POTLATCH
POTLATCH #3
Released June 24, 2014 2:47PM
Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Long Beach California
my father got sick on Mother’s Day, 1963. He was
33 years old. He had an embolism near his spine,
which caused paralysis. My mother was 8½ months
pregnant with me inside of her. I was born on
June 24 th , 1963 in an entanglement of my umbilical
cord, a knot of my mother’s distress and
confusion, and a house full of crazy. Ours was a
tragic-comic wounded family. My father spent the
next year of his life trying to survive and then
rehabilitating himself at Long Beach Memorial
Hospital. My mother raised three kids all alone.
My family spent the next 50 years trying to heal
itself, lesions that scab and reopen over and over
again.
When I turned 33, I had not achieved all the
things I had dreamed of and thus began to
suffer from anxiety attacks that led to a nervous
breakdown. Part of me had an overwhelming dread
that my own health was going to echo the fate of
my father. During that strange time I was living in
a magical artist colony where a more evolved
friend of mine gave me these Hishru Balls from
Baoding, China. I don’t want to say that they
cured me, but I spun them around and around in
my hands and before you could say Bǎodìng
Jiànshēn Qiú, I was a father myself, and
henceforth had no more time for the fatuous self-
absorption of worry.

POTLATCH #3
