Crossing The Channel

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Q: What is the cause of the world?

A: Love.

Q: Why do men revolt?

A: To find beauty, either in life or in death.

Q:  What is for each of us inevitable?

A: Happiness.

Q: And what is the greatest marvel?

A: Each day, death strikes, and we live as though we were immortal. This is the greatest marvel.


The Mahabhrata




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My wife is the single greatest gift that the universe has bestowed upon me. Greater than eyesight, greater than intellect, greater than strength or longing or knowledge.


I cannot believe my good fortune.


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Not that the universe dropped her in my lap, exactly.


I have never fought for a thing harder.


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There were many times I thought, without exaggeration, that it would be the end of me to win her.


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And now, each day, I taste the fruit of my sweet victory. If there be a greater boon than spending each minute of my life with her, I cannot imagine it, nor would I trade what I have with her for it, though it be some golden wish-granting machine.


I have what I have always wanted.


*

You think me a fool. You think that I overstate my case.




You could not be more wrong.




If I sin, it is only by not giving her her due.



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I used to believe that there was a magical world, just beyond this one.


Now I know that this is the magical realm after all.




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I have pledged myself to love.




I have no regrets.















***
















Namaste.


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Leaving Tulsa

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It can't be helped.



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The dog is snoring in the livingroom, the wife is out thriftshopping, the rain has paused.



A certain stillness in the house.



A stillness in me.




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And still the art.




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What can you do?


You can't do nothing.




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Namaste.



***

The Butcher's Dream

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We are a provisional creature.



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If you look for us in a million years, we'll be long gone.



It will be like we were never here.



We will join Neanderthal, Homo Habilus, Homo Ergaster, and the rest.


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In a hundred years, everyone alive right now will be dead.


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In four billion years our Sun will expand into a giant and we'll be swallowed up.


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After that, a few more billion years, comes the heat death of the universe.


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Make hay while the sun shines.




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It is the weekend and raining and there is going to be hot coffee, potatoes and eggs, fire in the fireplace, and art and art and art and art.


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Namaste.



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Fishers of Men

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Praise to those who are left behind.
Praise to those who tend to the bodies of the dead.
Praise to those who trouble deaf heaven with their bootless cries.
Praise to the women who bear it away.


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This is our prayer for today.




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Namaste.



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Our Lady of The Sweet Waters

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It grows late and I won't sleep.


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I am burning.


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I cannot slake my thirst.



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I make art instead.




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It is as sweet as any water.





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Namaste.



***

The Lake Where Things Are Lost

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Can you name one who is to be spared?


We are all for the bone yard.


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I feel blessed to be where I am, still drawing breath. I just went and stood on the front porch, in the sunlight and cold air. The sun is going down and it floods across the yard through the arbor, all golden, firing up the tulips and daffodils and the brick path and the green weeds, making no distinction among them, painting them all alike. The dog is asleep in a patch of sunlight, too, soaking up the warmth of it.

I got my small troubles, just like you do. I got my portion of blessings and then some. I work at opening my small and flinty heart. I throw myself at my many failures yet again. I love with abandon and don't begrudge it.

Of late I have been astounded at the physical world and am learning to find in it all of the magic and wildness I once sought in religion or spirituality or god or magic or what have you. I see now that it was my paltry imagination that was to blame, for I could not apprehend the vast wild strangeness of my own visible world. I sought out some other thing, as if this world were drab and lifeless and boring, when there could not exist a thing more strange and wonderful and limitless and mysterious, unknowable.

I will go to my grave without understanding much more than I do right now, but that's okay. I won't stop trying.

I am glad for this life.


I am glad for it all.



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Namaste.



***

Waiting for The Hangman

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You are always the last one called to step forward.


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When Hare heard of Death, he started for his lodge & arrived there crying, shrieking, My uncles & my aunts must not die! And then the thought assailed him: To all things death will come! He cast his thoughts upon the precipices & they began to fall & crumble. Upon the rocks he cast his thoughts & they became shattered. Under the earth he cast his thoughts & all the things living there stopped moving & their limbs stiffened in death. Up above, towards the skies, he cast his thoughts & the birds flying there suddenly fell to the earth & were dead.

After he entered his lodge he took his blanket &, wrapping it around him, lay down crying. Not the whole earth will suffice for all those who will die. Oh there will not be enough earth for them in many places! 

There he lay in his corner wrapped up in his blanket, silent.



(Winnebago Indian)
Technicians of The Sacred
pg. 85


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This is our prayer for today.



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Namaste.



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Waiting For The Future To Go Away

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Let me see, what was Snake saying?

Ok, I will tell you.

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1


Ogun kills on the right & destroys on the right
Ogun kills on the left & destroys on the left
Ogun kills suddenly in the house & suddenly in the field
Ogun kills the child with the iron with which it plays
Ogun kills in silence
Ogun kills the thief & the owner of the stolen goods
Ogun kills the owner of the slave--
& the slave runs away
Ogun kills the owner of the house
& paints the hearth with his blood
Ogun is the death who pursues a child
until it runs into the bush
Ogun is the needle that pricks at both ends
Ogun has water but he washes in blood


2

Ogun sacrifices an elephant to his head
Master of iron, head of warriors
Ogun, great chief of robbers
Ogun wears a bloody cap
Ogun has four hundred wives
& one thousand four hundred children
Ogun the fire that sweeps the forest
Ogun's laughter is no joke
Ogun eats two hundred earth worms & does not vomit



3

Ogun has many gowns, he gives them all to the beggars
He gives one to the woodcock--
the woodcock dyes it indigo
He gives one to the coucal--
the coucal dyes it in camwood
He gives one to the cattle egret--
the cattle egret leaves it white

Ogun is not like something you can throw into your cap
Do you think you can put on your cap
& walk away with him?

Ogun scatters his enemies
When the butterflies arrive at the place
where the cheetah shits
they scatter in all directions.

The light shining on Ogun's face is not easy to behold
Ogun, let me not see the red of your eye


(Yoruba)
                                                                            
Technicians of the Sacred
pgs 164-165


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That is our prayer for today.



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Namaste.



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Stealing Beauty

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The living feed on the dead. It is the way of the world.



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I cannot extricate myself from the vast web of interconnectedness all things share. As alone as I want to be, I have the company of billions of parasites and bacterium on me and inside me at all times. I am spinning with the earth in the deep void of space, bathed in the light and warmth that is thrown off from the thermonuclear core of our Sun, inhaling the oxygen given off by the photosynthesis of all the plants that fill each nook and corner of the planet we have not scraped clear of them, eating the bodies of dead animals and plants to nourish the heat factory at my core. The atoms in my body don't see any division at all between inside me and outside me. Infinitely vast on the scale of atoms, I am vanishingly small on a planetary scale and invisible on any scale greater than that. On the scale of time my life and all it contains is but a breath, the falling of a wave on the shore, instantly erased by the next wave in a never-ending process.

It seems silly to persist in the notion of a self at all, yet I do.


I remain stubbornly convinced of it.




I am.



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The whole endeavor captivates me.




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"No matter how far you have gone down the wrong path, turn back"


Turkish proverb

***


Namaste.



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Bitter As A Blue Ruin

One thing you can see on the palms and forearms and fingers of some murder victims is slashes and knife wounds known as defensive wounds. Your killer is coming at you with a knife or a machete and you hold up your hands in front of your face so that is what takes the brunt of the initial assault.

But then he gets to your throat or your heart or into your brain through your eyes and when you are laid out on the slab we will note those defensive wounds, you can be sure.


We know to look for them.


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For the first 3.5 billion years of life on earth, it was just a bunch of single-cells floating around.

Prokaryotes.


You couldn't even see them with the naked eye, they were so small.


The whole planet lousy with them, but if you landed on it, you'd never know there was life at all.


It wasn't on the right scale for us to apprehend.

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We are limited by our own scale of size and temporality, so that everything that falls outside of our scale, which is 99.9 percent of the Universe, is beyond our ken.



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It is little wonder we're so inept.


***

God bless us, every one.


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Twilight

I feel about as mean as a snake right now.


I want to hit someone.


I don't much care who.



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Sick of everything. Sick to death of it.


Not everything.



Just my little portion of it.


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I know the world is stuffed full of goddamn wonders. I know it takes a paltry, flinty soul to mewl about petty unhappiness in the face of all that conflagration of blessings.


I know it.


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As I'm rolling downhill in a hand-built go-cart, the wheels threating to clatter off at any moment, I continue to be amazed at the grinding mindlessness of the big machine, and yet enchanted beyond all reckoning at the pretty lights it throws off all the while.

I love it in the abstract and specific, but not in the personal. Or the other way around, I'm never sure.


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I am consumed by the mechanisms at work on all scales.


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I don't know why I am continually shocked at my own small problems and continue to labor under the illusion that they matter or have significance.


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I should delete all of this.


Every word of it.


***

Namaste, begrudgingly.


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Not really.


Not begrudgingly.




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I want you to be happy.


I want the universe to shower you with blessings.



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Which it is already doing without ceasing.



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Solitaire with Scissors

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The Wild Woman of Borneo wields her wand in a stone room and climbs a ladder that goes nowhere.


Digital photomontage, heartbreak, despair, on cardboard with hair and glue.

twelve inches high by a thousand sleepless nights long.

NFS

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In "The Wrestler" there is a point near the end of the movie where Mickey Rourke's character, "a used-up piece of meat" is working part time at a deli counter. He's at the end of his rope, and he's slicing some ham for some guy's sandwich, and he hauls back his fist and jams his thumb into the blade of the big meat slicer and that pretty much sums up how I feel right now.

There's just nothing better to do at this point.


He rubs the blood all over his face and then runs through the store scaring the crap out of the 'normal' people doing their Sunday shopping.

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"I WANT SOMETHING DONE!"

Charles Cheswick


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In other news, I made some damn good pizza last night.



Here's how:

Turn your oven up to a million. Put a cast iron skillet over a high flame for ten minutes. Take your baseball sized dough ball, and flatten it to the size of a small plate. Drop it into the smoking hot skillet.

Fast as you can, top with carmelized onions, goat cheese, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts.

Throw that bitch in the oven for three minutes until it's charred along the edges.

Eat it fast and burn the roof of your mouth and put out the flames with beer.


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Repeat X 2.


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Under the heading "More of The Same,"

I am broken hearted.



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It is but the human condition.



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Namaste.


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The Engineer's Dilemma

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So, I really am taking a college course from GOD. Professor David Christian is Professor of History at San Diego State University. He is making my brain accommodate 13.7 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to the present moment and beyond.

It is the coolest fucking thing in the world.


It's no secret that I am a NOVA junkie, a Frontline junkie, a general PBS crack-fiend, a voracious reader of John McPhee and Jared Diamond and Gould and Dennett and imagine if all of them got together in one wild man's body and you could sit around a campfire under the stars and listen to them explain the deepest mysteries of the universe for forty-eight half-hour long lectures. Not an hour on PBS, not a two-hour movie, not a five-night miniseries, but twenty-four hours of hard-core brain-stuffing bliss.

That Teaching Company is going to get so fucking much of my money.

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Okay, I gotta go walk the dog now. Then a movie on the sofa with the wife and some ice-cream.


Do I know how to live, or what?



***

Namaste.


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Leaving The Circus

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Or

The Dishwashers as seen through the eyes of The Wild Woman of Borneo.


digital photomontage, 22 x 14 inches


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Yes. I'll admit it. We are freaks.


She's right about that much.


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Where we went wrong, perhaps, is trying to raise her like one.


Nah.


I mean, look at her.


She's twice as strange as us.



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We love her, though it will be our undoing.



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Yesterday we got a box in the mail. Inside it were the courses we ordered from THE TEACHING COMPANY. We got "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft" and "Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity."

Each one is thirty or forty lectures from some hot-shit college perfessers on the topic. THE TEACHING COMPANY genetically engineers their speakers from the DNA of Albert Einstein, Brad Pitt, Sir Richard Attenborough, and Glen Gould. Something like that.

They say it is like taking a college class from GOD only there is no homework and no grades, and a very low likelihood of showing up and finding out it is the last day of class, you're just in time to take the final exam, and you're not wearing any pants.

Which pretty much sums up my brief college experience.


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So, my redemption may be at hand.


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I got four days off and I'm not doing shit except having two weekends in a row. Today is Saturday until after dinner, when I will make it be Sunday evening. Then I will wake up and it will be Saturday all over again. Then on Sunday, it will be Sunday until lunchtime, when I will make it be Saturday afternoon for the third day in a row. Monday will be Sunday pretty much all day, which will suck, but there's nothing for it.

I will cook a lot of food and go for a lot of walks and do art, art, art, art, art, and clean the house and the fish tank and kiss my girl on Valentines, which now I don't know when the fuck it is.

Guess I'll just kiss her a bunch to be safe.


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My goddamn wife.


She is a space alien from the future.


I love her like nobody's bidness.



***

Namaste, motherfuckers.


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Rangeday!

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Today we'll be working on dynamic movement off the 'X' using the Pekiti take off, wounded drills that include tactical and slide-lock reloads using only one hand, primary side or support side, and Type I, II, and III malfunction clearing using primary only and support side only to simulate the effect of getting shot in your gun hand or your support hand at the start of a lethal engagement.

It's all about working these problems through in a relatively safe environment so that the first time you think about clearing a malfunction one-handed is not when you've been shot and someone is actively trying to murder you.

This way, when that happens, you already know what to do!


Won't you be a happy camper then? You bet you will.


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And is it going to rain all day?


Hell yes it is.


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It is a hard old world out there. You have to make your training harder.



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Namaste.


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The Bosses

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I got the Sunday anxity.


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I want to stick my head in the sand. Pull the blanket over my head.


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Instead I will quit doing art and get my ass in the kitchen. Tonight is roast pork loin with maple orange chipotle glaze and roasted potatoes, carrots, and shallots to go with.

I suppose it will be good for me.


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Namaste.


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The Lighthouse Keeper

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The washer and dryer are going, filling our small house with the sound of agitation and tumbling and the smell of warm, clean clothes. The woman is doing her yoga in the studio and I have just gotten back from the beach with a very wet and dirty dog.

Tonight we are having dinner at McPhee's with my dad and step-mother (who is not evil).We haven't been there for a long time, but we love Ian's food. The place is on Main street in Templeton, a kind of left-behind cowboy town. You can hear spurs jingling on the sidewalk, and every truck has a couple of dogs lying down in the bed that will eye you lazily as you pass. Inside it is dark and there is a long bar and a pressed tin ceiling and over the kitchen hangs a great iron pig and there is a very good wine list and bread served with olive oil and balsalmic vinegar to dip into and the plates are large and white and plain as a sheet of paper.

It is some good eating to be had there.

And it will be nice to sit and eat with Pops and Leigh and catch up with them. My old man is the original police from which my brother and I have tried to craft our models of manhood. He came up on the job in Texas in the sixties, and in my mind it was a romantic time of car chases and shoot-outs with six-guns and fist fights in the alley behind the bars.

Not all that different from the job today, but undoubtedly cooler and more manly. In those days my old man looked like a movie star, handsome as all get out. He looks even better now, how men can sometimes.

A old man like that, what chance have you got?


You're gonna take up the gun and badge.






See if you can't measure up.



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Our poor mother.


A staunch feminist, liberal college professor, historian, artist, pacifist. After the divorce, she never let us play with toy guns or have them in the house. Of course, all summer long we'd be out on the farm with our old man, riding motorcycles and shooting machine guns and pistols in the back yard, wailing on each other with sticks and rocks.


I got some hard bark on me, but my little brother is altogether tougher. He is a warrior in his bones, in his blood. Every cell in his body wants to fight. I don't think I have seen him more than two times in a row without a black eye or a busted lip or a broken bone in his hand or a cast on his leg.

It drives our mother mad.


Why can't we be nice boys?


Hell, I don't know.



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Of course, I am as much my mother's son as I am my old man's. I got a hunger for reading and learning and I believe in the strength and beauty that a woman possesses that man cannot claim for his own but only marvel at from a distance. I have a liberal stance in the world, an odd thing for a police at any time. I sometimes even think that mankind might be basically good, if given half a chance at it. I love art and music and poetry, although I cannot abide tea parties, dances, or gatherings of any type.


Hard and crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside.


*

How bout that piece up there with the woman and the swimming horses.


I don't believe it's half bad.



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Namaste.



***

Awake, Not Dreaming

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It is just after four in the morning. I have been awake since midnight.


The last couple of years, I've forgotten how to sleep. Not all the time, but more and more often lately.


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I spent four hours in the box day before yesterday with a guy, trying to get him to admit that he'd been molesting his girlfriend's seven-year-old daughter.

It took a long while, but we got there.


It was the worst kind of intimacy, being in there with him. The whole trick is getting inside their heads, figuring out what motivates them, what they're afraid of, what they think you'll think is okay. You have to develop a sympathetic way of seeing them.

Everyone wants to be loved. We all want to be admired and respected. We don't want to have to admit our mistakes, or pay for them. We want to be understood. We want to be able to do what we want without consequences.

All I do is exploit that humanity for my own ends. For society's ends. I tell myself that. But in the box and in the aftermath of the box, all I feel like is a whore. I flatter and cajole, tell him what he wants to hear, listen to his tales of woe. Blame the victim, that's always a fruitful line.

There is a momentary sense of triumph when you get them to pop, but after all I want to do is take a long hot shower and drink until I can't feel anything.

Still, it's what I love to do and I'm good at it.

I can't believe I get paid to do it.



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I'm a broken toy.



*

We are working on catching a killer right now. He doesn't know we're coming for him. It is a slow, methodical kind of thing. Not the hot and heavy, balls-to-the-wall, four hours of sleep every three days, hundred miles an hour of the fresh pursuit.

It has its own kind of beauty, though.


There is this process in the work when you are in a room with the team and they are some smart motherfuckers, some people with time on and they have clear eyes and they are funny, they are always, almost always, funny fucking people, and you're kicking stuff around, lining things up, working it backwards and forwards, turning it inside out, going big picture, tiny detail, this-way-that-way, and this is also what I love. The world's biggest jigsaw puzzle and no box, no picture, no guidelines, but somebody picks up a piece and turns it and sets it down next to another one, and you get an edge, and a piece of sky or water, and you are off to the races and it is beautiful to watch. It is like watching trauma surgeons or fly fishermen or hyenas taking down a wildebeest.

I really love smart people doing difficult things well.


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I'm reading Daniel Dennett right now. I just finished "Freedom Evolves" and I'm working on "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." Like Jarred Diamond, he helps me fit things together into a larger conceptual framework that allows me, or I hope will allow me, to continue with this expansion I am struggling to force onto my consciousness. My mind is small and my concepts are small and my focus is narrow, so to overcome this I feel like I must always build a bigger scaffold around what I have so far, and then fill in and build up around that structure so I can launch out yet farther.

How am I supposed to really understand the vastness of the physical universe? It is too big to encompass conceptually. It really is. And what about deep time? Geologic time? Cosmological time? How about neural complexity? There are more neural synaptic connections possible than atoms in the universe? WTF? How do I understand complexities of scale, macro and micro, not just intellectually, but emotionally? As big as the whole enchilada is outside of you, it's just as vast and huge inside of you, cellular, molecular, atomic, sub-atomically.

You are the center of the universe, geographic, temporal, scale-wise, etc.

No, you're not either. But something about the concept is illustrative. I don't know of what.

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In the meantime, I like to eat peanut butter sandwiches at around three am. They taste so good and they soothe me and settle my stomach, which is always in knots. A symptom of my nervous disposition. Hard-hearted, misanthropic, shaved-headed mean guy on the outside, nervous little poodle on the inside.

Among other pathologies.

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It's nearing five am now. Soon I will wake up my better half with a fresh pot of strong coffee and a new day will unveil itself for us in all its unpredictable glory.


I am glad for the gift of it, always.



***


Namaste.



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