I'm packing now to leave tomorrow morning for Eugene. I just walked to the corner to mail my RSVP for Chris's wedding. As I was waiting at the light to cross back, a young guy walked up to the corner with a suitcase and a piece of cardboard, wearing an old suit. He looked like he was about 19. He asked me

Hey, do you know what paralysis is?

Yeah.

What is it?

It's when you lose control of a part of your body.

Oh! [pause] I think I have that.

Well, you should get it checked out. There's a hospital right up there.

I don't have any money.

There's a free clinic.

Eh. I kind of want to die.

Well, okay.

He was an attractive kid with nice skin. I wonder where he was going. Last night I had dinner with Albert at Cafe Intermezzo in Berkeley. It was a beautiful evening--it's amazing how much warmer it feels over there than in the City. I got back to the City and got drinks with Andy and his girlfriend Becca at Valley Tavern in Noe. We ended up being there for past three hours, a few of the only people in bar after 1 a.m. on Sunday night, sharing beer and Andy and Becca playing songs on the digital jukebox, Beck, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5.

Andy is restrained when he speaks, but I'd describe him with something he once said about one of our students, Forrest: he lets things in. Andy has this quote taped to his bathroom mirror: "Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart." -Rilke

Yeats

I don't want to post whole poems, but I wanted to post the Larkin poem below. Here's Yeats:


The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time


Kyndall told me those lines are tight. I'll miss him.

Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And slience laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

-Larkin

Larkin

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

-Philip Larkin

Chekhov

"In a short story it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because--because--I don't know why."

-Chekhov

Oakland today

The liquor store on the corner by my apartment sells eggs 3 for 99¢ from a little basket at the counter. So, if you go in to buy beer to fuck yourself up, you can also consider making an omelet.

I didn't post yesterday, I know! I was feeling sick all day. Watched a documentary with SSJE called Soldiers of Conscience about conscientious objectors in the Iraq war. I told my large school classes I won't be back next year. A lot of people told me I would cry, and I might have, but I felt too sick. I felt more like I was going to faint.

Had dinner with my dad at Saul's after school, then drove him to the airport to rent a car. He's going out to a party in Stockton thrown by a college friend of his. His friend just started a coffee company.

Going to a barbecue at Sherene's in Oakland later where I'll fuck myself up. Then I need to work on some recordings. One of my students has a friend at the Cal radio station who will play me. I need to give her what I want to play on Monday.

For the life of me
I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise

Xzibition

Tonight was SSJE's end of the year Exhibition Night: a potluck with families, students, and faculty, followed by students presenting work from each of their classes.

It was beautiful. I was SO PROUD of my students! Fevn kicked major ass. It was such an overwhelmingly positive night. It felt like being with family and friends...

..which makes me feel so sad that I'm not coming back next year. I've rarely used the difficulty of this year to justify leaving. When I have, I've always been aware that it's just been a bad day, week, etc. I've always known that it would be mostly hard to leave. Tonight I was really strongly reminded of why.

I went to Royal Ground between school and Exhibition Night, had an iced coffee and wrote a letter to my students revealing/explaining that I'm not returning next year. I'll give it to them tomorrow. I feel like I have a cold or sore throat starting. I should get some sleep.

Btw-- I'd appreciate comments on my Great White vs. Crocodile post. Especially if anyone knows enough to answer it scientifically. I'd like to solve it. My thinking right now is that the great white is more agile and a faster swimmer, so it would get the angle on the croc. But maybe the crocodile has really fast reflexes and could whip around and grab onto the tail of the white and not let go until the great white bleeds to death or dies from not swimming fast enough to get water past its gills?

my students' things

Darron's shoes, Malik's shoes, Dana's books, Braneya's lotion, Chase's mallets, Abby's staff paper, Aimee's hair ties, Seth's bats, Trevon's shoes, Michael's Palm Pilot, Kyndall's pumpkin, Laron's beanie, Vicky's moldable eraser, Keelan's oars, Eva's cape, Durante's cape, Anna's gum wrappers, Cameron's lacrosse stick, Nia's bandanas, Manny's necklace, Brandon's DS, Ivan's trophy, Sasha's water bottle, Ben's pin, Antonette's compact, Koutney's keys, Danny's hat, Torri's stories, Chenoa's husbands, Tom's CD player, Nancy's photos, Cici's weave, Kristina's bagels, Akira's gloves [boxing], Caroline's journal, Sam's calculator, Jameila's earrings, Jonna's fruit snacks, Ariel's pen, Vijay's cricket bat, Jeffrey's sketches of cars, Taylor's scarves, Harley's chains, Jimmy's headphones, Jared's crutches, John's pizza, Fevn's socks, Jenny's patches, Jules's super ball, Kenny's bike, Ben's guitar.

HS Lordships

We had the last new teacher dinner tonight at HS Lordships in Berkeley. I got to the dining room late and ended up at a table with the gym teacher, Rick. He never stops talking! He looked like a football player in the off-season, a beefy white guy with fat fingers and a crew cut wearing black slacks and a green Tommy Bahama shirt. I panicked when I saw that I would have to sit with only him and his wife. He's also piebald. He has one brown eye and one half brown/half blue eye, like a marble. I sat next to his wife, a cute blond woman from Estonia. Rick was talking about corporal punishment and his wife said that in Estonia teachers make students kneel bare-kneed on dried peas for an entire class if they misbehave. Rick told a story about one of his senior students, a girl, stopping to talk to him while completely naked today during the senior streak. His wife pursed her lips and stopped talking.

I read an interview with Pat Metheney a few years ago in which he made an offhand remark that B flat minor is the saddest key. I'm trying to write a song in B flat minor that isn't sad. I don't know what it will be, just not sad. I want to record new songs, but I haven't come up with anything that sticks recently.

I don't want to go to sleep. I'd give up sleeping if it weren't for dreams, I'd much rather keep sitting here and listening to music, do you know what I mean? This morning I didn't want to wake up because of my dream. Adam and I were preparing to bike to the Nevada desert from my house in Wisconsin. The bike we were using had the Superman logo painted inside the wheels. I turned off my alarm to go back to the dream but I couldn't fall back to sleep.

Commitment

I was going to shut this fucking thing down, but instead I decided to write in it every day. Even if it's short. Every day I'll write here.

I commuted home holding a ceramic pot that René gave me after school, for, he said, "being a really good teacher." It's beautiful, the kid's a savant of some kind, his handwriting takes up half a page, he can't write, but he's the most verbally articulate kid, and he explained to me the process of making this pot in such detail that I could make it myself. It's covered in little brown dots caused by minerals in the glaze that react to the firing. The glazes are made of glass. After class today he comes up to me, he's like, "Mr. Borrelli check it out, Kyria braided my hair!" Kyria had braided his hair.

Great White vs. Crocodile

The city was fragrant tonight, I smelled lavender and rosemary and charcoal and incense and fabric softener. Walking up 17th I passed the skeleton of a new house & smelled the cut wood. It reminded me of Hales Corners when we'd bike through the new developments and the house frames made the whole area smell like sawdust.

Last weekend I was in L.A. with Adam, and I got to watch his widescreen HDTV. I watched a show called Great White: Uncaged where people swam with great white sharks without a cage. I was watching that show, seeing 15' long great whites in high definition, seeing their jaws and their faces with gashes and scars all over them, and I was thinking, great whites are the baddest animal on the planet.

Then we watched Planet Earth, and the first episode we saw was "Fresh Water," which includes this scene of wildebeest getting eaten by Nile crocodiles that can be more than 16' long.

After seeing that I thought that maybe crocodiles were even badder than great whites, because there's no way you could swim with crocodiles without a cage. They'd eat you--no test bites like great whites will do, crocodiles would just start eating you right away. But then I saw these clips (1, 2) also from Planet Earth. That shit is mind-blowing! After that I was back to thinking that great whites are the meanest animal in the world.

What do you think? If you put a great white and a Nile crocodile [edit: of equal length, say 4.5 meters/about 15'] in a tank together (pretending they could both survive in the same water, i.e. fresh or salt), and neither has eaten for like two weeks, who's going to live? Which one is the BMP (Baddest Motherfucking Predator) on Planet Earth? This is like Godzilla vs. King Kong; Alien vs. Predator; Freddy vs. Jason. Except great whites and crocodiles are real.