Cashews

There's a reason why Trader Joe's sells cashews by the pound, in fact several reasons.  None of which matter, actually, because reasons, and in fact reasoning, are severely skewed these days.  These March days, marching toward April, the second day of which I found myself holding the unfeeling hand of my glassy-eyed wife, while a hospice nurse counted out the breaths.  Finis.  And the start of everything relating to now.

"You're not hearing me," I recently told a friend.  We were arguing about something, and the something was emotional, and the heat was rising.  Not being heard, a perennial California psychobabble complaint, does fall harshly on the ears.  We don't need to express ourselves this way, it seems to me, but the energy to express anything appears to have drained.  All I'm left with is a bag of cashews.  Jumbo cashews, which I had rolled myself into the kitchen to nibble during a pre-blog break in the psychic action.  Except that the intermission extended into the second, even the third, acts.  And damned if half a pound of cashews wasn't more or less demolished by the time the keyboard reclaimed me.  "The Famine Within," the title of a famous Canadian documentary.

So here I am, post-cashews and post-Marlou, and angry and obsessed, not sleeping terribly well, and wanting to be heard.  The latter is a simple request that someone pay attention.  Is someone paying attention to me?  Most definitely.  But grief is a strange branch of psycho-dementia, and one needs a lot from people, but a lot of what...well, that is difficult to say.  Even impossible.  Unless there is a bag of cashews handy.

Was it six months ago that a friendly helper from Jewish Family Services put a temporary stop to part of the problem?  Yes, or maybe even seven or eight months ago.  A stop to The New Yorker.  The Nation put on hold.  Same for the New York Times.  Problem is, all of these publications wanted a time limit.  You can hold the mustard on a sandwich, say, but you can't hold the New York Review of Books without some sort of context.  Which is the hard part.  One by one, these publications have commenced mailing themselves to me.  And one by one I toss them on the coffee table, age them into the recycling bin, and generally do my bit for deforestation.  Which is because the world and its travails fatigue and annoy me and, in the last analysis, fail to hold my interest.

Except for condors.  There are two of Gymnogyps Californianus nesting in the Pinnacles area south of Hollister.  And I read the San Francisco Chronicle's account with genuine interest.  Big dead-meat-eating vultures, they are, the reporter reminded everyone.  No romance, less glamour, just the fact of their rarity, their 10-foot wing spans and slowness to procreate.  A sense that the world may be slipping away, but the condors aren't.  That I have been heard by condors.  And I can almost hear them myself, for reportedly the wind through their massive feathers makes a sound audible to those below.  Naturally, Americans can't resist training their guns on a passing condor.  I mean, there they are, big and slow and towing a banner that says "Pleistocene & Proud," so let's shoot the fuckers.  The two of the Pinnacles population had recent shotgun wounds.

In short, condors and I have much in common.  Being shot.  Dependent on a health plan.  Being abandoned, left behind in the species race.  Much like Ishi, the last red Indian leading an aboriginal life in North America.  Marlou, of course, did not mean to leave me behind, but a year later it does feel that way.  At least I'm feeling something.  It's been a year.  A year of numbness and dumbness.  And now it's time for something else.