Where The Magic Happens

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This is where I am sitting right now. This is command central. You can see our Sumo, and the sweater-vest chair wrap the woman on the verge made, and the rug that really ties the room together.

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This is Mickey and Sandburg’s Lincoln, both of which look over my shoulder as I type.

It’s only the war years, people. It’s not like I have all thirteen volumes.

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Okay, on the shelf above Mickey and Carl Sandburg are:

Blocks our friend Allene gave us for christmas with mad scientists and robots etched into the wood.
An African mask made of hide and animal quills perched on top of a glass vase.
A glass skull decanter filled with red dye number four and water.
A bronze buddha with it’s head JB welded back on, sent to us from the monk.
Above them all is Duane Kaiser’s tomato painting.

They all keep watch over me as well.

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dolltooth hangs over the television. she stands in the drawer of an ancient korean chest I nailed to the wall one day.

I nailed up the drawer, not the whole chest.

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And, yes, we have a television.

In our defense, it is not connected to broadcast T.V. or cable. It just gets Netflix instant streaming and odd DVD’s.

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Like we like.

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I wanted to post these photographs as a way of saying thank you to all of you for everything you bring to our lives.

I wanted to open up the door a bit and let you take a peek.

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Thank you. I’m damn glad you keep coming by.

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Namaste.

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I know I am indebted.

I am awkward about it.

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Keep Out

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You want a specific item to begin with.
The worn table against the wall in a slanted box of light.
Motes of dust in the air. Their erratic
movement.

Brownian motion.

Call it that for want of a name.
Why isn’t there a letter
on the table.

She didn’t write one.

Go to the blackboard and begin erasing.
Gone is the table, the slant of gold light,
the motes of dust.

Begin again.
This time with a scythe,
a long blade of steel on a wooden pole,
curved to fit the work.
Listen to the sound it makes
cutting through 
the tall grass.

The sigh of the grass as it falls.

After a while you find yourself
standing by the well
with a dipperful of water.
You taste the darkness of the well
and the clean bite of the water
and the hint of moss and moonlight.

You press your hands to your back
to soothe the ache there.
What is moving in the woods behind you.
A scrape and rustle in the underbrush.

Are you a bear. Are you a mule deer. A man
with a rifle.

Low down against the rim of the earth
the sky goes from yellow to purple.
You think of a woman you once knew.
Her dark hair like a waterfall of night
as it fell on her pale skin when she brushed it
of an evening.

If you had a hammer
you would know
what to do with your hands
but as it is
you just stand there.

Are you a bear. Are you a mule deer.
A dark shape in the woods.
Are you standing by the well.
Can you taste the moonlight in the iron colored water.

You could bear the loneliness better
if you had a name for the things of this world.






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Cahill Flew The Coop

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Quiet day. Rain-filled.

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A measure of peace, and solitude.

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It felt good to clean the house today. I’d not been attending to it the last few weeks. I don’t know what happens to me. I’m like a television that only gets one channel. If the cooking channel is on, you ain’t watchin’ nothin’ else.

Right now it’s the Drinking Channel marathon.

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Speaking of which.

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Namaste.

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PS-

Dinner is Bittman’s Spanish Tortilla, via Bobby Flay and yours truly.

Roasted pasillas and garlic and fried potatoes and onions and lots and lots of free-range eggs and salt and pepper and roasted poblano mother-sauce. And a small salad of bitter greens with a lemon-balsamic vinaigrette.

Add a tiny loaf of crusty bread.

Add a bottle of red wine.

While watching a documentary on India. And after, reading Patricia Churchland’s book on the neurological basis of ethics and morality.

Maybe I can work in some gunfighting and artwork in there somewhere.

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At The Last Ditch Attempt Saloon

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“Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won’t fix.”


Tom Waits
9th & Hennepin

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Today I stood around in the pouring rain doing a neighborhood canvas on a crime a week old because, well, because the FBI was involved, I think.

I’d thought I’d left that kind of detail behind ten years ago.

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My little gay thin leather dress shoes didn’t stand up to it too well.

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Then there was interviewing all the folks at the old folks home, asking them did they see or hear anything unusual in the middle of the night about a week ago?

I could write a goddamn book on that alone.

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If there is anything sadder or more beautiful than this life I don’t want to know about it.

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I fucking mean it.

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I don’t know how to feel about anything. Standing around in my suit, soaked to the skin, listening to a demented old lady who smelled like pee, pretending to write shit down, I felt like I wanted to kill everyone I’d ever known. Not that I was mad, not that at all.

I just wanted to spare us all.

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they are killing the everloving fuck out of cops this year.

I get up early every morning and work my pistol craft because, well, if you want to kill me? You better bring your A game.

I will goddam run you over if you don’t.

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I don’t need another drink, but I’m going to have it anyway.

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Namaste.

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Catching The Away Team

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Last night I made grilled chicken thighs in yogurt and aleppo pepper. The woman on the verge won’t eat birds, so I made the same dish with firm tofu for her. That didn’t seem like enough, though, so I made some braised country pork ribs in a coconut lime ginger sauce. Those ribs looked kind of lonesome floating around in the cast-iron skillet in all that coconutty goodness, so I threw in a couple of sliced up sweet potatoes. Then I made a three-grain rice thing with pine-nuts and golden raisins and saffron and garlic to pile everything on top of. Then I made Ezra’s spinach salad with sesame oil and soy sauce and sesame seeds and fuck me.

Then I plated the fuck out of that mess of goodness. Packed the three-grain rice blend into ramekins that I inverted over the plates so there was a beautiful pile of grains in a circular, robust shape on the clean white plate. Then I drizzled the yogurt/aleppo pepper sauce over the rice. Then I made a little circle around the rice with the coconut lime ginger sauce. Then I put a little pile of quick-pickled cucumbers against the rice. Tofu for her, chicken for me, a little bit of braised and seared pork maybe, maybe, for both of us. And the spinach salad. And wine. And vodka. And fuck me running.

I will be killed from this.

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Plus, the woman on the verge cleaned up after me, which was a gargantuan task.

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I don’t know about you fuckers, but I’m going down swinging.

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Namaste.

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Also, what the fuck? I do AWESOME art.

Seriously.

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Run and tell that.










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Mop Up Crew

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Yeah, things are shitty all over. But Fay’s
rocking her respirator with pearls.

We’re in good hands.

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Namaste.

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This Man Refused To Open His Eyes

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We’re all just waiting our turn.

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I don’t understand it. Something like eighty percent of all living things die before they get the chance to procreate. Even assuming that there isn’t any purpose to life other than keeping the machinery grinding along, that’s an awful lot of waste. I think about the seemingly endless parade of the dead who preceded us here, all those lives lived and now gone with barely a trace, numberless and faceless, gone, swallowed up like they’d never been. And that’s humans, nevermind the Neandertals and protohumans and the whole ascending line from prokaryote to me.

All of that? Just to arise and fall away again?

It seems like my life matters. To me it seems that way. Yet it doesn’t seem at all unusual to get born, live, and then die.

And still, I can’t conceive of ceasing to be.

Not really.

But I have seen so many dead people. An awful lot of suicides, and those left-behind bodies make it pretty concrete: you can check out any time you like.  It’s real, and permanent, and you don’t come back from that.

You don’t come back from any of it.

But I guess I won’t ever know a world without me in it. Right? I mean, as long as I’m alive, the world has me in it, and I’m able to comprehend it and place myself in it, and enjoy it, and think that in some form or other, reincarnation, bodily ascension to heaven, whatever, I’m free to speculate and believe whatever I like, because I’ll never be proven wrong.

Once I’m dead, the world and everything in it ceases to be for me.

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I kind of like the idea that I will never know a world without me in it.

Feels a little bit better.

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The rest of you?

I’m not so sure.

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As usual, I feel sick about my failures. I am a damn mystery to myself.

Why this stubborn refusal to be perfect?

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I know what I need to do.

Good luck getting me anywhere near it, though.

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Tonight I’m making a baked cod in a provencal style tomato sauce served on a slice of rustic bread, toasted and smeared with garlic and olive oil.

Think that’ll be good?

You bet.

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A word here about your friendship to me, and support, and love, and that is that I am humbled and befuddled and overwhelmed by it and greedy for it.

Another one of my flaws.

The greed part.

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Here’s a poem from Jack Gilbert that kind of puts a good face on it (if you have been reading here very long, it should be familiar):

GOING WRONG

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them.  “What can you know of my machinery!”
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
with rock and silence.” The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. “You have lived all year without women.”
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
“No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn.” The man slices
tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.










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Namaste.

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Love

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Last night we ate at The Cass House in Cayucos.

They do a four-course meal with a wine pairing for dinner. The restaurant is in a recently restored Victorian house that is run as a bed and breakfast. The food is fresh, local, organic, free-range, and individually chakra balanced for you before you eat it.

Holy shit, batman.

Warm, dark, intimate dining room, maybe a dozen tables. Views of the garden through the windows, and beyond that the sea. Candles, linens, dark wood, golden light, and everyone easy-going and mellow and happy and perfect in the way only Californians can be.

Started off with an amuse bouche our waiter called, “A Shot and A Bite.” A shot-glass sized serving of creamy leek soup, and a golden fried bite of crab claw with a dab of garlic aioli. Served with a glass of champagne, just to awaken our palates and send a serious warning signal to our bellies-

“Stand the fuck by.”

A salad of just picked garden greens on a disc of local chevre with roasted beets. A plate of house-cured meats- tongue, headcheese, sopressata, fresh ham, served with a pickled quails egg, mustard, and greens. Wild mushroom ravioli. Seared abalone steak on a bed of spinach. A pork dish with three bites of a tender loin and three bites of a braised leg concoction topped with pearl onions. Each dish accompanied by a different wine, reds and whites from all over the map, each one alive and dancing on the tongue and perfectly paired with the food and also new to us, exotic and off our beaten path and there was bread just made, tiny sourdough bites, and shot-glasses of a house made fennel soda I think, and chocolate opera cake and pots de creme and bourbon beignets and dessert wines and it lasted hours and I forgot the goddamn carbonara with fresh hand-made pasta and a golden egg yolk and cracked pepper and it was flawless and my beautiful wife was across the table enjoying herself, enjoying the incredible food and we were talking and talking about our life together, when we met and all we’ve done together and the goddamn food kept coming and the wine kept getting poured and there was just enough of a pause to catch your breath and sigh and wipe away a tear before the next plate was set down in front of you and I have never had the equal of that experience in all my life and it was good.

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The other night I dreamed that I had an audience with every spiritual leader, one after the other. Jesus Christ, The Buddha, Mohammed, Keanu Reeves, Shiva, Kali, Vishnu, The Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bob Dylan, Theodore Rothke, Mama Cass, Janice Joplin. One by one they spoke to me and answered my questions and explained the nature of reality and the meaning of life and then morphed into the next one in an unending parade and each one said the exact same thing and then one of them said, “Okay, now it’s your turn.” and then I was the spiritual King of Kings for a while and I said the same thing they had all said before me as I explained the nature of reality and the meaning of life to my supplicants, and then it was somebody else’s turn.

If only I knew what it was trying to say, I know it was trying to tell me something.






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Japan.

We cannot begin to imagine their pain and desolation.

not the first aspect of it.

despite what we’ve seen and know to be true about suffering.

how can we bear our good fortune in the face of this desolation?

must we safeguard it all the more, or let it go?

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So, the horror continues unabated. On scales both vast and intimate, lives are destroyed and the hope of good people is crushed and the dreams of the innocent are set aflame on a sea of anguish and despair.

And none to be spared.

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Nor ourselves.

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In “The Adjustment Bureau” there is a scene where the lovers have run to the end of the road and the forces that want to destroy them and destroy their love have surrounded them and in that last second they turn away from their destroyers and to each other and they say “I love you” and they kiss.

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If we are to suffer and be slain, let us be together in it.

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Namaste.

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crash landing

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You just never know when the curtain will be torn asunder, and you are left gaping at the terrible truth of the world just as it is.

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Namaste. May you be spared.

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The Bee Keeper’s Saint

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Is there any real difference between me and anything else? Am I separate from the world? Do I stand apart from it?

Sometimes I believe that I do.

But I am more and more convinced that this feeling is a side-effect of my conscious mind. I am beginning to see my body as intertwined with the world around it, integrated and integral to the whole. I live my life just like a bee in a hive, dancing to the music of physics and biology, awash in a cascade of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, electrical charges, a seething sea of physiological triggers and responses to data input from a sensory system designed to keep almost everything out because there is simply too much information for any biological system to utilize it all, and everything I do is automated, determined by the laws of physics and the limits of my own processing power, and my conscious experience of this is further circumscribed radically by the narrowing and winnowing of even the tiny trickle of information that penetrates the sensory organs, because, really, I can’t pay conscious attention to how my liver processes toxins in my bloodstream, can’t track consciously the state of every system, organ, tissue, and cell in my body, nor the numberless ways they interact, individually and systemically, so I am left a prisoner inside a tiny cell through which only a little light makes its way, and inside that cell I am also sitting inside an even smaller locked box which is my conscious experience of the world, and in that tiny box I don’t get any raw data at all, but just a kind of cartoon show put on for my by my own brain, a show that is sufficient for me to have a sense of being alive and of interacting with an environment, but that is no more reflective of what’s “really out there” than a child’s drawing of a house, and of course it’s no wonder that I am all the time making errors about the true nature of reality. I haven’t the first clue. And I need my tiny cell, and the box I’m in inside of that, because if you dumped “me” into the raw data it wouldn’t make any sense at all to me. It would be the same as nothingness, the ground of being.

It’s important to remember that everything I feel and think and believe and experience and hope for or dread is, on a very real and tangible level, a fantasy, a trick played on me by my brain.

Isn’t it?

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Maybe it isn’t.

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But I can’t shake this feeling that I am a bee in a hive. The same systems are at work in my body and the body of the bee. The exact same systems. The same physical laws rule us both. Our DNA is the same, just ordered a tiny bit differently. Maybe I have a richer interior life, but maybe not. Maybe it’s the other way round. Like life in a hive, my life is ceaseless activity that seems mindless at one scale, makes sense on another scale, then goes back to mindless seeming on a yet larger scale.

My emotions are regulated by the same biochemical processes that drive respiration or reflex movement.

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Maybe that means that the terrible things I feel and experience are not terrible in and of themselves.

Maybe the good ones, too.

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But that’s not my experience of them.

Nor can it be.

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Good things are good. Terrible things are terrible.

I’m willing to live with this belief, even if it’s wrong.

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Namaste.

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