the only Joan Didion essay I have ever read...

was posted in a link on gawker this morning.

When I read this at the age of 21, and only at the behest of a non-fiction writing teacher in college, I rolled my eyes and wondered what all the fuss was about, and I think I skimmed to the end, and wished someone would give me something to read that MEANT something.

And then I moved to New York, chased a boy around the Strand, and kissed him in the rain, and was broke, and broken hearted, occasionally. And left and came back even more broke. And worked shitty jobs for crazy guys at sketchy retail establishments and glossy temp firms. And discovered the dirty corners of the activists world, which seemed both better and worse than any other parts of New York I had been in, until I was broken for real and done with it. And then decided, at 28, to move to Guam.

And I always thought, at the very least, I could turn all my myriad adventures into a weary-eyed tale of hard-fought wisdom about the way things are.

But, if I had paid better attention in my non-fiction writing class, I probably could have forgone all of that.

I have always gotten the feeling that I am walking through one long series of cliches, which I am experiencing slowly and painfully, one day at a time. This does not help.

But still, it's a lovely essay.

And I'm glad that I came to it, and New York honestly.

A walk to the store...

Even in its most wild places, in the hilltops of forests belonging to national parks, or in under-utilized clear glassy reservoirs upstate, New York, the entire East Coast really, has the feeling of a place where nature has long since been conquered.

It realized this, belatedly, only after visiting my sister in San Jose, after more than a decade not living on the West Coast. This was a few years ago and my boyfriend and I spent a week wandering around the San Francisco Bay area, proudly mooching off my sister's honeymoon absence by crashing in her apartment, much to the chagrin, we suspected, of our new in-laws.

We walked through San Francisco, and visited a lonely and empty beach on a gray day, just next to Golden Gate Park. I think we were hiking up a small hill, looking at juniper bushes and a pond with an Asian pagoda next to it, and I realized I felt this almost imperceptible tingling. It was vague, but familiar, and seemed now and then to be a sort of throbbing, like the air itself was vibrating.

Everything in California felt that way, and had, I realized, informed what I thought the whole world felt like as a child growing up there.

Being fond of anthropomorphizing natural phenomena in all ways, I immediately decided it was the last remnants of an angry, but-not-yet defeated earth god, still reeling from hundreds of years of being pushed this way and that by the settlers who dug for gold, among other things, pillaging natural resources and exploding outward in concentric circles until they eventually built strip malls and suburban enclaves of tiny, identical houses.

This, of course, explains all the earthquakes, I thought to myself. And mudslides, and fires, and droughts, and occasional pummeling Pacific storms. Of course.

And, of course, New York, having long ago killed any remnants of its gods, with skyscrapers and subways trains and the artificially branching networks of apartment complexes and streets, would remain free of those things, if somewhat denser and duller.

Being fond of creatively applied self-justifying mythology, it seemed a good explanation to cover any myriad number of half-baked descriptive theories I have about the world.

In the Midwest -- where no one walks, and life quickly becomes a pattern of moving from house to car to job to car to store to car to house again, where one immediately plugs into a media device and forgets that outside exists at all -- the sky is the only thing that seems left untouched by the blight of Hardy’s and Wal-mart. Thus, tornadoes.

The South, what parts of it I have been in, feel old, but unguarded in an inexplicable way, as if the residents there know they have lost the battle, but go on anyway, in that demurely gothic fashion awaiting the apocalypse, which could come via hurricane, or flood, or ironically devastating slew of coal muck pouring from long ago raped hilltops.

Texas, not quite the South, not quite anything else, felt different. I once spent an afternoon in the hot sun exploring a suburban enclave of Houston on foot. I got lost, almost immediately, after having brunch at a highly recommended, though somewhat obscurely located, diner. The taxi having reluctantly taken me to the outskirts from downtown Houston, I decided to try my hand with the bus system. I asked about four people at various local establishments -- including a vintage clothing store and several tatoo parlors -- and got nothing but blank stares.

I realized that if the crunchy, alterna-retail employees didn't know where the bus stops are, then there was probably little hope of finding one. Still, I wandered, hoping to avoid the $30 cab ride home, and tripped over broken concrete growing up with weeds, and tried to navigate my way through moving streams of air-conditioned SUVs, worlds unto themselves in a city where places had been replaced with the well-worn roads of getting to and from.

Houston represents itself on postcards showing a tangle of downtown traffic, architecturally dull buildings, and a stadium named after orange juice -- a nod, according to a friend of mine who used to live there –- to the unremitting war the city had placed on the snaking growth sidling its way into hard-fought civilization.

Walking along the sidewalks where so few people actually walked anymore, I saw green things sprouting, uprooting concrete and pipes as if in a quietly planned rebellion, which will, someday, I have no doubt, take back the land and overturn the SUVs in a coordinated strike of moss and tree roots.

I'm thinking about Houston, in particular, because I had to walk to the store tonight -- or well, decided to -- because it's Sunday and I am both bored and lacking a car, mine being back at the dealer for the second time in less than a month of ownership (ah -- used cars).

At any rate, the walk from my apartment complex to the very large, brightly lit supermarket is five minutes at most. It's only just up a hill, and then across a somewhat perilous strip of highway, which doesn't have a crosswalk or pedestrian-friendly sidewalks to speak of.

Actually, no roads have sidewalks here. No one walks anywhere, unless they have to. Thus, you will occasionally see a gaggle of teenagers, well below driving age, walking dangerously along the median at odd times of the night, much like in Midwestern suburbs. And I'm sure some people walk in the villages -- where the roads are smaller and more similar to pathways leading between clustered houses.

On the main roads though -- they're all called routes here and have unevocative numbers instead of names -- walking is done at one's own risk, and almost no one does it.

I got offered a ride from someone almost immediately after taking off up the hill, which I declined. Even so, I would have preferred to take my car. It's not just that it was hot and muggy and dark, or that I had to carry my groceries home by hand.

Going outside feels like an intrusion, almost. At the very least, being outside in the unregulated spaces draws a sharp contrast to the spaces where civilization has built walls, or roads, or parking lots and housing complexes. It's not quite the same as stomping around the boonies with a bottle of water and backpack. Those places you know don't belong to you, and the trails are marked, even roughly, to accommodate the fact that you are a visitor in patches still accessible on foot, and you tread warily.

But it's a different feeling to have the wild encroaching upon all the spaces that have been dug out, and cleaned and made to be square and concrete. When you look out the window, it's always there, the ever-increasing jungle, which must be pushed back and tamed constantly, to avoid overtaking even the most staid of buildings.

And the air here feels neither tamed nor as if angrily revolting against foreign invaders. Nature clearly has the upper hand. And outside does not feel fenced out. It's everything else -- cars and the concrete -- that feels fenced in.

People here seem to know that they cannot win against the elements, so they whiz past on highways, headed to shopping malls, or air-conditioned workplaces or homes, as if whistling past the graveyard.

I made it back perfectly fine from the grocery store -- if hotter and stickier. But, I am eagerly anticipating the return of my car.

spiders

I'm afraid of spiders. Really, really afraid of them.

I don't know when it started, exactly. I like to rationalize my fear by telling myself, logically, that I was a small insect in my last life, who met its demise being consumed by an eight-legged predator. But, my mom swears that I wasn't afraid of spiders as a baby, having once casually thrown out that I liked to play with them, now and again.

My favorite book, for years, was Charlotte's Web. I think I read it more times than anything else, until I reached the age where I was reading historical fiction about girls abducted into the wilderness by Indians and Southern gentlemen.

It wasn't until older that I realized that they were terrifying. It may have been from an on-again, off-again relationship with the Lord of the Rings, which were read to me as a child, and which feature a particularly nasty spider.

In any case, somewhere along the way, as I formed my very burgeoning perception of what is real and what is not in my early childhood, I learned to be afraid of spiders.

And not just afraid of them. It became a thing. I once dedicated an entire self-penned monologue, performed by a fellow thespian in my high school drama class, to my relationship with the "phantom" spider that liked to haunt the bathrooms of my house. No one else, apparently, saw the spider. I would, occasionally, during the most inconvenient moments, see him -- definitely a him -- lurking in one of the corners. I have distinct memories of the thing, black and shiny, breathing. Yes, because I could see him breathing.

No one believed me, of course. Other, less mythological spiders also haunted me, occasionally sending me into fits of hysteria that had to be broken by a cliched slap from my dad. If there were a spider in a room, I would avoid it until I could rationally convince myself that the spider had lived out its natural lifespan and died.

If that was impossible, I had to call in one of my brothers to remove it. The removal -- usually involving someone brusquely killing it while I pretended not to look -- never quite worked. I was always left with that creepy, crawly sensation -- the one of being invaded, and being watched -- and being unprepared for the horrors that lurked somewhere unseen.

And I didn't like killing them -- or being responsible for their death. I still don't.

As an adult, I have learned not to see spiders. I have occasionally even behaved myself quite well -- or, at least not freaked out -- when in the inevitable and unsolvable presence of a spider.

I once slept in the spare room of an activist homestead -- converted from a Southern Baptist ministry, in the poor, neglected rural suburbs of Atlanta. There were large spiders, black, and long-legged, but not without the bulbous middle that keeps me awake nights. Six legged spiders -- although not technically spiders -- or those lacking large centers I find less terrifying. Don't ask me why.

It was during the only activist conference I have ever attended, in the deep and humid regions of Georgia. My hostess was a wild and not-unpleasantly aged 40-something activist, with a funky garden and garage that still had pews and that characteristically sloping roof of churches.

Sleeping arrangements were limited. By the time I arrived a handful of anarchist teenagers had taken over the garage, a roaming anarchist videographer slept on the couch in a thong and a t-shirt, and my host's still politically developing daughter -- whom she feared would grow up to be the next David Brooks in protest of her mom forcing her to hold Cynthia McKinney signs along the highway -- slept in the bedroom.

I was relegated to the spare room, which contained little more than a bunkbed and a mattress on the floor. And spiders in the corners, large and black ones, edging in between the wooden wall frames.

I held them at bay for a whole night, with only my good thoughts of socially worthwhile deeds and sacrifices for the greater cause to comfort me.

I'm thinking about spiders for two reasons this week. One, I found myself perched on the side of waterfall this weekend, facing a perilous ascent and possible (though unlikely) death from climbing a 10-foot rock face at the top of 500 feet of sheer cliff, or scrambling up a muddy and dirty path, totally accessible to the uninitiated hiker, except for a brambly patch of nasty cobwebs with a plethora of spiders taking their respite inside.

It's the jungle. It's not like one doesn't expect to see spiders. So I tried. I really, really did, to take the less dangerous path. I made it half way up the hill -- only a few feet really -- on my hands on knees, looking at the spiders in a web above me, aiming for the clear patch of air between me and the gauntlet of webs.

But I couldn't stop looking at the largest of the spiders, a black one, with a painted yellow and red back, lying in wait along the hillside.

After ten minutes of groping my the green weeds in a panicked asphixiation in front of my perplexed co-worker, who had just watched me brave the side of six waterfalls, I gave up.

I slid down the hill, dove in the pool at the bottom of the falls to get the spider feeling off, and then took a deep breath and climbed a wet, rotting rope up the side of the waterfalls. And it was easier than facing the spider.

The second reason I am thinking about spiders, is that later that day, or the next, it's hard to tell with the time difference, I came home and talked to my boyfriend. He is very far away, entertaining himself in New York while I have my adventures here.

He and his friend, either a recovering mormon hipster with an unfortunate h and y in her otherwise normal name, or his out-of-town former internet pen pal from middle school, I can't remember which, had explored the West Village together. He found one of those crystal-selling, incense-burning shops, I think, or imagine, and bought a deck of cards he and I have wanted forever.

It's the animal power medicine deck, or whatnot. And in it are a bunch of cards, sort of like tarot, but that tell your fortune through animals.

Apparently, you can also use the deck for a one-time only reading to give you your nine power animals, which align you with animal soul guides, or whatever. The catch is, of course, that you only pull seven cards. The other two come to you in a dream, apparently, and are the animals that are with you throughout your life's spiritual journey. You know.

The first card Keith pulled was the spider.

I don't know if he has had any dreams about animals since them. I, however, have dreamed about spiders every night.

onward toward banalities...

It might sound odd, but the only thing I really miss here in Guam (besides boyfriends, cats, statues, that lovely feeling of being in the center of the universe while passing through Grand Central Station) is seltzer water.

Yes, I mean that stuff that is exactly like regular water, only it comes in sexy green bottles and is bubbly enough to be able to add it to things like juices and milk to make concoctions that taste almost like soda, without that gritty carrot taste in the back of my throat and the feeling of wanting to wretch from the burst of high-fructose corn-syrup induced mania.

Like any almost-bouegie person living in New York City, I drank a lot of seltzer water. I'm pretty sure the guy at the Mexican bodega in Bushwick stocked it only for me - because I'd buy all the bottles one after the other until they ran out.

But seltzer water is not a luxury they apparently have in Guam. Seeing as most things have to be shipped in via container ships, I can see why most stores probably don't carry it. Still, I've checked every grocery store and gas station that I've been to for something resembling seltzer water. The closest I came was a six-pack of club soda at Pay-Less.

So, imagine my giddiness when I found one lonely bottle of Pellegrino wedged in between bottles of Kirin and Sapporo beer at Island Fresh, which seems to cater to an Asian clientele, with lots of sushi and puffed rice and freeze-dried Japanese products in store.

I'm pretty sure it might be a mistake - a stow-away somehow carted here in the bottom of a crate of beer. The check out girl couldn't find the price tag, and there was no label for it on the shelf. But, I bought it anyway, and now have one bottle of fancy seltzer water to be pondered and savored whenever I decide to indulge myself.

I'm sure there are better things to write about here - but I'm killing time before the very important World Premiere of the new Twilight movie, which I must cover this evening. So this is the best I could come up with.

Also: chocolate chip cookies and geckos (a very, very tiny one).

Sugar cane and boonie stomping

I rode in the back of a truck - an actual moving one - today. Somewhere I know that my mom (hi mom) is shuddering, but, if my little sister can ride around Thailand on a vespa with her slight man-child boyfriend, I must be able to join in the local custom of riding around in the back of beat-up pick-up trucks.

This is, after all, what they do here. I was headed to my first boonie stomp, which is exactly what it sounds like.


You go to the boonies,













you stomp,













wade,













thrash,



















walk past the remnants of latte stones,













go through a little bit of jungle,



















occasionally grapple,



















and hopefully make your way to some kind of particularly gorgeous piece of sort-of-unspoiled wilderness,













where you take off your clothes and sit in the falls to cool off for a while.













On the way back, we were accosted by some friendly kids living in the housing just at the mouth of the trail. They asked me to take their pictures - and offered me some sugar cane. One of the older boys wielded a machete and passed out the treat to the other kids. They showed me how to peel it down, and then bite down and suck out the juices. They also asked me when I was coming back - which I thought was a funny question.

But, maybe they're friends with all the hikers. At any rate, if I can ever figure out how to get to the trail on my own, I might go back and interview them for the kids' publication I used to work for in New York.

For now, I thought I'd post their pictures. Because these kids were sort of adorable.

in praise of knock-offs and painted cows...

Whenever my boyfriend and I visit upstate New York, where he is from, I always ask the same question about why every village seems to have a different-colored painted ceramic horse hanging out in their downtown. Either I don't ever remember the answer, which is possible, or all I've ever gotten from my boyfriend is a disconcerted shrug, what with the horses not being a landmark in any way associated with places where he made out with girls, tried to make out with girls, was in bands, or had existential teen-hormone fueled crises.

I was very excited to find out that Guam also seems to share the middle-American need to put painted, four-legged plastic creatures in front of buildings, adding to my increasing suspicion that the midwest has somehow been packed up and transported on a container ship here. I noticed several in downtown Hagatna a few weeks ago, and finally asked one of my co-workers about them. I think he gave me the same disinterested shrug that my boyfriend usually does - something to do with an initiative providing these customized cariboa to local businesses.

Also a few weeks ago, while I was wandering the wilds of the Micronesian Mall, I noticed that there was a KD toystore about to open up. I was pretty sure that this was some hilarious local curiousity with an unsavory tale behind it, much like the Dimple Donuts in my hometown of Topeka, which, rumor had it, was disenfranchised from Dunkin Donuts (they just changed a few letters in the sign) after some health code violations resulting from hijinks with dough, and uh, frosting.

So I took a picture (above) - on the hope that either there was a good story, or that the promise of an endless supply of probably real toys would somehow compel my boyfriend to move to Guam.

At any rate, my suspicions proved correct, at least about the first part, when I heard my boss snicker to himself at work after reading a story in the paper about a local businessman opening up a "KD Toystore." There was actually a large feature on it in the daily newspaper.

"Dude, I've known this guy since fifth grade, and he is a total fraud. I bet he's going to ship in all the knock-offs from Hong Kong."

KD toys, not to be confused with KB toys, is the Dimple Donuts of Guam. Apparently, there used to be a KB Toys, but, since it went out of business, the new proprieter is opening up his own branch, complete with the same color scheme, and layout. And, we suspect, will be stocking his shelves with lead-filled imitations of our favorite action heroes.

I'm not sure how these two stories are related - however - I'm pretty they must be.

Long live knock-offs and plastic cows.