Hartford and Vine

Yesterday my boss came in to the watch commander's office and saw I was working on this piece.

"What are you doing?"

"Working on this piece."

"What is it?"

"It's a digital photograph I took. I'm playing around with it in Photoshop."


LONG PAUSE


"What is it?"

I explain that it's a picture of little plastic people and toy cars that I set up and then took pictures of and then altered the pictures until I was pleased with the effect, etc.

"Okay." He says. "But why do you do it?"

"Uh...it's a hobby."

"Oh." He looks at me like I have three heads.

"Like duck hunting."

"Oh...."


*


Like I was from Mars...



*

The Blue Tutu

*

Sometimes despite your best intentions, things go all wrong.


*

I would reach them. I would hold and comfort them, but they stay a foot away.
Out of my reach.

It is a bitter distance.


*


Too little sleep. Three hours last night. Five the night before. Five more ten hour work days ahead before the next break. My eyes are hoarding sand and little metal fragments in their sockets, and they won't turn them loose.

I need to wring out my spine.


*

Our daughter left a note (calling us by our FIRST NAMES!) explaining that she understood that she didn't like being around us and we didn't like being around her, and that from now on we'd maintain minimal contact until she was out from under our thumb, etc.

She is fourteen.

*

I love this little portrait of her.


"Nel mezzo di camin de nostra vita..."



*

I am not insane or depressed.


I am not.

*

Delaying, Moment by Moment

*

I am in a fit of work.


All I see, I see through a lens. I have no other language available to me. I work on an image- set up, shooting, then tinkering, tinkering...until the image comes into its own and an ethereal light washes over the whole of me.

Print it, scan it, gaze at it, put it away.



*

Begin.



*


My hands shake like I have had too much coffee. Which I have had. What is not work flows by me as a stream of blurred images and unremembered conversations, noise and clutter. Only through the lens does the world come into focus. A small world, but one of my own making.

Although richer, somehow, than I can come to terms with.


*

I am finding my way towards a language.



*


Stumbling. Errant. Haphazard.



*


I must hurry.



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They Are Most Excellent Mathematicians

*

Today is spent in preparation.



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We must face our fear.




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Catching The Thing With Feathers

*

I love my daughter. When I see her or think about her my heart swells with an intense joy. Right now, and for the past year or so, she can't stand me. I need only to be present, or worse, to speak, and I become the recipient of a withering gaze and a cutting remark.

What's nice about this love for her is that it makes me nearly immune to her scorn.

I know it's real, I know it's how she really feels, but I also know that it's temporary and necessary, etc. So it bums me out, but it doesn't really touch me. I still get all googly when I see her.

But for right now she's also kind of more enjoyable to be around in the abstract.

*

It seems to be true that we are really living in a samsaric realm. It's a little bit harder to see when you happen to have been born whole, born to parents who love and care for you, born into a family and a home, a functioning economy, with no obvious physical deformities or grave mental defects, gifted with your five senses, not beaten, threatened, starved, continuously raped, or hacked with machetes or have bombs dropped on your village, etc.

I mean, from this vantage point it just swirls around the periphery: it comes in through the electrical outlets of your home, via television and radio and internet and in the daily newspaper and the weekly magazines and it passes from hand to hand and mouth to mouth at work and in the streets. Like contagion. The disaster virus. Somewhere else the machetes swing into the night. Somewhere else the car bomb explodes as you are walking your children across the street, carefully, watching both ways for traffic. Somewhere else the men come in the night and hold you down as they rape your wife and children before hacking your arms off and cutting out your tongue. Somewhere else the men come into your cell and close the door behind them and they come at you again. With their tools. With their empty eyes and their stone ears that are deaf to your cries for mercy.

It doesn't really touch us most of the time.

Then it does. In all its many ways. Intimate and intensely personal, it worms its way into your own body or the body of your beloved. It takes your old life away and gives you something else in its place.

It tears away the curtain you've been holding up in front of you as protection from the endless pain of the real world.

Raw. Real. Unendurable.


But we somehow manage to patch up the curtain in time and hold it back up. Sure, we can see through the tears and holes, see a lot more than we did before, but it's nice to get that curtain back up there nonetheless. A little more comfortable. A little more secure.

It sometimes seems like we are abandoned children, starving for food and for love and left to dig in the garbage for our survival. Sometimes we happen upon a scrap of food, or a piece of clothing that we can wrap around ourselves and we beam with joy and happiness. We know then that the universe loves us. We do a little dance in our glee.


But this is not quite correct. It isn't.


Because the truth is also that this world is a wonder of wonders. It is jampacked with beauty and tenderness and quiet pleasures. There are wide, clean beaches where you walk hand in hand with your beloved and the murmur of the surf washes over you and the whole of the sky puts on a heartbreaking display of wild color, for you, for everyone, for free. There is touching the body of your beloved. There is the taste of fresh fruit. There is art. There is science. There is everywhere a man laying down his life for the life of a stranger. There is compassion. There are miracles. I myself live in an endless parade of them, blessings and miracles raining down upon me like a wild summer rainstorm, drenching me and taking my breath away.

I am loved.

I am loved.

I am loved.


Yesterday I met with a friend of mine who'd left the Sheriff's department a year and a half ago to go to Iraq as a private security officer. With Blackwater or one of those operations. This guy is a former Marine officer, a fifteen year SWAT cop, boxer, martial artist, weapons expert, etc. He had trained his whole life for combat and had never really gotten into it. No shootings, no wars, etc. He had terrible timing that way. And he was always, always, always looking for it. He had no humor, no sense of perspective, no room for anything but vigilance and anger.

He was a terrible person to be around.

So he came back last week from Iraq. He was completely transformed. When I saw him I was stunned by this light coming off of him. He looked like Jesus Christ or a saint or Buddha. He said he was changed. He said he was calm now, for the first time. He said that he understood things much better than before. He described his time in Iraq, the eerie unreality of it, how it seemed to him like he was in a movie about hell. How he and his team did things time and time again that he could not believe. How there were no rules. How death came regardless of your training and preparation. How there was no protection from it. How it was capricious, how his own body and his own mind were no different than a piece of brick or a cow or a parked car- nothing magical, nothing special about it that would somehow spare it from destruction.

Etc.

This guy, who'd been a mostly terrible person to be around, had gone to a terrible place for the worst of reasons, and he had found his salvation there. He'd been opened, touched. Transformed.

The mechanisms are variable.

*

It is my fervent hope and prayer that this day brings you peace and that it does not leave you untouched. I pray that you are attentive today to the myriad small miracles that are hidden all around you. I pray that something cracks open the tough shell, either from the outside or from within, and lets a little light in. Or lets it out.

Somehow, both.

*

"For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly."

- don juan


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The Crossing

*

Everything is converging. The forces that have been aligning are now massing on the border. At night the men can hardly sleep for the discordant murmur of the voices, the clank of iron that echoes across the lowlands. It gets in their ears and burrows deep into their hearts. In some it stirs fear, but in all of us it creates a deep unrest.

*

We would all welcome the warmth and cheer of a fire.


*

Tonight our seer cast her bones into a circle of dust and peered at the result only briefly before sweeping the bones back into her leather pouch. She muttered something under her breath but only walked away when I asked her what she had seen.




I fear we have come to a difficult moment.

*

Kip by Avedon

Peace out.


*

Does anyone else have prescient nostalgia?


I have this condition like a motherfucker. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with longing for this exact moment, as if I am visiting it from thirty years from now, looking back on it and missing it terribly.


The cool part about it is running around and hugging everyone you see, just like Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life!"


*



"Hello, Bedford Falls!"



*

Those Mai Mai in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo.


Man alive.


Did you hear about them on NPR yesterday? Kabila's government armed them as part of a "local peacekeeping group" to help repel invaders from Rwanda in the late 90's. They liked being armed and after the Rwandans were mostly taken care of they kept their guns and started taking over all the little villages they could.

In the villages they took over, no one was allowed to wear clothes. There were strict rules about what foods could be eaten and which days they could be eaten. Disobediance was punished with death.

They became cannibals.


They believe that they are immune to bullets. The name "Mai Mai" means "Water Water." They got this name from chanting "Mai Mai" as they attacked their enemies. This powerful magic chant turns the enemy bullets into water in the middle of the air.


There is now another local group that is trying to fight the Mai Mai. They are not armed with guns, but with "Batons Magic" (imagine a french pronunciation here).


*

This is happening right now.


*


I don't mean to say by using the African subcontinent as an example that these kinds of things are only happening "somewhere else." There is shit going on right now in one of your neighbor's houses that would flip you right the fuck out.


Unless you are that neighbor, in which case, knock it off, you're creeping me out.


*

In The Garden

We make our own world.

We make our own world.

We make our own world and then sleep in it.

We stew in the juice of our own concocting.

*

One part of my job now is to handle citizen complaints and take phone calls from the crazy, convoluted, and pissed off. It is a wonderful way to get into people's heads and to inject yourself into their dramas. So many angry, angry people. They want the cops to come fix their problems. One thing I always tell them is that we can't do that. We can write down everybody's name. We can say what you told us and say what the other person told us, and we can sometimes take one or two folks to jail for a few hours or even a few weeks sometimes, but we can't fix the real problem.

Sometimes I'll let them ramble on and on to get it out of their system, then ask them to boil down the problem to a single sentence. Tell me what's wrong like I am a little kid. Simple words. Then when they get it down to that form, I'll ask them to keep repeating it to me.

Sometimes after ten or twelve repetitions, they stop and sort of shake their heads. "Huh," they say. "I guess maybe I should do something about that myself."


*

Ah-ha.


*

Okay, so they never really do that.



But wouldn't it be nice?

*

The real lesson in these kinds of interactions is always a personal one. It is all just a mirror that I hold up to my own dark soul and peer into. Am I any less blind? Any less willful and petulant? Don't I want a mommy and a daddy to come unfuck the big mess I created? On some level?

*

Sometimes you get to help someone who is really just getting screwed by a situation or a person through seemingly no fault of their own. Then the job feels pretty good.


*

Shouldn't everyone who carries a stick to hit people with be a poet or an artist?


*

Shouldn't every poet and artist carry a big stick with which to hit people?



*

This Way To The Circus

*

Our daughter is home. She is more beautiful and more truly a wild creature than I can keep in my head, that is, her physical presence obliterates the mental image I have of her, smashes it to pieces.


She has brought her friend Sky home with her for the week. As insulation from us on some level, but it will keep her happy.


*

Last night was my mother's birthday/welcome home for Em party. Our friend Catherine showed up out of the blue looking for a place to crash, so there was a house full of people there. My brother and his wife and their two kids, Yolie and I and Em and her friend Sky, Mom and Jim...it was nice.

I have a very hard time at gatherings like that. I get uncomfortable and kind of withdraw from everything. My inner French Poodle becomes agitated.

It is very off-putting.

*

Mardi Gras is coming up for San Luis Obispo. A couple of years ago we had a big riot, so once again we are all gearing up for a massive deployment. I'll be leading a company of twelve deputies for the weekend, only one group out of some three to four hundred cops that will be in the city.

It's usually a good time. We hang out with the college kids and have a blast, then if it gets ugly we start kicking ass. But mostly we just have a good time. Last year we played some ping-pong in a frat house for a while. Got our asses kicked.


*

Lately all I want to do is my art. And meditate and do yoga. And lay on the sofa with my wife and the bulldog. Go for long, long, long walks.


*

Is that so wrong?



*

So Street

Last night my beautiful wife and I went out to dinner at Robin's. It was really nice, good food and all, but we both noticed that the sound of everyone talking was too much for us. A baby crying off and on, the two teachers at the table next to ours talking break room shop stuff; it was driving us crazy.

Man, are we spoiled.

Lately all I want to do is listen to silence.


*


We get to have our daughter home this week! Tomorrow we banzai down to Los Olivos to pick her up in the morning, then we get to keep her for a whole week!

I'm so proud of that kid. She can't stand me right now, but I know it's just a phase, part of her figuring out how to be independent. Like she hasn't been working on that since she popped out of her mom.

Anyway, she is full of light and love. Everywhere she goes the sun follows. Birds come down from the trees and sit at her feet, chirping and cooing gladly. Deer eat from her hand. Grizzly bears roll on their backs to get their bellies rubbed.

She is a wonder.


*


She has a boyfriend.



*


Patience.


My big shortcoming. I struggle with it daily. It shows me such an ugly, stupid side of myself. Driving is terrible. I have a hard time letting go and "going with the flow." I am convinced that I should be able to direct the movements of every vehicle around me so that maximum efficiency is created.

My wife hates my driving.


She used to say I was a terrible driver. But now she says I drive fine, she just hates the way I do it.


Ouch.



Here's one thing I do that I love:


I am the creator of "Isolation Zone Driving." Every day I commute along the two lane highway One between Cayucos and Cambria, about fifteen miles or so. As we approach the place where the four lanes narrow to two, I space myself between groups of cars, either speeding up madly to pass a group, or slowling dramatically to let a group pass. The goal is to have no visible cars in front of me or behind me in my lane as I drive the fifteen miles.

Often this requires that I pull over and let cars pass me. Or if I've got room in front, I have to speed up so that no one gets in my 'zone.' Overall speed is irrelevant, even forward progress. All that matters is that the road is "clean."

So. That's a little bit weird.


*

I've got the day off. I'm shooting pics and doing artwork. The dogs are begging to go for a walk, but it's been raining and I am steadfast in my determination to continue fucking off.


*


Aye, Wobot! is a wonder. That guy kills me.



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Warning Signs

This week I've been confronted time and time again with these incredible moments that jar me out of my ordinary conciousness into a kind of stunned amazement. I was watching a television program about this man who suffers from elephantiasis, and his bravery and spirit just cut into me like a knife. He has suffered terribly his whole life with a disease that causes him blinding headaches and has disfigured his face and body into something terrifying to look at, but he maintains a good attitude and tries to make the best of his situation. I saw him and felt this overwhelming sense of the unfairness of his situation. Why do I get to be so lucky and he has to live with that?

Then I ran into a woman that I haven't seen in three years. She had a new baby and looked radiant. We chatted for a while and I mentioned the big changes in her life. She said "Yeah, it's been really challenging. I would never have asked for all of it, but after losing the first baby, then having the brain tumor and the brain surgery, gettting pregnant again with her....it all worked out as it should have, I guess." She had been through hell and come out on the other side with a wonderful gift, and she was grateful for it. I was stunned by the ordeals that people have thrust upon them, time and time again, and how beautiful it is when they come through them with grace and gratitude.

After talking with her, I saw an old friend who'd been stationed in Iraq for the past year and a half. He'd been going along in his regular life as a cop, putting in time with the National Guard, then this war...he was jerked out of the comfortable trajectory he was used to and thrust into an alien life. His wife and children had to be without him, worried sick...then here he is, back like he'd just taken a long walk around the block. Back, but with the specter of additional deployments ahead of him...

Then last night a guy I work with got shot. He's not a cop, he works at the garage. Took a round in the face, one in the shoulder, one in the hand, in the stomach, in the back...He survived, but barely. The shooter left him lying in the dirt and went to another house, where he shot and killed another person. The guy who survived the shooting is the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. At the scene they found roses and candy he was bringing to his girlfriend.

You think you're going to have a nice little Valentines Day celebration, the next thing you know you're fighting for your life.


I dunno.


It feels like some kind of serious heads-up.


I guess that I am so happy with my life, with the abundant blessings that have been heaped on me by a benevolent universe, that I kind of feel like I'm maxing out my last credit card, and any moment the thing is gonna melt down. The lady behind the counter's gonna get on the phone and not let me have it back.

"I'm sorry, sir. Your card's been declined."


*


Did anybody watch Nova last night? Those bugs trapped in amber from twenty million years ago? A fly with a lifespan of two days gets stuck in some resin, and twenty million years later we can count every little hair on his head.

Fuck me.


*


Last night's Yoga class was a lifesaver. I always dread going and try to come up with excuses, but once I'm there I feel like I want to do it forever, every day, all day long. I'm good at putting up resistance to what I need. I'm a tricky bastard that way.


*


I love this life. I truly do. I want so much to do it right, to have a great fucking time and not waste it, not waste any of it.



*


I still want that lens.



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Blogger's Remorse

*






I have blogger's remorse.


Suddenly I understand the desire to pull it all down and retreat to a quiet place.


I feel this odd sense of shame and embarrassment, a sort of cringe when I think about what I'm doing here. What am I doing here? Why do I imagine that what I think or say has any import? And then, of course, these questions in themselves make me cringe even more.

Hmmm....


I guess it's just natural. I wonder if it's been identified in the DSM, what, four? five?




*


I'm sure there'll be a pill I can take for it soon.





*

Boola-Boola

When a thing is right in front of you. That's when you decide. That is when you make it happen. Or it goes back some time before that, and when it is right in front of you is only the front edge of an intention whose beginning is in the distant past. Nevertheless, when the thing is there it is undeniable that it has become the time for action. The trailing edge of the thing is off there in the past, and the leading edge is going somewhere else, pointing off into the future, to the place you are headed based upon the action that you initiate at this juncture, this moment when the thing is physically in front of you. If your perception was clearer, perhaps, you could look along the timeline length of the thing and decipher its head and its tail and your role into calling it into being and your roll in continuing along the subsequent path, but your perception is limited. The hills rise up behind you and in front of you and all you can see is the truncated reality of this moment, and the thing in front of you. But don't make the mistake of discounting all that other just because you can't at this moment perceive it: it is real. And the repurcussions of your act and intention here will echo. As the echos of your past acts are sounding in your ears now. Here and now, where you are and where you face the thing itself in all of its individual peculiarity and tangible physicality.

I might make a list of the things: a dog, a house, a human being, the taking of a life, the saving of a life, some artworks, some written works, many objects of various uses and usefulness. A handful of scattered objects and souls. Dragged into existence by my intention, removed from existence by my intention, created and discarded, abandoned, searched for. What is your list. What is your list. Of what is it comprised. Whose list am I on? Whose are you? We make the mistake of believing that we are not a causitive factor in the wheezy machine or that we are the only one or that we are one of a handful. That the causitive factors are removed from us, or that they have some concern with us, or that they do not. Wheels inside of wheels inside of wheels. Making the calliope sing. The horses spin. Rising and falling to the music. Slowly, sedately. Or fast, faster, headlong rushing. We ride the horse and reach for the brass ring and we stand off to the side and watch our children and our hearts soar and they ache and they collapse in on each other and if we were to look carefully into a slim gap between the mirrored panels at the center of the machine we could see ourselves, bent and shirtless, sweaty and grinning, cranking away at the intricate, whirling gears. I reach out with my hands and pull you lifeless from the past and swing you around in the grass as you laugh, dizzy and gleeful, then when I'm spinning fast enough I let go and fling you into the future. Where you will find me. Where I will have gotten off the path long ago and all you meet is my hazy ghost.

Where I am in the stars raining down on you and in the red moon falling into an endless night and the wind in the stars is all of my cold breath or the burning in my heart is the birth of a new sun.






*

Anchored

Yolie and I celebrated Valentines day early today. We slept in late, then packed up a batch of her fresh-baked scones and a thermos full of coffee, a couple of books, a sleeping bag, the dogs, and headed out to Lone Palm. We hiked in along the isolated cliffs for a mile or so, then made our way down to a sheltered, private cove. The dogs ran in and out of the surf and chased each other and the birds up and down the beach, coming back to shake salt water and sand all over us before running off again. A curious sea lion kept poking his head up to see what the dogs were up to. One by one, others joined him, and after twenty minutes there were over a dozen of them. They looked like spectators at a tennis match, watching the dogs run up and down the beach. A half-dozen egrets and a trio of blue herons occupied the rolling grasslands behind us, and dozens of cormorants held their wings out to dry on an outcropping a dozen yards off-shore. It was like going to the Galapagos Islands for three hours.

I wandered down the beach looking for a suitable Valentine for my Valentine, and found a chunk of seaweed rootball that was shaped exactly like a heart. Perfect.

Anyway, that was about the most perfect day I've ever had.


*


I don't know how I got so lucky.


*

Night Encounter

Okay, love is good. Love is powerful. A kind of glue that binds the fabric of the world together. But when I veer too far into the feeling of love I get uneasy. I get an unbalanced feeling. A feeling that I'm forgetting something vital.

That's where this guy comes in.


*

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.



*


The destructive force. Malevolent and powerful, it moves with grace through the tangled vines of the jungle and it is intent upon its mission of death.


Sweet little kitty cat?

Crushed.

Innocent baby?

Set upon and torn limb from limb.
Devoured.

And etc.

*

Our small minds and hearts must open for this dark beast, too. Without him we are only half alive.


*

Argh. This whole episode just devolves into pat, smarmy, obvious truths. I'm not trying to be profound but it sure sounds like I am. It's just that I'm trying to make room in my psyche for all of it. The whole enchilada. I want to take an axe to my small, provincial understanding of the whole contraption and leave it in splinters. Crack it open and let it all in. Cleanse the doors of perception. It isn't pretty, it's awesome. It doesn't make you feel all warm and happy inside, it stuns you into awareness.

I mean, shouldn't it?

Won't it?


*

Big, little. Love, death, life, birth.


Checkers. Grilled Cheese sandwiches.

*




Fuck it. I'm taking the dogs for a walk.



*

On The Path

The other day I heard this story about how when a woman becomes pregnant, cells from the fetus get into the woman's bloodstream. Scientists drew blood from women in their study group and found fetal cells in all of their blood. What's strange is that these fetal cells stick around for a long, long time in the mother's body, up to forty years after pregnancy. And each pregnancy results in these cells getting in, regardless of the outcome of the pregancy- stillbirth, abortion, doesn't matter- the baby's cells are going to keep floating around in the mother's body for the rest of her life.

The other thing they found was in studying women with active disease processes, such as liver cancer. When they did biopsies of the liver tissue, they found a high concentration of these fetal cells had attached to the liver and were actively repairing the damage being done by the disease. And wherever they looked at the disease process, the scientists found these fetal cells at work.

This seems too beautiful to believe, and it seems to be correct.


This story is the kind of thing that jumps out at me all the time of late. Despite all the horrors that threaten to destroy us, love is at work in the tiny mechanisms of the universe.

The Holy Grail of physicists has been the discovery of a unified theory that would explain all the physical processes of our universe. Strong and weak electromagnetic force, gravity...

love?


If you dug down into the center of my being you'd find my heart. And if you took me apart down to the quantum level, would you find love as the glue that binds my soul to the machine?


I think so. I really do.



*


It is easy every day to lose sight of what's important and we should make a concious effort to remind ourselves that we are all playing a very serious, very fun, very dangerous game here. And that, like a game, there is a time for it to be over. It isn't a regimented game like football or baseball, with those kinds of rules, but more like the games you played as a child in your neighborhood. A pick-up game of freeze tag or kick the can, where you join in the game already in progress, and you play your heart out, running, freezing, laughing and crying. The sun sinks toward the horizon and the first stars come out but you pay it no heed. One by one mothers come to their doorways and call in your friends, who veer off from the game and run homeward, to a place of light and warmth and love.

You'll be called home soon, too.


So run your little heart out while you can.



*


Tag, you're it.



*

Aeromotor

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San Geronimo Beach

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Plum Blossom

I am taking Cash and loading him up in the pickup and we are going to the beach. Every day on the way to work the surf has been huge and the wind howling, blowing the spray back in the most beautiful way, the two powerful forces smashing into each other as the sun peaks up over the hills and turns everything into a glowing, magical display...

If I get any good pictures I will show them to you.

This little plum blossom is attached to a tree in the lot behind the burned-down house behind the old Bucket of Blood saloon (now Painted Sky recording studio). Santa Rosa creek runs alongside the long, fenced-in lot. It is also home to an old shack that is all that remains of our little town's Chinese neighborhood.

I love this place beyond all reason.


Okay, gotta run before the light changes.



Oh, yeah- Have a good day. Be good to yourself. Breathe. Focus. Gratitude and Compassion.



*

Bad Medicine

we are in such great pain we must take
our medicine.



*



though it kill us it will first ease
our pain.





*



you don't have to hold us down we will
get in line for it.




*



we must have it. the pain is more
than we can bear.


*


have you no pity? give
it to me do you hear.




*


oh, my little beautiful moment, my sweet
one come to me.



*

Headstrong Vs. Headstrong

This is Yolie and Lucy on our last East/West Ranch walkabout. The Taurus has decided that the Bulldog must obey. The Bulldog is dubious about this new state of affairs, to say the least. But as headstrong and willful as that Lucy is, my money is on the taller one.

I'll keep you posted.

*

My wife had been on a bulldog tear for about five years, just freakin' obsessed with them. Their schrunchy faces, their wide-legged stance- it drove her crazy. But they cost about as much as a small house in North Dakota, so it was never really REALLY gonna happen.

Then last summer, it did. Just like that, so fast we didn't have time to think about it. Or I didn't. I dunno, it's all kinda hazy now...we were at a gas station, there was a picture of the puppies on the window, the breeder was nearby (okay, a half-hour drive into the middle of nowhere, but, hey...) we went out to take a look, we drove home (another hour), we got into the house and sat down, got up, drove back out, grabbed the dog, drove home, and I lost my wife.

I mean it.

She loves this damn dog so bad it makes her teeth hurt.

It is the single best thing I could ever, ever, ever have done for her.

How can you put a price on love?


*

By the way, love, love, love, love, love to you all.

May you be happy.
May you have peace.
May you be free from suffering.
May all your wishes be granted.


*

Hanging out at Camozzi's

I told myself this year would be my year of no purchases. That is, I won't buy things for myself that I want but don't need. We live pretty simply, and we've done a good job of living within our means, or more exactly, to the very limit of our means, but every year I find that there is some expensive thing I want, and usually I buy it. A laptop. Digital camera. Digital video camera. This cool printer. That cool scanner. Whatever.

This year it is Photoshop and the Canon 100mm 2.8 USM macro lens.

oooh, baby.


And it's not really for me so much as it is for my art, right? I mean, I'm using photoshop elements, I have no macro lens...I'm hamstrung by these limitations and if I had the full Photoshop and the cool lens, I could really jump into the kind of work I want to do...

See how it goes?


I don't know if I'll be able to hold out, but I'm thinking I should. It's got to be better for me in the long run to learn how to break free from the hold my desires have upon me than to give in to them time and time again. The school that our daughter is going to has as one of its slogans "Distinguishing between needs and wants." They believe it is an important value to instill in the kids, and I agree wholeheartedly. I can easily pass up new clothes, or a book of poetry, or music...but these items get me and won't let go.

I suppose I should be grateful for them. I can't learn to master desire until I am denying myself something that really has me in its grip.

*


I don't know how to understand this crazy world, but it's good to know that all of my best efforts are, in the end, only approximations of how the contraption fits together and where to put the gas in, where to check the oil... I do know how to love it, and for that I don't really need to understand exactly how it works.

It is a great and wonderful thing with which to wrestle, though.

Right now I am utterly convinced that compassion and lovingkindness are the key. And reckless loving- headlong, holding nothing back, not exactly fearless, but feeling the fear and loving without reservation anyway.

I have a long, long way to go.


*


I want the lens.


Can we make some kind of compromise?


Lets talk.


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Punch List

In a beautiful routine here lately. I go to work, which is right now mindless and easy, then I come home and hang out with my perfect wife and our flawed dogs. Do artwork, watch movies on the sofa, go for long walks in the woods or on the beach, once a week go into town for shopping, eat at the Natural Cafe, go to the bookstores. Hit the gym a few times a week, yoga class, the library...

Happy. Stable. Calm. Like the river, after it has run down the mountainside and it stretches out onto the flatlands, how it slows down, gets all curvy and mellow...it's still going to the sea, it's still doing its thing, it just isn't in a big hurry right now.

I'll take it. Nice deep breath.


Thank you, whoever you are. I am humbled and grateful.

Please don't smash me with a rock or anything.



I mean, if that's okay with you.



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Double Self

Two Tearful Dishwashers.




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Armageddon Bedtime Story, Part III

Did he ever imagine this day would come? When he was younger,
his mother told him stories that always began 'a long, long, time ago,' and in these stories there were fabulous creatures, or horrible mutant monsters, but only the boy in the story could see them.
Only he had the magical powers.

Now, the monsters are commonplace. One has only to go downstairs, to the market or to the movie house, to see them: their long fangs glistening with saliva, their hooded eyes burning with a green fire, their long arms dragging on the ground. Their shuffling steps and pitiful moaning.

Better to stay inside. Watch the television, even if it's just snow. If he is lucky, there is still some cough syrup in the medicine cabinet. Or some decongestant pills. Anything to dull the senses. It is unendurable, he thinks, to wear the mask any longer. His skin itches, everything he says is muffled. It is damp and oppressive.

He turns the sound up on the television.


*

Shipwreck and Monkeys

I was digging through a photo album from my childhood and came across this picture of my little brother and I, which was something of a revelation for me. I don't remember this day at all, don't know where it was taken, don't even remember seeing this picture ever before, but it explains, I believe, my lasting obsession with:

1. Shipwrecks, and
2. Monkeys


I dunno. I just had to share this with you.


Okay, off to secret beach now.


I mean it.


*


okay, I admit it. There's also some evidence here of another obsession...

3. Checking my package

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The Open Road

It's my day off and this is where I'm headed. Yolie is working, so I'm taking Cash and the camera and we're off to secret beach for the day. Get the inside stink off of me, as my Grandfather used to say. When I'm on my death bed my only regret will be that I had to miss too many of these days...





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Once Upon A Time

She used to keep her purse crammed with candy, and she'd hide candy in her bedroom. We found it in her drawers, between her mattress and boxspring, in little nooks and crannies all over her room. When she was little we would occasionally awake in the middle of the night to find her standing by our bed, staring wordlessly at us.

In my heart a difficult battle continues to be waged. Part of coming to terms with adulthood is learning how to make room for failure. Some things, you get one chance at, and when you miss it, well, that's it.

Afterwards, you make accomodations. Like after a car wreck, you walk with a limp, or you can't taste lemons anymore.

Love is a complicated thing.


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First Dog Watch

What's best is how the ship is alive. How she speaks constantly to me. Like a lover who by the turn of her head can tell you whether she's happy or not, each sound the ship makes tells us all how she is feeling, if she's thrilled by the freshening breeze, or overworked by the quartering seas, if she's well trimmed or loose, cautious or headstrong.

How she speaks to us even as we sleep, creaking and groaning, singing or keening. Our bodies feeding her body, attending to her like worker ants servicing their queen, her body keeping ours alive and sheltered from the pitiless sea. As lively and powerful and demanding as any woman. She gets in our blood, whispers to us in a low murmur so that the very sound of her voice almost disappears, but it is always there. Our mother, our lover, our sweet and terrible jail.

It is too small to call what we have love.


*

On Devil's Beach

Millbrae has decided that we must quit this place, and so we are off. We loaded into the skiff and rowed back to the ship. Millbrae took note of my injuries, but I offered nothing and he did not ask. Carlos refused to board and took off into the jungle. He relented once we were a good quarter mile off shore, running from the tree line, down the beach, and plunging into the waves, swimming out to us with strong strokes. Rather than submit to the indignity of being hauled aboard, he swam on ahead of us and was scooped up by Nately.

I took my customary seat at the bow and looked back at the island as the men worked the oars. I regarded the Finger of God as the morning light struck its flanks, and absentmindedly rubbed at the tender wound in my chest.

"Restless night, eh, Samuel?" Millbrae said, inclining his head toward the island. "Carlos made some kind of racket. I shouldn't wonder he got into something even he couldn't handle."

"I suppose."

"Taking off in the middle of the night like that. Could have been killed."

"Yes, could have been." I concentrated on a fleck of food on Millbrae's moustache. It rested on the thick, greasy hairs like a liferaft in a high sea.

"He weren't though, were he?" Millbrea laughed. "He might be tougher than I thought."

I said nothing and continued to watch the Finger of God receed in the distance as the sounds of the ship drifted towards us.
Millbrae's laughter rang out all around us, sounding for all the world like the barking of the sea lions we'd left behind on Devil's Beach.

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