Eden M. Kennedy's Blog

Here is the joke I made up last night: Q: What’s it called when you get your period while you’re camping? A: Cramping! One thing that Jack loves above all things is camping, and one thing...



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Jackson turned thirteen years old this past weekend, which we spent at a kids’ basketball tournament at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Jackson is the newest kid on his team. Back in third grade,...



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I had an unexpected reaction to the shooting that happened a week ago out at UCSB. I spent all last weekend reading all the articles and opinions and tweets that ran past me, and none of it was good news, but the thing that finally got me was when I went to work Tuesday morning and heard that one of our patrons claimed that the shooter had been hanging around the library the last few weeks. “Didn’t you recognize his car? It was out in the lot all the time.”

That was some chilling news. And of course, it was possible to imagine a black BMW parked just about anywhere, if you wanted, this is Santa Barbara, black BMWs are as common as frisbees. I don’t ever remember seeing the guy’s face, but sometimes people sit out in the lot in their cars before we’re open and after we’re closed, just to use the wifi. It’s possible one of them was him.

So I don’t know if the patron who claimed the shooter had been that close to us was making up this story just to claim his own piece of the drama, or if he really saw the shooter, or what. I do know that anyone can come to the public library and most of our patrons are interesting and kind and grateful for what we provide. Underneath that, I’ve learned that some of them are terminally ill, and some of them are mentally ill, and some are homeless and some are the most polite racists I’ve ever met, and I do my best to treat them all the same.

Of course, this shooter who felt bullied and ignored, me being nice to him wouldn’t have helped. A woman my age would have been invisible to him. But so help me God, this is what I ended up clinging to in the wake of all this: Be nice to everyone. Listen. Be present. Say something funny whenever possible. Help them if you can, and if you can’t, refer them to someone who can. Of course, that’s my job, but I’m taking it more seriously than ever right now.

It’s not a philosophy that will bring any of those kids back to life, and I don’t know if it will prevent any more from dying, but at least it helps me feel like I’ve done my best by whoever shows up in front of me. And I refuse to live in fear of any of these gun-obsessed assholes.

END OF SERMON

On a brighter note, one of my friends from college died this month, and there’s nothing like one of your peers taking off for points unknown to make you wonder if you’re secretly growing a tumor or two of your own. I was commiserating with another friend who was in the same class, and we began to marvel at how many people from our relatively small circle at college are dead. Like, out of a loose coalition of 12-15 people, six are dead. Five of them went before the age of 40. One in his 20s, thanks to AIDS in the 80s before all the good drugs showed up. So, take care of yourselves, everybody! We’ll all be dead before we know it!

O.K., NOW THE SERMON IS REALLY OVER

The other weird thing is when a library patron dies. I mean, we work with a lot of old people. You get to know everyone, over time, and what they like to read, or what they’re willing to try when they can’t find anything they like to read. And then the day comes when you ask your coworker, Have you seen Mrs. X lately? And you check her record and see that she hasn’t checked out anything in the last seven months and your heart sinks a little. People have strokes and become homebound, or one of their children comes in and hands us their card and asks us to delete their account. I used to marvel at a sprightly 99-year-old who used to come in every few days. He stopped coming in at some point, maybe I was on vacation and I just didn’t really notice, it’s not like I have a checklist although maybe I should. And then last week, seemingly overnight, another one of our regulars stopped being the guy who always brought us jars of homemade jelly at Christmas and turned into a thank-you note from his wife, telling us how much he loved the library.

I’LL STOP, I’M SORRY. FORGIVE ME?

May is fucking beautiful in Santa Barbara, these jacaranda trees bloom with purple flowers all over town and it’s heavenly. Unless you park under one and your car gets covered in smelly, sticky, godawful blossoms that ruin your paint. But apart from that: so beautiful! Here’s a picture! Cheer up! Would you look at that!

I guess I’ve talked a little bit about how I’m writing this novel-thing. I’m normally not brave enough to call it a novel in public because novelists write novels. I know that novelists are human beings, and that I am a human being, and that therefore I am a novelist, because that’s just logic and also because I hit 77,444 words this afternoon, which is equal to one-and-a-half Great Gatsbys or two-thirds of a Great Expectation.

So if you didn’t know it before, now you know I’m writing a Thing, and in this thing one of the characters has a profound spiritual experience. But because I’ve found it challenging to write about a character undergoing something that I have not had a drug-free personal experience with, I have been doing a fair amount of reading on the subject. Some writers are wonderfully articulate about what they’ve been through, and there are some great nonfiction accounts speaking to a wide variety of experiences, because it seems like no two experiences of Melting Into Oneness With The Ancient All are the same, and often it results in a bunch of delirious poetry. Not to mention that some second- and third- and fourth-hand interpretations of other people’s spiritual realizations (I’m thinking Jesus in particular) are flat-out insane.

Well, there I was, a few weeks back, remembering I wanted to reread Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Somé. Malidoma is an African shaman who was born into the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, and who was essentially stolen by some Jesuits when he was a small child because that’s the way you turn the tide against the heathens, I guess. Eventually he managed to escape and make his way back home to his people, but not until he was 20 years old. A lot had changed since he’d left, and apart from having to relearn his native language, another thing he’d missed was his manhood initiation, which happens when a boy is around 12 or 13. He still needed to go through it if he wanted to be considered a full adult member of the Dagara and not just an overgrown child.

The part of the book where he’s in the bush going through this ceremony, which takes a month, with a bunch of Elders and maybe 60 boys, all younger than him and all far more experienced in roughing it, is like Harry Potter meets Star Trek with a side of Carlos Castaneda. It’s just great reading, and it scares the shit out of me. So I was flipping through the book when I thought, I wonder if Malidoma Somé has a web site? And then I was like, Oh, look, he’s going to be 33.5 miles away from my house in five days. And then I emptied my PayPal account to sign up for a personal appointment with him. There are not enough exclamation points in my body to describe how excited I was.

I have 50 minutes of audio I recorded of Malidoma and I talking, but mostly of him talking, because he is a lovely man with a beautiful smile who likes to laugh and I, too, like to laugh but mostly I prefer to listen. It’s just my way. I’m really bummed I didn’t get a selfie with him, but I was doing too much listening and then he needed to get ready for his next appointment, so I’m going to have to wait until he comes back next year and does another divination for me! And I don’t want to tell you what he divined for me, with his rocks and shells and bones, because that would SPOIL EVERYTHING.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to this month, and now I’m reading the new Barbara Ehrenreich book, Living with a Wild God, where she writes, as a journalist and an atheist, about several unspeakable experiences she had as a teenager.

Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words like “ineffable” and “transcendent.” If there are no words for it, then don’t say anything about it. Otherwise you risk slopping into “spirituality,” which is, in addition to being a crime against reason, is of no more interest to other people that your dreams.

But there is one image, handed down over the centuries, that seems to apply, and that is the image of fire, as in the “burning bush.” At some point in my predawn walk–not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time–the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.

The thing that I find really interesting about her account is the way she looks at it through the lens of mental illness, depersonalization disorder, etc., which seems like a more frightening version of the ego-less state we’re supposed to strive for in meditation? Hi, I’m turning into a spirituality nerd.

The other thing that happened this month is that the night before Easter, Jack and Jackson planted jellybeans, and look what sprouted up overnight:

A transmogrification of truly Calvinic proportions!

P.S. Peewee’s doing fine, thank you for asking.

March was an exciting month. For starters, Peewee almost died. It started with Peewee barfing four times in a row one morning, and having this weird little palsy to his head. I started Googling...



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My birthday present to myself this year was going to be a car adapter so I could listen to my phonePod while I drive (safely, without ever looking at it to switch songs, even if I’m listening...



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Thus beginneth another year at Fussy.org. Updates for 2014 will be monthly, if you’re wondering whether you should drop me from your feed reader or not. Blogging: it’s less urgent than...



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This morning I was going through my yoga routine, like I do when it’s the first time since the first week in November that my day hasn’t been filled with family, work, or the flu. (My...



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I’m not sure where this falls along the continuum between “homage to Kate Beaton’s Fat Pony” and “blatant rip-off of Kate Beaton’s Fat Pony.” Crucial...



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Here’s the re-do of yesterday’s terrible lettering. The lettering is still awkward, but it doesn’t have much of a choice given what I’m forcing it to work around. It’s...



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