Welcome to the Corbified Mind

Greetings,

This prime strip of digital real estate is the online home of my collected works as a writer.  I am greatly honored that you would take the time to visit here and peruse my amusements. And that is what the stories listed in that little box to the right are -  amusements. I take keen joy in stitching a story together with quirky characters, sticky situations, and a steady stream of words that play well together. Whether I’ve ever accomplished any of those literary ambitions is certainly up for debate.

This site holds in it’s incomprehensible vaults a vast array of thoughts that I have, at some point in the past five years, captured. In that same time, just as many scenes, real or imagined, have slipped by unrecorded, or lost to the ages due to the complications involved in some dramatic revelations. I am glad that some of them made it to the “page,” as it were. And, actually, in some cases, I’ve been paid a pittance to craft a tale, though not as often as I would like.

To this date, the entire list of publications who have paid me actual money to create a story for them can fit on a drunken carpenters hand: consisting of the Aspen Daily News (who invited me to write a weekly sports column centering on the Roaring Fork valley of Colorado despite (a.) not living within 1000 mile of said valley, and (b.) not writing a word about actual sports for four months running, instead figuring that there might be some corollary between the random happenings that I ventured into on the road as a corporate AV man,)  a magazine called BEER, which touts itself (and proudly) as the “Maxim of beer publications,” and who refused to pay me the agreed upon rate for 8 months until I threatened to drive down to Dana Point and shake it out of the boozy buggers, and the Monterey County Weekly, a free entertainment weekly who at random times sends me on assignments that I swear are created just to see what carnage I might exact from a delicate situation.

If you are interested in a little exploratory reading, then there ought to be plenty drama for you to gander at here: Newspaper columns, magazine profiles, journals, music reviews, essays, book reviews and blurbs, press releases, poems and lyrics. If you like something that you read here, then by all means, please comment below it or repost the story in the bright light of your own special network. The way things work nowadays, a single well placed click can get an undiscovered story noticed overnight. I think that they call this phenomenon a “virus”, and for some reason, that is supposed to mean that it “spreads” in a good, healthy/productive way. These things confuse me to no end.

Right then. Enough with the blathering on. Have at it!

Yours in constant wonderment,

Corby Anderson

PS- And for GOD SAKES, please don’t call it a blog!

Marina, CA

2010

A Page from “The Comeback Journal” – Ship Bar, Brown Palace Hotel – Denver, Co. 12/18/11

The Honorific and the Doomed?

Sunday morning in the Mile High City, and I am drinking at a Saturday Night pace. One hand grips a creamy brown pint of Guinness draft (or is it draught?), the other – a jigger of polish vodka laced with concentrated orange juice. It is game day in the old cow town, and I am bound for it.

I arrived this morning at 11am, a  good hour early after a winter-time traverse from our mountain valley went more swimmingly than anticipated due to unexpectedly clear roads.  Colorado is in the throes of a snow less glut, a situation that has just about everyone in the entire state racked with a piercing anticipation – whether it be the blunted, edgy skiers, the vacant hospitalitarians, or the dream-shattered vacationers – everyone here has some stake in the good business of bad weather.

The sparsity of road-borne precipitation was much to my favor today, though – which I am grateful for. It is my first winter drive to Denver since my return after having moved from here out to the unfrozen coast of Central California four years ago, and even though I figured the road to be clear for the most part due to the dearth of ill weather, there was no accounting for the two mountain passes between, which are typically pummeled by snowstorms from late-October to nearly June. I’ve been on Highway 70 in times of great distress. The 100 year storm of October, 1999, comes to mind – when the road was scattered with stuck and wrecked cars so badly that it resembled the infamous Baghdad highway that was carpet bombed by the Air Force in the first little Bush Family Gulf Excursion

It was then that I rode this track in a frozen state of amused terror as Johnny “The Mernick” Mernicki flogged his twenty-year-old, 2WD Honda Accord, with five fired-up bachelor party-goers (and all of the attendant indulgences that can be partaken while squeezed sardine-tight into a squirrley Japanese coffin during a  historically significant weather event) over Vail and Loveland passes, weaving an impossible path through snowdrifts and automotive casualties. I recall with pickled irony, watching a tow-truck off to the side of the road, yanking a Hummer out of a ditch as we somehow navigated our way through the heart of the storm.

But clear it was on THIS fine day, and here’s toasting that.

So here I are, ahead of schedule, downing cheer at a fancy bar in an elegant, but unfortunately named hotel – The Brown. If there is one word for a color in the English language that refuses to inspire class, it must be the word “brown.” Though, the staff sure does do a hell of a job striving to prove otherwise.

The Visio above the ornately carved whiskey bar broadcasts the Kansas City/Green Bay game. It is the first game started by new Chiefs QB Kyle Orton, who previous to assuming the title of sacrificial mule, was the starter for our home team Broncos over the course of several frustratingly semi-productive seasons.

A 1-5 record to start the season while hot-stepping it on the lid of the bubbling cauldron of inexplicably miraculous phenomena — one Timothy Richard Tebow — in the soup of the Bronco quarterback hierarchy doomed the earnest, but uncharismatic Orton to the Hard Pine of Destiny, who then handed him off to the caroming Chiefs.

It is either his terrible luck, or his own redemptive fate that proposes that his biggest game of the year will likely be next week, when, if the Broncos lose to the Bellichick/Brady machine today, Orton will be tasked with leading his new team against his own personal shame wagon, with a chance to exact some bitter revenge and dash their playoff dreams.

If it comes to pass, that game will be a Shakespearean affair – the old, ineffectual king who had been deposed by the usurping, anointed savoir. The honorific and the doomed. But which is which?

Above all, if the Donkeys blow it here today against the mighty Patriots -  as expected and heavily wagered – the Broncos/Chiefs season-end catharsis will be interesting, and that, in a nutshell, is the meat to the question of why people care at all about the game of football.

At least two generations of Shipp’s have just arrived, decked in blue and orange, at the Ship bar. The time to sail is Nye. Away from the rocks!

2010 Anderson Family Holiday Letter (as read a year later, for reflective purposes)

‘Tis the season once more for merriment, familial togetherness, quiet reflection, and yes, another Holiday Letter from the Andersons!

With the sudden, onrushing popularity of social networking sites that connect family and friends (and co-workers, friends of co-workers, the entire worlds human population, and beyond!) in near instantaneous, often over-ambitious communication, in-depth letters like this may soon fall by the wayside, like so many cherished relics of yore. But, as I have come to realize, change is inevitable, and technology is both bringing us closer together and yet further apart simultaneously, so you might as well think it a positive and make the most of it! Which means, dear friends and family and even those random digitally rummaging strangers who may find this letter compelling for totally unpredictable reasons, expect more of these letters, one way or the other!

2010 was a year that I held high hopes for even before Old Man Time dropped the ball on New Years Eve. It was the dawning of a new decade- a chance to collectively start something new, and frankly, a real opportunity to put some of the negatives of the previous decade into our rear view mirrors. Sharon and I entered the year with all of those hopes and aspirations front and center, and were almost immediately met with both challenge and blessings.

The brief synopsis of the first week of 2010 tends towards the surreal: Our house in Carbondale, Colorado, which we had been renting out since we moved to Central California three years ago, froze while we were getting a new tenant installed over the new years, bursting the pipes. Then, the tenant went missing. She surfaced in Mesa County Jail, where a prison riot was underway, cutting off communications for a solid week. We finally got her animals and possessions out of the house on Jan. 5, a traumatic event that had both of us convinced that we were being given a sign to move back to Colorado and reconvene our lives there. Then, on the very day that we had set as a deadline to make the decision to move back, I received a random call from a client telling me that she wanted to hire me to start a video production business in her marketing business! The timing was remarkable, the opportunity impossible to overlook, and our California adventure thusly extended, and happily so.

With the help of our good friend Walt and my wonderful parents, we put the house back together and put it on the market while moving on with our third year in California. In February, at Sharon’s insistence that if we stayed in Califronia, we needed to camp more, a request that I was quite happy to oblige, we loaded the dogs up in the truck and spent a beautiful weekend way down the Central Coast under a grove of redwood trees at a campground called Plaskett Creek, near Pacific Valley. Later, we drove up to Shasta and spent a weekend celebrating my old friend Gebo’s 40^th birthday with a few sunny days of skiing and mountain merriment.

In March, I was honored to be invited to serve as a writing coach for the National Steinbeck Center’s Young Scholar program. It was my first opportunity to work with young people in the realm of writing, and I was thrilled to get the chance to do so for the Steinbeck Center, an amazing museum organized around the life and work of one of my heroes, John Steinbeck.

We were all deeply saddened by the passing of Sharon’s grandfather, Valentine, who passed on April 26^th. Sharon flew to Michigan and attended the funeral with her family, and by all accounts it was a sad, but warm remembrance of an amazing man who fought for our country and returned to lead an eventful, successful life as a farmer and patriarch to a wonderful family.

The impetus for my hiring at Schipper Design in January was an ambitious documentary video project highlighting the economic benefits of moving new industry to historic, bucolic San Benito County, a small but fruitful agricultural center located right smack dab in the middle of California. After several months of very interesting videotaping –covering just about every major business and personality in the area, I finished the project at the end of spring, and was really excited to see the rousing applause that it was given when screened at the big Cineplex theater in Hollister, the county seat, to most of the movers and shakers in the county. It was a lot of work, and actually became two separate movies by the time that it was done, but in the course of its creation I was paid to traverse just about every nook of some really fantastic country.

In June, I was honored to be invited to give the commencement address to the two graduating seniors of the Pacific Valley School Class of 2010. The school is the smallest school district in the nation, with just 20 students from kindergarten to high school, all in school together. I had written a story about a character who is one of the teachers there (and surf coach, meteorologist, etc) named Dave “Captain Lingcod” (he is a fisherman too) Allan, and he remembered me when it came time to find someone to offer some words of encouragement to the two kids who were moving on to the real world from their enclave that literally is in the middle of nowhere, stuck out on the coast a good hour from any stoplights up or down the coast, and walled in by the sea on one side and impassable mountains on the other.

Sharon and I were stoked to attend the swanky vintage automobile festival called Concourse D’ Elegance at Pebble Beach in August. We volunteered for one of my clients, the local hospital, who were selling raffle tickets for a car giveaway to raise funds for new pediatrics equipment, and had a blast strolling the grounds and gawking at all of the amazing cars – old, new, and in between. We both got dressed up to the nines and did our best to help the cause, and had a blast in the process.

In August I wrote a short story about my old buddy Bear Dog and I getting stuck in the desert for four days and submitted it to the National Steinbeck Center for an international essay contest that they were hosting to celebrate Steinbeck’s “Travel’s With Charley.” A few weeks later I was called and told that I had won the contest – an wonderful honor that marks my first official award as a writer. I am still aglow about it. Bear and Sharon and I all went to the party at the center, where there was a dog contest and various other excitations going on. After a while, we were introduced, and as we were walking up to receive the award – two year memberships to the center and a $100 pet store gift certificate, one of the other dogs in the “fashion show” chose that moment to make his mark on the red carpet that stretched from the chrome doors to the dias. We were upstaged by a pooping poodle, but it was fairly hilarious.

Also in August, we attended my 20^th Clayton Valley High School reunion. The class of 1990 got together for two nights of ridiculously good times, telling stories, eating, drinking, and dancing together in northern California. I made a video featuring all of our yearbook photos plus about a thousand from all of the people who sent me their own shots to include.

There was a pretty classic moment when, after weeks of working on the video at night after work and on the weekends, I finally finished at the last moment and ran over to the reunion to set up the projector, only to realize that we had left the power cable to my hard drive back in the hotel a half hour away. After much consternation and considerable woe, as this was my chance to really show that I had done something with my talents to a group whom I hadn’t seen in 20 years and who last I saw nearly voted me “most likely to walk into a manhole”, the DJ and I put our heads together and figured that we could try to use the cable from his computer, even though upon looking up the schematics on the internet it said specifically to not use for the exact scenerio that I was proposing, and that it had the potential of not only not working but actually wiping out my hard drive in the process – and with that dread potential hanging in the air, we plugged it in, and to all of our relief it worked and everyone cheered all night to the images of their younger selves playing on the video on the big screen as we ate dinner and reconnected.

It was a spectacular night, and both Sharon and I were so grateful to have the chance to spend it with everyone. She got a chance to tour my old town, hear some “interesting” stories about me (that I shall not repeat here!), and to see how it was that I became the person that I am now: The guy who comes through with the video in a pinch, even when the situation looks grim!

In the fall, we were stoked to get multiple invites to go to see the San Francisco Giants play at their majestic AT&T park along the bay, in the City. Little did we all know that this would be the year that the team of  “misfits, castoffs and has-beens” would put together an amazing run that led them all the way to the World Series, which they won for the first time in 50 some odd years. The whole north state was gripped by a prideful happiness mixed with worry that was sustained for months on end. All season, the team played games by extremely close margins, winning more often than losing, but earning the “Giants Baseball: TORTURE!” moniker  that was bestowed on them about halfway through their historic season. As the playoffs neared, we were lucky enough to be invited to see a vital game to see who would make the playoffs, and after that were blessed with the chance to see our favorite band – the Mother Hips, at the historic Fillmore concert hall in SF. Altogether, it was an incredible night, combining the best of multiple worlds, and one that neither of us will soon forget.

October came and we made a journey to Michigan to celebrate the wedding of Sharon’s younger brother Ron and his bride Amber. Family members from all corners of the Glove state and the rest of the country arrived in Traverse City, where the fall colors were in full spectrum, to support the happy couple with a half-week of parties, dinners, and a spectacular wedding day. I recorded the wedding while Sharon and her sister Laura served as greeters. We had a chance to spend some great quality time with Sharon’s parents Rita and Jerry, and made the most of every minute of the trip – including Sharon’s leaping at the opportunity to Polka dance with her relatives and friends to the live band that Ron and Amber hired. She is fantastic at it – a real graceful whir, as are everyone in her family, spouses included. I, on the other hand, am more of a plodding doof, but certainly enjoyed giving it my best shot!

As fall turned to winter, the over-30 men’s baseball league that I played in (for the first time in 5 years!) wrapped up with a playoff run that was truly inspiring. Our team consisted of a bunch of aging ballplayers who combined could barely field a single healthy player. Name a muscle and at least one of us pulled it. Hamstrings, backs, abdominals – no sinew was spared. But despite our various ailments, we put together a few torturous wins of our own and very nearly won the whole league. After years of running a traveling team in Colorado, I thought that my hardball days were behind me, but now, after my season with the Expos, I am more fired up than ever to keep playing ball.

Things took a turn for the fateful on a sunny November morning, right after the Thanksgiving weekend. Immediately upon my arrival at my job, I was laid off due to economic difficulties that I could not alter. On the way home, I received a call from our Realtor in Colorado informing me that our house in Colorado was foreclosed on. We had been trying to sell the house all year, but Wells Fargo refused to accept the best offer that was proffered, and in the end, they took the house back. It was a pretty interesting double shot to take in one day. I sat at the house sort of laughing at the timing of it, and was considering the plan that Sharon and I had in place to relocate if a layoff happened, and within another hour I received a call from a former client. This call was much more to my liking.

I was asked if I would like to produce and write for a TV show, and to produce events like corporate meetings and concerts. I mentioned all that had just happened that day and we agreed that the timing was perfect. After a few meetings and interviews and many talks with Sharon, we agreed that the situation was just meant to be, and so just last week I accepted the offer and am set to start the new job at the beginning of January. I will be producing a cooking show that travels all over the world to shoot segments. The job will be a one-year contract with many opportunities to build on the opportunity and to advance in several directions within. Once we find Sharon a job that she will enjoy and can advance in, we will be moving to the Lodi, California area, sometime in early 2011.

We are really, really excited about the coming opportunities. Our three years in Monterey have been incredible – a real learning experience in one of the worlds most beautiful environs. We’ve explored, grown as professionals, and had a tremendous time of it, and now it is time to take the next step in our careers and lives!

Together, we wish you all a sweet, relaxing holiday and a fruitful 2011. We wish you all success in your professional endeavors, good health, and many blessings.

Be warmed, be loved, and have the most happy of holidays,

Corby, Sharon, Bear, Hondo, and Cotton

Marina, CA

December 17, 2010

Letter to Steve Jobs (dec’d) – November, 2011

November 29, 2011

Steve Jobs, (dec’d)

Former (?) Chairman of the Board

Apple Computer Inc
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Steve,

So… You died after all. God that must piss you off from here to eternity. Hell, it pisses me off every day, and (sadly) I didn’t even know you. It is sincere fact when I say to you  (assuming that you are still checking email) that the entire world gasped right along with you upon the exhalation of  your last living breath.

Every nook of humanity (*at least 87.221% of the Earth’s population that has access to electricity, according to one scientifically made up study) shuddered at this particularly grim Reapers toll.

Research shows that the remaining 12.779% of digitally-deprived humanity experienced a pronounced, instantaneous mass mood shift that was reportedly attributed as both “mysteriously moving” by Keer Deng, Sudan’s Dinka tribe elder spokesman) and “waasaayyyyy freaky, man” (Riverrock Morningwood, America’s Rainbow Family tribe elder spokesman.)

I guess my point here in enumerating admittedly circumspect data on the worldwide impact and heavy-hearted reaction to your death is to communicate directly to you,  perchance that you have not heard elsewhere — and that somehow, some miraculous way this channel remains post-physically opened — that It All mattered. Very, very much so, It mattered., Steve. Far more, I suspect, than any of us even realized it would, and will.

Every sleepless, brain-twisting, perplexingly distant, far-seeing thought that you so painstakingly fathered. Every hurtful, unfair, soul-chilling setback that you experienced, and every waking moment sacrificed to your work was worth it. Yours is a legacy of profound creativity and unwavering drive to move humanity forward through smarter, more useful technology.

Something tells me, though, to suspect that you know this already. And not just through your own late-life, clear-minded assessments of your personal achievements, but actually post-mortem. I was not stunned in the least when I heard that your last living words were “Oh wow…oh wow…oh wow.” Even in the grips of death you expressed an inspiring excitement about the future.

Now that you are up there, literally in The Cloud, I wonder if you might take a moment to consider my Earthly dilemma? What the hell? Maybe, as broadly wired as you were, you discovered a way to keep an ear to the ground. If so, maybejustmaybe you’ve still got some pull down here…In my thinking, seeking favor from a dead genius’ ghost is better than kneeling at any unfounded pew.

I sent you a previous note back in August, detailing the situation that I am still enduring, which, of course, you never answered. How could you? You obviously had more important things to attend to than a random, slightly obtuse letter. For that I don’t blame you at all. It was a fluky, Tebowian long shot anyways to attempt to compel you to help me during your Bad Decline when I frustratedly exclaimed that I “need all of this great shit to work.”

Then, as now, all of my Apple products lie lifeless on ashy shelves. In particular, Blister, my invaluable Macbook Pro laptop from which all income-producing creative work of my own emanates, sits dormant and heartless. The computer repair lady in Glenwood Springs called me at 11 pm on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend to tell me that Blister was not indeed brain dead, as was feared, but lacked a functional Logic Board. After she lithely ducked my pre-prepared volley of insults and accusations that I reserve for anyone with an unregistered number who dares ring me after the second scotch sets in, Bytemark Dana relayed to me that the expensive machine that houses my dream was built too hot to handle its own creative potential.

Metaphorically, I can easily associate with her oddly-timed professional assessment of Blister’s Main Drag: there are not enough fans to keep its internal burners from permanently nuking wiring and circuitry vital to sustaining The Work.

Thanksgiving was bitter sweet this year for the Rocky Mountain Anderson’s. It was exactly a year ago that I drove to my job as Media Director at a struggling marketing company in Chicken Scratch, California only to find that my position – indeed, my entire department (*Population One) had been summarily executed over the holiday weekend.

On the way home from the sad exchange, I decided to take my severance check (the unused vacation time that I had not yet exhausted) and buy a plane ticket to North Carolina, where my wife and I had just decided the day before during a romantic holiday retreat in a toasty yurt at Treebones along the Central California coast that we would hastily move to out of self-preservation if exactly this scenario played out.

Only, when I arrived home, my trusty Macbook refused to boot and thus I could not research plane tickets online. I was driving to the computer repair store when our realtor called to tell us that our only earthly investment, our house in Colorado, had just been foreclosed on by the scum sucking, greedy whore bastards at Wells Fargo Bank Home Mortgage. THEN, of all things, in that same two hour window, my temporary benefactor, Don Bean called me and told me that he wanted me to write and produce his globe-trotting cooking show, news that caused my wife and I to rejoice in our karma, timing and luck, and ditch the plan to move suddenly to North Carolina. But rather to bail out of our Monterey dune-side digs out to the unknown grit and dour economy of the lesser Modesto region. But that is a whole ‘nother story, Steve.

A year later, after The Lodi Disaster played out in all of its harsh nerve butchery, I find myself happily living back in a heavenly log cabin in the clutches of a steep mountain valley in Emma, Colorado. Happy, I say, to be in the mountains again, in a safe place where people know me and have faith in my potential. Unhappy, however, at the continuing plunge of my professional career.

Once again, I am laid off, this time for the seemingly endless fall mountain town “off season”, with no net other than a sympathetic landlord, but he is heavily armed and suffering daily from severe sinus discomfort, and even in his kindest moments I sense a man who might have a firm limit to deadbeatitis.

My point is that now is the perfect opportunity to charge ahead with my dreams, Steve. While I sit here painfully quiet in this groaning cabin, scribbling away, waiting for the next paying day of production work, I could be launching the company that I have long-dreamed of running! I could write copy, manage social media communications for at least ten local businesses that have expressed interest in my abilities to help them reach the networked customer, make stunning videos, record voice over narration for a bevy of friends who need audio work done. I could manage special events for customers who need a hand with making their special suarree turn out to be memorable and effective. I can help to create and publish websites, magazine articles, books, even APP’s. You like those, don’t you? APP’s are the way, eh?

Anyways, enough with the VC pitch. To be honest, I’m not even sure if I know how to do all of the things listed above. But if anything, I am a man of earnest effort and steadfast optimism, except when corralled into a Ludditian, cashless corner, which seems to be the case now.

Thanks to the layoffs and the foreclosure, my credit is shot full of more holes than the argument against legalizing marijuana, so any designs on borrowing start-up capitol are grounded in the reality that I will likely have to type, shoot, edit, and publish my way out of this hole to a position of leverage.

And that is why, now more than ever, I need this goddamned voodoo machine that you so elegantly conceived to spin up once more in glorious ease and remarkable capacity. Bytemark Dana tells me that a new Logic Board is going to run me $850, plus the costs of her labor. For that kind of scratch, assuming that I had it or could attain it in time to have a positive effect on my all-American dream of viable business ownership, I could buy and equip a new PC to do my bidding. But then I’d have to struggle through all of those inane virus updates, drunken snail speeds, random file folder disappearances, and general non-Apple wiggyness that I had hoped to place well in my past.

Well, that is all. There are fresh brutalities to review, and a Heisman debate to attend to, so I had better wrap up. I do hope that somehow you are still receiving incoming messages in one form or another, and that this letter is no empty lament. If there is one thing that we’ve learned from your premature passing, it is to not waste a moment of precious time.

Here is to hoping that you’re incarnate isn’t snuffed in utero by the blunt end of some bored Oakland cop’s truncheon. Let me know if you get this.

Corby Anderson

0300 Vagneur Lane

Cabin A

Basalt, CO

81621

P.S. Apologies on the uncertainty of your job title. Not sure if they let you keep that ad infinitem.

Recess Is In – a poem

Recess Is In

This day is done shot

and it ain’t yet noon

The shop’s still locked

there’s no work soon

Pawned my Dad’s watch

Still got time on my hands

Got one eye open

for the repo man.

To the dern fool who said money can’t buy you a smile

Watch the sun sink in it’s broken frown.

If time is money

then I’m rolling that dough

Just don’t bother callin’

my phones furloughed

I’d work way down there in the mines

but like e’ry thing else they’re all closed down

And it’s well past high time

my fortunes rebound

Milk my last coffee bean

and smoke my last butt

Gather dimmed wits

Try twice again to rebuild my dreams

To the dern fool who said that money can’t buy you smiles

Watch the moon rise upside down.

C.M. Anderson
Emma, CO

11/28/11

Blunder Dancer (for Laura) – a poem, 11/22/11

Blunder Dancer (for Laura)

She is a bleach and sunshine

dirty beach blonde

scared of shadows

but glad she has one

it’s one friend she

can never throw away.

 

Supernatural disaster

that she wills

collapsing statues

fill her frame.

 

Blunder Dancer, the vogueing chancer

she see’s her reflection

clearly in the mud.

 

Built you a useless tower

for the midnight hour

when your tanner tenor

sees your play.

 

But what she did not count on

would take just one finger

to soundly express his dismay.

 

Blunder Dancer is no romancer

some build their dreams

she stacks her nightmares

in rotting fields of thorns and clay.

 

Wanna be on television

that was her only mission

vanity unlimited

empire of flimsy tenets

she’s just another waste

in the shroud.

 

Blunder Dancer, the image monger

with unconscious karma

how does her round heart

ever square?

The Importance of Being Choosy When Unemployed (Blowing off the Boobman) – Nov. 3, 2011 Journal entry

(From the Laidaway Journal, 2011-12)

What awaited me at my alternative-reality job.

Sensory overload. Temporary dissonance…Bold sound hits me from for and aft at once. The Grateful Dead blare away at their masterwork, side two of “Workinman’s Dead,” from the old cabinet record player behind me that, much to my wife’s chagrin, serves as the keystone piece of our living room furniture layout. Meanwhile, the laptop fronting me loudly plays a video of a hiking expedition in the John Muir Wilderness led by Ian Elman and Tim Bluhm of Yosemite Mountain Guides, Tim’s day job. Only, rather than montage to the dulcet sounds of The Mother Hips, or Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers, Brokedown in Bakersfield, Ballpoint Birds, or any number of Bluhm’s musical pursuits, the producer has used some crotchpop guitar anthem as a music bed, ramped up to eleven on the annoyance scale. Just now the UPS truck rolls past my cabin window, eliciting a focused, piercing primal rage from deep within the beer-colored goat dog that was otherwise snoozing next to the old desk where I, er, work…

Jesus, how can anyone concentrate in these conditions? And look at the time! Almost 1pm. And to think that I blew off a real job interview to sit around wild haired in my felt pants, slack-jawed, reading  internet reports about another wave of Wall Street riots led by a suddenly emboldened faction of American anarchists in Oakland.

Ah, the life of the unemployed! So gloriously uncomplicated by someone else’s deadlines, plans and expectations… if you take away the desperate hunt for sustainable income. And unless you have your own inner set of these drivers and motivators, which I do. This leads to mental dissonance. The Guilt is strong here. But, better to have guilt and career anxiety than erosional ambivalence, I say. Keep the tracks in sight rather than treading off aimlessly into the wilderness of goalless existence.

In an alternative reality, I would just now be returning from my 11am interview with a plastic surgery outfit in Glenwood Spirngs. The gig offered was a managerial position at a “health spa”operation, likely a recovery center for recently sculpted patients: a twisted menagerie of burn victims, identity shifters, re-breasted MILF’s, the morbidly obese, and other misshapen stomach turners.

The more that I thought about the opportunity over the past week, the more that I became convinced of how fundamentally wrong it was for me in particular. How many men do you know of that run medical offices anyway? And in Glenwood, no less. A longer drive from my compound in Emma than the snowy wintertime commute to Aspen, and generally for 15% less pay across industries than upvalley jobs.

The real deal breaker for me was the prospect of being tethered to a sterilized desk with an Ark-full of vain, greedy headcases far away from the world-shaping political and cultural action of Aspen. Deeply ironic. At least spotty AV work in Aspen is something to inspire thought and foster a sense of worldly comprehension, even if it does require long stretches of destabilizing unemployment and grunt work when there is any.

No, I suppose that I’d rather sink further into this terrible red hole this off-season and start digging out again after the ’12 hits than to waste away semi-profitably in the infirmary of a human chop shop.

November 3, 2011

Great-Granma Tullis’ Desk

Emma

Thoughts Upon Seeing The Rum Diary on Film

Well, there it went. One hundred and twenty minutes of silver truth. An imperceptibly flickering accounting of an old story told right and then told right again. We can only hope that our future selves tell our sagas with as much clarity and poignant zeal for the original nut.

The Rum Diary. My favorite book. Written long ago, shelved due to a series of tremendous strains on reality. Reawakened decades later, just before that last fat nail was pounded by the terror of a second helping of Bush and a debilitating habit of self-medication.

I’d heard about it through the grapes, kept abreast of it’s long development cycle for several years through sensationalist internet chat rooms and gossip magazines. Then it appeared in my town… HIS town,  at a sudden screening in a film festival up town. Attendees had to sign gag orders. No habla Rum, see? One guy (or girl, the mysterious, and now credibility-vacant “ZG”) spoke of the midnight splash. His words were not encouraging. Still, I refused to give in. The book was too good. The makers too talented, too dedicated to the Truth.

When the local theater brought it in, I proposed a party, a celebration of the arrival of another Hunter Thompson story told in light.. Nobody could come. Fucking musicians. Always playing music. Days past, pained days, days of knowing that there was something out there vital to your interests that was going unaccounted for.

Finally, tonight I acquiesced. To hell with Halloween, I’ve got a film to see. Out of my way. Give me hot corn in a bag and a cup of ice to pour my hooch in! .

And she played. She played like an old violin. All the notes were still vital, though some of the strings had been lost to time. Depp has created a masterpiece if you ask me. Not many other people will think so. They’ll pan him for his age in relation to the original Kemp character, but I say screw them. He’s the only person on this earth who could get that movie made the way that it did, so sure he gets the part. And not every masterpiece is perfect, that is the point of great achievement. Mash a series of paint globs onto a piece of cloth and there are bound to be some organic matter stuck into the works.

I’d see it again, if I were me. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe a double feature: back to back screenings. I need time to let all of the words soak in…

So it goes when your heroes are ghosts.

Letter to Chaco Sandal Company Repair Department, October, 2011

Artist Rendering of Goat Sucker Attack in Dumb Ass Canyon

October 29, 2011

Chaco Inc

Re-Chaco Repair Dept.
39955 Hayden Road
Paonia, CO 81428

Dear Sandal Repair Dept:

Enclosed is one (uno)size 11,  left-footed Chaco sandal, presumably a Z/1 Vibram Unaweep model, though I have no way of identifying it with absolute certainty as there are no identical matches listed on your web-site. While my own research skills lack the sleuths cunning and doggedness, I have little doubt that your well-trained people will know immediately what version of your shoe I am actually sending you.

As a new Chaco owner who for decades prior has purchased, worn out and discarded a stinky series of competitor sandals, I am pleased to hear that your company endeavors to repair even the most dilapidated of your products. It shows a real commitment to customer service — not to mention corporate fortitude — to tell the world to send back their grungiest thongs for a refreshing renewal.

Please so to it that the tattered foot-bed on the enclosed huarache is replaced. The sole was nearly lost as well, but appears to have weathered an unnerving, vicious attack relatively intact, save for a chilling sliver torn from its port side.

I shudder to even re-tell the story, such is the crippling power of the primal fear that has infested my mind since that awful day in Dumb Ass Canyon this past September, and request that anyone privy to this letter be sworn to an oath of secrecy in order to protect my identity. I wish, as ever, to remain out of the media’s white-hot glare, despite the extraordinary circumstances that I have endured. Also, there is a book deal in the works, and I’d hate to fucker that one up, right!? I mean, a $110K advance is nothing to sneeze at anymore. Better yet, I didn’t even have to lose an arm like Ralston. Just one measly pinky toe is all, and only the nail section at that. But what the hell? I’ve got nine more to work with, and my balance seems to be coming back quickly as I adapt to life as a victim of supernatural evil.

Hopefully you have a bible present in your repair shop…or a Koran or Torah. A copy of Elk Hunter will work in a pinch. Anything to swear an oath upon is fine. Once that small matter has been attended to, please proceed to the next paragraph of my letter:

It was a typically gorgeous September day in Southern Utah. The noon sun bore down in comforting waves of glorious warmth – one last reprieve for summer after a recent, all-too-familiar cold snap had gripped Western Colorado in an icy clutch. I was solo hiking a little known side canyon within the Grand Gulch, moving fast and light, as is my custom. I was also moving backwards. Blindfolded, and naked, save for my new Chacos. WTF, you might ask aloud. I’ll give you that. I ask myself the same question at least 17 times a day, especially days when I am practicing my newly developed sport of Republicanyoneering ((R)© ™ etc.) The jag is to move downhill and backwards as quickly as possible while blind to your surroundings and the implications of your own nudity to those that might be impacted by your actions. A slight variation of the sport requires one to hike in a similar fashion, only now carrying a fully automatic M4 assault rifle strapped to their pasty white chests while reciting the United States Constitution in Spanish. I call that one the Tea Paradox (also registered).

My travels in D/A Cny. were going along swimmingly until I rounded the crux of Climax Bend and stepped unknowingly on the tail of a creature so vile, so terrifyingly hairless and beady eyed that for a moment I thought that I’d trammeled on Terry Bradshaw. A spine-straightening shriek pierced the calm canyon air, bounding off of the steep walls of my hidden oasis, echoing out to the great nothingness beyond.

I had pinned under-Chaco a creature that I could now sense had a strong, peculiar stench, smelling faintly of a combination of fine, peppered chèvre and elderly ball sweat. The demon writhed and shrieked some more in increasing octaves as I attempted to take my blindfold off. My hands were frozen, though. The Fear had overcome my nerves, and I stood helplessly locked into place. That was when I felt the wiggly thing lunge, ripping its bony tail from under my foot one weird lumpy vertibrete at a time. Everything was happening in slow motion. I mentally pinched myself to make sure that I wasn’t just dreaming, hoping that I was. I could tell that the beast was free from my foot and could hear its soul-quaking guttural snarling as it encircled me. Then it struck. A God-awful crunching noise followed a sudden flurry of activity to my left side. I could feel a cool breeze waft across my left foot in places that I had never previously felt the sensation of air. A gulping sound came next, then, I swear to Ullr, an unhealthy sounding burp.

Every hair on my body – joined in horror, it seemed, by the ghosts of those brave soldier follicles that had suffered from years of attrition – stood on end, screaming their tiny, silent brand of bloody murder. Of all of the ways to go out, I thought: Being slowly consumed from the ground up by some unseen varmint while standing stiffly naked in a remote canyon of Utah was not how I imagined my bucket would ultimately be kicked.

You know the sound that you make when you’ve eaten something altogether unpalatable and are in the process of spitting the undigested remnants into a napkin? Sort of a “BLECHK” sound. It’s hard to type accurately, but you get the gist. Well, that’s the sound that the critter made next – an utterly disgusted, deeply offended sound, followed by the unmistakable gated “loogie” note of something substantial passing through pursed lips and being spit onto the ground with great force.

Something about the anticlimactic tone of this noise snapped my deep paralysis at exactly that moment. Instinctively my hands shot up to my face, yanking my mask down. Channeling my inner William Wallace, I wheeled to my left to face my tormentor, terrified beyond words, but inspired now to fight for my life…what is left of it. All that I caught, however, was a split second glimpse of a fleeing genetic monstrosity. Grey, wrinkled skin — shorn of even a single guard hair — hung loosely from a nightmare frame – half coyote, half kangaroo, half wingless bat – all protruding spine, whip tail and bloody snout, I watched disbelievingly as that fabled goat-sucker himself, El Chupacabra, sprinted nimbly away around the boulder-strewn gut of Dumb Ass Canyon.

Later, while the steady-handed surgical team at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, reattached the tip of my left pinky toe,  I was told just how lucky I was to be alive to receive the painful barrage of anti-rabies vaccine. According to Dr. Ledbetter, only the tough rubber sole of my Chaco sandal and the three day foot funk that I’d worked into a putrid lather on the course of my walk saved me from certain Chupacabration.

So, surely you can see the sensitivity of my story. Thank you for cooperating in my request to keep this one under wraps until my book, “Attack of the Goat Sucker in Dumb Ass Canyon”, and the film version “Dumb Ass” are released. In the meantime, I am told that I can saw my cast off in two more weeks, which should be ample time to get my wounded sandal repaired. My mending left foot awaits its partial savior in eager anticipation of their soleful reunion.

Sincerely,

Corby Anderson

0300 Vagneur Lane

Cabin A

Basalt, CO 81621

PS –Turns out that my detective skills are improving before my very eyes: I’ve just discovered through intense study of the box label that the true brand of sandal that I am sending you for repair is apparently called a Yampa Z1 Vibram (Edgy).

“The End” – from the New Old New Emma Cabin Journal

Emmacabina Journal
Oct. 20., 2011

I was awoken deep in the night by an intermittent tickling sensation, one that from my semi-lucid state of detachment seemed to be callously afflicting the most tickle-prone regions of my defenseless face.

Initially, perhaps out of a perverse sense of self-preservation, I chose to exert my manhood and just ignore it, figuring that by subconsciously undercutting and diminishing the urgency of the sensation, the problem would go away, much like one turns up the stereo to avoid the temporary crisis of a bad knocking in the motor of a car.

However, after a few more increasingly twitchy episodes, my consciousness was torn reluctantly away from the moors of a pleasing dream of sex, revenge, and world peace, and dropped smack down into the land of itchy reality. No longer able to avoid confronting my tormentor,  I cracked a nearly crusted-over eye into the darkness of my cabin home, and set about reeling in my wildly gyrating focus until I could ascertain up from down.

My cat Cotton, a devastatingly effective assassin of rodents and amphibians, and a known habitual abuser of high-grade Hawaiian catnip, was standing triumphantly on my chest, slowly — almost lovingly — reaching out at me with his ninja-trained paws, using my cheek as a mouse pad, my nose as a joystick. My waking eye froze him in the act. We stared at each other for a few long seconds, his outstretched right arm making my one operable eye cross-eyed, until a powerful creepiness  overtook me and I was forced to glance away to break the spell. His prying gaze was that of a sentient seer. The way he studied me made it seem as if he were attempting to peer directly into my soul. It was awkward. “Sonabich. Whachuwan?” I asked discombobulatedely, unable yet to think, let alone speak in complete sentences.

I got up gingerly, having gone to bed after a spirited, late evening session of full court basketball. I tested my tricky right knee with a half-lunge, confirmed its cooperation, then limped over to the kitchen to fetch us each a glass of milk: one to wet down my gurgling guts, one to assuage whatever weird instinct it is that makes cats desire the milk of almonds, coconuts and cows.

Casually, I looked over to the microwave oven to get a sense of what time in the night it was. I like to try and intuit the time. It is a little game that I play with myself, at times a fairly big challenge since other than a predictably materialistic period in the seventh grade,  I’ve never worn a watch. I guessed somewhere between the closing of bars and the opening of gyms.

But that was not true at all. Rather than read 4:00 am or 1:36 or some such, or even the fairly common indicator of seconds remaining, ala :15 – an indication that someone (i.e. me) had aborted a nuking preemptively. But rather than a quietly winking time of day, or time remaining until full radiation was to have been achieved, the bright green microwave clock had a whole different message of timeliness for me: THE END, the blocky digits on the panel read. They did not blink. Just, THE END.

“Well then,” I thought, suddenly curious about the ongoing status of my vital signs. “So this is how THAT goes. The jig is up. The end as I know it is foretold on the face of a Sears appliance.”

City Job – a poem

Whoever made this new decade

Surely didn’t know my plans

TV screens, electric dreams

All washed out like grains of sand

 

I’m gonna get me a city job

we’re gonna run this show

401k pay, insurance, va-cay

in this new position where I grow

 

I got zeroed out by the default louts

Took everything but my will

Houses, cars and new guitars

My accounts grow redder still

 

But that’ll all stop with my new city job

This ship will sail once more

Bonuses and advancement paths

Respect down at the store

 

Just wait till they see my resume

Nevermind that fateful hole

I guess if they don’t hire me that’s OK

I hear they’re hiring at the state.

 

C. Madison Anderson

Snowmass, Colorado

9-16-11