Dr. John to the Rescue

I’m listening to The City That Care Forgot by Dr. John. It’s a record of anger and sadness, cutting deep, about the shameful response to the disaster in New Orleans. I find myself shaken, moved by the harsh beauty of the raw. Sometimes a song can hit a nerve you weren’t expecting. It’s happened to me before.

It takes a good writer to tell a tragedy without melodrama or vanity. I can’t do that very well yet. I’m working on a set of songs I wrote the day my mother died. So far they seem pathetic, verging on banal.

So I remembered other songs that have struck me, provoking an excessive response when compared to my emotional reaction to events in my life or in the real world as shown on TV. For example, I was shocked and enraged when Katrina happened (worst natural disaster in US history, as you know), but even more so by the songs of this noble spokesman for the nearly 2,000 victims.

Here’s a list of songs that, for whatever reason, drew blood:

City That Care Forgot, Dr. John
Enola Gay, Utah Philips
Prison Song, Bryan Bowers
Follow the Flag, Randy Newman
Love Sick, Bob Dylan
John Brown, Bob Dylan
Motherland, Natalie Merchant
California, John Mahal
Where is Maria? Greg Brown
Miss Ferris, John Hartford
Blue, Lucinda Williams
Beloved Wife, Natalie Merchant
America, Paul Simon
City of Immigrants, Steve Earle

If you put those together you’d get too many punches, but you’d see what I mean, or just meet my nostalgia. Tell me, if you like, what’s the saddest song you ever heard? When did a song choke you up? Anybody remember Johnnie Ray who sang Cry every night of his life and cried every time?

While we’re all under machinegun attack by the vendors and liars, tragedy milkers and two-for-one dope dealers, at least we can still let ourselves be affected by a few simple words and a soulful tune.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Which is the most feared of the forest inhabitants?
Jeff: No idea, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.
Mutt: Well, a hawk claimed that, because he had the ability to fly, he could attack anything from above, and his prey wouldn't stand a chance.
Jeff: Okay.
Mutt: But then a lion pridefully said, "Due to my strength, no one would dare challenge me!"
Jeff: Right.
Mutt: The skunk, incensed, said, "I need neither flight nor might to frighten off any creature!" So the trio were debating the issue, when a grizzly bear came along and swallowed them all ...
Jeff: Yeah?
Mutt: Hawk, lion and stinker.
Jeff: Oh man, did you just cut one?

When I Too Played the Game

I only played ball once, one night of my life. I went 3 for 4, and my team won the championship with my contribution. I was not myself, however. I was another guy.

Staying down in Tulare with my brother, Don, one summer, and someone, his wife I seem to remember, suggested an afternoon snack of cold milk and warm cinnamon rolls from Costco. If you don’t know what these are, they are the best tasting, partially baked globs of sugar, butter, flour, dense cinnamon swirl, sugar and butter, with white frosting half an inch thick, that exist in the modern world, and they are as big as first base. Finishing one was a challenge that I met. I triumphed. I poured fifty pounds of sweet cement into my belly.

Then we went over to the softball park for the big game. All the teachers from Don’s school had a team, and they’d got to the finals of their town championship. The last game of the World Series in miniature. I drowsily sat on the flimsy wooden bleachers and waited for the boys to take the field. My stomach was churning like the cement mixer of my worst acid dreams. Never again give in to temptation, ugh.

So I read a paperback waiting for the mythical shout (PLAYBALL!), around 5, when Don called me down from the splinter repository.
“Hey dude, you got to do us a favor.”
“Uh.”
“You got to be Greg Mendez.”
“What?”
“Yeah. We’re one guy short. If we don’t have Greg we forfeit. It’s the finals, man. Come on.”
“But I’ve never played softball before in my life.”
“On the job training.”
"And I look like a Greg Mendez to you? I don't even speak Spanish."
"You don't speak English either."

I went out to center field, with my gut full of wallpaper paste bobbling up and down, and Don explained the game to me.
“You don’t have to do anything. Don’t try to actually catch the ball, just don’t let it get past you (there was no back fence). Then always throw it in the general direction of second base.”
“And when I have to bat?”
“Just take some hacks. We’ll do the rest. And … thanks Greg.”

We gathered in the wire enclosure that was a sort of dugout, a monkey cage. I thought I might be arrested for impersonating a softball player. Then Don went up to the ump and introduced me as Greg Mendez. He also introduced me to his teammates,
“Guys, this is not my brother. This is Greg Mendez, our friend. He just looks a little different today. Like my brother.”

All the guys said ‘Hi Greg’ and the game started. I got through the first half inning just standing in center field. Wow, I thought, lucky nothing came my way!

Then we were up. When I stood at the plate, nervously holding the bat as tightly as I could, my teammates (none of whose names I knew) were yelling, ‘Go Greg Mendez! You’re the man!’ and other sarcastic encouragements. The slow pitch came in respecting its arc, falling to my doom. But as it got square in front of me I blanked out a second or got natural inspiration or let all dull care go, anyway I got a solid hit—donk—over the short stop. As I ran towards first, I thought ‘drop the bat, drop the bat’ and I did. And made it safe, without even a throw. Fooled everyone on the field and in the stands. They thought I was a ringer.

Or maybe Greg Mendez. Except that his wife, Betty, and young kids, Garth and Chelsea, were there watching. I met them after the game and almost wished I really was Greg Mendez. Earth calling Martin, come back down.

The next inning a ball came to me on the roll, and I scooped it up and tossed it weakly towards second base. I was 40 at the time and Don was 30. I wasn’t sure I could raise my arm over my head to throw a baseball, but I did. Some people in the stands, I heard later, thought that Don and I were twins because we both had the same short beards. That was a nice compliment. Twins ten years apart, they called us afterwards.

At the plate I got two more hits into the outfield, one past the moved-in fielders for a two-bagger (actually I got to first and stopped but my whole team yelled at me to keep going). In later innings I caught two balls, watching them arc up and get closer and following them with intense concentration into my glove with both hands. Almost the first baseball glove I’d ever worn. Greg's glove, that is. I've never owned a glove myself. Anyway, it worked. I tried very hard, and didn’t make a fool of myself.

You know why we all love pro baseball so much, don't you? Because sitting in the stands with your official MLB uniform on and glove in hand, you hope and wish they'd call you down. Hey Martin, Pablo Sandoval's not feeling too good, can you fill in today? Sure, be right there. No other sport makes something so hard seem so easy. In our fantasy lives we're all baseball heroes.

The P.E. teachers on our team were real softball studs and hit the big home runs into Kern county, driving us all in. It was a high scoring game. I came across the plate all three times that I got on base. It was 19-10 in the last inning, with two outs.

I stepped up to the plate and nodded once again to the umpire. I peered out at the pitcher swinging his arm like bowling for … a strike. Gripping the bat with white knuckles, here it comes, wait wait, now, swing! Strike one, whoof, I nearly threw out my shoulder. Why did I miss? Swing too soon, too late, too high, too low? I should have just whacked it like I had before. Nope. Hmm.

Second pitch coming. Whoosh, whiff, strike two! What? I’m losing my touch. Shouts from the dugout: Come on Greg, knock it hard! Go yard, Greg! They were giggling, mocking me.

Then the pitcher lost his timing and threw three clear balls in a row, two not even getting to the plate. Full count, here it comes, stay calm, WHOOF again, strike three. Out. Game over.

I’d lost my own timing and badly let down the boys. Guilty of pride. Even though we won, I watched dejectedly as we were given the big trophy for the school. I still can’t figure out what happened, trying too hard I guess. Like old Matt Williams in the 90’s when every swing should have been a homer, but most just moved some air, inspiring the Candlestick winds. And he bit his shirt collar and cussed himself until he got traded to Arizona with a buck-and-change average. Might Casey …

Well folks, my batting average was and still is a respectable 750. Three runs made, two catches made, one embarrassing strike out made. We won. Couldn’t have done it without you, Greg. Hey, everybody out for Chinese food!

I excused myself and walked six blocks home alone, hoping to settle my stomach still churning that sugar goo from three hours before. I felt even worse once I arrived in the bathroom and spent a good long session praying to the god of porcelain, with disappointing results. Your brain knows it’s better if you hurl, but you can’t force mother nature or Costco.

Then I stretched out flat on the floor in the dark, swooning. Don and the partiers came home, and eventually I fell asleep. The next morning my belly still hurt, not to mention my shoulders, arms, legs, neck, butt and hands, but I also went to the breakfast table for coffee and grapefruit knowing I had played the game and not badly.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Ahhh. She was only the moonshiner's daughter, but I loved her still!
Jeff: Was that a shotgun wedding, Mutt? As in: wife or death?
Mutt: Marriage, my friend, is the mourning after the knot before.
Jeff: Let’s see: aisle, altar, hymn ... thought the bride as she entered the church.
Mutt: And please allow me to express myself in poetry.
Jeff: Be my guest, sir.
Mutt: An ode to marriage:
He goes to adore
He rings the belle
He gives his name to a maid.
And He's taken in.
Jeff: A gem, a gem, you’re a true artist, a true artist. Now can I tell a conjugal story?
Mutt: By all means do.
Jeff: A man and his wife were on vacation on a remote Caribbean island. The man was lying under a palm tree relaxing in the shade when his wife walked over. "Honey," she said, "let's go snorkeling now. There are many fascinating sea creatures for us to see." To this he replied, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?"
Mutt: Oowah!

Boomer Angst, Back Again

A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. (Henry James)

Come here. I’ll let you glimpse in the window at my mid-lifeness, for Mr. Jim Houston told me, quoting William Morris: “Writing is finding out what I didn’t know about what I knew.” Apply liberally to self. Because I don’t know what’s wrong with me or why, but I do find myself asking myself, “what do you want,” several times a day. Though sometimes the question is: WHAT DO YOU WANT!!!

The severe thing is that I have no consistent answer. The severer thing is that the answer may be that I already have what I really want. It’s become a path to a pathological question, one that everyone I know can eagerly debate to infinity, except those who’ve brainwashed themselves, or are anesthetized, or sold-souls, or are so busy they don’t ask, don’t tell.

There’s a new lottery in Italy that pays a good monthly wage (about triple mine) for life. No millions raining from heaven, but the common sense of paying bills and having a little left for a summer trip or a new bicycle. This is a country in which the wages are so low, they call it the fourth week problem. You can eat pasta and fagioli and keep the lights on for three weeks, then the cash runs out. Most bank accounts contain hundreds of euros, alternating red - black. Squeak.

So do I want dirty money? Financial security, 10-weeks salary a month, the relaxation response? My buddy Mike has always accused me (correctly) of searching for the leisure life, riding the gravy train, taking it E.Z. Would that reduce the tension? But, wait a sec, the poor people I’ve met around the world are often the happier. Couldn’t I just trust that the cash flow will keep flowing like the water cycle and peace out?

So is it spiritual bliss I want? Hell yeah. Only I’m not on any spiritual track so finding something I’m not looking for is gonna be extra hard. I think enlightenment takes more work than luck. Plus I lost my faith about forty years ago. Other than that …

Or do I confuse bliss and peace with tranquilizers and neck massages? Maybe I just want the stress to go down a notch or two, not all the way to zero like a flat line. That sound dangerous, huh? Plus I’ve become a coffee drinker in my old age. Awakeness please.

So I want movement, excitement, rock and roll, shit happenin’, hoppin’ and boppin’? Yeah, I guess, whatever. A rise in my Levis? Hey, let’s not get into that. A hot actress? A wonder woman? My buddy George once said to me, “it’s not that big of a deal.” Extreme wisdom in seven short words. Not worth chasing the bunny’s tail round the track every day.

And while it’s been scientifically proven that men think about sex 99% of the time, I believe that to be high by several points. As Dr. Jane Goodall said, more or less, “Yes, chimps have wars, but that doesn’t mean humans have to have wars. We have the instinct, but we also have self-control.” And self-denial, I add, and self-pity and self-centeredness and self-loathing.

So where’s the power? What big big dream is left? I want … um … I want the Nobel Prize for originality, the Olympic Gold for being me. Will I be a great school teacher? (1970’s) A folk singer? (1980’s) A scholar? (1990’s) A novelist? (2000’s) I can have all these lives in one, but then I can’t have one in one. And I may have passed the expiration date for each career. I am now older, for example, than every player on my baseball team, every player in all of baseball AND the Giants manager (ancient Bruce Bochy’s 4 months younger than I). So though I may train and dream, it is unlikely I’ll make the team. Another job I’ve cut myself out of.

Is it ‘work sucks’ versus ‘find a job you love and never work another day’? To paraphrase Confucius (read ‘confusions’). A promotion, a career, a position of prestige, recognition of professional excellence? Well, in this funny country prestige is bought and sold; professional excellence is punished; a career is a sick joke. So maybe the Sicilians are right: work less is best. Get out of anything you can, the smartest avoid the strenuous. But you can’t get out of one thing.

“What’s that, Martin (tell us wise guy)?”
“You can’t not be yourself.”
“Clever.”

If you alone feel a sense of duty, pride in a job well done, a foreign sense of the just-ness of credit earned and given, then you can’t “do as the Romans do.” You gotta be yourself (to be true) simply because you can’t be/do any other way/one. There’s the wild dog metaphor again. In Italian work jargon a “wild dog” is someone who doesn’t play by the rules, someone out of control and, therefore, dangerous. Grrr.

What’s left (he asks in his questioning, questionable anti-sermon)? Dunno. I’m spinning around the Merry-Go-Round without getting anywhere, and the colored lights, the painted horseys, the flashing mirrors, and the tinkling music I liked so much when I was young are giving me the creeps, about to make me puke. I’ve auto-diagnosed some pre-freak-out form of epilepsy. It was fun while it was fun, then it became the Twilight Zone. Dudududu dudududu.

I think more than one person has concluded that we girls just wanna have fun. Then the question becomes, “What do you like?” But I’m a Norski, so the answer is elusive, and the question's unintelligible. We’re worker bees, not lazy street dogs rolling on their backs moaning for a scratch with their legs spread apart. We’re Scandinavian protestants on a mission, not He-Done-ists. Back to the grindstone, boy, like it or not. And a sugar cookie on Christmas. Back to rolling the grindstone up the muddy hill, that is. Sissy.

If I were alone in this feeling of taking myself hostage—mime in a phonebooth—I’d call myself crazy and shut up, but recent conversations with friends my age tell me it’s a crowded boat with no rudder, oars or sail (and no boat). We’re all seasick with no land in sight. Let’s play Charades! I know, let’s sing BINGO!

Hyla Bolsta put it best in her essay (scroll down a couple months). And re-read Ken Kesey’s spiel on the Mystery (also below).

Well, I’d like to blabber on some more, but I gotta get back to work. As Surmelian said: "... writing out of his own bleeding wounds; knowing he is probably the most absurd of men ..."

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: So tell me a story and make it good.
Jeff: A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named Amal. The other, who goes to a family in Spain; is named Juan. Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his natural mom. Upon receiving it, she tells her husband that she wishes that she also had a picture of Amal. Her husband responds, “If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Amal.”
Mutt: I don’t get it.
Jeff: Tough.
Mutt: Here’s mine, watch out. There were two skunks—Out and In. When In was out, Out was in. One day Out was in, and In was out. Their mother, who was in with Out, wanted In in. “Bring In in,” she said to Out. So Out went out and brought In in. “How did you find him so fast?” the mother asked. “Instinct,” he replied.
Jeff: P.U.

Origin of a Scar

A British friend, let’s call him Neal, had an accident many years ago in Germany. He’s a big burly guy, from up North. He doesn’t talk or dress like John Steed, but he has a gentle charm and can tell a great story. Here’s what happened.

Neal was getting off a train, walking along the platform, when someone asked him directions in English. Being an extremely obliging chap he turned to help the English couple find the exit. Neal speaks fluent German and can read the long signs. He felt a warm glow in his heart for having helped his countrymen on their way in a strange land. As he proceeded down the platform, Neal, who’s about six feet two, wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings, still glowing with pride for his small Samaritan act, and he bashed his head full on into an overhanging sign.

Why or how the Germans could leave a sign hanging over the railway platform low enough for a tall but not basketball tall fellow to crack his head on is a question with no answer. The fact is that Neal hit his head so hard that he blacked out, fell right there on his back, blood gushing from his forehead.

A thin German woman, not unattractive but clearly quite shaken, was the first to offer assistance by kneeling beside Neal and trying to rouse him. "Geht's dir gut?" Maybe she thought he was dead. However, as she bent over his bleeding face it was too much for her, and she fainted and fell onto Neal with her beautiful bosom right on his face. I cannot say that this felicitous position was what finally aroused Neal’s spirits, but he did come to and awoke under the weight of a strange woman’s boobs.

Naturally, he could not really comprehend the situation, and so he carefully pushed his helper’s limp body off his own, lifting her upwards with his strong arms. His arms may be strong, but Neal was just as sensitive to the sight of blood as his passed-out German friend was. When he raised the woman and saw that her entire chest was covered in blood dripping down onto his face, Neal thought that she was the one bleeding, and the sight made him faint again.

I think I will leave the couple right there on the train platform, wilted but still breathing, sharing their bodies in a ritual of intimacy, the bloody embrace. Not unlike the couples in ancient ballads or Hammer films. Rather touching actually.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Today is Thursday, you know what that means…
Jeff: A special guest? Annette? Spin and Marty?
Mutt: Definitions!
Jeff: You mean like “Alarms: What an octopus is.”?
Mutt: Dockyard: A physician's garden.
Jeff: Pasteurize: Too far to see.
Mutt: Toboggan: Why we go to an auction.
Jeff: Enough. If you want anymore, go look ‘em up in our book: Mutt and Jeff are the Funniest Guys on Earth by Mutt and Jeff.
Mutt: That’s the one. It’s about voyeurism.
Jeff: Right. A peeping tome.
Mutt: Did you know that reading while sunbathing naked makes you well-red?
Jeff: Boy, am I glad I can’t read.

Peekaboo, I see you.

A close friend just had both eyes operated on. My spouse recently got new custom-made contacts, and I got new, very progressive lenses for my fashionable yellow spectacles. We can all see better than ever before. It’s a coming into focus from the slightly blurred vision of so many years. It’s a high-definition miracle of new, improved eyesight. It’s a shock.

The houses I see from my balcony all have lovely clear lines; the windows have curtains, and behind the curtains I can finally see dancers, partiers, and couples making love and fighting and murderers disposing of bodies. I can see everything I couldn’t see before, the gold pot at rainbow’s end, the guy in the hood hiding around the corner. Those roadsigns jump out at me, telling me where to go and what to buy. At long last I can tell a strike from a ball even sitting in the upper deck.

There’s a problem with seeing too clearly. 20-20 vision is considered normal (called 10/10 in Europe), but 20-10 is too good, it’s very disturbing to the psyche. Blind people who have had sight restored through surgery, for example, often have serious neuro-perception and adaptation difficulties. Cataract surgery has been around since ancient times, bringing sight to the partially and totally blind. About 3 million procedures are done each year in the U.S. The new awareness is both a joy and a burden.

... she was permanently blind in that eye. A disfiguring layer of scar tissue formed over it, rendering the previously outgoing child self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to poetry writing. Although when she was 14 the scar tissue was removed—and she subsequently became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class—she came to realize that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin "really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out." Who said that? Alice Walker.

I’ve read about people who kill themselves after losing their sight, but also about people who kill themselves after regaining lost sight. Some of the ex-blind become dependent and weak, refusing to socialize. Some continue as if they were blind in a tactile world, ignoring their new sense. The longer they’ve been blind, the harder it is to see. The eyes say yes, the brain and heart say no.

On a small scale, new glasses cause headaches. All those details to process, all that sensual bombardment. It’s tiring for the rusty old wheels. It takes growing into.

Peekaboo [the baby game] is thought by developmental psychologists to demonstrate an infant’s inability to understand object permanence. Object permanence is an important stage of cognitive development for infants. Numerous tests regarding it have been done, usually involving a toy, and a crude barrier which is placed in front of the toy, and then removed, repeatedly. In early sensorimotor stages, the infant is completely unable to comprehend object permanence. Psychologist Jean Piaget conducted experiments with infants which led him to conclude that this awareness was typically achieved at eight to nine months of age. Infants before this age are too young to understand object permanence. A lack of Object Permanence can lead to A-not-B errors, where children reach for a thing at a place where it should not be. (from Wikipedia)

You’re getting my drift, right? All this can be taken metaphorically (duh). Hard to see crude reality, reaching in the wrong place, etc. You can make poetry or philosophy or horror stories from the sight/insight motif. Better wise and weighted-down, or light, happy and stupid? Oops, answer’s in the question. (It is?) As always, the eyes have it.

When I was eight years old I went to visit the Blind Camp, and I was the only sighted kid in camp. But, heck, I’ll tell you about that another time.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft it sank, proving once and for all that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
Jeff: I’m sorry for you.
Mutt: Whatever for, my dear friend?
Jeff: You’ve got it all wrong.
Mutt: Well, lay it on me, brother.
Jeff: The husband of Kate was called to court on a charge of bigamy. Kate told the judge that her husband’s other wife, Edith, was causing too much friction in their marriage. The court ruled that he could not have his Kate and Edith too.
Mutt: For the love of Mike!
Jeff: Quite. And I propose we should quit right there.
Mutt: Fine. This one is true though: a polar bear, a giraffe and a penguin walked into a bar. The bartender said, "What is this? Some kind of joke?"
Jeff: Joke? What’s a joke?

The White SUV of Pershing Avenue

That big sweeping S-curve on Highway 5 just after the Pershing Avenue exit is where this happened. On the northbound side there’s a brown sound wall. The Red Roof Inn is on the other side of the freeway, but don’t look. Don’t get distracted; it’s raining really hard. You know what really hard means on the freeway? The rain beats the wipers in a race for visibility. And the thick spray that shoots up from the tires of trucks and cars in five lanes across of traffic (each way) is just as bad. You get pounded from above and from below, but mostly from straight ahead.

Me and my brother Paul took Mom’s ashes over to El Cerrito to the Sunset View Cemetery (I’m not making up that name to go with this blog) on my last full day in California. It was raining, but it didn’t really pour until evening when I took some papers over to Stockton for Dad to sign.

In the car I was listening to NPR, somebody bitching about something, and, though I take conscientious responsibility for being an informed citizen, I couldn’t take that anymore. I switched to classical music from Sacramento to sooth the savage beast within. Perhaps classical music’s comforting effect saved my life. I’ll give it partial credit.

So dark and pouring that the lights on the Stockton freeway gave no light, headlights looked like fireflies, the red brake lights prismed and strobed, so loud and wet it was like being inside an automatic carwash with no escape, like the metal roof might cave in. Five lanes full of traffic, cars and trucks, flying blind. I’m in the second lane, trying to go as slow as is safe. Alert but with plenty on my mind.

A white SUV streaks across from the fast lane, cuts across all five lanes and, sideways but still skidding forward, is suddenly right in front of me. I watch it careen diagonally skating, spinning clear around, going up on two wheels thirty feet ahead showing me its tender white flank, slamming down gracefully, struggling against the pull of momentum to keep itself from flipping numerous times at seventy miles per hour (killing the occupants and maybe myself), steering into the slide, as they say, and, finally, righting itself in sort of a forward direction by slapping up against the gray car beside mine which ricocheted off to the right banging against the brown stone wall as if attempting to climb it, but not flipping completely over either and coming to rest in the emergency lane, while the culprit white bully caromed off and spun back over to the left and halted against the center divider.

I was at the head of the pack of trucks and cars, pickups and vans watching fate play its hand right in front of us. We couldn’t stop to offer assistance. We couldn't talk it over amongst ourselves. The two cars involved were sitting safe and stopped in opposite off-highway lanes. We came out of our brake-slowly-but-don’t-slam-your-foot-down-or-you’re-dead mode (there’s always a big danger of creating a famous Interstate 5 multi-car pile-up from behind), so we put the foot back on the gas and gingerly pulled forward away into the black tempest. I took the next exit and drove through town a while.

What was I thinking at that slow-motion, surreal moment:

My Mom just died so if I slam into that white side door, who cares?

Nothing to worry about; I have classical music on.

That car is sliding forward sideways at the same speed I’m going, so I’m not actually getting any nearer to it. How weird.

Those two cars just crashed but didn't make any noise.

That driver did something extremely stupid to get into this mess, but he (maybe she) is doing pretty well to get out of it alive. Stunt driving, I’ve seen this on TV.

Am I invincible, immortal?

Brake slow and don’t move that steering wheel. Better to plow right into him than flip your own self. (Remember Don's whole family unharmed thanks to seatbelts after fifteen rolls thanks to an exploding Firestone.)

And lastly, this is going to make a great story.

I watched through the windshield like on a television screen, calm throughout the dream-sequence; panic out-trained from me, as my friends told me happened at the World Series of 1989. 50,000 people kept their seats, waited until the roads cleared, left when called section by section in an orderly fashion. So it does work. All that jumping under your desk at school, the drills. Boy, are we ready for the A-bomb!

The white SUV of Pershing Ave. was a moving target, swimming away from me, not a white buffalo in the middle of the road, ka-bam. It wasn't a ghost either. And it wasn’t O.J. Simpson’s get-away car or the white SUV in the Jennifer Hudson tragedy. But it was a car type that Hollywoodists like. The Stockton country club parking lots are full. Well, I’m glad this one was only scratched up a bit (to say 'you deserve it, ya rich bastard' would be excessive and mean). When I drove back by an hour later both cars were long gone. Yet there is a sort of class struggle symbolized by my 1992 faded gray Toyota avoiding contact with a brand new pearly white luxury car. You don't have ALL the luck.

I’m grasping for meaning, obviously. Many lives could have been ruined forever. Yet, in a sense, I enjoyed the dance, the swoop and swoosh, like full shopping carts on ice, like some Takeshi's Castle game or the planchette on a Ouiji board. I was happy to have had an original experience. Hey, man, there’s something you don’t see every day. Moby Dick up close.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Good thing we'll never run out of math teachers.
Jeff: Why not?
Mutt: Because they always multiply.
Jeff: Old mathematicians never die, they just disintegrate.
Mutt: Old number theorists never die, they just get past their prime.
Jeff: Did you hear? The math professor went crazy with the blackboard. He did a number on it.
Mutt: Don’t interrupt. Old numerical analysts never die, they just get disarrayed.
Jeff: Old bookkeepers never die, they just lose their figures.
Mutt: Old accountants never die, they just lose their balance.
Jeff: You know, if you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.
Mutt: I know. I used to sell computer parts, but then I lost my drive.
Jeff: Old hardware engineers never die, they just cache in their chips.
Mutt: Old programmers never die, they just branch to a new address.
Jeff: Is it math week or something?
Mutt: No, why?
Jeff: These jokes.
Mutt: What jokes?

(Mutt and Jeff salute Don Pedersen teaching math in a new school and badly in need of new material.)

Will the Circle be Unbroken?

Mother nature, mother Earth, mother tongue, the motherland—what goodness the one who knew us first and best.

A time for clinging and a time for breaking away, recalling embrace and no one there to embrace anymore. Chilliness, missingness, wrongseemingness.

‘Member the water cycle: evaporation-precipitation? The tears she shed when I left in 1978 I reused when she left last week, shivering under a shadow blanket on a Delta airplane that, though racing at 550 mph, could never make it on time. No point in even going to the hospital. And, yesterday, in visiting the cemetery I was too early—no marker yet, no ashes. Incurable bad timing, forgiven I know.

Well-accompanied by Dad (stronger than he looks), three tall brothers and a sister who’s really a cousin. And well wishes, many messages of affection—maybe she’s telling me to can it with the invisible man fantasy. People aren’t blind: they saw her; they see me. I am her son. I can do better.

They didn’t all see her as I did though—my only mother (thanks to me), her only son (for a couple years), but they took note despite the quiet and private. I was impressed how good ol’ Ma impressed them so. It’s not the squeaky wheel after all.

I heard less “better place” nonsense, and it angered me less than I expected. Still I am angry Mom can’t just be here like before. Like always, to count on. A part of me. Bye.

And finally I might know what this means:
Happy trials, Martin


Mutt and Jeff will return next week.

Lessons from Zimbabwe - part 3

I’m walking down a path outside the centre, by myself strolling around, probably whistling, and I meet a man or woman or child: “Mangwanani,” I say. They respond “Mangwanani, marara sei?” I answer, “Ndarara mararawo,” and they respond, “Ndarara.” Usually this also involves a hand shake, or hand grasp really, with one shake maybe. It all takes about thirty seconds. If they greet me first, I’m the responder. The problem is that you must go through this rigmarole with every single person you encounter. Imagine walking down a busy sidewalk and stopping for a greeting ritual with every single person. And that’s good morning; it changes to good afternoon and good evening as the day progresses, and if you meet a group you can’t say hello to the group, you have to go through the routine with each individual. Africa teaches you to slow down, which is the secret of time. Whatever you’re rushing off to do, it’s not as important as greeting the person in front of you right now.

I’m walking down a path, and I meet a boy about seven years old, one of the many children too poor to go to school and learn English. He has a ball he’s kicking made of some stuffing, grass or cloth or cardboard, completely covered in duct tape. It wasn’t very round, but he kicked it as he walked. When he stopped twenty feet in front of me, without a word I made a slight gesture with my head, and he kicked the ball over to me. I kicked it back as best I could. The day before I’d been laughed off the soccer field at the school because I couldn’t pass to my teammates. My stupid response was, “Wait till baseball season!” Now with this little boy I did better, blocking and kicking back, over and over. We played for at least half an hour then quietly went on our ways. I’ve never told this story because I don’t know what it means, but it has always stuck with me.


The pastor of the little church where the beautiful hymns were sent up to the heavens organized a dinner in my honor. Sadza, like polenta, was served with vegetables and sauce. We honored guests also had delicious stew meat and gravy with our porridge. Outside there was quite a struggle over who was allowed to sit and eat with us and who was left out. My good friend, Israel Chisosa, a young teacher, and I talked vivaciously the whole time. It was a great party. Then I was formally thanked for my visit and more songs were sung. Every single person had to shake hands with Baba Pedersen afterwards. Many were worried because I was not married. They wished me many children.
On the way home I was thoroughly happy, and I asked Baba Finster what meat we’d had that was so exquisite. “Don’t ask,” he said. “You mean it was goat?” I insisted. “They rarely eat meat. It was in your honor.” “What was?” I really didn’t get it. “That they killed the family dog.” Oh.

After I left in 1975 the war got worse as independence loomed. My friend and host, Bishop Abel Muzurewa, was the peace-making leader of a transition government, before the oligarch Robert Mugabe (1979). The freedom fighters, drunk on homemade beer, came to warn the Finsters to leave. The Dendera Community Development Centre was taken over by the rebels as a base camp, and they destroyed everything there. Now nothing remains. Well, a great deal remains actually. I carry some around with me all the time.


Happy trials and Fambai zvakanaka, Martin


Mutt: Hmmm. A contest then, a duel?
Jeff: And I’ll give you first strike.
Mutt: You’re on. Acupuncture: a jab well done.
Jeff: A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.
Mutt: The dead batteries were given out free of charge.
Jeff: Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.
Mutt: A will is a dead giveaway.
Jeff: A boiled egg is hard to beat.
Mutt: You win. I give. Uncle!!!
Jeff: Nix, Mutt, nix. A gentlemen’s draw.

Lessons from Zimbabwe, part 2

Besides Dendera I spent several days at the Nyadire Hospital with its nursing school and teacher training college. I spoke to all the classes, had great political discussions with the young people my age (I was 20), and we enjoyed an afternoon of tennis (with very dead balls). The Finsters and I stayed with a Finnish nurse who helped out there (no doctors), and she taught me to play Mah Jong. One evening we were playing when Anika excused herself to go operate on the pregnant woman I had brought in. An hour later she rejoined the game. Mother and baby fine. In Nyadire health care is urgent but matter-of-fact. (This was before the AIDS epidemic.)

My grandmother’s cousin, named Alice Whitney, has always been a legendary figure in our family. She was a missionary for many years in Nyadire where she founded an orphanage. Many mothers died in childbirth so their children were cared for at the orphanage for a couple years and then returned to their families. Alice Whitney met with me in Berkeley before I went over to give me letters and photos, messages and instructions on who to greet. In Nyadire I met the head nurse who had been her assistant; I think her name was Joyce. She was happy to have news from Amai Whitney, now an elderly woman, but she explained to me that she wasn’t feeling very well that day: a malaria attack. I got the disease myself a few weeks later.

On our little tour of the two-room orphanage I noticed that the naked babies came and went from the dirty outdoors to the filthy tiled indoors. There was even some excrement and urine on the floor. I didn’t say a word, but Joyce explained that they had had a problem a few years prior when some Swiss nurses had taken over after Amai Whitney left. They had sterilized the surroundings and kept the entire environment sanitized. The babies were much healthier. As soon as they returned to their families in the villages, the children died from lack of antibodies. Now they kept the orphanage only semi-clean and encouraged the kids to play outside on the ground.

Another tragedy had happened before my arrival. The year before I went, another young American man had volunteered to work the summer in Dendera. At the airport he met with three European nurses he was to accompany into the tribal lands and drove them in a borrowed jeep. While barreling along the bumpy highway toward Mozambique he saw a rabbit in the road, swerved to miss it by instinct, flipped the jeep several times, then crawled out yelling, “Is everyone okay?” All three of the nurses were dead. Could have been me.

In Mtoko one day, where we stopped to get the mail, a little boy brought me an mbira, the wonderful thumb piano of the Shona. He had carved out the inside of a board and burned a pattern on top. The tines were bicycle spokes beaten flat. I gave him a little money and was initiated into the music of the mbira. First thing I did back in California was get the only record of mbira music available (The Soul of Mbira, recorded by Paul F. Berlinger). Music as beautiful as any I’d ever heard. Music as spiritual as the wind blowing, a creek flowing, or the tiny birds in the baobab trees. I didn’t see Victoria Falls, but I heard the sound through the mbira. I heard the now-vanished antelope herds. Suffering and resistance. Listen to this record and compare it to the singers at the Grammy Awards. They have no idea what singing really means deep down inside. All their narcissistic vocal gymnastics cannot compare to the simple voices of Africa.

Happy trials and Toonana mangwana, Martin


Mutt: Remember Bertha? With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
Jeff: When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she’d dye.
Mutt: She fell onto an upholstery machine and was fully recovered.
Jeff: She was a geology professor, right?
Mutt: Yeah. Until she discovered that her theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.
Jeff: No, I don’t remember Bertha.
Mutt: Me neither.
Jeff: Did you know that when fish are in schools they sometimes take debate?
Mutt: No. But I know that a bicycle can’t stand alone, it is two tired.
Jeff: Okay, I’ve got one to shut you up. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Mutt: Oowah!

Lessons from Zimbabwe, part 1

Zimbabwe is suffering: AIDS, inflation, hunger, dictatorship. It was when I was there too, thirty-five years ago. In 1975 I spent a long summer in the Mtoko Tribal Trust Area (Chief Johnny Mtoko’s land), in the northeast corner (of then Rhodesia) near the Mozambique border at a place called the Dendera Community Development Centre. It was run by a couple from Sacramento, California: Bill and Esther Finster. Bill was a forestry manager hoping to bring back the trees that the locals cut for firewood, a losing battle in a desperate, parched land. At the center we had a clinic (with a nurse and an aide), a church, an adult literacy program, and an agriculturalist teaching farming/gardening in perpetual drought conditions. There was a reservoir that, in the dry season, women would walk even 25 miles to use, sleep overnight on the ground outside our house, then carry a jug of water home on their heads another 25 miles home. The precious water was infected with bilharzia, a parasite. Across the big pond there was a public school. Since it cost a dollar a year to send a child, most families could not afford it. They had no income.

And there was a civil war going on that was a decade old. We heard fighting nearby, but our center was protected by both sides. Probably because we treated both government soldiers and freedom fighters at the clinic (I was told to stay away when they arrived). For civilians I drove the ambulance (a right-drive Land Rover) on the long trip (about 4 hours) to Nyadire Hospital along the main A2 highway, a horrible, non-maintained dirt road, while another driver named Joseph would drive the smaller roads and trails around our area to pick up people because the roads were mined by the guerrillas, and Joseph knew where the mines were.

I helped Bill and Esther (Baba and Amai). I boiled oil drums of water. I tended to the chickens, fast little devils. I gathered the pawpaws. I washed clothes on a washboard and took showers outdoors from a sort of watering can on top of a ladder. I drew posters for the nurse to teach mothers how to keep their children alive. I recorded the beautiful singing of our friends who gathered in our living room after curfew (risking arrest). I unpacked barrels of books donated by the Americans and made a library.

One day I was supposed to meet with the school children, and I was very punctual (naturally), whereas their teacher was an hour late. So while waiting I grabbed a picture book from the new untouched library and read to them. It was a popular book among American kids: The Bear’s Christmas, all about snowmen and reindeer. The African kids seemed to enjoy it, all sitting up close and staring wide-eyed at the pictures (I couldn’t tell how much English they spoke; their native language was Shona). I ended with the usual, “Any questions?” and one brave soul asked, “What’s a bear?” Oops. I tried to explain. A furry animal big as an ox that lives in the forest. “What’s a forest?” Um, a bunch of trees, big trees. And then the killer question: “What’s snow?” The teacher arrived and saved me from further embarrassment.

Baba Finster had built all the buildings in the complex himself, including their small farmhouse with a kitchen table next to the window with yellow curtains. The people that Amai helped as she could would sit on the ground right outside that window. Women and their nursing babies mostly. They would not beg or demand, just sit there. Hungry. Starving. Watching us eat. Every day. We had simple food, much of it canned (no fridge), fruit for dessert, orange squash and coffee. We saw the starving, dying people a few feet away and ate our meals while trying to get radio reception (it came and went) for our only contact with the outside world. We ate so we would be fit to continue helping these gentle, warm folks. They all have names, you know, all those babies that die. Their families love them all and cry at their funerals. The Shona are good, kind people who just don’t have resources.


I was eager to do something important at Dendera so Baba showed me the closet full of weird stuff sent from America. One thing struck me: a volleyball and net. He said skeptically, “You want to set it up? Go ahead.” I worked with Thomas the handyman to set up two poles and boundary lines, all measured precisely. Then I pumped up the ball, and, in the evening, after the clinic and school closed, I invited everyone to come play. I showed how to serve and hit, but the Africans were not bothered by regulations and technique; they liked to have ten on a side (or fifteen) and just hit the ball around and laugh. Keeping score became unimportant or impossible. I saw all these friends, who had lived in hardship all their lives, come every evening before sundown to play a chaotic volleyball game. The shouts of joy could be heard all around the complex, but we also heard bombs, grenades and gunfire from over the copse. Sometimes the nurse excused herself to go treat an injured fighter. The Shona lived in a country at war with itself (1965-1980). Nothing could stop that, but volleyball did raise a smile. A bizarre normalcy.

I had virtually no contact with the ruling white minority during my time spent in the tribal territory. I only drove through Salisbury (now Harare) on my way to the airport. I experienced a lot and learned a lot. I gave away most of what I brought from home (a frisbee, a flashlight, a harmonica), but I took with me a lifetime of lessons learned in only 3+ months. Maybe being there for a short time clarified the events for me; after 30+ years in Sicily almost nothing is clear, and I feel I have almost nothing to share about this culture. I’m not the sociologist in the family.

So what were these great lessons I got from this enchanting, unlucky, once-glorious people, the Shona? 1. Know your context. 2. Look after yourself, then others. 3. Find a reason to laugh. That’s kind of a phony list of platitudes. You can do better. We don’t need the slogans, but we do need one another’s stories. And we need to meet others to know ourselves. So, young people, go to college but also go to Africa and say, “how can I help?” Once the great continent’s healthy again, it will teach us all about how to live.

I’ll put some of my field recordings from Dendera, Mtoko, Zimbabwe on Martin’s Moan and Drone.

Happy trials and Toonana, Martin


Mutt: Did you know sir …
Jeff: Uh, oh, here it comes.
Mutt: That the roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference?
Jeff: Jolly good, old chap. Did you hear about the butcher who backed up into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?
Mutt: No. But I did hear about the dentist and the manicurist who fought tooth and nail.
Jeff: Nix, Mutt, nix. I heard that when the smog lifts in Los Angeles, U.C.L.A.
Mutt: Oowah! I heard that when a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
Jeff: Please stop, for the love of Mike. My calendar's days are numbered.
Mutt: Help!

(Mutt and Jeff salute old friend Paul Dirdak currently in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.)

Who’s Mutt and Jeff Anyhoo?

The official story:
"Mutt and Jeff were comic-strip characters from the early 20th century. A precursor to Laurel and Hardy, they were two working-class everymen -- drinking, gambling, and getting in hot water with their wives. In 1907, a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist named Bud Fisher ...
By 1915 Mutt and Jeff were a national phenomenon. Many people consider "Mutt and Jeff" to be the first daily comic strip.
Mutt was a tall, lanky man with a penchant for the ponies, while Jeff looked like the Monopoly man after a rough weekend. Mutt and Jeff were affable losers -- the guys in the cheap seats at horse races on a Wednesday afternoon. Characteristic catch phrases used by Mutt and Jeff included "Nix, Mutt, nix!", "For the love of Mike!" and "Oowah!""

Officialer story:
Many years ago I lived alone in a shack by a canal. The plaster was rotting and the mould stinking so I usually left a door open when I was inside the one room kitchen-bedroom-study. There were two cats from the neighborhood who would walk into my house like bored housewives in a shopping mall, stroll around, sit a while, eventually traipse off till the next day. I called them Mutt and Jeff. I talked to them often. Maybe they understood English, or maybe they thought they could pick it up from listening to me.
Then one spring day a tragedy occurred. Mutt and Jeff, my only two buddies at the time, were in front of the shack where I could see them through the glass door, and what they were doing shook me and shocked me. Jeff was on top of Mutt (or vice versa) from the rear biting his neck and they were both screeching in intense pain, wiggling to get free, and ecstatic. I finally realized that one of them was a female and felt so strongly “in the mood” that I could smell it through the closed door. I’m not sure which, since I could never tell them apart. I bet they knew which was which.

The real true authentic story:
I hate Mutt and Jeff. They always criticize me and make fun of me. I wish they’d leave me alone. I’m very sensitive and can’t take it anymore. At least they don’t listen to my songs on the other blog (Martin’s Moan and Drone), or there’d really be some hooting.
And what are those jokes? I don’t get them. It seems they mean to be funny, but come on! Humor, to be humorous, must be much more intelligent than their weak one-liners. Example:
A punster entered a local paper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns with the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, NO PUN IN TEN DID.

Ha, ha. Now that’s funny. Get it? No pun in ten did.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: For the love of Mike!
Jeff: Nix, Mutt, nix!
Mutt: Oowah!
Jeff: Oowah!

Talk to us, you old grouch!

We who loved J. D. Salinger’s books passionately are sad, of course, that the old man’s finally died, but we’ve carried around for decades a sort of ambivalent admiration for his reclusive resistance, a model non-conformism with ourselves as victims, mixed with a longing for his voluntary muteness to end so that we might once again hear our favorite songster hit the high notes.

In the late sixties—that era of youth being youth (living like there was no tomorrow, against all parents and pigs), loud colors, assassinations, moonshot triumph and Vietnam debacle—I survived adolescence (without finding the sense in it, however) thanks to Salinger, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Tolkien, Conan Doyle, Herbert, Saroyan, Fleming and Thurber. There are others that don’t come back to mind after forty years, but these writers kept me going; I systematically read every book they wrote.

I’m sure high school would have been dreadful anyway, but it didn’t help that I was almost two years younger than my classmates. The girl sitting next to me in sophomore English dropped out of school because she got pregnant, while I asked myself what precisely that meant and how it was accomplished with no answer forthcoming.

I bought my copy of Catcher in the Rye at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. It was covered in butcher paper and tape, still a banned and shameful book in many places. The thought of someone hiding forbidden-nastiness with fifty strips of scotch tape was hilarious and pathetic. I left the paper on and read Catcher again and again. Then I graduated to the Glass family books, which I liked even more. In 1997 my dear copy of Catcher fell off the trailer while I was moving and vanished. Wonder what the finder thought.

They say that Jerry has been writing all this time. When will we get more (“want it, need it, gimme gimme gimme")? Times have changed; I’ve changed, could be a colossal letdown I suppose, yet I believe I will enjoy the next Salinger book more than just about anything. After all, I liked Cat Stevens' new record (Yusuf Islam, An Other Cup).

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
Jeff: Let me tell you, if you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.
Mutt: Oh yeah, well if you don't pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.
Jeff: Okay, show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I'll show you A-flat miner.
Mutt: Well, when you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.
Jeff: And not only that, you’re stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.
Mutt: Y’know, we should be on TV.
Jeff: Hell, we should be on Mount Olympus looking down.
Mutt: Don’t forget: when two egotists meet, it's an I for an I.
Jeff: That’s us.

Home Stretch

“Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.” John Muir

35,000 of a total 40,075 kilometers. That’s where I am. The home stretch, I call it. 5,000 to go. Then what?

I’m doing something crazy. Have been, off and on, for about fifteen years. I’m cycling (on the stationary bike in my study) around the globe at the equator. The equator intrigues me, like a rubber band around the ball we live on. Finally I can see my own tire marks up ahead.

I’m not getting anywhere though. What sense does this stunt make? Almost none. I mean, why do we humans do these things (especially men), these phony accomplishments? Will some hot blond be waiting when I cross the finish line next year with bubbly and a kiss on the cheek? Nope.

It’s not like I’m curing cancer; I’m spinning my wheels. It’s not even the best type of exercise. Certainly doesn’t help lose weight. Yet here I am—20 k per day. At about 20 km/h, as we earthlings all spin about 1,675 km/h at the equator.

What is up on top of Everest anyway, that is so worth risking one’s life and limb? Not a fountain of youth or all wisdom and peace. Litter and footprints in the snow. Are these people who do these foolish exploits merely out of their minds or lost among the lost searching for life’s meaning in the hardest places to get to? You know, more people who attempt to climb Mt. Everest (excuse a digression, but does anyone ever climb any of the other mountains around the big E or are they all ignored in favor of the celebrity climb?), uh, more people who attempt to climb Everest succeed than those who try thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

The Pacific Crest Trail goes along the peaks of the mountains from Campo on the Mexican border to Manning Park in British Columbia: 2,650 miles away (4,260 km). There are two ways to hike this trail: thru-hiking means you do the whole thing in one go, which takes roughly five months. Section-hiking means you do it in pieces (41 official sections, or 5 larger chunks-—Southern CA, Central CA, Northern CA, Oregon & Washington). You walk maybe 20 miles a day through deserts, mountains, rainforests, high plains from April or May to September or October with everything you need on your back. You carry your home. Takes about five pairs of shoes. Those few times you land in a town to stuff yourself with diner food, get mail, buy groceries to keep going, sleep in a motel (some folks sleep on the floor as the beds are too soft after months of sleeping on the ground), those breaks are like entering the twilight zone. Reality is back up on the mountains. Where you’d rather be.

The two other great trails in North America are the Continental Divide Trail and the famous Appalachian Trail. If you want to go for a nice walk just go anywhere, around the block, over to the park. If you want to experience the beauty and spirit of the mountains, go car camping, sit and stare. You thru-hike one of the triple crown trails for other reasons. There’s something inside you that drives you like a walking machine all that way, day in and day out. (What does that mean: day in and day out?)

So I’m gearing up, revving up, pumping up the funk for another two sections of the PCT to check off this August (Tuolumne Meadows to Echo Lake). Checking off seems so silly, unless you’re up there doing it, payin’ your dues, senses wide open, body fully functional. And aching. Every day you question. The answers you bring from home don’t work anymore. You have to find a new answer to the big WHY every day. It won’t be what you expect.

And when you tell the people at home what you did, what great feat you accomplished, they generally don’t give a shit. You’re stuck with it. I learned to shut up about it. It’s mine anyway.

And of those few nut cases that succeed in thru-hiking the PCT, many go back and do it again. What is there in those woods? Elves and fairies? Some Steven King spooky force? It’s not the trees or animals or stones or pain or adrenaline or solitude, but it is something. A feeling you can’t get at home. A feeling you earn.

So, wise guy, what’s the feeling of circling the globe in your own room?

5,000 to go. Then what?

Happy trials and trails, Martin


Jeff: Oh man, not another blog about “home”!
Mutt: “Home, home on the brain.”
Jeff: What brain?
Mutt: Well, he had a photographic memory but it never developed.
Jeff: Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Mutt: Did you hear about the Tibetian housewife who, upon entering her smoke-filled kitchen, said: "Oh, my baking yak!"
Jeff: Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused his dentist's novocain during root canal work?
Mutt: Yeah I did. He wanted to transcend dental medication.
Jeff: So did you hear about the UC Berkeley parapsychology professor that had really bad breath?
Mutt: Nope. Enlighten me.
Jeff: It was a case of supercalifornianmysticexperthalitosis.
Mutt: I have only one thing to say after that.
Jeff: Hit me.
Mutt: It is better to have loved a short person and lost …
Jeff: Yeah?
Mutt: Than never to have loved a tall.

Thirty Years A Broad, Now Attempting Manhood

Homey, home-boy, homeland security, homepage, homing device: these are East Coast/foreign terms, newly recycled into the national lingo. Out west we say, “Give me a home where the buffalo roam...” You laugh. But have you been there and seen those brutes up close? Home on the Range being the great ecological song, as Odetta taught me, and the West being about place, the land, roots in dirt. Did you know the rock you’re sitting on was under the sea only a hundred million years back?

That’s Aldo Leopold’s shack in the photo, by the way. Whatever you do don’t look him up, don’t read A Sand County Almanac. No, no, heaven forbid. You might start reading Thoreau and Muir, Stegner and Maclean, Abbey and Dillard. Watch out. I warned you! Anyway, that is Leopold’s home. Nice, huh?

When friends from Italy come over, I take them to Ocean Beach, to Yosemite, to Tahoe, to Muir Woods, to Big Sur, maybe over to Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. They think they want to see the cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas (Europe is about cities, the countryside is mostly vegetable gardens for the city-folk, or wood farms, pastures and ski resorts), but when they see Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, the Everglades, Alaska, the Colorado Plateau and Mojave Desert, the Hawaiian isles, the Alleganys, Rockies, Sierras, the Mississippi River, Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, British Columbia, and all the little corners, plants, animals, birds, seashells, well, I hope they forget the cities a minute and stand in awe. Look at a sky bigger than your whole country and say, “Ahhhh.” Some are momentarily and appropriately awestruck; then it’s, 'okay, when do we get to see New York?'

What is this entry about? I just bought a house back in my home state of California, something I never thought I could do (sorry if the crisis is rough on you). And we spent the holiday/winter break personalizing, home-making, turning a bland crackerbox into a rat’s nest by living there, looking at the corners, breathing in the stale air, our human vibrations infusing the plasterboard.

"Homeless, homeless, moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake …?" Yes, I have been; haven’t you? Did you see Into the Wild? My ending is different. Have lived in old trailers, on people’s couches and in shacks and garages and tents, a backpack and a car with curtains. And been on food stamps and Medicaid (my grandfather was outraged that a new college grad had to go on welfare!). But poverty lends perspective (when temporary), it doesn’t scare you into living stupidly once you know how little it all matters. Like traveling to a third world country in your own life.

So I bought my first house at 50, and my second at 55. Never really thought of myself as the two-mortgage type. Maybe a hobo riding the rails, you know, with a guitar and a bedroll. Mid-Atlantic, in this case, using the guitar as a paddle. For most folks the fear is not having enough; for a few of us it’s having too much. Travel light is our mantra. Yet, here I am with two mortgages, happy as a squirrel in a nut tree.

Home is a good place for love. Making, creating, fabricating, fashioning love from the essence of a place that is yours, your own place in the cosmic scheme. Not that a couple cannot become intimate in rented digs, on someone else’s furniture. Or rather, yes, I guess that’s what I mean. Buy it or build it or paint it pink or glue your own newspaper to the walls, but if there’s no place that mirrors and echoes your love, it’s a blind, deaf, roaming homeless love. You ought to fall in love in space like Disney birds, circle around a while, then come to earth and make a nest together. A silly idea, but worth trying. I’m not guaranteeing anything, just saying.

And homesick? Have I been homesick these three decades of my adult life? Come on, Doc, what are the symptoms? What’s the cure? Is “best of both worlds” a cruel myth? Is “going native”? Straddling the border? Is the ex-pat a cry-baby? Or has it been effectively hard here where not a single person can pronounce my name? Crank up the self-pity machine and put “goin’ home” in a song for a sure hit. As for the ‘going home’ part of baseball, I’ll tackle that in an upcoming episode. Stay tuned.

What else? The Bible, no less, says: Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. Oh, I didn’t want to talk about that. We all know that old joke. I’m talking about the next-to-final resting place now, the one where you sleep and then wake up refreshed, yawn and stretch in your own soft bed. Where the books aren’t holy, and the tragedy of death is measured in burnt toast.

Or burnt down houses. Oakland Hills, Malibu, Santa Cruz County, Santa Barbara County, San Diego County, San Bernardino Mountains, Los Angeles County: thousands lost. “YOU’VE GOT THIRTY SECONDS TO GET OUT; GRAB ONE THING AND RUN!” My soul? My charming good looks? My insight into the secret workings of the universe? I’d probably just grab a scrapbook of photos and poems about my house, already lost in the fires of self-doubt.

If being a man (or woman) is an act of courage, and courage is facing up to what scares you, maybe that’s ownership, roots, permanancy, the rut, the stagnation risk, prodigal boy returning like Thomas Woolf, knowing what he knew ... well, maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s finally time.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Well ...
Jeff: Yeah. What?
Mutt: The short fortune teller escaped from prison.
Jeff: So?
Mutt: She was a small medium at large.
Jeff: Ow. How about the thief who stole a calender and got twelve months?
Mutt: How about the thief who fell and broke his leg in wet cement?
Jeff: Can I guess? He became a hardened criminal.
Mutt: Okay, how about the thief who stole corn from a garden and was charged with stalking?
Jeff: I’ve got one.
Mutt: Go for it.
Jeff: The police were called to a day care center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.
Mutt: Oh no, officer. I do not wish to give up my right to remain silent!
Jeff: You said it, man.

(Mutt and Jeff salute Paul Pedersen retiring from T.P.D. after thirty years fighting crime.)

Zen Saying

There is nothing you really have to do
Nothing you have to say
There is nothing you really have to have
Nothing you have to know
There is nothing you really have to become ...
However, it helps if you remember
That fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet.

Quoted by “No Way” Ray Echols in A Thru-Hiker’s Heart.

Whatcha want? Whatcha got?

Hello. Buy, buy. Or to paraphrase Mark Twain: Everybody complains about the Christmas shopping frenzy, but nobody does anything about it. Starts about Labor Day now, doesn’t it? Forced labor, shop till you drop. Life is all economics, right? Bad economics = bad life and vice versa. That’s what it’s all about. Give an’ take, in and out, keep the blood/money movin’ around. You shop at my store; I’ll shop at yours. Get it while it’s hot. Newer is better. The one with the most junk wins.

Remember that TV show from 30 years ago where people got five minutes in a supermarket to grab anything they wanted? Wow, what a dream, better than Halloween candy, like the 12 Days of Christmas. I want all that stuff, even if I don’t know what it is. I do know it’s all free! Complimentary, they call it now. [Sorry, can’t walk in the woods or down on the beach or look at the stars or swim in the river. Can’t enjoy breathing fresh air or drinking sweet water, gotta go downtown and get my FREE stuff. I deserve it. I need it. Or else somebody else’ll get it first.]

What if I gave you a million dollars right now? Who would refuse? (Nobody.) Think of all the great things you could do with all the great things you could buy. Sorry, I won’t. Disappointed? Do you hate your non-million dollar life so much? Boys and girls living/learning at the mall, if I only had that ... and that ...

Free at last, free at last. Will we ever be free from the Big Lie of getting something for nothing? Or ‘slave your life away and you will be rewarded’? Money brings happiness. Will they just continue to fool us every time, like lab animals that keep grabbing the cookie even though they get a shock instead of food? Can we shake this tragic distraction of the hysterical market: “Hey, buy this! Over here, buy this!” Can we have a little quiet, please?

And they sell us our opinions, our religions, our politics, our wars, our entertainment, our pastimes, even our conceptions of ourselves as a country, an ethnicity, as individuals: Who we are is right there in CostCo alongside the miracle knives and the flat tummy machine. You are what you buy, they say. You are what you sell, I say.

Yet can we not buy in, just say no? Conformists need nonconformists to define them, consumers/nonconsumers, the buyer weary/the buyer be wary. This silly new green consciousness, for example, a fad, like people didn’t live simply and self-sufficiently in our grandparents’ day. Like we didn’t know what ecologically sound meant five years ago, twenty-five, fifty-five. As my Thomas Jefferson Junior High P.E. teacher, Coach Smith, would say: “I don't buy that brand of crap!”

But we gotta buy something, some brand of crap. Can’t live on air and poetry. Or handouts for very long. And then the gentler, friendlier companies like Starbucks or Timberland or Nike turn out to be the same greedy bastards that have conned us and squeezed us out of our dough all our lives. So the people who see behind the curtain at the little man running the big machine (because they look, most people don’t want to see) know what’s going on, but what’s the alternative? What choice do we have? I used to believe that the little choices mattered (ethical shopping stress), buy the all-natural, all-organic, 100% no preservative soap, even if it doesn’t clean as well. But, you know, there are bigger pictures.

What I need is a slogan to live by. Give me an F! Give me an F?

And whatever happened to the myths, the myth of a non-crashable system, the myth of continuous growth, the myth of noble competition? Back in the seventies and eighties I took Continental Trailways buses a lot and wondered why the station was always across the street from their biggest competitor, Greyhound. Later I found out they were both owned by the same company. It was phony competition, and I was the victim. And tell me again why Microsoft saved Apple from bankruptcy? And, while you’re at it, I’d like a list of the millionaires and billionaires that lost every cent in the recent crack. The soup-lines are full of bankers, right? All we hear on TV are rich people telling us that prosperity is right around the corner, and we chase the carrot around in circles, digging a rut with our work boots.

Cogs. Maybe you’ve got a mission, a noble humanitarian calling. Maybe your work is to save lives or fight injustice or ignorance, poverty or addiction. Are you still selling something? An idea, a principle? ‘Fraid so. Wait a minute. My doctor, for example, is giving his/her gifts away, isn’t he/she? In between rounds of golf. Optimists might buy that, but we can see that the drug company mafia and the insurance company mafia and even the medical research mafia have us all by the throats and are tightening their grasp the more they perceive their power is threatened. And Republicans and Democrats keep screaming: “Brainwash me, I beg you!” I must have quit believing in good intentions (even my own) when I turned fifty. Or I’m in a particularly bad mood this morning.

I haven’t seen Michael Moore’s latest film, “Capitalism: A Love Story," but I did see “Religulous” by Bill Maher. I don’t want to spoil it for you (if you’re brave enough to watch); let’s just say that it’s related to my song “I Believe in Santa,” posted (free) on myspace (click right). As a P.K. I’m exempt from charges of blasphemy.


Yet and all, it is sad that our greatest cultural folk hero representing the values and hopes of an entire nation is not a saint or holy man (surely not St. Nick the Turk, the patron saint of pawnbrokers) or even a superior being or superhero, but merely a cardboard advertising character, cynical fakelore. Two-dimensional too, don’t look around his back; there’s only a speaker going “ho ho ho!” till the battery runs down. That’s no loving old man dealing out justice in gifts, just a phony rip-off artist selling an unhealthy fizzy drink. As the year nears its end, we don’t celebrate some comforting religious legend or the conviction that love of clan leads to redemption; we celebrate sugar water with stimulants.

Humbug and happy trials, Martin


Mutt: Finally, I agree with everything he said. Amazing how he can insult every person on earth in so few words.
Jeff: Yeah. Brilliant. Ruin Christmas. Nice move. What’s next? Our mothers never loved us? I mean, is there no shame?
Mutt: It’s a shame to let any old nutso write a blog, I say. There oughta be a suppressive writers law.
Jeff: I say to write with a broken pencil is pointless.
Mutt: And I say a backward poet writes inverse.
Jeff: This is fun, keep going.
Mutt: A lot of money is tainted: 'Taint yours, and 'taint mine.
Jeff: Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.
Mutt: They say that in a democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism, it's your Count that votes.
Jeff: And don’t forget: Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.
Mutt: One more thing ...
Jeff: What’s that?
Mutt: Santa's helpers ...
Jeff: Yeah?
Mutt: Subordinate clauses.
Jeff: Oh man, who farted?

Sunset Intersection

A painting by Robert Bechtle. A tutorial on seeing. A trip nostalgic.

I grew up on this street in the Parkside or Outer Sunset district, also called the Neighborhoods or the Avenues, formerly the Dunes, in western San Francisco out by Ocean Beach, out by the Zoo, out by Stern Grove. I didn’t live here for all of my childhood, but this is what I think of as home. This painting, by my favorite painter, is what I think of as home. Because home is an idea or, at best, an image. Not a place, real or otherwise, a google and oogle map mirage. If a home falls in the forest with no former inhabitant to hear it, it really does NOT make a sound, but wherever the former inhabitant is home is screaming all the time: "Come back, Shane, come back," in a crazed, ghostly voice inside the head. A siren call or the echo in a shell, it’s something you had once or think you did, maybe deja vu, maybe ocean view. Maybe home/heart is where you left it, where you lost it, where you broke it. Your time machine’s broke, though; you’re stranded in the now of the canvas.

Walking by these houses, after a hard day at Parkside Elementary, I told my friends lies about the Pacific trips and escapades that I’d had during the night in the belly of a friendly whale I met down the street at the beach (thanks to Disney’s Pinocchio). Mostly I described China to the Chinese girls I walked home with; mostly they giggled. My storytelling career begins on this very spot.

Every blink of an eye is a still photograph printed on the virgin cells of the brain, one added to all the rest, piling up like flapjacks, like the dead photo bin at the junk shop. Flipped through quickly they seem to be moving, huh? But what is beautiful, what is art? Pull one photo-card out of the deck. Magic trick time. Is one as good as the other? Certainly the one above is the best for me; coulda been the other side of the street, I guess. Who cares? Weird that it’s so quiet. Is it as peaceful as it seems? Actually—looky—it’s three paintings: can I switch ‘em around? Hang ‘em in separate rooms? By the way, what are you looking at right now at this instant? It could be your last, you know? How important is this experiential moment compared to all the rest? Keep flipping. Keep moving. Cut the cards and deal. Nothing up my sleeve.

Someone described this style of painting as a form of abstractism, at least from the painter’s point of view. That those are not houses necessarily, that’s not a street, cars; those are shapes, colors, lines. Stand on your head. Can you look at it like an optical illusion? A woman’s face or a vase? Can it not be the street of my youth 10,000 miles away? For you it’s easy. It’s another painting. Optical delusion.

I, painting, Sunset Intersection in this case, I challenge you; I defy you to make of me something for yourself. You can give me symbolic significance if you want, but it’s your contribution, not in my lines or intention. Yet, I’m not an empty container or a provocation either. I’m one card as good as any other, and I need you to make me. That’s your freedom. Go ahead, make me.

I ran into Robert Bechtle once at the San Francisco airport. I had time to kill before my flight and, wandering, I found a painting hidden in a corner (SFO has a great art collection) called Frisco Nova of a man watering his lawn in a middle-class neighborhood of white stucco houses. That painting shocked me. Shook me up. Never the same again. I know that man; I know that street; I am part of that picture! So that’s how I met Robert Bechtle, a San Franciscan. That’s how I met Hyper-Realism or Photo-Realism or Realism, which is NOT copying a painting from a photograph. I’ve seen sidewalk painters do that for tourists in a matter of minutes. This is painting as an exquisite philosophy. The painting asks, “Who are you?” It says, “I’m not an exhibitionist (like most of my colleagues), so why are you staring at me? Did you resist hypnosis or let yourself go under?”

A new way of seeing, intensity of intent, in that split second, right here right now: LOOK AT THIS! Look what I found; this is reality; this is the world you live in; this is outside your mind not on drugs. This is the other, but still your life, your still life. No judgment now, just live. Be. Like the eyes that saw this and froze it, the hands that took weeks to reproduce it, the eyes that saw it again. The farthest thing from the painting, Sunset Intersection, is the photo it was based on. Hey, what does that mean? Aren’t they the same? Bechtle in his workshop day after day bent over his table until he’s an old man won’t even answer that stupid question.

If it reminds you of something, even a false memory, you’re either in the painting or you’re outside looking in the painting. Enter at will. Get sucked in and spit out, back and forth. Or the painting will exit its frame for you and invade your space. Look around the airport, everything’s a painting! Go outdoors. Everywhere is important! And you’re not waking up from this dream. I dare you to walk down that street again.

I have been in the witness protection program here in Sicily for the last thirty years. Must have been something I saw. Chosen exile, self-inflicted house arrest, called ex-patriatism (not ex-patriotism, but a bit of that too). When you change your name and leave your family (who are always your family but feel betrayed or, at least, abandoned) and your friends (who find other friends fast), take all your belongings in a couple suitcases and tell them to give the rest away, it means you ain’t comin’ back. You, as you leave, ain’t never comin’ back.

And you don’t and can’t because what you would come back to doesn’t exist any more. Not the houses and trees, but you who were there are not you who are here. The you you left is gone. The photo card flipped by like those minute-flipping clocks. Ask the Chinese girls; you in the myth of the you of days past is bigger an’ better an’ braver than the you as you were. As you were. Attention! As you were. At ease.

Okay, you change, but Sunset Intersection stays the same, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the point, cryonics? Or do you look at it each time with different, older eyes? Wow, fixed as it seems, it’s never the same either. Anyway, you can’t choose, you can’t stop that flipping.

So you stood at the intersection, chose a direction, and cleared out towards a sunset. Don’t we all do that? Isn’t it called growing up? Leaving the nest? Heading off into the wilderness to seek your fortune. Into the wild. Being your own family of one, house of one, sack of bones you carry with you always. Embracing danger, courting adventure. Or do we all do that? Sometimes I feel like over here in the Land of Eternal Children, a.k.a., the Land of Spoiled Brats (Mommy do my laundry; Daddy get me a job), I’m a cowboy stuck in a briar patch of giant interconnected nests made of twigs and string, where there’s only one way out. Horizontal. Not today. I’m enjoying this painting. Wish I were there.

Happy trials, Martin


Mutt: So he found his title. ‘Bout time.
Jeff: I liked it better before. Now we’re stuck looking at the same picture every day.
Mutt: And what crap too. I may toss my cookies.
Jeff: Yeah. Nothing to get all choked up about. Sometimes he acts like such a baby!
Mutt: It’s no act. So I’ve got a question for you.
Jeff: Shoot.
Mutt: Bang.
Jeff: Well, here’s one for you: Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?
Mutt: And what happens if you get scared half to death twice?
Jeff: And if Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
Mutt: And how do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
Jeff: And, okay, so what's the speed of dark?
Mutt: Had enough?
Jeff: Damn Wright!