I’m Going To California

Patrushka and I leave Wednesday for California - for a week in the home country.  I’ll try to keep a record of how my homeland looks in the summer of 2008.

I’m a little afraid of what I’ll find there.  Will there be a pall of  yellow forest fire smoke over the land?  Will gas cost $5.00 a gallon?  Will temperatures away from the coast top 110 day after day?  Will the live oaks that cover the golden hills be withered and leafless from sudden oak death blight?

We’re going to fly to Oakland, rent a car there, then make our way down the coast 350 miles to Santa Barbara for a big family wedding.  We’ll stay a day, then turn around and roll back up the coast for a couple days in the City before we fly back to the North Country.

I wonder if this will be the last trip of this frivolous kind I ever take.  In a way I’m squandering resources on a trip I don’t really need to take, just as if global warming and peak oil had never happened.  Like most everyone else, I’m having trouble adjusting my worldview.

It’s only my great-nephew’s wedding (gad, that makes me feel old).  If we don’t go, we won’t be missed.  Except possibly for my sister and my niece.  I hardly even know the groom, I haven’t seen him in years.  But I want to stay in touch with that side of the family.  Family is, well family.  You only get one.  And I’m lucky enough to like mine.

Like so many Americans of my generation, I’ve spent my life wandering from place to place.  Itchy feet, I guess.  Wherever I saw a deck of cards I laid my money down.  Now my own kids are scattered all over the forty-eight.  Patrushka and I landed in an isolated little city far off in the northwestern farm country.

My older sister, on the other hand, never left home.  In 1955, she moved across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito where she’s lived in the same house ever since.  Now she is matriarch of a great tribe of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom still live in Marin Country, and some of whom are probably hanging out together at this very moment.  They’re a tightly knit clan, and I, an outsider, a wandering ponderer, look at them with awe and respect.  Good going, guys!

So we fly to California tomorrow to celebrate another wedding in that noble family.  I’ll keep notes and file a report on our return next week.

Photo by Patrushka

Leslie In The Crystalline Night

One night in December 1961, Leslie Hipshman and I were driving across the city at the rainbow’s end in my beat-up Studebaker Lark. We weren’t on a date of course. Dates were uncool. It was just an ordinary Wednesday night in San Francisco and for some reason lost in the mist we were hanging together.

The night was cold and crisp – not crisp like eastern autumn nights when the leaves are falling, but crisp in clarity, the light exact, deep-focus, like it gets in San Francisco after a December rain and a windy afternoon. There was nothing left in the sky but clear sea air flowing over the downtown stockbroker’s offices, the Fillmore conk salons, and the desolate streetcar tracks of the Sunset.

We weren’t supposed to be together. Leslie was going with Don Auclair, the leader of our peacenik brotherhood. Against my will, I was ending a painful love affair with a seventeen year old beauty from Riverside, Carmen O’Shaugnessy. But neither of them were in the car. There was just Leslie and me cruising through the clear eternal night at the rainbow’s end listening to somebody singing how he didn’t like his mother-in-law and wondering what to do with ourselves.

I knew what I wanted to do, of course. I wanted to park somewhere and hold Leslie tight. Leslie waves beat against me like radio signals. They came in clear as the air: “I’m young, I’m beautiful, my skin is like satin and my hair is shiny black. I’m very, very delicious. And I like you too.”

But…you had to let these things take their course. Forcing yourself on someone was uncool and could lead to an unfortunate outcome. Besides, I didn’t have designs on Leslie. We were just together, that’s all. She couldn’t help owning a powerful radio transmitter any more than I could help having a receiver that worked really well.

Leslie and I had never spent time alone with each other before. Once we’d walked to the corner store together to buy Bugler cigarette tobacco. That was all. So we did what self-respecting young freaks did in the winter of 1961 when they weren’t on a date – we headed for the wasted remains of North Beach. The era of the beatniks was over and the era of the hippies hadn’t begun, yet we knew we were as happening as the beats had been. We just hadn’t had a chance to show it yet. We were drawn like moths to the flame. But the flame had burned out.

Upper Grant Avenue, scene of epic cultural battles when Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books stood trial for publishing a dirty poem called Howl, where Officer Bigarini had arrested beatnik chicks for wearing sandals in public, where poets like Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso and of course Ginsberg had broken free from writing airy martini-driven university puzzles like professors required me to study in English 101 and instead shouted visions of backyard greentree cemetery dawns on street corners or riding the Muni or standing in the smoke filled Coffee Gallery declaiming while Jack Kerouac ran to the deli for more dago red. Upper Grant Avenue in its quiet desolation was our link to the mighty heroes of old, whom we would never admit we sought to emulate. We were just going to get something to eat and look for our friend George The Beast.

George was the biggest beatnik we knew. Of course, since I was nineteen and Leslie was seventeen, we didn’t know too many. I was pretending to go to college at San Francisco State and Leslie was still at Lowell High School, but George – George was living the full-bore life. With his army fatigue jacket and single gold earring, his hypothetical parrot on his shoulder, and his magic to make everybody laugh with joy at anything, George was the dog who trotted freely in the streets. Maybe he wasn’t up there with Ginsberg and Corso yet, but hey, those guys were in their thirties already and George hadn’t hit twenty. Meanwhile, he slept where he could and cultivated acquaintance with the rotters, pimps, poets and crystal merchants who congregated in the Hot Dog Palace after midnight.

We found a place to park on Commercial Street jammed between a vegetable truck and a red zone. Out the door lay the land of tong wars and Fu Man Chu, of sweat shop lights glimmering behind curtains in the night, of dripping dried chickens and squirming fish in the butcher shop windows – Chinatown, the penultimate scene for San Francisco romance and I was walking though it with a beautiful unknown continent beside me. Before us lay the tiled stairs that lead to the coolest of Chinatown’s cheapest restaurants, Huey Gooey Looey, where the beat elite meet to eat.

Ah, where are the cheap Chinese restaurants of yesteryear? While you’re looking it up, I’ll tell you where Hooey Gooey Looie is. It’s buried under the weight of Chinatown international credit. It’s a bank. Even the steps leading to its florescent lit, subterranean depths are gone. Like George Bailey had never been born. Like Mister Potter had won. Like I imagined the whole thing. (Don’t worry too much about it – there are plenty of new ones.)

But in the winter of 1961 and for many years thereafter, Huey Gooey Louie’s was the restaurant of choice. Nowhere were the waiters as surly and the chances of meeting someone you knew as likely as at Huey Dewey Louie.

We slid into a red vinyl booth, ordered fried wontons with sweet and sour sauce, and leaned back, maybe wondering who that person was sitting across the table. I’d moved into the peacenik flat at 311 Judah Street a month before to live at the nerve center of our scene, and Leslie had come with the territory. Leslie was involved in some minor way with Don Auclair, the big dog of our little scene. Don was a couple years older than me, he was tall, he was brave and bold, he rode a Triumph Bonneville, he’d walked from LA to San Francisco on a famous peace march and been arrested for it. He knew all kind of ways to get high using legal substances like lighter fluid. He was a player and I was a beginner. It didn’t matter that he had a gentle spirit and a sweet smile, he still intimidated me. But I would never let it show, of course. To see Leslie and her pals Riley and Teresa ensconced on Don’s mattress playing guitar, listening to Joan Baez or Ray Charles, was as normal as looking to see if anyone had done the dishes yet.

One other thing I should mention about Leslie. She happened to have IT, as they used to say about twenties movie star Clara Bow. She wasn’t exceptionally beautiful. She didn’t attempt to be sexy or provocative. But something about her made young guys like me turn their heads to see her walk by. Perfume emanated from her that you couldn’t smell, but it smelled good anyway.

Now here we were at Huey Louie Gooey’s, leaning back, waiting for the wontons, waiting for the world to end, waiting for our lives to begin, and talking about the inconsequentialities of the day. Some friends in the peace movement were going to drive across the country over Christmas break. We were going to march in front of the White House waving placards and chanting and not eating anything for twenty-four hours and being non-violent about it but still making a little mark against death from the skies. We knew it was hopeless. But we couldn’t just sit there.

Leslie couldn’t go but I thought I would. Then we moved on to Joanie Baez, whom we loved, and Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Her father collected jazz records; she’d grown up listening to the greats. She even knew about the Dixieland guys from long ago. That was cool. I liked a girl who stood up for something, even if it only Dixieland jazz.

I don’t think I had noticed before how intelligent she was, how full of brimming life, eager to experience the full range of human possibility. Restless, reckless, a little crazy. I just took it for granted — we were all like that. We didn’t talk about it. And of course I noticed her shining black hair cut in a dutch boy bob. Of course I noticed how she filled her bulky-knit blue sweater against the booth’s red vinyl. Her easy laugh. Even her slightly crooked teeth were cute. Why couldn’t I be in love with her instead of the braided, insane wild child who teased and tortured me, driving me insane too, but my craziness was to want her more and more. Leslie was reckless, but in a different way – I felt easy and comfortable with her.

Like every other restaurant in Chinatown in 1961, Huey specialized in Cantonese delicacies. Besides fried wontons they offered pork fried rice, cashew chicken, seaweed soup with little pink shrimps swimming through kelp beds in the bowl. I’m sure they had more authentic food over on the Chinese side of the menu, but for for Leslie and me, fried wontons were still pretty exotic. After the meal, I splurged and treated her to Hooey Dewey Gooie’s signature culinary delight: shivering, quivering, glistening almond pudding with a nut in the center and a canned mandarin orange slice and a fortune cookie on the side. We took bites from the gelatinous, translucent substance in our bowls as Leslie told me about her life as a hip high school kid. It wasn’t a lot different than my own life as a high school hippie in San Mateo, the suburb where I’d learned to hate suburbs.

On weekend nights, Leslie told me she’d get home by curfew, make a show of going to bed early, brush her teeth, flush the toilet, yawn, then make a body shape from pillows under the blankets and quietly sneak out to meet her beat wannabe friends. No one had a car – so they walked through the city, down to Market Street, or over Russian Hill to North Beach. There they patrolled its back allies to see if any big beat parties were still going on. Maybe one day they’d catch Jack Kerouac running out to the late night deli on Broadway for even more dago red. But they never saw him. Maybe they saw his shadow once.

We were all under his shadow.

Next we headed for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s great information station for the underground world - City Lights Books. By now we were comfortable with each other and enjoying the night. Finding George the Beast became a handy reason for wandering around the best neighborhood in the best city on the best coast.

Shig was at the counter as usual, leafing doubtfully through some baggy poet’s self-published tome. We checked for George upstairs and down, and poked around the poetry section. I leafed through the new issue of Sing Out! to see if it had the plastic record to hear how the songs sounded if you couldn’t read music. Two months before, high on peyote, I had listened to Joanie Baez sing The Great Silkie on one of those acetate pull-outs, listened to her over and over until it was inscribed in my consciousness. I wanted another one of those little records if I could find it.

George wasn’t anywhere around, so we browsed until we were bored, then crossed Broadway to check the Hot Dog Palace.

The Hog Dog Palace, fabled hangout for meth freaks, junkies, beat wannabes, angel-headed hipsters, posers and hosers, also known as the Ant Palace or the Meth Palace – maybe it was grim, cold, florescent, unsanitary, but it was really really cheap. From its fly-specked windows you could see everything and everybody making it down Columbus Avenue or even Upper Grant if you snuck up the back stairs and peered through the glass door. The Hot Dog Palace stood on the site of Pandora’s Box, which in its day had been a genuine pseudo-beatnik sandwich shop where they served Zen Soup to sip while wearing zen slippers and pretending to read Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. It was kicks, man, kicks! And they kept getting harder to find.

George wasn’t there either, but I saw Pat Lofthouse scribbling cartoons in his sketchbook with a Rapidograph like he always did. And I saw Gypsy Boots, a street hustler who made his living doing things with other men I didn’t want to imagine. Gypsy was shoveling quarters into the jukebox like they were slugs. Maybe they were. I guess he was in the mood for Bright Lights, Big City, because we heard it three times in the ten minutes we strolled from table to table.

Looking for George was getting boring. We decided to walk on up Grant Avenue. There were no more hangouts up that way unless you were over twenty-one. I wondered if Bria was in the Anxious Asp. She was the first Lesbian kid I knew I knew, and she could pass for twenty-one. She was usually drinking in the gay Asp or somewhere nearby.

The question in my mind was – should I take Leslie’s hand? Were we at that point? I wanted to. I liked her. But…well…I didn’t want to look uncool in her eyes. Cool people didn’t hold hands while they walked along. That was it. Unfair, but true. The rules were the rules.

The moon rose, silvery and full, its mysterious light rolling past us as we hiked towards Greenwich Street. At the corner we passed the laundromat that had been Pierre DeLattre’s Bread and Wine Mission, where poetry and bongos and Jesus and hipsters, made for each other really, had touched and kissed and sadly parted. The moonlight glimmered on the laundromat’s red neon sign 15 CENTS WASH. 10 CENTS DRY. We kept going. Pierre didn’t live there any more.

Such a beautiful night. Why not walk on up the hill, all the way to Coit Tower, the floodlit phallus that pierces the skyline for fifty miles on a night like this. None of the city’s Manhattan style high-rises had been built yet and the City still looked Renaissance, magical, from up there. Let’s go look again.

We turned right up Greenwich. The street was lined with pastel colored narrow flats climbing in the moonlight like in some Italian hilltown, Verona maybe, where Mercutio was stabbed by the Jets while Romeo screamed. Maybe Mardou Fox had lived in one of those flats when Kerouac mourned for her in The Subterraneans. Years later I learned Jack moved his story from Greenwich Village to North Beach because his publisher said it would sell better. Oh, protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who’ve never and could never harm and crack another innocent in its shell and thin veiled pain…the inventor of spontaneous bop prosody had shifted locales at the advice of his marketing director. He’d done it so smoothly I never even wondered.

At the top of Greenwich a narrow staircase leads into the trees. We climbed on through the spooky city park darkness. Did I touch her? Our spirits were beginning to touch, just a little. Spidery tendrils of…what? Friendship? Understanding? Whatever it was, we were wrapped in it, and it was nice. The tendril webs were going to prove strong enough to link us across the continent as we tossed through squalling marriages, and stayed strong enough to urge me to to keep her letters for nearly fifty years. I’m not sure those spiderweb tendrils have a name, but they wrapped round us like ectoplasm. They weren’t named romantic love, and surely not just friendship — you don’t want to hold a friend tight in the moonlight. But whatever it was it felt good. I had enough problems with passion at the moment. Who needed more?

We eventually emerged into a clearing beneath the great illuminated tower, its white stone turned golden by the floodlights. A half dozen couples like us and several melancholy gents perhaps looking for same wandered hither and thither in the moonlight. Leslie and I sat on the damp grass and looked out over the city at the rainbow’s end sparkling crystalline in the December night.

The ramparts of the Shell Building lit in blue-green shimmers, the parapets of the Russ Building flooded with gold shimmers, they beaconed over the Renaissance city like Doge’s towers, papal towers, Aztec towers, Inca towers – over the great city that sprang from the sand dunes on the far Pacific shore. And we were sprung too. Aw, Frisco – how’d you get to be so blessed?

You probably didn’t know native-born San Francisco kids can be just as manic about the town as any fresh arrival from Dubuque. On a crystal December night from the top of Telegraph hill we could feel somehow we’d been accidentally born in the perfect place.

Leslie said, “City’s sure beautiful tonight.”

I said, “Yeah…”

I didn’t mention the other nights I’d sat here, usually with Ricky and Parm, my high school pals, occasionally with a girl. Leslie didn’t go into her past either. The light descended upon us and into us. I had no plans beyond loving this night, this city, this sweet girl beside me – all in pretty much the same way. Generalized and without any particular future.

We thought we knew what we wanted. Leslie wanted to be free from sitting in rows waiting for the bell to ring, free from her mother’s plans for some wrong future, free to go where she wanted, to find out who she was, who she could be.

I was already free to be blown wherever the wind blew me, if not free from the chains of the skyway. What I wanted was someone to love forever with the freedom of complete equals. Someone who would want to go see where Mercutio got stabbed that starlit night. An adventurer comrade who would also be beautiful and very very hot.

It was eight years before I got her. And she came with kids and responsibilities. I had a lot of growing to do.

We sat there a long time, talking quietly and then not talking at all. Maybe this moment was what we really wanted.

Eventually though, the damp seeped its way through our jeans. It was a week night, anyway. Leslie needed to be home by ten-thirty.

When we hit Greenwich Street again, Les decided to run. She wasn’t really in that much of a hurry. Screw curfew. But the hill was so steep and we were so full of moonlight that when she took off I peeled out after her, catching up and grabbing her hand like we were kids or young lovers in a New Wave movie, running and laughing and trying to go yet faster but stay in step. Cats looked up from their garbage can in surprise. The old man walking his poodle turned to see more of this beautiful girl and the freak with the Buddy Holly glasses trying to beat each other to Grant Avenue. We careened around the corner onto Grant laughing breathless and didn’t stop until we passed the Coffee Gallery where we hugged each other as drunks shouted encouragement out the door and tossed quarters.

We kept going now just walking past The Fox and Hound where we could hear Jorma Kaukonen playing Delta blues inside on his slide guitar. Back past the Hot Dog Palace — through the window we saw George the Beast standing at the counter jawing with Fast Walker. But the night was coming to an end.

Aw, there’d be other nights. Hundreds and thousands of other nights in the city of our hearts where the fog never lifts and the moonlight never ends and the wind blows always bright and clean. George wasn’t going anywhere and we’d be young forever.

We drove across the City again over Russian Hill down past Van Ness and out through the Fillmore to Leslie’s mother’s flat on Baker Street. Miles was blowing Freddie the Freeloader on the radio and the night was sacred.

I double parked of in front of Mom’s place so Leslie could jump out but she didn’t jump out. I didn’t want her to jump out. We were illuminated, bright and I took her in my arms and we kissed. We took a long time. We could have kissed forever as far as I was concerned. But then it was over and she did jump out and in though the door and she did look back at me before diving through, Hi Mom! I drove back to 311 Judah levitated one foot off the front seat.

Did we fall in love and live happily ever after?
Did we save up together to go find where Mercutio was stabbed?
Or did the wild child Carmen O’Shaugnessy finally break up with me forever and
then did I finally completely disintegrate and catch mononucleosis and go home to recuperate in the suburbs and
there did I meet a girl at a party in Burlingame and
didn’t we split for Pacific Grove three days later and
didn’t she get pregnant that summer and
didn’t we marry and live together in love and misery and
didn’t Leslie run off to New York with Peter Van Gelder when she turned eighteen and
didn’t she get pregnant too and
didn’t she give up her son for adoption but find him again years later as
I found Leslie’s letters again in a dusty box and put them on the blog and
didn’t we meet each other again one time more when we’re old?

Would it have been better if we had found George the Beast and gone off to his hotel room and smoked pot all night? Or if Leslie had caught a cold and stayed home?

What does this scanty story mean, anyway? Why go sit under the moon observing a city with no clouds when you could be making money, lots of money? For that matter,
What is the meaning of life? I have no idea of course, but it might have something to do with the little tendrils that might creep out in the moonlight. Sometimes they grow into strong cables like the ones between Patrushka and me. Tested and true, no matter what. And sometimes they never grow beyond a tentative little spiderweb. But either way – they’re the best things God gave us poor humans. Nourish them. They make life worth living.

Photo credits:Coit Tower Moon: Dan Heller Photography; Chinatown restaurant: Dizzy Atmosphere’s Photostream; North Beach Hangout: Jerry Stoll from I Am A Lover copyright 1961

How The Beatles Saved The Great Wolf of Pudley

You know how legendary stories tend to gather around the names of famous real people? Here’s an interesting one I came across the other day...

How The Beatles Saved The Great Wolf of Pudley

One winter’s twilight John, Paul, George and Ringo were walking back from the village of Pudley to Liverpool when a large but scrawny wolf leaped out of the bushes beside the towpath.

“Eh ooup lads”, quoth the wolf, “would thee have so much as a bit ‘o black pud about thy persons?”

Ah, black pudding, jewel of the North. A luscious blend of rare spices, fat and pig’s blood all wrapped in a delicate intestine lining and fried to perfection!

“Sorry, mate,” says John, “We’re skint. Not a chip butty left in me overcoat pocket.”

Ah, chip butties, also jewels of the North. Great long rectangles of potato deep fried in the finest fat, then layered between thick slices of white bread and downed with large mugs of milky Yorkshire Blend Tea.

But they didn’t have any.

“What a shame,” sayest the wolf, “Then I’m afeared I must eat YOU!!!” And with a terrible leap the wolf launched himself toward the hapless moptops. He was about to land when suddenly John held up his hand and boldly sang in the words of their friends The Supremes:

“Stop! In the name of love!
Before you eat us up
Think it oh-woe-ver!”

And Paul and George added in querulous voice, “wooh-hoo”.

The wolf froze in mid-air, never an easy feat even for the healthiest of wolves, and with a puzzled grimace responded,”What’s to think about, Johnny me boy? I haven’t had a bite in days and my insides are caving in. Look at me! Naught but a shadow of my ferocious self.” Then he too burst into song to the tune of The Beatles’ favorite cover song, Please, Mr. Postman…

“Please little Moptops, look and see
Is there a sandwich in your pocket for me?
I’ve been starving for such a long time
My stomach’s hurting and it’s really a crime!”

Ringo got out his drum kit and set up on the towpath while John answered the wolf in song and Paul plugged in his Hofner bass.”

“Hey, Wolfie, there’s a much better way
For a wolf to make his living today.
Come back to Pudley and we’ll have a nice cup
Rosie at the teashop will soon fix us up.”

They carried Wolfie back to Pudley
Introduced him around.
At first the people hid because the wolf was in town
But when they saw his aged snout without any teeth
They said, “You shouldn’t have to live way out on the heath!

“Mr. Wolfie, you can come live with us!
We will promise not to kick up a fuss,
You needn’t worry that you’ve not any wealth
We’ve got a dentist and a chemist on the National Health!

“If you’ll cool it, Mr. Wolfie, not eat any more kids,
We’ll buy you lots of hair gel, help you screw off the lids.
You’ll look like Johnny Rocker when you fall by our pub.
We’ll stand you to a pint but keep your mitts off my pug!

“We’ll get you on the short list for a nice council flat
Where you can watch the telly then lay down for your nap.
There’ll be sausage rolls at midnight,
There’ll be pork pies for tea
And every holiday we’ll send you down to the sea!”

Mr Wolfie!”

Their little song ended. The Great Wolf looked at the crowd with tears in his old rheumy eyes and sang back to the townspeople to the tune of the Beatles’ It’s The Word Love

“In the beginning, I misunderstood
But now I’ve got it, the word is good!

Because you blokes have set me free
I’ll guard your town
Industriously.
No evil men shall cross your gate
Your gift of love destroyed my hate.
It’s so fine
It’s sunshine.
It’s the word….love.”

Exit the townspeople dancing with Wolfie as the Beatles pack up the gear and start walking home to Liverpool once more. Who will they meet this time?

With apologies to Ugolino Brunforte.

What’s Your Purpose?

If you’ve got a reason To live on and not to die, You are a lucky man
Allen Price (1973)

What was Allen Price’s reason to live on, way back when he wrote that song? Maybe he was seeing his career going nowhere and he hoped creating a soundtrack for a Lindsay Anderson movie (O Lucky Man) would put him on the map again. I don’t know and he ain’t talking.

But actually I want to know if you have a purpose in life and, if so, what is it and why is it? I was reading an old prayer the other day and this phrase struck me as it possibly will you: “in all I do direct me to the fulfilling of your purpose…”.

I think the idea is that somehow we’ll be more connected, more in a state of rightness, feel more one with the Force (somebody help me here - I’m floundering) when we let God use us for whatever he has in mind rather than working only to meet our goal of, say, financial independence, a Ferrari, and membership in the exclusive country club on the edge of town by age 40.

When I was a salaryman, I didn’t think about my purpose too much. I knew what it was - to go to my stupid job for one more day, and earn my salary for another month so I could pay the mortgage and insurance and taxes and car payments and the kids’ music lessons. I didn’t feel a bit connected with Eternal Oneness — I was just doing what I had to do. So what else is new?

Now I’m old and rich. I sit in my exclusive award-winning pigsty at the tippy-top of South Hill looking down on my extensive grounds with their graveled paths and fountains and rose gardens and I have to ask myself - now what? What is my purpose in life?

Remember that gods and myths guy who was in vogue in the Eighties, Joseph Campbell? His memorable phrase for the secret to life was “Follow Your Bliss…if you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

Most folks don’t have that option, but some of us do. I was wondering if ‘following your bliss’ is the same thing as ‘fulfilling Your purpose’ in the prayer I quoted. Is feeling right about what you’re doing a kind of litmus test?

To go a step further, if you love doing something and feel you’re where you’re supposed to be when you’re doing it and just want to do it more - just for the thing itself and not for any kudos or toys that might come of it - is that a sign that you’re not only fulfilling your purpose - but also God’s purpose for you?

In the past, I’ve usually heard explainers say that ‘fulfilling God’s purpose’ meant not thinking about yourself but only about fulfilling God’s plan, which to them meant you should be a missionary or plant a church in the next town or teach Sunday School or something in the religious line. But that doesn’t seem right to me. It’s imposing very severe limits on God’s plan!

If you do all that stuff but don’t enjoy it and aren’t very good at it and wish night would come - maybe it’s because God always thought you’d be perfect for schmoozing with people down at the flea market or fixing their cars for them. Or even playing video games, if you are passionate about it. One thing leads to another you know.

What do you think, gentle reader?

The Guy in Our Neighborhood Who’s Beating His Wife

I’m taking a little break from writing about the Haight-Ashbury in 1965 this morning. My blogging pal, Spoke, up in Alberta, sent me an email expressing his anger and frustration about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and encouraging me to publicize Amnesty International’s excellent site Eyes On Darfur, which I hereby publicize. Worth checking out.

I’m frustrated too. So many world crises and all so intractable and what can we really do? I just bought an electric lawn mower because it emits less CO2 than a gas one. Did that help?

Maybe we could change human nature?

Actually, that might work. I can’t think of anything else at the moment, but it’s hard to do.

So, in my frustration, I get silly and write foolish poems and pretend they’re by some famous author you never heard of and I open the memory vaults to share other times and places I’ve known.

But, back to Darfur — if I can stay on track for one minute. Imagine a nice peaceful neighborhood in a small city like the one I live in. The neighbors have an uncomfortable feeling there’s something wrong in that little house across the street. It’s the screams and the thuds. In fact, they suspect Bill Jones is beating his wife black and blue every night, sexually abusing his daughters and kicking his boys to death.

So the neighborhood holds a meeting. We can’t let this go on! What should we do?

They decide to form a delegation to talk to Mr. Jones and tell him he has to stop. Mr. Jones greets them with a big smile and says oh no he’s not beating his wife and abusing his children. That’s just the TV on really loud. You know these kids!

But the neighbors keep noticing Mr. Jones out in his backyard at night digging long holes and filling them up again. So they hold another meeting.

“I know. Let’s see if Mr. Jones will let us send our own sons over to his house to sit in his rooms and keep watch on everything. That way he’ll be too embarrassed to do anything bad.”

So after a long time and much talk Mr. Jones agrees to allow the scrawniest, most nearsighted twelve year old in the neighborhood to come over and watch TV in his living room for an hour every night. Now the beating sounds and screams come from the kitchen and the bedrooms, but the living room is peaceful as a church for one hour a day.

Meanwhile, the neighbors are putting up signs in their front yards that say “Stop Mr. Jones Beating His Wife! Now!”. Mr. Jones retaliates with his own sign, “My neighbors’ comments are unfair. I am only a firm but just disciplinarian.” And, to be fair, Mr. Jones sons do need some discipline. At least from Mr. Jones’ perspective. They can imagine nothing better than kicking the old man out so they can run the house the way they want. Which may very possibly include beating up their mother and raping their sisters.

The neighbors decide to get videotape of Mr. Jones beating his wife. Then they’d really have something. So husbands start sneaking around at night videotaping through Mr. Jones’ windows. And guess what? They get video of Mr. Jones beating his wife and raping his daughters and killing his sons. And you know what happens? Mr. Jones says, “Ha ha ha, it’s for their own good. I will manage my affairs as I see fit.”

So finally the neighbors go to the biggest, strongest, richest guy on the block and say, “George, You do something! You need to take that guy out!”

George, who is already involved in some wars of his own so to speak, is reluctant to take on yet another battle, even though he is big and strong. So instead he calls everybody to say he’s going to reduce the business he does with Mr. Jones’ company (which, unfortunately, isn’t very much to start with). Maybe that’ll stop him! The local newspaper ran a little story about George’s economic sanctions. You can see it here and decide for yourself how effective they will be.

What are the possible ways to bring peace and love to Darfur Street? They can’t call the police because there are no police. It’s up to the neighbors. What’s their next response?

So far the best they can think of is…call another meeting.

And, you know what? I can’t think of anything else either. Maybe if all the businesses in town got together and refused to buy noodles from Mr. Jones’ noodle factory? But, trouble is, there’s a very popular Chinese restaurant in town - all the neighbors eat there nearly every night - and the restaurant really needs those noodles. And the neighbors really like eating there.

You got any ideas?

How To Not Understand The Bible

I have such difficulty reading the Bible. I can’t understand what the words mean. It’s like the characters are speaking in code and I don’t have the key to decipher it. Plus the words themselves keep shifting depending on which translation I read.

Case in point. This morning I was reading the passage in chapter 18 of Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells the ruler to sell everything he has and give it to the poor — then he will be cool. (In Luke’s version, by the way, the ruler is neither rich nor young.) It’s been a puzzler for generations, right? Why would Jesus ask someone to do that? OK, so I think I will have a go at it and I start by trying to read the story as if I’d never heard of it before. Right away I run into problems.

First I pick up the New Revised Standard translation and they start by having the guy ask Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”.

Well, naturally the first thing I think is, “Well, you can’t really do anything to inherit something - it’s just coming to you when your parents die. So maybe he’s worried God is going to disinherit him because he’s been so bad. If he thinks that, then he has a problem, and Jesus is going to have to set him straight about God’s love for his children - like tell him the story of the prodigal son, or the lost lamb, right?” Well, Jesus doesn’t take that route.

So then I think, “Well, maybe I should look at another translation. So I pick up the New Living Translation, and they have the guy saying something completely different: “What should I do to GET eternal life?”

In their version the ruler doesn’t think he has eternal life and he wants to know what to do to get some. He wants some nice rules, like in “How do I get from here to Topeka?” or “How do I get a discount on this?” This ruler sounds kind of simplistic and a little foggy in the brain. So Jesus will have to go easy on him. But Jesus doesn’t take this route either.

So I pick up yet a third translation (the New English Bible), and this time the ruler says “What must I do to WIN eternal life?” Now he apparently sees life as a game to be played or a war to be won and he is asking the really good teacher for a winning strategy. How can we beat the Red Sox next week so we can take the pennant?

Luke intended one of these meanings, and I’m pretty sure at least one of these is wrong. But which one?

We haven’t even started on whether the question asker is a 1) ruler - a real bigshot, like King Herod, 2) a member of the ruling class (a lesser bigshot, maybe a prince or something), or 3) a religious leader (somebody who already knows a lot and has an interest in maintaining the status quo). And we haven’t even begun to start on what eternal life might mean to him.

So I haven’t even got through the first sentence and I’m already tired. Now I have to go find a word by word translation of the original Greek. It makes me tired and I haven’t gotten anywhere. I don’t even understand the first sentence. I mean really grok it.

I don’t just want to make stuff up - I want to know this character’s motivation, why he would be desperate enough to seek a really good teacher out and ask him this serious question. I’m not even sure what he’s really asking, so how can I understand Jesus’ response, let alone apply it to my life?

By the way, the one thing every translation agrees on is that the question asker wants to either inherit, get, or win eternal life. I think most people assume eternal life means “go to heaven.” But hey, I don’t know anything. So I got out my little book called Christianity 101, which purports to explain the “eight basic Christian beliefs.”

If I can believe this book, I must conclude that Christians haven’t the slightest interest in eternal life. Neither eternal life nor heaven is mentioned in the index or anywhere on the pages I leafed through. So maybe it’s a code for something else.

Look, I’m not recommending this approach, which I could call the “can’t see the forest for the trees” approach. I’m probably a lot like this ruler guy myself and I need to learn from his sad fate — walking away disconsolately when he could be grooving at the big party in the sky after he die.

I crave joy too. I don’t really want to be walking around watching the autumn leaves fall and the little ducks quacking as they lift up their wings and fly away south. Left behind while everyone else is having a great time.

But what am I supposed to do? Pretend I understand when I don’t? Join a monastery and let somebody else take the controls? I’m stumped.

How do you ponder the imponderable?

Labels: Christianity

The Myths I Live By

Hey, you should see my mailbox! I’m overwhelmed with letters saying the world would be a better place if only I would write more about beach parties, Gidget and Moondoggie.

I, too, am craving more sights of that cute brown-eyed blonde in her itchy bitchy teenie weeny yellow polka dot bikini and all those buff actor studs who knew how to surf before there were wet suits.

But, before we open the gates to Jollity Farm, I have a few words to say about ‘Myth’ with a capital M. As an beatnik hippie English major at San Francisco State, I read a lot about it. A Myth is neither a computer game nor just a story that isn’t true, as many people think. Not to put too fine a point to it, myths are stories we need to believe in order to arrange our lives into a meaningful pattern.

So that our lives will make sense to ourselves.

I write about my personal myth from time to time, as I have fashioned it over the years. Seeking for meaning in my early years, hanging out with Gidget and Moondoggie, struggling to raise a family in the middle years as a world-famous lecturer on ginseng root, now a rootless wanderer wintering in Antwerp, and, of course, I’m a pig. My Patrushka, as you know, also looms large. The possibility of true love forever is a major strand of my myth.

Another myth I have glommed onto is the one about my homeland, America. Land of the Brave and Home of the Free. I speak without irony. America, crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. America, the apple of the world’s eye where reign Liberty and Justice for all.
In my mythic America there could never be a story myth about about how Roosevelt or some other president authorized torture camps to extract information from enemy prisoners. Americans would never do that. That’s what the Nazis and the Japs did (forgive me, my Japanese readers, I’m using the words of my childhood myth-making time). In fact, it would be the most unAmerican thing I could think of.

All you Native Americans please shut up about our nineteenth century policies of genocide. All you Afro-American readers please be quiet about one hundred years of segregation by government policy. And I would prefer it if you wouldn’t mention the thousands of loyal Japanese-Americans who sat out WWII in concentration camps.

They don’t fit my myth, which I sometimes have to hold on to for dear life. If I begin to believe that the American government, by policy, has authorized torture as a method to gain information from terrorists, I have two choices. One, I can let my myth crumble and rebuild it with another myth about an America where all that stuff about Honor and Justice is bullshit. A lot of people do that.

Or I can start screaming LET’S FIND OUT! IS IT REALLY TRUE? IF IT IS, THEN BRING THOSE BASTARDS DOWN! Light the freedom torch again! Bring out the evidence. Let’s start the hearings. Because I need my Myth of America. And I’ll fight for it.

Freshman English Papers

Looking back on my freshman college year, you know what’s better about today? I don’t have to turn these posts in for a grade! No grim faced professor is allowed to scratch pencil marks around the edges of each little essay. Just think – I can write a whole blog full of fragmentary sentences and there’s not one thing they can do about it!

And I do write them. Hither and thither. Sometimes you just have to go with the way the words sound. That’s how I felt then and that’s how I feel now.

On my desktop I keep a list of Jack Kerouac’s thirty axioms for modern prose. They’re pretty good and I recommend you immediately go over here and study them. You’ll notice Number 13 suggests “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” He doesn’t say we don’t need to understand grammar or syntax - but don’t let them get in your way. Try to get the picture clear in your mind and go straight for it. I keep Jack’s list at hand for inspiration and to remind myself that anytime I put words to paper (so to speak), I’m part of a long line of guys who struggled their whole lives to learn how to write out of the box, how to keep their idea line as free of crap as if Keith Jarrett (a piano player I like) was writing it.

The only difference is I’m a pig. It’s hard for me to tell where my inspiration leaves off and the crap begins. Jack’s axiom #1 is the whole key, for me anyway: “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” And if I make myself laugh as I type, then I figure I’m heading in the right direction.

Those professors at San Jose State in 1959 wanted me to write clean, clear prose. Like this: A plus B = C. Start with your introductory paragraph (which itself has to start with a grabber sentence), add body, then concluding paragraph. All nice and neat and when you’re done your reader thinks, “Aha – I see. Cats eat rats! Very interesting.”

Sorry, Dr. Smith. I already heard all this already in high school. Next you’ll want me to turn in my outline.

The more they tried to whip me into shape (of a square) the more I wriggled and jiggled and wandered off in four directions. It became a game. I was sublimely confident in my ability. I was convinced my English Comp professor wouldn’t know good writing if Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti broke into the classroom with their guns leveled straight at him.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I just wasn’t very good at it. Needed more practice. Still do.

I always felt when they wrote ’spelling’ in the margin they really meant “Why can’t you be more like a girl? They check their spelling! They’re nice! They smell good! No – you’re sloppy and improvisational and you should shave off that scruffy beard if you think you’re going to get a decent grade in here.

“And what’s this? Horrors! Slang! You’ve used slang in a college-level essay! And just look at this illogical and non-parallel series of clauses and phrases. How can anyone possibly understand this beatnik prose? Why don’t you write like Ernest Hemingway? Mr. Pig, you are MUCH TOO SELF-INDULGENT! You must write to communicate, not for your own private pleasure…Tsk tsk tsk..”

And on and on. Next I was accused of ‘rambling’. What’s wrong with ‘rambling’ anyway? I’ve spent my life rambling round this country, and I’ve met a lot of funny men. Some robbed me with a six gun, others with a fountain pen. Woody Guthrie said that. There! I used an eminent authority to emphasize my point. Are you happy now?

Whatever I was doing in college, I was not here to learn how to write a simple, clear, direct essay. That was for sissies. Sissies, drones, English professors, and other bores. Funny, in later life I have come to admire that approach. I usually write to capture a feeling or a moment of time, or possibly make you laugh if I can, but if someone is writing to communicate an idea, and I can actually understand what they are trying to say - I love it! That’s the whole idea.

Don’t know quite why I rambled down this path this morning. I really meant to tell you about my beatnik-lefty-socialist seventeen year old pal Bob Gill. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t write out your outline ahead of time. By now, you’d be up to the demonstration and kids getting washed down the stairs with fire hoses and it would be really exciting. Instead I’m still sitting up in my attic room in the boarding house writing a paper I have to turn in in the morning. Wonder what he’ll say this time! I know. “You use too many exclamation marks! This reads like a comic book!”

Where’s Your Sticking Point?

Didn’t End World Hunger Again Today inspired a jet stream of comments. People took my basic question and hopeful tentative answer in a zillion different directions and I thank you for them all. I have been educated.

I was particularly struck by blogger Genevieve’s rephrasing of my existential question, and I quote: “Is it wrong to pursue self-actualization…when so many in the world still live at the base of the pyramid without even the basics needed for survival?”

That about nails it. I wish I could express myself so well.

To ratchet the thought a little tighter, how can we justify painting The Last Supper or playing our flutes and dancing like the Three Pigs when a six year old girl is about to be raped for the eighteenth time in a brothel somewhere in Cambodia? Shouldn’t we drop everything else and fold our arms like Mr. Clean and say to Evil, “Okay, that’s one step too far. You’ve had it, buddy.” and just fucking take him out? (excuse my beatnik language)

Please forget the logistics for a minute. This is an existential question. What’s important around here? Isn’t there a moment in each of our lives when we have to say, along with e.e.cumming’s beatup conscientious objector, “there is some shit I will not eat.”

This is it for me - my sticking point. No more little girls sold into brothels! No more dancing on the hilltops until the kids are home safe and sleeping in a clean bed with you and me guarding the door.

Then maybe we can get back to art. You know what I mean? Maybe your sticking point comes somewhere else. But doesn’t it come somewhere?

What’s important around here anyway?

Banks of the Kankakee

We were camping on the banks of the Kankakee River and, after our little dinner of taco salad from Wendy’s because it was too wet to cook, we went for a walk. How fast summer comes on! Just last week I was wearing my Gore-tex against the cold and now I’m wearing it against the mosquitos. Patrushka was shooting and I was just pondering. In fact, I was so busy pondering that a beaver swam right by, took a bite of grass, and paddled on upstream. Never saw the old pig.
I was looking at some piers of yellow, hand-dressed stone rising out of the misting river, all eroded, with little bushes and trees digging their roots in for the duration. The river was also digging away — at the upsteam side of the foundations. It has already carved little tooth cavities at the waterline of each pier. Two more piers stand on either bank. I could see they were clogged and strangled with vines like a Mayan ruin in Quintana Roo. The bridge they once held up must have washed away or torn been down years ago.

Kinda gets a pig thinking. Each one of those stones was knocked into shape by a guy working hard all morning. Maybe all day. All that work, all that struggle and sweat to get those piers up across the river and now we don’t even know what the bridge was used for. Maybe some lady at the historical society knows. Was it a railroad bridge? Why did people way out here in the country want to cross the river so bad and what capitalist with what dreams of glory paid the navvys’ wages?

What’s the point? That’s what it comes down to. I know, they got paid for their work and that’s what matters. But still, all that work and now no one knows or cares. Why not just live out in the marshes and croak like a bullfrog?

When Patrushka starts feeling low she’ll wonder why she bothers to take all these photographs. They just go in a drawer. Just more stuff the kids will have to figure out what to do with when we’re gone.

“Look at your mother’s paintings”, she will say. “Nobody wants to hang them, but nobody’s willing to throw them away, either. So there they stand in their bubble-wrap, year after year, gathering dust in your brother’s garage.”

It is kind of depressing all right, but I tend to see the issue in another way. To me, these guys were dressing stones all day because they needed the money (of course), but maybe they enjoyed the work too. It was skilled labor, hard sweaty work with the other guys. Maybe they liked making those stones and maybe they got a kick out of seeing those piers going up in the river and knowing they were part of it.

Patrushka takes pictures and my mother painted pictures because it gives or gave them joy in the moment they were seeing the idea of it, then executing it with crazy brushstrokes and color mixing and aperture checking, then fiddling around in the darkroom or on the easel until it looked the way they wanted it.

I think of my Dad, Dwight Newton, the newspaper columnist. Certainly he had one of the world’s more trivial careers — if you take the galactic view. He wrote about television for the San Francisco Examiner every day including Sunday for 26 years (except he got to go on vacation - he was a union guy) and he had to get that damned column out no matter what and he reviewed every silly sitcom and corny western that came out each season and interviewed every flash in the pan, you never heard of him actor who starred for six episodes of Pigs On The Run before they cancelled it.

He gave them all the same attention, the same focus, then he rushed back to the office to type type type exactly the right number of inches to fill his space in time for the first edition.

I doupt if he ever groaned for a moment about all his columns gathering dust forever on library shelves and microfilm fiches because nobody remembers now who Tal Koolguy was or cares. Dad was having a great time and he had to get the column out and he took pride in getting the words just right. A nifty turn of phrase lightened his day considerable.

Did Ernest Hemingway have a better time than my Dad? Did Georgia O’Keefe have more fun than my Mom? Greatness is a gift from God and it’s no good to strive for it. Maybe a time does come when you have to say I’m going to change my life around so I can do my art, my craft, my skill, the thing I love to do, all day every day so I’ll…what?

For me, I’m just going to walk back to camp in the gloaming and sit by my tent and swat the mosquitos and wonder. Because that’s what I do - I’m the Pondering Pig.