Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Syncretism

Three year-ends ago Jane Coffee and I took a trip to the South Coast where she showed me her camera theories and I took this meta-photograph of her photographing the moss-draped pine trees in Bullard’s Beach State Park. We were cold but the day was crystal clear that morning and the early light made everything look magical and new.
Two weeks ago I was in that area with my big brother Bob and his family. We took a side trip to Bullards after viewing the new Bandon Marsh restoration project. We were unwinding after a sad morning at Grampy’s burial service.
I took the opportunity to harvest some Spanish Moss. Not very much of it, but enough, it turns out, to make a voodoo doll.                                                                                                    Say what??

Last October when I told my friend Vera who is a sort of a wiccan type person spiritually nontraditional that I would visit New Orleans on my bus trip she got all excited that I would be down there where all those sideline practices of voodoo and hoodoo and other transplanted and swamp type religiosities are still practiced but me, I couldn’t have cared less.
My ex, Isheim, drove me around the Vieux Carre winding up at madam somebody or others voodoo emporium, but even I could see the voodoo dolls they sold were fakes made in Taiwan so I didn’t get one for Vera like I had planned. But I did start to wonder what was the deal so I have been reading up on it there’s tons of stuff on the internets and exhaustive material on Wikipedia. I found and bookmarked a site that gives step by step directions, and another site that changed my mind about this shit. It woke me up.
http://howtodovoodoo.com/how-to-make-voodoo-dolls/

This is the work in progress. I took my time letting the moss dry out and finding the skeleton sticks and meditating on my purposes and motivations and intentions. You have to be careful with this shit turns out it’s no joke. Throw out a bad intention and get nailed in the ass tenfold and I have seen that happen, not specifically with voodoo dolls but with other shit over my long and dangerous life.
Light blue is the color of family, and white is the color of healing.There's other color that I'm not so sure about but it feels right and it feels safe.. I need to do some healing and I want this thing to express my intentions and to gather the spiritual world to help out...
I have sort of an altar type place where I have some things that give me crucial vibes I won’t get into the details and it wasn’t intentional but I had this stuff I feel connected and tender about and then I scored a nice stand of shelf s out of the dumpster at the marina and these things migrated there so I’m putting my ingredients  on it to marinate the vibe.
And believe me, the vibe is there. As soon as the moss started to go around the cruciform it started feeling way bigger than me, and it was no longer a goof. To be honest it is scaring me more than a little but I think I'm OK so far. I will let you know what happens...

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Hitting Bottom

 The little white and blue sailboat way in the back is Felicity Jane my lovely moneypit shown here standing in the Ilwaco Shipyard in June of 2009 where I spent three days scraping and painting her bottom.
 This is an obviously posed photo of me supposedly at work. You can tell it is fake my clothes are perfectly clean, the bottom has already been painted brick red so why the eff would I be sanding on a part of the hull that doesn't even get paint anyway? But I do look good and serious and competent.
 Actually I was just killing time until the travellift came to pick me up and put me back in the water. 3 days was all it took
The stupid little weak looking rope across there just holds the weak looking stanchions from splaying outward with the weight of the boat which is 6,600 lbs for those of you keeping score at home.
The travel lift is very powerful and it really didn't notice the weight. Still, it is a scary thing. The Ilwaco shipyard is a great place to work on your boat
I had such a crush on this guy.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

What's with the Princes up in BC?

Whats up with the princes in British Columbia? Well, in case you wanted to know, here's what I found out.

 Rupert was an actual guy, a cousin of the king that got his head chopped off by Oliver Cromwell which is a hopelessly oversimplified version of what happened. The King was the chopee, not Prince Rupert, who was young and good looking and a bit of a dandy nobody knew least of all him that he was a gifted military mind and an inspiring leader who not only led the king's army in its losing battle with the roundheads , survived that whole mess, came back with the monarchy when it was restored ten years later but he then became a well respected admiral and practically the only consistently victorious commander in the whole sorry series of wars with the Dutch and the French and Spanish virtually everybody else on the mainland except the Germans and only because they didn't exist yet. A talented guy indeed. Lived to what passed for a ripe old age in those days, the 1600s...

Prince Rupert is only one of 50 cities in Canada named after present or past royalty. Social climbing snobbery at its worst. Having said that, I liked the town. But then I am a sucker for anyplace with salt water and boats and trees, and even some with no trees if the boats are there. I didn't do the place justice


 This guy, Lyle Campbell, is an amazingly talented sculptor.Taking a break from the monumental group of bears below, Lyle is making the first cuts on a commissioned leaping Orca. Commissions pay the bills


But shit like this group of anthropomorphized spirit bears is how I know Lyle Campbell is a genius.


This is a cedar bark hat under construction in a corner of Lyle's studio. There are very methodical coils of prepared cedar bark in racks on the wall above this bench.


This big kid is making the cedar hat. In another of an endless series of faux pas, I didn't even ask his name.

Prince Rupert has boats, trees, salt water, cool people, and a laid back attitude. I hope some day I have the good fortune to visit there again.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Del Cabo Daze

 Frank Stuart, left, with his lifelong pal Jack Devore, the two hippest characters I ever met, and  my pals as well. Frank learned color theory, classic oil painting and water color technique in the Art Alley at Folsom Prison. Jack Devore, a gifted artist, credited Frank with the  point of view that ultimately became Elastic Symbolism. Jack is , however, considered the founder of the small but influential west coast movement. His work may be seen at http://www.philo.com/
Jack and Frank, who went by the sobriquet Don Quiroga, loved to hang out in the shade and smoke reefer listening to bebop. In the late 50s, perhaps on his South American junket in the employ of  Safeway corporate headquarters supply division, Frank somehow acquired an old Spanish cape of a classical design. In the early 60s Jack and Frank traveled to Mexico, where Don Quiroga, a fluent speaker of barrio Mexican Spanish, introduced his pal Jack, who always wore the old cape, as Doctor Jose Del Cabo, his personal physician. In the early 90s Frank emigrated to Mexico, and Jack followed 10 years later. They had some very good years once again living in the same city on the west coast. Jack, who was in his early 80s at the time, died in 2010.
Frank Stuart, who is much older, possibly approaching his 90th year, is as far as I know still hanging out in the shade and smoking reefers and listening to bebop.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Photos by Jane Coffee

Mark Twain lived in a very weird house I think the bricklayer was a pothead.
Jane Coffee holding a Golden Delicious apple slightly past its peak while Jane has yet to reach hers.
Hartford has the inevitable RiverWalk modeled I believe on San Antonio's
I have permanent Nipple Erections and a totally fake smile

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Goose Grease

My pal Nan has a photo on her facebook page of an osprey sitting on the head of a plastic owl scarecrow, which pretty much tells you how owls and ospreys relate on the food chain. I see them around the marina where my sailboat lives. The plastic owls.
Back in the summer of 1992 I made a very long voyage in a 14 foot rowing-sailing craft, putting in at West Linn above the falls on the Willamette, down through the locks and on down to Astoria in 6 days, no motors, thank you very much, and not much sailing either seeing as how the wind blows up the river in the summertime, damn near 24/7 as the saying goes. But I digress.
It took a very long and miserable Sunday to even get to Portland, you wouldn’t think it was that far down the river but it is, and there were ski boats all the way going very fast not much caring about the idiot with the dreadlocks in a little rowboat. Getting myself set up to take the massive breaking wake of one such high speed dimwad I pulled real hard on the starboard oar only to hear it snap off at the fulcrum under the leather. I fished it back together with some sticks and the leather and some tuna cord but it didn’t improve my mood any or help with the blisters that were rapidly forming on the palms of both hands and on the cheeks of my tender butt I can still feel them, and later on in the bathtub…but that is another story.
So it was with a certain feeling of relief I noticed a sparsely occupied small boat dock on the west bank under the Steel Bridge where the condos across from the freightyards at union station nestle along the river there in NW Portland between there and the Broadway Bridge. I rowed on past while I thought about it but not very far and it only took a minute to get back there and swing around to the inside of the dock and tie things up and collapse into the bottom of the boat and roll out my sleeping bag kind of squinched over and I slept on my stomach all night while the city around me clanked and roared. I was tired.

There was only one or maybe two other boats there, and a gate over the walkway to the headwalk so I might not get disturbed and the half abandoned look of the dock made more sense when I saw the three inch layer of goose poop that covered every foot of the dock. Those Canadian Geese, or Black Brant, or whatever they actually are are not stupid and they don’t bother to migrate any more they have easy pickings around the city.

Here last summer 19 years later, I was going by that same little dock,  and there are still only one or two boats tied up there but as I got closer this is what I saw. Some kind of horror-movie plastic wolf or fox with rabid red eyes in a very menacing pose. Two of them.
And it did look like there was considerably less goose poop on the dock.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Shit I never got to at the time: The Player

(This piece is from September but I never got around to putting it together until much later)

I saw Marlo Stanfield on the bus today. If you are have absorbed the cult favorite television series The Wire you know what and whom I am talking about.
I believe he got on the bus in Columbus Ohio. Late twenties, quiet, self possessed, dark skinned black man, short hair, sideburns, slender, apparently made of a very high grade of corfam stainless titanium wire. I'm saying no fat and no beef just whipcord. Extremely masculine.. Sat a few rows ahead of me on the other side of the aisle. What made me really notice him was the 4g wifi stick on the laptop he was operating in his seat as we rolled through the last of the summer’s greenery in lush eastern Ohio. For some reason, maybe I caught a glimpse, I have the impression he was doing his facebook thing, chuckling to himself, or maybe his email. I dunno.
Then I noticed the sneakers, new, nice, Nike. And the black Adidas tracksuit. I noticed that because I have black plush Adidass, and they weren’t any cheaper than Juicy Couture which aren’t cheap at all. I remember thinking they might not be Adidas but they were the good, and the Nikes might not be Air Jordans but they were the good, and I noticed he wasn’t young, even though he hadn’t hit thirty, no way, but he was alert, and serious, and he wasn’t worried about anything at all. That fact really caught my full attention. There's one thing that can yield such confidence. Street money.
Then later on we were on one of those stops that aren’t listed on the schedule, where the driver goes in to check for priority freight or passengers on or off and that’s it, back on the road. But the drivers that smoke cigarettes somehow hit these stops six or seven minutes early, and leave on time, and the smokers get off too and everybody burns one on the down-low. It’s a nice thing to do. One of these times I noticed the guy, the serious twenty-something black man with the quiet confidence standing there casually chewing the fat with our driver while they and the other handful of smokers had their smokes. He thanked the driver and made a gesture which I recognized with a start that he was passing a folded greenback like you do with a maitre' d that you wish to seriously and respectfully cultivate with gesture of gratitude, saying thanks man I appreciate the break, but the driver wouldn’t take it, which didn’t offend this fellow, he respected that, but the thing I noticed that it wasn’t a small bill either, and I been around enough street money and the guys that have it and I saw the play. What we had was a no-shit but surprisingly rare cash-carrying dope dealer, and not any of your sideways pistol, rap-slangin’ homeboy “playa” but the real thing. And that was why he wasn’t worried about anything at all, he had it covered, on the down-low but well sure of his world, and he knew I was watching, too, had me spotted as he come down the aisle in Columbus and so he knew I knew but that was ok, he even knew that, too.
There’s guys like that, complete situational awareness, and an ethereal sort of command presence.
I think he got off the bus in Philly.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Prince Rupert . 3 : Director's Cut

Ok this is the third version after I made a couple of adjustments you might not even really notice. Going over and over the material from my trip is making me very very sad in this cold Autumn/Winter as the leaves are beaten down from their lonely trees by the cold rain and wind and lie helpless in gutters all over town. Such a long time ago I had nothing more than a snack and the window on my mind, and somebody else had to drive, and I could go anywhere I wanted and nobody knew where.


I'm no genius with this video stuff sometimes I think it is just the opposite I never know what about the thing I am looking at makes me feel what I feel when I am looking at it, no eye for the visual image, yet a sunset or a branch or a ripple on the water can make me cry. So I took what little I had and put it together in an easiest way and remembered sad music for the moving pictures and now this thing made me cry and I wish I was back on the road. Maybe some day I will be...

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Looking For Somebody with Bobby Lindstrom at the Tonic Lounge

This here is shit nobody remembers but the fools, and Bobby Lindstrom is a guitar-playing fool. Looking For Somebody, off the very first Fleetwood Mac album,  by Peter Green. Actually the album is named Fleetwood Mac, but this tune is a guitar masterpiece, and totally Peter Green, with the delicate-to-ripping  progression of techniques. And our dear sweet Bobby Lindstrom does it, in my view, even better. This was the second song of the first set that night at the Tonic Lounge, there wasn't nobody there but me and the drummers dad and his girlfriend and the guy behind the PA from the house staff. 

That's the real shit, right there, when the guitar player digs deep and plays his heart out for nobody, just to play, and play heavy and play light and right when nobody knows. That's why Bobby is the undiscovered genius that he is. Its the heart, man, the heart.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

My Mom

This is my Mom. She is not sad. I am sad.And hopefully you will be sad too. My movie won't upload. I don't know why. Maybe I can get it to go to YouTube and get it from there. But not now. I am going out to the boat now. When I get back. I love you Mom. I didn't tell her about my blog. There's too much cussing.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Cold Tater

 
This tree is way in the back of the Miami Greyhound Bus parking lot. I think its on acid. No idea what it actually is, but I almost missed the bus because I couldn’t tear myself away from staring at it and trying to figure out what I was looking at. Baobab?
I’m going back into my photos for stuff I should have posted at the time but this was on my phone and I didn’t figure out how to download en masse until well after I got back to Portland. To keep us all happy while I figure out the video.

This flower was the thing that made me start thinking seriously about the tropics. Just casually growing on the parking strip behind the fence between the bus depot and 18 th street, a gravel road through the down-at-the-heels industrial neighborhood where the bus station is. What I dug about it is that the tree and the flowers are just in the back yard in kind of a throwaway spot and they are bloody gorgeous and exotic as hell and this is the shit they throw away. Like the old John X song about the man who lost his stash in the trash. He hears a knock on the door and it’s the garbage man, who hems and haws and finally says “Look, man, I found your weed in the trash, man, and I smoked it, man, and if that’s the shit you throw away, man, can I try some of the shit that you keep?”

Monday, November 21, 2011

Coming Attractions


MOVIE
This might be another in a long series of big mistakes resulting from expectations raised and promises made and never fulfilled however I want to build up a little excitement around here. I'm working on a movie of my Trip.. Yes I am, more accurately, splicing together all the lame-ass little snippets of video I made in different random settings and dealing with the incredibly even more lame-ass narrations trying to make  it all fit together.
In the process of finding a photo for this post I found a bunch more from the Cabnabda run so there will even be a sequel...

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Head Shot


This guy , sitting in front of me from Bellingham to Seattle, had the fattest head I have ever seen. I kept trying to take a picture of it without him getting wise to what I was doing and so I never did really capture the sheer bulge protrusion of the way it  marshmallowed out from the the little adjustment portal in the back.
And he was with a babe, an attractive and yet somehow goofy looking brunette, and, to make it worse, they were in love. They chattered like magpies on meth all the way every minute, eventually leaving the Seattle bus depot hand in hand out the back door. Go figure

Thursday, November 17, 2011

PCBs


This here is the center of my life these days. Well, not these exact days, but this past three years have been all about this sailboat the FelicityJane seen here at anchor in Willamette Cove with the St Johns Bridge in the background. There wasn’t much sun all summer so this cloudy evening was distressingly typical.
This particular evening I had the dinghy in the water and I was rowing around taking pictures of shit and looking for cool stuff washed up on the rocks along the shore. The only beach around there, as beaches go, is the very inner edge of the cove. Everything else is riprap or these weird puzzle blocks. But cool shit still washes up so I can still go beachcoming, which is pretty much my secret mania. Behind me you can’t see the railroad bridge, and beyond that towards town the beach was so contaminated with PCBs and heavy metals from the shipyards that used to line the river here so they paved it.
That’s right, paved it with articulated concrete blocks, interlocking  tessellated three by two blocks interwoven to keep the contaminated sand in place. It works for that, but it plays hell on your dinghy’s bottom paint when you run her up on the edge to salvage something or just to take a leak and look around. All I found that night worth picking up were a couple of foam blocks, rigid foam bread loaf sized and shaped pieces of rigid polyurethane foam, which I kept one to make an external float/fender for the bow of the dinghy. I figure the more built-in flotation you have the better to a point, and I don’t at all follow the blow-up-boat fad the inflatable thing yachtsmen these days have to have to look cool to themselves. Sheep.
But I had a nice night on the hook. Next day I ran into the lady from the Metro agency that deals with Willamette Cove and is trying to get it in shape in its transition from filthy Superfund Site to public park. Its about a 100 million dollar difference. Metro was given the cove for a dollar by the old owners who tore down the buildings that used to house a creosote plant in the cove. Apparently I had anchored in the most contaminated spot in the cove. She urged me to not eat the local fish, and to swim as little as possible, and to please please not careen my boat on the beach to scrape the bottom and wash off the growth with buckets of sand and a push broom like Larry Pardey does in all those Serrafyn books. Actually, I was planning to do just exactly that when she and her pal Ranger Rick cam walking up looking tense. I probably won’t, she made a convincing case, but I don’t think taking pictures of the sunset will be a problem.
Even if there isn't much of a sunset.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Bus Window

It wasn't all such a disaster. Coming into LA I happened to see this and for once I had my camera in my actual hand. I think it is Los Angeles City Hall.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Gangs Of New York


This biker gang came swarming up alongside us at a stop light at 87th and 5th Avenue in New York. We were running down fifth toward the Port Authority bus depot at Times Square. I don't know who they were, I think they had name tags on their jackets and it got me thinking about how I was only notionally in New York and what it means to actually be someplace. Sure, geographically at that moment I was in New York but we didn't stop, not above ground anyway. That afternoon I got on another bus and we went through the tunnel to New Jersey and down the pike to Washington DC. 
I once flew from Medford Oregon to Portland via Seattle, which sounds incredibly stupid but it is the same phenomenon. I wanted to stay in Ashland until the last possible moment that Sunday, and the departure time for the flight I booked was 7:30 pm, which gave me an extra 4 hours, and I didn't notice that the flight was nonstop to Seattle. Then a half hour layover, then to Portland. Stupid, but a lot like my bus trip. It was close to 9 pm when we flew over Portland at about 30,000 feet. From that height you didn't see a big city at all, what you saw were a few scattered  lights as if from a small desert town. It really made me think about the nature of the experience of being in a place is really more about how you interact with it. I was no more "in" New York this day on the bus than I had been "in" Portland that night at 30,000 feet.                                                                                              

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Unconscious Impressionism

To start with these pictures make me very angry they are perfectly focused on the mud splashes on the window. I can't get the damn macro to focus on a flower when I want it to, and why it would think I want to take a picture of the mud on the window is beyond me, the level of irony that puts me into kill mode. All that aside here's what it makes me think about.
Unconscious Impressionism.
Mostly on the bus you are watching out the window as the world goes hauling ass by. Safe. Removed from consequences. Nothing can happen to you there. You inhabit that particular space only for the fleeting moment and time pulls you onwards. If something is ugly it can't hurt you. If something is nice it can't help you. You are already gone. I tried to take pictures through the side windows and this is what I got in California near Los Banos after we left I-5 heading for Salinas. These were cotton fields I think. Or cane sugar. There was both and you can't tell from the photo which brings me to my point. This here is pure impressionism.
Mass of soft color shapes. And the filth from road-rain-dirt caked on the plexiglass.
 Farther on into the Salinas Valley the landscape became more intimate, perspective of fields and groves of trees and crops rendered in the soft mass of color shapes yet it gives you the impression of peace and plenty.
I keep thinking I could get this same composition with oils even though I know eff-all about it. I fully intend to get into it at some point., when I can put some time into it. Think about it  and think and look some more. I think I could get some of this.
But from a bus window hauling ass into the California evening this is all I got.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Rocky Mountain Video


Turns out you can put video in here. Who knew? 

Between Salt Lake City and Denver you go over the Rocky Mountains. Is all. How you do that is the question. I had been redirected to a bus that wasn't on my schedule that traveled over state highways, two-lane jobs through the very NorthEast corner of Utah past Park City and many other small towns some of which were desert style and some of which were ski-towns in the mountains. A woman named Bert drove and I still wonder about her, a truly weird chick whose duckface poses and weird body language and self-obsessed manner put me off at the time but she kept the thing on the road and made her stops plus extras to smoke and probably didn't have a destructive bone in her body and you can leave the pun alone thank you.
 I liked not being on the interstate, and as many stops as we made not very many people got on or off, so those of us that began at Salt Lake got to know each other and the thing turned into a community before too long. Really the only time in my 10k plus miles that happened.

Side Trip To The Beats


I have an advantage that is fairly recent. I wrote and published, such as it is, within hours, sometimes within minutes, of the events I wrote about. And it was all event reporting, even if the event in question is an intangible insight. Otherwise what is there to write about? So I captured my events immediately. Jack and Neal waited and percolated and shifted lenses and added lenses before they wrote spending a good deal of energy recapturing the to me distant past during the process of composing. Jack’s contribution to world literature being the rigorous stream of consciousness, and rigorous it was, which recreated the sense of the event actually long after it in time, but somehow traveling back to within the event spiritually and that was a heavy discipline indeed. I don’t have the chops. And I never will, so that cannot be what I am doing here. I understand that.
I do have photos, which is what I have learned to call my pictures, and a tiny bit of video. Now the question is how this stuff captured in the exact moment of its occurring relates to the spiritual stream captured so truly by those guys with their rigorous discipline?
Alcohol killed Jack Kerouac. Bloody and dead. In my view it killed his life long before it killed his body. Then I have to wonder what good are exact spiritual portrayals of a spiritual suicide destruction, exact pictures of a bloody disaster?
Crank  killed Cassady. No doubt about it. Neal’s gift was a trick he had of giving you the exact internal stream, expressing in the moment. I’m no expert, I’m uneducated but I have read these guys and talked to their friends and I, so to speak, read books. I’m sorry but Neal Cassady, as thrilling as he was, was a talking horse.
Crank will kill me. I haven’t touched it in eleven years and I am likely to never touch it again, but in the end it will be the long term effects of methamphetamine abuse that puts me under the ground. Probably liver cancer or liver failure when the cirrhosis turns what’s left of my liver tissue into rotten oak. Hepatitis C. It might be pathetic but it won’t be bloody or sudden when it happens. I will doubtless have plenty of time for regret.
This isn’t what I started out to say , but it might be worth saying anyway. If you go on the road and you write about it you have to deal with these guys somehow.
I give you some near-time reporting and a few pictures and you can work out the spiritual experience for yourself.




Monday, November 7, 2011

Sarvice Berries

Apparently this is a sarvice berry, or more properly, berries. They are everywhere. I finally looked it up. Or as one says now, I googled it. Then I wikipediaed it. My pal Rivers didn't believe Wikipedia could be a reliable authority. Like a lot of guys his age he's afraid of anarchy.
If you have been following this rant/blog you will recall that I made me some pemmican for my travois trip on the Greyhound, and that I said I used golden raisins in the place of these things, Sarvice, or Service, berries, which is what the pioneers always were said to use as  the sweet starch filler in pemmican. Smoked dried buffalo meat, dried sarvice berries, and congealed fat or suet. Yummy. So much for orthodoxy.
And it turns out that is not just an okie mispronunciation of the word service. Sarvice is listed as one alternative name along with Saskatoon. All this variation stems from the fact that these things are all over the place, North America, Europe, in more than twenty different species. The taste is described as ranging from delectable to insipid,  Blueberries to Crabapples are comparisons I read about. Many of the varieties are cultivated by landscapers for their abundant foliage, compact shape and the contrasting color of the blossoms in the spring and then the clusters of berries in the fall.
I took this photo in early November just last week with my phone across the street from my apartment in NW Portland. I tried one of the berries. They had it right, it was, in fact, insipid

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Ex-Husband

Ish is my ex-husband I visited in New Orleans. I hasdn’t seen her in thirty years more or less, but that didn’t seem to make too much difference. We got along like a house on fire, we always did.
When Facebook says “its complicated” they don’t even know. Ish and me were actually married for a couple years back in the 70s. It was a political thing and a friendship thing and I would do it again only now it would be illegal in most places. See, me and K Isheim we don’t do that gender bullshit, we got our own system.
Back when I was an angry young man I was extremely alienated from the American culture. I’ve grown to accept it but back then it could take a flying fuck and I would have been happier. Ish was in the US Army, fully functional, but as a practicing Lesbian she operated under severe constraints. That was where I came in. We got married to take the heat off her a little bit and so she could live off post with her girlfriend. Me, I dug the dependant's allowance Ish sent me every month. We never had a harsh word.
Then I got serious about a girl and me and Ish filed the paperwork for divorce and we gradually lost touch over the ensuing years while we both had careers, lived lives, and had our heartaches and triumph separately.
Now I’m a chick which means most states wouldn’t let us remarry, that is, if we wanted, which we don’t, me not being Ish’s particular type, which is kind of the blond surfer look. Ish gets around. She has pulled some major babes in her time. Me, I’m happy to be out of the mix. And the more I adjust to actually being a woman the  more interesting men have become.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

The New Is Better Than The Old

Five years after all the shit that hit the fan in New Orleans was over this is what the bus depot looks like. Ish drove me around the city and we found some abandoned properties in the lower 9th ward. Not very many of them to be sure, and I felt like a vulture scouring the place for  fucked up shit. I have to be honest, those poor bastards did a hell of a job fixing shit up. You wouldn't hardly know what happened if you didn't know what happened. Its just not quite as densely populated as I remember it from the one time in early 69 that I drove through there with Rick DuPuis right after he got back from Viet Nam.
This place is unlike the rest of the town, it is neat as a pin, polished, shiny, crispy looking. Ish's house is also like that but very little else is.

Matriarch

This portrait hangs above the davenport sofa in Jane Coffee's delightfully collected apartment in Hartford Connecticut. At first I thought it was from the 70s television show "Dallas" depicting JR and Bobby's mother Ellie. I think that was her name, but no it is not her, but Jane's actual grandmother, Rusty,  whom I was later to meet in Cashiers NC.
In a way my first guess was not so far off. Rusty was, and still is, something of a looker, glamorous to the extreme even still today. She was 'discovered' in Dallas in the late 50s and made an exotic career as a fashion model, becoming as it were the face of the fashionably rich Texans of the sixties of Dallas, and that is very much of a richness indeed. Her portfolio is filled with beautiful photographs and snapshots taken wearing the highest of high fashion posing with the rarest of rare celebrities in the most colorful and exclusive of the world's glamor capitals. I don't remember specifically if there is a shot of her with  Shah Rezha Pahlavi of Iran or with Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco but I will wager real money that there is either if not both.
I was terrified when I got to Cashiers and I learned that I was scheduled to meet Jane's grandmother, this formidable woman whose austere beauty made such an impression. I could not bring myself even mentally to call her Rusty, and I was racking my brain to remember as much as possible of the Emily Post which I actually read as a teenager in preparation for just such moments. Lo and behold she was a warm and engaging and charming woman, and she too collects  things, chinoiserie to be more specific and she was delighted that I knew the term and used it correctly in a sentence. I couldn't have done it again, but I will take a gift horse so to speak, and smiled and made a note to myself to shut the eff up while I was ahead.
Coincidentally a surprise party in Rusty's honor had been in the planning for months before Rosemary's tragic ending and it served a useful purpose in taking Jane's mind off the casual brutality of the cat's demise. That is a very good thing about family ritual, to distract us when it seems nothing will, and also the beauty of the matriarchy, to give us strength through the generations.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Murder


 Jane's wonderful wise curmudgeon of an old fluffy cat Rosemary took an unprecedented liking to me and nobody knows why. She wouldn't give most people besides Jane the time of day. I was sensible of a great honor.
Rosemary slept with me at the foot of this ancient austere bed in Jane's guestroom. The surprisingly comfortable mattress is a ten inch slab o' foam, the head and foot board look like a puritan version of a Spartan version of the Parthenon. 
Three days after I left Rosemary was brutally murdered by the neighbor's pit bull. Jane was devastated. I felt like I had lost a friend. Fortunately Jane was scheduled to go to Cashiers North Carolina the next day
To her mother's place for a family get-together. Jane's Mom Sally is pretty wise herself, and kind and warm and If I had lost a friend like that I wish I could be sure I would have somebody to comfort me as wise and warm as Sally, posing here at the door to the guestroom of her antique-filled home on a hillside in Cashiers.

Key West With a Really Good Guide.

 On Big Pine Key, I think, halfway between Key Largo and Key West the hipper tourists stop to feed the Tarpons. Amazing. For 5 bucks you get a dozen mullets in a little bucket, and when you toss one off the dock all hell breaks loose. They are huge, and there are dozens that hang around waiting for the out-of-towners and free lunch. I tossed and snapped blind and this is the picture, they are gone just as quick. I'm not kidding. Huge. The little ones are 3 feet long, the bigger ones are bigger than me. Don't fall in.
 Nan Kitchens, the Really Good Guide in question at the Fisheries restaurant on Marathon Key where we had lunch. Fish, of course. Not only is Nan gorgeous, she is a brilliant and productive artist working in a fascinating medium of giant clay work installations in public spaces plus she has a beautiful daughter and she is a gracious host. And she drives a convertible.
Guess where? Nan knew all the tourist type spots, took me to swim at the one little public beach in Key West and then drove us to the sunset celebration. Unfortunately there was a bit of overcast so there wasn't really a sunset to celebrate, but that didn't stop the locals. We did the Duvall Crawl down the main drag with the top down and I felt distinctly superior to each and every tourist I saw. Then at ten o'clock amidst a warm tropical downpour with thunder and lightening complete, Nan and Nikki did a tenderloin BBQ for the three of us. The tropical warmth and humidity and foliage everywhere made me think of Thailand.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Hartford next door to Mark Twain

Jane took us on a tour, first  to Mark Twain's house where we walked all around and took pictures it is a great place and a crazy cool house made of different colored bricks with fancy High Victorian gingerbread everywhere.
 Then we went downtown to look at the old graveyard with headstones from the 1600s...and took pictures of our reflections in a gold colored office building we found nearby. After that we went to the Connecticut River.
In Mark Twain’s time at Hartford Harriet Beecher Stowe was the crazy lady who lived next door. Alzheimer’s. She would wander in and out of her neighbor’s houses not knowing what year it was or where. Despite the anti-slavery rhetoric, her 1845 book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”’s racial sterotypes drove another century’s worth of racism. Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”, more realistically honest in its portrayal of race relations, is practically unreadable now because of the use of  the "N" word. I tried to read it aloud to my kid and I couldn't do it, as brutally cold and habitually out of line as I am. But I still love the book. Jim is an honorable character, so is Huck. Uncle Tom, however is an insult to the reader. IMHO. 
The irony of this sculpture goes on and on.

This statue is displayed on Hartford's RiverWalk, a promenade in the downtown area overlooking the recently flooded Connecticut River, which was still brown and angry looking when Jane and I were there. 

Jane takes pictures that somehow make me look beautiful, I don't know how. Check the dimple on my little chin. I don't really have one, but I do think it makes me very attractive and feminine. Good for my self esteem