Blind Girl's Ride

*


Back to work. Couple of my buddies got in a scrape last night. It got loud, if you catch my drift.


I can still have beers with them tonight, so it turned out alright.


*


Yesterday I made homemade raviolis with butternut squash, goat cheese, and sage in a brown butter pecan sauce for dinner.



I don't care what I ever make again.



*









I got a deep, abiding sense of sadness and sweetness right now. Every time there's one of these things it is like a tuning fork trembling far down inside of me, singing a razor's song.

I like those boys and I'm glad they come out of it good.



Fuck everybody else.







*





Shit. I thought I had something to say, but I don't.




***



Namaste.



***

The Outing

*



One thing I dream about often is my fish leaping out of the aquarium and flopping on the floor. I run to pick one of them up, and notice that there are fish kind of everywhere, in the corners, under the sofa. As I'm scooping them up and plopping them back into the water, I realize that I've got dozens and dozens of aquariums all over the house, and I've neglected them terribly. The water is dark and murky and half gone, and the fish are all sick and dying, and they're beautiful- amazing, rare specimens that I can't believe I'd forgotten all about and it makes me feel how you'd imagine.

Also, once I get them back in the water they tend to just kind of float up out of the water again and drift through the air and I have to push them back under water or they'll die.

Of course I know they're all going to die anyway after all that trauma.


But I have to try.



*





I'm going out into the woods again. One more day I don't have to work, I'ma spend it out of doors.



*


Coffee is hot and dark and strong this morning. And, shit, can I do me some art or what.



Run and tell that, home boy.



****



Namaste.




***

Alice At Home

*



I can't stop going into the woods.



Something there is drawing me in.




*




Yesterday I was sitting on a log, putting my shoes back on after a couple of barefoot miles. Tall pines stood between me and the sun and the air was thick with dancing motes climbing up towards the glare of the sun and the boughs shook with a small breeze and everywhere my eyes lit things were alive and moving and I thought that I was for the first time home again.

Would that I could build me a shack in them and be silent and walk until my legs fell off and then sleep under a blanket with the overhead stars banging to get in and a well full of cold water and a tin cup and a bucket to draw it and an axe and a pencil and some papers.

And a woman to kill and die for.




*


Instead I do it in this small, beautiful house almost touching those woods and backing up to them.


And everywhere my eyes light there is art and magic and hard, clean beauty.



*


Meanwhile, I gnaw the bone of the world between my teeth.



*




Namaste.



***

Fear Not The Obstackles In Your Path

*



You seek a great fortune, you three who are neigh in chains. 
You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. 
But first... first you must travel a long and difficult road, 
a road fraught with peril. 




Mm-hmm. 




You shall see thangs, 




wonderful to tell. 












You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house, ha. 








And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you
how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, 
for fate has vouchsafed your reward. 








Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, 
still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.




                                                      The Blind Seer
                                                      Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?














*










Namaste.






***

Diana Appears to Pericles

Or, How Woman Was the First Hunter and Bagged The Sweetest Fruit

*


It were a good meal and a nice day of it.



I took a chance and got a smoked turkey from Greenburg's in Tyler, Texas, which arrived on time as advertised and was so damn smoked it smelled like our house caught fire and then got rained on and we was standing around in the aftermath of it.


Tasted pretty good, though.


*


We had my mom and step-dad, my dad and step-mom, my mom's parents, and my step-mom's son and his wife and their new baby. A convivial and generally angst-free gathering, very low-key. I enjoyed like hell cooking all day, doing up old-timey collards and roasted sweet potatoes and some cauliflower in a mustard-lemon glaze, stuffing, gravy, rolls, what-not.

My right arm and helpmeet kept it all flowing smooth, appearing magically with just the right word or gaze or bit of food or taking away dishes or washing them.

The dog made herself the center of every conversation and got her ass pet like she likes.



We had the whole crew out by six and the house spanking clean by seven and I was laid out on top of the bedcovers, snoring away by seven fifteen.


*



I thought about all of you, and gave thanks for your friendship and your warmth and generosity to me and to this place. You make this place what it is.



*




Now for three glorious days off in a row with nothing planned and nothing I have to do and bright, sunny, cold fall weather.



*


God-damned-son-of-a-lesbian-bitch I've got it good, don't I?



****


Namaste.



****

Pluton & Furor

*


You don't go to war with the Armadillo you want, you go to war with the armadillo you have.


*






Here's wishing you and yours a blessed and bountiful Thanksgiving Day.




*



May you be happy.
May you be at peace.
May you be calm.



*




Namaste.




****

Sitting with ghosts

*



I like that movie Badlands.

"Kit was the most trigger happy person I'd ever met." Holly Sargis

"I got it all planned, and, uh, I'm taking Holly off with me." Kit Carruthers 

That movie undoes me ever time I look at it.







I want the world to be written by Cormac McCarthy and shot by Terrence Malick.




Hell, I guess it is.




*




Sometimes I think I'm crazy and other times I think I'm just self-indulgent and if I'd buck up I'd be fine.




It's just my wires is all.





They tangled.




*









I'm glad for your company here, I truly am.








*




Namaste.




***

Elizabeth's Dream

*





We went down in the rain to see the Wild Woman of Borneo and she has made that place her bitch. She reigns over her minions, the staff is always coming over and holding her hand, patting her head, older addicts come up and tell us they are watching over her, don't worry, don't worry- and she knows it is all her due.


She is beautiful and glowing and frightened like horses get frightened but she won't show it, not to anyone, not ever.


She throws off sparks. She's like the man in the planet at the end of Eraserhead. Disfigured, burned, pulling the levers that move the world.







She is glad to see us.



That is a thing I would have cut out my liver to have happen, and it's mine for free.



*


I know there are worse places, and sadder, more broken people, and more loss, and more anguish, and more guilt and blame and horror and terror and meanness and vile hatred and orneryness in the world, but that place will do until real trouble gets here.

Our troubles are but small, and we have experienced the tenderness of mercy more often than we've a right to expect or to ask for.


Again and again we are spared the worst.




*



Today we polished the dog in preparation for Thanksgiving. The hedge got trimmed and I did not lose any fingers or even parts of fingers. The garden got weeded and raked and cleaned and it sparkles like a new dime.

I took the dog out to Lone Palm and walked the low cliffs over the dark sea and there was a cold wind blowing hard from the sea and dark clouds and rain spitting and from the sea, arching over the low flatlands and pinning the foothills rose a vivid, pulsing double rainbow ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE SKY!!!



*


I did some art and the woman is lying on the sofa watching a Japanese horror flick and I better figure out what the fuck I'm cooking her so she doesn't up and leave my ass.



*



I am blessed beyond all measure.




*


Namaste.




****

Mara's Room

*


It's raining and it's not going to stop all weekend.




That's okay with me.



*







I'm fine, I'm feeling better. Still crazed, but not as unhappy. I got everything I need. I got a good woman who loves me, I have a job that pays the bills and gives me a sense of doing something larger than myself, a way of being in the world, I got family and love galore.





So what if my wires are crossed and get all sparky from time to time.




*



Plus, I'm not feeling conversational. If you know me at all, you won't take it personal. Maybe that's wrong, I don't know.






*



Did you see the trailer for "Marwencol"?



I can't stop thinking about it. About Mark Hogencamp. About his violent and beautiful women, the SS troops, the Catfight Bar, the whole village. Brain injury as an avenue towards a strange and all-consuming artwork.


A whole new world.




*



I keep bumping up against this concept of emergence. How the same forces that made the small-scale structures of atoms also made the large scale structure of planets, and galaxies, and the universe itself, and how the same insensate grinding along, flipping over of genetic cards in a game of solitare played by a blindman for thirteen billion years, made whales and lichen and bees and monkeys and us and how we're not anywhere special in the process, it just goes on and on without limit but it's going on past us, beyond us, we'll be buried in layers of accumulated silt like everything else that's come before us. And how the internet is going to be the start of a Matrix-like world where there's no difference between what's carbon based and what's silicon based, the whole of creation is going to be sentient, if it isn't already, and how all of it is, not exactly predetermined, but kind of unavoidable, inevitable. Things are the way they are because of these myriad physical rules, and you could roll the dice a million billion times and probably things would shake out pretty much the same.

The set of possible evolutionary moves is much smaller than the set of impossible moves.


We are the ants in the colony. We don't know what the fuck we're doing or why we're doing it. Or rather, we do, on this small, intimate scale of interpersonal interaction and house building and road-making and sailing and murdering each other. But we're blind to what kind of a thing we're building, and to what purpose.

And everything is happening on this limitlessly expandable and contractable fractal scale that we are smack dab in the middle of. Not because we're in any way unique, but because you are always in the middle of infinity. Infinite time, infinite space, infinite multiverses that split off from each other billions and billions and billions of times each nanosecond, soap bubbles in a limitless sea of soap bubbles.....


It makes the idea of an old bearded man in a white robe sitting on a golden throne in the clouds, getting pissed off if you don't believe in him seem pretty tame. A big failure of imagination.


Things are much stranger than that.



*


I'm grateful to be alive.




*





Namaste.




***

Working Lunch

*






I got the anxity.






*







Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would tell me it is because I'm not autotelic enough. My goals and aspirations are externally motivated, and I have not jettisoned these artificial goals for intrinsic goals of my own that allow me to experience flow states in my everyday activities.




Maybe he's right.






*


Anxiety and a melancholic moodiness seem to be hard-wired into me. I don't know why, and perhaps it is silly to try to eliminate them, or even alleviate them in any way.




I should accept them, I suppose.




*






Unless they are, like Csikszentmihaliyi asserts, symptomatic of a kind of failure on my part to live a truly engaged and authentic life. 






*
















I dig my rut a little deeper every day.






*


Maybe it's enough that I try to handle my failures with a little grace. 






Maybe not.






*




namaste.






***

Hartford and Vine

*



Last night we watched this documentary called "Pressure Cooker" on our Netflix-enabled instant-watch crack delivery system. It is about these high school kids in an inner-city school who enroll in the school's culinary arts program as a way to latch onto some scholarship money and get out of the ghetto. The program is run by Wilma Stevenson, part drill instructor, part mommy, no bullshit, all business.

I started crying about three minutes into it.

*


So many people live their lives completely under siege. I think that most of us just get crushed by life, smashed down into smaller and smaller lives by the brute forces of poverty, violence, disease, despair, stupidity, unfairness, disaster. We just get rolled over by the big machine.

But some of us get stronger and harder, like diamonds, under that pressure.



*


It's good for us as a species, but not so much fun for us as individuals.



*



We also watched "The Exploding Girl" which was the quietest, sweetest film. Ostensibly about falling in love, but mostly really about taking your first steps into the world.

I cried all through that stupid thing too.



*


I can cry at a Jello commercial.












*


My wife is getting more beautiful, which just freaks me the fuck out. She's always been a strikingly good-looking woman, but lately she's radiant. She throws off like a five-foot circle of white light around her.


And whatever you do, don't look her in the eye.




You'll be as lost as I am.



*


In the early morning hours the bulldog went apeshit, whining and pacing and even barking, which she considers very much below her.


Racoons.



I ignored her for a long time, but after a half dozen sharp pokes in the ribs by someone next to me, I got my flashlight (which happens to be mounted to a Glock 17 I keep by the bed) and went out onto the back deck.


It looked like somebody threw a frat party in our koi pond. Shit was all over the place. The hammock was pulled down, branches from the Japanese maple were busted off, the deck was strewn with lilly pads and little wet paw prints traced back and forth everywhere.


Fucking criminals, is what.


I should hate them, but they don't bother me. They're evil chimpanzees dressed up in cat-burglar outfits, I know. They'll fight you over the trash can, they'll hiss and hunch up and glare, and they don't like you at all.


I don't know why, but it cracks me up. My old man, he traps them and shoots them.


I don't see the need for it myself.




*




There is yet enough of death in this world.





*






I miss my kid but I don't think we're going to get to see her this weekend. She's got to go to a black church in Compton and get prayed over by some real professionals, so no visit for us.











*


The hedge remains wild and untrimmed. Maybe I'll just let it devour us whole.




*


Namaste.



***

Shining Path

*

Back to normal.



Whatever that is.


*


For me it is attacking the hedge in the front yard, which is eight feet tall and three feet thick and surrounds our front yard like a castle wall. We even have a moat in front of it.

It sort of says, "Stay the Fuck Out."


But it makes the most wonderful sort of room when you are inside it.



*

So, trim that fucker today. Walk and wash the dog. Make something good for dinner. Clean the house. Hold hands with my wife.


Be alive. Keep my eyes open.


Watch what happens.


*


Namaste.



****

Out of The Desert

*







Made it back.


No extra holes in me.



*



The class was awesome. Tons of fun. My brother went through the whole thing shooting left-handed, and he shot better than almost everyone in the class. But the thing that gave me the most pleasure and pride was watching him teach and coach everyone around him. The class had forty students and only four instructors, so there was not a lot of time for one-on-one instruction and 'fine-tuning'. My brother worked with the other students around him constantly, and by the end of the class people were coming up to him at every break with questions and wanting help with some aspect of their draw, or press-out, or trigger control. And he talked all the time about integrating weapons work with empty-hand techniques, about the need for combatives as part of your training, how the gun won't solve every problem, how over-reliance on it can kill you faster than not having a gun at all sometimes, etc.

He is an encyclopedia of killing.


*

And he is the nicest person I know.




*


Now to brag on me:


I shot the test clean.



The test is the most demanding I've ever seen in a firearms training class. To graduate you have to get between 70 and 90 percent hits, and only eight students out of forty graduated. To get a distinguished graduate level you have to get above 90 percent on the test. I was the only DG in the class, and I did not miss a single shot.

Yay for me.


Also, they have a last-man-standing, man-on-man competition where students shoot against each other, engaging a hostage-taker target at ten yards, a little steel plate about three inches wide that is behind a hostage target. You shoot that little plate and don't hit the hostage, then you knock down two more steel targets at about twenty yards. It's a nice balance of speed, accuracy, and stress.

Yours truly was the last man standing.


*



I may be all kinds of fucked up, but I can sure as shit shoot you dead in the blink of an eye.




*



That's what I love about going out there. Yeah, its a pain in the butt, and its hard, and costs money and time, but look how it does!


*



Now I am back and can pay attention to the things that really matter. To my wonderful, patient, and understanding wife. To my sweet little bull dog. To my embattled kid.


And wade back into the tide of shit that covered my desk while I was out having fun.




*



It is good to be home.




*



Namaste.



***