Regressions and Recriminations

Another protest at the Gates of the Death House yesterday. While transplanting my agapanthus bulbs out front (everyone's pissed off that I took them out, so now I'm putting them back) I have mixed feelings about going to it, though I know that eventually I will be swept up in it as the protesters have to pass my house to get to the gates of the prison.
With shovel in hand and dirt on my face, still in my pajamas though it be 3pm, I see a familiar face, a guy with dreadlocks and a guitar, carrying a small child, walking by the beach in front.
Holy shit, it's Michael Franti. Barefoot in this cold weather.
I can't resist the urge to make contact so I walk over to him and say "Hey, Michael I love most of your music". He gives me a hug. Jeez, what a hippie. The entry in this blog "What I Be" is his song of the same name.
Okay, now I have to go. If Franti can go barefoot, I can go in my pajamas (though they look like regular casual clothes).
At the same time a huge motor cycle gang blast their way past the house with deafening sound effects which I'm sure pisses off the neighbors.
Turns out this is the annual toy run by the Hell's Angels, delivering toys to the visitor center for prisoners families. How fucking obnoxious though their intentions are good I guess.
My ex neighbor and friend Lisa is among them and I am momentarily feeling torn between talking to her, catching up and participating in the parallel event of the death penalty protest.
I love Lisa. Never met anyone who tries harder than she does to do the right thing in this life, clean and sober a raising a kid after years of drugging and mayhem.
But she's white trash through and through, just white trash with a lotta integrity.
Michael is playing his guitar to a small crowd while his kid plays with something on the ground. He always sounds like shit acoustically and the event is lacklustre. Not at all like the "Power to the Peaceful" sellout concerts in Golden Gate Park he does every year.
Open mike time, no one says anything so I take the mike and say something like "Whatever a person does deserving of punishment, removal from society, the state should not be in the business of killing people, period".
I miss my mother. Thinking about poverty, injustice, knowing that she knew about these things and cared deeply about them despite all that went on between her and me in later years, the difficulty of having any kind of relationship with her that didn't make me want to slit my wrists or hers.
Her keen sense of justice became warped and morphed into a kind of perpetual victimhood that made it impossible for her to see anything else. Like seeing the holes in the cheese but not the cheese itself.
Victimhood paralyzed her. It contaminated everything she said and did in later years, making it impossible for her children to help her. Made it impossible for her to help herself.
I miss having her to talk to even though I didn't do much of it. But I could have, and I know she would have been loving and supportive of me no matter what.
It was hard for me to talk to her because I resist victimhood and it's paralytic effects, fearing being dragged down into a morass of self pity and self righteousnous. It would have been too easy and the power to be self directed would have disappeared, however momentarily.
I miss her. Alot.