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October 28th, 2002  Dateline - The gulf `tween me and...u. Thunder from the East and Stefen speaks of this beach house pink & purple painted stilt stork house as though it weren't even here anymore. He talks about it with a zen predilection, a kind of premature c'est la vie voice, saying with a wave of his arm, "One good hurricane, and all this.. gone." And he adds how the wetlands are taking back the land, a good thing in his view, points out how his front yard used to reach 100 feet or so further out. "Quarter of my land, underwater. I'm paying taxes on.. water." We're on a point here, the tip of the tip of a small spit of land reaching out into the intracoastal waterway. Apparently Stefen's surrender to nature is not unfounded, given that a hurricane took the house many years back. He points at an area well in front of the current structure, in front of the giant concrete cisterns that hold drinking water, says the house used to be there. Okay. So another hurricane could rip the place to splintered shit. So what. The fact that it happened before and his father or grandfather or some other "Stout" (his last name) men of his clan rebuilt, well, I don't read defeat in that. So fuck it. Let a hurricane rip it down again. WE'LL REBUILD IT! And I'll be first on site with my tool belt and hammer because dammit if this ain't one of the most beautiful spots on Earth, or at least in Texas, a place I heretofore had little hope for aesthetically. This place is great! And Stefen owns the land! Does he have any idea what that means to someone like me? I'm a frikken American Bedouin, a wanderer, a Palestinian without land of my own and so I wander and work my craft and try and feel thus that the world is my home, or at least this country, the US of A whose every corner I have visited and over whom I have flown circles, vectors, parabolas all summer doing this or that, going here or there for a little work or a little fun. BUT DAMMIT IF I WOULDN'T STOP DEAD IN MY TRACKS AND HANG ART ON MY WALLS IF ONLY I HAD WALLS. And I'm not talkin rented walls. And I'm not talking rented land. I want this. I want what Stefen has and yet offhandedly regards as a fluke and borrowed gift cottage from the gods, his ancestors, whatever. I woke up this morning feeling like hell. Some fly landing repeated on my head and all those mosquitoes that got in last night with all the comings and goings of our big whip-dee-doo BBQ. And then just feeling that let down feeling, that post-Bday blah that gets ya. But now, after sitting down to this and writing all this and thinking about this place, this gulf coast gem of a beach house teeming with wildlife and the sky grumbling with thunder far off and the pelicans and the egrets and the seagulls and that crab i caught yesterday and the little lizards in the bathroom and that marsupial.. what do you call those things? ..digging in the trash the other night I spooked him and he ran off before I could get a photo and so cute he was and all I could think of was "I want one!" what with Matilda dead as King Tut and just as well sealed in stone buried just off the edge of the house here and me petless and loveless and homeless and lonelier than a parking lot when the last car drives away, as Tom Waits said. Ahh, fuck it. There's nothing wrong with me a six figure income wouldn't fix. His Lordship RSM the Duke of Nowhere, USA
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