Write Out Of My Head

Twelve Angels

2012-01-30T15:07:00.000-08:00

Angel One by Art Rosch

Twelve Angels

Everyone can havetwelve angels.

Everyone. All that is required is desire.

If you are alive

and can imagine the idea

of having twelveangels,

they are yours.

They will protect you,guide you, teach you,

and make a home foryou in the world of spirit

while you strugglewithin the trials of your life.

The universe is vast.A trillion trillion creatures worship the mystery of creation.

A trillion worlds,countless lives, as near to infinite

as can be, all thelives, all the minds, all the bodies

that ride aboard thisgreat wave of matter.

Everyone can havetwelve angels.

That which is GreatSpirit

does more than create.

Great Spiritdelegates.

Great spirit hasstructured consciousness

so that twelve angelsare always yours,

to help in a moment ofterror, to comfort in an emergency,

to guide the livingalong the pathways to death and beyond,

towards another kindof life.

Twelve angels areyours now.

They know what youneed and bring it

before you knowyourself

what is coming downthe trail of the future.

Next time you meet astranger

it is possible thatthis person has twelve angels

and doesn't know it. If you tell him, he will

think you're crazy, soit's best to keep silent.

Light years beyond thewildest dream, twelve angels for every mind

that seeks to knowtruth, are here. The twelve of them,

here for you.

Prayer For 2012

2012-01-28T12:04:00.000-08:00

Show me the way, Lord.
I am always your student.
I am always in love with you.
I am always willing to change myself
to follow the deepest promptings
that you have planted in my heart.
Show me not the answer,
show me the right questions
to ask. Show me what is right
and I will try as best I can
to do it. I will fail, often.
If I ask for something that does not help me,
show me the error, and lead me to that
which helps me.
Show me how to love, Lord.
Many things pose as love;
how do I sort my way through all the masks
that show themselves as love
that are not love.
Show me how to live my life.
I walk in a trance,
I move without being awake
I act without a plan.
My head is fuzzy; my limbs do not respondwell.
My walk is tilted.
I don’t know when I’m hungry.
I eat whenever my stomach hurts.
I breathe air that I have spoiled.
My spirit seems clogged. Though I want to fly
I have no wings.
Teach me how to recognize you, Lord.
help me listen
to know your voice
when I hear it.
A thousand teachings flood my senses
until I am falling over the ropes of words
of those who claim to be wise.
Cloudy mysticism is everywhere:
“we are all one, god is in all of us,
listen to the silence within you, ”
so many messages that do not bear
on my experience of reality.
I only know what my day presents,
nothing more. I can feel my fellow humans,
their fears and their dreams.
I would serve and be served by them
if I had something real to give.
Show me what is real, Lord.
Show me a work that is generous and clean.
Show me how best to use my gifts,
for you have given me so many,
yet I squander them
and am left with a greed
that controls me.
Help me not to ask for help, Lord.
Or help me ask for help,
for it is confusing to know what provides
dignity. Confusion is not dignity
unless you sanctify my confusion
as a worthy state.
Show me what is possible, Lord.
I would love to believe that anything
is possible.
I need to have faith in Faith.
My senses tell me
that nothing is fixed, that the earthly world
swirls like a fluid dream. I want to know
what is true, Lord.
If nothing is fixed, then nothing isimpossible.
Show me how to master it, Lord.
At the depths of my heart, I long to masterlife.
I long to master awareness itself.
Show me my own mind, Lord.
I don’t know who else to ask, but You.
Everything is important, Lord.
Everything. Show me how to wear myself
in the best light. Show me grace, Lord, showme
all the things I have forgotten, all thethings I knew
when I was young, whan I was a child,
before I lost my courage,
before I knew what courage is,
before I cared whether I won or lost
or tied or died or lived well
or lost myself in dark valleys,
before I learned to walk,
before I learned to talk
before I learned to think.
Show me everything, Lord,
show me all that I need
and all that I can handle
to create me as your heart’s desire.
Show me how to make your heart’s desire
my heart’s desire,
that I may walk alongside you
secure in the knowing of you
as my friend and mentor.
Show me, Lord, show me, show me
I weep with desire, show me
reveal it to me though it be too bright
reveal it to me in the little bits that youdeem right,
any way you want to bring me into your heart,
Lord, just show me.

The Scam Of Self Transformation

2012-01-14T17:58:00.000-08:00

They're everywhere. There are thousands of would-be gurus, lifecoaches, revealers of new techniques, New Age formulators of ways to help youempower yourself, to get what you really want out of life. They're all offering you a way out of yourproblems. Everything will be fine ifyou follow the Eleven Laws of Committment, or the Seven Ways of Tai-Fen, or TheSecret's True Secret At The Heart Of The True Secret's Truest Secret.

Relationships,Money, Health. Those are the holytrinity upon which are based the promises of the Salesmen of MiraculousChange. These salesmen will show youhow to cut through the knot of your obstacles, how to rid yourself of theNegative Energies that have been keeping success at bay. For only $75, or $350,or whatever amount applies, you can purchase the Program. You'll receive your DVD, The Book, and maybea T-shirt or a coffee mug. There areessential accessories, like tuning forks and magic water and The Programdoesn't really work unless you have these gizmos to enhance your Chi. Gee. If you follow the techniques diligently, the mess of your life willclear up very soon, maybe in a few months. You might start to see change immediately! Your life will begin to work for you!

Arepeople THAT miserable?

Yes. A lot of people are.

Many,too many people are sick and stressed out. We've been hooked on the Happiness Con our entire lives. It got cooked into The American Dream. It means different things to different people but those of us beyond a certain age have a veritable cellular expectation that the Good Times are going to roll. Our lives are supposed to be Fulfilling. That's written into the contract. Isn't it?

Now that ithasn't worked out the way we planned we're in a state of shock. How did our lives get so fucked up? We were supposed to be happy, we wereguaranteed a life of abundance so long as we got our degrees and certificatesas we went around the track. We werealso expected to be "nice". We weren't supposed to make Bad Karma.

BadKarma happened anyway. We chose thewrong partners, made dumb business decisions and indulged in escapistactivities. Whoops!

Icall this state of affairs Human Life. Someof us are more messed up than others, it's true, but the bedrock reality isthat everything is a mess. I'm notsaying that we can't and shouldn't work on our characters. I'm not saying we can't or shouldn't putcompassion into action on the stage of life. I'm not saying that miracles don't happen. Clearly they do. Big ones and little ones. The world is filled with miracles, the worldIS a miracle. It's just that the worldis also a mess. How are we supposed to livein a messed up world without being ourselves messed up?

Ibelieve that most of the Self Empowerment carpetbaggers are sincere. They really believe their own schtick. They're selling books, DVDs and T-shirts. They have followers. People attend their seminars. Ican't help wondering if, deep down in the ooze of their suppressed Negative Energy,they don't have a little twinge of guilt. Nah, probably not. Ninety ninepercent of their followers, or consumers, are failing to transform their lives. They're still overweight, or single,overwhelmed with financial problems, fighting with a partner or confused by the demands ofparenthood. Hence they sign up for the Advanced Course.

TheSelf Transformation Industry is just that, an industry. It's loaded with hyperbolicadvertising. If you want to transformyourself, it will happen organically. All you need to do is aim your intention and cooperate with your ownlife. Good things will happen, and badthings will happen. Usually it's thepain that does the most transforming.

Captain America: A Review

2011-12-09T17:17:00.001-08:00

Some time beginning in the late70's a change began in the genre of Super Hero/Comic Book movies. I think in particular about the first"Superman" released in 1978. Then I follow a trajectory that brings us to 1997 and"Men In Black". Within this timeframe superheroes stopped declaiming their lines like politicians onsteroids. They abandoned the cornballsentiments that are still heard (unfortunately) in the world of politics. Before this sea-change a film might end withthe hero giving the obligatory pretty girl an obligatory super kiss. When the kiss is done, he looks into the sky, eyes narrowed with noble determination, and says the ogligatory closing line:"Now theworld is finally safe from Tyranny."

Bythe time "Men In Black" came along, the hero's lines had changed, theentire tone of movies had changed, so that Will Smith could say something like,"I hate gettin' goo on my suit when I blast those mothas!"

Thedeeper truth that lies behind this change is that pop culture has entered a newpsychological era, the Age of Irony. Insofar as mass entertainment is concerned, irony is now a more commondramatic currency than is heroism. We,the audience, see ourselves more realistically. We are saturated in irony because we know that we aredoomed. We are doomed individually: weare all going to die. We arepossibly doomed as a civilization, because of the way we have fucked things up.

Weknow, or can imagine, many dooms that were hidden before the Discovery Channel founded its empire of info-tainment. We imagine doom by comet impact. We imagine the coming doom wrought by globalwarming. We imagine doom by theexplosion of the super volcano simmering under Yellowstone National Park. Weimagine doom by weapons of mass destruction, or malignant microbes. We are a people of a thousand imagined dooms.
I have devised a personalmotto: March Cheerfully To YourDoom. Is there any choice? Or shall we simply proceed to the Age ofDespair and forget about having any fun at all?

Iwas curious to see how the producers of "Captain America" would adaptto our modern ironic sensibilities. Thethemes of "Captain America" hearken back to that most heroic andpatriotic era, World War Two. How could they twist this red- white-and-blue superhero into an ironic commentary that would appeal to today's audiences?

Theproducers used a simple device, and it worked. They made the film's action a flashback. Contemporary explorers in some remote shifting glacier discover astrange artifact sticking out of the ice. As soldiers rappel down into this artifact, it becomes obvious that itis a highly advanced aircraft. There is a pilot's seat looking out a giant windshield. We don't see what, if anything, is in that pilot's seat. Scraping away a shallow layer of ice, one of thesoldiers discovers a round device. Isit a shield? It looks like ashield. And, by god, it is emblazoned withthe white star surrounded by red and blue circles: the icon of the U.S. ArmedForces during World War Two.

Thisflashback device enables us to look as through the wrong end of a telescope,witnessing the Age of Heroism through the sensibility of the Age of Irony.

Captain America, played withouthyperbole by Chris Evans, goes about his business

without any bodice-bustingfuss. He's likeable, modest and utterlycommitted.

A top secret agency, the Strategic Scientific Reserve, is working with abrilliant scientist, a fellow who escaped from the Nazis. He has invented a biological technology thatcan turn ordinary men into Super Soldiers with super reflexes and superphysiques. The scientist's name is Dr.Erskine, but we may as well call him Dr. Epstein. We all know he's a Jew, which releases him from the taint ofGermanic Fascism. Meanwhile, theGermans have an advanced Black Ops club, run by a rogue genius named JohannSchmidt. Herr Schmidt is at the helm ofhis own organization called Hydra. ThisHydra thing is to Nazism as a Great White Shark is to a goldfish.

Nowwe throw in a pretty girl. She is an intelligenceagent who liaises with the aforementioned Strategic Scientific Reserve. She's everywhere. She's part of the inner circle, though she doesn't seem to do anything besides be head cheerleader. Heck, she's the only cheerleader. She believes in Dr. Epstein. Sheaccepts his choice of the first human subject to undergo the transformation into Super Soldier. This person is Steve Rogers, a weak, skinnybut indomitably plucky 4F washout. The boy weighs maybe eighty pounds in a wetT-shirt and can't lift a moth without dislocating his shoulder. He has tried to enlist forty times underforty different names in forty towns, but he's got asthma, heart murmur, flatfeet, bed wetting, 20/80 vision. He'sunder weight, under height, has Recalcitrant Plebny, Feline Leukemia, and everyother disqualifier for military duty.

Buthe is plucky! Dr. Epstein recognizesthis Pluck as the true ingredient of a Super Soldier. Sure enough, when Steve gets put in the machine and pumped fullof the esoteric hormones, he emerges as a plucky hunk of buff manhood likewhooo hooo! Now his head looks as if itactually belongs on his body, which was a disturbing artifact of his previousdigitally de-buffed body.

AgentPeggy Carter loved him before, but now she loves him just as much

and will love him even if thehormones turn him into a gay guy with a huge body and a tiny pin head.

Herewe go, folks! The elements are inplace. We are now ready for manychases, explosions, gun fights, grappling and swinging from the bars ofindustrial catwalks, plus a few romantic interludes that are always interruptedbefore The Kiss can happen. The Kissfinally happens as Steve Rogers pluckily volunteers to go on a suicide missionthat leads to the surprise denouement of the film.

Iliked the film, (meaning I watched all of it) but the ending left me saying"HUH?"

Igive the film three muskrats. One ofthose muskrats is for the moment when villainous Herr Schmidt tears his ownface off to reveal a red-orange skull with a Michael Jackson nose.

The Singles Party From Hell

2011-11-28T16:18:00.001-08:00

When I hit middle age I found that it was time to re-calibrate my mating radar. The things that I wanted in a woman were becoming less relevant. A twenty fiveyear old man falls in love with his girls’ boobs. A fifty year old man, if he’s not an idiot, will fall in lovewith his partner’s character. If he’sexpecting to revel in exciting boobs his whole life, he’ll look like the oldfart that married Anna Nicole Smith. That arrangement did not end happily.

I continued tobehave as if I was twenty five. This strategy wasn't working. It led me into ridiculous situations where I felt as if I was closer to twelve than what I was, a supposedly mature man. I needed to overhaul my pheromones. Myromantic fantasies needed a serious tune-up.

Let me say this right now: looksdon’t mean a thing. Love doesn’t carewhat someone looks like. Love is amatter of soul, the long run, a lifetime. Love finds us, we don’t’ find love. When I met the woman who would become my partner, it was as iflove was waiting for both of us. Love hadacted as a match maker, moving us around like pawns until we were together andcommitted.

I had spent years doing some of thecraziest things imaginable, with one purpose: to meet my life’s partner. Everywhere I went, to clubs, parties,salons, bird watching expeditions, I went with only one motive: to meetsomeone! I went to events that didn’tinterest me. I went to boring seminars,poetry readings by bad poets, turgid discussion groups. I spent time with people I didn’t like. I even joined Mensa. Wow. (Mensa members, please do not take offense. I’ll trade you mockeries. I’m a hippie. Mock me! You have my permission.)

All this frenzied woman-chasing cameto a head when I attended a monthly singles party hosted by the localnewspaper.

I had never attended a singlesparty. When I entered the restaurantand looked over the crowd, I realized that I was at a gathering of predators.There was a subliminal noise of growling and hissing, of lips smacking andbarely audible wolf whistles. The good looking people became like human bumpercars. There wasn’t enough room for thegirls to squeeze into the space around The Handsome Rich Guy. It was a maniacal jostle, carried out on thedance floor to the D.J.’s disco beat.

The scrum around Hot Chick was evenmore ridiculous.

There are always a few major playersof each gender at a party. Ms. Hot wasexuding a monstrous fug of pheromones that drew men like some protozoan homingbeacon. I could feel the other womenhating her with arachnid intensity. Shemonopolized..no, she hypnotized.. the men with her jiggling act, the bouncingof her visible parts.

I began a conversation with anattractive woman. A few moments later a man emerged from a nearbyrestroom. He looked me up and downdisdainfully and said, “I’m already here.”

I checked with the lady. Our conversation had been fun. I thought shewas enjoying my company.

“Do you want me to leave?” Iasked.

“He was already here,” she saidmeekly. The man, who had thin wispyhair, glasses, and looked like an insurance salesman, puffed up his chest andmoved in close to me, getting inside my personal space in an aggressive way. I could have crushed him with one hand.

“I’m HERE, get it!?”

I walked away. I’m not the crushing type, although I admitthere would have been a certain satisfaction in lifting this twerp and throwinghim across the room.

As the evening progressed,distinctive sub-groups began forming. There were the “alternatives”, that is people who dressed like hippies,punks or eccentrics. I felt that I wasan “alternative”. I have a tendency towear loose, comfortable clothes. I justput on whatever is handy. I spent sometime talking to a woman who dressed entirely in black, like a Frenchintellectual from the fifties. She worea turtle neck sweater, a black beret and thick-rimmed black glasses. Her name was Harry. Or Hari. Or Hairy. I don't know...themusic was loud.

The “office workers” seemed to dresslike cubicles even when away from them. The“Bad People”, tattooed and pierced, grimaced disdainfully and oftenstrolled to the parking lot to imbibe drugs.

There was a legion of dark curly-haired men with shirts open to the waist, wearing gold chains and Rolexwatches. They danced that eternaldance, The Crotch-and-Swivel. Theirheads rotated, eyes searching, arms groping in the crowd. Women jumped backwards and collided withother dancers as these hands found private places. The expression “meat market”, cliché as it is, kept whirlingthrough my mind. This was it; theerotic butcher’s selection of choice cuts, laid out on a platter, a dancefloor, as Abba tunes alternated with Stevie Wonder. Good god, I was dressed in athletic pants and a t-shirt. I was overmatched. I was completely out of my depth.

The final assault on my sensibilitiesoccurred when I saw, there on the dance floor, my therapist.

My therapist.

Ten years of weekly sessions, awhole cataclysm of my soul in a decade of the most intensive work, and I see mytherapist at a party so comic and ridiculous that I sensed a foreshadowing ofthe end of my therapy. If she’s HERE,why am I paying her to advise me on how to live my life?

I left before ten and never went toanother singles party.

What Isn't Love?

2011-11-27T11:14:00.001-08:00

Noone has ever read this poem. There wasa period in which I was obsessed with a woman. It was a terrible, destructive, painful experience.

Thewoman enjoyed her power over me and used it to pull me in, push me out, toywith me. She wasn't such a badperson. She was simply in thrall to herown problems and the two of us constructed an awful parody of "love". During that period I wrote several poemsexploring rage, obsession and the difference between healthy love and obsessivelove. I chose to post this poem because I thinksuch experiences are not uncommon. Manyof us have been through the agony of obsessive, jealous, manipulative andenslaving attachment.

WhatIsn't Love?

Staringinto space at work,

whileover and over you rehearse

somethingyou must say to wound your lover.

Orhaving to replay

againand again throughout the day

someway that your lover wounded you.

Listeningto the sound

ofcars homeward bound;

toextend the range of audibility

fartherand farther down the street,

parsingmotor noise as you wait:

cartoo big, car too small,

howlong will he or she be gone?

Wincingwhen your lover smiles

througha party's unheard talk

witha too-attractive stranger;

itfeels so much like danger.

Tomiss someone is sweet,

buthelplessness is bitter,

andlove does not taste bitter,

rejectionis the acrid morsel on the tongue.

Tryingtoo hard to be good;

tryingtoo hard to be bad;

tryingtoo hard not to feel;

feelingtoo hard to try,

andwanting to cry

whenyou beg for love

asif it were a drug,

thenmoan in shocked surprise

whenyou don't feel high.

Andyou grow more passionate

witheach betrayal.

Whatisn't love?

Heatwithout light;

lustwithout compassion;

compassionwithout passion.

Noword exists for what isn't love

butit's always been around

inpromises that are broken

inthe language being spoken

bythose who cannot hear

itssplintered sound.

Wholes: A Poem

2011-11-26T12:08:00.001-08:00

There is no part of you

that is not a whole.

There is no hole in you

that is not part of you,

whole and alive.

There is no whole without holes,

no healing without wounds

no making without

unmaking

that which is a whole,

to begin again,

be born, again, whole.

What crying is this,

in the hole, in the hurt,

yearning to be whole?

Leave yourself alone,

quiet, make everything work

for you, everything,

the base and the noble,

the useless and the crucial,

whole is what is, resting in thecenter

of the hole.

Writing a Villain Energizes Your Story

2011-11-23T12:05:00.001-08:00

Nothing infuses energy into astory like a powerful and grotesque villain. If youardently hate a villain in a book you're reading or a story you're viewing then you're hooked! You've invested emotion in the battle betweengood and evil, you're waiting for justice to be served.

Thesewicked characters must get under your skin. They have to arouse a visceral sense of repulsion and fear, the wayspiders and snakes evoke primitive terror, the way decaying fecal ooze repelsthe senses. Villains are difficult towrite because we instinctively recoil from the dark sides of life and the moregrotesque aspects of our selves. Thatdark side, that shadow, is the only place from which a truly compelling villaincan emerge. We can't tear off evil like a number at the grocerymeat counter.

"NumberTwenty Two!"

"HereI am. Let's see. What have you got that's horrible andscary?"

Agood example of a well written villain came in the film CYRUS. The cast consisted of John C. Reilly,Marissa Tomei, Katherine Keener and Jonah Hill.

Jonah Hill as Cyrus

Theemotional engine of the story comes from the dark portrayal of Cyrus by JonahHill. Cyrus is twenty two yearsold. He lives with his mother, played by Marissa Tomei. Their relationship is what the shrinks call"enmeshed". Mother/child/husband/wife/lover and beloved, all have becomeconfused. Cyrus wants to be with hismother forever. She's his best friend,his only friend and he expands his presence to fill her life nearly to theexclusion of other men.

Nearly.

JohnC. Reilly, playing a decent shlub namedJohn, meets Molly (Tomei) at a party. In the usual sequence of events, John starts dating Molly and soonenough comes to her house, where hemeets Cyrus.

Likemany evil characters, Cyrus is a charmer. He exudes a disarming "honesty", he's well schooled in moderntherapy-talk.

Letus pause and consider this concept, Evil. What is it?

I'veparsed my own definition of evil to a simple formula: Evil is the inflicting ofpain to avoid pain. This inflicting is often done in the name of Good, i.e. Hitler was saving Germany and the Aryan race from humiliation and contamination. I exclude those beings who enjoy causing pain because it's theirnature. Such creatures exist but notfor the purpose of this essay.

Cyrusis going to destroy the relationship between John and Molly. He's a smart, tubby man-child who can easilyread John's psychological roadmap. Thisgives him power. He also gets powerfrom his mother's uncritical support of his efforts.

Evil characters have malice and they havepower. Many of them are concealedbehind a facade of charm or apparently benign goodwill.

Evilpeople are trying to wriggle out from under a burden of pain by forcing othersto experience pain. What is the painthat Cyrus wishes to avoid? He doesn'tseem to have any friends. He isn'tengaged with a community of his peers. He creates techno music on a bank of keyboards and electronics. The music quickly devolves into sterilemonotony. Cyrus is a twenty two yearold loser, a lonely fat kid. That's pain enough. If we follow the formula that evil is paininflicted on others to mute the suffering of the self, we find Cyrus'motivation. He will obstruct any ofMolly's efforts to be happy. If she'shappy, she will elude his possession. She might become attached to another man.

Johnquickly understands the game that is being played. It's impossible to carry this information to Molly. She won't believe him. Cyrus is too clever. Cyrus quietly stands behind Molly in ahallway as she talks with John about their burgeoning relationship. Cyrus faces John while showing cardboardsigns over the back of his mother's head. Cyrus has printed phrases of malice and contempt. "You don't have a chance." "I'll get you." "You're out of your league."

Thisis the moment in the film where I truly grew to hate Cyrus and to fear forJohn. This is where the bad guy engagedmy emotional investment in the film's outcome. Cyrus' mask slips and he shows a chilling blankness, as if John issimply beneath consideration. John maybe a shlub but he's a decent shlub and he steps up, steps up to the dragon,willing to fight for Molly. That's thenarrative counterpoint to hating the villain. It offers an opportunity for the hero to draw upon courage he doesn'tknow he has. Hate the villain, love thehero. It all sounds so simple, doesn't it?

Unlesswe're writing comic books or cartoons, it's not so simple. Each of us is a composite personality. Our inner child is really a little carfilled with squabbling midgets. Thesteering wheel passes from hand to hand, the brakes are fought over, the carveers crazily.

Avillain takes advantage of the muddle of human nature by having a clear pointof focus. A fixation, an obsession, apurpose. This purpose empowers thevillain at the expense of ordinary people. Bad guys know who they are and why they act. In many narratives the hero struggles with doubt and obscurity ofmotivation. His struggle isn't justwith the villain; it's with his ownconfusion. When he sees clearly, whenhe knows what he wants, he obtains the weapons he needs.

Allthrough this essay I've been thinking of two characters: Adolph Hitler andSouth Park cartoon nasty Eric Cartman. Hitler annihilated millions; Cartman is a fictional character in atelevision show. Yet they haveattributes in common.

Myemotions regarding Hitler are an historical abstraction. He's become a universal symbol of evil. Cartman, on the other hand, keeps my guts inan uproar. I HATE the fucker, I loathehim! It's a very personal engagement.

Thelessons of Cartman are numerous. All ofhis actions are manipulations. He iscompletely without sincerity. He's abigot. There is no minority group whoescapes his ire. When he's told that white people have become a minority group,he simply doesn't hear the message. This may be Cartman's greatest signifier: his inability to hear anythingwith which he disagrees. Intellectualand moral deafness is a widespread symptom of evil. Cartman, and villains in general, like to blame other people fortheir own emotional discomfort. Thisprofound moral choice, to blame others, is a basic step into the world of evil. When writing a villainous character, it's useful to give him someone toblame. Give him a scapegoat.

Avillain can't be frightful without power. It may be supernatural power, political power, military power, physicalpower, but a villain cannot elicit fear, revulsion and anger withoutsignificant power. It's the abuse ofpower that sparks the reader's anger. Most of us see power as a privilege that entails responsibility.

We get angry when power is usedfor gratification of the ego and the appetites.

Cartman'spower comes from several sources. He'sclever, inventive, without moral scruple and completely selfish. His mother gives him everything he wantsbecause it's easier that way. Cartmanis a fatherless boy. His mother alwaystakes the lazy way out; she gives in to her son's demands. If I take South Park as a microcosm, a modelfor the larger society in which we live, Cartman's mother represents economicpower. She makes him rich in comparisonto the other kids. He has all the latest toys, thebest video games and a total lack of supervision.

Tofurther amplify Cartman's power he has a follower: Butters. This sweet but witless innocent will goalong with any outrageous scheme Cartman dreams up. Cartman generatesmomentum. While Stan, Kyle or Kenny mayhave qualms about Cartman's ideas, Butters is always there to support him. The plan, the idea, the scheme always seemsto run away with itself before it can be thought through. Its consequences are neveranticipated. The only brakes onCartman's destructive power are the other boys' common sense and lack ofmalice. In the end, Cartman alwaysbrings himself to destruction, but he will never admit defeat. In some people this is an admirabletrait. In Cartman, it's merelyirritating.

InHitler it cost millions of lives. IfCartman were a real adult person he would be a frightful monster. Think what Hitler and Cartman have in common. Scapegoats. Blame. Moral and intellectualdeafness. Unwillingness to takeresponsibility for errors in judgment. A will that generates great momentum, and attracts followers who are willing to obey without question.

Inthe episode called "Breast Cancer Show Ever" Cartman takes aschoolyard beating by a mere girl, by Wendy Testaburger. She played the righteous avenger whenCartman mocked breast cancer and persisted in telling hurtful jokes on the subjectof breasts. When she established the timefor the duel, when Cartman realized that Wendy was serious, he tried to buy heroff. She would have none of it. In spite of the fact that Cartman waspounded to a bloody mess, he twisted events in his mind so that he won thefight, that he was still "Cool", or "Kewl" in the eyes ofhis compatriots. Kyle and Stan toldCartman "You suck, you've always sucked. We hate you." Cartman can'thear these declarations. He is stillKewl.

Thisamazing deafness made me want to jump through the screen and pound the fattwerp to a pulp. My emotions werecompletely engaged. When a writer canraise the emotional stakes to such a pitch, that writer has succeeded increating a compelling villain.

Ihave used a silly villain in a silly cartoon show to highlight the power of a villain to propel a good story. Ignore Cartman at your own risk. He's a first class little asshole.

Peopleignored and dismissed Hitler as a buffoon. We know what happened to those people. Monstrous villains have arisenthroughout history. We arewriters; we deal in fiction. The most frightening villains in fiction draw resonance from history'styrants. Lazy writers may imitate thesetyrants in their narratives. Goodwriters draw villains out through themselves, knowing that each of us is capable of monstrosity.

We Don't Know We're Insane

2011-11-19T18:02:00.001-08:00

We'rejust like the fish; we don't know what water is. But the element in which we swim, the element that is impossiblefor us to recognize, is stress.

We have become denizens of a culture that isactually a Torture Machine. It drivesus insane by presenting demands so complex as to be impossible to achieve. Every day, it issues thousands of orders. Turn your left blinker. Pay your insurance premium. Pick up your kids' school uniforms. Don't forget the doctor's appointment. Where'd you put the McFarland file? Where are the paper clips? Why is this milk sour? Now I have to return it to the store. Screw it; not worth my time, flush it downthe sink. Are the dogs' vaccinations upto date? Do I have the receipts for mytax audit?

Whyam I always left with the feeling that I've forgotten to do a homeworkassignment? Who is this screaming atme, right next to my ear so that it hurts? The Occupy Wall Street peopleare scurvy hippies. Our government isletting people steal on a massive scale. My bank account is auto- siphoned each month, it's gone and I've got nothing left to spend.

Ithink I'm going crazy. I don't have anysexual desire at all. The last time Ifelt truly alive was....when? Have Iever felt truly alive? I truly don'tthink so. There's nothing to look forwardto. My old age will merely be a timewhen insurance machines squeeze the remaining dollars from my estate, leavingmy kids with nothing. Zero. The globe is warming up. It's true. The waters are creeping on shore, slowly.

OURSOCIETY IS A TORTURE MACHINE, so complex that it takes a genius to maneuver itsdaily routine. It tortures by itsrelentless pressure. We don't needStalin or Hitler. We have modern lifein Amerika. See that guy with thecardboard sign sitting at the parking lot exit? "Will work for food." He isn't a pathetic loser. He'syou or me or someone we know who just cracked under the pressure and opted tosit in the TIME OUT box in front of everyone. He couldn't take the complexity any more. Now he's doing better. He has a shoe box where his money pilesup. He's doing better than I am! Could I take sitting in the TIME OUT box infront of everyone? I don't thinkso. I'm not tough enough.

Lifehas always been complex, but not like this...Hunting, gathering, fighting offraiders, that was easy stuff compared to this. The modern Torture Machine can't be dodged. Your assignment is late! Punishment will be swift and merciless! Your interest will rise, your credit will sink.

Theinjustice of it! I'm choking oninjustice. I can't breathe! Give me a cigarette. Where are all these voices coming from? Let me turn off the radio.The off switch doesn'twork. The voices are coming from mypocket. It's my Z-Phone. Its off switch doesn't work either. The argument continues, shouting everywhere,lies compound in blatant and shameless huckstering. Everything is a trick. Even the tricks we know to be tricks conceal more subtle tricks. They say those Occupy Wall Street types are going toburn Manhattan. Quick, we'd better launch a pre-emptive strike, mow them down beforethey find out where we've stashed the money.

Thefish don't recognize the sea. Thepeople don't recognize the element that dominates our lives. I will coin a term for it:Phobagonovia. Phobe-ago-NOVE-ee-yah. It causesus to curl up inside our homes with the giant TV playing football games andscripted "reality" shows where people are abused by theirin-laws. Phobagonovia. We are afraid of new experiences. The Torture Machine has implanted thiscondition in our nervous systems. Weare afraid of relating to one another openly, of crying in front of strangers,of expressing feelings easily, of hugging or kissing spontaneously, lest we beinappropriate, our strait jacket is "Appropriate", we haven't a cluehow to dance in a circle while deeply in love with members of a clan, to singancient songs, to sit around a fire feeling wonderful under the stars. I don't mean we need to go backwards. We need to invent new kinds of communities. We are dying of Phobagonovia. Our neck ties are cutting off our breath. Our high heels are warping ourskeletons. The future is over. Rush Limbaugh will be reborn as a talkingpig that can only sputter nonsense. The people of his remote village will laughat him holding their sides with mirth. They will postpone the time to eat him because he's a tourist attraction. People come from distant villages to see him. They stare in disbelief, listen to his pompous mutterings. They throw him pieces of rubbish. His timewill come, at last.

Whenthe chief takes the first bite, he will spit it out.

"Welaughed too long," he will say. "This fat talking pig tastes like shit."

Film Review: HESHER

2011-09-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

Thefilm HESHER is billed as a comedy. There it is, right on the DVD box,

"Hilarious", says EricVespe of AINT IT COOL NEWS.

Whilethere are many moments that Hesher's behavior is funny by way of its sheerincongruity, this is a very sad film. It's about a family grieving for the mother, who died two months ago ina traffic accident. The bereavedfather, son and grandma live in a cluttered house whose air is so thick withpain that it's enough to knock you flat just walking through the door.

Hesheris a thirty-ish slacker who seems to have radar for helpless people. He finds them and uses them to support hisslacker lifestyle. He lives in housesunder construction or in empty vacationer's houses or sometimes in hisblack-primered van. His magnetismderives from the fact that he is utterly without etiquette, morals, or concernfor what anyone else thinks. He commitsa continuous string of crimes, walking through their concussions as if he is adistant spectator, unaware of the pain he creates in the people who get toonear his blast zone. We keep wantinghim to be a hero, but he's not. He's aselfish asshole without any deep personal connections. He doesn't deserve any, and that seems to befine with Hesher.

TJ,the twelve year old son, rides his bike in pursuit of the family's fatalaccident-car. He follows it to thegarage where he asks to buy it back. He's obsessed with the death car, an ordinary red sedan with clearindications of the lethal T-bone that took his mother's life. The whole family was in the car when it washit. Everyone else was okay. TJ's mother took the full impact.

Thecar is TJ's only connection to his mother's memory. It's morbid, weird, but that's how it plays. TJ wants the car so badly that he steals hisfather's credit card and offers the buying price but it's too late. The car has gone to the wrecker's, where itis being reduced to a small cube of scrap metal.

Thegarage owner throws him out. It happens that the garage owner has a sixteen year old son who is TJ's nightmare bully, aspike-haired pimply monster who owns a yellow convertible sports car.

Heshermeets TJ when the latter throws a rock through the window of a partiallyconstructed house, which is located in a partially constructedsubdivision. The rock throwing drawsthe cops. Hesher beats a hasty retreat,tossing a smoke bomb (or something that looks like a hand grenade) out thewindow and jumping into his black van. Hefollows TJ home, strips down to his undies, puts his clothes in the wash, helpshimself to food and sets up a room in the garage. TJ's dad is too passive from taking pills to object. Grandma takes it as yet another bizarre pagein life's crazy book. Grandma hasprescription marijuana cigarettes for an unspecified illness. This is lovely for Hesher, who initiatesgranny into the virtues of the bong.

Grandmais the only person with some sap left in the leaves and stems of her life. She's beyond being shocked by humanbehavior. She takes Hesher as she findshim, and a bond arises between the old lady and the punk who looks like Jesusand has a tattoo on his back of a large hand giving the world The Finger.

Thisfilm belongs, lock stock and barrel, to the character of TJ, played by DevinBrochu. His rage and sadness are so visceral,so real that I can't help but wonder how a boy his age comes by suchexperience. There are a lot of greatyoung actors and I often ask the same question but I've never seen a childactor carry such a sense of the world's unfairness. Brochu's performance is amazing, worth an Oscar with a side orderof Golden Globe. He projects his rage,his devastation, he builds a wall between himself and his father, betweenhimself and the world, yet there is still a chink of vulnerability. That chink is plastered over with a signwritten in plain English: NO ONE GETS NEAR ME!

Grandmatries her best. She's always invitinghim on walks. "Teej, it's such abeautiful day, why don't you come with me on my walk through the park?"

"I'mbusy, grandma, I've got school grandma, I've got homework grandma." TJ 's not letting any fresh air reachhim. He's basting his grievance in thefurnace of his rage and it's scary.

Hesherisn't his buddy. Hesher fails TJ onevery count. When Big Bully is pushingTJ's face into the urinal cake in the school bathroom, Hesher happens along,takes a look at the situation and walks back out the door.

"Whydidn't you help me?", TJ later demands. Hesher takes a can of gasoline in one hand, pinions TJ's wrists in theother and drags him to Big Bully's house. The spotless yellow sports car gets a douseof gasoline.

TJ'sangry but TJ isn't stupid or insane. Hebegs Hesher to stop. Hesher doesn'tstop. The convertible goes up in flamesand the next day the police are putting TJ and his dad through thewringer. Being a minor, TJ is setfree. His father asks, "did youburn that car, T.J?"

"No,"says TJ "Well, sort of..." heequivocates, then decides to stay with "No." How can he explain what happened?

Oneday Hesher goes to granny's room and finds her dead on the floor.

It'sa moment when TJ and his dad must either break irrevocably or find a newpath. It's the moment when Hesherbecomes the hero we've always wanted him to be. He shows up at the funeral holding a giant can of beer. I can't reveal subsequent events withoutbeing a spoiler. Let's just say that atlast granny gets her walk with TJ, dad, and her pal Hesher.

Thisis a good film. Directed by Spencer Susser, written and directed by Susser and David Michod, it's odd,sometimes funny, poignant and never quite what we expect. The conventional line would have been tocast Hesher as the subtle Zen Master with method to his madness, leading hisgrieving new friends to healing acceptance. That's not gonna happen. Hesher is not Mister Miyagi. Hesher is morelike the broken watch that tells the correct time twice a day. Fortunately, he gets it right after granny'sdeath, when it's needed the most.

Fourmuskrats for this film, with Rainn Wilson as Mr. Forney, Piper Laurie asGrandma, Natalie Portman with glasses and split ends as a grocery clerk who befriends TJ. Of course there's Joseph Gordon-Levitt doing afine imitation of Hesher.

Review of X-MEN FIRST CLASS

2011-09-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

Examined by Aliens while sleeping in jeep

Whatis the message of this movie? It'ssimple: don't be ashamed to be yourself! If your body is covered by hundreds of zebra stripes that come to lifeand attack people who have ticked you off, well...that's okay. Or, for instance, you could have eyeballs that pop out of your head onstalks that get infinitely long and have the tensile strength of titanium andfollow your commands with the dexterity of a classical pianist, well....that'sokay too. Don't be ashamed! There areothers who are...well...different. Andthey're looking for you.

Weall know the world is full of mutants. Look around, anywhere, any time. Mutants. Your next door neighboris probably a mutant. You might even bea mutant and not know it. You might domutant things in your sleep, like eat the contents of an entire bakery and notgain weight. It's possible, isn't it?

X-MENFIRST CLASS extends the Marvel Comics empire with a prequel, a look at theadolescent X-People and the ways they first defined themselves as mutant heroesand villains. A selection of theclassic characters make their youthful appearances. Magneto is here, as areRaven, Havok, Beast and a youthfulpre-wheelchair Charles Xavier.

There'sa philosophical divide established in this film, as to who is hero and who isvillain. One side regards the humanrace per se as just so much evolutionary garbage. Greedy, destructive, lacking impulse control, addicted to wearingdark suits and driving big dark cars, humans are so much dross to be sloughedoff in the wash of new mutations. This new breed will make a glorious civilization in the future.

Onthe other hand, the human race is a flawed but soulful species that redeems itsmayhem with beautiful and noble acts. It's capable of creating sublime art and architecture and there is afundamental Goodness at the core of the species Homo Sapiens. Humans simply need guidance. Soon enough they will be ready to take theirplace in the galactic civilization that will arise in the coming eons.

Frankly,I find it a toss-up. If I were a youngmutant with the ability to make my circulatory system emit radiations that canheal all the diseases of mankind, I'm not sure which group of mutants I'd join. I suppose I'd go with Dr. Xavier becausehe's sweet and has such plump lips and is obviously a man of integrity. I don't like Sebastian Shaw because he'sinto concealing his thoughts from mutant telepaths, and besides, he was a Naziand just got out of the Third Reich with his britches on fire. He's a visionary, yes, butwhen Kevin Bacon wants to play villain, he can be really scary. My wife has always been terrified of KevinBacon. He scared her even when heplayed sympathetic parts.

I'venever been into Marvel Comics. I wasborn to an earlier generation that read Superman, Wonder Woman and Archiecomics. I guess that makes me a D.Ccomics guy. Whoa, I hope that doesn'tmean I'm a Republican.

Asa movie, X-Men First Class is pretty ordinary fare. All I ever ask of a film is that it be entertaining, that I'llwant to watch it to the end and not bail out in the first ten minutes. X-Men First Class meets that standard. Is it up to the Rotten Tomatoes rating of87%? I don't think so. I'd give it two and a half muskrats. 87%? I think my run of Marvel Comics-based movies has hit a wall. I've gotten bored with the concept. I'll wait for Robert Downey or ChristianBale to re-appear as Iron Bat or whatever that thing is that climbs walls andchanges shape every couple of seconds. The half muskrat is for James McAvoy, who is the weirdest lookingleading man in the film industry today. Okay, maybe Owen Wilson tops the weird looks department, but I have alot more respect for the acting abilities of Mr. McAvoy.

Movie Review: THOR, directed by Kenneth Branagh

2011-09-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

The Orion Nebula in mostly infrared

Thor: A Review

            Wehave become a people inured to the stupendous. The term "awesome" has become the ultimate superlative. What's beyond "awesome"?Mega-awesome? Hyper-awesome? Has it become Gi-normous? Our imaginations have been fertilized by TheHubble Telescope. We think it terms of billions of light years. Our movie specialeffects are so good that we expect, we DEMAND, a higher level ofstimulation. So, the Romans watchedpeople eaten by lions. Fech! Big deal. We've watched movies of the most gruesome realism. In the so-called real world we've watched colossal tsunamis ravage continents, storms of staggering power, melting ice caps, species going extinct before our eyes.
            Whathaven't we seen by now?
            Here'sa movie about Marvel Comic character slash ancient Norse god The Mighty Thor.
It's directed by KennethBranagh. What an odd match-up. Branagh's name is synonymous withClass. He joined the Royal ShakespeareCompany at 23, then founded his own Shakespeare troupe. His film version of HENRY THE FIFTH madeShakespeare accessible and exciting. Getting Branagh involved in any project is to raise the bar, to nudgeexpectations upward. The formula hasheld so far: Branagh = not trash.
            Alot of things did not happen in the movie THOR. There was no thespian rug-chewing. The villain did not twirl his moustaches. The special effects were beautiful, notmerely stunning. The fight scenes didnot go on and on. The love story waslight and believable.
            Giventhe budget and the subject matter, a lesser director would have cast Vin Dieselas Thor and had him throw his hammer through the Pentagon, from whence it wouldhave drilled its way through the earth and come up in the Chinese version ofthe Pentagon and then split into a hundred hammer-clones that would wreck allthe military command centers on the planet before whooshing back into Thor'soutstretched fingers. Haha!
            InBranagh's self-assured hand we get hunky Chris Hemsworth as Thor.
Hemsworth looks like a sweetsurfer dude. He plays his characterwithout hyperbole. The story arc is theclassic "arrogant prince gets humbled before attaining his full legacy asa wise king."
            Thereal star of the film is its beauty. Cast and crew have deferred to the setting, the cosmos, and they haveused the latest telescope imagery to render a universe that is awe inspiringwith its clouds of black dust back-lit by radiant nebulae.
            Thisis no masterpiece of a film. It'spossible that half my pleasure was simple relief, that the cliché chorus didn't come out ringing its bells and insulting my intelligence.
            Threemuskrats. I'd give it three and a halfbut it's a comic book film,
people, albeit an awesome comic book film.

A Review of the film HANNA

2011-09-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

Hanna: A Review

Ishould make a rule. If a movie blurbhas the acronym CIA in it, I should pass. I got suckered by the idea of a wild child being raised in the backwoods of Finland. I wanted to seeFinland. That's why I rented the movieHANNA. Everything else was loaded withthe usual signals. CIA, CIA, CperiodIperiodAperiod.

TheCIA has become a cinematic boogeyman, anarrative trope for deception, rogue agents who are awesome martial artists,plots within plots within plots, old paper files that should have been burnedat the end of the Cold War, EVIL, pure old fashioned EVIL. This is our main national security agency,the one that sets the paradigm. It'sinteresting how much we depend on it and hate it. No one imbues the DIA, the NSC, the FBI or dozens of otheracronymic agencies with such an aura of sinister misdirection. No other agency is synonymous with THE BIGLIE.

Hereis the movie, HANNA, directed by Jon Wright, and starring Saoirse Ronan as thewaif-like uber-warrior, martial artist supreme. My first problem was simply working out the pronunciation of thegirl's name. Turns out it's pronouncedSeer-sha. Hoooray! I think the Irish are just having a laugh atour expense, cleaving with ethnic loyalty to the old Gaelic names. I can imagine it, the Christening of a girlchild, and the parents confer in ponderous whispers. "Let's call her Riaoirdhagnha-hna." Couldn't just call her Riordan, could ya?

I'mhaving a bit of fun, certainly not slinging ethnic slurs. The Irish are entitled to defiance. As are the Blacks, the Jews, the Arabs, theEthiopian Coptics, the Mormons, The Kurds and everyone else. No one needs opt out of defiance. It's the national creed of all nations. Oh say can you seeeeee?

Letme see if I can compress the plot of this movie into a logical sequence.

A while ago, in themid-nineties, the CIA funded a program to mess with genetic sequencing viain-vitro fertilization. The idea was tosee if they could produce a SUPER SOLDIER, a warrior with superior reflexes,intelligence, better vision, better hearing, greater strength and soforth.

Ifwe want to trace the origins of this cliche, we may go back to sci fi maven Isaac Asimovwriting in the fifties and then fast forward twenty years to Bionic Man.

Thisprogram (the one in the movie) produced maybe twenty children and then thebottom dropped out of it. The film gives us a five second vignette of fast cuts of news and magazine items. Apparently a certain number of children met untimely deaths, around the same time and locale. Guess the CIA didn't want freaky little chromosome carriersrunning around the world.

There'sa flashback scene of Cate Blanchett stepping out from behind a snow-bound roadsign and firing six or eight or ten shots from her nine millimeter Beretta atan oncoming car. The vehicle contains a man, a woman, and a toddler. This brilliant, foolproof assassination plan doesn't work. My goodness! The toddler's mother is dying in the snowand curses Blanchett's character, agent Marrisa Wiegler, with her final words:"You'll never take her." Or was it, "You'll neverfind her?" Whatever. Maleperson/daddy and super-toddler have vanished into the eerie north woods.

Theremust be another rule, a Hollywood rule, that if you have a movie that's justmiddling in quality and if you can land Cate Blanchett in the cast it will addenough class to the project to push it uphill a notch into cinematicrespectability.

Imust admit that Blanchett played her high level agent like the perfect WickedWitch. "Come here, child, I won'thurt you," she says with a voice like dry ice. We know her character's nuts by the way she brushes herteeth. She attacks her gums until shecan spit blood. It's interesting thatBlanchett distances herself in the movie's credits. It's hard to discover that she is actually IN the movie. In spite of near-dominant screen time, she's a somewhat hidden "And CateBlanchett" way back in the cast credits.

Okayokay okay. The movie wasentertaining. It was as saturated withcliche as a Denny's waffle is with maple syrup. Two thirds of the film time was taken up with chases. Watch out for chases. Rule Number twenty three: long chases areevidence of the director's lack of imagination.

Atthe end of the movie the chasing goes on in an abandoned theme park withheadless dinosaurs and roller coaster tunnels. The final scene has Blanchett emerging from the mouth of the Big BadWolf.

Inever quite figured out why Blanchett was chasing Hanna through the park andthen suddenly Hanna was chasing Blanchett through the park. It didn't make sense. Did Marissa Wiegler (that's another thing,was she a German with a Southern accent? Or a Southern with a German accent?. Sheeesh.) Each had hurt theother. Hanna had created a functioningcrossbow while running full tilt through the abandoned theme park. Blanchett had shot Hanna somewhere near theabdomen but apparently her super genes included quick healing. There was some symbolic dwelling onWiegler's shoes in an earlier scene. Apparently these shoes are the witch's undoing, because she slips,ooops, just at the climactic moment of confrontation, and goes head first downsome bobsled track thingy. Then theironic comments get to be uttered. "I just missed your heart", says Hanna, in a reference to thefirst scene in the film when she's hunting a caribou buck and mercifully giveshim the coup de grace. She told themagnificent animal, with appropriately aboriginal predator/prey bonding,"I just missed your heart."

Iguess I won't be spoiling anything to say that the movie ends with a bang.

Irate it three muskrats. Couldabeen better. Fairly entertaining.Coulda been a lot worse.

My Momma Told Me There'd Be Days Like This

2011-09-14T18:40:00.000-07:00

Early morning view from inside our RV

Talk about a day that goes wrong. Let me 'splain, Lucy. We live in an RV, in a campground. One of the campground rules is that once a yearwe have to uproot ourselves and move to another site. I must make it very clear that site choice is a fine art, and ittakes a veteran to choose a site that isn't next door to hip-hoppin' meth-lab freaks who d'zizz all night long. And that's just on the left side. On the right side I might have a seventyfive year old evangelical lady who wears the same two mu-mus and loves toproselytize her religion and hand out copies of her church magazine, ApocalypseHow.

Nono. A good site is a gift. And we hada good site. The change shouldn't havebeen too bad. We were moving nextdoor. We have an arrangement whereby wekeep swapping with our neighbor, back and forth, etc. The neighbor isn't bad. She's as loony as the rest of us, but she's quiet.

Unfortunately,she knows nothing of RV maintenance. Her gigantic fifth wheel has been decaying before our eyes, and thistime, when MOVING TIME arrived, she couldn't move. Things didn't function. Her slides wouldn't go in and out. Hence, she was stuck. Hence wewere stuck.

Let'scut to the chase. Eight or nine hourslater I had to drive our 38 foot motor coach around the circular road that services the RV park. I clipped a planter full of flowers andcaved in one of my bay doors. Incertain places, the amount of space through which to drive a big RV can bepretty tight. I had to go around again,because the neighbor STILL wasn't ready. On the second go-around, someone had parked acar where it hadn't been before. I hadinches to clear on each side. I'mwatching mirrors and sticking my head out the window and the manager issomewhere behind me screaming "turn right, no turn left, no back up!"

Iclipped the manager's RV. I should sayI clipped ONE of the manager's RVs because he buys and sells them afterrefurbishing. My clip made a ding about sixinches long next to his headlight. Youwouldn't see it if you weren't looking for it.

I can't show you pics because now I'm in the midst of aninsurance claim.

It'sbeen that kind of day.

Link to my novel-in-progress, THE SHADOW STORM

2011-09-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

This is the link to my work in progress, a multi-book series called THE SHADOW STORM, an epic adventure novel that takes place on an alternate world that looks a lot like the Balkans in the year 1900.http://bit.ly/ngDcCz

The Death Of Beauty

2011-09-02T09:48:00.000-07:00

How can beauty be killed?

Melt the ice caps;

Beauties that we've known and loved

will die.

Polar bears will swim toexhaustion,

their cubs will starve.

A beautiful creature is dying,

but is beauty dead?

Poach ivory from elephants until

there are no more elephants.

A great and profound beauty isdying.

I feel its death throes in my body,but still

I doubt that beauty is dead.

There is no end of beauty. Perhaps

when a small piece of beauty ismurdered,

it diminishes those of us who livein this time,

for we are accomplice to the crime.

I don't see myself as a beautykiller.

I see myself as a beauty maker.

But I can't stop the tides that arerising,

the beaches that are drowning,

the skies that are fading.

We killed beauty for comfort. I did.

You did. I bought into the con

until I saw the contempt in thecon.

When I saw the con, I stomped on itlike a poisoned artifact.

Beauty killer! Murderer! Earth hater!

Is beauty dead? It can't be.

The desolate tide flats where bonesshow in the mud,

where mangled soldiers lie, wheresteel and gunpowder

show their leavings. That's what I see, but that isn't all

there is to see. Beauty still lives. Beauty is immortal.

We may kill ourselves with the lies

we have lived. We may go the way of the whale and the polarbear.

swimming until we're exhausted.

Beauty may be wounded,convalescing, emaciated, ravaged,

but with or without us

beauty will return.

GLEE: a review of the TV series

2011-08-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

Ienjoy the TV series GLEE. Let me makethat clear right away. It's loaded with tokenism and it knows it. The political correctness is like a flagpole stuck up, well, let's say it's stuck up. In spite of these sins, it's a lot offun. It's relaxing, sometimes moving,always entertaining. If I had to watchcommercials with this show, it would suck. My wife and I ordered the discs from Netflix.

Whata wonderful world it would be if we could sing our feelings to one another, ifa song in the vast library of pop music could be taken from its envelope andseamlessly rhapsodized to our partner, our friend, support group,spouse...whomever. That would be great. And that's what GLEE does. It's a variety show merged with asit-drama. It's a great big musicalwith a few scenes of spoken dialogue. Important themes are explored in the plot: teen pregnancy, tolerationfor gays and weirdos, high school bullying, adolescent angst. The range ismodest but positive. GLEE gets usemotionally involved. We get angry at the lies that hurt and deceive innocent (or ignorant) young people. My wife and I wanted Quinn to fess up to who was the real father of her baby. We wanted Terry to come clean to Will that she was NOT pregnant. It's basic, simple story telling, but it's effective.

I'vewritten, in my other reviews, of the so-called Fulcrum Character. This is a supporting role without which thewhole story would collapse. In GLEEthis role is carried by the effeminate gay character of Kurt Hummel. The actor, Chris Colfer, landed this plum ashis FIRST show biz role. Talk aboutfate. He's good, really good. The story lines of GLEE would simply flattenwithout Kurt's presence. Colfer carriesthe role with amazing authority. If heweren't such a good actor, the gay stereotypes offered by the script writerswould be off the charts. He simplyaccepts his status as Victim with indifferent aplomb and leaves it behind,leaves it in the dumpster where the jocks toss him every morning. In the REAL world, a Kurt Hummel would spendmost of his time in the hospital E.R. But this is GLEE, not the real world.

GLEE,the TV series, shows the influence of another TV series, SCRUBS. I'm so often reminded of SCRUBS by theincidental music, the 'tween scenes' bopping and percussion fills. I'm also reminded of SCRUBS by the dialogue,especially that of the vindictive cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester. Alas, GLEE is not SCRUBS. Not even close. And Sue Sylvester, no matter how gloatingly superior herrhetoric, no matter how repulsive and outright dirty MEAN she gets, is not Dr.Perry Cox. Not by a long shot.

Still,GLEE is a lot of fun. When Rachelbreaks up, or reconciles, for the twentieth time, with Finn, Jesse or whomever,she belts out a perfectly produced, professionally glossed song -and- dancenumber. The Show Choir, the so-called"losers" dubbed New Directions, waits in the wings with supportingharmonies. It pops out from behind the curtains with a great band, sometimeseven strings and horns. The lightinggets inventive, the costumes are immaculate. Brad the piano player is always available and the fantasy iscomplete. This ain't no high schoolglee club. We wouldn't sit still for ahigh school glee club unless it came from the School For The PerformingArts. We wouldn't watch the performanceof a show choir from a suburban midwestern town unless our kids were init.

Whenthe glitz of the music fades away, and we return to the plot, I find that mywife is crying along with Kurt Hummel, when his wonderfully supportive fatherlies in a coma, and the series' emotional content spikes in somenot-quite-preachy way.

Ifyou've enjoyed this brief review, I may yet have more commentary on GLEE as aparadigm marker, or something like that. Meanwhile, we're starting Disc One of Season Two.

All The Words Are Broken

2011-08-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

All the words are broken.

I have these few words because Iwas near the bottom of heaven

when the languages fell in shards.

I nearly died, impaled

in their despairing crash.

All the words are broken, all thelanguages are dead.

I've sat like a child with a giantpuzzle, assembling the bits

that remain. Splinters chill my hands, blood from cutfingers

drips into the earth.

I have shackled each word recoveredfrom the fragments

and dragged them to this page. The work

is long: months, years, rounding up

a letter here, a syllable there,

building a fortress for their protection.

The Torah is but a vowel, the Biblea blurt,

The Koran is mixed with sand,unreadable.

Why, why are the words broken?

There was nothing strong enough tohold them,

to keep them from trying to speakthe outrage.

They failed. There are no words left to make it felt,

the outrage. They exploded, trying to reveal thedisguises of evil. They vaporized

from the frustration that hastried down the ages
to cry against malice and injustice.

I have my work, long work ahead ofme.

My successor, and their successors,will work

to rebuild the words, to make newwords, until language

is strong enough to speak witheffect, with potency

against the evil that bestrides theworld.

Do Dogs Laugh?

2011-07-24T15:58:00.000-07:00

This is how sad Bear was

WhenI tickle and play the game of "hand" with my dog, he laughs. The game consists of scratchinghis armpits while he tries to gently bite my fingers. I roll him around as he kicks with his back feet and tries tograsp my wrist with his front feet. It's a game that pits his strength against my strength. He would never bite to hurt me while playingthis game. I calibrate my strength sothat each of us wins. Bear wins whenhis teeth grip some part of my hand. Iwin when I roll him over on his back and tickle his armpits. We go back and forth. Bear's laugh consists of his tongue hangingout while the back of his mouth rises, showing his teeth. He pants quickly with the breathy sound of"hah hah hah hah." When Ifirst realized that he was laughing, it was a discovery, a revelation.
A coupleweeks ago we decided that we couldn't afford the expense of grooming two smallpoodles. When Fox rescued Bear from the puppy mill,http://bit.ly/nDnbLC, we had no idea that these dogs were so high maintenance. Their hair grows at astounding speed. We had to start doing itourselves.

Foxis Number One groomer. I act as support. I hold, restrain, turn, calm the dogs, andmassage Fox's back.

Westarted with Gabriel. He's smaller andmore pliant. Fox worked for almostthree hours. There wasn't much that Icould do. Sometimes I needed to holdGabe so Fox could work on his delicate parts. After a long struggle, the job was done.

Itwasn't a work of genius. Gabrielsported a Punk Poodle-do, all spikes, cowlicks and occasional bald spots. Fox gave a mighty effort. It would get better.

Inoticed afterward that Bear looked depressed. He sat with his chin on his paws. His eyes radiated sadness. Hedidn't want to play. He wasn'tinterested in eating a treat. He wascompletely inert. It scared me. I'd never seen him this way.

Irealized with a flash that he was depressed because Gabriel had gotten agrooming, and he had not. When Gabe wasreleased from his grooming harness he ran all over the place, doing flips androlls, rubbing his face on his bed and his toys.

Gabrielhated the process of being groomed but he loved the result. He felt great! He was cooler and lighter. He didn't pee all over his tummy hair when he lifted his leg. There were other benefits which I shall notmention here. As Gabe raced around thecoach he was telling the world, "Hey, I feel great!"

Bearwas devastated. It was painfullyobvious. He remained depressed throughthe next day. We got too busy to do hisgrooming. We had problems. On the following day it was finally Bear'sturn.

Monthsago, during our early attempts at grooming Bear, we had terrible battles. It wasn't his fault. The people in his natal puppy mill were brutal. The sight of groomingimplements became a signal for torture.

GettingBear to accept grooming has been a long process. We use a muzzle. We've been bitten but we'll live. Bear is a seven pound teacup poodle. He's very strong but the bite is more aboutterror than pain. When he explodes,when he reaches that berserker biting state, he's like T-Rex, he's scary. It's a release of atavistic savagery. Fox and I have had to conquer our fear ofthis little dog as much as he's had to conquer his fear of scissors andclippers.

It'sgetting easier all the time. Bearunderstands how good he'll feel when the grooming is finished. He WANTS to be groomed, but still, weapproach the event cautiously.

Thequestion inevitably occurs: does Bear envision a future outcome? Does he prognosticate, does he understandthat if he submits to "X" the result will be "Y"?

Mybest surmise is that he understands the relationship between cause andeffect. He knows it's in his bestinterest to submit gracefully to grooming in order to have the result offeeling cooler and cleaner. He hasbecome cooperative and almost docile. We aren't ready to give up the muzzle yet, but we're makingprogress.

BeforeI met Bear I had no idea that other species could have such nuanced and subtleemotions. I lived in a narrowanthropocentric world. All around methe rich perceptions of other animals filled the air while I remainedoblivious. That has changed. I am now part of a larger conversation.

Somewhere,years ago, I read or saw a philosopher discussing the difference between humanbeings and animals. "Man is theonly creature capable of tears and laughter," he said.

Hewas full of smug arrogant crap. Animalslaugh. Animals weep. Animals do things of which we have only avague snippet of awareness. Thephilosopher would have been closer to the mark if he had said, "Only human beings can turn this planet into a pile ofrubble fit for cockroaches."

Imight have taken him seriously if he had been more honest and less sentimental.

Bythe way, Fox is becoming an accomplished dog groomer. Bear and Gabriel no longer sport "PunkPoodle-do's". They're sleek gorgeous exemplars of the breed of itsy bitsy poodles.

I am A Pre-existing Condition

2011-07-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

I'm over sixty, therefore I AM apre-existing condition. That's why I'mafraid to get off Kaiser and take my chances with Trapdoor InsuranceCompany. I'm not quite old enough toqualify for Medicare and by the time I reach that age, so I'm told, there willbe no Medicare. What am I supposed todo? The premium on Kaiser eats up halfmy income. Half! What kind of country is this?

I have no talent for drawing or painting, but if I did I would make a comic strip showing a man dressed like Evel Knievel. He's carrying his head under his arm. The head's eyes are open and apparently conscious. There are still a few attached nerves,vessels and tendons, going up over his shoulder and down into his body.

Thenurse behind the Emergency Room intake counter is saying, "We're sorry,sir, but there's an eighty percent co-pay on accidental decapitations. That will be, let's see here....four hundredthousand one hundred eighty seven dollars, without the sutures. If you want sutures, we have severaldifferent models, there's self administered bovine sinew, self administeredcotton/silk, intern administered micro-fiber dissolving, resident administered dissolving,all of these options begin at two thousand dollars and increaseaccordingly. To have suturesadministered by a fully qualified surgeon will be..oh let's see....seventythousand and change. You get the top ofthe line dissolving sutures. Oh..and Ihaven't mentioned pain control, have I?"

Thenext panel shows the almost-headless man holding out a wallet that is empty ofcash or cards.

Inthe next panel the nurse says, "I'm terribly sorry, sir," and pulls a giant lever. A trap door opens, whooshingheadless motorcycle man down into a deep pit. On the way down, the chute branches off into various tunnels. One is labeled 10 percent co-pay, the nextis labeled Mysterious Insurance Babble, another is labeled ConfusionGulch. All these chutes meet in thecenter of what appears to be a giant donut. There's a small brass plaque on the underside of the donut upon which isengraved, "Passed by United States Congress at 3:00 A.M., March 11,2010."

Thereare thousands of sick and injured citizens clinging to the sides of the donut,desperately attempting to avoid being sucked down the hole. Our severely injured motorcyclist has onlyone arm with which to hold to the donut's surface. The other arm is keeping his head from detaching from hisbody. He doesn't last long. He slides off the glazed surface of thedonut, leaving fingernail tracks as he screams his last desperate cry: Ithought I had insurance!!

God's Unemployment Line

2011-07-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

photo by Marco Fulle

July 9, 2011

"You're fired!"

That'swhat God is telling us. We, The HumanRace, screwed up. We were hired asstewards of this marvelous planet, and we failed. Imagine if you owned a McDonald's outlet, and you hired a kidnamed Fred to manage the place. In twoweeks you return to evaluate Fred's performance. The oil in the French fryer is black. The griddles are so funky they emit clouds of smoke. The rest rooms make you puke. There's graffiti on every wall and window,inside and out. Fred has a tag,"freaky2". Fred's tag iseverywhere. Freaky2 on the doors,Freaky2 on the windows, Freaky2 all over the drive thru.

Wouldyou keep this kid in his job? Hellno! Fred, YOU'RE FIRED!

Wewere given some sweet benefits. We gotbig brains and opposable thumbs. We gotall the gear we needed. Forests,fields, rivers, creatures large and small. All we had to do was take care of it, keep it clean, maybe make a fewoptional improvements. Our job was tokeep the place running so that families could come in and get a decent meal.

Instead,with remarkable energy, we set about tagging the place, Freaky2, Freaky2,Freaky2.

God brushes his comb-over with his left hand and says,"YOU'REFIRED!"

Theunemployment line is weird. We didn'trealize how big this franchise is. There are Earthy planets in half the solar systems in half thegalaxies. There's this race ofcreatures just ahead of us in line. They look like ball point pens. They have a single roller instead of two feet. They pour different colors into funnels on top of their heads, and zoom around making cryptic markingson various surfaces. When they're atrest they have to stand up in threes. That's all they talk about, three this and three that. Their tag was Threekyfoo. And that's what they did to their planet,covered it in tags that said Threekyfoo, Threekyfoo, Threekyfoo.

Ihear the unemployment insurance doesn't last very long.

Wemay have to start from scratch.

Bankruptcy Blues: an excerpt from AVOIDING THE POTHOLES

2011-07-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

Note: Blog entries are supposed to be short. We live busy lives, we don't have time to read a ten page

comic essay on the bankruptcy process. It's from my memoir, AVOIDING THE POTHOLES: ROAD STORIES IN A CHANGING AMERICA. I hope the piece entertains you and holds your attention.

I admit I need to do some editing. That's always the case. Just not today.

Bankruptcy Blues

One morning I woke up, did some simple addition and concluded that I was thirty seven thousand dollars in credit card debt. I still had six thousand to go on my car loan, so that made a debt load of forty three thousand dollars. How could this happen? I’m legally single and without dependents. I own no stocks, bonds, properties or other convertible assets. I am a man utterly without collateral. So, my question “how did this happen?” is a rhetorical utterance, because I know how it happened. I spent more than I earned, it’s that simple. If we see this happening on a larger scale, as an entire society goes bankrupt, the same basic laws apply. The only difference between me as an individual and our society at large is that society, represented by The Government, can print money. The newly printed money is really fake money, toy money, but it buys a smidgen of time because it’s backed up by history, prestige, momentum and the memory of immense wealth. It may be a few years before anyone notices that United States dollars look like little orange, blue and yellow pieces of paper about three inches long and two inches wide.

I got my first credit card when I was forty five years old. I had managed to live outside the consumer cycle for all that time, by being either a hippie or a bum. My time as a bum was still really ongoing when that envelope arrived in the mail, the one that said, “You have already been approved.” I thought it was a joke, I laughed. Who would give me a credit card?

I like being approved. People thrive on approval, it’s a normal human need. This Visa Card provided me with a credit limit of two hundred dollars, at an interest rate of twenty three point nine nine percent. Of course, a credit card is not really about its interest rate. Credit cards are a barge full of tricky charges, most of which are confined to the small print. The two most lethal words in the English language, “Adjustable Rate,” are stated or implied somewhere in that print. There are annual fees, late fees, cash advance fees, all around Desperate Ignorance fees. You’re dumb, and you’re desperate, so we’ll charge you a fee.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was still pretty much a bum, I was living in an in-law unit behind a house in San Geronimo Valley. The area is an enclave of hippies, new age healers, artists, crafts-people and bums hiding out.

I was excited about having two hundred dollars credit. My therapist approved. Having a credit card was a mark of responsibility; it meant I was turning into a mature adult, integrating myself into mainstream society. Provided, of course, that I kept up my payments. How much trouble could I get into, with a two hundred dollar limit? How much would the minimum payments be, eight dollars a month?

I didn’t know, at the time, that paying minimum on a credit card means that any amount, no matter how trivial, will take your next ten incarnations to pay off, or about six hundred years. Fortunately, credit companies don’t track future incarnations. Instead, they sue debtor’s spouses or any relative available for the unpaid sum. Eventually, our corporate-controlled government will pass laws allowing credit banks to force you to work off your debt. You will pass your days working in a cubicle in South Dakota, making collection calls for the bank and living in dorms with twenty four beds to a room. Lunch will be a choice between bologna or peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Spam or Macaroni and cheese is the menu for dinner. There WILL be movies every night, hell, we got plenty of movies. Disney will have the exclusive contract to provide Credit Default Camps with DVDs.

I racked up my two hundred dollar debt in one day. I bought a car. That was the kind of car I got in those days. I used a courtesy check from the card company (special interest rate of 29.9 percent) and bought an’82 Honda Civic. It turned out to be a good car. The starter was broken, so the car had to be hot-wired every time I wanted to drive. The gas tank had a crack halfway down its side. Anything over six gallons sent a flammable trickle of gasoline through this crack. I could never put more than five gallons in the tank. I had to be very careful about that. I got full disclosure from the seller about the vehicle’s problems. “Watch out how much gas you put in,” he told me. “Five gallons tops and keep track of what you got left in the tank when you fill. Best thing is to just get three and half.. I had a friend with the same problem, and he blew himself up.”

I got great mileage from that little beige go-cart. Five gallons was a hundred twenty miles, easy. It was a bargain, it was a reliable vehicle.

I paid my monthly minimum on time, every month. In about six months, the card company notified me that my limit had been raised to five hundred dollars. Fantastic! I bought a set of tires for the car.

I was living as a free-lance anything: janitor, painter, carpet cleaner. I worked for a dry cleaners, I worked as a flower delivery driver. I survived by the seat of my pants.

My monthly payments were fifteen dollars. Not a problem, I always put a check in the mail at the last possible minute. I was always on time.

The card company raised my limit to a thousand dollars. It felt good, it meant that Visa Card trusted me.

I wanted to become a professional photographer. I bought my first digital camera. The payments went up to about twenty eight dollars a month.

Then I got another envelope in the mail. This one was from MasterCharge. “You have already been approved!”

Nice! They were offering me twenty five hundred dollars credit at a rate of sixteen point four percent. It was a Gold Card. I wondered about these metallic cards. Gold, Silver, Platinum. I wondered if there were cards for people on different economic rungs. Cards with metals both common and uncommon. A Uranium Card for nuclear physicists, with radioactive interest rates and loan half-lives that take millions of years to pay off. An Iron Card for weight lifters. The rates just go up and down, up and down. Heavy Metal Cards, shaped like guitar picks, for rock and rollers. Lithium cards for manic-depressives, with rates that plunge and soar, and plunge again.

I believe that credit banks operate with a fundamental yet covert philosophy. It’s called the We Don’t Give A Shit If You Pay Us Back Principle. By the time you have gone through the agonies of ballooning credit balances, of paying monthly minimums on seven different cards, of borrowing from one card to pay another, of paying late fees, overcharge fees, balance transfer fees and been suckered into “credit insurance” programs that protect you from being unable to pay your credit card bills, you have put so much money into the pockets of Citibank and Chase that even if you default, they’ve made a profit of twelve thousand percent, which more than offsets your default, when it comes.

In U.S. Dependencies like Guam, Saipan and Puerto Rico, Congress will enact loopholes in anti-usury laws, allowing Citibank to be what it really is: a loan shark. Rates of a hundred percent, payable next week or they send a goon to break your finger. What’s the “vig”, Louie?

Since I was unable to get credit, that is, low interest bank credit for a legitimate business loan, I used my cards to start my digital photography business. The problem was that my business took ten years to get going, and after five years I was paying almost six hundred dollars a month just to maintain the minimum payments on all those cards.

This was like taking six crisp one hundred dollar bills out of my wallet and setting a match to them. That money was gone, it would not reduce my debt, it would not purchase anything. It was gone. Wasted. At this point my repayment would take twenty six thousand years, or nine hundred future incarnations.

I was having a good spell in my business. I was enjoying some cash flow. I was always rescued by a last minute thing, a portrait session, a wedding, a house to paint, sale of a print or two. Somehow, I was able to keep up with these incredible payments. I made some large payments, bringing my balance down. That’s when the next round of offers came in: “You Have Already Been Approved!”

Wow. Capital One allowed me five thousand dollars in credit at a rate of eleven point nine percent. I took it! I needed a more sophisticated camera, and some portrait lights.

Pretty soon I was running five credit cards and I lost track of my total debt. I guess I lost track on purpose, so that I could live in denial.

I was the ideal customer for credit card banks. I racked up a lot of credit yet made minimum payments, on time. There is no better earner for a bank than a consumer like me. They don’t want me to pay off my loan, heavens no! They want to gradually load me up on debt, drag me down into the depths of high interest compound rates, and keep me there for the rest of my life.

The thrill began to wear off. For a while, I actually defined wealth as the amount of one’s credit. If I had a few hundred grand in credit, I was in pretty good shape, wasn’t I? Aren’t we defined by our debt? I saw my world as a kind of spending party. Need a new printer? Cool, I‘ve got credit. And I’ll keep making the minimum payments. I always do.

I’ll admit it was fun. I had a great time. I am a compulsive person. I will always be a compulsive person. In this, I am not much different from the average American. We are ALL compulsive.

I never considered bankruptcy. I held the almighty Credit Rating in such awe that I would do nothing to besmirch it. Meanwhile, I became more and more miserable, as my anxieties focused on making the monthly minimum payments and seeing my income going into the fire. Get out the matches, dude, time to burn some more hundred dollar bills. I began to feel as though I were carrying a mountain on my back. I knew that I would never get rid of this mountain, that the rest of my life would be spent holding up this Sisyphian mass as it grew larger and larger.

This wasn’t fun any more. My outlook changed in a single week. One day, I simply looked at my situation. Within another few days I was there; I was prepared to file for bankruptcy.

What changed?

It occurred to me that the almighty Credit Rating is a hoax. People go in fear of losing points on their credit rating. People obsess on the difference between six fifty and seven hundred. The terror of losing points on one’s credit rating is a ubiquitous American terror. It rides invisibly on people’s shoulders like a pair of wooden stocks, like a medieval torture device. Companies thrive on milking people’s obsession with their credit score. Go to freecreditreport dot com and find out your score. You’ll learn that your free credit report isn’t free. It’s a lure to sell credit monitoring services. For a monthly fee a consumer can track his or her credit rating and get even more obsessive.

Every American can get a free credit report once a year. That’s the law. You won’t get it at freecreditreport dot com. You’ll just get more crazy.

Radio stations are flooded with commercials for get rich quick instructional CDs, books and videos. Every time I hear the word “free” on the radio I laugh and I visualize gullible wannabe entrepreneurs panting to exploit this amazing opportunity. I’ve always had a maxim regarding American marketing techniques. It’s simple: contempt sells. Hundreds of commercials promise the consumer an income of five to ten thousand dollars a month by investing in the stock market. Best of all, the CD is free! Or how about this? Make money using the internet! You don’t have to buy inventory, you don’t have to store inventory, all you have to do is sell stuff on Ebay that you don’t even have! Let your computer do your work for you. Earn money while you sleep! And best of all, the CD explaining how to pull off this miracle is FREE! Wow, (the radio voice says) now I can quit my day job, and pretty soon I’ll own two houses!

Hey, wait, what about Real Estate?! There’s a book telling me how to earn a fortune buying up foreclosed properties. The introductory CD is Free! The word free should be spelled eff arr dollar sign dollar sign. FR$$.

The people making money on these programs are the people selling the book or CD. If the program worked so well, why would these entrepeneurs spawn thousands of competitors? Imagine a radio commercial sounding like this (provide your own cheesy radio-announcer voice):

“Want to get rich on the internet? Make five thousand dollars a week from the privacy of your own home! All you have to do is buy our book, "How to Get Rich on the Internet by Writing How To Get Rich on the Internet Books!" Your own book, "How to Write How To Get Rich on the Internet Books" will soon be a hit and generating fantastic income. Your satisfied customers will be writing their own "How to Write How to Write How to Get Rich on the Internet" books and will in their turn be raking in the money. In Step Three, you will branch out into other "How To" book fields, such as "How To Publish Your Own How To Books On the Internet", "How to Soak the How To Book Instruction Market on the Internet", and "How to Invest Your Money Earned from Writing How to How to Books on the Internet". Then, in the final phase of our instructional program, you will learn how to write How To books on any subject at all, such as "How to Learn Russian in Ten Minutes", "How to Write How to Learn Russian In Ten Minutes," or "How to Write How to How to Learn Russian in Ten Minutes in Ten Minutes". The possibilities are infinite! Start raking in the cash now! All you have to do is pay us to learn how to do anything on the internet without knowing how! Visa, Mastercharge, Versatron, Intellidebt, AutoCarLien, Prodeduct Utilities Bill, all forms of payment accepted!

Call 1-800-Howtohow or go to www.howtohowdy.com”

Let me admit that, initially, my new philosophy, my ‘credit score is a hoax’ pose was a bit of bravado. I was still scared. What if one of us got sick? What if I wanted a new car? What if Fox and I decide to upgrade to a better motorome? What if what if what if?

I’ll relieve you of the suspense right now. My bankruptcy was a complete success. The first thing that happened was that car dealers showered me with offers. It’s the standard procedure for a bankruptcy. There are business entities whose most lucrative product is helping bankrupts re-establish their credit. Car dealers are foremost among these entities. All kinds of people wanted to help me re-establish my credit. Offers poured in. The first few months, the offers were terrible. The credit cards were loaded with sign-up fees and yearly fees, and the interest rates would shame any loan shark. I got those “You have already been approved” deals all the time. After a few months the offers settled down, became more like the offers I got before I went bankrupt. I accepted one card: no sign up fee, no yearly fee, interest at eleven percent. I keep that one credit card, and I stay below two thousand dollars in total debt. I make large monthly payments when my balance gets too high. Every offer that comes along goes into the waste basket. I have one credit card. Two thousand dollar limit. Period.

Wait a minute, wait a minute! I have to confess something. I wrote that last paragraph before gas prices hit the roof. It’s getting tougher to function and make ends meet. I sort of broke my rule. I haven’t exceeded my limit. I did, however, take on another credit card. That card is sitting in my wallet like a radioactive pellet, just waiting to leak through and contaminate my world. It scares the hell out of me, while at the same time it comforts me. Its purpose is to backdrop serious emergencies. I haven’t used it. I don’t want to use it. I pray that nothing happens to force me to use it. I just pray and pray.

My attitudes have changed. I don’t spend money just to have something I want, like a new printer. My camera gear is getting old. That’s the way it will have to be. I can’t afford the latest, neatest gear.

What I’m saying is that it’s almost impossible to escape the world of credit cards. They keep coming back like the Terminator’s metal arm.

Have I mentioned that I feel like I’m really getting screwed? Have I just come out and said it in so many words?

I feel choked with anger. I am so frustrated that I need a pitcher of margaritas or a bottle of Vicodin. (I am, of course, exaggerating dramatically for effect here. I’m not an alkie or a dope fiend, no no no.) There are a hundred rip offs dipping into my pocket every day. There are dozens of virtually undetectable drains on my income. This isn’t a free country! It’s a very expensive country.

In the last decade I have found myself trapped by invincible shackles. I have hit the wall of middle age. I have just enough medical and chronic pain conditions to place me at the very center of the health insurance vortex. I have no choice but to be a consumer. I am now the victim of medical blackmail. Insurance and drugs are so expensive, they dominate every aspect of my life. Why? How can one blood pressure pill cost four dollars? It costs pennies to make. We all know that. The Big Pharm companies scream “Research and Development! Marketing! How can we invent those orphan drugs that will help a few thousand people and conspicuously demonstrate our compassion? Our expenses are staggering!”

There there, Big Pharm, don’t cry. Poor Pfizer, you’ve worked so hard to ensure that our aging males can have erections. Don’t sulk in a corner, Glaxo. We know how much you love us. Your efforts have controlled our cholesterol, have saved our lives time and again! Your executives deserve those boats and planes, they’ve earned those vacations at hotels in Dubai that look like flying saucers and cost four thousand dollars a night. They deserve the call girls and the Bugati sports cars, the Rolex watches and the gated estates overlooking the beach at St. Moritz. They’ve worked hard for our benefit.

I often fantasize about what I could do if I didn’t spend half my income every year on health insurance and prescription co-payments. I wouldn’t be living in constant anxiety. I might be able to save enough money to travel and have some fun. I might be able to get my car fixed. I could repair that weird flub flub sound it makes in the right front wheel. I could afford my dog’s dental work, the removal of those extra teeth that are going to become a nightmare in three or four years.

I’m old enough to remember a time when health care wasn’t everyone’s ball and chain. I remember when a factory worker could support a family and mom could stay home and pay some attention to the kids. I remember when people didn’t endure sour stomachs and panic attacks thinking about their credit card debt. I remember when my dad made enough money from his small business to provide a decent middle class standard of living for his family. I’m old enough to remember the way things shifted so suddenly in the late seventies and early eighties. No one had ever heard of HMOs. Then, suddenly, they were everywhere. Our big industries, like steel and auto manufacture were under assault by the Japanese.

De-regulate everything! We have to compete with a free hand!

I’m not an economist or a political scientist, I don’t understand how our society was co-opted and undermined by an inferno of greed. I only know that a corrupt and devious corporate cruelty has turned middle class people into paupers and terrified debtors.

Dammit, I’m angry!

To further amplify my vulnerability, I have taken yet another credit card. I spent up to the limit on the last one after my car broke down. I needed brakes, a catalytic converter and a new clutch.

My debt has climbed to about three thousand dollars, and I’m paying about a hundred dollars a month. I can live with that. The debt stopped climbing a year ago. I’ve kept pace with my payments, I occasionally pay the bill down by a few dollars. This is familiar territory me. I understand the game, and the futile squirming that I must suffer to keep afloat because I’m not much of a money person. I’m an artist-person, woe is me. I am aware that more millions of people are now living the same way. The economy has gotten bad and there are many new recruits to the kind of life I’ve always lived. I have a certain amount of psychological armor against this insecurity. It doesn’t freak me out. I know that a lot of people, new to poverty and crushing debt, are freaked out. I’m sad about those people.

A few days ago I was getting into my car in a large parking lot. I was approached by a well dressed woman. “Excuse, me, sir,” she asked with apparent reluctance. “I’ve had a bit of trouble and I…”

I didn’t force her to end her pitch. She was begging. I held up my hand and said, “Sure, no problem, I have a couple bucks worth of change. I’ve been through hard times myself.”

She relaxed, her shoulders came down from around her ears. She wasn’t a funky street person holding a sign at a busy intersection. She looked like a soccer mom with two kids. This was my first encounter with a more upscale type of beggar. Looks can deceive. She might be the fore-runner of a new type of beggar, the housewife-Oxycontin scammer. I don’t care. If she needs money for drugs, let her buy drugs. I’d prefer that she find treatment but if she’s willing to beg drug money in a Safeway parking lot that means she’s NOT willing to be a hooker, not yet.

Some stop-light panhandlers have a dog. Some sit in wheelchairs. There are busy intersections claimed as territory by beggars. Their signs are variations of the same message. “Anything will help.” If the person is able-bodied the sign might say “Will work for food.” I hold no animus towards them. They stand for hours in a noisy place clogged with car fumes and endure a thousand humiliations. I could tell that the well-dressed woman in her early thirties was not used to this kind of activity. The look on her face was shattering. She was humiliated but she tried to appear as if this was just a momentary blip, like she had left her wallet at home and had run out of gas. She was going to beg just this once, it wasn’t a thing she would do tomorrow and the day after that. I saw her move on to the next person and the next. They recoiled, they refused. She kept on, walking gently up to people with an “Excuse me, sir, I’m in a bit of trouble…Excuse me ma’am ”. I don’t care if she spent the money for booze or drugs. I never care about that. Begging is a profession that has always been with the human community. I’ve begged and panhandled. I sank to the bottom tier of society. The work of begging is very difficult.

Yesterday I was in another parking lot, just coming from Raley’s with two plastic bags of food. It was five-ish, getting dark. A woman approached me wearing a white down jacket and slacks. Her hair was well kept, her makeup was in place.

“Excuse me, sir” she began and again I held up my hand. “No problem,”

I said, “I have a couple bucks worth of change.”

As I dug through my bag, I asked her a question.

“How many hours a day do you do this?”

“All day. I’ve been here since eight this morning. My feet are killing me. I’m done in an hour. Eight to six,” she laughed bitterly, “it’s a full time job.”

“So..what are people like?” I wondered. “Do they help you?”

She leaned back against a car, taking the weight off her feet. The bright blue light of the mercury vapor lamps made it easy to see her face. She didn’t look like an addict. She looked like a thirty five year old woman trapped in the grip of circumstances beyond her control. She’s divorced. Her ex-husband’s vanished, not paying child support. She’s three months behind on the rent. Laid off from her job after twelve years of loyal service to the firm. Unemployment benefits are running out. Can’t find a job anywhere. She’s desperate and she wants her kids to have the things they’ve always had. Karate lessons. A music teacher. Little by little she’s lost the ability to provide, and must make some hard choices.

So…panhandling in supermarket parking lots becomes an option, a desperate option that she takes with greatest reluctance.

“About one person in ten is nice.” she replied. “You can’t believe the abuse I get out here. ‘What’s the matter with you?’” she imitated a shrill pitiless voice, “‘Go get a job like a decent person. Shame on you!’ Women are the worst, especially the ones of a certain age, over forty five, fifty. I don’t bother with the twenty-somethings. They’re just overgrown high school kids, they tell me to go fuck myself. Excuse my language. And you know what? I stand up for myself. I tell them they don’t know what’s going on in my life, they’re not qualified to judge me.”

She paused as some unpleasant image washed across her mind.

“Some of the men,” she said, “some of the men, are…you know…they think I’m a hooker. They say the most disgusting things. I’ve got a radar for that type now, it works pretty well…what would you call that, ‘Jerk-dar?’”

“Maybe ‘ass-illoscope’” I quipped, not sure she would get the pun.

“Perfect!” She got the pun. “That’s what I’ll call it from now on. Thanks!

My ‘ass-illoscope!”

Her eyes shifted. A woman carrying groceries was loading her car just down the row. She needed to get back to work.

“Thank you,” she said with sincerity. “I have to make every minute count.”

“Go on,”, I said, “Go back to work.”

She had to push herself away from the car. She was bone tired. She didn’t know whether her next approach would end in kindness or invective. Her eyes thanked me for treating her like a human being.

With each passing week I expect to see more and of these parking lot beggars.

Begging is one of the hardest jobs in the world.

This has everything to do with the move of Fox and me from house to motor home. We were not forced to move out of the house. True, It got too expensive. We saw our resources diminishing and a future where our age was going up as our income was going down. We saw an economy edging towards bankruptcy and we wanted OUT as quickly as possible, we wanted a way to reduce our earthly footprint.

We WANTED to live in a motor home! After the trip in Yertle, the epic voyage to Arches National Park, the idea became more and more appealing. We didn’t know whether or not it would work out. It was a tremendous risk.

Declaring bankruptcy was also a tremendous risk. What if “they” came and took away our motor home? It was half in my name and half in Fox’s. What if “they” took my camera, my computer, my car? I didn’t know they wouldn’t. I asked several lawyer friends of mine, and they assured me that such things would not happen. I had no real assets. My possessions were exempt. I would be fine.

In spite of these reassurances, Fox and I spent a nervous couple of months.

In 2005 there was a major change in the laws regarding bankruptcy. These changes tended to favor the card companies. A bill was passed called The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. I love that: Consumer Protection Act. The so –called intent of this act was to prevent people from racking up a lot of debt with the intention of going bankrupt after spending oodles of the bank’s money. How is this protecting consumers? Give me a break. How many people do you know that are exploiting credit card companies with the intention of defaulting? One, two, a hundred? How many have you heard about? Is it so common that an act of congress is required to protect us from these unscrupulous spenders? The real motive behind this Act is that the banks foresee a flood of bankruptcies looming in the near future. They want to be ready for this tsunami of debt, they want to get their rich butts to higher ground so that when the bankruptcies mount into the millions, they will be safe and capable of forcing debtors into losing the pants they wear, the shoes they walk in. I can see it now, America. People walking around in blankets.

I hired a good lawyer. She was a little hobbit of a woman who wore thick glasses and neat business suits. I had the feeling that in court she was a cyclone, that her antagonists quaked in terror when she opened her briefcase. She charged one fee, two thousand dollars, in advance. She always let me know what was happening, she communicated with me regularly, instructed me in what to do and what not to do.

One of the stipulations of the new law is that debtors must pass two courses in money management and credit awareness. To this effect, a host of companies have arisen to cater to the expanding market of bankruptcy cases. The whole shebang is done online, and it costs about three hundred dollars. The debtor must first pass a credit counseling course. The material in this course is not difficult. The test is a multiple-choice quiz with some pretty silly questions.

The questions go like this: “What is the correct way to use credit cards?”

Answer One: To buy cool things like cell phones, shoes and car accessories.

Answer Two: To finance trips to Hawaii and Disneyland.

Answer Three: To be used as an occasional aid to pay emergency expenses when cash is short.

Question: What is the best way to manage one’s credit account?

Answer One: Put off paying to the last minute.

Answer Two: Build up a lot of debt and make minimum payments.

Answer Three: Pay off debt as it arises, maintaining the lowest possible balance.

These courses are designed for the average American genius. It’s a case of having questions reveal more than the answers. What kind of people find these questions challenging? My god, are we in trouble, here in America? Is this what we’ve become? Consumer morons?

I am the American economy in microcosm. I was encouraged, no, I was seduced, into borrowing beyond my means. Who am I? I am poor! I don’t feel poor, I live a great life, but on paper, I am poor. Why would banks lend me money? Yes, I am responsible for my debt. My greed is at fault. No question.

I was a frustrated man with no money being treated to the most sophisticated sales technique on the planet. Borrow this money! We’re offering it to you, it’s easy, just apply online and we’ll have your credit approved in five minutes.

Got it almost paid off? Here, we’ll lend you some more. We approve of you! You’re a good person! We like you! Here’s five grand. You can pay it off any time you want, just make sure you meet your minimum and we’ll get along great. No one will call you, no letters will arrive. Gee, you know what? Our records show that you have five credit cards, and owe a total of twenty thousand dollars. That makes you a good credit risk! You wouldn’t have all these cards and owe all this money unless banks trusted you. Here, another ten grand in credit. Fine! Pay us back when you can!

The credit counseling companies who advertise so heavily on radio and television are flourishing. They will help you pay down your debt! In fact, there are reputable companies and disreputable companies. The business is predicated on the simple fact that credit banks are willing to let you pay off forty percent of your loan at a reduced monthly rate. This is a fact. Almost all of your card debt can be drastically reduced. The counseling agency is there to do the paperwork, run interference for you, comfort you in your distress. That’s what the honest companies do. The dishonest ones will have you send your payments directly to them. They will take your money and do nothing. They will not pay your creditors. They will reassure you that all these harassing phone calls that have begun are normal. Wait a couple of months and they’ll die down. Don’t worry, sir, the man with the generic foreign accent on the phone says, don’t worry this is the normal procedure. We have negotiated your credit to ten percent of what it was. We are paying your creditors, and in eighteen months you will be free of debt! Isn’t that wonderful?

I called one of these crooks. He wanted to start the program right away. “I can sign you up right now, you can stop worrying about the letters and the phone calls.”

“How does it work?” I ask.

“It’s simple, “ he replies, “you just make one monthly payment to our office and we’ll take care of the rest.”

“That sounds easy enough,” I say.

“Great, then you’re ready to start,” responds the man.

“Don’t you need my application, some paperwork?” I question.

“Oh no, that’s not necessary, just give me your phone number, social security number and address and we’ll get started on the paperwork right away.”

“Uhhh…I think I’ll wait on that.” I hung up very quickly. I felt as if I had avoided a rattlesnake bite.

I never got any letters or phone calls. I made every monthly minimum payment until my lawyer filed the papers. Within three months, all my creditors had been notified, and there was no point in calling me or harassing me.

I took, and passed, the two courses, via the internet. I filled out a lot of paperwork. I waited some months while my lawyer did whatever it was that she did.

Then my hearing date was scheduled. I was going to walk into a room where it was possible that representatives of all my creditors would confront me with my irresponsible behavior, accuse me of being a crook, question me about purchases I had made three months before I filed for bankruptcy. Why did you buy this lens in August? When did you decide you were going to file for Chapter Eleven? Did you know you were going to file when you bought this lens? How many assets did you transfer in the year before you filed? What are you concealing from us?

Waiting outside the courtroom I was nervous. My lawyer toddled up, looking harmlessly fierce, like a rabbit with giant fangs. “Just answer the questions,” she advised. “Don’t add anything, don’t talk too much. It’ll be fine.”

The doors opened and I entered the hearing room. Five or six other cases were on the docket, so I sat in a folding chair with my fellow bankrupts, while three trustees sat behind a semi-circular dais. A tape recorder was turned on.

The trustees didn’t look like monsters. They looked kind of nice.

My case was first on the docket. The blonde trustee swore me in. Then she asked me two questions.

“Do you understand the implications of your filing Chapter Eleven?”

“Yes, I do, ma’am.”

“Have you been truthful with the trustee in your documentation?”

“Yes I have, ma’am.”

“Thank you very much, you will be notified of your bankruptcy within sixty days.”

That was it. I walked out of the court room a free man. It was a very happy day in my life. I could return to my cozy motor home and tell Fox that it was over. Nobody was going to take anything away from us. Except my forty three thousand dollars in debt.

America is, after all, a wonderful country. The system needs a little tweaking, but it is a wonderful country.

Dilemma: Love In The Age Of Hippies

2011-06-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

Checked Out By Aliens

Ah, youth. I had some interesting experiences in the sixties, living in Marin County.This story came to me in a bank of memories over coffee a couple of days ago. It said "Write me, write me!" Who am I to defy the command of the writer's muse, no matter how arcane or silly the subject matter? Actually, I like this story a lot.

1967. Muir Beach, California

Robert had taken LSD three hours ago and now he was trapped in the bathroom. It was a small bathroom in a small beach house. The place looked out over the Pacific Ocean and could only be reached by climbing a hundred and fifty wooden steps or riding a cable-driven cargo trolley. The place belonged to Linda, Robert's acquaintance, a woman who made tie dye and batik clothing.

Robert wasn't a casual taker of psychedelic drugs, but he was with good people: yoga practitioners, Tai Chi enthusiasts. He felt safe. His friend Pam was at the party, and his room mate Steve.

It was an intimate gathering, about a dozen people agreeing to share an experience in a beautiful setting. Linda dispensed a tab of LSD to each arrival. Now it was getting towards evening and the group had settled into serious tripping. There was a bit of quiet talk. Some giggles from a couple on the sofa. It was quiet. The sound of the surf tumbled in the background.

Robert was VERY high but when nature called, she could not be denied. He viewed the act of taking a shit as a comedic episode, a meeting of the sacred and profane. He made a little mantra from it, mentally chanting the words to a samba beat: how could a thing so huge..still have to take a poo. The Huge was himself, in his expanded universe, the hyper-galactic infinite divine. And yet, way way down there in the microcosmic world, his body still had to eliminate the dross from his small intestine. It all came down to the most common things.

The bathroom was a cubby hole. It had a toilet, a small window and a wooden stand that held an incense burner and a couple of magazines. An old tarnished mirror hung on the wall opposite the throne.

Before the toilet episode began, Robert had been watching Linda move about, with her bun of blonde hair trailing cute little wisps. She wore a sleeveless batik dress of luminous green and a necklace of silver and turquoise. Robert liked the shape of her. She was well toned, contained in a nice little parcel of soft firmness. Her breasts lifted the neckline of the dress and the effect was mesmerizing. Linda was single, Linda was beautiful, and Linda had given him a smile as she dispensed the tablet of LSD. Robert interpreted this smile as an invitation. He thought Linda was conveying a message. "Ask me to make love," he thought she was beaming at him, "ask me."

The problem.... that is, the problem before getting trapped in the bathroom, was working up the nerve to ask Linda to make love. Other couples were pairing up and vanishing into various nooks on the property, riding the sound of the mighty surf into psychedelic splendor.

The party's social math, the indices of affinity seemed to put Robert and Linda together. Robert had never done this kind of thing before. He had never approached a woman to ask if she wanted to "go somewhere quiet". The complexities of an LSD high built a scaffold atop Robert's shyness. How do I do that? he wondered, how do I come right out and ask a woman to make love? He wondered and feared, and wondered and feared, and tried to engage Linda in pleasant conversation but an acid conversation can be very weird. There are multiple interpretations layered on every word and phrase.

If he said, "Hi," well, okay, there you go. Was he greeting her or was he making an insipid observation on his state of psychic elevation?

"You're beautiful" he said, at one point. "You look stunning in that dress." That was not ambiguous. Linda merely said "Thank You" and the conversation jumped off a cliff and went splat. If only she would make things easier for him! Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she didn't send the signal he thought she sent. But her fingers had lingered on his hand as she offered him the white tablet. She had given him a deep soulful look.

Then his stomach sent him another kind of signal. The bathroom was directly off the one large room of the house. The room was virtually the entire living space. There was a counter, a kitchenette, and a short fight of stairs that led to a loft bedroom. A thin plywood door separated the bathroom from everything else.

Robert's poo was a loose disgusting mess and he was about to turn the flush handle when the thought occurred to him: what if the sound of the toilet flushing sends someone into a bad trip? Or worse, what if it sends everyone into a bad trip?.

The house was high on the bluff and the toilet flushed with a distinct sound as the water forcefully drained. Sploosh! it said, splodda splodda splodda splodda, and all the pipes in the house rumbled and whooshed for what seemed hours.

Everyone is so high! Robert thought. If I suddenly introduce these sounds with all their associations, they will drown out the Ravi Shankar on the record player and they will enter people's LSD-saturated inner landscapes as a downward spiral that will carry them into the underworld! People on acid are so suggestible! I'll ruin the party!

He couldn't look at the poo. He had closed the lid and was frantically using a National Geographic to fan the fumes outside. He was on the verge of puking, which would add another dimension to his problem. There was a box of incense and a pack of matches, which he now used as he attempted to work his way out of this mess.

What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

Another part of Robert's psyche was laughing at him, saying, oh this is pathetic, you're wasting your whole fucking trip on idiotic paranoia. Robert fought back. It's unselfish paranoia! he replied. I just don't want to send anyone down the toilet. Acid's unpredictable. It can be a catalyst for deeply buried psychic material. I can't take that chance!.

It seemed that hours passed. Robert fanned fumes out the window, lit incense, lit matches until the pack was gone. There finally came a breaking point.

Fuck this, Robert decided. It's inevitable. I have to flush the toilet. He reached out and touched the cold metal handle with its contoured shape. He caressed it for a moment. Then, in an act of passionate courage, he pressed down and released the water.

Sploosh! Oh god it was deafening! Splodda splodda splodda, down down and down into the depths of the netherworld. The pipes went Whhhsssssh like Boeing 707's lining up on a runway before takeoff. There were at least eight people just a few feet away from this sonic extravaganza. They might tear him to pieces when he emerged. He, personally, had bummed their trip! They might ostracize him forever, banish him from other weekend retreats at other beautiful houses full of beautiful women.

His heart was beating frantically. Okay, he decided, let's face the consequences of my irresistible evacuation. Robert turned the knob and exited the bathroom, closing the door with the barest of clicks.

It was almost dark. Ravi Shankar 's music came gently through the hi fi speakers, playing an evening raga. Candles were lit and most of the group sat rocking to and fro, lying on beanbag chairs or prone on yoga mats. Nothing had happened as a result of Robert's flush. Nothing at all.

A candle had been set in the middle of the room. Linda was alone on a cushion, sitting in yoga posture, meditating on the flickering light.. Her eyes were open and seemed radiant and enormous. She glanced at Robert without reproach. The whole episode had passed without a ripple, it was a product of Robert's self-conscious agony.

What the hell, he thought, just do it. He found a cushion and sat next to Linda, replicating her full lotus, displaying his credentials as a yogi. His feet rested easily on his thighs and his spine straightened as he gathered the nerve to approach this gorgeous woman.

Linda's shoulder looked velvety in the candle light. Robert gently put his fingers on her body, just the four tips of the fingers of his right hand, touching her oh so lightly. He watched Linda's response. She didn't flinch or move away from him. Nor did she move towards him. She was set in her own center. That's okay, Robert thought. That's okay. Again, his heart beat fast, his stomach turned over with anxiety. I've got to do this, he urged himself. I've got to break through my fear. You get nothing when you don't ask. So just ask while you have the chance.

"Linda," he said, "You're beautiful. Your skin is amazing."

She smiled a subtle little smile but remained facing forward. Robert was about to commit himself but he realized that he hadn't prepared his words. How should he put it? "Linda, will you make love with me?" Or more commanding. "Linda, make love with me." That might seem too aggressive. How about "I would love to make love to you, Linda." Oh, that was clumsy. Love to make love. Oh fuck it. He leaned close to her and quietly spoke into her ear. "Linda, love make me, oh, uh, you know, I really dig you, um, um, this is hard. What I mean to say is I want you to make love to you. I mean me..I want.to make love to you. There! Whew!"

Linda's head turned with agonizing slowness. The huge shining eyes rotated until they met Robert's eyes. She was a sacred dakini, a deva, a goddess!

"Robert," she said, "you're sweet, but you're just not my type."

Robert squeezed the pillow, almost pulling it out from under himself. "Okay, okay, that's cool, I understand that, it's just that, well, okay....thanks."

He stood up holding the pillow in front of his body, then dropped it back to the floor and walked onto the deck. He could see the last of the sun's rays as they vanished into the starry night. His vulnerable heart opened and wept. After a time, as he watched the sky, he realized that at last he was free from all the ridiculous bullshit he had just put himself through. He didn't have to hook up with Linda. He didn't have to hook up with anyone.

The sky was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. .

Gabriel: A Very Small Poodle With A Big Ego

2011-06-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

When our teacup poodle Bear first came to us he was nothing more than a wad of fur with two eyes. He barely weighed eighteen ounces. To lift him was like lifting a bird; there was nothing there, a bit of cotton candy on the wind, just fluff. If you've been following my animal stories you'll know that Bear has grown and thrived and sired a son. The story is here: http://bit.ly/eN5mbM

My wife met the owner of Bear's mate at the grocery store. The woman had an AKC registered miniature poodle named Snickers. A mating session was arranged, and it was successful. There were two pups from the union of Bear and Snickers: the robust Kioni and the runt Gabriel. At birth, Gabriel weighed a mere ounce and a half.

No one gave him much chance at survival. He was brought to our place after ten weeks of nursing from mama Snickers. He weighed a little over two pounds. He was absurdly cute. We worried about him. His development lagged so badly that we thought we might have a special needs dog. Or worse, he might not make it.

Gabriel hung on. He gained weight and bulk. He's still so tiny that his bark has the quality of a rubber-bulb squeeze horn that clowns use when they ride tricycles. He is a talker. In this he takes after his dad. The voices on super-tiny poodles are like instruments of both torture and comedy. These dogs don't yap. They howl, yammer, moan, scream, ullulate and speak in nearly human syllables.

Gabriel makes up for his smallness through cunning. He's a wily little provocateur. He is half Bear's weight. I often think it's Gabriel who is the alpha dog of their little pack. If he wants the chewy toy that Bear's pulverizing, he takes it away. If he wants to lay on mom's lap while she's sleeping, he'll bother Bear until he vacates the warm comforting nest that goes up and down with mom's breathing.

Bear adopts a cool attitude. "You want to be alpha? Okay, be alpha. I don't care. You're a pipsqueak and I could eat you for breakfast. I don't care. Be alpha."

That would work except that Gabe is a teaser and taunter. Gabe goes

'neener neener", blows raspberries, gives the finger. Or the psychic four-legged equivalent of these gestures. Don't treat this as hyperbole. The gamut of subtle communication available to these creatures is enormous. If we, as humans, fail to perceive what goes on amongst our animal friends, that's due to our lack of sensitivity.

When Bear is sufficiently provoked to knock Gabe sprawling he goes crying to mama. Gabe is a real crybaby. He screams as if he's being tortured when mom picks a burr out of his paw. We have to hold our ears. Ow! What a piercing, pathetic wail! We've learned to take Gabe's screams with a grain of salt. He screams for effect. When the burr-extraction is done, he calmly goes his way.

The animal count in and around our RV/home is two dogs and four cats. There are two indoor cats, bright orange tabbies. We have a sluggish long haired male named Andrew and his sister, a short-haired female named Peaches.

Peaches talks, nags, wakes us in the middle of the night, demands Whiskas cat treats like an addict. Peaches is a pain in the ass. Her voice isn't annoying like the yowl of a Siamese cat. It's more like a car alarm that won't go off. Ever.

An oft-repeated refrain in our home is this: "Peaches, will you SHUT UP!" No, excuse me. It's really "Peaches will you SHUT..THE..FUCK..UP!"

The Whiskas quiets her down only because she's busy chewing. If she could meow and chew at the same time, she would. She wants attention. She wants to be on the bed because other creatures are on the bed. She wants the cat toy Andrew is playing with. She wants me to scratch her belly. She wants whatever someone else has. And she bitches about it incessantly.

One remedy is the squirt bottle. We keep squirt bottles loaded and near at hand. A mere shake of a squirt bottle will often cause Peaches to run, hide, and, mercifully, to be quiet. We're not cruel. Peaches gets plenty of love. It's just never enough.

Gabriel and Peaches have a special relationship. Gabriel has appointed himself the official Peaches Squelcher.

Peaches teases Gabriel until he chases her down the length of the RV so that she has to jump on the dashboard. Then she acts as if Gabriel started it.
There's a little step at the foot of our bed to enable Gabe to join us without needing a lift. The step has become, in our household spatial economy, a choke point. Who controls the step controls access to the bed. Peaches likes to park herself on the step and wait for Gabriel to try using it to get up or down. Gabriel is stuck. Peaches knows this.

A staring contest ensues. It goes on and on. Five minutes. Seven minutes. Ten minutes. Peaches and Gabriel, staring at one another. Then, booom! an explosion of running cat and dog as Peaches takes off towards the dashboard with Gabriel hot and barking on her tail. She gets up high where she can't be reached. She pretends total innocence.

Neener neener neener. Raspberry. Middle finger. Or the psychic four-legged equivalent of these gestures.

Gabriel may not have Bear's power and stamina but he compensates with ruthless unprincipled trickery and manipulation.

The litle shit. We love him.

Look: A Poem About Missing And Finding Love

2011-06-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

Look.

Look around you

at the people, so driven,

by a force

relentless as gravity

inescapable as day and night, life and death.

The power that winds us and grinds us,

makes us crazy is the hunger for love,

the search for love, the absence of love,

the loss of love.

Its effects are everywhere,

visible, invisible,

pervasive;

in this landscape of loss

and loneliness

the search grips everyone

obsessive as a drug hunger

so intrusive and demanding

that we are not even aware

as it seeps into the air we breathe,

the molecules of our daily existence

have sponged it up

so that it becomes like the music

from the next apartment

or from a passing car,

a beat felt,

vibrating up through the floor, humming

in the walls, everywhere.

I will wear clothes that get me love…

I will scent myself

to find love…

I will paint my face

to attract love…

I will sculpt my body

to perfect love….

I will groom my hair

to waft love…

I will signal my hunger

without knowing my desperation…

I will scream my loneliness

in silent longing glances

across parties,

in stores,

twist my neck,

twist my soul

for its wanting……

want my soul

without knowing

that it is love

without a search

without a need

without a struggle.

It took me but half a life

to meet the person

in whom love made a home for me.

I twisted and howled so loud

I did not see her when she first knocked at my door.

Her face was not familiar

her smell was strange

her voice was odd

I kept looking

like so many fools before me

love did not make the noise

of the neighbor’s apartment

the thump of the passing car

love was unexpected

because I was drawing children’s pictures

in a book with a silly title:

True Love For Soul Mates in Eternity.

That was the wrong book.

My love gently took the book from my hand;

here, she whispered, look around you

this is what love really is:

only when you’ve exhausted your immaturity

are you ready

to care for someone

as deeply as I now care

for you.

Look around you

at the heartsick lonely ones

who sniff greedily but disdainfully

for a few moments

at the possibility of love

and then move on,

hoping somehow love will find them

when they have missed its delicate sign

a thousand times, so busy with the pursuit

that they have failed the simple lessons

of caring.

Now I have, at last, exhausted my immaturity:

now your voice is familiar,

your face is beautiful

your music is here,

in the room with me,

not some distant fateful sound,

here, with me,

I hear you, I see you,

I smell you,

I love you more
all the time.

Query letter for CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN

2011-06-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

I've written hundreds of versions of a query letter for this novel. Hundreds. The ones that I've sent haven't worked for me. I know that I'm trying to promote a project that isn't much in demand these days:
a literary novel. About ten years ago I had a prominent editor offer his help free of charge. He thought the writing was audacious and fresh. We weren't a good match as editor/writer. The relationship turned strange.
This latest query letter is, I know, a bit too long. But I think it's pretty good. What do you think? Really.
Help me out, fellow writers.

Dear Agent,

The literary turf of my novel, CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN,

is similar to that of Jonathon Franzen, Dave Eggars and Richard Lethem. It's about fifty years in the lives of members of a midwestern Jewish family. The major focus of the story is the war between mother Esther Kantro, and her son Aaron.

When Aaron is nine years old his talent for music is discovered by an influential concert soloist. Aaron is offered a precious scholarship. Esther tries to squash this opening, tries to flatten her son in all his aspirations. We don't yet know why this is so.

Aaron wins the scholarship but sidesteps the ambitions that other people have for him. Aaron learns about jazz from his fourth grade teacher. Aaron's passion is ignited and he is consumed by jazz for much of the book. He finds his apprenticeship with a successful musician named Zoot Prestige. It is Zoot who provides Aaron with a mentor and spiritual guide. Zoot is a sly wit, a very tricky cat.

CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN, at 125,000 words, is divided roughly into three segments. There is the world of jazz. There is the world of 60s high school in a Jewish suburb. And there is the world of Afghanistan, in 1982 and 1996. In Afghanistan Aaron finds the inner resources to confront his demons.

My writing career began with a sale to Playboy Magazine. My short sci fi humor piece was represented by Scott Meredith. The story won Playboy's Best Story Award. My budding career was unfortunately interrupted by a long illness. I returned to active writing in 2000. Editor Barry Malzberg offered his assistance with CONFESSIONS after Mr. Meredith's death. I've since written and published as a photographer for Shutterbug Magazine (six articles, two magazine covers), eDigital Photo, and The United Nations Environmental Photography Exhibit. I've shown literary pieces in Exquisite Corpse, Species Link, and Truckin.'

CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN is a book that will have a special draw for baby boomers. It deals with adolescent life in the 60's and includes cameo appearances by Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. If you are interested, I would be glad to send my material.

Best

Art Rosch

Rohnert Park, CA

415-272-0147

No Excuse: a meditation on the use of violence

2011-06-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

I would not label myself a pure pacifist. There are situations in which I know I would fight. I've been as honest as I can be in writing this poem. I'm not strong enough to turn the other cheek. I would fight to protect my loved ones, certainly. The photo is of my grandson, a child so beautiful that my heart breaks when I imagine the world he is inheriting. He has resources undreamed of, however, and he will find his way to become a compassionate citizen of the world.

No Excuse

There is no excuse for the agony of the world.

There is no excuse for a single person to be starving.

No excuse for anyone to be without a safe home.

No excuse for children to be frightened of invisible menace.

No excuse, no excuse, no excuse.

Anyone who tells you this killing, this maiming,

this bombing is justified,

is revealing a criminal lack of imagination.

There is no excuse to be without a creative idea,

a new way to solve a problem,

no excuse, no excuse.

To be mired in the endless slavery

of historical cause and effect

is no excuse.

To be defending one’s self from oppression

is no excuse.

To be reacting to outside danger

is no excuse.

There is never an excuse

to use violence, not even to prevent greater violence.

Using violence always causes greater violence.

No excuse for the weakness of force,

no justification for violence.

We had to stop Hitler, we have to stop Al Qaeda,

is that an excuse? No. Is that an explanation?

Perhaps. Must I live with this explanation?

Evidently.

Must I treat it as a rational solution to any brutality?

Never. There is no excuse.

What can I do about this insoluble problem?

I don’t know. Write poems?

Do you have any better ideas?

If you do, and it is not an excuse

for adding agony to the world,

please, please, tell me, tell everyone

right now.

Poem For My Wife's 60th Birthday

2011-05-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

We met like shapes appearing out ofthe dust of a battle just ended.

I could barely see you, all scarredand wounded.

My hair had turned to mud.

We had fought for different kings

but we had survived the wars. Now we serve the same king

and we are together.

Today you are sixty. I know, that's a hard stone for a woman

to swallow. You think you're done for. It doesn't matter.

In this kind of life, there is nobeginning middle or end.

You are the same woman you'vealways been.

You think you don't work hardenough, but

you work way too hard. Your bills are already paid, the importantones: mother, grandmother, partner. You've given far beyond your heart's frontier.

Be sixty. Be seventy. If we get toeighty

we can walk together into thedesert, beyond where the roads end,

toread the messages in the rocks.

When I Was In The Sixth Grade

2011-05-18T15:01:00.000-07:00

The above photo was taken in May of 1959. It shows my entire sixth grade class, with our teacher, Mr. Warren, to the right (YOUR right) of the principal, Mr. Long. I am located in the middle row at your extreme right. That little boy with the strained smile and the upswept hair- is yours truly.

Memory provides me with the names of almost three quarters of these people. The scowling boy in front of me, sitting on the bench, recently got in touch with me. He's a successful attorney with kids and grandkids. He was always affable and known as a superb athlete. When I tap his memory, things look very different from the way they look in my own memory. My classmate remembers not only the shoes he was wearing that day, he remembers the shoes I was wearing that day.

Most of these kids were eleven or twelve. Sixth grade was the last moment of innocence before we were pushed into Junior High School and the fierce competition that would ride on our backs like flying monkeys all through high school.

WE HAD NO IDEA THE HELL THAT WAS WAITING FOR US!

Some of these kids look dumb as telephone poles and others look like they're plotting to bomb the school. I'm positive that at least one of the boys farted. I'm also positive that at least one of the girls suppressed a fart, thereby precipitating her very first menstrual period.

The guy standing next to me, whose name was Lansing Boyles-Hertz, invented a working time machine in 1967. He went back to see his father during the Battle Of The Bulge and accidentally shot his dad in the head. Lance wasn't seen after that. He erased his own existence. The tall guy in the top row is in the Witness Protection Program. The boy standing just below the teacher is doing time for arson, and the guy next to him is now the Rabbi at United Hebrew, St. Louis' largest Reformed congregation.

That was the sixth grade. At the time there were only three billion people in the world. A mere fifty two years ago.

A Jewish Nazi

2011-05-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

My father cut out the image of my mother sometime during his second marriage. He had his reasons but I regret not being able to study the visage of the woman who had such a devastating effect on our family.

I come from a Jewish family. When I was a kid I attended Hebrew School four days a week until I was thirteen. As you can imagine, I hated it. While my gentile friends were out playing, I was wearing a yarmulke in a stuffy classroom taking instruction from a stuffy alte-kocker named Mr. Ansky. My Bar Mitzvah brought four years of religious education to an end.

I've never had much sympathy for organized religion. Over time I've cobbled together a personal interpretation of the cosmos and my place in it. That's all I need to say on the subject.

When I was eleven or twelve I became fascinated with Vikings and Nordic mythology. I discovered the operas of Richard Wagner and spent hours listening to The Ring Cycle. This tied in with all things Germanic, and I was engrossed in the history of World War Two. In retrospect I think it was about style: the Germans had the coolest uniforms. I read everything I could get my hands on.

Then I fell in with an older kid who was a neo-Nazi. He had an amazing collection of memorabilia. He had photos, documents, models, weapons, uniforms. I found the whole Nazi mythos fascinating. I was hooked, big time. I couldn't get enough of it. I can, in a weird way, understand why so many Germans fell under Hitler's spell. He exuded a terrifying magnetism.

I didn't appreciate the irony of being a Jewish Nazi. I rationalized that I was a history buff. Only in retrospect do I understand what I was doing. I was in rebellion. My mother was a Jew-hating Jew. If you're not Jewish you may not understand this phenomenon. Trust me. Some of the most anti-Semitic people are Jews. My mother planted in me a deep shame. She said awful things about Jews and I developed a loathing for my ethnic identity. I also loathed my mother. Or shall I say we loathed one another. That's very sad.

My Nazi friend drew me deeper into his fantasy world. He believed that Hitler was still alive and that an organized Nazi movement was preparing to spring forth and begin another war of conquest. Bear in mind, this was 1960, and memories of the war were fresher than they are today. My dad and all my friends' dads had been in the war. They didn't talk about it and we didn't ask. But they had been in the war.

My acquaintance showed me letters in German that he was receiving from Argentina. They appeared with authentic looking Nazi letter heads. They were scary looking. My companion told me that I could be "safe" and even "useful" if I renounced Judaism. Meanwhile my Bar Mitzvah was only months away and I was singing from the Torah several times a week, rehearsing my portion of the reading.

I had to get away from this guy. He was asking me to paint swastikas on synagogues. He wanted to beat up Jewish kids.

When I told him I was done with all this crap, he threatened to kill me because I was now a security risk. I believed him. I lived in silent terror for almost six months. I was too ashamed to tell my dad.

I remember this scene so well. Dad and I were sitting in a booth at an ice cream parlor called Jack And Jill's. The owner created monstrous castles of ice cream. The premium super-duper top of the line sundae was called The Empire State Building. It was two feet high with buttresses of wafer cookies and whipped cream, topped by a giant spike of chocolate.

It was a special moment, being with my dad at Jack and Jill's, but I was too nervous to enjoy myself. I was constantly looking over my shoulder. I watched every person who entered the establishment. I looked so wan that he asked me what was wrong. At last, swallowing my shame, I spilled the story. I told him that Nazis were going to come for me, to kill me.

He laughed. "That's total nonsense," he responded. "No one's going to kill you. It's only kid stuff."

Just like that, my father dispelled my terror. I felt as if I had been released from a set of medieval stocks. It was over.

Of all the things my father has done for me, I can never forget the relief he gave me by responding as he did. My father, in his wisdom, said exactly the right thing. He might have gotten freaky and suggested calling the police, or talking to the kids' parents. That would only have prolonged my misery. That would have treated the threat as real. But it wasn't real.
And dad knew that; he had his own finely tuned threat-gauge that seems to belong in the toolkit of fatherhood. He quickly consulted his gauge, saw that the needle was way down on the Green
zone, and dismissed my terror as unnecessary. I wasn't humiliated. Dad wasn't the kind of dad who called his son a pussy. He simply enabled me to gain a perspective on the situation, which I grasped with total instant clarity. My Nazi friend was all hot air. End of story.

Modeling On Our Parents

2011-05-09T17:30:00.000-07:00

The older I get, the more I realize that I am just like my parents. There was a time when I would have rejected this notion bitterly: I am NOT like my parents. I've spent my whole life trying NOT to be like my parents.

It's mostly unconscious and completely out of my control. The behaviors that I witnessed as a toddler formed the template for my future life. It is possible to alter this template but I don't think it can ever be overcome.

Jung said that it's not our parents that wound us; it's our fantasy of our parents that wounds us. I think that's an important concept. How much time do we spend going over our grievances? How much anger do we have towards dad's indifference or mom's suffocating micro-management? Were they really as atrocious as our memories indicate? Or are we just spinning a narrative that's convenient to our self-image? Somewhere in this skein of memory lies the truth. It's almost impossible to find the truth after coloring in all the spaces with our interpretations. I'm not even sure the truth is so important. It isn't about what our parents did to us; it's about who our parents WERE.

I'll be very specific. My mother had no self control at all. She ate herself into obesity. She spent money that nearly ruined the family. She drugged herself into both stupor and frenzy. There was no brake on her temper. She blamed everyone for her troubles. She was cruel.

My father had too much self control. He had no spontaneity. His emotions were bottled up. He seemed to secretly enjoy being at the center of crisis, so he arranged his life to provide him with ample crisis. He married a woman who could provide continual drama.

A toddler observes his or her parents and models on them. This modeling is so powerful that it will dominate a lifetime of behavior.

After ten years of therapy I got to know my parents pretty well. But I missed some fundamental things. I have only sketchy memory of the little stuff, the daily habits, the body language. I forgot the way my mother stuffed herself full of candy and cookies every night before she went to sleep. And what do you know? Here I am, a middle aged man, stuffing myself full of candy and cookies. My bedside table looks like a Seven Eleven counter.

I talked to my dad about it. He admitted to doing the same thing. It's a family trait, eating junk in bed while we watch TV. When my sister and I were very little, we slept in a crib next to our parents while they watched Jack Paar and consumed Oreos with milk or ate Snickers bars.

Here I am dealing with the same behavior now, and it's compulsive. I can't get a handle on it. I've been doing it all my life. I need to stop this and it's really hard. I substitute. I get raisins instead of candy. Sooner or later, I slip back into candy or dunking oatmeal cookies into milk. Or both. I know better. I practice Yoga, I know about nutrition, I know the do's and dont's of our modern system of self maintenance for health and vanity.

This line of thought arose after a visit to the doctor and a shocking weight gain of seven pounds. I'm a big guy but I hold steady at my weight, I've held steady for decades. I noticed that I was doing a lot of junky night time eating and I could feel the pounds coming on. I know it's all about frustration, it's comfort eating at a time of discouragement and sorrow.

The Flame raisins at Whole Foods are really really good. Maybe I can try graham crackers instead of oatmeal cookies.

It's food for thought.

Impressions

2011-05-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Impressions of you

are engraved upon me.

I don’t know when it happened:

that a certain way you laugh

became like oxygen when I was gasping

for breath.

Your laugh became my life.

When you cry and become small

and crawl into me for comfort;

I can no longer live without that.

Every day some other tiny part of you

takes residence in my soul;

little by little you have moved in.

I invited you to come here

but I did not know what I was doing.

The best parts of me, the parts

I seldom have the sense to visit,

met and agreed

you should be here.

“We’ll tell him later,”

they concurred,

pointing at the hapless man who slipped and stumbled

amid the twisted debris of his life.

“We’ll let him know when he most needs to know.

For now it’s enough that she’s there,

that she won’t go away no matter what a fool he is.”

Now I know. They told me. Or I heard them.

Or something changed and I knew.

There are things you do with your voice

that are like keys that unlock boxes

that contain gifts I have always wanted.

There are ways you smell

that remind me of the best days of my childhood.

There are things you make with your hands

that I watch like a happy captive.

There are ways you mispronounce words

that make little dances erupt in my stomach.

Oh, lovely one, how can you doubt yourself,

when it is the very things you doubt

that I most cherish? It is your mistakes

that tickle me,

it is your funny odors that have seeped into me

until I can no longer tell

whose sweat I am smelling.

It is your hair that refuses to harm me,

though it could turn lethal at any moment.

Impressions of you are engraved upon me

so much, that when you are not here,

I must write a poem

to bring you home.

Letter From The Afterlife of a Terrorist

2011-05-01T22:15:00.000-07:00

This seems to be a good moment to publish this poem. I wrote it on Sept 12, 2001 and no one has read it until now.

Letter From The Afterlife Of A Terrorist

I thought I would be in Paradise

but I am in unspeakable hell.

The fire, the fire!

I thought it would only burn for a second,

but it keeps burning!

I thought I would lose consciousness

and wake up in heaven,

but now I am trapped forever

in agony!

The screams of the innocent dying

are like poisoned darts,

they lance the exposed nerves of my inmost soul.

The tears of the bereaved in their thousands

rain upon me like acid.

The worst hell of all is my regret,

my infinite regret,

that I was so stupid, so gullible, so callous,

so easily swayed by insipid argument,

so readily moved to escape my living awful depression

by casting it upon others.

The fire, the fire! The jet fuel

sears me for ten thousand years!

The screams and the grief that blame me, rightly,

crush me under a million tons of leaden metal and concrete!

Allah, Allah, I was not merciful, I was not compassionate,

and now when I call to you I see the grit of your robe

as you turn away from me.

I thought I would awake in Paradise.

I have made a dreadful dreadful mistake!

Thank Goodness I'm Not Happy

2011-04-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

If I were happy I'd be miserable. At this moment in time there is so much suffering on display that if I were happy I'd go nuts with some variation of Survivor's Guilt. Call it Thriver's Guilt. It wouldn't be right to be prosperous or to have a great job and a great relationship. No one else does. Why should I?

Fortunately, I'm not very happy. I mean, I'm not miserable, and that may pass these days for having it Really Great. I can hear people saying, "Hey, he's not miserable. That lucky son of a bitch."

Happiness is like fancy expensive dog food. It isn't as good as the advertisements say it is. It isn't made as purely as its makers would have us believe. Happiness is kind of a gritty mix of stuff: there's some chicken but it's all dried out. There's filler like bone meal and chemical junk like polysorbate hydro-whamazone. Modern happiness, hooray! Not miserable. That's about as good as it gets. If you're happy, if you think you've got it all, you're living in a dream world.

If you happen to belong to the one percent of people who have a filthy amount of money, you're not happy either. Admit it. Greed is not a happy thing.

The plain fact is that when other people are so unhappy in such large numbers, it makes personal happiness pretty damn near impossible.

I'm sixty three, a classic baby boomer, ex-hippie artist without a dime to my name. All the boomers who went to college, got their degrees and made a lot of money...well, whaddya know, they've lost all their money! They're in psychological shock. I'm just cruising along, business as usual, living from week to week. Being broke is normal. I don't have to weep for everything I've lost. I never had a house to foreclose, never owned property to lose.

I have a wonderful relationship but both my wife and I are caught in the medical insurance labyrinth that has become the great booby trap of modern times.

People of my age group have idiosyncratic health problems. Baby Boom-itis consists of odd diseases like neuropathy, fibromyalgia, bone spurs, hammer toes and a raft of weird afflictions that have no diagnosis. They're stress related. I may be generalizing but it seems that each of us experienced some kind of nightmare between twenty five and fifty. We had an abusive relationship, an addiction, a horrible divorce, a near-fatal disease, a damaged child or the traumatic loss of a loved one.

Along the way we became dependent upon prescription drugs or require dialysis or some essential procedure and thus became shackled to the medical system. Each of us is like half a pair of Siamese twins. The other twin, joined at our livers, is a tottering and expensive insurance structure that is arbitrary and beyond comprehension.

I call it Insurance That is Not Insurance. It's Trapdoor Insurance. You stand at the pharmacist's window, expecting a prescription that will be covered by Medi-hooligan Insurance Corp. Last month it cost you fifteen dollars. But oh...

you've reached your maximum expenditure, or haven't spent your minimum, or

dropped through a donut hole and what do you know? This month the same prescription is four hundred dollars! Floof! Trapdoor opens! Next?
I'm not miserable but I have a sour stomach. I'm incredibly frustrated that no one reads my work. I'm not happy, so there is that consolation. I don't have to feel guilty or heedless of other peoples' ratcheting credit card debt, foreclosure, bankruptcy or divorce.

All these petty personal bitchings are insignificant compared to the looming Earth-catastrophe that has everyone stashing giant cans of Costco tuna fish in their garages. Global warming, or, as I like to call it, Warble Gloaming, will fix everything. In fifty years all of our naive concepts of happiness may have changed drastically. In fifty years happiness might be a cup of clean water.

Yoga Has Saved My Life

2011-04-25T22:37:00.001-07:00

I'd be dead without yoga. I'm sure of it. I've lived a life of risk-taking, I've imbibed a lot of drugs, a lot of toxins. Somehow I was able to maintain a practice in the middle of the Dark Night of my soul. I held to the yoga, and the yoga rewarded me by enabling me to survive without major illness. No HIV, no Hep C. I'm a baby boomer. I don't think I'm alone in saying that aging came as a great shock. Yoga has been precious in helping me cope with the phenomena of aging.

I'm limber and though I might wake up in the morning and walk like Frankenstein for a while, I don't have any onset of arthritis. I owe a debt of gratitude to yoga and I want to convey this most basic of lessons.

Lessons One Through Omega.

The breath is a circle. People tend to think of their own breath (when they think of it at all) as an in/out process. Wrong. The breath is a circle, it's a microcosm of the Great Circle of life.

The secret of good breathing is to use the muscles between the navel and the pubis. There's your handle. Use those muscles to push out the breath, really empty your lungs. Do it once or twice. Consciously move the handle back towards your spine as you exhale. Use it to completely empty your lungs. When you've expelled all your air, relax those muscles. let them spring out. Give yourself a pot belly. You don't need extraordinary effort, but if you push gently outward, the air will naturally rush in to fill the deepest parts of your lungs. Then it's a matter of drawing the air up, up, watch your ribcage expand and then finally raise your shoulders to give your lungs that one extra bit of air.

Then you go back the way you came. Let your shoulders relax, let your ribcage contract until you are finally at the bottom of the breath. Then use the lower abdomen to push out the last bit of air.

That's it.

I use two basic breath procedures. I've just described the Deep Breath, or Slow Breath. You can take half a minute, a minute or more, just to complete one cycle. The longer you practice this technique, the longer your breath becomes. I

know adepts of the Slow Breath who take hours on each breath. They greet one another with a ritual: May your breath last a month. To which the other yogi responds, May your breath last a year.

The other breath I practice is Easy Breath. There's no effort at all. I just sit, let my body relax, let my lungs operate automatically. I see the center of my body, those vital muscles beneath my navel, as the control panel. Everything radiates from the Center, from the Breath Handle of my body. It's very relaxing and enjoyable.

I like to work with the Slow Breath for a time, getting myself focused. Practicing Slow Breath is a great way to quiet the mind. When I sit down to

do this practice, my mind is going yakkety yakkety yak. It's full of plans, speculations, fantasies, fears, all the stuff of daily life.

Fuggettaboutit! The first Slow Breath helps me shed a great load. The second takes me farther. I feel the mundane prattling of my mind diminish. If I have the patience to practice three Slow Breaths, I find myself greatly soothed. If I'm really on a roll, I'll do more, I'll do five or six. Then all I need is to do is go Whooosh! I let it all out, and go to Easy Breath.

That's it. That's my yoga lesson number one.

The Reach

2011-04-16T22:39:00.000-07:00

I was using my flash to defeat the backlight at a child's dedication ceremony. I saw this scene in front of me and quickly turned off the flash because I knew I would get pure silhouette. It was a lucky shot.

A Poodle's Progress: Doing It Doggie Style

2011-04-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

Watching dogs mate isn't my favorite activity. But this was MY dog mating, my Bear, the surprise doggie love of my life. We acquired Bear in a last-second rescue from a puppy mill. I've told that story elsewhere. http://bit.ly/evbFda

Sometimes Fox (that's my wife) takes Bear to the grocery, all five pounds of him, snugged in a sling. Fox was putting milk into her basket when she was approached by a husky woman in her late forties.

"He's male?" the woman asked, putting her face near to Bear so she could see his eyes. She smiled and made kissy sounds. Bear calmly returned her gaze.

Fox nodded.

"Tell me he's still intact, please!", the woman implored. " I have a female poodle just his size and I would love to put them together. What do you think?"

Fox thought it would be nice to have a companion for Bear, so one thing led to another which led to this: I was to supervise the mating of Bear with Snickers. Fox was out of town when Snickers came into heat. The phone rang, the heat was on and I was designated the Master of Ceremonies.

Bear stands five inches from the ground at the shoulders. He would never win a blue ribbon or Best Of anything unless it was a dog show run by old beatniks on Quaaludes.

It's strangely deceiving to describe Bear as tiny. He has short legs and a round powerful torso. If I had four of him they could pull a sled through the snow.

There was a knock at the door. I pulled the screen back to open. "Here she is, " said Tammy, and dropped a gangly brown creature at my feet.

There was no ceremony, no meeting and greeting as Snickers' owner left her bitch with me." I'll see you tomorrow night around five" she said. "Good luck."

Snickers and Bear had a whiff of each other and without foreplay or so much as a hello, Snickers lifted her tail and accepted Bear's pursuit.

It was clear from the outset that we had a problem. Snickers stood eight inches tall at the shoulder. Bear looked like a sixth grader dancing with a girl who towers over him.

So far Bear had been a masturbator. He loyally and monogamously humped a stuffed toy dog named Greta. He got it right; he knew Greta's business end. He pulled at her ear, beat her up a little bit, jumped and humped for a while before dismounting. Greta was the perfect size and she obeyed implicitly. Bear would beat her up again, hop on and hump some more. Bear's humping was so enthusiastic that he literally launched himself into the air. All four feet left the ground as he banged away.

I don't think I need to say that this was extremely funny.

Snickers was not Greta. She was alive. She moved. She wagged her tail in the air, and the fug of pheromones filled the room with flirty invitation. Snickers wasn't much to look at. She was a stringy toy poodle, dark brown, with a long pointed nose. She growled but we were told in advance that growling was her only means of vocal expression. There was no explanation why this was so. It was a simple fact. It made Snickers seem as if she had a grievance with the world.

Wonderful. Bear didn't care. Bear had the whiff and was panting as he followed Snickers around the small front room of our RV. I must remind you, we live in an RV. There wasn't any hiding place, no love nest or cozy nook for the two to go off and get acquainted. That isn't the way dog mating works. The act of copulation must be witnessed. And, hopefully, repeated as often as possible.

Snickers' business end was a little bit too high for Bear. He was game, oh yes. He got up on his hind legs and tried to mount the tall girl. Snickers kept walking in figure eights. I had the feeling she'd done this before. In fact, Snickers was a bit long in the tooth. Snickers was pushing the dog equivalent of forty. We hadn't known any of this. Our deal was simple. We would get one puppy from the litter.

Bear tried grabbing her around the waist with his front legs. Snickers kept her tail up and her parts ready for action, but she wasn't helping poor Bear. She kept walking figure eights, up and down, round and round. She dragged the grappling Bear along with her, growling all the way.

Bear tried jumping. He hopped on Snickers' back but the angle was all wrong. He slid back to the ground without gaining purchase.

I felt awful for Bear. His eyes held a bewildered sorrow. His tongue hung out and vibrated in rhythm with his panting. He tried grabbing one of Snicker's hind legs and climbing. Snickers walked around the room with Bear attached to her svelte but aging body. I tried not to laugh. I have learned that Bear is capable of suffering acute embarrassment.

Is that a stretch for you? That dogs can be embarassed? I've learned that animals have complex emotional lives. The best I can do is try to understand their feelings.

Bear was caught between humiliation and lust. In the hierarchy of instinct, lust wins out. Bear wasn't going to quit until he reached his goal.

I think Bear felt a little better when I behaved foolishly. I tried to help by putting phone books under his legs. I was crawling around thrusting books, cushions and boxes to elevate Bear to the action position, but of course nothing helped because the two dogs were in constant motion and weren't about to stop and think things through.

It just didn't work. Now and then Snickers would turn her head to look at Bear and growl. That was the only sound she knew how to make. Growl. I might have hoped for a more supportive partner for my boy, but fate had brought the couple together and fate would determine the outcome.

I sat at my computer while all this strenuous activity went on under and around my chair. Bear's energy was faltering. I was beginning to worry about him.

I tried to encourage him to take a break and drink some water. No deal. He had been following and trying to mount Snickers for three hours and he wasn't about to quit.

That bitch was in HEAT!

I was thinking about ways to end the situation. I was afraid Bear was dehydrating. The only way I had to separate the dogs was to close the door that

enclosed the RV's bathroom and bedroom. I looked down from my chair and noticed that Bear had adopted a new strategy. He was hopping from foot to foot. His front paws were on Snicker's flanks and she was still ceaselessly moving. I wanted to scream at her, Stand still for god's sake!

Bear's hippity hop from foot to foot had the effect of getting him some altitude. I don't know how he worked it out but the next thing I knew the two dogs were locked together.

Nature, clever nature, had designed the female dog's parts to close down on the male's penis and trap it there. Snickers was still moving in her relentless figure eights but now Bear was being dragged along, fumbling over his own paws.

Snickers growled. Bear looked up at me in utter bewilderment. His tongue hung halfway down his chest, his mouth dripped saliva. He managed to get himself onto Snicker's back so he could match her strides with his rear legs. I know he felt

ridiculous. Now and then he would lose his rhythm and drop into an ungainly sprawl. He was dragged on his back, on his side, as he struggled to achieve a position that gave him a modicum of dignity.

When Tammy arrived for Snickers around five the next day, the pair had successfully copulated twice. The second time was easier. Bear used his alternate leg hippity hop move and was trapped by Snickers for another ride around the RV.

I could swear, when the whole thing was finished, that Bear's eyes pleaded with me to get him neutered as soon as possible.

"If this is dog sex, I don't want anything to do with it."

Snickers' litter consisted of two pups, a male and a female. The girl pup,

named Kioni, was twice the size of the boy pup, Gabriel. We didn't want a female,

so runty little Gabe became a member of our family.

At first we thought he might be a special needs dog. That, however, is the next story.

A Life Lesson: The Moral Quality Of Intelligence

2011-04-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle. That's my bro and sis.

When I was a kid I knew that I was smarter than other kids. My grades weren't good. I was a bored student who squeaked by with C's and a few B's without exerting an ounce of effort.

I just knew. I was different. I had complex thoughts going on in my head.

I was interested in different things than other kids.

I first realized this at about the age of seven. I hated school but when I came home I read the entire set of World Book encyclopedias from A to Z. By the time I was eleven my interest in music confirmed my suspicions that other kids weren't quite as deep as I was.

I had joined the Capitol Record Club because that label had Miles Davis' Birth Of The Cool LP. They had Stan Kenton's Orchestra. After that, their jazz catalog grew a bit slim, so I fleshed out the required number of purchases with some Nancy Wilson and then quit.

That poor kid, I now think, sitting in his basement room, the room built by his dad to keep him and his mom apart. They were like flint and tinder. Mom hated music, loathed it. The eleven year old kid hunched close to his blue and white Zenith stereo automatic record player and absorbed The Birth Of The Cool note for note. He memorized everything and tried playing along on his trumpet. He was learning to master intricate bop melodies like Budo and Boplicity. They were difficult, but he kept practicing until he could play in perfect unison with the recording.
As I got into adolescence I thought it might be comforting to join Mensa. I would find people like me. Mensa administered their IQ test and I scored an impressive number. I was accepted. I quit after the first meeting. It was so boring it was like watching steel expand in sunlight.

I had a strange misunderstanding about the moral quality of intelligence. I thought that intelligence also made people good. It wasn't until I was sixteen that I lost that mistaken conviction. I was in New York City chasing jazz musicians and trying to get into bands that were way WAY over my head. In the process I managed to be around a few great and famous jazz musicians. They had to be intelligent, they were geniuses.

Several of them were very wicked.. I saw one of them beat his girlfriend and that was a fundamental shock. My whole worldview had to be re-arranged.

Well. If there are evil intelligent people we're in big trouble, aren't we?

All of my subsequent experience has borne out this observation. The world is loaded with people carrying around high powered minds, and using those minds to damage other people and wreak havoc upon the planet.

I thought intelligence was a gift. I overheard teachers talking to my parents, calling me a "gifted child". This label was then followed with another phrase which seemed to be glued onto the first two words; "who's not living up to his potential."

I was following my own path, that's all. I treated my mind like a gift and I thought god had made me intelligent for a reason. I also thought that imagination automatically came with intelligence, and I was wrong about that, too.

Eventually I concluded that there were different kinds of intelligence and that my kind was one kind and there were other kinds that people had, like scientists and bridge builders and soldiers. There were all kinds of intelligence.

I will never get over my shock that being intelligent didn't automatically make a person virtuous.

What Isn't Love?

2011-03-29T12:02:00.000-07:00

No one has ever seen the next poem. There was a period in which I was obsessed with a woman. It was a terrible, destructive, painful experience. The woman enjoyed her power over me and used it to pull me in, push me out, toy with me. She wasn't such a bad person. She was simply in thrall to her own problems and the two of us constructed an awful parody of love. During that period I wrote several poems exploring rage, obsession and the difference between healthy love and obsessive love. I chose to include it in this collection because I think such experiences are not uncommon. Many of us have been through the agony of obsessive, jealous, manipulative and enslaving attachment.

What Isn't Love?

Staring into space at work,

while over and over you rehearse

something you must say to wound your lover.

Or having to replay

again and again throughout the day

some way that your lover wounded you.

Listening to the sound

of cars homeward bound;

to extend the range of audibility

farther and farther down the street,

parsing motor noise as you wait:

car too big, car too small,

how long will he or she be gone?

Wincing when your lover smiles

through a party's unheard talk

with a too-attractive stranger;

it feels so much like danger.

To miss someone is sweet,

but helplessness is bitter,

and love does not taste bitter,

rejection is the acrid morsel on the tongue.

Trying too hard to be good;

trying too hard to be bad;

trying too hard not to feel;

feeling too hard to try,

and wanting to cry

when you beg for love

as if it were a drug,

then moan in shocked surprise

when you don't feel high.

And you grow more passionate

with each betrayal.

What isn't love?

Heat without light;

lust without compassion;

compassion without passion.

No word exists for what isn't love

but it's always been around

in promises that are broken

in the language being spoken

by those who cannot hear

its splintered sound.

Little Red Riding Cosmos

2011-03-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

This is a possible nova in the constellation Monoceros

Feb 19, 2010

Where am I?

I know this much:

I am in California, on planet earth,

within the solar system, part of the milky way,

which is bound to the local galactic group,

which forms The Great Wall Galactic structure,

which is part of further strings and shapes of galaxies

in structures too big to see, yet, part of a thing

called Universe,

and then , then…

where am I? Large or small, or in between?

Fractal geometry reveals that size

is meaningless, macro is the same exact shape

as micro, and if that is true,

the Where of Am I?

could put me at the very center

of….of what? Not too big, not too small, just right?

If our universe “banged” some fourteen billion years ago,

then evolved into the shape we now see,

this universe is temporary, it’s passing on through,

truckin’ down the road. What’s fourteen billion years?

Nothing much. An expanse of time. It’s not Forever.

So where am I? Let’s leave alone the What am I? question.

I have a feeling that the Where will reveal the What and the What

will reveal the Where, but man, this thing is complex and subtle.

Wrap your mind around the most brilliant idea EVER thought,

an idea that dwarfs Einstein’s most stunning insight,

an idea that has Steven Hawking playing coloring books and wooden blocks

that have letters carved in simple relief, “A”, “B”, “C”,

that’s very good Steven, very good Albert

very good deepest thinkers of our world,

you’ve gotten us off our tricycles,

but we don’t know where we are, don’t know what we are,

and surely don’t know why we are,

so it looks like I’m going to have to keep asking,

I mean doesn’t EVERYBODY ask?

Maybe not everybody but a lot of us would like to know

and we put all these frustrations into books

and start religions and maybe they soothe the frustration a little

but they don’t put a face on my location in the scheme of things

so I just want to grab this super smart Intelligence, Force, Creator,

Joker, whatever it is, grab it by the collar and say just like a movie tough guy,

“Hey! Where am I? I want some answers! Quit fucking around!

Can’t you show us a formula, an artifact, a document that’s less ambiguous than Koran Bible Torah, can’t you send an angel or an E.T., or something to change me from frustrated to fulfilled?

Why can’t you do that right now, huh?”

Uh oh. I know I’m not as smart as Einstein much less this thing that casually

tosses universes out like a tennis ball machine, bang!

whoops we missed, Bang! There it goes again. Universes all over the place that support life, no, encourage life!

This is not someone you grab by the collar and get tough with, anything could happen. And does. Everything happens!

It makes me kind of tired. My eyelids droop from the effort of all this

ravenous curiosity.

I think I’ll go to sleep. Maybe I’ll find the answer in a dream.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I had that dream,

and then couldn’t remember it?

The Big Move: From House To RV--full time!

2011-03-27T23:12:00.000-07:00

The View From Topside of our RV

My wife and I have lived in a 38 foot motor coach since 2006. We consolidated all our savings and paid cash for the big RV. We moved from a cottage in the woods of Marin County to a pleasant campground in Petaluma, a small town about sixty miles north of San Francisco.

Our monthly overhead for rent and utilities shrank instantly from $2400 to $900. This was obviously a great benefit, but our odyssey into full time RV living was not easy. Making the transition from living in a "stick house" to living in an RV was a huge project. We were confronting the magnitude of switching into a wholly new mode of life, a life in a small space, a life where every object, every glass, cup, dish, spoon, razor blade and bottle of after shave must be in its place. If there was no place for a particular substance or object, then it must either be tossed out or stored.

This was where the madness began. This was the trial of my relationship with my wife at its most intense. This was where the difference between being male and female came into stark relief. This was the time where the difference in our tastes, the variations in our personal hygiene, the needs of a man versus the needs of a woman had to be negotiated with utmost patience.

Fox has a total inability to throw things away. Fox is the keeper of the family ‘vault’, which consists of various closets, cubbyholes and store-rooms in which she keeps her personal belongings and all the things she has deemed essential to the future of her children, her grandchildren, her great grandchildren and so on down to the utmost generation.

Through the trials and horrors of her first marriage, Fox held on to her family’s legacy of furnishings, photos, documents, silver, glass, chinaware and jewelry. Fox keeps everything! She has her daughter’s first school essay. And the third, fifth, twenty fifth, sixty fifth. She has the most minute school document generated by two children from kindergarten to the graduation of college. She has every homework assignment. She has their report cards, their certificates of merit, their bronze plaques and blue ribbons, their gold stars, their baseball gloves, their team caps and shirts, their framed community service awards, their books and baby booties. She feels that all of this is precious history and must be restored to her children when they’ve married, had families and moved into their own homes. Meanwhile she will carry this titanic cargo container of luggage wherever she might go.

She has the trunk that her grandma brought from the old country. It is filled with mothball smelling sheets, pillowcases, linens of esoteric Swedish origin and serving trays of engraved silver.

In order to prevent her husband from stealing the silver, she had it stored for sixteen years in a secret locker at a Pay-n-Stor in Oakland.

Fox has twenty eight albums of family pictures. She has fourteen white buckets, ten gallons a bucket, of rocks and seashells. Aside from these smaller rocks, she has sixtyseven larger “unusual” rocks that she has collected from all her wanderings across the hills and plains of her childhood. Fox has kept all the neat rocks she has ever collected from the age of five. She has a forty pound amethyst cave geode.

This is to say nothing of clothes. Fox has clothes: a collection of marvels, of shawls and swirling skirts, of gypsy vests sewn with coins, of blouses from Lebanon, sweaters from Morocco, hats from Afghanistan, baggy trousers from Bosnia, scarves from Samarkand. She has her children’s clothes. She has the shoes Rashid wore at five and that Karima wore at ten. She has the high chair and the rocking horse. These things must be preserved for her grandchildren. No matter that Rashid and Karima have forgotten the very existence of these items, they MUST be preserved.

When we had made our decision to move into a motorhome, we were renting a cozy cottage in the woods. We gave our landlord ninety days notice. Then we procrastinated for the next two months, not knowing where we might end up, which motorhome we might purchase. When the coach was found in Florida, we had twentyfive days to go. When we reached Petaluma in the coach and parked it at the Kountry Kampground, we were down to eleven days.

In eleven days, we had to move out of the house. We had to store or dispose of all our stuff. Fox’s stuff and my stuff.

They were different kinds of stuff. In all fairness, it is acknowledged between Fox and myself that she has more stuff. But I have stuff too.

I have a Yamaha electronic piano with a synthesizer module. I have power amps, tuners, tape recorders, microphones. I have cameras, lenses, flash attachments, and attachments for the flash attachments. I have diffusers to eleminate shadows, to turn light yellow or to prevent light from turning yellow. I have computers and computer hardware. I have pronged wired capacitor-laden stuff for sending signals through the internet on a broadband frequency or a narrow band frequency. I have ancient modems that have no use whatsoever, that transmit zeroes and ones at a rate so slow that earthworms could carry messages more quickly. I have telescopes! I have eyepieces, adaptors, binoculars, equatorial mounts. I have unmounted lenses for future telescopes that I will never build. I have a bicycle, spare tires, pumps, inner tubes, cables, chains, sprockets and handlebar mounted flashlights. Speaking of flashlights, I have big flashlights and small flashlights. I have the flashlights to find the flashlights that I’ve lost in the dark. I have red LED flashlights for astronomy. I have hat- mounted miner’s lamps, just in case I go into a mine. I have million-candlepower flashlights for repairing eighteen wheel big rigs in the dark. I don’t have, never will have an eighteen wheel big rig. I have a two axle-six- wheel motor coach. I just have a thing for flashlights. I love ‘em! I also love cigarette lighters. Even when I quit smoking, I love cigarette lighters. Oh, yes, I have books. I have star charts. I have maps, atlases, thesaurus, the obscure novels of Charles Williams, all the science fiction of Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick. I have the crazy metaphysical theories of H.W. Percival in a tome the size of a New York City phone book. Though I may have less than Fox, I DO have stuff. Major stuff. Never mind Fox’s face creams, emollients, hair conditioners, powders, brushes, combs, scissors, electric trimmers.

I almost forgot the pet stuff. How could I forget the pet stuff?

Here, Fox has a near-pathological weakness. Fox is a compulsive gift-giver. Fox has a list of gifts that must be given to friends and family members for the next ten years. She finds a bargain for cousin so and so that will be perfect for her fifteenth wedding anniversary in the year 2016. She buys it because it’s a bargain. She cannot resist a bargain. She stores the gift away in a box and then is unable to find it when the occasion for the gift arises.

As for our pets, no toy, health aide or grooming implement is too trivial. So long as it’s a bargain. She buys chewies and catnip toys and braided leather jerky treats. She buys cat castles, self-cleaning litter boxes that never work, pet beds for the window sills, pet playpens for outside the coach, mazes, obstacle courses, turnstiles and ball-throwers. She buys plastic mice and scratchy poles and replaceable cardboard scratchy boards and a wonderful round thing that has a pingpong ball in a circular track that surrounds a scratchy pad in the middle. The cats love that one.

One day as I was about to sell the sofa, I moved it and found forty nine cat toys and thirty four missing catnip mice.

Eleven days! Eleven days! We bought the coach in Florida and drove across the country like maniacs! Why we didn’t stop at the Grand Canyon and spit over the rim? We didn't have time!

Something happens when it becomes a fact: that we are moving from a house of normal dimensions into a motorhome about the size of the very first submarine, the one designed by John Ericson during the Civil War, the one powered by two guys pedaling a chain-driven propellor. The one where they drowned on the first trial in Chesapeake Bay. We were going to attempt to separate the necessary from the desirable and make distinctions that would enable to us to live well in a wheeled boxcar with awnings.

In that eleven days we drove ourselves on caffeine and anxiety, shuttling from the woodsy cabin to the campground and back. Some nights we stayed in the coach. Some nights we stayed in the house. Gradually, our bedding disappeared from the house, our coffee pots, our silverware.

Fox is a wonderful artist and craftswoman. She creates things out of all kinds of materials. She has leather strips, boxes of beads, bags of feathers, nameless baubles, threads, glues, pins, an easel, paints, two guitars. She has healing work materials: long sheathes of sage, bags of herbs, bottles of essences, oils, salves, balms, powders, homeopathic pills, cosmic crystals. Everything must be stored or brought into the coach.

All of our many friends suddenly found that they had pressing engagements elsewhere. Fox and I were on our own: a woman with fibromyalgia and a bad back. A man with feet so sore they feel like they’ve been inside bowling shoes four sizes too tight.

I refuse to let Fox lift heavy objects. When I am away somewhere, she’ll sneak a lift on me. I’ll come home and find the forty pound bag of kitty litter has shifted from the steps to the storage bay. Then I sound like Ricky Ricardo. “Honey? You got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

Busted! Fox says sheepishly, “I thought I could lift it.” Her elbow is bent so that her left palm can press against her lower back, just beside the hip joint. She’s slightly hunched over.

She does this because her lazy ex-husband always screamed at her for being lazy. He was a liar, so he lacerated her with accusations of falsehood. He was a cheat, so he perpetually interrogated her about hatching schemes. He was unfaithful, so he called Fox a whore. He was a thief so he accused her of stealing. He was a terrible loveless father, so he called Fox a useless mother. This went on for decades, and Fox is still overcompensating. Lifting heavy boxes. Working like a mule. Gradually the message sinks in: I won’t yell, I won’t insult, I won’t accuse, I won’t suspect, I won’t philander, and I WILL love as consistently as I can love. Our move brought out all this buried material and put our relationship through a powerful test. I was irritated. I wanted to say things. I didn’t say those things. Instead, I realized that all this stuff is as important to Fox as are my computers, cameras and instruments. They are integral to her self –expression. She is a mother. She is a woman. She is an artist and a healer. Who am I to tell her that she has too much stuff? If it’s too much, she will discover that on her own.

We rented two storage units at a local facility. This place is a collection of old cargo containers painted beige, plopped down on a piece of property next to the Petaluma River and locked behind a security gate. For a hundred seventy dollars a month we squeezed all the excess into these two containers.

Our daily itinerary became a triangular ping pong game of house-storage-motorhome house-storage-motorhome. I had old papers in the basement, manuscripts I’d written thirty years ago, novels about the United States after it had been taken over by Hare Krishnas, short stories about jazz musicians who walk through time portals to play Charlie Parker to the Mandan Indians. I had notebooks of poetry that I couldn’t throw away. They were juvenile, they were terrible, but I couldn’t toss ‘em.

As I carried all those fifty pound buckets of rocks, I wanted to scream.

I kept my mouth shut. I don’t know how I did it, but I’m glad I did. I wanted to remonstrate, “Honey we will never need these buckets of rocks, these barrels of seashells! Why are we going to pay money to store them? Why, honey, why?”

I kept my mouth shut. It was one of the most profound acts of restraint I have ever achieved. I watched Fox keep all this stuff without uttering a peep. Some day, maybe a year from now, maybe five years from now, she’ll look at this and say, “what the hell am I doing, storing all this junk?” Not yet. Not today. I have to carry the stuff, all boxed up and wrapped in newspaper, load it into the car, take it to the storage place, pile it high, build towers of useless junk, not saying a word.

I am ready to explode.

A month ago the Petaluma River jumped its banks during a mighty storm and rushed into our biggest storage container, wiping out half its contents. After a few tears, Fox bravely threw out the ruined clothes, the soaked papers, the filthy supplies, the laid up gifts for unspecified cousins. I lost some things, too, but I was lucky. The electronic piano, standing upright, was half underwater. After drying, it still plays. Unbelievable, but it still plays.