i like snoopy

 

*

 

so, wtf?

 

I been sicker’n a dog is what. Four days of fever and delirium. AND babysitting. AND no Woman on The Verge to soothe my brow and bring me cool water from the well. Not that we have a well, but you get the point.
So put upon I am.

 

Ha.

 

*

 

So, that jury fucking hung. Mistrial after a month of hard work. Six months, really, but almost a month in trial alone.

 

Cocksucker.

*

then our computer bust. I think Google Chrome did it, we’re running an ancient OS X 10.5 and they won’t support it anymore, and when I tried to use Chrome the dang thing went all blue screen of death on me.

 

Ratfucker.

 

*

 

There’s some dishes on the counter my daughter used making bacon and eggs. I’ve leave ‘em set there five days now. I clean the kitchen, do all the other dishes, laundry, sweep, vacuum, etc.

Ever day I’m babysitting that boy of hers for ten, twelve, fourteen hours. Putting gas in her car so she can get where she needs. Food on the table.

I’ll die before I wash those dishes. I don’t know why, but I swear it’s true.

 

*

 

In other news, that woman is flying, flying across this great land of ours, heartsick for home and her grandbaby and her man.

 

That’s me.

She gone be home soon, is what.

 

Fuckin’ eggs, bacon.

 

*

 

Now, I got all that outta my system. Sorry. You can start reading again, any of youse that’s still left.

 

*

 

Here is the best thing:

 

 

*

 

*

 

 

*

 

Don’t he beat all?

 

*

 

Hurry home, woman. I miss you too bad.

 

*

 

Namaste.

 

***

 

Exploring the rooms of the house I built

*

It’s late. I’m up past my bedtime.

The jury has the case and now we’re just waiting for them to finish deliberating.

I hope they don’t fuck up.

*

My woman is setting off from Florida tomorrow, going to work her way back home over the next couple of weeks, driving her new campervan, White Dragon Horse. The vehicle that carried the monkey king and his message of the buddha’s teachings from East to West.

Maybe she’ll enlighten me when she arrives.

I hope so.

*

After I got home from work I picked up my grandbaby from my mom and took him home and feeded him and played with him for a couple of hours and gave him a bath and changed him and gave him a bottle and laid down with him until he fell asleep and if there is anything more holy and real than that I don’t know what it could be.

*

The last two hours I been reading through the last five years of this blog. Seeing patterns emerge. Looking at the deep ruts I’ve dug in the world. I stick to the same paths. It reminds me of this kid I knew in sixth grade, he had this plot of land his house set on, about an acre, and he had this old working dog that ran the perimeter of their land all day long. It wasn’t any fence to it, except where it fronted the road, but he’d worn this smooth dirt path exactly along the property line all the way around the house.

Probably ran it a hundred times a day.

I’m the same way. I’m not going anywhere, not really. I got my anxiety and my fearfulness and my small-heartedness. My rages and my longings. Deep interstellar space and deep time and evolution and emergent properties and matter and meaning and of course dead bodies and gunfights and blood and tears and shit and art and love and drinking beers around a fire, and that’s pretty much it. Throw in some Cormac McCarthy to read and some Terrance Malick to watch and some good food to eat and you’ve got me pretty much summed up.

But the other thing I saw in going through all that is how awesome you all are. How much sustenance you have given me over the years. How all this time I’ve been rowing in the hold and you’ve been right there with me. Rowing and listening to me bitch. Putting salve on my blistered hands. Acting like you don’t mind when I’m being an asshat.

It’s touching.

*

Namaste.

***

We are carried to end of the world

*

Went out with da boys last night and saw “End of Watch.”

Boo-yah!

Yeah, it was formulaic and predictable and over the top supercop stuff, but they really did a bang-up job with the two cops, played by Jake Gyllenhal and Michael Pena. Those boys capture what it’s like to push a sled with a good partner- the banter, the ribbing, the love, the boredom and the thrill-seeking.

And they get at how good it is to go into the mouth of the lion with someone who’s got your back.

I fucking loved it.

*

The defendant took the stand yesterday on the last day of evidence. The prosecutor tore him up. It was beautiful to see. Dude was cool as a cucumber on direct, with his attorney holding his hand and leading him down the primrose path. He was looking at the jury, all smiles, and bashful glances, and heartfelt apologies. Only the barest edge of his temper glinted under the carefully groomed surface.

But when it was time for cross, things got ugly fast. Soon the defendant found himself in the tall weeds, looking over at his attorney, wild-eyed, for help.

There was none to be found.

*

I hope the jury could see him for what he is, but it’s not real easy. Guy is a handsome, articulate, intelligent dude. Pretty wife, lots of family and friends in the audience carrying his water.

But he’s a sociopath. Empty inside, except for a sense of self-regard and a disdain for others.

Makes you want to roll over him, you know?

*

Nice quiet weekend ahead of me. Clean the house. Walk the dog and the grandbaby. Do the shopping. Maybe cook a little something.

Take a nap.

Read.

Miss my old lady.

It could be worse.

*

Namaste.

***

Reluctant angel sets foot in the world

 

 

*

 

It’s three thirty in the morning. Can’t sleep. I’m in the second week of this trial and it’s been high stress the whole time. Like an episode of Law and Order that never ends. I came home after work yesterday with my head in a vise and took some aspirin and went to bed to read and was asleep by eight. Dreaming of the next witness we’re going to call. Etc.

Now I’m up and it’s not bad. Still and quiet, except for the gurgling of the fish tank. The bulldog snoring in the corner. I fell asleep before the Wild Woman of Borneo and her baby got home, so I didn’t get to see them, but I can see his blocks scattered on the floor, and his sippy cup on the kitchen counter, and she left the television on with the sound off, so I know they were here and did make it home and are now sleeping safely out in the studio. All is well.

All is well.

 

*

I have to admit I’m enjoying this trial business. I like the open combat aspect of it. I spend so much time amassing information, taking statements, gathering facts, that I sometimes forget that in a way it is like gathering ammunition for a battle. Now that I’m in the trenches, I’m grateful for all of it. And until you’re in trial, you don’t really know what’s going to become significant. I mean, you know, you do know the important stuff. But at any moment what you thought wasn’t significant can suddenly become the hinge upon which all things turn. When that happens, you’d better hope you did your homework right.

I am also astounded at the system of which I am a small, barely functioning part. I mean the jury system. It’s astoundingly primitive. Primitive, but powerful. It’s as visceral as our civic duty gets.

I’m reminded of a story the David Christian tells in his Big History course, of Aboriginal justice. Before there were courts and governments, human justice was a communal task and obligation. He tells the story of an aboriginal tribe, one of whose members had killed three men over the course of a year. The men of the tribe gathered together and ambushed the killer, and killed him. Then each member of the tribe ritually stabbed the man with their spears, so they all shared the burden and responsibility of his killing.

Anyway, I got my spear ready.

 

*

 

Maybe I’ve said this before, but I’m going to try from now on to remember, as I go through my daily life, that the important thing is not what I am doing, or trying to do, or neglecting to get done, but rather, how I interact with those around me while doing so.

It’s the contact, the spark, the incidental interactions with other human beings that matters. The opportunities, large and small, to make each person’s day a tiny bit better if I can. To let them know that they are seen, that they are loved, that they matter.

The rest of it is chaff.

 

*

 

In other news, I’d like to take a month off and go live in the woods.

 

*

 

Namaste.

 

***

 

Desiree

*

Ah, me. I didn’t realize I was all that sad until I started working on this piece. I think she made me sad.

Still, I like her.

*

Lately I feel so damn unmoored. Bitter taste in my mouth all the time. Small moments where I’ll begrudgingly admit to a provisional happiness, long spells staring out the window at the passing world.

At my passing life.

*

It’s entirely normal to go through these dark passages.

Essential, even.

I’m long past fighting them. They bring life, just like a rainstorm. It’s not necessarily the case that I’ve lost my way.

 

That rain soaks the earth.

*

Namaste.

***

Mothgirl

 

 

*

How strange this world is.

We don’t think it is, mostly. We believe it to be mundane, almost changeless. We drift along, complacent, even bored. We stop seeing what’s around us at all.

Then, there you are, watching your house spin away into the sky.

Or maybe the sea rises up and engulfs your city.

Or you turn left at the grocery store and into the path of a giant tractor trailer.

Or you look at the keys in your hand, suddenly seeing them, really seeing them, as if for the first time. All they signify and all they hold for you.

These little epiphanies.

You can have as many as you like.

There isn’t any limit to them.

Maybe you shouldn’t wait only for the big one that comes at the end.

By you, I mean me.

*

You think they’re going to find life in the sub-glacial lakes in Antarctica? Lake Vostok, Lake Ellsworth, there’s probably more than five hundred of them known. Under miles of glacial ice, in the dark, under all that weight and pressure.

So far, everywhere there is water, life abounds. This holds true on our planet. If there is life in that cold, dark, isolated and changeless place, it might make a case for life existing anywhere you have liquid water. Like in the lakes trapped under the thick icesheets of Europa.

We’re just starting to look around this place.

We got no idea what’s going on.

*

I have this idea that the universe is pretty much the same all over. Everywhere we look, it looks like here.

My bet is the thing is teeming with life. There seems to be little reason to believe that our little insignificant chunk of rock out here in the tall weeds of the milky way is somehow special, so different that life arose only here. The number of planets with similar conditions to ours must be almost numberless, on a practical level.

And then I think about how tough life is. The many catastrophic extinction events our planet has experienced over hundreds of millions of years. In the P/K event, almost 95 percent of every living species was killed off.

A few million years later, the place was teeming with new life. Unless you knew better, you’d never even notice.

Even if we royally fuck this place up, life is going to roll right along without us. And consciousness will continue to rise and expand in other iterations. Conscious thought is the one really cool thing we brought to the party, but we’re not going to be the only form of life that tries it out.

Relax, man.

Everything really is going to be okay.

*

Today I’m hanging out in a still and silent home that has been cleaned from stem to stern. I’m alone with only the bull dog for company, and the whole glorious day in front of me with nothing to do.

Write. Make some art. Work in the garden. Eat a simple lunch.

Heaven.

*

Sometimes even my nervous little poodle brain takes the day off.

*

Namaste.

***

corrigan’s landing

*

Build a man a fire, he is warm for the night. Set a man on fire, he is warm for the rest of his life.

*

Amen.

*

The woman is gone so I have broken out in a frenzy of pacing and cleaning. Laundry is going, the fridge has been ruthlessly purged and cleaned, the floors vacuumed and washed, flat surfaces dusted and polished.

The O’Keefe&Merritt is eyeing me suspiciously.

*

I’m down with a cold, which exacerbates my loneliness and makes me snarly. Kaleb is sick, too, which sucks. His mom seems to be running on an even keel right now, for which I am grateful.

*

I am unhinged from the world.

*

How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?

The Layers

Stanley Kunitz

*

It seems the requisite question.

*

I guess I’m a sucker for the golden light. And that Linda Manz.

She makes it all seem fittin’, somehow.

Like it was all meant to be.

*

The three of us been goin’ places.

Lookin’ for things. Searchin’ for things.

Goin’ on adventures.

They told everybody they were brother and sister. My brother didn’t want nobody to know. You know how people are. You tell them something, they start talking.

I met this guy named Ding Dong. He told me the whole earth is goin’ up in flames. Flames will come out of here and there and it’ll just rise up. The mountains gonna go up in big flames. The water’s gonna rise in flames. There’s gonna be creatures runnin’ every which way, some of them burnt, half their wings burnin’, people are gonna be screamin’ and hollerin’ for help.

See, the people that have been good, they’re gonna go to Heaven and escape all that fire.

But if you been bad, God don’t even hear you. He don’t even hear you talkin’.

*

*

 

And while I’m at it…..

 

 

*

 

Namaste.

***

In Which The Princess Is Abandoned To Her Fate

*

At least she’s still got her smart Hermes jacket and a sensible navy skirt.

*

Last night I had a long dream where I was living in my dream house, a scattering of modernist cubes on a rolling landscape of grass on a cliff overlooking the sea, with a dark thicket of woods behind and miles of emptiness and silence.

I drank coffee on the deck and listened to the waves and the rising birdsong as the sun came up. I went for a long run in the woods and down to the shore.

The house was still and silent. I looked at a collection of small ceramic animals my wife had made, all brilliant glowing red with black spots, set out on a long, low table against a wall in the kitchen.

It was as if the universe held open its arms and gave me my fondest, deepest desires. All that beauty and wildness, all that emptiness and order, all that calm and stillness.

My dream brain’s gift to itself, perhaps.

It was deeply, wonderfully good.

*

In another dream I was on an oceanliner and we were tying anchors to the feet of all these Nazi soldiers and tossing them overboard, alive. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. The hemp lines would unfurl from the deck and whizz down into the dark, frothy sea, and when the slack was out the men would be snatched from the deck and disappear over the side. They never cried out. They just looked at us as they went over.

We were merciless in our work, and it was hard labor, nor was there an end to it.

*

In the next dream a man stood in my front yard, mumbling to me. One of his front teeth was loose and kept jutting out over his lip as he spoke, getting tangled in it. The tooth was small and misshapen and decayed, the color of snot.

I kept wanting to stop him talking and just reach up and yard that tooth out of his head.

*

I am not convinced that my dream life is any less significant than my waking one.

*

One of my deepest pleasures is to get out in the woods and go for long, long walks.

Going there with my grandbaby makes it even better.

I think he likes it, too.

Oh, hell yeah.

*

I got it so damn bad for that kid, I tell you what.

What can you do?

You can’t do nuthin’, is what.

You just gotta love him up.

*

The older I get, the more I like it.

*

Since I was a kid, all I ever wanted to be was married to a woman who loved me that I could share my secrets with, and kiss on and stuff.

Plus be an astronaut or a deep-sea diver.

I got the woman, and I got to be a police. I got love and a scary job and a little bitty old house with a real white picket fence and a dog and a kid and a grandbaby and all manner of terrors and heartbreak and disasters to endure.

I reckon I just about got it all.

*

Love.

High, wide, and handsome.

*

Namaste.

***

Girldance

*

Today was my little niece’s Bat Mitzvah.

Yesterday my daughter turned 21.

Today I found a note hidden under a metal grate on my front porch that told me that there was a witness to a local murder, and gave all the details.

Last week this guy came to the house with a little bottle and some sand and note. He said he found it on the beach when he was vacationing in Hawaii. The note was from a ten year old girl and said that she would probably be dead by the time anyone found it.

He figured maybe I could find out who she was. If she was okay. Probably I couldn’t, he knew that.

But maybe I could.

*

 

I never been to a bat mitzvah before. Never set foot in a synagogue until today.

I was telling The Woman on The Verge today I feel like my life got replaced with an exact duplicate life, only they didn’t get everything right.

Or almost anything.

Everything that was there is still there, only….it’s odder.

It was nice at the ceremony, all our family was there. My sister-in-law’s family, too. Surreal and beautiful.

Touching.

*

Those notes, the people who come to our door infrequently, but often bloody or distressed, they greatly disturb my wife.

To me they are dispatches from an absurdist universe, addressed to “current resident.”

The world is profoundly odd.

*

Why should we expect anything different from it?

*

It distresses me to feel at one remove from life, as if there is a semi-permeable membrane between me and everything that isn’t me, and it can be violated only with a great deal of effort.

As I was sitting in the pew listening to my niece read from the Torah, I watched a red-tailed hawk swoop down from the perfect blue heavens and take a small rabbit or squirrel, I couldn’t be sure of what.

The cantor played a blue guitar throughout the ceremony. It made me wish he’d just intone with a sonorous voice, devoid of strings.

It seems frivolous somehow. Joan Baez. Not that she’s frivolous, but, you know….

*

Last week this woman I work with came into my office. Her son died a few months ago at 21, the same age my daughter is today. She sat down and talked and I listened to her. We hadn’t spoken since his death, so it was our first foray into that subject together.

She cried a lot.

So did I.

She stayed there in my office for more than an hour, all broken hearted and snot-nosed and brave and smart and funny and decimated by it.

I felt like there wasn’t anything more important in the world than just letting her talk and letting her feel that I was right there with her.

*

I’m still deeply saddened by Ryan’s murder. This other murder, the one that someone left a note on my porch about, also has a deep and personal connection, astounding and terrible.

I feel as though I’m getting peeled. Peeled and scalded. Peeled and scaled and run over.

It’s leaving me all tender.

*

I got so much selfishness in me. So much anxiety and fearfulness and small-heartedness. It gets so I can hardly stand my own self. Like I’d like to smash myself to bits over it.

Lucky for me I am getting peeled and scalded and run over without me having to do a damn thing.

Ain’t that some shit?

*

Namaste.

***

Jawbone

*

I’m watching “The Ascent of Man” with Jacob Bronowski. If you know me at all, you’ll know that watching this thirteen part documentary narrated by the male equivalent of Sister Wendy is my idea of pure bliss.

And I get to read Murakami afterwards until I fall asleep.

*

Still, I am sore put out, anxious, restless, depressed. All I can hear in my head is the great grinding of gears. Like the disfigured man at the center of the merry-go-round in Eraserhead, only not quite so upbeat.

*

I managed to put a good meal on the table tonight. Roasted new potatoes with cilantro gremolata and a roasted beet salad with cherries, ginger, feta, red onion, toasted cumin seeds, lime juice, cabbage, served on a bed of spinach leaves. Some hockey puck of breaded garbanzo and spinach burger thing from Costco.

I know, I know.

Still, it were pretty good. You would have loved it.

*

Watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”

Went to Krav class and stabbed and shot and kicked and wrestled and hit the bags and did gun takeaways and knife defense.

Did some work. A suspicious death investigation review, set up a polygraph on a rape suspect, planned next months firearms training, met with a retarded attorney on a stupid-ass case he can’t figure out to save his life, etc.

When I got home, there was a red-tailed hawk trapped in the laundry room, and a very mad bulldog trying to get at it.

The hawk was successfully released back into the wild, a bit ruffled but not too much the worse for wear.

*

Right now life with my kid is like that scene in “Bowfinger” where Steve Martin gets Eddie Murphy to run into highway traffic as part of his guerrilla movie project.

She’s gonna get smacked.

But maybe not.

Fuck, I don’t know.

*

How can it be that our whole civilization burst onto the scene only about ten or twelve thousand years ago? After a few million years of hanging out, banging sticks together, killing deers and buffalos and mastadons and shit?

I wonder if there wasn’t a few abortive false starts that just got swallowed up in all that time.

I wonder about a lot of stupid shit, I really do.

Good luck catching me wondering about anything useful.

*

One thing I love is long walks. Especially in the woods or along the shore. Especially with  the Woman On The Verge. She soothes my mind. She is my great good mystery and fortune, the best thing about this whole damn disaster.

*

I am on the junior varsity of suffering.

This ain’t the show, not by a long shot.

***

Namaste.

***