Notes from a recent informational webinar run by For The People, a fantastic team aiming to get more people actively involved in defending and championing libraries. This was well-timed, since I wanted to check out volunteer opportunities with our local Friends of the Ojai Library organization, but Katie, Mariame, Tara, and their colleagues inspired me to dig deeper. This call was aimed at enrolling people in their incubator project, which offers weekly Zoom calls to help elected or hopeful board members navigate group dynamics, stand up for free speech, and strategize together. It’s an incredibly smart and well-run operation.
True to their word, I found the documentation online for the Ventura County Library board to be pretty opaque, but with a little digging I was able to locate the one board member who lives in Ojai. I reached out and she kindly agreed to give an informational interview on Friday, so we’ll be chatting about how things get done in this corner of the world. I’m very curious to see what she has to say about the process.
If you’re a library enthusiast, I can’t recommend For The People enough. Sign up for their newsletter, check out their fantastic resources page (especially the Public Libraries 101 zine), and see if you can get more involved in your own local library community.
I don’t know how long she’s been there when I spot her.
A pointed muzzle. Massive, soft ears swiveling in the dusk. Slender legs perched on the rock wall. She’s close to the orchard, but leaving the shelter of the trees. The comet of her dark-tipped tail follows her to the lawn.
We’re close, maybe twenty feet from each other. The dogs don’t like it one bit, growling and barking in a defensive fury, but she saunters forward, unconcerned. I’m frozen, attuned, waiting for something. She holds steady until I stand and shatter her confidence against the edge of my movement.
In seconds both the coyote, and the brief unselfing she brings, are gone.
After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.
I really like this post from my pal Christopher about his approach to “super-saturation and world-building” in his paintings without the use of psychedelics (despite what many people seem to think upon viewing them).
Our town (~9,000 people) has a couple garages, but there’s a big one on the main drag. My family has been going there for decades. I drive past it every day.
There used to be a huge pine tree on the corner of their lot, but last year it became a hazard and had to be taken down.
Shortly thereafter I drive by and see they’ve hired a guy to chainsaw sculpt the stump into a bald eagle.
Birds own my heart, but nationalism makes me twitchy. I withhold outright condemnation of the eagle, but I’m skeptical. (The original owner—an objectively Good Dude—sold the business to a younger couple a few years ago, and I don’t have any knowledge of their whole deal.)
Then it turns out someone on staff is really into making costumes for the eagle. Every holiday. Every month. Stuffed turkey, witch costume, menorah headpiece, bunny ears. These people love to dress their bird.
The changing of the eagle suit becomes a source of joy every time I drive through town.
Until June, when the eagle is bare.
Now look, maybe I’m expecting too much asking my garage to celebrate Pride. But this is a small town. Every time I drive by that stupid eagle—this thing that has previously brought me so much joy—I feel hurt. I feel reminded that there are plenty of people in my liberal bubble who don’t consider my community worthy of celebration. I drive to work, I feel bad. I drive home, I feel bad. The eagle is mocking me.
Then my A/C quits working.
So I book an appointment to bring my car in—and realize what I have to do.
I pick all this up at a thrift store for under ten bucks. I print the shirt with some weird heat-transfer fabric crayons I find in a cupboard. I loop gold elastic around the sunglasses and pray they’ll fit on the eagle’s head. (It is also important to draw your attention to the price of the feather boa.)
Nice.
My reasoning is thus: if I show up with a complete costume ready to go, someone will have to look me in the eye and say “We don’t believe in that,” at which point I’ll be finding a new garage. But if they let me dress the eagle, then people in town get to have the joy I’ve been missing since the start of the month.
I listen to a lot of hype-up jams on my way over. I hate confrontation. I also don’t wanna have to find another garage. I want to believe that this decision isn’t actively antagonistic, but I’m not particularly hopeful.
I talk through the A/C issue with the guy at the desk, hand over my keys, then take a deep breath.
“Who’s in charge of the eagle?”
“Oh, that’s all Dylan. Second bay from the end.”
I walk down the row of hydraulic lifts and find a disarmingly smiley middle-aged man pouring fluid through a funnel. I introduce myself and explain that, since the Pride parade is this Sunday and the eagle seems to be missing a costume, I have taken the liberty of making one myself, and can I get his blessing to go put it on?
Dennis Rice, former headmaster of my eccentric, much-loved little high school, wrote some thoughts about the Morning Assemblies we used to hold. I’m reproducing it here because I haven’t written anything in a long while and it touched me and what is a blog for if not to collect things that touch us?
The choice is always ours. Then, let me choose
The longest art, the hard Promethian way
Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan
That inward fire, whose small, precarious flame,
Kindled or quenched, creates
The noble or ignoble men we are,
The worlds we live in and the very fates,
Our bright or muddy star.
Aldous Huxley
The 17 students of my first Happy Valley year slowly grew to 30 then 40. The new buildings wallowed on a muddy hillside, waiting for many Project Days to come before they could be planted and green. Like much of the experimental nature of what we did in those years, we did not pave the paths of the school until people had walked on campus for two years. The paths designated themselves.
To the chagrin of some alums, I admitted other than classical music to Morning Assembly.
When my mind drifts back to HVS, it often lands on Morning Assembly. Each day, rain or shine, students and teachers would gather together—at first in the new Commons, but by the mid-eighties, in a large yurt—seated in a circle on zafu cushions, having all removed our shoes before entering. A selection of gentle music was played, often orchestral or single instrument, on occasion played live by Eddie Guthman and the Advanced Band, and then there would be a reading.
I still have a dozen books that are severely dog eared for morning readings (Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy or The Choice is Always Ours), as I would read on Monday and then solicit volunteers for the remainder of the week. It was rare that anything trivial was chosen. In fact, we had a shelf in the library dedicated to good quotes and readings for assembly. After the reading, we would all sit in silence—a remarkable feat for a room full of teenagers, but it happened every morning. Morning Assembly was an important time for the community, a time to start together before we began the challenges of the day.
I realize that it was not all that popular with every student at the time—some of those mornings were cold—but I would like to think that more than a few look back on those mornings fondly. I understand that Morning Assembly was one of the first things to go after my departure, as David Anderson, who followed me, generally looked on it as a waste of time. It moved to mid-morning and met only on selected days. I would wager that the school still gathers in some way and there are a few old timers still on campus who attempt to keep part of the old flame alive, but the magic of those often cold mornings, sitting in a circle with colleagues and students, still lingers with me after these long years. My gaze drifts around that circle, bringing an endless chain of faces and voices, 27 years’ worth.
I reach over to one of those dog-eared tomes, open to a random page, and read:
Any friendship—between two or a hundred—entails a new emergent unity, where each of the constituent selves is far more in its functional oneness with the rest than it ever was in its apartness.
Gregory Vlastos, 1909, Canadian professor of philosophy
Given that they were the standout delight of 2023, I planted wildflowers again for 2024. The frontrunner is still Nemophila menziesii (Baby Blue Eyes), opening its first flower on March 16th. (Last year’s arrived on March 29th.)
Most of what reseeded this year was Elegant Clarkia. It is out of control. Every patch that held five plants last spring now holds triple the amount of seedlings. The lupins were much-beloved by gophers, so no more of them for now. I sowed a lot of Purple Vetch (with seeds harvested from El Nido Meadow in 2023). They’re currently putting forth tiny tendrils around the agave bed. The local high school’s native plant sale yielded more Narrowleaf Milkweed for the butterflies, Sticky Monkeyflower for under the oaks, Island Snapdragon for the cursed bed out front that gets too much sun. We were liberal with the California Poppies, with varied success.
There’s so much greenery this year that the seedlings often can’t complete, but they’re made for this land. They’ll keep coming back.
I’ll be at Bart’s Books in Ojai, CA next Thursday, March 21st at 6pm to interview my genius bike-touring, adventure-having, genre-bending cartoonist friend Tessa Hulls about her new graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts. The book explores three generations of her family’s tumultuous history from Maoist China to America and beyond. It’s rich and cathartic and unbelievably gorgeous. Tessa’s spent the last nine years bringing it to life. You can read more about it in the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times.
Given the lengthy isolation and emotional toll required to craft a book like this, I’m very keen to have a packed house to help celebrate its emergence into the world. Bart’s has a gorgeous outdoor courtyard and an absolutely amazing selection of used titles. Well worth the visit. I’ll also be bringing some of my own books along, so if you’ve been wanting to get your hands on some copies from the second printings of 100 Demon Dialogues and Baggywrinkles, you can do a one-stop shop!
Want to get your hands on the book, but don’t live in Southern California? Great news! You can order Feeding Ghosts from wherever books are sold. Personally I’m a fan of using Bookshop.org or requesting it at your local library. Tessa’s book tour also ranges widely, so if you have friends around the country who might enjoy this project, take a peek at the list of other stops.
Our neighbor of 31 years died in February, followed by my godfather in March. They each meant very different things to me, but both occupied an archetypal permanence that’s hard to reconcile with death. And all grief is linked, isn’t it? This thread pulls on that one and so on and so on until the tapestry unravels and you’re left holding a mess of snotty string.
The last two weeks of my wall calendar are utterly blank. I’ve learned to read these gaps in my paper trail as markers of total emotional exhaustion (although sometimes they correlate with the thrill of a new relationship). In this case, I know the data is missing because I’ve been too tired to track whether I wore my mouth guard, too forgetful to know if I attended a Zoom meeting, too frazzled to write Morning Pages. Too much. Too much.
Last night I finally turned my phone all the way off and threw it behind the bookshelf. I buried my laptop in the couch cushions. I hid my iPad in the closet. I hucked all this technology out of my room because I was drowning in it, trying to get away from everything.
Instead, today, I walked. Not for long, but enough to remember what my legs are for. Enough to see how everything has changed from storm after storm of rich rainwater filtering into the hillsides since January. You can stick a finger in the earth and water pours out. Every divot in the trail is a spring.
Last year I took a photo in this spot on April 11th. Happened to end up here again today while I was talking on the phone with Nia and realized I should do the same thing again. I lay in the grass under the valley oak at the bottom of the hill, stroked the velvety neon leaves unfurling at the end of every twig and branch, and thought about coming here in 5th grade after endless games of Predator/Prey in the groves further up the Saddle.
If the grass is still this green in April I’ll be very surprised, but I’ll take a photo that day and see. We had early rain this year—a rich rush of green. Maybe it’ll hold on. I’m still becoming acquainted with being here for a full year’s cycle.
