the weeping buddha

"The statue of the weeping Buddha depicts Buddha in a bent over position, covering his face with his hands.

"There is a story about two warriors associated with the weeping Buddha. The warriors often faced each other during several battles. Both the warriors used masks as part of their costumes as a result of which they couldn’t see their opponent’s face. Following several such confrontations, the older warrior triumphed over the younger warrior. The younger warrior was killed. When the older warrior took off his mask, he realized that he had killed was his own lost son. Seeing this, the older warrior – who is none other than the weeping Buddha – began to cry.

"It is believed that the weeping Buddha takes away the grief and troubles of the world. In return, he bestows peace and provides strength to those who rub his back."

I am not actually sure where that paragraph came from. It was sent to me by my curmudgeonly opinions editor via email, after he bestowed upon me this awesome and inexplicable statue for our office Secret Santa gift exchange.

Like so many mass emails about angels, written by the anonymous poets among us, I am assuming the text is historically, religiously and grammatically correct, and, as many technologically challenged aunts have assumed in opening their inboxes, meant for me.

As is the Buddha.

I find myself, as I descend ever more into my loopy, dog-lady, tarot reading middle age -- just one existential crisis before decking myself out in jangly bracelets -- believing in, and relying on, the power of objects, moments, places, things that carry weight beyond their usefulness.

I am not sure why that's important. But I am sure that it is. 

I think things find you, or me, for a reason.

Beyond that, they provide a soothing outlet for the things in your (my) brain that smash around and muddle things.

The bestower of this gift is not one I would associate with the Buddha. He's best known for his Christmas columns, and the World of War Craft, and the weekly editorials grumbling about issues we have hyped on our front pages, and will forget for the next week's fling with public corruption or incompetence. 

When I first arrived on island he was writing a series about a near-death brush with complications from diabetes, and his herculean efforts to win back his health after years of neglect.

The series was candid, and was more useful than any of the other generic weight-loss stories I, and others, have written.

Most recently he has become the arbiter of online updates, in which we convey important breaking news such as the next meeting of the utilities commission or the response to a response to bill or other political hijinks initiated by the people running things.

And he gave me a Buddha that is full of enough energy that requires me to keep it in a similarly awesome woven square box.

And I'm in love with it.

So he is now equally awesome (until he makes me rewrite a press release about the next middle school musical).

My point is I think this is my way of saying thank you to him, the universe, whatever compels people to be surprising and nice, and all that.



And also I have power rocks. Not that that's related at all. 

Merry Christmas to me

It's awesome to date someone who has both carpentry skills and enough of an obsessive compulsive disorder to build me a spice cabinet, and individually label each of my spices (and herbs).

Corrections, nay, clarification, on the parrot fish

So, in the all too familiar ritual of clarifying earlier reporting, I have to add a slight alteration to my narrative of the great parrot fish story.

But it actually makes the story cooler, and proves that even the feminist intellectualizing inculcated into me during my four-year venture into incredibly expensive liberal arts education has been lost.

So, it turns out, as it turns out with many a legend, men had nothing to do with the vanquishing of the parrot fish.

In fact, the women at the pond, who were using the citrus limes to scent their hair, used a more subtle tact to defeat the fish.

They  made their hair into a net and charmed the fish to the surface.

Much better. 

the parrot fish

There is, apparently, and I have this on no good authority, a Chamorro legend about a parrot fish.

The legend goes that sometime, presumably long ago, a giant parrot fish was devouring the island. I'm not exactly sure how a parrot fish does that, but it was.

But no one could figure out exactly where the parrot fish was hiding, and daily it was consuming more and more of the island -- so much that ancient residents feared the island would break in half.

(Like that one congressman dude).

The answer to this quandary came from a spring where the culprit parrot fish was found to be hiding in between munching on rocks and trees and coral and other such tasty snacks.

Chamorro women frequented the pool -- washing their hair, or clothes with orange and lime or some kind of citrus fruit -- and cast the rinds into the water.

The rinds floated down into the cavern connecting the secret parrot fish lair to edible parts of the island, and great Chamorro warriors vanquished the fish.

And the island was saved.

This legend -- which I have loosely interpreted from no particular source -- and the promise of seeing something new on an island where all the caves and ridges and jungle and odd corners have been explored, by someone, sometime, was enough to motivate an expedition.

The problem is that neither I, nor my banged-up-truck-driving fellow expeditioner, knew where the spring was. And as we drove around in circles, up and down hills on little roads leading to jungle turnarounds and cramped flat-roofed houses with menacing garages -- it became clear that no one else did.

Half the problem was that we went around in circles in Agana Springs (the village), looking for Agana Springs (the springs) -- and everyone who warily and bemusedly gave us directions seemed to think we were looking for the village, and thus sent us down one set of hills, or up another, before we realized that we had done this before.

At last, we found a friendly middle-aged lady, and asked where "Agana Springs, the springs" was.

"Oh, you don't want to go there," she said.

She proceeded to warn us not to go in the water -- alluding to what I can only assume are unspeakable environmental horrors of days past.

Because I am like this, it also seemed to be a warning that you give to stupid non-locals (there's a Hawaiian word that is used liberally here on Guam for white people, but I don't know how to spell it) who are looking for a muddy pool haunted with the spirits of an ancient vanquished parrot fish.

Our environmentally conscious friend gave us directions anyway, which actually got us where we were going -- more specifically she pointed out the water pump station, behind which the pool is now located.

Even then, it took a little investigating behind bamboo scaffolding and down paths marred with old refrigerators and TVs to find the actual springs.

Not so much a springs anymore, it was more of a dank pool, still populated with fish, but tiny ones -- and no giant island-eating parrot fish to be found.

It was brown, and a little sad, and probably incredibly polluted.

It was also alive  -- with trees and bamboo and a sloping jungle cover that persisted despite all efforts to exorcise the beautiful.

I like it, and imagined that someday the pool will be resurrected as a home to mythical creatures, long after pumping stations have melted into jungle.

Sometimes that's good enough.

Concrete jungle where dreams are made (oh)

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I used to work for an insurance company across from this park, in the building with the stupid cock-eyed red square modern art installation out front, circa 2006.

I didn't actually do anything on my job, because I was a temp paid to sit and answer a phone one hour a day, in thrift store dresses and oddly fitting suits, which no one actually told me not to wear.

My only responsibility on this job was to cover the lunch break of an opera-singer-turned-receptionist, and occasionally label folders while surfing the Internet, and/or writing my first heartfelt journalistic theses.

But I still had to take a lunch break, mainly so they could pay me for one hour less of not working.

Mostly I was broke. On the good days I could buy tempura from the sushi place down the block, which didn't actually sell sushi, and mingle among the stock brokers and executive assistants who all had cooler clothes than me.

On the bad days I just wandered and wished I had enough money for an eggplant curry at the hole-in-the-wall Indian place on Fulton street that still managed to get reviewed in the New York Times.

So I would sit in this park and try to read, but mostly just watch people eat and talk on cell phones, and sometimes catch a few elderly men playing chess, because they had chess boards painted onto some of the ubiquitous granite decor.

And I would rue the world, the hard benches, the tall buildings, the muddy hole whose tragedy wasn't mine, and which I could not really understand, and contemplate my place wearing checkered sun dresses among the suits and blouses and fashionable shoes.

Alienated is not quite the word -- befuddled, distracted, trying to see only parts of this overwhelming whole made up of ill-fitting cubes crammed together -- bored, resistant, yearning. All that stuff.

I think most people must have thought me borderline autistic, or a homeless person passing for employed, which, I sort of was.

I was still fairly new to the New York grungy activist scene then, having only recently been inducted into the circle of desperate defiants, motivated by either principle or by a realization that there was really nothing beyond grey offices and cubicles -- and the terrible discovery that one actually has to make money.

(I knew this, but didn't realize how lame it would be).

At that time, whatever scene I had found had retracted into a skeletal collective of the committed and cynical, grasping for significance in a very small ghetto of self-induced poverty.

Some, most, of the younger ones would eventually wander out to actual employment (me), while others sank deeper into the mire of dysfunction, viciously guarding the only territory they had.

In those days the hub of my activist world was in a dirty office on 43rd street, just above Grand Central.

There I worked, and dithered, sometimes all night, typing at the shittiest computers that one could still turn on, reading page after page of unevenly printed proofs of a newspaper that didn't really need a deadline.

Often we were too poor to buy ink, or if we did, it was, like, paid for by unwitting volunteers who just came into help, and our volunteer proofreading created this dialectic of mistakes and editing that would have been comical (okay it was) except we were tired and working on other people's volunteer time.

It was dim and often uncomfortable, and on the second floor of a building owned by a cult, whose wayward members would occasionally brush past us before returning to the safety of delusion and domination.

I'm not really sure why I didn't see the connection, or mostly ignored it. I think I liked the chandeliers and the large spiral staircases of the building, which had been an old hotel, and had a faint Shining quality about. I grew fond of the creaking elevator, and I heard tell that there was a reflection maze somewhere in the building's nether regions.

I knew my fellow activist colleagues (who I was really only visiting -- I think the word is tourist in the vernacular) were without perspective, and with nothing else to do but throw rocks either aimlessly or at causes that needed more than shouts in the wind.

But throwing rocks is often fun.

For me sitting on that hard bench, that world was still inviting. It seemed true, partly because of its hardscrabble veneer.

I welcomed it as a respite from every other glossy thing. It was a way out, because otherwise I would spend an indeterminate amount of my life sitting at a desk labeling folders, answering phones and making sure I exactly pronounced the four-syllable gauntlet of a name belonging to the she-devil office manager, who eventually retired to a gated community in Florida, to make sure she only mingled with the "right people."

Even in my tempered 30-year-old wisdom, I am still bugged by that.

The protests I went to at that time were either dull, ill-conceived, momentarily thriving before hitting the end of the barricade, or a premeditated circus directed mainly at the selves we wanted to be, screaming cries that meant something, somewhere, but not to Manhattanites and the commuter hoard.

And now, in the park where at 25 I prostrated myself to better things, there are people sleeping in tents, dirty and pissed off and no doubt psychically harassing the business men who quickly walk by.

It may be small. It may be in its zenith of organizational serenity before interest flatlines and the earnest but unprepared file out only to leave the irrationally committed clinging to tents.  Mainly because they have nowhere else to go.

But I don't care.

Dirty anarchists and the unemployed white collars, living momentarily in tents, have, apparently, made enough of a dent to confuse the usually dismissive "mainstream" media -- a fairly hilarious term given the all-seeing eye of twitter --  to be more effective than anything I can say I did in my years of organizing/fighting/believing/writing.

More than anything when I marched with big signs and shyly shouted slogans, and tried in an exacting way to speak truth to power, I was doing it for myself. And also because horror and the Bush administration was happening around me, and more importantly to the rest of the world, and what else does one do?

All in all, it was not a bad decision.

But sleeping in a park next to the Nasdaq and a few blocks from Wall Street doesn't seem to be a bad decision either.

I know both sides of that world of aimless activism and mindless business, at least cursorily, and even from 10,000 miles away both still feel like home.

Once, on a lunch break in my park, I read lower Manhattan's tarot cards, or rather, the cards of the bench on which I was sitting , for a reason I can't explain -- well, mainly boredom.  And all I saw was death, collapse and the world of inorganic construction, male drive to make towers into the sky, and what happens when they fall.

That is likely still in lower Manhattan's cards.

But I am rooting for the people who are, at least metaphorically, trying to fill that collapsed hole, and replace the edifices that have not yet been torn down, with their honest, inconvenient pleas for something better.

It is more than I could do. And enough to make, at least a part of me, wish I were still doing it.

10 years to forget

fell. commemorate. collapse. dedicate. mark. mourn. honor. heroes. sacrifice. determination. valor. American. soil. USofA. bless. mastermind. evil. good. terrorism. win. freedom. our freedoms. inspirational. Islamic. Osama. extremists. Islamists. jihad. Guantanamo. blacksite. Fallujah. IED. detention. Abu Ghraib. wounded. warriors. why. we. fight. remember. never. forget. first responders. ground. zero. fire. fighters. reflection. suicide. bombings. grenade. rocket. launcher. threat. unconfirmed. credible. air. plane. security. terrorists. depose. weapons. mass. destruction. enemy. freedom. intelligence. secure. security. officials. stop. search. at home. surveillance. patriot act. sunshine. why. hate. us. them. bodies. execute. struggle. ongoing. loss. lost. fear. terror. hearts. minds. drones. civilians. casualties. efforts. military. personnel. troops. service. men. women. mourn. son. daughter. father. husband. wife. mother. cousin. uncle. aunt. sister. brother. friend. thousands. millions. exile. vigilant. mosque. God. faith. holy. war. burned. buried. resilient. determined. foe. hit. us. stand. salute. hood. detain. tireless. law. enforcement. defeat. victory. never. forget. silence. lessons. meaning. regrets. decider. victims. me. I. remember. there. names. names. names. unnamed. reports. reported. scare. counter. offensive. rescue. trauma. rights. then. now. muddy. hole. rebuild. success. president. probe. water. board. suspect. NSA. surveillance. evesdropping. radical. right. left. march. stop. support. resist. defend. clarity. justice. never. forget. lead. protect. peace. silence. speak. out. truth. power. lie. divide. conquer. forces. anti-. post-. memorialize. free. world. never. remember. forget.

the inevitable righteous indignation

I hope everyone appreciates my little beat poem to the last decade.

It was all I could muster after a day of chasing around 9/11 memorials with my pen and paper, dutifully taking notes as fathers and mothers and wives and children of the war dead all sobbed or held back tears stoically as they were once again trotted out for the annual grief fest organized to help them staunch wounds that they never should have had;

After a day of listening to speech after speech from leaders, elected and otherwise, about why were are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why 19-year-old soldiers came home exploded into pieces in little body bags, why the wars' disfigured roll themselves onto podiums to get medals of freedom, or honor or whatever;

Why there are terrorists who hate us, and how we have to stop them;

How this tragedy CHANGED US ALL FOREVER. And how we can never forget, ever, this event that we all watched on TV.

I hate this day. I doubt very many people like it.

It was a terrible day.

But when I watch guys on Harleys riding motorcycles for the benefit of the limbless, armless vet being pinned with an honorary medallion, and listen to twangy songs about kicking the terrorists with our American-made boots, and see the same determined vacuousness that emerged when the Sept. 11 attacks chiseled the nation from an ignorant, inert stone into a blind directionless god of war -- crying and cheering as it launched expletives and platitudes and missiles at the rest of the world -- I am particularly resentful.

I am not going to waste everybody's time talking about all the reasons why the start and continuation of two(ish) wars is wrong, or try to speak about my own, unique connection to this event, whatever it would be, as everyone seems to have a special and unique reason why they were touched by 9/11.

We all were.

Any thinking, half-conscious human being knows, feels, that death is wrong. And torture is wrong. And killing innocent, and even not innocent, people is wrong.

It is wrong.

But, somehow there seems to be a deep internal conflict between basic human empathy and the compulsion to blow shit up.

I have given up trying to convince people to change by telling them all the gritty details of wrong done to other people by our country, trying to waive about facts about torture and detention and civilian casualties, and young kids still barely out of high school being shipped to a war zone.

This approach has clearly failed.

So today all I want to say is just fucking stop riding Harleys for a half second, or singing God Bless America and the National Anthem really fucking loudly, and holding the American flag, or whatever flag, as if it could save you.

Just stop, and think of the most painful experience you've been through, and think about how you felt when you saw people falling from a burning building -- in your own country -- and how you would feel, or do feel, about your son or daughter or whoever coming home in pieces. And then fucking ask yourself how you, or anyone one, or any nation, can do that to someone else.

And if you're really happy to see them all get blown up anyway -- fuck you. I'm tired of this shit.

If not, maybe we should be coming up with a better way of dealing with this day than regurgitating mindless sorrow, and analyzing 10 years of failed military intervention, and vomiting our grief all over the world with an air of entitlement that we do not afford anyone else.

And maybe we as humans should try to find a better way to stop wreaking incalculable damage on people -- our own and others.

Thoughts?

trees

I, like many others I assume, would like to believe that trees are mythical beings, with names, with characters, with voices whispering unspoken languages in the wind.

That when you see a tree branched out, with wooden knots and gangly arms, reaching up to the sky or curling under the dirt, there is some kind of divinity to the whole thing.

If there is a divinity in anything, it must be in trees.

I saw many trees in my very short recent jaunt through Northwestern forests.

And all of them seemed beautiful, unique -- some grimacing and spiky with spiraling blades for branches, and some just tied up with knots, as if their trucks had oozed in one direction before changing their minds and going another way.

When you touch them, or when I did at least, I expected a kind of spark, like those moments in movies where everything goes white and there's a flashback epiphany waiting on the other end.

But still, despite those many romantic images of trees imparting their secrets to us, of their long-lived existences unfurling wisdom around us, I have yet to commune with the soul of a tree.

It seems very fun, and very poetic, and I would like to close my eyes sometime and find out that yes, you can listen to the wind and all that, and there is some message we have not yet heard in all our walking lives drifting down from falling leaves.

But, and there must be a but here, because this is the point at which I tell myself, and everyone, that the world doesn't work like that, and no, you can't talk to trees.

I'm not sure I'm ready to make that leap just yet.

I like trees, and I like, better yet, metaphysical interpretations of things otherwise explicable through rational thought.

On a related note, I am contemplating focusing all my remaining career ambitions on becoming a wild wandering witch (very lovely phrasing) and figuring out how to harness the elements and the darkness and all that to tell fortunes of the peasant folk on the not-quite moors of the Midwest.

I really should have been an Emily Bronte novel.

Or a tree.

true things

The more I write, the less I find myself writing true things. It should be the other way around -- that experience and practice of craft makes honesty flow more easily, and provides an varnished surface on which to place the singular moments brightening an otherwise murky reality.

But it doesn't seem to work that way.

When I write, the less I feel the terror of exposure, because it is something I do all the time. And more often than not, it turns out relatively well -- or at least not awful.

And that adequacy just engenders within me a sense of empowerment, but also apathy, because today offers no real exceptional reason to do my utmost, to prove that I am better than mediocre treatises on what I did yesterday.

I think this is to some degree -- or perhaps exactly -- how I, and I suspect most of us, live our lives. Without the assurance that I got through yesterday reasonably well, or at least survived it, I would likely find myself in perpetual anguish, like the tottering teen literally doing everything for the first time, and therefore pulling all my limited willpower into getting up that next day.

Oh god, that explains so much.

But I am always surprised when I can somehow pull out of me something good, something worth reading. And usually more surprised that on those exceptional occasions, I am writing something true.

Expectations, unmet and otherwise

I have never been good with expectations, and least of all with disappointment, which is, understandably, my least favorite emotion.

Any occasion rife with expectations, also comes with the lurking fear of disappointment, which I have never quite been able to dispel even in the lowest-stake situations.

I met two very lovely people, on their first visit to Guam in 40 years, in the course of writing a story for my respectable, more importantly paid, job as a local news reporter.

I was happy to write the story, and looked forward to meeting them when they arrived with their now-grown son. 

They had lived on Guam for three years in the late 1960s and early 70s, and returned with unvarnished memories of the island's friendliness, lushness, squawking birds, fiestas, rustic living, power outages and Pacific beaches. Some of these things remain, for better or worse. Others are, to my knowledge, entirely extinct.

Thus I planned a hike for our first meeting was to my favorite, as of yet, natural place on Guam.

The northern jungled region of Pagat, which will perhaps host a military firing range sometime in the not-too-distant future, has always stuck with me as one of Guam's little exceptions.


There you can see the remnants of another now-extinct way of living through the crumbled pieces of pottery and ancient grinding stones littering the site of a former Chamorro village.

You can feel the cool air of a cave that once must have inspired both awe and dread in its dark recesses, and view clifflines almost completely unmarred by housing developments or hotels.

The hike incidentally required a harrowing descent down slippery vertical rocks, and an even more harrowing ascent up those still slippery vertical rocks, pretty much in the middle of the hottest part of the day.


When we arrived at the cave, it turned out to be a little too dark, and a little too slippery for the enthusiastic couple to explore.

Their now-grown son, who spent only days on the island following his birth, came with us inside to the interior of the cave, which had been mocked up with enough candles to conjure images of the Phantom of the Opera, albeit it with a dozen cannon-balling members of our fine armed forces making the most of the chest-high pool.

When the military kids finished disturbing the otherwise placid waters, and headed elsewhere to pursue amusements more likely to kill them, the cave seemed to widen above us like a vaulted cathedral, and you could hear, as always, the soft lapping of the tide as it rushed in and out.

The village, which we arrived at after several unsuccessful detours, was also nice -- lots of grinding stones and latte stones and rocks that should not have been there.

The view of the ocean and surrounding green cliffs gave one the feeling of isolation and perhaps wonder, although the military kids now cannon balling into the swirling surf below did, once again, dampen the impulse to be reverent.

Following much bottled water and some mushed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches eaten on the cliffface, there was the thorny question of how to get back up the now seemingly unconquerable hillside.

This task was, to say the least, a bit tricky, and I felt, as I watched them struggle to the top, a deep sense of responsibility, and worry, that perhaps I had just contributed further disappointment to a trip perhaps already fraught with the weight of high expectations.

I think I nearly killed them.


All things considered, may have been perhaps not the greatest way to reintroduce them to the island.

But I launched the initiative only partly because of bad planning

I felt an insecurity and nervousness on their behalf, returning to a place they once called Camelot, where I am as much familiar with the strip mall (singular) of Tamuning, and occasionally filthy beaches as I am of the magical places still left.

I have never seen Guam before the hot paved and pot-holed roads, the traffic jams and the terrible, tacky tourist shops -- but I like to imagine that there are still places here that capture their description of a place undiscovered, and a world left out of the worst parts of the disappointing certainty of today's world.



And after the hike, when everyone was still alive, we had a lovely dinner at a spot where they once ate regularly.

When they ate there, the place looked over a dark night sky unmarred by the exactness of illumination.

Now the place is in an apartment complex converted from a hotel, adjacent to what I assume is a dive night spot, overlooking a horizon speckled with lights as far as the eye can see.

For them, it was perhaps an adjustment.

But over dinner we talked about the Guam they remembered. And I looked out the window and saw back to those quieter, darker days, to a place I have never been.

Dug out

This rock should be whole. Of that, I am fairly certain. The fact that it is sitting on my living room table in various pieces does not exactly sit well with me.

But then, I have these compulsions that are, even to me, inexplicable.

For example, while walking my dogs on the beach, I spent half an hour digging with bare hands and a rusty piece of rebar to uncement a piece of shiny marbled rock that I thought looked interesting.

Embedded just below the sand, which was mostly covered with the detritus of coral and rusting oil pipelines, this weird thing that most closely resembled a turtleback popped out.

And before I knew it I was seeking the corners with my hands, trying to find the edges and the bottom. To what end, I had no idea. 

I sort of felt like Indiana Jones, uncovering that snake-ridden Egyptian tomb in order to beat the Nazis to the lost ark. 

Again, these things aren't particularly well thought through.

But surprisingly I found the edges, and even more surprisingly, the whole thing was light enough to carry -- at least to a coconut tree where I could return with my car to pick it up.

But the more I touched it, the more in flaked apart. First a few sharp corners sheared away along the side, then as I hauled it up to said coconut tree it broke in half. On the return trip fire ants had their way with it. And I think it broke a final time in my apartment.

I sort of feel bad for the rock, which must be volcanic, and really had no business being on a coral beach anyway.

I can't help feeling like maybe there are things that should not be dug out. Then again, the pieces will make nice book ends.

A series of stupid ideas

It's that moment when you're knee-deep in water, missing a shoe, with two terrified soaked dog-paddling animals next to you in the dark, and are about a 1/4 mile from shore that you realize something has gone awry.

Not death-threateningly awry, just, that perhaps things had not gone according to plan, if you had a plan, which you clearly didn't.

And by you, I mean me, because really, no one else does these kinds of stupid things. Except Heidi, but we are genetically predisposed in that way.

So yes, I decided in the middle of the night to take my dogs to a secluded beach, populated at that time only by a few straggling divers making their way inland with flashlights and air tanks strapped to their backs.

This, however, was not the extent of my bad ideas.

The tide was exceptionally low, and not having a long beach on which to walk my dogs, I thought it would be an opportune moment to explore what was on the other side of this really big cliffline that I assumed was only like, a few feet long.

Because clearly my sense of geography is entirely warped, as I have gazed at this particular cliff line from afar, and apparently not noticed that it is large enough to support an entire hotel, and also hundreds of feet from the closest shore.

Yah!

And, as you can imagine, as I waded by dogs around the side of the cliff, expecting at some point to find beach, I was disappointed only to find more and more cliff, and water of varying depths, but which seemed to generally get deeper as we continued.

Also there was coral, which hurt and ate my shoe.

Like many a doomed explorer before me, however, I decided we had to go on.

So on we trudged, Rusty in my arms, Paz desperately swimming beside me, too far away from the previous shore and hundreds and hundreds (really it was a long way) of feet to the sandy beach.

I mean, the trip wasn't going to kill us. But it was dark, and I did lose my shoe.

Many minutes later, upon arrival at the beach everything was great.

Rusty immediately peed on something; Paz rolled around.

Except for the fact that I was soaked and my car was on the other side of the cliffline, and only accessible by either a trek back through the water, or a trek through an unlit gravel road cutting through menacing (even in the daytime) jungle -- and also an eco-adventure park -- things were looking up.

I decided to walk around on the beach for a while, because certainly, at some point, someone will return my phone calls and drive me back to my car without the possibility of meeting taotaomo'na, or like, other fun jungle-dwelling creature on the dark road.

Flash forward like an hour later, after exhausting all attempts to be rescued via cellphone, and walking up and down the beach a few times, I meandered begrudgingly in the general direction of my car, which was at the end of the Tumon strip, past the last brightly lit hotel, down a dark road that turned into an even darker gravel road leading to a concrete lot where my car was parked.

I only made it so far as the last hotel, however, before it started raining, and also simultaneously my phone died.

This is the point at which you're like, wow, either I'm going to sit under an awning of the Nikko hotel chapel all night, or I'm going to ask that nice-looking Japanese security guard who probably won't rape me to give me a ride back to my car.

Squid that is octopus

After watching many a horrifying YouTube video on how to dismember squid before throwing it in hot oil, I decided to go ahead and try to eat this squid, which turns out is actually octopus.

Apparently squids have those pointy heads and short little tentacles. Who knew?

The result is above.

I tried a few bites timidly. It sort of tastes like a mixture of crab and a tire.

I think I overcooked it.

My first squid

I have a dead squid in my refrigerator.

It was given to me by a guy named Mike at Tagachang beach.

He waded across the shallow reef with a spear slung over his back and dozen squishy dead squids hanging down to his knees.

It was sort of hard to avoid conversation.

I was the only one on the beach, sitting in a few inches of warm water, with my dogs frolicking in the sand and my soaking dress billowing around me.

He had squids.

He made his way over to me -- squids and all -- and told me about how he hunted the cephalopods by poking his spear into tiny holes in the ocean floor.

Apparently it's better hunting in high tide -- but the tide was low.

Being a vegetarian, I felt very bad for the squids. Although I eat fish, I have avoided squid since I mistakenly ate calamari on a school trip to a French restaurant during my year abroad.

They have little heads, and eyes, and are smart -- relatively, for sea creatures.

But when someone offers you a squid, it's sort of hard to say no.

So Mike, the squid hunter, disentangled a medium-sized squid from his hook, cleaned the ink sac, and gave me directions on how to cook it (put in boiling water for a few minutes on each side, cut off the head, don't eat the teeth).

It seemed easy enough, and for a moment, I thought -- maybe I'll try squid.

Today, seeing it float around in a bowl of ice water in my fridge, staring up at me with glazed eyes and frozen tentacles, I am not so sure.

Maps, again

Like many things in my life, the first attempt at map-hanging didn't quite work out.

The whole thing collapsed in on itself within hours of being affixed to the wall with tape.

Try two seems to have been more successful, so far anyway.

Maps

I had a map of the world once. A really big map, with all the countries of the world well-detailed and color-coded.

It took up a whole section of my shoddily decorated bedroom wall in my first attempt at a post-college Brooklyn apartment -- and then filled the overwhelming white space above the secondhand couch in the living room of my shoddily decorated attempt at a couple-dedicated Brooklyn apartment.

It was a present. Possibly the best present I got at that time of my life.

I loved it.

Since childhood I have had a fondness for maps. I used to collect them from copies of National Geographic Maganize, which in middle school seemed like the most sophisticated and exciting magazine on the planet.

It was glossy, and full of big print hinting at magical places and things around the world, and they would give you free maps of places my middle-school mind could not really contemplate.

During high school, among the posters of forgettable movies I ganked from my job at the local cinema, photo montages of mostly myself and glued-together puzzles I for some reason felt motivated to hang on my wall, I had an odd collection of maps gathered from hastily devoured copies of National Geographic.

I remember distinctly a map of Ontario, another of central America, which in my post-modern college phase I graffittied during a late-night giggle fest with my little sister with a permanent-ink marker pen in order to identify exactly what part of the mysterious region from which the stereotypical 25th century Native American Star Trek Voyager crewman hailed.

I can't exactly remember what motivated me to do this, but I have a distinct memory of drawing the words "Chakote [sic] Belt " on a region approximate to Guatemala.

When I was younger and still collecting experiences like little pieces of lint, I would put little pin pricks on the places I'd been, which seemed much more interesting than the scene of cars and street lamps and infuriately mundane tract housing outside my Topeka bedroom window.

After a while I got tired of defacing the world with an ink-smudge of myself, and just wanted to look at the planet whole. To have a view of all things, terrestrial at least, is a comforting feeling.

You can almost see yourself in it, use it as a way of keeping track of exactly where you at any moment.

I abandoned many things when I left New York -- my cat, my hoard of assorted kitchen implements collected from Midwest garage sales, to-do lists, winter wear and torn fishnets, crestfallen ambitions for social justice and a career, people I loved, subway staircases I groggily trudged up daily, Batman and Legos and homemade t-shirts. Too many things to count, and which seem now pointless to catalog.

I miss my map though. Something about it made me feel balanced, and like the world was there for me to explore.

I'm pretty sure that map isn't coming my way anytime soon.

But I now have a new map now -- freshly resurrected from the bowels of storage and posted on my previously very blank wall.

A reproduction of the world before all the edges were defined -- where North America was still just a jagged coast and a shapeless hinterland, where the southern polar region had been unfortunately, and I assume briefly, dubbed Magallanica, and the tiny little island on which I currently live had not yet lived down first impressions -- this world is not one on which I can easily and concretely place myself.

It is old and, undefined and surprisingly accurate, and full of possibility.

It was also, fittingly enough, printed by National Geographic.

Dark waters

It turns out that swimming around in murky water on the edge of a waterfall you can't see is sort of scary.

Especially if some unseen creature tries to eat you.

I went out the other night with friend of mine, the well-prepared sailor -- in an attempt to provide him with a memorable last night jaunting around Guam exploring things before he headed back to the states to figure out The Rest of His Life.

Having a very limited knowledge of Guam's adventure spots -- especially compared to someone who hikes to unexplored caves by himself AT NIGHT -- the best I could do was Priest's Pools.

Oh, and also I was incredibly late getting off work, which limited our adventure capabilities, and I had to check my email every few minutes to re-read a story I had written at work.

After a few wrong turns, I managed to navigate us through sword grass to the pool, which is slightly more picturesque in the daytime.

And also warmer.

Floating around in a dark pool, preoccupied with looking at constellations I couldn't recognize, I felt a sharp tug, like a hand grabbed me under the water, and the distinctive feel of teeth.

Later, my friend and I saw a moss-covered lobster-fish thing, and a two-foot eel slithering under the rocks in the pool's shallows.

I'm thinking it was the eel that bit me.

I hope so anyway.

Pagat revisited

I visited Pagat with a friend several weeks ago.

I meant to post something whimsical and cutting -- about the hallowed ground strewn with beer cans and coolers, and the experience of dragging a body (literally a pair of old pants and shirt stuffed with garbage) up a tree-lined path in the fading evening light.

But somewhere along the line I got distracted, and never got around to posting it.

And now, weeks later, it's all sort of fuzzy, so the best I can do is a prosaic summary:

I visited the village for the first time, and went beyond to the coral cliff line where green fields of moss and vines had sprung up on rocks. I sat in extended silence with my friend -- the well-prepared sailor -- and looked down at the blue ocean swirling through a cliffside crevice.

Navigating the dark black interior of the cold cave was more and less scary this time around. Less nerve-wracking because I knew what I was getting myself into, but more unsettling for the repeated faint knocking that was definitely not an abandoned beer can gently hitting the side of the cave wall.

And I heard singing in the forest as I played with the water collecting in the hollow of ancient dug-out grinding stones.

At first I thought someone was with us in the forest, doing some kind of latter-day Chamorro ritual. But after a while I realized we were alone. My friend couldn't hear the singing, only the sound of traffic at the nearby raceway.

But I could hear the sound of a woman's voice, faintly, singing something I didn't recognize.

It was odd. And then again -- not so odd.

The last Japanese tank on Guam

I followed a guy I met on the Internet through a labyrinthine golf course on an expansive patch of jungle to a World War II-era Japanese tank yesterday.

Supposedly the only Japanese tank in Guam -- and by that I mean it's the only one I've seen so far -- the tank was lying only a few dozen feet off a conveniently mowed grass access road splitting off from a private golf course on a large and mostly empty resort confusingly located in the island's interior.

Rusted and crumbling, the surprisingly small artifact more closely resembled a flower pot -- with weeds and plants growing up through its body -- than something that once held multiple (?) people.

We got there after meandering our way through a small paved road along the course's driving ranges, which were literally cut through jungle.

Despite having hiked in the vicinity of LeoPalace, and having enjoyed its always empty bowling alley, I was surprised to see that the actual extent of the grounds was huge. The area seemed to be its very own artificial community, complete with villas and bathroom facilities, located in what is otherwise an isolated expanse of wild land.

We had started early, so luckily there were few people on the course to yell at us.

Once we left the golf course, the "hike" was actually a fairly comfortable stroll along a muddy back road.

Surrounding the course, large concrete bridges connected dirt roads rimmed by head-high sword grass.

I sort of assumed we were just kind of wandering, but being a crewman on a Navy nuclear submarine who routinely bikes around the island discovering new and interesting things, my new friend came prepared with a GPS tracker and a Google Earth print out of our target.

And within minutes, we found the tank, sitting along the side of the road, mostly shrouded by sword grass. What was left of the vehicle was decomposing. Metal and rubber and the insides of the thing all seemed to be disappearing.

On the way back, we saw delighted golfers pitch balls across river gullies and steep waterfalls, which had been littered with the white round fallout of holes missed.

As they made their way along the road in carts toward the next hole, several golfers passed us along the way, and seemed none too happy to have their pristine recreational experienced sullied by the presence of sweaty hikers.

Moon rising

One day late for the "super moon," but still, close enough.

What I see when I look up

I don't remember exactly when I started looking up.

It's the kind of thing that everybody does; no one really thinks about.

It was probably in New York -- when the frantic columns of civilization and crowding of psychic white noise heaved inward daily -- that I began truly looking at the sky through the trees.

In Union Square, where corporate chain stores and an obstacle course of shoppers, commuters and irate drivers ringed a stalwart patch of green, the trees gave me a glimpse of something unexpected.

In between the swaying leaves and the sky, there was something I couldn't explain.

Escape, sometimes euphoria, other times a sort of sublime tranquility -- these are things that are not exactly typical emotions on my part.

But at some point I found myself looking up at trees, through trees, day and night, whenever I could find them.

And when I looked up leaves always seemed so many different shades of green, blossoms brighter, stark branches more severe. On windy days, the air always seemed to kick my stomach and provide a kind of temporary high. And through the trees the sunlight, or moonlight, or fast- and slow-moving clouds always seemed to suggest a greatness that I can't explain, a whole that cannot be contemplated beyond its most basic parts.

There are many more kinds of trees here, or at least, different kinds of trees -- wide and low, with expansive criss-crossed branches, bare and intricate with colored flowers, tall and straight, or bent, with a pompom at the top.

But look up at them is one of my favorite things to do, and not entirely because there isn't much else to do.

There seems to be something primal about them, something sacred.

If I were ever to look for god, this is probably where I'd go first.

The jumping is easy; the falling is fun...

Actually it took me about 10 tries hovering at the edge of this to take off, but you get the idea.

Things on Guam that are totally normal and every day experiences

like two dogs riding a carabao.

I actually see this guy all the time walking the carabao and dogs on the side of the road.

But I've never gotten a picture.

Hooray!

the roads that lead somewhere

I have found it hard lately to write anything particularly enlightening for this blog.

I think part of it has to do with an absence of that breathless excitement I first experienced when exploring the terrain of my new home.

New places suddenly become old places, and you start to know too many things to just gush and wonder and see glitter everywhere.

And roads that once led to new places, lead only to places you have been before.

I am also fairly busy, and since my transition from fluffy lifestyle reporter to "serious" news reporter I have experienced this kind of self-censoring paranoia, wondering what, if anything, is in bounds for me to discuss publicly.

And then there's this sort of creeping cynicism I can't shake.

It's not even that I cover anything particularly gritty. I mean, really, the daily workings of 15 (ahem) professional politicians is hardly the most soul sucking of jobs -- emphasis on the most.

It's not even that I have had any specific experiences that have added to overall cynicism about the world. I would say that in general I am less cynical than I was, say, four years ago when I was extolling the hypocrisy of the U.S. government in tri-weekly dispatches from a corner of the leftist fringe.

But dealing daily with cops and courts, legislators, accidents, evasive PIOs (even nice ones, sometimes especially nice ones), and the never-ending onslaught of (often) meaningless and self-serving press releases has imprinted another kind of cynicism in me.

It's the cynicism that comes with writing things you already know the answer to.

One thing I have discovered over the last few years is that I am best when I am writing about people.

People are always surprising -- and more often than not you cannot know the answer to what makes them tick. I have found that even if I were tempted (for some reason) to write pat cliches instead of really looking hard at someone, I would invariably be wrong about what I assumed.

But my job is not to write about people. It's about jobs, and organizations, about structures and money and who works and who doesn't.

It's about filling space and hitting certain themes, and making sure there's a follow the next day.

And writing what I write all day makes me sometimes feel like I am on rails, heading to and from a prescribed destination.

And the joy I feel when I meet someone or find out something new seems gone from my life. Because these stories are not new. They are the same stories over and over -- someone dies, someone steals, someone screws something up they shouldn't. Occasionally someone "gives back" -- or writes a check.

But I am not looking for anything beyond that, and I am losing the ability to see the good things, and follow roads that will lead me somewhere surprising.

And then sometimes I do follow roads -- metaphorically or literally -- and I feel like I remember what the good things are, and see the possibilities again.

Or at least find carabao, which are cool.

Inarajan

Trees will out survive us all.

15 hours in Tokyo

The next time I visit Tokyo on a 15-hour mid-winter layover, I will certainly remember a few things.

For one, I will try to remember to wear weather-appropriate shoes, and also a coat, and maybe a change of clothes that doesn't make me look like a homeless version of the stereotypical Fat American Tourist.

On the tail-end of a whirlwind tour of the western half of the United States, I had what turned out to be a longer-than-expected layover in Tokyo.

I sort of suspected the layover would be longer than usual, as my flight time from Los Angeles to Guam was 30 hours. Perhaps that should have tipped me off.

But you never know, perhaps they're taking into account stops in 7 different states not listed on the itinerary -- or like, tail winds or something. These are the kinds of things I have a difficult time planning ahead for.

At any rate, I had the brilliant idea traveling back to only bring the bare essentials in my carry on, and to wear comfortable clothing for the long flight. Thus, I wore a couple of ratty t-shirts layered on top of a pair of stretchy, comfortable pants more appropriately worn during a session of yoga, or like, dog walking. I did, luckily, bring outer wear -- two jackets I usually sling over my knees at work to help with the climate of an over-air-conditioned office.

And that was it.

When the attendant informed me in LA that I wouldn't be able to get a boarding pass until I arrived in Japan due to an overnight stay in Tokyo, it did occur to me that I should prepare by buying a Japan travel book.

That was a good idea.

So, at least when I arrived after an 8 hour flight, I had a good idea of the benefits of visiting rustic Japanese baths in the northern provinces of the country. Or like, how awesome a Japanese tea ceremony is.

What I didn't have was a basic working understanding of Japanese, and/or a detailed map of Tokyo.

Given that I lived in New York for 6 years with only a slightly better ability to communicate and no real understanding of maps, I figured what the hell? Why not spend the night in Tokyo?

Plus, also, the airport wouldn't let me spend the night in the boarding area because my flight was too many hours away.

Tokyo being the Japanese version of New York, with better public transport, it wasn't that difficult getting into the city. I just asked a polite train attendant how to get into Tokyo -- who responded in better English than half the subway attendants in New York.

Since it was cold and a Sunday night, the train ride into the city probably accounted for about half of my sightseeing.

Having spent the last year and a half on a tropical island, however, it wasn't bad.

I looked at curious posters hanging from the ceiling -- and finally realized the magical reason why you see Japanese people wearing those ridiculous surgical masks everywhere: advertising.

I watched people fall asleep cell phones in hand -- as if they could not even gather the strength necessary to distract themselves during their mind-numbingly boring commute home. I marked the increasingly dense Japanese suburbs turn into urban sprawl by the clusters of lights out the window.

I felt hopelessly inadequate in my own near-pajama wear next to the laced-up boots, fitted jackets and layers of stylish, or at least weather-appropriate, outfits around me.

But, other than the fact that I was a head taller than everyone around me, I felt strangely at home. I missed my boots and jackets and riding the train around New York City. I even missed the cold.

When I got to the city, it was already around 8 p.m. I was faced with what seemed like a bustling heart of the city -- there were large departments stores (where I bought a hat and a scarf), tall buildings, and small winding streets with suspiciously accessible restaurants advertising all their food in English. There was even a park, supposedly one of the city's nicest. It was too dark (and cold) to stroll in it, but I felt like I must have discovered a reasonably happening part of the city.

It was only until I made my way back to the main square that something clicked -- holy shit, I was in the Times Square of Tokyo. I flashed back to all those days I spent rolling my eyes as I walked (hurriedly) past meandering groups of tourists in Times Square, and felt a little guilty.

And then I was like, whatever, I'm hungry.

After at least an hour of cold indecision, I found a sushi place (where they had to dig in a drawer and dust off the English menu). I ate passable sushi very slowly, trying to figure out what I would do with the next 10 hours or so.

When I went back out into the cold, however, I realized it would be impossible to try and do much sightseeing. I figured I could take the last train back to the airport, where I hoped they would let me sleep.

My timing not being great, however, I missed the last train by minutes. And, it turns out, the train station was one of those outdoor ones that is actually very cold, and not at all meant for sleeping.

Dejected, I left the train station and saw a lit-up sign that said "Hotel." At that point I was cold, and tired, and desperately in need of a bath. So I wandered in, found out that the place was only reasonably expensive, and got a room.

Given the fact that the hotel's entire clientele must be lost tourists who have missed trains, the place was pretty nice. The room wasn't much bigger than the bed, but it had a TV, a bathroom, and even offered slippers and one of those Japanese robe things, which I skipped.

Although it wasn't as exciting as bar-hopping all night and watching the sunrise with my heretofore undiscovered Japanese soulmate, I got to bathe, and sleep, and watch just enough Japanese anime to feel like I was hanging out in my parents' basement in college.

And then I got up and took a 5:45 a.m. train back to the airport -- and got to watch the sun slowly rise over Japanese suburbs while commuters begrudgingly made their daily slog to work.

All in all, not bad.

On Nebraska

I returned to the continental U.S. for the first time in a year and a half -- which, saying it now, doesn't sound all that dramatic.

But, I guess spending one's time on the same small patch of land in the Pacific does make traveling to any place bigger than 300 square miles sort of exciting.

Or maybe it's just being older, and (slightly) more mature that makes the expansive plains of the Midwest, and the brown grass, and cold skies, and homespun attitudes, and small-scale cities all seem quaintly charming.

I don't know.

Suddenly I miss all of it, and am more appreciate of the warm bed and free food of my parents' house.

On writing about sad things

There is no way to quantify tragedy.

That is one simple truth of the world, and one that we, all those who have experienced some form of tragedy, know inherently.

That being said, newspapers do it all the time, or try to anyway.

I have been thinking about this lately, because of national tragedy, and local ones. No matter the scope of the event, it seems there are some basic formulas we cleave to in trying to understand these things.

I have never been one to deal very well with formulas. But, I have also never dealt very well with scrutinizing people up close.

Sometimes I think I would rather look away, rather than look at the things I know everyone has inside them.

When I have written about loss in the past, or at least, large-scale injustice, it was always for a purpose. The element of human tragedy was, perhaps unconsciously, dwarfed in my mind by the larger cause for justice.

Lately, I have had to write about tragedy for what it is -- something sad, something impossible to understand, and something deeply personal.

I have had to try and put into words what losses from which people cannot recover.

And that has been hard.