anti:freeze

Every possible moving nightmare has come true, so I am sad to say that posting will be delayed a little while longer. In the meantime, I invite you to take a stroll through my categories:

psychogeography

guns

family

lomo

to the dead boy

forensics

I was sitting on a bench in Jamison Square this afternoon, reading Being and Nothingness,* enjoying the empty (and kid-free) stretch of sand behind the water fountain, when dirty smoke drifted into my face. Two hand-rolled cigarettes had been tossed near a tree, and now they were smoldering on the dry dirt, their paper peeling back as it blackened. I bent over and watched as a circle of gray ashes slowly expanded and collapsed - my own personal volcanic landscape, bubbling with tar pits and magma.

I remembered the two wisdom teeth I carry in my bag, and I wanted to toss them into the ashes, stir them around with a stick.

But the usual paranoia kicked in. I will get blamed when this tree bursts into flame. Someone will remember my red t-shirt and glasses, my bob haircut and baggy jeans. Are surveillance cameras recording the smile on my face? Do I look like someone who would burn down a park? I stood up and stomped on the ashes, but the paper still burned. A toddler squealed in the nearby fountain. I grabbed my messenger bag and walked to the Hoyt Street Properties office to alert the authorities.

And at the exact moment I made my decision, every person in the park came into sharp, high-resolution focus. The stripes and checkers on their swimsuits glowed brighter. Hair highlights flickered like prisms in the sunshine. As I walked past, I felt that I could wave to total strangers. Funny, these people seemed like actors or props when I first arrived, so perfect the city of Portland must have chosen them. Now, they seemed almost familiar.

I thought about Sartre peeping through the keyhole, how he flushed with shame at the sound of approaching footsteps, and I shuddered. What if nobody was watching me at all? No surveillance cameras. No park management. No police.

And what if I had sacrificed the two teeth?

*and yes, I do understand the irony, comedy, ridiculousness - whatever you want to call it - of reading this particular book on a park bench in the Pearl.

David Ulin - my Antioch mentor for three semesters - has published The Myth of Solid Ground, and you can purchase it soon at powells.com. I was lucky enough to read the manuscript after I graduated last June, and it was amazing. Plans are in the works to post an interview with David right here, so look for it soon (most likely late July/early August).

construction site in the Pearl at night

The concrete walls and turquoise glow remind me of the basement in my childhood house. It was moldy and wet, with water leaks springing from every corner and a sludgy, toxic moat. The moat was my father's idea. He took a jackhammer to the bare concrete floor and worked his way around the perimeter while we all plugged our ears upstairs. It was the only way he knew to stop the water, and disgusting as the moat looked, it actually worked - for a while. (Later, I would learn he had other plans that simply went unrealized. The moat was never meant to last.)

I hated its rough concrete bricks (painted turquoise for the only party ever hosted there) and the weirdly cheery curtains, decorated with poppy blossoms and coated in furry mold inside the folds. I hated the texture and temperature of the floor, how when my toes scraped a certain way, I could taste the must on my tongue. But I loved the emptiness. Or maybe not the emptiness, but the sense that the basement could still become. The space had potential. Energy.

I wonder how the Pearl will feel when all the empty spaces are sealed, the curtains and blinds closed, the doors locked.

The first time I walked past, I misread the sign. Think Safely instead of Think Safety. Which got me thinking about the difference, and what it means to post this warning (command?) on a fence.

If the sign commands me to think safely, then I have already failed to comply. Questions are inherently dangerous, risky, unpredictable. That, and I had to kneel down in the middle of the street to snap this photograph.

Safety is a noun instead of an adverb, so what does it mean to think safety? Obsessing every second over traffic signals, carrying mace in my messenger bag, calculating the probability of a crane dropping a steel beam on my head? Practicing the fire drills and stocking up on duct tape? Driving instead of flying? There is a paradox here. You have to think danger in order to think safety. And the more danger you perceive, the less safe you feel.

And then there is the fence. Why do we always feel safe when we are locked out? Or when someone else is locked in? When spaces and streets are unavailable? Is the sign sending a secret message to think fence?

But most important - at least for me - is why I misread the sign at all. What unconscious fear can project its own alphabet, spelling the very commands I resist most?

my entry for Photo Friday: ocean

As a kid, I used to dig holes in the hopes of reaching the ocean floor. I had heard the myth that you could make it all the way to China, but I just wanted to get somewhere deep - somewhere where even the surface was submerged, where surface and interior became one. Drain all the water, and the ocean floor transforms into a surface - the outermost layer of earth, a vast expanse of ground that we can walk on. In this sense, it exists in two states at once.

Here in the city, this sealed staircase is the closest I can get to that feeling. I want to follow the steps down, disappear beneath the city. Explore the surface beneath the surface.

But I am not even certain these steps still exist. Or if this was ever a staircase at all.

My mother is here from Iowa, and since we haven't seen each other in almost five years, we are spending every possible minute hanging out, reminiscing, and eating deliciously naughty food. I promise to post soon.

David Ulin is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith. He was also one of my mentors at Antioch Los Angeles.

Below is an interview we conducted via email for anti:freeze. My questions appear in italics, his answers in plain text.

I was struck by the Denis Johnson quote at the beginning of your book:

But everything is like we think it is, don't you get it? Out of the million little things happening on this beach, you can only be aware of seven things at once, seven things at any given time. ... We never really get the whole picture. Not even a microscopic part of it. ... Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations. - Denis Johnson

It seems to hint at something beyond the issue of science vs. delusion or truth vs. fiction - pointing toward a new way of understanding the world. What does this mean for nonfiction writers?

What it means for nonfiction writers (and for fiction writers, for that matter) is, in the most basic sense a rephrasing of that old Hassan i Sabbah statement: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Or conversely, “Everything is true; everything is permitted.” I chose that quote as an epigraph because it seemed to me to encapsulate an idea that I’ve been wrestling with for years, one that was very much at the heart of what I was after in this book, which is the essential unknowability of the truth in any but the most subjective sense. As writers, or humans, we are all observers and participants in our own constructed universes; we take the raw data of the world and shape it into a pattern that makes sense to us. This is equally true of science and delusion; that’s why scientific theories change so often. It seemed to me that in a book that was largely about conjecture – what do earthquakes mean? how do they operate? what do I think about it? – this was an essential notion to embrace from the outset. How could I claim any authority other than the subjective authority of my own mind? We’re all just making it up all the time.

Early in the book you write, "Not only does this undermine our belief in the everyday stability of existence, it also offers, in a way I can't pin down exactly, evidence of an entirely different vision of reality: odd juxtapositions, inexplicable happenings, situations that don't add up." Was this a sudden shift for you, as a New Yorker living in Los Angeles? Or did the process of writing The Myth of Solid Ground open this up?

And on a related note ... You were in the process of writing when 9-11 happened. Do you find any intersections here, in how a sudden and destructive event can change our world views? Or is it different because 9-11 was a man-made disaster? Does that change anything?

This idea of odd juxtapositions, of signs and symbols, of a meaning, or a reality, that is always just the slightest bit out of reach – all this is endemic to how I think about and interact with the universe, and has been since I first began to think about the philosophical underpinnings of reality. It has nothing to do with California per se; it’s just the way I’m wired. I remember when I was 13, reading an interview with George Harrison in which he explained the concept of Maya – everything in this world is just an illusion, a dream overlaid on top of some deeper universal truth. At first, I though this was pretty crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Of course all this is just an illusion; it passes like a fleeting thought. I really think of that interview, that comment, as the genesis of a lot of things for me; it led me into philosophical areas I might otherwise have missed.

When I was in high school, I was one of those kids who took drugs not to get high so much as to see the face of God. I wanted to get in touch with the ineffable, and in some sense I still do. My heroes were not just the political radicals – Che, Frantz Fanon, Abbie Hoffman, Eugene V. Debs – but also the psychic explorers: Ram Dass, Carlos Casteneda, Black Elk, William Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson. In that sense, The Myth of Solid Ground is just the most recent manifestation of a process I’ve been investigating for a long time. The difference is that I look to the ground now, to the physical, for my taste of the ineffable, rather than to the sky. But in some ways, earthquakes tie directly back into the notion of Maya, because if a quake can shake this building or this city down, then what else could it all have been in the first place but an illusion or a dream?

As for 9-11, it’s too soon. I don’t understand it yet. I still feel it viscerally, as a former resident of lower Manhattan, on the level of loss for a neighborhood I love. I do think there are pragmatic, psychological similarities between earthquakes and terrorism, mostly having to do with how we prepare ourselves for sudden, unexpected devastation; I think we need to bring the same sense of release, of setting our fear aside, whether the mechanism of disaster is an earthquake or a terrorist strike.

The Myth of Solid Ground is an extremely self-conscious book, with constant references to story-telling, lies, fiction, and process. For example, the first four words of the book are "Let me tell you ... " This immediately draws attention to the narrative as story - or maybe more appropriately, as a kind of myth. It has a fatherly or generational quality to it - like something is being passed down. And immediately after you utter these words, you tell an elaborate lie. Are you creating a kind of fault line for the reader - in which narratives and eyewitness accounts are called into question? I found myself going back and reassessing what had come before, trying to force previous facts to fit into the new reality, questioning the concept of witnesses, or the act of witnessing. And this resonated later on as well, when you mention the lack of credibility to eyewitness accounts of large earthquakes. Why do you undermine your authority in this way? Why lie so elaborately and then admit to doing so?

To me, it’s not a matter of undermining my authority, but rather of establishing authority instead. I don’t believe in truth, or at least not in any truth we can apprehend as humans, so what interest me more is narrative, story, memory, myth. What are the belief systems we use to get through the days? How do we construct meaning from the shard ends of our lives? In a very real sense, that opening sequence is an illustration of this process – obviously, over the last 24 years, I’ve somehow conflated a couple of incidents and woven them together in my memory until they are part of the same event. But I don’t think this is a lie; in fact, I think it gets at the truth in a much deeper, more elemental fashion, because it begins to lead us to the question of how truth works, of what is the nature of belief. It felt absolutely essential to me to begin with this, if only as an illustration of the floating ground we’re all standing on – when it comes to earthquakes, and when it comes to our own lives. We see things, and then we interpret them. And in the act of interpretation, we change the facts to suit our own purposes, on whatever level and by whatever means. What is more true? The facts as they actually took place? Or the meaning we derive from them, the stories that we tell? I will always argue for the latter, that it is our analysis, our interpretation, which is the most fundamentally accurate and interesting, not only in terms of reality but also in regard to ourselves.

How do you see the process of geological science intersecting or resonating with the process of creative writing?

I’ve never really thought about it, to tell the truth, except inasmuch as both involve for me a kind of excavation, a process of looking beneath the surface, beneath the Maya, for the deeper truth. More to the point, I think, is the idea that anything can be a subject for creative writing. This is one of the things I stress when I’m teaching, and it applies here as well – creativity is a function of mind, not material, and anything can be interacted with creatively if we so choose.

At one point, you say that you refuse to keep an earthquake kit because it would tempt fate. I couldn't help remembering this later in the book, when you stop your car on a bridge suspended directly above the San Andreas fault and wait for something to happen. Did you find yourself embracing - even wishing for - disaster? And what about the predictors you profile - do you see their predictions as something more than intuition? That is, an active temptation of fate? A kind of wish?

Yes, absolutely. I actively wished for disaster, even as I actively wished it would not come. This is the great conundrum of fear and devastation, as you can see in America now with terrorism – no one really wants the next strike to take place, but at the same time, we’re all kind of secretly looking forward to it, if only for the relief of it finally happening, so we won’t have to anticipate it anymore. Certainly, the Bush Administration wants it, if only to justify their agenda, to get people to curl up in fear. Often, I think the president is actively courting it, whether out of a sense of apocalyptic Christianity or for some other reason, I don’t know.

As for the predictors, I think it’s a bit more complicated. What surprised me about them as a group was that I did not meet one predictor who I thought was lying – that is, everyone I spoke to seemed genuinely to believe in his or her theories, to think that there was something to it, and that he or she could save a lot of lives. There’s an altruistic element to this, in other words, or perhaps messianic is a more accurate way of putting it. These people are all true believers … so, yes, in the sense that every one of them would like to find him or herself vindicated, I suppose their predictions represent a kind of wish.

The way you describe the 1906 San Francisco quake - as the beginning of contemporary California - reminds me of post 9/11 America (and I am using the word America here on purpose - for what it evokes, for its inherent myths and possibilities.) How do you see The Myth of Solid Ground fitting into our current context of terrorism, eroding democracy, and war? What kinds of lessons can your story offer? I think you hint at this several times throughout the book, but there is never an overt explanation, which I like.

I’m not sure I see it fitting into our current context of forever war and encroaching authoritarianism in any direct way, except for the fact that the book argues for one essential idea above all others: THINK FOR YOURSELF. That’s what I hope I’m getting across in regard to both the scientists and the predictors, that the truth lies somewhere in between all these theories and predictions, and that dogma is inherently limiting, the end point of thought. Towards the end of the book, I talk to a theoretical seismologist named David Bowman, and he says something like, “Once you have an answer, it’s not science anymore.” I remember listening to him say this, and thinking, “YES!” This is what disturbs me about current American policy, both domestic and foreign, that it is based not on the asking of questions but the making of pronouncements, that it’s a zero sum game in which no one is listening or asking anymore.

More fundamentally, to spend time in the presence of geology, of geologic time, is a way of stepping outside human discourse; in that sense, it’s a very Taoist idea. In the Tao te Ching, Lao Tse reflects: “The whirlwind’s spent before the morning ends; / The storm will pass before the day is done. / Who made them, wind and storm? Heaven and earth. / If heaven itself cannot storm for long, / What matter, then, the storms of man?” In some sense, looking at centuries and eons of the earth’s slow movement reminds us of how utterly insignificant we are, which is a horrible idea if you cling too closely to your own ego and (here we go again) sense of Maya, but can be incredibly freeing – ennobling even – if you look at it in different terms.

There seems to be a split between the kinds of evidence and proof you need from research and science, and the elaborate ways in which you adjust to earthquakes in everyday life. You look for signs. You worry about tempting fate. But you also have a lot of skepticism about predictors. You want good science. The Myth of Solid Ground seems to reach a kind of middle way. How do you think this can help readers as they grapple with the political, social, and moral debates around scientific advancements? I suppose what I'm asking is, do you believe your book can reach out beyond earthquakes and geology, and offer a kind of geo-poetic process for everyday life?

Oh God, wouldn’t that be amazing? A geopoetic process for every day life? It’s an interesting question, but the most important aspect is that notion of process, geopoetic or otherwise. For me, the tension is always between rationality and emotion, between what I think and what I feel. I am a critic, both by avocation and vocation, and I place a heavy value on intellect, on clear thinking, on logic and deductive reasoning, on doing the necessary work. That’s where I walk away from some of the predictors, who I’ve seen fudge their data so that their observations might fit their theories instead of the other way around. To me, that’s not playing fair; no matter how much you might want something, if it isn’t true, then it isn’t true. Yet discovering what is true, I think, is a lot harder; I can disprove something a lot more directly than I can prove it. This necessitates a middle way of thinking, in which you have to suspend your disbelief in certain circumstances, and simply go on faith. The irony, of course, is that the best scientists already do this; one of the most fascinating discoveries I made while working on the book was the degree to which science is caught up in faith. We ask these questions and then blindly reach out and see where they take us. We have no idea, no foreknowledge; we’re just operating in the dark. This, it seems to me, is the most spectacular kind of faith, the faith that questions will lead us somewhere, that it is better to ask than not to ask. What better message in a time when the very act of questioning is considered subversive, dangerous, when our leaders tell us not to ask?

Do you feel, in some way, that you are doing what the earthquake predictors do? That is, creating a theory that "seeks to establish a common ground between mythology and fact?" If so, do you place any more value on hard science than on prediction?

I don’t think I’m doing exactly what the predictors do, because as I’ve said I’m more interested in questions than in answers. Or perhaps, it’s that I don’t believe in answers. In any case, I think I’m much more willing to accept loose ends, chaos theory, things I cannot ever know. I also don’t think that prediction is the be-all and end-all of earthquake culture, or even really very important in the total scheme of things. This, too, is a process I went through in the course of writing, from believing in prediction to thinking that it might be largely beside the point. When I first started working on this book, I wanted very much to write about predictors, to vindicate them in some sense in the face of scientific negligence. Then I dug in and found out that (surprise, surprise) everything was more than I took it for. For me, prediction as an idea yielded to the larger notion of geologic order, the notion that earthquakes interact with each other, talk to each other, than an earthquake here or here helps align the stresses there, and sets the stage for a bigger quake. This, it seems to me, is a much more important idea, for it suggests that earthquakes are not random – at least when looked at on a geologic time scale – but are rather part of some larger order, the order of the earth. If the earth has an order, it only stands to reason that so does the universe, and that, to me, is a very comforting idea. Earthquakes will continue to appear random because the geologic time scale is so much bigger than the human one; we may be able to forecast earthquakes in terms of ten or twenty or hundred year windows, but we may never be able to do it in terms of months and weeks. Again, it’s a matter of adjusting your perspective, and taking the longer point of view. And to do this, we must “establish a common ground between mythology and fact,” because once we get into the sprawl of geologic time, the only way to wrap our minds around it is as a kind of mythology.

Though you have published widely and edited several books, this is your first nonfiction book. How does it feel to see your process transformed into an object - something people can purchase and hold? Is it difficult or disquieting to send your story into the world? Do you find yourself wanting to control the way readers interpret and use it?

I don’t want to control the way readers interpret and use it; in fact, I find it hard to think in terms of readers at all. That’s not to say I don’t write for a public readership; I definitely do, and I believe most writers do, as well. But for me, the notion of the audience is somewhat abstract – I don’t write with particular readers in mind. I don’t know who is reading my work, or even why they’re reading my work; this is one of the reasons I like to do readings and panel discussions, because it’s usually the only way I get to interact with the audience face-to-face.

As far as seeing my process transformed into an object, it’s something that is both exhilarating and difficult all at once. For me, this book is, in a very real sense, the huge file box of photos, scientific papers, interview transcripts, and notes that still sits in a corner of my office – that’s the raw DNA of the project, the amniotic stew. I lived with it for so long – five years, or even longer if you factor in the articles I wrote about the subject before I decided to try and write the book. My process is a very solitary one; I don’t show work until it’s finished – not to anyone, really – and that was very true of this. For a long time, I wasn’t sure I had a handle on the material, and I didn’t want anyone else’s opinion to get in my way. As a result, when I finally finished the book, it felt enormously intimate and private, and consequently very difficult to show. Until the book went into production, only four people had ever read it – my wife, my agent, my editor, and one friend. So it’s a big jump from that to having it in bookstores, where it is exposed to a much larger world.

One of the criticisms of the predictors is that they turn their ideas inward, in a "muddled private landscape of the individual." In other words, "they get obsessed with their own theories." The same criticism has been lodged against creative nonfiction writers - especially memoirists. Do you feel, in a way, that your book tries to find a middle ground between the macro and micro - the individual and social? Because here you are, thrust into this strange and disturbing landscape, and instead of immediately generating your own theories, you set out on a long journey to find what others have said and done. And then you internalize the ideas and look for connections before generating your own new theories. Do you feel that this is the ultimate role of creative nonfiction writers - to negotiate between the individual and social?

I do feel that this is the ultimate role of creative nonfiction writers, to somehow find a middle ground between the individual and the global, to have their work reflect a kind of universal particular, if you will. I am not a memoirist, and I don’t have a lot of use for the genre – at least not in the way we currently define it, as an overwhelmingly interior narrative. For me, I want a larger application, some sense of how all this connects. I live with a kind of double vision, aware of myself as one person, on the one hand, but also as a member of a larger network, a component of society. There’s a Patti Smith song I used to love when I was younger, and in the chorus, she sings, “Outside of society / that’s where I want to be.” At a certain point for me, that line seemed a mantra, a way of staying pure. Now, though, the line seems nothing if not self-delusional, because we can’t step outside of society, any more than we can step outside of family, or identity. We are here, and part of it, and the question is what we want to do with that. In some sense, this is the malaise of the political left, looked at through another filter; for decades, the left (and I very much include myself in this) opted for purity, voted for third party candidates because we thought the system was corrupt. We were right – it was. But while we were remaining pure, the extreme right was busy co-opting the system entirely so they might bring their vision of America to pass. Wouldn’t it have been better for us on the left to be a little less pure, a little less individual, to engage and fight back? It’s a stretch in some ways to apply this to creative nonfiction, but, really, why is any of this relevant if it doesn’t reach outside ourselves?

Going back to the previous question - is this why the sensitives seem more genuine, perhaps? Because they experience the connection between self and world in a really visceral way, as opposed to intellectualizing too much or getting caught up in the circularity of intellectual (and possibly incoherent) theories? The interesting thing is that you attempt to understand the sensitives intellectually, which fails. Especially in the case of King, who tells you that "any time someone goes home and kills their family or there's a murder/suicide, anything spur-of-the-moment or really violent, you can be sure that within one to four days will follow a quake in the Chile/Bolivia/Argentina border area." Your response is to wonder, "what does it take to accept this?"

So I suppose my question is, did it ever feel impossible to understand the sensitives through the creative writing process? Was writing enough? Because in one sense, you were using this scientific process of investigation, and in another sense, your skepticism seems based on scientific principle.

I’m not sure I know the answer to this question. I agree that the sensitives seem extremely genuine, because for whatever reason, they’re describing something that they’re feeling, and it’s hard to argue with physical pain. But as to whether their experience is more visceral than intellectual … well, I think pathological may be a more accurate word. Take Charlotte King, for example, who has created a kind of superstructure in which every ache or ailment anywhere in her body corresponds to an earthquake somewhere in the world. To me, that boils down to a kind of pathology, and while I have enormous sympathy for her as a person, I can’t help but respond to her ideas, her testimony, with a certain amount of skepticism because I can’t, at the most fundamental level, believe what she says. I don’t know that writing helps me understand her, but it does allow me to parse out what I think about her process, to understand my own response. As writers, I think – especially nonfiction writers – this may be the best we ever get to hope for, because we are attempting to characterize people, real people on the page. I don’t – can’t – know what makes Charlotte King tick. All I can do is record my own response to her, so that hopefully I’m giving you an accurate portrait of how I see her. Which brings us back to the issue of subjectivity and truth all over again.

One part that has haunted me is the moment when you visit the Ciudad de los Milagros. You find a Book of Miracles and record there the story of a dream someone had that predicted the World Trade Center collapse. And then immediately after writing this down, you look up and see these words projected on screens:

I wonder what you think of the converse. What about an intuitive way to understand scientific processes and ideas? Do you believe this can happen?

Well, I hope that’s part of what I’m doing here, by staking out this elusive middle ground. For me, science is simply one of many mythic superstructures, and we do it an injustice if we think about it in other terms. Science is always changing, always developing; the rules are being altered all the time. It was only 36 years ago – in 1968 – that plate tectonics was first commonly accepted as a geologic principle. Plate tectonics! This is at the heart of everything. If the basic building block of an entire scientific discipline could change so radically and so recently, then how can we take anything for granted? No, I think it’s far more useful to think of science in mythic, or intuitive, terms, as another kind of storytelling, another way of seeking to embrace the world. That’s the idea at the heart of that Denis Johnson epigraph: “Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations.”

It took seven years to write this book (am I right about this?). Can you talk about your process as it relates to time?

It took five years to write the book, but there was a cover story in LA Weekly that appeared before that, out of which the book evolved. That was another year of work. And then there were some other projects I did about earthquakes dating back to the early 1990s. In fact, the very first thing I wrote after I moved to California in 1991 was a piece called “Waiting for the Big One,” which addressed the issue of denial, and concluded that – at least in regard to earthquakes – it might not be such a bad coping mechanism, after all. So in a very real sense, I’ve been working on, or towards, this book for the entire time I’ve lived in California, which makes it reflective, in some way, of my own process of acclimatization, my becoming a Californian, as it were.

As for the writing, I’m just a slow, particular writer. I write a sentence, then I tear it out and write a new one, and so on and so on and so on. One of the hard things for me in writing the book was to set a daily goal and stick to it, so that I didn’t get behind. I had to have a lot of faith that I was going somewhere, especially deep in the middle, when I often felt like I was lost in some dark woods of my imagination, with neither the end nor the beginning in sight.

Links to other interviews and reviews:

Washington Post

Boston Globe

San Diego Union-Tribune

my aunt, mother, and cousins, reflected on an elevator ceiling, for photo friday: mother

My mother, aunt, and cousin arrived last Tuesday sporting identical Iowa: Home Sweet Home tee shirts. It seemed to me there was something so quintessentially mother about this, so perfectly embarrassing and sweet and quirky that I had to post this image for Photo Friday. Here we are riding the elevator to my 2nd floor apartment - another essentially mother experience. I never take the elevator when I am alone.