389 the power of awesome

Guys, I want to talk about something totally out there. A few things. 

A couple weeks ago, I filled out our taxes, the kind of job that leaves you wanting to do yardwork and clean up storage spaces, for fun.

It put me into a pretty dark mood. Somewhere in there, I had a call with my mom that lightened things up a bit. Then, a day or two after I finished, I got this other feeling.

It's something I've been working on for a while. Years ago, I used a simple mantra, "Worry is wasted energy" to get me to stop thinking about stuff I had no control over, or fantasizing about bad outcomes to situations.

Last year, when I found myself in a particularly foul mood, I started a new mantra. As I walked down the street past San Francisco's usual collection of human debris blown west into our city like the tumbleweeds of America, I just felt empathy. Solidarity. Brotherhood. And my mantra was to smile, and send out "Rays of light, rays of light."

And it worked. I felt much better. 

Then, a few days ago, wielding my mom's new mantra, "Thank you for the miracle happening in our lives," and fresh off the low of tax prep, I felt this new feeling, one I've felt so rarely that I can pinpoint the last time I felt it, or something close to it.

That was back in January of 2017 or 18, the day my book Winter Sailor got featured on the Sailing Anarchy website and actually sold a bunch of copies. It was this feeling of lightness and a sense that everything was working out. Back then, I chaulked it up to hope and selling a few books.

But here I was, having, uh, just finished this kind of annoying task, and feeling... bulletproof? It felt great, but really? Why?

Then flash forward a couple weeks. The news has hit that our landlord passed away. It's a bummer. It likely means our lives are going to get jostled around a bit. Or a lot. And here I am, thanking her for the miracle in our lives, and feeling that feeling. It's all going to be alright. 

Friday, I had a dentist appointment. A few weeks ago a filling, put in by a previous student a couple years earlier, fell out. So I was able to text my new student, who set up the required Covid test and scheduled me to come in. Tell me another dentist situation where one text could fix your mouth? Of course, it's a learning situation, so there are some slow points as well.

Then I roll in for the appointment, and my student doctor has a helper, and they see the missing filling, and decide that I'm going to get two fillings and a cleaning, all at once. So I'm stuck in that chair for three hours of drill baby drill.

And you know what happened? It was painful and all of that, but I couldn't stop smiling. 

Guys, I'm beginning to wonder if this feeling, this feeling of pure contentment, this feeling that everything is indeed going to be ok, great even, I'm beginning to wonder if I can just walk around feeling that way ALL THE TIME.

It might be a lot to ask. Or it might just be thanking the miracle that is happening in our lives.

(Insert awkwardly placed sailing screencrap, just because.)

Ok, that said, I'm going to go a bit further out there. Let's talk about ghosts and spirits.

I've lived in four apartments since moving to San Francisco. The first, I don't know it's backstory. It had a cockroach issue, but in hindsight, was a pretty sweet apartment.

The second, we moved out of, breaking the lease. It had a bigger cockroach problem, and let me tell you, when it comes to cockroaches, size matters.

After we moved out, we learned that there had been a murder upstairs, and we were living under the body for a few weeks.

My next apartment, I eventually learned that the previous owner had died in the garage and his body also went undiscovered for some time. He'd been a junky, and apparently all the people crashing with him just left, leaving his body.

When I learned all this, and before I moved out, I built a shrine, and turned the garage into an art gallery, and generally attempted to communicate with this spirit and lift him up. I'm not sure how it worked, but I moved in with Deb next and it's been great.

We've been in this building now for sixteen years. For a while, our landlord was living in the apartment next door. She was a funny neighbor, very sweet to us and especially the animals, and a bit haunted herself. For reasons I could never explain, she seemed increasingly unhappy. She worked at home, and rarely moved out of her command position on her couch by a back window, in her black pajamas.

One night, she borrowed a bottle of wine. The next day, she decamped for her mother's couch, and never returned. Looking in the back window of her apartment ten or so years later, and it's exactly the same. The bottle of wine is in the garbage, the cork is on the table.

Eventually, the other renters moved on, and our landlord kept saying she was going to rehab the empty apartments and rent them out, but she never did. 

In the meantime, I moved the spot where I work. There's a studio in the basement our landlord let me use, and I moved the desk from one window to another, this one two stories directly beneath her old couch command position.

Then I locked into novel writing. I pumped out seven in three or four years. After a day of writing, I'd have pain in my back and arms. After three years, I got fat, and the pain became unbearable. Then I got injured, overstraining my unused body, and would frequently just lay down instead of trying to write, in that same spot. 

It's a lovely spot, with a nice view and bright, but only about an hour of direct sunshine per day, so good for working on screens. But if you catch the drift of this story, I'm beginning to wonder if it's haunted. If there's a strong spirit in this house that wants someone to stay right there and work. 

(Did I mention that the middle-floor tenant had his desk there for a while, when he was very single and a bit out of shape, then when he got together with his current wife, she made him move his desk? And then eventually, move? Where he seems to be thriving?)

So yesterday, I'm floating between lamenting the loss of our landlord, and thinking about this spirit. The previous tenants were in our apartment for seventeen years, and i kind of remember that the tenant before them was here for seventeen years. That's next year for us. And all of this is floating through my head, and suddenly I think "Nina died for our freedom."

That's a big leap to make, and we have a lot of finding out what will happen between here and there, but that's the ray of light I picked up on. It could be the gift. It's definitely part of the miracle happening in our lives.

So, we'll see what happens. In the meantime, yeah, I'm going to keep smiling.