Desert Journal – Circle Cliffs, Utah – March 29, 2012

The Circle Cliffs at Sunset.

Calm revelry. The solemnness of plenty…plenty space; plenty scenery; plenty nourishment of body and soul; plenty libations – perhaps too much at times. Like last night, when I went deep into my cups of whiskey and put a meteoric dent into my stash of beer, while all but polishing off the pint of brown German liquor in a feel-good, guitar-molesting celebration of the past winters’ demise.

I slept well and warm and deep into the late morning – waking only out of bladder-damning urgency and finally rising only when “The Blue Moon,” my crusty old Sierra Designs tent became too hot to ignore or wallow in any longer.

A bluebird Utah spring morning awaited me. The sky is now swept with high, thin clouds that I saw form seemingly from the crosshatched etchings of morning jet traffic o’erhead. Yesterdays winds have died down into soft, friendly breezes that remind me of perfect summer days on a baseball field or fishing with my father on a creek in Northern California. The wispy gusts are barely enough to turn the pages of an upturned book sitting atop my kit box. Good thing too. I am intent on whiling today away in relaxed thought, reading from a selection of books and magazines that I ‘ve brought along for just the occasion. Some people have Hawaiian beaches or Vegas pools to read by, but I prefer to soak in words amongst the hot rocks, high crows, slumbering snakes and time-stuck junipers of the Utah desert.

My library lives in a canvas bag given to me by the Back of Beyond Bookstore in Moab some years ago when I bought a few Abbey’s. For a long time it held my tangle of bungees and ratchet straps, all necessary for boating and camping excursions. It has now been restored as a proper book sack, but somehow I don’t think that it minded its old occupation at all. In it are books like Steve Earle’s “Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive,” The Short Stories of Earnest Hemingway, Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (an old favorite normally left at home due to its enormous heft, but brought along on this trip to better mentally prepare me for next month’s journey to Jeffers’ hangout – Big Sur, CA), “Beyond the Wall”, by Cactus Ed Abbey, and other self-help books like “The Ultimate Desert Survival Guide,” “Camping’s Top Secrets” (frustratingly out of date and off base in back country principle at times) and a four-wheel-drive guidebook for Southeast Utah which is useless on this leg of the trip as it appears that I am officially now in Southcentral Utah by guidebook standards, along with the Utah Gazetter almanac map book, Monday’s Aspen Times (mostly read and put to use as fire starter by now) and another hopeful tome – The Holy Bible, by God.

This bible is the very same blue-jacketed version that I’ve had since pre-puberty. Grossly, I should point out that at the age of 12, with nowhere safe to hide such things, I attempted to preserve my first visible pubic hair in the sanctified pages of my personal bible. I was aware of history even at a young age, it appears (but not of deep irony, it also appears.) This is the same book that nearly started an Anderson family war the last time that I visited my parents in Ohio, when my mother insisted that I take my old book back into personal possession after years of sitting dusty and unread on their shelves. I bullheadedly refused to take the book with me when I was to return home, accepting only after it was clear that I had deeply offended mom’s constitution.

***

The canyon wrens chitter and chirp as they flash up and down the cantaloupe walls of the Circle Cliffs, sheer and scalloped, pocked with holes that hide their nests. A pair of large crows cruise the thermals high above the cannonade, watching me watch them. Their caws pinball off of the canyon walls, quadrupling their number in an echoing fade.

All is bright and warm and perfectly ordered on the desert floor. The ancient junipers quiver lightly at their spindly tops while their stone dead brethren lie below in grotesquely twisted silver and black poses. The pinon pine holds firm against the transient breezes, but grow imperceptibly towards skies that hold no aide.

Occasionally, a bee will buzz by, launching the otherwise docile Hondog into scurrying, snapping flights of fancy. If he were an Indian dog – which his ancestors surely were – his owner might call him Bee Dancer. I just call him Dummy.

The desert flies are springing to life before my eyes. Each day we are visited by more and more of them, though never too many of them. Yet.

Somewhere within a ten-foot radius of my camp chair, a small green scorpion skulks. I rousted him last night when I collected an old juniper branch for my fire. Putting myself in the tiny shoes of the scorpion I realize that I must have been a terror to it – an inexplicable giant coming from out of nowhere, effortlessly lifting away his hallowed home. Now I fear his retaliatory nature, especially when stoned and of a mind to remember such things as vengeful beasts in the dirt.

Sage, cactus of a dozen varieties, ephedra, cheatgrass, yucca and other unidentified flora appear to be emerging from their own winters dormancy. The first big rain storm will likely catalyze this place into a raging bloom. Already the small white flowers of the cliff gardens are shimmering in the sun. The soil here is a rich rust. It turns brown only when churned by foot traffic of the blade of my shovel.

Deer, elk, and rabbit scat are everywhere, as are cow pies. The topography is greatly pleasing to the mind. Short, rolling barrancas carved by drainages formed by eons of runoff build in height until they meet the sweeping cliff base crown of vertical stone spires. The lung-colored spires are long, tall extruded rectangles of sand stone, segmented by shadowy cracks and topped with uncanny facial forms that change personality with the shifting of the sun. The watching wall. It curls to the east, behind me now, for a mile of two until it runs into the Oyster Shell Reef section of the Capitol Reef National Park, which in turn bisects the Waterpocket Fold.

This is heaven. My angels are wrens with harp string wings. My gates bear no pearls, but rather a wall of red stone. God is a scorpion looking for a new home… or a giant to sting.

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Desert Journal – Onion Creek Road, August 26, 2011

The pebbled dirt road underfoot is dampened to the point of congealed saturation. A morning storm has cast its long shadow over this sunless Sunday morning. This after a day of intermittent storms chased us from easy chair to the relatively confined shelter of the truck several times since sun up.

It is not so much the rain, you see, for that is mostly a refreshment in the nearly 100° late summer heat of Southeastern Utah. But rather, it is the random, bold swaths of lightening that have chased us from our idyll. Hondo the dog has spent most of the past 24 hours – only the second day that he has ever spent in the desert – cowering in a black, hairy ball atop of Sharon’s retro puffy ski vest in the back of the land cruiser. There were not many thunder storms in Monterey, California, where he spent the first three years of his existence. And it’s a damn good thing too: the one storm that I recall lit the entire South Coast region afire and threatened to take out Big Sur in its entirety.

This is our first desert camp, officially, in about three years – a shocking gap of time to me. There was a trip four years ago to the Utah/Colorado border, but required a 1500 mile jaunt each way with less than a week all told to do it in. Now, I am back living in the Colorado mountains. Getting here is just a half day drive. I thank the lords of spare time for the chance to do it. This is my place.

The coffee has finished brewing. It is an instant mix that I am sure will taste thick and alkaline compared to the luxury of the French Roast at home, but a nice cup of warm joe sounds appealing under these moody morning skies. Especially with a little brown liquor as a sweetener. Nothing like a good strong cup of coffee before a long walk…

 

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“The Face of OffSeason, Colorado” – Emmacabina Journal Entry – 11/2/11

Stoveside, Emmacabina

I’ve gone native, given into the wild nature of the surrounding mountains. My hair grows in strange shoots and uneven chunks. A course beard stands defiantly away from my jaw. A brushy mustache has outgrown its banks and now curls east and west towards my ears, respectively (or not). Every passing day sees my visage grow woolier and more feral than the previous one.

Glory be and hall-e-lu-ya! It is the first positive grown that my person has seen in a rack of moons. And why not? There is no suit that can fit my form of spartan employment these days. This is the face of Offseason, Colorado.

I am, for all intents and porpoises, cabin bound. The ancient pine timbers that frame my dreams draw out my formerly recessed follicles and harrow my shorn cheeks like wooden magnets in the chilly November nights. Every morning I awake to find that my head has sprouted anew, seemingly in every direction at once.

This new wool is my winter coat – a self-defense mechanism triggered by the plunging temperatures and stout winds that sweep down from the Arctic. To NOT humor my Neanderthallian instincts would be to invite frostbite, mange, and other forms of cellular petulance. This new, old look has done wonders for me in ways other than just serving to preserve my threatened pores: Babies and other young children people run from me upon first sight, saving my weekends for more important things than baby-sitting duty, for which we seem to have been tabbed for increasing increments.

Bill collectors flee as well. They must sense my humorously “fierce” appearance over the phone, for it seems that the bastards have resorted to using robots programmed to call me at all hours rather than risk a human agents’ professional sensibilities by allowing their ear to be accosted by someone who would allow a mug as handsome as mine to moss over so incongruously,

It’s OK, though. As of tomorrow, they’ll shut my phone off for non-payment. That’ll teach the greedy dicks to call me for their money….

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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!

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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

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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.

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“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.”

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Border Wall Journal – Don’t Miss The Last Ferry Out of Dope Town

Don’t Miss The Last Ferry Out of Dope Town

Alamo, Texas –

No, not that Alamo. Not the Bowie, Houston, rental car variety. This Alamo is on the Rio Grande River, not up in the high country near San Antonio. This one must be an unofficial Alamo, as I cant see Texas allowing two towns with the same name to exist, though it is Texas, so who knows.

This Alamo is a reverse façade – a tourists dream. Unlike most cow towns, here the exterior that you see on the freeway is new, Califortified and soullessly similar. The old town of Alamo is just a street back from the brain blending warehouse stores, and still feels like 1957. The streets are made for horses, though none walk them, and roosters serve as the alarm clocks, since the power cant seem to stay on. It is the kind of town that you would find a Chihuahua running down the street with a chicken egg in it’s mouth, or a pit bull roaming the alley looking for a leg to gnaw on. The Mexican restaurant doesn’t serve tequila and neither of the two drive-thru liquor stores have ever even heard of Lonestar beer. I had to describe the logos on the bottle to the red-eyed girl, who obviously suffered from monoxide poisoning and a severe bad taste in music. If you want twenty different varieties of Doritos, 24-ounce Monster soda, orange flavored lube, or a chance to hear some jet toned umpapa music, this is your place. Lonestar must be a Dallas thing.

I am here as the soundman for a PBS documentary, but out of necessity, I have been much more than that. Sound is but one of my hats, all of which are sweat stained and stink of Folgers, Pepsi and adrenaline. I pride myself most on performance in my role as Wheelman. Twice now I have had to extricate our crew from dicey conditions at top speed. Both times I have evaded cops and robbers, who we figure are one and the same down here on the border. Once in America, once in Mexico.

There is something about knowing that you have stayed too long, shot too much, that motivates one to evacuate at speeds thought unattainable on the way in, though I often spend a moment pondering that very thought nowadays whenever we go somewhere. A good wheelman knows to keep his exit clear, and to never have to back up. Traffic signs are to be ignored, as are brakes, oil pans, and GPS units. Time is of the essence, and the smugglers gun waits for no man. The Wheelman’s weapon is his mental radar, and his vehicle, both of which need to be clear and have plenty of torque and top end at the ready.

For my part, I have taken to drinking several shots of 5 and 6-hour energy tinctures that the local gas stations sell to truckers, often chasing those with a Starbucks Espresso double shot drink and a few cups of coffee. I have found that overcaffination is impossible along the Rio Grande. Kind of makes me long for the days of cross-tops and pure ephedra. I used to know that I was properly awake when my hair ached and I had to piss every five miles, now I have to keep a steady stream of stimulates on the intake or risk crashing, literally and figuratively.

Somehow, despite the mainlining of legal speed, I was about to fall asleep a few nights ago in my hotel room after having watched a Senate hearing on C-SPAN. It was some purposefully mundane and vague discussion of budgetary fraud and mismanagement, but was doing the trick for my nightly winding down. Coming down off a sustained run at 22,000% of the recommended daily allowance of caffeine requires some serious tedium. C-SPAN is the only antidote that I have found, and I was happy to settle into a good budget session after a day chasing this Border Wall story around rattlesnake country. Everything was going well, so well that I half expected to be asleep by midnight. The suits were droning on, the lower third explained that this was a fraud and misappropriations investigation, and everyone looked very concerned.

My eyes slammed shut, but sputtered open like I had been stabbed with sharp pencils when I heard a strange and familiar voice. I stared at the blurry monitor until it came into decent focus. There, on the screen was a bad vision, a mushroom trip gone sour. The fat face of Larry Craig was questioning a nervous looking staffer. He looked concerned, and this concerned me. It concerned me because Senator Larry Craig RESIGNED last fall when he was arrested and confessed to soliciting male homo love (NTTAWWT) in an airport bathroom. But there he was! On the TV and keeping me awake with his mere presence! Did you know that he never quit? Does anyone know this? How? What the??? I haven’t slept for days now, and with 3 days to go, I suspect that I won’t be able to until Tuesday of next week. I am in constant shock and disbelief, and haven’t even gotten to Brownsville yet.

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The Hawkshadow Journal

Anderson in residence at Hawkshadow just before his 3rd banishment.

The Hawkshadow Journal

First Night Sleeping at Hawkshadow

Prologue: I had never actually spent a night at the old creaky cabin on the hill. In the past, I would stay as late as I could, but then invariably my efforts at continuity would give way as I pulled up lame, scared of the myriad strange noises, willy-stricken and bail for home.

But this time I came prepared with the mindset and the gear to do it, the time to spend, and a mission to refocus this 1^st novel. The night dragged on and I reorganized the novel, writing out the outline twice, changing this and that, getting the old stranger back into my head. Using my camp stove, I heated some water and had a cup of noodles and a Balance bar for late dinner, washed down with a cold can of Bud. At about midnight I actually started writing (though I did write a long letter to my pal Derek when I first got up here at 6pm), and ended up writing a short story called Keeping House, about a pair of housekeepers at a golf resort. Nervous about spiders (I have seen some doozies) and god knows what else might crawl in this place at night; I eschewed the bed upstairs (covered in rat pebbles) in the loft, and made a spot on the floor, near the plug in heater. There I lay waiting for sleep, reading Cannery Row with new eyes.

That book, my friends, is writing. That I hope I can do, given the time…IT must have been 2 in the AM when I fell asleep. I left all of the lights on, and blocked the old glass swing door with the two rickety chairs, for safety. I set the bolt on the door, but the wood was split in the jam, so this was my last defense against a marauding javalina, ghost, or offensive neighbor.

Dreams – I am on a tall Sur like cliff, overlooking a fast moving surf scene far below. On the deck with me, in a Nepenthe like setting (but maybe not exactly there) are some Vietnamese workers eating after work. I feel like we are in Vegas, maybe. Down below I see a surfer take an insane line, darting through rocks from left to right. I can see sharks in the water. Then I am in the water. I am on the edge of the bank, having slipped all the way down without realizing it. The workers pull me up, and we all see a killer whale throw a small yellow submersible onto shore.

Vague here. Something to do with Pebble Beach. I am shown or given a very old book with an elaborately stamped leather cover. It is an African scene, very old. Valuable. I run my fingers over the stamping with awe. I want this book, but may not have it.

Next, I am on a roadside for some reason. The road is very narrow and a car shoots past me on the right. It is tiny, ancient old thing, but like a 50’s concept car. I see this car later in some sort of promotional material. There is an air system inside, two chambers, where people breathe towards each other through a port of some sort. The car is blue and runs on air. It is shaped like a pill, with no motor and a big sloping window up front.

I am in what feels like Sopris Park in Carbondale. A familiar face sits in a new wheelchair, and I ask what happened- if he is the one that we heard about. He smiles and stands up. Everything is fine. Next I meet with a younger guy, not so remarkable. He has me helping to install his PowerPoint presentation. His is one of three that I must be helping to set up as some sort of AV job. I arrange some funny looking antennae for him, attached to a blue remote. We fix a poster on the podium. The other groups go first, and while they are speaking I discover that the man that I was helping is a fanatic racist who goes on about Anthro’s and hateful death. He has a nuclear bomb buried deep in the ocean, and plans to set it off as a warning, or a test. A single citizen setting a nuke off. So I go behind the podium, which is somehow now very high in the air and I take down the remote and flimsy wire antennae and disassemble as I make a sprint back through some woods. I take out the battery from the remote and chuck it into the woods. Looking backwards, I see the mad bomber is now in an inflatable with one of the women from an earlier presentation, but they are comically deflating and splashing down far far below into a lake. He seems to have had a change of heart.

Before some of this, and in the middle of all of it, my alarm goes off on my computer. It is the second time that I have used the alarm function, so it is not very familiar. It uses iTunes as a sound source, and I must have picked Amy Winehouse for some reason before I nervously fell asleep. So in the middle of all of that, while supine on the cabin floor, wrapped deeply in my new sleep sack, hand on my Benchmade apple sticker all night long, the alarm goes off.

The first time that it happens, the song is cued up to the part of the song Rehab (a remix, at that – some gussied up electronica version that I didn’t even know that I had) that just repeats the words “No, No, No” over a shockingly loud dance beat. Confounding to a sleeping man with a head full of the above, too little actual sleep, and a rack of nerves spinning on my internal roaster. I ream up above me onto the table and feel for the keyboard, and hit a key and the alarm ends. This goes on for 2 hours. I awake at 9:31 am. The interesting thing is that from the first time that I hit the snooze/keyboard until the last two things happen: 1. The keyboard does not seem to work as easily after the first time, when any key did the snooze trick. As time goes on it seems that I have to blindly hunt on the keypad for the right key. 2. The time between snoozes progressively decreases. IN the end I am hitting the key every 30 seconds, it seems.

I awake to a perfectly still, blue-sky California day on the top of a mountain in Palo Colorado Canyon near Big Sur. It is time to write it all down…

2^ND NIGHT at Hawk Shadow

Powered through about 8 pages of the ski bum novel yesterday and at night. Also wrote a letter, a journal, and a half poem about some freighters that I saw in convoy close to the coast. Went to get my taxes done but was mocked by the type A personality taxman for being laid off, getting lost and thus about 5 minutes late, not having my receipts together, not bringing my folder that he gave us early last year, and for making less money than last year. He busts my balls about being one of those creative types who never has their shit together, and I protest slightly. He is both right, and so very wrong. I feel like he has made fun of artists throughout his whole life, all while profiting from them.

I went to the bank and deposited my severance check, none too soon. At home I check the mail and find that my story about Skinny Singers in Big Sur has been published at Jambase.com, and read a letter from the editor who asks me if I want to write more stories. He seems to really like my words. I read the Skinny Singers piece, and really like how it looks on the page, interspersed with Andrew’s photographs…Also an AV company writes asking if I would like to talk to them about a job.

I caught up on mail, and then went to spin class with Sharon. We rode hard to nowhere in particular, and got a good work out in. When the long ride nowhere was over, I decided to go back to the cabin and continue my Residency while I have a chance. I wrote most of the night, fueled by thoughts of snow and high times in the mountains. I finally sputter about 1 am, my brain searching for up to 10 minutes per word.

Lying down on the floor in my comfy bag, I read some more of Cannery Row, finally understanding that the story is really one of mostly abject poverty in the Depression. Hard cases. People carrying a stove 5 miles for 5 days to heat up a flophouse. Living in abandoned boilers, drinking punch of every kind of drink that ha been abandoned at the bar. Monterey is now a rich mans town living on the legacy of some who overcame poverty to have a decent time of it, or possibly just Steinbeck’s eye gave hope to a desperate situation, which is now lauded by the tourist and local wealth as their roots. I finally fall asleep sometime after 3am.

Dream – Sharon and I are going to dinner and a movie. Feels like Carbondale, but likely isn’t any place that I have ever been. We are walking, and I have some chores after the movie to attend to, and so I bring with me a basketball and a broom. The young staff at the theater laughs and tells me they will watch the broom for me, and I opt to hold the basketball during the film, which is an Elvis film. I am wearing a robe. Sharon decides to sit out the movie across the street, but encourages me to go in on my own, so I do. There are two screens, so I decide to wander through to mostly empty other theater before that movie starts to get to the Elvis screen. The basketball falls out of my hand and bounces all the way down to the bottom in slo motion. I run to pick it up. On the way out, I am assailed by a young woman working there. She claims that I have to leave. Young dudes working there show up on her flanks as back up, as if they are expecting some sort of trouble. I demand to know why. What did I do? She has a notebook and there is some scribbling in it. Apparently there is a woman (chick?) from ESPN, POSSIBLY Plum TV in attendance at the other screen who is claiming the viewing rights to the film, in other words, I cannot go in, and must leave. I Demand to see names, numbers, to know who is telling the worker this as I think that it is a joke, but the young dudes get bucky and start to grapple with my arms.

There is a lot of jabbering, just nonsense excitable talk and hard to get a real answer out of anyone. I want my broom back. I am escorted to the door down a long corridor by a fellow of about 18. I tell him to cut the shit out, let me go, or I will sue him and the girl and ESPN and everyone, and he thinks that I want to fight, so I grab him and start pushing him, a strength test. This goes on for a while, my leading him around by the collar, and all the while he is calling me a fag and a pussy, so I start to push his head through some pretty brittle railings, and then we are outside squaring off to fight. I give him like two roundhouse kicks to the face, still holding the basketball, my robe flying out like a barn dance dress, and he goes down and stays down. I go back in to figure out why this happened and actually start to reason with the blond girl who kicked me out. She is cute, and suddenly not so mean to me. We look at her notes and they make no sense. She gives me the broom back and I tell her that I have to go sweep out a cabin.

Then we are sitting together, along with another girl, who is holding a deep skillet that roils with cooking bacon and about 3 inches of grease. I ask her how she likes the bacon, and she says it is too greasy, and hands it to me.

Next we are outside of the theater, and the crew from GrassRoots TV is there. Ellen, Ashley, Rye, and Brad. This part fades now, but at some point we are walking around in a field and I am just trying to duck out to pee, but Ellen and Ash keep following me around, lost in conversation. Finally I just blurt it out. I have to pee! Then I am at my desk and telling my old boss that I am having trouble getting funds raised for sports production. I am just restarting a job, it looks like. I am probing the town to see who is willing to support my mission. He asks me if I have gone down the “old list”, and I sat no, and that encourages me, so I do that.

Next there is some sort of holiday party that we have been given costumes to wear by a donor, who also bought an outdoor awning, which doesn’t fit the space (?) and is too high up to see. But it is professionally made. The outfits for us are like Elf suits and we are all depressed.

Next I am with Sharon and her parents in like a Buick sedan. We are driving along the banks of a river, and we pass a car that is spray painted in gaudy orange and green colors, and says the words Middle East on it. In the car is a tough looking fucker, really more like a skull with skin on it. No hair. We see a dude walking out onto the lake and it looks dicey. To me, from the back seat it looks like water, not ice, but Jerry guns the car and heads out onto the lake. There is a road across it and the car caroms left and right, fishtailing. I reach my hand down and catch water, as if in a boat, and yell not to go to the right. The left is wet too. Jerry keeps it on the road and we prepare the ladies to ditch.

At 7:43 am the alarm goes off. This time it is Fine Day, by my friends in Colorado. It weaves in and out of the above dreams as I hit snooze a dozen or more times. I awake at exactly the same time as the day before 9:43 am. Head hurts. Coffee on. A pair of buzzards sailing around outside the window. They are all over this place, the buzzards, and I am guessing that they are more prevalent than the hawks, but that Ed called this Hawk Shadow due the ominous implications of using Buzzard Shadow. He is a freaknik, after all, a pacifist who fought in two wars, none of them recent.

3^rd Night Sleeping at Hawkshadow

Down the mountain to sweat. It is a weekly basketball game with some of the more incorrigible staff of the Monterey County Weekly, played in a tiny outdoor court up Jocylyn Canyon. After, I showered and caught up on email at the gym, with it’s intermittent hot water and solid WiFi. Question: Why does WiFi translate to Why-fy, other than cuteness?

Lunched on a steak sandwich at Croce’s, fries, soda. Plenty of stimulation to seed the mind. A late round college playoff game on the big screen, The Foolish Times, MC Weekly that I had not read completely. My story at the ass end of the magazine to read again. A beautiful young curly haired black waitress with charisma bubbling over, petite, hilarious,  served my sandwich.

Up the hill for a blazing sunset. Celebrate with a can of beer and a smoke. Feel worn down a bit, energy deficient, so work is negligible, unfortunately. I did write a letter to Troy Hooper, and tweak the pages from earlier in the day a bit. Spent some time studying the path, etc…Mostly I sat back and allowed myself to full immerse in Cannery Row. Finished the book, a marvelous bit of observation and subtle irony, somewhere around 9pm. Decided to lay out early, due to the prior nights ridiculously late ends.

Stretched my sore bones and muscles out and read Thompson’s letters in the Proud Highway. I see this as study, as a course in how to scrounge and claw and shout and rationalize and glower and freak the fuck out. We are lucky that he saved carbon copies of his letters in battered suitcases and toted them around to his many backwater hovels on the ascent (or is the other). He knew. This was his journal, addressed to anyone who ever loved him, hated him, published him, or dared to cross swords. Flipped paged in a quiet spot on the boards of Ed’s cabin, under his rickety table, under my own words…

Dream – Due to circumstances that were fully controllable yet completely blown off, and up, these dreams are lost to the infamy of deep rest in a quiet place. What remains are a sludge of half-concepts and notions. One that I know happened involves Jay Hoagland, my old friend who lives up by Redding now. Jay was now the host of the Rush Limbaugh show, which was incredible for several reasons. One, Rush was gone, to where I know not, but many rejoiced and welcomed the change, and Jay seemed to acknowledge that his direction would be less divisive and nasty. Also, Hoagland was actually really good at this job. The man can conversate, we have always known that. He is funny and infectious (without all the dripping sores), and charismatic and interesting. In this scenario, he actually made sense as well. He was an Utmost Authority, which comes as a bit of a shock if you know Jay in reality.

There was more. Dreams here are thick as prison walls, sometimes you cannot escape them. Only an internal timer will release you to the waking world. It is a place that I now look forward to sleeping in, despite the rugged accommodations- the sleeping on the floor, the stench of whatever rat died in that drawer that I tend to ignore, the mice that skitter about in the walls (hopefully IN the walls!), the dust and cold and spiders drooping. Hawkshadow is dreamy, and not many places can say the same.

Set the alarm on the laptop to wake me at 7am, but it never went off, and I lazed until almost noon, when I heard a phone ring and a voice at exactly the same time. Ed was here. Time to work, and hopefully he wont be mad at my staying. He did tell me that I could stay the last time that I saw him, at the gym last week.

4^th Night Sleeping at Hawkshadow

Thursday was to be my landmark, page blazing, head down day. Looking on the week from outside, I could see that Monday would present challenges as far as consistent writing goes. I had planned for Monday to be a catch up day, an orientation of sorts. Just getting packed up, outfitted with food, water, beer and the necessaries would take hours, and then there was the bank screaming to take some of my money etc…Plus sweeping out, walking around, enjoying the lay of the land up here was something to distract from hardcore novel writing. Tuesday had the built in roadblock of an important tax appointment at the end of the day, a good 3 hour round trip that I somehow turned into a 5 hour jaunt. Wed. there was midday basketball, same score as Tuesday…So Thurs. was to be the touchstone production day.

Then I overslept, and Ed arrived, and the next thing that I knew I was standing on a flimsy ladder, climbing up the side of a fat palm. The ladder was dug into the wet hillside above the tree, and on one side the leg did not even touch the earth, such was the angle. The only thing keeping me from pitching over from 10 feet up were the hard dead frond scores that ring the palm, the ladders architecture being braced with only that to hold my (embarrassed to say) 225 pounds from calamity. As I still cleared (literally) the cobwebs out of my eyes and tested the ladder, Ed got impatient and went up his own self. 82 years old and crawling around 10 feet up on a leaning ladder sawing palm fronds. Amazing. I didn’t let him do that for too long, but the point was made…

Spent a few hours watching Ed work on his artwork up in his Military Substation gallery cabin. The work is called 6,000,000 and is in two parts. One is a neat 6-foot pile of papers that have a host of marks on them, each representing one Jew killed by the “German Government”. Ed says that he is very careful not to use the word Nazi, because so many Germans claim to have never been Nazi’s. Part two of 6 mil is on the floor. Those same pages that are stacked are pulled to the floor and arranged in a bed, and a series of pebble numerals are written on each. It looks like a giant, messy Suduku board. At the top was the number 5,999,999, and I asked Ed who the 6 millionth was. This seemed to throw him a bit. We discussed the name of the project, and some philosophical banter about who the 6 millionth was, what the number actually was etc. Finally Ed decided to sweep away the old number and reconfigure it to be 6,000,000. He thanked me and I felt like I had done something helpful for this man. I recorded 18 minutes of his description of his art on my hand held recorder, and took some photos, for later.

Another 5-7 pages in the afternoon. Then down to Fernwood to check mail, clean up, and show them the Jambase story, if they cared, which they really didn’t. But who knows, maybe they will read it later and think that it was something, which it is. Ate a lamb sandwich at the bar and drank two jolts of whiskey and then had a coke. Classic conversation at bar between Mark (?) the chess playing keep, and two ladies. Talk of fire, and music, and fighting, and writing. Favorite quote. “He’s calling cops complaining about the noise of the pub, but he’s living in a “non-compliant dwelling unit”, which is the garage attached to the bar! You are the one who wanted to live next to the bar, I mean…Come ON!”

I settle in for bed and start reading Rum Diary again. Just as I get stretched out, the phone rings. I don’t normally answer the phone up here, but yesterday the wife called complaining about chest pains and difficulties with her heart medications the night before, so I figured it might be her needed me after all, even thought he predetermined ring pattern wasn’t followed. Who can remember to ring twice, hang up, and ring again when it’s an emergency anyways? But it wasn’t her:

PHONE CALL:

Automated female voice: 11:01pm

This is a missing persons report. This person was last scene in your neighborhood. Please check all out building on your property. Call 911 immediately if you see 82-year-old John _____. He has dementia.

Great. First, lets examine the situation. I am near the top of a mountain that winds me to get up. The neighborhood, per se, consists of about 3 houses per mountain, the nearest one several hundred yards up and down hill. So the chances of my encountering this lost person are greatly increased, given the size of my “neighborhood”.

And with all of the lights on, the house is a beacon to anyone within miles, a safe haven in a dark, foreign, vertical world full of animals and overgrown with mean looking vegetation. There are at least 8 known outbuildings here at Hawkshadow, and the thought of me going out there at midnight with my flashlight and peering into their blackness just seems overly creepy, even by my adventurous standards. The call sounded like something from a horror movie, and I admit that my residency here has reminded me of such, only without all of the evil ghosts, noises, disappearances etc that I thought might befall me in that scenario.

At first I thought that it was a cruel joke, but then I realized that Sharon was the only person with the number here, and this seemed beyond her deviosity. The only thing that kept me from outright panic was the age of the man, but that relief was tempered by the closing statement. He has dementia. What the fuck does that mean? I mean, a fragile old man whimpering in the darkness I can handle, comfort, warm up and call the cops to.

But what if he was a raving around, slipping into some nightmare role as a homeowner returning from the war to find a foreign car in his driveway, the wrong man atop his wife? Age was not so relevant in this scenario. After all, I had just seen an 82-year-old man climb a palm tree and hang off of its fronds sawing like mad earlier in the day! What if the old coot snuck up on me while I was sleeping on the floor and tried to tickle the back of my skull with the business end of a rusty spade? All that it would take would be a minimal effort to raise the damn thing, and then gravity would do the rest of the foul deed.

I had no choice but to bar the door with all of the 4 chairs that live in the cabin, and then crawl under the table and turn off all of the lights. I read Rum Diary with my 6 million-candle watt lamp strategically hitting the wall so as to not be seen from the outside. There are no curtains here, is the thing.

Dream: I am at a concert setting. Feels like High Sierra Music Festival. Sharon is somewhere with the dogs (?) and I am talking to Gebo, who is there too. There is talk about past times. A cautionary discussion.

Next I am sexy time… We are planning to meet somewhere over the phone and she is overly horny, shockingly so. She wants me to meet her in the ballroom, to turn on the cameras, and to be ready when she gets there for big screen sex. She never gets there, and I awake before the sun rises, in time to put coffee on and sit at the workstation just as the alarm goes off at 7am. I think that I may have poison oak all over my body, but think that maybe I just need to go shower. Still, the itchiness reminds me of the last time that I got PO up here last year, a real disaster to be avoided if at all possible, which I tried to do when tromping about in the weeds yesterday with Ed, but probably still caught a swipe or two…

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