September 1997

Night of a thousand dreams.
I am observing hundreds of snakes in a glass tank when I notice the latch has been left open and the snakes have gotten out. Within seconds there are snakes everywhere. They have even gotten into birdcages and swallow the birds whole. Two larger snakes devour another from both ends and I know when they meet in the center one will swallow the other! Snakes. Snakes eating snakes eating snakes…
Night of a thousand dreams.
Rats swim in an aquarium as though they are fish. They seem exhausted as they paddle their little feet, gasping for air, sinking. I am horrified and want to save them, but it is not my place…
Night of a thousand dreams.
He is half man, half cobra. He lives in a glass house. He walks upright but possesses a cobra's fangs, a cobra's mesmerizing fierce eyes. He charges at me, hissing! His face fans out forebodingly. I am terrified…
Night of a thousand dreams.
I enter a grand hall dressed for dinner. I pass a great doorway inside of which I catch a glimpse of Barbra Streisand mingling with other celebrities. But just as I pause at the door it is slammed shut to whispers that Madonna is to arrive shortly. I am seated in an adjoining room, severed, wistful, longing to be with the famous…
A few nights in a row I open my eyes from sleep to see a great web encompassing me. I am in a cocoon, fermenting, developing, maturing to one day emerge lovely and winged to soar, to live, to write!
The days fly by like hurried lovers whose kisses leave painful imprints. And when I'm denied proper hours to recount the events I am forced to dream awfully, and to remember the dreams.
Over lunch Jackie asks, "Are you happy with your life here?"
I am touched that she would pause and ask. The aroma of Basmati rice, sautéed eggplant and tomatoes from the garden accent the tenderness.
I look down and answer, 'Yes, I am… Thank you for asking.'
After lunch Mom-Suzie, Jackie, and I drink Turkish coffee, which Jackie has fixed. We talk merrily about people, things, while our fortunes dry in the cups we have turned. Mom-Suzie playfully tells my fortune that is filled with opportunity, financial gain, and happiness. Of course, I realize that fortunes read by one's own grandmother are bound to be portentously doctored and biased.
I look over the notes I have made on the inside cover of a book while riding to and from school, home, and work on the bus; little things I want captured in essence rather than lost in reality.
From the grill at the food court I watch the crew of South-American women vigilantly maintain the endless tables. The women are always smiling because they cannot speak English. We occasionally exchange glances, nods, smiles, and brief greetings in Spanish. They return trays to us, sweep the floor that is gray, thoroughly wipe tables and chairs, disappearing in and out of view, reappearing to maintain the cycle of our day. I find reassurance in their presence.
Alongside these women works a lone man- he is white, odd, unattractive, and looks lonely. His eyes, though, are a lovely deep blue-green color, and replace all other unsightly qualities with their sheer splendor. Over a short period, with the help of my imagination, this man has somewhat revealed himself to me through certain gestures and characteristics. I construct that he once had basketball dreams! I've glimpsed him tossing a dirtied rag into the air and catching it behind him, and successfully throwing trash into the garbage from a considerable distance.
I like these people. I like them not because I feel sorry for them and not because I think they may have hidden talents, but for their very humanness, which to me requires great courage and humility. I love them unrealistically from my counter.
Leaving the mall in the evening I notice just how gorgeous and golden the hills are in the last of the day's light and sun. In Marin one has occasion to see birds of prey circling these hills. Recently I happened upon a deer nursing her two offspring, her underside swollen with life, her calves famished. Encountering nature so intimately makes one feel equally magnificent, alive, and breathtakingly natural.
It is here that I am granted the cue to accept that my illusions and dreams of fame have not been a hindrance only, a weakness, or a shaming memory, but as well my protection from realities I could not have then acknowledged and embraced. My fantasies protected me when I was young in ways my parents could not. My dreams of fame were just another medium with which I was able to express my anguish, my smallness, and my helplessness, my secrets. I went to dreams when I could not go to my own parents with my problems. When I succeed in hitting a difficult note in my writing I know that it has all been worthwhile. When my writing voice quivers with emotion I know it has not been in vain, the many hopeful breaths I have drawn in the privacy of my fantasies. Writing is my ablution.
The meter has expired. Sleep beckons. Night demands my attention.

Art, charm, intelligence, and imagination are not shields, they are veils. They cannot protect me from the realities of life. I resolve not to let bitterness and exhaustion deter me. When Janet tells me at the grill that one of the women who attends the tables works sixteen hours a day to support her husband and children I am overcome with a sense of exhaustion. I am convinced that I will not survive this life, that it is too unforgiving, too real.
No matter how hard I am on those around me, no matter how high my expectations, and how diligent my search for flaws, I am intent on seeing the good in people and loving my family. Yes, I am let down by their ignorance, their most subtle shortcomings, but I will love, love, love from the deepest springs inside of me.
It is the touch of another's voice that sustains me, and genuine, heartfelt, aching laughter. Is anything else in this ephemeral universe as certain as laughter?

I just hung up with Vivian in Berkeley who called in desperation, her voice screeching with sorrow. I literally cringed. But I listened from a distance I could not for the life of me overcome. I am too consumed by change.
And change, change, change.
I am moving beyond the destruction of romance and debauchery.
I trust myself.
While waiting for his meal a black gentleman tells me he converted to Islam only years before and that he teaches at a Muslim school in Oakland. I find it difficult to understand what it is he is saying exactly as he rambles, hops, and skips without orderliness from history to geography to religion. Suddenly I realize that he assumes I too am Muslim because I have told him I was born in Iran. I have a hard time following his words as they sputter excitedly out of his mouth, but I thoroughly enjoy the shifting expressions on his face. Myriad curls swing from black to silver atop his round head. His light eyes move rapidly, rarely meeting mine. Many gestures accompany his guffaws. It is all very entrancing as I find myself leaning lazily into the counter, drinking from the spectacle.
When he leaves I am exhausted but relieved.
It is now midnight and I have to be ultra-selective, write fast, because there is never ample time anymore to convey the many impressions and nuances. Tonight I feel as I did so often as a teenager who closed this diary with a certain painful disappointment, a rage, and a keen sense of failure because he had not been able to fully express what he felt in his hollow heart, and the echoes therein. Again I want to curse, I want to blame, to shout, to tear my hair out! I want to sleep but I want to write. I want to scratch at the door of the page and be let in, let out. Instead, I take a deep breath, forgive myself, and sacrifice these remaining thoughts, let them fly out into the darkness so that I may catch up with them in another state, a café called Sleep…

Sunday brooding, finding inner rage rather than solace on this precious day off from school and work. Mother's at the opposite end of the table doing her Persian crossword puzzles. We are at Casa De Maria. I am angry that I must spend this day with her out of sheer obligation, not pleasure, not even instinct. When I feel this way I am only able to see others' flaws, as well as my own, and I grow indignant like a clairvoyant who sees his powers as a curse, not a privilege. I want art, healing, conversation, or just inactivity.
Outwardly the days seem ordinary, but inside I am experimenting with acrylic, musical notes, clay, indescribable sensations, dualities, multiplicities. I experience my new life as the child, the toddler, the teenager, and the old man. We are all present and alive, and when we have been successful in becoming intermittently integrated we traverse the moments in tandem, through fire, laughter, evening, and the page. But when one of us refuses to move into a Siamese direction I suffer, I falter, I deliberate for too long over the simplest matters, agonize over things that are supposed to be second-nature by now- like breathing, living, making decisions, patience, love. I ask my selves, 'Why are things that are so easy for others oftentimes difficult for us?'
We are tenants of a single cell dreaming of disparate things.
Only when I am preoccupied with the moment am I able to calmly receive the very whispers and essence of life, at least my own.
Mother has just verbally misinterpreted Jackie's propensity for procrastination as a kind of cunningness, a personal and circuitous attack. I emphatically disagree, attempting to draw my mother away from this harsh flame she has entered. She is so suspicious, mistrusting, impervious. There is a quiet malaise in the family that rings in my ears, burns silently in my temples. Now I'm in the heart and heat of it. Will I succeed in comforting its other occupants, and if not, at least walk away myself unscathed?
I dream that I am in a crowded classroom. Our instructor asks us to define "Fatalism". Instantly I think of Anais Nin. In another dream I am with her husband Hugh Guiler, and love him tremendously.
One afternoon I board the bus, choose a seat, and ride looking out the window with a child's delight for travel, vehicles, and new places. For that singular moment in time, ephemeral in duration but not impotent in value, I come to love the world hopelessly.
Another afternoon at the grill we are visited by one of George's friends, a relative of sorts, Nardin. At first I do not recognize him, but soon come to remember him as a rather wide Assyrian man I knew in my childhood here in Northern California. He approaches the counter with gusto, smiling widely, speaking loudly.
"You've become a man," he says heartily and playfully punches me in the chest.
It takes a moment to catch my breath, all the while smiling, feigning a semblance of composure, but offended really by this kind of machismo interchange I find uncouth. But his eyes are so brilliant and smiling, so wet like puddles after rain that I have to forgive his overbearing behavior.
We chat while I work the grill, Nardin talking all the while with zeal, so sumptuously about life, women, travel, and spirituality. I am nearly dizzy, even giddy. I find it difficult to believe that this is the same reserved Assyrian man I had known, as well as any child could, some ten years ago! More strangely, it is difficult to comprehend his now failed marriage to a rather mousy and stern little Assyrian woman.
George would tell me later that Nardin and his ex-wife were pressured into marriage by relatives- a typical story- and that Nardin's aunt had enticed him with promises of great wealth and inheritance through the young bride. Do Assyrians ever marry for love?
Nardin eyes teenage American girls as they pass and looks at me devilishly, wide-eyed, everything but salivating. I in turn watch him with fascination, even disgust. And yet, am impressed by his flagrant and contagious enthusiasm for life, sex, and freedom.
"I'm so glad I got divorced," he says once the girls have come to pass.
With an air of false superiority, sounding petty at best, George would later say that Nardin likes sex too much for a man in his forties.
Indeed, I find Nardin to be overwhelming, over-frivolous, sexist, mischievous, and flighty, operating on moxie alone, and like him for it! Finding my own severity and seriousness shrinking in contrast to the festivities in his face, his virile posture, his emphatic steps. At one point I go into the tiny kitchen in the back of the grill and much to my surprise find Nardin washing pots and pans alongside George, who looks sheepish in contrast, and frail.
Nardin invites me to join him at his camper on the northern coast, and for a moment I imagine us by the ocean, in the camper, Nardin forcing himself upon me in a drunken state while I pretend to struggle against his weight, his verve, surrendering ultimately to his lustful appetite for life. In the morning we would surely drive back to Marin in silence, in shame. But I would be talkative, defiant against the remorse, animated. This would of course baffle him, inspire him and through the wonder and the confusion we would become, secretly, lovers.
When I sit to lunch Nardin joins me and here I see a different side, a quieter man, a softer expression. I see a man who has found himself, forfeited from Christianity and drawn to Buddhism, therapy. I hear liberation in his voice as he tells me his thoughts on the Assyrian community from which he has distanced himself because it is oppressive, conditional, and apt to punish those who choose to live according to their own desires, needs, and calling.
"When in doubt, love," Nardin advises, adding that his love for life and for his human brothers and sisters has undoubtedly saved him from his own anger and violence, his personal anguish.
George discloses that oftentimes Nardin has sex with up to three women in a single day, and although this bit of second-hand news may impress me, I know that for Nardin sex is a form of self-expression and decompression.
Such polarities can exist within all of us; I've learned that we as people are not one thing or another, but capable of containing many values and peaceful contradictions.
One morning, while Janet is chopping lettuce in the cramped kitchen, she speaks without looking at me, and says, "Emil, I love you like a brother. You know that?" I am pleased and immensely moved.
My mother surveys me from across the table as I write. She wears a weary expression of love and loss and warns me not to become too dependent on Jackie and Mom-Suzie, that as soon as I have come to trust anyone they will fail me miserably.
She says wistfully, "If I could escape here I would. I would leave in an instant…"
I don't know how to respond to this. What could I say? What could I do? I cannot change her mind. So, I write, write, write for six hours now.
I have a magnificent dream in which a woman I do not know gives me a tour of her new home. As she ascends the grand staircase each step plays a musical note. She says that this will alert her to an intruder's presence in the night. The music is sonorous. She points to the row of many great chandeliers hanging silently from the ceiling and tells me that in case of an earthquake the glass chandeliers will fall to the floor and shatter into diamonds. I see this happen as she speaks. It is a magnificent scene. This is perhaps the most innovative dream I have ever had!

A shadow of a shadow of respect, respect that was never deserved or real, but were nonetheless encouraged out of a sense of duty to display. Perfunctory respect, yellowed at the edges, bland, questionable. I am liberated from it now, though I held on until George himself met me at the precipice and tripped me over. But I am not disenchanted, dramatically disappointed. It happens.
And it happened when an august Muslim woman approached the counter in the evening to place her order. She wore a black suit and a black veil, everything pressed, with the exception of some deliberate folds here and there. She was clearly devout. She evaded my eyes, my smile, and I reminded myself that this was nothing personal, talked myself down from high emotionalism. It was George who offended and embarrassed me when he noticed the woman, moved closer to her, and playfully asked why she wore black. He smiled boyishly and much to my horror asked, "Are you going to a funeral?"
I wanted to strangle him, then bury myself.
The woman smiled shyly for a moment before reforming a more serious countenance. She merely said, "I am Muslim."
I know that George- blue-eyed, boyish, and emaciated, forgetful- was only trying to be lighthearted, attempting to make the stranger in black smile, but he failed miserably. He was tactless and insensitive. What if the woman were returning from a funeral or a memorial? What then? Losing respect for George is not a loss I suffer deeply.
Jackie and Mom-Suzie spend much time emphatically praising those in the Assyrian community who have attained financial and material wealth, while I am left brooding and offended. Success as defined by money, property, and flashy cars gravely offends me. And I wonder what measures my success in their eyes that happen to shine with diamond reflections? They seem to be indirectly shaming me while they laud others. I am so uncomfortably moved by their views that I spend hours deliberating over how I might define my own success as a young Assyrian writer.

In the end I know I am blessed with this pristine and wild duality, this double-gender sagaciousness that materializes in my movements, gestures, voice, and writing. I am man and I am woman while my imagination remains androgynous; it is where my sense of compassion, as well as my intuition, lies. My sensitivity is an asset; it is my intelligence, a source of power. I no longer try to rectify it and apologize for it.
Though, in moments of miniscule egoism, I am convinced that I was born on the wrong planet, and that my birth to human parents was an error! I was to go elsewhere- not necessarily a better place, but a different realm, a more compassionate society, species. Instead, somehow, I crash-landed here. In simulating these customs and these behaviors I try desperately to salvage my own…

Memories visit me on the bus, stirred by the scenery, inspired by books, reawakened by temperatures. Rustic recollections, pristine and nebulous, but emotionally lucid. Natural, yet foreboding like cactus and rosebushes. My hand traverses the thorny conduits of my own making to feel for berries, pick the berries, taste them, and give them to others. Everything comes back to Iran, a distant childhood from which I feel severed. Only in this manner, by association, indirectly, am I able to see, hear, and touch my beginning in Iran. Maybe I'm not a born writer, but my displacement as an Assyrian living in the Diaspora certainly enforces it. I write perhaps more out of nostalgia than pleasure.
The bus passes San Quentin Prison, Larkspur Landing where the ferry waits in still waters for passengers destined for San Francisco. Here sea birds gather in the sun. I want to capture everything in the present because the past is so unattainable. I can only move forward when moving forward frustrates me; it happens too fast, not allowing enough time for me to gather everything, anything. Just these words. Just these words.
I form my dreams out of nettles.
One night, a last customer at the grill was an alarmingly attractive woman in her forties. She had an accent and prodigious charm. Her eyes were warm, warm, warm, her skin luminescent. I cannot forget just how charming I too became in her presence. Her smile was made of everything- her mouth, her eyes, her arms, hands, hair, heart, and was enrapturing. In her presence it was either make or break. I could have only faltered and stuttered, or succeeded in grace and my own charm. Fortunately it was the latter. How soothing and simultaneously exciting she was! I could have been seeing double, but this source was forthright and singular. To serve her I had to dance. I thought, how lucky those whom she loves…
Jackie praises me to friends she never sees but talks to long-distance.
A regular at the grill is pleased when I remember to serve her kebabs off the skewer. She is old and her hands look broken, her fingers crooked and arthritic. Nonetheless, she is a beautiful woman. I surmise that she must have been quite the looker in her day. There are many remnants of beauty in her expressions, her lost features. Her husband is a handsome old man, also. He thanks me playfully in French, "Mercy monsieur." For a moment I stammer and spit out, 'You're welcome.' He seems disappointed until I win him over with a swift, 'Mon ami.' We laugh at ourselves.
And Janet is thoroughly amused when I attempt to speak Spanish.
I seem to have recovered from my miniature crush on Juan. Though, his childlike expressions, his confusion and frown make me want to embrace him, kiss him as I would my little cousins.
He always looks at me vaguely as though he sees me indirectly through mirrors.
On the bus I look up from the pages, stare out the window and come to feel as though a different vessel carries me entirely. Thought. And reliving emotions. My mind, it seems, does not think with words, but with feelings. Numbers? Never!
Liberated moments are only allowed when I am a brave young man, ephemerally insouciant, without the tortures of immediacy, without having to race myself, without the ticking of time bombs in my ears as if I'm living with a pernicious infection, without the responsibility of grand dreams.
The windshield of the bus is a movie screen that always plays the feature "Road"- a redundant, but picturesque melodrama.
A petite Latina worked with us at the grill for one day. She was soft-spoken and meek. Her hands shook as she dressed the skewers. Suddenly she dropped everything and grabbed for her belongings, said to Janet in Spanish, "I must go. I am hearing things!" She broke my heart.

Walking amidst the hills that have become my symbolic fortress, I remain unsafe from childhood memories, perhaps because the hills are not in my mind. I think of Iran and am struck with a longing for a purer self and an even purer relationship with my mother.
Looking into the wardrobe mirror as I dress, seeing a healthy young man there, I soothingly tell myself that it's alright to be happy. I tell this to the young man, the student, the writer, the brother, the woman, the son, the friend, friend, friend, and the fearful child. I urge myself to at least be content with the fact that suffering is just another side effect of living.
I seek a quietude inside myself that has never been there.
This is what I admire most about trees. They are able to live silently, grow silently without fanfare, give fruit silently, change, and die silently. Yet, they branch out bravely. Their roots break through the earth and concrete unapologetically. Why can't I? Why must I prune my fundamental self and dream cautiously? I want to share my hopes, wishes, and life with my family- no matter how gnarled. But they only envelop my essence in darkness, with shame.
I want my mother's own stifled roots and core to branch out with mine. I know that our relationship, our lives, would improve dramatically if we only allowed it. If she allowed it. But we choose the familiarity and security of pain and shiftlessness. It is easier to live in error than to atone for it. So drastically we would change that in the process we would no longer recognize each other!
His name is Philip, the mad bus driver- the one who drives too fast and takes scenic turns so sharply that I invariably lose my place in the book, becoming deeply vexed. He is slender and neat, his uniform shirt always tucked perfectly into his tight uniform pants. He talks too much, curses, and has a regular following of sorts that sits at the front of the bus and converses with him noisily. Tonight, after one of the driver's now trademark friendly gestures toward a transient, I got up the courage to speak to him, 'That was nice of you.'
This started an entire conversation of our own while the bus traversed a darkness we could not penetrate. We were the only two on the bus. And when I stood to dismount, bidding him farewell, he asked, "Hey, what's your name?"
'Emil.'
"You seem like an intelligent, sensitive young man."
'I am!' I said laughingly.
"How old are you? Twenty?"
'Twenty-four.'
He extended his hand that was unusually soft when I shook it.
I walked home the rest of the way smiling to myself in the dark.
Philip. Crazy. Loving.
At the grill, Janet is always astounded when I say things like, 'I don't want children. I don't even want to marry. I want to live my life, travel, write.'
Her dark eyes further darken, widening in disbelief, "No son?"

Experiencing a keen disappointment with members of the family. In relation to them my own sense of future and health grows grim. From the moment mother sets a hesitant foot here she is anxious to flee, return to Modesto, to the Valley. When I suggest she spend the night and return in the morning she says darkly, "It won't matter. I won't see you anyway. You'll be writing or reading."
She has launched a minor missile.
I retaliate without thinking, out of familiarity, with this lifelong necessity to defend myself, and my craft, 'What should we do instead? Sit in a room in silence? It's not like we ever have anything interesting to say to each other!'
And why should I care so much when I know we are taught this sense of obligation, this guilt to remain close to our families and breathe in the clouded air of homegrown toxins? Is this what it means to be a good Assyrian son?
I fear for my emotional safety and come to wonder if this much exposure will permeate my perception, and alter my being indefinitely. I am impressionable, a mockingbird. I have already adopted certain gestures, phrases, and habits I see in them. It is after all my nature to immerse myself in my environment. This is how I write, from the core, within the essence where I might glimpse every nuance, every telling shadow and silent expression, disappointment, fear, grief, as well as our small triumphs. I am living every adult-child's nightmare.
Michael holds auditions, as we speak, for the one-acts we wrote back at Modesto Junior College. I call him and he and I throw around names of student actors we think right for the two parts in "Third Rail". It is all very exciting. Michael says for the millionth time, "You know I'm directing 'Third Rail' personally. The best one…"
I can't help but become prodigiously pleased, mirthful, and giggly.
Now it's late and raining. I'm not in the mood to write, but a need bigger than myself pushes me forth through the words. I'm tired of being human. I want to be a farm cat, a wolf pack, two dolphins copulating in blue buoyancy! Not human, in despair and clothing, at work, in constant hopes of finding meaning and purpose, fabricating faith, fiction, only to find myself again challenging what I fought for only months before. I don't want to be human, but animal. Get dirty and not care, live out of doors, and blend successfully, effortlessly. To be wild, natural, instinctual…

Is one lifetime enough?

Cold Northern California mornings. Beautiful. Invigorating. Sun across the hills. Crows. Dew. A soft unfurling of streets, like leaves.
I strike up a conversation with a tall, slender man who walks awkwardly with a cane. The fingers on his left hand are curled, bent indefinitely. He speaks with great effort, but never complains. He has suffered three strokes and lives. He says that his wife has been the one to faithfully see him through this struggle. I tell him he's fortunate to have such an amazing woman in his life.
"It's not only physically challenging, but emotionally, too. Some people lose their desire to go on and become depressed and suicidal," the man says in a voice that is quiet and accepting.
Immediately I think of mother whose own emotional strokes seem to have left her in many senses paralyzed.
The bus comes, we get on. I tell him to take care and move to a seat somewhere in the back. But there is something I have not said to him. Something else. I am suddenly propelled forth, through the narrow isle to the man. I sit across from him, leaning in.
'I really didn't say what I wanted to say. I truly respect your resilience and will. I think you're amazing. In a sense you're luckier than those of us walking about blindly. You've overcome so much more.'
He accepts this quietly, thinks about it and says, "But I always ask why this had to happen to me."
'Each of us has his plight. You are successful. I admire you.'
He thanks me, then adds, "We don't appreciate what we've got until it's gone."
'We can't…'
He swallows something then. Maybe it is a semblance of joy, maybe grief. Now I think it may have been a little of both.
I have decided to keep my writing a secret. When "grownups" ask me what it is I want to do with my life, I will lie, 'Teach.'
George's accountant- an Iranian man in his fifties- dominated me for an entire hour at the grill, urging me to read more, to study philosophy, history, sociology, learn to type, do this, do that! He was suddenly out of control. I was dizzied by his recommendations and began to resent him for his obtrusiveness.
He asked me what I think might be most important to a writer. I said living. "Imagination," he said in a tone that was belittling and final.
I disagree. Doesn't life itself come before imagination? A writer has to have faith in living, faith in self. After all, how is one to imagine open skies if one has spent an entire lifetime in a cave? A writer has to live, read, listen, watch, move, love, even hate in order for his imagination to grow and improve. I find that the more I choose to live with courage the better I write.
I can't imagine not living…
Janet tells me about espirituales- Guatemalan women who perform magic. She explains that in Guatemala you can possess the one you desire by going to one such woman to procure a potion whose amorous spell is to last three months. But the espirituales charge a fortune for their services. So, there's the catch, I suppose. To keep a man who does not actually desire you without the aid of a spell you must spend a fortune. Isn't that how it works even here in the States? We exhaust our resources on those who seem to require proof of our blind devotion through material means.
But who am I to say?

Very many people live by autotomous reflex. We sever from a portion of ourselves that is in deep pain only to find that years later the overlooked cell of misery has divided into many more pernicious subtleties. I guess I refer to my mother in this instance. Mother. Mother. Mother. A woman who speaks vaguely with symbols and hints; conveys her great anger indirectly and politely; destroys herself in the process of attempting to annihilate her deep anguish; screams her agony in silence.
She is alone in the yard and does not notice me watching her through the kitchen curtains. Her face is contorted while she smokes. Her lips moving slightly, her pain centripetal. I lean into the sink, my own heart sinking, astonished that after everything, everything, everything, mom would rather evade the destructive truth than to utter it, ultimately setting it, us, and herself free.
I blame her upbringing, Christianity, being Assyrian- all things misogynistic!
I see this kind of evasive affliction throughout my entire family. It is an infection that has spread by example. I hold my diary up to my mouth, as a mask, and am spared the disease of silence.
Strangely, I had erotic fantasies about George's accountant, the man who offended me by being tactlessly domineering the other afternoon at the grill. In the fantasy he stands over my shoulder while I type, and rubs his pelvis on my back. He is commanding and tells me what to do, and how to do it.
In fantasies I am obliging while in real life I remain insubordinate.
Aziza is a Moroccan woman who on weekends works with us at the grill. She speaks broken English, but it is obvious that she is intelligent, educated, and possesses a genuine heart. Talking with her, no matter how arduous, makes me crave life in other places, in the Middle East, or Africa.
One evening George began preaching the virtues of Christianity to Aziza knowing well that she is Muslim. He argued that Mohammad was a violent and diabolical prophet, and that Islam encourages vengeance. Aziza merely listened politely and smiled. She only said that she wished she spoke better English so that she could defend her faith. I stood aside and wanted desperately to slap George's self-righteous grin off his face.
When friends came to visit Aziza later that same evening she hugged them all and cried. Then she left for the day looking broken, ill.
Earlier I had found the opportunity to pull Aziza aside and apologize for George's tactlessness. I told her I choose not to practice Christianity because of my own disheartening experience with people like George. She had smiled warmly, almost comforted for an instant, and asked, "How old are you?"

I listen to others' complaints about life and people, petty complaints, futile inconveniences we inflict upon ourselves, all the while holding others responsible. My family complains that they are too nice and that this seems to enable others in taking advantage of them.
'It's your nature to be giving. Do it and thrive. Being giving is a power to be celebrated. And when you're not compensated for it just keep moving ahead knowing that you've done the right thing,' I urge them at the table around which we sit at Casa De Maria.
I'm passionate about this topic because I have struggled with it all my life. But I hope to be no longer hurt when my benevolence is unappreciated. I'd like to think that my efforts in bringing a sense of joy to others are no longer tied to a need to soften others, change their mind about homosexuality, but to simply better the world in my head.
I don't need religion or Christianity to be a good person.
At times I am overwhelmed by the realization that there is so much I don't know about philosophy, history, mathematics, geography, and myself. Things I'll never learn.
Nonetheless, I celebrate with gratitude for all that I do know and am.
Children. Small, inspiring children. A little Indian girl smiles at me from her stroller, which her father pushes. She is plump and swarthy. I smile back. She waves at me with tiny brown fingers, curling them in the air. I wave too. But would rather lift her up and eat her, as we'd say in Assyrian!
Some women flirt with me and I am lost as to how it is I am to respond. George says I am lucky because I could have them so easily. He is again wistful and says he has not lived. So, in his sixties, and awkwardly George awakens to an untimely rebellion.
I was brought up to be polite to others, to all others, no matter what my actual opinion of them. I saw this trait in my elders, in the Assyrian community, which is outwardly circumspect, but piously dishonest. We would rather internalize our displeasure than vocalize it. Growing up, my mother's own displeasure with her marriage and in-laws was palpable in our home. It permeated everything and circuitously taught me to hold my indignation in. Misery matured me. Psychically it reached and reared me. No one voiced her actual and true feelings. We lived on eggshells. Precariously. Always.
We still do.
But where my parents have failed I will try to succeed. This remains the only way to honor their experience- by going, growing against it.
Last time mother was here she admitted that if she were to sit still she would go crazy.
Once, when I was in my early teens, mother and I stood in line at a supermarket. I observed that she looked especially angry that day, sad- though this was a normal expression she wore. Somehow I mustered up the courage to say, 'Mom, why don't you ever smile?'
She was not at all struck by my inquiry, which I would think would have seemed curious to anyone else. She merely answered, "There is no reason to smile."
Funny that in wanting to help my mother I would actually learn to help myself by coming to terms with who she really is, which is more realistic than trying to change her. For the first time I trust that I will ultimately do what is right.

Always ready to explode. Conflagrant longings sustain me.
The regular who frequents the mall, the one who tells Janet she has intense eyes, and me bedroom eyes, seems like the loneliest man I know. He wears old white shoes, tan slacks, a green sweater, a cap, and tinted glasses. This is his everyday costume. His hair is entirely silver and he must be older than I imagine. He stands tall and erect. He teaches me many things. I am a hungry student with him, listening quietly. He speaks many languages and knows a lot about world history. At times he veers off on irrelevant tangents as I fade into our blurred surroundings at the food court. When I reawaken he is still talking and spitting.
One morning I walk to the mailbox just outside the mall where it is sunny and cool. He is standing there reading the San Francisco Chronicle. 'He is everywhere!' I say under my breath and laugh to myself.
We speak for some time. He tells me that the pleats in a chef's hat signify the many ways an egg can be prepared. He tells me many things but forgets to tell me his name. I do not know his name.
If only I could read all day long. On the bus I am oftentimes horrified to find healthy young men and women sitting idly, wasting precious time. But when it is night and I am beyond exhaustion, traveling homeward, I finally come to understand them better.
Another morning, I find the black homeless woman, whose dirtied skirts wave slightly in the Northern California wind, in fits of religious glory. She is shouting with all her might at the bus terminal in Novato. "Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!" She continues metronomically, never failing her enraptured cadence. I am surprised to see her so vocal as she is otherwise usually silent and lethargic, sitting calmly, or lying down on a bench. Someone waiting for a northbound bus across the terminal shouts back, "Shut up already!" I flinch at this, troubled by the man's insensitivity and impatience with the woman who is elderly, and deserving of respect no matter how soiled her skirts.
"Bring peace, love, and joy," she shouts into the air. I feel that she might rip in half by the sheer force of her own voice.
I find myself slipping into the interstices of her exaltations, and whispering to her, 'Amen, sister.'
She sobers suddenly, looks straight at me, and smiles warmly.
"Bless you."
She seems to have been permanently calmed by my acknowledgment. A few minutes later, when we have all settled a bit, I give her a couple dollars. She is delighted, and thanks me.
A southbound bus arrives. She boards it as she often does, leaving me to wonder where exactly it is she is headed. But today, when she has taken her seat by the tinted window toward the middle of the bus, she turns again to smile at me, looking very much sane and present as the bus starts to pull away.
The prosaic world falls away and in its absence nothing breathes but a nameless emotion.
I continue to search for apertures in life, glimpses of what is worthwhile and what is superfluous, straining for beautiful subtleties, piecing these small voiceless instances together, and pasting them to the pages in my diary. I look for these enlightening cracks in the walls of life and relationships, in unlikely places and people, even in the most polished surfaces where my family and I meet.
Oh, and Freud was gravely mistaken- homosexuality is not a freak immaturity. Homophobia is!

Morning. A feeling of anticipation. I am a restless horse, desperate to gallop but commanded to trot.
Luay called from the city earlier in the morning. He is the Assyrian I met through Vivian and Shammi some months ago. A gentle and sweet soul. It seems that Anthony is still lavishing him with adoration and love. Luay invited me to stay with him at his apartment but I said that I probably would not be able to make it until January.
"You're gonna make me wait that long?" he quipped.
He then gave me Nadia's phone number- one more queer Assyrian living in San Francisco. The circle I could never have imagined grows, and I know that after thousands of years of estrangement as queer Assyrians we will soon meet in a modern city called San Francisco.

A "real man" is someone who is simply truthful with himself. A homosexual, for instance, no matter how effeminate remains more courageous than, let us say, an American professional football player. A homosexual traverses many societal impasses usually by independently and single-handedly overcoming great measures of self-loathing and prejudice. What does a lauded football player do that is so revolutionary? For crying out loud he is coached in the matter! Supported by his family, school, scholarships, peers, and millions of fans. Really, he is a sheep. A homosexual often has no support system, no coach, no team to train and guide him, encourage and support him. He is instead ostracized, taunted, disowned. The homosexual teenager is not offered a seven-million-dollar contract per school year for merely surviving the cruelties of his own class.
A penis does not make the man. A vagina should not enslave the woman. Gender roles remain futile, offering a sense of normalcy that is vaporous, a sense of security that is tentative, like money.
I am a man willingly trapped in the intuitive thoughts and sentiments of a warrior woman!
Hermaphrodites are nature's prophets who mirror our superstitious outlook regarding the genders.
A faceless forefather attempts daily to define the world for me, what is right and what is wrong, but I refuse his outdated, jaundiced droning. Today I am freer of him than I was yesterday, though still shackled in many ways to a wall that is dilapidating. Through many growing cracks in this wall an unearthly light streams…
I notice that my senses have become keener. Colors are more brilliant than ever, dimensions more vivid. I live in the physical world now as if for the very first time, seeing things I never saw before. From the bus I note that everything beyond the windows looks sharper, crisp, and that the foreground sidles softly while in the near-distant background hills turn as if propped on humming axles.

A.M. assignation with you when I ought to be faithful to schoolwork. But that remains secondary in relation to you- my sustenance.
I realize that Janet is not an employee at the grill. That is a pretense. She is paid instead for companionship. George says that customers enjoy being served by an attractive young woman. It is easy to see he is speaking for himself. He asks, "Is it wrong for a sixty-year-old to marry a twenty-five-year-old?" He is making a wish when he asks this.
George cannot keep a secret. His new boyishness, a mischievous glow about his cavernous face, betrays him. He tells me that he and Janet are "doing it". Now he loves her, now he resents her for taking liberties on the job- not as an employee, but as a lover.
Juan and I have grown close, bonding mainly in our dislike for Janet, her laziness. One afternoon when George and Janet return from "Costco", Juan and I retaliate by going to a matinee.
After the film my attention is diverted by the cries of a disgruntled man somewhere in the lobby of the theater. I turn to the source of the desperate pleas, "Will someone please help me get outta here!"
It is a blind man and his Seeing Eye dog. They are circling the concession stand. Both the man and the dog are clearly disoriented.
I find myself taking initiative, 'Right this way.'
The man follows my voice, comes to me. I ask him to place his hand on my shoulder. Without hesitation, even eagerly he does as I ask.
'Wouldn't anyone in there help you?'
He talks like a man who was moments ago drowning.
"No! They'd just tell me to go right or left." Anger, frustration, and fear amalgamate in his voice, which shakes.
I look down at the sad-eyed black lab, silent, and sheepish. Heartbreaking.
'O.k. Now we're out of the theater and in the mall,' I report.
"Oh, no, no, no. I need to be outside!" the man exclaims as if his life depended on it.
'No problem. This way,' I say with feigned casualness.
I make small talk as he follows, his hand resting permanently on my shoulder. Juan is trailing somewhere behind us. I can feel him there.
'We're gonna go through Sears. Is that o.k?'
The man asserts that once outside he can figure it out from there.
We move through the hardware department.
'Do you smell that paint?' I ask.
"Oh, yes!" he sounds calmer now.
Soon we have exited the store and are in the sun, which he cannot see but certainly must feel. And isn't vision futile in comparison to the clarity of emotions? It seems I am not convinced as I watch the man and his dog practically flee the traumatic entanglements of the mall.
Evening is impending. Juan and I smoke cigarettes on a nearby bench.
Broken English from a broken heart- Juan tells me how much he misses his wife and children whom he has not seen in two years, and probably won't for another three. He smokes wearily, confessing that he often feels the urge to cry when he talks to his children long-distance on the phone. Children who make it harder when they plead with him, "Papa, please come home!"
His is the saddest frown I have ever seen. I want to embrace him when he pouts so perfectly, so beautifully. Instead, and more appropriately I merely console him by words, with simple phrases. He admits that every morning he is awakened and pulled out of bed by the thought of his children. He prays to the ceiling, "God, help me."
I am struck so deeply. This evening, under the twilight of a cooling Northern California sky, I teach Juan the word "Respect".
'Juan, I respect your strength very much.'
Again, it has become real to me that all people struggle and suffer in their own way, in their own fate. I even fantasize about stealing money from the grill to give to Juan so that he may return sooner than planned to his family and to his dream home in Guatemala.
Tonight I am a butterfly with stone wings.

Others' shortcomings, weaknesses, and neurotic idiosyncrasies are revealed to me in such a saturated light that in comparison my own defects seem to vanish entirely, and I become cool, standoffish, and impervious. I am so deeply disappointed in Jackie, who complained all the while as we loaded mother's belongings onto a rented truck to officially move her from Modesto to Marin. I had forgotten how hot tears are…

The gallon of Prelude, a blue-gray I had hoped to paint my room, a literary color, will have to wait for now in the garage- the cemetery of unstarted projects! After yesterday's devastating move, throughout which Jackie's own resentment for mother spiraled well out of proportion, I can't help but resolve not to move in yet, emotionally.
I came singing, with ideals, hopes, and gusto, but crashed into a portentous yesterday! The rift between each woman I admire independently for her own attributes and strengths seems to swell and heave even as we speak. I want to run from here.
Each woman, though remarkable in her own right, remains reprehensible in contributing to an atmosphere of palpable malaise.
We are each suspended in the sap of self-created bewilderment with the other, attempting to get closer to each other, but failing.
Jackie is just as much responsible for this growing rift as anyone else in the family. I caught her yesterday with the chisel! I was naïve, certain that we'd build a bridge. And mother is not the august older sister upon whom we can depend for balance. I've witnessed her lean her stilts against the wall and call it a day. Every day.
How foolish and childish I feel for my own dependence on my family, obligated and fettered in ways I could not have foreseen.
Challenge: Not to feel and become alienated from the world at large due to my own insubordination.

Mother is here, looking defeated. We lay in bed together for a while as we have so often throughout our life, and playfully I offered her the smallest consolations, tiny words, minute doses of hope, something, anything. Smiles. Lightness. Playfulness. She became insouciant, but only for an instant, and drifted back into a sleep that did not look restful. If we could only turn these instances into an hour, into a day, into a lifetime…
The poet lives in this fortress- my body. He is sheltered by love, idealism, eroticism, beauty, and hope. The poet is androgynous, capable of a compromise.
The man lives on the exterior and is susceptible to easy adulation. He speaks discordantly to those he loves, is fickle and temperamental. He loves with caution knowing all the while any emotion marred by suspicion is superficial.
The poet appreciates antiquity, as he is himself perpetually changing, growing, loving without ambition. He walks at a pace that allows him to glimpse otherwise lost moments, childhood, gardens, and architecture that may contain a semblance of something concrete. He often pauses at cathedrals and worships the possibility that perhaps it has all been worthwhile. And once called a slanted tree house: Child's cathedral.
The man is confrontational, anticipates discord. And what he chooses to disregard the poet can't help but assiduously record in a diary of dualities.
This partnership seems to sustain me in an indifferent world made forgiving by poetic probabilities.