dark and the cold and the quiet and I meditated for about a half hour, then I got up and walked around the room in an attempt at walking meditation, following the contours of the room around the cushions and the chairs and in front of the giant gold Buddha statues. When I worked around the room twice, I stopped in the back and did three prostrations, perhaps because I felt like I had to do some kind of penance, or perhaps because I needed to do more than sit and walk. After the three prostrations I left, the room still dark, still cold, still quiet.

I know we can't escape what we've done. We can't flee regret. But maybe Hanh is right, and the pilot in the story too. Maybe we can correct our own mistakes and therefore change the past, and the future, for the better.

It's unseasonably warm today, with the sun shining bright and the air not crisp or cold at all but rather sweet and breezy, a mid-May day, perhaps, but not a late November one. Tonight it's supposed to drop 40 degrees, which may sound impossible if you've never been to Chicago where the weather can turn from tropical to arctic with a wind change. I've had an excellent mail day: the check from NPR came, and an incredible postcard drawing from Doc. How lucky I am!

It's been days since I've written, in part because of the holiday (wasn't that fun!) but also because of my ongoing ceiling saga, soon to be remedied when my contractor tears apart the existing one tomorrow morning. My neighbor will not even let me buy her carpets, and so here we are. I am going to propose to the board that new rules and regulations are adopted that will force her to buy some of her own (and make her subject to fines if she continues to come home at 3, 4, 5 in the morning making a racket like she did again Saturday night), though meanwhile I will spend thousands to have my ceiling soundproofed as much as it can be, which admittedly isn't much because it really needs to happen on her end. Six years with no problems and now this. Got to love city living!

Pero basta. I've had it with the ceiling, the ceiling, the ceiling, as I'm sure everyone who knows me has too. Enough already!

Thanksgiving I spent at my mom's with two of our friends who own the gallery where my mother is represented. We had a traditional turkey, etc. meal and around dessert time my friends Molly and Eric came by with their darling son Etienne. It was so good to see them, to hear their stories. And Etienne! He's such a doll. Though he's only sixteen months he talks up a storm and can go up and down stairs on his own. On Saturday I saw them again. I took them to a couple of south side neighborhoods -- Pilsen and Bridgeport -- then we went to my friends' house for the most delicious sweet potato pie I've ever had (and that's the truth, Maria!). It was more fun than I've had in months.

S has been out of the bush for the past few days so we've talked on the phone several times. He had the hardest, most dangerous mission of his deployment: firefights, rockets, two of his soldiers nearly killed. I miss him so much and he's desperate to come home. We're down to just 80 more days. He's been living in extremely primitive conditions (no water, no electricity, etc.) that has only recently gotten better because of his and his partner's initiatives. They had the water pump repaired and purchased a new water heater (the old one held only 10 gallons). Right now he is back with the special forces for a few days, so he can email and call unlike at his new base. He's ready to be done with it all and I'm ready too. It will be great to have him home again.

The past couple of days I read "The Kite Runner" because too many people had told me I should. It's a compelling story, but it is way too contrived, and the writing is, frankly, rather pedestrian. Over and over I found myself rolling my eyes, letting out a heavy sigh because what came next was exactly what I had expected to come next and the telling of it was so plain. The book is not subtle. The emotions are placed right on the page, out in the open, requiring absolutely no work at all. No passages jumped out at me and held me for minutes, even longer, as passages in my favorite books do.

Several times the narrator talked about how his writing teachers admonished the use of cliches but how he liked them and therefore used them: "Here is another cliche my creative writing teacher would have scoffed at; like father, like son. But it was true, wasn't it?" Why even include such lines? Why not let us see through the action and beauty of the prose that yes, the father and son were similar, rather than telling it to us? And then why tell it to us in the frame of cliche?

I have no doubt "Kite Runner" will be made into a film and unless they hire a know-nothing director the film will be better than the book. Am I the only one who feels this way? I wonder because the book received excellent reviews and so far everyone I know who read it loved it.

Soy como un chile verde, llorona, picante pero sabroso, and that's just the way it is.

I purchased two excellent CDs this weekend: Chavela Vargas' "Sentimiento de Mexico" and Corey Harris' "Daily Bread." If I could, I'd sprinkle some of these beautiful songs right here on my blog so everyone could hear them.

So that's it. All caught up. I hope to get back in the frequent posting rhythm this week. More to come!

The love of my life. How lucky I am to have found him!

I've been fighting the mild depression these long, silent periods seem to bring me. That brief conversation with S on Saturday morning was not enough. He left his old base nearly three weeks ago now, and since then I've talked to him twice via sat phone ("the phone that talks to the moon," as the Afghans call it) and both conversations were not much more than short reportage: "I'm just calling to tell you I'm okay" and "I don't know when I'll be able to call you again," the mantras of separation.

I did get a wonderful surprise call today, though. One of my New Orleans neighbors, Eric Julien, called me this afternoon from the steps of the Shedd Aquarium down on the edge of Lake Michigan here in Chicago. He and his wife Molly Day and their darling son Etienne (pronounced the Haitian creole way, "Eh-shawn") moved to Chicago a little over a week ago. Since Katrina they have been nomads, floating across the country from relative's house to relative's house, friend's to friend's. Though our area of New Orleans didn't flood much, their house, the famous ghost house of Carondelet and Washington, was badly damaged by the winds. The roof blew completely off (did the ghosts finally escape?), and now the house is uninhabitable, though Eric said a couple of their neighbors are living there anyway, "basically camping out." Since he and Molly have a baby son, "camping out" was not an option, especially since no one knows when, or if, the city will resurrect.

Imagine having your entire life jumbled and tossed about, thrown out like dice on a craps table. And then think the same thing happened to 500,000 other people who used to be your neighbors. It's hard to comprehend the vastness of it all. New Orleans has become Pompeii; her people roaming, homeless nomads and my neighbors are nearly my neighbors again, but now in this shockingly different place. Here it is winter already. Even when it's bright, it's bitter. Tonight the temperature is supposed to drop even further, and tomorrow evening there may be snow. And it's only going to get colder in the months to come.

How sad Eric sounded. They lost about 50% of their things, if you don't count their way of life, their community, their home town. And their jobs. Both of them are now looking for something to tide them over while they squeak out a living as all of us restless artists are condemned to do. We're going to talk again tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to see them soon. They're living down in Hyde Park, though I don't know exactly where. I want to take them around and introduce them to everyone I know so they won't be alone. I want to help them get started here if I can.

This is a city of rough edges. I hope Chicago is kind to Eric and Molly and baby Etienne.

Apparently some families have found better places for their kids since fleeing Katrina and being washed out of New Orleans. The schools cheated them there. I know this because I met so many incredibly bright freshmen who had graduated unprepared for even basic introductory classes. They had been abandoned by a system that seemed designed to keep the basic social and political structures of the city in place, to keep it "authentic." I remember the first time I was told "this is all you can expect from these kids."It was my first semester teaching at Delgado Community College and I was in the copy room where I spent most of the first month of class xeroxing my own thrown together text book. (I couldn't bear the thought of teaching from our uninspired text book, so I put together my own with some of my favorite essays and poems I'd collected over the years. The beauty of no-code copy machines!) The teacher who said it was one of the full-timers, a tenured professor who the next semester would be my 'mentor.' I had to give her a stack of graded papers so she could review them and tell me whether or not I was grading correctly, even though I'd had to do the same thing my first semester there, and even though I had been awarded because so few of my students failed. I had one student my second semester, an artist with a mop of black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, who turned every essay into a short story. His essays were so smart, so funny, each punctuated with little snips of dialogue. Of course my "mentor" said his As were Fs and that the kid would fail the exit exam if she had anything to do with it. Well, he passed. She was wrong about a lot of things.

I only bought one piece of art down in New Orleans and that was one of Eric's Haiti photographs. His photographs are visions, not mere documents. My photo, "Temps," floats next to our bed and dances on our fuschia-red wall. It's beautiful. I remember Molly told me that to get pregnant she had kept a special sugar bowl next to her bed so the spirits would get enough sweetness and wouldn't want to taste hers. I always meant to ask her what kind of sugar, what kind of bowl. Now I'll be able to, though I wish I could ask her over a glass of wine in our leaky apartment on Washington Avenue instead of over coffee, perhaps, in this city of rough edges. I wish they hadn't had to go through these piled-on weeks of hardship, that everything was still as it was. But it's not. The roof's been blown off, and here they are in my blustery, brumal city.

The spectacle on capitol hill yesterday was another pathetic, dark mark on our so-called democracy. This made me incredibly pissed:

At one point in the emotional debate, Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel.

"He asked me to send Congress a message - stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message - that cowards cut and run, Marines never do," Schmidt said. Murtha is a 37-year Marine veteran and ranking Democrat on the defense appropriations subcommittee.

So it will never end, this smearing of vets who disagree with the hawkish chickens in power. Is it any wonder at all that most want to get out of the military and stay out?

I wasn't surprised that the Iraq vet who Schmidt quoted was an officer, but I was surprised that he'd said anything at all. I had this image of marines being loyal to each other. S was a marine right out of high school. He has always had this dual loyalty to the marines and the rangers, which is quite unusual -- most stick to one and badmouth the other. But then, now everything is different. Everything is tinged with political opinion. Facts no longer exist. Slobs like Dennis Hastert can call decorated war veterans like Murtha cowards and the only consequence is young veterans agree with Hastert instead of defending Murtha. We're swimming in a poisoned pie and it's made us sick. We see everything through a fever-induced haze and therefore we see only hallucinations, if we see anything at all.

Early this morning, before the sun had risen all the way up in the sky, S called me from deep in the mountains via satellite phone. We talked briefly. He wanted me to know he was okay and that he would be out on this same mission until after Thanksgiving at least. It was great to talk to him, even if I was in a middle-of-the-night daze. I dreamt vividly last night, probably because I'd spent the evening watching stupid movies on television. I ought to have just read instead of wasting hours on nothing.

In that daze, I forgot to tell him about the All Things Considered essay. How silly was that?