Amy Aimless

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Amy Aimless

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On October 17, 1989, I was riding my bike home from my Clinical Psychology class at UC Davis, looking forward to watching the Bay Bridge World Series Game 3—San Francisco Giants vs. Oakland A’s—on TV with my boyfriend, when the earthquake struck. The Loma Prieta earthquake. I didn’t even feel it.
The 5:35 game hadn’t started when the quake hit at 5:04, and so the many TV cameras recording pre-game excitement at Candlestick Park actually televised the earthquake to millions of people. It would, in fact, become the first large earthquake ever to be broadcast live.
Right after the shaking some fans assembled at Candlestick let out a cheer believing it was a sign that the series battle between two teams from the same metropolitan area was now christened by unseen forces but when power went out, murmurs of confusion rippled and within minutes, players were gathering their family from the stands as people were told to leave the park. Only about half the fans were in their seats at the time of the quake and had there been any more seated, their weight on the structure would have made the concrete less able to retain its integrity.
The earthquake hadn’t been centered in San Francisco though. It had been centered in the Santa Cruz mountains, where our home was. Or where our home HAD been, before my parents’ separation a few months before. During my first year at college—‘88-‘89–things had somehow crumbled and I’d come home on weekends over the course of the year to see dad crying in the living room and intervened on his behalf only to be informed that I wasn’t welcome to come home if I couldn’t support my mom’s decision to divorce. Then that summer—of ‘89, months before the quake—dad moved out, and my mom went a bit bananas—obsessively making my 13 year old sister do the Ouija board— until one day, shit exploded and my sister ran off to the neighbors house where dad came to get her from and we didn’t see or talk to her again for almost a year. In the interim, mom moved out of the dome on Hazel Dell Road—the last place we’d all live as an intact family—and I moved my stuff to Davis to live with Steve, while Dad and my sister (and brother, who was in and out) were living in the Hazel Dell dome.
When the 6.9 magnitude quake hit, my sister was in the house but my dad was up the road, at the well which was over a hill and not visible from the house. The earthquake rocked our geodesic dome so violently that it slid off it’s foundation and made the deck which encircled the entire span of the home’s exterior break away from the house. Once it was over, dad ran towards the house and screamed at seeing it, knowing my sister was inside but in trying to get in to find her, discovered he couldn’t because the back door we always went through wouldn’t open anymore. Everything had shifted, and was twisted in different directions, so the door was still a rectangle, but the door frame was a rhomboid, and wouldn’t budge. My sister was fine having found a doorway to get into but stuff was everywhere, windows broken, the house cracked and a complete wreck. Dad and Alex left—having to obv move out—and Jeff squatted near the dome for a few days but left to go somewhere and after that the house sat there alone, dark, broken and eerie.
The divorce wasn’t yet final so one weekend soon after the quake, my mom, my moms friend Mary, myself and my boyfriend Steve went to see it and retrieve things of ours that might have been left behind, one example of which was our family pictures and baby books, which were still in the ruined house inside the drawer they’d always been in when we lived together.
The smell of the house is what I would remember most for years after. The refrigerator had been slammed forward, and tipped and door open, was laying on the counter. The food that had been inside had been flung out of the fridge and lay rotting. The odor of this rotten food was mixed with the smell of my sister’s smashed fish tank—gravel, broken glass, Angel fish on the floor of her bedroom—and her broken bottles of perfume, creating an aroma of rot, and fish, and perfume that bled into the carpet and the walls.
The floors were sloping and rising, and almost spongey—clearly not on solid ground—and the house groaned and creaked.
One surreal thing I saw that day besides the physical destruction of a home I’d loved was a baby blue chest of drawers that my parents had put under the deck of the house to store. It had been my younger brother’s changing table and then his dresser but put under the deck of the house when it wasn’t needed anymore. The shifting of the house had caused the deck (still mostly attached to the house) to land on top of the dresser, and when I took a picture, one ten inch deck joist is visible and denotes just how heavy the entire deck itself was even while this baby blue dresser held steady as if in a strength beyond rationality. I’ve forgotten much of the intense/scarring feelings from that time but am glad I listened to the feelings that day because now I have this picture as both an emblem of our family history as well as evidence of the surprising resilience of forgotten ordinariness.
In the end, the insurance company (my parents somehow had earthquake insurance) eventually decided to lift the existing damaged structure back up and onto the foundation rather than demolish and rebuild. Geodesic domes are known for being earthquake resistant and in some ways, that was accurate. The home is still there—visible on Google—but they named the driveway/road something specific and when they did the address of the house changed too.
[On a side note, after the house was fixed and my dad and sister were moving back in, a tow truck driver bringing my dad‘s beloved ‘57 Chevy (that didn’t run but was his dream project that we’d moved around to all our various cities for 20 years) up the hill to the dome, ended up somehow not setting his emergency brake(?) and after he got to the top of the hill, the truck started rolling backwards with the Chevy still on it and flipping over in the field, destroying the Chevy.
I ended up with those family pictures, and still have them. Mom had them for many years after the day we saw the dome but when I moved to Virginia and James and I bought 6348 Tisbury Drive, she asked if I would take them because I was at that point pretty geographically settled and she wasn’t. Fast forward multiple decades—about three—and I’d (accidentally) find out that some came to believe I had the pictures for Different reasons which I won’t detail here but which is indicative of the misunderstandings that often accompany broken families. I’m certainly not hoarding these pictures; much of that life honestly feels like it didn’t even happen. It’s now just bits and pieces, enmeshed in a larger much-more complex experience]

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Every morning, I go into the bathroom and with my makeup bag write the only fiction possible for me—my face—so when my iphone crashed the other day and in setting everything up again after it came back to life, I had to do another face scan password, I really had to contemplate. At the time, it was morning and I didn’t have my makeup on so I briefly thought that maybe scanning my makeup-less face to use as my password might make it more challenging for my phone to recognize me and use my face as my password once I had gotten the fiction published up there on my freckles (*cough “age spots”) and my eyebrows. But I proceeded with the makeupless scan and realized that I didn’t need to worry; I’m happy to report that my phone scan recognizes me either way—both with makeup and without—and opens right up at the sight of either face. And I think the moral of this story isn’t so much that I don’t look that different without make up as it is that basically anybody’s fucking face could probably open my phone at this point. Use it in good health, Anybody.
This particular picture was taken this morning in honor of the new lip balm I bought at Sprouts the other day. I don’t usually use the stuff—if your lips are dry, you’re dehydrated: drink water—but it’s nice to have so I grabbed some randomly and after applying it to see if I liked the texture (I didn’t) noticed it made my lips do this iridescent pink/white effect. And Back in the ‘80s I had this lip crayon that used to do the exact same thing; the ‘80s were a very iridescent time—chock full of a lot of face fiction plus some non-fiction, no makeup, etc—but I’d forgotten about it until seeing my face with this stuff on. Seeing it was a walk down an old and age-spot covered plus FiveGuysLastNight memory of my face and a surprising one; like who makes and sells iridescent pink/white lip balm at Sprouts? That’s not a thing now. How exactly does the company that makes it justify the hassle and expense of producing something that even the freaks of the free market like myself aren’t sure they can pull off? So I looked at the label. And that’s when I realized that my lip balm was sunscreen.
I’m in that losing point where I want people to see these videos because it could transform their life but where to put it? Who really and honestly wants to watch something that might change their life? And who really sees the things I post to FB (or my blog…) when on FB their entire schtick is to routinely separate the pic material from the words they’re to accompany because they know pics sells the “user experience” to where they’ve programmed their site with an algorithm that hides like the curtain of Oz. And then if someone does actually see something I post together with the words, who would bother to read and admit it? What does the reader really know of me beyond my face and love of animals since what does Oz let them see, and is it designed to make them feel ostracized? uncomfortable? We are a scrolling nation not touching awkward spaces because we’re all freaked out and traumatized then I log in and feel like a dead space; a space where I’m fully aware that an entity who recently rebranded itself—“Meta”—spends billions to figure out how to purposely separate us from one another. How to make us all feel just dissatisfied enough to keep us addicted to coming back for reassurance. They have researched us all to the level of psychological warfare in the name of almighty capitalism and so if I share this there who would they let see it, and what version of discomfort would they find appropriate for us to experience to advance their user machine, and are these questions the end game of what I want for myself or the people I love or the planet? Its no longer the issue that people are complacent: the issue is that we are being led into this experience and into particular motivations/perceptions skewed towards mindfucking us just enough.
If I’m gone soon from FB and IG (EDIT: I will be), know it’s not because I’m pissed or unstable (ahem; correction: I am) or flouncing: it’s that this machine has changed the way human beings think and the way human beings feel and connect; it has kept us from knowing and understanding one another, and it’s a constant stress made more traumatizing every single time I delete or deactivate and become hooked on it again anyways.
My mom had done her part to keep me off psychedelics by repeatedly relaying the story about the time that guy spiked her Coca Cola. She didn’t know what was happening while she slowly devolved into psychosis and, as her friends looked on, attempted to escape the chemical mind trap of LSD by clawing her way out of a Studebaker via the tiny rear triangle window. The incident cemented for her that not only was she was not cut out for that specific size of window but that we kids probably weren’t either, and henceforth advocated strictly for the madness brand known as “reefer.”
Naturally, I didn’t even remember her acid story the first time I took it myself. Poised as I was to capture the event of my first experience of non-ordinary states— armed with a mini cassette recorder and list of questions I’d ask myself during—it never entered my mind that I could potentially be setting myself up for having to crawl out a window. Ends up, I just sat in my car overlooking the Pacific Ocean, recording my answers to the questions I’d written—the only answer that I remember was “you need to be there for your sister”. That was ‘87, pretty sure, in Santa Cruz, California.
Four years later, ‘91, I’d be high again—second and last time—in Virginia, and dancing to the “Touch of Gray” in the nosebleeds with three other people, one of whom was the boyfriend I’d met at a CA wedding then moved to Maryland to shack up with. Not there for the music necessarily but for the life of what Grateful Dead means.
The GD formed in ‘65–four years after this ‘91 concert, Jerry Garcia would pass away—and long time fans didn’t like this new “sellout” commercialized sound. For the free-flowing movement is the actual art of the Dead; Jerry describes that early in his life he’d viewed the Watts Towers—a huge metal art installation that took some artist 33 years complete—which had gotten scorched in a fire and slated by the city for demolition but then couldn’t be removed. A giant crane sent to do the deed even toppled over from the effort and eventually the city gave up, leaving this artist’s work intact. And Jerry said this saga inspired him, in that “It just goes to show if you dedicate your life to your art and work hard enough, you can make something huge and unchangeable that will last forever.” Which he was saying tongue in cheek since he already knew that was the complete opposite of what he felt he wanted to do and be. Jerry wanted to create something that could live inside only one moment then drift; he wanted his art to flow from person to person and change, to be “played in real time and then vanish.” And that is what I believed even then that all humans truly want; we are born, we are labeled, we desire love and validation and in all the mental froth, we forget to drift; forget how to be nothing except amazed at how profound it is that we are even alive. I wanted to invite that in; wanted to feel safe in the vanishing.
After the concert, we went to check out the deadhead tour camp. The parking lot had buses made into homes, vans made into food trucks and family-made tie dye shirts for sale. People were playing guitar, and dancing, and shooting the shit—both stoned and not—in a community designed to earn the gas money to drive to the show in the next town. Just hanging out, being their own rabbit hole. Flowing and drifting, like following the heady freedom of nothing all the way to the end.
And as we walked around in the alternative reality of both the camp and ourselves—me and this guy I’d go on in a years time to break an engagement to a month before the wedding—periodic smoke made patterns in the air, as if shadows had gotten all dressed up just for us to play a part in the performance of impermanence.
And by the ‘90s, GD fans felt they were becoming what Jerry had said he hated; that fame and lifestyles and mortgages had compromised the music and made it as solidified and immovable as the Watt’s Towers. And maybe they’re partly right; but that’s because part of drifting and being permanently unlabeled and free is you don’t attach to “not being that thing.” You do your own thing, absent froth and adherence.
I never got to listen to that mini-cassette recorder tape. A month or so after the experience, it proceeded to plunge into the sea of “letting go” when my purse with the cassette inside it was stolen during a family friend’s graduation party (in which so many people showed up we had to call the cops on ourselves). I don’t remember much else from that first time overlooking the ocean except what a beautiful day it was, and that the water sparkled like lights blinking at me in the afternoon sun.
EDIT: for the record, I have always been a teetotaler. For me, the journey into sidestepping this normal consciousness and going into the feelings this lady describes is sun, nature, quiet, poverty, stress, humility, surrender, and empathy.
And I didn’t know the earwig was alive until I squeezed the mop out in the sink for the second time.
It had been floating in a dirty bowl when I’d done the dishes. And I’d thought “what a terrible way to go.” Drowning. In the panic of not having air, the one thing capable of easing said panic. Monks on mountains using only breath to reach states of mind that overcome the deep miseries.
And it had seemed too late until the mop ran clean and I saw it wiggling its legs trying to get away. But seeing the hope, I scooped it up and laid it gently onto a torn piece of paper bag so that it might recover itself.
And this lady I sit for—AZ— is mostly likely in the process of OD’ing. And the worry she’s dead—or worse, not yet dead, still savable with no one knowing—is with me as I clean the floor. Waiting for some sign she’s alive. Waiting until I see some mountain zone daylight before texting her CA mom, not knowing if I even should. Saw AZ so “asleep” yesterday I almost called an ambulance. She wasn’t supposed to be there; asked me to care for her cats and I found her in her bedroom. Took care of her cats; texted her a cute video of them; texted her again later, no responses. Have been on this addiction journey for a few years with her and her wealthy California family, and Don’t know the entire story. She has a trust fund, no job, and a fraught relationship with her mom (has asked me not to contact her); three cats and a dog, a horse somewhere, copious ordered packages always piled feet high over her porch and expensive furniture tagged and still in bubble wrap in a house she never locks despite a previous break in. Goes Into rehab, comes home; relapses; attracts grifters; admitted to hospital, back home, paranoid; trust fund cut off. The last relapse I arrived to her house destroyed—to the point I couldn’t find her dog who was sitting in the mess—and writing on the walls in Sharpie asking people to find a home for a spider who’s sad and a manuscript on the south wall of her bedroom reaching up as far as her height could take it, saying “…and when I’m alive, I’m alone; and when I’m crazy, I get to be loved. But not really.”
And here, in my “own” life, I walked right into a stick with my right eye yesterday. I’m chronically sleep-deprived, fall asleep anywhere. I have no days off but still had to move residences four times in five years creating permanent residence in “lunatic fringe” and am forgetful and constantly swirling with things I have to do/finish/clean/write/tend to as I actively run in place inside the full catastrophe known as the “American Dream”. And Yet on this Sunday in August 2020 before I leave for work, I’m distracted with another’s life—could paramedics even help her when several bouts of expensive rehab couldn’t?—and Squeezing dirty water out of the strings of my mop, singing Sugar Magnolia softly to myself as I wash the house, knowing already that teams of people with love and money can’t save someone who doesn’t want it. “Sweet blossom come on
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