Penultimate desert visit and week of school

Since my Knott’s obligation start has been inexplicably moved to mid-June, that left me with an available Memorial Day weekend, which of course was spent in the desert, heat be damned.

We now have a nice selection of regular activities out there - we go to the drive in every Saturday, can hit up the community pool between Memorial and Labor Day, and get brunch at our favorite punk rock dive bar, The Palms, on Sunday. The rest of the time is usually spent driving back and forth to hardware stores for parts for various projects. This weekend’s project was Operation AC - the H brought out a small window unit for the upstairs, which needed a platform built. As I suspected, it takes way more power than we currently have available from our camping battery. Because the place is insulated so well, I think it’s possible to run it for a short time and trap the cold inside for some relief; but I still maintain that once it starts getting up into the 100s out there it’s really just too miserable to be worthwhile. The H wants to be able to still go there in summer, I say we just stay away. As long as our lives are the way they are currently (me playing Knott’s every Sunday, stressing about my event coming up, and kids starting school early in August), I just don’t see how it’s possible. I had a thought about how women want to work with the natural ebb and flow of things, while men prefer to force things to their will. He always wants to buy battery-powered things for out there, I prefer manual so you don’t have constant anxiety about having enough power. He wants to make the place visitable in summer; I say just wait until it cools down. I suppose there’s value to both approaches, really.

One pleasant surprise was getting a pump for the water tank which enabled us to finally fill the old galvanized cowboy tub I bought years ago - we kept it full of sun-warmed water all weekend, and we were able to just hop in and immerse ourselves all weekend, which was more wonderful than I can describe. 

So we went to the community pool on Saturday to beat the heat, saw a movie that night, then Sunday went to a charming little local carnival. I can really see the appeal of small towns - it’s just so much easier to keep track of things when you don’t have a million choices. I see how people get overwhelmed by cities. There’s just too much going on. 

The plan is to go out one last time in two weeks and strip the beds and close the place down for three months. I’m watching the temperatures, though - last year in June there was a wicked heat spell with temps above 120° for about two weeks. Right now it looks like it should only be 90s. Hopefully we can make it. It’s always bittersweet, that last visit.

The boys officially have two weeks and two days left of school. I can say that Bobby did spectacularly well at his first year in junior high. He’s got a good work ethic and does his best, which is all I had hoped. Theo, with his normal guileless nature, got through what could have been a meh year with his usual aplomb; I’m not a fan of his current teacher, honestly, but as with everything, he seemed just fine. He’s developed a sudden obsession with soccer, so I’d like to try to get him into something for the fall - although he’s starting so late, it may be challenging. But if he’s really into it, I’ll do whatever I can to support it. 

We have one more year of elementary school and then that world for us is over forever, which is an odd thought. Next weekend I’m going to a seminar to learn about colleges and how to prepare now - I’m at a complete loss as to how that all works, especially California’s complex system. As usual I’m eager to get a head start. Tonight we take Bobby to see The Damned, and tomorrow we take him to see Gang of Four. Within 5-10 years, all these 70s foundational punk bands will be gone - got to get that music education in now while we can!

Hello, my beautiful weirdos

This Saturday was Cruel World, the annual dark 80’s goth music festival in Pasadena. This year we took Bobby, who thankfully still has an interest in his parents’ music. I don’t know how long this will last before he thinks everything from our generation is lame. Or maybe he won’t? I never tired of my mother’s 1950’s bebop jazz - I still think it’s the coolest thing ever - but with that said, I have not passed that music on to my kids. Just goes to show how much is lost generationally.

This was the first of the four years I’ve been in which the weather was cold and rainy - thank god I brought a poncho on a last minute impulse, only thinking of having a dry place to sit; I ended up wearing it for the four hours it rained in earnest. Despite spending a day putting a cool, sexy goth outfit together and watching hair tutorials, because of the cold I ditched it all and just wore pants and a t shirt and a jacket. Boring. But boy did I appreciate that later when the temperature dropped and we still had to be outside for several hours! Also, I must admit it was nice to not have to wear a dorky hat and worry about re-applying sunscreen all day. 

As far as lineups go, this year was my least favorite, and I’m afraid that may continue to be the case as the festival naturally moves on from the original goth heavy hitters into more 80s pop and modern goth bands (I personally kind of enjoyed the down-ballot modern goth bands early in the day more than I expected - they still have the spirit of the original movement, whereas some of the legend bands have moved on and lost their bite, as it were). But as always there were too many bands to see, anyway, so we caught the ones we really wanted to see and had a full day: Actors, She Past Away, OMD, Madness, The Buzzcocks, Blancmange, Alison Moyet, DEVO (Bobby’s favorite), The Go Go’s (kind of a hot mess imho), and finally New Order. We were there about twelve hours and were wrecked. Theo stayed home with a sitter. 

I’ve had a lot of feelings about this festival - every year it awakes in me a certain saudade that I can’t really put my finger on; is it wanting to be young again? Is it the joy of community? Is it some youthful romanticism? It’s all things, really, and this year in particular for a few hours there was no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA. It was great escapism at a time when we need it most, and for that, I’m thankful. Since none of my favorites were there this year (Bauhaus and the various offshoots), I didn’t have any magical moments. But it was still a profound experience, one I’m recovering from emotionally a bit today. Feeling dark and sad about the political news today - Rump gets to remove protective status from Venezuelans, the horrid soul-crushing budget bill advances, ugh ugh ugh. It’s a harsh reality to come back to, for sure. 

Theo is off on his 5th grade trip for two nights to Astro Camp, and that feels odd and sparks a certain mom anxiety in me, hoping he’ll be ok. It’ll be just me & Bobby until Wednesday which feels wrong (the H will no doubt be working every night). I’m trying to focus my energy on next weekend’s desert trip - possibly our last - as the next thing to look forward to. In between I’m just taking things one activity at a time, trying to not be overwhelmed and stay grounded. Life in a fascist dictatorship is a marathon, not a sprint. 

Happy MD

It’s been a few years since Mother’s Day was a tortured exercise for me, and for that I’m profoundly grateful. I’m not a big fan, in general - I don’t like attention and huge displays of emotion, because a) I’m an uptight New England WASP, and b) the child of a narcissist. So the idea of being fawned over is extremely embarrassing for me. Just to spend a day with the family is enough, so we did that. We went to a Bowie photo exhibit, then had a desultory lunch at this random place in Koreatown that unfortunately only had one thing on the menu without meat in it, then the H went to work (of course) and I went to the weekly protest at the airport, to protest the airline (Avelo) that has a contract to fly deportees to the Salvadoran gulag. 

Because of Mother’s Day, the crowd was about 1/4th of what it was last week. As an event organizer, I feel for the people putting these things together - you really have no control over who and how many people show up, and the experience for everyone rests heavily on who and how many people show up (I may feel this in real time when my event rolls around). The V-E day event I went to was pretty cringe and lame, but really only because such a small crowd was there (probably about 40 people), so it just felt sort of pathetic. But if it had been 500 people, it would have been great. Go figure. 

As usual, we had probably 85% of cars driving by ignore us, 10% honk in support, and 5% flip us off or yell things. One guy was bold enough to roll down his window and yell at us that the deportees (I should really say kidnapping victims) were “rapists”, and I was proud that the crowd didn’t stand for that - we all got in his face and yelled “your president is a rapist!!!” One Latino guy in the front was especially agitated. Good for him. 

I’ll be back next week. Hopefully there will be more people. I always exchange sarcastic outrage with other women over 50 (most of the crowd), and was pleased to connect in person with a nice disabled man I’ve been connected with on Bluesky. 

I hand made this sign for Andry, the gay makeup artist who has been trapped in that hell hole for two months. We don’t even know if he’s alive. The thought that he, and so many others, escaped their home country and came to us for safety, only to be hideously betrayed by our shit government, makes me absolutely sick. Whatever happened to “bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? This is NOT the country I was raised to believe in. I, too, feel betrayed. So I hold this sign to remind people what happened to this young man. If this were my son, I could only hope someone would do this for him. Happy Mother’s Day.

 

Pancakes and contemplation

This morning we went up to the kids’ old school which was having their annual pancake breakfast, an event I’ve been going to off and on since Bobby was a baby. It’s a community gathering, really, of people On the Hill (or, in our case, at the base of said Hill). 

I wasn’t sure if we’d see anyone we know - I assumed Bobby’s old friends wouldn’t be there since they’re all junior high schoolers now. But I was pleasantly surprised that most of Bobby’s friends were there, and Theo saw an old friend, and they all ended up hanging out and playing basketball and handball for much of the morning. It was funny watching Bobby slowly walk back and forth across the playground with kids he’d been in kindergarten with, all in their giant pants and all taller than me. He’s at a friend’s house now. 

As I sat on a bench in the shade and watched all the hipster parents milling about with their raggedy free-range kids, smelling the familiar eucalyptus, I had a thought. I think it may have been a mistake to pull the kids out of this school.

In hindsight now, I realize Bobby most likely would have been admitted to his current school no matter what, and I’m not sure that one year of being in the highly gifted program did much for him. He says he didn’t like it much, and now he’s just in the regular gifted program that he would have been in anyway. And Theo’s definitely gotten the short end of the stick just being wait listed for the gifted program every year anyway. So…was it worth it? I’m starting to think it probably wasn’t. They could have easily stayed at this school as planned, finished out sixth grade, and gotten the same results. 

But I also see how, at the time, it seemed like a great opportunity, and I didn’t want to “hold Bobby back” just for sentimental reasons. I didn’t want to be selfish. And I was very much influenced by the one friend who’s son had moved over in 5th grade - only to have both our and their friendship pretty much vanish once the kids were in the same class again, which I did not predict (the mom got a full time job, so getting together for coffee or hikes became impossible, and the kids drifted apart). I couldn’t have left the kids at this school and not felt guilty. Then in the same year the principal was replaced with one that’s been roundly disliked, and most of the best teachers left. So it seemed like we got out “just in time”. But being back up there today…I had my doubts. 

It was heartwarming to watch the boys pointing out all the things they remembered - even certain bushes by certain houses they remembered from when they used to walk home. I told them maybe someday if they have kids they can use my address so their kids can go to this school, and grandma can pick the kids up and they can play at my house until they’re done with work. Of course, all of this assumes a lot - that we’ll even be living normal lives in 20-30 years; it’s hard to picture that, now, that in the 40s or 50s there will even be a country or a planet in which people still have kids, go to work and school, have normal lives. But I digress. Hearing them speak so nostalgically about their old school made me wonder what the harm would have been in leaving them there until they graduated, and realizing that I probably could have done that after all. It made me sad. I think of all the connections I could have fostered there, instead of going to the new school where I know nobody and don’t feel any community at all. Sigh. Well, we all make our decisions, and we have reasons why we make these decisions based on the information we have at the time, and to be fair both kids are happy and thriving either way, so no harm done. I don’t think they care either way. They wouldn’t say it’s been a mistake to move to the new school. And Theo would have only had one year left, anyway, so, as I noted at the time, there was never a scenario in which they would have stayed at that school forever, so the school would have drifted out of our lives by 2026 anyway. Oh, well. Maybe in the 2040s or 50’s that school will return to our lives after all. Nobody knows what the future holds.

Surviving

Some gigs are to be enjoyed, some are to be survived. This last weekend was to be survived. It was a Lindy exchange at Cal Poly up in San Luis Obispo, an event that went dormant for five years because of the pandemic but returned this year and brought us back on. Unfortunately, in five years all the college kids we used to work with are gone, so this new group had never done this - or any - event before, weren’t even around to attend the last one in 2019. And it showed. It was just a whole weekend of bad decisions and inconveniences. Things like not giving us information on parking so we all drove around for 45 minutes in circles on a campus until someone finally texted instructions, having an all-amateur sound crew so the battery-operated mics kept dying during songs, timing things so the audience started filtering in during our sound check and were totally confused, nowhere to go to sit during breaks, etc etc etc. Between that and my half-dead voice from the cold I caught in DC, it was a tiresome slog. After the three hour drive home, I still managed to make it to the Avelo airlines protest, though.

I had the H get Bobby some giant pants (“pantalones gigantes”, I call them) and Theo some new shoes while I was gone - I feel this need to “stock up” and brace for shortages headed our way. Today I high-tailed it to the grocery store for toilet paper, paper towels, tissues, and pet food and supplies. These, plus batteries and kids’ clothes, were on a list of things that might be difficult or expensive to get, soon. The last shipping container lands at our port in five days. Then what? The shelves were all fully stocked (I was afraid over the weekend everyone would have bought up everything) which tells me either a) no one else got the memo, or b) I’m overreacting. Oh well, at least all of these things will get used up either way. 

We’re all just watching and waiting for “it” to hit. Some say it’s going to be a doomsday of epic proportions…others say it’ll just be a minor temporary inconvenience. Nobody says everything will be fine, not even The Dump himself. So it’s kind of like anticipating my event attendance - I am 100% going to take a hit this year - it’s just a question of, how bad? I did some math today and figured out I could still be sort of ok even if I lost 200 people (this is calculating in paying less taxes due to less income). But if I do lose 200 people, I definitely have to think about retracting the camp back to its previous three day-four night schedule, and saving the $30,000 adding this extra day is going to cost. And I have to clear that with the hotel and make sure everyone knows before I start selling tickets during the weekend. Because if things still look bad in four months, they’re not going to magically turn around in a year. I can only have that extra day when 1100 people attend. If it’s 900 or, god forbid, LESS, then I’m going to have to do something I’ve never done in this event’s almost 30 years, which is cut back. I’m sure everyone will understand. It’s about survival. 

Only the strong and well-established are going to survive this. Let’s hope I’m one of those.