Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Jitterbug Boy

marshmallow
gryphon
paraplegic
rake
membrane




In my business, you gotta be ready. You gotta be ready to make somethin' out of nothin'. You gotta be ready to create that ol' song and dance, that pop and sizzle razzle dazzle. You gotta make wow outa mush and juice outa lemons. You got air? Make marshmallows. You got rain? Make gravy. You got leaves? Rake 'em into a big ass pile and sell jumps for a buck. That's my job. Jumps for a buck. Hop on my brain and take a hey ride.

Last night I was up late weaving magic bullshit into threads of solid gold. I could hear that Jamaican caddy daddy singin' in my brain "Solid gold, mon. Solid gold." And it was coming out like the gossamer threads out of the burnt-out arachnid tracks in Spiderman's wrists. Zip zip. I was flipped on, tipped up, tight-lipped and unzipped. I was sellin' ketchup popsicles to a whole floor staff of a bridal boutique. I was selling funnel cakes to the Atkins crowd. I was selling wheat-germ sandwiches on whole wheat toast to a convention of celiacs, and pogo sticks to paraplegics. I was the jitterbug man. I was on top of it all. I was a gryphon on the top of Notre Dame looking down on the let-them-eat-cake peasants. My shit was firing hot on all cylinders. Arcs across the membrane, 220-volt sparks across my corpus callosum. On fire. Thass how I was, cuz, cuz, thass how I work.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Out of the Blue

farm implement
clown fish
brogans
paddling
alabaster




It started out as morning exercise. Isn't that the way it always starts out? It's always some innocuous event that gets you - that out of the blue thing you don't expect - the thing you don't plan for. This morning had begun perfectly. Her Brainwave Python kayak sliced through the morning surf off the point at Fort Barry with ease and once the water formed a thin layer between her chilled skin and the neoprene wetsuit, she had been really quite comfy. The sun was just up and the sky was a beautiful blue streaked with just wisps of cloud. Paddling south across the entrance to the bay she could see San Francisco laid before her like a glistening Oz of some kind - the sun behind it in the east. Follow the yellow plankton road. Whatever.

She paddled on, feeling the rhythm of the sea's gentle roll. She'd read somewhere that the Polynesians navigated by studying wave patterns. They could detect wave patterns that had traveled thousands of miles. Now that was being in tune. That was down to earth. Westerners had never really connected like that with the sea. Or the land for that matter. They were too consumed with material crap. She thought back to her grandfather. He'd been a potato farmer up in Idaho - and that's pretty down to earth - yet even so, he wasn't so in tune with his land that he could sense deep patterns. Were there even deep patterns of which to be aware in the earth? God, Idaho had been beautiful country. There was a rawness about it that felt still quite real, unfucked, untethered. She didn't remember much about her grandfather. He'd been a big mountain of a man with a white woolly chest, red face and tough hands. She remembered a few things - a pair of old brogans he wore, a worn red leather baseball cap, some sort of farm implement he used to dig the potatos - a hoe? She wasn't sure. She remembered more the patina of it than the tool itself. It had been worn and shiny. She'd always been attracted to textures. And there was something comforting about the textures of much-used things. She admired the creamy white hull of the kayak carving through water so deeply gray it felt kinship with black. The creamy hull reminded her of alabaster, of marble, of heavy cream. One day her kayak would have the patina of a much used thing. One day.

She looked east toward the coast. The sun was higher. San Francisco was passing behind her. Today, she figured she'd paddle down as far as Half Moon Bay then back. It would be past lunchtime by then and she'd be worn out. But she needed it. She needed to burn some stress. She had a lot to work out these days and paddling was good therapy. Her thoughts wandered back four days to that fucked up night in Palo Alto. She'd met Brent down at Antonio's - that had been their spot even back in the Stanford days. It was the usual sort of evening - beer, foosball, jukebox. It was comfortable. Comfortable. You see, that was the problem. It was comfortable. It wasn't like the Stanford days when they shared DIScomfort with the world, when they had virtually reveled in discomfort, clutched together in mutual disdain for the fuckedupedness of the whole freakin world. That mutuality had made for seriously rabid lovemaking and intense all-night conversations. But now they were comfortable. It was foosball and beer and jukeboxes, and she had just grown suddenly and irreparably sick of it. Like instant food poisoning. Brent had been hurt. He didn't understand what had happened and she could see why not. It was out of the blue.

She look back east one last time, then, expertly whipped the small sleek craft around pointing it back north up the coast. As she did, she looked west out to sea. What she saw concerned her. There stretching across the entire horizon was a fogbank. This was not good, she thought. She glanced at her watch - 10:45. She looked east again - San Francisco to her front barely in view, still shining in the sun. It was doubtful she would make it back to Fort Barry. If she went to shore now, she would be within spitting distance of Pacifica. And Brent lived in San Bruno. That would be the safe thing to do - the responsible thing. Go on in, call Brent, eat crow, get him to take her home, probably end up screwing. Or... she could try to beat the fogbank. The risk there was that she could end up loster that shit. She flashed for an instant on that little clown fish in the cartoon, then on her clean alabaster skeleton at the bottom of the sea, her beautful kayak washing up in algae-stained pieces on the beach. Safe - ride with Brent, eat crow, back to comfortable (stroke) or race the fog, beat death, live on the edge of possibility and impossibility (stroke) hot tea, a fire in the fireplace and naked Brent (stroke) or bones polished by the waves (stroke) foosball, beer and jukeboxes (stroke) or in tune with wave patterns, following them through the fog all the way to Fort Barry (stroke). She redoubled her stroke heading north.

She thought about turning east.

Monday, July 25, 2005

Levi

slab
shutter speed
ankle holster
fatigued
tempest



Levi adjusted his ankle holster, stood up from the bed and buckled his belt. He looked for a moment at the fatigued holes behind the one the buckle tongue was in now. The belt was a timeline. Levi could trace his history on the force - all the stress, stakeout food, alcohol - he figured he gained about a belt hole every two years. Six of them were looking pretty wallowed out and he was just about to the end of the belt. That wasn't all he was near the end of. It was time to give it up. He'd seen three partners on the slab and watched two others retire. Time was up, dammit. Shift's over. Yeah, he'd made detective, but he was still tired. He gave himself one last check in the mirror, smoothed out his beard and headed to the living room. There, he did a quick inventory of his bag - film, camera, glassine bags, markers, print kit, evidence markers, test-tubes, pen, graph paper, toluene, tweezers, luminol, superglue, latex gloves. Good to go.

Besides – this business of late was just more than he could handle - at least a regular dose of it. There had always been outbreaks of violent crime. That was the nature of the beast. Levi had given this much thought over the years and had come to the conclusion that the outbreaks came and went according to a broad, complex, incomprehensible pattern. It was chaos theory. Levi didn't believe you had to be a super-cerebral mathmatician to figure that out. Crime came and went like an angry human weather system. "A low pressure system will be moving through the metro area today. We can expect flaring tempers, a number of brutal murders and the occasional violent sex crime." But this thing lately, this was no tempest, this was the motherfucker of all storms. This was that perfect storm thing - the confluence of events. This was mass anger on a ten-year high, sexual tension setting records, planets aligned, weapon purchases up, bullet sales off the charts and - and this was the kicker - ultra, conservative religious fervor thrown in for good measure. The calls were like nothing he'd ever seen - like a friggin' George Romero movie. Beheaded children with symbols carved into their flesh, household pets hung up like strange fruit in neighborhood trees, churches, mosques and temples desecrated. And the goofy thing was no particular denomination was spared. Everybody got to share in the misery. Shared misery - that was the deal. He'd just finished that thought when, as if to confirm his thinking, the phone rang. The phone was never good. His ex quit calling years ago. His son was in a halfway house somewhere in Fresno and never called, and his daughter, well, she wasn't going to call again in this lifetime, that was for sure. So when the phone rang, it was no surprise to discover some more shared misery at the other end.

Levi walked into the blood-spattered doorway and took a good look at the lighting inside - mostly incandescent, but lots of it. He took out his Pentax K-1000, double checked his film speed - 400, set the shutter speed at 60 fps and proceeded to do the job.

One more time.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Portfolio Center

survival
apprentice
bluegrass
sallow
forage



Yesterday, I tripped over to Portfolio Center (Atlanta) to address the current clutch of young, soon-to-be wannabes – apprentices all of popular culture, serrations on the leading edge of the communications arts version of phaedrus' knife. It was energizing. They are the yet untarnished and unvarnished, and at least for now, wide open with possibility and those fresh ways of communicating with a population that is decidedly less intelligent than they give it credit for being. I listened to their hopes and dreams, questions and opinions. Drank that stuff in like a cool stout on a fall day.

Fresh.

I enjoy rambling through PC. It really hasn't changed much in the 7 or 8 years I've been gone. Even the students seem the same - all hungry-jivey-intense with sallow faces from hours bathed in the cool glow of their Macs, all of them in some way desperate (in the hip sort of way you can be desperate without showing desperation) to fill that one need Maslow left off his survival matrix - the need to create. The school, as always liberally peppered with excellent work – print advertising concepts, illustrations, cartoons, nudes, radio scripts, package design solutions, photographs, brochures, posters, floors littered with singularly designed chairs - is a jangling-bluegrass/jazzy-Pollock-technofreakadelic-cognoscenti experience. If you have an opportunity to visit, you should. Go there. Forage. Let your mind fill those spaces that were hungry even when you couldn't feel hunger, just a nagging back-of-the-brain pit like you need a cigarette or drink or hit of something.

Fresh.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Finding Dees

Garnet
Scot
gather
challenge
tourist


I've been a tourist here before, maybe even pitched my little word tent and began. But, if I did, (and I'm not at all sure that I did), It was just once. In and out - the proverbial quickie. Wham bam, thank-you-and-maybe-I'll-be-back-and maybe-I'll-just-be-on-my -way-ma'am. The tourist thing, you see, is standing operating procedure for me. Life-defining A.D.D. of the soul.

Scot-shepherd-restlessness. No roots. Just chaff.

For a moment it's all interesting to me - a challenge - and then, like an infant no longer intrigued with the car keys and looking for something else noisy and bright, I'm on. Gone. So I can't even reassure you that I'll be back here tomorrow, or the next day. Or the next. Maybe.

Today I found Dees once again. Here in the ethernet he is constant as the ticking of a clock and it was reassuring to find him. I read two or three of his blogs, could hear his voice and see the unruly hair for a moment. We had this thing a long time back - a gang of four or five of us. We'd been brought together in the serendipity you have when you're young and in college and still you still allow for the possibility of perfect coincidence. Thereafter we used to gather around the New Year, but even that event became burdened. Our paths diverged.

We're all married now. Wives with birthstone jewelry. Aquamarines and garnets.

In truth, Dees was the only one of us who remained constant - Dees - who was the earthy, centered one most affected by gravity, or most in tune with it – as constant through the mail as through the ethernet where he still makes a nest. I realize I miss Dees. I debate whether I should let him know of this blog (refer back to paragraph number one). RIght now, it's just sort of a one-sided epistolary thing and maybe that's all it needs to be.

I have wheels on my feet and a duststorm at my back. Hey, Dees.