water under the bridge.

Tonight was the annual cocktail party at my old house in Oakland. It's one of the least exclusive events I know, and you're encouraged to bring friends or co-workers--often it turns out they know someone else at the party anyway. Sometimes, it's a small Valley.

When Anna and I were dating, I once told her that if I got married, I could easily invite 200 people to the wedding without thinking very hard. She was skeptical, since she was still deciding whether I was a fountain of bullshit--I am, but not so it matters--but then she started meeting the horde, and saw that I wasn't showing off. It is actually a very big group, and while relationships vary as you'd expect, by and large we know each other well enough. The accumulated weight of shared experience.

Tonight there was my ex-girlfriend C, who was quite justifiably angry at me for a few years, until I got my head out of my ass and apologized, and eventually we became able to talk like old friends. Just last week, at a dinner party, I got to tell the remarkable story of our first date, which is one of my favorites. Of course everyone at the table has known me for years, and known her almost as long, and that just makes it all awesome.

There was also my ex from The Bad Relationship, who doesn't want to remember anything about our mutual past, but we did have quite a civil conversation about the labeling of the numerous cheeses. She reportedly acknowledged Anna's presence in the room, as well. Small steps toward a more peaceful world.

Many of us have dated, several have been married and divorced; sometimes the pairing up happens within the community, and sometimes the pairing up brings in a new person. (Or several, in my case: on the way home from the party when my late friend J and his wife H first met Anna, H commented how much she liked Anna and how well Anna and I seemed to fit together. J said, "Yeah...don't get too attached. We've seen this before, and they don't necessarily stick around." Anna was unable to convince H to tell this story at our wedding.)

(In my defense, this seems a little unfair, since my pre-Anna girlfriend was around for 3 years and still talks to my friends, if not, for mysterious reasons, to me. Nonetheless, a valid point.)

Most of the gang is a bit older than me, so they've had the pleasure of watching me grow from an obnoxious, if usually charming, twentysomething single guy, into a charming, if occasionally obnoxious, thirtysomething husband and father. These are my people. We've all grown up together, gone to Burning Man, eaten lovely food, helped each other, trusted each other, adjusted our expectations to what we're all capable of.

Across the community, biological families range from the fabulous like mine, to varying levels of dysfunction, all the way down to the horrific. No matter what we each started out with, now we have each other, too.

Our traditional dinner toast is "Here's to the family you choose."

impermanence, questions

Whoever writes the Sincerely Lost blog has been kicking ass again in that way that makes me wonder why I bother. (It was "Shannon," who went so far as to comment on a couple of my posts under that name, but the blog author is now identified as "Eli", but is obviously the same person. I'm confused, but whatever, it's great writing.)

But then I thought some more: about neighbors who move, friendships that naturally fade, boyfriends you grow out of, even marriages that end. And then I remembered impermanence, and the fact that all relationships are temporary- in the same way that people are temporary. It isn't the commitment that makes a relationship permanent, there isn't anything that makes a relationship permanent, it could end (or begin) at any second.

I've had so many relationships disappear or change, from an early age, that I can't say as I ever much thought of them as permanent. I once spent three years in a very healthy, affectionate dating relationship that worked well for us both, but we acknowledged from the beginning was not going to be a permanent thing: we are both marvelous human beings, but we'd both experienced that certain spark that we knew was missing between us, and we knew we wanted it eventually. We did what Shannon describes:

It's a scary proposition to make and I think it's going to require really being present when I'm with the person and then just letting that be all it is.

It was a very pure relationship, in a way, because we were in it only for that transient time, however long it was. It was explicit that (a) we were seeing each other for only as long as it worked for both of us, and (b) that time would end in the kind-of-forseeable future. Whatever it lacked that we wanted, it also lacked complacency, and we did a pretty good job of paying attention to and appreciating everything we did together. It would end when it ended, and we were there to enjoy each other's company right then, without planning for the future, and knowing that while we'd probably get some warning that the relationship had stopped working for us (and we did, eventually), it could end more or less any time.

Even marriages dissolve, as I've seen with roughly 50% of my friends who have married. Not long ago, J.D. and Hope's marriage ended, with his death.

This brings up a larger point for me, though, which is the hinky stuff about impermanence and our response to it.

Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi what the essence of Buddhism was, and he said, "Everything changes." Buddhist teaching is so multi-faceted that it sometimes feels like many concepts could serve as the "essence," but impermanence might be the best, because it's the beginning of the following chain (Pali terms included, if you want to read more about it):

1. Everything is impermanent (anicca). Anything that seems permanent, like our family, society, and especially our sense of self, is actually transient and subject to change.
2. Even though everything is impermanent, we insist on the truth of our perception that it's permanent, thus creating anguish/angst/suffering (dukkha).
3. Because everything is impermanent, everything is devoid of an independent essence (anatman), because what would happen to that essence as the thing changes?

To illustrate that last point, Buddha used a chariot, but since most of us don't recognize the parts of a chariot, we often use a ball-point pen:

• If I take the cap off, okay, it's still a pen, right?
• If I unscrew the top part and leave the bottom, is that still a pen?
• If I take out the ink cartridge, is that still a pen? Most of us would call it a "cartridge" or "refill," but why isn't it a pen? I can write with it just like I do a pen. But we don't call it a pen. Did something about its essence change?

Buddhist practice is really the process of asking these kinds of questions, but about our experience: our sense of self and our actions and reactions to events and feelings.

• What am I experiencing right now?
• What other times have I felt this way?
• Am I responding to what's happening right now, or am I reacting from my emotional history?

What arises in response to those questions is...often not what we expect.

dead bodies are weird

It's been a few days since J.D. died, days packed with J.D.-related events, and I'm still kind of sick and I'm ready to be done with all the mournful socializing. Friday night a bunch of us got together to eat some food and hang together; yesterday a group of mostly the same people went to his house to help out his wife by carrying out his last wishes that his friends take away most of his stuff. He had a pretty solid collection of books, and an absolutely stunning collection of CDs, but since he mostly gathered CDs so he could use them in DJ sets, the collection is incomprehensible to most of us: vast stretches of obscure and usually wonderful electronic music. Nonetheless, we did the best we could, and many of the DJ pals found some exciting stuff in there. I got an Iron & Wine CD (he's even better than I thought), some Apocalyptica, a whole bunch of Bob Dylan, and I think every one of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. Inexplicably, I also took Sounds of North American Frogs, just because.

I mentioned before that I helped the hospice nurse move the body from the big fluffy chair where J.D. spent most of the past several months, onto the hospital bed where the nurse could do some cleanup and put a shirt on the body so we could have some last moments if we wanted, before the crematory guys came. There was a certain unreality to the whole experience: an hour before, I'd stood in the doorway for a few minutes, hands in my pockets, fascinated by J.D.'s labored breathing as he slept on morphine, watching his clock tick down. That wasn't the J.D. I knew, and yet it was: just a few weeks earlier he had bravely and generously had some folks over to watch movies for my bachelor party. He was vomiting and hiccuping the whole time, and everyone just took it in stride, made sure he had a clean pan to vomit into, and enjoyed each other's company (though not, alas, the movie).

This is the very blunt list of things I noticed about seeing and moving a dead body. I'm not likely to ever forget, but I feel compelled to share.

• I picked him up and thought, "Wow, he's so lifeless." Which is ridiculous thing to think, because he was dead. But, we have the "lifeless" as an everyday word, and never used for genuinely dead things: it's stuff like artistic performances, or bad food.
• The nurse thought I might be able to move J.D.'s torso: not a chance. After months of wasting away he still weighed a good 180 pounds. Also, "deadweight" has new meaning.
• A dead person's head will loll around and backwards in a way that a live person would never tolerate, even when unconscious (I think because it would prevent breathing).
• The jaw slacks in a certain unmistakably not-alive way.
• Hands are ice-cold, but the head is still warm, as the brain is the last thing the body tries to protect as it shuts down.
  
• That thing on TV where they close someone's eyes? I tried it, and it turns out that's why various cultures put coins on the eyes, which are otherwise determined to stay half-open. There's all kinds of things to say about why that feels creepy.

When I've talked to friends and relatives with hospice experience, they all independently say that no matter how ready you are, death is always shocking. The alive-to-dead transition is a sudden between-the-eyes direct education in how fragile and transient we are.

You often hear someone want to remember a person in a certain way: in their full alive-ness, instead of wasted and dying. And we ourselves always want to choose how we are seen and remembered. My last memory of J.D. is of moving his dead body, but it doesn't bother me. It's just part of the cycle of my J.D. memories. I wanted to be there for the end, partly out of curiosity (like most of us, I've been lucky enough to never see someone die), and partly because I felt it was something important that I could do, and I was right. It is something I can do, and it was a great privilege to be able to do it.

I've always wondered how it would go when it came time for one of us to die, and I have to say that as a community we've done magnificently, in taking care of J.D. and his wife, and in grieving freely and openly together. It's a chance for us to really see each other, and to forget about whatever stories we may habitually tell ourselves about how we see each other or what we can tell each other. We're free to spontaneously start crying, or start giving out hugs. There's a great sense of openness, of everyone creating an accepting space for everyone else.

Given his dedication to community, I can only imagine J.D. would have been overjoyed to see it.

bedtime conversation

"Time for a snuggle?"

"I guess. Do we have to?"

"No... You can always lie there by yourself and listen to me cry."

This is how you know you found the right girl.

*heart*

mawwiage.

As of Saturday night, Anna and I are engaged. We're aiming for October.

I decided sometime last year. I bought the ring in December, and it seemed like it was finally about time for us both, so I brought it with us to San Francisco last night, and asked her in the middle of the freezing cold dark windy rainstorm under the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts. Specifically, behind one of the columns, on account of the freezing cold wind.

It's an almond-wood ring because she doesn't really like metal rings, and it says "Say Yes" on the inside, which she did, and I hope she says yes every day, for a long time.

he's got a point

J is an observant, affectionate kid. Anna and I were hugging and she was petting my head, covered with short, fuzzy, freshly-buzzed hair. J appeared.

"Mama, it's time to read that book."

"Just as soon as I'm done snuggling Chris."

"It's gonna take forever for you to be done snuggling Chris!"

Well, fair enough.