Friends,

Mo and I have just returned from visiting Smash in the hospital at UCSF Parnassus. She is currently being moved out of the intensive care unit into a normal room.

As most of you don't yet know, on Sunday she manifested an aggressive bacterial infection in her right arm. It is partially a complication of surgery during her breast cancer treatment during 2005. The current diagnosis is cellulitis (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulitis), but there are other less pleasant possibilities. She has been on broad-spectrum antibiotics since arrival in the ER on Sunday afternoon, and today is sufficiently stable to be moved out of intensive care.

For the past three days, Mo and I have been spending all of our free time (as well as Mo's entire workdays) in the hospital with Smash. Keeping her emotional state stable and her spirits up is critical to beating the infection and recovering quickly and fully. In short, she needs company. She has not lived in San Francisco for a long time, and her family is in the Midwest. Mo and I (not to mention Smash) would super-duper appreciate anyone who can take the time to pay her a visit. If you have met Smash and spent any time with her, you know her to be smart, caring, compassionate, funny... She's super. Please help us support her through what is truly a shitty situation.

If you want to know more, including her location and visiting hours, please contact Mo or I as soon as possible. Tribe message, email, phone, whatever. Fastest response by SMS or email to Mo.

Mo: 203-675-2438, m.khodadoust@gmail.com
B: 408-205-0031, bmc@section9.net

Y'all a buncha without-me-playa-goin-ass motherfuckers.

Also, GAH! I certainly hope I can bring this project to some kind of useful conclusion in another two days. TWO DAYS? Christ. I'm fucked. In three weeks, I've had to learn two AMS (Application Management System--the portion of the JME that is responsible for managing the lifecycle of Java applications on an embedded device) architectures, Windows IPC (*barf*), and the JSR 211 specification, and then mostly rewrite the JSR211 code because the new architecture that I'm porting to is so different.

I'm being a whiny bitch--this is my JOB, after all. But I'm also in China, which is, itself, a little stressful from time to time. This morning as I was almost ready to head out of the hotel to come to work, the thought popped into my head, "Oh, shit, it's still CHINA out there, isn't it?" As though "China" were a weather pattern I had been hoping would blow over. So.... Ordering breakfast by pointing; wild gesticulations with the taxi driver to get him to drop me off where I want to go, instead of where he seems to want to take me. Also, fast-ish food courts in and near office parks are, it turns out, mediocre the world over.

At least Mo is home. She's gonna be lucky if I don't break her on Friday night.

Time flows through
me, in a hotel room high
above Chaoyang. I have come
to Beijing to do my small part
in
the
accelerating
enrichment of the elite
of China, and of those other
nations that own
and are owned in turn
by parts of it.

Time flowed through
me in the eternal, unchanging summer
afternoons of childhood,
just the same. Misdirecting
mitosis; strengthening and building
the striated muscle
that allows
me to do; bringing to seed,
bloom
and fruition
the brain
that allows me to be.

I didn't know, then, that the vibrating
rush
of the unfolding was
wearing on me.

Or, maybe I did.
I curse Frost for
warning me that the memory fools. Does this monkey tell
himself lies
about
the past, to make the narrative
more pleasing? The flow
of events more
satisfying?
Serendipitous?

I cetainly feel in this moment,
and in many others recent, a helplessness in the
apprehension
of inevitability.
Whatever
I choose, the world
will continue to be. However full
my accomplishments, however
tragic,
comic,
pathetic my failures,
I am one small dog.

What minute change
in the stream--whatever

chaotic,
dynamical
perturbation
I can
create--it seems

I can not predict.

And I have watched
others, women
and men that I admire,
whose poise
direction
serenity I seek
after, err
in recollection
of their own days and concerns.

There was a terror in seeing it.

But as the time
slides through me, its bulk
filling the channel of
my being as water
fills
a sluice
through a dam,
each drop that passes
by
is gone.

So much water was before
me once, and now so much
is
gone
behind.

And it is all full.
Each moment pregnant
with possibility,
a tree laden
with fruit
to pick,

to crush

between

my

teeth,

to feel slide
cool and wet into my
throat on the way to becoming me.