Last night Claire and I went through her favourite cookbook and picked out the gnocchi, lasagne and baked peach recipes for her to make. Today after wushu we went to Lucca, the awesome Italian place on Valencia and 22nd, for pasta flour, amaretti and parmesan. (Some dulce de leche and tuna in olive oil snuck into my bag as well.) At the farmer’s market we found stone fruit, onions, spring onions, cilantro, kale, potatoes and Colin, who always has the best neighborhood gossip. At Good Life we bought meat, carrots and lemons. Right now I am baking paleo quiche (savory custard tarts in pancetta crusts) and the girls are about to make lemonade to sell at the street party around the corner.

It’s so rare that I find myself being more or less the mother I’d hoped I would be…

I just love this guy. Subtle and perceptive.

It requires almost a lifetime of riding to acquire really educated hands, because by “educated hands” we mean hands which are fixed on the reins with a resistance exactly equal to the resistance of the horse’s mouth against them, and hands so sensitive that they can yield the very instant the horse yields to their pressure. To continue that severe a pressure in the horse’s mouth even an instant longer than is necessary is to continue a punishment after the horse has yielded.

Also kind of totally Zen in a “you will never perfect this; deal with it” way.

In riding, you have got to feel. You cannot, and you must not, look. When you look down at your horse all you will see are your own mistakes! To keep from making those mistakes, keep your eyes up and focused on some definite point or some definite object.

The book is 62 years old but could’ve been written yesterday.

Remember, it is the horse’s job to throw you forward and upward, when posting with the motion. All you do is sink down in the saddle. The forward movement of the horse will then carry you back into position. Much of getting too far out of the saddle, twisting the upper body in mid-air before coming down, collapsing on the horse’s neck, or, in the other extreme, being thrown too far back so that the legs shoot out in front of the rider, is caused by the rider’s trying to do the horse’s work for him. The horse throws you forward and upward. You sink down. The horse’s forward motion carries you back. And until then—Wait for him!

Don’t just do something! Sit there!

But somehow, after weeks of trial and error, Randy and his team had accomplished the ideal. They had found a design that was both functional and beautiful. The swept-wing solar array looked like nothing that had ever been created before. It looked so good it just had to be right. And the calculations said that it might be able to hold as many as thirty-six strings.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on Mars and all ye need to know.

Woke up this morning thinking, worst case scenario, Bella’s still sore and I have to ride Jackson in the Grand Prix arena. Then I thought, I’ll just jump smaller jumps. Done it before, can do it again. (A couple of months ago when Bell was being naughty I was busted down to crossrails!) And sure enough I had to ride Jacks in the Grand Prix, and we jumped smaller jumps, and it was FINE.

I’ve been spending cycles thinking about how I can improve my riding given that it’s just not practical to spend more hours in the saddle. Three things came to mind: first, have a better attitude; second, read more books about riding; and third, use visualization.

Attitude: I need to make the most of every minute in the saddle, which means paying attention every minute of the lesson, taking criticism gratefully, letting go of my ego and accepting that making mistakes is part of the process. Books: my Kindle is now full of equitation textbooks and I’ve already gleaned a ton of ideas, such as visualization and having a better attitude. Visualization: before every course now I try to not only learn what jumps we’re jumping, but also to feel how the course will ride, what rhythm we’ll need, where the sticky parts are, where to sit still and go forward. What it will feel like. That, surprise! Is helping me develop my feel.

Salome came to cheer me on and we talked without stopping for several hours, about horses and children and love and art. We sat in the sun at the Crissy Field Center watching the shadows move across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I felt so, so happy and lucky.

…which is what we did on Labor Day afternoon. We all schlepped down to Noisebridge, where the girls did a circuit hacking class with Mitch Altman. Liz and Milo were there and Jamey and Rowan came too, and then Danny showed up. Danny and I curled up in the library writing. Every now and then Claire or Jules or Jeremy would come and give me a hug.

Claire made an LED lamp that changes colour. The frequency increases if you put your hand near it – it has an infrared sensor. Julia made a name tag with her name spelled out in LEDs. She soldered it all herself.

I love Noisebridge for being so close to us and so full of light, and for having a library, and for running this class deliberately to be at a family-friendly time, and for being a place where all my friends hang out, and for having as its motto “Be excellent to each other.”

Another week; they flicker past. The big trade show of the year tired me out so much that I would come home and lie down on my bed for an hour after work. The first day I didn’t do that, the girls were surprised. A coworker said today he never thought of me as the sort of person who worried about client meetings. I said “Ever asked yourself why I do three hours prep for every hour face to face?”

Claire has a new violin. The school is giving lessons, free, so we rented this half-sized instrument from a place on Market. It’s adorable. I want to learn myself. The feel of the bow across the string is tantalizing.

Speaking of, Bella has a sore foot and I have been riding Jackson. He’s a big sour old Thoroughbred, scary sometimes to watch because of his repertoire of evasions. But when I ride him with my best self, I can get him forward and soft. I can only get it for a minute or so at a time: hence, tantalizing. I want to stretch out the nice moments so they get longer and longer. The trainers talk about the feeling of being “on rails”, when the horse’s hind legs are pushing along a straight line and the reins feel like train tracks and everything feels preordained. I’ve had that a couple of times on Bells, and now I can get it a little on Jacks. It’s quite a feeling to ride this huge horse over fences, fearless. Lopity lope.

When I get off him, it’s another six inches or something before I land, versus getting off little Bella. My eyes are probably sixteen hands or so off the ground, but his wither is above the top of my head. He’s vast and gentle.

I’ve been intermittently organizing around the house and I made my folding desk into a proper workplace for myself, with paints and sketchbooks and pens and pencils, so that even if I only have half an hour I can make a sketch or a watercolor. On Labor Day Monday I was in a bad mood for various reasons, but I did a painting and it helped me to feel better. I am completely amateurish, which is the point: I am letting myself learn to fail more. Julia loves to paint with me. Claire likes it but is also enjoying her piano. We’re the Austen sisters around here, I tell you what.

Speaking of, Claire has mastered the rice cooker and the kettle, and tonight’s stir fry with chicken, broccoli, green beans and carrots was mostly her work. She taught Julia to make the rice. Claire likes to bring me cups of tea, and has been offering to make me gins and tonic as well. Kid knows her mother.

Jeremy’s lovely but between his new startup gig and wushu, and my promotion and the horses, we sort of terrorist fist-bump in passing. But he did get a haircut and is looking totally awesome. I wonder if he would go out with me.

Hugely enjoying this tale of growing up among Mitfords-manque in America.

Life is a scavenger hunt run backward as well as forward, a race to comprehend. But with Wasps, the caretakers lock the explanatory sorrows away, then swallow the key.

It is unkind of me to consider the embarrassment of the aristocracy my own private soap opera, but Goddess forgive me, I do.

When Donny lived in Manhattan he’d often walk by the Ralph Lauren store on Madison and glower at the windows’ horsy homages to the world the Robinsons once bestrode. “If Ralph really wants to get to the heart of Waspdom,” Donny says, “he should do a whole window full of beakers of lithium and patients in white gowns.”

I picked this up because one of the Rumpus bloggers read it in the Australian coffee shop in Brooklyn that Matt took me to – what? That’s cromulent! – but no one told me it was an AIDS memoir.

The Last Time

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his hands and said,
I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you’re going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

Oh, and also a love letter to her brother, two things which separately and together are bound to make me verklempt. I miss them, the AIDS dead. I imagine another mentor or two, acid-tongued, politically astute, fond of my children. The other books Paul Monette would have written, Kenny Everett’s late night talk show, Freddie Mercury’s kickass performance at the Olympic opening ceremony in London, the rest of Derek Jarman’s films. Fuck.

Nothing for it but my best Zen life hack: pretend you are travelling back from the future to see that person you loved one last time.

1. I work in SF’s tourist central, two blocks from the cable car turnaround, which is usually just infuriating but today, also inexplicable. I’m not sure how a person loses an 11-year-old page from his or her diary, but here it is, made weirdly poignant in spite of its shitty politics by its date.

2. I was still holding the page when I joined the line at Peet’s. The lady in front of me insisted that my favourite barista had short-changed her. “I gave you a twenty and you only gave me five!” “I’m sure I gave you another ten,” said my barista, flustered. “Is that it there hidden in your hand?” I asked the lady helpfully. She scowled at me. When I was a checkout girl in the eighties I was handsomely ripped off by a woman pulling that scam.

3. An update from my work-best-friend on the friend of hers who adopted a baby from Kazakhstan and bought a BMW and paid cash for a half-million-dollar house, all on a comfortable middle class salary: “she’s in Camp Cupcake!” I look blank. “Where Martha Stewart was?” Nothing. “She’s in the federal prison in Alderson. She embezzled $800,000 from her job.”

My mornings are not usually this entertaining.

This made me swoon:

But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.

Stopping now, I promise! I only just figured out where Amazon keeps my Kindle highlights, so I worked through a little backlog there :)

Marr is Australia’s best journalist right now, as far as I can gather. He is acute on both what makes us different…

David Malouf has a wonderful theory that it’s the English we carried in our baggage that makes America and Australia such different places. In the early seventeenth century, settlers took to America a language of abstractions: “Passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time, this was the language of … dissenters … who left England to found a new society that would be free, as they saw it, of authoritarian government by Church and Crown.” Malouf argues that by the time Australia was colonised, the language had changed. What the First Fleet brought here “was the language of the English and Scottish Enlightenment: sober, unemphatic, good-humoured; a very sociable and moderate language; modern in a way that even we would recognise, and supremely rational and down to earth”.

…and what makes us boringly the same as everyone else.

Wherever the Tampa tactics lead Australia in the years to come, those of us in the City Recital Hall yesterday will remember the sight and the sound of a white, prosperous audience baying for border protection. They know it’s the winning ticket and John Howard has found it for them. He is a genius of sorts: he looks this country in the face and sees us not as we wish we were, not as one day we might be, but exactly as we are. The political assessment is ruthlessly realistic. Only the language is coy. But who has ever admitted to playing the race card?

So great, I had to go back and read the whole series in one go.

…the psychological impact of inherited wealth, the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it; the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire; the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich, generating their characteristic disguises: the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation in perfect taste; the defeated, the idle, and the frivolous, and their opponents, the standard-bearers, all living in a world that the dense glitter of alternatives made it hard for love and work to penetrate. If these values were in themselves sterile, they looked all the more ridiculous after two generations of disinheritance.

Right now I am reading Tad Friend’s Cheerful Money, which is At Last’s transatlantic twin.

You can see tragedy coming from a considerable distance when you are older, but when you are young tragedy does not pertain to you and certainly never catches up to you.

The best book I have ever read about death.

When the blowup rose out of Mann Gulch and its smoke merged with the jet stream, it looked much like an atomic explosion in Nevada on its cancerous way to Utah.

I’ve had some discouraging rides lately, feeling like I will never not suck, etc. Remember how Colin asked us to rethink cadence, and I forgot how to ride, and then I realized that Bella just needs a bigger canter to get over bigger fences? What I elide with a neat little narrative like that one is that the epiphany itself is almost beside the point. The stories I tell in my blog, like the running commentary in my head, are post-facto rationalizations of choices my body had already made. And muscle memory doesn’t have epiphanies, not really. You get a feeling, then you lose it, then you struggle to get it again, and you get a little worse, and you beat yourself up for sucking and being lame (which are sexist and ableist slurs, so… don’t do that, anyway.)

But you keep trying, if you’re me, in your half-arsed, forty-something, adult amateur way, as if riding ever so slightly better, not hanging on the reins, not squashing the movement with your stiffness, not blocking on one side – as if those things had some kind of moral weight, or any meaning beyond just exactly what they are. More rationalization, I guess. The truth is I want to ride because I just, I just want to ride, I always have. It’s beyond wanting to jump classes or overcome obstacles or transcend my earthbound whatever, although it is all those things as well. What it fundamentally is is having glimpsed something very good – that feeling, very occasionally, that I am moving with Bella, helping not hindering, that the two of us together are something more than the sum of its parts. And being unable to forget, or to effectively reproduce that singing moment, that plain canter with the horse moving straight under me, outside hind to inside fore, and nothing in me stopping that, my body like water, like light, like part of her body.

I had that, in glimmers, last week, and on Friday. Today we rode with Colin again and the thing about Colin is that he puts the jumps higher for us than any of the other trainers do: that’s his privilege, because it’s his name above the door. He was actually pulling them down because Toni had been jumping Coneli at a solid 4’6″, but even taken down they were 3′ or so, and the oxers were wide, and there was a hogsback.

I looked at them and knew that I could be afraid and let the fear stop me, but I could feel Bells sound as a bell underneath me, and I knew that Colin wouldn’t overface me, so I did that thing where I pretend to be the rider they think I am, and I felt the tension ebb away. That “chill the fuck out, I got this” feeling. We jumped the massive course and all I thought about was Bella’s rhythm and my line. I made mistakes but I fixed them. There was a huge oxer I thought would be a problem but when we rounded the corner to it I saw my distance and showed it to Bella and she jumped it. And then there was a white vertical five strides before the hogsback, and I turned her to it and saw the five and we jumped through it all forward, on the lightest possible contact; and it was very good.

“She goes well for you,” said Colin. “Cranky old mare.”

We stayed up to watch the landing. Claire crashed out but Jules was with us when we jumped up and down and screamed and cried a little bit. I hope she remembers this for ever: the helpless fear, the perfect landing, the grainy pictures beamed back from another world.

You will not be tested on this material.

Showjumping is the sport I do, but eventing is the sport I follow. Eventing has a narrative: there are teams, and there are three phases (dressage, cross-country, showjumping) such that after three days of competition everything can hang on whether a horse taps a rail with a hind foot or not, and if so, whether that rail falls. It’s VERREH EXCITINGE. I’ve been enmeshed in its DRAMZ since reading KM Peyton’s glorious books about it at an impressionable age, and it’s why Princess Anne is my favourite Royal, because she rode on the British team in Montreal.

This year’s Olympic eventing offers up maybe the dramiest dramz in, oh, ever. Let’s see: the US coach ran off with his mistress, who he had made the showjumping coach. Scandal! The US coach is also the father of a member of the British team, which member is also the daughter of the abovementioned Princess Anne and therefore the granddaughter of the Queen. The dad says he might watch his daughter ride, if he can find the time. For these and other reasons, the dad is widely thought of in eventing circles as a gigantic tool. Two members of his US team are former Australian Olympians who have switched sides, leaving Australia to scramble for other riders. Those Australian-Americans rescued one of the Olympic horses from a burning barn last year, by dint of punching out the fire chief who was trying to prevent them from running into the flames.

It’s a Jilly Cooper novel COME TO LIFE. Me, I will be rooting for Ingrid Klimke, for sentimental reasons as her father Reiner Klimke is still my favourite equestrian ever; Mary King, a marvellous English rider who is best thought of as Helen Mirren on horseback; Boyd Martin, a punk kid who is one of the heroes of the barn fire; and Hawley Bennett, a Canadian who is based in California, because I saw her ride at Woodside last year and she was awesome.

Most of all, though, I’ll be hoping that everyone gets around with no injuries whatsoever, not even a loose shoe. Eventing has a filthy little secret: it’s sometimes fatal. So that’s my Olympic dream: that just this once, everybody lives.

ETA: Gold medal: German team, including Ingrid Klimke. Silver medal: British team, including Mary King. BOO YAH.

…these ones gun- and bomb- and massacre-related, and resulting in me waking up and staring at the ceiling thinking “What am I doing having kids in a world like this?”

And then today, a music festival in a local park, beautiful bands and perfect weather and duck and mango tacos and iced chai.

Impossible to reconcile all the different Americas. Love and fear and love.

We spent the fourth of July in the Sierras with two families from the kids’ school. There were some pretty epic treats: CatHaven, Boyden Cavern, my first wild bear, a juvenile, walking through a sunny glade by a lake. But the lake had Christian camps all around it and was unexpectedly upsetting. Claire is reaching the age I was when I joined the unpleasant church, and I lost an entire night to nightmares about the past invading the present.

I keep coming back to something helpful the wife said a few weeks ago. I said I didn’t know why I let it get to me so much, given that I was not myself one of the victims. She said that I am allowed to mourn my own losses. That got me thinking about what those losses were.

I spent the years from ages 9 to 21 in an institution where everyone with any kind of authority lied routinely about everything that was important. I was praised for my worst behaviour and attacked unmercifully for all the things I like about myself. Black was white, up was down, right was wrong. I was predisposed to depression, obviously, but what I learned at the church was that I could neither trust myself nor anyone else.

Nothing remarkable about that. Institutions rot. Here’s to fluid overlays, begun with the enthusiastic consent of all parties and subject to strict term limits.

I read Leonard’s book and identified completely with his crunchy Granola post-scarcity, zero-coercion aliens and their fluid overlays for getting things done. I said to Danny: “I think I may be becoming an anarchist,” and Danny, because he is perfect, ran off to find a pamphlet to push into my willing hands.

The pamphlet is perfect. It is Kevin Carson’s “Resilient Communities: Society After State Capitalism.” The first essay talks about local economies, including farmers’ markets and barter systems. The second essay talks about the historical roots of such local economies: Pompeiian villas and labor cooperatives.

I started to realize that I have been a practising anarchist for quite some time. Consider! I like: credit unions, hackerspaces, Mechanics’ Institutes, small-press books, community gardens and California commune and other DIY architecture. I dislike: large banks, surveillance, inequality, institutional racism and sexism and the police state.

I’ve been thinking a lot about money, both professionally and politically. Despite the overwhelming centrality of venture capital to the technology industry, my standard (good) advice to engineer-entrepreneurs is: “bootstrap. Run off revenues. Never sign a term sheet.” The more I read Keynes, the less I think of money as stored value. Money is something else.

This is important. Carson brings up Schumpeter, who distinguishes between “the money theory of credit” and “the credit theory of money.” We live in a world ruled by the money theory of credit. That is, when you borrow money from a bank or VC, it is assumed that loan comes out of a pile of cash placed in the bank or fund by account holders or limited partners. The credit – the loan or investment – is funded by the money, which exists. Right?

Wrong. Schumpeter’s credit theory of money turns that logic on its head. “It is much more realistic to say that the banks ‘create credit…’ than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them.” What does it mean to create credit? Think about what “credit” actually means. It is a measure of trust in a relationship. Money flows from the social contract.

That’s why Keynesianism worked, especially after WW2: people were too afraid of the consequences of not trusting one another, and so they credited one another with enough goodwill to build the Interstate Highway System and the National Health. It worked right up until Reagan and Thatcher made hate fashionable again.

Carson takes up the argument:

“Capital” is a term for a right of property in organizing and disposing of this present labor. The same basic cooperative functions could be carried out just as easily by the workers themselves, through mutual credit. Under the present system, the capitalist monopolizes those cooperative functions, and thus appropriates the productivity gains from the social division of labor.”

Far from “storing” “value” in the form of “money”, banks and venture capitalists subtract credit from the social contract by adding (mostly worthless) extra layers of abstraction between individual actors. The mortgage crisis began with liar loans and banks selling off mortgages: anything to distance themselves from the consequences of what they had done.

Vast wealth is hoarded money, stagnant credit. It is more disgusting and a bigger threat to mental and public health and aesthetics than the hoarding of physical goods.

So that’s where I am. Still supporting Obama because of Affordable Care, but adamantly opposed to extraordinary rendition and detention without trial. Not exactly soured on electoral politics, but empowered to say A Plague On Both Your Houses! because finally able to imagine an alternative: a society in which we help each other, listen to one another and share what we have. In short, I am an anarchist.

Claire and I were driving home from lunch at Taco Los Altos (burritos, Kanye West, the Supreme Court and Sigmund Freud). We were just turning into Eugenia when the car parked next door to Colin’s house jumped the curb, accelerated across the street and T-boned Colin’s truck. It sat there revving and revving, smoke pouring off its tires, about fifteen feet in front of us, while I stared at it, dumbfounded.

I had to back out into Mission and drive around the block. We parked and walked back down to talk to Colin. “I am so glad it hit my truck,” he said. “The little boy was in there and the engine was running. He likes to play in the front seat, and he put his foot on the accelerator. If he hadn’t hit my truck he could have been killed.”