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Monthly Archives: February 2012

About Men (Songs Of Our Fathers)

22 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Alice Salles in Whatever

≈ 1 Comment

My ancestors believed no man should run away from his responsibilities. Yes. To face your demons, your foes and your lovers with the same integrity of character was just another name for being a man (or a tough and girlie woman like me).

My ancestors didn’t have balls they had a foundation.

While others were running away or begging for mercy under the shinny blades of foreigners, my ancestors were declaring independence, creating their own language and declaring war on anybody who attempted to keep them tamed. My ancestors created a new nation out of love for their own kind and respect for what they pursued to be a free civilization.

My ancestors believed that to exist without lingering under the shadow of an overpowering church was a truly free-living experience and so they marched and created a new State.

My ancestors loved the ocean, the sweat and tears of their brothers and sisters and found the thrill of crying quite fulfilling since melancholy was just another name for love.

Often enough, my ancestors believed they could too be weak and fall under the spell of a proposal they would not be able to refuse but until then, they were sworn to be men and men don’t fucking run away.

When someone I know refuses to solve a problem like a man solves a problem, intrigue kicks in. How could one prefer to run when the only alternative is to stand and speak up? I don’t know and I could not be certain for sure. Until the moment I get an answer I’ll repeat: a man doesn’t run away, create excuses, refuses to listen, no.  A man doesn’t need a strategy to escape when the problem can be solved and a man doesn’t run away when the problem doesn’t have a solution, a man stands and faces the consequences simply because it is his responsibility.

After all, cowards are wimpy and the world always enjoyed whipping chicken butts into butter.

Todays Little Revelation

19 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by Aubrey Anne Dickinson in Family & Friends, Living, Reality check?

≈ 2 Comments

On days like that these I dream myself home. I put myself in the yard—the air is warm in a soft, kiss your skin kind of way and it smells like fresh grass and sweet apple blossoms. I am out there barefoot, holding a bowl of blackberries—my hands sticky and my mouth purple. It’s quiet in a way that a city can never be quiet. I can hear my mother singing or my brother with his infinite clever comments. I can hear my sisters laughing.  I can hear the neighbor’s door shut down the hill.  I can hear my own thoughts give way to a happy nothing. In my dream, I close my eyes. I take a moment to feel the sun on my face and the soft blades of green between my toes. I suck the sweet air into my lungs and swish it around to taste its perfect flavor.

On days like these, it hits me—suddenly! Life may come in like a hurricane and knock all your most precious things down. They may shatter. You may come out battered and half broken. It’s true. These things can happen. It’s not an uncommon story. It hits me that I am not living as I should—that the life I need is just there—over those mountains—far but certainly not intangible.

I made myself a promise to always be happy; to shine; to believe in magic and everyday miracles. To fall in love with nothing more than the perfect blackberry or the way even a sprinkler can bring rainbows forth to dance. And above all to laugh my ass off all the way to the end.

Summer of the Rooster

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Alisha Dickinson in Family & Friends

≈ 4 Comments

The year I lived with my cousin Cherry, right smack in the middle of Hollywood, was a year of many firsts and it left an indelible mark on my unsure swagger into adulthood.  Cherry is nothing if not original, and her uniqueness touches everything she does; from what clothes to wear to whom she brings home for an impromptu jam session at 3am, so it’s no wonder that my sister and I gave each other exasperated looks when she brought Rocky home.

Not only did the three of us live together but we also worked together, in a hip & chaotic cafe in Hollywood, a recipe for surefire family spats if ever there was one.  Luckily, we had the good sense to work opposite shifts and so it was that we got a 1st hand account of how Rocky came into our lives from the cafe night manager before Cherry had brought him home.

Our cafe was located on an especially busy LA street corner, right off the 101 and I’d witnessed more than a few accidents in that very intersection.  So, on that lazy summer evening when Rocky first made his appearance, when a pickup truck, crusin’ down the street hit a bump and lost some of its’ cargo, the last thing I would have done is run into the intersection to grab him.  That may sound callous and cowardly but Rocky wasn’t something cuddly and cute, he didn’t conjure up precious childhood memories of a long-lost beloved pet. He was a rooster. Something people put out in their yards and sometimes ate.  Yet there was Cherry, weaving in and out of traffic, chasing a rooster down Cahuenga Blvd.

She did eventually get him out of the street, into a box and all the way home to our apartment.  There, my sisters’ and I’s two ornery cats sat diligently outside Cherry’s room in the hopes that Rocky would somehow conquer the fortress of boxes and pillows that Cherry had used to blockade her doorless bedroom and fall down into their feline clutches.  Needless to say, Cherry eventually realized that a Hollywood apartment, with two fat cats and three hygienic girls, was no place for a rooster and she drove him out to a farm in the valley where he would be free to roam about with no fears of ever being eaten.

Cherry took the loss of Rocky hard and though we only had him a week, I learned then, that when a thing touches you, be it a person, a place or a rooster, it can be hard to let it go.  One thing’s struggle can be another’s freedom and often in life, as with so much else, it is the choices we make, when to let go and when to hold on, which defines us.

Just a lonely boy

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by Alice Salles in Ocean, True story?

≈ 1 Comment

He was approached early one morning by an apparition.

The vision of a kind of life he had never imagined but repeatedly wished for his own: the kind you read about in novels.

It stepped into his room just before the alarm clock went off and it spoke to him in a language he understood, it leaned over his bed carrying the scent of a woman who knew him better than he could have ever learned to know himself. It spoke to him in a tone he could have never heard coming from someone in any other way but the way it presented itself to him, as the only one who would ever be ready and willing to take him in: a mother and lover beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not just one woman, the woman: an irrefutable fact.

She had come as a whisper first, than as a whole figure. Her eyes smiled and so did her lips; the fullness of her hair smelled of the ocean. She was it – he figured.

Then the alarm clock rang. The squeaky sound shattered perfection to pieces: it was only an illusion after all and he was left to pick up the bits and pieces, hoping to put it all together before long.

A perfectly normal week came along and then a second perfectly normal week kicked in and then a third. A month or two, maybe three, twelve even. Two years, maybe more or less, who knows?

She never came back, the apparition. The scent of ocean never returned in the fullness of her hair in the middle of a dream but he knew, oh he knew… life may grant you with the quality of reason but it will never grace just anybody with the talent for recognizing sheer virtue and he had it: he had just been graced.

It was now in the books, the time would surely come. It always does.

A Call of Revolt

07 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by Aubrey Anne Dickinson in Reality check?

≈ 2 Comments

A Call of Revolt

This is my cry! This is my Revolt (for the moment). This is me questioning you. This is me asking you to question me.  This is my stance against what we have become.

I am not typically a political person. I sit on the sidelines. I watch. I flutter around ideas that have beautiful borders—portraits of kindness. I vote because it is my duty. I am proud because it is in my blood. My ancestors lives are interwoven in the history of this nation—they were great people fulfilling great dreams in a land that could make even them look small.

It has come to my attention that we have dishonored them. I am guessing that we have dishonored your people—your history—as well. At what point did we become so complacent? When did we let the fight in each of us go? When did we say that it was okay to be herded—to let another mans thoughts fill our brains and dictate our lives?  That is not the American that I know or that I strive to be.

Our government was built to serve us (yes, us! We lowly people). It was constructed to protect us and to serve us. Hell, it even gave us the right to bare arms so that the common man was never less than anything a government can grow to be. Our nation that was founded on so many lofty ideas has grown weary—it is covered now in bureaucratic red tape. It is dirtied by greed and corruption. It has grown into a great beast that we must protect and serve. It has acquired an appetite for revenue that our small pockets can’t possibly fill.

It enables people to do less with their lives (I took a friends’ unemployment check to the bank to discover that the government pays him more weekly than my bi-monthly check I receive for working full time. Why work when unemployment will offer you greater wages? The common man is crushed by enormous economic woes—homes are foreclosed on—school programs are cut– small business’ fail as large corporations prosper (they have money to endorse politicians, you know?).

Our government has a ticket for everything. We need permits to do anything. And we are taxed again and again.  I am pretty sure that my ancestors left the land of King George for a reason. But somehow, his policies seemed to have followed them here. Just a few hundred years later we have become everything that we set out not to be.

Agree with me or don’t. But raise your own questions and do us all a favor and think for yourself.

A leap

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Alisha Dickinson in Living

≈ 1 Comment

There is an inalienable right, in life, to be allowed to strive for something better.  To be able to dream of grander things & hope for something more~it’s part of what makes us human.  And who can blame someone for dreaming?? For having the courage to leap into the unknown in the fierce hope of finding a life worth living??

So this is my Cheers to all those who leap.  Those who set out on an unknown adventure, to new lands, new languages, new lives.  And as we sit back, in our glass tower, and criticize those who come, hoping to get in, it would be wise to ask how we got there ourselves and whether we would have the courage to do it again.

Dedicated to all those who’ve come before me and those dreamers I’ve met along the way, who had the guts to leave all they’ve ever known in the hopes of finding something better.  May I be as brave as you.

  • Alice Salles
  • Aubrey Anne Dickinson
  • Alisha Dickinson
  • Aubrey, Alice & Alisha.

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