Post No. 997 - Equinox

 

“Your belief in yourself must be greater than everyone else’s disbelief in you.” August Wilson

The equinox passes. I didn’t know the significance of the day until M, a man who reads books and watches videos on his phone on the patio at the Market, told me. M’s a tall man with a large frame, sunburned skin and close-cropped gray hair, who has lived on Hitchcock avenue out of the camper shell of his red Toyota pickup for several months. M uses the bathroom in the store, fills many water bottles at the filling station, and buys items from the hot bar now and again, all without troubling a soul. M is obviously resourceful having survived being unhoused so long. It can’t be easy or comfortable, particularly for a man in his 70s. M’s got a weathered look about him, but he’s never dirty. One day he complimented me on what he called my “work signature,” telling me it’s obvious when I’m on duty because the men’s bathroom is always clean. As to why he’s here I gathered that he’d blown the engine of the Toyota and was waiting for money to get it fixed. He moves between Bend, Oregon, Boulder, Colorado and Santa Barbara. I don’t think I’d be a very kind or rational and patient soul if I lived like M. 

Running errands this morning with a runny nose and a dull headache. Not feeling 100%. Passed my first stop like it wasn’t there because my mind was elsewhere. I had to drive three blocks out of my way and double back. My debit card failed twice and to pay the bill I had to draw money from an ATM. Service charge for this privilege of $3.50. Drove down the road to BevMo and spent several minutes wandering around in search of tonic water. When did BevMo start selling groceries and sundries? Checked out a selection of bourbons. My debit card worked fine at the checkout. 

Feels like I have a late-summer cold. When I get home I drink a cup of herbal tea for cold/flu symptoms. 

Lately I’ve spent more time reading than I have writing. Finished a fine biography of James Baldwin by David Leeming, and am deep into a biography of August Wilson, the playwright who shook Broadway with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “Fences.” The usual periodicals, New York Review of Books, the Nation, The New Yorker. 

The Baldwin bio gave me some new insight and understanding about a man I consider a prophet. I also read True North by Jim Harrison for the third or fourth time, with renewed appreciation for Harrison’s perceptive observations about the human condition, particularly greed. I’m just getting into The Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard. The way Shepard strung words together is under-appreciated; there’s music in his writing -- and also an edginess. I’ve read a lot of his considerable oeuvre.  

My daughter is discovering the rigors, deadline pressure and sleep-deprivation of a packed senior year at an arts university. She had to memorize long monologues in four different classes, and then, along with the memorization, make the characters’ speech carry weight. The actor’s art, in other words. But otherwise she’s doing well, with a cozy room in a decent apartment, a circle of friends, acquaintances and classmates. We talk to her several times each day. I worry about her less than I did last year when she struggled with homesickness and the shock of moving from Santa Barbara to Philadelphia. 

If only my football team, Chelsea, was faring as well as my family. But no, the boys are struggling to jell and after five league matches have scored five goals and won five points. By contrast, Manchester City have fifteen points. About a dozen Chelsea players are out injured, including Reece James, Moises Caicedo, Christopher Nkunku, and Wesley Fofana. It’s all very dismal and looking like a repeat of 2022’s futility and failure. The club’s new owners have spent an enormous amount of money on players, many of them young, but in football money doesn’t always lead to results; the money has to be spent in the right way. My sense remains that Chelsea is a collection of parts rather than a cohesive unit and that there’s no short term fix. This means Chelsea supporters are in for another long season. The glory of the recent past fades quickly.   

No. 983 - Message in a Bottle

“He says the news is all lies and the reason it’s so popular is that it sells itself as all truth and people believe it because they’d rather believe in a lie.” San Shepard, “Berlin Wall Piece”

I was thinking the other day that this blog is equivalent to a message in a bottle. Tossed from an iron bridge into a wide, slow moving river, one full of silt and dead trees and jagged rocks. These entries have about the same odds of ever reaching anyone, and that’s fine with me because if I was looking for anything else I would have quit years ago. If I’m honest I think I’ve been searching for some kind of connection and community with like-minded souls, though it hasn’t happened yet and most likely won’t. 

It’s gray and overcast here, a heavy marine layer that will linger until well past noon. Garbage day. Beige-colored Marborg trash trucks pass on Milpas Street, and the sound is loud, but not as loud, or jarring, as the gas-powered hedge trimmer from across the street. I hate that particular sound, the way it winds out, whines and echoes. Hedge trimmer, leaf blower, chainsaw. Drowns out the sound of birds. 

My mother turns 89 this month. A Depression-era baby. The women on her side of the family tend to live well into their 90’s. Stubborn genetics. French-Canadians. Catholics. My grandmother lived at 27 Charter Street in Salem, Massachusetts, in a high-rise building full of elderly people. I went to visit her in the early 1990’s, a surprise for her birthday. She was in her early 90’s then. There was a cemetery near her building with headstones dating back to the late 17th century. My grandmother loved to play bingo. “Beeno,” she called it. She’d win pocket money. I don’t have any notable ancestors, no dukes or cardinals or even Civil War veterans. No wild and crazy uncles. No eccentric aunts. No criminals. As far as I know, nobody wrote a poem or a symphony or a play or a novel or an essay. Ordinary people, forgettable people. 

I’m aging. When I roll out of bed in the morning my body is stiff and my first few steps on the hardwood floors are painful due to neuropathy in my feet. I see floaters in my left eye and have tinnitus in my ears. My hair is wispy and silver and my sex drive is non-existent; only half joking, my wife says I should take Viagra or Cialis or one of the other drugs that inject new gusto in aging cocks and produce magic moments of romance for old married couples.

Parts of my life are a mystery to me, buried deep under layers of time. Almost all the years before I met my wife. Memories are there, but I can’t easily access them; they’re like black and white films with huge gaps. I wouldn’t call them lost years, more like misdirected and wandering. What was I looking for in Tokyo, Honolulu and Seattle, and then for a short time in Irvine? Myself, I guess, an answer to the question, who am I? What am I doing in this life? What am I meant to do? 

Childhood memories are even more difficult to get at. Maybe my parents’ divorce when I was ten affected me more than I realize. Right around the time I began junior high. There’s some reason why I can recall so few memories of early family life, of my father. Was the experience that traumatic? Nothing changed all that much. Even high school is a blur. Mostly what I remember is being shy and feeling awkward, and doing a lot of dumb stuff with my friend David. Borderline juvenile delinquents, rebels without cause or clue or coherence. Driving around Santa Barbara in the late 1970’s in my light blue 1965 VW bug, my first car. At 16 a car is pure freedom. We smoked weed morning, noon and night. I spent many days and nights at David’s house, his parents had also divorced but his mother was cool, and his older brother -- who was the same age as my older brother -- managed a waterbed store, which was there was a king-size waterbed on the patio; David and I slept out there many times, under the stars, and we’d wake up in the morning wet with dew. 

Time takes its toll. Not an original thought, just a fact. I ask myself if what I’m looking for isn’t meaning, but stories. 

Seeing the Contours

“The color is innocent enough, but things with which it is coupled make it hated. Slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn.” Frederick Douglass

One

I compost kitchen scraps and leaves and clippings in a medium capacity plastic composter in our backyard. One of those drum composters, with two compartments and rollers that allow it to be spun. I’ve composted in our narrow backyard for years, in bare piles and homemade bins fashioned with scrap wood and chicken wire and, until it fell apart, a plastic bin from Smith and Hawken that was my mother-in-law’s. The drum is the best composter yet, even though the aperture is a bit small. I like the idea of turning waste into fertilizer. Seems like a good metaphor for life. It takes time to make fertilizer, some patience and care, just as it takes time for the contours of life to start making sense. What I mean is that it takes time to learn to see the contours, how they fit together. It’s easy to miss a lot of signs along the way. What seems monumental today may be meaningless further down the road, and the apparently meaningless might turn out to be monumental. 

Two

The real criminal types aren’t satisfied with taking over a street or village or city. Real criminals think much bigger. They take over governments and entire countries, fix the laws for their own benefit and the benefit of their compatriots and collaborators. Hasn’t this always been so? 

Three

My congressman, Salud Carbajal, put his finger to the breeze begun by others with more courage, and only voiced his support for the impeachment of President Trump when it was safe to do so. Political pragmatism, I guess. Courage is more admirable in my book, especially when the most fundamental principle of representative democracy is at stake. Even while we watch Trump take hammer and chisel to the integrity and legitimate authority of the Legislative branch, Salud waited, hesitated, calculated. On the question of whether the chief executive is immune to, exempt from, and above the law, Salud followed the herd, but only when it was politically safe to do so. Not exactly a profile in courage. 

Four

Fiesta time in Santa Barbara. For some, a time to remember the city’s Spanish and Mexican origins, for others it’s all about commerce, hotel occupancy rates, bed taxes. We saw some of the parade on State Street, men on horses waving and calling out, “Viva La Fiesta!”, horse-drawn carriages or wagons hauling local bigwigs. Ladies on horseback, their colorful dresses flowing, flowers in their hair. Little girls in traditional dress tossing flowers into the crowd lined along the street. Horse hooves clip-clopping on the pavement. The image that stuck with me was of a vaquero holding an American flag. I imagined the days when State Street was packed dirt and Fiesta was a much smaller, more local affair. Progress. Maybe. 

Five

We used to think big in America. Send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. Eradicate poverty. Establish the Peace Corps. Now we think small. Once we had confidence, now we’re afraid, all the time, of shadows and just about everything else. What happened to us?

Six

I’m reading Sam Shepard’s last book, a slim volume called Spy of the First Person. Just finished Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 

In Search of Zen Mind

“Building character is like making bread -- you have to mix it little by little, step by step, and moderate temperature is needed.” Shunryu Suzuki

It’s difficult to stay present in the moment and too easy to drift into the most dire scenarios when the world seems wracked by calamity -- floods, violence, poverty, corruption -- and yet the sun comes up, birds chirp, and spring unfolds. The hills above Santa Barbara are green, and the County recently announced that the drought is over, though we still have a water problem and need to conserve.

The media are breathless about the Mueller Report that is in the hands of the Attorney General. I’m not holding my breath for any shocking revelations about Trump and Russia. What about Trump could shock anyone at this point? Do we need Mueller’s report to know that the President of the United States is corrupt? We already have enough proof of Trump’s disdain for the law. Trump will take to Twitter to deny the report anyway, calling it partisan, a witch hunt, or whatever, and his loyal base of cops, soldiers and bikers will nod their heads in agreement, and the Republicans will remain in line, mute and deferential. Rachel Maddow’s likely to be very disappointed, might even slip into depression.

Although the stock market took a dip yesterday, all you hear about the economy from the mainstream press is how strong it is, how many jobs are being created, and how this strength bodes well for Trump’s re-election in 2020. Incumbents, even one as unpopular as Trump, have built-in advantages, and add to that the near certainty that the Democrats will nominate Joe Biden -- or someone of similar bent -- as their standard-bearer and Trump’s re-election looks even more likely. That’s hard to accept on a sunny Saturday morning. Trump is pushing our institutions to the brink and it’s not certain they will hold for two more years, let alone a second term.

And if the economy is so great, why are so many people struggling and living in precarity?  Great for who?

I’m reading Almanac Of The Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko and 2 Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark. At first I had trouble keeping the relationship of the characters straight in the Silko novel, but I’m getting into it now; it’s a long one. The Shepard and Dark letters are fascinating, a 40-year friendship between two men who bare their souls to one another and examine their lives through lenses that are by turns humorous and deeply philosophical. For men of a certain age, the observations made can bring you up short -- these were well read men who examined themselves rigorously and had life experience as well. I’ve read a fair amount of Shepard’s writing, the play Simpatico, Motel Chronicles, Cruising Paradise, and Great Dream of Heaven. His letters provide context for his work, glimpses behind the stories. I’m old enough to know the excitement of receiving a letter from a friend, the sense of intimacy that an email or text message or social media post lacks. A letter provides a more tangible sense of connection, allows for a pause between receipt and response.

Humans need pause, need time to stop and reflect, but this modern, hyperactive, interconnected society we live in hates any pause and fills any silence with noise. My daughter’s connection to her phone scares me. I’m happiest when I don’t have my phone around, my daughter can’t be without hers without feeling anxious and unmoored. I remember being dependent on pay phones (and having change) when away from home, my daughter barely knows what a pay phone is, or was, since they are few and far between now. So much change to navigate, so little silence in which to do so. We can’t eliminate the pause.

Think I’ll go out and have a look at this day, scan the sky, turn the compost, and empty the trash. Maybe in doing so I’ll find my elusive Zen mind.