Getting your Kip

Someone posted a list on how to get a good night's sleep. At best it's a hodgepodge list of cobbled-together pseudoscience. It's also making a lot of cultural assumptions. Which got my goat. Or my rhetorical flycatcher.

Here's the list.

Tips for good sleep include:
Eliminate caffeine.
Avoid naps.
Don’t drink alcohol.
Don’t eat a large meal near bedtime.
Exercise.
Try to go to bed and get up at the same times every day.
Reserve your bedroom for sleep – no TV, piles of laundry to sort or even books. If you can’t sleep, get up after 20 minutes.
Go into another room and read or listen to music until you’re sleepy.
Avoid bright lights and electronic screens before bedtime.

At first glance the list looks good, and some of it's fairly sound advice, except that napping is good for you, unless you're an insomniac.  (We do love our lists. They make us feel so organized...)

I would move Exercise to the very top of the list. Exercise during the day (not in the evenings after work). It releases endorphins. Exercise at night will certainly rile you up. 

Eliminate caffeine. Or just don't have any after after 2 PM. That includes chocolate. Yes. (Gasp!).

Avoid naps. You decide. Some people thrive on naps. Depends on the culture too. Me, I can't nap and I don't like falling asleep too early because I will wake up at 2 AM raring to go. I sometimes get my best work in during the middle of the night. 

Don’t drink alcohol—let's amend that one: after dinner. Why cut alcohol out completely unless you have a problem with it? Seems silly. I can see getting blottoed before bedtime could be a problem, but a glass of wine with dinner is good for the heart. It releases endorphins. Just like exercise. And chocolate. What should be on that list is no sugar (in the evening) because sugar, like caffeine, interferes with sleep. As does chocolate. Yes, chocolate.

Don’t eat a large meal near bedtime. Well, duh. Digestion and sleep don't mix well. Eat your dinner at dinnertime. Unless you're in Spain, or anywhere in the Mediterranean, then eat your dinner during the day and your supper late. But then, take long afternoon naps, call them siestas.... Oh wait, you're still sleeping after a big meal...

Move this list to another culture and the paradigm falls apart. How we divide our day with food and sleep is entirely cultural. There is no one correct method.

I did some research on sleep patterns since the Middle Ages It turns out this eight hours of solid sleep a night is a post-Industrial Revolution thing. And all kinds of myths have arisen around the concept of what constitutes sound sleep patterns. Most of them are bogus. (See my reading list below.)

The point on that list that rankled me most was: Reserve your otherwise empty bedroom for sleep and have nothing in your bedroom, including laundry, or books...that is so post 20th c., and a first world notion. For whom is this sleep list meant for? It strikes me as very Northern European Anglo-centric. Waspish, even, with a Puritanical hangover. Laundry causes sleeplessness? Oh my. There's an embedded judgement in there.

If clutter were a factor causing sleeplessness, then no one would be able to sleep in their bedrooms—since at least the Middle Ages. In fact, during the Middle Ages, most people didn't even have bedrooms. Or beds. Besides, you can't see those clothes hanging on hooks and book avalanche invading your sleep space when the lights are turned off—unless you have very good night vision.

I've lived on other countries, and slept in some odd places. My bedroom in Leningrad was also a well-stocked famine pantry. I slept on large vats of canned foods, the cupboard above my head was stacked with dried bread, dried garlic and onions hung from the walls. (I won't mention what it was like sleeping in the Indios' best company beds in Andean huts.) Most people in the USSR didn't even have separate bedrooms, the living room couches converted into beds. I doubt that it's changed much.

Ditto that in Japan where the communal living space converts to sleeping space. Where everything is beautifully austere and clutter-free. I could go on...

And what about we artists in our live/work spaces? Clearly clutter has little to do with getting a good night's sleep. Messy rooms, messy desks, equals a fertile imagination. No books? What's with that? My old poetry professor David Bromige propped his bed up with overdue library books. (Don't ask how I know, and no, it wasn't me).

I get the idea—remove anything from your room that you might be stressing on. But that sounds like a case of evoking sympathetic magic as UC Berkeley’s folklore anthropologist Prof. Dundes might have said.

The idea of an empty bedroom equals a good night's sleep, also evokes the austerity of a nun's or a monk's cell. For the record, they never slept well. Or even through the night. There were novenas to be said, water clocks to be reset in the middle of the night. Other offerings. And that instruction: Go into another room to read...how we repeat the past. That's exactly what the monks did. They said their prayers then crawled back into bed for their second kip.

And the current pseudo-science notion that anything electronic (blue light) including a Kindle, an iPad, your computer screen (or TV), disrupts or interferes with sleep patterns is unsupported "science." The whole "blue light spectrum" theory is one person's hunch, no scientific studies have actually been done on it, and it keeps getting repeated as a fact...until it becomes "fact." Personally, I think she had a grudge against K-Mart's Blue Light Special.

Now I love incandescent light, it's comfy, reminiscent of hearth fires and candlelight. I'm no fan of LED or florescent light, and I don't like the blue color range. So you'd think I'd jump on the electronic blue light bandwagon. But I don't think it disrupts one's circadian rhythm to the point of creating insomnia.

I'm still toying with how it ties in with the idea of light boxes and SAD. Or if that's its origin. Besides, by now, almost everyone uses those energy saver light bulbs, right? Hello? Blue light? Yep. So having that table lamp on is emitting the same color spectrum as my iPad or laptop?

Someone at Apple read that same theory and now since the installment of iOS 10, my blasted iPad starts glowing like an orange pumpkin with indigestion at sunset because of the so-called blue light theory. First few times it happened I thought I was losing my mind...Why is the screen glowing orange? No, I'm not getting sleepy. Is there something wrong with my eyes? TG I found the app that caused my iPad to glow so strangely....

That said, I agree that TVs and electronics can keep you overstimulated at night when you're trying to doze off...but they also seem to have the opposite effect on me. Put on a boring show and it’s....zzzz.

What probably messes with our sleep patterns more than anything is our fear of not getting a good night's rest. We've been told that we need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep—or else. Just like we've been told that we need to drink eight glasses of water a day—or else. There's not science behind either notion. There is no magic formula.

While we do need at least eight hours of down time, how we get that sleep, as long as we get both REM and lighter sleep (or deep rest), and we're not tired, then all is good. Unless you're Margaret Thatcher operating on four hours of sleep a night while running a country, That's not good. (I don't want to know the sleep habits of the Orange One.) But there is such a thing as sleep deficit. Hey-ho, hey-ho, it's off to work we go probably messes with our sleep patterns more than we care to admit.

Snyx? Did I miss something? I wasn't asleep, really...

Lemon Meringue Merengue

Though down for the count with a headcold, yesterday I decided to make lemon meringue pie for my sweetie, a birthday and Valentine's Day tradition that had fallen by the wayside. But in an uncharacteristic pique of cabinet cleaning frenzy, I had thrown out the old yellow box of Kingsford cornstarch with the recipe on the back, and the elderly Albertsons's box only had glazed chicken recipes printed on the back and sides, which was not useful.

So I cracked open food-encrusted (sign of a good cookbook, is the resident food patina) Silver Palate Cookbook, so lovingly inscribed to Neil from Ingrid Gerstmann so many decades ago. A housewarming present from 1991—when he moved to this cottage. I thought of sweet Ingrid in NY, how she knew Neil from the theatre, dahlingk, how I went to school with her, and how small the world really is.

The scalloped pie crust baked (if only I had kept my grannie's spare dentures, the scalloping process would have gone much faster). Thanks to Jim Henin's old poem, my mind wandered far afield.

I gathered Meyer lemons from the tree. Because of the recent rains they had doubled in size, they looked like schools of bloated yellow pufferfish trapped in a green net made of leaves. Meyer monsters the size of oranges. Forget canary-sized. Or pamplemousse. More like Pamelona. The running of the bulls.

I peeled the rinds of three large lemons off in small wormy slivers (forget the 1/2 teaspoon of grated lemon zest—we were going for the full Diet of Worms with the lemon zester to make up for lost time.) I juiced them, but because of the rains, they weren't very sour. So I added another lemon or three  until I had a large cereal bowlful of juice and rind.

I threw in 3 heaping tablespoons of cornstarch into the bowl of juice and rind to let it soak. And then I looked for little swimmers—TG it was weevil-free. Nothing much likes cornstarch except maybe blankmange pudding and chicken glaze. That was way more juice than what the recipe (recollected in memory) called for, by a factor of three, maybe four.

I pulled the crust from the oven and began assembly.

I washed the French copper bowl down with salt and white vinegar until it glowed like a new penny (and thought of Neil Cook with his small army of salvaged copper pots), I scrubbed the equally country French huge balloon whisk (it looked more like bailing wire than a cooking utensil—no stinkin' stainless steel here!) with a large wooden handle—which hadn't been used for years, maybe longer (both gifts from my Aunt Jane when she was at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris).

I set up the double boiler (also unused for years—there was a time when I baked early and often), and I got down to it.

But when I read The Silver Palate recipe, it was all wrong. Two cups of milk in that much lemon juice? A real curdler. Not what I remembered. My grandmother and Aunt Jane had been adapting their variation of the Kingsford recipe since the middle of the last century.

So I went online, and found Alice Waters' Chez Panisse recipe from 1987, courtesy of the New York Times. I tossed in two eggs, three yolks, sugar and juice, and stirred the mixture in the double boiler, running back and forth from the computer screen to kitchen, oops! Not two whole eggs....then I saw how much butter... A cup? I wasn't making lemon butter FFS. WWJC say? (Julia Childs).

So, I flipped back to the Williams-Sonoma recipe. Closer to what I was looking for. But by that time I was so far off the recipe reservation, I was winging it. More sugar, more eggs. OK. Hey, what about that Limoncello in the back of the cupboard? Vanilla bean sugar? Why not?

Not that much butter. Are you kidding me? A cardiac arrest feature built right in, for Valentine's Day, so I tossed in another yolk to compensate. So much for watching the cholesterol. So I tossed back a capful of Limoncello for good measure.

I whisked the whites, added cream of tartar, noting that it too was from the middle of the last century—as was I, for that matter), that balloon whisked whipped the whites until they resembled glistening clouds in the bright copper bowl the color of a sunrisen sky.

I whisked the lemon curd which had thickened to the texture of fresh cement (maybe that was a bit too much cornstarch and egg yolks? So that's why all the butter—a loob job). I needed 2, maybe 3 more arms—make it a shiva's dozen arms. I was wearing lemon curd in my hair and on my newly washed red cashmere sweater (which I can probably never wash again, as it's desperately trying to shrink its way back to doll-sized despite my best efforts of washing it in creme rinse to relax it and stretching it with s steam iron—but it's red. Crimson red, I tell you.)

By this point, I had gobs of lemon goo in my hair, and no free arms to speak of. Where's that bottle of Limoncello? And by this point, the lemon curd was so stiff, it couldn't boil if it wanted to.

Lightbulb. I'll chiffon it with some meringue. Or was it bouffont? So I tossed in another yolk into the curd mix, added more whites for more meringue madness. Or was it merengue madness? I whipped them some more until my arms ached. Luckily the meringue held its air, from this rather unorthodox treatment—and didn't collapse on me. A real ollie.

Limoncello? Wherefore art thou? Forget Romeo. Give me the freakin' Limoncello, or give me death. By this point, I really wanted to die, I was so tired, And when the meringue resembled the texture of angel wings, I carefully folded in half the whisked whites into the concrete curd until it resembled pie filling. Or a yellow cello sponge.

Then I dressed the pie crust in raspberry jam knickers to keep it from getting a soggy bottom, added the filling, with a meringue chapeau (next time make sure the meringue can clear the height of the broiler shelf). And hoped for the best. Luckily the oven did the trick. Me, I went back to bed to recover from the ordeal. Best pie ever. He has no idea, of course.

               

Bay Area Generations, Edition #42, The Bellevue Club, Oakland, Maureen Hurley & John Oliver Simon

We are very grateful to invite you to be a part of Bay Area Generations at The Bellevue Club, Oakland on Monday, February 27, 2017.
We would like you to read the following pieces:

STILL LIFE WITH DEAD BIRD (Maureen Hurley)
LETTER TO COLM TÓIBÍN (Maureen Hurley)
I WAS TEN (Maureen Hurley)

Pablo (John Oliver Simon)
Mama Skunk (John Oliver Simon)
After Rilke (John Oliver Simon)

Day of The Show
Your Reader arrival time - 6:45pm
Writer's mixer (at the bar) - 6:30pm
Doors open for seating - 7 p.m.
Reading starts - 7:30 p.m.

We invite you to arrive early so that you may meet your fellow readers and then we can review our reading procedures for the show.

We provide you a complimentary "souvenir" chapbook of the entire show, and there will also be a small number of copies available for purchase at a nominal cost.

Sales Table You are welcome to bring your own products to sell at the book table: books, chapbooks, cds, broadsides.

Guests We hope that you invite friends and colleagues to hear you read! We are unable to offer comps. We do ask that all attendees, other than readers, donate $7.00 admission (or $10.00 with a souvenir chapbook), which helps to offset our costs.

Directions The Bellevue Club, Oakland is located in Oakland at 525 Bellevue Ave., Oakland, CA, right on beautiful Lake Merritt. It's walkable from BART (19 St.). The Bellevue Club has a full bar and offers a sumptuous view of the Lake. Map:https://goo.gl/maps/pjv7KpvvWv62

We are happy that you will be participating in this event and look forward to a memorable evening with your work.

Sincerely,

Sarah Kobrinsky, Guest Curator
Sherry Wilson + Amos White, Board Curators

Bay Area Generations
A Reading Series for the Ages
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Sandra Wassilie, Co-Founder & Chair
Amos White, President
Gina Goldblatt, Secretary
Sherry Wilson, Treasurer
Charles Kruger, Emeritus & Co-Founder

Bay Area Generations is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Tax ID #47-2973129

Bay Area Generations reading 42 at the Bellevue Hotel 

Bay Area Generations Reading, Hotel Rex
Fred Dodsworth + John Oliver Simon introduce Bay Area Generations #15 at Hotel Rex in San Francisco on November 24, 2014

Transliterating the names of drugs

My friend Jorge Luján, a poet from Mexico, developed a poetry lesson for kids called Imaginary Translations. My favorite: Dragons—stoves on the run.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my old UC Berkeley professor former Jeopardy champ (he got married on set!), Dan Melia's been having a good run with his own version of Imaginary Transliterations using drug names:

Drug names: Repatha: prize-winning Bollywood film.
Taltz sounds like something you can get a bad case of.
Trintellix: a low-cost cell phone service or Trinidad and Tobago's equivalent of the CIA. Trulicity: online university or Christian matchmaking app. Namzaric: master of the pan flute, or latest Sasha Baron Cohen character. (Or both.)
Viberzi: Italian cheese or one of those annoying horns they blow at soccer matches? (Someone quipped: All drug names are Dungeons and Dragons character. This one was a gnomish illusionist.) Victoza: right wing Spanish political party or Miami Dolphins running back.—Dan Milia

So, I decided to have a go at it.

OK, I'll bite.  Omeprazole: it's all about me, oh, me, oh my—self praise, I'm a fiesta screaming ¡Ole! while sticking in your craw. 

Omeprazole (alternate definition): an orange acid-reflux twittering Cheeto with smol hands, that causes, not cures, widespread indigestion upon contact. Approach with caution. And carry a big stick.

AKA Prilosec: Someone who stoops pretty low to hurl an insult, but doesn't take the time to properly masticate it and so it comes back up to haunt him.

AKA Losec: A harried SNL phone operator trying to swallow lunch and talk at the same time.

PeptoBismol: A pretty-in-pink pepOmint-flavored gullet unguent that tastes abysmal butt also has a dark side.

An Apostrophe too far

The Case of the Missing Apostrophe, or an Apostrophe too far.

I read an eoook where a clueless author got her apostrophes wrong EVERY SINGLE TIME! You'd think there'd be a 50% chance of her getting it right, but, no. Simple plurals were well beyond her intellectual grasp. She even wedged apostrophes into words that naturally ended with -s—which made for some very surreal reading pleasure. Not. I was swearing a bluestreak by the time I finished that book. She did not get a very good book review.

You see, I take this stuff seriously. I have dyslexia, and an apostrophe can make or break the meaning in a sentence. So, why are teachers wildly successful with teaching the rampant and errant use of apostrophes every time an S appears on the tail of a word? Clearly no one has a clue as to why they're using them. Other than they must use an apostrophe if there's an S. Hiss. His's? Hiss's?Cats and snakes have better grammar skills than said author.

OK, I looked it up. An apostrophe is a bridge that replaces missing letters or words! Blame it on Chaucer. Like German, olde English nouns in the genitive case picked up an -es to show possession. Mine! Take the genitive forms of Boyes, Mannes, Knyghtes, Kynges and Goddes. Drop the -e, enter the possessive apostrophe. The Kynges speech becomes the King's speech. Quit swearing! Hisses (oh, look, it retained the plural -es stem).

OK, so why did vegetable, and apple get to keep that final -e? Shouldn't it be vegetabl, and appl? Children? Come back! Ms. deVos, please do sit down. Quit polishing that apple. It won't do you any good.

Towhee in the Kitchen

Yesterday we had an orange-ass'd towhee sneak past the kitchen door which was open a crack, looking for crumbs, but then she couldn't get back out. She had a lot to say with her plaintive one-note call, as she tried every window looking for the way out.

My grandmother said that when birds enter the house it meant someone would die soon. She said this, as the towhees gathered morning crumbs at her feet like small chickens. The cats ignored them. Death wasn't on the menu.

Today she was back in the kitchen again, eating crumbs off the floor. (The towhee, not my granny.) In this case, it's all about the free lunch. Or a place to nest. Not death. This time she also knew where the door was. She only swore at me once on the way out. We're making progress, that towhee and I. 

See, last year, I tried to save her baby who fell out of the nest too soon, before it could fly. I perched it in the lemon tree—and I think she remembers something of it. Who knows the reasoning capacity of towhees? She has no fear of me. That's for sure.

She's baaack! This time she ventured down the hall to collect some fluff-n-stuff. I really should vacuum more often.

KITCHEN CHICKEN
Towhee visitor
Rescuing a Towhee Chick
DEATH OF A SONGBIRD, BASTILLE DAY

New swearword of the day: fascist, loofa-faced s***-gibbon

New swearword of the day: fascist, loofa-faced s***-gibbon.

Thank you Senator Leach for a gut-wrenching belly-laugh.

Score a 10 for sheer creativity. Shakespeare would be proud. Not the first time oor wee manny's been called a s***-gibbon, for aa' that. A right guid Scots epithet that made headlines when he mistakenly claimed Scotland voted to leave the European Union last June, (not to mention those ill-fated golf courses) which kicked their ire up a notch. The Scots loaded both barrels because wee nyaff just wouldn't do.

My friend Mark Adler quipped: I can't unsee it. I'll never look at a loofa-sponge the same way again. Yeah. Shades of the Bill O'Reilly loofah escapade. Scrub-a-dub-ya-dub. There's a new Dubya in town. So hysterical I'll even forgive the loofah typo. But it's so not fair to slander and malign the poor gibbons with the Orange One.

Think I'll file this one under linguistics. Ya can't make this shit up.

Happy Birthday Dougie Jarret,

Dougie Jarret, last night I dreamed we were still young, you were driving your hotrod. Revving a turquoise two-tone Chevy in front of your house in Forest Knolls. I was banging on the passenger window of a car from this century, just as we were slowing down to turn up Arroyo Road, toward home. I was trying to get your attention, screaming Happy Birthday Dougie! But you couldn't hear me from across the ages. So, I rolled down the window, entered your world, and you smiled that James Dean smile that left the girls giddy and breathless. And still you couldn't hear me. I awoke to find that today is your birthday. Like, Dude! Happy Birthday and now, get out of my dreams already!

Facebook memory: photo shoot with Richard Salzman, take one and a half

Seeking chronological order, I posted a version of this story but this was written in 2017.

I was doing a photo shoot, a double-truck fashion spread, certainly one of my weirdest assignments ever for The Paper, (fashion was not my thing at all), and I needed one more image—my models were flighty young creatures from my poetry class at El Molino High School, were gone for the evening, and I was the last one standing in the field at deadline. Make that dreadline.

So I went to see my neighbor Richard Salzman and he said Just use yourself. I set up the lighting on a music stand, and the camera on a tripod, set the focal plane, shutter and aperture, and hoped for the best. (No light meter, just my jaundiced eye.) It's sort of an assisted selfie. Of course, you can't go wrong with a Hasselblad. Incredible glass. Large format negatives were more forgiving, you could practically use then as contact prints, as is.

The Paper (North Bay Bohemian) editor Nick Valentine would loan his camera to me from time to time. The camera was worth the price of a small country. I quaked whenever I used it. I never expected Nick to use the photo for The Paper, but he did. That's Richard Salzman tickling the ivories, in Forestville. Late 80s?

Now, our cabins were the size of a minute. You had to go outside in order to change your mind. Richard moving his piano into that cabin was a major feat of ingenuity. So we were also fighting physics too, to get the distance, and most of my body into the frame. I had to shoot it from the corner of the bed.

You know, it's funny, but I had no real sense of self, or how I looked to others—my inner dialogue was always nattering on, telling me that I was homely as a mud fence. My tall, leggy aunts and mother were the gorgeous creatures. My Aunt Jane was the Gallo Girl on the back of the Sunday Funnies, and Time Magazine. I was indoctrinated at an early age not to be vain, or focus on my looks, etc. And the girls in school were seriously cruel, as a rule of thumb, always making fun of me, because I was from the San Geronimo Valley, and wore hand-me-downs, etc. So glad when the hippie movement rolled in, because it no longer mattered what we wore. Liberating.

I was not a fan of the mirror either. I once made the mistake of looking at myself at Judy Soga's house—after someone had slipped me some acid Koolaid earlier that afternoon at the Kent Lake spillway, and let’s just say it was a long, rough ride. Took me years to get over that trip. The Pinnochio nose slidehsow didn't help. I drank a whole lot of it, as it was a hot day at the spillway.. I was stratospheric for a solid week. My ride was a darker turn of the soul as well. Why I am glad the heaviest stuff I ever tried was peyote. Hitching out the The Valley after peyote tea, I swear I saw the ghosts of Miwoks by the golf course.

Speaking of print ads, Bill Deutra, the Marlboro Man, lived right across from me, lovely man, full of stories, the KS ravaging his handsome face. He'd take me out tea dancing in Guerneville. Told me about JEdgar's propensity for cross-dressing. I know the feeling. I felt like I was (reverse) cross-dressing in this photo. Out of character, out of soul depth, charging right ahead into the abyss. I was madly in love with poetry itself, the rest was ephemera.

Photo shoot with Richard Salzman, 1981, long and winding musical version, Take two

I was doing a photo shoot, a double truck spread on fashion, which was one of my weirdest assignments ever for The Paper, (so not my thing), and I needed one more image...my models were flighty young creatures from my poetry class at El Molino High School, were gone for the evening, and I was the last one standing in the field at deadline. Dreadline. I set up the lighting on a music stand, and the camera on a tripod, set the focal plane, shutter and aperture, and hoped for the best. (No light meter, just my jaundiced eye.) It's sort of an assisted selfie.

I had these huge 200-watt bulbs that I stuck into aluminum reflector lamp shades with clippies. Seriously low tech. I used Tri-X, with a slow shutter speed, wide open aperture, and pushed the film in the developing process. Almost no post process. Grey scale was all there. Of course, the Hasselblad negative film was so big, it was practically like making a contact print.

Of course, you can't go wrong with a Hasselblad. Incredible glass. Large format negatives were more forgiving, you could practically use then as a contact print, as is. The Paper (North Bay Bohemian) editor Nick Valentine would loan it to me from time to time. The camera was worth the price of a small country. I quaked whenever I used it. I never expected Nick to use the photo for The Paper, but he did.  I remember I was mortified at the time. I really didn't think Nick would go for it... I still have some of the half-tones from some of my photos. In some cases, the half-tone is the only copy I have.

I did clean up nicely from time to time. But I preferred old clothes to new duds. I wound up keeping the outfit, and used it to land a couple of jobs. I still had a waistline and my boobs weren't frequent flyers. I love thrift stores. My grannie and mother were both seamstresses, so I learned to sew at an early age. I was relieved when the hippie look became popular. So much less stress. I will NEVER wear panty hose again. Just sayin'. My friend Lee Perron said I used to dress to challenge—whatever that meant, other than wearing lingerie long before Madonna was a household word.

That's Richard Salzman tickling the ivories, in Forestville. Late 80s? They don’t shoot piano players, do they? Ken Bullock said that I looked like a torch singer. At the time, my favorite torchiere song in those days were My Funny Valentine, Stormy Weather and Stormy Monday.And Ewan McCall's First time ever I saw your face, a tribute to Peggy Seeger knocked me stone cold with its beauty. But there's that little thing called words. And the notes, they all have to line up exactly. I was never good at that. I get too nervous and it all flies out the window. My Torchiere amore, you're the one that I adore...

Even Don Coffin chimed in on my thread. We'd all go nuts whenever he drove up the Celli driveway in that big green caddy with all that chrome grille, ‘cuz it meant the craic was on. Don would step out with his fancy cowboy boots and mandolin. An Irish saying, means to part-ay on like there's no tomorrow!  Don always traveled with some musical instrument or other. And Paul was a switch-hitter, he could go either classical or bluegrass.

Sone incredible music sessions at the cabins with Paul, Alistair Ingram, and Richard Salzman on the flute, because he couldn’t drag the piano out into the driveway, which was our communal living room, because there wasn’t a cabin big enough to hold us all. I asked Don if he was with Kate Wolf when she was living in Forest Knolls. I just remember her white ford falcon stationwagon parked in front of the Forest knolls USPO, not much else.

A high school friend, Toni Tierney commented on my photo saying it’s a Stevie Nicks look. Funny she should say that, I used to clean house for one of the band members—tall guy with an English accent. was it Fleetwood Mac himself? Dunno. They lived behind The Drake Club in Fairfax. Still trying to piece together that memory. Wish I could sing like her. I can still see the inside of the house in my mind's eye. They had an adorable toddler. The man was lovely, offered me tea, but she was a cold fish.

I didn't last long as a housecleaner for Fleetwood Mac. The blonde just didn’t like me. But they turned me onto some good music. Probably the first time I ever listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac. Rhiannon became my favorite song. Weirdly, they turned me on to Michael Franks. He had me at those popsickle toes. I hear they're planning to buy the old recording studio in Sausalio. LOL. Toni confirmed that it was Fleetwood himself—and they probably paid me with checks too...Talk about autographs. But I was never into the fame thing.

You know, it's funny, but I had no real sense of self, or how I looked to others—my inner dialogue was always beating me up and nattering on that I was homely as a mud fence. I was a tortured angst-ridden soul. (Still am). At Lagunitas school, Jimmy Bohman taunted me, called me Skinny, and Flaca. Cruel kids. And trying to fit in at Drake high school, just wasn't within my skill-set. Those were miserable years. Thank god for art. It literally saved me. And my horses. Always the horses. Riding alone along the ridges of Mt. Barnabe brought me solace and refuge from the savage world.

I’m still not a fan of the mirror either...made the mistake of looking at myself at Judy Soga's house—someone had slipped me some acid Koolaid that afternoon at the spillway, and it was a long, rough ride. Took me years to get over that trip. The Pinnochio nose slidehsow didn't help. Yeah, my ride was a darker turn of the soul. Hitching out the The Valley after drinking some peyote tea, I swear I saw the ghosts of Miwoks at the Nicasio turn-off, by the golf course. Must’ve been Geoff Davis’s doing. He said he used to see their ghosts there by the pond. Said there was a village there. I never could shake that image. Window to the past.

I was certainly indoctrinated at an early age not to be vain, or to focus on my looks, etc. And the girls in school were seriously cruel, as a rule of thumb, always making fun of me, because I was from The San Geronimo Valley, I wore hand-me-downs, etc. So glad when the hippie movement rolled in, because it no longer mattered what we wore. Liberating to finally be ourselves in a massive hippie crowd.

My aunts and mother were the gorgeous creatures. My Aunt Jane was the Gallo Girl on the back of the Sunday Funnies, and Time Magazine. Speaking of print ads, Bill Deutra, the Marlboro Man, lived right across from me, lovely man, full of stories, the KS ravaging his handsome face. He'd take me out tea dancing in Guerneville. Told me about JEdgar's propensity for cross-dressing. I know the feeling. I felt like I was (reverse) cross-dressing in this photo. Out of character, out of soul depth, charging right ahead into the abyss. I was madly in love with poetry itself, the rest was ephemera.

2/2017
Added 2/20

RAIN HAIKU

Tempestuous night
rain hammers a thirsty land
mountains become prone.


She didn't expect
runaway nightmares, sleeping
on the horse-sleigh bed.


Staccato of rain
cats racing to the front door
to outwit the storm.


His words are windows
streaked with the grime and decay
of alternate facts.


Sing America
while the enemy within strikes
down justice and truth.

Preserving the past: Centrum in the early 1980s (photo)

In the process of using old Facebook Memories to flush out the gaps in my blog, I discovered that I had met Meridel LeSueur, not in 1981, but according to the Centrum site, it was 1980. I will need to readjust many (undated) poem dates...

Not only that, as I attempted to fill in the gaps on this timeline, I discovered that I've been misspelling Meridel's last name for decades. It's LeSueur, not LeSeuer!!! Got that. Awg, egg on face. Blame it on dyslexia. (True—I had a hard time unraveling it—even now, when I knew it was wrong and I had to resort to a snapshot of her name to keep it right in my head.)

As to fluffing out this blog, the trouble is, my Facebook Memories only date back to 2009. So it doesn't help flush out those impoverished writing years. I'm still sorting old papers, so more work is coming, but the bulk of the poetry has been scanned and posted (a huge task). Now it's come down to transcribing old journal entries. (Not the highest on my priorities list, of sorting all my old papers, filing them, and eventually dispatching them.)

The year 1980 is particularly dicey in that I didn't seem to keep a proper journal. Napkins, paper place-mats and menus were pressed into service, along with carbon paper separator tissue, as well as the backs of old posters and poem revisions—an odd sleuthy way to date my many undated old poems.
 
So, I must've gone to Centrum three times. I know we were personae non gratae for crashing the gates of the kingdom when Meridel was there. Carol Jane Bangs in particular had it out for me. She actually chased me out of a poetry reading, screaming bloody murder, the only thing missing in that lunatic chase, was a cleaver in her hand. No matter that it was free and open to the public. Luckily she never knew my name. The nerve. Crashing a poetry reading/reception like that. I was an alley cat, hungry for poetry. Perhaps the free wine and hors d'oeuvres were involved as well. 

Jim Heynen, one of the other Centrum coordinators, apologized to me later. He didn't mind at all that I was there as a freeloader. We spiced up the conference. Jim read a hysterical poem about someone using false teeth to make the scallops on a pie crust, and hog farmer David Lee read from The Porcine Legacy. Worth the gate crashing entrance fee.

Writing at Centrum

1980 (I remember meeting Lisel Mueller, and Bill Knott as well as Donald Hall; I think this is the year I met Bill Root and Pan Uschek, and Rusty North.) 

FACULTY: Galway Kinnell, Meridel LeSueur, Richard Shelton, Ann Standork, James Bertolino, Madeline DeFrees, Donald Hall, Sam Hamill, Bill Ransom, Lisel Mueller, Bill Knot.

1981 (I'm pretty certain I went to this one too as I have a journal entry on Jack Cady; and I spent time with Tree Swenson and Kathleene over at Copper Canyon Press. Kathleene West (what was her last name back then. I adored her. I found out that Linnerson was her maiden name, she said she was always reinventing herself. Anyway, she got me to apply to teach poetry to kids in Montana.) 

FACULTY: Margaret Atwood, Robert Haas, William Matthews, Sam Hamill, Tree Swenson, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Stafford, Jack Cady, Jane Yolen. 

 

1982  (I know that I went to this one too, I remember singing and drinking with Tess and Ray at the Town Tavern (note to self: don't try to keep up with them drinking); I fell head over heels in love with Thomas McGrath. I remember him reading from his imaginary letters, wow, and his talking about coal mines.)

FACULTY: Olga Broumas, Henry Carlile, Sandra McPherson, Carolyn Forché, Tess Gallagher, Sam Hamill, Paul Hansen, Jim Heynen, Thomas McGrath, Richard Shelton, James Laughlin, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish.

This photo engendered an interesting conversation on June, 2013, which was worth preserving in situ.
Facebook conversation (photo) Lyle Daggett & me on Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press, Doubiago

And another much shorter version of this post was filed July 10, 1980, for continuity's sake.
Port Townsend Poetry Conference 1980 (photo)

Preserving the Past: scanning old family photos (at what cost)

I've been preoccupied with the process of creating order out of orphaned papers since November, 2014, when we had to clean out my grandmother's house (which not only contained her memorabilia, her husband's memorabilia, but also that of her three daughters, as well).

And when I suddenly had to move all my stuff from my old cabin, which in danger of falling down, during the summer of 2015, I was left with mountains of my own paper, photos, etc., that had accumulated during a 35-year-career of being an artist and writer. The penny dropped. Get it together now. Don't leave all that crap behind for those who will survive you. Because it will all wind up in the county dump.

In 2015, I rescued and scanned thousands of family photos—after catching my uncle pitching my aunt Jane's France photos in the trash—Jane had lived with my grannie until her death in 1987, then moved down to Santa Cruz with my aunt Toddy ca. 2002, when she had breast cancer.

My aunt Canice, who lived in my grandmother's house too, until her death from colon cancer in 2012, also left mountains of memorabilia behind. And my mother's stuff from 1994, not to mention her ashes, was still in the house as well. None of the three sisters particularly got along, and each one of them was a hostile hoarder.

In the summer of 2015, I created an online photo archive. By 2016, I finished scanning most of the family photos. Except for the ones in Santa Cruz. Then my aunt Jane, who was living in Santa Cruz, with her sister, my aunt Toddy (Kathleen), died a month after her birthday.

I had made order out of most of Jane's old photos, scanned them, and had returned them all to her in Santa Cruz in June, on her birthday—when we found out that Jane's cancer had metastacised as melanoma and uterine cancer.

My cousin Katie saw me looking though a box of Jane's photos, accused me of stealing Jane's photos as I was returning the last batch.The irony is that most of them were photos that I salvaged from the basement trash cans. I was merely taking the final batch of photos north to be scanned, and Jane had given me permission.

But Katie, misread the situation, not knowing that Jane had given me permission to take more photos, thought I was stealing them. It just doesn't make sense, but Katie was under a lot of stress at the time. My explanations fell on deaf ears. And the "problem" escalated.

For some reason, all three of my Santa Cruz cousins completely lost their minds because I continued to scan family photos. Maybe they thought I'd stop if they got angry enough? I don't know. It's useless to speculate on irrational behavior. The next time I went down to see Toddy, in October,  all kinds of accusations of theft and epithets were hurled at me—for preserving family history.

I was devastated, in that I loved my cousins, and had devoted thousands of hours to the process of preserving our family history. As my cousin Barney verbally abused me, with his brother Myles joining in, I realized that I'd never set foot in that house again, that I'd never see their mother, my aunt Toddy, alive again. I hugged my aunt, made my final goodbyes, walked out their front door into the night, and waited for the death announcement to come.

Meanwhile during the summer of 2016, I began scanning my own photos—I had lots of travel photos. I still need to process them and put them online, which I do, from time to time, in random fits and starts. I still need to tackle the black and white photos of the 1980s and 1990s when I worked for The Paper, etc. Mostly photos of famous poets, etc. But for that I need a negative scanner. On the TO DO list. A massive task.

When my aunt Toddy died last month, we were able to go into the family archives and share the wealth of our family history. Toddy's daughter Katie and I made up at the memorial last weekend, but Barney and Myles are still heavily barricaded behind their irrational anger and misdirected hostility towards me for scanning (not stealing) family photos, so they kept their distance.

They needed a scapegoat. I was a convenient target. I doubt they'll ever get over it. Dickheads who were raised better than that. But I remind myself, searching for a small grain of compassion in my heart, by not fueling my own anger towards them, I reminded myself that they're survivors of a dysfunctional family.

Their older brother (mine too, as Toddy adopted Sean) was a drug addict, and a convicted felon for possession, who killed himself on October 16, 2007, rather than go back to prison (for assault), on the Third Strike program. And their father was a functional alcoholic for most of his life. In recollection, Toddy always had a can of beer in her hand, as did her husband.

Toddy, who was a two-times cancer survivor, later admitted that she had a problem with drinking too during the early years, but when she became a mother, all that changed. She held the family together as John spiraled out of control, losing jobs.

Toddy held the family together, against all odds, also raising Sean's children as her own, and once her faculties began to fail, her granddaughter/niece Tiffany took care of her, every single day for seven long years, as an unpaid laborer. No time off. No vacations. Once I was part of that family matrix, spending every Thanksgiving, Easter, and summers in Santa Cruz, going to the Feather River with Toddy and the gang. Halcyon days.

It all changed when I began to scan the family photos. To cope, everyone opted to live in a continuous fucked-up time present, where the relics of the past stayed firmly entrenched in the past, and the future was undefined. And here I was, disturbing carefully reconstructed timelines, uncovering the angry ghosts of the past.

With Toddy's death, my ties to that family are severed, except that Sean's children are also my blood nieces—not that anyone's ever acknowledged it. What I didn't know is that the family hatred and rage wasn't limited to just me, some of it was directed toward Tiffany, and it continues to stain the unblemished days of the future present.  I'm not big on prayer, if I were the praying kinds, I'd pray for them. All I can do is offer compassionate thoughts, and keep my distance. And hope that they begin to heal themselves.

Meanwhile, I've got some more scanning to tackle. That's what we do best. Carry on. Even in the face of adversity.

Declining coho run on Lagunitas Creek: It's the damned dams, Stoopid!

An Open Letter to Alastair Bland:

Who, in an article, Big Rains Bring Both Good and Bad News for Salmon, for of newsdeeply.com, wrote that: "Lagunitas Creek and its lower tributaries, have been lined with bank fortifications and berms that confine the streams to their main channels..." are the real problem for failing coho salmon runs ... Not.

Hmm, Mr. Bland, and there are few berms on Lagunitas Creek. Unless you're referring to the dams on upper Lagunitas Creek, they are called, you know, flat-out dams, not berms. I  ridden every inch of that creekbed from the Inkwell to Tócaloma. There are berms at Jewel, but that’s about it.

As to your reference to all the damage to the lower tributaries, you're way off mark (have you ever heard of primary investigation vs using Wiki as a reference, bolstered by a Marin Municipal Water District quotes. Nice touch, BTW. Lends a real air of authenticity.

Has it also ever occurred to you that MMWD just MIGHT be part of the main problem? Not exactly an unbiased source. Think about that for a moment. I'll wait. Five dams. Has the penny dropped? Oh, right. Dams! MMWD's bread and butter. Ka-ching!

One main tributary to Lagunitas Creek (other than Olema Creek), the San Geronimo/Creamery Creek does not have extensive berms either, and certainly not any new channeling, and the fish runs were huge when I was a kid. There was a fish ladder at the golf course (see below), but it didn’t impede the fish run. The golf course (and pesticides) did.

I know damned near every bend of these creeks. (And most of the tributaries). And I have swum in, or ridden most of the streambeds. On Lagunitas Creek, south of Kent Lake Dam, Devil's Gulch Creek, another main tributary, has NO berms whatsoever... never had them, so this is bogus info. Total bullshit. Olema Creek, ditto. Cowshit might contribute to the problem in Point Reyes. But I have seen silver salmon runs where the water was roiling with fish in cowshitted water.

There was a fish ladder (at Roy's Dam) on the San Geronimo Creek in San Geronimo. Unless the fish ladder was later removed, SPAWN's claim to fame is somewhat hyperbolic. The fact, that in 1997, the fish were still navigating San Geronimo Creek, suggests it wasn't a problem. I distinctly remember going to the ladders to watch the coho navigate the steps in the 1970s.

It is possible that the SGV Golf Course radically changed the structure of the ladder ca. the late 1980s, early 1990s, and I wouldn't have witnessed it. (From what I can gather, upon further sleuthing, the fish ladder was in disrepair, and fixed in 1999 and Roy's Dam—if you can call it a dam— was removed). But I’ll also mention again that the golf course used pesticides to keep the weeds off the course. 

Maybe Andy Giddings has more specific info on the SGV creek fishladder as his father was Fish & Game Warden for the San Geronimo Valley during the 1950s-1980s?

BTW, Fish also made it all the way up to our tertiary creeks, Barranca and Arroyo during the 1960s. 

On San Geronimo Creek, where it meet Lagunitas Creek, Shafter's Pool was dammed during the summer, but that practice stopped in the late 50s, early 60s. It was a seasonal dam, a summer swimming hole for kids. It had zero impact on coho runs. And the salmon were still plentiful. No other dams on the creek. So what exactly are you talking about?

The silver salmon and the coho runs declined in the 80s-90s, there's something else at work: like over-fishing and lack of spawning grounds. Oh, and the biggest "berm" of all, Kent Lake Dam—is probably the biggest reason of all why critical fish habitat was destroyed. Add Nicasio Dam to that list. Most of the Mt. Tam dams date back to the 'teens" so they didn't have a huge recent impact on failing coho runs of the 1990s.

Lake Lagunitas dam was built 1872, Alpine Dam 1917, Bon Tempe 1948, Kent Lake (Peter's) Dam, the largest reservoir, in 1954—it was still filling up in the late 50s. The dam was raised 45 feet in 1982, after the drought of the 70s. Nicasio Dam was added in 1962.) And then there was the drought. Did I mention drought. As in several back-to-back long-term drought cycles?

So, to be clear, Lagunitas Creek (and its three forks) is dammed at Lake Lagunitas, becomes Lagunitas Creek the First, which drains into Bon Tempe Lake, then to Alpine Dam, (with a name change to Big Carson), then to Kent Lake Dam, then to Lagunitas Creek the Second, at the confluence of San Geronimo Creek. Note: they are full blown DAMS not berms.

And then there's Nicasio Creek, which flows from the Nicasio Reservoir (1962), to Platform Bridge, where it joins Lagunitas Creek— another damned dam, to the mix. That's the source of the problem. All the damned dams.

FYI: From Kent Lake to the sea, Lagunitas Creek is a wild creek through Samuel P.Taylor Park, through Jewel, around the bend, past Devil's Gulch, past McIsaac's Ranch, my cousin's Gallagher Ranch at Elephant/Black Mountain, to Point Reyes Station, to the Point Reyes bridge....still NO channels or berms, on to White House Pool, that I can recall—then it empties into Tomales Bay... Even Olema Creek is not bermed. So, what are you talking about?

Seriously, this sounds like a spin from the self-serving organization, SPAWN (litigious Todd Steiner's Salmon Protection and Watershed Network) which began its alternative truth campaign in 1997, and has been wildly successful at obfuscation and litigation...probably leading to some of the factoids in your article, a case in point. It's the damned dams that are the problem. And droughts. Did I mention the droughts???

Otherwise, a good article...

Google Maps screenshot of San Geronimo Creek headwaters. Roy's Dam was at the golf course, where SGV Rd turns up to Nicasio road.

Fluffing out the blog timeline (home stretch)

Lately I've been adding a few Facebook Memories to my blog. The past few months, I've been scanning adding variations, revisions of old poems and generally fluffing out the blog timeline (home stretch). My goal is 52 posts per year (poetry, prose, journal, or art).

The weak-kneed anemic years:, but 40 posts per year is doable; hell, I'll even settle for 35 posts per year, which means I have 10 9 8 abysmal years to fluff out... In which case, I need to focus on 1986; 91, 92, 96, 98, 99;  2004, 05, 06. The rest is pure gravy. 

The 1990s I was traveling a lot and never got around to transcribing my travel journals. Truth be known, I'm resistant to typing up stuff, so searching for typed work is a higher priority than cracking open old journals. There is some resistance. This is my carrot, this is my stick. Flagellate! Flagellate! Avanti!)

Dirtbags

My aunts and uncles, Myles, Jane, Feilim, Toddy, Bill Reilly (all gone, now—including Jane, Canice, and my mom. I only have one uncle left), in Forest Knolls, ca. 1932-33. My aunt "Toddy" Kathleen (Reilly) Ritter, RIP, Oct 1, 1930 - Jan. 28, 2017

Dirtbags, all...nothing like Marin County dirt.  Franciscan strata. Baths were Saturday night, whether or not you needed it, and since water was scarce, the eldest went in first, followed by the next, and the next, until the water could walk out of the tub on its own.

None of this single person per tubful bathing nonsense, and certainly not showers.

They are even dirtier in other photos! They weren't afraid to play in the dirt or eat mudpies.

Is anyone else being blocked by Facebook censors?

Facebook note: Apologies in advance for any typos. I'm a terrible typist, and I have dyslexia, so I make many mistakes. I do not think in parallel structure, I'm a messy writer, i hone and refine my posts. (It doesn't come easy.) And yes, it's important to ply one's craft to the best of one's ability—even on Facebook. Because, in my world, typos are often the only bits of writing that survive...some sort of weird Murphy's law at work.

It takes me, upon average, three tries for each comment or post, to get everything right. So far, today, I've been blocked by Facebook from correcting my posts ten times. Belay that, we're now up to 2 dozen times.

The problem is, that I have to make a decision each time to either save my revised post or complain to Facebook.

Despite the fact that Facebook is once again blocking my every amended post I have found a copy and paste workaround. Cumbersome.

Wondering if anyone else is being blocked by Facebook censor.

My note to them:

"HEY! I have the right to correct, edit, amend my posts withougt you arbitrarily deciding thst I'm a spammer, As you can see, I'm a terrible typist, and I have dyslexia, so I make a lot of mistakes. It takes me upon average, about three tries for each comment to get everything corrected. QUIT BLOCKING ME!!!"  (Note the typos...)

What is significant, is not that I make typos, etc., but that you, Facebook are being a censor nanny, and your algorithms are broken, if they continue to construe my correcting of my typos on my comments as a form of spam.

"It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it."

I can't help it if I'm a fast thinker.

• Dear Facebook, stop blocking me

• Facebook censorship in a time of crisis, Tubbs Fire
• Is anyone else being blocked by Facebook censors?

• Facebook FAIL Rant

The Regrettable Rise of Arturo Ui: a foretelling

Lately I have been thinking of Bertolt Brecht's 1941 Chicago gangster play, the Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The iconic Berliner Ensemble produced the parable play at Cal during the summer of 1999. It was the company's swansong, their final curtain call before they disbanded forever.

Brecht never staged, nor saw "Arturo Ui" performed. He wrote the allegorical satire while living in exile. It languished in a drawer for decades. Brecht is better known for The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Arturo Ui was so riveting, I went back twice to see it. My partner was non-plussed, whereas I had chickenskin—as if it were a foretelling. Alas, the play fits T.rump to a T. The regrettable rise of a gangster where all the world's a stage. And now we are in exile in our own country.

“Therefore learn how to see and not to gape.

To act instead of talking all day long.

The world was almost won by such an ape!

The nations put him where his kind belong.

But don't rejoice too soon at your escape -

The womb he crawled from is still going strong.”

"Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men.

For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."

Oh, how history repeats itself. The play's the thing.

#resist

The Man with the Van

I went in to Amazing Grace Music on Miracle Mile in San Anselmo for some guitar strings and a smartly dressed older woman with brassy permed hair and long red nails greeted me. She said she was minding the shop for a friend, they had their own music store in Fairfax.

We got to talking and she gave me tea and bikkies —Walker's shortbreads. Then she sat me down for a good natter, while her husband dressed in tweeds from another century, reclined in a chair reading the paper, holding his pipe reverently. 

She asked what I liked to play, I said Irish music. She was quick to tell me that she was Irish too. From the north, she said. I remember being shocked to learn she was from Northern Ireland, as our family was about as southern Irish as you can get, without falling into the Atlantic Ocean. 

I looked for horns, and found only the kindness of her blue-violet eyes, Violet Morrison was well named, I could see that she was once a beauty, with her red  hair and lacquered nails. She said she was once a cabaret singer in Belfast. I told her of my grandmother who raised me, from Bantry, and how she taught me the old Irish rebel songs.

When Violet found out that I had walked all the way from Drake High School to the store to buy strings for my precious Martin, and had no way home, she called up her son to give me a ride out to Forest Knolls as he was living in Inverness. 

I climbed into the battered white van hugging my precious guitar to my chest. I had no idea who he was, this man who was sullen and refused to speak to me the entire way home. Made me feel obliged. Like I was a real bother. I never spoke to him again. 

Later I found out it was Van Morrison. Though I very much like his music, I'm not a fan of Van the Man with the van.

What albums from my teenage years?

The latest silly meme that everyone seems to be indulging in is listing the top ten albums of your teenage years.

Albums from my teenage years? What albums? I didn't collect albums, I was way too poor (my horse's feed and vet bills got first babysitting money dibs—at 25 cents an hour), but Dobie Gray once gave me his 45 hit, "The In-Crowd." My mom shared a flat with him next to the SF Art Institute on Chestnut. I was pretty young. I didn't even own a record player.

When I was ten I liked The Purple People Eater, The Monster Mash. The mashed potatoes song, and that song about the rings of Saturn? Wait, malapropism: White on white, lace on satin... no wonder I was alternatively abled. 

What can I say? I was ten and I had to sneak listen to KFRC...as my grannie didn't approve of rock and roll music. My aunts, uncles, and parents' collections were mostly jazz and Big Band. Johnny Mathis too because one of them went to school with Johnny, and his brother, who was the toll taker on the Golden Gate Bridge. Chances are...

I did buy two albums when I was a teenager, The Monkees, it cost $3.50 at a record store next to Ali Akhbar College of Music in Fairfax (where Ravi Shankar used to visit).

Meanwhile, Peter Tork of The Monkees was often seen staggering down the streets of Fairfax, drunk out of his mind... Cheeky monkey.

And I did buy a KFRC collection with Van the Man Morrison's "G-L-O-R-I-A" recording and The Rolling Stones' "Can't Get No Satisfaction." Van Morrison's parents ran the Caledonia music store in Fairfax.

Otherwise, it was usually live music, listening to Jefferson Starship/Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver, Sons of Champlin, Janis Joplin, Big Brother and The Holding Company, etc., rehearsing.

I witnessed most live music in the San Geronimo Valley from the back of my horse, where I could escape... One time the Greatful Dead and co. played in a Creamery Creek gulch under the bridge across from the Papermill Creek Bar in Forest Knolls...

We had to hitchike home from Sir Francis Drake High School—so we got to know all the musicians. They were the only ones who'd stop and give us a lift. But Jesse Colin Young drove a VW van so it was often a crowded bus. Van the man drove a white van. And Carlos Santana drove a Mercedes with leather seats. Janis had a two-seater Porsche so she'd usually shrug and smile. Flash us a peace symbol.

Lots of live bands in high school too: Clover, Moby Grape, The Tubes.... Terry Bozzio (Frank Zappa) was a classmate. Why would I even want to buy albums? We were living in the epicenter of live music.

Ankle biter

I went to the doc to sign up for general massive body invasion types of testing, probing at both ends, and squashing maintenance that one is supposed to routinely do, that I've managed to put off, or avoid, for a decade or two—all this, before my medical coverage dries up under the new political regime.

She asked if there was anything else. So I showed her my ankle that I did a right angle stair-stand on mid-Dec., (trying to protect my knee), she slapped a bandage on, and said keep it elevated above your heart! I giggled at the thought of driving home with my ankle elevated above my heart... I drive a clutch.

And here I thought it was healing nicely. I did all the RICE stuff religiously for two weeks (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation ) but apparently it takes longer than a few weeks to heal soft tissue danage. I thought you were supposed to use a sprained body part ASAP... I thought I WAS healed, now I'm merely unheeled. I guess that's better than being unhinged. It only hurts vaguely. Tingly, more than anything else. I chalked it up to chatty veins.

In the GoDays, I would've used horse liniment... I lean toward the stiff (quivering) upper lip thing. I was the kid that broke her arm and never said a word because I was afraid to tell my granny. Donkey tossed me into a fence. A ditch. Many trees. 

And here I've been stomping around all over town with it, gimping like a pirate, yelling ARRRR, ARRR. And craving plunder, booty, and Advil. But it throbs like a gnarly session with an ankle-biter. Wine is an excellent anti-inflamatory agent. Maybe I should switch to rum? I guess I should be grateful that I got off so light as several other friends are sporting full ankle boots from their holiday misadventures with stairs and trampolines.

The doc didn't like my fake clogs either... She told me to wear proper shoes, with laces— not flip-flops either. Apparently because you curl your toes up to walk, that puts strain on the ankles. But I've a fat ankle with a bandage that won't fit into a shoe. And the boots with the split soles that made me fall in the first place, are the only shoes I can slip on. Sigh. When I injured my knee, I couldn't get down there to even put a shoe on, let alone, tie it, so I wore flip-flops exclusively.

For the record, I hate shoes. I have narrow heels, and not quite so narrow fronts. Short toes, long arch, so I hate anything touching my arch. My grannie made me go barefoot in summer, and pick up marbles with my toes so I wouldn't get bunions. I have prehensile toes with fine motor skills.

I guess going barefoot's out of the question mid-winter. Maybe I should get some lace up boots. I'm thinking my flamenco boots with their hobnails won't work. I'll just skid on those nails and fall down again. Time to buy new shoes. Or maybe an irate chihuahua.

If the shoe fits....


Stairways to hell

SCREAMING FOR ICE CREAM

 SCREAMING FOR ICE CREAM
 — With thanks to Danny Lynch who overate his Hagen Daas welcome

Give me Chocolate or give me death,
give me Cappuccino, or plain old Coffee.

Make it sweet as Dulce de Leche, 

or give me that new swirly Hagen Daas number

with all three flavors rolled into one heavenly pint,

call it Sweet Cream Coffee Caramel,

with vanilla reining supreme as a beneficent godlet.

Not Strawberry Cheesecake or Blueberry Crumble, 

or some other absurd fruity concoction

like Pineapple Coconut, that non-alcoholic impostor

with a tiny invisible parasol complex on the side,

that leaves you desperate and wanting at the bar.

Not Vanilla Swiss Almond studded with land mines,

nor that raw Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

or Midnight Cookies and Cream, with other odd chunks 

and frozen detritus lying in wait to break my teeth.

And you can forget about that frozen yogurt shit. 

I want full fatted flavors frolicking on my tongue 

until my fillings ache, my tongue goes numb, 

and my brain freezes in kalideoscopic moiréd patterns.

Give me gelato or give me death. 

Make it with chocolate or coffee or caramel.

Make it in a double-wide carton,
make the spoon bigger than my eyes,

and I will certainly scream for more ice cream.

Let me wear it proudly on my hips and thighs.
And may the late-night movie be doubly good too.
Make it so.


1/13/17
rev. 1/16/17

TWELFTH NIGHT

Cloudburst and thunder,
a leonine wind roars with hunger,
followed by a tattoo of hard rain
falling in biblical proportions,
followed by a full Magi moon
and a fierce king tide determined
to reach the Sea of Tranquility.
Soon, we'll be able to deep sea
fish from the Oakland hills.
What would the cormorants say,
those fisher kings with their mad eyes
full of summer promises?

1/12/2017
rev 1/17/2017

KING TIDE

OMG, a king tide and full moon too? 

We'll be able to deep sea fish from the Oakland hills. 

What would the cormorants say 

with their mad eyes full of summer promises?

Thunder on the right

Thunder on the right....cloudburst.
Love the sound of hard rain falling.
Uh-oh, wind roaring like a lion does not bode well.

All-out Eye Exam

Eyeball exam. Check. Cataract/glaucoma test. Clear. Check. Healthy eyes. Check. Prescription for glasses. Nope. Come back next week. Your eyes were caught cheating on the eye exam. They don't play well together. Right eye is a freeloader. A lazybones. A shirker. Gives the world the stinkeye.

Left eye wants to be on top. King of the mountain... Has eagle vision 20/15. Doesn't want to share. Is a loner (vs. a loaner!) I knew a woman with a glass eye...

Apparently I don't fit the patient profile. And my "guess" was right on. I need 150 readers for my left eye, and 175 readers for my right eye. But it's a lazy SOB, and it's probably a brain thing vs ocular.... I had a lazy eye as a kid. It's positively lethargic now.

Binocular specialist it is. Good luck with that, my eyes have never played well together. I can't even use binoculars. Monocular vision times two. Marty Feldman and gOogly eyed. Or maybe gecko-eyed. Think I'll stick with my Dollar Store readers which surprisingly close to the right prescription, more or less. 

My left eye rocks. It makes up for my lazy eye. But then, eye dominance is switched. Left eye/right brain. I wonder if it's related to dyslexia. You know those silly pilot tests, matching color/ shades, or seeing the embedded figure. I always score 100% (unheard of for the color chart). 

So they strapped on both red/green and 3D glasses on me. Apparently I'm using periphery vision to get by. Cheating on an eye test! Imagine. Maybe I need John Lennon glasses. Somehow I don't think prism lenses will work. Like, oh wow....

Driving home in the dark, in the rain, with dilated eyes, was like a bad acid trip. What do they put in those drops? LSD? Atropine is made from deadly nightshade and datura. Then we watched Arrival. OMG! Talk about tweaking out.

Groovy, man.

Here comes the rain again...

Here comes the rain again... The Pineapple Express is never good for California water tables. It melts the snowpack, and then tries to wash us out to sea. We need a stable snowpack in the Sierras so we'll have water in the reservoirs come September... It keeps melting. Not good. We could be in the curious position of drowning in water AND still being in drought mode. It will take years, decades for the Central Valley underground water to recharge. The fat lady is gargling and it ain't over yet.

Rain on top of snow, which is disastrous for our Sierra snowpack, is why California's experiencing a drought (simultaneously while drowning in water). The warm rain is supposed to follow, it's not cold here which means the Pineapple Express has already arrived.

Pineapple Express

Here comes the rain again... The Pineapple Express is never good for California water tables. It melts the snowpack, and then tries to wash us out to sea. There is no downriver or upriver, escape from the ravages of the atmospheric river in the sky. We need a stable snowpack in the Sierras so we'll have water in the reservoirs come September... But with this rain, it keeps melting. Not good. Rain on top of snow is disastrous for our Sierra snowpack, which is why California's experiencing a drought (simultaneously while drowning in water). We could be in the curious position of drowning in water AND still being in drought mode. It will take years, decades even for the Central Valley underground water to recharge. Meanwhile rain is falling in biblical proportions in Healdsburg. Everything is underwater. The fat lady is gargling, not singing. Maybe she’ll need to take up snorkeling. Or kayaking. It ain't over yet. That’s for sure.

See Rain, Rain Everywhere

SIX HOURS INTO THE HEADACHE

 SIX HOURS INTO THE HEADACHE

So I abdicate
the hammer and tong striking
my forehead and pate.

GIVING ME THE ONCE-OVER

Blue-footed boobie 
waved one foot, then the other. 
I had to dance back.






STORM

Thunder on the right

Cloudburst, a hard rain falling

Lion wind roaring.

Stump Spellcheck early and often

You know you're doing something right when you can stump spellcheck twice in one post.

A geology post on the malfic peripheries of the Mammoth Caldera was particularly dry reading, but because there was an interactive map, I explored the caldera, and then got lost in the dendritic patterns of rivers (spellcheck does not like dendritic, let alone, malfic).

Which led me to a random comment on a friend's Facebook page, which led to my Facebook post, which led to a blogeen on watersheds—none of which would've happened if I had not read that rather dry post on Mammoth....

The only reason whey I was even interested in the Mammoth article was because I was awakened by a series of earthquakes that originated in Hawthorne, NV, near Mono Lake. Which is a munitions dump on the periphery of the Mammoth malfic periphery.

You see where this is going.....

Rain, rain everywhere...

Before the long-term California drought, about 90% of East Bay's water historically came from the Mokelumne watershed in the Sierras.

The Camanche and Pardee Reservoirs, northeast of Stockton, are the primary source of water for the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) where it's piped across the Central Valley via the triple steel pipe Mokelumne Aqueduct to storage reservoirs in the East Bay hills, including the San Pablo Reservoir.

During the drought, EBMUD also siphoned a lot of water from the Central Valley Project) (Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed). In May, 2015, EBMUD declared an end to the drought emergency. BUT...

The New Melones Dam, one river south of the Mokelumne River (Stanislaus River watershed), in Sonora, is the last reservoir to receive water from the Lake Shasta-Central Calley Water Project. For the first time in over six years, the water level is rising ever so slightly in the New Melones Dam.

As of July, the New Melones Reservoir, the fourth largest reservoir in the state, was almost a quarter full. Then it lost about  2000 acre-feet a day during August-October, due to evaporation. 

By comparison Mokelumne watershed reservoirs, Camanche and Pardee Reservoirs are at 70% and 91% (still not 100%), but as of today, the beleaguered New Melones Dam is still only at 26 percent capacity (up from 24%).

Maybe someday soon we will no longer need to save the shower water for the toilet? However, saving water is a good habit, even during the storm. Bail and scoop. Bail and scoop.

Addendum: Some of Alameda County does get its water from the Tuolumne River watershed: the Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir (and by extension, the Don Pedro Dam). There's a water temple in Sunol.

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/reservoirs/RES


Some history of our Northern California dams and the towns that were drowned to create them.
Underwater towns of Northern California

On writing reviews

Dear Peter,

Sorry I wasn't more articulate or indepth, etc., in that book review as it was a "repeat" performance. Then, because you asked me to write a review,  I felt compelled to read the entire collection. Catholic guilt.... LOL.

I slogged over the other stories. I even fell asleep in the middle of a few of them. Then I had mixed feelings about the collection itself. Your story was, by far, the best in the collection. Such a powerful voice. And spare prose. Kudus!

I lost the original note I sent you, and l can never seem to reconstruct lost writing. None of that BS: "well, the next post will be better because you had practice." There is no practice. There is only writing. Each attempt at writing is its own progeny.

In my book, lost writing is lost writing. Whatever that drive is (no matter how mundane), it's always a one-off experience. I'm just along for the ride, holding on for dear life as the writer's voice charges along like a rhino on the randan. That's why I have to grab the "voice" when it comes....full steam ahead.

Here's the odd thing: I like good fantasy writing, but there's so much BAD stuff out there, I avoid it like the plague. I adamantly refuse to take a chance on most new fantasy writers. I'm freakin' bored to death.

If you must know, I once took umbrage with Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogies—the moment of discovery that Na' was Napa—flooded just pissed me off, a cheap bank shot. I never forgave her. Ridiculous, I know.

So I punished that book by using it as a mousepad for ten years. I've got a bad Irish sci-fi book in mousepad hell at present. I probably should do a catch and release with it. Let it go.

Luckily I can't turn bad ebooks into mousepads, otherwise I'd have to get another room to write in.