The Dishwasher's Tears

moved

2012-01-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

for anyone who doesn't already know, I've moved.

i miss this place, i really do. i started here and never wanted to move, but i really like the new place, too.

hope you'll follow me there.

Clay

2011-11-13T16:18:00.001-08:00

Go ye forth and yet read him.

Savannah

2011-11-13T14:36:00.001-08:00

*

The thing is, you don't get to bargain with life. You are not allowed to say, "Okay, this far, but no farther." I mean, I guess you could say that, but it ain't going to help none. You make what room you can to accommodate whatever new conflagration arises and still maintain some hold on what you believe matters to you most, what's inviolable, and you draw the line there.

Unfortunately, this just serves to make your foolishness stand out in starker relief.

You best get out the way, cause that line is getting crossed.

*

I don't know. I guess that a good measure of pain accompanies every necessary transformation. We want things how we want them. We want control, we want a voice, we want something done! But maybe a large part of that pain is from fear and resistance. Nothing new there.

Still, it feels like a revelation when it's happening to you.

Don't it.

*

So, opening to it. Rolling with it. And keeping your eyes open for the slim little gap of daylight you might be able to jam into and pry open, so you can breathe for a minute while you try to think things through.

It's something to shoot for.

*

I feel so damn crazy right now. That storm just keeps building, the dark clouds scudding lower and lower, all charged up with electricity and the sky gone dark green and a thousand miles between you and the nearest shelter.

*

"Stahm's a-comin'"

*

Namaste.

***

Loser

2011-11-11T07:44:00.001-08:00

*

Three days off.

Thanks, Veterans.

*

So, the Wild Woman of Borneo is living under our roof now, waiting for the miracle of birth. We are all on pins and needles, except for her, it seems. She tends to get all unraveled with the little shit that bugs her, but the big stuff just seems to roll off her back.

Maybe the small stuff feels like she has some control over the outcome, I don't know. That woman is the deepest mystery of my life, how she turned out to be the way she is, what she is, how to interact with her. A writhing, seething mass of dangerous contradictions.

She's got this boy hanging around her now.

Talk about an awkward romance. I think of him as Joseph, dragging Mary around from inn to inn, looking for a place to crash.

They are both in recovery and under the court's thumb. It breaks your damn heart to look at them, it really does.

You never seen anything more fragile seeming in your life.

*

Myself I feel pretty damn good. Tethered to my amazing woman I feel as grounded as I am likely to get, and ready for the storm. Not tensed up about it, either, just ready. Almost healed up, too.

It's all good.

*

Open, open, open.

*

Namaste.

***

ECQC Los Angeles 2011

2011-11-07T11:38:00.000-08:00

*

So, made it back alive from Extreme Close Quarters Combat. And just like last year, I had the goddamn time of my life. Even better, I got to go with my "little" brother, the monster. The picture above shows one of the two-on-one evolutions from the last day. You can see the guy on the ground has managed to access his clinch pick trainer to try to even the odds a little bit, but with two guys on top of you, it's really difficult to get anything done at all. He's already lost his protective helmet and eye protection that everyone starts out with. In most classes that would be the end of the drill, but Southnarc does an outstanding job of monitoring what's going on, and he keeps the evolution going as long as possible as long as everyone is respecting the spirit of the fight and not taking cheap shots or shooting a guy in the face who has no protection. He steps in and calls it as soon as things begin to fall apart, but he keeps it going long after you've gassed and wish you were dead. He lets you get in the deepest of holes and makes you keep fighting, working, struggling, trying something, anything, to stay alive a little bit longer. He won't let you quit, and that's what we all love about training with him.

No matter how deep the hole, you have to keep fighting.

The Brave One at the start of his two-on-one. The little guy in the shades is SouthNarc, our sensei.

*

That's my bro up above, wearing his training company T-shirt ( Spartan Training Resources.) This was his first time at ECQC, and I was excited to be there for it. He's got a good base in striking, ground grappling, muy thai, and, of course, firearms.

It showed.

Getting rounds off in the fucked up tangle

Here he's lost his helmet and eye-pro, he's getting dragged to the ground by one assailant while the other guy is wrapping up his legs, but he managed to shoot bad guy two twice in the head on the way down.

Then it was time to solve the other problem with a little over the shoulder head shooting.

The guy is a little bit of a handful.

*

The Dishwasher dancing with his assailant.

The Dishwasher getting rolled.

I learned a lot in my evolutions. The shot above is me in the one on one with my assailant. In real life he is an active duty Marine in a special operations group with ten years of downrange experience. He schooled me but good.

The thing about these things is that you really do learn a lot more from your failures than you do from your successful outcomes.

Things are falling apart for me here.

Here he's got me on my back with my dominant arm pinned behind my head. He's reaching for his weapon behind his hip.

I'm entering a world of pain.

Now I'm being gut-shot by my new friend.

I'm on my back, my arm pinned over my head, getting crushed and gut-shot by a Special Forces Marine. So, end of evolution, right?

You know better than that.

The fight for control of the gun.

The slide is pushed to the rear. It won't fire like that. I've got a slim chance.

He's got the gun, and he's a lot stronger than me, and in better shape. I'm gassed bad now and I can't out muscle him. I've got one hand on the gun and I've got the slide run back so he can't shoot me, and I'm grabbing his gun hand wrist, which he's trying to pull off. I'm not going to get the gun from him like this...

Getting my knee to help me out.

So I manage to bring my knee up. Now I can break his grip on the gun using the leverage of my hips and the strength of my legs against his arms, a better deal for me. This worked for me, and I managed to get the gun from him. But it took so much out of me that I quickly lost position. I threw the gun away so at least he couldn't keep shooting me, but I wasn't able to take the initiative back. I knew I had to do something, but for the life of me, I didn't know what that could be. All I wanted was for this shit to stop. I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry. I was completely helpless and getting run like a fucking sock puppet. There was no way out.

back in a bad place.

He's crushing me now. I can't breathe, I'm all out of gas, and flat on my back.

Keep fighting.

Southnarc kept me fighting long past the point that I could do anything effective, but I grunted and screamed and thrashed long enough that he took pity on me and finally called it.

Out of gas, game over.

So, other than getting stuffed, pinned on my back, arm pinned over my head, and gut-shot, I think I did pretty good!

Ha.

I did better in the two on one, going up against the same Marine and another great guy who is a full-contact stick fighter from the Dog Brothers. Managed to stay on my feet for a long time (also known as running away!) and got some shots on both assailants before I got my shit stacked again. I also dominated the car-jacking evolution, where you fight inside a car against a guy who's got a gun to your head. I got the muzzle averted, drove hard against him as I raised my hips up to the ceiling and crushed him down into the corner of his seat and the passenger side door. I got a knee on his belly and braced my back against the roof, then stripped the gun from him and fed him a couple of head shots.

It were more fun than losing, I noticed.

Plus, it didn't hurt nearly as much.

I didn't get a lot of pictures of the last day because we were up there in the foothills, fighting in the mud in the pouring rain. Then in the rain and hail. Then in the rain, hail, and lightning.

My brother and I were rolling around in the mud, getting pelted by driving hailstones, fighting over a gun in a lightning storm, and he pauses in the middle of the fight and looks at me, grinning, and says, "Well, it's official. This is the best fucking training ever!"

Then he kicked my ass, took the gun from me, and shot me in the face.

Namaste.

***

Coffee break is over, back on your heads.

2011-11-03T18:08:00.000-07:00

*

It's that time again. Southnarc's Extreme Close Quarters Combat class. Three glorious days in LA, getting the fuck beat out of myself and rolling around on the ground with a bunch of violence-fueled apes.

What could be better?

Last year I went with my work partner. He claims I broke one of his ribs, but I doubt I did more than pop it out of joint or something. This year I'm going with my brother, the world's most dangerous man.

I may not survive.

*

I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me. Last week at dinner with my mom she told me how when I was a little baby I was scared of absolutely everything. Not like my little brother, who took it all in stride. Anything that moved, I jumped. Anything new, I shied from like a nervous colt. I cried a lot.

She had to make sure to introduce things to me real slow so I wouldn't bust into tears.

*

I'm not much changed.

I put a brave face on, but there's still a nervous little poodle working the controls.

*

I don't know how to resolve the contradiction, and I don't guess I ever will. I fucking love to shoot and bang and fight, to kick doors in the pre-dawn dark, to hang it out over the line. There's nothing that makes you feel more alive than the surge of main-line adrenaline when your brain has turned the tap wide open.

And yet I'm afraid all the time of the simplest things. Anxious and sleepless over money or work or relationship matters. Forget about Sundays, man, the thought of going to work on Monday ruins the whole day.

A fucked up tangle of tough and lazy, clever and stupid, fearless and trembling. Like Private Joker said about Paris Island, the home of the fake tough and the crazy brave.

And at forty-seven, I should perhaps have these issues better resolved than I do.

*

At any rate, that's where I'll be for the next few days.

I don't know how that woman of mine puts up with me, but she seems decided in my favor. It takes all kinds, I guess.

I am damn lucky for it.

*

Namaste.

***

Mr. Spock

2011-11-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

*

In the dream Spock stood at the lectern, his hands gripping hard on either side. His head was slightly bowed and he looked up through the ridges of his forehead at the classroom. His lidless eyes bulged and it seemed to me that he had Down syndrome, perhaps, although
it was hard to say for sure. His face was red and his body shook with something like suppressed rage. The tin insignia on his uniform breast trembled against a field of blue polyester.

He was saying something about Melville's use of imagery in Moby Dick, but everybody knew he wanted to teach us physics instead. It wasn't in his nature to teach the humanities, but he struggled on.

He was at war with something inside of him, that much seemed clear, but there was nothing to do but watch him fight it out. It was not something that could be helped, it was what he was made for.

*

Namaste.

***

Bereft Object No. 1

2011-10-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

*

"Death comes, death comes."

*

Another weekend of hard prep work getting things ready for a whole slew of family to move in. More painting, more furniture rearranging. New light fixtures, etc.

Also, the much beloved O'Keefe & Merritt stove started falling apart on us, the door springs busted, the broiler refusing to light or stay lit. So on saturday I took her all apart and tilted her back so I could get underneath her, propped a footstool and a pile of books under so she couldn't crush my head, and spent the next three hours trying to fix the busted door springs. It's one of those deals kind of like fishing wires through the walls trying to wire a new outlet, you've got a flimsy hook you're trying to thread up into the hidden void between the oven and the broiler, and the hook has to grab onto a tiny knob on the back of the door hinge, then a steel cable hooks to that and runs through a pulley and down to a big spring that hooks into a hole on the bottom of the stove. There's one of these setups for each hinge on the oven door and the grillevator door. I managed to get both of the hinges on the oven door repaired and restrung, but the grillevator door is running on just the one hinge. I disassembled the broiler shut-off safety valve that was malfunctioning and not letting any gas run to the burner head. I reassembled that and tightened everything up and now she's running like a champ. While I had her stripped down I gave her a good overall bath in hot water and simple green, washed her and scrubbed off all the accumulated grease and grime, cleaned the oven racks and the inside of the oven and the broiler, the burner heads and drip pans, the back and sides, everywhere I could get to. Then I rubbed her all down with an old dog towel till she shined and glowed pure white like some holy thing.

Which she is.

Ready for Thanksgiving!

*

All that work was done as a kind of half-assed penance for some bad behavior on my part. Also I managed to put a pretty good strain or tear on the flexor tendon of my left index finger. It swole up pretty good and I can't really do much with it now. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't my damn trigger finger.

Just when I think I'm just about the best thing since sliced bread I manage to put that notion out of contention in a pretty convincing way.

You could set your watch by it.

*

It is one thing to beat yourself up over imagined shortcomings, another one entirely to stand gape-mouthed at your own stupidity and bad acts.

*

That woman was pretty good about it, too. I am damn grateful to her for that.

She's a wonder, that one.

*

I feel like a great storm has gathered and is soon to set upon us. Nor will aught be left standing. Nor will aught be spared or left unchanged.

Me, I'm itching to throw open the shutters, strip buck naked, and stand howling in the teeth of it.

I don't believe that act will protect me nor any of those I am bound to try to save.

*

I think Hume is right about us being primarily emotionally driven, with the rational mind mostly just running around behind us, trying to tidy up. I don't know if it's a good idea to always be yearning to be better than you are, but I can't seem to accept that I'm good enough the way I am. I know myself too well for that. I think that probably, yes, I am not separate from the great universal groundless consciousness, not any more than anyone else. But also, I am running an operating system that is very primitive and error prone, so it might actually be a good idea to kind of fault-check my base suppositions from time to time, and, you know, defrag my hard drive and dump my cache of cookies.

Plus give myself a good degreasing and maybe rub myself all over with a fluffy towel.

*

I am grateful to be alive, and healthy, and loved. Employed and paid up. Sheltered and transported.

And given each day the wonderful puzzle of the entire universe to ponder and hang out in.

*

What did I ever do to deserve all these riches?

Not a damn thing.

*

Namaste.

***

Wonderland

2011-10-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

*

Is the self a cage from which one should struggle to be free?

*

Or should we see it as a home?

*

Is it both things?

*

Maybe I should treat it both ways while I try to work through the conundrum. I can patch and paint the worn walls, knock down the cobwebs, scrub the floors, fix the toilet, open the windows to let in some light.

At the same time, dig at a spot on the floor with the spoon I hide from the guards under my mattress, take a handful of dirt out each day, working on my escape.

*

We watched "Inside Job" last night. A documentary designed to make you pissed off, if you weren't already.

I couldn't help seeing the behavior of the wall street investment banks and giant insurance companies, the traders, the politicians, the regulators, the insiders and money-makers, as inevitable. Environments are made to be exploited. That is to say, that the very function of life, of living organisms, is to exploit the resources of the environment as efficiently as possible. And that's all that happened.

It's just that those guys are parasites that live off our labor and our efforts and they are sucking us dry and they will keep at it until all of us are stone cold dead.

It's nothing to get mad about. It's in their nature.

*

Something we should probably take notice of, however.

If we want to survive.

*

I am not a big-picture thinker. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that I am not a big-picture actor. I don't really believe in protest, in sign-waving and chanting and all that. It irritates the fuck out of me, point of fact. I can't tell you how fast I reach for the knob when I hear some fucking yahoo shouting, "What do we want?" and then a bunch of outraged people shouting ~~"PEACE!"~~

*click.*

I got no patience for it.

I have a more contractive, isolative, individual reaction. I grow the hedge around my house higher and thicker. I dig the moat deeper.

Put more heads on pikes around the perimeter.

*

And inside the walls, I tend my private paradise.

*

I guess it's the same with my self, my ego. Barbed wire and trenches filled with gasoline on the outside, a gorgeous walled garden with burbling springs, redolent with the scent of roses and lilacs, abuzz with the sound of bees and birdsong.

All built on a giant raft that's headed for the falls, the mist rising and the roar getting louder by the day.

*

Namaste.

***

Self at Forty Seven

2011-10-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

*

I think my face is a pretty accurate mirror of my soul. Like Orwell said, at fifty every man has the face he deserves. Not quite there yet, but it's true enough already.

*

Pretty awesome birthday week. Had range training on wednesday, got up before dawn yesterday and today to serve warrants on some shitholes out in BFE. Yay, shooting! Yay, pointing guns! Yay, predawn raids!

*

I know, I know.

I should be over that shit already.

*

I can't help myself, though.

*

I'm not one of those people who dread growing older. I embrace it. I wouldn't go back if you paid me. The aches and pains and slowing down, the deafness and the ringing in my ears, the sleepless nights, the failing eyes, they're all worth it.

We earn that shit, man.

*

I got nothing profound to say today. I'm going to get in some meditation and some restorative yoga goodness, and eat dinner with my beautiful and amazing wife, and then lay on the sofa and watch some streaming netflix goodness.

Maybe she'll let me watch one of those PBS Nova shows, or some shit about neanderthals.

Or something about killing.

*

Namaste.

***

And She Was

2011-10-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

*

Did you read about the discovery of abalone shells with ocher pigments and bone marrow mixtures in a cave in South Africa? This hundred thousand year old art studio pushes back the earliest evidence of human symbolic thinking forty thousand years. Lascaux paintings are less than twenty thousand years old. The Chauvet cave paintings just over thirty thousand years old. There is evidence of Neanderthal jewelry and painting that is over fifty thousand years old.

The Great Leap Forward as put forward by Jared Diamond proposes that humanity as a species suddenly developed the capacity for symbolic thought and language after migrating out of Africa and settling in Eastern Europe, due to some combination of sociological pressures due to increased population density and a sudden evolutionary change in the human brain, which led to the development of more sophisticated tools, speech, and manipulation of the environment (leading from pastoral nomadism towards a nascent agricultural society).

In this view, the ascent of man follows a natural linear progression in which we, as modern humans, and the only remaining homo genus, are at the pinnacle of evolutionary growth.

But we know that evolution has no destination (well, I believe that consciousness, universal self-recognition, awareness of everything by everything else, may be, in fact, where everything could be headed, but I certainly don't have any data to back up that supposition...). Thinking that evolution has a point is a continuation of the ancient human tendency to see ourselves as being at the center of everything, at the top of everything, where the all the men are strong, all the women good-looking, and all the children are above average....

If the evidence that humans were mixing paints in order to express symbolic thoughts a hundred thousand years ago shows that our "modern" brains are much older than we previously believed, it raises an interesting possibility about what we have become in the last ten thousand years. Now, we have to keep in mind that we have incredibly few data points to refer to, and there may have been vast cities and whole civilizations that we're blind to, because nothing was left of them, or we haven't looked yet in the right places, or we don't recognize the remnants, etc. We have scant data, so it's easy to draw conclusions that are completely unsupported and just plain wrong. But still, an interesting thought nags at me when I ponder this new information.

If modern human society did in fact arise relatively quickly after some genetic mutation that spawned our modern human brains, then it makes some sort of sense that our current society reflects in some way the structure of our brains, that it is in some sense inevitable that we develop agriculture, cities, trade, science, and fill up the available space, use up the available resources, and choke on our own pollution and starve to death in a horrifyingly overpopulated, decimated petri dish of a planet, victims of our own evolutionary "success" in out competing every other species on earth.

Definitely a potential outcome, given our current course.

But what if we've been hanging around for a hundred thousand years with most of our modern thinking tools intact? What if it's been longer, say a hundred and fifty thousand? Two hundred thousand? Then a somewhat different picture emerges, one in which we can conceive of an almost timeless edenic realm where mankind lived in balance with his environment. Not in peace and harmony, I mean, lifetimes were short and death came early and violently for the vast majority of us. We killed each other. We killed other creatures to eat, and we were killed and eaten ourselves. So, it wasn't some hand-holding, stand around the fire and sing with the lions and the lambs of the circle of life, but it wasn't what we have now, either. We didn't outstrip our resources on a planetary scale. I think it's likely that we did on a local scale, but with the transient nature of pastoral nomadism we likely left a denuded area for a long enough time for it to replenish itself before our group or another one reoccupied it.

If you contemplate a society of small tribal groups of humans wandering around hunting and gathering and raiding outlying groups and singing and painting and falling in love and making babies and getting eaten by lions and falling off cliffs and getting crushed by giant sloths or mastadons in a endlessly repeating cycle of lifetime after lifetime, hundreds of years, thousands, tens of thousands, fifteen or twenty times longer than our own idea of our civilization, where each generation's experience of life is exactly the same as the previous one's, and the one which follows, you get this idea of a kind of a timeless experience of existence, an existence where time only expressed itself in a cyclical way, through the seasons and the movement of the stars, birth and death and rebirth, forever- there was no, there could have been no conception of time's arrow, of movement through time. Time did not start over here and then end up over there. Time was like the sea, like the sky, always new and ancient at the same moment. It didn't go anywhere.

Think about what that kind of existence, that kind of conception of time and your place in it might do to your world-view.

*

It changes everything.

*

It makes me wonder if our sudden explosion of growth and scientific quest for knowledge and our drive to dominate and exploit the world and the whole of the universe is merely a side-effect of a shift in our conception of time, of what it is and how it works. If we somehow stopped seeing life as something to be lived, our whole existence no longer just a single, uninterrupted present moment, but now suddenly only a way-station on a journey from where we were to where we are going. Time is moving, it has a destination. And we are moving through time, with time, it's running out. We can't stay here forever. We are going, and if we don't we'll be left behind, so let's be first.

Let's get them before they get us. Let's kill more of them. Let's plant more food. Let's build bigger walls, and stouter spears, and let's make engines and let's go let's go let's go!

*

Maybe all of this is just a symptom of a new and sudden species-wide mental illness. Or a philosophical error. A malignancy of sorts.

*

Interesting to think about, for me anyway.

*

At any rate, I think that vast and nearly limitless history of small-group pastoral nomadism explains a lot to me about my experience of being human. Why I feel comfortable in a small group of people and jumpy and anxious in a crowd. Why I love walking in the woods or along the beach alone or with my wife and my dog and I could do it for hours and hours and hours every day. Why I love to gaze at the stars and cook meat over a fire. Why I love to fight. Why it feels good in my bones to protect my tribe and to make war against those who would harm them. Why it feels better to be outside than inside. Why paperwork and minutia and clock-watching and meetings are soul killing. Why cities baffle and assault. Why moving water sounds like music and why the thrash of the surf on the shore lights my heart on fire and soothes it at the same time.

We are ancient things lost in a modern world.

Our biology has not caught up with our environment, and I don't think it ever will. This environment isn't stable enough, it won't last long enough for our slow churning evolutionary mechanisms to react to it.

Can't go back, though.

*

Maybe the key is to try to recapture a more functional conception of time. Maybe we could do that. That seems possible.

****

In other news, last night I made hot and sour grilled fish salad and Pad Kee Mao for the woman and me.

Ruck me funning, it were good.

*

Hot and Sour Grilled Fish Salad

Grill, bake, or fry a couple of fillets of a good white-fleshed fish. Let them cool and break them up into bite-sized pieces and put them in a bowl. Add two stalks of finely sliced lemongrass, a couple of shallots, a cup of sliced mint leaves, a handful of sliced bird chilies or jalapenos, a few sliced kaffir lime leaves, an inch chunk of ginger, minced, six tablespoons of lime juice and one limes worth of zest, a generous tablespoon of fish sauce, a teaspoon of honey, salt and pepper to taste. Mix that shit together, let it sit in the fridge while you cook your Pad Kee Mao, then when it's time to eat, lay out some lettuce leaves on a plate and mound the fish salad on the leaves, serve with lime wedges and sliced spring onions.

And an ice-cold beer.

SCOTT'S PAD KEE MAO

1 lb. shrimp, peeled, deveined, split down the back so they'llbutterfly when they hit the wok.

12 garlic cloves, chopped

1/4 cup chopped fresh thai chilies or jalapenos.

tablespoon of whole peppercorns

1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced thin.

small napa cabbage, sliced thin.

can of bamboo shoots, rinsed and drained and chopped in half.

tablespoon of sambal olek

red onion, sliced thin

1/4 cup fish sauce

1/4 cup black soy sauce

1/4 cup golden mountain sauce

1 tablespoon honey

1 red bell pepper, cut into strips

1/2 cup fresh thai leaves (or regular fresh basil)

two large eggs, beaten.

Big mess of wide rice noodles, 16, 18, 20 oz., whatever youhave. Boil for five minutes, drain, rinse well in cold water, set aside. Heat oil in a wok over medium-highheat. Add garlic, pepper and Thai chiles; saute 30 seconds. Add shrimp and all the wetingredients and saute about 2 minutes. I ran out of room in the wok, so Istarted the mushrooms and cabbage in a cast-iron skillet and then added the beaten eggs andwhen they were done I threw that mess back into the wok. Stir fry a littlelonger, add noodles; toss to coat.

This will feed us all weekend, or six normal people onetime.

Sambal Olek, cilantro, chopped peanuts, mint leaves, limeswedges, sweet chili sauce, sliced spring onions to go with.

And more beer.

***

Woot.

Namaste.

***

Manning The Oars

2011-10-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

*

Last night I dreamed that there were two Batmans. The good one and his evil twin. But the evil batman was the Bruce Wayne guy, the rich and successful one, the one who helped society and gave money to the orphans and lived in a high rise penthouse overlooking Gotham. When the evil Batman got in his costume, he was huge and powerful and malevolent, mocking and derisive and as cruel as nature.

The good batman was a criminal for his day job, and he used all that inside information to try to strike a blow for justice when he was in his Batman costume. But his Batman costume was weak-sauce compared to the evil Batman's. He didn't have a jet pack or a rocket car or anything like that. He took the bus. Nobody really gave him a second look, his Batman persona was just a joke. People saw him and thought, "Crazy guy on the bus, don't sit next to him, just hang on to the strap or go sit next to that fat guy who smells bad."

Plus, the good Batman would always give the bad guys a break. He'd rescue the innocent when he could, and make things right, but when it came time to whomp up on the bad guy, the good Batman would just shake his head and sigh. Maybe he'd lock a guy up to a lamppost or something, you know, throw his car keys into the river, but that was about it.

He wouldn't even lecture the guy.

Then in the morning he'd go back to his life of petty crime, which he was also kind of terrible at.

Bruce Wayne thought all of this was just about the funniest thing ever. He laughed all the time, it cracked him up.

*

It's a quiet morning so far. The deck is wet from a heavy, spitting kind of morning drizzle, not quite rain, not quite fog alone. I've got some dark, hot, bitter coffee in me and I can hear the woman starting up in the other room, getting ready to paint I think.

I better go give her a hand.

*

I had this weather running through me all weak( hmm....freudian slip much?), anxious and worried, like there was something big I'd neglected to do.

Then, just like that, it blew out of town, left me feeling like it does after a good rain.

*

I won't ever figure myself out, I don't guess.

*

Namaste.

***

Dogfight

2011-10-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

*

Creation myth number ninety-two million and four.

*

I was up on a ladder today swapping out light fixtures in the new bedroom. Probably my butt-crack was showing.

That is how you really look like a tradesman, if you're interested.

Anyway, now we have three big old paper moons over our heads instead of little dainty frosted glass pendants of orange and blue and green.

They looked like somebody else, man, not like us.

It's way better now.

*

So, one thing I am learning is about breathing. Just taking a big breath in and holding it for a minute and then letting it out, letting it all out, slowly and fully, and pausing, and then filling up again.

It'll take five years off you, every time you do it.

Never mind the slow, full, deep, ujjayi breathing.

That will do things to you that are untoward, man.

The dog always freaks out when I do that.

She wants to get in my mouth.

*

It's very spiritually creamy, let me tell you.

*

Another thing is we got rid of about ten linear feet of books today. Good books, too. But they needed to find a new home. And we packed the bed of the pickup full of clothes and homewares and drove them off to the Salvation Army and gave that shit away.

Open, open, open!

We do this, I don't know, two or three times a year? We live in a 950 square foot bungalow, so we don't have a lot of extra room for shit. And we are lean. We don't bring a lot in to our home, and we mostly follow the "one in, one out" rule. But still, it piles up on us. I don't know how people who don't regularly purge can survive.

We have never once gotten rid of something and regretted it.

You get started, man, look out. It can sweep like a fire through you. Burning and purifying, destroying everything that is weak and brittle and used up, and hardening and tempering the good stuff, leaving behind only smoke and diamonds.

just like life, man.

*

The house feels like all diamonds now, diamonds and the acrid smell of the conflagrated past.

*

We are shorn, and stripped, and lean, and ready for it.

*

Now I need a goddamn tumbler full of frozen vodka and my woman and the leather sofa and some shit to watch on the fee-vee.

Do not fuck with me, man. I will make you rue the day.

***

Namaste, bitches.

***

And On The Sixth Day, God Drove Hard To the Hoop

2011-10-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

*

Creation myth number seventeen thousand five hundred twelve.

*

There is all kinds of madness afoot here at Casa Azul. The Woman on The Verge and I have moved almost every stick of furniture we own. This bed, out there. That bed, in here. These shelves go over there. This stuff all comes down, that stuff all goes up. This gets tossed, this other thing gets brought in.

The fucking dog is beside herself.

She don't approve.

*

She strongly prefers the status quo.

The goddamn routine.

This isn't Nam, Smokey. There's fucking rules.

*

All in preparation for opening, opening, opening. A home for ailing parents. A home for pregnant children. A home for babies and grannies, for the newly arrived and the soon to depart.

A way station of sorts.

"All aboard!"

*

One of the coolest things about it is that we've moved our bedroom out to the studio and turned it into an oasis of calmness and serene beauty.

Check it out:

A sanctuary from which we can shelter from any storm.

*

I guess we should be more freaked out than we are. But we're both oddly serene about the impending chaos. The disruption of our precious idea of a quiet home with just us and our very mellow bulldog. But life, man, it fucking asserts itself.

You cain't but hold on tight.

*

You don't get to refuse anything.

You must have it all.

*

Shit, I'm strong, man. I like manning the oars. Let's row this bitch to land.

It's out there somewhere.

*

Namaste.

*

PS- I love my wife like a goddamn house afire.

Fucking smoke and flames everywhere.

***

Form and Formlessness

2011-10-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

*

So, the woman and I were talking about how to reconcile the scientific, rationalist, logical, empirical, skeptical worldview with the spiritual, non-dual, ecstatic, shamanic, buddhist, santeria, magical worldview. And it seems natural to talk about that in terms of my own evolution of thinking on the subject.

As a child, I was a magical thinker. I'm pretty sure all of us were. I believed in portals that opened to another world. I believed in Aslan and the Wardrobe and Sandworms and robots and ghosts and Superman. It seemed obvious that these things existed. You just had to know where to look, and you had to really, really believe, or the magic wouldn't work.

Then I explored the religious path. I remember very clearly watching television early on a Sunday morning before my parents were awake, four years old and watching some televangelist on a black and white screen and he was telling me I had better accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior right now and I did.

I opened my little four year old heart to Jesus and asked him to save me and told him I would believe in him and be very good and never do anything to disappoint him. And I did it again when I was eleven. Got baptized in the tepid waters of the baptismal font of the First Southern Baptist Church in Burlingame, California, under a painting of the river Jordan and the watchful eye of my Grandmother Janice.

At sixteen I had this friend of mine who was born-again in a serious way. He gave me a big old bible and we used to read it together and we would pray together, but I was already drifting away from that idea of God, and of right and wrong. It seemed like a cartoon for little children to watch. It seemed to me to be fear-based and small-minded and parochial.

So when I got to my junior and senior year in high school I was in Taiwan and I started to read a little bit about buddhism and hinduism and Confucianism and those folks seemed to be on to something with a little more substance. I read the vedas and the bhagavad gita and the tibetan book of the dead and herman hesse's Siddhartha and I even meditated with my acid-fried swim coach.

In college I explored the whole psychopharmacological approach to enlightenment. After a year and a half I was invited by the administration to explore other opportunities, especially opportunities that might be available in an off-campus setting.

So I joined the Coast Guard and entered a period of seriously grounded-in-the-real-guts-of-the-world study. I disdained religion as a balm for the simple-minded, and philosophy and meditation as an escape for those who were too weak to understand life on the level of bloody-tooth-and-claw. If a boat was on fire and people were burning and jumping into the frozen alaskan sea, you fucking pulled them out of the water and you put out the fire on their boat and you tended their wounds and you towed the smoking hulk back to port where it could be repaired. By hungover ships mechanics and still drunk crewmen. I lived in and relished a world where the sea was implacable and malevolent and utterly, utterly real.

In a way that mere thoughts and fancy ideations never could be.

And I suppose I have inhabited that world almost without pause since I became a police. It is, perhaps, the most intimate and personal relationship that I have with the world. I love it because of its physicality, its immediacy and raw power. Blood and smoke in the air, the wailing of the damaged, the snarls of the evil, the courage and power of the righteous. It is everywhere available for the senses to ascertain, and nowhere hidden, nowhere coy.

But I have yet studied. I have learned my classical, Newtonian physics. I have learned my biology and geology and neurology. I have delved yet more deeply into Buddhism and meditation and yoga and mindfulness. I have explored the mind-body problem. I have learned my quantum mechanics and my string theory and I am comfortable with the paradoxes of the multiverse and black holes and on and on.

And I have had my spiritual education. I have experienced the power of what comes from beyond the known. I have had my own initiation into the path with a heart. I have read Casteneda and believed him literally, then symbolically, then literally again. I have stood witness to events and experiences that tear asunder the veil of rationality and show the whole shebang as a dream, albeit a forceful and persistent one.

So, we come back to the question. How do we reconcile these divergent world-views? Certainly a hard-boiled scientific, rationalist perspective must demand a skeptical approach to magic and spirituality, to the power of meditation and prayer, of wishful thinking and visualization? Surely a magical shamanistic approach must deny the ability of the scientific approach to ever quantify the nature of reality?

Surely the two points of view are irreconcilable?

*

Well, I'm not certain.

*

Here's my provisional take on a way to get these differing views in alignment.

Let's start with acknowledging that, from an empirical, rationalist viewpoint, our own objective reality is nothing more than a very sophisticated mock-up of what the real reality might be like, that is, a reality that is not filtered and reduced and modified by our own, very limited, sensory apparatus.

Right?

I mean, light doesn't penetrate the skull. Nothing happens inside the bony vault but signals-processing work done by neurons and various combinations of peptides and neurochemicals- there is not a kind of movie screen onto which the signals input from the retinas are displayed for a little man inside the brain to watch.

It's all biochemical, physiological signals processing.

So, let's take that as our jumping off point. Next, lets look at how, on the very, very tiny, quantum scale, classical newtonian physics breaks down. A single photon approaches a barrier with two openings and goes through both of them at the same time. A pair of electrons are separated by time and distance and then one of the pair is measured by an observer, either velocity or location, and the other electron immediately collapses into the same state as the observed electron.

Look at varieties of scale, as seen fractally. No difference no matter how vast you scale up or how tiny you scale down. Look at deep time. Imagine, if you can, what fourteen billion years looks like.

I could go on and on.

The point is, the fucking universe is strange as a three-headed goat, and the more you look at it, the stranger it gets.

And think about what's going on inside us as a species. We're relative late-comers to the show, but we still have millions of years of evolutionary history packed into our DNA. If you cotton to the idea of the conservation of energy, it's likely that there are all kinds of evolutionary ghosts riding around in the biochemical soup of our brains.

And now allow me to drag in the theory of the placebo effects. All these studies done that show if you think a certain injection is going to ease your pain, it will. And that if you think you're being given an inert ingredient and you are really given morphine, the morphine won't work very well. And if you are not aware that you're being given anything, it might not work at all.

Meditation. Prayer. Fasting. Homeopathy. Medicine men. Shamans. Yoga. Acupuncture. Trances. Shaker dances. Whirling dervishes. Holding hands. Wishful thinking. Buddhist enlightenment. Psychotropic enlightenment. Ghosts. Ouija boards. Surfing. Sword fighting.

*

We are trapped by our own conscious minds, by our sensory apparatus and the major-league filtering and modeling that goes on, simply so we can have some kind of coherent experience of what we call objective reality. Vastly more stuff gets filtered out than gets admitted in, and that is of the signals that come in through our very limited sensory apparatus- humongous amounts of data we cannot even access.

Then of the tiny bit of the torrent of stuff that gets through, ninety percent or more of it all gets processed outside the conscious experience.

But it's all still there, out in the dark and slimy waters of the unconscious.

Here's how I see it:

These mystical approaches, be they meditation or prayer or magic, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Satanic, yogic, what have you, they are all every bit as real and necessary as anything else. They allow us, by means of ritual and hard work, to momentarily dismantle the tyranny of the machinery of the conscious mind-

They allow us to interrupt our own dream.

These practices allow us to create a gap through which information that is kept out of awareness by the mechanisms of the conscious reality-creating mind is allowed to penetrate the veil of conscious awareness.

Because it comes from outside the conscious mind, it is interpreted by the conscious mind as something other than itself. But it is not, not really.

And this is why the other than information is always coded in a sociologically congruent way by the conscious mind. Christians see angels and hear the voice of God. Buddhists see Buddha and taste enlightenment. Lakota Sioux see wakan tanka circling round. Physicians think they're hallucinating, or having a stroke.

The critical point is that this information, this other than information that is accessed by prayer, meditation, fasting, or simple intention, is valid and real.

Or exactly as valid and real as our own vivid and imaginary dream of objective reality imposed upon us by our faulty and limited sensory apparatus and cognitive framework.

Everything is provisional. Everything is fuzzy on a quantum level. Everything is vastly odder and more complex than we are capable of imagining.

I used to think that religion was a child's way of seeing the world, and for the most part, I still do. I like something with a little more bite and pizzaz. So I lay claim to the structure of Buddhism and the path of meditation and physical yoga. But I keep my eyes open for more. I keep my heart open for magic.

I look for portals to another world.

*

Our minds are playing a trick on us.

We need to play back if we're to have any hope at all.

*

Namaste.

***

Las Hermanas Del Olvido

2011-10-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

*

"Look at us. Look at what they make you give."

The Professor, The Bourne Identity

*

Namaste.

***

Kynodonta

2011-10-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

*

In honor of the return of The Woman on the Verge, a special dance.

It pretty much sums up what happens to my insides when I see her.

*

I have laid in supplies for the trip to retrieve her from the heavier than air flying machine and the various minions and henchmen who have sworn to stop me in my quest....

*

Soon, all will be back to the way it should be:

You will forgive me if I drop off the radar for a while.

Namaste.

Bleak Island

2011-10-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

*

*

i thought those girls needed a little bit of space and silence, although it looks like they might have cornered the market on both already.

still.....

*

I miss my wife. I'm all miswired.

She's been on the hero's journey. Facing the mean old nasty dragon. She's getting all crispy around the edges and smoke inhalation and red eyes. Sword all nicked and dull-edged and battered. Shield lumped up, boots a mess, lip balm almost used up.

Still, my money ain't on the dragon.

*

I can't see the path ahead, but I can hear the rustling of unnamed beasts in the deep of the wood.

We can't rest here, we must go in.

***

Namaste.

***

Knockaround Boys

2011-10-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

*

One Man's Saturday:

Dog medicated and walked and petted.
Weekend breakfast made and consumed.
Load of whites soaking in hot water.
Pot of strong coffee drunk.
Vacuum standing by in living room.
All rugs out on the back deck.
Drapes opened. Ditto windows. Ditto back door. Ditto front door.
O'Keefe & Merritt pulled out from wall, standing by for field stripping, cleaning, and repair of the grillevator.
Tub prepped, towels standing by for washing of the dog.
Scott's housecleaning playlist ramped up on iTunes.
Scott likes to rock the party.
Water softener switched off, hose out ready to water the way back and central beds.
Fucking awesome artwork committed.
Ketel One standing by in the freezer.
Shrimps thawing for dinner, awaiting the wok.
Yoga mat and bolster cleaned, ready for action. Or inaction. What do you call lying down and breathing very deeply and slowly for half an hour? Either way, it's heaven.
BBC's Story of The Universe queued up on Netflix.
Time's Arrow and Archemedies Point by Huw Price standing by on the nightstand.

"Ready, steady, Go!"

PS is them boyos tough or what?

Namaste.

***

Three Graces

2011-09-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

*

One thing that will reliably trip up any man is trying to express his complicated feelings about women. Especially as they grow older and more experienced with them. I have been with the Woman on the Verge for twenty four years now and I am every day hamstrung by my bewilderment at her astounding 'her-ness.'

She is no man. She is something altogether richer and more strange.

*

You can put me in front of a fire, or flood, or avalanche, and I know what to do. You can tell me, "Beyond this door, a monster awaits, with fang and claw and foul breath," and I know what to do.

But let me open a door and see three strong and self-contained women on the other side, and you will see me undone.

*

My mother, I am certain, set the stage for this. But also gave me a back-stage pass- so that's kind of a double-edged sword.

She raised my brother and I almost alone for the bulk of our childhoods. Imagine, if you will, a Phd candidate in European History, with a focus on British Socialists and the Second International, recently divorced from a handsome, dashing policeman who chased off after some tall, chestnut-haired beauty, trying to raise two small hellions on her own. She worked menial jobs and talked Gloria Steinem and Ralph Nader to us while we lit ants on fire with magnifying glasses and hit each other with sticks.

We hid our toy guns in the toy chests of our neighbors.

So I learned that the macho-man, G.I. Joe, James Bond, Walking Tall, John Wayne figure was a kind of boogey man, one to be feared or ridiculed. A kind of Frankenstein creature that didn't understand the need for love and sharing and communication and compassion.

The fascist ubermenche.

Batman, Superman, The Rifleman= misogynistic halfwits who did not understand the need for real emotional connection and love.

Men who mistook violence for effectiveness.

*

And, of course, from my father, I learned to belittle and scorn the whole of the feminine approach to the world. Women were to be seduced and objectified, they existed as exotic prey and beautiful bounty.

There was no higher calling than scoring the finest among them.

*

Is it any wonder that I am Janus faced?

That I embrace all of the worst of both points of view?

*

But I think I have been successful in integrating the wildly divergent world views of my two parents. I love and honor male strength and power, and I equally love and honor the female expression of that same strength and power.

I sought out for my mate a woman that could outstrip me in every way.

I sought out for my profession a challenge that would ask all of me, and more.

I wanted always to honor both my mother and my father. And all of life.

I have given it my earnest best in all endeavors.

***

Perhaps I will die in my narrow bed, alone. Perhaps I will.

But I may lay down my life on the field of battle.

I may die alongside my sweet wife.

I may be ripped from life with no seeming reason.

I may limp out, silent and broken.

I may go out swinging, giving as good as I get.

*

I know that it is how I have chosen to live that matters most.

I don't get to choose how I exit the stage.

*

I get only to choose how I move and speak
while I have my brief moment in the spotlight.

*

I will give life a good show, I swear it.

***

Namaste.

***

The Way of The Gun

2011-09-28T17:47:00.000-07:00

*

So, shot competitive pistol match on Saturday, trained ten hours with SWAT on Sunday, and hit a house on a dope warrant yesterday.

That's as good as it gets for me.

*

I've been thinking a lot lately about this side of me, this thing that is not about police work, it's not about the law, not about shooting well, being fast and accurate....it's something deeper, more primitive. It is the urge toward violence and the seeking out of danger. It is the predatory, aggressive, hard-bark tough guy thing.

You feel it when you're in that group of other hard men, suiting up in the dark in some parking lot somewhere a few miles from your target, gear checking, weapons check, that roll of the head to get the kinks out of your neck, the clean bite of adrenaline and epinephrine, norepinephrine, just a little bump of it that makes the world come alive and makes you feel all switched on.

There's this feeling of competency, of mastery, that is very powerful. A feeling of brotherhood and camaraderie that is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful and noble things a man can feel. I love looking around at the others with me and knowing that these kind and smart and funny and wonderful guys will turn on this thing inside them if it should go wrong and they will become implacable machines bent on the destruction of what would harm me, or any one of us, or some innocent.

That they would kill to protect me. That they would do what is asked or die in the effort.

And in my world these men are unremarkable. I marvel and rejoice at it. It is one of the very best things about this calling, to keep company with them.

It is an honor and a blessing.

Perhaps I am unworthy of it. Perhaps I am only a pretender, working through some deep-seated issues of insecurity and inferiority that only seeks to play at warrior to soothe my fragile ego and bolster a weak sense of self.

But I don't believe that to be true.

I think, instead, that I merely sought out a place and a role where this ancient and powerful urge could find an outlet, an integration with the rest of my being, so that I could feel whole and alive. I am a big hearted man. I love art and beauty and good food and all of the comforts and indulgences of the sweet and soft life. I really do. But that alone would not suffice. That alone would leave me only half of a man, perhaps less than half.

Yin and yang. Soft and hard. Black and white, hot and cold. "The duality of man", as Private Joker said.

*

I relish it.

I really do.

*

namaste.

***

The Goddess of the Cargo Cult

2011-09-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

*

"Tell 'em, 'Boola-boola.'"

- Gary Busey, The Buddy Holly Story

*

So, the WOTV has done left up outta here. Attending to her filial obligations in the great flat and sandy state of Florida.

Leaving me to my own devices.

So far, my devices have been cleaning the house, pacing, and competing in an action pistol match this morning. Tonight I'm going to watch the fights with my buddy, and tomorrow we're going to train with the SWAT team.

Yay, shooting! Yay fighting! Yay, more shooting!

I know, I know.

*

But I cain't hep mysef.

*

You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains.
You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek.
But first... first you must travel a long and difficult road,
a road fraught with peril.

Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell.
You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house, ha.
And, oh, so many startlements.

I cannot tell you how long this road shall be,
but fear not the obstacles in your path,
for fate has vouchsafed your reward.

Though the road may wind, yea,
your hearts grow weary,
still shall ye follow them,
even unto your salvation.

- Lee Weaver as Blind Seer

*

And big props to my brother, the brave and tough one in the family, for completing his first century ride, one hundred miles from Cayucos to the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse and back. Next month he's back in the ring for his first fight since his last knee surgery which sidelined him for a year. He's fighting at 165, twenty pounds lighter than he usually fights.

The kid looks damn good, I tell you what.

I never met his equal for doing the hard work. Since he was seven years old I don't believe he's taken a day off from training. Boxing, Jits, Krav-Maga, Muy Thai, Kickboxing. Triathlons, open water swims, adventure races, kayaking, windsurfing, surfingsurfing, paddle board, you name it, he's done it. While carrying a boulder in his arms. And shooting. Carbine, long rifle, shotgun, handgun.

He's the best man I know.

He's got no quit in him. I've seen him blow out his knee in a SWAT competition and just wrap that bitch up in duct tape and keep going for five more events. When he was in the Marines in boot camp he broke an ankle jumping off a high platform into a sand pit, then he broke his other one trying not to land on the one he broke first when he jumped again.

I never said he was smart.

Just tough.

*

But he is smart. And tough. And the most easy-going, laid back motherfucker.

Way to go, bro.

*

I did a restorative yoga practice last night, and I'll go again tonight. Every night for the next few weeks, see if I can establish a bit of a practice.

I liked it pretty good. It seems like just laying down and breathing, like meditation. Only comfortable.

I like doing things that when you've done them, you know something has changed.

I'll keep you posted.

*

Damn, we went to Suchada for some Thai massage while we were in the city?

Holy Twisted Spines, Batman!

Those ladies just disassemble the fuck out of you and when they put you back together you function in a whole new way. They are like the quantum physicists of the massage world. They do not exist on any ordinary plane of reality.

And they have the strength of ten ordinary men.

I'm telling you, you ever get the chance, plunk down a hundred bucks and have one of these wizzards walk all over you, work your shoulders with their knees and twist you up like a washrag, wring you out and hang you out to dry.

You think it wasn't worth it, I'll go your hundred for you.

I'm serious.

*

Damn I miss that woman. I know she's doing what's necessary and I don't begrudge her doing it at all. I admire her for it, point of fact.

But still.

I do miss her.

*

We supposed to be together, man.

***

Namaste.

***

Singing For Odysseus

2011-09-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

*

who among us is not in danger?

yet we cling to life, thinking we'll be spared.

*

it's entirely normal...

but not very sensible.

*

the samurai believed that only the intentional refusal to value your own life gave life any value at all. or not that you didn't value it, but you knew that it had value and you were going to spend it. On something good. If you tried to keep it, you got nothing in the end.

you gotta put your money down.

*

battening down the hatches here for the woman's imminent departure for points East.

I should get used to it when she leaves, but I never have yet.

*

While she's gone I'm going to try some restorative yoga practice every day. Add it to my pistol work and my morning calisthenics. The woman's been reading this book, yoga for emotional balance, by Bo Forbes.

I snuck a look at it.

It made a lot of sense to me. Not that I need emotional balance or anything. Or a yoga practice. Or a mindfulness practice.

Shooting, running, pushups and pullups. Hitting things.

That's enough, right?

*

I like to stack everything on one side of the see-saw.

*

Slowly by slowly, as the Monk says.

Slowly by slowly.

*

Of course, the other thing the monk says is, "Okay! Pee-pee time!"

So, make up your own mind about that.

*

Namaste.

***

Interlude with Diana

2011-09-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

I have by some miracle these two women in my life, my daughter and my wife. There is such fierceness in them. It manifests in different ways, but neither of them is someone you'd want to go up against. The kid is at war with the entire world. She's lost every battle, gotten her ass kicked hard. She never cries about it, never despairs. Just takes a deep breath and plunges back into the fray.

I don't know what it is inside her that drives her to war with everything we tried to give her, but she won't rest until the landscape is a smoking ruin as far as the eye can see.

Perhaps she will rebuild her own golden city on the burning plain.

Perhaps she will.

That other woman, the one I married. You wouldn't maybe know it right at first, because of her quiet nature and her beauty and graciousness. But if you weren't careful you might brush up against something that made you want to back up a little bit, make some space for what felt like there might be a bear or a lion or a bull somewhere close by, something so goddamn strange and strong and indifferent to you that it makes the hairs on your neck lift.

I make my living studying violence and passion and this has in no way prepared me in my lifelong dance with these two women. I am wrong about them over and over again, with little hope for improvement in the future.

I don't think it is my fate to understand everything about them. Obviously it isn't.

But what sheer joy to be in orbit around them, careening through life, headlong, throwing sparks, watching things burn, hanging on by my fingertips as they break against the world or each other, or me, or themselves.

It isn't always easy, but it's a hell of a ride.

Thank you for the honor of your company.

To you brave warrior women!

Skoal!

***

Namaste.

***

Bedtime Stories

2011-09-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

*

What better for a freak than to be loved?

There is naught.

*

Lucky, blessed beyond all measure, strong in hand and heart and back, I yet fuss and mewl. Wanting to understand friendship, I shy from it and what it asks of me. Obsessed with fighting and shooting, loss and violence and rage and fear, I pretend that the other thing does not exist, or isn't important. Openness, gladness of heart, compassion, trust and warmth. Instead I add another layer of pointy sticks to my armor, search out a stouter staff, batten down the hatches and pace the floors.

Yet she still takes me close to her and reads me a story and soothes my savage soul, as if I did not offend.

*

She is the sea to my stone.

*

In all my life I am most proud of having won her to me.

***

Namaste.

***

Swimming To Antarctica

2011-09-12T15:48:00.000-07:00

everywhere I turn it seems like I'm looking at the end of things. I feel caught up hard in the gears of the world. My kid is having a baby any minute now and up the street my grandparents are careening toward death at an alarming rate.

The world is a magical place, but it's a mistake to think it has a personal regard for you. For any one of us.

i am all the time swimming in the waters of deep time, of limitless space, the cosmos, the utterly, incomprehensibly vast, and the vanishingly tiny, too. Quantum mechanics. String theory. Quarks and muons and the elusive Higgs boson. dinosaurs and plate tectonics, evolution, heredity, epigenetics. The nature of things.

as if to soothe myself. not for any other reason than just to try to comprehend it. As it is. As it seems to us from here.

but i can't live in deep time or deep space. i can't be a cowboy or an astronaut. i can't hunt with a tribe of Neandertals in some french wood.

i got this tiny handful of years and these few beloved souls around me and this is the secret of it.

what is it. to love without reservation or regard for the cost of it. to be stripped of every tender mercy and be ground up in the jaws of the great machine, and see your loved ones ground up, too. and to yet love, and to begrudge none of it, the grief and the pain and the measureless sorrow of it.

for you are given the great bounty of it as well. and free to do with it what you will, in whatever manner you choose. for as long as you've got the stage.

i don't know what the hell i'm talking about.

i claim i want peace but i seem to strive against it in my bones.

you want to be equal to what's asked of you.

that's true.

i don't want to be found lacking.

namaste.

***

Mighty Garganta Eats a Sandwich As Lu Waits For The Inevitable

2011-09-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

*

The Woman on The Verge snapped this gem of a portrait of me and the dog while we were boondocking lunch in the parking lot of a middle school in Gilroy on our way home from Napa.

It's a low-res deal shot on her cellie, but it still captures a moment.

*

We had a hell of a good time up there.

Although some of us remained dubious.....

The diRosa was absolutely insane. I can't even talk about it.

This is what it looks like when you walk up:

And this is the kind of shit you see inside:

Here is a shot of one of the sculptures in the sculpture meadow:

This is a stack of filing cabinets that rises fifty feet into the blue sky. It is supposed to contain the artists' MG convertible, disassembled and sawed into tiny pieces, weighed, then filed according to weight.

It felt like standing in front of the monolith from 2001. I wanted to throw a bone into the air.

There was cool shit everywhere you looked:

We loved it bad. We got all recharged and renewed and relaxitated.

I owe that woman my life, man!

She's privy to all the new developments, the in and outs, the what-have-you's.

That is our concern, dude.

Namaste.

***

Fleeing the Robots

2011-09-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

We took the Sweet Lime out for the weekend. Mostly to escape Pinedorado, but also to visit diRosa up in Napa.

That place squoze my heart.

Made me see stars.

I stopped breathing.

If there is anything better than seeing that kind of art in that kind of place with the woman you love more than life itself, I don't know what it could be.

It was one of those made you feel like you could die happy, just for having been there.

I will die happy, for that is my aim.

***

Namaste.

***

One Minute of Bach, Jennifer Koh

2011-08-28T18:43:00.001-07:00

Thanks, Riley Dog.

This makes me feel like no matter how fucked we are, at least one of us did something like this.

Take that, you fucking fucks.

***

Namaste.

***

Portrait of Death as a Crimean War General

2011-08-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

*

I don't got nothing to say these days.

*

Namaste.

***

Night Demons

2011-08-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

*

In the dream they tormented me endlessly. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, one or more of them would appear, acting at first as if to help me: change a flat tire, start the car, free the stuck window. But as soon as one of them got a grip on the tire iron, or got behind the wheel, or had me close to the open window, things got ugly fast.

My skull bashed by the tire iron. Over a cliff in the car driven by one of them, grinning madly.

Out the open window, dashed on the ground far below.

*

They killed me, or tried to kill me, over and over. Inexhaustible, clever, driven to my destruction. And strong. Crazy retard strength. Matrix-like jumping over buildings, twisting reality to fit their needs.

*

Despite all this, they couldn't really kill me.

I fought back, hard. Wrenched guns out of their hands, drove blades deep into their eyes or throats or soft guts, twisted. Kicked and punched, threw into traffic. Over and over, just as strong as they were, just as driven, just as merciless and hard.

*

Eventually they let me know their demands.

"Open the doorway."

"Never."

"Open the doorway, let us out. We'll leave you alone."

*

All I had to do was let them out of the dreamworld, and I could sleep in peace. If I refused, the torment would continue unabated.

They all gathered around me as I tried to reason through my predicament. Then it came to me.

"Look, you guys, I'm not going to let you out. This is my dream world. I'm God here. I call the shots. And that's why you can't kill me. And why I can't get rid of you.

You're my demons. I created you, I gave you life and yet give it to you. And this, all this destruction and mayhem?

You are but doing my bidding.

You are my beloved demons, doing what I need you to do, in a world of my creating."

*

*

Not very psychological, huh?

I wonder what it means?

*

May you have a good long talk with your demons, whatever they are.

You might discover something startling about them.

***

Namaste.

***

Watching It Burn

2011-07-31T11:42:00.000-07:00

I was reading Meg Hitchcock's blog yesterday. I stumbled upon her blog through my wife, who has been following her for a while now. Anyway, I was reading something she wrote a couple of years ago, about destruction, and it struck a chord with me. She's a fine writer and an amazing artist, keenly observant and intelligent and quite mad. I was smitten.

Anyhoo.

Destruction.

So feared, that. The loss of the thing we believe we need. For happiness, for safety, for keeping things the same. But without destruction there can be no renewal, no room for growth, for what is trying to be born.

What Meg said was that we need to begin seeing destruction not as the end of a thing, but as a needed first step in the birth of something new.

It's obvious, I suppose.

Like a lot of obvious things, it's easier to articulate than to embody.

I love destruction myself. Okay, that's not quite accurate. I am fascinated by it, that's closer to the truth. It thrills and terrifies me, both.

And I suppose it's because I know that I'm not immune from it. I will be disarticulated and disassembled in the end, turned into worm food, all my precious thoughts and tender longings. My fierce heart stilled.

That day is waiting out there, who knows how near or far.

In the meantime, I yet live and love. All the more wildly for having to lose it.

It don't seem fair, but it does seem fitting.

Namaste.

***

This Message Is Brought To You By SaranWrap

2011-07-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

*

I don't know, man.

It cracks me up.

*

I been living too much to write anything or do any artwork. Seems like all I have time or interest in is reading all of your blogs. And then not commenting.

The modern guilt.

Well, fuck it.

*

Since I found out that my daughter is going to have a baby, I've become a total mellow-cat. Everything I used to spend all this energy worrying about I just don't give a shit about any more.

My nervous little poodle has been knocked unconscious.

*

He looks pretty bad, too.

Might not make it.....

*

All I want to do is be outside. That, and not wear pants.

I'll be gutting fish on my desk pretty soon.

*

Namaste.

***

Red

2011-07-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

Be her.

That's the goal.

Namaste.

***

The Woods Are Lovely, Dark and Deep

2011-07-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still believe.

I'm not saying what.

Ha.

I feel lately like I'm hanging out in God's waiting room.

Maybe I'm going to step out onto some kind of talk show set in a minute. Or I'm going to run out onto the football field and crash through a big banner held up by hyperactive cheerleaders.

Or he's going to take my liver out.

Do brain surgery.

*

You don't get to know which it's going to be.

***

Namaste.

***

Leaving The Garden

2011-07-04T09:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes suffering looks like prayer.

Back from a few days in the desert with my little brother.

Yay, shooting!

We have a good time out there. Shoot all day, sometimes late into the night. Learn a lot, teach a lot, push each other, work hard, laugh and take it easy together. When it's just the two of us we talk a lot about family, how we came up together, what we think it means to be a good man.

It all comes down to love.

And the path of the warrior.

They're intertwined.

Now my brother is a much, much more serious warrior than I. Where I dabble and play in fits and starts, he puts his head down and plows ahead, ever deeper, ever stronger and more capable. For every hour I've spent in the gym he's spend a month. For every hour in the ring I've got he's got a hundred or more. He has more heart and grit and determination in his little finger than I've got in my entire soul.

He both inspires and rebukes me with his example.

I love him without condition. And pity those who would cross him.

Since my return I've been working with the Woman on The Verge on the trailer. Painting painting. Installing trim. New flooring. New table.

It looks freaking awesome.

She did a bang-up job on the mad stenciling. Detail and drudgery and madness all while contorted and smashed into a shoebox with odd angles and hard corners.

That lady. Tenacious as a pit bull and gifted as aphrodite.

Do I love her bad?

Fuckin' eggs, bacon.

Here's a peek at what we done:

That enough color for you?

It's like a goddamn magic carpet ride in there!

Still a ton of stuff to do, but she's coming together. Can't wait to take her out again.

Hope you have a happy fourth!

***

Namaste.

***

The Ferryman

2011-06-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

I know that I am blessed beyond all measure.

I know also that I am doomed.

It sounds better if you switch those two statements.

I know that I am doomed.

I know also that I am blessed beyond all measure.

Same facts, but one is more comforting to face.

I think all the time about Temple Grandin's slaughterhouse ramp, how it is designed not to alarm the cattle as they circle their way down a path that grows ever narrower and leads to a real dead end.

We're all of us on it. The trick is to keep reminding yourself of it so you don't sleep walk your way through and miss the whole shebang.

And it's a hell of a good ride.

I don't know how I managed to latch on to my wife, but what a poor world I would have known if not for her.

Nor will I leave go of her.

Namaste.

***

Chief Sitting Down Now

2011-06-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

Working like mad on the inside of the trailer now. Prepping, painting, rebuilding here and there. It's a mess, but exciting as hell.

It will be a sight to behold when we're done in there.

Heading out to the desert again in a couple of days. Get my shoot on. Just going to be me and my brother and fast, fast murder.

We're only killing paper, though.

That's a good thing.

We watched Malick's "Tree of Life" last night.

It were Terrence Malick alright. Maybe he was parodying himself, but I doubt it.

Still, I'm a sucker for him and even when he's overly self-indulgent, which is always, but even more so here, I still like seeing the world through his eyes.

Okay, more coffee. Walk the dog.

Get back to work.

***

Namaste.

***

Penitents Seeking Absolution At the Altar of The Easy Jesus

2011-06-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

Get in line, brother.

The sweet waters yet flow.

Sometimes you need to listen to Warren Zevon and get your drink on.

I mean, come on.

This place is out to kill us.

Sometimes doing bad is the best way to prove you're still kicking. Not real bad, just a little bit bad is all.

*

This round's on me.

*

Skaal!

***

Buffalo Gal

2011-06-19T15:45:00.000-07:00

*

I suppose it's natural on this day to think about the Wild Woman of Borneo. Think about how I parented this child who has grown up to be such an unholy terror. Near as bad as anyone I've come across, and that is saying something. Given my line of work.

She's certainly blown the doors off of anything resembling a normal life. For herself, for all of us who love her.

Maybe there is a lesson in there. I don't know. I'm inclined to think that any lesson I try to derive from the whole experience is probably something that I impose on my own rather than something organic to the dynamic.

I love her, though.

Though she kill me.

And her mother.

And all who look her in the eye.

*

My wife just told me that although she wouldn't speak to me directly, the kid wished me a happy father's day from her jail cell, said she loved me and all.

*

Life goes on.

*

Namaste.

***

Baby Got Back

2011-06-18T16:39:00.000-07:00

*

So, this is what we started with. Wood rot so bad you could crumble the framing between your fingers. Whoever designed these things is some kind of crack-smoking fool.

Nevermind what kind of fool buys them used and then tears into them looking for bad news.

*

*

The whole back end was rotted out, along with the back half of the overhead and the street side back wall. So everything came out, and we put in all new shiny healthy wood.

*

Like this.

*

*

Gave her some new insulation, too.

Then buttoned her back up nice and tidy.

*

*

New butyl tape for the drip edging and the window frame, reinstalled the edging and the window. Brake lights go back on tomorrow, cuz we're both freakin' wiped out.

Started demo on Thursday and she's all buttoned back up on Saturday, spanking new.

Not bad for a couple of amateurs.

*

Namaste.

***

What We Done

2011-06-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

So, I was supposed to be spending the next month or so in trial- a long, messy, difficult case to put on. A lot of folks had put a lot of work into it, not least of all myself. A good case, solid, but just an enormous pain to put in front of a jury.

Last second, the guy took a deal.

Soon as the ink was dry, I ran into my boss's office and told him I was taking the next week off.

Next day, we hit the road.

On The Road Without Jack Kerouac

*

We hit a few spots on the beach, up and down the coast.

Let me tell you, it were a blast.

*

*

Had a little ocean front home there for a few days. Read good books, ate good food, went for lots of long walks, lazed around a whole lot, and generally had fun. Learned a little bit more about our rig, and what we need and don't need, etc. Fine-tuning as we go. I gotta say, that woman is a hell of a traveling companion. Even-keeled, unflappable, generous, kind, happy, and just fun to be around. Her little dog, too.

It was deeply good. Restorative.

*

And speaking of restorative:

This is how she sits as of this morning. We spent yesterday on the demo of the entire back wall, and the ceiling in the back half of the Nomad. The previous owners had done some bad things to her that left her open to the elements along the roofline and other places, so she had gotten some serious water damage.

So off came the skin, and out came the rotted walls and ceiling.

Today we'll find out if we can put her back together in somewhat better shape.

Lots to learn.

But I'm having the time of my life.

*

Namaste.

***

Jawbone

2011-06-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

*

I can't stop chewing on the bone of the world.

*

I am too old to feel this unsettled.

Groundlessness, Pema Chodron calls it. You think you have a life, it's illusory.

It's ill, and it's for losers.

*

The things I believe are solid are not so. These things are external and internal and there is really no difference between the two. Everywhere I look I am imprisoned by my habitual way of thinking, feeling, and reacting, yet I am also completely unmoored, unable to find anywhere solid to rest. Unable to escape my mind, unable to be at peace in the world as it is. Seeking to avoid all the things I fear. Unwilling to abandon the damaging patterns I erected to bolster my ego, to keep myself safe from the dangerous world and the people in it.

Bone sick of my self-created prison, terrified to leave it, I gnaw and pace and rattle the bars of the cage, bars that seem solid enough, but if I'd just drop them they'd fall to the ground in a heap.

*

Still, I persist in it.

*

Ah, me.

*

Namaste.

***

Leaving The Island

2011-06-05T12:47:00.000-07:00

*

*

namaste.

***

Sunday Breakfast

2011-06-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

Piping hot espresso from the bialetti moka express. Hot whipped milk or soy and a big mug, drink until your ears ring.

Applewood smoked bacon, as much as will fit in your skillet.

French toast, but mix up some softened butter and brown sugar and once the pan is hot, drop a tablespoon of the butter sugar mixture in the pan. When it's melted, drop in a couple of slices of the bread you've dredged in the milk and egg and cinnamon mixture. The sugar and butter will caramelize and give the toast a sweet candied crunch.

Mess of fried eggs with runny yolks.

Eat while reading the New Yorker and absentmindedly patting the dog's head. Enjoy the companionable silence of your partner, interrupted only by the sounds of coffee slurping and fork-scraping against the plate.

After clean up, take the dog for a walk.

On second thought, walk the dog later.

Take a nap.

*

Namaste.

***

Sustenance

2011-06-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

*

North African Shrimp Tagine.

Peel and chop eight ripe plum tomatoes and put them in a saucepan with some olive oil and three or four large cloves of garlic that you've either minced or put through a press. Add a generous tablespoon of ground cumin. Let that thicken and bubble over a medium flame for half an hour or so. Add salt and pepper.

Meantime, in a large bowl combine a handful of chopped parsley and another of cilantro, a tablespoon of fresh minced ginger, another of pimenton or paprika, a teaspoon of red chile flakes, a big pinch of saffron (rub it between your palms to break it up into smaller bits). Add the juice from a lemon and about a half cup of olive oil. Stir to combine and then throw in a pound of shrimp and let them marinate while your sauce thickens.

Once your sauce is how you like, divide it and reserve half. Next layer about three or four carrots you've peeled and sliced on the diagonal. They go over the half of the sauce still in your pan. Slice one large or two medium red onions and layer the onions over the carrots. Slice four red potatoes and layer them on top of the carrots. Slice a red pepper and a jalapeno very thin and layer them on top of the potatoes. Spoon the reserved sauce over the top and cover. Cook until the vegetables are tender, about thirty minutes.

When the veggies are tender, layer the shrimp on top. Add a layer of salt-cured lemon slices (slice up a lemon, dredge the slices in a salt/sugar mixture and let them chill in a bowl in the fridge while you're cooking, longer is better but even half an hour works.) Add a generous handful of pitted kalamata or green olives or both. Pour the remaining marinade from the shrimp over the top, cover and give it another ten minutes or so, until the shrimp are pink and piping hot.

Serve with yesterday's grilled onion focaccia and whatever red you have at hand. You could serve it over a grain, or sop up the pot liquor with the focaccia.

Eat as much as you can, then have the rest for leftovers the next day, even better.

*

Namaste.

***

Pancakes

2011-06-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

*

*

namaste.

***

Nervous Hospital

2011-05-30T13:48:00.001-07:00

*

*

All That Heaven Will Allow

2011-05-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

*

***

Memorial Day

2011-05-30T06:58:00.000-07:00

*

For those who have laid their lives on the altar of freedom. For those who answered the call and are now missing their legs or their eyes or their hands or their ability to think right or sleep through the night. For those who still serve and for those who are yet to come.

Thank you for your courage and your sacrifice.

*

Namaste.

***

Easy Bake Gas Chamber Mishap

2011-05-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

*

portrait of every living soul.

*

Instead of suicide I am cooking. Caramelized French Toast with bacon and fried eggs for breakfast. Paella last night, with cod and squid and argentine red shrimp and andouille sausages and vialone nano rice. Saffron. Garlic. Rosemary. Crusty bread dipped in olive oil infused with red peppers, garlic, and more rosemary.

Garlic Aliolli to spoon on top.

A bottle of Ripasso to go with.

Got up this morning and grilled a couple of the left-over andouille sausages and fried some eggs and made some toast and ate that with a pot of strong coffee. Then I started on the baby back ribs and tri-tip and the baked beans. Ribs marinated in Kahlua then rubbed with spices and braised in the oven, low and slow, to be finished on the grill later. Tri-tip dry-rubbed with salt and pepper and garlic, resting on the counter for a few hours before it goes on the grill as well. The beans bubbling away, filling the whole house with the smell of garlic and molasses and ketchup and barbeque sauce and bacon. I'm going to drink beer and barbeque and eat leftover paella and I won't stop until it's dark and i'm stupefied with liquor and food that was made with love and tenderness and passion and as a direct fuck you to the forces of death and loss and stupidity, forces which lie, not outside of me, but within.

It is a battle to the death.

*

I will feed the woman well, if I can do nothing else.

***

Namaste.

***

Intermission

2011-05-18T18:36:00.000-07:00

*

Feel free to peruse the archives. I'm sure there's stuff you haven't read, or should read again.

*

Thank you all for your friendship and support.

*

There is nothing to protect, and nothing to be protected from.

Namaste.

***

The Falcon Cannot Hear The Falconer

2011-05-06T17:11:00.000-07:00

I pray you will forgive me my silence.

*

This week the Wild Woman of Borneo was recaptured after some months on the lam. She's behind bars and likely to remain there, cooling her heels, a good long time. I'm not going to go into details, out of deference to some kind of privacy, but she has generally been wreaking havoc on friend and foe alike, leaving a swath of destruction and terror not unlike a particularly malevolent tornado.

*

We are yet huddled in the wreckage, aghast at the sunlight pouring into the basement through what we had imagined to be the solid foundation of our lives.

And yet, and yet.

Maybe the tornado is the wrong metaphor. Maybe she's a dirty bomb, or something grander.

*

It seems everything must be burned.

*

I know these are but small troubles, and everywhere you look things are worse, and worse still.

I got no right to go on about it.

*

Yet I am sore put out.

*

I do not think that all things happen for a reason. I do not believe this is all meant to be.

I believe that some people bring evil into the world because it is what they want to see.

I do not think this is in any way a good thing.

*

I have, in point of fact, set my very life against it.

*

Is that my lesson here?

*

fuck if I know.

*

Namaste.

And may you be spared.

***

(ps- don't feel like you have to say anything. I know you love me. I do.)

*

The Assassin's Escape

2011-05-01T15:27:00.000-07:00

*

So last weekend The Woman on The Verge dragged me down to San Diego to look at a little-bitty old trailer she had her eye on. Built in 1979 and pretty much untouched since then, except for an unfortunate Miami-vice inspired reupholstery job done in the mid-eighties. The roof leaked and the overhead inside was water damaged and rotted. Everything that could open or shut was held in place with bungee cords. The exterior paint was sun-faded and the seams were split and bulging.

But it was also short enough to fit in our driveway, and light enough for our little truck to tow safely, had a toilet and shower that worked, a beautiful little stove and oven I fell in love with, and overall it had a certain undeniable charm.

The woman was in love.

So she gave the nice lady the money she'd been saving up for the last six months, and I got a three-minute walk-through of the systems from the nice lady's troll-like husband, King of The Bungee Cords, I'd already taken to calling him, the gist of his commentary ran along these lines..."This here used to be hooked up, but it come undid and I never noticed nothing different, so, hell, I don't know what it did. Same with this here switch under there, I flipped it back and forth, but I don't know what it does."

We hooked up our new 13 foot 1979 Nomad travel trailer to the new tow hitch and drove the three hundred miles straight back home.

*

This weekend we took her on our shakedown cruise. There happens to be a beautiful and wild little RV campground not six miles from our little blue house on Main street, and that's where we went.

The Trailer, The Woman on The Verge, and The Bulldog

We had a hell of a good time.

Dishwasher's Command Central: Three burner stove and kitchen sink.

We managed to eat pretty damn good.

Lentil tacos with pickled onions, red cabbage, and roasted poblanos.

*

Good Lord Almighty.

*

I have to be honest and let you know that I was not the best partner The Woman could have hoped for. I was nervous as a dog shitting peach pits driving that trailer home, and I was worried about all the imaginary things that could go wrong.

Thank God she handled me like a snake-charmer. At this point I'm almost half convinced the whole thing was my damn idea.

*

At any rate, I'll spare you the details, but I will say this:

My soul has been becalmed.

*

I will take to this like a duck to water. All day to cook over smoldering coals. All day and night to play with the dog and look over at the woman, catch her eye, catch her by the arm as she passes me, kiss her, kiss her and kiss her some more.

Sit by the fire and stare into it.

Roast vegetables in the ashes and coals.

Read until I fall asleep.

Take the dog for long, wild romps in the tick-thick grass.

Let go of the entire architecture of my imagined terrors and petty fears.

*

Breathe.

*

We had a damn good time. Set up camp on Friday at about 2 pm, and broke camp Sunday at 9 am. I love the Woman on The Verge and I owe her my soul, but what she did by getting us this camper and bringing this whole new thing into our lives- I am down on my knees in thanksgiving.

I fed her, though. I gave her caramelized French toast and bacon and fried eggs for breakfast. I gave her grilled shrimp and grilled corn on the cob and roasted poblanos for dinner. Lentil tacos.

We even roasted a butternut squash that we didn't bust into until we came home today, served with goat cheese and mint vinaigrette and salad greens, that almost killed me.

*

The whole time we were camping, I felt this huge, twisted knot that was in my soul gently unwinding.

She'll tell you, man, I can't sit still for five damn seconds. Out there, under the setting sun, or under the blazing stars, under a cloud of mosquitoes, I could mimic stonehenge.

*

Stalwart in my immobility.

*

Abject in my passion for the woman I love and the taste of good food and the warmth of the wine and the woodsmoke on my skin and the deep, deep, rekindling of the pastoral nomadism that is my biological homecoming.

All that Mongolian steppe manliness and abandon.

*

The Assassin Has Made Good His Escape.

***

Namaste.

***

The Dissectionist At Home

2011-04-21T17:55:00.000-07:00

*

It's coming for all of us.

*

But before it gets here, look at these cool trains I have.

*

Maybe that's what it's all about.

I remember this poem that a friend of mine I used to know wrote. John Hughes, you still out there?

Anyway, in this poem it was all these people flying in space, falling or being pulled into the sun, where they were consumed. And there was this big, black book and the thing was that each person would scribble something into it as they were falling into the sun, and just before they burst into flames they would huck the book back behind them to the person just a little farther out, who would grab it and begin their own furious scribbling.

As the heat built and the edges of the page began to blacken.

Then they'd throw it back, to a never ending line of folks headed for their destruction.

*

Maybe it wasn't the best poem, but it stuck with me.

*

Earlier this week I had the uncomfortable experience of seeing myself through the eyes of someone else, someone who kind of knows me, has worked with me, and....wow.

I did not at all like the person they saw in me.

It kind of rocked me back on my heels.

*

I mean, I know I'm an asshole and all....but still.

*

The thing is, that's who I am to that person. That's who I am to a lot of people, apparently.

It has its own kind of reality to it.

It isn't imaginary.

*

Ah, well, joke 'em if they can't take a fuck.

**

Namaste.

***

Crossing The Channel

2011-04-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

*

It's all uncharted waters.

*

Last night we watched Marwencol. I cried like a baby watching it. In a good way, I think. This movie was all about fear and art. Mark Hogancamp got his shit stacked by a bunch of thugs that didn't like that he was a cross-dresser. He was so badly beaten that he spent forty days in the hospital, nine of them in a coma, and he suffered permanent brain damage.

He lost all memory of his life before the attack.

He started playing with GI Joes and barbie dolls, and created a fictional town for them, Marwencol, which he set in WWII. The main character is Mark, and he interacts with this town full of beatiful, dangerous women, all of whom love and protect him. Nazi soldiers are a constant menace to Mark and the women, and their lives swing back and forth between triumph and tragedy.

Mark built the whole town to scale in his yard and then spent all his time photographing the story. The film follows him through his attack, his creation of Marwencol, his loneliness and sadness and deep, gripping fear, his discovery by the filmmaker, and the opening of his show in New York.

Fucking beautiful, is what.

*

Fear.

Art.

Love.

Food.

Sex.

*

Engage in each, I suppose.

*

PS- This sonofabitch can flat write. It will maim you to read him.

***

Namaste.

***

Tasty Salted Pig Parts

2011-04-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

*

When you absolutely cannot stand it anymore,
get thee to The City.

*

we made our escape yesterday. what did we do.

bhan mi and grilled eggplant with cherry blossom rice at Pho 69 in San Jose.

ketel one martinis and oysters on the half-shell at The Slanted Door in the Ferry Terminal.

a goddamn snow-cone full of salted pork products from Boccalone. Seriously, three bucks for a paper cup full of brown sugar and fennel salami, coppacolla, and soppresata.

A cheese plate from the Cow-girl Creamery with cheeses, almonds, dates, crusty dark bread, arugula.

lemon-grass pork with vermicelli from the Back Door.

sushi rolls from the japanese deli.

chocolate bar and vodka from the corner liquor store.

art to murder us at the DeYoung Museum.

*

and etc.

*

whatever is taken from us, we yet lay claim to this kind of pleasure.

*

nor will we be dissuaded from it.

***

it is enough to renew our parched souls.

***

enough and more.

***

Namaste.

***

Falleni Sits For His Portrait

2011-04-11T17:32:00.000-07:00

*

I do not care for perfection.

I love the odd and disfigured.

*

Good thing, too.

*

Lately whenever I am frustrated or despairing of human activity I picture us all as a big, unruly troop of chimpanzees.

It really helps.

*

Namaste.

***

.

She Wasn't Sorry For It

2011-04-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

*

The Buddhists say we all take turns, being one kind of thing and then another. They seem to have a lot of good ideas about how to break down the intricate, high walls our ego erects around the little button of our soul, trying in vain to protect it.

The Buddhists would say there is nothing to protect, and nothing to be protected from.

I yet reserve judgement on this.

*

After several months of hopeful, if incremental, progress, the Wild Woman of Borneo has gone off the reservation.

Whereabouts unknown.

*

Maybe it only seems like utter destruction. From this vantage point it's hard to tell. Of course, by the time we figure it out, we'll all have been swept so far downstream that the knowledge of whether some past event was what it seemed like it was back when it happened will be of small comfort either way.

*

There is all kinds of destruction afoot. Women swinging axes at the foundations, monkeys with fire poker peg-legs crying doom, dog-bite curs underfoot, embers and soot in the air all around. Just because the devil is urging them on doesn't mean what they're doing is all bad, right?

*

Just making room for the new.

*

It could be that I am the most fearful little boy there ever was.

*

*

Namaste.

***

American Crocodile

2011-04-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

*

"And heaven, heaven is a place,
a place where nothing,
nothing ever happens."

David Byrne, The Talking Heads

*

Sometimes I think it's gone forever.

But then an image like this comes into being.

*

I feel so lucky to have Photoshop. It gives me the ability to create what my soul hungers for in a way that I just can't do in any other medium. I need the strangeness I can create by juxtaposition of disparate imagery, and more than that I need the photographic realism of the image so it tells my eyes and my heart that what is being seen is no longer only imaginary. I need the ability to layer and grunge with organic detritus from the real world to give the image depth and coherence. I need the ability to transfigure light so the image reads as real to the engineer in my brain, the one who interprets space and depth and locality.

It is a way to give my dark soul voice in this world, and for it I will forever be grateful.

*

I continue in my faults unabated.

*

Namaste.

***

Paella Redux

2011-04-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

*

Last night we had friends over for dinner, a rare event here. We had a hell of a nice time at it, we really did. Both of us usually dread social engagements just a bit more than dental surgery, but last night was a real pleasure.

I tried my hand at paella. Chiringuito seafood paella from a recipe in the LA times.

All that seafoody goodness: calamari and clams, Argentine red shrimp, thick, flaky cod, a couple of andouille sausages for good measure, and then all cooked up in a big pan with saffron-infused arborio rice. And here was the kicker for me- garlicky allioli to top it off and lend its creamy richness to an already rich meal. Add a mixed green salad of pickled onions, pomegranate seeds, feta cheese, balsalmic vinaigrette. Add crusty seeded baguette. Add Ezra's asparagus (WOOT! Thanks, dude! That stuff rocks.) Add a couple of good bottles of lusty, over-the-top reds. Add good conversation, real conversation, with good friends.

Add watching Lucy jump up on the coffee table and eat the cheese plate.

"Believe what you like. I'm taking the fifth."

*

Bliss.

*

So, the picture at the top is not how it looked last night. The picture at the top is how it looked for brunch this morning.

Fuck me running, it were good.

All that seafood and garlic and the fresh, sharp bite of the pickled onions and cucumbers, the crusty bread, and hot, dark coffee and a whole day of nothing else ahead of us but lounging around watching Netflix and napping out in the studio?

Weekend Plans

*

Well, it just doesn't get any better.

*

Namaste.

***

Where The Magic Happens

2011-03-28T18:07:00.000-07:00

*

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

*

*

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

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

*

*

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

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

They all keep watch over me as well.

*

*

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

I nailed up the drawer, not the whole chest.

*

And, yes, we have a television.

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

*

Like we like.

*

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

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

*

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

***

Namaste.

***

I know I am indebted.

I am awkward about it.

***

Keep Out

2011-03-26T20:26:00.001-07:00

*

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

Brownian motion.

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

She didn't write one.

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

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

The sigh of the grass as it falls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Cahill Flew The Coop

2011-03-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

*

Quiet day. Rain-filled.

*

A measure of peace, and solitude.

*

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

Right now it's the Drinking Channel marathon.

*

Speaking of which.

***

Namaste.

***

PS-

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

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

Add a tiny loaf of crusty bread.

Add a bottle of red wine.

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

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

***

At The Last Ditch Attempt Saloon

2011-03-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

*

"Ah, there's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix."

Tom Waits
9th & Hennepin

*

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

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

*

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

*

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

I could write a goddamn book on that alone.

*

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

*

I fucking mean it.

*

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

I just wanted to spare us all.

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

Namaste.

***

Catching The Away Team

2011-03-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

*

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

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

I will be killed from this.

*

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

*

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

*

Namaste.

***

Also, what the fuck? I do AWESOME art.

Seriously.

***

Run and tell that.

****

Mop Up Crew

2011-03-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

*

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

We're in good hands.

***

Namaste.

***

This Man Refused To Open His Eyes

2011-03-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

*

We're all just waiting our turn.

*

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

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

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

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

Not really.

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

You don't come back from any of it.

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

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

*

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

Feels a little bit better.

*

The rest of you?

I'm not so sure.

*

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

Why this stubborn refusal to be perfect?

*

I know what I need to do.

Good luck getting me anywhere near it, though.

*

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

Think that'll be good?

You bet.

*

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

Another one of my flaws.

The greed part.

*

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

GOING WRONG

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

***

Namaste.

***

Love

2011-03-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

*

Last night we ate at The Cass House in Cayucos.

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

Holy shit, batman.

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

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

"Stand the fuck by."

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

*

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

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

*

Japan.

We cannot begin to imagine their pain and desolation.

not the first aspect of it.

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

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

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

*

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

And none to be spared.

*

Nor ourselves.

*

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

*

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

*

Namaste.

***

crash landing

2011-03-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

*

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

*

Namaste. May you be spared.

***

The Bee Keeper's Saint

2011-03-06T09:54:00.000-08:00

*

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

Sometimes I believe that I do.

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

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

Isn't it?

*

Maybe it isn't.

*

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

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

*

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

Maybe the good ones, too.

*

But that's not my experience of them.

Nor can it be.

*

Good things are good. Terrible things are terrible.

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

*

Namaste.

*

Monkey Suit

2011-02-26T14:51:00.000-08:00

*

So, making Ezra's fish tacos tonight.

We'd probably starve to death if it weren't for him.

Watch his little cooking movies, you can tell the guy gets it. He cooks with gusto, simplicity, and mad love.

The guy's a goddamn miracle.

*

I had this thing at work this week, like, a big problem that my boss had to address with me and kept putting off.

The solution he came up with made me very happy.

Sometimes that happens.

*

What matters?

Love matters. Getting outdoors matters. Giving yourself to an endeavor greater than yourself, outside of yourself, matters. Overcoming fear matters. Not overcoming it, but doing what you want in spite of it.

Well, you know all that.

*

I really hit it out of the park with my lady. We got our 21st anniversary coming up pretty soon, and I still can't stop looking at her. She fascinates me. You ever see somebody, they just are themselves, no matter the cost? And what a self.

I think sometimes I'm big and strong.
Brave, stalwart.

Huh.

She got it all over me.

And I was such a kid when I clapped eyes on her. Seriously, a youngster. But I remember the very instant. I had never seen a human being like her, and I watched her walk across the room and just about died from it.

It took three years and a lot of changes before we would meet again after that first time, but I never forgot it, never forgot her.

And the first time we got together, three years later?

We met for dinner in the city, NYC, and walked around after and had drinks. She let me walk her home, and I never left.

True that.

*

It wasn't all sunshine and daisies, let me tell you. But I had sunk my teeth into something I will still not quit.

So, that happened.

*

We finished watching Battlestar Galactica. We watched "The Edge of Dreaming" by Amy Harding. You should check it out. It's good.

We're going to watch "Dogtooth" again tonight, and the second season of Wallander, or as much of it as we can.

Tomorrow we are going over to my dad's place for barbeque and beers before he and his wife go back to Texas for a month.

It was supposed to snow here today, which hasn't happened in twenty-six years.

And still hasn't.

*

Tell me something good.

***

Namaste.

***

I Am A Tiger Who Was Born on The Sun.

2011-02-21T12:49:00.000-08:00

*

We are all of us tigers born on the sun.

*

Run and tell that, homeboy.

*

Namaste.

***

To Grandmother's House We Go

2011-02-18T10:35:00.000-08:00

*

So, this one is for my wife.

All that swimming in the deep waters of home, and family. Of motherly love and guilt, and the ghosts of the dead.

There is no stranger journey to make, nor one more familiar.

*

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
and the hunter home from the hill.

*

Hey, Ezra, man, I made her that calamari.

She is so my slave.

*

My inner nervous little poodle is fast asleep. I am deeply happy and contented now. It is raining and raining and I don't go back to work until Tuesday. I aim to spend the next few days cooking lavish meals for my lady friend and laying on the sofa and rubbing her feet while we watch Battlestar Gallactica and drank whine and eat cookies.

Eat yr hearts out.

*

I am grateful to you all for the love and affection you bring to this small gathering.

***

Namaste.

***

Man On A Mission

2011-02-16T12:10:00.000-08:00

*

Give me the woman, back away slowly, and nobody gets hurt.

*

Woof.

***

Namaste, bitches.

***

Benton's Gap, 1932

2011-02-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

*

I am a tiny wooden boat knocking against a falldown dock on a dark green river that tastes of iron and weeds.

I drift to the end of my painter and that's as far as I go.

*

Last night I made calamari a la Ezra.

Tentacles, rings, flour, salt, pepper, garlic aioli, lemon.

Sriracha and beer.

Thank you, Ezra.

*

I think if I make this for the woman on the verge with a lime chili dipping sauce I might keep her tethered to me a bit longer.

Say a hundred years or so.

*

If you can't be no damn good, be a good cook.

*

I watched Sin Nombre last night and dreamed of bloody killings.

*

Remember impermanence.

It's real.

*

Namaste.

***

Riding a Tidal Wave of Whiskey on A Surfboard Made of I Don't Care

2011-02-12T10:22:00.000-08:00

*

So far today I have:

1. Made a pot of coffee and forgot to drink any of it.

2. Made grilled chicken andouille sausages for breakfast and left them unattended in the grillevator until they were nothing more than shrunken, blackened twisted up snakes throwing off acrid smoke that filled the house.

3. Repeated # 2.

4. Ate toast instead.

5. Still forgot to drink the coffee.

6. Got in the shower right after I loaded the washing machine with whites, which I wash in hot water.

7. Took cold shower with tiny, hard sliver of soap.

8. Tried to brush my teeth with my whiz-bang electric toothbrusher.

9. Toothbrush will not turn off. It's still sitting there buzzing in the soap caddy.

10. Got under the heavy dinner table to wait out the rest of the day.

*

Namaste.

***

girls with car on fire

2011-02-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

*

things ignite every day.

*

***

namaste.

***

snow day

2011-02-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

*

Love, let us embrace like the bereft do.
Let us regard and be regarded, warily,
like old age; or like youth,
with abandon. In the end
it's all the same.

We wrestle half naked in the elements,
waiting to be admitted into that last room,
the room of our long recline;
our beds narrow and severe and sometimes
covered with snow.

*

Rendering

2011-02-08T19:50:00.000-08:00

*

There is yet goodness in the world.

*

Though you be blind to it, it yet exists.

*

Tomorrow I get to go to the range all day and instruct on the killing arts.

*

*

I'm thinking all the time of my dear wife, doing her best to take care of her mom out there in the everglades or wherever the fuck she is. That state, I don't know.

She's a goddamn trooper, is what. I never met her equal. I could spend ten thousand years just hanging out around her. She wouldn't even have to speak to me.

I got it bad for her.

*

Sometimes I feel like there is a really good, really centered and spiritually creamy person underneath all the layers of anxiety and worry and laziness and tooth-grinding stupidity I seem to be wrapped in. Most of the time I'm pretty sure that for every layer you might pull off there would just be another layer exactly like the last one. A bitter, nervous core under layers of bitter nervousness.

I'm damn near fifty and I still feel like a third-grader waiting for his daddy to come home and whoop his ass for failing arithmetic again.

What a sorry thing.

*

Fortunately, I don't take none of it seriously.

Only thing I take serious is love, and you can take that to the goddamn bank.

*

Namaste.

***

Tools

2011-02-07T18:20:00.000-08:00

*

This is what I carry:

Glock 17, 9mm x 17, plus one in the chamber.
Extra 17 round magazine.
Shivworks P'kal folder.
Ka-Bar TDI fixed blade.
Shield.

*

Gear selection is a constant process. Trying stuff out, seeing if it works, seeing if it stands up to abuse, seeing if it works better than what you had before or is just different. Does it require new skill-sets to put into play, or can you run it off your existing 'software'? How does it fit in with what you've already got?

It's easy to spend a lot of time and money chasing after the new cool thing. It's also easy to find what works for you and then never change it, and maybe you lose out on something really good.

What I have is spare and simple and battle-tested.

*

I also have a metric shit-ton of stuff that didn't work out, or is for special evolutions. I got more knives and pistols and holsters than I do pairs of socks.

*

But I've spent a lot more money, and a hell of a lot more time, investing in training than I've ever spent on equipment. If you have good software, you can make almost any hardware work for you. But if all you ever do is buy the cool guns and wazoo laser-sight/strobing tactical light add-ons and you don't build yourself the corresponding skill-sets to deploy them, you're fooling yourself.

It isn't the tool that solves the problem, it's who's running the tool.

*

So, keep it simple. Make sure it is rugged and reliable and you have it rigged securely and then you build the reps in deploying it. You train with your set-up every day, in the clothes and shoes you'll be wearing, and you do it over and over and over until you've got it hard-wired and then the tool is going to be in your hand before you've had time to consciously decide to deploy it. Which frees up cognitive processing space that you can then direct toward your threat and your environment.

Making you a deadly motherfucker.

World without end, amen.

*

What I've found it that with my spouse gone the world just seems drained of color and life. I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog day, except that nothing happens and I don't learn anything. I'm just a hamster on a wheel. Get up, go to work, come home, sleep, repeat.

I guess I'm lacking in self reliance or something. I'm bad anxious, pacing and grinding my teeth. I can't settle down. Soon as I sit down I jump up again, then in ten seconds I'm back on the sofa.

I got no peace like a river in my soul.

*

I watched "The Parking Lot Movie" last night. Indie documentary about this crew of over-educated slackers that work in a pay parking lot and take the job, or at least their thoughts about the job, to a semi-psychotic extreme. There are in-depth discussions of the rise of "parking lot attendant God" delusions, the role of parking lot attendants in balancing the scales of karma, and how to throw a wrench into the windshield of a rich, entitled, SUV driving yuppie that refuses to pay his three bucks to park.

It was both enjoyable and horrifying, on many levels.

*

I wish that I could find a way to calm myself down and just enjoy things the way they are.

That, however, is not my destiny.

*

Namaste.

***

Billy and The Delta Clipper On Caladon 9

2011-02-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

*

prayers to summon
the destroying angel

moon stuttering in the sky
like film
stuck in a projector

The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee

*

We watched the movie "Dogtooth" a couple of weeks ago.

I cannot get it out of my mind.

*

I don't want it to leave.

*

It is a dark, deeply disturbed and disturbing film that I found utterly intoxicating. My god, though, don't go see it if you find nothing funny in cruelty. Especially the cruelty of parental love.

Not all of it unintentional.

*

Today is a quiet day of laundry and housecleaning and dog washing. The sun is shining, the sky blue, and I've thrown open all the doors and windows so the world can come inside if it wants. I've got The Magnetic Fields blasting, and I've got coffee and I've committed art.

I want to take a hammer and crack my head open.

*

I mean that in a good way.

*

Okay, let's think about this for a minute:

Something like ninety percent of all of our sensory input gets thrown out on its way through our neural processing net. And we're already only getting a tiny sliver of what's out there. Then what gets used is almost entirely unavailable to us consciously. It's all done behind the curtain of our unawareness.

Then of that sliver of a sliver of a sliver that does get through we largely ignore, misinterpret, or find unbearable. We drink and drug and distract ourselves so we don't even have to deal with that tiny fraction of the world that makes it through our defenses.

Then we use this sad little sliver of 'facts' to make up our minds about the way the world works and by god we won't be swayed once we've decided.

Seems like a pretty good way to proceed.

*

I don't know how anybody makes up their minds about anything.

*

I wish I could make an atomic bomb of love.

I'd drop that bitch on all of us.

*

Namaste.

***

Liquor Mart

2011-02-05T22:31:00.000-08:00

*

I drove down to the City of Angels to see my little broken-winged one. She shines like a bronze buddha that's been burnished by flames and rubbed smooth and hard by the ten thousand things.

You hope your child will gain wisdom, but you forget what kind of pain that entails.

*

Better to hope for a measure of peace.

*

The whole drive down, I couldn't stop thinking of how completely insane it is to get on the freeway with a million angelenos, hurtling down the road at eighty miles an hour, inches apart, every single one of them reading the newspaper or talking on the phone or texting or eating burritos or giving each other hand jobs or being on the nod or suicidal or homicidal, I don't know how any motherfucker makes it out of there alive on a daily basis.

The older I get the scareder I get.

I figure I already used up my good luck.

*

Here's the thing:

I only like the good people on this earth.

The rest of you?

I got no time for you.

*

I don't fucking understand it. I don't. I know I'm all kinds of fucked up, but I am one of the good guys. And it don't matter. You can be all fucked up and still be good. You can be goddamn miraculous.

But some of you fucks, you just don't get it. You won't be good no matter what. You just suck the life out of the rest of us, make us as miserable as you are all the time. You look out for yourself, you see the raw hand you got dealt, you do what you think you can get away with if no one's looking.

You don't never reach out a hand to someone else.

You don't let the beauty in for fear of your lockedup heart.

You squander all the goodwill and love that comes your way.

Out of your fear. Out of your ignorance.

Your greed for what you think is owed you.

*

Well, you can go fuck yourself.

*

The super power I wish I had was I can reach inside your head and rewire your network. Plug shit in the way it works the best for you. Not to turn you into someone else, just to turn you into who you were supposed to be. Before your shit got all miswired.

I guess I'd start with me.

*

I think that when you love someone you should just go ahead and love them damn the cost.

It's how you'd want to be loved.

*

Do you remember in City of Angels how those invisible angels would all the time be hanging around the fucked up humans, trying to hug them, or shield them from something, kind of crying and ineffective?

Like that.

*

Namaste.

***

The Engineer's Dilemma

2011-02-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

*

If I don't have a murder to work on I'm about a worthless fuck.

I need to go a hundred miles an hour, or I won't go at all.

*

Lately I've been indulging in this fantasy where I quit the whole endeavor and take to the hills with the woman on the verge and build a nice modernist glass and rusted-steel house on the edge of some woods overlooking the sea and a wide expanse of green. A three mile driveway that leads to a rutted dirt road that is a dozen miles from the nearest paved anything. Some dogs to lie around on the deck and wander in the woods and down to the beach. Maybe a wind that comes up in the afternoon, but dies down by nightfall. A kind of old barn that houses the studio, with kilns and potters wheels and big easels filled with gigantic white canvases. Metalworking gear, a whole wall of drawers and cubby holes the woman could fill with fabric and doll parts and found objects. A heavy bag to hit, a little platform to do yoga and meditate.

The house filled to the rafters with books, a kitchen running down the side of the house overlooking the fields. A fireplace or two, a japanese bath, big open spaces and small, intimate nooks, and light and quiet and stillness.

No murders. No phone calls. No wading through the blood and guts, no crime reports, no witnesses to babysit, no testifying, no watching the parade of stupid, violent, thoughtless fuckups.

Just the sound of the sea and the wind in the grass and the feel of a day that is entirely mine to share with the woman I love.

*

Sounds kind of nice, doesn't it?

*

And to be honest, I have something that very closely approximates my daydream right now. I don't have the modernist house, but I have a house. I don't have every day to call my own, but I have some of them.

In all the ways that really matter, I am living my dream.

*

And I'm not fooling myself.

I like the blood and guts.

I don't know if I would miss any of it, I don't think I will if I ever get to leave it behind, but if I have to have a job, this is the one for me.

*

When the woman is gone, I realize how little there is of me. I am greatly diminished. I pace and fret and scowl, I can't sit still for five minutes at a time (Okay, that's how I am anyway, even when she's here, but that's not my point).

I just don't feel like anything I think or see or do has really happened to me until I experience it with her, or at least reexperience it through her eyes. Something like that.

It's like I'm missing both my arms, or like my set got tuned to the wrong channel.

I'm not worth a fuck.

*

I have to say that I've been really humbled by your kindnesses lately.

*

Namaste.

***

What She Gathered In The Wood

2011-01-31T17:17:00.000-08:00

*

If he doesn't fear you, he has failed to understand you.

*

The thing is, he must fear you, but this must not turn him away.

Then you will have found a woodcutter to build you a home.

*

He who goes into the thicket with spear and blade to kill the hart.

*

*

The last few days of sickness reduced us to laying on the sofa and watching Battlestar and touching each other in the mindless, comforting way that a parent touches a child, or the way two old lovers do, not unlike petting a good dog. Full of affection and tenderness, absent of desire or need or demand or rebuke or reconciliation.

Nor did it fail to heal something in us.

*

Now we are apart for a spell. It is good to take leave from each other from a place of strength and calm. It is bitter and hard to do so when things are already fragile, for you fear one of you might enjoy the distance too well.

There isn't ever any guarantee. The past does not buy you a ticket to the future.

Knowing that, you sign on anyway.

*

The woman has been my great good blessing in this life, all I ever wanted for true and in ernest.

Still, I'm greedy for her and begrudge each day spent without her, like throwing gold out of a coach window on the way to town.

*

Still, I walked the dog on the beach in the golden light of the late afternoon and there was the salt tang of the sea in my nostrils and the thrash and boom of the green water against the rocks and the cries of birds in the sage and I thought I might could live a whole lifetime without setting foot inside a building again or looking at a computer screen or getting in a car.

I was meant to be a pastoral nomad.

To raise beasts and to go on raiding parties against the soft villagers and to sleep by a fire on a wide steppe under a hard and glittering night sky.

*

"uhg."

*

Namaste.

***

just pull this thread as I walk away

2011-01-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

*

It is raining.

The woman on the verge is packing up. She's got a one-way ticket on the next flight outta here.

She's gotta go take care of her momma.

*

She is the best human I know.

*

I been sick a week now, coming out the other side of it just as the woman on the verge is going down hard. And now she's got to endure that whole joyful airline experience while she's sick as a dog. And then when she lands she's on the clock taking care of mom.

All I gotta do is lay around in my own mess, missing her.

*

It don't seem fair, cuz it ain't.

*

I think we have watched twenty-seven episodes of Battlestar Gallactica in the last three days.

We ain't no damn good.

*

The wild woman of boreno yet remains in her gilded cage. She passed her six months a couple of days ago. We are damn proud of her.

And the tiny, crushed bird in our hearts that once was hope yet stirs, flapping its crippled wings and bleating, turning in circles, somehow still stubbornly alive.

You don't get to choose what happens. You just get a say in how you carry on about it.

*

It is a sweet kind of sadness to sit in a quiet house while the rain falls all around it and your woman packs her bags and she's leaving, but she's not leaving you.

*

Godspeed, woman.

***

Namaste.

***

love is the engine of the world

2011-01-23T14:07:00.000-08:00

*

I'm back home after four days in Vegas. A trade show for guns and various tactical gear. State of the art, bleeding edge ways to kill people, plus gambling.

I didn't gamble.

It was fun, in a kind of nightmarish way.

*

But best of all was coming home again. To the woman on the verge and the bull dog. To our home sweet home and the stillness and quiet and deep, deep comfort of it.

The love in our home will knock you down. It does me.

*

I'm nearing fifty and I'm still a mystery to myself. Mostly I can't figure out why I can't fix what's wrong with me. These stubborn flaws. Bad for me, bad for those around me, bad for the world, yet I can't get a handle on them.

Can't or won't, one.

Ah, well, what's interesting about perfection?

Not a damn thing.

*

Last week I found the skull of a small animal on one of my runs. I picked it up and brought it home and asked the woman on the verge if she could clean it up for me.

Which she did.

Run and tell that, home boy.

*

I'm going to make falafel tonight. I'm craving musky flavors melded with garlic and bright lemon, bread and yogurt and kalamata olives, crunch and chew and smoke and thrill.

*

There is stone at the center of my heart.

***

Namaste.

***

Fighting Fighting

2011-01-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

So, I spent the last three days getting my killing on.

Spartan Training Resources founders, John and Steve

This time it was at Spartan Training Resources' Tactical Pistol course. That is my brother, Steve, on the right. He and his buddy, John, started their own training company after running the firearms training for the local police academy for the past several years.

This was their first class. They invited ten high-speed operators from around the county to attend their shake-down class and give them feedback before they open it up to paying customers.

*

Two-man tactics

wounded malfunction clearing

more team tactics

empty hand combatives

knife defense

the dishwasher working knees

Steve handing out some pain

***

I think they're going to do okay.

*

The three day class started with the basics- grip, stance, sight picture, trigger control, etc, and built on that foundation step by step, introducing movement, wounded drills, team tactics, combat mindset, close-contact shooting, all the skills necessary to prevail in a dynamic lethal-force engagement with a pistol.

Then on day three we went into the gym and pressure tested what they taught us, using airsoft guns and rubber knives and dedicated, live opponents to see if the shit really worked.

And it did.

We also got a basic intro to Krav Maga from Eric, who runs a Muy-Thai/Krav Maga/Jits dojo in town. Eric is a certified bad-ass, professional Muy Thai fighter, high-level Krav instructor, former Marine, academy trained, the whole shooting match.

He and his assistant Lisa kicked our asses but good.

Lisa working the tombstone bag with Eric

Eric's dojo, the Budo Ryu

*

There are lots of places you can go to learn how to run your gun, lots of places that will teach you how to shoot really, really well. There are places you can go to learn how to shoot and move, and think tactically, and win a fight with armed assailants. But they almost universally see the pistol as the be-all end-all tool for the fight. Not many schools are working at integrating empty-hand defense, knife defense, ground fighting, and striking into the defensive pistol curriculum. South Narc does it in his ECQC classes, which I took last year and let me tell you, that fucking opened my eyes.

But most places don't have the width and depth of experience in combatives and pistol work that my brother has. Gun guys tend to stick with guns, and combatives guys tend to stick with rolling and striking.

The future is in integrating the disciplines. Just like how mixed martial arts took a bunch of different styles of fighting and tested them against each other- it showed what worked against a dedicated opponent and what only looked good in a kata but broke down in the real world. Eventually a mix of stand-up striking and kicks, a BJJ based wrestling game with locks and submissions, and a ground-and-pound game emerged as the most functional and lethal combination, and that's what we see today in the fights. You can't just be a standup striker, or a jits player, or a kickboxer. You've got to integrate all the necessary skill-sets, and that is a completely different game.

That is what my brother is doing with Spartan Training Resources. I think in another ten years we're going to see a lot more of it. Especially in the .mil and LE world, it's just necessary. It's not optional. I don't think it will take off too much in the civilian world, just because it isn't as comfortable as standing on a range and poking holes in paper targets. It's hard, and it hurts, and most folks, even most gun folks, won't want to do it.

*

I love the fuck out of it, myself.

*

I am really proud of my little brother. He is a total stud. He can kill you just by looking at you, but he's the most easy-going guy you'll ever meet. I will never be as tough as him, but he gives me something to aspire to every day.

I love him like a brother.

Ha.

*

So, that's it from me. No art, no poetry, no cosmic deep-thinking, no food porn, no alcohol, no despair, no moodiness.

Just fighting fighting.

***

Namaste.

***

The Pit

2011-01-03T18:59:00.000-08:00

*

I do not have any kind of understanding.

*

Nor can I make progress, nor stand in place.

*

I am dragged relentlessly back into the pit.

*

All the pretty things in the world seem cheap and tawdry and beyond sad.

*

I know that these feelings, too, are a figment of my imagination.

*

Above all this, the sun still shines and the moon glows and stars without number ignite in the silence of space.

*

Namaste.

****