12/30: A Smashing New Year!

Here's wishing you all a SMASHING NEW YEAR! May it be a better one for everyone. Here's a short film clip of Swami and his sledge from this afternoon, a little last minute silliness to usher in lots of good new silliness in 2006!

[Note how the phone is jettisoned toward the cameraman (me) on the second swing. The resulting howling and camera jitter is me reeling from the impact.]

THE DEATH OF A CELL PHONE

PS: For those of you paying attention, my two for one book offer on signed copies of Dead Men Hike No Trails IS genuine but must be preordered by credit card by clicking the cover photo below or a U.S. Postal Money Order (no checks, no other types of money orders) in the amount of $25 to:

Rick McKinney
PO Box 4101
Bisbee AZ 85603-4101

..to be received by me NO LATER THAN JANUARY 15th, 2006, as I will then order a box of books from the publisher, sign them, and send them out to you. Kiss, kiss:-p

And finally, this will be the End of this Blog. The Blog Monster will spring a new head next week accessible from the Rants menu. Adieu.

-RSM

12/29: Could it be real?

This just in from the publisher:

Rick..

We rec'd the print galley of your book from the printer and I'm sending it to you today via priority mail.

Please holler when you get it so we can send you the final step for getting it listed on Booklocker and also info. on ordering.

Have a beautiful day! - Angela

Click on the cover to preorder your signed copy directly from ME for $25, S&H included!
[Note: Click the "if you do not have a Paypal account" option if you don't]

12/28: Last Minute Musings from a Weird Ass Year

Merry Christmas, by the way. I was dead dog sick and missed the whole thing but I hope twas good for you. (Not true, I did have a nice dinner of lamb thanks to Bill Carter and Leigh Schubert and made a bizzare but brief appearance at Gretchen and Julliette's Santa Colostomy party, for which I had written (and read) a filthy, nasty poem about Santa and colostomies) but then went home and have been deathly ill since.

I'm getting tired of reading HST anecdotes. This isn't to say I love the man any less. It's just the human animal I oft times loathe, the human instinct to jump on the funeral carriage and spout off in.. in.. what's the opposite of in vitro? In postumum? My spell checker, like a lightning quick English teacher, redlined that in an instant. Okay. Fuck you, spell checker. I need a Latin dictionary. Hell, I need an English dictionary.

I wrote all 387 pages of Dead Men without a dictionary. That should surprise a few of you, horrify still others, and give the whole of academia just cause for banning it from English programs worldwide. Fine, fuck em.

I'm in a fuck this, fuck that, kind of mood right now. Perhaps it's the influenza. My lungs are so full of fluid I feel just a dock line knot away from sailing off across the river Stix. And in the words of Tom Waits, "My head's so full of bourbon I can't get up." Actually, delirium would be a better word for it. The label on the medicine bottle says Canadian Club blended, so, bourbon it ain't. The delirium is real. The whiskey just helps soothe my throat, and if it's making me more delirious, well, there's no way of telling.

What do you want? I have no other medicine. So I "blend" a little whiskey with my cocoa or my sleepy time tea. I'm a dozen miles down dirt roads from the nearest store, and my muscles burn as though my veins were full of acid. There'll be no driving today. I've run out of those nifty Trader Joe's vitamin C power pack envelopes, and God knows where I got those down here in Borderfuck, Arizona. My friend and cerebral lover who lives far away but keeps me afloat with her welcomed phone calls full of love (let's call her G), she says I need to get out of bed, go lay in the Arizona sunshine and bake the fluid out of my lungs. She reckons I've been calling Death to me so much lately that I'm in real danger. I have been sick, with varying degrees of infirmity for perhaps three weeks now. The final stages of my book formatting and editing. Christmas. Now New Year's just hours away. Still sick. She could be right.

But what was I saying about Hunter Thompson? Oh, yeah. This guy was MY MENTOR, my hero, twenty pfflllt! (gone) years ago. Back when I got the gonzo dagger tattooed on my arm, nobody knew what the fuck it was. And upon explanation, only a handful knew who Thompson was. Now he's everybody's hero, an icon, a legend, the one and only, "there'll never be another," blah blah blah. Bullshit. If I survive this flu, I'll show you good writing, you dingbats. It stills exists. And blogs be damned, I'm one of literature's greatest hopes for the early 21st century. Fuck modesty. I'm tired of kicking myself down. I AM next. Hear me roar. (Just somebody please give me a few grammar pointers: like vs. as; lie, lay, lain; bring & take; and teach me how to spell!)

In other gnus, my longtime friend Crazy James recently returned from the grave after dropping dead of a ruptured spleen. Fortunately for James, he was in Phoenix, and James is nothing if not a phoenix and, amazingly, rose from the fire and into an eight week coma like nothing, like a Napa Valley raptor who'd just been dipping in the leftover ferment piles awhile and needed a good long nap. ( I really must grill him for details of his near-death experience, for indeed he was dead for a spell before doctor's revived him). I don't think God Himself could kill this collosus of drugs, violence and insanity. I just trained under Dr. Gonzo's pen. This man is Gonzo. Hell, for all we know he could be the illigitimate child of Thompson! He's the right height!

No, probably not. Why not? Because "dad" was one of the first things James was updated on after his long, time-warping sleep. I say time-warping because the poor guy missed a birthday and a few other landmark days as well during his comatose period. Hell, maybe he even missed Alfred E. Newman's re-election to the Presi-dense-see. That's a day I would have liked to have been comatose. Jumping back to the subject of all the post-mortem writings on Thompson, that's one thing that comes up repeatedly: Bush's reelection. Anita Thompson says her husband shut the TV off and left it off for three days, an unprecidented news blackout at Owl Farm where generally at least one TV was on 24/7. Speculation is that Thompson saw in this event the final blow to American freedom, the true death of America. And fuck speculation. I say it's the God honest truth. What killed Thompson was the nauseating dumbness of a nation so steeped in fear & misinformation that they would reelect an ignorant puppet to the highest seat on Earth. How did that full page ad in his defense read from the hot tub bimbo incident of 1990? "TODAY THE DOCTOR, TOMORROW YOU!" something like that. Well, here's my headline:

So there. Forget about his broken back and hip injury and total lack of cartilage between his vertibrae. They can fix all that shit now, right? Silly Putty for cartilage, a titanium hip, no problem.

Crazy James. That's a term of endearment, by the way. He's no crazier than I. Well, perhaps a little. But he makes up for it in intelligence. Crazy James is waaaaaaay smarter than I.

So James wakes from his coma and is told two things. One, he had lymphoma cancer but he'll live. And two, while he was comatose, his father shot himself and left James a sizable inheritance.

The bodies are piling up, folks. Suicide is King.

And for this reason, I'm about to do something rather uncharacteristic of me. I'm about to take on a roommate. Or we're about to take on each other. It'll be the first time I've lived with anyone in a very long time. And I've plenty of misgivings. James chain smokes. James has an electric guitar and an amplifier the size of a refridgerator, and when the medical mary-wanna (sic) and the 12-pack of Heineken take over, I fully expect to be blown out of bed with the auditory equivalent of a fire hose. James is crazy. Living with him might well be like sharing a Vegas hotel room with Benicio del Toro's rendition of attorney Oscar Acosta.

When James is sober and his bipolar self hasn't gone completely south, however, he's brilliant. And he has a dream. He dreams of being a publisher. Well, I happen to have a few manuscripts scattered around, and I dream of being a published writer. Perhaps Mother Chaos will grace us awhile, and this uniting of two mad tornadoes will be of mutual benefit.

[Note: A day later at St. Elmo's Bar.. I was going further with this, but James got a peek at it, so the thread is gone. No big deal, I just need to pick it up again later, maybe in the New Year.]

Have you got NetFlix? Isn't it the best thing since sliced bread? Being a gypsy, I've had to merely watch as other people benefitted by it since its inception a few years back. But finally I got it. And man, I'm loving it. First thing I did was put on my list one of my all time favorites, a film I haven't seen in years but absolutely loved when I did. A tale of time travel based on the dreams on a young boy during the Black Plague in the mid-14th century, it transported me out of my rain-chafed misery in Oregon years ago and into a place of hope, faith and miracles. And dreams. Though it's a time travel piece, it doesn't utilize and sci-fi hocus pocus or CGI or even old school time machine stuff. All the paranormal activity springs from the dreams of Griffin, the young boy hero of the story. The Navigator. That's the name of the film, and it's what the boy is for his terrified village as the Black Plague moves north to their homeland of Cumbria. It's hope in the face of death, its very transcendence of death, have warmed my heart in these past days of illness. I've drained my deep cell marine battery and my car battery down twice now in watching it over and over. Rent it. You won't be sorry.

All right. I'm gone. Will try and shoot out a LIVE REPORT from Bisbee New Year's Eve, truly one of the finest, funnest places to be on New Years, as I learned in 2002. Fantastic! Old Bisbee, what a lady! Already the town is filling to the brim with freaks and tourists, the former all colorfully dressed and bright-eyed with a special bounce in their step, the latter, well, a little less all that but they gotta be halfway cool to BE HERE in FREAKVILLE. They must have some inclination of what's a-brewing. The Freaks fill the doorways with music and tricks and jewelry. It's a magical day of sunshine and coming celebration and I, thankfully, with at least a moment's reprieve from sickness, am here to witness it. Back to bed tonight early with 48 hours to get my immune system online.

Of course, that's all relative. Through Mardi Gras 2002 in New Orleans, I drank and paraded and ran myself so ragged that, though I made it through to Fat Tuesday midnight, I was deathly ill and bedridden for nearly a month after. This year I've at least got Mexico and no-scrip antibiotics within reach, should I need it.

-RSM

ps: Click the Hot Links above or you'll be soooooooooooorry!

12/20: The Final Twist

Although the font is different, more like long crude vertical lines carved into a wooden beam, "it is finished" are the words written on my scuffed up left hand. The words are like a heading or a descriptive phrase for the nickel-sized gash of coagulated blood below them, a good sized wound on the butt of my hand, the part of the hand to hit the ground first when you crash headlong out the door in the dark and onto the desert floor as I did just minutes ago, wine glass in one hand, cell phone in the other, in frantic pursuit of better signal as the person on the other end fades out. I suppose I was celebrating, but then I've been doing a lot of that lately with little satisfaction. Call it "hesitant celebrating." All of my friends want badly (as do I) to fete the occasion of my book's final submission to the publisher. But by now I feel like the boy who cried wolf, so oft have glasses clinked in toast and the thing been returned to me for further work.

Sometimes you just have to ask for a sign. Perhaps I have subconsciously been asking for a couple of weeks now for a sign that the book is finished. At first, it seemed to me that it would just be done, that I would finish it, hand it in to the publisher, and that would be that. But no. It has been a month of false finishes. The day I submitted it the publisher, I thought it was done. I mean, the publisher insisted that it BE DONE before I hit that SUBMIT button. Well, I got word right away that it was accepted, a thing for which I am entirely grateful even though I am essentially The Publisher, the company Booklocker.com merely a facilitator of the POD or publish on demand process. I am paying them a nominal fee to format, install in their system, attach an ISBN, handle all the paperwork and shipping, and basically put up with me (and my several corrections, sniffles and whines). I consider it highly worth the $200. After the endless editing and formatting and fact-checking and blah blah blah bullshit, one more nuisance not having to do with the art of WRITING would have driven me mad. Besides, Booklocker is a small press and only accepts 10 percent of books submitted them, so, I'm pleased.

So, I got my sign. Yes, lying there on the desert just outside the doors of Sanctuary, I was quite sure that this fall marked the end of 22 months of work on this book. Why? Because I had stepped on a loose stone and twisted my ankle (thus precipitating the fall). And laid out there screaming in that initial ten seconds of blinding pain that accompanies a good ankle twist, I looked up and for a second saw not Orion and the wide open Arizona night, but the tops of tall trees, hardwoods, the trees of Appalachia. And quick as the flash of pain, the vision was gone. I pulled myself up with not a little difficulty, stumbled back into the rounded strawbale retreat that I call home, closed the door and set about to cleaning up my hand and shaking the wine out of my cell phone. Pulling up my Levi's, I discovered a good sized gash on my right knee, to boot. Sweet. Just like old times!

I miss the Appalachian Trail, the cuts and scrapes that would, with any luck, leave beautiful scars to wear like badges; the camaraderie of so many like-minded souls, the most genuine Americans I've ever met for each was a pioneer searching for and at once exercising great freedoms; the constant pursuit of a physical, doable goal; the simplicity of carrying all your worldly needs on your back; hell, even the spiders. Well, maybe not the spiders. But if you think for a minute that I procrastinated or delayed the deliverance of this book (yes, intentional pun), well, them's are fightin' words. I didn't. I worked my ass off on this book, sometimes fifty or sixty hours a week.

One of the things I muse over in the book is how hard the trail was, and that I don't believe I'd ever worked so hard or so long in my life. The book was an extension of that. The editing and the rewriting, the fleshing out, the filling in of lost anecdotes, all of it. It took FOREVER. Next time I'll be better prepared. I'll take a raw manuscript under my arm, say "See you in two years" and fuck off to a remote coastal village in Mexico or something. My expectations for speed of finishing this one were ridiculous. And I still don't have a book in hand.

BUT I WILL! Next month, a decade of laboring in unpublished shame IS OVER. Everyone who ever doubted me can kiss my ass. Relatives and former friends who think me a bum can kiss my ass. And anyone who doesn't like the book can kiss both my ass cheeks. I've got half a dozen other manuscripts dusty now but ready to be edited and likewise put into print.

To the far greater number of you who have had unflagging faith in me all these years, well, I WANNA KISS YOU! I wish I could buy you all new cars or something! But those days are far off yet, maybe never. But I'm nothing if not prolific, and so as long as I live my body of work will balloon with time. And there will be film adaptations of my books, I promise you this. I'll tell you a secret since I'm in such a good mood:

I've always known deep, deep in my soul that someday I would make it as a writer (this inner knowing contrasted with an outer "going nowhere" has nearly killed me) and that fame would follow the money sure as Americans love their celebrities, their heroes, their tabloid silliness. Not that I crave fame. I crave the comfort and security of the money that usually, not always but usually accompanies fame. My point: save everything I've ever written and autographed. Sounds audacious, but hey. Dean Koontz said, "Never underestimate the value of fame in America."

(Didja keep those Gonzo Gazettes? Mental Floss? The Bones? The Idyllwild Word? Remember Watermelon? Dog Bowls & Ashtrays? Didja know autographed copies of my Xerox-generated poetry chapbooks have resold online for upwards of $60?)

It won't be long before I've crafted my writing into a genre that will sell to a wider readership, or better yet create a whole new genre of my own that will sell as this book will sell, despite its humble beginnings. So save everything AND BUY AUTOGRAPHED COPIES FROM ME, not from Amazon.com. This is the first edition. Get it while its hot. And maybe someday you can sell the lot on eBay and buy yourself a new car!

Until then, thanks for coming back again and again to read my crazy gibberish. If I fell again tomorrow and twisted my neck instead of my ankle and none of the above ever came to pass, I would die a happy man and a writer content, just from all the positive response to Jigglebox over the years. That, in itself, has been enough.

-RSM

12/19: False Finishes

The book, in its alleged final form, has now been through so many false finishes that I thought sure I'd lose my mind this past week. The past nine days have been a game of volleyball between me and the publisher, back and forth with the ball of the manuscript, this change, that change, formatting problems, and so on. And the cover art went into overtime, too, when Shawnee and I decided the back cover text was too depressing and not promotional enough. But today we got it in the can, so to speak. I just uploaded it, all 40 megs in about ten minutes through some wormhole in the sky from Arizona to Maine. That and the "final" draft of the book body. God speed, you beautiful 387 page beast, sure to forever scramble the line between fact and fiction forever, to ruin the fun of depression and make suicide a silly thing. Nii!

Shortly, I'll be posting the cover on the front page of Jigglebox with an offer to preorder the book thru me, so you can get a signed copy. They'll run $25 with priority shipping, but if you preorder I'll send you two for the price of one, no profit to me but you'll be helping me by getting me the money now so I can bulk order a bunch and by you giving the second copy to a friend you'll be helping to spread the word. I'll put together a professional shopping cart on Paypal shortly, but you can use the donation buttons on the site if you wanna order em now. They'll be out late January. Ok. Exhausted. McKinney, out. -RSM

12/10: The Panic Button

A silver dollar spinning like a dragon fly flashing in the sun, hung for a moment in its fixed orbit around my own little sun system of indecision, then fell, as we all will in time, flat to the ruddy earth, and the hung jury was sent packing. Dead Men had won in a coin toss. I thank you all for your input, all very good reasons for both titles. But the race was too close, and I, alas, am so close to some kinda post-partum-bookem nervous breakdown, that I threw it skyward, literally, in my own little simplified I-Ching, and the eagle beat out the Eisenhower and that was that. Dead Men Hike No Trails.

Then I had my panic attack. Right on the threshhold of a fun Tucson road trip to an undoubtedly fantastic party at the Bombshelter residence (I wanna change my name to Bombshelter, is that cool or what?) with Kathleen and Gregg and their cool little Green Day-lovin' rocker grand-daughter Jade and Kate's friend Rowina. Just a half hour before launch time, I had to put in the call to Kate, the call I hate, the call to cancel that often elicits the response (from anyone) "if you don't wanna go, that's okay," to which I just wanna cry out that it isn't a question of want. It's a question of can't. It's can't as a fact. Can't do it. Can't cope. It's an answer I have to give a lot lately, more and more frequently it seems. I don't know what's come over me, though lonliness is surely a factor. Companionship lonliness. And body chemistry no doubt. Harrod says I need to go climb a mountain. No doubt he's right.

All that matters is the book is done. -RSM

12/6: Cast your vote for the book's title, today!

Okay, it's gettin' weird. The publisher has accepted and awaits the book. Tonight I sit down with friend and graphic designer Shawnee to craft a cover. But the jury is STILL out on the title. Walking off my own funeral was thought up on a whim the other night in the afterglow of finishing the book. But Dead Men Hike No Trails is holding strong, at least in Kate Pearson's small street-corner poll of Bisbeeites this afternoon. Me? I'm not lettin' on. Any opinions? Get your votes in quick! -RSM

Likely back cover shot

[By the way, here's a sneak preview of Chapter Zero. I think it rocks. Check it out here at Chapter Zero. It basically starts the story at the end, turning the whole book into a flashback of sorts.]

12/5: Aluminum Weaver Pipe Smoke Slim, Enough to base a movie on

Yesterday I poured the wax of blue and pressed deep my seal, sealing the letter, sealing the deal. Yesterday I slammed the coffin shut on nearly two year's of growth and life, of blood sweat and tears woven and now forever entwined in words, and Harrod was there to share in my moment of relief. Then he took his cell phone in hand and checked his voice mail. "Oh-oh," he said, "Oh-oh." And I waited. "Slim died," he said, still listening to the prerecorded voice in his ear. And some part of me surrendered and said, yes. Of course.

This is the way it happens. This is the way it works. We live in a closed Universe. Hell, forget the presumption of "Universe." We live ON a closed planet, a gravity-locked system: Earth. Nothing escapes. All is recycled. One door opens, how? By another shutting. "You've seen this entertainment through and through. Your birth, your life, your death, all the rest. Did you live a good life when you died? Enough to base a movie on?" Mr. Morrison asks. I bet Slim did. Everything I ever heard from the pipe-smoking lips of that septugenarian longhair said, YES. Slim lived.

Slim stomped the terra in his days. So many stories had he. Picturing Slim on his home turf in Goldfield, Nevada, I think of that film Howard and Me, about that Nevada oil rig worker guy who supposedly saved a dirtbike-crashed old eccentric Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) off the desert one night, then years later got an inheritance check that went contested forever because no one believed him. To me, Slim was both Howard and his blue collar savior. He had that mystique about him, a style, a grace, a confidence yet he was blue collar all the way, and a long-haired hippie activist artist in retirement. God only knows who he was. Thus the likeness to Howard and Me. See the movie. You'll dig the connection.

Out there on the road in the skull-spinning interstate map, inner city world of Houston, Texas during the Orange Show Art Car Week or the roller coaster ride of the streets of San Francisco during Art Car Fest or in the wind-swept dusty world of Burning Man, Slim was always Joe Cool. Time and again, year after year, I'd be all spun-out socializing or run ragged prepping my car for show, and there would be Slim, solid. Slim sitting in his soda pop or beer can aluminum woven chair smoking his pipe and watching with an old man's poker-faced wisdom, saying nothing. Or saying everything! Everything a crazy, festival-rushed you just didn't wanna hear for the 10th time, like the time he went.. or the time he did the.. or the.. goddammit how I wished I'd recorded the old bastard! I loved him.

Slim must have told me a hundred stories in our time together. For often together were we. The aluminum weaving old long hair with a soda can camper and a can-woven giraffe, and me, the freak from Cali with the luggage-laden Granada, Mr. Antique Baggage Extraordinaire, Jed Klampet on wheels. Seems like we were always camped together or placed side by side, post-parade. Slim and me. Now he's gone, and now I can't remember his stories for shit. Ain't that just life?

I told myself I was taking the night off tonight. I told myself, and Harrod, I needed the night off from the world. I emailed a friend that I would be off the map for a day or two. I took rain checks on offers to celebrate my manuscript's bon voyage, bought a pre-cooked chicken and a bag of salad from the Safeway, and retreated to Sanctuary. I just wanted to be alone. I wanted to shut off my head for a night. But here I am, at 11 o'clock at night, WRITING! Fucking Muse! Lass Mich in Ruhe!

Leave me alone, relentless Muse. Leave me in peace this night. Let me grieve. Let me breathe.

I love you, Slim. I see you flying, soaring, swimming in space with flights of angels fore and aft, those guiding you forth, those watching your back, stoned on your pipe smoke and stories of the material world, circa America, entire second half of the 20th century.

I need to unplug now, Svein Sirnes. I need to go to bed. I need rest. But I wouldn't mind a bed time story.. if you have the time.

Aluminum Uber Alles!

Bis Spater. - Rick, aka Papa Duke

12/4: Slim Sirnes, 1930?- December 2, 2005
Rest In Peace Dear Friend

Folk artist Slim Sirnes in a modest garage gallery of his amazing art, September 7, '05

Go gettum in Heaven you cool old cat! You will be missed, my friend. So glad I got to say goodbye, not once, but twice, passing through Goldfield, Nevada in September. Now I know why I was called back, against the odds, to the Burn one last time. May your Heaven be everything you want it to be. Personally, I will always see you in the hot spring off Black Rock with a dozen naked hippie chicks, always laugh at the thought of your wife Carol finding you in that nudist magazine, captured thus. Ha! What was she doing reading nudist magazines, anyway? Sweet dreams aluminum weaver man, dry wit columnist, folk artist uncroixable. You won't be forgotten. -RSM

Click HERE to view the hi rez version of the above photo of me & Slim

12/3: Gittin' her done

Well, that's it. Tonight I finally did it. After weeks and weeks of false-finishes and resumed editing, I finally pressed SEND tonight, sending my book off to the publisher. Humble as I feel sitting here in the desert, I must acknowledge this milestone.. gotta admit that this is a truly monumental moment in my life. In some fifteen years of writing everything under the sun, sometimes for pay, sometimes for pleasure but mostly because I was compelled to by a stubborn Muse, this is the first full-length manuscript that I have nursed through to a cleanly edited finished product.

Also noteworthy: this is the first time I have sent a book to a publisher since being screwed by a fraudulent vanity press in 1996. In the ensuing nine years, I have written enough material, in the form of feature film scripts, fiction, non-fiction, poetry and over 1000 web pages of ranting "essays" that, stacked together, would be tall enough to use as a bar stool. I credit my 2000+ mile walk of the Appalachian Trail with teaching me the discipline needed to spend the better part of a year editing a book. Or perhaps I'm just mellowing with age. NO! Fuck that! Editing sucks, and the day I can afford to pay someone who enjoys editing to do it for me will be a great day indeed.

In a moment of inspiration last night while off-handedly describing my book's theme to my friend Harrod, I stumbled upon the perfect name for a book that's gone through several names, none of which I was real jazzed about. Here's the title page and probable text for the back cover:

Two thousand miles and 17 Everest ascents later, I live to tell my tale.

That said, I'd like to go out tonight sharing with you the genius of a poet friend of mine, a poem that blew my mind. As I haven't permission, I won't reveal the poet's identity, and even at that, I may have to pull it tomorrow for breach of confidence. Dunno. Dig it now. I'm so fortunate to be literally drowning in the sweet sugar waters of an ocean of amazingly talented friends. This one.. wow. A human volcano ready to blow. Far fucking out. I am humbled. -RSM

[Okay, I have the author's permission now. She said, "Yes! Put my name on it, and link it to my site." So, here you go, Queen T. Pardon the preformatted text, but I didn't wanna mess with your line breaks, etc, so I posted it exactly as writ.]

A Hired Mission to Love:
Goddess Ship 2 God Save the King!

By Tricia Pilkington

He said "She Brings It...she's my girl"
Yao!...Lao. Lit a fire Under Me
Note to Self, Bring It, Girl
So B-Ringin it forth, I BE.

You'll never find me in your bed
Rock
Tick'in a tock on your time
Clock
Leavin a fossil behind
Dark

Dive Deeper Than This The Abyss
Of the Heart Man, &

If you follow me there
(Where?)
You can share my joy
and despair
(Where?)
Everything and Nothing is There

You do NoThing, Man
And Every Thing
Gets Done.
---------

Ah,KaliYuGa You Sublime Fine
Make a disciple of my mind thine Eine
Panning for gold in the rhyme Mine
My Mind is not Mine Anyway so I
offer the coffer up everyday
on a silver plate
lick the slate clean
Coming up blank
rounds
Hit the ground
No det-o-Nation sounds
[Insert Self Here]
Oh My Fear Lead Us Not Astray, Empty Ash Tray
Wednesday Wed Us Today

It's the Right Time
Got the right sign
Not a hollow back girl
Got the right url
On the right track
It's the Right Time Now

You can't sway me in division
Sin Makes sinners
Truth is the Vision
Unity Decision
Dive Dive Deeper than that, Yo!
Ho
Shrug it off like the warm gun
Exiled by Pride Bride
Whyontcha sit it out on the side lines
Prodigal flower of the sun, One,

Another will house the Host,
Love Bomb ego with the H Ghost

Bring me to my knees, Please,
Love me with Thy Tender Breeze, Pretty Please
Keep My Eye At the Altar of thy Mercy Seat,
Mercy Mercy Mercy Me.

Compelled by soul
to call me Queen Ship
Bewitched by the Essence of my Pentagram
Telepathic Mind Slam
Submitting, and Officially Done.
Do you see, Neo, we've won.

I'm a goddess to you
Who are you to thee?
Unworthy of the Altar
of the High Priest?

Be Thou, Worthy of the altar
thereby worthy of the Crown
Every night Put it on
Every morning Lay it down
Now spoken, Wherefore I Am
I think therefore I Am
I AM That I Am.
--------

When you lay it down
Kiss the cracKing-feet of the ground
double hallowed down
And raise them up
to the waist
to the tips
to the pink lips
of the face
No fall from Grace.

i-Yah, Go.
Break the hymen on my thought plane
Do the Penetrada through my life no shame
Surfing the waves of the chi main
Be Thou.  Yo.  Ahk-mane.
-------
My Life Stream Floats Me
Right where I AM
Right over the damn y2
(k)Not, Workin it Out
Out DamnSpot,
Think through the Ink Blot
Doctor, Could you handle the Truth
Hot Potato in your Blue Tooth
Melted wax in the ear those who
Have ears then Hear Here,

I don't sub scribe
to pawnship
I dance anywhere on the Board
Red letter checker jump the black mind trip
I'm On! A Hired Mission to Love
Queen Ship to mates
God Save the King.

----------
I hold the ring,
I'll never set it down, cause I tried,
Won't ever Step Aside, Lyoness O my Pride,
In Place we Abide
Who Am I to You
Cause I Can't UnKnow
Can't Undo
Ciao BellAllah U' Abha (Dive! Dive!)
Find me
in your bed
Rock
Pick'in a lock on your time
Clock
Leavin no fossil behind
Hark!

Climb! Climb! Higher than this
Through the Heart Of Lightness,
Abide in This Grace Space
You Know the Look on My Face Dove
A hired Mission to Love
Queen Ship 2
God Save the King.

If you can follow me there
(Where?)
You can Know the Joy
and despair
(Where?)
Everything and Nothing is There

Dive Dive Through the heart and
Abide -
A higher Mission to Love
God Save the King!

A hired Mission to Love
Ship
Be Thou. Yo.  Ahk-mane.

A hired Mission to Love
Queen Ship 2 mates in check
Godess Save the King!

A higher Mission to Love Queen Ship II
God Save the King!

12/1: Battery life, the Muse and a few books I'm reading

Good. Now that we're done with the Living Will and such morbidities, we can move on to happier climes. (A Living Will, like a food stamp application, doesn't take long when you have no assets, no stocks or bonds, no property, houses or holdings, no credit, no cash on hand and one junker car no one would want, naught but a pile of manuscripts and the clothes on your back.) So in all my final hours of editing and re-editing and slaving to prepare a book to (at least) grammatical perfection, I've been reading. Oh, yes. I do read.

It's especially good to have a pile of library books lying around at all times when you live "off the grid" and consistently run out of battery power. How often have I been smack in the middle of some powerful prose, the Muse overseeing from her perch on my shoulders, her legs wrapped 'round my neck, when "Bloop!" up comes the message that I am now running on reserve battery power. Translation: finish that thought now and save it quick. Then nothing. The computer goes to sleep and dreams of its next union with a wall jack, likely a plug in the local coffee house where I do double-duty, charging and answering emails via the in-house WiFi.

The screen goes dark, often enough at night, thus throwing the Muse and me into the total blackness of Sanctuary. One glance out the window into heavens free of clouds or light pollution reveals Orion resting on his laurels as usual just over the hills to the east. Would that at this point my Muse could take real human form and me her to bed. But in the darkness with the typing ceased, she leaves me. (Sure, I could write longhand, but only new material. The manuscript is IN the computer and thus unworkable without it.) So I set flame to an oil lamp and sit down with a book and in an hour tear through a month or two of another writer's labor, from conception to completion.

There's a parallel there, one suddenly so clear to me. Writing & editing are to the writer what mile after mile are to the long-distance hiker. Reading the work of a writer is thus akin to driving a car down a road paralleling those same miles so slowly and painfully covered by the hiker. Unless we're talking about Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own, which I've lately been enjoying in small bites. This latter read is more like driving a horse and cart out of which objects continually fall onto the road, forcing one to double back and collect them, in this case reread them. It's a seminal work, to be sure, but definitely requires concentration and a lot of time to ponder.

Conversely, the sci-fi paperback Divine Intervention by Ken Wharton, was a good fast read with plenty of adventure and the sparkle of magic of a deaf mute boy's interaction with an advanced life form he believes is God. Good story. No tax.

Ah! There goes the low battery warning again. More on books later, perhaps, although another one I just read was Morvern Callar by Alan Warner, a bit strange and a tad gruesome but not without moments of beauty, and unique in style and language. It's the story of a young grocery clerk who's handling of her boyfriend's suicide and subsequent theft of his novel (putting her name on the finished manuscript and publishing it), is a bit dicey to say the least. Apparently it was made into a film in 2002. I just LOVE the book's cover, at least the edition I have, a portrait of very intense-looking young woman, her face covered in mud, her eyes wild. -RSM

11/30: Stricky Goes East: my last high school friend gives up his long beloved-west coast for a woman (God help him!)

Okay. Time for a long-overdue plug of my old high school buddy (and thus half-my-life friend) Mike's super sharp web site and new verflogged geblog. Mike's the friend who wrote me on the AT with the words "..your writing continues to captivate me, to touch the free spirit chained inside me. I thank you for keeping the words coming. They fill black and white lives with dazzling color." To that he added his pride and later, in a hugely generous response to an AT911 (the total failure of my ankles), a motel room wherein I gained a few days of much-needed rest. His card expressing the words above was the only non-essential item I carried the length of the entire trip. So get thee to Strick.net and follow the adventures of a die-hard, lifelong California boy as he makes his way in the (brrr!) East. Meanwhile, I'll go back to tearing my hair out over my book and flogging myself with jagged toothed cacti limbs. -RSM

11/29: The head trip and the book nearly done

"Perhaps you should stop smoking pot," I suggested. "I mean, I CAN'T smoke it because it provokes in me the same sort of madness and gruesome visions it apparently does in you."

I was just trying to help, but I don't think she appreciated it. She turned the tables on me in an instant, focusing on my problems. I found myself trying to explain the damage twenty years of struggle and failure wrought on the psyche when she'd asked," So when are you going to stop struggling?" The question struck me dumb. She may as well have asked an 18th century Alabama black man when he was going to stop being a slave. "The day I start making a steady income from my writing," I replied. "The day I'm both actualized and free." She didn't buy it and went on at length about how money in and of itself would never make me happy (obviously, she's never lived in her car and relied on food stamps to eat). But fair enough. Actualization of my dreams, though? Future days as a published writer doing book signings across the continent and Europe? I envision "Struggle" then as the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail, his limbs lopped off in a fair fight and naught but a cantankerous torso and head uselessly baiting me as I leave impotent him, chuckling to myself as I throw down my sword and walk away.

"Do you believe in yourself?" she asked. The setting sun on the highway dead ahead veritably screamed its brightness, screamed like a child refusing to go to bed. It hurt my eyes. After a pause I replied, "I try." She went on how C.C., the recently smashingly successful writer I'd introduced her to, about how the first thing she noticed about him was his belief in himself.

Ten minutes later, the car parked, I sat staring into the blaring late day sun as my mind collapsed like a white dwarf star, leaving only tears. And then she touched me. For the first time in 72 hours together, this woman who had driven 800 miles to spend Thanksgiving with me and spent three nights with me without ever touching me, reached out and embraced me. Then she left to drive home, refusing even a kiss on the lips (I kiss my MALE friends on the lips sometimes for chissakes - BIG DEAL!). I hadn't attempted to reach out to her physically the whole weekend. At times she seemed in serious need of comforting, a hug, a spooning in bed (fully clothed - could hardly hurt!), but her whole body emitted clear signals of "Don't tread on me." Never one to push, I let her alone.

As I write this, she's driving still. Sixteen hundred miles to come see me. Why? Had she just needed the emptiness, the desert, and I was just an appendage? Had she no need of tenderness? I hope she got what she came for. I sure enjoyed the company. In a weird twist, we discovered, whilst walking to the border and into Mexico from the strawbale (6.5 miles), that we'd attended the same high school! Small world. It was only after she'd been gone a few hours and beers that the answer came out of me, loud and clear, shouted, screeched, screamed, spat. (Is there no better word than shout in the English language?) Roar! It was at once a roar and a cry, authoritative and yet fraught with sorrow.

"BELIEVE IN MYSELF? FOR TWENTY FUCKING YEARS I'VE HAD NOTHING ELSE TO BELIEVE IN BUT ME, MY DREAM! EVERY FUCKING DAY I GET UP AND EVERY NIGHT I GO TO BED ALIVE IS TESTAMENT TO MY BELIEF. YES! I BELIEVE IN MYSELF."

But I'm writing a Living Will just the same. I put up a pretty good front, but I'm coming apart at the seams. Not always, but much of the time. One day I feel like I'm losing it. The next day I feel dead. The next day I feel fine. (Aside: I know I'm not alone in my darkness by a long stretch. These are dark times in America. Thompson wrote often about the American Dream: his search for it and later its death. For my money, however, I'd bet he never really BELIEVED the dream had died until a year ago November when Americans went to the polls and voted for security over freedom, safety over sanity. Besides his physical ailments, Hunter Thompson, a staunch supporter of America's historically unheard of constitutional freedoms, died of a broken heart that day. It just took him a few months to get his affairs in order before pulling the trigger.)

For two days after my guest left, I felt more dead than I had in years. Utterly lifeless. After this book is off to the publisher, I'm half-sure I'm either checking into rehab, a psychiatric hospital, or pulling a Chris McCandless. It's the market I don't believe in, the people, the readers, the buyers of books. I don't think we even speak the same language anymore if we ever did, the people and I. This is why I stammer in conversation with people in public, why I always find it so difficult to explain myself verbally.

My book is finished but for a few paragraphs of introduction, a line or two about myself, and a one-page epilogue. Instead of a prologue, I'm calling my opening author's remarks The Disclaimer. Putting myself in the Reader's head, I find Chapter One a bit too journal-like but can't seem to rewrite it as it is excellent in information and cadence and gives one the feel of my desperate need for immediate change. It lacks the wow-factor necessary for a first chapter, however. So I am experimenting with a more random beginning, just a few paragraphs of something out of left field but grabbing and with just enough connectivity to the theme of the book to make it transition in. If you don't follow me, think of the first line in Fight Club. "With a gun in your mouth, you speak only in vowels." Brilliant. I'm calling it Chapter Zero. [By the way, a few weeks later, Zero is written and in the can, and I think it rocks. Check it out here at Chapter Zero if you want a sneak preview. It basically starts the story at the end, turning the whole book into a flashback of sorts.]

The above gibberish about my female guest was a candidate for that random opening I sought, but it's out. I'd toss it in the trash, but I thought, what the hell, I'll throw it on my blog.

-RSM

11/23: The Palm Pilot goes Turkey Belly-up (again!), Duke's Silly Song #1 and Other Reasons for Being Most Thankful

First, lemme tell you about Duke's Silly Song #1 of 6. For those of you my Readers who have never heard my voice or better yet never met me, well, have I got a treat for you! Even my bestest of friends, if you haven't heard this, ya oughta. By this the Year of Our Lord & Lurid Executive Leadership 2005, even suburban grandmothers and brain dead pill junkies like me can usually figure out how to download and play an mp3, so HERE IT IS. Good luck and happy listening!

A few notes about it: one, it 's 19 minutes long and will probably take a light year to load but once loaded it's worth your every second of your attention I listened to it this a.m. for about the eighth time in as many months and laughed my ass off. Two, yes, that's me on guitar and you'll never believe it, but I've never had a lesson! Three, my mp3 player/recorder requires a microphone amp. Not having a mic to distance the recorder from itself, one can hear the sound of the hard drive kicking in occasionally in the background - a tad distracting but you get used to it. Four, this song and its five companion songs were all sung March 15th, 2005, whipped right off the top of my head one sangria smiling high night out here alone at Kate Pearson's strawbale house, a place I've lately come to refer to lovingly as Sanctuary. I also whimsically call it Valium Nation as it truly is the most peaceful zen space I have ever had the privilege to inhabit and thus precludes the need of anti-anxiety drugs. It IS a drug.

Song #1 owes its inspiration to my adoration of Molly Ratchet, my love interest of ten years. The song is all about a man's ten year adulation of and quest for a woman, and of all the girlfriends, boyfriends, misadventures and life events (including, on her part, a husband named Potato and a baby named Chance!) in between, and finally getting to call her girlfriend for one brief but unforgettable month earlier this year. It is a silly song, but one improvised in the moment with a lot of heart, recorded straight through without editing, and rediscovered this morning when it "chanced" to pop up in my 20 gig mp3 jukebox song rotation during my morning hot cocoa. Thank you, Chance Papas;) Molly's little miracle boy child.

In other news, we have MUCH to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. I usually refer to it half-sarcastically as Turkey Day, but when writer friend Bill Carter recently called it "the one holiday I actually enjoy," it gave me pause. I thought about how family dysfunction plays such a role in ruining the holidays for so many people. But then I remembered my days working at a mortuary and how high was the mortality rate amongst the elderly in November and December. This lead to the thought, "God, does time just slyly ferry us from bickering family bullshit to the empty holidays of the elderly, our loved ones dead and gone, leaving us to die our hearts broken and alone?" There was a scary thought.

Speaking of death, my Palm VII, yes the same one through which I churned out 175,000 words live from the AT, just pulled a memory wipe on me again the other day for about the fourth time in as many years. Not using my old PC anymore, it's a big pain in the ass to backup info from the Palm. So I never did. Now I've lost every address and phone number from everyone I've met in the past year, maybe longer. When it happened, I just kind of took in stride. Like a miner with an overly-burdened old burro who just watches as the old beast of burden finally gives up the ghost and collapses in a heap. If he loved it, he might shed a tear and stroke its head. But he accepts it. I accept the Palm's random dumping of a whole brain-load of information that I considered of great importance. Just the other day I was scanning thru its memo pad and reading all this great stuff I'd written from my final days on the CDT and forgotten about. I wrote myself a note to transcribe it. Now it's gone. Irony. It just never ceases. I'm glad that last week I got thank you letters written and sent off to Mont-Bell and Jet Boil and the other companies who outfitted me in great gear this past summer. Thus, not all was lost.

But seriously, if your number or address changed or if I met you in the past year and you're reading this, drop me an email to palmsucks@jigglebox.com with your info so we can keep in touch. Or just call me sometime, 480-283-3237. I also have a new PO Box since I'm more or less moving to Arizona at a glacial pace. That is: PO Box 4101, Bisbee AZ 85603

Have you ever heard Yo-Yo Ma's Cello Suite #1-1. All his work is amazing, but this one in particular is so frikken beautiful it takes me flying over the hills and desert cliffs and desert canyons around Sanctuary. I'm listening to it now. The cello always makes me think of Ana Lenchantin, my late-friend Luciano's eldest sister, and yes, Paz's sister, too. Lord, please send me a cellist for a wife! My God, what a powerful instrument is the cello and so erotic in the arms of a woman.

I'm most thankful this season for FINALLY finally finally not only writing but editing a book to completion for the first time in my life. (Much to my horror, the editing and rewriting took fully twice as long as the initial writing, over a year.) I am especially thankful to Pam in PA for her pro touch, and to Scott in Bisbee for giving it a read and some helpful notes, as well as the contact info for an agent friend of his who he feels will take an interest in the book. But I'm not gonna go that route right now, not yet. No, that would take too long and the possibilities for disappointment are too many for this borderline nutcase. I need CLOSURE on this illness of mine which one could call the Disease of the Consistently Unfinished, and I'm going to buy that closure by paying a publish-on-demand publisher $200 to typeset and arrange and ISBN the fucker for me and run it through their machine so that sometime early next year I can hold a bound book in my hand, one that anyone can buy online, and kiss it and scream "Halleluja muthufucka!" And like Christ in his final breath say, "It is finished" and perhaps drop dead myself by the shock of it all.

I was going to run down a long list of other people for whom I am so very thankful this year, but I cannot. Out here at Sanctuary, we are off the grid. No electricity. And my iBook is telling me I am out of time. Battery life in the red. So I'll say instead:

All of you. You know who you are. The Vlasics, the Harrods & Hunters, the Leadville Crew, Still Frank, Blister Sister, Pearson & Snyder, Inc., The Forbes Foundation, T.S. Bennett Enterprises, The Palermos, The McKinneys, The McCrearys and so on and so on. Whoops! About to blink out! Gotta go.

Quickly, to Bill Carter & Leigh Schubert for inviting me to Thanksgiving Dinner and to my special guest who should be arriving soon from the general direction of the Orion constellation, my favorite!

-RSM

11/21: Paint Balling For Jesus

Paint my body red
by RSM

Paint Ball
Never played it.
The benign war game with rented guns and exploding slugs of color
red a favorite I'm sure.

Never played it.
But I've shot a lot of TV's wired up to generators
Watched Martha & Oprah implode with a slug to the screen.

Shot my sister in the leg with a bb gun when i was 12.
And much later, in New Orleans at 34, held a 9mm to my temple
and pulled the trigger. Gun jammed, old Spanish military pistol.

Is this NOT WHAT YOU WANTED TO HEAR?
I mean, paint ball, what kinda fuckin theme for a poetry slam is that?
You may as well have asked Kerouac to write about Atari,
Burroughs to ponder the addictive nature of Play Station.

A girl left her guitar here at the place i'm staying. I dunno why she left it. She's gone from my bed now. Give me a paint ball gun and I'll paint her guitar green for the envy I feel for the new freak she's found to occupy her bed, and then set down my gun and ball her in mad embrace, bathe in her red menstrual blood like before and lose myself inside her one last time.

Okay, you got me. I've linked paint ball to love. So yea, I'll play your paint ball game.

I'd love to go back in time to the forties and run headlong into the first mushroom cloud ever made at the Trinity Site in New Mexico, run headlong with all the other soldiers, bayonets flashing in the wake of the initial blast, irreverent of radiation, under orders and uninformed, and run right into that thing with my paint ball gun a-blasting, purple balls vaporizing before my eyes into a purple haze for a Hendrix barely born and all the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sleeping warm in naive beds.

I'd love to be that guy from X-men who can transport around the room in little mini explosions, to be him armed with a paint gun and blast the bastard in the Oval Office with every color of the rainbow, do it for Wavy Gravy, for Hunter Thompson, for Ghandi, for Thoreau. Blast em with paint balls, non-violent but sticky and sure to cost the geek a day at the cleaners and interrupt that nine o'clock press conference.

I'd love to take a paint ball gun with a powerful laser site and start blasting the Minutemen down by the border outside Tombstone and Bisbee, blast em with a tricolor ball: red, green and white like the Mexican flag, tar and feather them in essence in the colors that harvest their vegetables in California, that cook their food in Phoenix, that clean their houses in Dallas, that are in their very blood in Arizona and everywhere west of the Louisiana Purchase that was once their frikken country anyway.

I'd looooooove to wake every badge-wearing, flag-wavin' fuck within a 100 miles of the nearest Wal-Mart and, like the deputized vigilantes who a century ago woke their striking coworkers before dawn and put em in boxcars outa Bisbee under threat of death lest they return, give these modern zombies an ultimatum: wake up from your fucking war dreams and propaganda and go back to being Americans for America or I'll send you back to your confused red voter state with hair made blue with a few shots to the head, and maybe even shoot your ass cheeks with a coupla yellow balls instead, show you for your true colors.

I'd love to take a paint ball gun to a political rally where the cops close in with batons and mace and play paint ball for mom who calls me a liberal instead of son, and sis with her 100-inch TV and the war ablazing and flags waving with my young nephews watching in training, all of it so wrong, wrong, wrong.

I'd love to play paintball for you America, for the good in your people, for the hope or governmental change, for the future I pray will be better, one last moment of patriotic bliss, just squeeze off a few rounds of blue, white, and red, before the cops mistake my gun for real and paint my body red, red, red.

-RSM

11/14: I got the blues so bad one time it put my face in a permanent frown

Mama told me, "Son, if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all. So I won't. Not today. I'll let my friend Rebbeca shine some happy light where I, at the moment, am incapable. Check out the great story written about this fellow art car artist and dear friend of mine by clicking the photo below. I'm gonna sit here and watch Donnie Darko back to back for 24 hours and try and cheer up. -RSM

11/09: Snow White, the bad apple, and the seven levels of lower back pain Hell

To catch you all up, the Foster's oil can touched down safely (with me in it) at Tucson's quaint little airport, and for about 3 minutes I was just tickled to be back in the desert. That's when I checked my voice mail and learned that Swami (my friend and ride home) had broken down somewhere near Gila Bend, Arizona on his 550 mile drive to Douglas to begin full-scale construction on refurbishing Harrod's warehouse.

Now, whereas I empathized with him and wished him well, I couldn't help but be a little more concerned suddenly with just how the hell I was gonna traverse the 80 miles to Bisbee, or for lack of a ride, where I was gonna spend the night. It was also an instant given that Bruce and I would NOT, after all, be making it to Bisbee this fine Saturday night for Gretchen Baer's "The Ex-Lovers of Stevie Nicks Wheelchair & Walker Dance Reunion" theme party. What a bummer.

More than a little dazed from my usual dose of airplane sedation, I watched in vain as one after another traveler met their rides, claimed their luggage and set off toward the parking lot. My six month Appalachian trek alone had taught me that there are a far greater number of kind, helpful folks out there than not. Additionally, odds were that some percentage of these people, however small, was headed east on the I-10 and very possibly all the way to Bisbee itself.

Shame mixed with frustration as I watched my entire plane load vanish, then another, then another. It felt like all my experience hitchhiking and approaching strangers for aid from both of my recent long-distance hikes had left me not a whit wiser or stronger or braver. In truth, however, I was stoned on birthday cocktails and jet lagged and just.. well, zapped.

So I started poking around with the folks who make money off of lost sheep like me, and sure enough, a shuttle to Bisbee was $150. (Mind you, I'd just paid $110 to fly 2500 miles.) I have one friend in the city of Tucson, and besides the fact that she wasn't at home on this Saturday night, cab fare to her house would run about $40. There's a great old historic hotel called The Congress in old town Tucson where I stayed earlier this year in the lap-dance of luxury with sweet, seductive Molly. I had $57 cash and no credit, not enough for a room at The Congress. But the old hotel is unique in that it has a few rooms of bunks reserved for budget backpack travelers. A bunk runs $25. I found that the shuttle service would take me there for $20. Yes! Then I called The Congress: totally booked. So much for that plan.

Next I availed myself of that backlit wall of airport adverts and the free phone that you just pickup and bing-bang they swing by with a van to pick you up for free. Of course the hotels cost big bucks, or at least bigger than I had in pocket. I tried a few and all ran well over my cash assets. Finally, I did what any self-respecting poor poet would do in my situation: I called my mother. Actually, it wasn't as bad or painful as it sounds. Mom was holding a little cash for me, ostensibly for the day when I found another $700 sailboat to crawl into an "live," that or a cheap apartment somewhere. So I said, "Mom, I need a little roadside assistance here," and spoke with her about booking me a room remotely and drawing out of my cash. "Isn't there a Motel 6 you can go to?" mom asked. I told her sure, there were cheap motels a dozen or so miles from the airport, a healthy cab fare away. But by the time you added the $25 cab fare to the $39 plus tax "cheap" room, it was still more than I had in pocket. "Besides," I said, "there's a sympathetic front desk clerk at Amerisuites that'll give me a room for $69, a twenty spot less than the going rate."

Well, thanks to Jacob at Amerisuites, I was whisked away in an airport van and sitting on a Titanic bed in a really nice room not twenty minutes later. God bless that kid, and the generous Universe that was driving his hand. You see, when I'd called and asked again how much the room was and if it was possible to have my mother pay for the room over the phone, etc, etc, Jacob said, "How much cash do you have, again?" Then he told me to hold on. When he came back on, he had priced down the room to $49, such that with tax it came just under $57! Far out! Forget that I had a backpack full of high tech camping gear, I had no desire to go hitch the Interstate or sleep by the side of the road. No, I was done.

Bruce meanwhile had used one of his 100-mile AAA tows to get him a little closer, popped a few Klonipin and gone nighty-nite in his broken down car. The next morning he called AAA again (apparently you can string together tows so long as you wait 4 hours between service calls!), had the junker towed 85 miles & plopped down right in the parking lot of my hotel, and joined me for breakfast in my suite!

Then, you guessed it, I called AAA. Less than three hours later, Bruce and I and what he was now calling his "toolbox on wheels" (for the motherload of carpentry tools inside was all he cared about), were dropped nicely out front of Harrod's 20,000 square foot museum-to-be in Douglas, Arizona. That afternoon, Hunter and Harrod were headed to the Strawbale House outside Bisbee to collect an old Rocket Bob car art creation long ago stored there, and voila. I was home.

And that's the conclusion of that story. How long have I been home now? A week? More? It's been a bit of a blur. Though I missed the Garland Family immediately, Halloween in Bisbee was everything I'd hoped it would be: weird, weird, weird. Gretchen came out in fine form as the Burnt-out Burner, a Burning Man refugee in a skin-toned tight body suit that made her appear totally nude, aided by painted-on pubic hair (on fire no less) and expertly painted breasts with real silver hoop rings piercing the faux nipples, all this topped off with wild, rancid-looking wig and face paint outa some 1950's National Geographic photo essay on cannibalistic New Guinea tribesmen. Between elaborate face paint and a wild print robe, Kate could have stood in for an Aztec ruler, whilst Gregg, with a huge bucket on his head, just plain tripped me out until I finally got it: pot head. Harrod, Hunter and I went with painted faces. I was fortunate to have Harrod paint me, for all agreed that my face was the wildest and most savage of all. Two giggling girls on mushrooms couldn't even bear to look at me. We ended the night singing kerioki (sp?) at the Stock Exchange Bar. It's taken me years to warm up to this weirdass Japanese tradition, but I do believe I finally graduated Halloween night with a clam snapper snapping rendition of the B-52's Rock Lobster that had the whole house jumping.

No sooner did the pain killers and beers wear off then I incurred or began finally to feel (the day after Halloween) a pinched nerve in my back. At the same time, my computer, this iBook on which I gently type never knowing when it will fail me again, went totally narcoleptic on me. Laptops have a sleep mode, hell all computers have a sleep mode. But lately my Macintosh iBook G3 has spent most of its time in Snow White mode, biting the bad apple, as it were.

As you might imagine, I've felt rather impotent this past week with no way to work on the final edits of my book and a back so tweaked I couldn't lift a 2x4 to save my life (or help out on the museum project with my friends, which I so desperately want to do). Things had to get worse before they got better, and so Bruce (being something of a Mac expert) falsely but most humorously announced that he'd fixed the iBook with.. ready for this? Duct tape. To his credit, he really had gotten it to awaken and work for him awhile by digging into its innards and duct taping a wire harness in the hinge. But when I came to collect it and booted it up, it was right back to its old tricks. It had been a red herring, and knowing as I did that the problem had been intermittent for weeks, I should have known.

The next morning, I woke up stiff, gingerly made my way down the ladder from my loft in the Strawbale, made coffee, sat down, sneezed and lost all strength in my lower back. I hit the floor with a howl and, unable to stand, crawled to a rug across the room to lie still and relax the muscle spasm.

In an ironic twist, my beloved Leki trekking poles that I'd been lugging all around the country with me since October 8, 2004 but scarcely used (the hike to Hunter Thompson's funeral being the exception), came in real handy these past couple of days as crutches. A local chiropractor/acupuncturist treated me last night, and although I felt no better that night, I am walking now and in much less pain.

And my computer's working! Miraculous. Do I trust it to not go narcoleptic on me again? HELL NO. My new strategy: never fold it closed, never turn it off, and try like hell not to let it go into sleep mode. This is not an easy thing to do living in the desert without electricity. But a clever combination of my own car battery (the car itself being used as a generator on occasion), a newly-purchased deep cell marine battery, a 300 Watt inverter, and the 15.5 Volt Brunton Solar Roll afforded me by my Suicide Hike sponsor Trimble Outdoors this past summer seems to be keeping me in juice. Just enough. And just enough is all I need to put this book to bed.

So why the hell am I blogging? I just couldn't resist. And I wanted all of those of you who are expecting the book to be out any day now to know, alas, it's gonna be awhile yet. Another few weeks on my end and then 4 to 6 weeks with the publisher. So much for late October. So much for Christmas.

How about Mardi Gras?

-RSM

10/29: An oil can moving at Mach 1 toward the sun

Southwest Flight #Blahblahblah shuts its doors, backs away from the Manchester Airport terminal, and with all the ceremony of a city bus leaving the curb the jet tears into traffic, the pilot guns the throttle and whiz-bang we're airborne! You gotta hand it to airlines like Southwest and Jetblue. They're cornering the market by cutting corners and flying headlong into the future of air travel, a future already upon us, a time when airplanes are indeed the busses and trains. After my most recent brush with the dumbfounding incompetence of Amtrak, I hope air travel puts those dumb-headed swine outa business forever. Lord knows, I love train travel. But Amtrak should be put down like the drooling, rabid cur it is, and the sooner the better. Then we can hire the Japanese to come over here and build us a REAL rail system, one where, thanks to electromagnetic repulsion, the wheels don't even touch the tracks making the trains capable of land speeds approaching the speed I'm doing right now in the sky, tearing over Vermont at 500 miles per hour.

Leaving the dismal gray blah of New Hampshire's overcast skies, I'm blinded suddenly by a magnitude of brilliant sunlight such as I haven't seen since leaving Arizona nearly four weeks ago.

"Yeeeeaaaasssss!" shouts my B-vitamin-starved eyes and brain (or was it Vitamin E? A?) We pierce the veil of clouds and roar into the heavens, Maynard and his Tool set roaring "So long we wish you well," into my ears, hard-wired into Tool's "Eulogy," peak volume of course.

Not a jet engine minute later, the clouds are gone and Vermont smiles up at me clear as a bell. Typing away, my attention on my iBook screen, something catches my eye out the window. It's a ski mountain, a big one I'd say by the wealth of runs visibly drawn in the white of early season snows, set off from the forests that separate them. Marveling at its beauty, it suddenly hits me. "Hot damn! I climbed that mountain!" And in all likelihood, it's true. Our tack: due west into the setting sun. Draw a line on a map of New England heading due west outa Manchester and I bet you hit Killington. Hot damn. How cool is it to be me? It's cool.

I smuggled an "oil can" of Foster's lager onto the plane. I mean, what's a guy to do? I bought lunch for Justin, Jess and myself as they were kind enough to ferry me the forty miles or so to the airport from their home at Owl Farm, Franklin, NH. While I'm busily engaged in transferring into my iBook as much music from as many of his CDs as possible with the time left me, he picks up our sub sandwiches down the road and buys me an oil can of Foster's (that I didn't ask for). That swine! How dare he? What is he trying to get me drunk so I can get thrown off the plane in Chicago? Or worse! Arrested for trying to pull a Bill Murray-Hunter Thompson and bang my way into the cockpit roaring "It's my turn to fly!!!"

Okay, so it was the geek journalist Harris from the Washington Post who, after being sandbagged by Thompson's character, went crashing into the cockpit to join in the fun being had by the genuine freaks: the pilot, the stewardess and Bill Murray on the stick singing Lucy in the sky with diamonds, da da, da da, Lucy in the.." well you got the picture. And if you don't, see the movie. It's called Where the Buffalo Roam and is required viewing for anyone hip enough to hit upon Jigglebox and STAY!

So whaddya know but Southwest serves Foster's! Excellent. I have exactly $3 left to my name, and the game is on. I order a Foster's and a Sprite and when the drinks arrive, I proceed to slyly (if not so successfully) crack open my mammoth Foster's to stretch out the mini little 12 ounce beer for which I just forked over three clams. Of course, MY Foster's has been through the X-ray and jostled around and lifted 30,000 feet in the air. To complicate my efforts at subtly mixing in my own supply, the flight crew has commandeered the last row of seats on the plane, truly a nightmare for OCD me who has developed an obsession with claiming the far rear left-hand seat of any plane. I mean, I simply MUST have that seat and have gone to strange lengths to get it. Once I gave a little old lady a dollar to switch seats with me. I know. You're thinking, "A dollar? You cheap bastard!" but she was from the Depression Era and rare is the occasion that I meet a gray hair who won't bend their osteoporosis-addled body to snatch a penny from the gutter. Clearly something has changed in the past hundred years. Today we leave pennies in little trays by every cash register to save the next Little Debbie snack-buying schmuck from the hassle of having to actually GET pennies for change. And I personally enjoy casting pennies to the wind whenever possible, for no good reason at all.

So then this flight crew dude winds up sitting behind me! The nerve. That's the whole point of my rear seat strategy: no one behind me. Needless to say, it took smooth maneuvering and when that oil can cracked I got a mouthful of foam in my attempt at subtlety. But we got through it. And now somehow two and one half hours have passed and they're announcing intention to land. I slam the last of the Foster's and the Sprite, mixed and on ice, and type like a demon to finish this before the swine make me shut down my computer.

Ah! They got me! Sun's setting. Plane is landing. Time is up. Tray up. I'm told the circuit board outside my window is suburban Chicago. I look for the "Save Ferris" water tower, but see only the endless microcircuitry of human settlement spreading out beneath me forever and ever. I hear Smith from The Matrix calling my kind a virus, and from the window of this plane circling the city, I see no evidence to the contrary. I only know that in me there is beauty and love aplenty (and at the moment a fair amount of beer), and that someday, someday, my love will change the world.

If only a little.

-RSM

[Postscript: I just got a hold of this mp3 today, a recording of my radio interview on the morning of Thompson's memorial in Aspen, snatched off the Net by Justin. [Note: Net "buffering" left a 20 second silent spot in the middle, but stay listening for the rest]. Hearing it last night for the first time since I spoke the words, I had to admit I'd done rather well. One small step toward loving the world.]

10/27: Birthday with a healthy family

Check out what a sweet birthday farewell I received today from the Garland children as their dad ferried them off for a Halloween weekend in Massachusetts! Click HERE or if that doesn't work, try THIS and wait (if you're on a dial-up, go to gym and work out a few hours - haha) while the short AVI film clip prepares to play, and have a lovely day! Happy Birthday wishes to Tom Kennedy and all my other Scorpio friends! -RSM

10/26: Weathering Wilma on wee little Triggs Island in a lake in central New Hampshire

Last night the storm remnants of Wilma lashed this tiny island in a lake in central New Hampshire while inside the Garland Family, Father Craig, Mom Michelle, and the kids, elder daughter Marina, 15, her sister Celia, 13, and wild little curly blonde Alden, 11, sat out the storm in the cozy embrace of their little cabin on the southeast corner of tiny Triggs Island watching movies and making crafts. I, too, was there, all of us nestled in the 200 square foot downstairs living room between a propane heater on one wall, the fireplace and cast iron stove on the other. Outside, the winds blew upward of 50 mph, and when I rose in the night to restoke the fire, I checked the outside temperature: 36 F, just four degrees away from snow.

I couldn't ask for a better place to pass into my fortieth year in this silly world of silly men and war and time, on this stunning Planet, than here, on an island empty but for us, the Garland 5 and I. Before I knew their names, I referred to the Garlands as the Von Trapps after they went strolling by my tent one morning in Georgia on the Appalachian Trail singing songs in unison and smiling gaily as they went. I later came to know their trail names. In the order introduced above they were Fotoman, Clothesline, Wolfsong, Starfire and Zing. Their story riveted me, their union out there on the trail fascinated. Former caretakers-in-residence at a retreat center in Massachusetts, they'd been "downsized" and sent packing. Even though the parents had been employed there for years, they weren't eligible for unemployment as they'd been working for a church-affiliated organization, a non-profit. So, suddenly homeless, jobless and penniless, they did not what one would expect, but rather packed their camping gear together and headed out for a six-month "homeschool" assignment on the AT.

In retrospect I wish I'd slowed my pace and spent time getting to know them on the trail. Alas, I saw very little of them after our initial crossings in Georgia and Virginia.

But lucky me! I saw them a few weeks ago at the annual gathering of ALDHA, the American Long Distance Hikers Association, in Hanover, NH in the hallowed halls of Darmouth U. To my surprise, they'd summited Katahdin at long last just three days before! It had taken them two years to finish, but they'd done it! Fantastic! I rode home with them, offering my help with whatever they needed, wood-chopping, prepping for winter, whatever. I was with them just two days when I decided to follow my initial plan to hang at my dad's for two weeks, then return here for the week of my birthday and give myself the gift of service to these very cool people and no doubt benefit by the company of intelligent, worldly and joy-filled children for a week.

After a morning walk in the sun with Wolfsong and the family dog Bristol around the island's perimeter today, I just know I couldn't have made a better decision. And this, after what has felt like a recent string of really dumb travel decisions, is a great comfort to me.

This old cabin reminds me so of the old McKinney family cabin on another lake quite near to here that I'm really in Heaven here. And on an island no less! Thank you, Garland 5!

But now, with the sun out and Craig on the ready, it's time to get to work chopping wood and getting going on the work we couldn't do yesterday during the heavy storm. Part of our work today will probably involve trolling around the island hunting in shallow waters for docks lost in the storm.

So, to it!

-RSM

10/20: An excerpt that will NOT be appearing in my upcoming book "17" (snatched as it was off the cutting room floor during final editing here in Maine)

We interrupt our bar story with this short lesson in how not to deal with Chilean women on a train. Where would Kerouac be now? Where would Thompson lay his head? Would Miller even go to bed? And like the constant division of the "old Elvis" versus the "young Elvis," would the septuagenarian Bukowski burn the midnight oil with me for the reasons I now sit here, still awake, still drinking, thinking radically impaired as I round the corner and enter the final lap on a five liter box of table red? Well, I can answer one of these questions with some resolve: no. Bukowski wouldn't be sitting here with me, not for a lack of interest in boxed wine, but because Bukowski would have told that Chilean chick to suck his dick, or fuck off, anything but my milquetoast concession to her question "Do you mind if I lie out on both cushions?" which meant no seat for me, not even to sleep sitting up in. Thompson would have scoffed at the broad, grabbed me and a bottle of Wild Turkey and headed downstairs to fire off a few rounds out the swing-latch windows into the frigid, fast-moving night. And Miller. He would have ignored me and seduced the woman. Jack just hands me a jug of red and smiles and we drink till dawn in the train's bar car. -From the Amtrak archives

On that note, life is just dandy here in Maine. The sun was out solid all day for the first time in weeks. My health is fine and I'm broke but content and there's food in the fridge. For my birthday this year, I'm giving myself the gift of service and the company of children by helping a local family in need prepare for winter. The Garland Family (mom, dad and three kids, 11, 13 and 15) spent the last two years thruhiking the AT and it will be my pleasure to aid them in any way I can as they get back on their feets. Then I fly home to Arizona the 29th in time to catch Halloween in Bisbee, sure to be a hoot! So you see, all is not so dark as I make it out.

Per usual, I've managed to alarm a few of my readers with my recent posts. Fear not. Just let the drama queen prance around and blow off steam. Underneath all my bitching about Billy Graham and foul statements about fucking crucifixes, lurks a big bulbous monster with crotch rot, toe jam and a brain cloud who's terrified at how frighteningly close we are to actually publishing A BOOK after all these years of doom and failure. He's afraid of what he's unleashing on the world and at the same time how incredibly insignificant his book will be in the grand scheme of things. So what's he doing? He's rowing the boat backwards, taking a damn-near clean post-professionally-edited product and dickin' with it. Result: the review of the editor's changes that should have taken a week has taken a month and we're only half done.

The publisher has a 4-6 week turnaround time that's likely even longer approaching the holidays, so I'm pissed at myself for delays that will likely result in NOT having my book in print by Christmas, this after announcing over the summer that the book would be out by late October. That and now I've gone and changed the title. Dead Men Hike No Trails wasn't eliciting the oohs and ahhs I'd hoped for, so I've changed it to a number, the number "17." Researching Library of Congress records, I couldn't find anything with just the number 17 as a name, and I like its abstract nature. The new title elicits oohs and huhs? which is cool by me.

And that's all the news for now. Read my cousin's latest blog off the link on the front page. It rocks. And chirps! Later.

-RSM

10/19: A Billy Graham-induced coma

I wanna go out with Linda Blair
I wanna be a demon hunter
I wanna lay waste to this world and blame it all
On the Father, my father.

Maine in October may as well be an Oregon winter this year
Rain, rain and gray gray gray
They pull the docks from the lake in preparation for the freeze
And leave me landlocked standing in drizzle
The soft thwack of raindrops on my rain jacket hood

There oughta be a sign at Logan Airport and Manchester's too
Reading "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"
In autumn anyway, with winter fast ahead
I'd rather be in Leadville where it's already snowing like shit
But I bet the sun's out there. I bet.

Blister dropped in today semi-unexpected but welcome.
Then Dad came home with Chink food and my birthday cards and gift.
I should have stayed his hand, said no, please, no gifts.
For I knew what was coming.
But I didn't, and so for the hundredth time since I became a curmudgeon
I got trite Hallmark cards with purchased emotions, sentiments written by
some hack like me squeezing her tit of a heart for feelings that pay.
I hate greeting cards.
Haven't they figured that out by now?
No. Because I never tell them. Like tonight, I never tell them how loathsome I find them.
The cards that is.

Give me your own emotions or give me nothing.

The worse part was the Bill Graham daily reader.
What are you kidding me?

On the TV screen, I have playing the BBC interview with Thompson from the Seventies. All I wanted was for the man to tune in as I showed him an interview with my mentor, with Hunter. He feigns attention. But Billy Graham?

I wanna slam the table and rake my arms across it tossing everything to the floor and shout at my father to WAKE UP! Don't you get it? I don't want religious shti! I don't want pre-packaged sentiments! I don't want anything!

But the horror, it comes.
I'm so horrified I cannot speak it.
It's like a coma. I cannot move.
I can only say thank you father, thank you father, robotic,
I hate myself for my silence, my courtesy.

He leaves. We drink Maker's Mark, Blister and I.
Blister offers up a sadder father-child story for comparison: hers.
This time I'm earnest when I say thanks but no thanks.
One nightmare at a time, I say.

Justin calls. He sounds good. His world has steadied, leveled, for the moment anyway.
I cannot hide my deadened tone. I feel dead. He wants to know. I tell him.

On screen, Hunter gesticulates and spills his drink, smiles, the TV sound muted. Dead Can Dance plays from my iBook atop the TV with the acid trip "visualizer" on full blast. I'm multi-tasking.

On the Exorcist this a.m., I saw the devil in Linda Blair jam a crucifix into her vagina repeatedly. I don't have a vagina. But if I did, you can bet...

Blister says the moon is out. Earlier today, before sunset, she asked, "Where IS the sun?" I answered, "It's in Arizona."

I should go and look at the moon. It's been overcast here for weeks.

-RSM

10/18: Two Strangers Alone in a Cabin in Maine

I made the mistake just now of telling my father of a conversation with my cousin earlier today, one in which Justin told me all about the a couple of rough days since I last saw him. Tonight is my last night with my father, for this visit anyway, and it will likely be a good six months to a year before we meet again. I want to let my guard down. I want to just chit-chat friendly-like. But then I tell him how Justin's girlfriend Jess left here in a bad mood and when they got home apparently proceeded to go postal on Justin's step-father (their landlord) over some problem with their kitten. I already know I've said too much.

My father was listening to some talk show the other day and said "Damn right!" when the commentator said we need to stop delineating by race and creed and so on or we'll never have peace and achieve wholeness as a people. Perhaps because I'm fresh meat up here at his "getaway cabin" in Maine where he usually spends his time alone, my father has passed judgment on half the human race in the space of just a few days in my company. I can scarcely believe how judgmental the man has become. I want to turn to him immediately following his "Damn right!" and chime in with my feelings on the subject, such being that HE will NEVER have any personal peace nor contribute to the peace of the world judging everyone the way he does.

I slipped this in to the Justin & Jess story because of course a verdict is immediately forthcoming in the wake of my errant gossip. "She has no right to go off on Chris in his house," he begins.

"They pay rent to live there, Dad. I disagree."

"You can disagree all you want but.." and so it goes. But with this statement alone my father is telling me that no matter how I might opine on the current subject matter, he is right and my disagreement, my opinion, in invalid. The immeasurable damage caused by my father's lifelong suppression of my natural verbal defenses leads me to believe that ANY form of communication is better than silence and that everyone has the right to speak their mind, even if it comes out sounding like Tourette syndome.

It is the sort of exchange that I have come to expect from many members of my family, primarily the primaries, so to speak: mom, dad and my sole sibling. It is sad, and it the reason I rarely speak my mind around any of them. There simply isn't enough communication between us anymore. Too much water leaning hard on the levee of our separate lives. Too many years of subtle changes in some departments, no change in others. Too many years apart.

There is an exception. With both my mother and my father, when we're drinking together we're safe. Somehow the playing field is leveled a bit. Dad comes down off his high horse, Mom out from behind whatever wall went up between us some years ago, and I rise out of my well-dug trench of child-parent defense. (Fortunately, my mother drinks wine with every dinner, as does her husband, so we fare much better together than dad and I.

My poor father. He really loves me. And I try and love him. I walked out on him after his Jess judgment twenty minutes ago, but he came in just now to tell me he would change his plans to leave tomorrow and stick around long enough to celebrate my birthday with me before he goes home to New Hampshire. To him, I'm still his 13-year old performer son, his budding young actor all smiles and song, the kid I was before the divorce finalized and mom moved us 3000 miles away from him. But of course I am not 13 anymore. So he tries and really aspires to communicate with me as an adult who shares his opinions and love of Jesus. We talk briefly of my turning 39 next week, one year from forty he reminds me.

The irony is that I really am still 13 in my sensitivity to the harsh realities of his world, of the world of men. I'm a diagnosed chronic depressive with severe anxiety and resultant phobias, mostly in coping with people. And lest he forget any of that: I cannot watch the news of death and horror with him when he returns from work to the "relaxation" of TV news at 6 p.m. I cannot handle the harsh tones of his judgmental banter. I crumble and mumble in the face of any direct questioning about "my plan" for my life. We have very few parallels on which to relate, scant few subject matters in which to engage in healthy discourse.

He mentions the girl I took to my junior high school prom, says she's probably married with five kids, fat and ugly now. "Yeah, Dad, I'm the only one who never left Never Never Land," I say. I'm joking, though the joke is lost on him. We 35-year old boys (as the character Tyler Durden refers to himself in Fight Club) are many. Together with the girls our age who never grew up (of whom my junior high prom date may well be one), we are legion. For those of you with no religious upbringing whatsoever, that means there's a shit-ton of us.

Thirty-nine year old boys and girls. Or 29 year olds. Whatever. We're out there, everywhere. I know more people like me than I do people like my dad, more single, eccentric, unemployed or underemployed, super-creative and talented, impoverished and credit-ruined people than I do people with wives, husbands, children, straight jobs, 30-year mortgages, good credit, all that.

I wish my father and I didn't have such a massive canyon of ill communication between us. Short of my staying here and taking up residence with him at his second home in Maine and chipping away at the iceberg of distance between us for the next decade, I can't see us ever really talking "normal" again, whatever that is. Well, like when we're drunk I guess. He doesn't talk shit about people when we're drunk, or if he does he's so much the less judgmental that I don't take offense. And I feel stronger when I've got two or three pints in me. The fear and the pain subside. I suppose drinking with my dad works so well because in reality we're both terrified of one another. We're strangers, and we need the cozy embrace of the tavern to set us at ease with the other.

Which is why time spent with he and his wife is nearly unbearable for me. She doesn't drink, and he doesn't drink around her. I went through a stage of thinking I really disliked her anymore. But in recent years I've realized that it is HE I don't care for when in her company. He, him, my father. Around her, he's the same judgmental, preachy stranger I left alone in the living room an hour ago when my attempt at chit-chat turned to "Disagree all you want but..."

He's gone to bed now. He has to get up in five hours and drive to a job he loathes. But as the fear of no job overrides the hatred of the work, he goes, as he's been going for 40-some years, a dozen years at this job at least. If it's not enough that he hates his job, I hate it for him. I hate that he's not paid commissions for the new accounts he brings to the company, for he has increased their client base immeasurably in his years there. I don't claim to know much about his job, but I know he's underpaid. And that sucks. Because he's a damn good salesman. With all the conviction with which he preaches to me about the ills of the world and the joys of knowing Jesus, I know he must rock in the field.

He's been teaching Sunday school forever and in recent years has been going to night school to earn his degree and become a teacher, something he loves. I hope he achieves that goal soon. Real soon. Maybe when he's happy with his work, he won't be such a negative and judgmental poop. Ha. Right.

I can dream.

- RSM

10/15: The Fog and the Flood

I told them to please
Bring the fog along for the weekend
They did

Reliable
Faithful as Giesel's elephant
Better than a five star chef with his shopping list of produce
That's Gino when it comes to the fog

Gino and his companion Gwyneth
She of snow-white skin, bottle blue eyes, tangerine hair
He Italian handsome and grand of appetite
Of a body that fluctuates with his level of comfort or stress
Like a method actor changing roles twice yearly
He packs on the pounds for Raging Bull
Drops sixty for The Machinist
Adds again for his role in the fiction we've been playing for years:
I the writer, he my robust attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I never know the role until I see him again.

Gino of my blood, my insecurities
Gino of dreams and potential that must be approaching fruition
If the Fates have any heart

He doubts it
We all doubt ourselves.

Together we dream and hope and scheme
While humankind bangs its collective head against walls of ignorance
In this way I'd say we're ahead of the game
We cannot lose
We are the hope that the world unknowingly leans on
We are Roald Dahl's dream makers
Our day will surely come.

For now, however, the fog is a comfort
The perfect accompaniment to the Bridgeton drizzle
Which isn't a drizzle at all, but a gush
And Moose Pond's water level rises with the torrent
The beachfront disappearing inch by inch in the night.

At dawn today it reached the porch steps
By noon: the six steps up to the stoop
By three it had achieved our knees
Four o'clock our waists
Now it's midway up our chests
We need no longer stoop to brush our teeth

The South Pacific had its tsunami
Quickly forgotten when New Orleans in Katrina drowned
Now it appears it's New England's turn
First Keene, New Hampshire, and like a tub it fills
And here, the water rises til it tops the chimney

But are we worried?
Heavens no
For we have the fog
A panoply of prescription pills
One to cure every ill

[Patriotic interlude:]
We pledge allegiance to the scrip
And the numbness for which it stands
One Nation under Prozac
Unsinkable
With anti-anxiety cures and pain killing fog for all.

In the fog that Gino brought
We float and grow gills
Breath long island ice tea and beer from the can
And in chorus say "Groovy" with campy Bruce Campbell
As Evil Dead 2 gurgles away on the sodden TV

And lest our gills fail us or the fog run out
I carry the screen tent up from the yard
Set it up on the porch
Against mosquitos you know
But we know there aren't any mosquitos
No killer bees
No vectors of West Nile
No bird flu
No glacial melt
No holes in the Ozone layer!

There is only the rain unceasing
And death an abstract to laugh at
As though anything could ever touch us down here
In the southern Maine sea
That in the fog, it seems to me, was only yesterday
A cabin by a pond in the woods

On the porch in the screen tent
Gwyneth exhale bubbles of smoke from her Camel Light
Like smoke rings they rise out of sight
To the now distant surface of the sea
Watching them go, we giggle, we three
My cousin, his girlfriend and me.

Swathed in our secret we retire to the cabin
Throw another log in the cast iron stove and
Stoke the fire that still burns like a road flare in the pouring rain
Like deep sea thermal vents in the trenches off Peru
That spit fire and lava and breathe life into the dark.

I think of Bob in Drugstore Cowboy, the film by Gus van Zant
Bob's comment about how most people never know
How they're gonna feel from one moment to the next
But a pill junky need only read the labels on the bottles
To know exactly how he'll feel
And I say "Gino, toss me the Rabbit Hole."
He hands me the bottle full of colored pills like M&Ms
I take the red one and wash it down with a beer
Because a moment ago
I coulda sworn
I saw the fog begin to clear.

-Jellyfish Jack