I had a dog, for a minute, anyway

July 1989, roughly
About 5^th or 6^th week working at the “pee shed,” Valdez oil spill response.
Every day that year seemed like its own year; 26 and 900 miles an hour.
I had been accepted to start at the Foothill College Paramedic program, ahem: Stanford, for the semester beginning fall ’89. Now all I needed was tuition.

I had only just moved into my apartment in Oakland, above The Alley on Grand Ave atwo months prior. I was working as a field training officer EMT at ACME Western Ambulance and was apace line my ducks up in the “couple years” it would take me to get back to my lover in Guadalajara. I needed tuition.
The news broke internationally: A reef, a drunken captain, Hazelwood (a good omen as I’d grown up on that street in Vallejo), a phone call…

I lost any warmth for my travelling companion within minutes of our departure, but he did introduce me to a friend I still have today. My usual M.O. when I can’t get across a threshold to boldly go over my crippling anxiety to do anything alone (except arm wrestle with God, of course).

My sis had the formula for getting work in Alaska: Get there, put your resume everywhere, pack a bag and leave it by the door, get the call: show up.
We probably hung out with Mike and Marie for a couple of weeks when the phone rang for me.
Safety Department. Valdez. Can you get there by tomorrow morning?
Check.

I’d never had a dog.
Our family got rid of Nicky, our boxer, when I was a toddler. I guess I’d “had” a dog in the vicinity, but I had no recollection except everyone’s nostalgia for the dog we’d never replaced. And, by the fables I’d come to understand, how we could afford to feed it seemed unsustainable, in the least.
Grandma and Grandpa had Happy.
Happy 2, I found out after I was fifty. Turns out the Happy 2 that I was familiar with was actually Happy 3.
“OH, you didn’t know that, Dave?”
“No, and you mean there are actual pictures of my father in albums? Hmm…”

Skinner was the friendly neighbor walking Happy across Military West in Benicia after he retired. Down to the park, a couple of laps. Maybe down the street for a couple packs of cigarettes, at least before Happy 3 (?) got so overweight that the extra blocks would have tuckered her out.

Mom tried cats for my young nerves, but Pete would take them over as his mascots before I could imprint.
I kept my pets in the “weirdo” category: wolf spiders and frogs that I would catch.
Got a pair of rats from the pet store where I used to hang out after school, where I eventually got a job, like Cheech and Chon’s drug-store bit, the I was off to the races.
A Boa Constrictor, Dweezil, fresh water and marine aquariums, various lizards and even a bird after I’d moved out of mom’s place, but nothing grounding, like, ya know: a dog.

The Pee Shed tableaux was a corner lot across from the Valdez medical building. A trailer office, a very flimsily sheltered area with a dozen ash cans and 10 porta potties where the crews would file up to fill their specimens before leaving for R&R (mandatory: 2 weeks on, 1 week off for the duration of the project).
I was the site expediter, at least for the medical clinic, with a passenger van to run errands throughout the village / airport, unless otherwise dedicated to activities around the Micturation Station.
I worked evenings / grave: action time!
The process, when it was working was that the workers who were out hosing down the beaches and living on barges as dormitories, would work a full shift, get off at 6, clean up and clamor for the ferries that would take them to shore for the mandatory seven days off.
Arrive at shore, grumbling (usually), hostile (not infrequently) and have to be talked at by: the Pee Guy.
That’s me: David Pee
This was probably where I got my comedy chops because I’d have to hop onto a a school bus (with the tiny little seats for children) and explain that the next hour or two was gonna be the worst part of their day (like tromping on dead sea-life wasn’t already) as. Per their contract, they were required to give us a fresh and clean sample of their number 1 before they could be released to the buses going to drive them through to Anchorage, and yes, this counted as their first day of R&R already.
And yes I milked it for comedy gold (see what I did there?) as I didn’t want to get shived by somebody hissing “I’ve about fucking had it!” through their clenched teeth, or worse: the brooding silent types, of which there were, I dunno, dozens every week on a 3 week rotation. I met most of the 10,000 employees about 4 times (we didn’t have mandatory time off for on-shore staff).

There was something going around for the duration of the deployment, affectionately referred to as “The Crud,” or the “Val-dizease” which was a lower-case nuisance endemic to all who lived on the barges which eventually everyone was being treated for or were taking every over the counter symptom interrupter just to make it to the time clock.

“Fuck this work / Fuck it: it’s work: seemed to be the price you pay to live in the last frontier.
To the credit of Henry Ford and Josephus Goodyear, Alaska is the camp stove state with hillbilly foreman in charge of job creation that will hasten the end of the American epoch.

When I wasn’t breathing fire in front of Mafia Mike’s Pizzeria or picking up staff orders from Fu Kung restaurant, I was always scheming how I was gonna survive these shifts so I could get back to “the mean streets of Oakland,” where, ironically, I felt more safe than nervous, despite my ambition to be right in the middle of the fire.
So I created a coach like character to at least bluff my way through. I had some of the specs on what the testing was* and offer that, what with the Val-dizease, that if you’d just fill in the box where it asked what prescribed and OTC meds you were taking in the last month with just as much drivel as possible, yes and even: “I ate twenty poppy-seed muffins this week at the commissary,” that their tests would be waived through for any minor discrepancies.
That sounded like good advice whether it was or wasn’t. I presented as an ally, and I was.
“But remember: don’t smoke any weed on your R&R. Sorry. You signed a contract. You will be terminated if THC shows up.”
“How the hell did you pass?!?!?!!?” **
“Oh; I’m an alcoholic. Noone’s checking for that.”

And yes; every morning after work, I’d be parked on a barstool at the Pipeline Club, doing that thing out of Brother From Another Planet, where I was trying to find which seat Joseph Hazelwood had got creamed on before he created the opera, dubiously titled: “The Ship from Hell.” ***

There’s a dog in here, somewhere…

So one night when it’s slow and no ferries are due, I’m sitting in the shelter outside the pee shed when the most gorgeous brown and white dapple coated malamute mix, eager but off, spots me from across the street and wanders over for help.
Dude has a whole snoot-full of porcupine quills and is hurtin’ for certain, no collar, looking like he’s all cried out, and in need of a two-legged stranger for some help out of this.

Of course, I try to hand it of to someone more outdoorsy / Alaskan because I was raised with cats, right?
The staff and I agree that it’s pretty funny that he came to the medical office, and Bruce, our PA handed me some forceps and scissors and said: “He’s all yours.”
I asked for and tried the spray lidocaine, the kind your dentist uses before the needle, and the dog was too overwhelmed by the strength of the scent to tolerate that.
It took a few tries to get a system down, but once we got a rhythm, he’d let me snip a few of the quill’s ends off, lock the forceps on them, and then he’d yank his head away from me and out they came! He had to walk it off and return a few minutes later for the next cluster.
Over the course of 45 minutes or so, we eventually got all the quills out and he let me look through his mouth with a flashlight and rub his snout for any lingering barbs, but he was doing okay. We collected some lunch meet and he drank mightily of the water we gave him.
And then he went to sleep right by me.

For the next 2 weeks, my new pal went with me everywhere.
My radio would crackle: “Dave, we need two VIPs picked up at the airport and brought into town,” and I would do my best Donald Sutherland impression, whether it was M*A*S*H or Kelly’s Heroes: “C’mon, Pup-Pup,” and he’d jump in the van, excited for the ride.
And I guess that it was such an Alaska trope, that nobody batted an eye that their car service meant squeezing in next to a curious fur-monster as the cast and crew of the welcome wagon.

I would be returning to Oakland to my studio apartment downtown and starting school in no time at all, really. How could I pull this off and not destroy the dog’s life?
Nobody in town was familiar with the dog.
“Oh look, you got yourself a dog. How Alaska is that?” was the general bruit on the “what happens to him next? menu.

I just went through my notes and found an old dispatch from the front lines of the event.
Ranting, mostly and trying to make light of all the wackiness and absurdity of this very thin slice of the Alaska labor motif for my friends back home.
After a few years of failing forward, what with relocating from the Napa Valley to downtown Berkeley, becoming a fish monger in the “hub of the incestuous culinary community” (Judy Rodgers), killing a dude (oh, it’s complicated), auditioning at Zuni, taking a hard pass and running off to Mexico to drink and write, meeting a gal there and deciding to come back in 2 years, certification in had so that we could settle somewhere in the world as medical professionals (she was a doctor)…

Let’s throw in Iran / Contra during all this

Returning home as the US was shooting down Iranian airliners for the 4^th of July, returning to Zuni and enrolling in my 3^rd full semester of EMT 1 basic, meeting Paul Pena (star of Genghis Blues) as an intern with SFDPH, quitting Judy again, of course as she was offering to promote me, joining ACME Wester, moving to Oakland to live above a piano bar where I NEVER sang (5 years = Not once), drinking, snorting, cavorting..
I was ahead of schedule, really, or at least succeeding by sheer will and a little psychosis magic for good measure.

I was unhinged and yet motivated by a complete hallucination of grandeur.
Could I pull off a Klondike Husky in Flaming Carrot’s court, though?
It would make a good draft for a TV situational pilot, but I’d be dead from the synergy of anxieties before its ever seeing light.

Thank goodness for the breaking news in Valdez (meanwhile).
The same week as 4 union welders were expedited off of the site, having complained that they weren’t okay with their most recent job: sealing off pontoons loaded with thousands of uncounted animal corpses to be sunk in the depths past Bligh Reef, another group of guys were being brought in for emergency screening for exposure to the new, untested dispersant that was being field tested on the down-low by the “consortium.”

These other abettors (I’ll call them, and include myself) were working with loading the distribution system for the new tool: Inipol, which some geniuses came up with to Houdini the crude oil out of sight, yet weren’t head to toe in full safety equipment in the process.
Bruce Afton, our Trapper John McIntyre / site PA had friends at Rocky Mountain Poison Control and was on the comm for a week over what the labs were showing on these guys:
Hemolysis: the stuff had been absorbed through their skin and was exploding their red blood cells (for shits and giggles).
But no, what affected me the most, because this is my rant, is that, as expediter, I had to go pick these guys up at the harbor and bring them back to the clinic, one of the guys just brightens, ear to ear, and joyously shouts: “OLLIE!” as my dog-gone daydreams pop like a cartoon bottlecap.
Turns out, poor old Ollie was left with a friend at a remote site while dad went out to earn a living. He must have split the very next day as he’d been my mascot for almost 2 weeks.
“Well he’s named after Oliver North, of course! He looks great! Thanks for taking such good care of him!” ****

Other fun things about my short trip to earn tuition:
I got to work with Chad Carpenter, author of Tundra Comics (before he was all that). Chad was a uniform security guard on site and would draw little serialized comic strips about life in the Man-Camps. He was asked to leave when the strips turned to a sort of great escape theme with piSS guards at the razor wire had the double X of EXXON on their armbands.
I got to take my first helicopter ride out to two remote islands and ask indigenous workers for their pee, per the company policy to get their checks for cleaning the permanent stains from their homeshores. About the most humiliating “duty” I’ve ever had to perform.
I rolled a pickup driving drunk (from my job at the safety department where I screened everyone for drug abuse on the job), explain to the officer a Dagwood’s worth of ironies: tat I was earning tuition for paramedic school, that the owner of the truck was a sober person…
Life’s Rich Pageant.

The second I meet a dog named Donnie, I’m running naked into the Wisco Desert.
Wave of you see me

BE-FORE a half dozen tangents: good night and thanks for tuning in.
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* Besides a ginormous insurance company co-scam sidled up to the propagandasphere of any industrial “concern.”

** Implying that I’m a nut job, which I wore on my sleeve.

*** and yes, I even had the challenge coin, minted for the event, along with all the commemorative swag that big business likes to hand out as merit badges for their suck.

**** I should add somewhere in here, but my editor is on sabbatical, the one of the gifts my doctor left me with was a bracelet where her dog’s teeth had ripped my arm open when I smacked him on the butt for misbehaving (he tried to kill another dog, is all).
Her dog’s name was Ronnie. Her dad had admired Reagan back in the day.

What’s going on in the quiet of this little hovel, is that I’m taking 41 years of notes, most hap hazardously “filed” into manila folders, milk crates, and cardboard boxes (excluding the three hard drives and also three externa; hard drives) where I’ve been jamming my observations for years. Some have gathered mold from being in wet basements, a season or two. Many are from my 5 years in Oakland, living on Grand Avenue above The Alley when I was an EMT and a medic, then working at The Cuckoo’s nest, trying desperately to prop up my inner Neal Cassady while being litt from both ends and speeding to smolder out from irony by proxy.

The other working title, though maybe I’ll save it for the anthology of On Scene, is:
“The There There 9-1-1derland”

My current doc, my dentist, goes right… there in the apocryphon of db’s collected meteoric mentors across the decades of rolodices.

Okay: so, because anonymity is the name of the game, let’s just say: I’m at a meeting in the general area of, say, the Piedmont Cemetery (for landmarks’ sake), and I hear:
“Hi. My name id Doctor Frunobulax...” and I’m like: “oh shit!” as my ears prick up and it dawns on me that, in telling his story, he’s reading MY mail and doesn’t know I’m in the room. Why should he?
And I don’t run up and fawn all over at the end, or scootch over to hold his hand to pray.
But it was Doctor Fucking Frunobulax who made a decision that the collected triage team should move the entire setup about three blocks over from where we’d initially set up, ya know, just because some unstable building could potentially take us all out like bowling pins if’n the ground heaved up again.

I got to work with John Fagan that same night. He’s been gone awhile. I can say his name.
I was about 7 weeks into paramedic school, at the time.
I was a Field Training Officer with my company (BLS).
I was partnered to run a through the night with an EMT who I had recommended to the company, at least twice, that they not continue her employment.
I was teching from behind the steering wheel (none of our patients were critical, thank god!) while finding our way throughout nearly ALL of Alameda county as every facility went in and out of diversion throughout the first 24 hours.
We had one clusterfuck: a pair of nurses speeding through downtown Oakland on their way to John Muir hospital, T-Boned a car carrying a cameraman and reporter from KCRA who were trying to find the (former) Cypress street structure.
Everyone seemed fine, except I thought one of the nurses was fragile.
I called the county for any available unit and John Fagan showed up.
John was FUCKING notorious for having zero filter for anybody seeming out of place and I couldn’t afford my partner to be psychologically disabled after the encounter.
I gave a speedy assessment of all four patients, and he asked: “What would you like us to do, Mr pedersen?”
Oh shit, “um, okay…”
We got the very uninjured but precautions taken task of driving all over with the KCRA crew, eventually ending up in the ER parking lot in San Leandro.
The John part is relevant as, a couple of years later, when I was running myself ragged with balancing the job and poly addictions, John approached me and suggested: “There’s a place for us. Right around the corner on Mandana,” and I knew exactly the address.
“I go there on the regular and I know there’s a chair available right next to mine, if you’re interested.”
And what was funny then as is anecdotally now: that was aguy I would have fallowed into any burning building or gunfire in the hood, but I wasn’t about to follow him into an AA meeting No fucking way.

I think John might have passed even before my chance encounter with Doctor Frunobulax.
I lasted about as long as a walk-by in one season of M*A*S*H. A couple of good lines, maybe, then out the double doors of Alameda County Hospital with my uniform going up in flames.
I hope he’s having a cuppa with Dr John Chiles, if there’s beaches in heaven.

It’s late, but I’m gonna watch “Little Man Tate” tonight. It’s free with my youtube subscription.
I’ll part my notes’ organizing like some sort of Red Sea mis en scene and project it on the big screen in the living room.
I’ll play it with the volume low enough that I can hear the Barred Owls hootenannying at opposite ends of the building tonight.
I bring it up as so many of my chapters in their disarray are based on the war in perpetuity I’m always going on about with my gods and goddesses who only give me everything for the low low price of karmic cmoedy.

I’ll spare you the laundry lists in tonight’s missive, but around the same time as the above content, a little movie came out directed by Jodie Foster.
“A mother of average intelligence” (Wikipedia) has a child prodigy / genius on her hands.
And just as quick as Gerald McBoingBoing went to: “You’re not really gifted, it’s just a perk the city gives teachers’ kids,” now I was suddenly her very own “Little Man Tate,” which honestly, was more about putting her in the light of a doting mother.

“Bonfire of the Anaerobes” is the working title for when I throw the moldiest of these scribblings in the wood burning stove this winter.

Stay tuned!

Theresa and Clay produced it for Skulls of Heaven. They made a thousand copies.
We made the carrot cupcakes at the kitchen of Hope Haven and held the release oarty at the Gates of Heaven, the synagogue up the street.
I was nervous and didn’t play long enough, but it was well attended and I’m sure I had a great, if fleeting, sense of accomplishment.
I endured some negative notes from friends about the title track, and my explanation never made a lick of sense, that I could tell.
Funny; what I couldn’t get over was, in the reviews I’d garnered from submitting them to sources, when a stranger I’d never meant would criticize the words at all, like: the more Pedersen’s words are understandable, the less interesting the overall piece becomes…

Any dipping sauce for to make swallowing my tail any easier?

Oh: duh (click more videos if you want to hear more. I don’t control this playlist)

!!! Double duh: I completely forgot the punch line.
About 3/4 the way through the recording process, I asked Jeff why he was doing me this favor (all this studio time for free) and he said that Nicole had asked him to. Ya know, to make up for that past transgression, if it was even that. !!!


I never had the confidence or momentum, really, to get off my pity-pot and tour, ya know: take a chance at sharing.

I decline at this time to innumerate the opportunities I’ve gone through with or turned down (though the best might be the Keller Williams story!).

I keep pratfalling or cartwheeling in the years, never knowing where I’ll turnip-seed my way onto a stage of maturation.

I could write a exhaustive list of opportunities I’ve shrugged off and people who have shrugged right back when all I can give them is my tweenish non-compliance for the reward of offering some help.

Did I ever tell you the one about the documentary my friends made about me: db pedersen?
It was right around the same time that Carrot Carrot! debuted. Brian and Steve came into 2 Degrees Coffeehouse and saw my show and proposed they shoot a feature for their series on outsider artists.
Of the 20 hours it took to shoot 2 hours of tape to edit to 20 minutes, I think I did more to confound them and deny it to their faces that I could bear the title: Artist. ***

I mean, that was fully 20 years ago and I’m pulling the same shit in 2026 and trying to make a statement that the worst thing to happen to me this year was when San Diego Fringe handed me a laminate on a lanyard that said: ARTIST.
The thing I paid them to do…

* “Paroxysms of glee!” was a favorite expression of my mentor, Judy Rodgers.

** I met Tom Buckner several years later at a Nils Bultmann gig where he’s shown up with Roscoe Mitchell. As I was a fan and played him on my late night radio show (In One End), I asked why HE didn’t sing words and her replied that it was too terrifying!

*** I have all the unedited footage on a hard drive. Some is even uploaded to youtube already. I’m glad that the portion where I’m talking about my dad, the monomyth, in the grain silo in New Glarus, weren’t published. At the time, what I acted like I knew about him was completely from my imagination.

# no, that’s dad

I think I ate enough “shut the fuck up” burgers in my childhood to make me swear off meat for the duration. I mean, sixty years later and I’m still more likely to sabotage than succeed.
I’ve had measured success with EMDR but I can’t shake the FuckYou blues

A princess handed me a poem called “Feeling Fucked Up” from an anthology from Etheridge Knight.
She’d gotten me through my step father’s suicide on my birthday that year, coaxed me out of my fiancé’s house and into Madison proper. She signed me up to audition for the “writer’s conference’ and, dish-like, ran away with the spoon as she, on full display, ran to the arms of the grief shaman in the matrimonius gaze of, literally: Coleman Barks. Talk about a tramp stamp.

Never had a use for it

The “molcajete” in our living room in the seventies, was piled high with the butts of True Blues, Winstons, and whatever was brought into the house by guests (and on very rare occasions: an errant roach, unhidden due to brain-fog), and was expected to be emptied, by some mid-week morning as part of allowance procurement.

The reflexology of puke-making is that, bless their sombreros; if a waiter ever tries to entice me with the freshest of handmade anything, to the dulcet grinding of the molcajete, tableside, it will be matched by my spontaneous emesis, like from a salad fetched from the toilet.

Yes Virginia, there’s a slim downside to the artifacts and potteries, the gewgaws from my apoplectic tween twaumas of growing up in a cotton ball tribe (meaning: soaked in alcohol and proffered to the nearest wound a la Campho Phenique on a freshly expressed zit).

I had, for years, brought home from each trip, a little family of fragile glass species for Grandma. Som many, in fact, that my big sis facilitated getting a mirrored glass enclosure for them to reside in.
Voila: a menagerie before I had the faintest idea that Tennessee Williams was more than a punch line from one of Pete’s many drunkard jokes. * , **
It had actually started when I was six, the first glass figurine, I mean.
I was in the car all summer with the folks, the black Monza that was our rolling NAFTA for years, before it was cool.
With Pete at the wheel, entertaining his newlywed wife and her precocious baby-child, hugging the floor of the back seat to avoid the London’s-worth fog of cigarette smoke, we bounced up the coast to catch the ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) tour of western Canada (they became Life Masters after a decade), most of the details I won’t go into.
I was six and inconsolable at the lost of the little souvenir British Columbia flag I had stashed under the hotel bed in Calgary (you know, trying to keep things safe in the mind of a little kid) that they let me choose just one little glass ornament from the hotel gift shop, and I chose, and I’m not kidding: a shining purple wolfhound *** that somehow never broke in the 30 years that we were friends.
My only dog.
There was a family of elephants; a mom with her three baby elephantitos, a stag and his 3 . staglettes (all a little top-heavy due to their racks), a swan mama and her brood (all groups of three, as was la moda, I guess, and there were bearded goats with amber bodies and blue horns, and of course; the horses.
Doggo was the only loner of the collection.
Grandma took pride in them and was careful, when dusting, not to cause them any harm.
I thank my sis for the glass box that they could all stand together in their three tiers like Laura Wingfield playing star-trek chess.

I held up a few pieces of the curios that remain that are withing my reach to show my therapist tonight (on zoom) while describing my few week’s absence from Substack while I get my bearings.
I’ve been on the road since the last week of April and I have one more engagement: two weeks in Anchorage starting next week. I had to redeem my unused ticket from January when I couldn’t attend the Anchorage Folk Festival for some last-minute moving of the business items.

Funny; as I considered the title and basic premise of this note, I wanted to use some creative turn of phrase that made ASHTRAY the way that Captain Beefheart talked to a saguaro standing in as therapist about his feelings.
The primal scream is what brought me here, after all.
Now what do I do with these broken dishes
A penny if you thought: mosaic

This “kid” (he’s forty) did a gig at San Diego Fringe that knocked me over with an eagle’s feather of narrative simulacrum.
It came with enough of a caveat, not unlike Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, that it was fraught with descriptions of suicide, self-injury, a brainiacal and labyrinthine first person account of harmful ideation and action.
The home movies of his torso scored and scabbing from the dissociation and all concentration took me straight to Timothy’s story of the “red-lace-vest” his father left him with so many times.
Of the myriad abuses he’d suffered and the distortions that fed him like an ouroboros, burning the calendar backwards to his fate. Now eighteen years.
I told Philip at the end of his set, pulling up my pants leg, that he fully restored the memory of a friend who now only weighs as much as the skin he’s inked into.
I congratulated him on his raw fucking courage to creatively make it into a chronicle of struggle, comingling humor and horror, and facing the motherfucker down every day as teacher of recovery. ****

I bring it up as to shine a light on the unfinished business of developing a script.
I just pulled off something (touring a work) that was good for my “timeline” (if that’s a thing), and yet deviates from the arc of a narrative and retreats into inchoate, frenetic dog-paddling . Unsatisfying for the audience and the author.

See, as much as I write or create, I feel like all I’m doing, sometimes, is adding more baffling to dull the chronicity of my stubborn truth. Like I want a sagittal dissection of my psyche to demonstrate where the firing of my neurons is cattywampus. Not “special,” like a Pretenders chorus, not enviable, like the kernel of mystery revealed, but to more than hint that what makes me different-acting is something I can draw a line to as the product of self hatred and the obsession of annihilation from before I remember words.
instead, I reckon, of acting as-if (imposter) 33 years of therapy, and more than that of fighting back against addiction necessarily consoles my restless soul.

My cousin, the folklorist, described it as the “Cruel Mother” archetype. *****
The devouring father. The cruel mother. Boy, these post-depression parents had it in to juice box their kids right through the fontanelles,
Their Carquinez Strait-Blues probably came with its own keel-hauling of their own fragile psyches, I suppose. Their smoldering resentments for how they had to act in the front-facing world, brought home to extinguish in the ashtray heart of the molcajete.



I went from being an oddball, maybe, but certainly fit into the “gifted” program to sophomore dropout concurrently with mom and her 2^nd husband screaming their way to divorce right outside my bedroom door for a couple of drunken years.
Pete was his own particular celebrity of teaching at People’s High School, the continuation school for Vallejo’s brokenest souls and mom let me know, frequently enough, that I wasn’t really “gifted,” it was just a perk they gave to teacher’s kids in the school district.
They had always argued after a night of drinking and log-stacking the molcajete.
The relief of moving from our first house to the fourplex they invested in was that my bedroom wasn’t next to theirs (praise jeebers), however, withing the first year of their being landlords, their tenants sheepishly complained that their arguing went right through their apartment walls. SO, moving it to the bar was the obvious choice, ya know: right across from my flimsy bedroom door.

The things I swore I would never do, the adolescent coping skills to not want to follow in any family member’s footsteps, fell away as I caught on that drinking made me feel whole for the first time in my life. I would fill up a few “airplane bottles” with their vodka and skateboard down the hill to Hogan High, sipping them in front of god and everybody and no one peeped a word as I power-slid through a D-minus average and my math teacher, Morris Wilkenfeld, suggesting I test out and go to college while I gladly tutored my fellow classmates with basic math and graded my former peers’ papers with a red Sharpie.



Fuck; it’s Monday at 6 AM and there’s a list of 8 stories I want to push through the juicer before tomorrow, cause that’s how I think.

Molcajete is incomplete, but what can you do?
These feel more like grief-clots than works
Separate garbage can, dig?

Johnny Winter’s “Still Alive and Well” was the first LP I ever bought (at K-Mart in Vallejo, grandma rolling her eyes).
Her molcajete were the nicotine dripping paneled walls of their living room.
But they alone, never called me Howard.




* Guy is drinking at Speck’s after performing Richard III at Curran Theater, walks out into the darkened street.
“Hey buddy, can you spare a quarter?”
and he whips his cape (it’s implied, I guess, that he hurried from the performance to get a stiff drink without changing out of his costume), and cites: “’Neither Borrower nor Lender, be,’ William Shakespeare!”
to which the disheveled, presumably unhoused, person, filled with indignant rage , gathers up the fetid corner of his jacket, whipping it across his stained shirt(s), and retorts:
“’FUCK YOU!’ TENNESSEE WILLIAMS!!!”


** many years later, Pete and I are watching the Malcovich / Woodward / Allen version directed by Paul Newman of The Glass Menagerie on videocassette, to which he posited: “Holy shit! How did you know?”
He had also raised me in Lake Chapala, Jalisco, home of the drafting of Poker Night and probably many other pieces.

*** “Shining-flying Purple Wolfhound, show me where you are”
YES: yours is no disgrace

*** Fall of the High School Valedictorian, by Philip Simondet

***** The Great Mother Conference (1997) only made it so much worse.

Tami Browne, former MOTION member and joyous voice

Start from scratch:
Queer-mo
Identity. Never hurts to go with the trend
A lesson I could have (and maybe did) from Fringe. Find, create, finish a script.
Stick-to-it-ive-ness
A literal Tinkerbell (on her way with mom to recital, I assume) in front of line at coffee.

As I’m restructuring my business to reopen this fall
The repeating question in the drop downs: is your business LGTBQ?
Last chance, nino blanco

Remember the time you passed on tribal affiliation on your college application?

Those coincide, actually
Whereas I took a hard pass at the tribal affiliation nudge to “helping” me to get a booster in the industry, it was in the same hallways at Solano Junior College, where, rolling in a wheelchair in the hallway between Fire Academy and EMT classes, I got to the end of Naked Lunch.
The whole world would never untilit.
Despite the “gifted” years, the art tours through Tonola and Tlaquepaque, Guadalajara, D.F., the DeYoung, the Curran Theater, Renaissance Faires, Choirs, performances in the dozens
Rather suddenly, I finally grasped what “art” meant
In the middle of the tornadic information taking in, in a field I could care less about, and by no means a college of intellect, much less curiosity: I was engaged in reading a complete, seemingly garbage disposer of ideas that made perfect sense in the very last 2 pages.
By an author whose identity was caps-lock QUEER that it validated all previous instinctual protection of my kind.
Not homosexuality, but the identity that whatever cocooned me into this amoebic nervous-system had farted me onto the free-throw line of an oddball court for my very own diorama of performance doo-dah that I could steer to my mind and body’s destiny.

At least the last 46 years.

Jokes around the Fire Department in my hometown (where I was volunteering to begin my career) leaned into all the homophobic tropes to the gills, so much that, when I pierced my ear, I did the “Right” side, which made me suspect not only on the home turf, but in field work in Alaska in later years.

I jotted down some notes for this missive, having more to do with instances, name-dropping, if you will, that were to quantify or qualify me to the reader, or maybe just humble-brag my way through another string of paragraphs for shits and giggles.

Though: “Matt Dillon ES Joto” is worth it’s weight

I want you to know that the content of my character is from the privilege of service to you.

WHITE MALE was an article of clothing I picked up in a Berkeley Tee Shirt emporium. It was from Wildwood Productions in Madison, WI. I’ve never been able to find the artist. It was one of the seeds that grew me toward there, though.
The design was a brooding, woodcut, Ollie North looking, leering A-Hole with a tie covered with a Hammer and Sickle motif. The background was a collection of cut-up phrases and branding, all geared toward machismo, white identity, sloganeering, etc. The kind of shirt you had to squint and ponder to get the absurdity.

Whilst I did some years in the related industry of EMS, maybe ten, where queer was less-emetigenic, still, at least in my era, homosexuality was tolerated, if lesbian, but the out male homosexual was too risky for the sake of the team conformity.*

Now they’re retiring or nearing their “fourth quarters,” my pride pals, sober or not, chasing bugs or monogamous to the core, freak flagging or looking up from their bifocals with a sarcastic micro-raising of a greying eyebrow.

Some teachers, mentors, rabid intellectuals, culture savagers, healers, warriors, pacifists, patients, cogent or disintegrating before our eyes…
Those who knew, knew, and those who thought that was a green light to hit on me, well;
go fuck yourself if you can’t understand that “no, thank you” is a complete sentence.


One of the “Short Straw” variations (a story that’s repeated throughout my journey) was the kid on my work crew in Fairbanks, 1999, who, on the school bus that took us out to the train line to then ferry us out to the Diesel spill at the Dunbar siding, asked if he could sit next to me on the cramped children’s sized seat.
“Sure. What’s up?” Nobody ever sat next to me anywhere that summer.
“Oh hey. Just wanted to say hey”
“Hey” I thought it might have to do with my curation of the sack lunches, coffee making, or hornet abatement.
“It’s just that… I dunno how to say it…”
“Dude: did you draw the short-straw?”
“Uh, what fo you mean?”
“Did the guys put you up to this?” I had been the medic on night shift for the past five weeks.
“It’s just that… well… we think you’re pretty cool, ya know?”
“Well, thanks, I think y’all are cool, too. I mean, nobody gets hurt, so that makes my job easy and the safety record looks great, at least on night shift!”
“It just that, well Dave: none of us mhave ever met a gay guy before, and we think that you’re okay. I mean, you’re funny and crazy as hell… that’s it. We think you’re alright, considering”
“AW! Well thanks, man! I tell you what; for the record, you still haven’t! But if y’all think crazy or queer means homosexual. I guess that’s okay, as long as you don’t murder me!”
Probably ended it with: Thanks, sweetheart,” but definitely not a pat on the ass as he embarrassedly excused himself to return to his seat.
So THAT’S why my log book was so unremarkable: though I’d set up the first aid, decontamination station and medical tent (my homage to M*A*S*H, naturally) my crew must have tiptoed around every of twelve hours of every seven days: so they wouldn’t have to catch AIDS from the affable fag at site HQ. The day shift log was full of medical intervention logging, medi-vac flights out, splint and ice pack restock request…
my shift: crickets a la Tennessee Williams fecundity under the midnight sun.
Should have gotten a stipend for overall crew safety, I reckon.


Rather than a retinue of smiling countenances or skeletons, b in and out of the closets,
I’ll just say that it’s been a privilege to be born and raised in the era / chair that really fit me.

One piece of family lore is that we all thank god that Skinner couldn’t find work when he came back to Texas after working at Mare Island in WW2, eventually moving his wife and daughter out to Benicia, where he could have work, buy a home, and all the rest
Otherwise we’d all have been raised in Texas. Among the siblings: a fate worse than gone-daddy-gonorrhea.

Third-Fourth-Sixth-Eighth sex?
Bring it
I only recently decide that I had to stick around AT LEAST till that day when whitey turns 49: I mean, specifically, when we’re 50% and on the downslope and Everyday People and Francis Scott Key’s monolith falls over like his rusted bridge and sinks into the swamp.


*Six Feet Under disproved that for a minute, but re-entering EMS a few years back (rural Wisconsin) seemed to still be the safer role in the flock, although we had a disproportionately “theatrical” crew in a community with a Shakesperean Repertory company serving alongside us.

Well okay

I’m just pulled up at the window seat at Starbuck’s
Southampton, Benicia

The same(ish) seat where, 8 years ago after being drug through Hollywood Fringe, I wrote about 8 pages of story / script of “Can’t get there from here”
That I’m back in one piece, well; post stroke and a set of dentures to do my best impression of Skinner, is a testament to one fucking day at a time, x almost fourteen years* and hella change.

As I haven’t posted in a minute, I’ll try for a longer one, quilting together some of these open pages and flesh out the homework I never turned in.

Not 6 days ago, wrapping up my act at San Diego International Fringe Fest (so many hurdles hurdled, catching my cape on nails, chipping paint), I put on my vest impression of Tom Waits, through the mic with more reverb, recounting the psychic dare that took me on my first “geographic” to downtown Indiana.
When an audience member, from the dark, said “San Diego’s own!”
After the set, I asked after, as he and his partner were leaving.
“You know, Tom learned a lot from the owner of a record store on University; Folk Arts Rare Records.”
“Uh, I just started this ‘tour,’ playing there last week.”|
feather-cap, penetration unlocked

Anecdotally (totally), I’ve been telling people that what I wrote in 2018, I couldn’t get through the mail-slot of Hollywood Fringe, maybe because, “it’s right there in the title,” Can’t Get was the poetic sticking point, having unremembered the cost-prohibitive part of why I never pursued it for a Hollywood production.

But the seed was planted

That was the first year back from decades of family-estrangement, cooled, curated, and cured by recovery, redoubled and reapplied with more efficacy than previous tries.

It’s time when it’s time / cause it’s time…

(cues Recording by Eric Geving 2010?)
“…tell the man in the moon.”

I just came from the Eppler Gallery in Crockett, where I saw Alison’s piece “Keeping House”
the Bancroft house, vouchsafed in jigsaw squares. Dave, Nora, and she were there with warm smiles. A quick catch-up. A town that Nora feels is haunted, Dave, meanwhile, is protected by the fact that the gallery was an old NASH showroom.**

I can vouch for the safety of Benicia, now, where I’m neither boss nor nova, just a tempered spirit with the desire to illustrate with words, songs, and images, rather than defenestrate my mortal coil for the sake of fuck, or that “it’s five a.m. somewhere” laissez faire that let everyone let me alone for the self-pyrotechnics of my suicidal clowning.

Caught up with my tonality teachers en route, Steve Sklar and Johnna Morrow, now living in Albuquerque, who I’d left with the twin skid marks of impression from 2006(ish) that I was an avowed poverteer, as well as an unpaid regional rep for Krispy Kreme to the point of probable annoyance.
Ah, the good old sugar-daze before “Dia-beet-us!”
I’ve had a beautiful booklet of prayers that I picked up on that trip.
Prayers from his Holkiness The Dali Lama, including the Heart Sutra.
I couldn’t remember, though, if it was a gift from them or a borrow.
We agreed that the source was probably a show of The Tibetan Relics in Minneapolis, and they may have gifted it to me as a gesture of kindness on my avowal airs.
I’ve made it a part of som many cycles with the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Ansd no, I don’t try to imitate the chants in Tibetan, even though the text is provided.***

FROM THE INSIDE (entry from last week)

I’m onstage all these nights attempting to craft something linear, and it leafs out on the potter’s wheel, too delicate and susceptible to throwing up from G-forces.

I got to be a part of so many worlds and yet I didn’t feel like I belonged in any of them.
THAT’S the common denominator
Every time a positive performance review (we didn’t call them that, then / faces would have been aptly slapped) came in, I’d run for the fucking hills for fear of being accepted.

The more I talk about this strange little boy and his disordered toys and personalities.

My inviolable inner secret can’t separate the diamond from the corpse’s mouth.
I just keep talking and listening for a giggle from the audience behind the blinding stage lights.
I’m showing off something that I appear to master and yet I have little relative control over.
The trembling has hurt me for many years
I was doing so much better until tonight
nevertheless, I persisted

Something came over me, slowly, when I picked up the lanyard with my picture on it that boldly states: ARTIST

Name in lower case: check, Name of show: check, lovely picture: check.

Notes and interaction from a friend and director
Notes from observers and from balanced inner voices (not the nagging old bitchy ones)

I’m thinking of introducing the concept that I’m a ghost
or
that I haven’t had any of the shades of tears
2 years

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So I finished up and ran up the coast, on fumes, caffeine, destination known-ish.
I came from San Diego and directly up to Homeworld, CA, to look in on the folks and have some ACME bread.

As the sun sets, with no particular agenda of gravity or haste, the inevitable change changes places. I’m into the calming waters of gratitude too far to second guess my former grips on unrestful resentment.

Deperturbed
The roots are the selfishness of wanting my own freedom from my incipient ichors, defined by my comparative inventories from harm to hallelujah.

~~~~

In a week’s worth of scrambling at others’ goals, I’ve gotten ahead of their game.
Now I turn, albeit briefly, to what mine look like for quarter three in the Completion-Backwards-Principle of Soups I Did It Again, version 3.0
Flip it, build it, teach it, sell it. Maybe 3-5 years.

I don’t care to be the forefront of any wave.
Worker among
With a little bit of class and a nod to all my teachers.
That “cosmic wink” that Odessa said I possess.



Hey! It’s me again.
Still looking for paid subscribers. A little monthly, quarterly, or annual contribution puts the steam beneath my flappity-flaps and lets me know that your farts are my laughing gas, and to keep up this little project!

Thanks to ALL aubscribers!
Next I’ll give some content on Fringe. I have a lot of editing of video to do.
That might take through summer
We’ll see

xoxoxo

63 x 63 (is it times or plus?)

not out of thin air, although my thinning hair is a give-away
and not without help
all the helps
the ontology of the good, the bad, and sometimes the painfully ugly
looking out, and sometimes their worst when looking in

there was an unshakeable feeling of “happiness” in the fall of 2018
but it was transitive, shook, too shall pass kind of a moment’s moment

and I’ve had and created and witness or even felt the giggling contagion, the vicarious thrill of my own and other’s happiness from the cheap seats to the front row

and now the spotlight

So this thing, with lots of help, is an hour-long musical monologue about the life of db, nee-david, and even howard, dog-boy, fishman, mad-dave, and creepy eccentric, all rolled up in a sweet, savory, and savage mass not wished for upon any palette

and yet here we are

63 years of ruidos: inarticulate blasts of sound to laughter, scorn, and sometimes frowns

60 years of alchemical curiosity, peering over mother’s stove or watching the pros on public television do performative cooking for entertainment and degustation

40 years of taking notes on the mutability and mutilation of bodies, minds, countries even, learned through the liberal taking of spirits to sort of astro-glide my way through the ethers and oars
in the company of other good space-persons, of course, but eschewing anything like sustainable attachment
a love-hate relationship with solitude / for many years steeped in hate with all it’s metastasis and melancholy

But I never wanted to be the artist of self-loathing, so I had to keep digging through the calendar to get

There from here


What’s happening is that the medicine is ameliorating the sad clown anxiety ego that I wrapped around the axle of the childhood state.*
Chicken, eggs, prematurity… it doesn’t matter when the goal of the game is to be free of the blame. Not mine. I can face my shortcomings, but the “theirs.”
Their faces spinning on the fractalling wheel of blame throws out the balance of perspicacity to see clearly: the medicine is recovery.

I mean, now more (than ever, heh heh) than half my life ago, when I shed the uniform I’d worked so hard for** and went to work at The Cuckoo’s Nest near Jack London Square (there’s some poetry), I finally felt befucked enough to try therapy. To begin to claw back after 30 years of doomscrolling (before it was cool).

It would take another decade before I’d try something different from the nadir of the rehab basement. I’ll spare this page the goriness of traction, suffice that now I’m the idjut in the hard conversations with my beaming smile, sloganeering, and antiskeptic bloviation.

Granted, I lean into cards of archetypal formulation, a dash of astrology and alchemy, some trickster mischief though eschew malfeasance
But I’m having a good or better time
I meant it when I said “I got pictures”

I have four more shows in this run at San Diego International Fringe Fest. It dawns on me, when I pay attention, that this is kind of an “outsiders” club, so I’m literally on the cartoon wagon, now figuring out a role in fellowship with creatives, standing out while holding space.
What’s lovely is that I don’t really hear the complaints that I might be susceptible to gorge my doubts on. I mean I’m a fresh-meat senior citizen, arriving at my own “just in time” time.

I can let go of my perfectionism that keeps me from picking up my instruments.
I have a director, a core chum with my best success at heart, to put me through the paces.
I send him the “pictures” I got (videos of my performer’s progress) and he sends me rants and balm to help me do the work of better to best.
See? There I go all gratitude-judy instead of living in a reactive, anaerobic belief system bubble.
A bubble that was absolutely necessary to crowd-surf the turn of the century but is now as useless as a sphere of cataracts that doesn’t my presbyopia whatsoever.

Different strokes?
No thank you. One’s enough for me.

When I can see that I’m not cashing in on the victim cards, the shame or blame game:
Then I’m fucking winning.

I just need a script so the hull’s not full of holes where the rain and the sea get in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was invited, some months back, to attend Jasper’s thesis defense at UC San Diego.
She’d hired me 14 years ago to do a vocal-performance trio (with Molly Wells) called FOMA, where we improvised movement and sound to create ethereal and playful works.
She’d returned to St Louis for her parent’s sunsets (they rest near Tennessee Williams, don’tcha-know?) and I found out she’d gone to Judy Rodgers’s alma mater.
She met Luke there and they moved to San Diego where she’d enrolled in their musicology doctoral program, and took roles in Voices of Our City Choir and taught Choir at Cuyamaca College.
Bazile and I served as co-officiants for their 2 weddings, the first online because: pandemic, and then here in their ne home town a couple years later to have THE EVENT they’d always wanted.
I wrote to some L.A. friends and such that I would be near and coming through when Ernie replied: “Why don’t you do San Diego Fringe while you’re there?”
Back a little ways, in 2018, he and Marlene had invited me to L.A. for Hollywood Fringe, but I only had 24 hours break from some work I was beholden to in the Bay Area.
In that brief time, they took me along to 9 plays, dragging me all over the place (with glee, mind you) and dropping me off at the Greyhound: “Now go home and write a script and debut next year!”

That only took 8 years

But, ya know: Taliesin, relocation NOT under the influence, a courtship, a marriage, a pandemic honeymoon, a new business, catering, prizes, very little cash…
(me outsider, how-bou-dat?)

I lived on the property (my second time) at Mr Wright’s estate in exchange for work and somehow didn’t throw my whole chest into trying to run the ship.
A three bedroom apartment with the Grande Dame and the architects and managers as my neighbors. All the “Mr Torrance”*** references I had to let go of, now that the space has shifted to more of a museum space, and the permission (given by members of the fellowship) to let any resentments go unfed, starve them out of rent-free in my head.

Once my application was approved, and it seemed far less stressful and more affordable than the Hollywood Fringe, Ernie signed on as my director.
We were going to spend the week together, brainstorming in an air B&B and then ;going to Ensenada for the premiere show. He had to get back to Boo, however. She’s had a bad year but is on the mend.
The “boys” we used to be, me usually ripped to the gills across the decades, now we’re two sanguine sober seniors, pacing along to have years to look forward to.
I show him my homework, he sends diatribes of cuts and form, which are necessary, as I’ve said. I just can’t wipe the smile off my face for long enough to care.
But I should…
Be hammering on my script instead of this

A couple of days off to catch up with business, notes, and the passing of another friend.
I happily got a burger, fries, and ice tea from In-N-Out the other night for the commute to Ramona after my SD show.
That night (Monday) I read the news that there was a terroristic shooting at the Mosque not far from that restaurant that very morning.
Business as usual. Couldn’t read the room.
Sounds like a Nancy Lanza scenario.
Fuck you, your guns, and your kids’ access to them.
I don’t go around thinking my voice can make a difference
But in the words of Leo Sayer (or at least in his delivery)
The show must go on.

Please bring your peace to your life
That we might share a little time
A contagious hug or smile

I can get there from here
I got pictures

*same-o kindheit, in other words. The day that band broke up should be celebrated as much as being fired from the cemetery on memorial day, 44 years and a whole lotta change ago.

** I literally went to the front desk at the John-George Pavillion (old Highland D-2), where I had taken dozens of psyche patients, and asked to be put on a 72 hour hold.
“Are you a danger to yourself or others, or do you have a method or plan?”
“No, I’m just at the end of my options, it feels.”
“Walk out the door, turn around, and we’ll try it again…”

*** I got a LOT of “you’ve always been here, Mr Pedersen” reassurances, especially in 2019, when I was chef for the School of Architecture. That, and: ‘Give me scones, or death!” the students wore for a motto.

More Balance, Less Act

I think it was 1989 when I stood at the precipice of: db vs David
At least that’s the first evidence I have. A name tag for my internship for paramedic school.
I liked the sound of it. I was still about ten years out from being a singer/ performer.
And besides, I’d never been too attached to David, at least not from the time identity was that crucial part of development between self and socialization.
The mythic stepfather had entered my family scene, the raconteur, aside all kidding, and nicknamed me Howard where I had no choice in the matter. He had, legend tells me, pulled our little family from hardscrabble to middle class in a kind of pas de deux of paychecks with two working parents in an Almaden honeymoon.*
I don’t think dad ever attempted or was ordered to pay child support.
Anyway, I was too preoccupied with barking and burbling to anesthetize the anxiety that what I was called was as switchable as Duplo blocks and me not having any control of the weather.

Albeit itinerant, David was the “sixteen jobs” guy who kept showing up because grandpa Skinner had to put in his two cents at every opportunity that having a steady job was gonna be the key. He of the self-inflicted cataracts of welding and metal slag for not wanting to bother with safety glasses as he welded and filed at the submarine yard at Mare Island.

Fine: I’ll take speed and go to work till I run circles around everyone and get jobs that enable if not downright encourage** my drinking throughout the day so I can get some shut eye, aye aye.


Brian Grimm came into town this last Friday and invited me to Chesapeake; Two Crows Theater that he’s been doing sound design and composition for for a couple of seasons, now. Brian and I have history as friends and collaborators from my other life.
We caught up with the director afterwards and I noticed something like the nose on my face: He kept referring to me as “db” which has just felt like eons as nobody really calls me that in the River Valley.
I mean Ive done a few open mics at the Slow Poke and a long form set in town and a few times on stage at Taliesin, but db has never stuck and I haven’t poured lacquer on my nametag or got it tattooed anywhere. It just kind of fell away. ***


I make up all kinds of stories, or at least I have and some come crashing down with time, patience, and others’ input fill in the blanks I’ve had to bridge over, like: in a documentary about db pedersen that some friends shot almost 20 years ago, but never completed, I’m being interviewed in the grain silo where I’d taught myself to throat sing at the lamb farm in New Glarus, and I’m rambling on about my father, who I barely knew, played the saxophone and drums, as if it were a holy ideal. Turns out, my big sis informed me about 10 years ago, that dad played the violin. Quite well, even.

Hmm. No shit? Glad that was never published.

Or the one about where I was a father to a kid I would never get to know. That one put a chip on my shoulder I had to balance while it threw me down a hole for beyond a couple decades. Even a Vedic Astrologer couldn’t talk me out of that one (“you just don’t have any biological children in your chart, although with Saturn and Ketu aspected where they are, of course your soul believes it.”), though he was right about everything else. ****

DB landed with all the subtlety of a plane-dropped, belly-flop on the scene in Madison in 1998.
I’d relocated to the Midwest, specifically Indiana, telling everyone it was on a dare from Tom Waits, to survive the landing and see where the corn-smut blew me, like a sentient spore print, along the lay-lines to re-home my “old soul” in Wisconsin, where I’d ended up in a house rented to me by one Ray Peterson (two letters off from my father’s name. Good enough) with a 4 track recorder and a lime green bass guitar (Jezebel) I got from Lisa down the street.
Odessa Piper is in this story, too. She’s shepherded me throughout my bitchy seasons, through my decades (now) of freeze and thaw (and sometimes thrive), having hired me when I first got to town and taking the sage advice of my reference, Judy Rodgers, to gently encourage me to go find some other place to vent my turbulence within a year of hire.
She recommended me to her friend, Janie Crawford, who had the aforementioned lamb farm, raising meat for Odessa, Rick Bayless, Charlie Trotter, and a few other curated clients, as a farm hand.
Among the many adventures awaiting me there, I was hollering at an unfair sky, trying to find the garment of my father, singing the Birthday Party’s “Fears of Gun” whilst flipping the mown hay atop my chugging tractor, when, screaming at top volume: “Fingers down the throat of love so hard that the last syllable broke into an almost train-whistle harmonic, my voice “broke” into what sounded like the didgeridoo I used to play.
It hurt like hell, but it was the coolest sound I’d ever heard from my toolbox larynx!
I wonder how it would sound in the silo?

Upon the fresh canvas of my scrimshaw mucous membranes, from years of strep throat, gargling alcohol and amphetamines, thrush from the one time I…, the burns from breathing fire wrong and blowing up a time or three, a couple packs a week smoker…
Upon the fresh canvas, Id force myself every work day to take my breaks in the 85’ empty steel grain silo and try to scare the birds that nested up in the rigging. Hacking and spitting and pushing my voice like a cutting torch.

I told my parents I could now sing like a didgeridoo (which they had gifted me from their trip to Australia. They said they’d just seen a documentary about a musician who’d done the same thing (I can’t do anything first, jeez) and sent me the soundtrack, and there was Paul Pena on the cover. That memorable face! I’d picked him up a couple of times in the Tenderloin when I was interning in SF as an EMT.
Ain’t the world just… ‘round?

I answered a want ad in the back of a local music rag in 1998
Vocalist wanted: angular / no-wave, Chicago _______________seeks talented vocalist capable of exploring the absurd…
Something to that effect with everything but my name stamped on it
And BOOM! I’m the screechologist for Ng Kindheit, and explosive trio out of Dubuque/ Madison who have all the talent and anger little Gerald Mc Pressurecooker could ever hope for.
I met people from the neighborhood who would cross the street to walk past over the years who thought someone was chain-sawing livestock in the living room. Nope. That’s just my voice! Tee-hee.”

My incipient alcoholism returned in the spring of 2000 and I turned my little witch house into a party house with bands in the basement, noodling, or playing to the jehu stars, creating 3 bags full, sitting in with Abandon Control nearly every week, doing plays when directors found their Orator or Thersites blasting out of my face from the stage. Mischievous, affable, code switching between performative mysticism to psychotically ululating, even doing the occasional show for kids.

Embrace or flee: I was db




*The big gallon jugs of California table wine that mom turned into terrariums.

** The cemetery was the coup. Underage and drinking at 10:00 am, M-F, Smirnoff, 100 proof, poured by the steady hand of my supervisor. 100% not kidding.

***Duh: except that I AM db every time I head out to Anchorage for the Folk Fest.

**** “Mom” (of the lost child) found me years later through social media and when I asked her, explained that she could see how I might have gotten that impression: she always wanted him to be my baby, but he wasn’t.

e’s




* “Oh! That’s a teen heifer,” I was assured by a really truly farmgirl many years ago.
Badge of honor.

** if that was a little Nick Fuentes, I’ll kick myself

Maybe our fourth or fifth trip down Mexico way.
I was getting used to summers in the Monza or the Pinto, caroming through the deserts, Air conditioning in the motels (NOT in our economy cars), coca colas, occasionally with a maraschino cherry with a caveat that it wasn’t very macho.
I think I learned how to eat what was in front of me from an early age. Whining was not an option and mother’s admonitions fell so artless out of her face, that it was best to go with the flow. “Remember if you order a sandwich, to say: “SIN CREMA” or they’ll drown your sandwich in it.
The menu at Motel Del Bosque would certainly ground me and I remember a fondness for Sirloin Tips at the Bavarian restaurant, El Tirol, in Guadalajara, oh, and Don Quixote at the Minerva Glorieta.
Some details my bleed around from other stories (It’s a bit messy in the ER without an editor. “Wear a smock!”), but I wanted to get some praise in for Ramon, 49 years after the fact.
We (meaning they) settled on a 2 bedroom apartment (that should have been a giveaway) on Tezozomac, Colonia Chapalitas, just north of Plaza Del Sol, I seem to recall, a two story stucco affair with a penthouse on the third, occupied by a guy who was referred to as: The Count. I’m not kidding. He had a baby blue Lincoln Continental out in front and looked like a mash up of Bruce Dern and Larry Flynt. Sunglasses, ascot, aloof. I think it wasn’t a nickname. I don’t remember anything about him, he was maybe: unremarkable (I’m sure I checked for fangs on the sly).
The building was populated with at least 10 units of U.S. students prepping to start their medical school semester at U de G, Oakland, Ohio, Lansing, AZ, CT represent, and more.
Jim/Pete (step dad) rejoiced in having so many people to nickname! A few retired U.S. Vets.
Ther was: Refrigerator Steve (always had refrigerator issues, even when he’d switch units. Probably abuse the freon) from Connecticut, Steve the Jogger (would be the Roly-Poly Pediatrician, some day, from Oakland), Lee and Debbie, from Ohio.*
Ron and Dana were from Lansing, not medical students, he was there to further his understanding of pottery and glazes in the studios of Tonola and Tlaquepaue, and Dana to work on her Spanish for her career.**

There were the loud lovers (who feature in every foreign memoir), Mexican, with their sliding screen right over the courtyard. VROOM VROOM, andale, whatever: cue squeaking bedframe.
There was Wheelchair Bob (quadriplegic from the bombing of the USS Lexington) who corresponded with friends, writing many letters every day, pecking his Corona typewriter with a pencil held in his teeth, aided by Pepe, always by his side.
Tall Bob was another Vet, walked / shambled with a crutch, a half dozen others who aren’t riding by right now in my mind parade…
The landlord lived in the apartment across the courtyard from us. From the Gomez Aadams archetype department, but lacking wild eyes. Laconic, chill, perhaps brandied in the privacy of his domain. He was a keeper of the peace, a passive captain, maybe, and if anything was awry, he’d just mellifluously utter: “R-R-R- a moooooOOOne”
and within a minute or several, eventualmente would emerge (from god knows where) a saggy panted and sleepy visage, answering: “Si, Jefe?”
“El refrigidador en el departemento de Esteban, puedes reglar?” por ejemplo.
and Ramon would fetch some rudimentary tools and go to it, his huaraches audibly scudding the tiles down the hallway to Steve’s.


We were there for what I thought was the usual summer vacay.
Pete (Jim), however, had gotten a sabbatical from his high school teaching job in Vallejo, and was taking the year off to study Spanish in Guadalajara at the University of Washington extension campus (ya know; full of norteamericanos).
The usual was thet mom got a month off work from the Times-Herald and she and I would fly back and Pete would drive home at the end of summer to return for the fall semester.
He’s fallen in love with Mexico in his twenties of thirties, so he tried to make it back as often as he could, with his beautiful wife and little Howard along for the ride.

I’d hated him since I met him, mostly because he called me Howard from the minute we were introduced. That and that fact that he was a “kidder” and a “joker” and a “teaser,” always commenting on my weight, parenting with sarcasm, drink-driving nearly everywhere. Fun times. ***
Only that summer, 1975, when all of us had slogged and somehow made it through primary, we would be returning to Junior High: mythic from within the safety of the herd, as useless as the wardrobe from Mervyn’s in the rearview.
But the folks rolled out their surprise the best way they knew how:
“Oh, by the way…”
and this is what got me my “white suburban punk” wings, o: Alas
“We’ve decided that you’re going to stay here with Pete for the fall semester and go to an all Mexican school to learn Spanish, immersively. At the end of the semester, you’ll take his final, and if you get a B or above, you can come home. Otherwise, you’ll stay the full year with him.”
No: What do you think?”
I remember being brought to the front gate, then the Maestra’s office of Colegio Britanico, where, it was understood, that I would be enrolled for the semester, and that I would have to get the school uniform and do something with my unruly hair, to which I replied that I would hang myself with my school tie.
I did literally say that.
I have no idea what the tuition was, but if it was anything like the mordida, they let me keep my clothes and stringy hair, whatever that cost.
To my astonishment, however, I was going to start off with the first graders, and then work my way up to sixth grade, based on my progress.
Most mornings and returning by noon, the walk was ½ an hour, through Chapalitas to Zapopan, while Pete got to be the cool guy at the American campus, across town.
I was so fucking miserable.
I never traded desks out of the first grade, just to be a dick, I guess.
The kids were alright and I was a great curiosity, so they didn’t pick on me. I hated the teacher to the core of her being. She’s probably the maestra, now.
One time, they tried having the kids my age come and chat with me, like to make friends. All I remember is sitting curled up at the base of the stone wall, like I was convinced they were coming to stab me, like West Side Story (I was a shark on my swimming team back home, after all). I failed as hard as I could for 3-4 months. I hated every second of it.

But hey: this was supposed to be about Ramon, right?

September, October, November… what are seasons south of the tropic of Cancer?
The med students were cool and I was cool with them as they were my siblings’ age: 10ish years older, so I had the “family systems” down, before it was cool. Too bad weed wasn’t part of the culture, I could have impressed everyone with my ability to twist out joints with my baby-fat fingers.

I could tell that Ramon didn’t care too much having a curious kid around.
Like this one time, I found these wee-tiny things dancing around in the bathroom sink when I’d fill it with cold water. I took it to the med students, who were interested and repulsed.
We worked as a team and found out there was a lid ajar on the water cistern on the roof and that mosquitoes were breeding in it.
“Why can’t you be clever like that kid, Ramon” or some latinized variation of: “what am I paying you for?” might have been lobbed at him.
But worse; one of my mimicry things that the kids reall enjoyed when it was sitiing around on the veranda having a beer time, was goading me into doing my perfect impression of the landlord’s trilling: “R-R-RamooooooOOOn,” which I was more than happy to do for laughs.
Ramon would show up a minute or few later, answering: “Si, Jefe?”
Only Jefe was nowhere to be found, and the giggling gringos probably gave it away.

One night, I’m sitting out on the veranda in those taught stretched rattan and leather chairs mom loves so much. I’m reading a book or something, and Ramon sits in the next chair, casual platitudes exchanged, and lights his cigarette.
I’m off in the world of reading some novelized account of a WW1 ace (the Blue Max), when I feel an intense heat at the very corner of my left eye, turn my head quick because I’m startled, and the cherry goes fully into my eye.
I must’ve shrieked like a pterodactyl as the pain was like nothing at all familiar and so abrupt.
ALL of the med students converged on me and lavaged my eye for what seemed like forever with tap water (not thinking of the larvae) and discussed whether to take me to the ER.
The Jefe was yelling at Ramon, who insisted that e must’ve been so casually postured (like one of those overacting flapper ingenues) that, while his cigarette might have been extended outward, the child must have rammed his eye into it due to clumsiness.
One of the students had some ocular ointment and a couple of aspirin. They came up with some bandages, covered the affected eye and wrapped my head with a roll gauze.
Pete drove me to school the next morning, like he was doing me a favor, and the kids did their independent research, a little each day, to figure out best how to manage my acute injury.

I must have been some kind of inconsolable, because we went to the long distance office the next night so I could talk to mom.
“You probably deserved it,” was her reply, which has never ameliorated the impact of feeling targeted and fucked over, much less ever trusting my remaining biological parent,
to this day.

I’m not rehashing any of this as a complaint or pushback from the recesses of kindertrauma. They’re just works for the lobby, you might say, for the next step which is putting all together for the show.

Now I’m going to school, twelve years old and in the first grade, crammed into a little desk (ya know, the one’s that are the right size for 6 year olds), with my threadbare YES logo Tee Shirt, my scowl, and my eye-patch, held on with roll guaze, working on my art project for the big “Celebracion Internacional” coming up in the next weeks. ****

In December, I took Pete’s test, dry and unprepared as I’d received no structure in my immersive sheep-dipping in linguistics.
I think I got an A-, just one peg above his B.
I hoped this would get me home.
Gale and Donna came down for Christmas and to get me the hell out of el Dodge, but we ran into a problem: seeing as my parent had been with me when I came in, then left, Pete was not my legal guardian.
I had a COMPLETE fucking meltdown (in front of my big sister) when, parked in some unknown area of town, the folks went into an office under the cover of night and bribed a lawyer to come up with some official looking document, forged by Pete as: “Raymond Pederseno,” as if he were my father, releasing custody back to mom.

I got home for new years and picked up at junior high with all my friends, but something never clicked, like the first tremors of outsider, despite the fact that I’d always felt like a weirdo in my own skin. This was weirder. It’s also when I started drinking, which was the BALM at least get along as an imposter.

And that put the kibosh on Latin America for the next 10 years. I never wanted to speak a word of Spanish or try to cook anything with “authenticity.”
I didn’t break any of Pete’s precious tchotchkes (which I cherish today), but if he sniffed around to assess my anything, I’d burn it to the ground to let him know he failed me.

Then suddenly, when I got pig-biting mad at Ronald Reagan and was too cowardly to front a punk band, I made a bee line for Managua and was thanking every lucky star that I’d grown up in what at least tried to be a bilingual household.

R-R-R-R-Ramon doesn’t keep me up at night. Never did. He just never had the energy or exuberance to even turn up as a killer in my nightmares.
I was teasing him because I was 12. I was humiliated every day and didn’t have anything resembling a skills-set to put that anywhere except to pin it on the burro.

I also never turned myself into a comic that made fun of accents, traits, nationalities, or “defects,” even though that’s clearly what you had to do to make your mark.

I’m gladder to turn over this leaf when I get to the bridge of autumn.





* Lee figured out that I liked planes and he’s take me to the Guadalajara airport to watch the taxiing and traffic.

**They had a huge tragedy when, with his visiting parents, they were struck by a speeding agua truck, crippling his father and disabling their vehicle. The cops arrested him and he almost died in jail from a pneumothorax over his undiagnosed broken ribs.


*** We became best of friends as they divorced and after. Turns out he was a trickster, sent to play me like a fiddle. His ridicule is time-released and I keep getting the joke as I ca;m with age.

**** Each student had to pick a country and make a big flag (bandera) of that country to raise above their head and shout the name of their country in front of the whole school’s assembled students. This was one of the times the campus was co-ed, as the girls were otherwise hermetically sealed away from us during normal school hours.
I selected Denmark (Dinamarca). Blond hair, big bones (huesos gordos), boy tits, and frowning in perpetuity, as if winter would never end.


Tanks for coming on this journey with me

db

That shit’s been going on for decades.

4^th month there and Ronald Reagan gets re-elected, which isn’t a huge shocker.
What is is that it’s the first presidential election I would have been able to vote in were it not for Bill Montgomery saying I couldn’t leave the county to go vote.
I mean, I could have planned to not work that day (I was living in Benicia, still) but why not have a diamond resentment to last for decades?
The proto MAGA’s giggled at my liberal tears, but I started scheming to get my buns to Managua and see for myself: I didn’t know a thing about americanything, now did I?

The tales of Napa Valley living are many fold and the friends I made at Palmer’s, The Liberty Theater, the Mount View Hotel, Atomic Janitorial, anon, are on deck for further development, but one great friend, Roz Myles, said she just had to introduce me to HOLLWOODLAND, where it was implied that I would go off like a firework for all the would to hear and see.

The Nicaragua trip was many shades of: I have no idea what I’m doing, but what it started still burns through me today. I was so terrified by the time I took my first stop at La Paz, Mexico, that I began writing letters daily to send home as I had lost my entire social scene.
I felt like a freak without my hall of mirrors and easy laughter.

I came home after an abbreviated stay and “borrowed” all my writing back to “make copies,” instead confiscating all my notes as wretched and gloomy confessional from a witless author with piss-poor penmanship.

Except for these notes and a fit of rage publishing stories on facebook in 2010, I tend not to share my words or put them to music, for all my neurotic “shouldn’t “mantras.

Even, or maybe especially, I got an opportunity to become the chef for a “writer’s conference” in Wisconsin for the poet laureate of Minnesota and all his camp of hobgoblins and gravy-gobbling-wavers. And it was FUCKING IMPACTFUL and the teachers taught me that to withhold the gift was to dishonor great spirit, or great mother, or all the holy karmas which I was pulling out my hooks, my lines, my sinkers to barter to them for their permissions when my girlfriend showed up and ran off with the grief shaman, Robert’s right-hand-man, with Coleman Barks as their witness…

You know, the irony that would never slake my thirst
And, as with every “brow beating,” I was given every pass and grace, but self-pity can be like generational trauma, at least where I’m from, so I contented myself to learn to hold my breath in Narcissus’s pond.
But that’s Wisconsin stuff. I’ve gotten ahead of myself…

What I wanted to include was some sort of demonstration of or temperance of: doulality.
Yeah, I made that up, just now.

I got back into EMS by riding around with my former partners as they became paramedics and worked in rougher geographies: Vallejo, eventually Oakland.

The temperament followed me, of course, and being on the stage of my high-stress job often seemed like creating this whole sympathy carnival to excuse my drinking and drugging, plus, I was collecting stories so graphic, grotesque, or wonderful, that I wouldn’t have to embellish in their re-telling, at least as performative attention seeking.

My first death in the field knocked me for a loop. Not cause I was fucked up, but because I thought I knew everything about that, what with tripping balls in the graveyard.
Completely outside their body and away from the morass of noise that I could hear him, he asked: “What happened?”
I go to that spot on Oakville Cross rd whenever I visit the valley. I pull over and meditate right there.
It changed me and led me to the kindergarten of bedside manner.
I had so much to learn.

I was graced in the period of time I worked ambulances and ERs in Oakland to attend the births of 6 new lives. All perfect. All precious, All healthy.
I never had a baby, not on a birthing call, anyway, that wasn’t textbook.
Some were assists, some were leads, 1 was in Spanish.
I KNEW that something was watching over me.
So much so that I thought, if not Physician’s Assistant, I might apply myself to become a midwife. But seriously: my addiction had me by the short and curlies, so much that I let that hard won degree lapse and left.
“Short Timer’s Disease,” my friend Skydog called it.

I had my typewriter and my marching powder in the desk at home.

After teaching myself how to sing in polytones like the didgeridoo my parents bought me (now we’re in Wisconsin, 1998), renting a shithole house in Madison from a slumlord with my father’s name, and joining a band named Kindheit with a fetal skeleton for a mascot, I knew I had room to stretch out and start thinking about being an artist.
My folks sent me a soundtrack from a documentary they had just seen about a blind singer who teaches himself how to “throat-sing,” and as I tore open the mailer, I laughed and reeled at the picture of I guy I’d met when I was interning in SF.
Paul Pena. I’d recognize that face anywhere. We’d picked him up in the tenderloin TWICE and took him to the Gen (SF General) when I was doing my field evaluations with the Dept of Public Health. I learned years later that we had the same birthday. We probably talked about that on the ride to the ER. Freaking Aquarians!

For a few years, too, I’d sniffed around becoming a singer for hospice, but each place I checked wanted me to complete a urinalysis test… for a volunteer job, and I was like: Eff that!”**

I started hearing about “death doulas” and why not create a career out of thin air while I gargle and ventriliquate. That would be so “outsider,” wouldn’t it.

I even had some friends make a docu about me
That one time…
They had an informal series on outsider artists and sprang the idea on me.
I think after a couple of weekends of following me around and having me just look them in the eye and insist, while a novelty; I didn’t think for a minute that I was an artist.
I think they tired of it. I present as functional.
I just feel like an imposter.

I have all the raw footage. How does one edit a documentary about themselves?
Alas.

It’s been a few decades since these things.

I have to / get to put an act together
I get to / have to keep staying sober.
I want to

I had a good laugh just today: I am going through all these boxes of everything and I found a thank you card from some friends I’d let stay the night at my Taliesin apartment at the Midway Barn in 2019. In the card was a joint! Probably a great joint at that time. Probably as potent as nutritional yeast at this point, 7 years after. I took joy in having a little Cheech and Chong moment: flushing it down the toilet with gratitude and laughter.
Why risk it, rubber biscuit?

This has been sitting on my desktop all week, waiting for some purple prose to fill it out.

“there from here is the shortened form of my original script: “Can’t get there from here,” because can’t has the gravity to hold me down as captive as any concept.

and “wish me luck” is a mockingbird whispering in one ear like the ghost of Henry Chinaski on a prayer mat in some temple far away



* At that time, fall semester, 1980, Mike suggested that I might consider checking the Native American box on my application. I couldn’t. Even though I couldn’t picture making it to 30, it was an intuitive (?), hard NO.

** My tuition to paramedic school was paid for by making one of my deals with the devil.
At my interview for the 89 semester, I advised the instructors that I was on my way to Valdez to work at the Exxon oil spill to pay my tuition, which I did.
I worked at the Urinalysis post for the entire site, like 22,000 workers all filing through the pee-shed in shifts every 3 weeks on their way to R&R.
The most humiliating incident was taking a helicopter out to a remote island and having to collect specimens from the native Alaskans who were working on cleanup on their island homes (you bet I came home and drank).



If you made it this far:
I welcome anyone to read these stories for a chuckle.
I’ll come up with some features for paid subscribers, maybe this summer, after I’ve learned a thing or two.
I looked at the way things work and I have two paid subscribers, which is FUCKING AWESOME! But their contributions, while generous, only pays for the stripe fees to have subscribers, so far. Anything helps.
Knowing that you’re here, after all these crazy years, is the greatest gift (I’ll have you know)!

Rest In Power
Amy Zing

*Rosalyn / Roz Myles initially invited me to LA forever ago and guided me to Hollywood Storage Masters, emceed by her pal Ernie

**John and I are both masters of estrangement. I think, too, there’s bifurcation wherein he enjoys supping with Christopher Hitchens at Chez Panisse, leans into his relationship with the Marcus family and generally wishes me the best as I can’t not stoke the engine of my “spirituality” more than feed the duality (or duplicity?) of merely settling for an orphan’s lament.

*** Chris Farley story is true

I’ve had the sweetest little dreamboat galloping around the space since the middle of December.
Hamina-Hamina-Hamina, her little paws would propel her all around the space, up the stairs as big cat zoo feature. Wha-da-dum Wha-da-dum Wha-da-dum when she heard the familiar porcelain ping of wet food time; morning / evening.

Coldest night of the year, she’d shown up, screaming, on Linda and Dave’s back porch across the street. Their older, grimalkin (for this story), satisfactorily solo kitty, Betty, hissed out her disapproval and so they brought the bony Holstein patterned kitten, maybe 5 weeks old, tops, over to Tony’s house for Uncle Dave (moi) to look after, or she, him, perhaps.
They stocked her up with all the supplies, made vet appointments, loved her and commented on her starvation figure, while she mewed and nestled every opportunity she got, especially fond of curling up with Linda in her heavy winter coats.
Nobody has occupied this space for many years, since Tony passed, and everyone with insight assures me that the tchotchkes were stacked floor to ceiling, necessitating at least 4 yard/estate sales over 2025, just to clear some paths.

In a hail Mary ask of the universal goo, I’d put out on social media that I was looking for a place to land in the Spring Green area. Jason DM’d me and said he had a friend with a possible opportunity…
Here I am
It didn’t escape me that this little friend bore some resemblance to Horse, Horse the legend. Little did I know that she was sent from feline central casting to get me through the holidays. I ALWAYS knew that she was bound for Linda and Dave’s, eventually, but I had a buddy for a few weeks, anyway.
I was booked to go to the Bay Area for Christmas and then a trip to Anchorage for the last 2 weeks of January (which, I had to cancel due to other obligations with my business). So I knew I could play the non-attachment card suitably enough not to be swallowed by the day of her, or: their departure.
Cause then a funny thing happened just a few weeks later.

“Hey! Is there more room at the inn?”
A couple weeks into January, and another scrawny kitten, this one frostbitten, showed up, again at their house.
Betty held her thumb claw down, animatedly.
This little dear had to live in the garage for a week before they could get him into the vet for ear mite treatment and an okay before moving in with us.
It sure was cold, so we built him a little box house and lined it with flannel shirts and a wool blanket cover. We took turns spending abbreviated cuddle sessions with him (because of the cold). Dave was sure that he was a boy because; “He doesn’t clean himself!” His little deeze-nuts weren’t making an appearance. They eventually did.
Cat 1 became Lucy because of her obsessive playing with a Little Lulu doll she’d been pushing around the floor. Cat 2 is still unnamed.
Dave has been working on a salvaged wood (there’s a lot around here) hamster-esque gymnasium for the kittens while Linda gathers blankets and coats that the kittens have besmelled to take over for Sra Betty’s hopeful acclimation. He’s also safe proofed the TV room for their kitten circus with devices and doors should Betty become too riled with their presence.
After the first week of Lucy being a little miffed to have another feline in co-occupancy, they’ve fattened up and chase each other around, wrassle on the bed and I even just got them to eat their wet food in the same room without fussing.
Cat 2 goes in for neutering and debriding 1/3 of his tail (frostbite) in a couple of days. Lucy was spayed within her second week. The folks are good cat owners.

They were just transferred out this afternoon. I’ll stick Betty at the top of my prayers list.

I knew that Lucy had something hidden up her little cat-sleeves.
That I would write about HORSE.

I’ll get the “pity pot” stuff out of the way, first:
My mom married Pete when I was 5
He moved into our house and started calling me Howard. I barely knew what my name was, much less to give consent.
He was a raconteur from the get-go, named my older siblings Hector and Hannah, but they weren’t into that shit. Only my “nickname” stuck.
Just for ten years. Unless I was introuble or he was pissed off at just about anything.

Anyway, at about 7 or 8 years old, Mom came to pick me up after I’d spent the usual weekend at her parent’s house, and she had a Tabby under her arms. Granma’s dog, Happy wasn’t too excited about it. Go figure.
“We got you a kitty, David!” For my very own.
I don’t remember that kitty sticking around for more than a week or two. I don’t even remember what I’d named her. Pete expressed ze-ro approval for that one.
Determined to give me something to love, as I was pretty miserable in Pete’s dominion, mom brought home another kitten, this one a Cow-Cat (I’m only learning the term) that was very mischievous and hyperactive.
I might have named it Poofy or Snowflake, or whatever, all that I really remember, is that Pete absolutely made that cat the primary object of his playful devotion and within a week had named the cat HORSE, because of it’s galloping and gambol down the hallway and through te living room as he would play peekaboo with his cat.
Pete would create stories out of whole-cloth about his mythical journey with his personal mascot, Horse, for anyone that would sit under his spell. He was a storyteller, joke rememberer, jock, and jocular schoolteacher at a secondary high school. Somewhere between Gabe Kaplan’s Kotter and Cantinflas (the Mexican actor clown who’s name was a portmanteau of He Who Boasts (inflates) in the Cantina. “En la Cantina, te infladas”), Mr Bloom ‘s reputation was a known quantity in the North Bay Area. I didn’t like him until he divorced mom, then we got around to becoming good friends. Maybe even soul mates.

The best of the Horse stories, and the only one that I can recall with any certainty is this:
Pete and Horse played the sneak-attack game often. This involved Pete crouching behind his barely ajar bedroom door, waiting patiently for Horst to come stalking up the hallway, set up with all the other doors closed for a curated darkening effect.
It must have given him the joy of Halloween, but if he could wait without giving himself away, when Horse was within inches of the door, Pete would jump out and scream: BLLLLLLLAAGAGAGAHHSHSHAYAHAN!!!!!!!! and Horse would pivot and gallop, excitedly, down the hall, banking to the right along the contour of the furniture.
This was their ritual of play, and Pete would be crestfallen and pouty if anything interrupted their play.
So one fall afternoon, Mom’s returning from grocery shopping at Lucky down of Solano avenue. I loved accompanying her (I was a shopping and cooking child from a very early age) on these outings, but I was usually at grandma’s for the weekend. Mom worked full time, so this was more of a labor she was assigned. Pete’s car is out front. The screen door is closed but the front door sits wide open.
“Pete?!?,” she calls out, just for general orientation and probably to ask for his help with the winnings. “Honey, are you here?”
Horse, too, doesn’t want it ruined, so he just keeps stalking up the hall…
Mom, unknowing, has cleared the take-off portion of the trajectory area, and as just about to set the two heavy bags of groceries down on the dining room table
BLLLLLLLAAGAGAGAHHSHSHAYAHAN!!!!!!!! comes, piercing the tranquil silence of the house. Mom screams as if she’s being nabbed like Patty Hearst and Horse, startled at this new addition to the fun, banks hard left, between her feet and ankles, and before she can draw her breath for the next scream of terror, goes head first through the dining room window. The smashing of the window sends her into complete histrionics and rage as she doesn’t know yet, what to fight or flee from.
Pete runs out, aghast and inconsolable after hearing the gallop turn into shrieks and broken glass, so worried about the cat and not his startled wife (is the part I never heard the end of), that he’s looking everywhere! He dashes into the backyard, and there, next to the healed and thriving mulberry tree from the last story, Horse the cow-cat, calmy licks at a small laceration on his paw from going through the window.

Whew, the cat’s okay. Guess we’ll have to get your dad to fix the window. Are there more groceries, babe? If you bring ‘em in, I’ll clean up the broken glass.

Would be about the measure of Pete’s retort.

I heard that story at least a hundred times, fractalling into legend and the mythic poetry of the great Horse.
Horse suffered Leukemias at only age seven or so, I could drop my resentment (or not) at the loss, Pete spent his last days with Horse, curled around him, drinking coffee or wine and cursing his fate.

James Britton Bloom.
“Mistah Bloom!” as recalled by any of his students who he doted over, at least in retelling.
His family was from the Pawnee Rock area of Kansas.
Pete had an older brother: Jim, who was lost to disease of accident before he was born, so they named their second son: Jim (like ya do) and apparently, Pete was chastised by his father for never adding up to the man his first Jim could have been.
I can, and do, and then forget the family’s timeline, but Pete’s family, Pa, Ma, he and his older sisters, moved to Berkely in the late thirties, Pa was a physician and opened a “blood clinic” at Vallejo General Hospital.

I had only the TV (and maybe a little from school) to paint by numbers in the retelling of my step-family’s lore: Pawnee Rock, Kansas, overlooking the wist-windful acres of flowing wheat, Pete’s churlish life, back when things were only black and white, as a sort of Froggy character in the Lil’ Rascals.
Jim had gone off to school one day and returned home, announcing: “I’m Pete, the dirty Greek!” to his family and had assumed another identity so much that he wouldn’t respond to “Jim” for some time.
By the time he was with us, his nieces and nephews called him Uncle Fardo, Pete, Jim, James (and other names) and he pleasured in calling all the kids by what ever struck his fancy. I never appreciated Howard, especially when everyone except my mother’s parents called me that, following the lead of the man-child.

I’ve often pouted in the chair across from my therapists, that maybe this caused a schism in my identity, or dissociation, or prop up my suffering, damn it.
He treated his students better than me, or at least he showed mercy to their circumstances.
He didn’t bring that home, and I wasn’t conscious of what he had done for our little nucleosis in the suburbs.

Mom worked full time at the Vallejo Times Herald, thrust into the working world for the first time so her children wouldn’t scream from hunger. Her mom had to take us on the weekends, What? Now a third?

Mom had been dating a guy named Richard who had a Ford Mustang, pleasant cologne, and was engaging. My sister once said that his biggest character flaw was that he loved her children. That could sound like a horrible diss. It isn’t.

One of the deals, that I learned of as an adult, long after he passed, was that he paid for our trip to Disneyland when I was 5.
Mom’s boyfriend was taking her to Mexico, whatever the hell that was (“is it like Taco Bell, there?”) later in that summer of ’68, but we got to pile in the Bel Aire and drive down to Disneyland. I was confused why a giant “little pig” would hold my head in his giant mouth and, to this day, remember “flying” like Peter Pan or the Pirates of the Caribbean every time I take a plane overnight.

Mom went away in August, came back married, Pete, my arch-nemesis, moved in, and I skipped of to kindy-garden (where Arthur Leigh Allen, the zodiac killer suspect, worked at Elmer Cave School as a janitor. Google it).

What I got: a menagerie of a second family of, frankly, interesting people.
Mom’s parents were TEXAN (full stop, no pursuable lineage), and dad’s folks were Mormon’s, right? Meanwhile, we’d struck the mother-lode of creative, brilliant, and liberal hippie era young people, who, despite divorce, I am a welcome force and grateful recipient of a love that transcends mere details. Of course, of course.
I had a family of dervish daughters in downtown Berkeley, and the silliest clan of cousins up in Fairfield, 9 of us in toto, each of Nana’s children having three babes in their nests.
My childhood was the holiday lottery of where we were going to eat ham, jello salad, and often turkeys baked in questionable suggestions from Sunset Magazine. There were ornate ashtrays, hand-blown Mexican wine glasses (at least at our house), parlor games and anyone invited.
Should I run into friends from this era, THESE are the stories they remember, and I think the common denominator, at least remembered and treasured is: joy.*

WE WENT TO MEXICO
Rather often. Certainly more than any of my classmates were. I’d rather had spent the summers home with friends, but we would frequently pile into the Monza or the Pinto and do the five-six day trek “south of the border” with me choking from the second hand smoke in the back seat with my Mad Magazines, often shushed at my outbursts of laughter.
Indio, Nogales, Hermosillo, Mazatlan (staying a couple of days overlooking the beach for Pete’s favorite ritual of sunsets, then over the Sierra Madre Occidental to Guadalajara.
We’d decamp at Hotel Del Bosque and they would comb the want ads for an apartment for the summer. I would usually fly home with mom on Hughes Airwest** because that’s all the time she could get off work. Pete was a schoolteacher with the summer off to go fuck off in his storied hombre-scape. I’m sure he went straight from the airport to hang with one of his Vallejo brethren, Uncle Charlie, on a bender in the mariachi bars beside Lake Chapala.
I remember bringing home at least two plaster-of-paris cobras, the 2’ ones you can find at the swap meet, as consolation prizes, for enduring these awful trips where Pete gathered more and more stories for his ataxic denouement.
I always felt like a third wheel. Pete would jokingly try and get me an apprenticeship at the many blown glass factories we visited. “Did you see that kid get burned? They’d plunge his hand underwater and then he’d get back to work! Wouldn’t that be great?” All I distilled was the sadism.
I would spend time beheld by the jewel-y shine of little families of blown glass animals and beg that I could buy a set for grandma on each trip, until she had, yep: A Glass Menagerie, curated by her growing, albeit distorted, bouncing baby grandson.

They’re honeymoon lasted 12 years. The fights outside my bedroom door lasted into the wee hours of nearly every morning and they’re wondering why I was falling off the edge in schooling.
Then, in the middle of a screaming match, he said something that I’ll never forget and completely changed how I felt about him in the space of a terse sentence: “If we don’t get a divorce, I’m so afraid that I’ll lose my best friend.”
Deep in the heart beating right over his burgeoning liver, there was a clarity of boy who wasn’t a man, who wasn’t a teacher (at least to me) who was scared straight enough to imagine the horror of his solitude and concomitant shame. The threat of rejection was his windmill, his armor, threadbare from arguing all the unwinnable hands in their game of bridge.***

Upon his moving out, we started to heal into a friendship that I hold close by, every day.
If he didn’t know how to be a good or normal father; he didn’t know how. No one had modeled it or him.
I do remember when Pappy, his dad, keeled over at the card table from a heart attack.
I don’t remember if my parents were married or still dating. The story goes that mom had to go to Dunphy’s, in downtown Vallejo, and drag Pete out to say goodbye to his dad, dying at Vallejo General (all the king’s horses…). That tore him apart for sure, only to return to house full of needy kids, especially the baby.

But whatever circle of fifths held him back from the creativity he couldn’t express (my sis insists that he had perfect pitch, which is why he couldn’t bear to hear the kids “practice” and learn our instruments under his roof), he was, by his nature, his own kind of Neal Cassady, bones dancing paroxysmally to find any comfort in his skin, and he was gregarious, maybe compensating for his feeling of not fitting in by self-medicating his anxiety.
Even though the aforementioned TEXANS dropped the N-word, casually as if they were among the Koncho Kounty Knuckleheads of home, Pete could distract us from the whining that we never got to eat at Sambo’s, and took in former students when first trying to populate their fourplex, an investment in my parent’s dreams which carried well after their divorce.

I grew up with the hipster high school teachers and my big sister’s friends and the cool colleagues form the Vallejo Times Herald all in our social pool, and I believe that Pete was held in regard for his baseline equanimity through the civil rights era that transmuted through him as the result of hard knocks, beset or earned.

And although I held no nostalgia for Guadalajara as a young adult, I wouldn’t hesitate to scream “PINCHE MIGRA!” at the first sing in Napa Valley restaurants.
When Reagan was reelected, I was like: “Fuck That!” and went to Managua in 85 to see for myself that the whole thing is a godforsaken lie.****
But I could get around because I could speak the language.
What a gift.
It’s also where I started writing.

A pantheon of father figures: Skinner, Charlie, Pete, Fos, and John Elrod, all attended my graduation from Paramedic school in 1990.
I got a job right away with Regional Ambulance in Oakland and Pete and I conspired to get out of town over Christmas: “You buy the flights, I’ll buy the rest,” and we got the hell outta Dodge for the “holiday season” he’d tutored me to hate over the years.
There, we visited Charlie in Chapala, drank in seedy bars in Guanajuato, spent Christmas in Morelia taking turns throwing up brandy in the hotel room toilet, smoking cigarettes and making amends I’m confident neither one of us remembered. We took a boat out to Potzquaro, he kept asking if I would get a guitar (“the finest in Mexico”) and I just thought he was kidding.
Between the stories and memories, I read Cervantes’ Quixote for some thread to tie the room together later.
He had given me a Volkswagen to commute to school, and another when I’d moved to Indiana in the winter of ’95. “You’ve seen The Shining, right?” was his bon voyage to my fiancé and I as we drove east to house sit for his niece and family at their ancient house in the middle of the cornfield near Purdue.

He stood with me on innumerable instances between uniforms and the “predominant minority”***** communities where we were called to intervene, hold a hand, or keep the peace.

I was one of the last people he talked with when lung cancer took him over the final edge of years of debilitating health. “Sorry it’s today. I gotta go. I love you. Happy Birthday, David”

~~~ “Speaking his syllables one at a time” is what I’m shrieking in the song
“You Seem Nice” with my band 3Bags Full. He’s also the dying ghost voice in Ng Kindheit’s
Small Town Funerals, which is my Star-Trek transporter room trick up my sleeve for when the going gets tough (another story).

Shit. I just remembered: he made candles for Christmas gifts. I’ll have to sit with that.


I got lucky last year when Taliesin Preservation gave me a place to stay, a harbor, smack in the middle of the village proper, and then to this artist’s house, where I can get my bearings, take a deep breath and get my notes together.
A little cow cat barged in and said “put ‘em up, put ‘em up!” like I was caught in its Lil’ Rascal cartoon like she hadn’t had time or trauma to don the gay apparel of cowardice.

Pete’s with me when I reflect on my 2 degrees of separation from Dr Huey and Dr Angela.
Who’s children do I want to / get to feed?

The cats are now moved over to the land lord and lady’s.
I’d promised myself not to get attached as I knew it was inevitable.
And you know what? (shhhhh, I don’t want them to hear) It’s quieter here. They’re not underfoot. I can devote more attention to the things I need to do.
Goodbye, horses
Too Soon? LOL.





NOW: I know that he elevated us out of interminable poverty.
Pop had split before I was born. He tried to have wife and kids kicked out of “his” house, and his own father told him to take a hike.

NOW: I know that Pete was bent into his own pretzel posture by a father who could only compare him to his first-born son. Built to spill.
Wine on my little boy-pants

NOW: I have so many meals at home on the plates from Tonola, Jalisco, where we lived many summers and shopped for tchotchkes. I even have one of their card-suit coffee mugs, the diamond. It’s why I’ risking at all to recount these memories.

NOW: He shows up like a mischievous shit. The steps to my apartment at Taliesin being so similar to those of the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.
That the origin of Howard is cow-herd (NOT coward), the kind of flute (bansuri) that I play.
Or the fact that I’d met so many so many of my decades of friends “en la cantina,” or that Lake Chapala was where I would go to shake the flesh off my early writer’s mutiny (or mutation), ya know, where Tennessee Williams wrote Poker Night.

NOW, too: more than ever, probably,I understand the roots of my social alacrity, Not thebraggadocio of bar-talk, but that I never could grasp the mantle of pedestrian racism.

*what was the mundane worth, really?

** Dad, who I barely knew, used to point up from the rooftop above his upper Market street flat in SF, and say: “Look at the flying bananas, David.”

***They were ACBL, American Contract Bridge League, Grand and Lifetime Masters, was the other reasons for their trips to Canada and Mexico. They argued over cards and strategies for 12 solid years, collected trophies, and reminisced over bottles of Almaden wine that mom would repurpose as terrariums.

****I just woke up to the news that we are bombing the fuck out of Iran.
Same shit. Worse suit.

***** The FUNNIEST thing I ever heard a white supervisor say, unironically

Ramblings of the artist as cartwheeling diletante (while working on newr pieces)

While I can’t time travel back and hand out hurriedly assembled epilogues as keepsakes for the MUNICIPAL performance, I’d got the idea that without a kind of summary to decode my intention, it might feel unfinished. The first part I was able to get out before 2 long trips. I lost my laptop on the 1st and my cellular on the second. As I’m so device dependent to scribble and store notes, I let this sit, and yet my defiance of familiarity (read; family) is a smoke and mirrors distraction in my effort to defy this ruse of TIME. The slide-show and videos that can now go along with this are making it a whole little circus of its own. 12/15/16

I had to run off soon after the piece to do my annual cartoon holiday card at the Barrymore. But let me tell you how I got there from here.

A few weeks back, I got that first “wet snow” gift that I could roll into a ball and make an effigy by Saturday as the event went full swing.

Having turned in something goosey-loosely resembling a proposal, I heard from the Bubbler that I had been accepted for MUNICIPAL while I was on the train down to St Louis for thanksgiving with another artist friend.

When I realized it was on the 10th, conflicting with the aforementioned holiday card gig, I thought to respond immediately that I couldn’t, but lacked the connection on my mobile to follow that impulse, which is good; it gave me a while to think of something better, like asking a friend if they’d want to collaborate.

Whether I’m a spider in the barn hollow spinning a tactile memoir or a second-string Jack London mending a threadbare purse seine, one leg ladder-locked that I can pretend to see a mermaid off the misting gunwale, I’ve now a better sense of what began as the fruit loop toucan migration through a sewage treatment-boot camp of my own and god’s conspiratorial making to hand the mouth-breathing me a to-do list for the days I’d show up for duty; a poem, a clue, a baffling fragment. I basically followed my nose.

It didn’t just start one day at the other end of Pinckney Street, 20 summers prior. I’ve always gotten away with gargling liquor before I reach for the trapeze flying bar. Should I succeed or slip, the net catches me like a cooing mother, in this iteration starring Madison’s Odessa Piper, lilting: “Who’s kicking it with the didgeridu?” in the parking lot hallway across from now the Children’s Museum, 20 summers prior.

“Well of course it’s you, my astral chum! Race you to the time-clock!”

I’ve broken every rule of the care of the soul and even the first 5 years of seasons that freeze and release the muscles like buttered-dough, pushing out the corruption and lactic acid trauma until I cried “uncle!” God damn you set a nice tableau out here outside the cities and distractions that run out lives like egg timers. God damn kid gloves concealing brass and break my heart like a jaw of glass, you had me at “What’s up, fuck-o? You’re not from here, are you?”

I am the fisher and the fighting prey, at times a danger to myself and mothers, but cunning midwives know to succor my entreaties with firm hands and diligent guidance, hypnotize me with belly rubs, debride my header injuries and dodge my insults as the tutors of transcendence.

That’s all a lot of hoggledy-babble, but my brain can’t not take in the marine-life roses through willing senses to wonder how a boy, with only the finite desire to touch the third rail with a fork, made it half a century and change with all his fingers and toes?

And the there’s MUNICIPAL, the Madison Bubbler if you prefer her maiden name. The gift of acceptance, the gift of reaching out, the gift of coming together in the incipient mode, the gift of that EPIC hallway, Holy Beans! Fer REALZ?! Like a match to Cupid’s heart and ALL the gradations of my plate-spinning semiotics showed up for the ballet, grinning like children at their holiday pageant.

And even the drawing board rises to meet the sketching pencil as off the cuff modalities issue from our scheming-beaming. I trust Christine, so, and I’m like: “Let’s not pay for anything! I’m sure I have enough at home, and if not: there’s community!”

Now for my part, I’m like...

picture a troglodyte:

I was inspired to write this the next snowy morning when I was helping a friend and her toddler shovel the snowy driveway, Frances taking turns to do faceplants in the snow and wield her toyish shovel, I said: “Hey kiddo; China’s that way!” pointing straight down and remembering fascinating yarns from my childhood. I did the mental geometry in my head that if one dropped a penny from a geosynchronous spot of heaven just off Prairie Road, New Glarus WI, through a grain silo and tunneled straight through to Siberia, probably wouldn’t go through Jules Verne’s mushroom forest, but I explain it away to a false positive magnetism to keep things north of no necessary south.

A conduit, a reed, a hollow, a trachea

see, I got here and felt the ancients through my parabolic and the first thing I wondered was: “Now just who’s grave did we build that eyesore on?”

What I’m trying to say is I keep going underground to find my voice. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager, shuffling down to check the double of a grave’s depth and scurrying up and withdrawing the ladder as the backhoe’s drunk operator lowered the machine terror jaw to coax up a little more silt.

I got here and wrote an opera on the smooth muscle of my windpipe, wondering if it would read like a forensic fortune cookie if I should maladroitly “die before I wake” from foolish alchemy or nodding off behind the wheel. (ends for way longer than I had intended) ########################################## And for hell did this not get away from me (2/22/17)

On the road and better for it, though wiser is an afterthought for this missive.

They’re dismantling Oceti Sakowin, like, this afternoon.

I’ve been in bed for more than 12 hours a day in the 3 weeks I’ve been back. I feel a sense of stagnant hangover after visiting with my family. The work has been good, the results aren’t in yet.

I caught up with them after decades to transmit the communication in person and sober, that I’m okay. Like: “Hi! It’s me. I get it, and thank you.” There’s not a inkling of desire to keep pace with that Jones, though.

In looking at the raw footage from Scoop Perlman’s Guide to Art that Brian handed over to me a few years back (a few months after Judy died and when I found out that Janie Crawford had, as well), it dawns on me that within the wisdom of the anxious separation, is the subjective information that my “community,” if interested, is interested in who I am. My family, however, is interested in when I’m going to be like them, and accepts no other measure standard.

At least not yet.

Until 60 days ago, I thought I might live in a completely mad space capsule bubble, and certainly the origamisation of facts to resemble something tenable to survive the heady toxin of our fine suburbia, that our father might have been of the criminal variety. On broaching the topic of the Zodiac Killer with my mother and older brother (I’ve not said much, if ever, to my sister, who lost one of her friends to him. I did ask “where’s Betty Lou at?” as we were recently going through her high school yearbooks), they both chimed in, independently of one another: “I thought your dad might be the Zodiac,” and no “just kidding” bridged the slack-jawed chasm of: NO SHIT?

What I’m saying is that during these interviews, within which someone is trying to decode the soul of my artist as mosaic obfuscation/ outsider-ness, I relate myths as if they’re facts because they’re plagiarized maps handed off, not with malice (historically assumed) but barely sewn together in the best of anybody’s ability not to further desiccate it with their anger. It’s the best they could do which is not an ethos I could digest until I’d outlived the ogre.

THEN, I could begin, with the trick of my voice in curlicues, wisps, and filigree, I could begin to show the roughshod duty of the work to restore my courage as karma.

In an attempt to catch the ear of an old colleague in the eve of her closing her flagship restaurant, Rouge, for the same reasons I’ve left the journey-mannerisms of its marriage (me, and cooking for a paycheck, I mean, and her not able to staff her restaurant due to cost of living in the SF market), I sat out front to serenade god’s Ocean View (a nod to Bette) and no one in particular, when a man asked if I would like to go livestream on Mongolia Live (had I not just attempted something like that on thanksgiving day to honor Standing Rock, but failed?), like, right now, for the literal world to see?

This was funny because it was a one-off.

Between rushing out before dawn that morning to sing a threnody to Ghost Ship, circling the site and that last view instilled the most awful hurt: that the fire station is across the street, and having scheduled to sing at a solstice open-mic at the Octopus Literary Lounge in downtown Oakland, I said “Hell Yeah!” and was seen by 10,000 people, or so... 20 hours before coming to closure with my family.

Every time I sang, I hit the mark. Friends and loves. Family and strangers. Even a guy at Civic Center Bart, where I was singing without my hand out, who said as he hurried by with his bass guitar case: “You remind me of my friend Paul. Sounds great!” “Paul Pena?!?!?” “YEAH!” “It’s weird how I know him. Thanks!” as he disappeared down the escalator, rushing for his train.

My friend Celeste, who I was waiting for to run off to “audition” at Exploratorium, said:

“I heard you from all the way down at the other side of the station!”

so we see again; I’m using the rock and tile of the caverns, the subterranean force-field echoes in my ululations, which nobody not named acid tutored me in where to point my parabola heart to connect the dots and sew the tapestry of my thy-healing-self, before I can go on to he next thing and not have to know exactly what that is.

I used my time in the green room of the Freight and Salvage on open-mic night, not so much to warm up my voice, but to make a quick altaration, kneel down and give thanks to a thousand + signators all there in shadow presence on its awesome, hallowed walls.

I sang to my mother and step-father, who proffered me a didgeridu from their trip to Australia about 3 decades before. I tied the room together with comedy and improvisation, and even an email from a friend’s surviving sister that god, if not their actual parents, too, might be in the house that night.

I flew home with a tape in hand of a radio show I had made 15 years prior in the middle of a stream of consciousness heartbreak epithet to the mysteries of love and the cruelty of a god of one’s misunderstanding. As would suffice a love-letter in a sound-scape, I chalked it up to unstuck in time again and how it was a paean to the dear just ahead in the headlights, and me with flat-like reflexes any more.

I hadn’t rested before I jumped now on a plane to Anchorage (like ya do).

Up up and away in the gondola all over again, my child-eyes pressed against the cabin window as I take in the topography, city lights, pachinko ball bearings cascading through memories out of rush and sequence. We skid safely to the home plate/ Delta gate and it’s off to folk festival week, only this time: I’m on the bill.

That mere bit of made up courage, though, helped me through the larger anxiety that I was welcome. It’s official. Sez so right here in the program. I would use that to the advantage of opening my magik box a little further. Set up some gigs. Shop me around. Cash me outside the glass menagerie of my mind, how bou’ da?

And snow it did.

And the moose didn’t wait for my birthday either. It looked up in the dawn’s early light of my first morning as if to say “What’s that infernal noise you’re making, white man?”

Like the gig at Octopus, an open-mic I wasn’t familiar with its casualness, I’d booked ahead at the Tap Root in Spenard. Now, I had come to the open mic during folk week the year before, mind you, and it was packed to the gills with people showing off their bluegrass and beer juggling skills, so I had an idea that I should have some healthy anxiety, but things change in a year here. Different host, different genre... what the actual fuck is going on here(?) as the host opens with 3 of the most (wonderfully) vile tunes from the basement of Frank Zappa’s pelvic floor, then knocking over a king-kong Emerson Lake and Palmer-esque orgy of Bass and Drum statistical density.

“Okay, cool! Db’s up next from Wisconsin!”

Okay.

And I had a about 4 contiguous seconds to be puppy-dog nervous and frightened of the stage, but those wonderful fuckers had scared it off to where I couldn’t find it, so the next best thing was completely double down on the obscenity from my unpretty spontaneity, and I had the room at “um,hello.”

I had literally written, unsolicitedly, to the dance department at UAA expressing interest in interacting with and possibly proposing sponsored work in the future, to which someone there tepidly replied (but they did reply), “Whatever.”

By the end of my set (and demanded encore from the crowd I didn’t know yet), 2 folks came up and asked if I’d ever considered singing for modern dance and I laughed at the visualization of whooping out my list of priors.

I got to the annual music and dance celebration at the Alaska Native Heritage Center (barely. Again: snow!) and renewed my eyes and senses with the chalking-on experience of this eternity’s passing moment, thinking of the souls and prayers in North Dakota and aware that I would be standing on a stage brought to you by BP (as, really, the entire facility of my travel).

Because I was there by so much grace and another’s gifting me the opportunity, I decided to lead with gratitude instead of politics. Do each next right thing over next thing right, and let the opportunities the solitary confinement of addiction never would have let me out to see begin grace my life.

That other being my big sister. Probably the real mother of my immediate family, at least as far as unconditional love is concerned. Certainly god’s gift to her was a bouquet of corpse flowers for the luck of being born to a barley quinceañera mother in the atomic cafe age.

It would be massively unfair to let this missive fly, also, with the above grouping as I delineated it. She’s the only one to have been in on the secret of my singing, at least in the first person, and not just an expectant, 2-dimensional kachina stand in for the purpose of my slanted narrative.

She may not understand, but gets me, and certainly has forgiven my sins and recklessness.

Now, this trip, we could pore over family pictures and heirlooms without my self pitying dramaturge shitting the bed over every potential hurt feeling dislodged from compartments and capsules of time to chew the scenery for someone with no interest in the conniptions of a hollow drag queen hollering up their ass.

I came home with an awful lot of baggage. Maybe a hundred black and whites of flakes missing from the patina of the story of a heart less traveled.

And I fucked up and strayed out onto the lacquer before it had time to harden, cloistering myself in house sitting and waiting for the images to leap up like the apprentices of cirrhosis and nimbly sew my memories into a fonder picture for my pomp and circumstance.

When, from seemingly out of nowhere, but how like me so randomly on time, I get a message from the airwaves from Kerry Parker, that she wants to mend the disconnect and play together in places like Murmansk and Finland, to which I reply where I couldn’t before: “Well; I can get us a nice black box on the campus of UAA, with some work. We could do an arctic circle tour.”

Even though I got the show of my wildest dreams outside the airplane window over the Yukon to the Northwest Territories: the full on dance of the Northern Lights singing “We must have waited all our lives for this... moment,” I got home and looked at the shit sandwich of my country’s death rattle, put in my 2 Cents that that’s the way the prophecy crumbles, and let the dream catcher snag me by the hope and think: “Fuck getting a passport! I’ll show those so and so’s.”

Tank topped kids are flying kites from a hilltop in Warner Park as sorties of F-16’s drag race across the clear skies, notable because it’s the 3rd week of February. I bet Chris Farley smoked a doobie on this same piece of real estate when he was an uncertain class clown in the Jimmy Carter days of wine and sausages.

And of course I wonder where exactly in the map of heavenly bodies the curvature of the palm of my hand fits and unlocks the eternity of my understanding that god is a sun-drop, right before it isn’t?

“Can’t run a business without an inventory,” I eschewed forever, but it’s just horse-sense.

I sew my spider costume, and it’s an otter day. I dress for the cold and behold; it’s ingenuous summer... til it isn’t.

Last summer, we found a big caterpillar right where the king’s throne might have been, give or take a cubit, at the top of Cahokia. We decided he was the king, or at least the organelle of the king’s pituitary in a tableaux vivant in the mystery of the world’s workings, on to the heart of the sunrise.

I looked for the arch of St Louis, from that vantage point like the eye of a needle, and started to work on a piece called “Westward Exhaustion,” which I used to be able to say is “sitting on my typewriter” while I’d pound beers in the desperation for amnesia, but I’m clear eyed and nobody else can finish my stories.

I don’t know if this makes a damn bit of sense except to my myopic inspection of the patency of what my love’s got to do with it.

As for the persistence of intuition, I’ll build a bridge out of her if she’s a witch. She’ll arch her back as I’m crossing over, and fall to pieces if I try to kiss her, and fail to see her riddle in the starlight

I had had a hammer
It’s an Estwing. I can finally hold it my hand.
Looks like Skinner, at least six decades ago, had repaired the original handle by re-wrapping it in coarse twine and the dipping that into shellac to make the grip work to his liking.
It’s always how I remembered it.

There’s an old story from my childhood.
I’m 4 years old.
Skinner, the Luther Burbank of our little Tex-oid transplant family, had, with all his kindness and skill, planted a mulberry tree in the backyard of our home. He had staked it and carefully trussed the stakes together with little cross bars, and then fashioned some arborist type of tape to hold it, equidistantly, from the stakes, as if we were in a kind of hurricane alley between the redwood fences he’d built and stained before I was born. Probably.
Anyway, in the Norman Rockwell version in my mind, mother had brought him sweet tea over ice with his lemons from home, admiring his meticulous ingenuity (for which he was credited throughout his life) to give the little tree its best chance.

Afterwards, when everyone was back in the house, whether watching the ball game or catching up on the gossip from Benicia, the peaceful tone was rent with mother screaming: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!?!”
at me

I’d gone to Skinner’s tool-box, open in the shade of the back porch, and gotten this same hammer (most probably), and it must have been colossally heavy in my little baby-fat arms, and I was just beating the absolute shit out of the tree, the scaffold, the ingenious tape.
Like I was possessed with some adult-level rage, right in the path where dad had picked up and thrown the washing machine out of the kitchen and through the back door a decade before.

I have no recollection. I’m sure I was stripped of the weapon, yanked to my room, probably spanked. I’m sure the yelling lasted a week. And it was repeated to me over the next five decades. It was a mosaic, at best, when I could assemble the pieces of memory, but it never came back as an event from start to finish.

Skinner died in 1996. Coming up on thirty years.
I’d only left California, for good, the year before.
It’s what you did if you had dad’s last name. I left the flock a little later than my older siblings.
My Benicia swan song was moving in with the grandfolks “for a year” before I left for good.
Skinner was getting too unsteady on his feet and they still hadn’t had any bites on getting a helper to move into their house where they built an extra room, adjacent to his.
I thought of it as spelunking, at least psychically, leaving my armor in the backyard, in the weed lot that used to be such fine Buffalo grass.*

It was a mess. I was a mess. About 9 or 10 months into it, I gave up and Bernadette appeared as if waiting for the cue, to walk him home.

I came back next May, kind of waiting till the last minute. I got to him and gave him permission to go. An hour later, he was gone.
Om Nama Shivaya con Dios

I didn’t think to grab the hammer at the time. Us kids kind of have this pact-thing, where we haggle (in a good natured way) over the family heirlooms. Mostly odd tools.

Grandma died a few years later and I wasn’t invited back. Mom and Fos packed up their house, sold off everything they didn’t want, and cut us checks in the settlement.
Remember that raging kid?

A lot of water has passed under the bridges in the decades, those spanning the Carquinez Strait, for example.

From Jack London bobbing along out to Belvedere or Humphrey the whale, I’ll borrow the metaphor of magnet-fishing to illustrate what a well-earned higher power helped me find in the dark night, among the sole. **

When clearing out Fos and Gale’s condo a few years back, I came across a cache of Skinner’s things among Foster’s curated garage full of tools. There it was: my name engraved in there, somewhere. They’re still thriving in Vallejo, hence the visits.

I should build it a silk case or a shadow box for my altar, but it’s great for straightening boards, driving nails, and prying, still.

My friend John Himmelfarb, after hearing the lore and holding it, admiringly, in his hand, said: “That’s an Estwing! A might fine one, too.”
I didn’t know a hammer from an Emcee, and was tickled that he knew the specific brand.
As I pored over pictures on the internet, I’m realizing that it’s an iconic shape and silhouette, available in many weights, but is yours customized with twine and shellac?


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was cheffing at the old rehab place I’d gone to college at.
A few years after graduating (on my 40^th birthday).
While a client, I begged to Dean and the staff to let me help in the kitchen. The food was beneath sub-par.
“Go to your meetings. Do your KP when you’re scheduled,” Dean seemed to sneer at me with every inquiry.
Four years later, there was an ad in the paper that Hope Haven / Catholic Charities was looking for a cook. Dean trained me in and proceeded to drop dead.
Om Nama Shivayonara.

A year into my gig there, while putting up a dinner with nods to grandma and grandpa: Pot Roast, Green Beans, Garlic Mashed Potatoes and an urn of Gravy, Salad Bar, Desserts, all the bells and whistles…
Friday, 4:23, the clients lined up with their trays and drooling: “Oh shit, that smells good!”
The deep fear that had been pestering me for a few weeks from what seemed inside my marrow, creeping up, Guillain-Barre-like, a kind of anxious paresthesia finally burst in to the front of my mind: grandpa’s next door neighbor, Smokie, had molested me on 4 or 5 occasions when I was 4. He’s threatened to kill me if I ever told (he’d gut me like the fish he was often cleaning in the yard).
Textbook recovered memory.
Asked the counselors and KPers to cover for me. Fled. Smoked half a pack of cigarettes while on the phone with my therapist, talked with Kate, our manager.
Waited till the next day and got in to therapy first thing, got assigned a different therapist for EMDR…
Like: flow
It was ready.
I’d probably have chosen to relapse to keep it in the rearview if I had any idea of its intensity.
But it didn’t destroy me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

If you go on Google Earth, 211 Baywood, Vallejo
You can see that motherfucking mulberry tree from space. It’s about 50’ tall and 30’ bush. Probably drops 30 bushels of berries every year, staining the lawn like blood when it’s mown.

It was my father who showed up in those EMDR sessions. He would show up like a silent hero. Like a father. Not promising to go get Smokie for revenge. Just holding me up where our eyes were level, the way he might have on the few occasions when I got to meet him when I was little.
He, of the Ogre/Zodiac dimensions in the family lore, took his temper tantrum out of the picture mere months before my birth.
Found a pic of a guy, spitting image of me, with my sibs in cowboy hats on grandpa’s back lawn, amongst mom’s photo albums.
“Dad had a tattoo?!?!?” right there where his sleeve was rolled up like James Dean.
“Well yeah, honey, he had that fucking enormous parrot on his bicep.”

Nope. Well, I mean it’s right there in a picture, but I have zero recollection.

He didn’t make it to fifty.
I stopped the rinse cycle and quit “sobering up again” at 49

With any luck, I’ll make it to 50’ tall, birds nesting in my gray hair, thankful for the upkeep of the yard. There were honeysuckle, passion flowers, and feral blackberry patches around that yard. The yellow roses (for Texas), easter lilies, and hydrangeas are all gone from the front yard.

I hope this hammer is buried with me, but I might will it to a cousin, who knows? That and the heirloom spatula (of the gods!) which I recently acquired in the sibling tribunal.
It’s its own story, anyway.





*Not really sure of the genus. Grass was spongy, thick, and grew in a creeping fashion. His front and back yards were very well maintained and gorgeous.

** they’re flounder, actually. Just trying to be clever

But what I forgot to include was anything about the original title: E is for Empire

And that’s the story of when/ where it dawned on me that real self realization starts with knowing one is a pawn as the Empire, as millstone, rolls on in its unremarkable task of rendering ambition to its atomic particles. Ya know: like for C-rations?

I had worked with Gavin Smith as soon as we were introduced in 1984. A veritable Tasmanian Devil of energy who was self-employed before he was thirty (perhaps my first entrepreneurial exposure) as Atomic Janitorial and hustling Life Force nutritional supplements on the side, whence my salad days of Spirulina smoothies and my evergreen stools.
He was possessed with such manic energy as to dream nothing more than to be buried in a pile of comic books shown to his friends or the many contraption features of his imported toys collection. For me, Flaming Carrot and Reid Fleming; World’s Toughest Milkman were the two that stuck to my muddied tires for decades (probably because I could imagine, as a young man in search of a role, I could portray one of these callous misfits in front of a camera).
My third job only having arrived in St Helena a month before, Gavin carted me all over the Napa valley in his van full of janitorial accoutrements and brain dizzying natural chemical remedies to what seemed to be every other winery and public toilet to scrub, polish floors, clean endless panes of glass, ascend ladders and use a multiplicity of vacuum toggles to wrest dust from fans and crannies. There were offices, grocery stores, homes, schools and villas, and what were then, to me anyway, palatial estates from the windows of which, the sophisticates could hold their snoots and snifters above the toiling peasantry among the merlot respirations and hot air buffoons floating up from the parking lot of Domaine Chandon.*

Without too many particulars of my “love-life” bringing me back to Napa some twenty four years later, only to smash my heart like an ataxic stag’s leap (sorry Paul) against the canyon wall, I had returned less like Douglas MacArthur and more like an inside out of Joseph Campbell’s hero (the fly?) at the end of the Jism trail. It was dear Gavin that scooped me up and added me to his collection of broken-toy employees to clean even further up the mountains, where the billionaires who supped at the French Laundry had glass pyramids mathematically aligned (I reckon) to the coordinates of their lizard-homeworlds.**
While not yellowed with jaundice or on the waiting list for a liver-donor, I was, after several years of relatively successful recovery from alcoholism (almost 6 years, but I hadn’t let go of resentments I was still justifying), back in my two-buck-chuck-cups of wino-ism and pity-pot-performance-art.
Between scowls of judgement for my lugubrious and lubricated march to my father’s fate whilst screaming “Don’t you dare fucking scratch that glass!” as we were scraping fly specks off one of the pyramids in the morning sun, Gavin’s mood flipped for a second.
“See that box-canyon over there, towards Berryessa?”
“Sure,” I said, squinting. At least his rage wasn’t on me for a minute.
“That’s where General Vallejo, after culling all the men from the captured Onastis (Wappo) Indian village, proceeded to march all of men off the men to their deaths.”
“No shit?”
And it was there, between my fatty liver and egg salad eructations and concentration to not pee out of my butt, with the scrape-scrape ghosts of grandma’s complaining about fly specks and Chris Rock’s Red Lobster monologue, that it all made perfect sense:
And I mean perfect sense, as in: oh there’s twelve steps out of here that these fallen great grandfathers were never privileged to take. That this: this right here, was a triptych in verité, like smelling salts for the glomerulus challenged. General Vallejo (I was never a fan), the fly specks, the Jaguar in the carport… That this was and is the definition of: Empire.
Not some fantastical Lucasian puppet show above the control boards at Industrial Light and Magic (just a few miles past the Howard the Duck exteriors).
Not necessarily the Caucasian chalk, circling the spent human figure, in all its semen belching efficacy, but that, as made of stardust, we are simultaneously precious and inutil such that even our solidarity is reduceable to evanescence, karma, and mass-grave ambiguity.

This is taking my mind off today, as the sun comes up and I scratch my head, wondering what time zone I inhabit.

I’ve had to cancel my trip to Anchorage. I have too many irons in the fire with shutting the bakery down, moving ALL of the equipment inventory to Madison for the next project. Moving everything out of storage, too, by the end of the month (we had a break-in to one of the units last night. Fun). Oh, and, depending on who you’re listening to, as the glistening saber is rattled across the arctic sky, like Northern Lights through tangerine makeup stage-blood, the 11^th Airborne could deploy from JBEAR (the joint armed forces base just outside of Anchorage) to, not Minneapolis, but Greenland at any minute during my fortnight visit.
And I’m not repeating the tragedy of Brian Willson, not the Beach Boy, but the protestor (1987) run over by a munitions train at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, which I believed changed… very little (for the service of this treatise, though his service, education, activism, and sacrifice are laudable, to be certain).

I have the luxury of making up huge scenarios when I am going somewhere and even huger ones if I can’t get there from here, at least not right now.





*My actual gateway drug to all things Napa Valley. Thanks Richard Alan and Shannon Kelly

**these are but flourishes. I’ve no time for dithering in conspiracy nonsense. Besides, reality is interesting enough.

Okay: I figured out a title that pushed me in the right direction.

Here’s the original start and then my latest will kick in in a few paragraphs.

Starts around the fourth grade…

Was contemplating penning something glib (or maybe aloof is more apt) about the dawning-on me clarity of empire and all its maudlin calving into epochs of human shortcomings.

then all this shit went down in Minneapolis and the big top goes up right in the middle of our collective breastbones, as the americowards, the paper tigers with their too-real firearms and jack-boots kettle our psyches in the mistaken belief that our fear is oil for their lamps.

My personal odometer just rolled 41 years since I got all jacked up to march against something. When I was convinced by naivete that not too much was bigger than me, I got it into my head and heart to make a bee-lone for Managua.

The company I worked for wouldn’t let me out to vote in my first eligible presidential election and I’d had to watch the couch-potato EMT roll around in laughter as they trolled me for Reagan’s re-election,

The short version is that I lost my shit the week of July 19th, 1985, when, sitting in front of the Sign up here to be a Sandinista office, that no matter how much I scratched my head, I didn’t know the first thing about what my country was, or at least enough to know what I stood against.

The bananas of United Fruit worked their way through the fontanelles of my turista credentials and I went to sulk at Sandy’s (The Denny’s of Managua) and couldn’t get served a cup of coffee, because: the color of my skin.

So fits and starts was the colors of my parachuting into conniptions of activism while juggling addictions, relations, and paychecks like a free-jazz snowball, eventually geographing to Wisconsin with my scores, unsettled, dragging in my Jungian bawbag not too far beyond my shadow and doubt.

I don’t know if jumping around helps. On the page, much less the sidelines.

I’m not making excuses, like: the dog ate my homework, I’m just tuned to a different frequency on how best to live a life of activism and care. Some of the better things my parents and family taught me.

I didn’t spit at my handlers, my “pedigreers,” if I may; what with my insides not matching the upward mobility of “go climb a rock,” (I was too stoned, I might have fallen), I couldn’t get my bearings for about the first 40 years.

While a prognosticator, that somebody else paid for, assured me that my conflicts were based on my past lives, my stars, the south node of the moon, and Saturn, in particular, having so much influence in my life that distortions were par for the course of my inability to grasp for normalcy, much less: purpose.

Before it gets too Aristotle Onanism…

I bring you:

HR WAFFENSTUF as a title to my absurd observations

round the 3rd or 4th grade… defs 4th grade; I had just met some other nerds to clique with in the gifted program. I think we were all fans of WWII movies, shows, and Baa Baa Black Sheep, starring Robert Conrad as Pappy Boyington.

It was aircraft, tanks, half tracks, maybe some ship-shit, but we were in a naval shityard town, so that wasn’t too popular (except for PT Boats).

It started with picture books, Monogram model planes, and then into TAMIYA (Japanese) 1/32nd scale weapons of war. Who could build the best dioramas? Who got their Bink’s air-brush from Bob’s hobby shop and could make the camo paint jobs and leaking oil flak holes look the most realistic. The model airplanes made out a little better, as they were strung up from the ceilings of our adolescent bedrooms. The Panzers and howitzers, the roots for trees with moss for leaves, the cell-u-clay landscapes, the painted on shadow of the soldiers’ faces…

The absolute boredom of my classmates as I would bring these in as projects (show and tell with fanfare) and stutter my way through my presentation, convinced everyone thought I was a war-mongering fag, take them home on the school bus, into the backyard, cover them with gasoline and strike a match.

That was a lot of allowances I’d be putting out with a hose and hoping the house hadn’t filled with plastic soot.

I was definitely over that by 17, when marijuana, mom’s vodka, and LPs were the only pastimes in a life that was spent knowing that I would die a virgin.

Alex Haley’s ROOTS was a hotter topic than the Holocaust in that era and I would have to venture out educate myself by reading as much as possible and hanging out making coffee for the intellectuals near Sather Gate.

I’d taken off for Managua when Reagan was reelected, not really sure what I was aiming at.

I did meet Jahmes Tony Finlayson there, on Independence day, and knew that I was the only time in my life that we would meet.*

I’d done lots of rallies in Berkeley, Oakland, SF, and of course any I could in Madison, even hustling home for the Act 10 shit in 2011, then OCCUPY

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself

In 2002, I hit rock bottom (eureka!), and in a gesture scripted for my semiotic grandiosity, the B-2 Stealth Bomber happened to be scudding low in the sky over Verona, WI, (flyovers for a Badger Game at Camp Randall) and it didn’t arouse any of the old autoerotic avionics glee: it was a symbol portending the end of peace.

A simple: a symbol for the end of my addiction would suffice, but this felt older than a millennia, not unlike some moribund thunderbird, wherein an invader hungers for all life-force.

At 2 billion a pop, I knew this was why we couldn’t have schools and health care. Meanwhile, I got on the waiting list for rehab.

I started going to AA meetings. Might as well get a leg up, cause that’s what their serving before and after shit on a shingle.

I met a guy there who I cottoned to, for his gentleness, wisdom, and intellect.

Bob was a retired history professor, a polyglot, but mostly, for our purposes: a recovering alcoholic.

His area of study, research, and professorship (is that a word? Spellcheck didn’t squawk. I never did go to college, proper) was: The SS. The worst of Hitler’s worst.

Yeah, that Bob.

But he was just Bob, my sponsor. We never talked about the war or the SS in any detail. He was more into Martin Buber, Bill Wilson, and learning Farsi so he could get deeper into the original texts of Rumi.** and ***

But in the years of our friendship, his wife was going deeper into the Fox “News” rabbit hole.

She would bare her nicotinic teeth, sneering a hello or goodbye when I would visit, and parrot some ulcerative anecdote from the idiot box as Bob would usher us through to sit in his room to work a step or move his many plants in or out of doors, depending on the seasons.

The most he would comment on the subject was: “Here they come.”

And I knew exactly what he meant.

Bob was, after all, a war hero. While he was not commissioned, he was a Ritchie Boy; trained at Camp Ritchie as a surveyor for US Army Intelligence. He earned his Doctorate on Heinrich Himmler, specifically, and went on to teach at MIT, University of Nebraska, and was one of the founders of the history department at UW Madison.

What we talked about, mostly, was how we were both overly sensitive children. Probably still.

He passed in 2015 and had a funeral with full honors (and Soup!) at Cress Funeral home.

I literally got to press the start button on the cremation oven and spent the duration chanting as the Buddhists had taught me when I was a drunken cremationist in my teens.

So, anyway

I got to be on the planning committee for OCCUPY Madison, even choosing to be the City Liaison, a natural fit, I thought, having been a uniformed public servant in the past. Some of the deeper hippies, though, thought I might be a turncoat, or at least a pig-lover (see picture), and yet somehow still a maniac.

I relapsed at OCCUPY and got the hell out of there (Thanks Deb Lee) and got back into AA in 2012.

I haven’t been on the front lines since, and now I’m pretty set on figuring out how to feed the troops (among other communities) as a way of continuing my life in activism for social change.

The nerd in me couldn’t pass up an opportunity, in 2019, to go fly around in a B-17, the Aluminum Overcast, as part of the annual visit by the flying relics (said with affection) on their way to the Experimental Aircraft Association show in Oshkosh.

It wasn’t lost on me, flying in that fully restored vestigial game-changer of the war against the axis powers, 75 years beforehand, was probably crewed by young men who’d come out from the corn-fields with a very real chance of not returning. And how, now, any number of the farmhouses we were scudding over, engines roaring, could be holding Christian-nationalist meetings and gunpowder swap-meets, despite their grandfather’s efforts and sacrifice.

I’m supposed to go to Anchorage this week. Returning to the Folk Festival as the throat singing, nature mimic affable goofball from Wisconsin. That is, unless the power-hemorrhaging tangerine Musso-mimetic dipshit invokes the insurrection act over a suturable laceration his nazi finger puppet just earned in Minneapolis yesterday.

I don’t feel like putting myself in harm’s way afield, but can’t not on my home acre.

Keep. Showing. Me. How. To. Be. Peaceful.

I need you to.

After this stroke, I just don’t want to waste any time and dish out lobotomies to these white power dildoes, screaming: “Great Spirit has a snack for you!”

But what the fuck do I know?

*I found him, a decade later, through music connections in Wisconsin, and then spent the next 20 years trying to cross paths by fortune. He lost his life in Milwaukee a couple years back. Carjacked. Killed. Something. Shit

**Which was a great balm for me as I had been keel-hauled by the men’s movement manitous who were wielding the Barks’ contemporary translations of Rumi to cosplay Epstein Island, before it was cool (ew. I can’t believe I left that sentence in).

*** Bob was pissed off after studying Persian/Farsi for three years, while his cataracts worsened, only to find out that the specific texts he was wanting to read were in Arabic (or Turkic (I can’t remember). “Well shit!” he laughed over waffles and strong coffee at our favorite place on Regent street.

SPACE 63

Cause, ya know; numberology

Coming round the mountain where I photographed you in the trees.
And Half Dome is always there, like an unmistakable tactile tit in the bottom of a

groping in my knapsack/purse/ditty-bag, be it dreaming or flying over at 30,000 feet.
Secure my tray-table. I must be almost home.
His mom bought him a white VW Rabbit. His license plate read: SPACE 63, and his proudest bumper sticker was QUESTION AUTHORITY, which, as his roommate with the ubiquitous cache of weed on my person, I wasn’t too happy for attention drawn.
You’d have loved these relaxing laws, oh Danny boy.
Marrow, dendrites, clean clothes, shoelaces where required, I still have the requisite north side of the soil requirements to walk the overrated, earthly path.
You’re up there with Douglas Adams or perhaps comingling with Montana Wildhack in a Tralfamadorian fishbowl.
This plods along, sometimes with glacial banality or lugubrious affect to be a void, unfillable with intelligence and cat-like reflections on the efficacy of “purpose.”
You’re a kind of tattoo before I knew what I was doing.

“Parallel our sights, and we will find, that we, we need, to be, where we belong” *

That I got a voice on the same topography of your cancer. It will always give me pause.
Perhaps till I can show up on your Saturn return.

I’m going to Alaska next week.
My 10^th or 12^th trip to the tundra, although I usually don’t wander too far out of Anchorage.
I’ve signed up to sing, or hum a few bars, before a kind audience and spin a spiel or two about my days along the shining brow of the Welsh Hills, captured by Georgia O’Keefe in a gift to Mr Wright, our shadows in those trees. You can barely see them. Maybe it’s dust…

I couldn’t steal your title and not write you in, but, as in most cases; I’m here again to write about myself.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me?
Guess I have to wait just one more year, if/uh/merica doesn’t conflagrate into an ashtray’s waste. I’m not picking out a thermos any time soon.

Your mother told me I was an “old soul” when I was 16 or 17. I hadn’t a cannabinoid clue what she meant, having never heard the phrase and passing it off like Yiddish to my load-bearing ears.

What cracked me wide open, and I didn’t know it, was that the jolly four or five of us would whittle down to one when I’d proposed we all go down to Nicaragua in the middle of the revolution. I felt betrayed. Cause that’s what a young soul would feel.
One fool tagged along. Your cousin who I’d just met. He spent all of our time telling me I was a flake for my choices. At a certain point, I was like: “well, I’m not going to keep paying for this!” So he stayed there, living out my dream, perhaps. I was penniless and had to slink home.
But it was within this loss of my Cassadian ejaculate-socialization that I started penning my madness and stuffing it in the buzons from La Paz to Matagalpa, hoping the world wouldn’t forget me if I was digested by my poor planning and good-looks as Kevlar against the pricks.
I’m sure I came home and confiscated every page. I thought them an artless embarrassment, the distorted cruelty of being ashamed, not a selfishness from you (the audience).
See; King Cole’s old soul isn’t too merry**
I’ve dragged and worn this underconfidence to way past its utility of denouement.
I can’t believe I mistook this rope for a necktie, but then I keep playing dress-up while sabotaging my efforts in the dark.

In this “in the woods” iteration, I’ve pulled dreamtime to the front burner. Looking across a field of does all grazing in the moonlight (at least they were when I pulled in tonight), I will howl, albeit politely, because I made a pact with my psychic (sidekick?) that I’d wanted to publish a chapbook before the end of 2025.

Meanwhile, the “cream” has risen above the black and brown. The coffee stills enough that ICE can shoot it in the face.
This isn’t in any way dismissive of the life robbed from our dreams, but suffice that it’s a wake-up call for some/ many is an awful symptom of the inherent horror we’ve subsumed for generations, tinkling espressos while the School of the Americas and COINTELPRO bulldozed entire populations whence we not be bothered to look up from our sexualized kundalini fixations.

Me? I’m just another privileged fly on the palimpsest wallpaper of Jack London’s mausoleum. From “Great Spirit Has a snack for you”*** to convey my sarcasm as a an armchair shamanic while the first world chokes on chemical smoke from dropping a cigarette in its recliner, I have no map, delusion, or disillusion that my recording or reporting has a point.
They’re here among my boxes: your letters, my notes from Oakland whence mass casualty events, like the cellucide of my pre-frontal lobes, got tagged and buried at Evergreen amongst the anonymous bones and clothing.
As if punctuation was as final as an extinguished coffin-nail, I couldn’t bear to let anyone in on the jotted contents of my caricature assassinations.

I bled. I fled. I moved here in a sled (I mean like, literally. some of my houseplants froze).

And my outsides matched my insides, as I would train a hose on everything as historical record and act indignant as it jellied past my smelly feet and down the drains as lost in erosion, like the episode of me as a medic or the unfinished documentary.

See: You can, I can’t. Which is its own reversing fractal of ego for ego’s sake.

I can’t expect to treat the inside of my skull like a Sistine Chapel camera obscura and hope it’s held like a relic, a windowed chocolate easter egg of the forgotten “artist” who used to make weird noises. It’s right there in his postcards from the third and fourth grades.

He grew up to thumb his nose at Hollywood, where his friends were only too happy to drive him to any audition, his nose being too full of biker meth for him to hook up with fuck for luck’s sake.

One particular afternoon, full of marching powder, LSD, and spliff, I sang across the canyon for what seemed like hours from Terry’s retaining wall, my mountain voice kaleidoscoping with free jazz association. To the point where some neighbors strode up as we were leaving to comment on the beauty of my resonance.
“Does your friend want work in Hollywood?” Terry asked of Ernie, my sherpa.
“Fuck if I know,” he replied, or at least he told me later.

EVERY. TIME. I. SEE. SOMEONE. SAY. UN-UH. TO. THAT. LIFESTLYE. (celebrity)
Confirms my bias
I’d have burned out in simultaneity to my victory.
And that IS what the voice of Chris Farley, falling out of the window of the John Hancock building from his crime scene and into my strap-on hayseed parabola ear holes heard through the grapevine:
don’t come this way / see you on the other side.
Which is what his poster, hanging on the office door of the eponymous recovery center I would graduate from a few years later: “Drugs and alcohol can take the laughter out of anybody.” Chris
Like, Hey Dave; remember what I said, buddy.





*YES, Parallels, 1977 (the cast of roommates found these lyrics transposed into a notebook lying around FUGAWI house and posited: wow! Dave’s a poet! LOL)

** I see what I did, there: The king is old, not necessarily his soul. Great. Did I wait too long?
Was the whole point to “whistle through the graveyard,” not pick up a shovel?

*** a title I came up with and put a pin in for this very sort of admonition as writer’s trope.