{ Journaling to avoid book writing }

In elementary school they called it ADD and prescribe pills to kill it .. in art school they call it stream of consciousness and praise it as an un-learnable gift. I never went to art school, so I still feel kind of guilty doing this kind of zigzagging .. 

But anyway .. here are my ramblings : 


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May 22 - 2019 

My mind is somewhat blank, which doesn’t feel like the best time to write. Can’t remember ever actually doing it that way before. The closest thing to being blank would be .. just one thought, like when I'm consumed with something. Like the idea that I don’t want to write, or that I really should write. But most times I sit down because something struck me. Or maybe just an emotion that I was feeling forced me into the chair. I could be doing dishes or doing yoga, as I just was. But anyway I have the coffee now. I realized that during yoga that I should have had my coffee already. 

It’s almost eleven am and all I’ve had was water and a scoop of peanut butter. The peanut butter, yes, now I remember. That’s why I’m writing. There were actually two scoops of peanut butter, and the second one was a bribe to myself, from myself to my self, and the deal was that I could have a second scoop of peanut butter if I sat down and wrote. So here I am, the taste of peanut butter now gone from of my mouth and coffee in its place. Here we are. Fasting again. Finally fasting again. And not talking too much either. Lost my voice yesterday when Paul came by with Wyatt and Paul doesn’t even like to talk, or listen for that matter, this vocal strain was the result of just trying to find the coconut aminos in the fridge and ask Wyatt about preschool. 

It’s a beautiful thing to be quiet. This is the first time I’ve even written besides some stuff I’ve been sending to Juwels. You know what? That’s what did it. I just started pouring myself out to Juwels and I think that’s when I said that it was time to write. Time to write. Have time to write. I think I do. Shit. Hmmm .. . It’s all good. But .. I’ve been having this feeling that’s not motivating me that the book I’ve written thus far, which is about three or four inches thick when printed out, it … is good. Just good. I know I can make it better but I hoped it would be better right away, and then I could polish it to kinda-great in some parts .. to certain people .. on a rainy day, stuck at a train station or something like that. It’s not a big deal. I’m a realist. An optimistic realist, as my friend Kelly calls it, him, me.

What else? Gotta get out of that paragraph, feeling kind of heavy all piled up there. 

And again. 

And again. 

See ? 

Anyway, I think mama and Lily left on their trip on … Saturday. They ran late getting things done and Lily cried when it was finally time to leave ( because she wanted to be there when we planted the full moon seeds and mama wanted to hit the road to keep from driving too late. ) Anyway I’d been talking about doing a fast - threating to in a way, to what or who I don’t know. The ego? Myself? My dietary demands? My noisy brain? But anyway, I was late for breakfast and ate no honey or bread or butter the day before, and then it was lunch, and I chewed some dried elk liver and sipped some bone broth and drank some coffee ( injected some too ) and there was little protest. 

It’s like Allan Watts said that somebody else had said: “If you’re going to skip town, don’t notify your creditors.” Maybe I’d threatened so much that the lower self stopped listening and just took a long cat nap on a branch over its kill. Those predators sleep something like 20 hours of the day. What’s the point? Barely alive. And we all fear the thing that is mostly sleeping. Well anyway, I’m starving the lion now and all I’m hearing is a slight grumbling. The delirious nonsense of a man dying of hunger. Slobbering. Snoring.

I’ve told these energies before, hostage negotiation style, Hey – your energy is welcome here, but please, let me give you anther job. Trust me, you’ll like it more anyway. Do you want to climb a ladder and tangle with a beehive and find the queen? Do you want to chop some wood or sing or dance or set booby traps for lily ( lately our favorite is to pinch snap caps under her toilet seat, so when she sits down it pops. She’ll even tell me to do it, and I’ll explain that it’s only funny if she doesn’t know that it’s going to happen and that I’ll surprise her later, and I do. I am a good father, but I am still a punk-ass skateboarder, an edgy teen, too, a little. I’m talking him off the ledge too. There are better things, trust me. Let me show you. 

I treat Lily as a little too much of an equal I think. I think it’s good but hands her some pretty big tools for such little hands. “This is an interesting little experiment you’ve got going on your hands here,” my friend Klima recently told me during his visit from Los Angeles. “I’m curious to see how it all turns out.” With that he also told me that his mom would have said she worried I might be destroying her innocence. Innocence? You mean that false world that we create so high up in the tree? I’m not going to say that I’ve so consciously planned out and studied the construction of this little human brain, I’m just going to say that I don’t adhere to certain things and I also have very few filters. I don’t want to watch the stuff as it’s flowing through the screen of self- censorship I just want to let it float on by. I also want Lily to be able to express herself and see what people think next, not the other way around.  

About the peanut butter, I forgot to say .. I didn’t really bargain or bribe myself the way I kind of made it seem, I did it much more cleaver. I took the first bite of peanut butter and I took a big scoop at the last second, surprised myself. And in the decadent way I ate it in two bites because one would have been too much. And while enjoying that, I looked at the computer and remembered writing, and I said to myself, Yes, you are going to need two scoops if you’re going to be pulling a long haul of writing .. and when my feet did not stop themselves from walking back into the kitchen and that second scoop was taken, another large scoop, well then it was a done deal. Implied contract.

So here we are in a journal. I just couldn’t get myself to open up that book file and find the last page. Not yet. I will. But funny enough I opened the journal because I didn’t want to write but I had already told Juwels that I was going to write in an email, and she’d already congratulated me. And so now I have to do it. And Juwels, the saint that she is, she’d be just as happy if I wrote a journal. In fact she told me so before she left. She said, Even if you don’t work on your book but you just want to work on other things. Even if you work on Thailand a little bit, that would be great. 

I had a quote one day that I started to write but never perfected and it went something like this ; A good woman will hold her man to the highest standards, but she will also forgive him and prop him up when he falls short of the mark. 

Or something like that. 

Juwels forgives too much. She’s too strong. It’s scary how strong she is. The mom from Grapes of Wrath comes to mind. There's a part where the preacher says, “That woman is so strong that it makes me feel afraid and mean.” 

Just fucking beautiful. 

I need more coffee and my legs are starting to go numb from sitting in this chair in a lotus, but I don’t want to stop and get up and have to take these earphones off with the spacy Radiohead in echoing. (Treefingers) 

But I’m going to anyway. 

Back with more coffee. 

Turkish coffee I think they call it, or at least that’s what Lillian told me when I was writing her from Bangkok. It’s where you just mix the water and the grounds in the pot and let it settle then pour off the top. That’s how Ed Abbey did it on this river trip with Ralph Newcomb, except they were boiling river water.   

Lily’s monkey, ( “baby monkey” ) is here with me on the table. Mama monkey was supposed to come with me to T-land but Lily reneged at the last minute after offering. She cried and said that baby monkey would miss mama monkey if I took her, even though they don’t even seem to hangout around the house, and so I settled on raven. Mama suggested raven, and lily, eyes still wet with tears agreed. Poor raven, she doesn’t love you enough. We found raven in a pile of oak leaves and debris down in the Oak Creek, up the hill from a secret swimming hole. Lily and I were exploring up the hill and there I saw a dead raven. Not a stuffed toy raven but a real one. Something strange about that glassy back eye though. “Hey Lily, want to see something?” 

Not a second passed. 

“Yeah.”  

I take her over to the downed bird and find it has a white tag, made in China, and comical flipper-like feet made of cheap black fake leather. His beak too was made of leather. Mama called him our gift from the fairies, as she would. Was it a dog toy, I wondered? But no chewing or dog breath. It was unlikely to have been a kid’s toy because it was a steep and prickly climb we’d come to. Or was it a real dead raven when I saw it and then became a toy for lily? The last thing I though, later that night, was that it was some kind of symbolic offering or off-shedding that somebody left. It’s a groovy little swimming hole where at times people smoke and take journeys and go naked. A symbol, yes .. maybe.. I know a girl who told me she’d thrown a toy truck into the ocean while she was on a mushroom trip. I’m sure it just came right back. Maybe some little girl like Lily has it today. 

Raven came to Thailand to be my travel buddy and writing partner. I used to stroke his little beak there at the café when nobody was looking and I’d hit a short pause in my writing. Raven, he’s a funny guy. Always goes missing, and nobody can recall where he might have been last, and then he’ll show back up, right out in the open. Is it a kind of magic that I’m too distracted to appreciate? There’s a door in Angie’s air b&b and it’s always open when I go up there. Even before we started accepting tenants, and I know it’s Angie from beyond the grave. I don’t know what she’s trying to say, but I know it is her talking to me. Maybe she’s just saying “Angie was here” as the kids scratch in the trees and scrawl on the walls. Maybe she’s a juvinle anarchist ghost who’s just learning graffiti? The door to her Airstream was locked mysteriously from the inside too. I had to crawl into the place through a small vent and risk dislocating my shoulder as I’d done sliding in through the window of our beach house way back when. What is it Angie? Do you not want me in there? Do you not want me to remodel the old bird and sell it for you as I’ve discussed with Bill? 

Anyway, just days before my trip, we could not find Raven. Mama looked in the bag and around the house but he was gone. I took the opportunity to ask Lily about mama monkey again but she refused. Just set her teeth. Silly as it was, after Lily had offered the stowaway, I’d found a kind of comfort in the idea of bringing that monkey .. or the raven along, but oh well. Lily gave me some rocks she’d collected and an obscure crystal. One of which she gave me, saying, “This will keep you safe.” 

But fast forward 8,000 miles and a change the continents, and who should I find in my bag but that prankster Raven. I was glad to have him along as I walked the streets of Bangkok at 3am due to the jetlag. He went in my backpack with me around town and was always placed out on the table with my other stones and oils beside the computer. In the hotel café I’d buy a huge bottle of water and then tincture it with a few different blends for this and that, and then I’d drop the grape seed oil in and then I’d order a curry and French fries and a banana shake. It’d leave out the dirty plates and a tip and the Thai boys would take them away, and sometimes I’d get up to pee or to stretch and then it was lunch. 

I’d convert the mean black coffee to words and walk off the curry and rice around town. The river path was my haunt. I was regular, you could almost set your watch by me. I sat at the same table everyday, in the same chair and mostly ordered the same thing. One day I walked down to the hotel café with my backpack and bare feet and I found some tourist girl in my seat, and I noticed all the people behind the desk see me pause there and they looked concerned and uncertain, one laughed and they talked amongst themselves. I sat nearby and the girl soon moved on. I’d look at the couples speaking in French or Arabic at the tables across from me while my headphones blasted, and I’d see how bored the woman might seem or how distracted the man was, and I’d think to myself, Kiss her you fool. But I too am a fool there. It’s hard to do sometimes. 

And raven was there to see me crying quietly as I wrote the wedding scenes or the time that I asked Juwels to marry me. Just as I’m huffing and blurring right now. I’d wear my sunglasses at those times and breathe down deep in my chest and just get through it. It’s one of the parts that I like most about writing. The emotion it can pull out. The slow measure of time that it takes to move through a single moment. It’s hard for me to do that it real life with the noise and everything going on in the sidelines. It was a glorious time. It was a time cut short at the perfect moment. I don’t miss Thailand. When I wanted to be gone, I was digging myself out of a grave. I was ready to swim. I didn’t feel good again once I wanted to leave, not until I was in that taxi to the airport. I tipped the guy big at the curb and exchanged my last Thai currency for American, and I almost cried again when I held that silly ten-dollar bill. I was like a boy looking at that ten. 

On 30 hours of travel and little sleep, I told the cabdriver who picked me up at 5am from the train station in Flagstaff about exchanging that ten back in Bangkok. He told me that he’d never traveled before but that he wanted to. I told him about my book and the café. He was a sweet faced Native American guy and when we pulled up to the trailer here and I saw mama’s silhouette in the kitchen window, I handed him the ten as a tip. I didn’t need it anymore. These cab drivers and pilots were bringing me back from the dead, they were literally carrying me home. “Are you sure?” he’d said, “but … this it the ten dollar bill.” 

“Keep it,” I told him, and then he said, “I think I’m gonna have to save this one.” 

“Yeah, put it towards your plane tickets, I said, and he laughed. 

Oh the flood of emotions. Everything swirling. Taking me away. 

I’m happy to be home. When I was gone, and I thought back on my life here and all the things I wanted to do and all my plans and hopes and dreams and desires, I was taken with the desire to just be home and scrape some propolis from the hive frames, the most tedious and least lucrative thing you can do in a beehive. I wanted to just take a little pocket knifed and go piece-by-piece scraping the tiny globs of resinous brown goo from the frames with a quiet mind. I wanted to come home and wash dishes and shovel compost and listen to Lily have conversations with her monkeys. I wanted to break down in mama’s arms and have her stoke my head like a shivering pup.  

Oh how I ramble. 

I think I should get out of this chair. 

Or maybe I’ll start on that next chapter .. chapter 51 .. only 25 or so more to go : ) 

{ Angie's Eulogy }

This is Angie. 

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Let’s not call this an obituary, let's call it a eulogy.

  

   Angie was a tough little woman. She was a warrior, turned tradesman to keep the peace in her life. 

   In her final weeks, she told me stories that I still regret not asking her to pause, so I could run home and get my voice recorder. Stories about lost love and young couples on vintage motorcycles - engines rumbling over crumbling bridges in the moonlight, back in Missouri where she grew up. From her fixed place on the bed, lying with the cancer, she told me about the commune she once lived on in Northern California. The seven-person village on an old gold claim, the mining shack-turned-cabin and root cellar, the abundant fruit trees, grape and berry vines, all planted by the original miners in the 1800’s. They banged pots and pans at the black bears in the garden, and there was also the stalking mountain lion which she never saw, but whose eyes she sometimes felt in a chilled clearing.

   She lived like a woman who’d been given a second chance on life, and coming from a painful childhood, once she was grown up and moved out, she was born again. Her zest for life found her in some vivid situations, not always fun, but a little wiser for the wear.

   In Northern Arizona she found her home and community and fell in love with the Grand Canyon and the beauty and the sorrow and the song of its Native people. She was an activist, a protester, and she’d later admit, briefly, a monkey wrencher. She believed in a better world, and did her part to create one while at the same time building her own, literally, in her own backyard. 

   Her vintage trailer, always with the smell of good coffee and old books, sat at the edge of the forest, on the top of a hill, and out in the yard she built a maze-work of sundecks and pathways below her quaking aspens. 

   She always kept a little spring garden in the dooryard but it rarely made it through summer. Still, she’d offer guests a sweet pea pod from her dwarfed vine or one of the three little strawberries, which she’d no doubt been watching ripen for a week. Her desire to watch the garden bloom was in constant battle with her conscience for water conservation, for she was the type to have not only one, but two bricks in the top tank of her toilet to displace and save water. But all this was offset by her guilty pleasure for a hot and fragrant bath some evenings, or maybe it was the cause of her conservation, paying penitence for those sinful starry night baths in her sunroom. Oh well ... the aspens were happy for the runoff anyway. She was a woman who worked hard, maybe too hard, but always had a little hidden stash of chocolate at the back of the cupboard, chocolate or a bottle of wine, both being stretched out and savored over months.  

   Groovy is not a word that’s used much these days, but Angie used it and Angie embodied it. She was mostly a homebody, working on mending a fence to keep the skunks out and the dogs in, or you might find her crawling under a travel trailer in the weeds to sew up a hurt spot in its underbelly. But when Angie did go out for a rare occasion, she was all bracelets, rings and beads, aged leather, indigenous silver and turquoise and layers of good-luck finds from the thrift stores. She was a short little woman, exactly five feet, with long silver hair hanging down around her trunk like a willow. She talked loud and laughed louder, and she’d sometime clip a beautiful bone-handled knife in a sheath into her boot.  

   Angie had the coolest junk and treasures: She had an obsession for vintage trailers and placed eight of them in the old Oregon Trail configuration, all huddled around each other with Angie in the center, the nucleus. They were a stock in trade for her, these relics from the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s and she’d let one go from time to time and then pick up two more. “Better than money in the bank,” she’d say, and they’d only grow in value. “And besides, these are homes. A quick home may be a needed thing someday.” 

   She was wise, tried and true, but naïve and girlish, too. Around her space were old farm trucks and tractors, “Lawn art,” she’d call them, and then the same in miniature, little toy trucks and plastic horses setup in frozen scenes in the walkways. Around the corner, one might find a crude totem pole wearing a silk scarf around its neck, a holster on its waist, with real bullets, and twin cap pistols. Grazing in the weeds, rickety sawhorses wore old saddles and cast odd shadows when the sun was low. Angie did have a horse as an adult, briefly. That horse was named Lily; she was a grumpy retired forest ranger horse who’d bite at Angie when her back was turned, kicked Uncle Bill once when he walked up in her blind spot with an apple, and she threw me off her back into the dust at full gallop. 

   Her scene was always whimsical and abstract. She had a living breathing vintage shop, something escaped from the route 66 and now living in her backyard. She was silly, but deeply spiritual too, a witchy woman with ghost stories and bookshelves of ancient texts. Smiling stone Buddha statues stood as gatekeepers. Dry birdbaths, full of figures and crystals and curious stones lay as offerings to the sun gods, and after the monsoon rains fill them brimming, to the honeybees as enchanted watering holes. Even though she was hidden away on the back of the property, her scene was a roadside attraction at heart. She built it just for herself and for her small tribe of visitors, complete with pink plastic flamingos and barn wood fencing and a shaggy dog named Rio who’s been known to sleep peacefully outdoors in a snowstorm.

   Angie did start to open up her scene to others in the last years of her life here. She did this by way of creating of one of the most unique Air B&B sites in town, hosting people from around the world in two spotless 1950’s trailers with sun decks and aspens and slow drip coffee. 

   “Pinky is for lovers,” she used to say about the smaller of the two trailers. She named it after its all-pink appliances. Even the toilet was pink. Lovers indeed, couples were always booking Pinky for honeymoon stopovers, and dessert leftovers and empty bottles were relics often left behind. Her reviews were one-sidedly positive and although it was a lot of work, she understood that she was offering not just a bed and a shower in this crossroads town, but a fond memory, a mental picture postcard for her guests to take back home to the real world. The future of Angie’s “AZ Vintage Village” is uncertain, but we’re hoping to keep its doors open and pink flamingo lights on.      

   Angie burned a fuel of old-school homestead labor motives, a self proclaimed A-type personality with all the skills of planning for the seasons and saving. Even as a young girl, she’d saved up for a horse and paid to feed and board it, and never lost sight of her goals. She had daydreams of going to seed somewhere down on the Hassayampa River, on a plot of land that she was already making payments on, and down there in the desert, she saw herself on the back of a mini burro, maybe with a long bending wheat stalk in her teeth and leaving muddy hoof prints along the banks of the river. 

   Angie was a character right out of one of those heavy novels she read in her chair beside the fire, read till her head dipped for that last time and dreams came. Being an outspoken woman, she was private and mysterious in some ways too. After her death, instructions were followed as to how to find and crack the safe and where to dig up quantities of silver bars and coins in the yard, and her squirreling away was surprising and impressive to all involved. Especially considering this woman’s trades and gigs were very modest over the years. Finding those hidden treasures invoked the feel of the ones we all used to create as kids, part time-capsule, part piggy-bank.  

   Angie wanted to write a book, and she’d tell me about the work she put into it here and there. She never let me read any of her writing, but if she wrote like she talked, she’d have a lot to say and say it true and real, too real at times. 

   When I first met Angie, I was surprised to learn that she was a Tai Chi and Qi Gong instructor in town. She taught classes for a group with Parkinsons - some of the most passionate and dedicated students, she’d later say. The practice brought them more into their bodies, and they couldn’t thank her enough for that. She had other small classes in a modest room at a community center, just breaking even on the room fees and gas most times, but she found a devoted group of students, some of which would come to her home on those familiar Friday mornings when she was too weak to teach. They’d practice right there for her in the sunshine and the sound of the aspens, and she would smile and absorb the energy that they created. 

   Angie always maintained that she hadn’t just found a practice in Tai Chi, but instead, a savior. She was a true wounded healer, overcoming immense pain and anguish to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but she rarely lost her sense of humor or her quirky sense of style. “I’m a Pisces,” she’d say of her extensive boot collection or the life-collection of impeccable Pendleton wool blankets. She was a connoisseur, and I find myself lucky to be heir of a few of Angie’s treasures, like a weepy potted bonsai, a cherry travel trailer, a six shooter gun and a skittish little dog named Shen who now sleeps on one of those folded wool blankets at the foot of our bed and nervously licks her paws all night.

   Angie found her bit of peace here in the pines and she met Grace too. Grace was her only child; a sweet, loving handful at times, and one Angie raised into womanhood all on her own. Born with Down Syndrome, Grace added an extra bit of challenge to this single mom, and a hesitant mom at that. But in her way, Angie met the path of motherhood with her deep strength and strong will. “It took her three months to latch but I never gave up. I wanted my girl to have the very best chance I could give her.” She explored every opportunity to improve upon her genetic difficulties, and Grace grew up to be not only as strong as a mule, but the highest functioning kid with a disability I’ve ever met. She’s hilarious, surprising and a living testament to Angie’s love and strength. 

   I’ve seen Angie run herself into the ground fighting for that kid, making sure that she was never pushed aside or disrespected by the establishments of school, society or schoolyard politics. Grace values relationships, family and delights in food and music, performing in the local theater or going to a school dance in red carpet style. She erupts with laughter and has full conversations with the actors on TV and old movies, actually becoming part of the show, and she engages herself in a kind of spoken-word stream of consciousness dialogue that never ceased to catch my interest and perk a smile on my face. 

   Angie and Grace were a dynamic pair, and Angie always talked about getting her dream motorcycle, a BMW with a sidecar for Grace. It never happened in this life, but I smile as I see it right now in my head, leather caps and goggles and all.  

   We’ll all miss Angie. She was a rock and she was a child. She was a child throwing a rock. She was the sound of an old window breaking in an abandoned country shack and the dedication to clean it all up, apologize and make it safe again. I could write a book on this woman, a child at 53, a tough little woman who owned multiple trampolines and jumped with her silver hair flailing and a huge smile on her face. Last summer, she spent weeks fixing up a kid’s playhouse which she’d found on the curb; she put a new roof on the thing, new glass in the windows, scrubbed the floors and intended to use the space to read on rainy days. Walking up to her place you might find her doing Tai Chi with a wooden sword like a ninja, practicing her throwing knives, shooting a kid's bow and arrow into a hand-drawn target on a hay bale or zipped up between the claustrophobic walls of her infrared-sauna tent.    

   She was a rare creature: a scrap book of pressed flowers from the south rim of the canyon, a dying quote from an old western novel, the wise feather brush strokes of a Chinese text on the liver’s connection to the spleen, a crumpled up journal entry from childhood written in the calming perfection of her longhand, or the lucky throw of a rusty hatchet, stuck in the stump of an old apple tree with her initials carved just above the spot.

   Some windy day, as we talked about, we’ll bring your ashes out to the Grand Canyon and set them free. May your spirit soar on raven’s wings. You are loved. And I’m glad that in the final weeks of your life, you finally truly understood that and let yourself be swaddled up by the people around you, your true family.

Happy trails ... to you … until, we meet, again.