Take 5. Brubeck played it and for now, I’m gonna live it.

We all come up with ideas. A dime a dozen. Some good. Some bad. But either way, execution is paramount. You must complete the task at hand or gracefully concede and move on. Ideally, this sentence should be presented in a dramatic English accent that would make Sir John Gielgud proud. I feel as though I’ve followed through on so many questionable ideas here, executed by throwing them under a speeding and out of control bus driven by someone named Artful Monk. Shockingly, this has happened 47 times over the past few years. Who would’ve known that I had 47 ramblings in me? Maybe rumblings but ramblings? To be honest, it has been a bus load of fun writing and publishing these essays and short stories and I’m humbled that people of your stature have actually read them. Mostly, my task was to make the reader laugh, become distracted and, if only for a fleeting moment, forget about the shit show that surrounds us all. That said, the board has cast its vote, 1 to 0, in favor of putting Artful Monk in a bucket of ice. Those of you who have financially backed me, I thank you from the bottom of my heart but all subscription payments will be placed on ice as well, just in a separate bucket. The free subscription will always be a painless option.

I feel as though now is a good time to concentrate on stuff like releasing my latest album, which I recently recorded at home, while pretending like there’s some sort of strategy behind the curtain. This also goes for releasing the chill house version of my international mega hit “Hidden Doors” that I just remixed. (If anyone out there has Fred Again or even Skrillex’s number, please DM me.) I’m also working on a few other larger pieces of writing that require brain power and skill that I may or may not possess and all along, continuing to make dodgy art against great odds. Reference the stunning piece of art entitled “Exhibit 2B” above if you’re confused as to what constitutes dodgy art. On top of all this, I’m also working on my abs.

I will still post every now and then but mostly it will be to alert you of happenings in the musical world of the songwriter and silent shredder Archer Monk, who will be taking over the wheel of the bus while his creative twin Artful retreats to his suburban rambler in Joshua Tree, the one with the kidney shaped pool and the Tiki bar out back. Technically, the house is in Palm Springs but Joshua Tree has a much better ring to it as a burned out writer’s destination of recoilment from the hazards of fame and fortune. He’ll be fine though, rest assured. All he needs is a short sabbatical of walking around in his favorite monogrammed robe on a light dose of mushrooms, drinking Palomas, reading the classics and reconnecting with his Saint Bernard/Chihuahua mix named Rumpelstiltskin or “Stilty” as the mailman calls him.

Thanks again to everyone who has ever read Artful Monk let alone sent me comments and messages of encouragement to soldier on. A special shout out to those of you who have read all 47 posts. I’m impressed but we both need a breather. It’s not you. It’s me. With hope, we can still be true friends not just friends with benefits.

Even in the midst of existential seismic change, always remember: duck and cover…

…and stay artful…

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For you avid and dedicated Artful Monk readers out there (my heartfelt thanks to you always), you may recall a recent essay which covered my brief life as a harbormaster. If your memory is fuzzy about that semi-riveting tale, well, that’s perfectly fine as there are a lot of words to digest these days. Anyway, I left off just as I was counting the pennies earned on the rough and trouble seas of Lake Michigan as a swash bucklin’ harbormaster, thinking it might behoove me (following the advice of my inner financial planner) to spend my entire retirement savings in Mexico, maybe learning Spanish and with any luck, getting into a knife fight.

The world had just clumsily clicked over into 1991 and we were in the middle of yet another wet and biting cold Chicago January so going somewhere warm seemed to hold some logic. The high of the holiday season had officially worn out its welcome as my harbormaster hangover was still thumping away in my head but my ducks had somehow gotten in a row. All the sudden, I had the confidence of Doug Henning’s mustache and miraculously materialized a one way ticket to Cancun out of thin air like a magic trick with bucked teeth. Immediately after this delusional hallucination had taken root, I ran out to Kroch’s and Brentano’s and bought the Lonely Planet Guide to Mexico as required reading after I was done inspecting my plane ticket due to my chronic brain fog. Did I actually book the right date? Did I get a ticket to Cancun, Tennessee by mistake? Was it a plane ticket or a train ticket? This was the time to double check. Shockingly, it all added up as if I had a crack personal assistant (which is quite different from a personal assistant on crack). During the flight out of O’Hare, I opened up the chapter on the Mexican state of Quintana Roo and speed dated it. Turns out we were a match. In a New York second I knew that it was possible to land in a plane, hop in a van, board a boat and book a room at a place called Los Tres Amigos Hostel. After that epiphany, the book fell on the floor and I was out cold drooling down the window pane dreaming that I was raising a baby on Mars as a single, working parent instead of pushing through and reading on, actually educating myself on the details about how the Mayan pyramids were engineered, what the best Mexican cuisine was, how to procure magic mushrooms in Oaxaca and learning if Frida Kahlo’s eyebrows were technically connected. Retirement was apparently more about napping and dreaming than reading. But with great pride, I had successfully plotted out that my first night would be spent on Isla Mujeres, an island just off the coast from Cancun. Then the following day I would figure out a plan for the next day and then the next day I would, well, “supongo que entiendes.” (No this does not mean “I am a spongecake.”)

We landed smoothly and the friendly van driver delivered me from the aeropuerto to the boat dock where I instantly made out the hazy outline of Disney World off in the distance in Florida but then realized that really wasn’t possible. Maybe I was still sleeping. Being a seasoned harbormaster though, as soon as I stepped onto that boat, my sixth sense was triggered like a mouse trap, recognizing that it was probably unlicensed and most certainly insured by a dodgy third party headquartered somewhere like Tortuga. It had the distinct possibility of sinking but since I was actually a pretty good swimmer and hypothermia was not an option in those warm, Caribbean waters, I was cool as a pepino. Maybe there was a hungry shark or two willing me to fall overboard as we sank but I had read somewhere that if you punched a shark in the nose they always swim off crying salty tears in search of their mommy. But there are no certainties when disaster strikes. If we went into the drink, I could’ve easily lost my passport and my copy of The Lonely Planet to a group of truant groupers but I figured that that’d be better than dying. Even the best consulate can’t renew a life. The boat had roughly 20 minutes to sink. I set my timer. It was overpacked with street dogs with bad tattoos, people selling corn and flour tortillas and multiple mariachi bands as it rocked back and forth like an old metronome clocking 62 bpm. But the Mayan gods were looking down on us that day as we safely made it to the island in one piece. Sadly, the isla was looking pretty harapienta. There had been a massive tropical storm the year or two prior which basically destroyed most of the palm trees, power lines and scrappy buildings built after the highly skilled and design forward Mayans had left overnight in spaceships in search of a planet with a brighter future. At that moment, it was all a work in progress. The poet John Donne wrote in 1624 that “no man’s an island” and had I been an island at that particular moment, I would’ve been something like Isla Mujeres: a lump in the sea, ragged, but full of potential and definitely ready to party.

My journey fortunately got off with a bang that first night after checking in at the hostel. I was sitting quietly alone having a coffee, reading the Lonely Planet and its companion book, The Confederacy of Dunces, when these three Danes approached me, twin brothers and their best friend. They were fresh out of gymnasium, i.e. high school for Danes and big Bowie fans. I had just gotten my haircut similar to the one during The Man Who Fell to Earth era (minus the red dye) and they evidently thought I kind of looked like him. Although my pupils match, it is true that I am one of many thin white Dukes out there with angular faces and a couple of funky teeth. They used this as an ice breaker which worked a treat as we quickly became thick as thieves. After a few minutes of small talk, we ran down the calle and grabbed some Coronas, a bottle of tequila and a bunch of limes and came back to the hostel to start the party. We threw on one of the handful of random CDs that were strewn about the hostel’s entertainment area which was one of the biggest albums of that year, REM’s “Out of Time” and blasted it through the boom box. People often hate on the song Shiny Happy People but that day it entered my ears as smooth as the tequila that was slippin’ down my throat while the groove and sweeping strings of Radio Song warmed my heart. It’s good to note that Losing My Religion is one of those brilliant, hooky pop songs but sadly has gone on to annoy countless “too cool for escuela” listeners. It ain’t Murmur or Document but it’s still a great album.

We eventually moved the party down a few doors to this scrappy bar/club where we continued on with the tequila and dancing. When we made it back to the hostel, we were hanging out listening to REM once again when out of the blue came these two drunken Mexicalis who obviously had a beef with one another that possibly went back a few generations and maybe had to do with a stolen cow or a mujeres. I blame Michael Stipe’s confessions for luring them into our particular hostel. They got through the front door with ease because there was no security bar an old potted plant with some ciggy butts in it. Shiny happy people they were not but they were each happily holding something shiny. Holy shit! A knife fight! My prayers and dreams had been answered! Of course when the rubber hit the road, I chickened out and laid low in the corner with the Danes, choosing not to participate in my first knife fight. Traditionally, knife fights (and gun fights for that matter) are between two people and, like romantic throuples, threesomes sometimes just don’t quite work. How embarrassing would it have been had they kept confidently slashing away at each other while I just stood in the corner/in the spotlight, knife at my side, feeling jealous and insecure. So I took the cue and stayed out of it. Luckily, the two vaqueros were so inebriated that they were both seeing double, which meant that together, they actually had quatro etrachromacy which is something that, if you’re sober, might be a super power. If you’re drunk, however, this most certainly guarantees that you will suck in a knife fight. This bumbling blade battle went on for way too long, accomplished next to nothing and only cut air so sadly, no sangre was spilled. It was all a disappointment yet had flashes of lucha libré but without the masks. No masks. No blood. What the fuck was the point? With the soothing soundtrack of the knife fight in the background mixed with Michael Stipe sharing once again that he’s “said too much”, I regaled the Danes with stories about singing in Denmark with my family when I was a little kid. I wasn’t bragging, I was merely helping them understand why I wasn’t normal. I think it sank in. Nothing was going to ruin our party but it was kind of like being underwater watching your passport float away with a shark smelling the scab on your leg. This could’ve all been avoided by hiring some guy named Miguel as security, just to stand at the door and look tough. REM always had security so why didn’t Los Tres Amigos? The whole scene was as if a Chinese kung fu movie director was attempting to recreate the Mexican version of Enter the Dragon but couldn’t find the local Bruce Lee so had to cast a couple of the mariachi players from the boat who would end up forgetting their well rehearsed fight scene choreography because they started their party too early. Eventually, a couple of locals appeared out of nowhere and grabbed each of the island cowboys by the lapel and threw them out on to the unlit street while I made the bold claim that the choice of having Kate Pierson from the B 52’s sing the harmonies on Shiny Happy People was a good call. But that may have been the tequila talking.

The next morning, the Danes and I were nursing our sore heads and throwing down mugs of coffee and yummy Mexican pastries while retracing the steps from the night before when one of them asked if I was going to stay on. Maybe it was because of the knife fight but they had made the decision to leave Isla Mujeres and would be heading south in search of the perfect cabañas to hole up in for a few days. “Do you want to join us?”, Kaspar kindly asked me to which I responded in the affirmativo. So after we drained all the hostel’s coffee, we hopped on that soon-to-be-sinking-sometime-in-the-near-future boat and found another van to take us to the promised land: Tulum.

After arriving in Tulum, the four of us walked around with our large backpacks on like upright Terrapins inspecting numerous cabañas that were strewn about in the sands just off the shore hoping to discover that perfecto spot that was NOT in The Lonely Planet: Tulum chapter. I’m not sure how we happened upon this particular one but by mid afternoon we threw down some pesos and committed to a few nights and were already smoking Quintana ditch weed in our hammocks, taking plunges in the beautiful water and napping under our own personal palm trees. We were pretty chuffed with ourselves but quickly came to the realization that this perfect place was actively putting the function into dysfunction. But as long as those two pathetic knife wielding kung fu fighters were still marooned on the island, we were happy and maybe even shiny happy. Turned out that, with great fortune, if you enjoy being entertained by life, this was as enjoyable as a bad, first year film school movie as it was an operation run by a mafia of misfits. There’s great reassurance when art imitates life.

The person in charge (and possibly the owner) of this slapdash restaurantè/cabaña scenario, was a very strange fella who introduced himself as El Capitán. I never caught his real name but I’m not aware of “Capitán” being a common surname in Portland, Oregon, the city from whence he had fled. He was probably in his late 50’s/early 60’s, had a belly pronounced enough to make the buttons on his Hawaiian shirt redundant, wore terrible board shorts with either beat up Sperry boat shoes or a pair of tired smoking slippers that were monogrammed in cursive gold with el Capitán. He wore a stained captain’s cap, á la Hemingway, of course, with an anchor patch and more gold cabling to match his slippers and the ever present aviator shades that never sat straight on his face. It was easy to reflect on the symbolism of his stylish offerings. He mostly hung out in the kitchen and restaurant all day, bossing the omelette-making staff around while the 1968 movie Blackbeard’s Ghost starring Peter Ustinov, which played on a constant loop on the small TV nestled in the corner. I never saw any other movie shown the entire time I was there. He turned it on in the morning and shut it off at about 11pm when he would go smoke some weed in his cabaña and prepare for yet another day of wondering if Blackbeard breaks his curse. I think I asked him if it was possible to play one of 8 billion other movies that had been made in the history of Earth but he ignored my request. How about The Man Who Fell to Earth? We could all discuss the cultural implications of Bowie’s haircut. Or not.

El Capitán’s only form of transportation was a loud, oil burning Honda Trail 70 that he would kick start (with his Sperry’s not his smoking slippers) and then envelope with his fat ass and cruise into town when he needed to grab some “supplies”. We all knew this was a euphemism for weed which he possibly scored from the local mariachi band although that’s not entirely fair to portray working musicians as drug dealers. (It is a fact that some musicians have been known to use drugs but most are just good folk who are trying to earn an honest living to put their kids through art school where they will end up doing drugs and making bad movies.) He would eventually return super stoned, super chuffed with a super bag of three limes and a maybe a cucumber. Always a man on a mission he was.

When El Capitán took off on these adventures, his sidekick, who I now recognize as my first live experience of Florida Man, would be left in charge. His name was possibly Mike but it makes more sense to call him Florida Man because any image you have in your head right now is probably pretty spot on. He was tall, had stringy, sun bleached blonde, shoulder length hair, donned mirrored, wrap around shades, always wore the same stained tank top advertising Big Pecker Surf Wax and board shorts with a pair of drugstore flip flops adorning his feet on the odd occasion when he wasn’t barefoot. The bottoms of his feet looked like a football Jim Thorpe might have scored with. I doubt he had ever spent much time indoors or even in the shade for that matter as his skin was elephantine. In keeping with the Florida Man theme, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the kitchen and was wonderfully inarticulate, therefore had no business helping El Capitán run his thriving, airtight business on his own. Lots of ins and outs to keep track of mind you. El Capitán would send him on little errands like “go pickup those coconuts” but Florida Man would mostly just walk around aimlessly and giddy with all this new found responsibility like a harmless reptile with a few ideas that he would impart upon whomever was standing within earshot. Even those grounded coconuts were not immune to his meandering diatribes. Sometimes you would get the feeling that El Capitán and Florida Man went way, way back, like to 3rd grade but other times it seemed like I already knew them better than they knew each other. They both seemed pretty brain dead, as if their cerebral cortices had been discarded on the streets of downtown Portland or sunk in the mangroves of the Everglades, respectively.

One morning, I was eating breakfast in the restaurant when this street dog sauntered in wheezing like a pair of broken bellows. The poor thing was struggling for its breath and I asked El Capitán what the hell was going on with it. He said, “lodged chicken bone” which was a full sentence for him. “Dumb dog”, he added, which lacked a verb. I asked him how long it had been in there and he said probably a few days. “You’ve got to take him in to the vet El Capitán!” I pleaded. “Mind your own business” he responded. The dog overheard us and couldn’t be bothered with El Capitán so continued on its way out the door in search of empathy. Those street dogs are tough hombres I tell you.

The whole scene was so bizarre. Thankfully, I was having a blast with my Danish buddies playing frisbee and cards, drinking tequila, smoking primo ditch weed and swimming in the turquoise blue waters far away from the biting wind coming off Lake Michigan. There was a game I played while laying in my hammock where I would surmise what fueled these nut bags called “What’s Their Deal?”. This game went back a couple of years when we needed to whittle away time while on the road with the college choir. It’s a good one. I got the feeling that they were down in Tulum not fully by choice. So what made them tick? Did they have families? Were they in trouble with the law? Trouble with the ex? Tax evasion? Skipping town because of a debt owed to someone with no teeth and a shaved head who was going to cut their pinky finger off? Life was pretty simple down there and, except for the occasional knife fight, it was actually pretty safe so you couldn’t really blame anyone with an IQ below 85 for arriving in a place like Tulum via a hallucinated version of destino manifesto.

Then the day before the Danes were moving their party down to Belize, the trinity was complete. Everything comes in threes. I realize I’m contradicting earlier words regarding the number trés. I will admit that there is something very powerful about threesomes and they do work occasionally. Triangles work really well and water, of course, is comprised of two hydrogen atoms with oxygen as the third wheel, making their complicated relationship work brilliantly. Then there’s the whole Holy Trinity but that was maybe one reason why the Mayans left.

Anyway, a late 70’s, powder blue Thunderbird with Oklahoma plates, full of crap with smudged windows, rolled up as a bold statement of intent and parked right in the middle of everything like an ad for a cheap perfume called “Perseverance” while this portly blonde woman dramatically spilled out of it. Central casting. There were beads everywhere as she emanated shades of turquoise. We all turned our heads in silence. I was so blown away by the overall presentation that I felt compelled to yell from my hammock, “Lady! What the fuck is your story?” but decided to keep my snarky thoughts to myself. She evidently had driven solo all the way from Oklahoma to Tulum in that clapped out Thunderbird, which impressed me to no end and squelched the need for me to read any modern American fiction for the foreseeable future. The Polaroid my mind snapped at that moment spoke volumes. Whatever story was in my head, I believed to be the Gospel truth. Maybe the life she was living back home had expired and she decided to throw all of her processions, her clothes, the beads, all of it in the backseat of that Thunderbird and flee in the middle of the night to reinvent herself in the Yucatán, possibly as a seer of sorts, make good money reading taro cards or the sweaty palms of backpackers in a country that knows nothing about you. Maybe she squirreled away a few thousand in cash and hid it under the floor mat of that giant, unregistered boat of a car that she could use as a bribe to the local drug cartel to purchase a small plot on the beach and officially extricate herself from an ex husband who had just blown all their savings at the casino along with the title to their double wide. Maybe she figured her kids were old enough to fend for themselves just as she was at their age. Time to get real and dream baby. Whatever it was, she needed a fuckin’ break. Didn’t we all? As she was surveying the property, I saw Florida Man’s antennae pop up. He walked over and said hello and they immediately looked like they were back middle school about to go make out under the bleachers during the B squad football game. For the first time though, I was actually feeling hopeful. I was anticipating some kind of horn rammin’, mating dance, ritual performance fight between El Capitán and Florida Man for the new girl’s heart but the former seemed uninterested in it all and actually appeared, in general, a tad asexual. This was perhaps due to the amount of weed in his system and let’s be honest, his true love would always be Peter Ustinov. Til death due us part. But Florida Man, by the grace of God, appeared as though he had finally found his soul mate amongst the patchouli mist of Miss Thunderbird.

The next day, the Danes told me that they had just met an Aussie who had an orange 1977 VW bus and was heading south to try and find a school that would teach him how to hablo Español so I bid farewell to the Scandinavians and said G’day to my new Aussie mate, a lovely lad named Campbell. Campbell from Newcastle was his title. I hopped in his bus and we travelled all the way down to Guatemala, past a border full of tanks and soldiers with Uzi’s as it was still recovering from being torn apart by the ridiculousness of yet another stupid civil war. We had a blast on the road and eventually found a great school run out of a home in Quetzaltenango and signed up for a month of intensive Spanish, miraculously becoming fairly conversational. I sadly lost the gift to gab in Español quickly after returning home from my travels. Oh well. There’s always retirement. I will never forget the profound phrase “en esta lugar” though, as that is the one phrase that can get you out of a knife fight.

About 12 years later, my wife and I were on a gig in Cuba filming a group of very well intentioned folk bringing aid to Havana yet they were as dysfunctional as my Tulum amigos. Like an adult church camping trip on steroids with a shortage of soap, there was lots of drama but sadly the kind that’s best not to film which proved problematic as the purpose was to film them. Anyway, we escaped over to Tulum for a few days of relaxation and on the last day rented a couple of bikes to ride around in search of my memories of that trip. I was determined to find those damn cabañas and with great excitement, introduce my wife to the madness of El Capitán, Florida Man and Miss Thunderbird so she could be enlightened and share with me this wonderment. Waiting for the beeping to start on my memory detector, I could feel it in my bones and knew that the scene of the crime was so close. I could smell the patchouli and almost taste the ditch weed. We combed the beach for a good few hours that afternoon but after all was said and done, there was not a building, palm tree or television set or human for that matter, that I recognized or who recognized me. It was all gone. They were all gone. Vanished like Blackbeard’s soul after he finally did a good deed.

Perhaps after the Danes and I split, things changed for the better around the joint and a reimagined El Capitán emerged. Maybe he offered to be the celebrant and best man for the marriage of Florida Man and Miss Thunderbird, paving the way for their new life lived happily ever after free of exes and taxes. And maybe his conscious got the best of him and he performed impromptu surgery near the blaring TV set, extricating the chicken bone from the windpipe of that poor perro and liberating it to go forth and find another chicken bone to choke on. Good deeds like these are perhaps the secret sauce that can help this ragged planet heal. Maybe there were many more good deeds El Capitán performed that I was unaware of. Who knows, maybe he did so many that he eventually turned into Blackbeard’s ghost, a benevolent spirit that would eventually find its way back out to sea.

Stay artful…

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Caeca Fides.

Had I whispered those words to my father even as he was taking his last breaths, he probably would have emerged from his hospice haze and emphatically elucidated, “Oooo! I love the dulcet tones! That’s Latin for blind faith!” Dad was not a Latin scholar per se but he would often access the Latin or Greek he kept somewhere in the folds of his mind like calcium deposits from his college and Lutheran seminary classes. Often translating or reverse engineering English words and phrases by extracting their ancient bones, he was like an unpaid archaeologist hired by Webster. Unless he was on your team, playing games like Bluff or Dictionary might possibly suck because he could pretty much figure out any word which ultimately defeated the porpoise of the game. He loved language, etymology and traditional grammar, often using arcane words like “extant” and “remunerative” rather than just asking “is it still around?” or “did you get paid?” When we were growing up, if someone called our land line and asked, “Can I speak to Paul Christenson?” he would respond with “It is I!” which was so right while simultaneously so wrong, evoking winces from any of his 6 children and including our mother. Good grammar to him was evidently the 11th Commandment. He loved language and eventually was able to get by preaching in German and Norwegian and even attempted to learn French sometime in the late 70’s during a time when he was busier than Martin Luther scouting doors in Wittenberg.

Dad was not very funny, at least not in the traditional sense of the word but thankfully, his blind faith forced God’s hand to intervene and present him the gift of the Queen of Puns, my mother, his beloved Loey. Mom showed little restraint with humor and would often use the names Al Dente, Skip Rope or Rick O’ Shay as the return address on the numerous cards and letters she would send us. She loved the phrase, “The pun is the Lois form of humor.” She was funny haha while dad was funny funny and that’s one reason why their partnership worked so well. He would often throw out phrases that were more intended as musings and observations but inevitably would crack us all up. When he would hear our laughter he would often say, “Good thing you have your dad to make fun of!” Since he was such a grammar freak, instead of saying “Have a nice day!” he would say “Make for yourself a good day!” which was hilarious yet made perfectly good sense to him since it’s impossible to grammatically possess a day. We all knew he was correct but who in their right mind would ever say that to their kids let alone in public? Well Dad would. He didn’t care. He loved living in a household of humor yet knew deep down that his bones were not really as funny as a well placed dangling participle. But he sure appreciated and loved humor and if you said something funny to him, at some point he began saying “good one!” in full support of your cleverness. This was so sincere yet hilarious in its own right because, of course, whatever you said was funny, otherwise you wouldn’t have said it in the first place right? Despite this and as in all aspects of his life, dad was fully confident knowing exactly who he was or if he didn’t, it was this insecurity that was his ace of spades that he continued to hold close to his chest and into the afterlife.

The phrase blind faith was one of the highest tenants by which he lived. He operated on this earthly plane at full speed, fueled by blind faith and that trickster propellent called hope. Dad was an extremely gifted musician who, even at 92 with neuropathic fingers, could still improvise and play Chopin’s Military Polonaise. He pulled this feat off on the piano in the lobby of his assisted living facility in Red Wing, Minnesota after returning from a 12 day stay at the Mayo Clinic where they installed something akin to a new carburetor in his failing heart. He spent his entire life fully ensconced in music performance, arrangement and of course his favorite: theory. Music theory, to most normal humans learning an instrument is akin to having your mother with you on your first date. But he believed you needed to know theory to really know music like the need to know the periodic chart if you’re studying chemistry.

Being a proud member of the esteemed The St. Olaf College Choir with my mother in the 1950’s, choral music was probably the genre that struck the deepest chord with dad. Hearing the St. Olaf Choir sing Grechaninov’s Our Father, Op 29 No 11 would send him as close to God as a mortal could get. He also loved the early composers like Mozart and was constantly amazed and inspired by the work of Bach. His performance idol and inspiration was Vladimir Horowitz who he saw as a young boy at Northrup Auditorium at the University of Minnesota. He would still talk about that religious experience some 80 years later. The great Sergei Rachmaninoff was another one of his favorite composers but his interest appeared to wain with anything written after the Romantic Period. I think he appreciated someone like Aaron Copland or Stephan Sondheim but even those two were possibly too saccharine for his tastes. Dad’s internal stereo was never quite plugged in like it is with most of us. To him, Elvis had never even entered the building let alone left it. Dylan? The Beatles? Joni Mitchell? Marvin Gaye? The Jackson Five? Abba? Haircut 100? “Nein danke!” he might say. He diluted all popular music post Rachmaninoff down to one hilarious phrase: “It’s all just 4/4! Baby baby baby! Done!” There is zero chance that he knew that Blind Faith was also the name of an English supergroup, an influential band who put out just one amazing album in 1969 as he was too busy building churches in Wisconsin and Iowa to bother with anything outside the classical canon or the Lutheran Hymnal.

There were phrases and words he would unconsciously come up with that still keep on giving. One evening, back in the Chicago days, dad and I cracked open a couple of father/son beers and sat down to watch The David Letterman Show in the living room of the parsonage in Evanston. After Letterman announced that the musical guest was none other than Tom Waits, a hero of mine, my beer began tasting even better. When Tom finally walked out on stage looking like he had just stepped out of a garbage can, he sat down at the piano and began playing with those straight, rigor mortised fingers as if he was suffering from a rare neurological condition. Dad taught all of his 6 children (plus some grandkids and numerous others) over the years and one technique he would use was to imagine holding a tennis ball in our palms for correct hand position. I could see that the sight of Tom’s straight fingers was an abomination to him going against every musical grain in his body. To add salt to the wound, Tom is known for singing like a frog who has a frog in its throat and using his diaphragm correctly was out of the question so dad looked over at me and once again, in all sincerity asked, “Is this good?” I started laughing and confidently stated, “Yes dad. This is good.” And with this blind faith in one of his children and the trust that I mostly know what I’m talking about regarding modern music, he believed that I was correct in my judgement or maybe I fooled him. Despite a severe lack of wisdom, he somehow took my word as the Gospel truth even though it was The Gospel According to Doubting Thomas which is a pretty dodgy Gospel even on a good day.

When I was living in Australia, dad called and informed me that Rusty Kephart had just phoned him on behalf of the Nordic Fest Committee in Decorah, Iowa curious if our family would be up for reuniting for the 50th anniversary that year of the Nordic Fest. In some cheugy circles, this would be like reuniting Blind Faith or even The Beatles. I told him that it would be pretty expensive for me to fly back at which point he blurted out, “Rusty has a budget!” which made me laugh out loud which in turn got him laughing and realizing that, once again, he was the King of Funny Funny. We have gotten so much mileage out of that phrase that I once put it on a T shirt for one of my brothers. But dad really meant it. He was dead serious and maybe Rusty did have a budget after all because for him, it seemed as though Rusty was just code for God and dad’s God always had a budget. This was the way he and mom led their family of 8 through life. Amongst many adventures, we went overseas three times, driving around in a van, surviving on bread and cheese, singing songs from musicals like the Sound of Music and Oliver as well as Scandinavian folk songs throughout Scandinavia and Europe in ‘74, ‘77 and in ‘81. The latter was the year we snuck behind the Iron Curtain, crossing barbed wire borders with machine guns clicking and German Sheppards sniffing. We sang our way through East Germany and Poland where we eventually escaped from the grip of the newly installed martial law by the skin of our teeth via a ferry to Sweden and the help of a random hitchhiker. One phrase that he would often use was “we’re living on the edge…with plenty!” said like a true preacher, one on a mission with God on his side.

I told him once about this popular, bari sax driven indie band brilliantly named Morphine who I thought was pretty cool and he said, “Oh! What a terrible name!” And then it happened again. I laughed and then he realized that he had said something funny without trying to be funny. Thankfully, in his relatively painless few final days in hospice, morphine became his friend, working side by side with blind faith and hope just like the original Holy Trinity that kept him going for 92 years.

Blind Faith’s biggest hit, which is still played live on countless stages around the world, is “Can’t Find My Way Home”. Stevie Winwood, a prodigy on multiple instruments, was only about 21 years old when he wrote it. He wrote a lot of those annoying “4/4! Baby baby baby! Done!” songs, the ones that would make dad slightly disgusted. Ironically, I, his own son, have gone on to compose and record albums full of these 4/4 songs referencing babies but he was such a devoted father that I’ve received nothing but praise and encouragement from him and my mother over the years. “Fine musicianship!” “Perfect intonation!” Well done son!” is what he would often say. Forever the supportive optimist and completely biased father.

In our nearly daily conversations over the past few years when I would ask “How’re you doing dad?”, his pat answer was “Well..quite well!”, his glass was always half full while mine is often half empty. We would begin with topics as mundane as “How’s the weather out in Minnesota dad?” “It’s pretty cold here. How’s it out in California?” but then would move on to more arcane topics which were, just like the weather, varied and fluid. We never did speak though, about how Stevie Winwood was actually similar to him as a young lad. Dad was playing in churches for weddings and funerals at just 15 while Stevie was around 15 when he began playing in clubs with the explosive Spencer Davis Group. He and Stevie were born in different eras, wore their hair in slightly different styles (ie Stevie had a lot of hair and dad barely had enough to even create a style) and took very different paths but dad surely would’ve appreciated his unlikely bedfellow’s musicianship. Dad’s blind faith and trust in my judgment of popular music might have made him appreciate that which, seemingly, was anathema to him. As a 21 year old, maybe it was just a turn of phase or perhaps Stevie really was lost and trying to find his way home. Dad, on the other hand, always seemed to know exactly who he was and where he was going and this was tied securely to this unwavering faith, albeit blind, in God, family and humanity. He recognized his life’s mission as preaching the social Gospel, creating positive change, spreading peace, living in fellowship and having fun from his first parish fresh out of seminary to his final breath. He always knew exactly where home was and he’s certainly there now, wherever that is, inadvertently being funny.

I love you dad.

Paul Henry Christenson

September 9, 1933 - April 29, 2026

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When we moved to Decorah, Iowa in 1972, my folks were cash poor but rich in the currency of joie de vivre. Somehow they managed to scrape enough money together to buy a big, beautiful, brick house built a year before General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. This was the house that I basically grew up in from kindergarten on through high school. Yes, these were the days when you could pop out six kids and buy a huge house on the paltry earnings of a Lutheran pastor. Though the house and yard were perfect for us, I’m not sure my folks were aware that the woods behind the house was a priceless perk to their purchase but they found out soon enough.

Above is the cover of our eponymous (renamed “Plaid” for obvious reasons) album that we released around that time. It could’ve gone platinum but records show that it only made it to tin foil. I have no idea what the photographer charged for that shoot but we sure saved a lot of money by using the backwoods for its backdrop. It was conveniently only about a 1 minute walk from the house so a few of us had just rolled out of bed and went straight to the shoot. Try guessing which ones. Everyone appears to be naturally glowing with our new haircuts while the tartan prints of our itchy polyester outfits created an undeniably powerful and relevant theme especially for a family named Christenson who had no Celtic heritage. The position of the big tree my dad is leaning on made it possible for him to strike the pose that he was striking as the shutter shuttered. It’s one that speaks volumes but somehow has no need for words. The brilliance of this cover art was lost on the general public due to the fact that Pink Floyd put out “Dark Side of the Moon” the same year with that uninspired, prism themed, half assed attempt of a hip cover. Plaid was the real eye catcher and those scrappy woods that held a thousand stories and that concrete bridge which delivered them, made the records almost sell themselves.

The gatekeepers to those woods were the bats that lived in the limestone rock wall that stood proudly near that bridge. I have nothing but respect for those sonar driven, blood thirsty, flying fanged daredevils. After dinner, we (and often a gaggle of neighborhood kids) would run around in our huge backyard playing Nerf football or whiffle ball or games like “Tag” though it’s safe to say that everyone’s favorite was probably “Kick the Can”. With the amount of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup that my mother’s recipes required, there was always an empty, label-less can laying around somewhere dying to get kicked. We would try and stay out as long as possible and would inevitably be in the final innings as the warm Midwestern sun dropped which was go time for those little vampires. This was their witching hour when they would emerge from their stupor, fly out of their caves and perform aerial shows that would humble the Blue Angels, eventually swooping our bowl haircuts in search of mosquitoes. I always assumed that they were on our side, protecting us, making sure that we didn’t get attacked by their dinner but perhaps they were just waiting for us to get stung so they could wash down a meal of mosquitos with our fresh young blood, thus ensuring the eternal life that all vampires crave.

I would spend hours in those woods with my few core friends after school and on the weekends. We would mainly “play army” because there’s really nothing better for developing minds than warfare for without it, what kind of a dreadful, peaceful world would we live in? Of course this had little to do with war and more to do with letting one’s imagination run wild in those woods and run it certainly would do. As you walked past the limestone bat chateau (“21 rooms but 1 will do”) and over that famously photographed bridge, you would officially enter “The Woods”, which was basically a ravine with a steep drop to your left and a hill going up to your right. There was a very primitive road that could support a truck or hearse on the very rare occasion if need be or guide a pair of skinny legs up to the other concrete bridge which was more or less the spiritual half way point on the journey. This is where you would either stop and take in the stillness or envision launching a bunch of bombs towards enemy troops to decimate all the evil beings of humanity and hopefully be rewarded with a Slinky or a Nerf football for your dedication and service. Then after that moment, as you continued on your way, you would eventually end up at the cemetery, the one that overlooked the beautiful bluffs on the other side of the hill. The dead resting in those plots would’ve certainly been grateful to have had such a lovely view.

Decorah resides in the Driftless area, a geological phenomenon known for its steep hills, forested ridges and deeply carved river valleys due to the fact that somehow it was not covered by ice during the Last Glacial Period while surrounding areas were crushed and flattened by the slow moving retreating glaciers. This was perhaps another thing I’m quite sure my folks were unaware of before accepting the call at First Lutheran Church. We moved from the very flat Kettle Moraine of the Millwaukee area to the dramatic Mississippi River bluffs of North Eastern Iowa so I’m guessing the God of topographical relief had our backs. We would be lost for hours in those woods during the spring, summer and autumn days but what we probably didn’t realize initially was the entertainment factor of 11 that those woods would offer us when everything was blanketed in deep, white, fluffy snow.

To say this rudimentary road that snaked its way through the ravine from the picturesque cemetery all the way down to the bat cave would transform into a professional bobsled track in winter wasn’t totally stretching the truth. With great fortune, this was the era of the invention of the infamous Red Tub. Gone were those cumbersome wooden and iron sleds from the 1800’s, the puritanical fear of death, the pestilence and of course the wrathful God. By the 1970’s, we no longer feared God because how could one fear a God if he had given us mortals something as awesome as the Red Tub, The Big Wheel and the Beatles? Shortly after the boom in plastics, there was a brief period where we would use these rectangular sheets of super thin, colored plastic to slide on which was fun but could get unruly the faster you bombed down the hill. When you reached the bottom of the hill and stood up, inevitably, your frozen mitten would still be clutching the hole that was the handle and at that point, the wind would gust and blow the sharp, plastic edge straight back at your face, knocking out a tooth or slicing up your forehead. The Red Tub, on the other hand, was a brilliant invention. Safe and stable in some respects, it also maintained a deadly aspect due to its sheer speed. It was a blast until you ran into something like a rock or ran over something like a frozen squirrel. One crack and it was off to the garbage dump, begging your folks to go to the hardware store to buy another one for the home team.

Due to the thrill and intensity of our private bobsled track, there were at least two accidents that were on the public records. I was not present for the first one but we all heard the awful tale told later. It was our slightly older neighbor Karen who lost control of her sled one outing and plummeted down the steep side of the ravine. She came to an abrupt halt as she went head straight into a redundant barbed wire fence that was holding nothing in nor keeping anything out. She ended up requiring stitches on her lip and cheek. I’m sure there was trauma involved but that scar eventually became sexy. Was it worth it? That’s not for me to say. It could’ve been way worse but let’s just say that I’m glad it was not me who came face to face with our friend tetanus that fateful day.

I was definitely present, however, for the second accident. I had a buddy named Dave who I called Dave Shave because he was already shaving in eighth grade. We were always hanging out those days mostly drawing cartoon black guys with huge afros and listening to Earth Wind and Fire despite being two very white boys from Iowa. At least he had dark hair. Dave Shave came over one bright and crisp winter’s day with his red tub to do a few runs through the woods with me. We walked up to the cemetery a few times and bombed all the way back down to the sleeping bats, trying in earnest to make it to the upper edge of our yard. We were having a blast until we weren’t.

I had just made a run before him and as I was walking back up, I spotted Dave Shave traveling at quite the clip, rounding the corner from the upper bridge laying headfirst in his red tub, looking like he was about to take gold at the ‘72 Sapporo Olympics. From there he kind of banked to his left and then banked to his right and then went hard left like he was a water skier being whipped around by a maniacal boat driver with too much horse power in his Johnson…outboard motor that is. As he hit the snow bank ridge, it appeared to launch him somewhere in the direction of the dark side of the moon. I watched incredulously and in slow motion as Dave Shave (now Flying Dave Shave) went airborne while the bow of his red tub slowly began pointing towards 3 o’ clock, perhaps intentionally battling aerodynamics. I looked over in the direction of his projection and noticed that there was a cute little maple sapling that was standing tall, all on its own, so proud to be part of those wonderful woods. Anyone with half a heart could tell that it was hoping to follow in the footsteps of his forefathers and foremothers, eventually growing up to be a powerful elder tree. Maybe he could be that tree, like the one my father suavely leaned against on our album cover or perhaps he’d gently fall on his own from a gentle breeze one glorious day after a long arboreal life of servitude. From there, he would lovingly get milled and planked and go on to serve as the skeleton of a house for a deserving family, one who desperately needed a roof over their heads and a tv so they could watch Johnny Carson.

But sometimes life barks up the wrong tree.

My eyes followed the arc of Dave Shave, with his ski goggles and stubble, as he sailed helplessly through the air. His journey came to an abrupt end when he T boned that poor little sapling, the one who was just getting its start in life. His adolescent tree trunk hit Dave Shave half way up his left side and that’s when I heard two cracks. One was the sapling and the other sounded a lot like human ribs. Then there was stillness. I yelled for him and ran over to the scene of the crime which, incidentally, was directly opposite of where Karen got her sexy scar.

There was Dave Shave, laying motionless next to his cracked up red tub, eyes shut and wheezing like a bagpipe being played by a drunk for the funeral of an unknown soldier. You could even hear the dead up at the cemetery shake their bones in collective sympathy.

“Dave! Dave! Are you all right?” I screamed.

He couldn’t even get a word out. And then I noticed that he had nearly cracked that poor little sapling in half. In that tender moment, time stood still and I could feel all its big dreams and aspirations being shattered in one violent incident. I got choked up, knowing that he had little chance to grow up to be a proper tree. But then I came to my senses and realized that Dave Shave was more important to me than that pipsqueak tree. So I rolled him over face up into what was left of his red tub, pulled on the bow string and dragged him out of the woods, getting him back on to the bobsled track. I pulled him over that highly photographable bridge, past the bats and towards our yard. Every rock and pebble that he slid over made him wince and wheeze. Poor fella. It was safe to say that he had had better days. I thought to myself “What would Maurice White do?” and almost began singing an Earth Wind and Fire song like “Shining Star” or “September” to comfort him but uncharacteristically and fortunately showed restraint. Our backyard was below the road and when we were almost to its edge, I gave him that last little nudge and was instantly mortified as I realized that I had lost control of him and all I could do was watch him go down the embankment towards our house gaining speed on the way. Though severely damaged, that red tub was still working its magic. I madly ran after him in a last ditch attempt to grab his feet but fell in the deep snow trying. From there, I watched him barrel towards the swing set but to my relief, he quietly stopped shy of hitting yet another seemingly immovable object.

I got up and ran past him and continued into our house, yelling “Mom! Mom! Mom!” Mom ran out and upon seeing the condition of poor Dave Shave, laying in his broken red tub, zipped up in his snow suit like a pig in a blanket, immediately called his folks who showed up in a hot second. His dad, a former aircraft mechanic with the Air Force who, thankfully, had never seen conflict firsthand, gently lifted that lifeless body up like a fallen soldier and slid it onto the back seat of their fake wood paneled station wagon and rushed him to the town’s only hospital.

Later on that evening, my folks received word that Dr. Callahan had been pulled from yet another boozy dinner party and had performed an emergency splenectomy, successfully removing Dave Shave’s spleen, the organ that little maple sapling and velocity had blown apart like an enemy sub. There were often rumors of Dr. Callahan performing surgery with whiskey on his breath. I cannot confirm nor deny this. All that I can contribute to the debate though, is that this was the 70’s and the rules of engagement were more open to interpretation. The main takeaway here is that a good Celtic doctor in the midst a community of Norwegians did the right thing by skillfully removing Dave Shave’s damaged blood filtering organ and saved the life of my fellow platoon mate. After a few months of recovery, he and I were back on track sketching pages and pages of black dudes with afros while listening to hours and hours of Earth Wind and Fire. So tipsy or not, let’s all raise a glass and toast Dr. Callahan!

The main takeaway here is: does anyone actually need a spleen? My belief and I’m sticking to this like a tongue on a frozen pole, is that the only thing in life that any of us really needs are some woods near by.

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When he was almost 12, Jack’s mom let him have an overnight with her sister Kate and brother in law Bo who lived on the other side of town in a rambler in desperate need of a new paint job. The two sisters were as close as you could get. They weren’t twins but mostly finished each other’s sentences. Bo started life out just fine, however, the two sisters felt that since around high school, he was moving towards the bottom right of the graph. Kate loved him despite his flaws, recognizing that she had her own and Jack’s mom still loved him too but the both of them hoped he might one day turn back into that kid who was almost like a brother to them.

Kate and Bo were always taking Jack on adventures but for him, the best was when they had him over for pizza and a movie. Jack loved them as surrogate parents and was over the moon because tonight was a bonus sleepover. After they had finished up eating the pizza, Kate announced that she wanted to rewatch one of her favorite movies, the Australian classic, “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert”.

“Ah jeez Kate! We don’t want to screw the kid up!” Bo said while geometrically assembling the remaining slices of pizza on a piece of recycled foil.

“What are you talking about Bo? He’ll love it!” she said looking to Jack. “Right Jack?”

Jack had no idea what they were talking about but answered, “Sure.”

“Then I’m going to bed!” Bo said as he walked away leaving the pizza neatly in their foil on the counter top.

Kate popped a big bowl of some Orville Redenbacher and they nuzzled each other on the couch and started watching “Priscilla”. He was transfixed from the first scene and mesmerized with every aspect of the film although he did comment on the slow bits and how fuzzy it was.

“This is an old film Jack. It’s from another era. Another planet.”

When they made it to the scene where the motley crew blasts Abba’s “Dancing Queen”, the two of them jumped up and began dancing and laughing on the shag carpet.

You can dance!

You can jive!

Having the time of your life!

Jack went to bed and dreamt of sequins, the desert and the Great Heron, a bird he had just learned about in school which, for some reason, really stuck with him. His little witchy friend Isadora told him, “Yeah, the way you’re talking Jack, I think the Great Heron is your animal spirit.”

The next morning, Kate and Bo were up before Jack and began making pancakes.

“Jack loved the movie by the way,” she said mixing the batter.

“Look. I’m just trying to protect him from this world Kate.”

“What the fuck are you talking about Bo?” she asked as she dropped the whisker in the bowl.

“You know very well that he’ll be in a world of hurt if he dances around in sequins the rest of his life,” he snapped back at her.

“Fuck Bo!”

“Kate. He doesn’t have a dad. There’s no man in his life,” he explained looking into her eyes.

“Well he’s got you but at the moment, you seem like just a fuckin’ cardboard cutout!”

He paused.

“I don’t even know what you mean by that Kate. Look, all I’m saying is that the little kid needs some balance in his life. That’s all. I’m mean, he can dance a bit here and there but he also needs to get some of that boy yang energy out like, how about some boxing lessons?”

“Boxing? Boxing Bo? Really?” she said while she beat the pancake batter like she was in the ring herself.

“Well, more like for self defense and, um, you know, fitness…”

“Please. Just let Jack be Jack,” she interrupted.

“Look I’m going to ask your sister if I can get him into my buddy Kieran’s boxing class. I think it’d be a good thing,” he calmly added. Kate just shook her head then noticed Jack walking down the stairs.

“Morning Jack!” they both said completely out of synch.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked. “Did you have some wild dreams of the desert?”

“I did and I also dreamt about the Great Heron,” he pause, “which I guess is my spirit animal.”

Kate caught Bo rolling his eyes.

“That’s sweet Jack!'“ Kate said flinging some batter from the whisker. “Up for some pancakes?”

“Sure,” he said through a yawn while rubbing his eyes.

Jack’s mother showed up after most of the pancakes had been devoured to pick up her little sweetheart. When she walked in, she enthusiastically asked, “How was the big sleepover Jack?” and held her arms out. He slowly walked towards her and gave her a gentle hug. Not too long ago, he would’ve ran straight over to her and wrapped his arms around her waist in a burst of clingy love. But he was changing, mellowing or perhaps just more self conscious. His excitement was now mostly elsewhere. But then he lit up.

“We watched a great movie last night mom!”

“Let me guess…Priscilla?”

“How’d you know?”

“Because it was the go-to movie for your auntie and me back in the day,” she explained.

“Mom, I think I want to take dance lessons!” Jack rattled off which created yet another eye rolling moment from Bo.

“That’s a great idea Jack!” she said. “We can get you in a class, maybe at the same studio where we used to take dance lessons as kids.”

“I think that’s a great idea too Jack but…” Bo chimed in, “…but how about taking some lessons in something physical like…”

“Dancing is physical Bo!” Kate forcefully interjected.

“…of course it is Kate but something to really get that boy energy out there, like, like, boxing…”

“Boxing?” Jack’s mom asked.

“Yeah my friend Kieran runs a great boxing studio where it’s more about strength and balance and less about slugging it out you know?” he argued.

Jack’s mom had that look on her face which Kate instantly recognized as the look of flashing through the years thinking about her boy without a man around the house, feeling guilty about raising Jack all yin lopsided. She could witness her thinking to herself, “Maybe punching a bag would be a good thing?”

“Well…what do you think Jack?” his mother asked gently.

Jack had the similar look on his face, the one just like his mother’s. They were cut from the same cloth, still mostly attached at the hip. They were both open to trying new things that would replace their missing man.

“Maybe that could work but, I, I just don’t want to get punched by anyone,” he pleaded.

“Oh you’d just be punching a bag or something, you know and you’d have a lot of gear on so it’s totally safe. Kieran is a really good guy,” Bo said astonished that he was getting anywhere, “and dancing is boxing!”

Kate couldn’t believe that Bo had accomplished his mission so quickly but also knew how Jack and her sister processed things.

So it was. Jack began taking dance lessons and boxing lessons. He absolutely loved the dance lessons while only tolerated the boxing lessons. Kieran was, as it turned out, a good guy and his philosophy was mostly about punching non human things and things like jump roping.

Until that one day.

“Ok boys! Listen up!”, Kieran announced. “Today we’re going to get in the ring. It’s time to get a feel for what it’s like to be a real pugilist but know that you’ll all be fully padded up. Just know that this is more about learning the footwork, kind of like dancing around and not throwing any punches.”

Jack swallowed, attempting to push his stomach back down where it was supposed to live.

“Jack. Why don’t you put on some gloves and some headgear and get in the ring,” Kieran instructed, “and Trevor, you too.”

The two boys got all the gear on and each stepped through the ropes like it was a Vegas fight. Jack’s legs were shaking. Trevor never said much on a good day and always seemed a little mysterious, perhaps unpredictable.

“Ok so just bounce around a bit you two. Go orthodox, peek-a-boo, do the Philly Shell, all the positions we’ve gone over. Be loose! Think like Ali! You’re butterflies!” he commanded to his pupils while shadow boxing himself.

So that’s what Jack and Trevor did. They bounced around like misshapen bearings on a vibrating sheet of metal.

“Looking good boys!” he said while hanging on the ropes. “Remember that this is actually more like dancing.”

As soon as Jack heard those words, “Dancing Queen” began playing in his head at full volume and everything faded.

Locally, he lost all control. Universally, he was God.

And then he became the Great Heron.

He looked Trevor straight in the eye and began a one, two, three, one, two, three hip sashay move that he had just learned in dance class and managed to turn that into a free wheelin’ flamenco dance. Trevor’s eyes turned into saucers.

“I know how I’ll win this fight!” Jack thought to himself looking around for his mom, Kate or even Bo. Turned out that Bo was the only one there in his corner. Turned out that Bo believed in him. Turned out that Bo finally understood him. The internal soundtrack made is arms spread out wide like a pair of da Vinci wings. He looked up towards the ceiling and searched for that same sky from “Priscilla”, the one that he knew was somewhere above those dusty gym rafters.

But then he felt the panicked, uncontrollable uppercut swing of Trevor’s glove make direct contact with his unpadded jaw. All the colors of the rainbow suddenly rushed towards him as he felt his body lift into the air. His technicolor wings began to flap to that iconic disco beat as he rose high above the red Australian desert. He looked down and witnessed Trevor turning into a lost ant walking in the wrong direction. Jack was the ruler of all things. He had become the Great Heron, just as Isadora had predicted, and he was flying free, gracefully, towards a burnt orange sun.

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“A harbormaster is an official responsible for managing, regulating, and enforcing safety rules within a port or harbor, overseeing vessel traffic, mooring, and facility maintenance.”

Sometimes life lobs you a softball so gentle and slow that it requires little preternatural talent or steroids to knock it out of the park. And if you happen to get paid to take a swing, well, that’s basically like moving to Margaritaville with a company credit card. Sometimes when I’m chatting with someone, say, at a fancy cocktail party (which happens often in my line of work) I will subtly mention the fact that I was once a harbormaster. This usually blows their mind at which point I’ve got them in the palm of my hand for at least 30 seconds. But being a man of ethics, I quickly give way to transparency and fully admit that I got the job with absolutely no qualifications. If they still want to keep the conversation going, I might consider them a friend for life. However, if they feign interest, I’ll quickly pull out my phone and announce, with great urgency, “I’ve got to take this call. It’s really important…” and excuse myself to go recharge my champagne glass.

I stumbled upon the best job I’ve ever had in between stints as a semi professional couch surfer. This was also the period of my life when I was trying to achieve fame and fortune through rock n roll without anyone knowing. My father had taken a call as head pastor at a lovely Lutheran church that stood at the crossroads of Evanston and Skokie in the northern suburbs of Chicago as I, the youngest in our family, finally left for college. Free of children, my folks were finally going to live the good life. After I graduated without honors, I felt as though I was the one who was living the good life. Bumming around from the Midwest to the West Coast like an unpublished beatnik, I avoided red carpets and worked very, very odd jobs like selling apple cider at the Pike Street Market in Seattle and stuffing envelopes in a windowless room in downtown Portland. The latter lasted for 5 days. As I endured paper cuts, I conversed about nothing of substance with a cute girl who was evidently just as desperate as I was to cover her rent and beer money. I never saw her again. It’s safe to assume that she recognized in me a certain maturity and stability which may have frightened her off. Apparently, she wasn’t ready to settle down quite yet and certainly not with the overachiever she was stuffing envelopes with.

During this highly productive time, I lived at my college friend’s dad’s house for a few months where my friend and I would end each beautiful, sacred day here on earth (mainly running around to thrift stores and then having a few beers to unwind) watching Barnaby Jones, a brilliant detective show based around the concept of the color brown. Everything was brown. Barnaby’s car, his suits, his shoes and the lampshades which kissed brown curtains. Even the coffee mugs, the key props that would help him (and his nephew Jedediah) solve seemingly unsolvable mysteries, were brown. Buddy Ebsen played the lead role as Barnaby (post Beverly Hillbillies fame) and I have little doubt that Barnaby Jones was Buddy’s best job ever. This was an easy softball for him and boy did he swing for the stars.

So I was back in Evanston for Christmas the year after I graduated with my big family to eat well, laugh often and sleep like a bear, all of which required a lot of concentrated energy. Professionally, it had been a big year for me and I needed some respite. I road tripped up to Minneapolis with a friend for a fun New Year’s Eve party. We were both finding our way in life so it wasn’t the most celebratory time but the road trip was awesome listening to Firehose and Richard Buckner. When we returned to Chicago, I needed desperately to take a post holiday breather to figure out exactly what I was going “to be” in life or at least in this incarnation. Initially, it seemed as though the answer from the cosmos was, “not much kid” which, if I may be honest, was slightly disappointing but I appreciated the straight shooting, law abiding nature of the universe. I looked into some graduate programs in education and even ethnomusicology, which sounded grown up and legitimate, but when the cosmos circled back around, I received a way more exciting answer: “You are going to be the master of your own harbor son!” Now that was the truth I was looking for.

Doug was a parishioner at my parent’s church. A lovely, gentle fella with a wife and two little boys, he had employed me as a grunt worker on one of his building projects in the North Loop of Chicago a few summers prior when I was back from college. He also owned and raced a boat, a J/24, which was moored at the Wilmette Harbor of which he was a member. It was a sweet little harbor with a couple hundred boats, nestled in between Sheridan Drive and Lake Michigan in the shadow of the beautiful Baha’i Temple. They were looking for a harbor master and he thought I might be the perfect fit. Obviously, the harbor board was feeling some level of desperation. Everyone needs to remember the most important law of the universe: it’s not what you know…it’s who you know. Never forget this. Barnaby Jones lived by this. Although I had mastered the J stroke while canoeing on the Kickapoo River in Wisconsin on church youth trips, I had zero sailing experience but one of the first things Doug told me was, “You don’t have to know anything about sailing. You just need to be good with people.” Sign me up baby!

A few days later, Doug set up an interview with Bill, the salty old dog who ran the harbor. When I met him in his office which overlooked the water and the temple, he immediately began cursing like a sailor at which point I understood how we got that saying. I fell in love with the guy. He was an absolute gem of a character. With his scrappy silver beard, he looked like Hemingway coming off a bender about to tell his publisher to fuck off. Bill seemingly had sailed and partied his whole life and was currently being kept alive by pills and the advice of overpaid North Shore doctors. His briefcase looked like a portable pharmacy ready to keep his blood pressure down, his spirits up, his arteries clear and his eyes from popping out his head like Marty Feldman, which they appeared to be doing on any given day. Through all of these aches and pains, he would laugh with loud bursts and I wanted nothing more than to join him in his quest to mock the world we found ourselves trying to make sense of. When I confessed that starboard and portside should be interchangeable and that I only knew how to tie one knot, he said he didn’t give a shit. “You’ll fuckin’ learn.” The reality was that there actually was a real harbormaster. And then there was me. The puppet harbormaster. Kind of like when Bush W. was president but Cheney basically ran the show. (This is the last and only time I will compare myself to George Bush Jr. as I’m already regretting this analogy.)

When Bill hired me, he introduced me to RH, or the real harbormaster, who looked me over and probably thought, “this is going to be a long season.” Whenever I’m in a tight situation though, I try and dig myself out with a few shovels of humor. I dug deep and it worked again. RH and I were not cut from the same sail but I eventually won him over as someone he could trust and definitely have a laugh with. He seemed like he had literally been born on the sea. I pictured his mother giving birth to him on the deck of a boat in a tropical storm somewhere near Tortuga. Despite being just a few years older than me, he had tanned skin like leather and these intense eyes that said, “The Sea. The Sea. Give me the Sea!” He definitely made me nervous. He was a great athlete and even raced the Olympic class Star Fleet boats at the national level. He wanted to concentrate on his sailing rather than deal with the day to day bullshit of the Wilmette Harbor. This is where I would be useful. If I got in over my head, maybe he would be there to pull me up.

With the bone chilling winds howling off Lake Michigan, our unlikely pairing began working in the very early days of spring, floating around in a dinghy in the serine, boatless harbor. We began to get to know one another with few words while we fished for the submerged wire that was strung through the holes of the numerous sunken train wheels which we used to attach the mooring balls. It was fucking cold and we worked rain or shine which required me to keep my soft, hippy, college boy persona to myself in an attempt to appear rugged like RH. I had to make this work as I was running out of options. My mental health and livelihood were at stake. I was living with my folks with an expensive yet unused degree in History while the polar icecaps were melting. Enough said. On a positive note though, the Chicago Bull’s were becoming a dynasty. Amazingly, I quickly loved everything about the job and RH was at least pretending as though he liked me and my slightly off kilter brain. For weeks, it was just the two of us on the water but we’d often have lunch with Bill up in his office full of pills and stories. Then the harbor opened up for the season.

One by one, we plucked boats off their trailers like a county fair claw machine, hoisting them high in the air and dropping them gently in the water. I got pretty good at running that crane. It was like a video game to me, utilizing invaluable skills developed after spending 10,000 hours playing Space Invaders, Galaga and Miss Pacman as a kid in Iowa at our local college bowling alley/recreational center. According to Malcolm Gladwell, at least I was an expert at something. I eventually learned how to tie different nautical knots, splice mooring lines and welcome, with a smile, any non member boats floating in looking for a mooring or some fuel to get home to watch the Chicago Cubs lose. My main task as harbormaster though, was to keep the dinghies running and get the kids that drove them around to do their job and most importantly, show up on time. We had a fleet of gorgeous, bright yellow, hand built wooden dinghies all powered by 6 horse power Johnson outboards that we used to deliver and retrieve boat owners to their boats. Buzzing around in a dinghy all day was a blast. I soon learned how to clean out a carburetor and fix a snapped propeller line like some kid who had just crawled out of the bayou. Anything beyond that would require driving the ailing motor out to suburban Naperville to a real marine mechanic and have a bonus cheeseburger and beer for lunch.

Early in the summer, I was chatting with a friendly boat owner I had gotten to know who always wore the usual sailing uniform of the Izod shirt, the khaki shorts, the sunglass chords and the boat shoes. He had that hue about him like he was stuffed with gorgonzola and diluted with a couple of gin and tonics. This look was popular on the weekends for many. He informed me one day that he was selling a 1968 hard top convertible Jeepster that had been stored in a barn for a few decades. My imaginary accountant advised me to use it as a write off. So I bought it but within a few weeks, the transmission rejected itself like a sailer’s liver. I found a rebuilt one had someone put it in for me which ate up a month’s pay but I was soon back on Sheridan Drive living the life. If only that envelope girl from Portland could’ve seen me now.

With summer in full mode, the next few months turned into some sort of version of a John Hughes movie, the north shore’s local hero of film. The spectrum of the dinghy drivers ran from innocent young high schoolers to dangerous college kids, back from college on a quest to keep the party going and somehow, I was their boss. This was the first (and possibly only) time I’ve ever gotten a taste of imposter syndrome. I guess it tastes better than Stockholm Syndrome not that I’d know. There were highs. There were lows. There was passion on the big, swollen seas and one case of scurvy. (This was later diagnosed by a doctor as just a tequila sunrise hangover or TSH.) Unfortunately, this lifestyle and all its partying was endorsed by Jimmy Buffett, the officially sanctioned musician of the sailing world. While I was a Dead Head, they were all Parrot Heads. I eventually had to give in like what happens after being waterboarded. If music was a color, Jimmy’s songs would be named “Barnaby Jones Brown” in the Benjamin Moore color palette flip book. With Jimmy’s help though, I learned how to ditch my fancy beers and drain Budweisers and Coors, chew Copenhagen loose tobacco and tolerate lyrics like “cheeseburgers in paradise!” and “just looking for that lost shaker of salt”. Brilliant! Some days it actually did feel a bit like I was the assistant director on The Breakfast Club: Semester at Sea II. Yet over the course of the summer, I had happily become one of them.

And then, just like that, RH and I began plucking boats out of the water, power washing zebra mussels off their hulls for extra cash, placing them on trailers and backing them in tight parking spaces like a Tetris game played on the y axis. And as the leaves turned burnt orange and chimney red and those cold autumnal lake winds blew in from Canada, we floated around just as we had 6 months prior but only doing our job in reverse, pulling mooring balls off and dropping the guide wire back down to the muddy bottom of that ancient, mystical Lake Mishigami. I thanked RH for his guidance and gave Bill a big, grateful hug, saying goodbye to a friend. As I fired up the Jeepster and pulled away from the harbor, the sunset shadow of the Baha’i Temple cast itself down upon the empty, zen surface of the water as the blind prehistoric lake carp all took in a deep collective breath.

During that Christmas, the days when my family was gathered again, overeating, laughing and sleeping, I finally took a look at my bank statement to see what kind of escape I could afford. Mexico seemed to have a nice ring to it. I figured that my slacker ass had earned an adventure. In one short but significant year, I had regained some level of dignity while learning how to act like a harbormaster. But most importantly, I was given a semi riveting story to share with random people at cocktail parties.

Sometime in early January, as the holiday glow was snubbed out like the big Jesus Christmas candle and the grey biting Chicago winter reared its ugly head, I threw on the Townes Van Zant song “Pancho and Lefty” and figured I’d pivot and become an outlaw like Jose Wales somewhere in Mexico, perhaps shoot someone in the leg who fully deserved it. Living on tequila and tacos while sketching pen and inks of local cacti with accompanying poems would maybe, just maybe, help me figure out exactly who I was going to “be” in this brief and wonderful life. I knew in my heart that this pursuit would need to be far, far away from the songs of Jimmy Buffett but as Bill would say, “Fuck it! It’s always Five O’ Clock Somewhere!”

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Lukas Larson had just been accepted into the esteemed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was over the moon after epically failing out of college a couple years ago. He was readmitted through kindness but under probation when he crawled his way back to the Dean’s list after someone along the way told him that he had talent. Whoever that was, he believed them enough to try a little harder and it paid off. He would be taking his first graduate level course in the fall. Lukas grew up in Scandinavian Decorah, Iowa and went to the local Luther College which made him a full blooded, card carrying Iowawegian. He had only crossed the state border a few times to go to Minneapolis to see bands at First Avenue and had never even gone overseas so he decided to shake things up, try to survive a summer out in the Big Smoke. New York City baby. He took the Greyhound to Chicago and then on to Cleveland at which point he got off with his backpack and a worn copy of A Confederacy of Dunces and stared at the bus as it left him like a programmed robot. So he combed his hair and threw his thumb out and hitched east, believing that doing it this way would further ignite the writer within. This is how Dylan got out to New York, right?

He stayed with a college friend in the Lower East Side who was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true. He got a job doing dishes at a greasy cafe near St. Marks but needed another income stream so he wouldn’t show up in Iowa City a complete pauper. He had heard about these creatively bold writers who would set up tables on the sidewalk and, with old typewriters at their fingertips, would pen poems and musings for passers by who, in return, would chuck them a few tax free bucks. Maybe that was his ticket, his way to survive the mean streets of Scorsese, the paranoid landscapes of Woody Allen or summon up the clever ghost of Dorothy Parker. But ultimately he thought, what would Patti Smith do? Just keep it simple. You’re just a kid.

After too much coffee at Veselka one morning, he found an old powder blue Smith-Corona typewriter in a thrift store nearby that mostly worked. He then rescued a card table with funky stains on it from a sidewalk pile round about Tompkins Square. He found an ace of spades taped to the bottom of it. There’s always a cheater sitting at the table. Then a gift from heaven of an old felt hat and a vest that didn’t quite match were smashed in a grocery bag on the sidewalk begging to be picked up. The outfit would turn him into the poet/street performer that he was or would soon become.

The next day after his morning shift doing dishes, he packed it all up, trained north and set up shop near Strawberry Field’s off Central Park West and 72nd Street, officially opening up for business in the dappled shade of the early afternoon. He was actually pretty busy the first few days, writing poems and letters to grandmas and grandpas dictated by adorable, lispy little kids while tourists from Prague to Orlando just wanted a unique piece of New York for themselves. None of them knew he was actually from Iowa of course and he became invisible to the true New Yorkers who would walk by lost in phone conversations or podcasts about fashion or therapy or both. He was just another transplant jamoke to them. He also crafted prose to no one in particular during the idle times, hoping that someone would buy them later for a few bucks. He certainly wasn’t making a fortune but then one day, a guy who looked like ‘a Vinnie’ walked up to his table and said,

“Can you write som‘m for me boy?”

“Sure man! That’s why I’m here!”, he said with excitement. “How should I begin it?”

“Well,” he said shifting his weight around and rubbing his chin with a meaty hand like a guy from the set of “Goodfellas”.

“Hello. Period. And don’t write the fuckin’ word ‘period’ smart guy. I was just saying period so you put an actual period there. Got it?”

“I think I understand,” he said nervously.

“Hello. Period. We need the money in cash by midnight tonight or you’re gonna be sleeping with clams on the bottom of the fuckin’ Hudson.”

He stared into Lukas’ eyes.

Lukas looked up just as he felt a tiny ball of sweat squeeze through a lonely pore on his forehead seeking liberation.

“Um. Ok. And how should I end it then? ‘Sincerely’? Or ‘Love’?” he said with a little chuckle.

“Hey you fuckin’ little shit,” Vinnie said under his breath looking around, “that’s it. These fuckers better get the point.”

“Well, um, just a practical question here if I may. Does the reader here know exactly where to deliver the money? I mean that’s pretty important right?”

“Ok smart ass,” he said accusatorially, then paused. “I guess you’re smart. Fuckin’ college boy right? Um. Ok, just type, like, deliver the money in unmarked bills to Vo’s Laundry on 23rd. That’s it.”

“Will do!” he replied.

The guy motioned with his dirty mitt of a hand. “Give me the fuckin’ letter kid.”

Lukas pulled the paper out of the pica and presented it to him at which point Vinnie held out a transparent plastic folder and nodded for him to slip it in making sure he didn’t touch the document. It was all weird. And it got weirder.

“Thanks kid,” he said as he threw an envelope on the table and walked away. Lukas looked around like he was under surveillance and opened up the envelope in the shadow of the typewriter. There was $500 in it. “What the fuck? I’m wearing a felt hat and I just made $500 bucks!” he mused to himself. “This is New York man!” He closed up shop and trained back down to the Lower East Side and took his friend out that night to celebrate. They started the party at McSorley’s and then danced and ate mid level sushi at the Disco Sushi until it was time for a nightcap at Mars Bar. Lukas took the next day off and spent 4 hours back at Veselka nursing his body with coffee and pierogis.

Vinnie patronized Lukas and his pica four more times that summer, each visit getting him to scribe some form of a ransom note or a letter of threatening nature instructing him to use terms like ‘concrete boots’, ‘permanent neck ties’, ‘featherbedding’ and ‘stool pigeon’, terms he had to look up on his phone immediately after Vinnie left. The letter that used the term ‘stool pigeon’ was rewarded with an envelope filled with $1500. Lukas began to sense some trouble but he was making some serious cash and figured he would blow town by the end of August anyway.

Then one day Vinnie lumbered up to his table in the same fashion as always and stood in front of him without emotion.

“Hey there! I’m assuming you need another, um, note?’, he said with a slight wink that only an insider would use.

“You are under arrest for conspiring and aiding extortion and threatening death. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law,” he said as he pulled a police badge out, shoving it in Lukas’ face.

“Hold on!” Lukas quietly yelped.

“You have the right to an attorney…”

“I know I do! I know I do! But wait! Um, ah,” Lukas pleaded just as the guy put his hands on a pair of handcuffs clipped to his belt. The scuffed metal and the jingle jangle of those rings made him break out in a New York sweat. “Boy this ain’t Iowa,” he thought to himself.

“Wait! Before you take me in, ah….let, let me write something just for you…to someone, ok? Anyone! To be honest, the fact that you’re actually an undercover agent is extremely disappointing but you’ve actually been a great customer and I owe it to you!”

“What the fuckayah talkin’ about kid? You’re under fuckin’ arrest. Comprende? I ain’t a customer dumb ass. I’m the fuckin’ law!”

“I know! I know! But please grant me that much, you know, like last wishes,” he said as he pulled out a clean 8.5 x 11 and rolled it into his trusty pica. He looked up. “View this as something like the last meal before you get the electric chair so, so, so,” he paused, “…who should I write this poem to?”

Vinnie just shook his head, bewildered and looked off in the direction of Strawberry Fields, the one that says “Imagine” in the middle.

“Ok you’re buying time now chump but um, fuck it! Ok, how ‘bout, just make it to Nonna. Write it to my Nonna ok funny guy?”

Lukas looked down at his temporary typewriter, his ticket to stay out of a Rikers Island orange jumpsuit and began banging away like his life depended on it which, of course, it did. After a few minutes of tapping with graceful madness like Horowitz at Carnegie Hall in 1965, he broke the “J” key and dramatically yanked the paper out, handing it to his best and worst customer. Vinnie grabbed it, glanced down and began reading the warmth of the page and was instantly lost in another world, another universe of words, of subtle poetry, of unconditional love, of his childhood, of his beloved Nonna. The tears began welling up in his eyes as he looked around in assurance that no one was witnessing his public vulnerability, his unmanly breakdown. Boy he loved her.

As a few tears dropped on the words ‘sweetgrass wings’ and bled the still wet Remington ink, he wiped his eyes and forcefully said to Lukas, “Get da fuck outta here kid! You’re a nobody,” choking on his words. And then he paused. “But damnit! You’re a somebody! I’m gonna catch another fool out here to get my department numbers up so I can retire on more than a pissant writer’s pension,” he paused, “which is all you’re eva gonna get! Go back to fuckin’ Kansas kid!”

Lukas reached under the table, grabbed the ace of spades, jumped up and ran like a subway rat towards Strawberry Fields with a spiral seed germinating a half baked story beneath his felt hat and yelled, “I’m actually from fuckin’ Iowa!”

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He had been using The Last Bean Coffee Shop as his go-to late night caffeine hit for the past month or so and not because they served the best espresso in town but because she worked there. When she would take his order, he would try his level best not to get lost in those deep, green eyes and instead, trained himself to look down at the counter where her hands rested. There was something about those hands. To him, they were an open book but that evening, one chapter was in a splint.

“What happened?”

“Got slammed in a car door.”

“Ouch.”

“I just about passed out but the doc said it’ll heal with time. Here’s your coffee.”

“Thanks…um…”

She held her hand out, the one with the splintered finger and said, “Don’t squeeze too hard. My name is Jupiter. Jupiter Jones. And yes, my parents were hippies. Still are actually. And you?”

“No. My parents are…um…”

“Your name stupid. I’m not interested in your parents at the moment but I’m sure they’re not hippies.”

“Oh, right. It’s Karl. Karl with a K.”

“Ok Karl with a K. Do you want to borrow my umbrella? Looks like you got pretty wet out there tonight.”

“Um, yah…that’d be great but how will you…”

“I’ll manage,” she quipped.

She handed him her umbrella pulled from behind the counter.

“It’s kind of broken but it’ll keep you half as dry as you would be without it.”

“Thanks Jupiter. That’s sweet of you.”

“I’m not real sweet Karl but I’m practical. And I guess, um, kind, in a way. Maybe one can be both?”

“I guess that’s cognitive dissonance or more like, behavioral dissonance?” he said stumbling a bit over his thoughts. She cracked the smallest of smiles and he recognized it as a pinhole, a distant crack of light bleeding in from another universe.

“Well, anyway, thanks for being kind and sweet, or neither, I guess, and..and..for the coffee of course!” his words trailing off, getting lost in the luscious drone of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” dripping through the stereo.

I wanna hold the hand inside you

I wanna take the breath that’s true

He turned to find an open seat. With coffee in one hand, umbrella in the other, he spun around quickly towards Jupiter. “The largest planet in the solar system,” he mumbled to himself.

“I’m sorry but, um, do you or, would you want to do something sometime, with me, maybe?”

There was a pause.

“Yes,” she said definitively. “I’d love that Karl with a K. How about tomorrow? After my shift? I’m done at 3.”

“Great! Ok. I’ll see you then…and I’ll bring your umbrella back!”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” he said before interrupting himself. “You know that was quite an assumption you made about my parents.”

“Well, I was right wasn’t I? Karl, just admit it. Your parents are not hippies,” she stated as a matter of fact.

“Ok...you were right but….”

“I’ll see you tomorrow!” she said, interrupting any attempt at clarification. He paused and then answered, “Definitely. Tomorrow it is.”

He found a seat at the window looking out across the wet streets with their oblivious traffic lights and after reflecting on her refreshing frankness, drank his espresso while skimming the mindless feed on his phone. All of the sudden, it felt like there was a cocoon of love deep in his gut. When he finished, he stood up and waved goodbye to her, holding the umbrella up towards the heavenly HVAC ducts and mouthed “Thanks” to her as she was busy with a customer. He got a wink in return, just a simple twitch of fate that calibrated his heart to 528 Hz.

The next day, Karl went to The Last Bean Coffee Shop around 2:45. As he walked in, he didn’t see Jupiter anywhere so he sat down next to the window for a few minutes. His heart was calm while simultaneously racing. She was probably in the back he figured. It was raining again and she was right about that umbrella. He was maybe half as wet as he would’ve been without it but he loved knowing that her broken finger had clutched it the day before. After a while, he finally walked up to the counter. There was a teenage boy with DIYied, spiky blue hair at the register who he recognized as a new employee.

“Welcome to The Last Bean dude. What can I get you?” he asked.

“Yeah hi there, um, is Jupiter around?”

“No, she, ah, it’s kind of weird but she died last night I guess, like, in her sleep. Kind of weird. Luckily I’m new so I didn’t really know her.”

“What do you mean she died?”

“She died. Brett the manager just told me. Everyone’s pretty sad. It’s my first day. I guess she just died in her sleep or something, you know, like I said. I don’t know.”

He spoke like an emotionally detached teenager who’s main concern was to make enough money as quickly as possible to buy a skateboard.

“So what do you want?” the boy asked again.

Karl looked down at the counter and searched for her hands. He found a galaxy of nothing staring back at him and answered the boy with silence. Slowly, he turned around and moved like a stop motion character hovering across the old tiled floor of the cafe on a pocket of emotions, passing through the door like a butterfly at the end of its migration, exhausted, but somehow full of love. He stepped into the rain and with all his might, opened up Jupiter’s umbrella, the one that would keep him half dry.

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Warning: this piece has a dangerous amount of Grateful Dead references as well as occasional strobe lights not to mention two shout outs to chakra points.

We just lost the one and only Bobby Weir but it didn’t take long for him to come back as a hawk in transition to transmission. Bob was one of the co-founders of the Grateful Dead, an amazing songwriter, a completely unique rhythm guitarist, relentless performer, father, husband, friend, philanthropist, early psychonaut, universal explorer, an icon and a treasure of San Francisco. A chance encounter - which turned into an all night jam - with a young Jerry Garcia on New Year’s Eve back in 1963 in Palo Alto, CA led to the formation of the Dead. He wrote songs with Jerry as well as the other members of the band, set to Robert Hunter lyrics but he and another icon, his old school mate, poet, essayist, “junior” lyricist and fellow troublemaker, John Perry Barlow, also got busy contributing some of the great songs of the Dead catalogue. It was off to races with a bit of pride in the backstretch. It’s an immense loss but what he and the band gifted this world, at least parts of it, is quite immeasurable.

I was talking to a friend the other night and we ended up exchanging a few Burning Man stories as one does at any random San Francisco party. I mused that no matter how you feel about Burning Man, if you ever decide to go, there’s a guarantee that you’ll return to your un-dustyfied home with a handful of great stories and perhaps a bummer story that eventually turns into a golden lesson in life. And if you don’t, perhaps your approach to life might need an adjustment to your sacral chakra. Well, the same goes for the Grateful Dead. If you’ve ever been in the gravitational pull of the Dead, you probably have no less than 18 great stories to tell at a dinner party, on a road trip or in your break out group at that awkward work retreat in Palm Springs. Like a traveling circus, Garcia confessed in a 1991 interview that “we're one of the few adventures you can still have in America.”

My relationship with the Dead is akin to a moth dancing maniacally around a light. When that light gets switched off or dimmed, I’ve flown off in search of other sources of light but have always returned due to its other worldly luminosity. To make this easy to digest, I’ll break the journey into a few parts not unlike listening to Terrapin Station and playing One-Eyed Jack with a deck of taro cards while simultaneously burning a sage stick (you dried and wrapped yourself ) in the first pottery bowl you ever threw, the one with the uncomfortably heavy base and unsellable, anemic glaze.

When I was a kid growing up in small town Iowa, I was so into dancing that the music I gravitated towards was mainly dance and pop. The Beatles were always a constant but our family loved The Jackson 5, Earth Wind and Fire and the whole Motown sound. I used to do dance routines on the brown carpet in our living room to the soundtrack of The Wiz and Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. I even got third place at a break dancing contest in Brooklyn, NY. Sorry. That’s not quite factual. It was actually in a strip mall in Monona, Iowa just outside the Orange Julius but everyone knows the origins of breakdancing can be traced directly to the cornfields of Iowa. I won a trophy that was an empty can of Pepsi with a silver, plastic guy, mid dance move, perched on top with a small plaque at its base stating the obvious and somewhat humiliating, “Third Place”. By my senior year in high school, I was mainly consuming all the Top 40 schlop on MTV or broadcast from KROC out of Rochester, MN and was even dosing tabs of Whitney Houston and doing whippets of Wham! while wearing espadrilles and stone washed jeans. Slightly embarrassing to admit, I realize, but full transparency is a good tenant to live by. On account of my first year college roommate, a goth from Nebraska, I fell completely into the 80’s scene of The Cure, This Mortal Coil, The Smiths, et al. I thank him for pushing me towards new musical worlds but this was also the time I began hearing the Dead emanating from dorm rooms like sirens off the rocks of Scylla via a giant pair of JBL’s.

When I went back to Decorah for the summer break, my buddy B’s had a cassette of Skeletons from the Closet: the Best of the Grateful Dead. I think we wore it out by the Fourth of July at which point, the light had been cranked to full lumens, basically turned to 11, as I morphed into a dancing moth. The song that really reminds me of those early days is “Casey Jones”. It was a song I had perhaps heard from previous lives lived yet was receiving it as something completely new in my current reincarnation. Of course it was released way back in 1970 on their album “Workingman’s Dead” but that summer, it was certainly sounded fresh to my ears. It was like some kind of weird country song about a coked up conductor without a James Jamerson funk bass line but damn it made me move! I guess I was becoming as interested in the idea of getting busted down on Bourbon Street than feeling the heat with somebody. Truckin’? Uncle John’s Band? Sugar Magnolia? My mind was blown wide open despite just scratching their catalogue and knowing little about their legendary live shows which was what the Dead has always been all about. In those infamous early days, they tested their music on their dedicated, crazed tribe passing notes and grooves like rose pedals through a prism of sunshine daydream.

For the next three years of college until I almost graduated (for the record, I eventually did but still have yet to use that diploma) our posse was pretty Dead oriented. Our senior year, 4 of us, plus 1 or 2 couch surfers, lived in a derelict house on St. Olaf Avenue which was anointed the Bourgeois Palace which is just a few letters away from being a Brokedown Palace. They used to raise chinchillas in the basement, a fact I tried to ignore due to the nausea it could induce. The landlord claimed he was going to “tear this whole building down” after graduation which we interpreted as a hall pass to turn it into our own little circus. I painted a wall sized mural of the Shakedown Street invisible man in his lime green zoot suit on my bedroom wall bidding he and the Dead sweet dreams every night.

The first time I was blessed to catch them live was at the old Metro Dome in Minneapolis. There were the pre party parties at homes in Edina (where parents were suspiciously absent) which then segued into tailgating in the Metro Dome parking lot playing frisbee, hacky sack and divesting all our investments out of South Africa. All of this was somehow accomplished while drinking Leinenkugel’s in an era where there was never any cell service. These were the days when our friend Eric would run a little mic from his recording Walkman Pro up through his rasta tam and straight out his crown chakra to bootleg the show. Every time some noodling chords began sprinkling in, our friend Kurt would grab Eric’s head with both hands and pull it down to his mouth to over pronounce his prediction of the next song which we were stupid enough to believe would ruin the recording. Little did we know, Kurt’s stoned enunciations made them priceless. (In the mid 70’s, Dan Healy took over as the main sound man from Owsley - the Acid King and creator of the Dead’s Wall of Sound speaker system - and established a dedicated floor section where you could plug directly into the sound board for bootlegs thus creating the totally unique community network of listening and trading bootlegs. Always the innovators.

A bunch of us made the Dead’s shows at Alpine Valley in 1988 and then in July of 1989, after which the town of East Troy, Wisconsin banned the boys citing “crowd issues”. I guess reuniting with old friends, laughing and dancing with new ones from Long Island to Laredo, sleeping in a cramped Honda Accord or in the bushes, eating grilled cheese, exchanging and ingesting totally legal drugs and having non sensical conversations is all considered dubious conduct which falls under statutory “crowd issues”? Sometimes you need a lawyer but mostly all you need is a miracle.

Then when I was living with Eric again in Portland, OR, we were part of a caravan of the classic split windshield, pre-1967, 23 window, rag top VW vans that snaked its way down the West Coast to catch the Dead at L.A. Memorial Stadium. The van I rode in was basically a big bed on wheels as the seats were pulled out to make room for one big piece of lovable foam with an open roof to Orion’s Belt. Truly epic it was. We drove though the night although I think we had your usual VW breakdown at least once. As we made our way through the Grapevine and dropped down into a hot, congested LA, we finally arrived at the stadium’s huge parking lot where Shakedown Street was somehow operating without small business licenses. Despite it being a great show, Alpine Valley it was not. During the post show come down, I felt a bit of darkness coming on as I passed a young strung out couple sitting down exhausted, with their 2 year old and ratty dog, wondering how they were going to manage until the next show. I decided to keep my spirits high and the adventure going though, like a headlight on a northbound train. In those days, if you asked me in the morning what I was doing for lunch, I would avoid answering out of fear of commitment. I was pretty hopeless. You could trust my heart and soul, sense of humor and definitely my hacky sack skills but certainly not my schedule.

So we asked around for anyone heading east and found a bunch of degenerates and their dog in a mid 70’s VW bus who were eager for some gas money. I drove down to LA in the 1960’s and was driving out in the 1970’s which felt somehow like progress. Perhaps I was using my BA in History? So I said “arrivederci” to Eric and our other friends and crawled in the back of the van and we rolled slowly out into the darkness, into that clusterfuck of headlights, doing our own West L.A. Fadeaway. The first glimpse of the driver’s bloodshot eyes in the rear view mirror made me shutter and hunker down on the floor. My only lifeline was to cuddle with the dog. The driver had that warm Charles Manson glow about him with pupils that opened up wide and revealed something like the vacancy of a 21 room chateau. They were a greasy, long haired, stinky, drug fucked bunch. I guess these were the types that made the authorities of East Troy, Wisconsin ban the Dead for life. Their energy was no bueno. Had I been a practicing Catholic, I would’ve crossed myself (and the dog) the whole way from LA to Telluride. We stopped in Flagstaff, AZ for some breakfast. I ordered eggs. They ordered silence. I had so many questions like:

“Do you guys even like each other?”

“Are you still in contact with your mothers?”

“Have you ever killed anyone and if so, what signs should I look for?”

“What’s your favorite Wham! song?”

I chose to remain silent and rely on telepathic conversations with the dog about quantum physics and what the best Scooby snack was. We eventually made it to Telluride, shockingly, in one piece. As we drove into town, the Casey Jones wannabe asked where he should drop me without even a civil “wanna come in for a cup of tea?” I opened up the sliding door, fell out and bid fare thee well to the dog and all that sticky energy and sat down on a warm bench with my backpack and guitar, turning my face towards the healing Colorado mountain sun. Just as I was recapturing my sense of joy, a guy drove by, stopped and asked if I needed any help. I guess I looked like I needed some. He took me in, fed me dinner and let me sleep on his couch. He was a gentle fellow and his sole mission during the cold months was to closely monitor temperature and other atmospheric conditions, like a hippy Neil deGrasse Tyson, to assure himself that the frozen waterfalls upon which he climbed for thrills didn’t suddenly sheer off and end his life. I felt like this was a tad extreme and decided that playing hacky sack and guitar was the sweet spot where I wanted to reside. Fun fact: he was the first and only climber of ice I’ve known. We had coffee and toast in the morning after which he delivered me back to that same bench from the day before but with full blessings this time. I threw my thumb out into the thin mountain air and hitched my way east, eventually making it to Minnesota, just in time for the blooming lilacs. Hold on. Was I a Deadhead? Difficult to tell exactly as there’s always a sliding scale to being anything but I sure had experienced the brilliant highs and the extreme lows of orbiting the Dead. I guess that’s the circus of life for you.

When Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, the light was dimmed for us all. I still listened to the Dead but not as much as in the past. Then I met my Sugar Magnolia on a beach and moved to Australia, a corner of the world where the Dead’s light didn’t shine quite as brightly. After 8 wonderful years in Bondi, we had an opportunity to move to California. With little premeditation, we somehow found a little cottage on the mountain in beautiful Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and have lived here for 16 years. Mill Valley (and Marin County) basically became the epicenter of the Grateful Dead after they migrated out of Haight-Ashbury. Jerry and Bobby moved here in the 70’s and Bobby continued to be a part of the fabric of this small town void of a mill but full of redwoods, nestled up against the mystical Mt. Tam all the way up until he took flight. He was a co founder of the local Sweetwater Music Hall in its second location, a place he would often show up unannounced, to play or sit in with other musicians. Suddenly, we were in the heart of town, poking around, slowly being reabsorbed into this tendrilly cosmic entity that’s the Dead family.

I kvetch often about how difficult it is to get gigs as an original songwriter while you can easily catch a Dead cover band often around these parts. There are so many talented Deadhead musicians here and they will always pull in a crowd with these songs. Archer Monk? He’ll get there one day but whenever I go see friends play songs from the Dead canon, I leave the kvetchin’ at the door because the second I hear the loping chromatic dah dah dah notes starting out “Althea” or the snakey bum bum bum bum..bum bum..bum bum..bum bum bum bum of “Estimated Prophet”, the light gets turned back on and presto chango, I’m a moth again! Everywhere you turn, everyone’s beaming, smiling, spinning, hugging, laughing and settling back into that happy place, that psychic hangout lounge we all know so well. The songs are just so fucking good. Hooky, adventurous, rockin’, soulful fucking good. It’s astonishing what world this band has created. I’ll spare you further pontifications other than pointing out that it’s all pretty hard to put your finger on, especially if you’re missing one.

Despite his age, Bobby continued to play a zillion shows over the years with all kinds of iterations as well as supporting his non profits (Further, Rex Foundation) through underwriting and playing at numerous fundraising events. He, and the music, never stopped. He’s always assembled amazing bands often taking many seemingly disparate or unsuspecting musicians under his wing to form the foundation to keep him doing his thing up there in front of the masses, albeit a bit croakier and slower than in his prime. The 50th anniversary run, the shows at The Sphere in Vegas and the 60th Anniversary weekend in the Golden Gate Park last August were absolutely awesome. Sure, they weren’t like the New Year’s Eve show at Winterland in 1978 but the Dead’s je ne sais quoi was still in the air. He continued to be the driving force up at the altar, the wolf priest, the humble sage everyone on stage and in the crowd turned towards for direction even while he was going through treatments for his unfortunate malady. One could imagine the pressure on the Kid to keep playing, keep everyone employed, keep the machine going and perhaps the responsibility he felt for the mental health of all these Deadheads, at least for those few hours of bliss. But he was a big thinker, a meditator and an explorer who had been playing since he was 16 so I imagine he probably took it all in stride most days and viewed it simply as his gift to the universe, the reason why he was placed here on earth, at this moment in time.

Like a wolf, his multidirectional silver hair, the ponchos, the capri pants, the bracelets and prayer beads and his signature Birkenstocks cut an instantly recognizable, somewhat mythic figure of lore. But of course it’s that intangible presence that we will all miss so much. Just knowing that he was out there, running mindless errands in Mill Valley, running from the stage to the tour bus or simply just running on Stinson Beach was all sweetly reassuring to say the least. This certainly signifies the end of an era but it’s our duty to keep the stories alive and to keep making new ones. This is what that hawk up in the sky is counting on.

Thanks for all the music Bob and thanks for all the adventures, especially the ones where tragedy is narrowly averted…

Fare-thee-well now
Let your life proceed by its own design
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I'm done with mine

- “Cassidy”

Bob Weir/John Perry Barlow

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Driving around in old cars used to be a thing. But those days are gone. Depends on which state and certainly which country you live in but here in California they’re rare as hen’s teeth. I mean, there still are some old duffers smoking pipes while wearing paperboy hats and youngsters in fleece vests with tech cash to burn who drive a few miles to get their matcha lattes in old cars but they’re usually restored collectables, i.e. a good looking sandwich with no meat. But that’s not how we rolled.

Take for example my beautiful hunk of metal. It was a 1963 Rambler Classic Cross Country Wagon with an in-line six cylinder and snow tires that gripped especially well in the summer. It was only about 30 years old but it had an air about it that harkened back to the time of the cotton gin. The fact that gas was about a buck a gallon certainly helped the cause. I bought it for a couple hundy off an ad in the local Minneapolis weekly rag. The photo above was taken shortly after I forgot the gas cap on the roof after filling up somewhere in Wisconsin on my way to Chicago on the only big road trip that car took me on. It was well worth the loss as that trip inspired one of my first proper songs: Sweet Ol’ Car. Some referred to it simply as S.O.C. just to save time. I sent a cassette of it off to the iconic radio show “Car Talk” with Click and Clack and they actually played it during one of their show’s interludes, that sacred time when they would play a dumb car song. I guess I got my 30 seconds of fame.

Out on the road in my ol station wagon

Feelin’ like I’m fightin’ some Arthurian dragon

Arthurian dragon? What the hell was I thinking? Leonard Cohen would be rolling in his grave. If those lyrics weren’t pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable, I somehow ended up rhyming mechanic with tonic in the fourth verse at which point the whole story comes together like a dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner:

I took her into my daddy’s mechanic

I was suckin’ on a gin and a t(a)nic

At that time, I was writing songs (kind of) and playing with my good buddy Dave. We were doing the acoustic guitar with harmonies coffeeshop thing. After ditching the name Fancy Squash, we legally committed to 80 Bones because we had a combined $80 in our bank accounts or something like that. Dave drove around in a 1964 Dodge Dart and blew it’s engine on I-35 near an infamous rest stop one night coming back from Northfield. Even in sub zero temperatures, he refused to warm it up before jamming it into first and going about his day. We all knew this was going to happen. It was just a matter of when. A couple of years ago, we went into the studio to record some of his new songs and threw down a version of S.O.C. Put your boots on. Maybe throw on a seed cap. It’s a ride you won’t regret but just know you’ll never get these 3 minutes back.

Back to the photo. I’m so curious to know what was going through my head when I took it. My buddy Griff and I were apparently really busy one day juggling high powered jobs and driving around on some random dusty country road in Minnesota when the urge must have hit.

“Hold on! I’m going to pull over and take a photo of the Rambler! Right here! This is perfect! The light! Oh my god! Epic! Just stay in the car Griff and when I yell, just flip me the peace sign!”

As you can see, the gas cap is nowhere to be found. This was before my handy brother carved a replica of it out of a chunk of balsa wood. It was large. He meant well. I probably lost that too or maybe it was donated to a car museum. Perhaps I was inspired and needed a photo for my records, focusing on the dust caked back window, the missing gas cap and the futon in the back that the spare tire was using for an afternoon nap. You’d have to pay someone the big bucks for that kind of brilliant art direction. This was the era that still had the utilitarian smarts to design those front triangular wing windows which worked a treat when you were smokin’ a ciggie or perhaps something even more adventurous. I always loved the shape of its wheel wells. It was falling apart but it oozed inspiration so much so that I got a song as bankable as S.O.C. out of it. Do you think I could pen a song about my 2000 Toyota Sienna that was any good? Not a chance. Would Thelma and Louise be the movie it is if they drove off that cliff in a Tesla? Maybe. But I doubt it. Would James Dean be as eulogized if he crashed his Nissan Leaf at the intersection of Routes 466 and 41 that fateful night? I’m scratching my head. His Porsche was nicknamed Little Bastard. What would he have named his Leaf? So many questions.

I drove that Rambler into the ground. Well almost. I tried my best to keep it in good nick and would work on it myself doing all the easy stuff but then I started having some bigger issues. I had driven past a mechanic’s shop on 38th a few times that had zero signage and plenty of mystery and noticed that there were quite a few Ramblers of my vintage parked on the lot. Aha! This dude must work on Ramblers! I really put two and two together. So I stopped in one day and shook hands with another Dave, the owner, who had a respectable belly held at bay with overstretched flannel and strong buttons. He wore a beard to keep him warm in winter and probably hot and itchy in summer. Dave was such a nice, gentle soul. How could he not? He was 100 percent Quaker. Smooth like the Quaker State motor oil that lubricated my Rambler. He would let me, free of charge, put the wagon up on his hydraulic lift so I wouldn’t have to crawl on my back on the street when it was -18F just to reach that bolt that was inevitably stripped. We would chat about all things but mainly there was silence. I loved the fact that he was a Quaker and therefore a pacifist. So mellow. So loving. But I figured he was not really into singing because of the whole silent thing. Catching a case of the uncontrollable giggles in church was one of the best things about growing up in the Lutheran church. I always wondered if that ever happened at Quaker Friend’s meetings. If not, I’m not interested in their kind of God.

After squeezing a song and a few stories out of that Rambler, it lost not only first but reverse gear. From then on, I would have to park it on the corner so no other car could box me in otherwise it would turn into a waiting game that could last a couple of days. I was up for this challenge though, until I wasn’t. Then some kids rode by on their bikes one day (probably when I was at a board meeting of one of my numerous non and for profit companies) who were in the habit of shooting tiny ball bearings through straws they held in their mouths like they were natives hunting wildlife with poisoned darts. The point was to hit a car window at the right speed, distance, angle and location on the window to shatter it and then flee on your bike to the 7/11 to get a slurpy and some more straws. They got a direct hit with the unique, long, rear, driver’s side window of the Rambler, one that was near impossible to replace. Just like James Dean’s Porsche, they were Little Bastards. So I hand cut a piece of plexiglass and jankily fit it in there with some duct tape. Not a good look but it kept the wind out, the futon safe and spare tire from waking up.

Alas, it was time to sell. I put a sign on one of the real windows and quickly caught a fish. I was fully transparent about the fact that it lacked not one but two gears and a gas cap but somehow the guy was up for the adventure. Maybe he was looking for some inspiration and a few half baked stories. After he handed me $150, I instructed him to go in peace and serve the Lord. And always use Quaker State.

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“Existence precedes essence.”

-Jean-Paul Sarte

There once was a little girl, stuck in the middle of her family, forever sandwiched between siblings. One Christmas Eve, when the older ones were home for the holidays, the house was so full that she was dispatched to the couch, the saggy one touching the Christmas tree. After a glass of milk and a couple of chocolate chip cookies were left out for Santa, her father tucked her in, kissed her forehead, unplugged the tree lights and was the last to go upstairs.

The house was completely quiet.

After a few minutes, she rolled off the couch and tip toed over to plug the lights back in. The tree, illuminated, made her take in a deep, deep breath. Now that was more like it. Her family’s Scandinavian Lutheran tradition dictated that all the presents be opened after dinner that night and before heading back to the church for the late Service of the Carols. Christmas Day of course, was for Santa. She climbed back under her blanket and marveled at the many open boxes and shredded wrapping paper surrounding the tree, half cleaned up by her mother before she hit the invisible wall of holiday exhaustion. She could barely contain herself thinking about all the sweet little gifts that Santa was going to deliver to everyone let alone the possibility of actually seeing the bearded, big bellied legend himself, drop down the chimney right there in front of her. Imagine that she was the chosen one who had a front row seat to catch a rare glimpse of Kris Kringle! As the excitement began to wane and sleep got the best of her, she was suddenly awakened by a noise. She lifted her head off the pillow and looked towards the fireplace through blurred eyes, ready to see the jolly man in red and there he was, her father, actually, who turned towards her with the glass of milk in one hand and a cookie in the other.

“Oh, you’re up?” he whispered with a good, strong, Minnesotan “Ooh”, milk droplets clinging to his mustache.

“What are you doing dad?”

“Well, I’m a, I’m delivering Santa’s gifts…and of course drinking some milk and taking a bite out of a cookie, you know, just to make it look real.”

“But…” she said.

“Shhhh. We need to be quiet. You’re little sisters still think Santa’s real,” he said with a little chuckle, “which is adorable, you know, just like you did a few years ago!”

“Right. Just like me…” she said feeling a few tears well up in her eyes. Luckily, it was too dark for her father to see that she was crying as she didn’t want him to witness how his little girl’s dream of Santa had just been inadvertently crushed by a loving father just trying to do the right thing. After he put Santa’s gifts in their stockings, all seven of them, embroidered with their names, hanging in a row from the fireplace mantel, he walked over to the outlet and unplugged the Christmas tree lights again.

“I thought I had already unplugged those? Hmmm. Maybe there is a Santa and he turned them back on when I went upstairs?” he mused. “You must have seen him, right?” he asked her with another quiet chuckle.

“No dad,” she paused, “but maybe he showed up when I was sleeping,” she continued, choking on her words.

“Well, there’s always an answer to everything isn’t there! Now get some sleep pumpkin. I love you more than the moon.” And with that he blew her a kiss and headed back upstairs, his annual mission accomplished.

As she was falling asleep, for the second time, it dawned on her just how close she had come to surrendering, but on her own terms, to the Santa myth. Just a few minutes ago, the little girl in her was still fighting logic, suspending disbelief and clinging to hope because, well, once Santa goes she thought, so goes the mystery of life.

- this one goes out to my dear mother Loey.

Stay artful…

Happy holidays and thanks for reading. I really appreciate it!

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It was an untested relationship but after only a couple of months of dating, they decided to go on a roadtrip to Montana as if it was the real deal. Fuck it. His dad had died less than a year earlier without even saying goodbye. He had the brilliant idea that he should take his dad’s old beloved 1981 Toyota Corolla on the road to somehow get closer to him and maybe find some answers. This part didn’t make much sense but the fact that the car still got great gas mileage and had the bonus of a working cassette deck sure did. The radiator might blow but at least there would be no ads to ruin the flow of a perfectly good album.

The ride out from San Francisco exceeded their expectations as they floated across the crazy terrain of the wild wild West, blasting songs from his dad’s go to era a la Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode and Joy Division. They would derive great pleasure by grabbing random cassettes in the glove box, under the seats and in the door pockets. Breezing through Winnemucca, Nevada, they slipped into some dangerous Howard Jones territory so both agreed to reel it back in, landing comfortably again on The Cure and Ministry. They got a room in a cheap motel outside Salt Lake that still smelled like the Camel Straights some drifter had smoked in it years ago, sometime around the release of “Personal Jesus”. They made love to the soundtrack of the flickering neon sign outside their window which sounded like a Linn drum machine with a short in it.

“I think we’re in a movie,” he said with a chuckle, staring at the broken ceiling fan which was missing a blade.

They eventually made it to their destination, a cute lodge near Paradise Valley, the name of which was printed on drink coasters scattered about. They checked in and, of course, made love before they even unpacked their bags but this time it was on a beautiful bed cradled on a frame made from local felled trees in front of a fireplace of river rock, the floor covered with a sheep skin. This session was on par with the one in the flea bag motel which was a good sign, they figured, as the sex was apparently wonderful regardless of setting. In the morning, they had breakfast in the great room and asked the lady running the joint if there was a good spot, some “off the beaten path kind of place” where they could jump in the Yellowstone River. She said that there were plenty of them around.

“…but I think you should go to the Kill Moon River,” she insisted.

They both looked at each other.

“That’s one of my favorite watering holes and I guarantee that you’ll be the only humans there.”

He scribbled the directions down on the back of his notebook and they headed out to the Kill Moon River.

“What are the chances of that lady suggesting visiting the Kill Moon River after listening to “The Killing Moon” on rotation for days?” he said quizzically.

“Freaky dude! Well, I guess Echo and the Bunnymen are our guardian angels,” she offered as a flimsy explanation.

They soon arrived, parked the car, walked on a crunchy trail for only a few minutes and rounded a bend. There it was: the Kill Moon River tucked in a dramatic valley. The sign was pushed over but signs mostly tell the truth even if they’re laying down. It was absolutely postcard perfect and just as the lady at the lodge had promised, there was not a soul around despite being so close to the road. How could that be? They ran like little kids to the water’s edge, stripped down and jumped in. The whole scene was like a tourism ad for Montana minus the brazen nudity. They ducked under the surface and swam around deep in the cool, clear water, warming up on toasty rocks, baked by the Big Sky sun, like lizards returning. They held each other’s skin and kissed like spawning trout and at one point, as he couldn’t contain himself anymore, he let out a “Wooooooooo!” to the expansive blue sky and they both listened for the echo.

“Oh my god!” she said. “That was like a 6 second echo or something!”

“Right? Craaazy man!” he said as he slipped under the water, gave her belly a kiss and then popped up.

“Let’s let out another ‘whoop’ ok?” He paused, “One…two…three!”

“Woooooooooo!” they both screamed then stopped and silently counted to seven.

“7 seconds! Holy shit!” he said.

“Ok. Let’s let out another one and see if we can beat 8,” she said in a vain attempt to compete with nature. “One…two…three!”

“Wooooooooooooooooo!!!!!”, they yelled uncontrollably again at the top of their shared lungs.

They stared at each other, eyes open wide, in silence.

Because there was nothing. It was like they were in a vacuum. Their faces dropped. Their eyes got smaller.

“Wow. I, I think we beat 8,” he said with a wavering voice.

“There was no fucking echo stupid!” she said getting in his face.

“Of course I know there was no fucking echo! Sorry I kind of panicked and then pretended to…”

“I know what you did. We’ve only been together for a few months but I’ve got you pegged”, she said with conviction, mostly because she was right.

“Ok. That was weird. Um,” he thought for a moment, “ok, let’s let out another one.”

She shook her head and looked off up river, away from them.

“Ok. One more time,” she mumbled.

“One…two…three!”

“Wooooooooooooooooo!!!” they both let loose as if they were having outdoor recess at the asylum.

Nothing. They could hear the water babbling by and the gentle wind trying to comb cones out of the trees but their screams died an instant, tragic death.

“What the fuck?” she said.

“Look,” he said calmly as he moved towards her. “I’m sure there’s some reason that…”

“What? There’s some reason for the laws of physics, sound, whatever the fuck, just to not work all of the sudden?”

“Well…”

“Maybe we are in a movie?” she said.

“Or maybe a weird short story,” he said with a chuckle.

“Not funny,” she said as she began moving through the water towards the bank of the Kill Moon River.

“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” she said not even looking back at him.

He watched her beautiful naked body slip out of the water and thought to himself how perfect everything was just a few moments ago and then, the fact that an echo didn’t work, not once but twice, sucked the air out of their little love balloon. He swam over to the river’s edge and awkwardly climbed out. They quietly put their clothes back on facing away from each other, dripping with self awareness and then walked to the car in silence.

“What the fuck just happened?” she asked once again, opening up the passenger door.

“Look. I really don’t know but…”

“The. Laws. Of. Physics! They’re one of the few things in life you can trust!” she half screamed.

He fired the car up and of course Echo and the Bunnymen began playing exactly where they had left off in full volume.

Your lips, a magic world
Your sky, all hung with jewels

He reached up to pull down the sun visor and a faded photo of his dad fell out onto his lap, the one taken when he was dressed up like Salvador Dali for a Halloween party sometime in the 80’s. He flipped it over and read the words silently to himself, words that were scribbled by his dad, to someone. His mom? A lover? To him?

“Everyone can bend time…I love you”

He put the Corolla in gear and as they drove away, they were unaware of a hawk on a hunt, high above them, flying over the exact spot where they had been swimming only a few moments before. More importantly though, they couldn’t hear the long, dramatic echo of its screech and how it effortlessly bounced its way out of the Kill Moon Valley.

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This is an illegal bootleg from a spoken word performance I did in Vegas a few years back while working as an undercover agent, ostensibly cutting the head off the snake of a nasty racketeering organization. (I was posing as a dishwasher named “Vincent” at Caesars Palace and got a free hamburger and fries after each shift). I wore a fake mustache during this particular reading as to not blow my cover. We eventually brought them down and I returned to my quiet life in Costa Rica, one of surfing, bird watching and writing my memoir.

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Here’s some artwork for you hot off the press or as some have been know to say, “still steamin’!”. Sometimes it’s best not to overthink ideas that come out of your head. The important thing is that they are mostly finished and either destined for the dumpster or the Sotheby’s gavel. Sold to the person in the back inadvertently stretching!

On a more interesting note, there’s definitely something in the water down in Melbourne these days that is nourishing a lot of great bands. Melbourne sometimes feels like a version of Minneapolis, another cow town that has a long history of birthing great bands and artists. (I’m not sure that Melbourne will ever produce their version of Prince but we’ll let that slide.) A friend of mine (thanks Paul) just alerted me to the band The Belair Lip Bombs who hail from the southern seaside town of Frankston, a place that locals lovingly refer to as “Fraangas” with a silent G. Their recordings are super tight with fabulous vocals and delivery from Maisie Everett. Their sound to me feels a lot like the great pop guitar bands from the 90’s ala Superchunk and Weezer, her vocals reminiscent of Harriet Wheeler from the English band The Sundays, a band that will forever reside in a little pocket in my left ventricle. Or is it my right? The rhythm section is killer and with jangly sonic guitars flowing over the top or at times, under the hood, you’ve got the complete package baby. Super hooky and as original as a band can be these days. These kids can play. They just signed with Jack White’s Third Man Records so let’s see where they go from here.

So back to my latest piece of art. Feel free to read into whatever message or story that strikes your fancy and report back if you’re so inclined. I see this as a portrait that could easily hang on a wall over a grand fireplace in a lodge in Scotland, a castle in Majorca or an antebellum mansion in the Deep South. Perhaps this is someone’s relative from 1848 who rose to be a 4 Star General purely through cheating at push ups and excelling at pipe smoking and went on to deviously sign war treaties with his pencil head knowing that he could command some underling to erase them if need be. If you have a lot of crypto, it’s for sale.

Here’s the video for The Belair Lip Bombs song Hey You.

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I took my second seasonal job as a construction grunt on the near north side of the downtown Loop in Chicago that summer and in August, bought my first car from a burned out carpenter who I had worked with. It was a late 70’s / early 80’s Honda Accord hatchback which I referred to as a “one door” due to the fact that the passenger’s door was smashed in from an accident and the rear hatch was permanently locked for some reason. The flip side was that the driver’s door opened and shut like an actual door and the window even functioned. For $350, there was really no need to complain. As I packed my life up and hugged my parents good bye in the driveway, ready to hit 2000 miles of asphalt out to the West Coast, the only question my father asked was, “Do you have enough windshield wiper fluid?” Never a mechanic but always full of hope and hope was the best fuel for my own Hejira. Oil? Brakes? That’s stuff for the non believers. The reality was that that cassette would part the seas and deliver me to the Promised Land. The album title was quite apropos as it is an unusual transliteration of the Arabic word more commonly rendered as Hijrah or Hegira, which means “departure” or “exodus”. (I had brought a few other cassettes along and the one that got the most plays after “Hejira” was “From the Mars Hotel”, the Grateful Dead’s awesome studio album from 1974. I would dance in my seat and sing to “US Blues” while driving and drum on the steering wheel like a madman during the groove breakdown in “Unbroken Chain”.)

So I pulled out of Skokie in a car that was barely road legal with a copy of Dharma Bums, random incense sticks, a guitar and some spare socks and headed up to an island on Lake Superior (to chase love) and then drove straight across the north in the long shadow of Joni’s Canada, stopping in the familiar Montana and ending it all in Portland. I must have listened to “Hejira” a hundred times. It’s crazy to think that she was only 33 years old at the time. An album constructed from three road trips she had taken during the writing period, they were big, traversing-the-country road trips that saw her through breakups, trysts and cocaine and evidently done without a drivers license. She also toured with Dylan’s infamous Rolling Thunder Review at that time and I’d hazard a guess that you could count on one hand the amount of people on that tour who were NOT doing blow. There’s amazing footage of her playing the opening song “Coyote” (rumored to be about Sam Shepard) at Gordan Lightfoot’s house with Roger McGuinn and a mesmerized Dylan in a fur hat pretending he knows what chords she’s playing because they’re these pretty crazy non traditional, open tunings. He’s in as much awe as Dylan could ever let on.

Where the players lick their wounds And take their temporary lovers
And their pills and powders to get them thru this passion play
No regrets, coyote I’ll just get off up aways
You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway

Her previous two albums, “Court and Spark” and “Hissing of Summer Lawns” began the transition from the classic Joni singer songwriting to a freer, exploratory sound with jazz affectations. I listened to “Hissing” after discovering “Hejira” and fell in love with the former as well. It’s got more melodically poppy elements at times (i.e. “Free Man in Paris”) but you can see the logic in this transition. I feel that “Hejira” has a more mature, balanced, natural and unique sound that goes deeper on some undetectable, subliminal heart level. She was certainly firing on all cylinders and definitely on to something.

The other thing she was on to was pulling in Jaco Pastorius, one of the more unique fretless bass players ever who mostly played jazz or fusion. He laid down bass lines on 4 of the songs but his imprint feels album wide. His playing actually ends it all on “Refuge of the Roads” as he plays a descending line that is barely audible and slightly feels like he changes the key to close out the album. That’s confidence. I’m not really a huge jazz head but the call to bring him in was a brilliant stroke of genius. Jaco is not everyone’s cup of tea though. In fact, years ago I went to a firehose concert with my buddy at the Metro in Chicago and at some point in the show, the bass player, the burly, sweating, flannel wearing Mike Watt yelled into the mic, “Fuck Jaco!” for some reason after which they ripped into one of their power punk songs. Perfect. ( I have referenced this story before. It’s too good not to.) Jaco was indeed a troubled soul. Shockingly, he was only 24 at the time and it’s wild that Joni and Henry Lewy (who co produced it) offered him so much leeway but he gave her songs a dimension and depth that other players would’ve never been able to achieve.

“Amelia”, the second song off the rank, is another one of a kind in it’s cadence, chords and melody backed up by lyrics that just drip with emotional beauty:

I wish that he was here tonight
It’s so hard to obey his sad request of me to kindly stay away

Jeez Joni. It sounds like a fully produced track yet it’s basically Joni and her reverb guitar with Larry Carlton playing incidental, swelling, textural lines over the top. So simple. Her voice and melody are otherworldly and the lyrics…dear lord.

The closing song, “Refuge of the Roads” is one of the best closers ever. This one has full instrumentation yet the drums are very understated. Mostly its Joni’s open chords again and her distinctive strumming patterns with Jaco’s bass lines flowing like prayer flags. Supposedly it’s one of her favorite songs she’s written, composed after she visited the controversial Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa in Colorado while on one of these road trips. Despite the claim that he supposedly spent $40,000 in a year on cocaine, Joni attributes him to curing her of her own white line habit. Takes one to know one I guess.

It was all so light and easy ‘til I started analyzing
And I brought on my old ways
A thunderhead of judgment was gathering in my gaze

It was somewhere in the depths of Montana, in the dark of the night on my journey, when I began to feel a little unnatural. So I pulled off to the side of the road, got out and stared up at a billion stars. It was there that I felt the pangs of an anxiety attack coming on. There I was, a speck of stardust (that word has always made me think of her song “Woodstock” and yes, being “golden” too) yet trapped within this beautiful, overwhelming and insignificant atmosphere of ours. I began to feel claustrophobic and close to losing my shit. It felt like I was tripping and on the edge of a knife’s blade. Nobody knew where I was. I was totally solo, out of the nest, away from family and friends with virtually no direction except to keep going west young man and chase the dream of writing like Joni. I was fearing fear yet simultaneously overcome by an exhilaration around the strangeness of the human experiment which somehow calmed my developing brain down. I opened up my one door wide to the smell of wild sage and cranked the album on my crappy stereo. Years later, I would write some of my own lyrics to my song “Only You (Need to Know These Things)”, explaining this condition:

I was spooked the other day just like a little kid felt like the world was too small like the sky was fallin’ in then I thought about this huge universe it’s got to end somewhere but that made things much worse

I thought of “Refuge of the Roads” (and therefore “Hejira” as a whole) the other day when I read about the astronaut, author and humanitarian Ron Garan’s take on seeing the earth from space:

“When I looked out the window of the International Space Station, I saw the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was as if we could reach out and touch them. And I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere. In that moment, I was hit with the sobering realization that that paper-thin layer keeps every living thing on our planet alive. I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life. I didn’t see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it’s obvious from the vantage point of space that we’re living a lie.”

Joni ends her epic 9 song journey with this verse:

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest, or a highway
Or me here, least of all You couldn’t see these cold water restrooms
Or this baggage overload
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads

In this current reality of our fragile planet and all it’s pageantry, I try for hope but fail most days. Perhaps it’s best to follow after my father and just give in. Give in to blind faith. Give in to hope. It is what it is. Do you part. Do your best. Love each other. Maybe all we need is a clean windshield. And an album like “Hejira”.

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(By the way, I’m selling this original sketch to the highest bidder, unframed. And when I say “highest”, I think you know what I mean unless you’re too high to recognize real art. *Artful Monk does not condone the use of drugs in any situation beyond therapy, concerts, speech writing or frisbee golf. The clouds were done in haste and certainly not to scale but, similar to a Rafael painting, even the untrained eye can see that they sure as hell add to the overall drama .)

Before my Australian years, bird attacks hadn’t really been on my radar but it’s certainly a thing down there. We recently got back from 3 weeks in Melbourne and one day, as I was walking innocently through a park, happily distracted on my phone, I looked up just in time to see this small bird barreling straight at me doing about Mach 2, it’s target being my third eye. It happened in a microsecond and as my eyes crossed themselves and tracked the incoming feathered missile, I realized that it was a bird and stumbled like a drunk to avoid its deadly beak hitting the place where I usually receive messages of transcendence. It was as if I was wearing VR goggles or on the floor at The Sphere in Vegas watching Hitchcock’s “The Birds” while listening to Johnny Cash cover Scott Walker “The Old Man’s Back Again”. I jettisoned my body off to the side but that damn thing kept coming at me swooping my head. Once. Twice. Three times…a lady. There was a construction worker heading to his car with his hard hat tucked under his arm who saw the whole shemozzle. We shared a laugh and then both realized what instigated the aggression. Inadvertently, I had almost stepped on a wounded bird sitting alone, blending into the grass under the tree, obviously the kamikaze’s child, partner, or grandmother. Eventually, everything becomes explainable.

There are popular video threads on social media of people getting swooped, attacked and chased by birds in Australia. Punters love watching birds freakin’ on humans. I’m sure this happens all over the world but the Aussie bird life really takes it to a new level. But while they may try and pierce your skull for beak sport, they will also grab your heart and soul with their song. Speaking as someone who loves to sleep, it borders on a pleasure to be awakened by the teeming bird life down there, especially when you get out of the city and into the bush. The songs of these birds are something else and in those pre sunrise moments, they don’t wait their turn. It’s a cacophony of melody that wakes and becomes the soundtrack of your dream life. There’s the lyrebird, the magpie, the eastern whip and the superb fairy wren, to name a few, all going for it at once talking and singing over one another. And of course, the craziest one has to be the kookaburra. I never tire of hearing that laugh.

When we were living in Sydney in North Bondi years ago, there was a frangipani tree in the front of our semi flat that was often refuge to a family of magpies. I was so taken by their song that it inspired me to write my own called “Miss Magpie” which was the closer on my album “Wanderdust” (2015). Feel free to take a listen.

*This post is dedicated to Annette “Henny” Dunphy (Dec 1, 1938 - Sept 4, 2025). What a beautiful Aussie bird she was…and still is.

Stay artful…and tell someone you love them.

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Intercepted excerpts from the local raccoon dispatcher for greater Mill Valley:

10:02pm

Dispatcher: “Attention. Attention. Calling all bandits. It’s gonna be a big night. The sun’s down so let’s get out there. We’re in the middle of another heat dome so all food scraps will be ripe for the pickin’. This heat’s gonna create human error. So right off the blocks, we’ve got a report of a resident at 180 Chestnut Lane using only one bungee chord. Easy access. Full can of go go juice. Anyone in the area? Over.”

Silence.

Dispatcher: “Hello? Repeat. Anyone in the area of 180 Chestnut Lane? Over.”

Raccoon 1: “Negative. I’m on South Madrone dealing with some Alabama Chrome. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Is that a code 8 for the Alabama Chrome? Over.”

Raccoon 1: “Negative. There are 4 of us. Ernie is helping me. The others are hiding in the drain for some reason. Over.”

Dispatcher: “10-4 that. Over.”

Silence.

Dispatcher: “Repeat. 180 Chestnut…”

Raccoon 2: “Affirmative. I’m 10-8 to Chestnut. I’ll be there in 5. Over.”

Dispatcher: “How many are you? Over.”

Raccoon 2: “I’m solo. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Call if it’s a code 8. Report back if it’s only recycling or yard waste. Over.”

Raccoon 2: “I’m golden. I’ll give you a 129 if I need it. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Someone just bird dogged some coyotes near the Dipsea Steps and Cascade. Over.”

Raccoon 3: “Copy that. Everyone in the area. Get up a tree. Over.”

2:15am

Dispatcher: “Can with broken lid reported up at the corner of Molino and Wildomar. Over.”

Raccoon 3: “Roger that. Be there in 3. Over.”

Raccoon 4: “Bandit down up on Sequoia near Panoramic.”

Dispatcher: “How bad? Over.”

Raccoon 4: “Fender bender with a dung beetle. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Is this a code 8? Over.”

Silence.

Dispatcher: “Repeat. Is this a code 8? Over.”

Raccoon 4: “I think he’s alright. Um…two maybe three dislocated fingers. Tire marks on the tail. Close call. Didn’t hear it. It was an electric dung beetle. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Should I place a 10-43? Over.”

Raccoon 4: “He says he’s fine. (A barely audible “I’m fine” heard in the background) Over.”

Dispatcher: “10-4. Keep safe out there. Repeat. Keep safe. Look both ways. There are a lot of idiots out there drivin’ chicken trucks. All the Buster Browns are sleeping. Over.”

3:52am

Dispatcher: “Any more coyote reports? Over.”

Silence.

Dispatcher: “Hello? Coyote report?”

Raccoon 5: “They’ve moved on. I’m at their old 10-20. No sign of them. I think they went up Cascade. Over.”

Dispatcher: “10-4 bandit. Stay clear of upper Cascade. Nothing beyond the library for the next 30 minutes. Over.”

Silence.

Raccoon 2: “Nothing at 180 Chestnut. Only a piece of bacon. Clean can. I’m moving on. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Roger that. Over.”

Raccoon 2: “Roger. This is actually Roger. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Sorry Roger. Over.”

5:56am

Raccoon 6: “Bandit down. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Code 8? Over.”

Raccoon 6: “No. Seems like he just fainted. This bin stinks to high heaven. But there’s some white froth on his lips. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Any yogurt or whipped cream at the scene? Over.”

Raccoon 6: “I wish but it may be rabies. Over.”

Dispatcher: “I’ll put out a 10-43. Get the bandit to the clinic asap. It’s open all night. Over.”

Raccoon 6: “Negative. We just hit gold. One of the dumpsters downtown was unlocked. Pasta. Fish sticks. You name it. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Leave your 10-20. That’s an order. I repeat. Leave your 10-20. That’s a 10-22c. Get fainted bandit to the clinic asap! Over.”

Raccoon 6: “Roger that. Send backups though. This is too good. The 10-20 is behind Sunny Side. Speaking of…the sun is coming up. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Any bandits near Sunny Side? Over.”

Silence.

Dispatcher: “Repeat. Any bandits near…”

Raccoon 7: “Roger that. We are near but one bandit just had babies so we’re staying at our current 10-20 in Old Mill Park. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Roger that. All babies safe? Over.”

Raccoon 7: “Affirmative. All alive and very cute. In the process of naming them. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Please don’t name any Roger. Over.”

Raccoon 7: “Roger that. Over.”

Dispatcher: “Ok bandits. The sun is in fact coming up. Time to get home. Hope everyone had a good night. Don’t forget to clock out. See you tonight. Over.”

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Speaking of cabins, at some stage probably in the 50’s, my grandfather Elmer John realized the American dream and bought one on Ward Lake, in Wisconsin, just over the border from Minnesota. A short drive from their home in St. Paul, it was ideal for he appreciated convenience like a king. (The Swedish band, The Kings of Convenience, more than likely named themselves after him but I’m unable to verify this.) The smell of knotty pine would drift up your nose as you entered wearing knee high tube socks and velour shorts with a grocery bag full of Fruit Loops and Pop Tarts, leaving little doubt that you were in a real cabin and not just a house on a lake. It was small but somehow my folks and us 6 kids would find enough beds or floor space to dream upon after a day of swimming, catching frogs and riding around on the pontoon while spitting cherry seeds into the water. We often made the annual pilgrimage there from our home in Decorah, Iowa sometime in August after the dust from the Nordic Fest had settled. Free lodging seemed like a convenience too hard to pass up for my parents. Notice the common genetic theme here. For Grampa Gar (short for “cigar” as we called him), I’m sure the hope of a mellow weekend of fishing, reading and smoking cigars would be gutted like a perch when my father would call up and ask, “How’s the weekend of the 18th looking dad?” Perhaps he would kick around the idea of fudging the truth, claiming the cabin was already booked. He was a hard nut but Gramp Gar loved having us around and Granny Alice, a chuckling gem of a soul, adored family. They weren’t always there the whole weekend though, as where would they sleep? They would hang out for the afternoon and then go home after a pontoon ride and before dark, leaving the cabin all to ourselves.

The summer we went to Ward Lake after Jaws was released, I remember jumping off the dock, fully confident I would be eaten by a Great White within 2 minutes. As I was floating and treading the murky, shallow waters, I assured myself over and over, “There is absolutely no way a shark can live in a lake! No way. No way. Sharks need salt water. Sharks need salt water. Sharks need salt water!” while visualizing the scene in the movie, the one shot from below the swimmer’s legs just before the shark gets excited by the double bass theme music bowing fear into us all. I knew that’s what my legs were currently looking like. I was an unsalted piece of stringy bait in a Speedo, full of Fruit Loops, Pop Tarts and Dr. Pepper. Thanks Spielberg.

Then in 1980, when we were staying at the cabin on a rainy Saturday afternoon, our dear mother decided it’d be fun to go see a movie. She was a total film buff and saw that The Shining was playing at a nearby cinema in the town of Frederic. I’m not even sure she knew anything about it beyond who the actors were, not that that was a prerequisite for her. A movie was a movie and any was worth watching. If you felt the urge, you went to the movie theater. This theater might have been in the other neighboring town of Luck, where they made Duncan Yo-Yo’s from 1945-1965 but I’m going with Frederic, primarily because Rita Lee was born there. Everyone knows that she went on to become 1977’s Playmate of the Month for the November issue. It may be worth noting that her assigned month was exactly between the release of Jaws and The Shining. I love that about Rita.

Anyway, the family packed into the station wagon and drove the wet country roads over to the Frederic movie theater. As we walked in, we saw that the only other movie goers were a few nuns sitting near the front. Ok. Not a scenario one could’ve predicted but we carried on. It was one of those theaters that was more than likely run by a single employee doing everything, perhaps an old funky guy or a pimply high school kid who sold the popcorn, the tickets, ran the projector and swept up. We took over a row of cushy, red, plush seats near the back as the film began to roll. During the opening scene, a deep, powerful fear flushed over me. I was already cognizant of my racing heart just watching the look on Jack Nicholson’s face with his sarcastic smile as he intently drove their yellow VW bug through the mountains on their way to a destination of complete horror. Had someone given me the option of floating in Ward Lake with an imaginary shark swimming below me, I may have taken them up on the offer just to avoid what I believed I was about to ingest.

Then it all unfolded. Danny on the Big Wheel. Danny with the knife. Redrum written in lipstick on the door and reflected in the mirror. The fear on Shelley Duvall’s gaunt face. The creepy twins. The blood in the elevator. My god, it just got freakier and freakier! Then, after the scene when Jack illogically plunges his axe into Scatman Crothers’ chest and proceeds to limp outside into the snow, dragging his axe and gimpy leg in tandem, well, that’s when the Frederic theater lost it’s electricity and we, along with the nuns, were sitting in utter silence and complete darkness. I grabbed my mother’s arm so hard that I’m sure I would’ve completely ruined her tennis career if she had one. Being the youngest, I was sitting bait for my older brother who quietly snuck behind our aisle and then lunged at my shoulders. Bastard! I nearly shot to the rafters and would’ve dragged my poor mother by her bruised arm up with me. At this fake intermission, she was probably rethinking the whole excursion. Or at least I hope she was. It was probably all worth it to her though, for a movie junky always needs a fix. The electricity was eventually restored and we watched the rest of that brilliant movie all the way to the end when we witnessed poor Jack frozen in the snow, eyes open, lost in his topiary madness. Ultimately, I’m not sure what was scarier; Jack or a semi realistic, giant, mechanical shark.

As we were driving home, I tried to hide the fact that I was completely freaked out about sleeping in our little cabin on a quiet and still Ward Lake, wondering how or if any cinematic insanity would play out in real time for me. Revisit the photo above for some level of compassion. I still need it.

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I just read (skimmed) yet another article about a buffalo goring in Yellowstone National Park. I can’t believe it happened…again. I’m talking about the article not the attack. Is it necessary to write more than a few sentences on the subject of a buffalo goring? A seasoned writer could easily come up with a good headline and leave it at that. Maybe a date, place and time just to throw a bone or two to feed some data farm in Texas. Fortunately, the person who was head butted got away with only minor injuries, thus there was no need to invoke the “death by misadventure” clause. This time. It seems as though there’s an article nearly every day about some idiot tourist getting “attacked” by a buffalo for “getting too close”. They always use those words which seems like a slightly redundant statement and one lacking creativity. So many questions have I.

With all the death, accidents and general calamity in this world, why are there so many articles about buffalo gorings? And since there are so many articles, why do the gorings keep on happening? News is supposed to inform. People are either stupid (ne’er a truer truism) and never really learn (a given that keeps giving) and/or these articles are not being read by the right readership. Also, have they posted warning signs as you drive into Yellowstone? One would assume so but perhaps they’ve all fallen over due to the lack of federal funding coinciding with rotting sign posts. Note to self: always use treated wood for outdoor sign posts. These articles have been jammed down our throats for years so you can’t totally blame it on cuts the DOGE dickheads have made. (The only article permissible for print, in my humble estimation, would be the one written if Big Balls ever got “too close” to a buffalo. The coroner of Yellowstone would be right to deem this “death by misadventure” and rightfully declare the presence of God.)

Look, despite mainly eating salads and the odd bug, buffalo do not look very friendly when they’re locking eyes with you so just stay the fuck away! They need personal space like we all do. Their relatives were historically run off cliffs so they’re genetically edgy on a good day, pugilistic on a bad. It could be the case that if these articles cease altogether, there would be the exact same amount of annual gorings, thus logic should inform all writers and AI programs to cease and desist.

But let me offer up a better suggestion.

Whoever is writing all these empty carb articles, please, for the love of the Buffalo God, write about the latest Archer Monk album instead! I need listeners and if I don’t get them soon, I may buy a golf cart, move to Sun City and officially retire. I’m guessing my wife will not be joining me and, frankly, I wouldn’t entirely blame her. It seems like the buffets there are to die for judging by the rather high change of occupancy rate.

Out of desperation, my next album is going to be a thematic collection of songs about the gentle buffalo, mostly metaphorical. It’s currently titled “I Just Got Gored by a Buffalo!…and Other Love Songs”. It may also become a musical but only if Trey Parker and Matt Stone are available. I’ve reached out to Brad Pitt’s agent because he would totally slay it as the buffalo. I’ll keep you posted.

The real reason I wrote this posting is because the subject of the buffalo made me ruminate about the great Boston band from the 90’s, Buffalo Tom. Their song “Taillights Fade” is still awesome.

Listen here.

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I rarely do covers but this gem flanneled me in the face the other day so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s “Sadly Beautiful” from the Replacement’s excellent 1990 album All Shook Down. They are one of my favorite bands ever and that’s not just because I consider Minneapolis home away from home. I regard Paul Westerberg as a songwriter of the highest order, an artist I’ve cursed (in private) for being so damn good at writing songs. All Shook Down is essentially a Westerberg solo album but the fact that it says “The Replacements” on the cover has always tricked me into believing that somehow Bob Stinson pulled a Syd Barrett and showed up in the studio while Chris Mars stayed long enough to sneak out the back door to the alley to dig through a dumpster in search of a box of paints and a way out of the madness. Many old school Replacement fans were not as chuffed about it but I think it’s a great album.

Another reason why I chose it is that it’s graduation time. Spring is in the air, flowers are blooming, kids are being launched into the great unknown, the nest will be empty soon and parents are wondering what the hell just happened?

from the very first day that you were born

from the very last day you waved and honked your horn

Seems like a lifetime in two sentences. Proud and amazed to send their kids off, yes, they certainly are, yet deep inside, parents are often crushed under the weight of a heart full of loss, an out of tune pump organ that has zero control over logic and the marching of time not to mention how to process the sight of a still house. Life slips away. That’s what it is suppose to do. Leave it to Paul to write something so simplistic yet so soul piercing.

from the very last day you waved and honked your horn

to a face turned away pale and worn

Ouch. But don’t worry. This is what makes life beautiful. The kids are gone! Freedom! It’s time to party! Or at least learn how to knit better. Maybe re-read “The Mists of Avalon”. Take a psychedelic journey. I don’t know. I still think it’s best to throw a party though, for you beyond the one for the graduate. Find you soul again and have some fun for f@^#’s sake!

As the story goes, he wrote “Sadly Beautiful” for Marianne Faithful to sing because some A+R person told him that she was looking for a song to sing. I picture him churning it out in 45 minutes or so. Perhaps it took longer. Perhaps shorter. At any rate, she didn’t sing it (who knows if she even heard it) but he thought it was too powerful to leave off the album and for that, I am grateful. Also, when they were working on it, he asked if they could get someone in to play violin and Scott Lit, the famed producer said, “Yeah, I think I know someone.” So he called up John Cale, of The Velvet Underground fame, who came into the studio and laid some parts down which made Paul “…nearly piss my pants…”

In honor of Mr. Westerberg, I decided to don my overalls and flannel shirt to summon the olden days of the ‘Mats. I hope you enjoy it.

Stay artful…

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