Forty Days of Fire Forty Days of Rain

Kindle This: Decade long e-book quest is print-on-demand cautionary tale

2010-02-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

Kindle This: Decade long e-book quest is print-on-demand cautionary tale

2009-05-15T06:45:00.001-07:00

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2009-03-23T10:22:00.001-07:00

Mythville

2008-07-24T05:26:00.000-07:00

Mythville

2008-07-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

“Riot, n., a popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.”
-- Ambrose Bierce, the Devil’s Dictionary

Just listening to a few lines of conversation from a recent meeting at Capitol Hill’s Gypsy House Café made it as clear as the view of the nearby gold dome could be easily found around the corner, if you cared to walk, that is, or of beautiful downtown Denver, all to be dressed up very soon like a $50 million red, white and especially blue bag of chips — or, if you prefer, the view of the nearby head shop: Re-Create 68 defies definition. Pin down Re-Create 68’s purpose? Try pinning down smoke.
Surely it’s not an organization. Not when its whole raison d’etre is to question authority, which pretty much precludes the act of organizing. Nor, for that matter, can it be defined as a lobbying group, considering that each member seems to have a different idea of what message it’s trying to convey. That is especially frustrating for those among us, especially in the media, who seek easy answers in order to write headlines.
Especially big headlines. Such as “Denver to Riot! See you there!”
Perhaps it could be at least loosely defined as a production company to encourage performance art. The meetings due seem to be, to the great disappointment of those headline writers, and the denizens of the outward blogosphere, more ready to cast protest in the light of a festivarian glee. To those in the middle, stuck in their easy chairs, watching all, clucking their tongues, its members seem to have some sort of common goal that involves getting people to drop out of their 21st century lives in order to come to Denver during the Democratic National Convention and replicate the turbulent druggy-leftist-protest-music-inspired lifestyle practiced 40 years ago.
But really, it’s just a bunch of people who, rather than rushing home to water their lawns or preen in their SUVS in the suburbs ... just not-so-plain folks, controvertionaries, who were actually paying attention.
“Re-create 68 is just a bunch of groups together and individuals. I didn't start it, nor am I a member,” said one of its meeting-goers, Jill Dreier, who is an organizer for the Visualized Film Festival in Denver. “I organize a film festival and used to be part of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace ... so from those groups, I know a lot of people, including the R-68 folks.”
Perhaps the Gypsy House Café itself offers some clues. Women in hints of gypsy garb, most of it slummed out to the basic tune of what you can now get pretty freely in the resale shops up and down Colfax Avenue, with perhaps a piece of two purchased at the nearby Cherry Creek Mall ... just maybe, maybe ... men in bleak-chic anarchistic looking black T-shirts, short-cropped hair, soccer moms and men in ponytails mix amiably as sitar music plays and members of the Denver Police Department stroll by, unobtrusively taking photographs.
Hey, where’s the tie-dye? What? No one calls anyone a “pig?” Where are the familiar boundaries we can trust, the old division the division between “us” and “them.” Where are the assurances that this is just some kind of cliche. And that, at least, the re-appearance of its roough best to serve as notice that, like it or not, ’68 is back in Denver, perhaps bigger than ever.
During their orderly meetings in the café’s basement, the group’s core, er, “people,” have sought to reignite the antiwar ethos of 1968, organizing events for a “mass mobilization” during the convention. There is no rabble, maybe a ramble of two. But if you really want a rabble, go cover the San Miguel County Commissioners in the high-priced echelons of Telluride for some real gripe and grinners. They seem to be about as radical as the Town Council there.
Anyone seeking a clearer definition might consider visiting the group’s Web site, www.recreate68.org. There, one can learn that Re-Create 68 represents “the grassroots movement opposed to the two-party system,” is a “convergence center for the antiwar movement” and has an agenda that includes everything left-leaning, from fighting poverty to bringing the troops back home. Environmentalism, too, but there’s still actually some faith in politics here.
Maybe you can turn the Titanic around in four years, eight, tops?
Among many, however, Re-Create 68 has become the hobgobblin of dysturbian anxiety.
As a result, the Re-Create 68 people have spent a lot of time lately trying to deal with dissent within their own loose-knit ranks as other liberal groups and activist organizations reject whatever it is that Re-create 68 stands for. That is to say, what the media says they stand for. The scary thing they have to say. The quick thing easy to rail against before you click off Uncle Bill to catch up on some reality TV in order to get a load off and feel better.
All politics is local, ‘tis said. This is no different. Earlier last month, eight left-leaning groups — the American Friends Service Committee, Code Pink, Colorado Street Medics, the Green Party, Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Students for Peace and Justice and United for Peace and Justice — announced they were splitting with Re-create 68 and forming a new coalition, the Alliance for Real Democracy. Such is the business of politics: Gyres winding in and out.
Re-create 68 co-founder Glenn Spagnuolo said it’s strange for groups to resign, considering that there’s no membership. It’s like going on Facebook.com and quitting one of many groups, such as the Rolling Stones network, to give the appearance you once played for the actual band. The participation from the other groups, he said, has been limited to dropping in on Re-create 68’s open gatherings, which usually draw about 20 or 30 people. For example, members of the Green Party came in a few times, then left, never really got involved.
But then came heap big headlines, assuring stuff to say, hell yeah, the center can hold. But, as far as it goes with the Green Party, or this other rainbow coalition of orgs, mostly driven by pushing for people to come from the outside toward Denver: “They were never part of Re-create 68,” Spagnuolo said. “Their groups reach a different audience than us. There are just multiple coalitions reaching different groups. We think that’s great.”
Green Party chair Claire Ryder, speaking for herself rather than on behalf of the Green Party, said that after attending several meetings she’d decided to stop going because she didn’t feel the group allowed everyone to be heard.
“I didn’t agree with the way they organize, and the name was chosen before anybody got a chance to participate,” she said. “It’s run by three people.”
Again, county commissioner boards come to mind: But it’s really not that simple.
Ryder also said she didn’t care for the way the group’s activities have been characterized in the media. Who would, if you were inside, looking out. Now the members of Recreate ‘68 have to put themselves through the rigors of “talking to the media” training sessions in order to keep from further fanning these so-called fire of Orc.
“The conflict is what the story is about now,” she said. “The big thing is the violent or nonviolent thing. It has been reported in the press that way. I don’t want to be a part of that conversation.”
It is, of course, the choice of the name “Re-Create 68” that causes people to visualize Denver’s streets filled with tear gas and billy-club-wielding police during the last week in August. The resonance to Chicago 1968’s Democratic National Convention, turns out, was a somewhat doubled-edge sword.
And there are those who seem ready to act out such a scenerio. Especially the police, who are planning for the chance to arrest around 3,000 people, and who are going to look pretty damn silly, after arguing for all of that budget money, if they don’t actually fill up that hotel from hell.
If a comment posted recently on a Rocky Mountain News blog is to be believed, at least one person is “Getting ready for the anticipated and promised R-68 assault. Let’s hope the National Guard is prepared to deal with arson.” Arson, of course ... ding dang ... there has actually been no table set up plan made for how to commit arson, the Rush Limgaugh crowd might be disappointed to find.
Such saber-rattling wasn’t even actually behind Apri’s announcement from Tent State University that it wants no ties to Re-create 68.
The group describes itself at Tentstate.com as a “Coalition of Projects in Pursuit of Democracy.”
“We were never a part of Re-create 68,” said Adam Jung a University of Denver student who serves as the group’s Colorado spokesperson. “We severed ties because the media had married us together, and the messaging was incompatible.”
See these words?
“Media.”
“Messaging.”
“Incompatible.”
As in, watch and learn ...
Spagnuolo, however, says the groups had been linked, but there are no money trails here. No special sections to produce. And since the troubles of the world are so diverse, nothing the logic choppers can real get their minds around.
Of the Tent State thing, yeah, sure, not even the left-of-the-left of center can hold these days for very long. “That’s a group where there has been a split,” Spagnuolo said. “There was a falling out, and we admit that. For them to say, though, that they weren’t a part of our effort is ridiculous. They clearly were. They even participated in one of our early press conferences.”
Still, Spagnuolo is willing to concede that the members of Tent State “were drawn in by … issues over name, and issues about how nonviolent we (actually) were. But we support nonviolent groups and we still support them.”
Tent State, of course, could’ve have been accused of casting the some sort of resonating flames from a bad die gone by, the Kent State shootings that inspired Neil Young’s classic, “Ohio,” but who’s counting?
Not the mainstream media. They are always going to glorify the dissent within the dissent, rather than the real way business works under the Golden Dome of Rome: Just follow money, it flows toward authority, to the right. Like the Demos could even think clear enough with Hillary and Obama banging in out, to come up with any comprehensible copy, for say a special section to run in the local state political gossip sheet, the Colorado Statesman, like the Republican party was able to do for its own state delegate convention. Follow the money, indeed ...
Re-create 68 also had been disinvited from using a tent designated for demonstrators during the convention, it was announced at a R-68 meeting in May. But at at Re-create ‘68 meeting, some of that news was regarded with a happy challenge. At least there was something within target range they could actually break through.
Fellow co-founder Barbara Cohen says Re-create 68’s early “successes,” as she put it, haven’t helped its image. That includes drawing the attention of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh seized on the name, saying he “welcomed” the notion of riots during the convention and was “dreaming” that they’d happen, exclaiming, “Riots in Denver! The Democratic Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.”
When critics charged that Limbaugh was inciting listeners to riot, radio station KOA, which carries the show, issued a statement saying, “A review of the full transcript from Limbaugh’s show on Wednesday, April 23, shows that Limbaugh was not advocating violence in Denver at the Democratic National Convention, but trying to make the point that if there were riots in Denver, it would hurt the Democrats’ chances of winning the 2008 presidential election.”
The controversy thrust Re-create 68 into the spotlight as the focus of liberal anxiety and conservative glee and helped make Spagnuolo a darling of the radio talk show circuit.
It also has led the three co-founders, Spagnuolo, Barbara Cohen and her husband, Mark Cohen, to assert that the anti-war movement during the breakout year of protests against the Vietnam War is the real source of their inspiration in naming the group.
“We all agreed the name would get attention, but it’s not re-create Chicago ’68, but re-create the year 1968,” said Barbara Cohen, a longtime local peace activist who, with her husband, was a plaintiff in the famous Denver “Spy Files” lawsuit after police targeted the couple as “criminal extremists.”
“We are an umbrella group that is trying to get the other umbrella groups together ... from every political stream,” she said. “We’ve worked with progressive Democrats, anarchists, Green Party members, everybody working together to put on nonviolent events.”
Spagnuolo says he also wishes the media would characterize Re-create 68 not as a group of rabble-rousers, but rather as an alliance of leftist dissenters that’s trying to get the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee to commit to bringing the war in Iraq to a speedy halt.
The group has recently obtained hard-fought permits to demonstrate during the DNC. During those demonstrations, rather than rioting, Spagnuolo says the group plans peaceful protests of what they characterize as Barack Obama’s “toned-down” anti-war rhetoric.
Spagnuolo says the new tack indicates Obama is moving his political position “more to the center, in order to get votes.”
If Re-Create 68’s most ambitious hope is to denounce Obama’s move the center, it’s hard to believe the group will draw down the National Guard. Nevertheless, Spagnuolo believes Denver’s government is stocking up on anti-riot weaponry and is itching to use it.
Spagnuolo alleges Denver has purchased such devices as a ray gun to send microwave pulses into a crowd, creating an extremely uncomfortable heat sensation, and an acoustic device that bounces sonic waves off crowds to induce stomach distress.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the city for access to public records related to the purchase of security-related equipment, Spagnuolo said, but the city, “will neither confirm nor deny whether they have purchased these weapons” for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
In response to a request filed by the ACLU under the Colorado Open Records Act seeking disclosure of the records, the city’s Department of Safety records coordinator, Mary Dulacki, denied their release on the grounds that disclosure “was contrary to the public interest” and because “it could potentially disclose tactical security information.”
Whether or not they’ve been purchased, Spagnuolo says even the rumor of such devices has sent a chill to groups planning demonstrations.
“They are trying to build up paranoia to make people afraid to come out and execute their constitutional rights,” Spagnuolo said. “I think the city should be embarrassed with their actions to date ... It’s going to leave a lasting black eye, the way they view people who protest as a criminal element.”
City officials have attempted to quell this type of criticism by announcing parade routes for public marches and promising to process parade permits promptly.
In a written statement, Katherine Archuleta, senior policy and initiative adviser to Mayor John Hickenlooper, recently stated, “We’ve been working to enable organizations with diverse viewpoints and agendas to have access to a safe and visible parade route for the purpose of public expression.”
The notice coincides with an agreement reached with the ACLU, which on May 1 had filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on the behalf of groups seeking improved access to certain areas for public expression.
But Spagnuolo, who has been a Denver resident for seven years but cut his activism teeth on the streets of New York, isn’t convinced.
“This city doesn’t want its $50 million party interrupted,” he said. “They feel like this will tarnish the Democratic Party.”
National and local media outlets have been quick to jump on such statements.
For example, in January, 9News political analyst Floyd Ciruli said: “If they actually do turn Denver into Chicago, there’s a very good chance they will turn off the voters. It could be directly counterproductive to what they would like to do.”
Yet, back in the real space of the Gypsy House Café, the only violence under consideration was dealing with Pieface, a relic hippie activist they think might try to hit Oprah Winfrey in the face with a pie.
If Re-Create 68 actually is a front for subversives working under Limbaugh, things must be tougher than they seem in the right-wing military-industrial cabal. Cohen announced to the circle that the group had a mere $1,600 in its antiwar chest. An early plan to have people show their support by underwriting portable toilets for protesters just hadn’t panned out as successfully as the PBS “All Things Considered” had reported. The size ... the size of things ... they are seem to depend upon the distance they are seen from.
But for the geriatric set, the Boomers, who clearly have the practical real world in mind, they clearly have such important questions to ask regarding the survival of the human race as: Has no time been “wasted,” buzzed in some Statesman editor from her office hotbox, stressing in the addressing of the hygienic or other bodily needs of the estimated “thousand to 100,000” demonstrators who actually might hitchhike into Denver in August “wearing headbands, bellbottoms and beads, bearing flowers and protest signs, and taking an occasional mellow toke as they flash the peace sign.”
(That same editor tried to insert those same lines into this same similar report ...)
But it didn’t work, just like the economy, or, the war machine doesn’t seem to work right anymore: Instead, the group discussed presentations, film fests and which bands to book. You know, stuff to keep the people outside the castle walls enterained while the real deals are made at the DNC.
As the meeting broke up, Spagnuolo was asked if he thinks Re-create 68 will bring a repeat of the rioting and violence that gripped Chicago during the 68 convention.
“That will be up to the Denver Police Department,” he said. “Any violence would be at the hands of the Denver Police Department.
“I’m more worried about people being killed in Iraq in my name,” he said. “The local media has branded us (as violent agitators) because it’s what sells. But there’s nothing sexy to report when people’s constitutional rights are being violated.”
And if he’s a radical, he’s an equal opportunity opponent of the two-party system. When asked if he’d also be protesting at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul in September, he said, “I will be if I’m not still in jail.”

Exile from Iowa Part I

2006-10-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

It starts with a big bang on a motel room door in Scottsdale, Arizona, where things like this aren’t supposed to happen. Or, at least, they are rare. Or, at least, they have never happened exactly like this before. After you have been in enough cheap motels, after all, if you are real good at pattern recognition, which is really less of a science more like a, well, instinctive thing, you can pretty much trust the bizarre nature of a particular event as worth noting. In this case, the hotel room bursts open, waking you from your sleep at about midnight. Suddenly you are awake, your head is spinning, the door is open, your girl is gone, and so is your dog. So is your weed. Everything that gave you solace during the course of that ridiculous day is missing, in fact, and the noise outside your door is a weird sort of rumbling of bodies flying against each other, rude noises, angry sounds of men in some kind of heat of anger. Some kind of riot is going on outside your door, which has burst open. There is a big dog bark, maybe two big bellowing big dog barks, for just a moment, but then that’s gone, too, and the shouting of men in heat remains as sound waves of thumping and women wimpering cascades around you. Your first thought, O. is missing, she is missing, your girl is missing, and these two things, the absence and the melee, are somehow related. So you venture out your door, and what you see in in the surreal night light, the luxury night light of Scottsdale, in a parking lot with a great big high end department store logo glow in the background of your sight, a pretty place where perfect people shop and corporate America plunders ... in this soft spacious parking lot where many mall-dressed trophy wives have carried their bags in and out of the mall, and where touristas have parked their many cars, too, since it’s officially a Motel 6 parking lot, in Scottsdale of all places, there is a kind of cyclonic motion of men in tuxedos and women in white wedding dresses thumping on someone, apparently a black man with knotty hair. By this time, the contagion of wild violence is rolling away from your door, down the Motel Six sidewalk in front of the rooms, between the parked cars in the door, and they are wailing away on the guy, in the light. Then the cop cars come, and they have dogs, too, and they are barking. Then the cops look at you, with your mouth agape, asking you if you belong here, asking you if you are missing anything, and you say no, lying, of course, because you never tell the strange cop the strange sad inner truth of what you are thinking: Your girlfriend is missing. So is your dog and so is your pot. You deny your very deepest worry because you think, well, hell, they all must be related, right?
I relate this little Kodak moment to you, right now, from another cheap motel room in a place called Bushland, Texas. Really, it’s a place to the west of Amarillo. And these two places, the Motel 6 in Scottsdale, and this anonomoplace in Texas, because they are uniquely related, too. Through me and now, as you read this, through you. You are now being impacted, in some slight way, at least, by the wedding riot outside the door of the Motel 6 and by yes, the fact it has an impact on me.
In the time since the wedding riot, all I have really learned is the insurgents were all from out of town, and they were beating up some guy because some $3,000 wedding gift got broken. There were several arrests. If you wanted to, you could go to the Scottsdale police station and get the facts. There must be a real interesting story there about that riot. You could piece it together and make a movie out of just that. But I won’t, because I’m in a cheap motel room in Texas right now, and that event may have just as well been a hurricane, and I’ll bet all of those Katrina victims never watched much on TV during those one-year anniversary specials because they were probably just trying to deal, all the same, with the impacts of the storm. That’s me, in a nutshell. Just trying to deal with the impact of the storm.
The storm is in my head now. It has cigarrette smoke for clouds. The low pressure reading is in the chest, at the flatland level of worry. Cattle trucks are searing down the highway right now and this is one of those authentic Kerouac-like moments that maybe you wish you could experience, too, but, dear reader, I wouldn’t recommend it. Oh sure, your girl and your dog and your weed eventually returned to that Motel 6, and the riot and the disappearance were, as it turned out, unrelated. Maybe. Maybe. What can you trust anymore, anyway, based on the apparent lack of information. All you know is that Saturday, a week ago, my whole enchilada was thrown into the air, and I’m not sure how or why. I know I have been lied too, by either the dog or the weed or O. Who knows?
I know I have been lied to in Bushland. I can trust that, at least. But that’s another subject. The straightforward reason for this dissertation is how it actually launched a rather impromptu road trip from Scottsdale, Arizona, to a place called Morning Sun, Iowa. That’s about 1,200 miles. It’s got to be that distance, but honestly, I have rarely looked at the map throughout this entire trip. I know this country pretty well, by now, and one thing I’ve noticed that as big as it is, it’s getting smaller all of the time. But, for the sake of the honest novel and the need for plain simple record keeping, let’s just keep this epic tale in the time frame of this road trip, and just let the lessons of life creep in.
Such as: If dog is man’s best friend, there are limits to this friendship, and therefore, a dog’s, um, fidelity. Because in this case the dog remained away for the rest of the night. And when O. came back from her mysterious journey that night, you spent the next 12 hours trying to explain, how, exactly, the dog got away, and why, exactly, you have so many questions of her whereabouts for the Saturday in question. Eventually, the dog returned to the very same parking lot at about 10 a.m. Arizona time that following Sunday, acting like, hey, I’m back, where are all of the bad guys now? O. and I are delirously happy at the return of the dog. But folks, there’s just this plain fact now, whatever happened the night before, if it was enough to send a dog the size of a camel running around Scottsdale in terror, it was certainly enough to send me, the dog, and O., the Exile of From Iowa, hurling at high speeds onto the continent in a generally northeasterly direction toward Iowa, where O. was born.

2006-07-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

23 Roads to Mythville
An apocalyptic journey across America and meditation on the imposition of order in space, both cyber and dirt real. By experiential author Douglas McDaniel, who explores the mysteries of American networked life. Read more

Ipswich at War
A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, poet and essayist Douglas McDaniel moved to Ipswich, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. A collection of poems from that period of fear and anxiety, as well as the polemic essay, "Media Arts and War."
Read more

Glasnost Lost
As an act of defiance after the botched election of 2000, experiential author launched himself into a journey into the underworld of American life, or, what he calls: The Science of Descent. Read more

Godz, Cars & Cannon
Experiential author Douglas McDaniel launches drives into the networked thickets of American life, looking for signs of myth and romance in the age of automotive machines.
Read more

Many Moons the Mythville: The Collected Road Poems
Poetry written during a 10-year span of criss-crossing America in a roving-eye view of the turn-of-the-century landscape of Mythville, or, as the author puts it: "It's all a bunch of Mythville." With work from four separate books by Arizona-based author and poet Douglas McDaniel, the bard-inspired voices of Milton, Blake and Yeats, as well as the saturnine streak of early beat poesy, ring through this collection of poems and essays. From the southwestern deserts to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, "Many Moons to Mythville" is a foot-to-the-floor blast through the mythical roads of American life.
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Human Search Engine

The journey continues as the quest for myth in an age of information overload leads to online life as an editor for Access Internet Magazine. A story about all human search engines as they chase the ghost in the machine.
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William Blake in Cyberspace

Experiential author Douglas McDaniel takes on the visionary art and poetry of William Blake, comparing an otherworldly worldview to that revolutionary, romantic era to our own wild, wired, mythic world.
Read more

The Kachina's Son

Poems about the Four Corners area written while author Douglas McDaniel was living in Telluride, Colorado.
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The Road to Mythville
A collection of poems on the new millennium in America, drawing from decade of bouncing across the country as a journalist and Kerouac-style poet, from the Southwestern deserts to the shores of New England and back again.
Read more

Rio Grande Wind

2006-04-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

Storms battered parts of Texas with wind up to 100 mph and hail the size of baseballs, damaging buildings and slamming parked airplanes into one another at an airport.

No serious injuries were reported Saturday, but two horses were killed when what appeared to be a tornado swept through a Waco ranch and flattened some barns and a two-story home. At least six other horses — all belonging to Baylor University's equestrian program — were injured, the school said.

"When you have winds from 80 to 100 mph it can do damage similar to that of a tornado," said Jesse Moore, a meteorologist with the

National Weather Service. "That can do some very, very big damage."

"Think Surface, Wallpaper"

2006-04-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

And that's the situation with the magazine business in Phoenix, all expressed oh so confidently by Desert Living editor David Tyda, who was trying to elucidate what kind of fill goes between the ads at his publication.

Print journlalism in America is so far removed from the First Amendment it can scarcely raise a mute defense against "surface, wallpaper." The skin-deep marketplace dictates all. Economic forces shape the printed word in order to appear before the overpopulated media frenzy to promote "surface, wallpaper."

My first thought, immediately looking at the "wallpaper" round the offices of Desert Living, tucked into the rococo renaissance of gilded logos at the Esplanade, where even Donald Trump gets shown the door, was to ponder what kind of lives go on there for those covered in wallpaper. If I cared to take the time to do a study, I would examine what kind of flora adorns the Esplanade: As above, so below, the sages say. The desert has been eradicated for many miles, so this shiny coated surface is a curtain of death, for all I can ascertain. The "surface" and "wallpaper" represents everything sucking the planet dry.

If you had read this far, certainly, you need little convincing of this. But it's worth railing on, all the same. That's because behind it all, there's something to live for. There's something valuable to know behind the notice that you can't drink from fountains. There's something valuable in casting a review of the song cast by the Vampire, who's sucking sounds ring loud and clear.

The Biltmore shopping mall, across the street, is one big mirror of surface and wallpaper. Notice the mall-dressed manikin chicks as they glance at themselves, half secretly, in the window shop reflections. To see my own reflection is to live in a kind of torment myself. I can't even laugh at the shallowness of "surface, wallpaper," if that's all I'm looking for. So trying to figure out how to fill in the spaces between the ads is a pretty pointless event, I see. Anyone with a global conscience is going to feel that way, if asked to observe the surface of high-end consumer paradise, and by swimming in these dry environs they will no doubt be likewise lost in the despair, hopelessness and banality cast by the controlling mechanisms of the ruling cast.

The Vampire sings: "Think surface, think wallpaper." All platform surfaces are even, yes, safe for high-heeled beings, but there is nothing eternal about the surface of concrete. And this is really, really valuable to know. Forget about trying to keep up by putting on new Euro-trash clothes. Forget about getting a free drink of water. Realize that if you are thirsty, you can always slip into some men's room and cup your own hands in the sink, like Pilot, I guess, and drink from the basin bowl of "surface," enjoying the "wallpaper" as you blow your hands dry on the electrified blower (this is the desert, there's not a free water fountain within 10 square miles; and you would think we could save the juice and let ourselves dry naturally.

Somewhere in the Middle East there's a bunch of crazies dreaming up a way to crash this surface and burn the wallpaper. But they are no better than the guys dialing up dollar digits to make sure the enemy surface, doesn't gain supremacy so that they, themselves, can cover it with their own name brand style of "wallpaper."

So sip from your tippy cup, sweet babies, and hope you are born with the right pattern and style on your faces. Hope your fathers won't turn their backs on you. Hope the bread and water you are fed doesn't toxify your brains. Drink up the gasoline on the car ride to buy more wallpaper. Tip the cup of vampire blood. Drink. Drink. Your mangled engines may wine and dine, and the pretty glossy sweet dalllied lies may glint for a month on your tabletop surface, but seek no truth there, just empty descriptions of "surface, wallpaper."

Yeah, it's all vanity. We know. We know. But if you see beyond it, there's the sun behind the artificial sun, eh?

Babylon By Bus

2006-04-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

If you take the bus along the full stretch of Camelback Road in Phoenix, the dislocation of humanity is so apparent, it hurts. The heat, the brain, and especially the eyes shake with each bump on the road. Especially if you aren't looking ahead with the right kind of frantic gaze. Indeed, no one is happy on the bus. Bus riders, like the meek that will never inherit the earth, live in a world of envy as a planet of automobiles speeds by, from the Hummer ship adorned in chrome to the Amerimexican jallope, which, for all its smoking stink and bellowing bass, appears to be a Cinderella's carriage for somebody else's perfect dream.
You can begin in the glittering canyon of high-end finance at 24th Street and Camelback, the area known as the Biltmore, and you can head west and descend into the valley of disenfranchised tribes. No one is more derelict than the bus driver, of course, who is the brain center for one of the biggest and noisiest robots to rove the land. There are the giggling latino girls, all dressed in black, the heavyset moms carrying their babies, the wiry old black men in ballcaps, the strung out, methed-up metalheads, the heat-beat white hicks in black beards, who smell so bad everyone else can only be reminded they are nothing but cattle, as members of the meandering mass, not even parts of the Machine, just parts, loose, crooked and real, all demonstrating the relative ineffectiveness of America the Database to round up everything alive and swallow it whole.
On this trip, the most professorial looking chap, carrying a large black bag, has sharp features and a close-cropped haircut. He appears to be the most ready to walk into some place and start doing something that means something, but then he surprises us all when he pulls out a half-full fifth of Jack Daniels, throws back a swig, and then jumps off the bus at a stop below a freeway overpass.
Stoicism is the norm on the bus. Gregarious behavior is dangerous, a sign of sheer lunacy. You are at risk if you carry cigarettes because you are socially obligated to give them out. If you don't, well then, you are less than worthy and therefore a target: depending on how dark it is. Malice is possible when you wait for the bus.
Among the hierarchy of the low, a cell phone is an insulating sign that hey, somebody actually cares about you. The cell phone ring on the bus is a cure for temporary loneliness, a cure for the impatience created by multiple stops, the drag, the malaise of movement, the malodorant, the dispossessed.
Once you cross Central Avenue, moving west, the construction zone for a light rail future for this town can be seen. That product of political shennanigans, which blows everything away in its path, beneficial as it may or may not be, reminds us all that we, the riders of the bus, are only candidates for more of the same. Though every citizen should ride the bus to save the planet, this good will is not so. The autos have won the day and therefore, the planet sinks into cloudy darkness and soon the Venetian wind will blow as life on the bus is a slow, dull, stretch reminder of the eternal road to nowhere.

Glasnost Lost

2006-04-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

A full 61 days after the Floridian dimpled chads were rendered null and void after the year 2000 presidential election in the United States of America, the bad ju ju arrived in Telluride, Colorado, the inevitable do-drop-in of the foul and gassy assassin perched, with a long, long rifle, on the Grassy Knoll of our times. As well as this: Sun spots. Solar storms. War. Winds. Muses, everywhere, muses galore, spinning wild tales as the electromagnetic energy, the very undulation of the earthen core, spun like an out-of-control compass. The first icy thaw of the Dot-Com Bust. Lightning? A load. The Skull & Crossbones War entering the planning stages. Global polarities red-shifting outward, great heaving seas getting colder, deeper; the air, warmer. The warlords, sharpening their knives, sharpening their stones. The Dead rising from their graves. The good spirits returning as the Ghost Dancers had promised. Dogs and cats, living together. Dubya taking his desk as the newly anointed Napoleonic National Executioner. And this: The Savage Pilgrim was fired from his job at the local bakery. This after joking with the owner that he should be sued for selling the locals bad milk. The Pilgrim exercised his free speech, and then paid for what a donut hole really costs. In other words, he was out in the cold in a resort town, in winter, at 8,700 feet above sea level.
Next, he wandered up the street on Colorado Avenue on a sun-drenched spring-like day -- despite it being February at 9,000 feet in the Rockies -- and commiserated with the rest of the high-life wannabe denizens of town, all of who were happy for him and sunning themselves on the smoker's bench in front of the Screaming Bean Cyber Cafe. Still, it hurts. This much we know about the Pilgrim. He's both sensitive and dysfunctional, a canary in the coleslaw mine. That the bad thing can come this far up the hill, isolated as they are in the southern Rockies, only goes to show how deeply entrenched the Machine Mind is on the American landscape.
But, recovery of what's lost is not only possible, it's inevitable. And under the right conditions, the transformation can take place in a blink of an eye.
"I'm getting over it already," the Savage Pilgrim says in movie star sunglasses, wide-open shirt collar and his patented leather pants, shiny as black licorice in the bright sun. "But it's a personal thing. It's the kids. The betrayal. I can understand ... but I cannot ... He gave me a check that said 'zero.' It was just being totally mean."
He hunched down in his seat, back in the glaze of the rejected. Looking at him in a slump of leather pants and mushed hair, it was easy to see how a Pharaoh might react. The Pilgrim, a creative genius with film scripts spinning their way up the food chain in Manhattan, is rendered null and void by the mere failure to fit in as a grunt laborer. He was fired by a man who, by all reports and my own understanding of the story. He was fired by a man who, despite being a devotee of mountain music Americana and a solid citizen in Telluride as entrepreneur and wise political player, is also a cutthroat mine boss of the 33rd degree, the very worst kind of low-paying capitalist exploitation creep. Another former Baked employee, a waster of time and scammer on the streets, now lives in the woods this winter. After being fired for giving free pastries from a throwaway bin to other street people, or "woodsies," one of the many who live in a network of yurts and small cabins nestled in the higher elevations.
A whole sub-culture of people inhabits these places, a Walden Pond ethos. Of course, the Savage Pilgrim is a city slicker, which means he prefers to "couch surf," yet another way to live free or die in Telluride. Sure, it's springy and warm and a guilty pleasure since everything points to still more global catastrophe, but it's colder than hell at night at 10,000 feet in southwestern Colorado.
"Fired from Baked," the Savage Pilgrim groans. "This is what happens when you go to work with leather pants."
OK, OK, it has been well established: They burn their witches everywhere. This is the way of the world, and others have already established that free speech in America is a crock. What's more deeply concerning is the fact that, even in utopia, the very worst are full of passionate efficiency.
Mere donut holes loosed upon the world.

~
The California Zephyr, which crashed the winter of 2001, was a happy enough ride for myself a month before, but then Amtrak is always a little dicey. Even my own safe trip was not without grim possibilities, or, even, consequences. That it then crashed only lent to the deeper mystery of its long traverse across the continent, well, at least from Chicago, through the Rockies, onward to San Francisco. The cause of the crash is still up in the air, but even if ruled as an accident it must mean ... something. Or so I believed.
"Maybe one of the golden spikes for the continental railroad gave out," I mused to my co-horts in Telluride, the paranoia working its way through this mountain haunt.
"Or, something else. One could just as easily imagine a group of barn-storming right wingers, as a kind of vigil and protest for Timothy McVeigh, America's least wanted murderous youth -- one could just as easily imagine something from out of the Turner Diaries."
Such had been in the case in Arizona, where Nazi youth calling themselves the Vipers derailed a train in the boon-dock desert of that state. When I was a kid a friend once told me you could derail a train by putting a quarter on a railroad track.e I never tried, but you could imagine the sparks that might make. Or, at least, a blink of a spark.
The "accident" being in the Midwest, in Iowa, where the train derailed for reasons unknown, with one dead and 90 injured, it's easy enough to see: It can happen here.
But such was the nature of the aura of this train. At least on my life trip. Which had become strange in other quarters. Leaving the Mordor of Boston, the gloomy post-election winter, where the very human face of the city seemed to cry out in a sort of despondency and anguish. Switching trains in Chicago, Ill. "Most likely at great terror," I wrote. But the original notebook is gone and no information is really available on what the true sources of my anxieties were.
"Carrying myself across the long distances always seems to sound a death rattle in me," I would most likely have said.

~

Dec. 13, 2000 will be remembered in history as the day our institutions conspired to fail us. If you haven't already forgotten and moved on to the consoling video stream of the virtual presidency, where President Martin Sheen says all the things we always wished our presidents would say, that drab Wednesday in American history was a very real, certainly material, corrosively visceral version of what we like to call convergence. Or, far better, convergent metamedia, now pouring through the anticipated cataclysm of the future like a bad-- but well publicized, rendered in 3D -- dream.
The whole constipated poop shoot of the dog-eared promise of the New World jammed into the screw-tight orifice of the next century and instilled an overwhelming dreadgeist of collective disappointment. Every human soul within earshot of any report or anguished groan over what the U.S. Supreme Court had failed to do: that is, be Supreme, and all voters, counted and uncounted, felt that gong of doom from the very bowels of hell.
"It Can't Happen Here," apparently, can. That much was obvious. Spreading like a contagion of fire across the networked landscape of the globe via talk shows, television news updates and e-mail flame war preventing even the most modest real estate developer's home page to upload in a slow a sludge ball of bad bandwidth as grief overdosed every pedestrian on Main Street, the deep truth we'd always expected, but never fully understood, pierced the broken heart and fogged the mind's eye of anyone able to read, think, love, hate and - especially -- vote.
If that had been it, from my view, I could of happily moved on, much in the same way that we push forward after the end of the Super Bowl by thinking about baseball or planning a snowboarding trip. But that ceremonial autopsy to the post-democratic ideal, with the suspected murderer, the corporate nation-state, winking like an O.J. Simpson after the verdict, wasn't all there was to it. No, if the end game of the 2000 presidential campaign ended the political playoffs with the bad call by the referees who refused to review the play, every conceivable valued institution of American life -- that is, my life -- joined in a chorus of screaming cats crushed beneath a steam roller called human fallibility.
It all made one think of that line by W.B. Yeats in "The Second Coming" about "mere anarchy loosed upon the world."
The tired fable, taught since grade school along with the story about Santa Claus, that stuff about the basic virtues of home, marriage, commitment, moving on up the ladder toward the protestant work ethic, then to the second floor of American myth of the techno-savvy capitalist as the benevolent shopping site to the world, then the top tier -- that we live in a free country, where speech is free, guaranteed by the First Amendment by the U.S. Constitution -- well, they all crashed like a house of cards.
To my unreliable, shell-shocked psyche, it was a sound much louder than the historic miracle of a mere decade ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall. You remember: When a little meme called "Glasnost," the post-Soviet call for "openness," a tiny word that nonetheless dissolved the antiquated authoritarian regime of a really terrible century in the acid bath of truth, first broadcast, on a daily basis, by Radio Free Europe.
As a result, I did the only thing he had the immediate means to do: I revolted. A private revolution, small yes, but potentially significant. What did I do? Well, it was a three-point strategy intended to disgrace every material bond to the earth within my immediate domain:
First, I refused to ever work in a corporate cube farm again (hah!). I vowed to vacate my cube at Access Internet Magazine, in Needham, Massachusetts, just a bus ride from Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau managed to tune out for an entire year, and the site of the "First Shot Heard Round the World," where a small band of well-networked colonials banded to slay the dragon, another guy named George.
Next, I resolved to disown my car, vying instead to work from home in order to write the God's honest truth, as far as my limited faculties could tell, for the remainder of my life (hah!, again). Or, the immediate future, whichever came first.
Finally, as my birthday loomed, Dec. 28, 2000, I refused to renew my driver's license. A small necessity to be declared officially expired, ironically, by the state of New Hampshire, which has the famous motto to mock this entire charade, "Live Free or Die."
By shedding this holy trinity of personal necessities in the hopes of reducing the impossible suffering of well maybe not mankind, but especially my own Job-like trek through Mythville, as well as to slow down the destruction of the biosphere, if just a little, I decided to become a living experiment in what we will now call the "science of descent." By destroying the very box-like weave of systematized ties to the world, this ongoing performance was cast as likely to end quickly or badly or both (true, so true). If there is ever a time to break free, it would certainly be when the System seems to be rendered ever so apparently obsolete.
"Impossible, you say? " I said, wild eyed, mocking my detractors. "I am going no code. Off the grid." Maybe. But for at least a short time, before the digitized deputy dawgs of Urizen hunted me down like one of the over aged guys in "Logan's Run," it has been at all points so far an instructive mapping of the basic problem of the inter-dependent ties to the autocratic demands of America the Database and the centralized city-zone of urban sprawl and decay.

~

I took a look at his pile of ashes on my desk in the Nugget Building, home of the old theater in Telluride where the soundtracks for the films thunder through the floorboards in the evening (usually a hellish noise, since that's where the popular arts are these days) and thought: "Well then, at least I'm a little farther down the road from my own failed dream of becoming a dysfunctional half-baked employee, a grunt laborer. That is to say, I'd only discovered a few hours before that I was unfit to sell carpets to the public. Overqualified, basically. So I went back up to my office to write some more ..."
And what do I think about (write), having failed to make an honest day's living: "A mere three months ago I was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in some grand old Boston hotel, doing research on Dr. Joseph Warren, the Grandmaster of New England, who, as head of the Boston Committee of Safety, sent three horsemen to warn the outlying villages that the Redcoats were coming.
"Well, they are back.
"And what do you know: I find out at the office an hour or so later that I'm too much of a loose cannon to be trusted with the 'vision' anymore. That is to say, my vision was too, um, visionary. It would possibly overwhelm a carefully constructed less-costs-less multi-media paradigm of this, the age of diminished e-expectations.
"There I was, only a few hours away from that point of no return, and I was transcribing the following words about the Jacobin Church in Paris, circa 1790 or so: 'But the chief priest and the speakers of this place, as we said, is Robispierre, the long-winded incorruptible man. What spirit of patriotism dwelt in men of those times, this one fact, it seems to us, will evince: That fifteen hundred human creatures, not bound to it, get quiet under the oratory of Robispierre; nay listened nightly, hour after hour, applausive; and gaped as for the word of life.' "
The effervescent writer, an editor named Tallien, as recorded in "Carlyle's Works of the Revolution, Volume IV, 1884," a scribble found on a great old bookshelf of all kinds of ancient texts at the hotel, described Robispierre as "The Trismegistus and Dalai-Lama of Patriot Men."
A few hours from that momentous post-mortem on democracy, on Dec. 13, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court made George W. Bush president by default, I was molesting a 116-year-old book about a still earlier time when a civic leader -- indeed, a revolutionary and visionary -- could be compared to a mythical metaphysical Prometheus and another cat who comes around every century or so like some reincarnated sparrow who arrives, like clockwork, at cosmic San Juan Capistrano.
But a full 61 days after the dimpled chads are rendered void by the Void, more interruptions were on the way.

~

I remember the sunlight fading as the train headed west through the Berkshires, a cigarette along the plank in Springfield, Mass., supposed birthplace of basketball, most certainly of all the attendant regrets of leaving home after two years of dot-com life, as well as a family, in Boston. Across the white-carpeted forests of the East we moved, with the train sounding off a warning and celebration in each small burgh along the line. With each hour, the light seemed friendlier, less closed in as we left the horizon-less maze of New England. That first night we stopped for a couple of hours in Albany, New York. A line was broken on one of the cars. There was a lot of commotion and confusion about hook-ups and connectivity. The conductors told stories and smoked.
I walked the length of the interior to the dining car, which was pitch black but still serving by candlelight. I thought of the last and only voyage of the Titanic. An elderly woman and a little girl sat down to dinner. It was a bit uncomfortable, at first, but I eased into it, telling the story of how the dragon slain by St. Patrick was really a dinosaur, the last of it's kind.
"In hindsight," I said, playing on the part of the worldly storyteller, "the pre-historic lizard, which had only come out for one brief gasp of air after living for so, so long, deep beneath the earth. Perhaps he would have been more appreciated as a relic from some ancient time, a novelty to draw the crowds. But preservation efforts were unheard of then. And so, the only remaining information about the dragon is this: He tasted a lot like chicken."
Even though I was always one to attempt to blow a small child's mind, I hesitated at the telling of the story of Joseph of Arimethea, who he had been reading about on that headlight into the night toward Chicago, about how he had lost the Holy Grail during sea travel on the way to Albion, as in England. Another book, "Rex Deus," a capably written historical tome, revealed the mysteries of the ancient Rosencruz, or at least that's my take on it. The revelations of the book, that Jesus had sired two children, and may have survived his apparent execution, and that the ruling monarchies of France, England and Scotland were connected to the bloodline of Jesus and King David and so on ... the kind of ancient mystery that makes a Steven Spielberg film laughably imprecise, in terms of the larger universe around us.
Then we were off again. The train's horn is a safety and comfort for all traders in the deal. That such peace could lead anyone to disaster, at that point, especially after a couple of bourbons on the rocks in the observation deck, was well beyond all of the hocus pocus I could imagine.

~

Until Toledo. A town for which hocus pocus has little practical use. It was 7:57 a.m. on Jan. 23, 2001, dawn at the Amtrak Station in Toledo, Ohio. Drug interdiction hour. Five Federal Agents, although they didn't show much ID to anyone, since the passengers were asleep, rousting the train awake. They hit mostly the Latin-looking men, many of whom could not speak English. They were asked about drugs, about where they were going. Asked if they had tickets. A conductor's job.
The Latinos only gave scared no-comprende nods. Racial profiling was the technique here, even if the agents also rousted the white punk with the blue hair, it was still an alternative tribe to whatever passes for the social norm in the center of god-forsaken Ohio, the ice floes of the river completely encasing the town in a grimy industrial cesspool of gray, bleak permanence.
But I thought I knew my Fourth Amendment rights, presumed it worked that same way for others, and figured the guys sleeping on the train might have access too.
"Improbable cause," I said out loud, in the direction of the melee. "You can't do that. It's a violation of the Fourth Amendment."
They all looked up. The evil eyes, the scanners. "You a lawyer or something?" said one. "Watching too much TV," said the other. "Yes," I smarted back. "I went to Harvard." A lie. I attended a music piracy seminar once. "You can't do this." I repeated. "You don't have probable cause."
One of the interdicks, wearing a nice suede leather jacket, like the kind a rancher might wear, who said I had been watching too much TV -- when I had in fact been reading too much Alexis de Tocqueville -- started asking me questions. Such as: "How would you like to get off the train and stay in Toledo?" He looked out the window. Morning was frozen and the river was one great ice floe covering the state. "No, I won't be staying here," I said. "But you will," muttering under my breath as I flew out of the car.
Out in the Toledo morning air before my so-called "disruptors of descent" really started to show, hurrying out of the train to smoke, thinking about the Pretenders, "Hey, O, way to go Oh-i-I-I-o." And I thought Boston, the land of Thomas Paine, was bad. Mordor was 1,000 miles away by now. That's what I was trying to get away from.
Back on the train, a West Indian woman started asking me questions, said she wanted to file a report about the raid. It became on ongoing matter of conversation during the day. She was some kind of academic freedom fighter from Berkeley, an attractive Indian or Asian woman with long dark hair, and what had happened had fit a paper she had been writing. The feds had found nothing, and the same group of what turned out to be Mexicans under the supervision of an interpreter, were by this time anxiously waiting for whatever might be in store for them in Chicago.
The remainder of the morning ride consisted of reading the headlines in the smoking car, on the observation deck or in the kitchen. "Bush ends overseas abortion funding," reads the headline for Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2001. "President revives plan on family-planning abroad." Just as I noted this, a guy in the observation car tells his friend, "That dang Bush, he's going to let them drill new oil wells in Alaska."
Another headline: "Four escapees caught, one dead."
Or, from long before, "Four dead in O-h-I-O!"

~

There was that bulgy woman's face, my ex mother-in-law, screaming at me, "Heathen! Heathen! Why don't you read something good for you, like the Bible? Not those stupidheads you call heroes. They are all screwed up, all of them." Her face is a big and red, blood-dimmed authoritarian swimming pool from God's forsaken lake a fire.
A flood of his life's decisions, mainly the bad ones, ping-pong through the head. If I'd only done this, resisted my ego on that, had gotten real on the other. And now this, this fat face in a blond mop of over-the-hill hair, screaming at me about reading Salman Rushdie. Instead of the Bible. Well, let's see, i'd be in an entirely different place, for sure, if i'd been reading the Bible. In fact, from year to year, i'd use it like the I-Ching, let pages open themselves, in hopes they might speak to me. Maybe i'd be married still, in Phoenix, living in the suburbs, like a squirrel counting my nuts for the winter, and still listening to this blather from this charismatic miscreant, in my own home, no less.
However, in less time than it took for the U.S. Marines to find Noriega in Panama, I grabbed my soon-to-be-first-ex-mother in law by the arm and ushered her out the front living room door. Once the lock was secured, as she tried to force her way back in, I went back to reading Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." Or tried to as his hands shook from the adrenalin rush.
Really, it's a hilarious book.

~
Now I’m back in the desert, with my notes meant for poems written in a green, nine-and-a-half by six-inch notebook. Perhaps if I'd left my thoughts unrecorded in that spring season, I would have never realized the unspeakable loneliness in this marriage. My future X knew it, which is why she eventually burned the notebook in the backyard barbecue. She was, like her charismatic Christian mother, the living microcosm of an authoritarian regime. A real reactionary. A rage-a-holic, most certainly, in disagreement with those words, my poor sad truth.
In my college days at the University of Arizona, I believed I was a poet, but a poet was no longer dangerous to any society. Once, the highest compliment that could be paid to a writer was to be burned at the stake or censored or sent to the Gulag. His ideas would run against the prevailing current, and the government would have no choice but to try to silence him, thus martyring him for future readers, and thus, the world would be moved further along. Yet, it was hard to see how it could be thus in a technological, democratic, pop-culture driven society. I couldn't make the connection. How could I know that the dissatisfaction as revealed in that notebook would, in fact, ignite a revolution in my small Web of life.
What did I have to be dissatisfied about? A wife, three kids, a crazy dog, a professional career in journalism that basically kept us more than just afloat. Barely, yes, but floating all the same. The Baby Boom was over, after all. The prosperity my mother and father had enjoyed and striven for held little promise as we walked a slow march into a new century. On that spring day, it finally broke loose. I looked at the words in his notebook and wondered why they were so dark: the tone seemed to be that of a prisoner who lived in a state of constant contradiction against his very nature; a secret self, working beneath the autocratic empire of the bedroom.
I remember being afraid to go home. The long straight city streets leading through the scatterbrained signage of Phoenix hinted at an ugliness of the suburban southwest. Fast food joints, convenience stores, strips malls and every now and then rows of track-homes cross the eyes. At each stoplight, there was back pain, the endless shifting of the truck's gears, and the anxious pressure of being surrounded by the city, of what kind of moods awaited me at home.
I pulled into the driveway and sighed. There were a few boards piled on the front lawn that my son had fashioned into a jumping ramp for skateboards, and a few new dents in the garage door from the past weekend's tossing the baseball around. I opened the door and there was my son, twittering on the nobs of a video game while he lay on the couch. He barely moved and there was a small beeping sound from his hand-held machine. Not expecting a reaction upon arrival, I moved toward the entertainment center console, checking for any mail. There were a few bills, an ominous looking certified letter from the IRS, assorted junk mail, and a couple of packages, no doubt new compact disks to be to reviewed for the rock magazine. I opened the first package immediately, pulling out something post-punk, or, maybe retro. Immediately aware of its unsuitable nature for my censorious wife's scanning eyes, I threw it in the cabinet, putting it beneath a slew of other CDs that would get attention later that night. I opened the other package, a jazz disc, which would be hard to say anything about since it wouldn't contain any offensive lyrics to hail as the new bad boys of rock. I threw it on top of the pile in the cabinet as well and gave pause to Iggy Pop.
A decision was brewing inside, moving from the back of the mind to the front. All of those things I'd ever wished for had never actually been considered. I sleepwalked into adult years, reacting to the merely formal expectations of finding a girl, making a marriage, the constant question of whether to have children. One would not call it an expectation, it seemed to happen naturally, as if I were an actor in a play in which the lines had been written from a dependable author who had the essence of life down to a biological science. Survival is everything, ya know, perpetuating the DNA, for what reason we cannot specify.
So that day in his mid 30s, the course I'd led found set me drifting. I sat on the couch, twittered on some poetry, then reaching for the headphones for loud music: a rock critic living in a charismatic Christian's home. The music is by the seminal L.A. punk band, X, the sound of late century central city sprawl in flames.
My eyes are closed as I lay on the couch, hoping to find a few moments of disengagement, to marvel at the dichotomy of the male and female voices from both heaven and hell. Then, I am stunned back to the suburbs by future X, who is poking, poking, poking. Her expression has that stormy, bleary eye contact of someone who is ready for a fight. She began one of her usual discourses on his behavior, what she often refers to as Short Attention Span Theater.
"You seem so frantic," she says, her hands on her hips, looking down. "At one time you show up, start reading a book, and then I look up again, and you are on your way out the door, sneaking a joint. Now look at your lazy ass. I've got things to do around the house, you know. I need help."
She has her dishwater blond hair up in a Bam Bam bush on top of her head, wearing a jeans skirt and tennis shoes, very much in her work detachment mode. Soon she would be strutting around the house, slamming cabinet doors and making everyone sure it was busy time in that passive aggressive way. You know: the kind of gal who saw no problem with running the vacuum cleaner into the wee hours of the night.
"You're shifty. You are stuck in sand, sinking in sand, or maybe just trying to avoid sinking in sand," she says. "Look at this place," she thumbs one of the books he's left half opened on couch. "How many books can one person read at once, anyway?
"Sometimes you seem so quiet, and then you are talking so fast it's like you are some drug. Why can't you relax, why can't you stop worrying about where you will be next. You just want to hang out in bars and smoke. I mean, why go all of the way to a public place to spend your time alone, if that's what you are really doing?"
That look in her eye? The bulldog that couldn't let go of those ever-tightening categories of perpetual blame. Angrier words were exchanged, neither side listening, and somehow I managed to leave, though at some cost, her haven taken the notebook and holding it up, scouring, her face with a challenging smile, as if to indicate, "Ah ha, I've got it," as she took it and left the room.
Within a week I'd left her. The notebook had been read then fricasseed, and then an attempt had been made to restore the charred notebook for legal purposes. Then she tried to ram me with her car, chasing me for nearly five miles until I led her right into the police station parking lot. Then, having taken to the streets of Phoenix in the need of disguising locations, I bounced around like a wannabe TV show fugitive, trying to arrange lawyers, new living digs, dealing with a capably diabolical X, and, the possibility that my soon-to-be ex-wife might try to find me and kill me. The paranoia was running unchecked. At work they called me "McGyver" because I was always looking for alternative exits to the surroundings. There were the urgings of my mother in law, who spoke in tongues and filibustered his future X into devious modes of attack. It was a multi-media event: flyers left on car windows, lies sent out through still-novice Christian advocacy sites, phone abuse. There were ugly late-night phone calls and cruel, teasing seductions. Before long, there would be the assault at the office, the crossing restraining orders, the use of the children as hostages in the marriage, but more than anything else, my descent into the maze of adulterated windows and doors in an exploration of my private novelty gene.

~

Nonetheless, as we moved West on this fabled railroad line that would eventually take me to the Rockies, the California Zephyr, all of the way to Grand Junction, Colorado, at the base of Grand Mesa, where the Colorado River winds its own sacred trail southwesterly. The destination: Telluride, Colorado. Which would require a bus jaunt to Montrose, with a driver who turned out to be a real asshole (but who wouldn't be, taking these routes over and over through such climes), as well as a helpful hitch with a local Jack Jehovah Ute, Leroy Morales, in a big green pickup truck up the San Miguel River Canyon to this mountain resort town, isolated as it is in rocky highlands of the San Juans of southwestern Colorado.
A latter-day Zephyr rider from Telluride didn't fare so well. His experience a month later in the coach car, which ended up on its side, after sliding down a 20-foot embankment, was more harrowing.
"I was just lying down to sleep when I heard a rumbling and a screeching sound -- the brakes maybe," said Noah McKittrick, who had also been bound for Grand Junction. "The lights flickered off and the car tumbled over. We were thrown about. It was incredibly disorienting. When we stopped, I was lying on the windows, which was now the floor of the car. People were crying and their kids were screaming for their parents. It was over in five seconds."
The Zephyr was traveling at 53 miles per hour, which is a lot slower than its usual 80 miles per hour, but anyone who has taken an Amtrak line from Boston to New York, or on the Eastern Seaboard at all, knows fully well the fallen nature of its infrastructure. Before the crash, McKittrick said his dinner companions, experienced train travelers, were commenting on how bad the tracks in Iowa were. "For two hours before the crash, the train was shaking like turbulence on a plane."

~

Spencer was a crazy family dog, most definitely also the beholder of the novelty gene. But he got that from Daisy, a purebred beagle.
On the day the he first landed in the suburbs of Phoenix, when I was just a boy, maybe 15, the heat was 120 degrees and the back yard, a one-acre field of white hot dust. The next day, hail stones the size of Hope diamonds pelted puffs of dust onto the phosphorescent ground as Daisy, Spencer's mother, despite the hellfire from the sky, chased around the yard, pouncing on each poof, steam rising on the sand. Next, a freak tornado tore through the neighborhood, and the only thing in its path, mainly, or house, was left intact.
Daisy was a runner, though. This was before she learned things about the neighborhood on midnight sneak outs. Before she'd gone through the rancheria of back yards, golf courses, a river park basin, the very edges of the desert, places Spencer would explore and go beyond. Well before he'd caused a fight with the family across the street. Well before the subdivision was made safe from the last horny toad lizard, well before his father ran over that same neighbor's pet snake, which had escaped, in the driveway: Long before the paradisiacal and counter-intuitive creation dream of Phoenix, city of the great Sonoran Desert.
As a mongrel beagle of Daisy, Spencer couldn't be trained, thus keeping him the place of the long line of pets that drove my father to distraction.
"Here boy, good boy, here Spencer," he'd say. "Sit, roll, dammit, do something!"
I'd sit and watch this comedy, a young teen in the suburbs, up in a willow. I was always up in trees. Despite the call, all Spencer could do was run up and down the fence, occasionally poking his nose through holes in the ground beneath. Spencer was a barker, too, howling at all hours, never seeming to run out of energy. Spencer had the novelty gene. Or perhaps he'd just learned it from his family.
Spencer was a real bastard.

~

This is in Colorado, where I was headed. The Great Plains all too well included in the disasters going on from Coast to Coast, but I thought about adding a few more words, another deck, "and one more at large heading home."
"The California Zephyr begins in Chicago and makes its way toward Denver," I wrote, remembering the last two days of the train trek across the nation. "By nightfall I meet one of two or three of the strangest characters, including the Zen-master man, a drunk cowboy artist named Charlie, who discussed Reiki therapy, meditation and Swedenborgian metaphysics. He disappeared somewhere in the night, in Iowa, I believe. He said: Have you seen the sun behind the sun, the trees behind the trees? Then, the next morning, in Denver, I noticed two men, one with a Masonic emblem on his coat, the other leading a doddering elderly gentleman on the train. Curious about the Freemasons after a lot of study and amazement about it in Boston, I asked who the elderly man was. The large man in the coat said he was the Grandmaster of the Freemasons for the entire United States of America.
"So once we headed up a winding trail into Rockies, I handed him my copy of 'Rex Deus.'
"Did Jesus survive?" I asked him. "Oh, that's what some say," he said, reading the book for a couple of hours with great interest. Not ever saying much. But there seemed to be something on this mystery train that was more than he could perceive, his work on this world pretty much accomplished. At one other point toward the end of the line, the train stopped for some time, in order to avoid an accident. In the canyons near Gunnison, the observation deck announcer pointed passenger's eyes to a cave in the wall, high up on the cliff. Safe enough place for anything, from anyone, anywhere, be it the President of the United States, or, the DEA. Solar storms. All the rest.
"I suppose you could worry about rock slides. No place is really safe, I guess."

~

A full 61 days after the dimpled chads are rendered void by the Void, more interruptions are on the way.
Stephen the Scout, the local half-blood Native American and cinematographer without a camera, whose family comes from big-time money in Oklahoma, has entered the building. His timing, too, is amazing. He's a pony-tailed self-made shaman who is wired as always with the kind of energy and insight that, if I didn't know any better, might be described as superhuman. Whenever Stephen the Scout speaks, which is almost all of the time, the room shakes with the booming voice of a post-hippie pony-tailed preacher on the prairie.
Like the rest of us, without work. Plenty of time on our hands. I wished I had a nickel for everyone he met in Telluride who claimed be a shaman. Ya know: Those who really are keep it to themselves.
"We've got to start pimping Waldorf," he says, putting the little dog on his lap and trying on my new beret for size. "Do you know how much puppies of Yorkshire terriers cost? Five hundred bucks, that's how much. I mean, even the dog is a Knights Templar Freemason dog, look at him."
The little tyke, brown and black with a pink tongue and more brains than most four-year-old kids, is a made-for-TV wunderkind. Waldorf is well beyond mere stupid pet tricks and is, in fact, more human than will ever get credit for, due no doubt to his good breeding and the fact his owner is a four-letter control freak. The dog is also the ultimate chick magnet in such watering stations as The Last Dollar Saloon. Now Stephen the Scout is addressing the dog directly in a "little people" whine that only dogs can understand.
"My mom said my whole life, you need to be an architect. If I'd only listened to my mom, but instead, we are dog trainers," he says in his doggie falsetto. "Your dad don't got no happy hour money, so you can't go to the bars and be with your buddies, beggin' for human food."
Oh yeah, the worm had turned. The witches, geeks and cyber sages were on the run, the lost scouts and the down-and-outs, sifting through the trash for food, sifting through the antique stores, the pawn shops, the big deep sleeper closets, the empty spaces, all for a sign of economic viability that they could recycle from the heady days of the so-called Gold Rush. Meanwhile, the local realtors were chasing their down spiral of foiled deals, fat cats pulling out of their agreements, bailing on their rent, selling their ranches considered to be their priceless, cherished dreams only a week before.
I had come to believe what veryone touched by the dot-com bust privately discovered: We are all not as rich as we only too recently, … um … thought.
"But all the same," I say, in one of those annoying, unrealistic, pseudo-positivist mood swings, "we are all rich beyond our wildest dreams, if we can only see the trees behind the trees, the sun behind the sun.
"Because if the quest is about anything, it's about finding the roots for the new trees now planted in the realm of the invalidated. And believe me, at the end of this foul rainbow, painted by carbon and alien atoms messing with the thyroid glands of everyone who will ever be, living or unborn … there is this deep, broad, humming sound beneath the surface of everything. The sun beams, pelting us, the solar storm causing vibrations … from the collision of atoms … in the very core of the earth. You would have to be numb on a lifetime of ludes, at this point, not to be shaken up by it.
"My problem is I'm not sure if it's the voice of the shaking comes from hell, heaven, or, both.
"If it's the sound of the Machine Mind, well, pay no heed, it's simply the demiurge uncoiling beneath our feet. If it's the sound of the Creator, yes, the thing outside the thing, like a train rolling down a hill, heading for us all, with one last chance offered for redemption, well then, maybe we should listen harder."
Maybe we should go back to the beginning; which is to say, go back to the end, on Dec. 13, 2000, when the dimpled chads were rendered null by the all-too-vulnerable architect of the Void. When the sky turned to fire, repeatedly.

~

Yesterday came suddenly, sang Paul McCartney all those years ago.
I was 12 years old, no doubt watching "Wallace and Ladmo." Little beep, beep, beeps went up on the TV screen (if those weather system warnings on the bulletin bar on the bottom screen actually worked like that, back then).
Hard to remember, he says.
I had just moved from Texas to the Country Estates subdivision at 58th Place and Shea Boulevard six days before. On the seventh day, the rain came.
Well, not so much rain. At least, not at first. The details of that day still linger. The visual impact the storm of 1972 created is still in his expressions better than any DVD could possibly replicate. It was 32 years ago in 2004. Imagine. See it. Feel it. Almost smell it. The ozone in the days of Oz!
Back then a new plat in the Country Estates subdivision was like a cookie-cutter parcel of the moon. Sure, there was mesquite all over, but once the fences sliced-and-diced the place, all of the new back yards were, until the landscaper arrived, squared-off hotbeds of fine whitish, powdery dust. On that day or any other, the dust would get stirred up into swirls of volatile air, called "Dust Devils."
Arizona still gets "Dust Devils" now and then, but with the paradising effect that's gone on since these bad 'ol days, the name is being lost with all of the horny toads, rattlers and coyotes running for cover from civilization. Suddenly, it gets windy. Then, it's not. You'd hardly notice it. But on that day, June 22, 1972, the whole greater Paradise Valley area, basically the Indian Bend Wash basin, from Mummy Mountain to the McDowell Mountains, was a whirling set of such dervishes, a practical ballet performance, as weather patterns go.
Anyway, I tell this story to newcomers to Arizona a lot because it teaches something about the monsoons (which this wasn't) and the history of Scottsdale (a lost great body of knowledge that exists, if it exists at all, in the archives of the old Scottsdale Progress and the Scottsdale Historical Society).
The story doesn't actually begin with my watching "Wallace and Ladmo," the old TV kids show, but with what I was doing when my dad came home as he was watching Wallace, and, of course, Ladmo.
He was mad about something. Dad was mad. Not Ladmo and his Lincoln-esque top hat, where is Waldo shirt. He was upset, you see, because he just got back from talking to some insurance agent. The story begins when dad said, right after coming through the door: "They wanted us to buy flood insurance. Those (bleeps!). Don't they know this is the desert?"
Country Estates is on the northern banks of the Indian Bend Wash. With the exception of a few golf courses, as it flowed to the Salt River, it was still a desert wash with mesquite and sage and rabbits and mice and prairie dogs. In the spring, lots and lots of butterflies. When it rained, even the slightest, downtown Scottsdale would be in need of Noah's Ark.
The next start of the story, after the beeping TV warning, after dad's now famous last words, flows in this direction: Hail stones, the size of golf balls, plopping, puft, puft, puft, into super-heated, white hot dust. Then the wind came. Then came some more. Every dot of dust and debris not tied down flew by sideways by the windows, as if the Creator were converting the new suburban environment into something akin to a black day on Mars.
The roof began to wail. Fences picked up and were lifted off as wind sails in a scene from the black-and-white segment of "The Wizard of Oz."
Then, I looked out the window, and saw a tower, a dirt vortex, well up into the sky, up and out of the frame, cascading off nearby Mummy Mountain.
Now, even before this, tornadoes have freaked me out. Sure, Dorothy's little house-spin into the air, up and back and down into Oz, always left a strong impression. But also this: Members of my grandfather's immediate family, including his mother and father, had been killed by a tornado in West Texas (and he had to raise his younger siblings by himself as a teen). So, fear of tornadoes is pretty much in the McDaniel DNA.
So, what did I do? Run? Scream? Duck and cover? No. I decided to go outside and get a better view. Went through the front door. Looked up. It was a big, brown, swirling behemoth. Or, that's what the eyes, as dust bits pelted hid face and sandblasted hid hair and his mother screamed "Get back in here!" - that's what my eyes still feel, see and remember.
There was no time to do the classic, heartland-style, get-into-the-cellar maneuver. No time to even get into the hallway, away from the windows. But by God's grace (as well as the seeming lack of it) the tornado hit the house across the street, destroyed a roof, killed their dog, hopped then over the entire Country Estates neighborhood, and then landed again, turning Shea Boulevard and points northward into a Vietnam era-, Robert McNamara-style playground pathway of near total destruction. Hundreds of homes had varying degrees of damage. Uncounted numbers were rendered, national-TV-news style, into images of flattened rubble.
Then, the winds passed. A half-mile away, looking toward Shea, a boulevard named after a Union General at Gettysburg, you could see nothing but the wrecked frames of bombed-out homes and flashing red emergency lights.
Then, it began to rain. In fact, it rained for a day. In fact, it rained four inches in four hours. The Indian Bend Wash became the Indian Bend River. It must have been a mile-wide muddy river, too. But our family never knew. We couldn't even step out of the door for three days as the wash, our street, now a river, flowed on by with every bit of debris and clutter it could pick up. A wash. Indeed! A major Maytag this so-called "Paradise Valley" will always be, say, every hundred years or so.
Now, we could go on and on about not having electricity or water for a week. Or, about how some official landed in a helicopter behind their house, looked around, and then left. How the governor came to bless us with his utter and useless amazement. I could thank the Lord for sparing us but punishing the neighborhood (it was their turn, after all) with a kind of creative whimsy, and yes, a cosmic sense of timing and selectivity.
It was, after all, right after the first official day of the summer. You could talk about solstices and the equinox and all ...You could ask, why them, but not us? It would be futile, of course, unless you have lived it, to try to fully explain the impact of this storm on the family, and yes, this burgeoning city called Scottsdale. The number of times I have told this story to people.
The day I faced the tornado.
~

So Spencer and had the novelty gene, and on the day the tornado came, I saw it in the window. Dust was blowing all around, but he saw it there, bigger than the black and white version in the Wizard of Oz. I ran outside. Pinpricks of dust hitting my face and my mother screaming to get into the house. I leaned into the wind. It ran hot and cold.
The tornado high in view, I saw it tear a roof off a house down the street, and went back inside, satisfied that my scouting report through the window was correct. We barricaded in the hallway, or tried to, but there wasn't enough time. God knows what was running through my father's mind because his father's family had been killed by a tornado in West Texas. God knows what's in a dog's mind when the sky had been turned upside down. All that is known is after the winds died down, after the new saplings were pulled out of the ground, after it seemed liked the wind picked up their back yard and deposited it somewhere west of their neighborhood, Spencer was gone.

~
It is the mid-1980s and Ty Hardin's agent in Beverly Hills keeps leaving messages, but lately, Hardin is not returning his calls. Hardin was the voice and leader of the so-called Arizona Patriots, the radical right-wing fringe group that had dropped out of public view. Except when they met out in the woods to shoot guns and maybe spout off about regional democracy, starting a new country and so on. Not coincidentally, Hardin, too, dropped out of sight.fe as a living, breathing Cowboy picture movie star.
Those who saw him in his last days in town said he had one thing on his mind: Getting back into the movies. A realtor involved with the sale of his home said when he last saw Hardin, a few days before he left for Northern California, all the former television star from the "Bronco Layne" Western series in the 1950s was to talk about the good old days of Hollywood.
The former star was extremely disappointed that the realtor didn't remember an old war movie he had played in. He talked less about his conspiracy theories on Jewish bankers and the one-world government to come. Nothing about the Posse Commitatus, which the Patriots had linked up to as a co-conspiracy unto itself. Nothing about the revolution to come. Nothing about the U.S. Constitution, about the right to bear arms, indeed, the demand to do so.

~

We looked for him for a week. First we walked past the demolished homes in the area, marveling at their bombed-out look. As a 10-year-old boy, the inconvenience this caused to our neighbors was hardly a factor. It seemed fun out there, fun to be a searcher in bombed-out Phoenix, the subdivision seriously in decline due to the storm. Worst hit were the people down the street, who we had a running feud with because they were always the ones who called to get Spencer picked up by the animal control officer. Once, when we'd returned from a sailing trip to San Diego, Spencer was missing from the back yard. I knew immediately what had happened. I rushed across the street, being a hot-headed 15-year-old, and started yelling at the neighbor, Rosey something something, who was dead drunk when she answered the door. "You give my dog back," I shouted. "You have no right." They, of course, did have a right.
Leash laws mandated by the homeowners' committee being fairly clear. When Spencer was recovered from the animal shelter, he continued to pursue his novelty exploits, eventually getting to the point that he could leap the height of our wood fence in the backyard. Had to be six feet. It was only a matter of time, at least he had the potential, to jump the fence. Then the storm came and we had to resolve ourselves to the image of Spencer spinning away into the clouds. These were happy days for father.

~

A few days later I had my first psychic experience. It was during a baseball game. Bats and balls and the hopes of being a professional baseball player being my only real concern. That and the skinny blonde girl who was watching the game in the bleachers. They were behind, maybe by a few runs. The Firebirds were up to bat. I sat on the bench, and he had this feeling come over me, that heaviness from within. He thought that perhaps he was feeling ill. It was then thought I saw the whole thing before, one, two, three batters ahead -- I knew that each one would reach base and visualized the bat hitting a line drive to right field and their team winning the game. That's exactly what happened. When it was his turn to bat, I half-consciously lined the ball to right, just as I pictured it, willed it, in my brain. I was buried by my teammates, and after the game that skinny blonde girl gave me my first kiss. His braces, unfortunately, cutting her lip pretty good.
When they came home, Spencer was at the doorstep. Historians can only wonder about the tales he could have told of flying over Phoenix and out into the desert.

~

There McDaniel was, meandering in an automobile's deep sea dive into the cesspool of Boston traffic, on his way to work in Needham, Massachusetts, wondering if he would make it before his kidney burst from drinking too much coffee, and deciding a little research on his book at the old hotel in Boston would be better than actually completing the 40-mile commute to his office cube.
Which he could barely look at anymore ... O, the stories he needed to tell.

~

So where was he? Oh yeah, that's right, near Walden Pond, closer to White Pond, in Concord, where havoc gets played on cell phones when military surveillance craft fly overhead, since this little getaway is directly in the flight path to Hanscom AFB.
But now he is at the train depot in West Concord and some kind of supply or fuel engine is speeding by, blowing through everything so fast along that commuter rail line that it blew the Sampoerna cigarette right out of his hands and sent leaves and trash following its wake down the track.
A portentous hue, indeed.
As he waited, he realized: no train fare. One dollar in his pocket, and the check for the recently sold 1990 Honda Civic wouldn't clear for another hour or more. So into the West Concord coffee shop at the depot he went, writing out a check for $44 for a 12-ticket pass, for the upcoming days to get his silly ass and belongings to Mythville.
The commuter rail arrived on time. On their way, McDaniel watched the increasingly bare trees go by as the sunlight lit his face brightly down to Boston through Lincoln, Brandeis, Waltham, Cambridge, Porter Square, all of the way to North Station, which is directly below the Fleet Center, which of late had been amply amplified with a stadium-sized wall mural of an American flag, in 2001 one of the most memorable icons of the Hub.
What happened next is left for the historians to ponder in a series of blogs posted at his Web site, Mythville.blogspot.com/.
"Now I have a new problem," he states to imagined readers (at the time there were none). "While the depot in West Concord would take a check for still more 12-ticket rides to get my silly ass to Mythville, the guy behind the glass at the ticket counter in North Station wouldn't take a check. So there I am, 12 minutes away from my next commuter rail out of town to Mythville, and I have no money. So I figure: I'm in the Fleet Center, right? I have a Fleet account, right? Should be easy enough to just go outside the door and get money at a Fleet machine since by this time the check for the car has cleared.
"O shit, that reminds me. I forgot a key ingredient for this tale: What I packed for the trip. That would be one backpack (black) full of books (heavy), one computer carrying case device that I stuffed fully loaded with my poetry and writings (heavier still since I'm rarely able to lighten up), one black suitcase with wheels, also full of books, which I actually happened to purchase at my as then of yet unrealized Mythville exactly a year ago. Or almost exactly a year ago. Sometimes the mind does get hazy, but not very often when I'm communicatin' in this Mythappropriatin' Nation.
"The first day after I sold my car, which I had purchased two months ago with my last unemployment check from the State of Massachusetts, I carried the license plates with me as I took the commuter rail from town to town. Let's see. That day I did Boston and Beverly and Somerville and Cambridge. Actually, Somerville and Cambridge twice. Total cost: $6.
"Today I opened my mail, sent to me from the civil servants for the town of Concord, Mass., site of the so-called `Shot heard Round the World.' Actually, I got two pieces of mail in Concord over the weekend. The first was a traffic complaint from the town of Hamilton. It said they were suspending my Arizona driver's license, which that state had given me with the agreement that it would last until 12/28/2024. Gets quite a rise out of the pretty girls at the banks when I'm trying to cash my freelance writing checks. The State of Arizona wants people to keep on driving for a long time. So they fail to build much in the way of public transportation, and then people get to drive for a long time. But that's not for me. I guess I didn't tow their line. Or, at least, I didn't in Massachusetts. I mean, I really was on the way to get my car approved, finally, with its inspection sticker. It was going to be the second time I went to the inspection place. Spent a total of $60 on fees, another $60 to get new tires, which they had said weren't safe enough for New England roads (which really are truly unsafe), and now they wanted another $50 because some police officer happened to notice that my sticker was of the wrong color. Platial profiling, I think they call it ...
"Since I gave up my car as an act, OK, OK, an experiment in civil disobedience (and not because I'm a drunk, because I'm not), but also as a statement of global citizenship, I figured this letter in the mail (well, both of them), I figured the letter from the Hamilton District Court signified the beginning of a kind of understated (Hmmm, unstated) social contract. I wouldn't pay their $50 fee, even if I was in compliance (or on the way to buying tires, in order to comply), and they would agree to take care of me by making sure I stayed off the road with anything other than my own two feet. I opened the letter. Laughed. I thought: OK, it's a deal. We will mutually cancel our official ties. I won't need a driver's license, and they won't need to watch for me while I fail to drive.
"Am I missing something here?
"The other letter, from Concord's civil authorities, came in some kind of red paper duplicate format. They asked me to pay some kind of an excise tax, something, since I am relatively new to these parts, that I don't completely understand. Do I pay a tax for the right to breathe, drive, what?
"Since Concord is a hotbed of accomplished liberalism and humanitarian letters, and since Massachusetts is a liberal state, which means there are way too many rules, deeds, covenants, restrictions, laws, organizations of security and plain old control and so on, I took this note to be another kind of serendipitous receipt for a mysterious agreement that had already well been determined when I sold my car as an act of civil disobedience. So, I unsigned on the dotted line, figured that eventually there might be some money in unsigning on the dotted line, if I can just find (by walking) the local office that wages excise taxes to someone who not only had no vote or gave no permission, but doesn't even know what the hell they are charging me for.
"I can't tell: Am I two or three days ahead of, or, two or three days behind the hyenas barking at my heels? Is it time to cash in, or, cash out? I guess I'll just use my old Massachusetts license plates for snow shoes someday and go down to this place, which I have no idea where it is, and see what they say. Hopefully, it's downhill.
"In the meantime, I'll just walk the walk, and, talk the talk ...
--Sullivan Square, Boston, or thereabouts, heading very fast toward Reading, Mass., and further north ... Nov. 19, 2001."

Dimpled Chads and Solar Storms

2006-04-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

January 23, 2001
The shock wave from the ejections that released on the 20th hit the Earth early in the morning, around 5 AM Eastern time. Geomagnetic activity did not reach high levels, but some aurorae were seen.

January 20, 2001
Two solar flares and a pair of coronal mass ejections left the Sun. The solar material was expected to reach the Earth late on the 22nd or 23rd.

January 10-14, 2001
On January 10, a solar flare eruption caused a coronal mass ejection to go billowing away from the Sun. This caused an interplanetary shock wave to hit the Earth's magnetosphere early Saturday morning, January 13. Although the conditions were favorable for aurora, the geomagnetic activity was not extensive. On January 14, the collapse of a prominence caused another coronal mass ejection to take place, but this one was directed away from the Earth, so geomagnetic activity was unlikely.

December 25, 2000
A Christmas Day solar eclipse. The eclipse was only partial, so depending on where it was viewed, the area of the Sun covered varied from 60 to 20%. The last solar eclipse on Christmas Day was in 1954, and the next one will be in 2307. There are at least two solar eclipses a year, with five being the most occuring in one year. (This is extremely rare.)

December 18, 2000
A solar flare erupted from the Sun in the early morning and was followed by a coronal mass ejection. This ejection hit the Earth's magnetosphere on December 21, 2000, causing the interplanetary magnetic field to turn southward .

Dec. 13, 2000
Washington
Gore conceded race, Republican Bush addressed the nation as the president-elect from the House chamber of the Texas

November 11, 2000
A solar storm similar to the one that took place on July 14, 2000. An extremely powerful solar flare erupted on November 8th, reaching the Earth on November 9th. The coronal mass ejection that follwed the flare hit the Earth's magnetosphere on November 10th, leaving the Earth in a high velocity solar wind stream through November 11th.

Nov. 7, 2000
Washington
Closest Presidential election Bush's slim lead in Florida leads to automatic recount in that state.

Aug. 2, 2000
Philadelphia
Republicans pick Bush, Cheney

Jul. 25, 2000
Elsewhere: Paris: Concorde crash kills 113

July 14, 2000
The biggest solar storm since October 1989 took place at about dawn. Eruptions were also spotted two days before that, on July 12th and 13th.

Mar. 10, 2000
Elsewhere: USA: Nasdaq reached 5048

Jan. 1, 2000
Elsewhere: USA: Y2K bug fails to bite

Of Solar Storms and Other Envirodigitas

2006-04-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

The first thing I have to say is I had a hard time getting anybody to believe me. The whole thing was too preposterous and prescient and certainly my description of the event as "a lake of fire in the sky" didn't help. Especially after my current histrionic state due to the stolen election of 2000. When the solar storm hit New England, in fact, most likely a series of storm, it appeared to myself as having biblical portents, but denial in those days of the Y2k craze was strong. The wrath of God stuff could be safely removed to points of conjecture.

Yes, in those post- X-File years it wasn't until after 9/11 that people were searching out Nostradmous again. Irregardless, the earth shook, and it was the sun that was doing the shaking, sending waves of electromagnetic winds pulsing down to the core of the earth. My observations for that day include: In the morning, going up Route 3 North in southern New Hampshire, steam rising from the freshly fallen snow. That night, same spot on the highway, coming back from a day searching out some old ghosts in Peterborough, my car swerved as the wind gathered into a swirling bowl as if the strictures of gravity were no longer in order. I was listening to the Chemical Brothers on the CD player, heading home to North Andover, Massachusetts.

The electrochemical night fire seemed to be stirring throughout the atmosphere. Lightning hung in the sky in veins of white light. The wind became so inense, I pulled off the highway, turned into the shelter of a local hospital parking lot. When it appeared that wasn't going to be enough, due to the intensity of the lightning, I went inside the waiting room to wait it out. I was tempted to pray since it was some kind of women's religious hospital.

After the wind failed to subside, I gathered my nuts to get back out onto the chaotic freeway as branches and leaves blew across my path. Turning east toward 495, looking out toward Lawrence and across the Merrimack River, the great sky-sea of pulsating lightning, bouncing off the ground as if an explosion were burning white hot from off the ground and back into the sky again. A massive electrical orb was attacking the city: A lake of fire in the sky.

The Chemical Brothers techno-invoked the scene with a suitable polyphonic fury, a lightning music sountrack, those two elements, storm and sound, fusing a coincidental kalaidoscope in my brain.

When I arrived home, I was completely out of my wits. Moses after wtinessing the burning Bush. But alas, the entire family was watching television during the storm and barely even noticed there was lightning outside. Fortunately, I mean, scientifically speaking, I ws able to get other from what I had seen by going out to get soem cigs. A woman at a convenience store in Andover, whose gas station was facing Lawrence, saw it, too.

So I decided to do a search on the Web. From there I learned plenty.

The Bleaching of the Reefs

2006-04-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

This, a quick pick up from Yahoo.com,: from 2002:

"An epidemic of coral bleaching has hit the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the world's largest coral reef, for the second time in four years. It is also reported to be spreading through the coral islands of the South Pacific.
"An extensive survey of the Great Barrier Reef carried out over the last month has revealed "widespread bleaching", says Terry Done, chief conservation scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. The survey was prompted by concerns at the start of 2002 and the full results will be published soon, he says.
"Coral bleaching occurs when high sea temperatures force the algae that give coral its colour out of the coral polyps. Usually, bleached coral recovers in the next cool season, but if all the algae are lost, the coral will die and reefs will crumble.
"Thomas Goreau, president of the Global Coral Reef Alliance in Chappaqua, New York, says he has received reports in recent days of bleached, dead coral across much of the South Pacific, including Tahiti, the Cook Islands, New Caledonia and Fiji.
"'It will take a long time before we have full confirmation of the magnitude of the disaster," he said. "But when it is all in, I predict we will have confirmation that almost all corals across the entire South Pacific have died in the last few months.' "

Hotter and longer

There has been growing concern among marine scientists about recent reports of widespread bleaching in Australia. But so far the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has not commented and did not respond to requests from New Scientist to make a statement.

However, the park authority has received numerous reports of bleaching from scientists, tour operators and visitors. According to information on its web site "bleaching around Keppel Island is extreme, with every species suffering". Other places badly hit include Whitsunday Island and Magnetic Island to the north.

The bleaching follows record sea temperatures since the beginning of the year. "Almost all the Great Barrier Reef was 2°C or more above normal for more than two months from early January to mid-March," says Goreau. "This was hotter and longer than the bleaching that wiped out the Maldives, Seychelles and western Australian reefs in 1998."

Global warming

The high temperatures appear to be connected to the likely onset of a new El Niño, which also caused the bleaching in 1998.

But Goreau says global warming is a key underlying factor. "It means reefs are already under stress before El Niño start," he said.

Donne told New Scientist that "there has been little mortality of corals yet". But Goreau says: "Catastrophic mortality will certainly have taken place." He claims the Australian government is reluctant to discuss the extent of bleaching on the reef because of its ambivalence about action on global warming.

The Ides of August!

2006-04-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

If the week began with the planet Mercury going into retrograde, and with my own knowledge this meant trouble for communications and all ars technica, well then, that would have been enough. But to see and feel and interpret this phenomena, powered by the solar winds permeating the earth, so often, well now, this is certainly an item for more research.

If you had told me January 1, 2004, that Aug. 14-15, 2004, would be like a summer day in Boston or San Francisco, well, I would have laughed. I am not laughing now. The solar winds, perhaps the very eye of Ayer beaming in on us, are blowing more holes through this thing called human technology by the hour.

Take, for example (since all journalism is local), by complex swimming pool at Tatum and Bell. As I mentioned before, on Saturday morning it appeared to be loosing water at an incredible rate. My assumption had been that the wind and the sun had been the culprit. But now, I have determined, the pool pump has cracked a leak, and despite all of my efforts to rescue it like some fire team on a U.S. Navy destroyer, going so far as to even buy a garden hose (I have no garden) to refill the pool, the whole damn problem is much more associated with something akin to a broken heart.

On Saturday night, the pool was bubbling up oxygen like some foul sulfur pit. This morning, the same, but in the light, it looked and felt more curative and pleasant. Great whooshing bubbles would come up from the bottom of the pool as the pump, with the help of the fresh blood, tried and tried to adjust. At this point, after informing the pool authorities about what is going on here, I think I have mastered control of this nature. For awhile, though, I almost could believe that the pool, like Gaia itself, could heal itself. But it cannot. Why?

It is dying of a broken heart. So, take this metaphor, dear readers: You want the planet to heal itself? Then stop breaking its heart.

Today the observations are as follows: The planet is melting. As foretold, the humidity comes first as the polar ice caps melt and the polarities of temperature and moisture ... no need to write formulas for you. Outside this morning, despite cloud cover the day before, the pump for a large swimming pool was sucking dry after several days of intense sun. August is always that way in Phoenix, but what was different on Friday, Aug. 13 (Jacque DeMolay, thou art avenged), was this: A dust torn tearing across the Valley at 2 p.m. Weather man was bit startled. These are his perfect days. Face time with his public to explain strange storms, fires and double-dipper hurricanes with triple-digit winds.

Cannot say I feel too bad about Florida, though, surely, many of those who suffered had votes that went uncounted in 2000. The remaining dimpled chads have blown into the Atlantic by now. Time to forgive. It is not for us to determine punishment. Although, I must say, we don eed no God to punish us, no Malkuth to flow our away now from the Sun, no: I say, we do a perfectly good job of punishing ourselves.

Anyway, this is about metascience. Keep all politics aside. Except for this: ADAPT THOSE DAMN KYOTO PROTOCOLS! Please, before we all burst into flames from the mere humidity and pressure.

Heap big storm in the Valley of the Sun on Sunday night. Me see um fire in the sky. Thunderbirds in weird mood swings. Me take Valerian to sleep. Noni for clam. The animals awake, confused. Clocks all set wrong. The large buildings of the Biltmore quad took all the hits.

Tall boys doin' us big um favor.

The sun rises high and hot and fast today. The morning is a beam. Venus and Mars and Jesus are in perfect alignment. Scotty, beam me up!

The Indian Bend Wash Flood and Tornado of '72

2006-04-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday came suddenly, sang Paul McCartney all those years ago.
I was 12 years old, no doubt watching "Wallace and Ladmo." Little beep, beep, beeps went up on the TV screen (if those weather system warnings on the bulletin bar on the bottom screen actually worked like that, back then).
Hard to remember.
What I do remember is this: We had just moved from Texas to the Country Estates subdivision at 58th Place and Shea Boulevard six days before.
On the seventh day, the rain came.
Well, not so much rain. At least, not at first. The details of that day still linger. The visual impact the storm of 1972 created is still in my mind better than any DVD could possibly replicate. It was 32 years ago this week. Imagine that. I can see it. Feel it. Almost smell it.
Back then a new plat in the Country Estates subdivision was like a cookie-cutter parcel of the moon. Sure, there was mesquite all over, but once the fences sliced-and-diced the place, all of the new back yards were, until the landscaper arrived, squared-off hotbeds of fine whitish, powdery dust. On that day or any other, the dust would get stirred up into swirls of volatile air, which we called "Dust Devils."
We still get "Dust Devils" now and then, but with the paradising effect that's gone on since these bad 'ol days, the name is being lost with all of the horny toads, rattlers and coyotes running for cover from civilization. Suddenly, it gets windy. Then, it's not. You'd hardly notice it. But on that day, June 22, 1972, the whole greater Paradise Valley area, basically the Indian Bend Wash basin, from Mummy Mountain to the McDowell Mountains, was a whirling set of such dervishes, a practical ballet performance, as weather patterns go.
Anyway, I tell this story to newcomers a lot because it teaches something about the monsoons (which this wasn't) and the history of Scottsdale (a lost great body of knowledge that exists, if it exists at all, in the archives of the old Scottsdale Progress and the Scottsdale Historical Society).
The story doesn't actually begin with me watching "Wallace and Ladmo," the old TV kids show, but with what I was doing when my dad came home as I was watching Wallace, and, of course, Ladmo.
He was mad about something. My dad. Not Ladmo. He was upset, you see, because he just got back from talking to some insurance agent. The story begins when my dad said, right after coming through the door: "They wanted us to buy flood insurance. Those (bleeps!). Don't they know this is the desert?"
Country Estates is on the northern banks of the Indian Bend Wash. With the exception of a few golf courses, as it flowed to the Salt River, it was still a desert wash with mesquite and sage and rabbits and mice and prairie dogs. In the spring, lots and lots of butterflies. When it rained, even the slightest, downtown Scottsdale would be in need of Noah's Ark.
The next start of the story, after the beeping TV warning, after my dad's now famous last words, flows in this direction: Hail stones, the size of golf balls, plopping, puft, puft, puft, into super-heated, white hot dust. Then the wind came. Then came some more. Every dot of dust and debris not tied down flew by sideways by our windows, as if the Creator were converting our environment into something akin to a black day on Mars.
The roof began to wail. Fences picked up and were lifted off as wind sails in a scene from the black-and-white segment of "The Wizard of Oz."
Then, I looked out the window, and saw a tower, a dirt vortex, well up into the sky, up and out of the frame, cascading off Mummy Mountain.
Now, even before this, tornadoes have plain freaked me out. Sure, Dorothy's little house-spin into the air, up and back and down into Oz, always left a strong impression. But also this: Members of my grandfather's immediate family, his mother and father, had been killed by a tornado in West Texas (and he had to raise his younger siblings by himself as a teen). So, fear of tornadoes is pretty much in my DNA.
So, what did I do? Run? Scream? Duck for cover? No. I decided to go outside and get a better view. Went through front door. Looked up. It was a big, brown, swirling behemoth. Or, that's what my eyes, as dust bits pelted my face and sandblasted my hair and my mother screamed "Get back in here!" - that's what my eyes still feel, see and remember.
There was no time to do the classic, heartland-style, get-into-the-cellar maneuver. No time to even get into the hallway, away from the windows. But by God's grace (as well as the seeming lack of it) the tornado hit the house across the street, destroyed a roof, killed their dog, hopped then over the entire Country Estates neighborhood, and then landed again, turning Shea Boulevard and points northward into a Vietnam era-, Robert McNamara-style playground pathway of near total destruction. Hundreds of homes had varying degrees of damage. Uncounted numbers were rendered, national-TV-news style, into images of flattened rubble.
Then, the winds passed. A half-mile away, looking toward Shea, you could see nothing but the wrecked frames of bombed-out homes and flashing red emergency lights.
Then, it began to rain. In fact, it rained for a day. In fact, it rained four inches in four hours. The Indian Bend Wash became the Indian Bend River. It must have been a mile-wide muddy river, too. But I never knew. We couldn't even step out of our door for three days as the wash, our street, now a river, flowed on by with every bit of debris and clutter it could pick up. A wash. Indeed! A major Maytag this so-called "Paradise Valley" will always be, say, every hundred years or so.
Now, I could go on and on about not having electricity or water for a week. Or, about how some official landed in a helicopter behind our house, looked around, and then left. How I now imagine it was the governor come to bless us with his utter and useless amazement. I could thank the Lord for sparing us but punishing my neighborhood with a kind of creative whimsy, and yes, a cosmic sense of timing and selectivity.
It was, after all, right after the first official day of the summer. You could talk about solstices and the equinox and all ...
I could ask, why them, but not us?
It would be futile, of course, unless you have lived it, to try to fully explain the impact of this storm on myself, my family, and yes, this burgeoning city called Scottsdale. The number of times I've told this story to people. The day I faced the tornado.
I could historically render an image of how that flood ruined much of south Scottsdale as the Indian Bend "Wash" flowed southerly to the Salt, and how the city fathers decided: Enough was enough. From that point on, the move to greenbelt all of the wash was official policy in Scottsdale: The paradising of this place had begun.
How we are the inheritors of a legacy left by a storm. I could go on about chaos theory. About how there is no such thing as accidents.
No, it's best to just leave any readers left with this: Yesterday came suddenly.

Weather Observations Written on a U.S. Government Issued Ball-Point Pen

2006-04-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

What do I know about the weather? I know that it passes through me, over me and, in some cases, below me. That’s all I know. Science, of course, addresses the evidence differently. In a supposedly objective way. Feeling from the subjective, I can say that what I know about the weather, and what I feel, is all that I need to know. Though my senses may betray and my emotions may swell, I know my personal track record is better than the weather man’s. He uses science, but he lacks the local skills to reach the conclusions of verifiable evidence that yes, it’s raining, yes, it’s a hurricane outside, and so on. But these are conclusions we are already able to reach by looking up into the sky, opening our eyes, taking a breath, and catching the ill winds that blow through all of us now, at one time or another, for an unlucky many on a daily basis.
The scientific process, whatever it takes to get theory ratified into human understanding, will not help us now. We must rely on our senses, now, or the situation looks terminal. Doomed, actually.
Now, “doomed” is a big long ominous word. Life will adapt. For example, you might live in a condo in the future in, say, Carlsbard Caverns. Certainly, Carlsbad Caverns, though I have never seen it, scientifically speaking, I know it must be a beautiful place. Yes, we humans have always done well in caves. Caves are consistently good for being safe from, say, tornados. The attendant rain my eventually reach you, but as far as tornados go, you’re good. They provide excellent cover from the cold, and yes, the heat. It’s nice and cool down there in those caves. You might like that fine.
Scientifically speaking, I don’t know much about the Kyoto Protocols. My knowledge is based on hearsay. Certaintly, here in Arizona, as it is for the rest of America, there is no evidence of any kind of Japanese-hosted global protocol, unless you count Toyotas. Otherwise, the air is dirty as sin here. In this valley, I choke on the dust, and it really cramps my smoking. My senses tell me the air is dirty as sin and sin is disorderly, to say the least. A protocol implies order. There is no order here, sir.
Chaos and disorder is what I feel when the wind gussies up and the barometric pressure drops. Anyone who cares to sense it can. At least they might catch a whiff of ozone in the air, right before it rains. We aren’t all robots. In fact, I believe our senses make us excellent subjective scientists, and that gives me hope. When the wind gussied up last night, fences were blown down, whole branches thrown across the city and into the street. In the Arcadia District, the old irrigated grove neighborhoods of Phoenix, every orange on the block was shaken from their trees. Whole groves in orbit around their former tree mothers now, turning green manicured lawns and dusty road gutters into brightly little decorated fantasy zones for free fruit: Just pick it before the noon sun cooks them into juice. The previous night’s wind shear, blowing from the northwest, from the barren expense near Barstow, a dry Mojave-style blow, spreckled the city greenery with little dots of fun factory oranges.
Indeed, the Good Friday Wind Shear of 2006 in Phoenix at dusk, as it now so shall be duly named and recorded, forcefully demonstrated the keen possibilities for our senses to detect some sort of disturbance in the ... um, force. A greater degree of unpredictability, at least, is clearly in the works.
The empirical evidence of the event suggests the following: Oranges don’t usually decorate lawns as if God’s great applecart had been tilted over. In nature, humans are biologically trained to pick them first. But today, the day after the Good Friday Wind Shear of 2006, oranges cover the desert floor, the fruit of spring is lost to everyone but those walking outdoors carrying grocery bags, or hey, little doggie poop bagettes. Those are coming in handy, too.
At the arrival of the storm, the front door to the second-story condo blew up, since it faced the winds, trees swayed madly, and to the good fortune of my own little endeavor in empirical science, a string of mulit-colored toy balloons (perhaps the casualty of a Latino car dealership upwind) swished across my line of sight, speeding by about one-hundred feet up: a perfect weather balloon. I’d say it was doing sixty (even though I can’t detect the red-shift and all). Conclusion: A big storm is zeroing in on the southwest from L.A., but who knows. Irregardless, the winds of change are speaking.

In the Big Fat Roselight of Oranges and Lemons ...

2006-04-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

As the roselight of the city speaks through me, it’s piped out musak pure and clear as a dot streaming down from satellite radio, digital clarity, I must say: Excellent sound system here. And the light. The light. Maybe it’s just the openness of this area of Phoenix, the Arcadia district with orange trees still plentiful, filling in the spaces of these 50-year-old residential areas is the cool spring morning blazes into view. I know it so well. Phoenix. This place I keep coming back to. Maybe it’s because of the weather?
As I gather my thoughts, written on some canyon map during a coffee, bidi and piece
of some kind of prettily made bread break;
while gazing at a Hummer-covered parking lot
at a gentrified suburban Republican Bistro called “Le Grande Orange,” the words flew:

I charted this course
with a red string
on a map of black chalk
The roads are many,
the final choice, new

I climb up the cafe canyon
walls to get a better view,
to see over the trees
and see my way to you

Having returned like Prometheus
to my city in pretty chains of light,
the rains have stopped like Porches
braking in the sun, which burns,
big and bright, drying this coffee stop
tabletop with its eviscerating truth

Gathering force, moving toward
the majestic and mysterious,
the merely merrily whimsical
snowcapped peaks of Ouray,
just a day away, as Latin horns
are piped through soccer moms
in sweatpants and motors purr

Is this city immune to war?

This cream of violence
rises to the top
For what they eat and taste
and buy and like,
they will not stop

Mechanized sweet, sweet soap,
the umbilical sword of the clean,
is the last potable hope
of water for the healing
and giving peace a hearing

And while the danceworld cult is searing,
I advance across an asphalt clearing:
In my heart, the key is just the start,
this language of escape
is now my art

Now that I’m stuck in this city now for the forseable future, as the sun continues to climb up and over the vines, the light filtering through, the latin music pattering, this coffeehouse daydream of mine is an obsession now. This wireless world of windless days, creature comforts, coffee, the scent setting the mind ready to ignite a cig. That’s the spring in Arizona, and there’s nothing better.
This week, people died on two separate days of tornados in the Midwest. Yes, springtime is the tornado season. This year, condition red. Strange how all color charts for fear bleed into one. Even stranger how a single sunrise can cause all doubters to believe in spring. And as the world spins faster, ever faster, it’s good to know, when you find it, what home feels like.
At least for now. The summer of war this 2006 looks to be a fairly dicey proposition from wherever you stand.

O. on the Edge of the Western World

2006-04-05T15:23:00.000-07:00

We were facing the west, out to the sea. In this case, the Pacific. A storm was moving in. You could see the line of squalls moving inland. She started shouting to some deity whose name started with a "T." Tiamat, that's what it was. The storm was moving in. The pressure was dropping. Enough to make you feel like the whole world around was dropping in some kind of spiral as the white gulls spun circles around us, defecating on O. in one case, or, floating on the 50-mile-per-hour gusts. We leaned in to the wind. She starts shreaking about Tiamat.

Then she starts shouting out Audrey Lord, and I'm looking around, trying to see if those huddled in their vehicles on the Highway 101 parking lot beach stop, just off the famed Pacific Coast highway in Lincoln City, Oregon, where the world's shortest river, the "D" River, emptying as it does from Devil's Lake ... trying to peak around to see if anybody is noticing us. Sand is blowing in our face now, and the rain is upon us. The wind, hitting the headlands now at 60 to 75 miles per hour, is pressing our rain gear against our bodies.

Tiamat. Audrey Lord. Then her own poems. O. looking like one of those sea queens on the front of old sailing ships. We are pelted with hail now, small stones, little bits of sleet. Tiamat and Audrey Lord. I laugh and dance and try to smoke, but it's no use. The wind blows out the lighter. The rain douses the cig. I act as if nothing is wrong. This is how you face the storm, like a scene from that movie, "Tempest," with John Cassavetes making circles in the air, saying, "Show me the magic. Show me the magic." Though rain dances are hardly necessary on the Oregon coast the winter of 2006, the force of the storm, blowing through us now, takes on the epic lyric of a howling she-wolf into the breeze, over the coastal hills, the Oregon plains, into the jet stream rising over the Cascades, sending global carpets of agitated moisture into the Midwest, where it spins all kind of hell.

Moved by the scene, getting home with O., somewhere, sometime, I don't remember when, I responded with my own furies cry into the wind, this pathetic little voice, first scratched onto a notebook, stewed up on the computer, and then thrown onto the computer, like some kind of Blakean prophetic rant!

She leans into the sea
keening a song
from the Madonna mirror
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
a crowny curtin of thorns

Unknowing from the unquiet
slumbers of lost ships
still melting in icy currents
below the surface,
the seagulls scatter
and defecate upon her:

Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan

Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view

America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth,
chased in the wind, wakes
the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
before the living dead
can get out of bed

Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits

After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
the northwesterly El Nino
sheared shanks of wind
off the Oregon coast,
then brought a low blow
to slap the soiled temples
of the City of Angels

Driftwood is piled fore desire
against sandy beach stumps
and stop gaps, infinite and wise:
Infinity stopped here for a day,
a deluge for the dead,
so I could admire
our wood chips,
our broken bones

A winter-long windshear
plucked the breath
from my pressurized lungs,
turning my fire to water.
I floated some, then burst,
mounted a floating oar
then sank into an orb
of sand

The sun, beyond the grey wail,
shaped a man inside here,
inside this calamity of clams;
one-part plastic,
one-part fishhook,
a bonney redwood mast,
a skull & crossbones flying,
walking the plank on dry land
without an anchor, who cares?

Setting of these banalities
of life aside, let me perscribble:
Glass floats on the beach,
I've found, and the ebb-tide
of the avenues are a roar
of trucks in the rain

On tuesdays, Great Food
is closed in a seaside town;
and what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran

Also this: The electric truth sheds
the oil slick skin off the CIA
and sickened seagulls
reel in the ninety mile winds
and Pennsylvania miners
with black lung bibles
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast

The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite's
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade

The camera's eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants

Glass floats on the beach,
it's endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it's coming here fast
It's time to drink
from the pirate's flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...

Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it's here, at last

Walking With the Lord to the Cheap Seats, Part I

2006-04-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

Come to think of it, there are more things this book is not about than what it's actually about. Sure, it belongs in context. Context is good. It provides a canvas for which I can mark upon, and, if I like, erase. The weather is the concern, sure, until you spend a week or so in Phoenix, where the weather in the spring is a kind of abstraction. Sixty tornadoes hit the Midwest on the night of April 1 and 2, 2006, providing a clearing not even Rumsveld could devise. Sixty Abrahms tanks, perhaps even without the nuclear-tipped strategic paintball bombs, would be hard-pressed to char an equal impression on the land. Especially if you think of the gas.
The gas, yes: The gas. It pours freely on the streets of Phoenix, where Hummers and SUVs stall in tight traffic spirals across a smog-choked valley, where busses and Seven Up trucks blast on by to their rounds, a daily routine of drops and pickups; airplanes throwing themselves into space; a whole washing machine detergent cycle of acid-laced lather, all churning up on the desert plain. The compromised desert plain. The boom of engines is a constant buzz in the ear until early in the morning, when the owls and sirens and ghetto bird copters resonate a peaceful slumber into the night, the cool, orange blossom scented night.
Rain is rare here. Compassion with those across the continent (when it comes to the weather), even rarer. Yet this place called Phoenix, this sprawl, is a beehive honey pit for smog and pollutants across the southwest, blowing generally east. One has to think hard, real hard, about the weather as it relates to the rest of the globe. One is forced to return to research, that is, empirical evidence of what sort of thing is being caused here, in Phoenix, as well as the billions of blazing headlights on dry land. The vampires live here. They are in force. They dictate space. Its use. Its monopoly, a monoculture clasping on a far-away river, the Colorado, as well as the Salt.
The media here, diverse as it is, lends affirmation of the catastrophe only in blips and blurbs. FOX-TV, of course, a bad example, practically by design, provides a nightly newscast that only affords the apparent imbalances in nature as a freaky thing that happens in other places, in New Orleans, in Tennessee, in Indiana, North Dakota, who cares! The sun is shining here. And so, the baccanalian delight in gas fumes on, a business big as fake breasts and highway taxes, the rest of the world be damned.

- Phoenix, Arizona

Polarity is the Pulse in Phoenix

2006-03-25T06:04:00.000-08:00

OK, let's set a few ground rules. First of all, this living novel isn't going to be one of my long sad odes to lost love. Looking for something a little more life-affirmin despite, as I said before, the forty days of fire, forty day of rain. Let all of that stuff wash this planet clean, I say. Good riddance.
Nor is this series of honest entries going to be overly metaphysical. I know, it can't be avoided. As the metaphysical blends with the physical, as it always has, we can at least grasp all things as one whole, and leave it at that. All religions are one, Blake said, and that shall be the central core of the moral code here.
That being established, the real meaning behind all this is the essential idea that global warming is a proven reality, and despite the fact science has yet to confirm it, we can rely on our own empirical experience, our subjective sensitivities, to guide us. Any animal has this power. We humans shouldn't deny it, either. Our instincts are telling us everything we need to know. Feeling shook up? Sure you do. If you don't, well, aren't you lucky. You must live in some high-class castle somewhere, with a bank account growing rich from the pilfering of the globe and its underclass of citizen servants to the machine mind. I know, you smile, in social darwinist glee, don't you, thinking there's nothing but money that flows like some kind of river or holy ghost that dictates the true realities of the global engines, and all of the rest of us, with nothing but spirit to hone, are just flapping around in the narcotic gods of our overactive imaginations.
OK then, you have your reward. Drive your Hummers into the sunset with glee. Carve up the valleys and canyons to your hearts' content. Vote red. See red. Drain blood. Carry your U.S. Marine guarded pallets of cash up and down the streets of Bagdad like a parade of caskets, for all I care.
You have your reward, you fucking vampires!
Now, for the rest of us, there is nothing but time to hone the spirit. Just know this: All televised visions of the apocalypse are irrelevant. As long as we are at one with the Creator, there is nothing to fear. Fear nothing, and nothingness will run.
So here we go, the moral and material pulse are openly presented and established. Time to move forward.
*****
We begin our day in Phoenix, just fresh from the largest Latino demonstration against some kind of proposed state legislation that, to hear the agents of La Raza describe it, sounds like some kind of Nazi pusch to rid this place of more than half of its population. On March 24, 2006, 20,000 citizens of real actual America, most of them more than likely so-called "illegals," showed their faces at 24th and Camelback to create the largest mass demonstration in state history. Throughout the day, all traffic in Phoenix was ground to a halt and consumerism took a heavy blow, as a result. Sure, I saw a parade of little Latino guys pushing those musical ice cream carts up and down the street, and thought I caught a whiff of ricin in the air while trying to negotiate it all in a white rented truck, but actually it wasn't too bad of a day to find Phoenix: A bundle of neverous polarities.
I left it that way. Now it has intensified. Figures. But, O my sweeties, how it made me forget about the beauty of the craggy desert I'd driven through. It made me forget about the little burghs of trailer parks, tire fix outlets, shanty little restaurants, and that whole weird world of citizens who are off the grid in the deserts of America. We can only imagine who they are. Good people, mostly, since most people are basically good. But they must be an anti-social bunch. If anti-social means avoiding the streets of Phoenix, though, then I can certainly relate to the gripe.
Anyhow, it sure made the clean-as-a-whistle resort marketplace of Lake Havasu City an attractive idea as a living choice, moonish as it is. A pile of rocks is what the Queen of Lake Havasu calls it. To which a daydream of the coast returns to the back of my head, memories of our next-to-last night in Lincoln City:

Egyptian bachelors
carting guitars
skinny and wise
as Dutch masters,
Filipino blood rising ...

He wrote up hieroglyphics
as a message to the Queen
of Jehu, of the Nile
as the faces of single malt
deities glimmer and danced
in front of the Stars & Stripes

The American flag, the grapes,
the gripes, the grapes, the wrath,
I threw my credit card
to the bartender
never counting my cash

The room clears, late night
a medley of the classics:
Your CC&R, your Rolling Stones,
as a moronic beer bath
leads to rock-solid thought

What we unlearn
tells us a lot

Pale bejeweled prancer
upon a dome upon the rock,
late at night old men hold
on tight to all that's lost,
as the young women walk
past them, gone, outta sight!

- Phoenix, Arizona

The Next Time I See You, Satan, I'm Going to Beat You Up

2006-03-22T02:46:00.000-08:00

Coming down the mountain, moving south, out of Oregon and into the Jefferson valley, I could see the clouds, wrung out by the winds, streaming across the top of Mount Shasta, a white-capped behemoth overlooking the region like a Himalayan monarch. Most mountains do. They have that quality. They are monarchical. They press against the sky and there’s no telling them anything. They are in charge. We wait on them. They are never pleased. Like the wind, they own the land, forcing their will upon all inhabitants. And so on this day, seabirds, white gulls of some kind (I wish I knew what kind), were oddly trouncing around, sifting for food at the roadsite rest site placed like a dish at the mountain’s valley table. They seemed lost, as if the wind had blown them there from far away. I asked the rest site attendants, one was clearly retarded and the other one, a Latino) if it was unusual for these birds to be there. The retarded one mumbled something that was lost in the 50 mph winds. The Latino said the white gulls always come in the summer. I thanked them and then walked away, then realized: It was March.
The point of this passage was to get out of the rain. And just this once, the sun burst through the clouds and painted this valley in a way valleys are supposed to be painted by the sun. Great broad clean sweeps of color. At this rest stop along U.S. 5, I got out to take a piss and a picture.
The wind was blowing hard, damn hard. I’d been driving for six hours at least, after leaving Canyonville, Oregon earlier that morning ( a nice little place that eventually creeped me out, due to its bible belt quality tthat packed its more hermetic charms in tight, its health food store, its cyber cafe, its large white masons hall, all tucked in tight in a womb of paternal Jehovah protectionism) and was about ready to go postal about the weather. Really had had enough.
Six miserable months the storms, my sweeties, have rendered me into complete unrealiable narratorhood. Now, after facing numerable challenges to my sanity as I have re-traced our steps to this dream of a life at the far end of our continent, I have been reduced to madly running through the Mohave desert in the cold and dark in order to find a fucking telephone so that I could hear your voice and know it’s going to be OK. But such assurances have escaped me. Instead, after facing yet another horrible Olympus on the road up and down the pass in Tehachapi, California, where I determined the most deadly foe to man isn’t the horror of nature, but instead, the nature of the California drivers who hurl through the world on some kind of high-octane hell without a care in the world for who they run off the road, I descended into yet another underworld to find I’m not worthy of this mission.
Now, as I face this cracked mirror in a motel room in Barstow, another place being cold-blasted by the hideous wind, I am tortured by a lingering premonition. A previous night’s dream at Sis’s place in Sacramento included, in the crash of iron and mix of metal, the literal sound of your crying that exists only in my head, the sound of the word “OK,” as I imagined maybe you too were succumbing to the same maddening drought of sunlight as we keep moving south, further south, only to find the sun has seemed to have flown forever from view. I turned on the television only briefly in this pitiful motel room to find the planet beset by volcanes and cyclones and endless war, as well as a nation preoccupied with meaningless trivial little follies like basketball playoffs and “reality” series carnivals. I tried to call anyone I could but it was too late at night. The loneliness of the road has undone me. I have scrambled to find some solution to this emptiness I feel, this gut-wrenching doubt about what, if anything, we are to become.
And worse, this cracked mirror reveals the face of a man who has been reduced to complete narcissism and treachery beyond even what he knew he was capable. It began in Canyonville, I believe, when the cyber cafe lady said my work was too irreligious to even be considered marketable commodity in their town. At first, I rejoiced. At first, I rested in the anarchist artist’s glee that comes from provoking such a strong reaction. Then this obsession of mine to be a bard for you and the whole world, this outright pathetic craving to be heard and understood was bolstered by a positive response in Ashland, land of a bards, a pretty, perfect land of Cathar glee, where poets, playwrights and other bards can be celebrated and congratulated and adored, safe and free to think and blather amongst themselves. I had an audience behind a coffeehouse during a short break from the road where I could be the man I imagine myself to be: The sage, the poet, the mystic, the raky rascal on the road.
Then I was off again to face more storms. I tried and tried again to find some lightness in me, you know, the humor in all this. I have come one thousand miles in two days of driving. During that time, I have seen the sun maybe three times, maybe for an hour or two, tops. Meanwhile, the earth is breaking open. The birds are either sick or lost. Volcanoes across the world are pouring black coal into the sky. This will only increase the greenhouse effect. A cyclone the size of a continent is tormenting the other side of the world, and here, on the Pacific Coast, the big hand of God is slapping America across the face with a cold, wet fist. And I, under this fist, can only marvel but cannot laugh. I cannot find the lightness necessary to carry any reader.
Raja, our dog, is saying nothing. Just like the rest of us, he has no answers. You sent him away with me as some kind of substitute for love, I suppose, and I answered the bell the night before this one by cradling him in a blanket as he shook in the cold on the porch of the white-picket fence home of Sis of Sacramento. He responded by refusing his food and obviously entreating me to find our way back to you. But I have nothing now but the fear all is lost, that something has gone hideously wrong with all of our plans, that it’s all my fault, due to my frailties and pointless yearnings, my hunger, my shame, my ceaseless clutching for some kind of answer to our demise.
I have this bottomless fear that when I last looked at you, the wolf woman goddess in the rearview mirror, I had seen you for the last time. That you would realize, as you began to retrace our steps, too, as you faced the rain-swept valleys and snow-capped monarchs, as you searched your memory banks and found new reasons to doubt my love, as you passed the miles with your Cappy sister priestess, who is also facing her own demons under these daunting conditions, that you will have both come undone together and gone wildly into some other more suitable direction. Like Portland. Or Canada. Or maybe you just stayed put and even as I write this you are hunkered down in our sad empty sleepness owl’s nest of a house on the Oregon Coast, fighting off the golem and gargoyles of the Chinook winds with bouts of beer and bible beating. With Reiki on the run. With wild-eyed goddess energy that knows better than to find anything decent enough to grasp onto when it comes to the flighty love of a mere mortal man. I imagine two queens who have basically decided to rule the waves and currents of the collapsing world on their own, leaving me to listen to trains in the night, to wait for the daylight to pull myself together in order to carry all of this crap, this boatload of property, this totem dance of overwhelming memories, these dirty clothes and dog-barfed blankets, all of this material scarred earthenware, this skeletal shell of consumable us, to my own private, personal, sex-crazed, ego-driven kingdom hall of hell.
Now, in this black desert of the night, I have this ten by ten cell as a shelter from the chaos outside, but nothing to soothe me from within but the summoning of my own muse. O Gawd, let him be Gabriel rather than the dark dragon himself. May I find some way to soothe all of this pain by myself so that I, before the end of these forty days of fire, forty days of rain, face the very uncoiling of the snaky, imperfect soil from which the whole world is made. May I fight back these ghosts and lusts with the purest love I can muster, maybe for one last time. My I take this silly sword of mine and strike one last blow to the machine mind that has sucked us all down. May I find compassion from someone, somewhere, who will take my call.

- Barstow, California