Kuenstler’s Gap

*

Yesterday I made a cassoulet. It is a kind of all-day pork and sausage and white bean French peasant stew with a bread crumb crust.

I don’t know that I’ve ever tasted anything as good in my life.

*

Except for the triple chocolate mousse cake I made for desert.

*

Woot.

***

Hope you are all having as good a time.

***

Capsule Six

*

We had a sweet Christmas.

*

We gave each other a few small gifts. We filled each other’s stockings with candy and magazines and socks and a brass compass for me and a flamingo scarf for her and we each  got the other a dark chocolate and bacon chocolate bar.

*

My father agreed not to exchange gifts but he asked me what I wanted anyway, so I am now the proud owner of an All-Clad 12″ stainless steel frying pan and a super-crazy 8″ damascus steel, left-handed Shun Chef’s knife.

Watch out!

*

One of the deepest pleasures was watching Lucy get her toys out of her stocking and run around the house with them sticking out of her mouth, proud and happy as she could be.

A dog that loves presents.

*

And we lost our beloved Cash today.

He was a tender little guy. After Raj died, Cash just wasn’t ever the same. I think it busted his heart. For years and years and years they slept together and hung out on the back deck or laid in the first rays of morning sun on the welcome mat in front of the studio together.

He just wasted away, glum and confused and broken-hearted.

It is a hard old life, buddy.  I know it is.

You will be missed.

*

The wild woman of borneo called her mother Christmas day. It didn’t go well.

If you are nice, she will eat you alive. If you are mean you feel like you just beat up a five-year old and stole his little red wagon.

*

So, the storms rage all around us. In between the heaving swells of the black sea we catch glimpses of great and terrible monsters, all razor-sharp teeth and menacing claws and low, moaning calls.

We pull our blankets around our shoulders and lean into the oars. She brews our tea in the lee of the gunwales and if there is any sugar left she will put some in and if there isn’t it still warms us.

Maybe the sky is a little bit lighter just over the horizon. It’s hard to make out.

But, yes, I think it is.

*

I would be undone without her.

I don’t know how the rest of you manage.

*

Merry Christmas! Batten Down The Hatches!

***

happiness

*

is a wave form.

Beauty and Horror are inextricably intertwined.

You must have it all.

*

We don’t want the pain. We don’t want the night terrors, the early deaths, the men with machetes charging through the camp, the car bombings, the airplane crashes, the rapes and  molestations, disease and mutilations, the plain sorrow of loss.

They are ours just the same.

Everybody pick three.

*

In the meantime, there are flowers.

There is the sun coming up.

There is the place where the sea meets shore and the sound of it and the cries of gulls.

There is kissing.

There is yet tenderness.

There is giving everything you are without concern for the cost or benefit.

There is ice cream.

There is the wide blue sky and the low gray one and rain and thunderstorms and at night the numberless and vivid stars.

It is meant to break your heart.

It is meant to.

***

Namaste.

*

rode hard put away wet

*

I look this bad.

I don’t feel no better, either.

*

Today I walked away from a fight, let a man go instead of arresting him for contempt of cop.

I mean, obstructing a peace officer in the performance of his duties.

I did it, though. I did the math, knew it was going to go bad, took a deep breath and sent him on his way.

Look at who’s all growed up.




Of course, the second I let him go, he started bragging to his friends and family gathered around how I was going to arrest him but I was too big a pussy to do it.

*

I thought I was going to bust my teeth.

*

Instead, I just shook my head and got in my car and left.

*

It wasn’t nothing. He just lied to me. Bald-faced, flat-out, lied. And it didn’t matter, I got done what needed doing just the same.

I still might bust my teeth.

But I didn’t bust his, and that’s what matters tonight.

***

Namaste, you princes of new england, you sons a bitches!

*

Lie to Me

*

Got called in on Saturday to administer a polygraph examination to a suspect on some bank jobs going on up and down the coast.

It’s one of the things they pay me for.

*

I find the whole thing very curious. I really enjoy interview and interrogation. I don’t know if I’m any good at it. The whole time there is a tremendous amount of information whanging around in the room. There’s what I know, what the suspect knows, what I don’t know, what they don’t know, what they want to conceal, what I want to have revealed. There’s facts galore. There is a lot of lying. A tremendous amount. Probably eighty percent of what gets said is truthful, though. Or a kind of truthful. Lots and lots of information that the suspect thinks shows him in a good light, or at least not too bad. Most of the lies are in the form of omission, minimizing, and concealing. Of course, there are plenty of outright lies, too.

And there is everywhere treacherous ground. Lots of times there are facts I think I understand but they get undermined in the room by new information that I may or may not be able to trust, or to prove up. Lots of times the bad guy has the same experience. He doesn’t know for sure he can stick to this story or that one, and my job is to play up that uncertainty, and downplay my own.

It can be like herding cats. There is lots of time exploring dead ends. There is constant circling back over previously covered ground. You hope every time to decrease the diameter of the circle, drawing him in to the ultimate point. You think you have everything tied up tight, then he bolts off in a new direction and you have to start all over. And your opponent is desperate to prevail, or at least not lose ground. Lots of times a guy will get in the box just to find out how much you know about what he’s been up to.

You have to watch out for him.

Most of the time, I don’t get what I’m after. I fight ’em to the ground and take away all their lies and evasions and bullshit and look into their eyes and they know they’re caught and they know I’m not buying their sad shit, and they get right there where they’re broken, they are going to spill, and then their eyes glaze over and they say it again:

“I didn’t do nothing.”


*


I wish I did better. I tell myself that there’s just some people who won’t confess no matter what kind of facts you have to confront them with. You could be standing there with them, they’ve got the guys severed head in their lunchbox, and they’ll just keep eating their sandwich and saying they don’t know what I’m talking about.

I can’t help it, though. I know that every time I fail to get the confession, I failed. It belongs to me, not somebody else.

*

In other news, when I left the house today to do some shopping at the Cookie Crock, my wife looks at me and says

“You look like a hit man.”

***

Night Ops

*

Last night I taught a little low-light shooting class. The Harries, Chapman, Rogers-Surefire, Marine Corps, Hargreaves, FBI, and Neck Index flashlight techniques.

You might think it’s pretty easy to hold a flashlight and a gun and hit what you’re aiming at.

It ain’t so.

Add to it that your own flashlight acts as a bullet magnet so you can only turn it on for a split second to identify your threat, then you have to shut it off and move somewhere else so when the bad guy tries to kill you, he’s shooting at where you were instead of where you are now, and it can get kind of complicated.

Plus, a dozen people running around in the dark with loaded guns where you can hardly see anything makes for a nervous instructing experience.

*

It was about the most fun I’ve had since I don’t know when.

Seeing the guys running and gunning, popping their lights on, making good hits, then scurrying to cover in the dark and popping out somewhere else, bang-bang, another bad-guy down.

Reloading in the dark. Clearing malfunctions.

Taking care of bidness.

Fucking awesome, is what.

***

Namaste.

***

dreamland

*

I was in a small house in the woods with my parents and my aunt and we were happy. Then, slowly, we noticed that we had begun to feel uneasy and we searched out the reason. It dawned on us that the house was rotating, like a very slow merry-go-round. For a while we stood at the windows and watched the world spin by.

We grew more uneasy.

It became apparent that the only thing we could do to save ourselves was to write down everything we could remember on great sheets of brown butcher paper, so we each got on the floor and began to scribble every moment of our lives down on these sheets of paper, the names of every person we’d met, our whole lives in each particular.

As we wrote, the house continued to spin, to unwind.


Branches came in through the windows and saplings sprouted in the floor and grew and soon we were all in separate corners of the house, scribbling alone, as the forest grew thicker in the house and the unwinding continued. Then I looked down at my sheets of paper and saw that one by one, line by line, everything we’d written down was erasing itself, fading into nothing.

At first I thought that we were dying, but then I realized that we were, of course, already dead, and then I understood what was really happening:

the world was forgetting us.

*

Namaste.

***

American Gothic

*

I already decided how to live my life.

But sometimes I catch a glimpse of my face reflected in a mirror and I see a grim looking dude.

Where’s his heart at?

Has he lost it along the way?

***

It strikes me because I think of myself as pretty happy. A balanced life, a deep appreciation for beauty and goodness and wildness and a refusal to shrink from the gritty business of it all.

So I see this mean son of a bitch, it sets me back on my heels.

I want to buy the guy a beer, put my arm around him, get him to loosen up.

*

But I am a nervous fellow, and grim in my particulars.

And as this morning’s yoga session pointed out to me, quite inflexible.

*

But I have made a salmon chowder and I have committed some art and for a brief moment our child is in the house and speaking to us and nothing is on fire or exploding.

So we count our blessings.

*

I am up to a brazillion so far.

***

Namaste to you.

*

The Library of Congress

*

So, a quiet day at home. Retrenching. Wound-licking, but only for a little while. Took the dog out to Lone Palm for a walk on the cliffs in the brilliant sunshine and cold wind and the scrubbed-world cleanliness feeling of the day after a storm.

Big white clouds in a blue sky. Andrew Wyeth scrub grasses and wind-tossed sparrows in them. Fat sea lions sunning on the wet black rocks and back-lit cormorants spreading their wings to dry above them.

Great crashing waves. A blue Heron that takes off lazily when the dog gets too close, four flaps of his wide, angular wings and he’s fifty yards away. A pair of egrets up on the hill in weddingdress white, unconcerned.

My own dark shadow on the ground in front of me, keeping a kind of company.

It is the best thing to do when your soul needs feeding.

Get thee to the sea.

*

My aunt was telling me about her practice. She lives on a Gompa up in the Northern California woods. She’s spent years in silent retreat, wrestling with her own dark adversaries.

Anyway, she’s doing this practice where she meditates on this woman with a necklace of skulls, a bowl made from the top of a human skull filled with sloshing red blood. Her fierce face is black and blue and she’s standing on a dead body, her ego. Big sword in her other hand, raised behind her head, ready to strike.

Ugly, fierce, deadly, monstrous.

Inside her heart is a small, beautiful goddess.

Buddha nature.

Her energy is awareness.

See it. Know it. Watch it all.

*

It’s not very smarmy.

I like it.

A lot.

*

I must have her tell me more about it.

*

Although my little ship of state got rocked pretty good the last few days, the leaks she sprung are small and I have already bailed out the bilge and picked up the books and foodstuffs that got strewn about the cabin and I’ve unbattened the hatches and I’m going topside now to hoist the main and get her back on course.

The goddamn storms are half the reason we go to sea, you know.

***

Namaste.

I am grateful to you for coming by and saying what you think.

May you be happy and at peace.

***

PS-

When my wife gets home, I’m taking her to the Library of Congress.

It’s my favorite library.

*

The Violent Bear it Away

*

Name me the foe and I will slay him.

****

Please do not point out to me that I am but a cut-out doll with a plastic sword.

****