Echo

And so there’s a change, in your emotions.
And all these memories come rushing
like feral waves to your mind.
Of the curl of your bodies,
like two perfect circles entwined.
And you feel hopeless and homeless
and lost in the haze of the wine.

–airborne toxic event

I’ve been planning to go to Amber and Jason’s wedding, but when I’m stressed I procrastinate on making firm plans so I didn’t book my ticket until two nights before I was supposed to leave. Got reamed on the ticket, couldn’t find a place to live so B and Amber promised to find me a bed or couch in B’s cabin (they’d rented 3 gorgeous vacation homes in the valley at Gold Beach. Amber said if I get him drunk enough, he would probably end up sleeping on the floor and I could take his bed. That usually is what happens.

Big long weekend, but I book a Saturday flight to give me time to distance myself from work. The flight gets delayed hours, and I get lost in the middle of the Oregon forest as my GPS goes Mercury-Retrograde wonkie and leads me into the middle of nowhere. Incidentally, this vendor that I’d just met last week covering an account for another salesperson was on the flight with his daughter. It was a tiny 40 person plane with propellers flying to the middle of nowhere California, and in walks this guy and it’s weird because it’s out of place and time. And I remember him quite distinctly because after our buyer introduced us and we finished a meeting, she asked me if I thought he was good-looking even though he was older (in his 40’s, I believe, but his hair’s all gray). I told her I bet he liked his women younger, and probably has a vivid imagination (ie dirty mind). And now he was on this plane with his ethereal, European-looking 9 year-old daughter, for a split second, I thought this happened because on a cosmic level, this is what happens when you make conjectures about people in that way. He says he’s visiting his parents who have a house just over the Oregon border, and I tell him I’m on my way to a wedding. He was really helpful, advising me to get my rental car first because the luggage would take time. He was right–they took another half hour to unload our bags.

I changed from shirts and jeans into a dress while navigating the mountain roads. For a stretch there, I was passing trucks in my bra. But I got changed up by the time I found the place, after making four more wrong turns (Later, everyone would admit having gotten lost multiple times trying to find the place). I hadn’t gone to the bathroom since before my flight, and now 5 hours later, really had to pee, but when I went into the bathroom of the house that was hosting the cocktail reception, the bulb was burned out. Unbelievable. Had to get ready in a dark bathroom with the door cracked.

B’s letting his hair grow out. I’m suspicious. He’s rocking the “older gentleman with money” look. What’s he got going on in LA? It’s like old times. He’s the closest thing I ever had to marriage. Someone asks how I know everyone and I say I lived with B in LA. Oh, you’re the roommate, she exclaims. We were almost common law, I say, and B interrupts, we still are! I look at him and ask, what do you mean?

We are according to the state of California when we file our joint taxes, he said in that dry tone where I can never tell if he’s serious or kidding.

I glare at him, kinda want to laugh, but kind of afraid he’s serious.

Amber and Jason look beautiful and she tells me she really thought I would have appreciated the poetry and spirituality of the ceremony. They had asked me to write something for it, but I hadn’t been able to find a place to write something worthy of their wedding. They showed me the poem they did choose, The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, and it’s the right choice. The moment must have been beautiful:

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithlessand therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

The wedding was supposed to be out on a plateau overlooking the forest, but a gale blew in out of nowhere. We were watching all trees in the valley sway with the force of this wind and I said, this is a storm caused by the uniting of the forces that Jason and Amber. Their passion. This guy Keith got a faceful of dust.

I think I just got some of that passion in my eye, he said.

They moved the dinner back into the master house where we’d had the cocktail reception, and this felt like the right thing, because a huge house party is in line with Amber and Jason’s personalities. We brought in every chair we could and ate and drank family style. There was a grand piano and I went through the crowd, trying to find a girl who was willing to sing while laying on top of a piano Fabulous Baker Boys style, and when I found a girl who agreed, I couldn’t find anyone who could play piano. It worked out even better though, because I’d pumped the girl up so much about doing a performance that Amber and Jason would remember for the rest of their lives, at the after party, she went into a rendition of Naughty-By-Nature’s OPP. It was like a scene from 8 Mile, watching Eminem rapping in a basement. She was phenomenal.

I’d been asked to bring weed but I was really lacksadaisical about it figuring it wouldn’t be hard to find up there. Sure enough, after watching the bartenders for a while, I walked up to the dark hair Italian one. Where can I get weed?

You’re asking the right person, he said. I have a medical card and I grow.

He had two prerolled’s on him so we were all set. You guys are coming to the after party, I said, and they carried the coolers of beer for us down to the party house.

I told Amber, mission accomplished. I asked her if she wanted to smoke it inside or outside. INSIDE! she said, and we lit up right on the dance floor. It was an amazing, happy, joyous party. There was singing, dancing, inappropriate pictures. There was a human pyramid. And let me tell you, being one of the anchors on a concrete floor is hard on the knees. Now I get all those Catholic jokes.

The Italian bartender thought I was the coolest person ever. B already gave me an evil eye warning–do not hook up with the help. This other guy who reminded me of Maryland Brian didn’t make eye contact with me the whole night, yet when he was leaving he caught me and said, “I never said this to a woman before…well, outside my wife, of course…but that is a really nice dress. I mean, you’re wearing the hell out of that dress.” That cracked me up. Red is definitely my color. Later, the gay guys got into the mix of things. I felt someone full on grab and caress my ass. I whipped around ready to punch someone, saw it was the other gay Brian (whom I’d just met that day), and instantly chilled, saying, “Oh, it’s you. You’re okay.” Like he had every privilege to touch me, and I really didn’t care. I mentioned it to Amber and she said, “I was trying so  hard to get you and Brian  to drive up from San Francisco together. I figured something would happen.”

I thought about it. It was true. I’d had the option of hitching an 8-hour car ride to the wedding with this Brian, but I’d balked at the idea of spending 8 hours trapped with a stranger. B had sent me a message saying, it’s cool–brian’s one of us gays. you guys will totally get along. But I preferred to fly. Now I wonder what may have happened…some adventure into the militia weed-growing operations of Humboldt County? An alien abduction? Would we show up as our animal spirits? Would we show up married after a shotgun wedding with Elvis bearing witness? Pair my imagination and lack of boundaries with the fearless balls of an openly gay man, and anything could happen. Perhaps it was better that our forces didn’t combine. But we immediately took an inappropriate picture. I was definitely cupping his mansack and he was doing something to me I didn’t quite understand. I think we were both snarling. Enjoy the wedding photos, families!

This other guy, who’d come with his boyfriend (and was my partner in the sausage stunt) came up to me and said he just wanted to tell me that I have incredible energy. That I must be a very unique and dynamic person. Later, he and his boyfriend would both try to coax me into the hot tub when everyone else was stumbling into bed. The bubbling water was changing in the same pattern and hues as my headboard in Amsterdam and all I was thinking was how much trouble that got me into. I think that whether they are consciously thinking it or not, there are times when it’s not about orientation or gender or what. With enough magnetic energy, objects want to be sucked into one another. I thought about how it happens with straight men, straight women, gay women, gay men. They’ve all tried to kiss me or sleep with me. There’s this spark, and they want to touch it, feel it, be deep in it. They want to know how it tastes. And in that opening, I could give in. I could let them inside me. Because somehow, I’m already inside them.

Ideas sometimes live richer lives as ideas than as realities. And as much as I would love a story of how I seduced two gay men into the erotic experience of a lifetime in a outdoor hot tub under a dazzling star-filled sky, my need for discretion overwhelmed. Plus, they weren’t that hot. So I shared a bed with B, who woke me up thinking I was in the caverns of a ship deep in space with the most insane snoring I’ve ever heard. He’s definitely got sleep apnea.

We woke up the next day, and had to help do the dishes from the wedding party that needed to be returned to the rental place in Portland. The instructions were that they needed to be rinsed but not washed in order to get their deposit back, so we laid them all out on the lawn and hosed them. Parker, Amber’s dog, probably thought he was in heaven. Or amidst a dream come true, with over 500 plates laid out on the lawn, he went around licking all of them. There was a barbeque that night (I got to make the playlist!), Texas-style, which is where I encountered the previously-posted sausage that blew my mind. The father of the groom followed me around a lot, and he was always taking pictures. Considering I don’t really like to have pictures taken, it was kind of uncomfortable, but it was kind of cute the way he had a crush on me. So did his 5 year-old grandson, Andrew, who followed me around and gave me a whistle. He was a sweetie. If only I were 25 years younger.

We learned a new game that tt’s boyfriend Dave invented–FrisBeerSki. It involves two ski poles with the handles taped up to provide a flat surface. They’re each planted about 30 meters from each other, and an empty beer bottle is placed on that flat surface of the handle. Each team is composed of 2 players, who each have to hold a full beer in one hand. The teams take turn tossing a frisbee at the ski pole, trying to knock off the beer. If the frisbee hits the pole and the beer drops, the receiving team has to attempt to catch both the frisbee and the beer using their one hand available. The frisbee and beer are each worth 1 point. If you can make someone on the other team drop a beer, it’s worth 8. Game is to 24, switch sides at 12. Hella fun.

Had a deep conversation with one of the gay guys who talked about how weed saved his life. I told him that I felt the same way. He talked about how he was so torn up because he grew up Christian, and he was always told that people like him didn’t exist, and they were only sinners who were against God. And if that was the case, where did he fit in? I told him how I’ve always had an affinity for gay men because of their courage–once they have come out and decided that they themselves accept themselves for who they are and they were going to be themselves no matter what, there was nothing else to be afraid of. And that was something I could relate to. He was telling me about how in the last 2 years, he’d noticed cycles more, paid more attention to the moon and numbers. I was surprised. I told him that it has been the same with me. I’ve never been so aware and influenced by the rhythms of the moon and numbers as I have in the last two years. Since 2008. Cool dude.

Next day, I was on the same fight as B and his friend Sarah. The vendor from my flight in was on the same flight with his daughter again.

I’ve got another wedding this weekend. Sareet and Max. They want me to read a poem they selected–1st person narrative of what she likes about her partner. I told her I would read whatever she wants, but as long as she knows it’s not some kind of last ditch effort to get her husband. I like weddings, their energy, their hope and optimism.

I was talking with Winston yesterday. I asked him how long he’s been married and he said 3 years. He said he was previously married for like half a month. He’d been dating a woman in China for a long time, then she was going to the US for a job and didn’t want to be alone so she wanted to get married. So they did and a few weeks later, she went to the US. Then he followed her and when he got there, she told him she wanted a divorce. So that was it. His current wife he met through his sister in law and whereas his first wife was a career woman, his current wife only wants to be a housewife and is very specific on how the house needs to be clean, where each glass or bowl goes exactly. “It’s not going very well,” he said. It made me wonder, then why marry her in the first place?