California in 72 Hours

California Haikus

1. Visiting Cali/
Is wonderful nostalgia/
But I miss my friends/
#haiku

2. It isn’t the same/
Without the people I knew/
When we lived with you/
#haiku

3. The same old places/
Remind me of the good times/
We shared in those days/
#haiku

4. Our children have grown/
Appropriately moved on/
From youth we long for/
#haiku

5. The friends that we saw/
Confirmed your key importance/
In our nostalgia/
#haiku

6. The California/
Visited was a ghost town/
Without our old friends/
#haiku

7. Seventy two hours/
In the place we loved you so/
Was an eternity/
#haiku

Five Days in Berkeley (Day 1)

Here is the chronicle of my five days in California After I submitted grades and a draft of my Powerpoint Paper to In-Transit.  These were written on my crackberry as facebook notes and updates as well as twitter-tweets.  Day One seems a bit cryptic, so I’ll embellish in bold.

Rockaways from Jet Blue 91

Cali Day 1
Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 1:37am
Uploaded via Facebook Mobile
Day 1 in CA/
royal cafe for a familiar breakfast (our favorite breakfast place where the kids learned their restaurant manners and I love the cornmeal pancakes with poached or fried eggs); where we met Diane and were remembered by the staff (Diane was one of the staff workers and ex residents of University Village in Albany CA [we hashed over residual bigotry in Albany Schools and the architectural destruction of the village community])./
noon mtg: familiar faces and places
Books, chairs and views that are perfect/
Le Petit Cheval bun (vermincelli salad w/ fish sauce), pork chops, pork sandwich (Simply the best low-hassle Vietnamese food I’ve ever had: Le Cheval in Oakland is better, but more involved)/
smyth fernwald flashback (Chandler and Mason’s last daycare before public school) with Mary and Leslie we recounted three years in kids life (Fond memories of really good kids)/
dinner @ greg & chalon’s was so comfortable and affiming of our friendship (I am amazed at how close I feel to Greg, Chalon Sophia and Maya, they were one of the families who spent my 40th Birthday with me: damn fine people)/
chandler to sleepover with zoe, arnelle & meagan (sleepovers have unseen costs when tired kids return)

Chandler’s Letter to Amir

I found this dry-erase letter in Chandler’s Room when I was up there.  I think that its medium, its very impermanence, says as much as Cha-Cha’s eloquent  words.

Amir Hassan

I realize that this post might have been an enigma for many (or any) who stumbled here (and a lot of good this will do people who’ve already left), but it is about Misti and Amir Hassan. We knew Misti and Amir from student housing in UC Village. I’ve known them these last 9 years or so. I saw them the last time I was in Berkeley. When we moved Misti minded the kids and cleaned the house as we moved our belongings onto the truck to come East. Misti, it seems, killed Amir. This is not, in the least, about me. This is all about Amir’s Death and Misti’s “survival.” I think that she has entered a new. deeper. more profound level of hell with this heinous and pathetic act. For some -the troubled- there is never enough pain, scorn or opprobrium, though I think Misti’s found the mother-lode.

From My Journal:

Amir Hassan is dead. He was found dead with Misti, his mother, who had numerous non-life-threatening self-inflicted wounds. The word is that they will charge Misti in Amir’s death. I cannot begin to process the grand scale of this horror. I am so sad. He was a good person, and I wish that this hadn’t happened to him. I am overwhelmed by the finality of death. I am shocked by the capricious nature of murder. I am terrified by the possibility of filicide (killing your child). If anyone can do it, we all could do it. I won’t do it, but now that I know one who has the idea has gotten out of the genie’s bottle of possibility.

A small consolation is that there are lots of good and kind words floating around the ether (internet) about Amir, our lives in the courtyard, Misti’s pain, and the gaping maw that Amir’s death leaves in the world I knew before 7:43 pm yesterday. But there will never be Amir Hassan at my door, playing light saber Jedi with Mason, swinging a wiffle bat, studying at Chandler’s kindergarten; the world is forever incomplete.

 

Misti always was a self-mutilator. I remember talking to her about it. I reckon that I was probably less kind than I should have been, judgment being my character defect of choice. I tried to share my experience strength and hope, but you need a willing and hopeful person to “catch” this optimism. Misti was not that person. I know when I’m “yessed,” I think. I recall that she told me that the cutting was a way of punishing herself and reminding herself that she was alive. I know that there was a positive veneer that she put on the act of slicing her flesh. I think that I believed her. I was into the vainglorious masochism of riding my bike up Grizzly Peak repetitively at that time, so I loved pain too. It reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me that I have a choice, and that I can make anything happen, as long as I can feel: pain or pleasure.

My understanding of this whole thing is incomplete. While I can relate to the self-mutilation, self-abnegation, and self-denial, it is all based on my, well, myself. I have always had a good strong sense of my perverse sanity. While I have red-lined my life for months and years to the point where I was temporarily crazy, I was never at the point where a good night’s sleep, food, and a touch of sobriety wouldn’t clear things up. I always saw the importance of the self in society, you know, the id and the ego, the me. When I was “Thinking of committing some dreadful crime” I always had the safety net of a basically sound mind to fall back on.

I knew that Misti was trying to find that when she was cutting herself. I am sure that the sobering pain and scarlet blood of the slices on her arm always brought her back to what passed for the quotidian, the daily, the mundane. I could imagine the secret satisfaction that cutting yourself would bring when dealing with the commonplace people and problems of suburban single parenthood. (“Yes, I’m fighting for my child-support, talking with other parents, taking my kid to karate, alone again, but I can, after he’s asleep, open up this flesh that people take so seriously [Misti is a handsome woman, never forget that] and look at the inner workings and liquid mainspring that keeps it all going. I do not respect what can be seen without pain. I am deeper. I look inside.”)

My suspicion is that the pain stopped bringing her back. Simple cuts of her arm stopped bringing her back to the pedestrian world she was forced to inhabit with us. She became, I imagine, inured to the daily cuts and bruises of her little life. I am sure that she needed a bigger pain to bring her back. I know that as the little deaths of arm-wounds stopped working she began to worry that she would lose the little prince. The idea of not having your alpha and omega readily available is the most terrifying concept imaginable. Once in a while I let my dark mind go there and battle and fight the evil forces that I’d imagine could rob me of my family, but always my rational self returns, asserts supremacy and banishes the paper-maché mad fears that I build in the cave of my mind. I cannot imagine what it would be like if the “self” that I relied on stopped coming and I was left with the terrors I had created.

When Misti’s blood stopped calling her “self” back, the monsters of her mind, no doubt, became unstoppable. To rescue Amir from those who do not love him as well as she did, in the exact way proscribed by her mania, she had no choice but to send him beyond pain. To think of your child sitting in someone else’s house, at someone else’s table, on someone else’s couch, dancing to someone else’s music, while having poison poured in his ear about you, his mother is a fate to terrible to conceive of.

God I know just how the awful child-welfare-horror comes together. Stephen King writes the civil service test and holds meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order. I know just how it feels. I can imagine the very linoleum, fluorescent lighting and cubicle where custody would be lost. I can picture the cursor on the outdated software which will perform the coup de grâce. When people say that they cannot imagine how a person, a parent, a mother could do something horrible, I say that they don’t want to know. I can imagine. It is not that Misti did it, it is that all of us could do it.