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Sitting And Traveling
The thing about today is that for all the so-called daylight hours there is only one moment. There is no progression of time. There is no tracking of the sun across the sky. There is only the one monochromatic lighting scheme and there is only the same fifteen or twenty drops of water tentatively leaping from the gutter edge to certain death in the bushes below. Except there is no death for them because they are running on a loop. Instant reincarnation. The rain can be described as falling only in the sense that it does appear to be coming down from up above. Really though it is almost floating, heavier and thicker but clearer than fog. There is only one moment and we are in it. Doing this, looping.
Two days later and now is the time to ask after one another. How was Thanksgiving? Ya’ll go ahead and do that amongst yourselves…all right, good. Did you eat too much this year? I ate a whole pie.
I am not positioned to see The Peak, which is the name of a specific part of the Shenandoah range, and can be seen if I stand up, walk ten feet, and look out the window to my left. In the other room is playing Double Nickles on the Dime, Minutemen, which I got turned onto by a hitchhiker I picked up in Utah 15 or 19 years ago. He was going to Oxnard, CA. or thereabouts and I was going nowhere. We speared rib eyes with sticks and cooked them over a campfire in the desert off the road a bit. The next evening we were outside Dodger Stadium and he was procuring tickets for us from a scalper. He could tell where the seats were just by glancing at the ticket so we weren’t taken advantage of by scalpers who might have imagined he and I had just fallen off the turnip truck. Not that they could see the truck I was driving but parts of the body were tied on with bailing wire.
I remember him telling me that Dodger Stadium was so clean you could snort coke off the bathroom floor and although I would never try that, and could not on this occasion because neither he nor I had any, the stadium was indeed a shining example of cleanliness.
After the game he suggested we drive down to Hunnington Beach for the next days’ national surfing competition, and so we did. It was late night or early morning when we arrived and we slept in the truck and got eaten by mosquitoes, parked on a residential street a few blocks from the beach. Mosquitoes are not a thing I generally think about when I think about California. In those days I traveled to and slept outside in California on several occasions. I only remember mosquitoes in Hunnington Beach. Once in San Simeon, sleeping on a construction site, I was awakened by construction workers at 6:30 a.m. and once in Santa Cruz young lovers snogging on the steps above where I was trying to sleep woke me up because the pitch of the male lover’s begging was similar to that whining pitch of the female mosquito. The whirring of a cheap circular saw might sound like a mosquito on acid but I didn’t wait around for that on the construction site. I gathered up my worldlies and crept off to the nearby road, where I was picked up by hippies in a station wagon offering windowpane. A year prior, in the tramp jungle near the train tracks in Yuma, Arizona, I was awakened by the groping hands of a hobo who was going for the buck knife I would never use but kept resolutely and foolishly strapped to my side anyway. He was unsuccessful because he mistook my mild grumbling as a near consciousness merely one step from him receiving my buck knife the hard way. He did not know how unlikely that was, which speaks well for the power of implication and/or near consciousness. Yuma, Arizona is not in California, obviously, so really doesn’t belong in this paragraph about mostly California but I was just thinking about it so here it is. I am not going to go on and on about it in such a fashion that would justify it having its own paragraph. Not that the tramp jungle in Yuma doesn’t deserve its own paragraph, it really does.
The thing about getting up early is…no, forget that. The thing about The Peak is…no, I’m a long way from being able to describe that because it requires so much compression of time/space and a vocabulary more specific to art. It was purple again this morning and the undulations were richly described by shadow. That’s the easiest one. How was it for you?
Later, on that same trip, I was in Winona, Minnesota and picked up my own copy of Double Nickles on the Dime. One last thing:
The day of the riot at my elementary school was, excluding the riot, much like any other day.
Full Moon Memories
Some cussing in this one.
Lorina was driving me and a mutual friend through tens of miles of late night fog to attend the ballet at a university in Virginia.
God bless Lorina for her social sensibilities and dedication to friends, even casual ones, for it is that sensibility and dedication that had us driving in zero visibility through winding mountain roads crossed frequently by deer and bear and sometimes cows. No kidding to Lorina, it is such effort that makes life richer, even as it increases the likelihood of troubling events.
It started out friendly enough at the mutual friend’s house, Kalvin, who stays with his parents and was once, at least in the hopeful eyes of Kalvin’s mother, a suitor of Lorina.
I try to be mature about these things on account of I have a relatively mature amount of years under my belt but at the same time I can feel Kalvin’s mother wishing I weren’t there. In all fairness to her, it had been my first inclination to decline this trip, but I’m trying to be less of a homebody and not make Lorina feel like getting me to do something social is an ordeal of teeth pulling magnitude. Even though Lorina has admitted that she likes pulling teeth.
So on the couch I tried to disappear into the college football game while we waited on Kalvin, who I think in the twenty minutes we waited was shotgunning possibly three or four more beers, on top of the case he had already drunk and not including the multiple shots of vodka he had tossed down earlier in the afternoon. Kalvin had started his first suit and tie job a month earlier and was limiting himself to one day of drinking a week. He was not a happy drunk but was loyal to the idea that it might ease his much held onto pain. He’d been at it for about four hours when we came to pick him up at five p.m.
Lorina was designated driver and was declining drink offers and expertly chatting up the parents while I tried to be ignored. I had some Haze in my pocket just in case the fog lifted. Many of the ballerinas would be beginners.
Kalvin’s parents gave me a delicious nut and dried fruit assortment to munch on the road, and we were off.
Kalvin and I had spent a little time together in the months preceding this trip. Once we had gone out together to hear Lorina’s punk band play at an area venue. We were turned away at the door because the club was full and neither one of us could see either one of us persisting with—“but we’re on the guest list.” Lorina was somewhat disappointed in both of us but if she is going to persist in befriending social retards then she will have to expect some of that.
Kalvin and I had both once lived in the same southern city and had some overlapping experiences that we felt bonded us. We knew things, we thought, that no one else knew. We knew poor kids who lived richly but depraved lives. Kids dropped onto the planet, onto the streets, with historical baggage imprinted with travel decals from all the wrong places. Kids so underprivileged that it seems wrong to cast all the blame their way when the some of them do wrong. At the same time we both agree that all persons must be accountable for their actions. And you can’t just cast a blanket of forgiveness over armed robbery, rape, and murder. It is a difficult thing to consider. I’m always trying to dumb it down for my own self, so that I can black and white an issue that has a thousand shades of grey. Here is a cliché that I like regarding all this. If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. And as part of the problem your complaining and whining are little more than self-loathing and you should take that to the closet quietly, or to the office of a professional, or frankly, internet writing can be therapeutic. But don’t let me hear you because I have absolutely zero tolerance and only slightly more maturity than that so whereas quietness will be my first response to you it will not be my last. Even at the risk of sounding smug I will discount any thought that does not consider movement towards solution. I afford equal respect to those who just keep their fucking mouths shut.
To discuss the problems related to impoverished Americans, intellectually, is one thing, but to complain about it, or to cast blame or point fingers at the few but legitimately frightening wrong-doers and say, with the exact words or just by implication, that bad people should be done away with, should not exist, should just stop being bad, and that you resent your tax dollars going to benefit them, or some other infantile phrasing from the infantile mind, is inexcusable, ill-advised, or simply idiotic.
I have had something approaching close contact with the people who are trying to be part of the solution, and from these people I have heard harsh words which hold all fuckups accountable, regardless of their beginning station in life. From a person who might be camped at ground zero in the harshest of ghettoes, I respect this harsh sentiment. Because on that person’s floor on any given night of the year might be camped a sizeable number of this country’s forgotten youth: some of them being the people for whom we are building prisons because that is the fullest extent of our forward thinking on the issue of crime, and what to do about it. This person offers to high risk youth her own food and shelter, and school supplies, some clothing, occasional gifts, an incredible amount of her time, and does all this in her spare time, before, during, and after her two jobs. She helps many even as her so-called success rate might be deemed rather low.
I don’t think a person has to be that selfless, or to give that much of themselves, to be in the arena of problem solvers. Any effort is laudable.
I know of some of the bad shit that resides within Kalvin, but not all of it. I don’t why he was being so unrelentingly hateful towards large groups of fellow humans on this night, stating that most frightening opinion (but as fact) that these bad people in America were bad for the gene pool. I don’t know why I just gave up and started calling him a motherfucker and a neo-nazi, first in the car, then in the bar after the ballet.
We had been so deeply into it that Kalvin, in his rabid state of disgruntlement, had fallen down on the job of directing Lorina to the university and we were late and had to beg to pay for standing room seats because the room was sold out. We had just driven two hours, we cried. I said nothing about Kalvin’s ethnic cleansing ideas. I was really heated up, I apologize for that now. It was Lorina who said we had just driven two hours to support our young ballerina friend. Wanting to make up for my lack of effort at getting into her punk gig the month before I said, yeah, is there standing room available? The woman looked at me and said, who are you? I don’t particularly approve of that phrasing and wanted to shout back, I am a human being, who the fuck are you, bitch, but realizing that overcoming immaturity is a lifelong process, I just meekly said, uh, I’m uh, I’m with them. Even though that partly felt wrong, because for the past two hours in the car I had most adamantly not been with Kalvin on anything.
Standing near or leaning against the exercise bar for two hours in a poorly ventilated recital hall was uncomfortable. In addition, Kalvin said a bunch of negative and scary stuff to the young ballerina we had come to see; spoke, or sang, during performances; audibly tapped his feet on the floor or his hands on the exercise bar along to the beat of introduction music; made a callous comment regarding the young man with long hair who collapsed to the floor next to him; turned to me occasionally and said—you’re wrong, and finally, after being reprimanded several times by Lorina, just lurked by himself in the corner, going pale and trying not to fall out like the young man he had just criticized for falling out.
The young ballerina we had come to see was a joy to watch and for those few minutes of her performance all bad was washed from the planet.
Lorina asked me should we stay and give our regards to ballerina friend. I felt and expressed the adamant opinion that we should escort as quickly as possible our mutual friend, Kalvin, from the premises. One of the things I like about Lorina is that she does not resent me for occasionally being right, and even applauds me for it. She presented no argument against the faux pas of leaving without a word and we bolted for the exit two floors down.
We went to a bar for one drink and it was as Lorina promised a nice place. Kalvin sat down and asked me to clarify my position, interrupted me each time I started, prattled on about his superior experience with the subject matter (his one month association with troubled youth to my ten years worth), and generally underscored his belligerently drunken personality with one hateful idea after another. As to his assertion that I was wrong I am only too ready to accept that, about everything I know, except that the ethnic cleansing he was very close to proposing, is wrong. It was at the bar that I had to inquire didn’t he see the similarity between his ideas and that of the neo-nazi and shortly after that I just started calling him a motherfucker, repeatedly. As a person of German descent he really didn’t like the nazi reference and as someone who lives with his mother, I guess he took offense to me calling him a motherfucker as well.
It’s been awhile since I’ve been caught so off guard.
At the bar, Lorina had tried to express an idea similar to mine, against Kalvin’s, and since he had admitted to me in the men’s room at the university that he thought Lorina and I were ganging up on him, I interrupted Lorina and out the side of my mouth told her not to help me. I was banking on the high probability that I could explain that particular insult later. She went and sat next to a woman at the bar and tried successfully not to bum a cigarette. She left me with Kalvin and by the time she came back ten minutes later there was very little coming from my mouth that wasn’t profanity. When she cheerfully asked would we like to get another drink I said, quickly and adamantly, no, let’s get the fuck out of here. She seemed to immediately forgive me that bit of rudeness too. I am not so needful or desirous of friends that I will be missing this one but I still feel bad about it. All of it. His ideas, my responses, his reasoning, my lack of understanding.
On the way home I was finally able to bow out as Lorina took over with calm and reasonable responses to Kalvin’s insane interpretations. Sometime during that he had changed subjects, away from ethnic cleansing to world politics, to mollify Lorina, and began talking about one of this country’s sworn enemies. He used an epithet which I honestly didn’t hear but which Lorina scolded him for and later told me was sand nigger. I was listening when shortly after that he verified the part of my nationality which accounts for half of my blood and I said, yes, that’s correct. It took me until the next morning to realize the epithet had been for my benefit but no real harm done on that one since I had literally called him a motherfucker perhaps a hundred times that night.
Finally, after being calm and reasonable an unreasonable amount of time, six hours into the evening, Lorina said, can we just not talk anymore? Can you only talk if you give me one pleasant thought to end this night? Kalvin truly couldn’t and shut up. Right before we dropped him off he was able to pull out one of his stock memories--driving at night with lights off on a thin ribbon of black asphalt through a bucolic, snow-covered Virginia, under the full
Moon.
Mike, The One Mockingbird
You can only wonder is it the rumored conviviality of its occupants that brought about the events of this morning.
It is something I wonder about. Is there more than one mockingbird? Everywhere I go I keep seeing the same one.
Last night, nodding off, the rabid fox, which I haven’t until now mentioned, made demented, near death fox noises, in the woods outside my window.
I don’t know if you can hear it from where you are but there is a light tapping on the bay window by the kitchen table in the other room. It is loud enough to hear over Townes Van Zandt, who is singing a ballad about not being loved.
I know you’re going to tell me that birds sometimes fly into windows by accident and it is my responsibility as someone who purports to be sensitive to hang streamers in front of it or some other visual marker so the birds won’t be tempted to fly into my kitchen.
I don’t think you understand Mike, the one mockingbird.
This isn’t the original paragraph that goes here, that one got eaten by the ibm thinkpad, which, similar to Mike, crashes, but not into windows, into itself, unless you want me to mean Windows, which probably is the culprit. Now the whole window concept is sort of tainted for me. I don’t feel good about it. But also, you ain’t missing nothing from that original paragraph, except the one allusion to Rudyard Kipling and one tired Heavy Hummingbird alliteration/metaphor.
I can still hear him though, Mike, in the other room, now tapping along to Willie Nelson singing Rainbow Connection, which I think is a cover of that Kermit the Frog song.
I cut some cask strength bourbon in half with water and offered it to Lorina so she would have something to drink while watching Fog of War, which I think is the most chilling anti-war statement ever made and also lends perspective to current events in the sense that what this country has survived just in the last sixty years is pretty remarkable when you are able to realize it through the lens of a condensed timeline. I mean if we can survive WWII and later a team consisting of McNamara, Johnson, and LeMay and not too long later survive a Nixon/Kissinger clusterfuck, and then 8 years of Reagan, well, we should be able to survive whatever comes, except, you know, the end (and here I would like for all you fundamental Christians to at least consider the possibility that your near salivating in anticipation of an Armageddon every time—and only when—the US is involved in some world conflict near the middle east, is sort of creepy, and perhaps indicative of mental illness, which is treatable. I am not speaking to the entirety of your value system as represented by the words of JesusChrist, which for the most part I aspire to myself).
What history shows is a balance of insanity and reason. Speaking of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the voices of reason that ultimately prevailed, Lorina expressed her fear of this current administration being faced with a crisis of similar magnitude. I got pretty good cred for wallowing in lakes of futility but I am breathing clean air with my head bobbing above that these days. I have tricked myself, I have told myself and believed me, that wallowing like that is a colossal waste of time and forgive me but I usually have to punctuate the sentiment with—you punkass crybaby bitch. Anyway, and also, I tend to feel the need to look contrary to popular opinion, regardless of the opinion, and why imagine a desolate future when there is so much of it you can experience in the here and now, if that is your cup of tea. So I said to Lorina—we can’t know for sure that such a crisis would be handled poorly by this current administration. Even though they may be lame ducks, there are voices of reason within the administration. I offered the obvious. I said we still have Colin Powell.
Lorina is a talented musician and spends time each week with talented musicians so she has a sense of timing and beat that overlaps into her everyday living. You don’t really know that a pause is pregnant until later but that’s what it was, that quiet space between me saying we have Colin Powell and her saying, oh, he resigned today. Well then, good thing Castro has been marginalized.
Autographed Novellas
Lorina's ex-husband plays with plastic sharks in public pretty near, in proximity, the place where Lorina performs one of her seven jobs. I'll come into the public place and nod at him and he'll, taking a break from the positioning of plastic sharks, nod back.
I would not say there is a growing lack of amity between us, yet, now that the words are out here, let's at least suggest that there is. There's only about 500 people you would have to know around here to say that you literally knew everyone so it is probably counterproductive to make snap judgements, or quick enemies.
Lorina's ex-husband goes by the name Spencer, although Lorina says the name on his birth certificate is Morton. I pondered the why-fore of such a thing until finally, coming up with nothing, I asked Lorina. I said, "If his name is Morton why doesn't he go by Morton, or Mort, or Mortie." Lorina nodded sadly, but with the crease of a smile on her red lips, and I, sure that I had asked a stupid question searched my database of limited knowledge for the obvious answer before she could give it to me. I did not want to seem too dense on the subject of why a person would change names. But Lorina, who was only midway through the one act play comprised entirely of facial expressions, entitled, Why Morton Calls Himself Spencer, simply raised her eyebrows, blinked her eyes (first concurrently one with the other and then sequentially), scrunched up her nose, puckered her lips, sucked in her cheeks and finishing with an impressive neck roll and a punctuating cluck of the tongue, said, "I really don't know."
So for now some things will remain mysterious. There are questions that will remain unanswered.
I was at a basketball game yesterday at the MCI Center in DC. There was a miniature but fully operational blimp floating around the stadium doing, to my knowledge, the only thing blimps are capable of doing, other than floating and steering, and that is advertising a product. The product was, nah, uh uh, psyche.
They now play over the sound system abbreviated arrangements of popular hip-hop and rap tunes throughout the game, instead of just at the breaks.
Right before the game began fireworks shot up from hidden cannons mounted on top of the goals. The smoke did not rapidly dissipate. About twenty minutes into the game the person sitting to my left, obviously so distracted by the ongoing spectacle of the modern day professional sporting event, and having forgotten about the fireworks said, "Is it smoky in here?" This guy, the guy seated to my left, is someone who, like me, is old enough to accept unpleasant possibilities as explanation for anything that may occur in life. Completely forgetting the fireworks he must have been accepting the possibility that life for him was going grey. I do not know if my answer was enough to pep him up from the potentially unpleasant reality he was facing, going blind in the middle of a professional sporting event, but he did, like me, upon receiving my answer that it was indeed smoky, fireworks be blamed, wonder just what the hell are they doing shooting fireworks in an indoor stadium. The fireworks did not even spell out the name of a product.
It was kids' day at the stadium and I got a portable basketball hoop and ball to enjoy in the comfort of my own home.
Do not get me wrong. I love the spectacle of professional sports. Even though I would fire whoever is the chief in charge of courtside priorities. I would replace those two pimply teenagers who get to sit practically under the goal so they can wipe up from the floor the leaking bodily fluids of professional athletes, with the entire cheerleading squad, who have somehow been most ridiculously delegated to the outer wings of the stadium. I would of course justify this change in terms of dollars and cents and not by the implied whim of some antiquated sexist mind-set. You know what I'm saying? Butt cheek product placement.
There was a baby race, an air guitar contest, a best smile contest, a kiss your girlfriend contest, a little kids slam dunk contest, a shoot around the world contest, an entire elementary school amount of kids singing the national anthem (off key), and of course the obligatory cute and quirky mascot. The cheerleaders had the floor for a while as did a dance team. There was a guy dressed up like a superhero who with the aide of a trampoline and landing mat executed some high-flying slam dunks, one with a full flip included. The same guy later shot t-shirts into the upper decks from a strap on device looking like a flame-thrower but which was instead a type of bazooka.
A tall guy from one team attempting to score against the tall guy from the other team became entangled with his competitor but scored anyway and to punctuate his prowess under the basket, after landing, spanked his opponent on the ass. His opponent became angry, but nobody cared, or paid him any attention, so he just went about looking confused and sullen for a few more minutes, before being taken out of the game for a rest, or to apply salve to his sore ass.
There is a huge TV screen hanging from the rafters in case somewhere in the middle of the game you realize you would rather be at home.
A guy came right up to my seat offering beer and peanuts but I figured there was probably a catch to it so I declined his offer.
A famous tall person looking slightly ill at ease in his clothing was projected onto the big screen and after seeing him on TV people nearby wanted his autograph even if they had no idea who he was. The famous tall person took more than a little time with each autograph, as if he had suddenly realized this was the time to begin that novel he had always wanted to write. He would write and concentrate and write some more. He would then look up and see the little kid who had given him the paper or ball to write on and he would smile apologetically and say a few words of explanation as to why these particular autographs might seem more like novellas. None of the children complained about this.
Malaproperistic
Penultimate does not mean what you think it does. If you think it means top of the heap you got another think coming. If someone told you it means top of the heap that person was at best making a common mistake and at worst telling you a bold-faced or bald-faced lie. You can’t slink around life with bad information. You run the risk of waking up one morning and having your life tossed asunder by one vocabulary word. Committee, referring, occurring, recommend, are words that no word processor will let you misspell so you can skate by comfortably ignorant as a bad speller. But what if someone said you were the penultimate member of a group and for twenty years you had thought they meant you were the best when in fact, whether they meant it or not, what they were saying is that you are, as pertains to your grouping, next to last. Next to last? Is that using a horizontal scale of measuring where next to last would be located almost to the far right and be by implication a better thing than next to last on a vertical scale which would implicate you near the bottom? What kind of word is so careless about its meaning and what are you going to do about this? If you were the suspicious type you might start with any number of bone-headed assumptions and move on from there. For example, perhaps twenty years ago penultimate meant best of best but shortly after that the word was co-opted by a radical group consisting of linguists, librarians and dictionarians, who in numerous acts of cunning malfeasance drugged everyone in America while they went about changing the typeset or digital equivalent of all dictionary publishers in the world while at the same time they gathered up and threw out all volumes of written material which would show the word to be in any way complimentary to me. Is that too farfetched? How many misunderstood words would a person have to have under their belt to be totally wrong about everything?
Basketball Astronomy
I was hiking up from the caretaker's cottage to the bighouse on a gimp knee caused by too much hiking and a smidgen of yoga. So clearly I know where I am, which is a qualifying statement meant to juxtapose interestingly with the statement I don't really know where I am. If I had to guess though, and now typing I'm pretty damn sure of it, I am in the South as defined by the Mason-Dixon Line, which is a statement meant to juxtapose interestingly with my assertion that I saw Northern Lights three days ago.
Some people around town, those that saw it anyway, are calling it the Aurora Borealis, and others are calling it a solar flare phenomenon. I'm calling it northern lights. By removing the beginning capital letters I am hedging my bets, because what I saw was an unusual lighting scene taking up most of the horizon between true north and northeast, and therefore, by anyone's definition, it was a humdinger of a thing going on, northerly. Although let me be clear about one thing—this thing in the night was not as spectacular say as a boy riding a bicycle across the sky framed in circular fashion by the full moon.
So I'm walking up the gravel driveway between the two homes on this property. To my right is the northern horizon back dropped by a chunk of the Shenandoah Mountains or perhaps not per se Shenandoah but only a geological relative. What I’m saying is—there are various names for things that are actually the same and what makes it more confusing is occasionally you run up on something that has only one name but is in fact several different things. There is specific truth and general truth and if you came for the specific you may as well just back right on out of here. There is none of that here. Actually, I was limping. That's as specific as I'm likely to get. It was my right knee; I'm ok, thanks for asking. It was near about 7:30 in the evening and the sky overhead was pitch black and dotted profusely with specks of star and planet. I recently climbed up on my roof and corrected the weather vane, which was prior to my ascent all caterwomped, so I knew more or less the points of the compass as they relate to the property landmarks, and something was awry with the sky.
Too much light to the north. Starting at true north and running towards the east for about 50 degrees that whole part of the sky looked like it had sunset afterglow except there weren’t no colors involved—it was just white light or white blue to be true. Bracketing this unusual but in no way spectacular light, about 30 or 40 degrees above the horizon, were two rather large splotches of red. Red that was not pink and was not crimson but could have been a blend of those two or you know it could have been any number of different versions of the red school. Evidently the phenomenon went away for awhile and came back near to midnight and some other people saw it and I believe the colors were different which is not meant to de-emphasize that so too were the people who saw it and very possibly their pharmaceutical content.
The splotches I saw took up an amount of space in the sky that could be represented if you held a basketball three feet in front of you angled up to the wrongly lit night sky. You would have to have very long arms to do this. I don’t mean to imply the shape of the red splotch was like a basketball because it wasn’t. It was the shape you get when you give your 4-year-old son a two-inch chunk of crayon without the paper wrapper and the kid draws a diagonal splotch using the crayon on its side. He does it twice, once on the left side of the paper and once on the right and you remark to anyone who will listen or is skilled at pretending to listen (head bobbers) that isn’t your son remarkable in general and specifically artistically because the two splotches are almost mirror images of each other and if there is anyone listening to your proud prattle they might remark seriously on the well balanced nature of the two sides of your son’s brain.
The next night I was over visiting Lorina when her ex-husband called to ask had she seen the Northern Lights the previous evening and that cinched it for her because I had mentioned it earlier and now she had to see for herself. She started gathering up enough winter clothing for the both of us to live an indefinite period of time in the wilderness but I should be more specific about the indefinite nature of the time period as implied by the quantity of clothing gathered. It would be a period of time longer than I wanted to be outside on an evening that was predicted to bring the season’s first hard frost. I had been gearing up for a little hard boozing, light doping, and relaxed movie watching. Of course one of these activities does not necessarily preclude the other but…it was getting late and was, my brain calculated, the exact time period between the previous night’s two sightings by various people in the community. There was the sense for me, unfairly yes, paranoid yes, that her ex-husband was conspiring to fuck up a relaxing evening for me by spurring on Lorina’s general nature—which is to live life to the fullest. I could see him in my minds eye, smirking, as my skinny ass froze. My feelings towards this imaginary version of Lorina’s ex-husband are not hard ones, I’m just saying.
While we stood there, Lorina and I, and I played with the convertible mittens she had provided for me, wondering was I really a stick in the mud or was I justified in feeling totally tossed asunder in my own little prescribed time-space continuum, a meteor as bright as a halogen lamp lit up the sky right above us and traced itself in 2.5 seconds a distance of what?—ten miles? A hundred? A thousand? If you put a basketball in front of your face tilted up to the night sky it would be about equal to the distance between the two poles of the ball, except you wouldn’t be able to see if the basketball was that close to your face. It wasn’t what we had come to see so it wasn’t but nominally remarked upon. Until the next evening, when it was again mentioned, briefly.
Buzzard Bait
This guy with his teenage son came up to me in the White Oak parking lot yesterday and asked me was he in the Old Rag parking lot and I said no. I was wearing the old style large headphones over a black knit skull cap because the ear buds have been bugging me and I had on wrap around shades. I may have looked a little freaky. And the ponytail and few days worth of grey speckled beard probably added to my "this is the guy we'll ask as last resort" ratio and even without the headgear and shades and throw in a haircut/shave if you want I pretty much don't have some of the more typical hiking gear and so look more like a guy wandered in off the street hiking rather than a guy who really hikes. I like hiking but I'm not all that good at it. I get lost and disoriented (only partly on purpose) and take not asking for directions to such an extreme that someday I may find myself disoriented too far away from help too long after dark and I'll die of exposure and/or get eaten by a bear and by all rights the words on my tombstone will be--"He wouldn't ask directions until it killed him."
The guy and his son were athletic, clean cut, and good looking by the most basic standards--in that they did not have any freakish proportions or unusual growths front and center--, and they appeared to have good teeth. Also, their healthy exemplary attitudes seeped from every healthy fresh scrubbed pore and no doubt advanced them in whatever ventures they attempted. People like them don't suffer after fools so when I went into evasive maneuvers and philosophical hem and hawing in response to their more specific questions, they wrote me off as a nincompoop and without saying by, see ya later, eat shit, or thanks for nothing, they just turned away from me and went to ask for help from the fresh scrubbed young woman who was now getting out of her car across the lot. At least she knew how to dress. I don't have any enmity for the young woman, she was just being herself for godsake and had not even a tiny bit of cognition regarding her role in making me look like a nincompoop. I'm really not the person you should ask for directions. I readily admit this.
But I stewed over it a bit and wanting to limit my exposure to any possible future human contact, I vered left at the first fork and ended up on a trail I thought I knew but turned out was unbeknownst to me until it was named about a mile or two later by a German tourist with a map. He also did not mean to underscore my nincompoopity but he surely did when in response to his question how far is it to White Oak trail I said you mean this isn't it. It hit me all of a sudden that it certainly wasn't the White Oak trail because I hadn't seen a waterslide the last time I hiked and here we were--me, the German, the English dude, and about 20 frat guys doing a polar bear thing by stripping down to skivvies and doing the slide, which is a gradual slippery drop over smooth moss covered rock for about 100 feet. There is a small pool of river water at the bottom. I'm on an "isolated" nature trail and there is over 20 of us congregated. I just kept going up until I hit Skyline Drive (which to get to driving, from where my truck was parked, would have taken about 25 miles and I don't think this could have been more than 4) and then turned around and hiked back to the parking lot, climbing down instead of up. I was hiking for about six hours. I got lost in my mind towards the end and backtracked to the guy looking like Seinfeld's, Newman, who told me I had been going the right direction and so that added another mile and a half to what was easily my longest hike thus far, maybe 6 or 8 miles of moderately steep hiking.
Today was perfect early so Loretta on her way to work (she didn't have anything to wear so she was today going to perform her job naked) showed me another trail, one known to far fewer people, and I hiked again, trespassing a little mostly because of the signs telling me not to. Back on the trail proper and I've always wanted to do yoga so I was doing some on a hill above the trail, with my shirt off, until, the combination of my calm station, and, rib bones prominant enough to imply cadaver, inspired six buzzards to circle in for a very close and somewhat threatening looksee. I stood up and they acted like they couldn't believe I wasn't lunch and even though that could be considered an insult I was pleased to see them fly away from me scared. For awhile, the natural order which implied my superiority over the beasts of the earth seemed somewhat skewed, and I felt small, and insignificant, like one of those MacDonald's cheeseburgers.
There was a forest within the forest, in a deep valley below the trail, and without leaves you could see alot of other birds and especially those bigger, red-headed woodpeckers, there were lots of them, and lots of still standing rotten trees suffering from apparent shotgun blasts which were really just round holes caused by voracious peckering. I'd never seen so many woodpeckers in one area and thought up the name Forest of Woodpeckers but later changed it to Pecker Woods.
I returned a rented movie to an area rental place last Sunday and one of the owners, whom I haven't seen for a year, and was then just where I had seen her last, out on the sidewalk raking leaves in a windstorm, called me by first and last name, which startled me because I think we had met only once. She said she was hoping to run into me today because she wanted my opinion on something. A movie I had rented last year had been checked out next after me by a person who came 25 miles to get it and when that person got it home it was cracked, from the center hole towards the outer edge, about an inches worth. She made me come inside with her so I could see for myself. I didn't really have anywhere to be but I was beginning not to like the direction this was going. First off, to show me the thing she basically proved the culprit of this crime not to be any one individual but instead the overly tenacious gripping ring of the DVD holder's plastic case. In fact her own machinations which resulted finally in getting the disc out of its cover were so severe in nature, so thoroughly was she bending the DVD, that when it did finally come free, and she turned it over to the side without the title, showing more clearly the crack, I was tempted to cry out--hey, did you just bust that? But I said instead, oh yes I see, and just offered to pay for it. This overly simple solution was met with disdain and a not overly convincing assurance that she wasn't trying to get me to pay for it, she just wanted my opinion on how to deal with such a thing. I offered several, most of which required more work, and one which simply wrote such matters off. She did not seem satisfied with any of my rather stellar suggestions and continued to remind me that it was just my opinion she was after. As I had given her the full range of my opinioneering, I was at a loss to discern just what it was she really wanted. So I offered to pay for it again, or make a donation, or accidentally drop a twenty on the floor the next time I came in. When enough time had passed I decided, rather all of a sudden, that I did have other places to be, and said ok, see you later. She said with no little vehemence that she was sure I would. I saw her again just last night at the community theatre but pretended I was someone I am not--that new guy who really doesn't know anybody.
Unrelenting Quality Of Quality
I got an email from one of those friends from that ever lengthening distant past. One of those people whom--you don't realize, at the time you are first meeting them--are setting the benchmark against which future friends will be measured. She sent me one of those comical American maps depicting a not so comical rendering of the religious diversity in America and which suggests that Canada might be a better model. Once I was up near that town in Washington state where Raymond Carver spent his last years and I saw signage for Canada and another time I was in Bonners Ferry, Idaho and saw signage for Canada. I was both times sort of afraid of what kind of illegal matter might drop from the crevices of my being and did not want to bother the border guards with it. I'm sure Canada is a fine place and does not suffer from my lack of attendance. I guess I would be more interested in knowing what Canada does suffer from before I held it up on too high a pedestal. I had already received or viewed this map from several different sources. I did not consider this map the meat of the email, although perhaps my friend would not have sent me a message at all if not for the prop value of the map. So, I am not without some regard for GW Bush and his ability to bring people closer together. Likewise, this same friend checked in with me after the fall of the NY towers, even though I was nowhere near them (in New Orleans) and she was nowhere near them (in Los Angeles) and so I must retain a similar regard for Osama bin Laden. This isn't me making lemonade from lemons because I have relocated to a place on the east coast where if I want lemonade I can walk into a quaint village and buy it for five dollars a pint. I don't drink a lot of lemonade.
I witnessed Fall colors this year, in both Pennsylvania and Virginia, of the type that inspires calendars and coffee table books, and I at times became uncomfortable, resentful even, of the unrelenting quality of the quality. Which probably only proves that you can take the malcontent from the ghetto but you can't take the ghetto from the malcontent. Responding to her email with map attachment I tried to break down the inexplicable nature of my discontent, referring to the coloration experience as a month long acid-trip. I suggested past experience which allowed me to consider such a thing as undesirable. She emailed back and suggested that I get ready for a four year acid trip. She was making a political statement.
There are drugs for dealing with drugs (Thorazine will often cancel that acid trip for you) but I honestly cannot recommend any of them and would be remiss in not mentioning that many drugs on the market today have side effects which include death. Of these you should be very careful. Because life, I think, is very good. Not despite all the shit but because of it. Sometimes, and I mean only sometimes, sobering up is a good thing. Is everyone sober now? Don't you feel good?
Do you ever get confused about what good feels like?
Goatman Returns
I have stood on streets in America listening to the pop bang of hand guns and the ratatatat of machine guns and I have been discouraged by the sound of it but not so fearful that I ran inside and hid.
Last night after a day trying to figure out why the light is all wrong in the sky I drove an open jeep type vehicle onto my back porch and heard on the other side of the hedge the rustling in the leaves of scared up deer. I turned the engine off and sat and listened. The sound of heavy hooves over dry leaves continued. It was pitch black. My fear switch clicked on. I had to think fast, my life depended on it. My first instinct was to jump and run but I gathered my wits about me and in a blink or two prioritized my movements. First, I grabbed the unopened Guinness from the drink holder in the jeep's console, and then I jumped and ran. I nearly tore the screen door off its hinges getting to the breezeway but jumpin' jiminycats, this thing coming towards me wasn't going to be held back by some twig-like wood framing and brittle, dry-rotted screen. My heart was pounding as I reached for the door to the house. Would it be locked? I never locked the door. Why would it be locked? Why would I do such a thing, on this day of all days, with the sun off course and all human endeavor teetering on the brink of uncertainty? I put my hand on the knob, and twisted it. It opened. Of course it opened, why wouldn't it, I never locked it.
However, once inside, I did lock it, which proved, which removed any doubt whatsoever, what it was I was dealing with here. The boogeyman had come to visit me up on this hill in Rappahannock.
I would have never guessed when I replaced the back porch flood lamps yesterday that they would become so essentially handy so soon.
I flicked them on, now ready to see the deer, the deer goddammit, not some hooved half human, half goat. Oh crapshit. Goatman. Goatman was here. After nearly twenty years free of him, now he was back. I had forgotten. Not only that, I couldn't remember. Did I anger Goatman that last time in those Texas woods? I vaguely remember a pact. What had I promised? Had I kept my promise? Was he coming to collect something from me? Was this it, my ending, all creepy, and scary, and alone?
About then, Herman, that displaced Brooklyn street cat, whom I adopted, or whom was thrusted or hoisted upon me, came waddling around the corner of the hedge. I had been pretty sure, all along, that it was him. I hadn't really been afraid.
Later that night I awoke screaming, crying out like a little boy as fingers brushed across his face in a dream.