THE APPROACH OF THE OLD YEAR

In the Midst of Winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa (1954)

The approach of the old year arrives
in dark gulches where redwoods define the meaning of time, 

darkness and light, where an understory of worlds hides,
grows, an entire life beneath their boughs.
Each year, the huckleberry and wild rose bloom,
leaving small gifts for us, whether bird or bear,
that dark beauty is filled with such sweet flavor
that even the gods would weep.
I live in a rented room that does not see
the sun for six months of the year,
and in the distance I can see
how the outstretched limbs of trees
reach toward the sky, as if bent in supplication
toward the east where the sun rises
faithfully each morning, like something akin to hope.
Not long ago it was the eye of the inferno looking back.
We are reminded the fire is also the darkness in the light
waiting to cleanse the earth and move on
to more clement shores.

Can you read or write while dreaming?

According to an article in Inverse, a blogzine, most people can’t speak, let alone read, or write in their dreams—unless they’re poets. It has something to do with where and how language is processed. — The scientific reason why you can’t read while you dream

I can both read and write in my dreams, and often too. Sometimes I even dream of words that I don’t know in real life, and then I have to look them up. They’re usually obscure foreign, or medieval words. I have often written poems in my sleep, sometimes I even wrote them down in my journals, but usually I can’t read my writing when I’m sleep writing. The strangest word I ever dreamed was heriorot of the woods. The other was obliette. I don’t speak French, so I had to ask a French-speaking friend what the word was. No I wasn’t reading a novel with those words either. I dreamt I was in a medieval dungeon when I dreamt of obliette, and I was in the woods when I dreamt of the word heriot inscribed in gothic lettering above the canopy of the woods. At least that word I was able to find on the OED. Sometimes I wake up in the morning saying the lines of a poem that I inscribed during sleep.

Small pumpkins, drawing

 

Thanksgiving in the New World

We tend to think of Thanksgiving as a uniquely North American holiday, but its roots are embedded in the mists of time. The November harvest festival that British-American pilgrims celebrated, prior to emigration, was called the Feast of St. Martin, or Martinmas. 

The first New England settlers were zealously pious British separatists and Puritans who left Britain during the Protestant Reformation. The dour Puritans believed the Church of England’s reforms did not go far enough in breaking away from Catholic tradition, and so they left Britain for the Netherlands.

The Pilgrims even found the Protestant Dutch of Leiden who gave them safe harbor from Britain, too lenient, hence the 1620 voyage on the Mayflower to establish a strict, if not a downright grim, religious utopia in the New World. After a reading, we went to the Pilgrim’s Pub in Delftshaven, raised a few pints at the place where the pilgrims shoved off for America.

The Wampanoag Nation, the “People of the First Light,” saved the Pilgrims from starvation during that harsh winter of 1620–21. But they too had an agenda shaped by years of tense interaction with European explorers and fur trappers, plague and disease—not to mention displacement. And you know what that led to.

When I brought home the usual Thanksgiving tropes from second grade, the hand-traced turkey, cut-out pilgrim hats, collars and buckles, instead of admiring my handiwork, my Irish grandmother grumbled that American Thanksgiving was a Protestant holiday. 

I was shocked, and fearful of losing my favorite holiday, I didn't know what she was referring to at the time. I didn't have my history down. However, I am thankful that the holiday has become re-secularized over time as it's my favorite holiday (and sometimes my birthday too)—despite its interim origin and political implications. 

Thanksgiving is merely a Protestant-American spin-off on an ancient harvest celebration—updated to expunge longstanding Catholic (and pagan) traditions centered around the feast of Martinmas, or Old Halloween, cognate with the Irish festival of Samhain/Calan Gaeaf— replete with gift giving. Samhain was not only the New Year, but also a time when the gates to the Otherworld were open. In Wales too, the entrance to the Otherworld (Annwn) was thin. Magic (and the dead) was afoot. 

Martinmas marked the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter and the "winter revelling season". Traditions include feasting on 'Martinmas goose' or 'Martinmas beef', drinking the first wine of the season, and mumming.

So this year, we celebrated an unThanksgiving of sorts, small bubble gatherings. In our case, it was just me, my cousin and a friend. A far cry from the the days of thundering herds of relatives, friends, and orphans, where dinner was served on doors propped up on sawhorse planks in the yard because there weren’t tables long enough to go the distance. 

Who remembers staging boxing matches with pitted black olive puppets on all of our fingers? And eating the losers? Playing conkers or marbles with loose cranberries, or sword-fighting with the crudités? Pasting deviled eggs on your nose? Stealing food before dinner? Strange gelatin salads and odd casseroles. Smoking dope in the closet with the cousins and fooling no one? That momentous graduation from the kids’s table to the big table.

Harvest festivals were traditionally linked with the September harvest moon or the October(ish) hunter's moon (first full moon in October or November): my Canadian cousin reminded me that Canada celebrates Thanksgiving, which predates our Thanksgiving by 22 years, in October. (But there were multiple Thanksgivings, by nationality—truly a movable feast.) Germany’s Erntedankfest, is celebrated at the end of September or early October, aka Octave of Allhallowtide. Goose was the turkey of choice, as turkeys were introduced from North America.

The Old English name for November was Blōtmōnaþ ('sacrifice month'). One could easily add the Celtic New Year, Samhain into this litany of feasts list (after all, Samhain was the Celtic New Year’s Eve). Christmas and New Year were winter holidays moved to coincide with calendrical reform. 

St. Martin distributed food to the poor on horseback, and gave presents to the children who made turnip, or paper lanterns to guide his way. During the English Reformation, festivities were expunged, the bonfires reignited as Guy Fawkes Night.

(The Julian calendar was recalibrated by Pope Gregory XIII, in October, 1582, The Brits were a couple of centuries behind in implementing the Gregorian Calendar. Britain and its colonies resisted, because it was a Catholic edict, but succumbed to the Gregorian calendar on September 1, 1752. By that point the calendar was off by 11 days—the reboot caused riots.)

The feast of St. Martin, Christianized from the old pagan harvest festivities, was as big as Christmas, besides bonfires, mumming and mayhem, there was so much exorbitant feasting and drinking, that in the 6th c., the Catholic church established a post St. Martin-fast until the Epiphany. 

After gorging ourselves silly on Thanksgiving, we still make those collective vows to our expanding waistlines, to eat less leading up to the Christmas season. And then we begin those vows anew after the New Year. 

Rev. 11/23, (ref. The Atlantic, Wiki and Medievalists.)

Thanksgiving traditions during a time of COVID

This year, because of Covid, my bubble world people are few—my cousin Sinead, and my friend Sam. So, Thanksgiving will be a small gathering in West Marin. But there will be leftovers, so the turkey table will be shared among several friends via care packages.

Tuesday was my birthday and I snagged an unexpected turkey, via the foodbank, a small one one, it’s snoozing in a brinepot in the fridge, awaiting its world debut. I have found brining makes all the difference in the world. No more dry turkey breast.

There will be stuffing, garlic mashers, yams, cranberry sauce, gravy, brussels sprouts with bacon and Gorgonzola cheese, green bean casserole, and a lot of leftovers split three ways. 

As soon as the turkey is roasted, and we’ve eaten, I will debone it, then start in on the soup. And it will be glorious soup. Because the turkey was brined, there’s no need to add salt to the broth, and it takes less time to make. A turkey boxing day of sorts.

For me, it’s all about the carcass. Turkey soup after Thanksgiving is over and done with, is sublime. 

Artichoke fields of West Marin

I remember seeing the artichoke fields of Olema—near the pasture of the donkey, the goose and caboose (which was the Pt. Reyes library car). There were still abandoned artichoke fields from Point Reyes to Petaluma through the 1960s. The shock of deep green amid the pale oat grasses, and the jewel-like purple blossoms in late summer.

Holiday travel

We just blew past a quarter of a million people dead in the US alone, no estimate of total COVID deaths worldwide, those numbers are exponentially growing daily, California broke its own infection and hospitalization record last week. Washington DC numbers are through the roof. That’s almost 1,500 deaths a day.

Yes, it’s a pain that California is back on lockdown curfew in an attempt to slow down the disease vector, it hasn’t even been a year since the pandemic struck, and people are seriously thinking of traveling for the holidays? What is this bizarre mindset, kamakazi lemmings attempting to outfox death?

Someone in the Irish in California group asked, Hi all, quick question. What are your sentiments traveling home for Christmas? Most answers were all for traveling back to Ireland. Even though the pubs are closed. COVID be damned. What kind of mindset is that? One Irish guy said his mother would kill him if he didn’t return home for the holidays. I said you might kill her if you do. Coffin nails.

Geez. My sentiment is that I want to stay alive. I’d stay home, certainly not endanger myself or others. Too many places are disease vectors—especially planes. As Kim Silverman so eloquently said, “Travel is exactly how the pandemic became a pandemic. And it is now more prevalent than ever before.” 

From a friend: “More than 200,000 NEW cases of COVID in the United States today. Only 37 countries in the world have had more than 200,000 cases in TOTAL since the pandemic began. For God's sake, and for the sake of our health workers, and of your loved ones, please be safe. Stay home. This is such a dangerous time.”

“California just surpassed a sobering threshold – one million COVID-19 cases – with no signs of the virus slowing down,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom.

So sad, all of it. There are refrigerator morgues permanently parked outside Kaiser in SF. At first I wondered what they were, then the grim truth hit. Last month, my cousin and I went to visit the shipping container place at the port of Oakland where they customize and trick up shipping containers for you, and there were stacks of refrigerator morgues at the ready. They said the refrigerator morgues were selling like hotcakes. Grim thought.

And the Irish in California host thought I was being too heavy-handed because I shared this information on their page. Someone said, Shouldn’t you be out on a ledge somewhere? So a laissez-faire attitude is the appropriate response? What am I missing here? Death is not reversible. Death is heavy-handed.

Please feel free to rant about it. I’m flummoxed and angry at the gross stupidity of some sectors of humanity—and these people are not from the T.rump sector. I have little time to engage in schadefreude because COVID is relentlessly rolling its way through the upper echelons of the Republican Party. I just want my life back. Pre-COVID. But we have to work on this together. That COVID vaccine is still pie in the sky. And the reality check is not in the mail.

Photos: Shipping containers serving double duty as morgues. This is not something we should get used to seeing.  Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Wear your mask. It’s the humane thing to do.

Remembering Jan Morris (10/2/1926 – 11/20/2020)

Way back in the yonder age, when I was an art student at Sonoma State University, circa 1976-78, Welsh travel writer Jan Morris came to give a lecture in Inez Storer’s art history class. That semester we met so many extraordinary artists, including artist and inventor, Don Farnsworth, whose grandfather invented the TV, and Sam Francis—who walked to Cotati from Point Reyes to meet us, as he was eschewing all forms of modern transport. 

I don’t exactly remember the details or the lecture itself. But what I do remember is that Jan had lunch with us afterwards in a Cotati pub and the afternoon stretched out beyond the fringes of eternity, embellished with her amazing stories. Beer-in-hand, she was on a roll. The story I remember most vividly to this day is of Jan telling us when she was in Mongolia riding a horse across the vast plains. And something about red cowboy boots stuck in the back of my mind. 

Of course, in those days, Jan may have still been a man (aka John Humphreys Morris, who was the only journalist on Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent team of Mt. Everest). But, Mongolia! When John began his ascent toward the feminine gender and reassignment in 1972, in Casablanca, Morocco, it rocked the world. People couldn’t wrap their minds around it. 

To this day, I don’t know if I imagined the story of the red Mongolian riding boots, or if I saw them in a photo. See, in those days, I was not yet a writer. It could’ve been a misplaced associative story fragment from Carolyn Leilani Lau, who followed Jan’s Mongolian path during the 1980s. I remember seeing the framed photo on her kitchen counter in Oakland. Celia Woloch too had a pair of red cowboy boots. 

Maybe it’s a poet thing. Those red boots, whether real or imagined, whether they were Jan’s or Carolyn’s, or Celia’s—on her tsigani journey to Romania—became a powerful symbol for my own wanderlust, and the metaphor led me to the far corners of the earth including crossing the Andes, the Galapagos, and to the Russian steppes when it was still the USSR. Not quite outer Mongolia. Or inner Mongolia, but I caught the firebug of travel. And ignited my mind, and my writing.

And no, I’ve never owned a pair of red riding boots, but I did travel to some of those places with red Reebock boots. Not quite the same thing, but infinitely more comfortable. I wore them out a few times over. Duct tape was my friend. In Leningrad, I discovered the Cossacks, and the ancient Scythians also wore beaded red riding boots, so I was in good company. 

But those red boots became a symbol within the distant vistas of my mind. Rest in peace, Jan Morris, and may the Elysian Fields of your mind lead you ever onward. And may you always wear those red riding boots as you travel the great plains of the great beyond.

From a Facebook note to Pamela Robertson-Pearce; rev. 11/21/21.

A note on fire and the hair trigger of memory

Sunset, during the August Fire Complex was otherworldly 9/28/20

A friend posted a photo of her sanctuary, a couthy glowing fire pit, and I found myself overreacting to the image of fire. I seem have developed an adverse knee-jerk reaction not only to the odor of burning wood, but also to photos of fire. A knot of fear that begins in the gut, then it encircles the heart, begins to squeeze its fist.

I grew up with wood heating, we had no other source of heat. It was my job to stack the wood for the coming winter. There was a satisfying rhythm to that work. The tump and twist of wood into a puzzle measured by the cord—4 x 4 x 8’ or so. As we laid in the wood, we’d venture to guess if it would be a two, or a three-cord winter. The wood stacking ritual marked the closure of one season, and the entrance to another—and to my birthday. 

I am no stranger to fire, I live in a house with woodstoves, you’d think I wouldn’t react to fire, or to woodsmoke. But I do. I used to love sitting close to the fire on cold winter days, the fire warming my face until my cheeks pulsed and throbbed. I was mesmerized by the strange hypnotic choreography of dancing flames. And seeing the heartwood, the distinct tree rings, their age cut short,  illuminated in the embers. Each tree ring, a birthday in the long count of time.

Yesterday I found a long-forgotten low fired pinch-pot I had fired in our fireplace long ago, it triggered memories of gathering and refining the clay, wedging a mixture of blue and iron rich clay into patterns, pinching it between thumb and finger, then firing it, lifting it from the ash, smothering it in husk and straw to cool slowly so it wouldn’t crack, silica annealed into the hardness stone.

This is the first year that the odor of smoke has affected me. Not the Tubbs Fire, the Paradise Fire, nor the Kincade Fire, but this fire season, beginning with the Walbridge Fire, and ending with the August Complex fires. It’s almost like having my own personal PTSD switch. A hardwired fight/flight syndrome kicks in. 

I first noticed it acutely around Halloween. Those pumpkins. Candle smoke, paraffin, a petroleum byproduct, diesel tinged with the odor of baking pumpkin pie. The mouthwatering thought of Thanksgiving, and things benign. Then begins the mental hell, checklist for evacuation. What to save? I have barely unpacked since my last evacuation. These are my sins. Always at the ready. Samhain, the gate to the Otherworld, open, always by fire.

Ever since the wildfires, I have been scanning and digitizing decades-worth of prints and negatives. Most of my writing and art is already scanned—except for my travel journals on the back burner. Soon. Sometimes I dream I am evacuating again. I sleep with my wallet, MacBook and hard drive within arm’s reach, my keys are already in the car, which doubles as a large go-bag. 

I have to talk myself out of my own tree when the terror begins. I run off a quick mental checklist to convince myself it’s merely woodsmoke from a fireplace. I remind myself it’s a benign, warm, cozy odor. I find that identifying the type of wood helps. Oh, that’s hardwood, that’s crisp black oak, pungent sizzling bay, or fruitwood. Apple or cherry? 

Mmm, applewood fire, the most pungent, the most extraordinary of odors. The secret heart, the perfume of a thousand apples released all at once like flocks of wild birds. The overwhelming odor of orchards in late summer. Mesquite barbecue. Bacon. Clean, pungent, mouthwatering gracenote. 

Someone in the neighborhood burning coal? Sniff sniff. I have the nose of a bloodhound. No, just the rotten bouquet of woodsmoke when the fire dies out. Someone needs to clean their chimney. Wildfire smoke is more complex, nuanced. More creosote laden. Greasy, acrid, but more electrical, with a slight overtone of burning brakes. Like the ember fall and the acrid ash blizzard that descended from the Glass Fire, covering the foliage with a strange blanket of snow.  

My relationship to fire has changed utterly. This year, our extraordinary sunsets came at such a cost. Fire is its own entity, far beyond our feeble attempts to comprehend it, and certainly far beyond our scope to tame it. As a child I was utterly in love with volcanoes, the secret heart of fire within the earth. Later, I watched molten rock plunge into the sea. Sublime beauty, and corrosive air, acrid rain. A terrible beauty.

These days, I see myself as if from the outside looking in. Bearing witness. The fire within burning bright. All I know is that there will be a prime factorization of proverbial candles on my birthday cake this year. I am mesmerized like a moth to flame. Fire-sign to the very end.

CZU Complex fire, Big Basin burning

A Contagion of Logorrhea

Bouncing off Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s post I saw out of the corner of my eye, while madly scrolling through Facebook which inexplicably conjoined, or congealed in my mind with a quote I had posted way back in 2009, I was off and running. Christopher Morley (1890-1957), an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet, who, like Charles Dickens, was once paid by the word, said, "Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump." I wondered if he was referring to himself.

That thought had me googling both Morley’s unattributed quote (how and when and why did he say it?), to a relatively new-to-me word I wanted to use in a sentence, logorrhea. It wasn’t so much a new word, but it was close to being unpronounceable and next to impossible to spell. So Google helpfully fixed my spelling to Logokorea, a sports site, I think, but phonetic Korean is not my thing.

So at the risk of becoming labeled as manky littérateur, in order to use the newfangled, if awkward word in a sentence, I constructed a faux review, perhaps with a knockoff of Finnegan’s Wake in mind. “The valiant attempt at avant-garde novel resulted in a long-winded game of logorrheic scrabble.” An old boyfriend once quipped that I was vaccinated with a gramophone needle. Better than a broken record.

I must admit that I was spurred on by this hilarious logorrhea example, an unattributed quote: “To Tom Wolfe, a dandy with an incurable bout of logorrhoea, words are like chips in Las Vegas.” Certainly The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test comes to mind!!! It was a jejune glissand of verisimilitude. I never did find out who said that word gambling line. I’d like to think it was Neil Gaiman.

Sure, the coining of logorrhea could be attributed to the prolific works of Morley, but to my way of thinking, the grand master of logorrhea before the word was coined in 1878, was Charles Dickens (no, not Samuel Pepys) who wrote on foolscap, in longhand, and was published serially, in newspaper format, which means he never revised a damned thing. And he was paid by the word which only egged him on. 

Ok, so The Pickwick Papers was written in monthly installments, followed by Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol—which covered the rent from April 1836 to October of 1839—followed by David Copperfield Bleak House and Great Expectations. After all, verbosity was his friend and rent is rent. 

A highly gregarious man, Morley believed in the 3-hour lunch, which led to his founding The Baker Street Irregulars which included Isaac Asimov, Rex Stout, and Dame Jean Conan Doyle. Holmes, James! And if the Sherlockiana wasn’t enough, he founded the Saturday Review of Literature, and relentlessly revised and enlarged Bartlett's Familiar Quotations—plus a baker’s dozen of other literary accolades.

Morley invented the bibliomystery whodunit genre with his first novels, and much of his writing was humorous enough to tickle your humerous or maybe your ulna. (Bet you had to look that one up.) But his 1939 novel Kitty Foyle was edgy as it discussed abortion which probably cost him some readership audience. He commuted by train from Long Island to New York, I’m sure the metronome song of the train clacking and swaying, contributed to his corpulent opus of writing. It took a series of strokes to curtail Morley’s voluminous output, but he continued to write for five more years until his death in 1957. 

Morley’s last words of advice were to: “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.” 

Great advice. Besides, my addled mind was already off, and running off the long mouth of the logorrheic cliff well before I uncovered that gem. AKA, this a day in the half-life life of my mind on caffeind.

Logorrhea, noun (early 20th c., coined from Greek logos ‘word’ + rhoia ‘flow’), given to prosy, rambling, or manic or tedious loquacity, garrulousness, excessive verbosity, wordiness, and repetitiveness, verbal diarrhea, AKA press speech. Sounds so much better, if not downright clinical, than calling a manic friend a loquacious loudmouth, or a manic off his meds.

Urban definition: “a condition suffered by an individual who has the inability to shut the f*** up.”

Synonyms: circumlocution, diffuseness, diffusion, garrulity, garrulousness, long-windedness, periphrasis, prolixity, redundancy, verbalism, verbiage, verboseness, verbosity, windiness, wordage, wordiness.

In other words, a schizophrenic’s thesaurus wet dream. Steve Jobs succinctly cut to the chase: Think different. OK, I’ll shut the fuck up now.

With thanks to Pamela Robertson-Pearce who recreated the graphic with the British spelling.

MORNING LIGHT

MORNING LIGHT 

Mapplethorp’s photo of a pale daisy 

in a ceramic vase, is almost painterly—

the way the windowframe and shadow 

dissect light diagonally, the wall divided

with a Rothcoesque precision, 

done in an austere palette 

of blue and gray. Such stillness. 

Perhaps even a faint stirring of joy.

11/15/20

Lauterbrunnen Valley

I remember when I first arrived in the Lauterbrunnen Valley. We were coming from Bischoffzell (long story) by way of St. Gallen, late at night. I looked up to see the stars and then I realized those stars were the lights of houses—there was an immense cliff above us, Wengen, to be my home for the next four months. I was 19. Ah, but I was homesick, and also stranded as all the charter airlines went bankrupt, As did Lloyds of London, so getting home was problematic, BOAC offered to fly us back for free. A lot of shandys were drunk in order to send us all back home. But there was a two-week wait so I took a mad train jaunt up to Inverness before I returned. Hotel Bishofzell did ask me to stay on through the winter season. But I wanted to go home. In deep summer, I walked those ski slopes to Gstaad and later dreamed of skiing them. If only I had stayed, my life trajectory would’ve been radically different. And then, later, I inexplicably became homesick for Wengen, and nightly dreamed of the Jungfrau. If only to ski again.

Friday the 13th Deluge

Friday the 13th, it’s raining for reals—with a king tide today. Highest tide of the year. Donna’s driveway where the septic tank is, has sinkholes. What else could go wrong? Anybody up for a septic tank snorkel? Petaluma, and all the Sausalito on-ramps are underwater. King tides will be at their highest Sunday and Monday. 

coyotes howling in tandem

The coyotes are singing in tandem tonight, 

practicing call & response patterns 

that echo & roll across the valleys & canyons 

like a sonic web.

Hometown hood turning out for homie VP Kamala Harris

Hometown hood turning out for homie VP Kamala Harris. It was the most entertaining and honkingist motherfucker of all traffic jams. The Grand Lake marquee, “America just told Trump: You’re Fired” mirrors the sentiments of the spontaneous crowds out celebrating everywhere, shouting America is great again, Fock Donald Trump, Black lives matter, and Barbecuing while Black is beautiful! And everybody was waving flags. We got our flag back! People swigging champagne, partying like there was no tomorrow. One black woman ran up to the car and foisted some champagne on us, I took a swig. It was that kind of night. We hugged crazily through the car window. Solidarity in Oaktown.

Chetana Karel’s brother-in-law, Allan Marchaud, who owns the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland should be classified as a living Alameda County treasure. He has generously offered the theater space for progressive meetings between matinees, and refused to back down from using the marquee as a community sounding board when other merchants and alders complained.

When I had out-of-town guests, I’d often take them into the theater to show off the faded grandeur of the art deco motifs, Allan, or an usher, always waved me through, never asked for tickets. you don’t need no stinking tickets. It still has the heavy brocade curtains from its vaudeville theatre heydays.

And the real treat was to go to the first evening show on Friday night, when the Wurlitzer organ came up through the stage playing scary music, the opening bars of Phantom of the Opera. We’ve slayed the behemoth. Now, to work.

An augmented beer story

A bit of an augmented beer drinking story, The last time I heard Black Sabbath was when I was forced to listen to it full blast while hung over, my cousin’s misogynistic boyfriend decided we needed to be punished for going out and drinking the night before without him at the Rancho Nicasio. 

Robbie, who owns S-Car-Go racing cars, decided it was funny to feed us Jagermeister boilermakers. Gawd knows what kind of beer—but with Jagermeister, does it really matter? It could’ve been a Grasshopper Nyquil with bubbles. I slid off the naugahyde barstool and it went south from there. I remember looking up the nostrils of the bison head mounted on the wall, thinking they needed dusting.

I was done and spun after two or three rounds. I cannot drink hard alcohol. My idea of living dangerously is an expensive chardonnay. Like Murphy-Good. My cousin has more fortitude, so I don’t know her final count but she soon joined me. I am terribly plebeian, I prefer unvarnished stout over beer. Preferably Guinness from Ireland. Murphy’s is too sweetish. Guess I’ll have to try a Beamish. Lagunitas is OK. But Guinness is as good as ten mothers. And gawd knows, my mother, a friend of Timothy Leary’s, was intergalactic. Positively orbital. But a Jagermeister boilermaker defies physics and good taste.

Luckily all we had to do was follow the dotted line on the road to get back home as she lived across the town square. Calling Nicasio a town is generous. It’s not even a crossroad, but a bend in the road. The dregs of an old racetrack. Walking across the baseball diamond was out. Mud. 

I do remember some hands and knees were involved with direct road contact because the paint on the double yellow line was smoother than the roadbed in front of her neighbor, painter Tom Woods’s house. I remember we were sniggering like raccoons by then. I guess it was a good thing there was no traffic as I doubt we would’ve been able to rise up off that road in time. Barrel rolls and dos-e-does were out. A good thing Tom didn’t have a shotgun. 

That night we out-competed the legendary town drunks, Sinead’s late dad, Bill Dinsmore (who had a breathalyzer ignition switch in his car), and Rich Gallagher, also grounded by the law, still rode his trusty steed, a dilapidated bike. A good thing the county never figured out how to attach a breathalyzer to the bike. It was a long walk back to the ranch.

And for what it’s worth Captain Kirk, or rather the actor, once stood in her yard pretending to drink from the well. It was a terrible B-grade movie, a Village of the Damnedish variation, I can’t even remember the name, not the Superman version ( that was her house too), but the Drady’s horse was in it. Poor Superman, felled by a horse. Enough to make you take to green drinkiepoos. Anne said it was called The People. More like the Pibble.

TG I was praising the porcelain god that night. It could’ve been worse. The couch was my Murphybeddish friend. The skittish kitties all decided we need some extra TLC that night and curled up around us like fat little mufflers, purring up a storm of chainsaws beneath our chins all night long. 

It was not a Pliny the Elder moment. Or was it? It was an eruptive experience, but no volcanoes were harmed in the process. Thank Guinness. Slaínte agaibh.

Signed, the beamish lass from Lagunitas.

(What is the half-life, or is it the half-lie of a story, anyway? But every word of this yarn is true, I swear to Gawd.) I think I’m channeling Eddie Stack, or is it Eddie Izzard.

Handbasket of cannabis and politics

Well I imagine that the other side of the political spectrum is feeling some of this same angst I felt four years ago right about now, but at least several more states have legalized cannabis. Consider it a door prize if you happen to live in Montana, Arizona, New Jersey and South Dakota—it’s been legal in California for for four years and we haven’t wound up in any of hell’s handbaskets. Oregon was enlightened way back in 1973, in 2012 Washington and Colorado followed suit...even Alaska! It’s funny how the pot map looks like a map of the blue states. Just don’t get busted in Idaho. But I digress.

I was appalled to find that some my friends on the other side of the political fence decided to “enlighten” me on my Hallelujah Joe post (below) wanting to correct my “wayward” thinking. The message was clear, that I’m either brainwashed by the news media or that I’m naive, and my thinking and deductive reading skills were somehow nascently flawed or impaired. Or perhaps retroactively stoned. I resisted the urge to 86 them all as we have to come together as a nation and clean up this atrocious dog mess left behind by the likes of .45 and his crony cabinet. Not to bag our own dogshit and leave it by the trailhead for someone else to deal with. As my astute school friend Claudia Siefer said, “For healing to take place there must be accountability.”

We all need to be better angels. Get to work.

Sour apples and sore losers, some Facebook notes

No sooner than the news was announced, a republican friend, whom I’ve known since grade school, quickly wheeled up his barrow of sour apples to my Facebook page to argue his points, which I’m not going to copy here. 

I hate having to defend my political position but I will not back down when men try and browbeat me with their logic and “reason.” I think they expect me to back down. If anything, it’s Game on, hold my beer. As Tad Alford found out when he insisted that the AntiFa were behind all the rioting—on my Facebook page. I took him on, post after post. We unfriended each other. 

But I usually go to great lengths to work with dissenting friends, rather than unfriend them. Too easy. It took all the cool I had not to unfriend these two blokes. My other like-minded liberal friends were puzzled as to why I even gave these guys airtime. I said, because I need to know how the other side thinks. They push and stretch me beyond my comfort zone, and make me take a stand and to define with words, what I’m feeling. The writer’s job.

I’m recording my half of the dialogue here because we are living in such extraordinary, virulent times. It is all part of bearing witness, as Carolyn Forché once said. When I first began this blog, I didn’t think to use it like a journal to recorded my daily thoughts. I thought it too mundane, not worthy. A mistake. Not art. Then I realized we can’t segment and sequester entire factions of our persona for art’s sake. It is all part of the milieu. (added 12/16/20).

Transcript:

Jeff, We are all in such grief one way or another. Please don’t be slinging stones. Now is not the time. We need to all work together, shoulder to shoulder. This finger-pointing has got to stop. Or we will never survive. We need to be better angels than this.  

Then he accused me of gloating. I said, I am hardly gloating. I am relieved because now there’s a chance for doing the good work. And if you perceive that I’m gloating, then perhaps it’s time to part ways because there is never any way to achieve anything at all. I thought you knew me better than that. I am sorely disappointed and greatly saddened.

I also think your timing was unfortunate. Too soon. Right now, for most of America, a huge yoke of oppression and grief has been lifted—this current government has been a living nightmare for far too many people. We may disagree politically, but living under .45 has been an absolute nightmare for me, as I am an independent contractor, no umbrella. No cushy middle class job with benefits. 

So please understand that your working view of .45 does not hold for far too many of us—too many of us are disenfranchised by this regime. A president is supposed to represent the United States, not one segment of the population. A president is supposed to unite the people of the United States, not divide a nation.

And I might add that your perception of .45 is just that, your perception. As is mine. Please don’t make the (unintended) assumption that you know the bigger picture, and that I am somehow, sadly misinformed. That I don’t see the bigger picture. That you shed light.

You’re right, in that if we were talking in person there would be more give and take in this conversation. But I (perhaps mistakenly) perceived a pejorative tone that I now see was directed at a friend, Terra Firma, not me—nonetheless, I cannot abide what I perceive as an attempt to foist one’s own opinion at the cost of another’s dissenting voice.

He doubled down his efforts to either convince me or air out his griefs.

I said, Jeff Sousa Sorry, some of your stories do not add up. I could easily look them up and refute them. I have in the past double-checked some of your facts and have found that with any story, there is a kernel of truth in them but there is also a healthy accretion of secondary interpretation and hyperbole too. You are defending someone who was unfit to be president and did more harm than good, and he must be held accountable for his criminal actions. You were associated the health profession realm. How can you continue to defend someone who did not have the nation’s own health at heart. He didn’t have our backs. Ever.

Then Robert Campbell piped in, and said, You have been fooled by he corrupt media. Biden is the bad guy. President Trump got 80% of the legal votes. Trump is not a racist. He is taking no salary as President. He is doing this for the people.

I completely lost it. After all this was my Hallelujah Facebook post, and they seemed to be determined to undermine it. I said, You may rationalize any way you want, you’re entitled to your opinion, this is still America, but .45 was NOT good for this country, he divided us, made racism ok, made a schism that will be hard, if not impossible  to heal. He was no leader. And you’re making a  huge assumption that I’m paying attention to mainstream media. Actions speak louder than words, and certainly louder than the media...and by his own agencies, he was found wanting.

How do you even begin to rationalize fascism? You claim that he took “no salary” but he took innumerable trips to the golf course at taxpayer expense, racking up a bill higher than his salary, he padded the wallets of his friends, practiced nepotism, cronyism, broke more laws than one can count, not to mention the litany of daily lies, he destroyed critical infrastructure, like the CDC, I won’t even mention the deliberate attempt to destroy the USPO. We are now more in debt than we ever have been since this nation was founded, he was vindictive and abusive, in short, a bad president and he will go down in history as such, the man who nearly foundered America. How could anyone with a conscience or moral compass, possibly support him?

Robert, I love your photography, but not your political world view, and your attempt to “guide” the somehow “misinformed” me.  I don’t mind your playing the court jester, which I perceive is behind many of your political comments. But I am hardly “misinformed.” You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to try and foist yours atop of mine as the correct world view. Your strongest world view is up there in the skies with the clouds and the land, not in the political arena. Pax out.

from Facebook posts—you can read Jeff’s arguments here.

Biden is President Elect! The tidal wave of justice

Look, the first image Joe used to thank the nation in a video Tweet,
our family church Our Lady of Loreto, aka St. Mary’s in Nicasio.

Hallelujah! I am thrilled to the moon and back that Joe Biden is president-elect, but I don’t feel the joy I had when Barrak Obama was elected. How do we get back to that joy? 

We have to figure out how to heal a fractured nation at odds with itself. There’s a frightening amount of work still to be done —just to reverse some of the damage that was inflicted during .45’s disastrous tenure. America is at a crossroads.

Like when Covid came along, when the entire world stopped, offering us a chance to change the things we once thought we could not change, I hope we don’t go back to the same old status quo of the Democratic (and Republican) Party system that contributed to this schism. I hope this time is an interregnum of structural rebuilding as it were.

When Obama was elected president, there was hope, and joy. Oakland was one big street party. Neighbors hugging each other. Strangers hugging each other. Everyone walking around with grins so big that their ears were conjoined. I want to get back to that joy. Instead we are wary.

Thank God nothing rhymes with orange. I never want to see that color again. All kinds of emotions are bubbling up now, tears of relief, the years of capped and stoppered grief, rage. I keep taking deep breaths and sighing. Asking, is it over? Is it true? Or merely an alternative ending to a bad nightmare?

I think perhaps now I have the ability to process the place where grief has been a fugitive in hiding for so long. At least now, there is hope. And perhaps the wings of hope will carry us as we get back to work rebuilding our nation. I am tired of living the Divided States of America. 

Plus now we get to take back our hijacked flag. Yes, the work ahead of us will be arduous, but we’re keeping the faith. Indeed, today is a good day. We can breathe again. Finally we can all learn to breathe together again.

As Heaney said, “the longed for wave of justice can rise up and hope and justice rhyme....Believe that farther shore is reachable from here.”

MSNBC just quoted Biden's favorite poem, "The Cure of Troy" by Seamus Heaney:

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

FIRST RAIN

Is that rain I hear
with my little ear?
Four drops, I’ll take it.
And 10 more drops.
What’s this, hail
drumming up a storm
on a hot tin roof?
Hail yeah!
We’ll take it.

11/6/20

San Geronimo Valley community center virtual art show, In Place

 

 I have two drawings in an online art exhibit, IN PLACE hosted by The San Geronimo Valley Community Center. You can also see it on my art page

An online group art show, In Place, presented on the SGVCC website through the Community Center’s Facebook page and Instagram on October 15 through November 15. The exhibit features work created during this time of isolation and stress. The art work in this exhibit is a follow-up of the Where Were Call Home exhibit but also expresses our inner geography, rather than our place on the planet. —Anne Faught