Categorical Thinking

Categorical Thinking

Kant’s Categorical Imperative says we should act as if what we do would be the rule for everyone. That would work fine if everyone was exactly like us. It generally works, and that’s about as good as it gets for categorical thinking. It can be generally true most of the time. The problem is it’s deadly dull ALL of the time.

Kissinger’s Economic Imperative was a noir categorical twist on Kant: that we should behave as if our economic interest should be the only guiding principle of foreign policy. It works fine if you turn a blind eye to the problems we visited on third world countries (including Iraq) by selling them infrastructure too massive and technologized for their abilities to sustain it or the debtload (and pantload) incurred in buying it (cf. John Perkins’ ECONOMIC HIT MAN) and also by engineering coups to install democracies in name only based on a capitalism that wasn’t relevant to their culture.

Categorical thinking is the triumph of mind over chaos up to the point at which the categories get treated as territory instead of maps whose reliability needs to be constantly tested. As we get older categories tend to take the place of realities, and words substitute for (and finally obliterate) sensory experience, and the triumph of mind becomes the instrument of its demise, as Wordsworth laments:

Splendour In The Grass

What though the radiance
That was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight
Though nothing can bring back the hour
of splendour in the grass
of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind
In the primal sympathy
which having been must ever be
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering
In the faith that looks through death
In the years that bring the philosophic mind

There’s a woman on the radio whose abusive childhood gave her a Jones for minding other people’s business and telling them how to behave according to HER categorical imperatives. Her name is Laura Schlessinger, otherwise known to those of us who suffer in silence and sweltering traffic thru her Yentaing rants as Dr. Laura. An expert at drawing lines she has now drawn her entire life inside the box to the point that the most and the worst of her advice is by category: no individuals can survive their classes or escape the numbers stamped on their wrists by the guards who stand at the stations of our lives saying to those numerologically too old or too young: “You shall not pass.” Oughta, coulda, shoulda, woulda, godda, and always “Now go do the right thing” until it fries your brain like an advertising jingle. With the rare exception of certain individual cases which she by fluke or fault or default treats with brilliance and specificity, she can’t even hear anything people are trying to say to her outside of what box they fit into and what generalized moralism or exhortation is attached to that box. In the good times, she cuts with surgical precision, but in the bad times she cuts like a surgeon who cuts because he needs to cut. I’m sorry about her unhappy childhood but basically she’s just become a coarse, crude, ugly woman because she has allowed her whole life to be degraded into one massive generalization, and in violation of her own rules, she brought a child into that semi conscious mess, and that child is now a gung ho Army Ranger fighting in a war we got into by the broadest possible categories of diplomatic thought: good vs. evil, with us or against us, our so called civilization vs. everything and everybody else in the world, man vs. nature, body vs. soul, capitalism vs. communism, torture vs. terror….where can we go from there except into another box labeled COFFIN (and sometimes flag draped with some corrupt politician moralizing and generalizing over it)?

But we must never forget, they also serve who stand in stasis as the best bad example possible. With an intellectual cowardice that should be obvious to anyone so full of praise to heroes who fought the system and its holy LAWS as long as they did it in the sanctified catacombs of history, she always stops us at the gates of knowledge, telling adoptees and other people not to go into their pasts. I understand there are good reasons for concentrating on what we can do in the present, but all children and all people want to know who they are, and part of that will always be in where they come from and the healing power of memory can give us all the strength to go on. In one case in particular her advice seemed egregiously culturally biased. She told a native American adoptee not to look into his roots and history. And then turned around and ranted on another show about how when the Rabbi comes down the aisle with the artifacts of her religion,

“You’re touching three thousand years of history.”

And, I might add, three thousand years of grumpy old dudes (& dudettes like her) with stringy white beards, above or below the waist, mistaking their disappointments, crochets, foibles and prejudices for the word of God. And let’s not forget it’s also three thousand years of submitting existential development to the poisonous generalities of culture, the daily banalities that kill us a little each day until we become one of them. She goes on and on: all criminals are evil, all women who marry men in jail are sick in the head, old men should not marry young women, murderers should be executed, living together without getting married is degrading and NO experience, for that matter, not sanctioned by organized religion can be holy, don’t be in a relationship that isn’t “going somewhere”, don’t talk or drive or write or create unless you know EXACTLY where you’re going! Her female principle, her family project, defines ALL goals as reproduction and VALUEing human DNA above all other….like there was a REAL line instead of the one she draws, BETWEEN! Thank you, Doctor, for being so OBVIOUSLY stupid. All of these kinds of things go over here, and all of those over there. There now, all tidied up. It relaxes the mind. Relax the mind enough, you’re dead.

All of which I state not to fight the lost cause of educating her or any of her fans, and not in the delusion that any knife I can make can cut through the petrified bull shit of political so called thinking, but to say again the value of her bad example can never be overstated and even more simply: to beg the question, how can WE not die like that? Assuming that I’d agree with Wordsworth that the splendour in the grass and the glory in the flower are ever really gone, what I take as useful subscript from his poem, are phrases such as “primal sympathy” and “soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering”, and “strength in what remains behind” and "faith that looks through death".

There’s a place in my philosophy about “the intelligence of nature” in which a “primal sympathy” unites us all and with all of the natural and so called material world. It’s evidenced in the way some animals manage to like us in spite of the way our overgrown brains have turned the world into a mail order catalogue. It’s evidenced in the way imitation or mimesis is evidently a principle of evolutionary development, and in the way evolutionary development proceeds not only by adaptation, but by proprioceptive leaps in which DNA seems to understand what is necessary for its survival and adopts creative strategies to that END, which qualifies it to fit the definition of intelligence, because that word comes from the Greek root, TELEOS, meaning end seeking. But it’s not Intelligent Design, it’s not Stupid Design, it’s not Design. It’s better than design, it’s improvisational. You can’t FIGURE it, because it’s a DANCE of matter becoming self reflexive, the MOVING CENTER of a non categorical sympathy that runs through all nature and is available to every being that has a sympathetic nervous system because it’s that PRIMAL.

There’s a place we get to in art in which the extraordinary rendition of “human suffering”, or what is considered “ugly”, creates a new esthetic distance that makes it new and beautiful. It gets to that place by being particular and specific and refusing to let creativity knuckle under to aging melodramatic concepts such as the anthropo and self centered cult of youth and cosmetic beauty. The lost, desolate, old and ugly are actually more beautiful than anything Hollywood could or can ever dream up once we understand how old and ugly and desolate and lost its vision actually is.

The “strength in what remains behind”, I believe, is the value of experience. I believe all experience, no matter how horrific, has an absolute value. We can approach that value by being moved from the place where things are happening to us to the place where we are watching things happen to us, that first and last act of will. Art can get us there, so can philosophy, or just meditation. Neither the categorical imperatives of Kant, Kissinger, Schlessinger, Hollywood, or any other person or institution of thought or government has anything to say to us that can alter the strength we can gather from what remains behind once we question all interpretation and thereby become credible witnesses to our lives.

As to “the faith that looks through death” the closest term I have is that when my father died, my brother and I, took his ashes out, according to his instructions, on county road 107 just outside Carlsbad, N.M, and, also according to his instructions, “with no ceremony” I scattered the ashes. When we got back in the car, my brother, a conservative Christian, said, disappointed,

“Well, that’s what he wanted.”

I felt, in contradiction to both my brother and my father, that my father, an atheist, had created a ritual by forbidding ritual, that was more moving to me than any church service from any culture could have ever been. I felt I had been privileged to witness a mystery. And I carried away from that place a shred of faith that sometimes seems to be able to look through death.

Becca And Bernie

BECCA AND BERNIE




I was pissed off when I came to work that day anyway. I wasn’t even able to enjoy my bad mood much because I hadn’t had a shower for a week. Air conditioning and evaporative cooler start ups were on me in a rush because the weather was unseasonably hot, which was disturbing enough in itself without adding family stress, a mother with Alzheimer’s, a sister with Schizophrenia, and I have to be co guardian and co trustee with an absolutist authoritarian brother who just came down with a bad case of Jesus, the years of research I’d done become irrelevant in spite of or to spite my best efforts. Because he’s scared, I said. Because he’s greedy, I said, he had to go to the one place where he could have it all. Goes with the territory, I said. Go faster, I said, hell ain’t half full. That’s his line. O yeah, right, wrong again, excuse me for living.
One of the first jobs I had to do was for two old people who lived next door to each other, Becca and Bernie. Becca’s husband had died two years ago from emphysema. She’d quit smoking and gone through chemotherapy and made a better than usual recovery from chemo, but she’d lost interest in collecting Guatemalan art and just about everything except TV and solitaire. I asked her why she didn’t invite Bernie over to play cards now & then & she said,

“He’s too crude.” Which reminded me of a joke where the guy responds,

“What’s all this crude shit?”

Bernie’s bald, muscular and fat. He sits in his armchair or his wheelchair day after day, watching TV, thinking about how crappy his situation is, and getting drunk a lot. He had childhood polio and was paralyzed from the waist down so long his legs atrophied to the point they are now just bones covered with flaps of skin, and his feet are purplish puffballs with stubby toes sticking out. He’s very tight with his money but he gave his nephew Power Of Attorney over one of his checking accounts. The nephew got put in prison for child molestation and the State Of Texas drained the entire checking account to pay his child support. So Bernie got even drunker than usual and fell out of his chair, which is where I found him.

When I came in after working on the screen door, the reeking disposal, the lid switch for the washing machine, the blinds, two coolers needing work on the roof which also needed extensive repairs, it was dark and I was tired & had been ready to go home hours ago. I saw him sitting on the floor in front of his armchair & just thought he decided to do some exercises on the floor or something. He stumbled and fumbled around with his words for awhile and finally said,

“Young man,” (joking) “could you help me get up in this chair? And by the way could you get my cooler cover and put it over on my side of the fence? I’m afraid Berta’s gonna die.”

“Why?”

“Well she’s 87, and if she doesn’t die I will.” Yes, I thought, by god If my neighbor’s gonna die, the first thing I wanna take care of is to get my half rotten cooler cover over on MY side of the fence, because I’m not going through probate to get it back. But if I’m disgusted it’s because I’m just like him: invested in stupid little possessions and an animal body that can’t control its urges or excretions, and also I too am invested in the idea of family. For years I told myself if I just worked hard enough and long enough for what family I had left it would know me in some way that the word “family” always seemed to promise, but, o well, just don’t talk to me about family values. . .

I was a little surprised to hear him say Becca was dying. A lot of people would not have done nearly so well at surviving chemo. But, he said, she was getting thinner and thinner and didn’t seem to be in her right mind, at times. And then, he said, she started smoking again. It didn’t make any sense to go through all that and then suddenly reverse course.

I couldn’t lift him. I took the footrests off the wheelchair to try to use it as a lever and ramp to lift him, but I couldn’t even slide him up the slope of the wheelchair seat.

“I’m dead weight.” He said, “I’m a heavy motherfucker.”

I struggled for awhile with the weight and more than I wanted to see of naked white flesh as his underwear slid around. Then somehow I managed to help him crawl up into the armchair where he lay at a dreamlike angle for awhile waiting for his strength to come back. He’d shit on the rug and I had to roll it up and take it outside, meanwhile thinking: “Blood is thicker than water.” Ok and where does that leave us besides sitting on the floor in our own crap? So, why don’t you just get up from it, what’s stopping YOU? I asked myself.

“Being crippled up like this isn’t worth a crap.” He said.

Obviously I was in better shape than him and so couldn’t say anything back. But I felt sad, frustrated and exhausted. I wished I could take him down to AA and leave him there without transportation until they’d listened to and told him exactly what he could do with all his sad stories.

And then when I came in looking for a way to get power up on the roof, Becca asked,

“Dennis, do you ever do anything just to have FUN?”

Like she was going to fix everything up with a little cryptic feminine wisdom, while the terrible irony of her statement totally escaped her. I said,

“Well if I start having fun, tell me, because I want to make a note of it.”

And there she sat, smoking, playing cards, watching TV, just like her husband before he died, and her and ten to twenty other customers like her, the very reason I wasn’t doing anything else except just exactly what I was doing at that moment.

Trying to lift Bernie was like trying to lift the dead weight of all the sad all too solid human flesh in the whole damn dumb world. . I tried hard. So something was supposed to happen. I explained it all logically so somebody was supposed to listen. I got really sad so somebody was supposed to fix it. Yes all that was true but something was broke and crying inside me and just couldn’t stop. And there was a refrain from a songlike childhood joke that kept running through my mind:

“Is THAT what pissed you off?”

And the final answer was, “No, what really pissed me off was I hung from the window ledge all night with vomit freezing on me and dawn came and I looked down and saw my feet were six inches off the ground.”

But that never happened to me.

Chickens

Working At Walt’s Old Shop



The chickens squawk and scream. I run out to catch the burglar or a dog, but it’s just the roosters fighting because it’s spring. Once I come near they stop fighting and squeal quietly to each other….”Human being. Danger. Danger.” I tell them to shut up and go find a job for Chrissake.

Coming over here there was a traffic jam on I-10 for road work, and we just finished rebuilding that road. Nothing is under control, all a mad rush to death.

Sunset, a jet flies into clouds over Davis Monthan Air Force Base. Empty door frames to walk-in freezers lean against their wall panels beckoning without hope of entry. Hulks of old machinery excellent in its day wait for their true value to be recognized by nature.

A class in refrigeration science starts next door in the classroom Walt built out of Walk-In panels. No windows to that room. Walt’s in his seventies, but I don’t think he’ll ever retire. He drives an old Ford service truck that looks about as beat up as he does, and some businesses ask him to move it to the rear of the building so it won’t make them look bad, but he teaches advanced refrigeration science to the guys who drive around in the fancy new trucks bristling with tools and organization and fancy logos. I look over and see the students outlined against the setting sun, big gutted men all angles and straight stiff rigid lines like potatoes with toothpicks stuck in them waving and wobbling. They talk and joke. They belong to some community I can’t belong to even though I work on the same machinery as they do. And I feel bad I’m not learning what they’re learning

Because I’m stuck doing service and maintenance work to make money to do art except I haven’t done any lately. I borrowed Walt’s shop to work on a frost top, a refrigerated slab of granite, like the cooling slabs at the morgue, used at ice cream parlors and sushi restaurants so customers can feel more elegant while they're eating. It’s going too slow to be profitable.

I’m cleaning out oil that’s been overheated and charred because the new ozone friendly refrigerants they give us cause high compression ratios and overheating. The oil gets charred, carbon builds up in the capillary tube, temperatures and pressures rise in a cascade accelerating feedback loop very analogous to snowmelt combined with ocean warming combined with deforestation et cetera. Walt asked the engineers from the chemical companies about the high compression ratios at a meeting and they said,

“We haven’t addressed that yet.”

So we’re trapped trying to do the best job we can with dead end short term engineering. I know we took a wrong turn somewhere around the beginning of history into an imbalance that brought us to an abstract greed that creates real hunger and pain and now we’re going 200 MPH toward a brick wall.

Just as I suspected, I find little bits of carbon in the oil, blow acetone thru the compressor, condenser and evaporator. It’s tedious and it may all be useless but I have to try. Honor, or some twisted sense of duty, demands it. I get choked up and weak from the fumes….should have worn my respirator….and I was just talking to Walt about seeing this guy seal a forklift tire onto a rim by spraying starting ether inside it and sticking a cigarette lighter in it. A big explosion occurs and either seats the tire or blows it off the rim,

“Some guys,” I said, “you wonder how they stay alive.” He laughed. He’s seen it all. .

The class breaks, the men stand around smoking,

“Buddy o’ mine started working for them and how he’s making….” Drifts across the darkness between us. And so begins the long moaning monotone litany of statistics about retirement, health benefits, salaries, expenses, mortgages

and the piece of sheet metal in between the building and a pile of crap leaning against it, starts flapping in the wind:

boom, boom, boom, boom

like a bass drummer playing a funeral march after the rest of the band died. And three large fans in a long old evaporator on the top of a pile of junk start moving simultaneously in indecipherable semaphore. I decide I have to wrap it up and start over tomorrow, put the tools away.

I ask the one of the guys in the class if he could move his Plymouth Neon so I can back out. I look down at his big gut and think, “What’s the point in a retirement plan & health benefits if you have arteriosclerosis before you’re fifty? Isn’t that like swabbing an arm with alcohol before the lethal injection? . And like ANY of us have a future to worry about?” I ask as I look down at the test he’s taking and say “O fuck it.”

The slow tractor throb of the diesel engine is somewhat comforting, nothing like the illusion of going somewhere. I stop at the ghetto market and buy a bag of ice to throw in the box with my home made sushi. It’s the usual clutter inside the market, hookahs, pot and crack pipes, brass knuckles, knives, porn mags, cheap fast food, dirt and sad faces. I walk out feeling the immense thermal mass of ice capable of absorbing all the heat from my body through my hands

And I think of the ice caps melting, feedback loops capable of exponential, irreversible acceleration without any human contribution, even scientists in denial as I walk across the road toward my truck taillights slowly blinking signaling

Heartbeat calendar, heartbeat calendar, now, now, now, now…..

I want too much. I want things to make sense in a world that was never rational on our terms. I want the kind of security the men in that class think they can count on and it would kill my soul if I had it, if I could keep these fleeting moments forever: the old sounds and smells of chaparral, oleanders, dirt and squalor and the railroad nearby, where a big locomotive sits with all that dark mass in tension, throbbing, its vibrations carried for hundreds of miles

and the headlights shine down the rails to the last gleam of polished steel and beyond that

there is darkness and the same chance we’ve always had.






.

Self Storage, Part Two

Self Storage, Part Two

Whenever I drive past Tony Greco’s house I think about the little pointy toed shoes, some of them two toned, and the expensive suits and hats in cardboard boxes sitting in the sewage leak under the house,

And also how he chased me out of his yard the last time I was there.

His walls were lined with boxes of dry food and cans of food and row upon row of dirty little bottles, each containing a single vitamin prescribed by a chiropractor named Dr. Deal.

I fixed his refrigerator once and was nauseated by the smell of well preserved food that had just been refrigerated so long it had lost its moisture and vitality. While I had my head stuck in the guts of the fridge, I heard loud moans from the other room. It sounded like an emergency so I extricated myself, dropped my tools and ran in to find him hanging upside down from a chair. He said that was just an exercise he did to improve the circulation to his brain. His kitchen counter was piled high with dirty dishes, and pots and pans. Everywhere in the house there were narrow paths winding in and out of boxes and stored furniture. The floor that was visible was almost covered with a carpet of discarded Kleenexes. A ceiling fan with one blade and one light hung over the stove. He loved pigeons so he fed them so the yard and house were covered with shit, feathers and dander. One of them flew in once and he broke one of the four blades with a broom trying to shoo it out, so I broke its partner blade off for him so it would be in balance.

Even his relationships seemed to be in storage. His wife had died shortly after his son was born. He turned out to be an unruly child and Tony traveled a lot so he paid some relatives to take care of him. Always doing the right thing, always noble at least in his own mind, always doing nice things for people, he took some refugees in and got robbed for his efforts, but his charity did not extend to the people he manipulated to do work for him. He’d befriended Charley when he was having trouble with the law, and got him released in his care.

“He’s a human being, deserves a chance.” Tony said.

That adventure worked out OK, for Tony, but Charley had to leave because he got tired of working day and night, moving boxes full of old light bulbs and electrical parts, vehicles and rotten lumber around, just for the privilege of parking his camper on Tony’s lot. It must have been hard for Charley to weigh the meaninglessness of that against breaking rocks in a prison yard. And the guard was now a tiny figure of a man with huge ideas about the value of his stored treasures. Realizing their actual value would have meant losing his self and all the time it had spent on earth. Tony always said that someday he’d get it all together, and follow the county fairs around the country again setting up temporary lighting. Verne took him out to the county fair once, and said Tony really had a good time, speaking to the Carnies in their own lingo and playing on his age & experience.

Several times the city cited him for the cars & vans in his yard and he’d get dressed up and go before the court and make elegant apologies and promises and get continuances and reduced fines. He enjoyed the attention, the fuss and bother, and the protocol and ritual of the court, and he obviously even more enjoyed telling people who offered to buy any of the old vehicles from him to go fuck themselves.

Verne used to work on the cars for him and his cooler and anything else that needed fixing and he’d get paid sometimes with a meal of canned goods or a boiled egg. I told Verne once,

“Careful you don’t get used.”

And he said,

“Used till you’re all used up!” Verne was tall and lanky, mechanically clever, cheerful and friendly. When he’d look up from an engine and see me, he’d shake my hand, pump it, grin showing a lot of bad teeth, and say,

“WELLLL, WELLLLL, missss STER DENNIS! How's missss STER DENNIS today?!”

He was in his late seventies and in failing health and his wife had diabetes. She often told me, when I called, asking for him,

“He’s supposed to be home, helping me.”

They had successfully raised eleven children. Melancholy as I tend to be, I was awestruck by his positive attitude as he toddled wearily around with his bad heart, fixing things. I was also awestruck by the uselessness of it, but that was only semi conscious in the beginning.

“It’s nothing but a headache working for old people” Verne said, “Tony told his son to just forget he ever had a dad. And you know that’s no good.”

Tony said he felt sorry for his son, and would tell him,

“You should take Vitamin C, and A and E for your acne.” And his son would say,

“You bug me.”

And Tony’d say,

“I’m just trying to help.” And his son would say,

“You bug me. Shut up.” And Tony’d say,

“Don’t talk to me like that. Get out of my house!”

“I WILL talk like that. And what’re you gonna do about it, huh?”

It would get physical then, and Tony’d tell him never to come back and that would be it for a year or so.

Once Verne arranged for some homeless people to clean out the front porch and Tony refused to pay, saying that Verne wanted to pay them too much and, besides, he said,

“I didn’t authorize the work.”

Verne would take Tony shopping because Tony’s license had been revoked because he ran into people’s lawns, telephone poles and parked cars. Before they went, there had to be a planning session of where they would go first and last and in between. It couldn’t be too early because Tony needed to shave and get dressed.

“Couldn’t you go without shaving?” Verne asked.

“No, it’s too HUMILATING!”

So he’d shave and get decked out with his two tone shoes, a suit and his little fedora with a feather on top and a cane, and he’d parade into Big Lots, The Dollar Store, or the other bargain stores like that. Sometimes they’d stop and he’d treat Verne to a two dollar meal at Whataburger as payment for a day’s work on the old cars or the cooler. Tony would tell me how Verne would take things like the cooler apart and just leave them for days, and laugh about it condescendingly.

I arranged to have social services get him a new water heater and he refused to throw away the old one. I had to run the water heater on propane because he’d had an argument with the gas company over thirty years ago and couldn’t get over it and couldn’t ever stop repeating the story to me. I changed the orifices and the pilot, but the burners still got all sooted up but it seemed OK for the time being. There just wasn’t time to get it totally converted. I hauled propane bottles for him. It was at least ten times more expensive than just settling with the gas company but I understood it was the principle of the thing for him.

And coming by late at night to change the propane bottles, I’d hear the Lawrence Welk Program going on the old Black and White TV, and one night, the song:

“I love those dear hearts
and gentle people
who live and love in my home town
because those dear hears
and gentle people
will never ever let you down.”.

After I’d worked a few jobs for him, I talked to Verne and Charley about the contradictions and frustrations. Verne just said,

“You’re one of us now.”

I’d been installing a furnace under his house, but the sewage and mold smells were making me weak with allergies. I said I’d have to clean up the mess before I could do any more work. He said he’d get some guy to do it cheaper, but that never happened. When I gave him a partial bill after doing a lot of the work he said,

“O that’s awful steep” and didn't pay.

“Yeah,” Verne said, “hard for us old fellas to get used to the way prices change. I remember in the thirties how we used to shuck corn and pull beans for $8 a day and was glad to get the work”

And I let it go figuring somehow I’d make up for it once it was done or chalk it up to experience and community service. But I gradually recognized that I was running out of chalk, and experience and community at the same time, and finally decided that all communication had broken down between us and I gave up on the job and got involved in work that actually paid the bills.

Months later, I came by once, to get something for Verne and saw him sitting outside in a makeshift chair, almost upside down again. I said hello, he rose up a little, looked at me like he didn’t recognize me and asked who I was. When I told him, he said,

“So you’re Dennis Williams?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re Dennis Williams?”

“Yes.”

Then he went into a diatribe about how I’d burned out the burners in his water heater, which I knew had to be a misdiagnosis by some self important counterman, because the flame didn’t have enough oxygen to burn propane, much less steel. And he said I’d charged him too much for time I spent out running around when I left my helper there to dig a ditch. And then he said,

“Now you ponder that.” in a fatherly tone. Then he asked what I had to say for myself, and I said,

“I think we’re too far apart to be able to have a conversation.” Then his face got very red and he said,

“You’re a crook, you’re nothing but a crook“

He started screaming and came at me with his fists. He was a wizened up 92 year old man so he was no threat, except to himself and since I seemed to be exacerbating that threat, I left for good. I think he was hurt that I hadn’t come by anymore so he just sat and mulled things over, figured out ways to make it all my fault, and threw me in the pot with the gas company and the water company and the other evil villains who didn’t care enough about him.

Pieces of the story come back to me all over again every time I pass his house, all painted up, with the junky old cars and trucks hauled off, along with the one that ran, his Cadillac. It looks clean and neat and kind of empty now.

And Yeah I think , maybe I coulda worn a respirator, maybe I coulda just cleaned it all up and charged him for it as part of the bill, and maybe I coulda gotten a propane valve for the water heater, but he was supposed to have fixed things up with the gas company so I could run the furnace and the water heater on natural gas...SOMETHING was supposed to happen and nothing ever did because everything there was stuck in the past.....and it wasn't good for me to be stuck in a situation where I was doing shitty work because there wasn't enough money to do things right. .

And I think to myself as I drive on, you can’t tell a proud, vain, stubborn old fool how wrong he is….for the same reason, I suppose, you can never win an argument with a dead man.

Waiting For The Hundredth Monkey

WAITING FOR THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY

WIKIPEDIA: The "Hundredth Monkey Effect" is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number was reached. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lyall Watson, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. Such an observation did not exist (e.g. Myers 1985, Amundsen 1985, 1991).




Parked in the dirt beside highway drive, lightning causes the radio to continuously change stations, and cold drops of the coming rain hit my skin. Beyond the squalor of junk cars and scattered little service businesses the sky is getting grayer and darker over the tiny hills that are the only relief from the flat desert landscape on the way to Phoenix. A bay opens up in the garage across the street and I drive the van/ambulance in to have the toe-in adjusted. It’s a huge garage with 24 ft ceilings, 4 bays, a parts shop, a dynamometer/engine rebuild space, and a large office where Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of inventions are animated on the computer space savers. It’s all dark and dirty inside. Like 80% of garages its main purpose is to subsidize the owner’s racing habit. Don Hall sent me here to his brother’s alignment shop, from Just For Fun Auto Repair, a title whose irony could not be any deeper. Don works from seven to seven, his knees and feet are blown out, he’s fat, balding, worried and tired all the time, but it pays for his race cars. He’s cheap & brilliant & compassionate & Mormon. There’s a framed credo in his greasy office defending the sanctity of marriage against enemies that in my opinion are about as real as Elmer Fudd’s shotgun or the dwatted wabbit he can never hit.

Everybody else has got religion it seems, what about me? What can I believe? I sent my friend an email copy of my essay for NPR’s This I Believe. It begins, “I believe in the intelligence of nature”. She wrote back,

“What difference does it make if nature is intelligent, if we die and cockroaches take over? Belief is baloney.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s GOOD baloney.” My brother’s belief takes him down to the county jail to rob people’s souls to save them, and the pisser is, it works. You really can substitute intellectual dope for cocaine, because, I think, they’re the same thing. People who think they’re being given marijuana actually get high. Dr. Weil says the placebo effect is as good or better than the best meds. Martin Luther King turned an ancient anthology full of myths, fables, gossip, historical inaccuracies and inherent contradictions into an instrument for guiding acts of courage and compassion. Al Quaeda turned the Quran into a weapon of murder/suicide and the ultimate intellectual cowardice of black and white, good and evil. Go figure. I wish I could stop because it’s a constant mental irritation.

My essay says I feel a common sympathy running thru all nature. Species and their immediate environments are engaged in a dance/dialogue based on proprioception and mimicry. In all the moments of the world, and all the sad stories the punch line is they ARE stories, and nature is capable of developing any number of intelligences besides ours, and greater than ours, and we can plug into that potential if we want, if we make up our minds to work with instead of against whatever portion of nature we are given to cultivate.

But nothing pisses people off more than being offered the wrong kind of salvation. Guess it’s kind of a sore subject.

I too am tired of grumpy old men with stringy white beards mistaking their irritability for inspiration, their prejudices & crochets for the word of god. How do you believe in anything after seeing these abuses of belief? But even belief in nothing is a belief. Only the completely catatonic and suicidally depressed have lost all faith But every time I think I’m getting somewhere I’m surrounded by conundrums.

In principle I believe we and all our technological traps are part of nature, and working on community and communication is a better strategy for survival than survivalism, but why is human governance so self destructive? And why would an intelligent nature create it that way?

But I feel a sympathy that runs thru all nature & I would be more joyful. The facts, themselves, have become liminal to me….like…the way we respond to other people in emergencies, the way children and animals and even plants respond to us, the way subatomic particles can affect each other across thousands of miles. Yeah, religion knows less than it says, but there’s more to this than you’re telling me in science class. Species evolve to fit niches like the key understood exactly what the lock was like, and was in love with it and imitating it and playing it and the whole scene beforehand. Why not just believe in the sympathy itself as the connective tissue of the universe? Or if the brains we think with are just atoms & molecules from the big bang become self reflexive, doesn’t whatever happens HAVE to be OK? Except for this little ego problem death always posits. We’ll work that out in no time.

Both these brothers who are working on my vehicles take better care of their customers than any other mechanics I know, and the customers thank them profusely, shake their hands and pat them on the back. That dividend is something we can’t measure. It may be all that’s keeping us alive.

But at the moment, I’ve lost all faith in everything because it’s getting darker and colder and windier outside and the rain is now roaring on the sheet metal roof like the end of the world and blowing in, in sporadic sheets. One of the five mechanics there walks over and puts a red blanket over the Snap On tool cabinet by the roll up door. As a joke somebody has pasted a sticker beside the Snap On logo showing a woman wearing a dildo that says “Strap On Tools”. Another mechanic comes in drenched and laughing rapidly like a machine gun. The others, usually as solemn as coronors, talk excitedly about the rain. A greasy German Shepherd with broken feet from walking on concrete all his life, comes over to me where I’m hunkered against a pillar where I can watch the alignment procedure. He sticks his head under my hand. His eyelids have opened wider and wider over the years and he has black tear runnels running down his jaw. It’s almost comforting to pet him, but I have a hernia that hurts with a dull ache that matches the drab surroundings, and I’m scared---of dying, or of living but not ever really being alive.

I left the roof hatch to my camper open and left a manuscript under it. I figure I’ll get home and find that and all my bedcovers soaked. Not much to worry about unless you have a long string of bad sense memories and associated disasters for other times when it rained, and not unless almost everything you have is at risk to one natural disaster or another. Outside of that, no worries. Cold, stinging sheets of rain are blowing over on me thirty five feet from the bay door now, and I get up to seek shelter. The garage space has darkened but the pin up girl on the calendar on the tool box by the door is somehow lit up like a projection and is flapping in the wind like an intentionally clumsy South Park animation. I believe this is hell.

After driving the van, which still pulls to the right because it needs new tires, just a few blocks from the garage, the rain stops, the ground dries out and the summer heat starts to come back. It was just a microburst. My mood flips and my belief in life improves dramatically.. Weather here in Southern Arizona is sudden and violent and people, likewise, switch from hot to cold and wet to dry without notice.

I call my artist friend, just back from England, to catch up on the news, and the latest in our mutual struggle against old age,

“I have to go get a goddam hernia belt.” I say.
“Well, don’t go to the doctor.” He says, sarcastically. I say I bought this ambulance on Ebay to use when my Isuzu NPR utility bed truck breaks down.
“Why?” he asked.
“O I thought I might need to drive myself to the hospital some time. And so I can have a second truck so I can keep working the business when the Isuzu needs work.”
“Of course you couldn’t just rent something.” He says.
“No”, I’m like that guy in Faulkner’s story who can’t stop buying horses.”

Yeah, right, you be Frank and I’ll be Stupid, I think, if we’re that hard up for entertainment, but there’s more to it than that, and it’s integral to another joke, which is the way all of us are forced to live these days. Which is so crazy we can’t talk about it because we don’t have time.

I don’t know of anyplace I can rent a truck with parts bins, cabinets, freon bottle and ladder racks, and it couldn’t be cheap if it existed. And working without those organizational amenities is the misery of always turning a pile of crap over to get what you want from the bottom. It will take a week to get the Isuzu alternator rebuilt and two weeks to get back a remanufactured brake booster after I send my core in. Or it will cost a thousand dollars just to get those two parts from the factory. But if I can put the truck down awhile, I’ve already bought the parts to get it converted to run on waste vegetable oil from the restaurants I service. Meanwhile I work on the Van to get it set up so it’s not hauling a pile of chaos theory. And he’d say, “And that’s cheaper than just buying something already set up that way?” It is cheaper, by at least five thousand dollars, but whether it’s me or somebody else, and however they choose to do it, this is a miniscule part of the absurdity of the technological dance that puts food on the table. Anybody who thinks they’re outside that joke, snickering and looking down on the rest of us, is sadly mistaken. The joke gets especially rich when you take your friends and business acquaintances out to eat.

I need a week to work on modifying the existing compartments and making new ones. Meanwhile, even though I’m in business for myself (with a tyrant for a boss) I’m working for Ford, Isuzu, Dupont, Monsanto, BP, and god knows what corporations exploiting the politics and agriculture of god knows what third world country. And that’s better than just being a writer and artist? No, it’s hell, but it’s the way I’m set up, and it’s the way a lot of us are set up. We don’t all get patrons and grants, and all good work doesn’t get recognized or accepted. That was my job in the first place, to understand when good work was coming out of me and to value and save it. But it just wasn’t as obvious then, as it is now, how stupid people are, how everybody, including editors whose judgment I once trusted, is in the system that’s heading for the wall at 500 miles per hour He’s right, and I’m right. I really do need a new “vehicle”.

If even that would help. Why can’t we, why can’t I, think more clearly? Why would an intelligent nature create us with foggy brains and a language center blind as a bat to motive? But stupid as we are, dogs and cats still at least pretend to love us and birds can talk and apes can sign and gangs of dolphins can plan stunts together in five seconds that Congress and the Bolshoi Ballet couldn’t get done in five years.

It’s sunset. I’ve been working all day on a problem on the condensing unit for the walk-in at Yuki’s Sushi, a problem I can’t solve, so I can’t charge for it. I could charge for it if I was a doctor, but a serviceman can only charge for results. As I’m taking down my ladder. Mr. Kim, a Korean who rents this Japanese Sushi Restaurant, comes up. He says he hates his walk-in cooler. I say I hate it too. Every time I try to take a shower he calls up and the walk-in has another problem. I give him a printed estimate and offer him a list of other companies who might be able to put in a new coil cheaper than I can. I hold out the paper. I say these guys can beat my estimates sometimes because they get stuff in volume. He brushes the list aside. He says, no, you’re the man. Everything you touch here, you fixed, fix this. I don’t feel competent. The system makes some messes nobody can fix. I’m surprised he doesn’t want to farm the job out. Guess he’d rather bitch, and argue and jack me around.

I leave, and a day later he calls again, I reset the high side cutout. He’s scared and exasperated. It’s illogical I say. I’ve talked to other refrigeration people about it. They don’t know what to do either. I install several new controls and ports so I can more accurately read the pressures that are actually going to the controls and discover a drier is clogging up with crap from a previous compressor job. So it’s not my fault, but I spent more hours on this than I can charge. He will still need thirteen hundred dollars worth of work installing a new coil. He doesn’t know why this is taking so long and there’s no way to explain it even if there were no language barrier. His ignorance is his defense. Even if it wasn’t, there’s a limit to what he can afford. And there’s a limit to what I can do without compensation. We’re both locked into the industrial food chain. We both, and don’t we all, stand harried by contradictions on common ground that’s sinking.

The farmer’s against the wall, the seed companies are against the quarterly earnings report to the shareholders, the scientists have to develop where the money goes, the seeds they develop require fertilizer and pesticide, topsoil is being lost by inches every year from irrigation runoff, produce has to be refrigerated, injected with gas and trucked, the food has fewer nutrients and more residual poison so we need more of it and also need supplements. Freon creates a bigger ozone hole, CO2 from suns of centuries past raises the temperature, people turn on more Air conditioning which pumps out more CO2, creating its own feedback loop. All the feedback loops combined, according to some scientists, support and exacerbate each other to the point of irreversibility. And speaking of feedback loops what happened to communication feedback?

I get no answers from Congress or from NPR Science Friday and a lot of other media outlets. Why aren’t they even mentioning either the most dire data and predictions, or the latest technological developments? I don’t care what your conclusion is, I want to know why the debate itself is so ill informed and unstructured. Al Gore was writing a heavy book on the problem before he ran (and knew he won) in ’00, but he gets hammered ad hominem by jealous talk show hosts and even far left outlets like Adbusters. Using that thousand year old strategy of manipulating the poor to take their misery out on each other instead of the rich they say, Look at his lifestyle. He’s just trying to take away your SUVs. Petty jealousy wins, Global Warming is a myth and there’s nothing to worry about. Such nice bars of soap they give us as they lead us to the showers. But I’m screaming into the speaker of my radio again.

In 1990 I covered myself with newspapers about the first gulf war and set them on fire at the Federal Building. “Why?” The firemen asked and I said, “The hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter.” They laughed at me. Maybe I should try stand up. I’ve worked with ice and ice machines and closed circuit refrigeration systems enough that I look at the ice caps and say to myself, once the inertia of the thermal mass is in motion, they only seem to be half gone. They ‘re freakin gone. . Sometimes I allow myself to hope and dream that the hundredth monkey wakes up and solutions are invented and a mass mobilization occurs like in WW II where everybody works on the problem because everybody realizes Jimmy Carter was right in the 80s when he said “Energy conservation is the moral equivalent of war”. And the quarterly earnings report will be naked in its temporary perspective.

But I might as well face facts. Right now, in more ways than I can count, we’re all empty and starving because we have nothing left to eat except fear itself.

I stop at a park and sling a hammock from the rack of the truck. I have to go in to Sushi Garden and clean their condensers from 10:30 P.M to 2 A.M. so I need some sleep. Sushi used to seem so natural and exotic before I started making my own. And until I started seeing how hard it is to keep a restaurant clean, what the stuff we use to clean ice machines & kill slime mold does to the taste of the water, the food that accumulates under the counters, the gas that vegetables produce in refrigerated spaces that eats copper and aluminum & changes the taste of the food. And then there’s the monetary and physical cost of producing and shipping and trucking exotic ingredients thousands of miles. I think my sushi is as good or better than a lot of the dishes you get in restaurants, but I offered Mr. Kim some and he just laughed at me. I guess I’m still doing stand-up. Thanks, you’ve been a great audience tonight, and I really mean that, really.

When I come in, Chun the owner, is just leaving, and Greg, the in-house carpenter is taking over, putting wainscoting on the hall to the restroom. We work without talking for an hour or so, then we talk tools, how you buy one and then need another one, how cheap you can get them from China if you don’t count the cost of doing a lot of product testing for free, and we talk vehicles, what it takes to have adequate transportation whether you buy another one for backup or not. And we look at the food on the floor and the grease in the condensers and we laugh at how insane the whole game has to be. Then we give up trying to make sense of anything and go back to work.

I woke up this morning staring at a mesquite branch just outside the roof hatch of my camper, brown branches, green leaves, yellow crested birds and yellow pollen clusters in the slant rays of the rising sun, infinite gradations of color, shadow and form…

tree lightning bolt, river bed, tree branch, spiderweb, broken glass, cracked mud, lines in a face, bird, fish, dog, on & on, branchings, symmetries, pattern after pattern after…. random?

and now, driving home at 2:30 A.M., the absence of people is very powerful and mysterious. After all the lies, there aren’t many common terms left except to do the best job you can, charge a fair price for your work and just be here with other people, but sometimes I like people a whole lot better when they’re gone. Watching their faces in traffic during the day, they didn’t seem to be all that happy, anyhow. At least the potential that produced them, which feels like an intelligence to me, is definitely here, now, everywhere. Out of this emptiness I think most of our creativity, possibly all of creation came screaming

“Well, here goes nothing!”

And I’m OK with just driving into that darkness, sorry if it doesn’t work for you. It’s especially comforting this last hour before giving up on the adventure of consciousness---permanently---for all we know at the moment of letting go.

Do Not Dare To Look Beyond

This is an essay about GRATITUDE, Dude….




I was up late, thinking about THE GOVERNMENT, paying bills & watching Thomas Hardy’s JUDE THE OBSCURE, & somehow OWNING every character’s shame and/or defeat:

In it there’s an old man a young woman does a kindness she later becomes indebted to, & thereby regrets & thereby learns to loathe him. Ouch! That hurt!
A man & woman, cousins of equal age, who loved each other & demanded their union have, & be recognized for, its own sacredness outside the law & church, were scorned & reviled & driven from town to town. Do not dare to go outside the norm. Got it.

The man is tricked into marriage by a woman who says she got pregnant by him. They divorce. He’s refused by church schools because of his low status & menial job. His true love, his cousin, the daughter of an artist, distresses him with her sensual and iconoclastic sense of life. Gradually he comes around to her way of thinking. They become outcasts, rebels and kindred spirits, but then his first wife gets him again, by guilt & trickery, & coldly watches him die. O wait, I know this one. It’s the triumph of the ordinary, the custom, the system, the numbers, the law, especially the law of averages. The daily drudgery, the same old, same old corrupted and dull things that make money, the people who bring us wars for all the wrong reasons and never have to say they’re sorry. That wins. NORMAL wins. And all that is all too human, feeling, young, open and aspires to be more than flesh, and especially, spiritual; loses, big time.
Yes, old man Hardy could really rack up the bitterness of love’s defeats, couldn’t he?

The conscience & desire for truth outside of social norms the woman free spirit begins with, turns her against marriage, and then back to it (& back into the hands of the old fart) in penance, after her children die.

This happens a lot, ridiculous as it seems on its face: 60’S RADICAL, CATHERINE ANNE POWERS WAS THE DRIVER IN A BANK ROBBERY TO GET MONEY FOR THE BLACK PANTHERS. IN THE PROCESS A GUARD WAS SHOT & DIED. SHE WAS AN ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT & FACED MURDER CHARGES. SHE WENT UNDERGROUND & WITH A NEW IDENTITY SHE MARRIED, HAD A CHILD, RAN A SUCCESSFUL RESTAURANT. AFTER 29 YEARS OF THIS THE CONSCIENCE THAT DEMANDED HER PARTICIPATION IN A ROBIN HOOD ACT, DEMANDED SHE TURN HERSELF IN. THE GUARD’S FAMILY DEMANDED VENGEANCE, AND THE JUDGE THREW THE BOOK AT HER. CASE CLOSED. JUSTICE WAS SERVED. 29 YEAR OLD STEW, BUT TECHNICALLY NOT ONE DAMN THING WRONG WITH IT. Which one of those people had a bigger, more harsh social conscience than her? I’d like to just take a look at THEIR lives, especially the lives of that self righteous, sermonizing judge & prosecutor, see how THEY stack up. I’d like to take a look at the justice system that presumes to be the keeper of absolute truth and morality instead of just an instrument for arbitrating human disputes.

They hated her, because she escaped, because she dared to look beyond, because she said your arbitration is arbitrary, your bright lines are drawn on air, your system is corrupt top to bottom, your identities are all assumed, so I’ll assume one and just run with it because this is all bull shit. EVEN THOUGH she was led to an abstraction called THE LAW by a nose ring rasping through her bleeding superego and submitted herself to sadistic wordsmiths with whips meant for their puritan selves, she DARED to SMILE in court and got the equivalent of a life sentence for it. They would rather have executed her because they thought that would give their lives meaning. Sorry that may be the sop the law & the profits offer you but it doesn’t work. Not really. Not ever.

I watched the movie and paid bills until 2.

Bills to credit card & power companies, my cell phone company owned by Red State Republicans, bills to my family,

Bills to the truth, myself, the facts, the clock counting the last minutes & pennies, bills from what I wanted to look like in my own mirrors to the verdicts of the camera, & other people’s & society’s mirrors

All night I paid bills & in the morning was broke.

I believe in failure, artistic & personal, in never being afraid to fling myself against the walls of the world, the wall of idiots & the cold hard facts. It’s not how we fail but how we get up from it that defines us. “And I’ll get up from this.” (Just another one of love’s bitter defeats, you don’t need to know the story.) “I’ll get up by doing.” I said, rummaged thru the bill stack & picked up a petition to close Guantanamo from Amnesty International, signed it & wrote them a check. Paid THEIR goddam bill too. They’ll send it to the White House where I’ll be put on a list of people to punish when the time is right….maybe with an IRS audit, or harassment or detention, doesn’t matter. It was just something at hand, just to begin a new self on principle. The way we are always beginning again, picking ourselves up, placing one stone on another in the smoldering ruins.


I dreamed all the characters in the novel were laughing at & mocking me as I tenuously climbed up rooftop after rooftop, higher & higher, to a church steeple. Then I was stuck there, couldn’t go up or down, just sat there straddling a peak in the dark, listening to the harsh voices below.

“There is something beyond us,” the woman in the novel said, “something that says,

‘You shan’t.

‘You shan’t learn.

You shan’t labor.

You shan’t love.’”

And I would add,

“You shan’t look beyond. You shan’t look ‘You shan’t.’ in the face.”

I paid the IRS. I paid the bills. I paid other people’s mirrors. I paid on my debts to friends. I work hard. I do good work. How much more can I owe this fraudulent society?

But if we didn’t have custom & law . If we had to depend on the still small voice of individual conscience that has served as a rudder to the ship of state as it sailed the myriad seas of human history, polluted as they were by public persona, ego & denial, why….why…..there’d be CHAOS. At least this way, we have ORDER. Tell it to the family & friends of Indymedia journalist Brad Will shot to death in Oaxaca by five Mexican cops who got away with murder because of a deal between the Bush administration and Mexican oil company PEMEX. The whole system may be corrupted, top to bottom, but at least we have an orderly society.

Always gotta remember to be thankful for small favors.

Guillermo Gomez Pena & The Perils Of Abstract Art

GUILLERMO GOMEZ PENA AT MOCCA
(Saturday, Aug. 11, 5-8PM, Museum Of Contemporary Art, Toole Ave., Tucson, AZ)



I heard Anne Marie Russell, Guillermo Gomez Pena and someone from TPAC on KXCI, community radio, one Sunday, discussing his international workshop to be held at MOCCA during the next week and oh we climbed some abstract Freudian peaks and walked some lonesome Jungian valleys in that discussion. We were drunk on words, smirking and giggling with the in jokes of the new esthetic and we were ready to die slashing hobbits with swords of light rather than come down to a hangover. We spoke without even a hint of a smile crossing our beautiful, botoxed faces, of “the calculus of our interaction”, “the equation of provocation”, the power of Guillermo’s “text” and how he bravely laid that weapon aside to interact naked with the darkness. “How do we imagine the terrain of our plurality?” the masked Mexican wrestler from TPAC intoned. “How am I supposed to answer a rhetorical question?” I shouted into the speaker of my radio, “With another rhetorical question? Huh?” I bit my hand and farted and tried desperately to plot my escape from the event horizon of the terrain of our plurality. But it was useless. Guillermo sucked me back into the black hole when he said,

“You see the politicians and the media are no longer leeestening to the arteeests.”

“Was there a time when they were?” the incredulous interviewer asked. But the masked wrestler did a power dive that sucked this smidgen of common sense into the vortex of the refulgent flatness of the picture plane of our interaction, and seven six guns barked and vomited flame into the darkness and we were off on the biggest magical mystery tour of our lives. I never heard so much bullshit packed into a five pound bag since the last time I picked up a copy of Art News. The performances are this coming Saturday, and I was intrigued. I bit on the bait of international art (and fame of course), and when Guillermo said,

“If you come dressed as your favorite historical figure you get in for half price and if you come naked you get in free.”

that set the hook.

I’d LIKE to come naked, I said, I’d feel very comfortable and debonair, walking into the terrain of our plurality, naked, splashed with paint, holding a tree branch and a urine sample. I haven’t done that in a long time, I said. Matter of fact I don’t remember having done that at all much less in the calculus of our interaction or any other form of higher math for that matter.

So Monday I went down to Mocca, walked in to an empty gallery. A faucet was running with nobody there. “Cool” the ape man said to himself, a faint smile flickering across his sun bronzed face. He licked his lips in anticipation of getting to do battle with the dark forces behind the mathematics of our betrayal, his perfect white teeth flashing briefly in the post modern darkness of the gallery. Unfinished paintings with texts were leaning against the wall, full of anti moralisms and deconstructed exhortations like “scream at the top of your lungs.” And “Eat At Joe’s” while a thumping sound came up from the basement.

“Ah,” said Lord Greystroke, AKA, Tarzan of the apes, as he paced the floor with his customary cat like grace, “the physical metaphor of the subconscious subtext of mass anxiety, the audible cosign of nausea.”

Soon, as if in answer, a man in a plumber’s uniform came up the stairs carrying a motorized drain snake. All traces of the ape man vanished from my face and I became Dennis the serviceman, my utility belt bristling with competence, my clothes covered with honest grease and grime, my Caterpillar Brogans proud to bear their war wounds.

“Hello,” I said, “is there anybody in charge here?”

“Three doors down behind the door with a “B” on it.”

I walked in and saw a woman in one of those tent like dresses, (I always wonder what small animals in cages they’re hiding under those things) and spoke into the trigonometry of her lipstick and the orthodontic calculus of her smile,

“Hi, uh….I came here to get a ticket for the Guillermo Pena performance series.”

“Oh, YES!” she said, as if to say, (in Tarzan’s mind at least) “Would you like to make love to me now, or would you rather take me out to dinner first?”

“Well, he said, on the radio that if you come as your favorite historical political figure you get in for half price and if you come naked you get in free. And I was planning on coming naked.”

(And I was wondering where I could put the ticket because as you may already know, naked people don’t have pockets. Don’t say it! Don’t bite on the easy ones!)

“Oh, well, I’m afraid he was just joking about that.”

“Oh. But he SAID it on the RADIO!….so….you can’t take anything he says seriously then?”

“Well, with a grain of salt.”

(or maybe with salt flats proving ground and that FAST too? I was thinking about the article that said he kept himself in a cage for three days and also crucified himself, both of which Chris Burden already did in the sixties, or as Bob Dylan said when imagining the terrain of our plurality: “O bull shit! O so MUCH Bull Shit!”)

“Oh…well…probably just as well. I haven’t been naked in public in quite awhile, but I guess it’ll save the younger generation from a whole lotta TRAUMA.”

(I was thinking of Mark Twain saying there was a woman in his home town who had a glass eye, and she’d take it out and hold it in her hand every once in awhile. He said, “The grownups didn’t mind it so much, but it made the children cry.” We must always think of the children, that’s what clothes are really for, to protect them from us.)

“And it’s not safe to be naked there. There’s a WHOLE LOTTA splinters so I always tell my kids to wear their underwear.”

Like a WHOLE LOTTA women’s statements about the purpose of clothes and social graces, that sentence totally defied deconstruction. Like the purpose of lawns in the geometry of our interaction, I just never got it. My mom was always disturbed because I refused to wear underwear, it just never made any sense to me. Turned out she was right, though, considering what a magnificent failure and abstract sociopath I turned out to be. Probably too late to start wearing underwear now, though, nobody’d believe I was really sincere about it at this late date, and anyway, I hate having inauthentic genitalia, even with clothes over them.

She was writing out the receipt so she asked for my name, and when I told her, she said,

“Oh, I know you, from KXCI.”

“Oh really, well I guess I can’t come around here anymore. Bring back too many old memories.”

“Friends of mine are always asking, ‘Whatever happened to Dennis Williams? Because I remember him.’”

“Yeah, I HATE that! It’s kind of sad in a way. Because I remember him too.”

“What’re you doing these days?”

“I’m just a working stiff.”

“Yeah, I know how that goes.”

“But I am doing some shrines to go. Shrines on wheels. Shrines for a fast movin world. We’ll see how that GOESSSSSSS!” I said as I stumbled into her desk and it moved out of the way too fast for me because speaking of things on wheels, it was itself, a shrine a go go and was fast moving out of the calculus of my motor cortex as I asked,

“Can I pay for this with a credit card?”

“Yes. But do you have anything else besides American Express because they charge us extra for it.”

“Bastards.”

“Well, I guess they have to make money someway.”

“Yeah, poor things. So…do I get a copy of that receipt to show at the box office?”

“No, you just show up.”

“Oh. OK. If that’s the way you FEEL about it! This whole organization is just full of false promises, isn’t it? First the NAKED thing, and now NO RECEIPT.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Would you ask Guillermo to call me about that? I think there’s going to be a whole lot of disappointed naked people showing up.”

I mean who WOULDN’T want to go naked and not pay $10, especially in the calculus of our ECONOMIC interaction?

It boggles the mind.

____________________






PART THE SECOND:

The morning of the performance I woke up at dawn and wrote a letter to someone who was giving me a heartache, someone too young for me in years and too old in expectations. The letter turned into a calculus of possibilities, a list of electrical potentials, consisting unfortunately of all the things I was intensely interested in and all the things she, a microbiologist, couldn’t give a Labrat’s ass about. I fell asleep and woke up at noon and wrote again. Finally I felt I’d said what I needed to. I think it had to do with the authenticity of romanticism---the soul of nature and the good earth that self centered assholes like Wordsworth, Whitman, Rousseau, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Olson, et al touched….and which grave realists & so called good citizens die daily for lack of…..so, though I die miserably in the attempt…. it wasn’t you, ladies…..just the primal energy of my song….that I had wanted….all along.

I went to a job. I had only a couple hours to trouble shoot the lights and the gravitas of the Mise en Scene, saw out an access panel to a breaker box somebody had framed over, make a reconnaissance run to procure the equation of extra armament and weaponry, put in cooler pads, a motor, a two speed relay, put anti seize on the adjustable pulley, amp the motor, adjust the new belt and oil the bearings. .

The woman who met me there was the mother of the tenant. As I worked on the lights she said she’d moved her daughter out of another apartment because her roommates’ boyfriends just sat around drinking all day.

“That is SO obnoxious! “ I said, thinking of all that youthful energy gone to waste in the equation of ITS provocation, “Isn’t there some kind of bugspray for guys that age?” (NOT! Seeing as how they’re already in a roach motel!)
I said I had to leave but she could go and just leave the cooler on. She said she’d just stay there and go through her daughter’s drawers.

“Hey that sounds great!” I said, wondering WHICH was more obnoxious, callow lazy college bums, or the Homer Simpson father, or the meddling mom who need for chrissake, to just GETALIFE!!!!.

“Jesus.” I said to myself, “why do I DO this work?”

I got it all done in record time, with minutes to spare, telling myself,

“You’re ALLRIGHT, Dennis! I don’t care WHAT your little imaginary girlfriend says about you to her girlfriends.”

It was a wild, gorgeous post modern global warming sunset from the roof, the kind where you expect Charlton Heston to come down from the clouds in S & M leathers, with the stone tablets and a bullwhip. I’ve seen a lot of sunsets from a lot of roofs. I like it up there, with my sad little city---that couldn’t plan the plane geometry of its plurality out of a paper bag---stretching out to its provincial horizon. You can imagine so many exciting lives down below, so many mysteries yet to be revealed…but then you always have to come down to earth and do the math, prove over and over to yourself, nothing works and nothing gives in, better just get used to it. Because it is what it is. .

Three ladies in white GRACED the reception desk, moving the brackets around from one side of the equation of our provocation to the other, balancing the artist evictions from their space---without due process, much less remuneration for improvements---with the common benefit of international, avante garde NAMES….a fleeting coquettish smile crossed the PERFECT white plaster face behind the scales of the figure of JUSTICE OF THE UNIVERSE!!!! Then I saw the director’s face, safely ensconced in the 6 dimensional tesseract of her estrogen and money based comfort zone, and I had a sneaking sensation that figure of UNIVERSAL JUSTICE might just be a selfish, semi conscious, masturbating little bitch.
Then I saw Paul from community radio, always nice to talk to Paul, good actor. Always sad to lose a good actor to the self conscious catacombs and ego echo chambers of radio. I hated that he’d ever gotten near that abstract terrain of our interaction….I wonder sometimes if he’s actually jerking off while he talks into the voice enhancing mike or if it just sounds that way. Probably the plurality of his voice resonating in his earphones, I thought. Media mirrors just seem to fuck otherwise decent artists up something fierce.

“You should be happy.” he said, “so many people here are doing what you like to do, get naked.”

“Yeah I’m kind of bummed out about that. Guillermo said on the radio if you come naked you get in free. And then SHE,” I pointed at the ticket master, “said he was just joking. ON THE RADIO! On YOUR station. You little fuckers!”

“What!?” he said to the ticket master, “you didn’t let Dennis come naked? The daddy of performance art in Tucson?” O well, I thought, at least he didn’t say “granddaddy” like the others do. And like, why should I care, what anybody says, anyway? Or like whatEVERRRRR DYUUUDDEEEE!
We three discussed her sillyass idea that underwear prevented splinters going up your career and concluded that theory had to be based on the irrational numbers of cultural parameters. Or SOMETHING like that.

In the gallery I watched a video of a naked man trying to drown himself in a bathtub, unfortunately unsuccessfully, while the illusion of trains running into each other went on forever. Then I saw a real live woman leaving the gallery.

“Charlotte!” I shouted. She turned.

So many years had gone by, we were barely recognizable to each other. She’d written several articles about me, one of them asking why I wouldn’t just shut the bleep up or, if I couldn’t, at least come down with throat cancer & get an implant where my voice box used to be. I published a cartoon answer, of me grinning,

“Gee do you suppose it was something I SAID?!”

She was thinner. She said I looked thinner. I said to myself, yeah I got that way trying to lift YOUR sweet ass….HONEY.

“What’re you doing?”

“Writing a book.”

“About?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“O come ONNN of COURSE you can tell him. You HAVE to tell him NOW!” Paul said. Evidently, being British, he knew ALL the rules.

“It’s about a rapist.”

“Oh. Does it have a happy ending?”

“No.”

“So it’s hard core? Realism? Naturalism?”

“Super realism.”

“Come on, we can get naked over THERE,” said Paul, pointing to the performance area across the street. “It’ll be a reunion.”

“I don’t WANT to get naked with you, Paul, to have a reunion or any other kind of union.”

“No, nor do I.” said Paul. Then I lost him. (And if he has a PROBLEM with anything I said about him he can tell me all about it at:
http://bigtimebigself.blogspot.com/2005_06_01_archive.html or
http://logosteleos.blogspot.com/2006/12/vita.html#comments)

At the entrance there was a woman with long black hair flowing over her naked breasts with black tape crosses over the nipples. She was massaging a man in sunglasses who periodically hit a skillet with a flyswatter. Another man sat at a desk writing “The story of your life” on paper, burning it a little, cutting it into pieces and filing it away. The broad sweep of his equation, the geometric gesture of the hand ripping the paper, the non specificity and anti particularity of his black leather space suit sucked the air out of the room. My eyeballs popped out in the remaining vacuum. I stumbled into the next alcove, gasping for oxygen. One woman there was doing martial arts moves, another was moving a flashing light over people like it was sage….or age….or rage…….god damn you turn he page…..

They all seemed so very, very PLEASED with themselves. And I always tell myself, it’s really HARD, to give it away and keep it at the same time.

A fat woman with bare breasts beckoned me in to a booth and sprayed water on my face. I held out the envelope with the tour instructions and the receipt to be sprayed. She complied. She was preparing to grab me and, I thought, make me suck something I didn’t WANNA….so I left…

There were a lot of men and women with dildos on. Dildos were big that night. Dada was in, la la was hip and ca ca was key. Bare breasts were de rigueur and anything could be everything. But nobody was really naked, and I had realized sadly and too late, how easily I could have filled that void. If I could start over. But where was there ever a place to start over?

A bride and a man in black leathers and mesh were preening while another woman danced with a 2 X 4. A huge, young, muscular, well proportioned Indian in breechcloth with beef stew rubbed all over him writhed sadly, self consciously on a pedestal. And I thought, “He’s got all that youth, muscle, and a grant, and spare time to work in, and I’M supposed to feel sorry….for HIM!!!!!”

So this is the deepest mystery of the terrain of our plurality, the darkest intrigue of the calculus of our interaction? I said. Well golly gee whillickers, I’m plotting out the trigonometry of my enchantment ALREADY! Where I had felt sad and overwhelmed at the thought of other, younger artists surpassing my wildest dreams of the possibilities of performance, I suddenly felt sad and overwhelmed because they had not. Sometimes we CAN have it both ways.

I started toward a dark hall but a woman put up her hand and said that was the way to the dressing room. I saw dark figures coming out, a man in a black sheet holding deer antlers, which he waved hypnotically. Guillermo came out, fat, balding, leaning on a cane, smirking at his little kingdom, and all that he and God had wrought. This was evidently the place where Mexican wrestlers went to warm up for their so called fights. One of the wrestler mask people was energetically licking the bare arm of a giggling semi naked woman. But it was the woman in the hall with her clothes on who intrigued me. I wanted to grab her hand. To hell with her hand, I wanted to grab ALL of her. At least SHE still had enough clothes on to rip off. It didn’t seem the mathematics of such a gesture would be incalculable in such a mileu, and yet…..and yet…..the ghost of Stanislavsky somehow always deserts me when I have a MOTIVE in search of a through-line-of-action.
I asked her name, and what she did for a living.

“This.” She said.

“Oh….they pay you for this?”

“Yes.”

“Wow.” I said. You can kiss me now if you want to, I thought, but, like in one of those dreams where you’re trying to scream and can’t, no sound escaped my lips. Hundreds of unsaid words and sexual provocations ached in my throat. VENGEANCE against the banality of evil and the evil of banality would not be mine that night. I knew somehow I was out of ammunition and this was not the hill I wanted to die on.

I went to the front to exit., The woman gatekeeper smiled and said I was SUPPOSED to exit out the back. This asylum MAY seem lawless but we DO have RULES here! Once outside, I felt lost and alone, like I’d just gotten off a carousel and missed the sad irony of all the whirling smiley faces I’d once looked down on. So I went through again. I gave the woman at the door, who was warm and nice, the instruction sheet from my envelope because I’d already given her my ticket. I explained that the instructions had been sprayed with holy water. She smiled, and took them. I went to the back of the performance area and asked the woman I couldn’t ask out,

What do you do for EXCITEMENT around here?”

She laughed:

“Play cards.”

“I’m kind of disappointed.” I said.

“Well, to each his own,” she said. She was keeping ALL her shit, and not giving anybody, ANYTHING.

And there WAS something cold and dully unforgiving about her in spite of the flower in her hair. The last time I went out the rear door, the sky was turning from turquoise to Indigo and little lights were coming on here and there. The desolation and loss suddenly became lush and achingly beautiful. I walked up to the nice woman at the front door for the third time and gave her my last piece of paper, a damp receipt for ten dollars for the ticket.

“I’m kind of disappointed.” I said.

“Is that why you kept coming back?” She asked. As a matter of fact, it was. I was trying to work up a little rhythm and distance so I could get my GROOVE on, so maybe it wouldn’t seem like just another dull, garish, greasy Halloween party, but it was never going to be one damn bit different.

“I need a hug.” I wailed. “Do you give hugs?”

“Yeah, I’ll hug you”. She laughed and reached out to me. I hugged her back.
Within the algebraic parentheses of our embrace I felt the sudden jolt of a solution for X. It wasn’t root mean square wave rectified electricity but it was good electricity.

I put it in a little electrical handi-box which I keep for mementoes---moments I’ve stolen from The Banality Gang, and carefully screwed the cover plate back on, a faint smile flickering across what few pixels were left of my sunbronzed face and walked away feeling a pittance of satisfaction from having stolen just a little touch of human feeling from all that self absorbed surrealism.

I walked away toward my humdrum broken life and my trusty old service truck.

I didn’t look back because I knew that within the parameters of our pluralities and the singularities of our rapidly shrinking event horizon, we could never be that beautiful to each other again.


CONTACT:
Dennis Williams
1323 Hualapai Rd.
Tucson, AZ 85745-2051
dennishwilliams@hotmail.com
520-429-0347
http://logosteleos.blogspot.com/2006/12/vita.html#comments


http://bigtimebigself.blogspot.com/2005_06_01_archive.html

Waiting For The Hundredth Monkey

A symphony that love between humans only sings the pop songs from & transcendental experience more deeply taps into
EVERYTHING IS A VIBRATION
A carrier wave that allows forest critters to move into groups where they act with one brain, an energy the Tai Chi master can send across space

That unites subatomic particles across space AND time

That the medicine man plugs in to when rolled up and nearly suffocated in blankets in the sweat lodge until he can make lights come on the lodge and call eagles to the medicine pole outside

TO: Sy Safranski, Editor
The Sun
107 N. Roberson St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27516


Stupid Design, Intelligent Design Or No Design?



Intelligent Design or Stupid Design? Both of them cop an attitude. Stupid Design just flips the arrogance To say a certain butterfly doesn’t live "long enough" or that a horse’s leg isn’t strong enough or to say Henslow’s Sparrow’s vocalizations are "one of the poorest vocal effects of any bird" is to assume, no less than the intelligent designers, that we understand what the purpose of life is or should be. Who do we think we are, anyhow?

George Burns, playing God, talks about the Avocado and says, "I made the pit too big." (Yeah, I know it’s a joke but) too big for what or who? The Avocado plant is doing fine as far as survival goes. Like horses, dogs & cats, it may be "dumb" but it’s teaching us to cultivate and serve it—how stupid is that?

I’d need a little more esthetic distance to get excited about the beauty of prostate cancer but it does beg the question of why have death at all? Or back problems? Or wisdom teeth and pain? And AIDS? These are all mistakes from the point of view that we’re the center & penultimate end result of the universe and deserve or should be able to live forever pain free or else something is wrong with evolution

The caddis fly, like the rain forest butterfly, also doesn’t live long, but it provides food for fish, birds, crayfish, insects, salamanders, and is stupid, sad or pitiful only if we judge it as thing instead of process and part of a larger process. The same logic is even more transparently absurd & one dimensional if we use it to criticize a human invention. What caliber of engineer would call "The Gossamer Albatross" stupid because it’s too "flimsy" or "not sturdy" (these are not engineering terms). The plane was made to be light enough for a human being to pedal it across a certain distance. Like many biological anomalies, it was made to do just one job, to fit into one specific niche in a competition. If we want to criticize it we need to know what the dialogue was for that competition. Weakness? or flamboyant delicacy? Neither, or both, or something else? Who are we to say?

True random selection. would be incredibly messy and ineffective. Beaks would grow out of backs, or tails. All the beautiful progressive symmetry, British Biologist, Gregory Bateson so patiently catalogued, would be turned to a plasma soup like the cancer I read about that grew a hair and a tooth. True survival of the fittest would understand the idea that being fittest is often "learning" to fit into a special niche. Using any machine or tool for some task for which it is not fitted doesn’t reflect on a lack in it so much as the user. How should we presume to know what the day of a rain forest butterfly is like for the forest or the butterfly? Who are we to assign and value one form of life over another? Lemmings may fall off cliffs, so may migrating Wildebeasts; but it’s because they, like Goat Sucker birds, have the feet or senses they needed (or didn’t need) for a particular circumstance. It seems equally simplistic to say God or some intelligence made them that way as to say they were designs arrived at by random or natural selection or survival of the fittest.

Stupid or intelligent, random or synchronistic, waves or particles, with us or against us, mistake words for realities. Everything we try to say, as Korzybski, Wittgenstein, and Bertrand Russell have tried to warn us, is in some sense metaphor or a leap of faith between speaker and listener. The best metaphor I have found for what is going on in evolution is there is an on-going conversation between the DNA and the environment, or a proprioception on the part of the organism as to what is required to be part of the process called the natural community and to survive within it.

How do the bait fish and the baitcrab "learn" (or just happen) to grow bait fish on their bodies with which to catch other fish? How does a plant "learn" to (or randomly) make its flowers stink like rotting meat in the center and turn its stamens, pistils and stem into a stomach and its petals into opposable claws and jaws? First how do mycelium fungi “learn” to throw digestive juices out into their environment, second, how do you get the stench-bait (= purpose or interaction) unless there’s a sense of what’s out there to stink for? How does a forest insect turn its proboscis into an "ovipostor" capable of sensing an insect buried 1 ½ " into a tree trunk? How does a corn plant get to the stage where when a corn eating caterpillar invades it, it sends out a smell that attracts a parasitic wasp which burrows into the caterpillar and deposits its eggs in its abdomen. The eggs hatch and eat and kill the caterpillar. What is the mechanism by which the blind mole rat of Africa developed a connection from sensor hairs on its nose to the cerebral cortex in such a way that the cortex devotes all its neurons---that would “normally” be dedicated to visual stimulation---to sensory data, to such an extent that it has sensory maps of all its tunnels? Similarly how do Aborigines learn to sing "song lines" that are topographical maps of the territory of a clan or moiety? How do chameleons, insects that look like twigs and leaves, and transparent frogs learn each in their own separate ways how to make do with the world they are given?

Look in the natural world at things that try to look like other things, try to look bigger, or smaller, or deader than they are, (possums, chameleons, the preying mantis), look at the mapping dances of bees, and the territorial dances of various tribes, and another term for the process comes to mind along with conversation, and dialogue, and that term is mimesis, or mimicry. It’s as if the entire natural and human world is engaged in it. Mimicry is a well documented natural phenomena but not as a working factor in the evolutionary dialogue.

Bertrand Russell, in a work called, "What is Philosophy For?" writes that philosophy, historically, often precedes science, that it asks questions and speculates about answers that science is not yet equipped to deal with, that science may NEVER be equipped to answer. Many such questions exist, not only in the religious and spiritual realms. The so-called "soft sciences" produce many questions to which science can't give definitive answers but nonetheless needs to hear them argued in a disciplined way.

The last time I saw Robert Creeley, at a dinner a year before he died, I mentioned all the forms and examples of various intelligences in nature I had been collecting (among them whales, chimps, apes, Bonobos, Dolphins, Elephants and Parrots). I said it appeared to me that nature has already created and could create any number of new intelligences, equal to or better in some ways than ours, and do it over & over again. He looked at me seriously and said, "It would be a shame if ours was the only form of intelligence, seeing what a mess we’ve made of things."

We can’t squander our habitat for the momentary payoffs of willful stupidity and then turn around and say we’re smart enough to characterize evolution as an either/or proposition of being divinely inspired or randomly arrived at, or just a bad idea. We can say the human foot is unnecessarily fragile or stupid, but it saves 70% of the energy an ape uses in walking.

The ankle and the arch of the foot:

Strength out of weakness. Intelligence out of stupidity

May it ever be thus. Why is the natural world so fragile? Maybe there are some things we can only learn by dying.
























I know you think I’m awful but I did the best I could. I know anybody can say that, but I also know how hard I tried, how tired I was coming home at night, how insane, depressing and hopeful at the same time, the situation always was. I wish I could have been kinder, smarter, stronger, have known then what I know now, but that’s all too easy to say. I thought I could remain outside the insanity and direct it toward a good end. That was my worst mistake, assuming we wouldn’t all be driven crazy. How could I have been so stupid? The seeds of our destruction were always so obvious from the beginning…..

that May afternoon with false promises of rain in the air when you gave me a ride in your VW bus to a little motel café beside the highway. The new managers for the arts center, The Reverend Brown and his daughter Kathy were going to treat us to lunch and also feed us some other stuff. They were going to tell us in more ways than we could hear, how our lives were about to change.

“We’re going to hit this project,” Kathy said, smashing her little fist into her other hand, “and hit it hard.”

That’s funny, now I need to hit a lot of things and people real hard, this great energy sucking black hole we call air conditioning and refrigeration, this blind banal horror we call art anymore, this stupid government, the energy problem….but fuck that, all I can do is try to make a living. .

Paul had argued with Roger that putting the Browns in charge would be the death of The International Arts Center, but Roger was desperate. He owed his wife too much money. Too many of her paychecks from her social work in foreign countries had been snatched up by Larry while she was out of the country and gone into the account for the LLC that owned the building.

“She will have my guts.” He said.

So many things could have been different. I might have been stronger and better able to deal with my attraction to June, might not have been seated next to her wondering what the hell I was doing. Dear June, I wrote, I appreciate your honesty…..and it went on from there, an attempt at earnestness that tried so hard it ignored desire as a motive. I can’t read the whole letter now it’s too embarrassing. You can’t try to do good this way.

Then Reverend Brown came in, moving slowly like a large ship coming into harbor with the assistance of invisible tugboats, a tall, pear shaped man in a brown suit, his lips pursed as if he was about to speak. He sat beside Kathy, took his napkin and stuffed it in his collar like a bib, and started eating. He ate a steak as big as his plate, potatoes and gravy, pie and then he stopped, put his napkin away and started talking.

“I started working when I was thirteen years old and I haven’t stopped since. I became a contractor. I treat all my employees right. I tell them you show me a way to make more money for the company, I’ll pay you more. I’m a minister. You can call me Reverend G
Brown. I do feel at my age I’m owed some kind of respect. I’m not going to censor anybody but if I found a crucifix in a jar of urine and accidentally tipped it over I wouldn’t bother to pick it up. (Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” his effort to bring Christ down from the all powerful position radio preachers had put him, to the level of a living breathing human being with body fluids and problems, because if he was never there, where’s the relevance?) My daughter here, Kathy, will be in charge. She’s run all my businesses. You see I didn’t have a son.”

I bit into a tomato a little too hard and it squirted seeds and pulp all over June’s bare brown shoulder. I felt sick. Rev. Brown got up abruptly and left.





hot sun beating down on scattered appliances, buildings stark white with nothing around them, lucky there’s any shelter at all much less and overhang, a porch or trees or shade. Nothing grows here except the big white boxes you gotta have more of. Victor’s aging, harried, has kidney stones, candida, worn out & getting fat from chasing the yankee dollar, people from Mexico come by wanting to buy anything, huge trailers with appliances hanging over the top and rear edge like fat on their bellies, their faces brown parchment full of lumps and wrinkles, walking carefree in the certainty of total corruption and doom without redemption, no more disappointments now that everything is totally fucked. How they get to the border much less into the interior, nobody knows.

Victor says,

“I need to ask your forgiveness.” It’s the third or fourth damn time he’s broken his promise to deliver the stackable washer dryer to the apartment I manage. I’m not surprised, he’s so not in control he can’t even promise himself anything. Always another big deal, the dreams put off to another day, shit piles up, can’t sort it, can’t get rid of it, the blistering hot legacy of appliance white in the sun and oil washed dirt. The hell of words not kept, things not seen beyond the guts of the machine.

“Bless you my son,” I say making the cross & shaking the imaginary holy-water wand, “go and sin no more.”


A tall pot bellied Mexican man struts around in his ironed, creased jeans, pointy toed high heeled cowboy boots, Stetson straw with the perfect crown, sunglasses, stone washed denim shirt. Wish I had a nickle for every hour I’ve spent waiting for some deal to go down in Spanish.

Bright phosphorescent nylon tie downs splitting face in two. Neil Young on the radio singing Broken Arrow and then Hoagey Carmichael with Old Buttermilk Sky.

“Because of you,” I say, “I cleaned out the bed of my truck.”

“O you making me feel GUILTEEEEE.” He whined.

“What guilt?” I said, “without you I NEVER would have a clean bed to haul stuff in.”

Victor told me the first time he didn’t show, “Just tell them Victor’s no good.” He said, then it’s all my fault.

“O he’s thinking about ME!” I said sarcastically, “such a nice guy!” He laughed like a kid caught in a silly lie. One of his many helpers rolls out the washer dryer, which is what I’m trading for the units that broke down after I sold them to a customer and had to take them back.

“We have a good relationship.” Victor says, “Sometimes I take advantage, sometimes you…..”

“Sounds like SOMEBODY’S getting fucked.” I say. He and his friends laugh. We load it up.

Everytime my hernia hurts just a little I get this image back in my mind of Native women who are given captives to torture at the stake by the warriors. The women slit open the captives’ stomachs and scatter their guts on the ground and then release them and let them try to pick them up. Why? What am I scared of? I ask myself. That surgeons have those same motives? Or is it a metaphor for love, having your guts turned inside out and seeing every ugly part of you in broad daylight. Is there that drive in women to poke and prod into every nook and cranny of a man until she has a death grip on every tender and needy part of him, after, of course, rendering him helpless and almost dead with too much sweetness? A friend used to tell me when I’d start talking about black widows eating their mates:

“It’s very dangerous and irresponsible to give scientific facts like that to anyone with your imagination.” And laughed.

As I head over the railroad bridge with my new load, a freight train pulls out as if out of me, at an angle from beneath me heading toward the vast beautiful wasteland between here and El Paso. I can smell the Chaparral, feel the hot dry wind and the sandy dirt out there. I need to just go, out into that sky but I’ve got work to do.

“Got a strong back.” My tenant’s “guest” (of two weeks now) says.














WAITING FOR THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY

WIKIPEDIA: The "Hundredth Monkey Effect" is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number was reached. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lyall Watson, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. Such an observation did not exist (e.g. Myers 1985, Amundsen 1985, 1991).




Parked in the dirt beside highway drive, lightning causes the radio to continuously change stations, and cold drops of the coming rain hit my skin. Beyond the squalor of junk cars and scattered little service businesses the sky is getting grayer and darker over the tiny hills that are the only relief from the flat desert landscape on the way to Phoenix. A bay opens up in the garage across the street and I drive the van/ambulance in to have the toe-in adjusted. It’s a huge garage with 24 ft ceilings, 4 bays, a parts shop, a dynamometer/engine rebuild space, and a large office where Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of inventions are animated on the computer space savers. It’s all dark and dirty inside. Like 80% of garages its main purpose is to subsidize the owner’s racing habit. Don Hall sent me here to his brother’s alignment shop, from Just For Fun Auto Repair, a title whose irony could not be any deeper. Don works from seven to seven, his knees and feet are blown out, he’s fat, balding, worried and tired all the time, but it pays for his race cars. He’s cheap & brilliant & compassionate & Mormon. There’s a framed credo in his greasy office defending the sanctity of marriage against enemies that in my opinion are about as real as Elmer Fudd’s shotgun or the dwatted wabbit he can never hit.

Everybody else has got religion it seems, what about me? What can I believe? I sent my friend an email copy of my essay for NPR’s This I Believe. It begins, “I believe in the intelligence of nature”. She wrote back,

“What difference does it make if nature is intelligent, if we die and cockroaches take over? Belief is baloney.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s GOOD baloney.” My brother’s belief takes him down to the county jail to rob people’s souls to save them, and the pisser is, it works. You really can substitute intellectual dope for cocaine, because, I think, they’re the same thing. People who think they’re being given marijuana actually get high. Dr. Weil says the placebo effect is as good or better than the best meds. Martin Luther King turned an ancient anthology full of myths, fables, gossip, historical inaccuracies and inherent contradictions into an instrument for guiding acts of courage and compassion. Al Quaeda turned the Quran into a weapon of murder/suicide and the ultimate intellectual cowardice of black and white, good and evil. Go figure. I wish I could stop because it’s a constant mental irritation.

My essay says I feel a common sympathy running thru all nature. Species and their immediate environments are engaged in a dance/dialogue based on proprioception and mimicry. In all the moments of the world, and all the sad stories the punch line is they ARE stories, and nature is capable of developing any number of intelligences besides ours, and greater than ours, and we can plug into that potential if we want, if we make up our minds to work with instead of against whatever portion of nature we are given to cultivate.

But nothing pisses people off more than being offered the wrong kind of salvation. Guess it’s kind of a sore subject.

I too am tired of grumpy old men with stringy white beards mistaking their irritability for inspiration, their prejudices & crochets for the word of god. How do you believe in anything after seeing these abuses of belief? But even belief in nothing is a belief. Only the completely catatonic and suicidally depressed have lost all faith But every time I think I’m getting somewhere I’m surrounded by conundrums.

In principle I believe we and all our technological traps are part of nature, and working on community and communication is a better strategy for survival than survivalism, but why is human governance so self destructive? And why would an intelligent nature create it that way?

But I feel a sympathy that runs thru all nature & I would be more joyful. The facts, themselves, have become liminal to me….like…the way we respond to other people in emergencies, the way children and animals and even plants respond to us, the way subatomic particles can affect each other across thousands of miles. Yeah, religion knows less than it says, but there’s more to this than you’re telling me in science class. Species evolve to fit niches like the key understood exactly what the lock was like, and was in love with it and imitating it and playing it and the whole scene beforehand. Why not just believe in the sympathy itself as the connective tissue of the universe? Or if the brains we think with are just atoms & molecules from the big bang become self reflexive, doesn’t whatever happens HAVE to be OK? Except for this little ego problem death always posits. We’ll work that out in no time.

Both these brothers who are working on my vehicles take better care of their customers than any other mechanics I know, and the customers thank them profusely, shake their hands and pat them on the back. That dividend is something we can’t measure. It may be all that’s keeping us alive.

But at the moment, I’ve lost all faith in everything because it’s getting darker and colder and windier outside and the rain is now roaring on the sheet metal roof like the end of the world and blowing in, in sporadic sheets. One of the five mechanics there walks over and puts a red blanket over the Snap On tool cabinet by the roll up door. As a joke somebody has pasted a sticker beside the Snap On logo showing a woman wearing a dildo that says “Strap On Tools”. Another mechanic comes in drenched and laughing rapidly like a machine gun. The others, usually as solemn as coronors, talk excitedly about the rain. A greasy German Shepherd with broken feet from walking on concrete all his life, comes over to me where I’m hunkered against a pillar where I can watch the alignment procedure. He sticks his head under my hand. His eyelids have opened wider and wider over the years and he has black tear runnels running down his jaw. It’s almost comforting to pet him, but I have a hernia that hurts with a dull ache that matches the drab surroundings, and I’m scared---of dying, or of living but not ever really being alive.

I left the roof hatch to my camper open and left a manuscript under it. I figure I’ll get home and find that and all my bedcovers soaked. Not much to worry about unless you have a long string of bad sense memories and associated disasters for other times when it rained, and not unless almost everything you have is at risk to one natural disaster or another. Outside of that, no worries. Cold, stinging sheets of rain are blowing over on me thirty five feet from the bay door now, and I get up to seek shelter. The garage space has darkened but the pin up girl on the calendar on the tool box by the door is somehow lit up like a projection and is flapping in the wind like an intentionally clumsy South Park animation. I believe this is hell.

After driving the van, which still pulls to the right because it needs new tires, just a few blocks from the garage, the rain stops, the ground dries out and the summer heat starts to come back. It was just a microburst. My mood flips and my belief in life improves dramatically.. Weather here in Southern Arizona is sudden and violent and people, likewise, switch from hot to cold and wet to dry without notice.

I call my artist friend, just back from England, to catch up on the news, and the latest in our mutual struggle against old age,

“I have to go get a goddam hernia belt.” I say.
“Well, don’t go to the doctor.” He says, sarcastically. I say I bought this ambulance on Ebay to use when my Isuzu NPR utility bed truck breaks down.
“Why?” he asked.
“O I thought I might need to drive myself to the hospital some time. And so I can have a second truck so I can keep working the business when the Isuzu needs work.”
“Of course you couldn’t just rent something.” He says.
“No”, I’m like that guy in Faulkner’s story who can’t stop buying horses.”

Yeah, right, you be Frank and I’ll be Stupid, I think, if we’re that hard up for entertainment, but there’s more to it than that, and it’s integral to another joke, which is the way all of us are forced to live these days. Which is so crazy we can’t talk about it because we don’t have time.

I don’t know of anyplace I can rent a truck with parts bins, cabinets, freon bottle and ladder racks, and it couldn’t be cheap if it existed. And working without those organizational amenities is the misery of always turning a pile of crap over to get what you want from the bottom. It will take a week to get the Isuzu alternator rebuilt and two weeks to get back a remanufactured brake booster after I send my core in. Or it will cost a thousand dollars just to get those two parts from the factory. But if I can put the truck down awhile, I’ve already bought the parts to get it converted to run on waste vegetable oil from the restaurants I service. Meanwhile I work on the Van to get it set up so it’s not hauling a pile of chaos theory. And he’d say, “And that’s cheaper than just buying something already set up that way?” It is cheaper, by at least five thousand dollars, but whether it’s me or somebody else, and however they choose to do it, this is a miniscule part of the absurdity of the technological dance that puts food on the table. Anybody who thinks they’re outside that joke, snickering and looking down on the rest of us, is sadly mistaken. The joke gets especially rich when you take your friends and business acquaintances out to eat.

I need a week to work on modifying the existing compartments and making new ones. Meanwhile, even though I’m in business for myself (with a tyrant for a boss) I’m working for Ford, Isuzu, Dupont, Monsanto, BP, and god knows what corporations exploiting the politics and agriculture of god knows what third world country. And that’s better than just being a writer and artist? No, it’s hell, but it’s the way I’m set up, and it’s the way a lot of us are set up. We don’t all get patrons and grants, and all good work doesn’t get recognized or accepted. That was my job in the first place, to understand when good work was coming out of me and to value and save it. But it just wasn’t as obvious then, as it is now, how stupid people are, how everybody, including editors whose judgment I once trusted, is in the system that’s heading for the wall at 500 miles per hour He’s right, and I’m right. I really do need a new “vehicle”.

If even that would help. Why can’t we, why can’t I, think more clearly? Why would an intelligent nature create us with foggy brains and a language center blind as a bat to motive? But stupid as we are, dogs and cats still at least pretend to love us and birds can talk and apes can sign and gangs of dolphins can plan stunts together in five seconds that Congress and the Bolshoi Ballet couldn’t get done in five years.

It’s sunset. I’ve been working all day on a problem on the condensing unit for the walk-in at Yuki’s Sushi, a problem I can’t solve, so I can’t charge for it. I could charge for it if I was a doctor, but a serviceman can only charge for results. As I’m taking down my ladder. Mr. Kim, a Korean who rents this Japanese Sushi Restaurant, comes up. He says he hates his walk-in cooler. I say I hate it too. Every time I try to take a shower he calls up and the walk-in has another problem. I give him a printed estimate and offer him a list of other companies who might be able to put in a new coil cheaper than I can. I hold out the paper. I say these guys can beat my estimates sometimes because they get stuff in volume. He brushes the list aside. He says, no, you’re the man. Everything you touch here, you fixed, fix this. I don’t feel competent. The system makes some messes nobody can fix. I’m surprised he doesn’t want to farm the job out. Guess he’d rather bitch, and argue and jack me around.

I leave, and a day later he calls again, I reset the high side cutout. He’s scared and exasperated. It’s illogical I say. I’ve talked to other refrigeration people about it. They don’t know what to do either. I install several new controls and ports so I can more accurately read the pressures that are actually going to the controls and discover a drier is clogging up with crap from a previous compressor job. So it’s not my fault, but I spent more hours on this than I can charge. He will still need thirteen hundred dollars worth of work installing a new coil. He doesn’t know why this is taking so long and there’s no way to explain it even if there were no language barrier. His ignorance is his defense. Even if it wasn’t, there’s a limit to what he can afford. And there’s a limit to what I can do without compensation. We’re both locked into the industrial food chain. We both, and don’t we all, stand harried by contradictions on common ground that’s sinking.

The farmer’s against the wall, the seed companies are against the quarterly earnings report to the shareholders, the scientists have to develop where the money goes, the seeds they develop require fertilizer and pesticide, topsoil is being lost by inches every year from irrigation runoff, produce has to be refrigerated, injected with gas and trucked, the food has fewer nutrients and more residual poison so we need more of it and also need supplements. Freon creates a bigger ozone hole, CO2 from suns of centuries past raises the temperature, people turn on more Air conditioning which pumps out more CO2, creating its own feedback loop. All the feedback loops combined, according to some scientists, support and exacerbate each other to the point of irreversibility. And speaking of feedback loops what happened to communication feedback?

I get no answers from Congress or from NPR Science Friday and a lot of other media outlets. Why aren’t they even mentioning either the most dire data and predictions, or the latest technological developments? I don’t care what your conclusion is, I want to know why the debate itself is so ill informed and unstructured. Al Gore was writing a heavy book on the problem before he ran (and knew he won) in ’00, but he gets hammered ad hominem by jealous talk show hosts and even far left outlets like Adbusters. Using that thousand year old strategy of manipulating the poor to take their misery out on each other instead of the rich they say, Look at his lifestyle. He’s just trying to take away your SUVs. Petty jealousy wins, Global Warming is a myth and there’s nothing to worry about. Such nice bars of soap they give us as they lead us to the showers. But I’m screaming into the speaker of my radio again.

In 1990 I covered myself with newspapers about the first gulf war and set them on fire at the Federal Building. “Why?” The firemen asked and I said, “The hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter.” They laughed at me. Maybe I should try stand up. I’ve worked with ice and ice machines and closed circuit refrigeration systems enough that I look at the ice caps and say to myself, once the inertia of the thermal mass is in motion, they only seem to be half gone. They ‘re freakin gone. . Sometimes I allow myself to hope and dream that the hundredth monkey wakes up and solutions are invented and a mass mobilization occurs like in WW II where everybody works on the problem because everybody realizes Jimmy Carter was right in the 80s when he said “Energy conservation is the moral equivalent of war”. And the quarterly earnings report will be naked in its temporary perspective.

But I might as well face facts. Right now, in more ways than I can count, we’re all empty and starving because we have nothing left to eat except fear itself.

I stop at a park and sling a hammock from the rack of the truck. I have to go in to Sushi Garden and clean their condensers from 10:30 P.M to 2 A.M. so I need some sleep. Sushi used to seem so natural and exotic before I started making my own. And until I started seeing how hard it is to keep a restaurant clean, what the stuff we use to clean ice machines & kill slime mold does to the taste of the water, the food that accumulates under the counters, the gas that vegetables produce in refrigerated spaces that eats copper and aluminum & changes the taste of the food. And then there’s the monetary and physical cost of producing and shipping and trucking exotic ingredients thousands of miles. I think my sushi is as good or better than a lot of the dishes you get in restaurants, but I offered Mr. Kim some and he just laughed at me. I guess I’m still doing stand-up. Thanks, you’ve been a great audience tonight, and I really mean that, really.

When I come in, Chun the owner, is just leaving, and Greg, the in-house carpenter is taking over, putting wainscoting on the hall to the restroom. We work without talking for an hour or so, then we talk tools, how you buy one and then need another one, how cheap you can get them from China if you don’t count the cost of doing a lot of product testing for free, and we talk vehicles, what it takes to have adequate transportation whether you buy another one for backup or not. And we look at the food on the floor and the grease in the condensers and we laugh at how insane the whole game has to be. Then we give up trying to make sense of anything and go back to work.

I woke up this morning staring at a mesquite branch just outside the roof hatch of my camper, brown branches, green leaves, yellow crested birds and yellow pollen clusters in the slant rays of the rising sun, infinite gradations of color, shadow and form…

tree lightning bolt, river bed, tree branch, spiderweb, broken glass, cracked mud, lines in a face, bird, fish, dog, on & on, branchings, symmetries, pattern after pattern after…. random?

and now, driving home at 2:30 A.M., the absence of people is very powerful and mysterious. After all the lies, there aren’t many common terms left except to do the best job you can, charge a fair price for your work and just be here with other people, but sometimes I like people a whole lot better when they’re gone. Watching their faces in traffic during the day, they didn’t seem to be all that happy, anyhow. At least the potential that produced them, which feels like an intelligence to me, is definitely here, now, everywhere. Out of this emptiness I think most of our creativity, possibly all of creation came screaming

“Well, here goes nothing!”

And I’m OK with just driving into that darkness, sorry if it doesn’t work for you. It’s especially comforting this last hour before giving up on the adventure of consciousness---permanently---for all we know at the moment of letting go.















WAITING FOR THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY

WIKIPEDIA: The "Hundredth Monkey Effect" is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number was reached. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lyall Watson, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. Such an observation did not exist (e.g. Myers 1985, Amundsen 1985, 1991).




Parked in the dirt beside highway drive, lightning causes the radio to continuously change stations, and cold drops of the coming rain hit my skin. Beyond the squalor of junk cars and scattered little service businesses the sky is getting grayer and darker over the tiny hills that are the only relief from the flat desert landscape on the way to Phoenix. A bay opens up in the garage across the street and I drive the van/ambulance in to have the toe-in adjusted. It’s a huge garage with 24 ft ceilings, 4 bays, a parts shop, a dynamometer/engine rebuild space, and a large office where Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of inventions are animated on the computer space savers. It’s all dark and dirty inside. Like 80% of garages its main purpose is to subsidize the owner’s racing habit. Don Hall sent me here to his brother’s alignment shop, from Just For Fun Auto Repair, a title whose irony could not be any deeper. Don works from seven to seven, his knees and feet are blown out, he’s fat, balding, worried and tired all the time, but it pays for his race cars. He’s cheap & brilliant & compassionate & Mormon. There’s a framed credo in his greasy office defending the sanctity of marriage against enemies that in my opinion are about as real as Elmer Fudd’s shotgun or the dwatted wabbit he can never hit.

Everybody else has got religion it seems, what about me? What can I believe? I sent my friend an email copy of my essay for NPR’s This I Believe. It begins, “I believe in the intelligence of nature”. She wrote back,

“What difference does it make if nature is intelligent, if we die and cockroaches take over? Belief is baloney.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s GOOD baloney.” My brother’s belief takes him down to the county jail to rob people’s souls to save them, and the pisser is, it works. You really can substitute intellectual dope for cocaine, because, I think, they’re the same thing. People who think they’re being given marijuana actually get high. Dr. Weil says the placebo effect is as good or better than the best meds. Martin Luther King turned an ancient anthology full of myths, fables, gossip, historical inaccuracies and inherent contradictions into an instrument for guiding acts of courage and compassion. Al Quaeda turned the Quran into a weapon of murder/suicide and the ultimate intellectual cowardice of black and white, good and evil. Go figure. I wish I could stop because it’s a constant mental irritation.

My essay says I feel a common sympathy running thru all nature. Species and their immediate environments are engaged in a dance/dialogue based on proprioception and mimicry. In all the moments of the world, and all the sad stories the punch line is they ARE stories, and nature is capable of developing any number of intelligences besides ours, and greater than ours, and we can plug into that potential if we want, if we make up our minds to work with instead of against whatever portion of nature we are given to cultivate.

But nothing pisses people off more than being offered the wrong kind of salvation. Guess it’s kind of a sore subject.

I too am tired of grumpy old men with stringy white beards mistaking their irritability for inspiration, their prejudices & crochets for the word of god. How do you believe in anything after seeing these abuses of belief? But even belief in nothing is a belief. Only the completely catatonic and suicidally depressed have lost all faith But every time I think I’m getting somewhere I’m surrounded by conundrums.

In principle I believe we and all our technological traps are part of nature, and working on community and communication is a better strategy for survival than survivalism, but why is human governance so self destructive? And why would an intelligent nature create it that way?

But I feel a sympathy that runs thru all nature & I would be more joyful. The facts, themselves, have become liminal to me….like…the way we respond to other people in emergencies, the way children and animals and even plants respond to us, the way subatomic particles can affect each other across thousands of miles. Yeah, religion knows less than it says, but there’s more to this than you’re telling me in science class. Species evolve to fit niches like the key understood exactly what the lock was like, and was in love with it and imitating it and playing it and the whole scene beforehand. Why not just believe in the sympathy itself as the connective tissue of the universe? Or if the brains we think with are just atoms & molecules from the big bang become self reflexive, doesn’t whatever happens HAVE to be OK? Except for this little ego problem death always posits. We’ll work that out in no time.

Both these brothers who are working on my vehicles take better care of their customers than any other mechanics I know, and the customers thank them profusely, shake their hands and pat them on the back. That dividend is something we can’t measure. It may be all that’s keeping us alive.

But at the moment, I’ve lost all faith in everything because it’s getting darker and colder and windier outside and the rain is now roaring on the sheet metal roof like the end of the world and blowing in, in sporadic sheets. One of the five mechanics there walks over and puts a red blanket over the Snap On tool cabinet by the roll up door. As a joke somebody has pasted a sticker beside the Snap On logo showing a woman wearing a dildo that says “Strap On Tools”. Another mechanic comes in drenched and laughing rapidly like a machine gun. The others, usually as solemn as coronors, talk excitedly about the rain. A greasy German Shepherd with broken feet from walking on concrete all his life, comes over to me where I’m hunkered against a pillar where I can watch the alignment procedure. He sticks his head under my hand. His eyelids have opened wider and wider over the years and he has black tear runnels running down his jaw. It’s almost comforting to pet him, but I have a hernia that hurts with a dull ache that matches the drab surroundings, and I’m scared---of dying, or of living but not ever really being alive.

I left the roof hatch to my camper open and left a manuscript under it. I figure I’ll get home and find that and all my bedcovers soaked. Not much to worry about unless you have a long string of bad sense memories and associated disasters for other times when it rained, and not unless almost everything you have is at risk to one natural disaster or another. Outside of that, no worries. Cold, stinging sheets of rain are blowing over on me thirty five feet from the bay door now, and I get up to seek shelter. The garage space has darkened but the pin up girl on the calendar on the tool box by the door is somehow lit up like a projection and is flapping in the wind like an intentionally clumsy South Park animation. I believe this is hell.

After driving the van, which still pulls to the right because it needs new tires, just a few blocks from the garage, the rain stops, the ground dries out and the summer heat starts to come back. It was just a microburst. My mood flips and my belief in life improves dramatically.. Weather here in Southern Arizona is sudden and violent and people, likewise, switch from hot to cold and wet to dry without notice.

I call my artist friend, just back from England, to catch up on the news, and the latest in our mutual struggle against old age,

“I have to go get a goddam hernia belt.” I say.
“Well, don’t go to the doctor.” He says, sarcastically. I say I bought this ambulance on Ebay to use when my Isuzu NPR utility bed truck breaks down.
“Why?” he asked.
“O I thought I might need to drive myself to the hospital some time. And so I can have a second truck so I can keep working the business when the Isuzu needs work.”
“Of course you couldn’t just rent something.” He says.
“No”, I’m like that guy in Faulkner’s story who can’t stop buying horses.”

Yeah, right, you be Frank and I’ll be Stupid, I think, if we’re that hard up for entertainment, but there’s more to it than that, and it’s integral to another joke, which is the way all of us are forced to live these days. Which is so crazy we can’t talk about it because we don’t have time.

I don’t know of anyplace I can rent a truck with parts bins, cabinets, freon bottle and ladder racks, and it couldn’t be cheap if it existed. And working without those organizational amenities is the misery of always turning a pile of crap over to get what you want from the bottom. It will take a week to get the Isuzu alternator rebuilt and two weeks to get back a remanufactured brake booster after I send my core in. Or it will cost a thousand dollars just to get those two parts from the factory. But if I can put the truck down awhile, I’ve already bought the parts to get it converted to run on waste vegetable oil from the restaurants I service. Meanwhile I work on the Van to get it set up so it’s not hauling a pile of chaos theory. And he’d say, “And that’s cheaper than just buying something already set up that way?” It is cheaper, by at least five thousand dollars, but whether it’s me or somebody else, and however they choose to do it, this is a miniscule part of the absurdity of the technological dance that puts food on the table. Anybody who thinks they’re outside that joke, snickering and looking down on the rest of us, is sadly mistaken. The joke gets especially rich when you take your friends and business acquaintances out to eat.

I need a week to work on modifying the existing compartments and making new ones. Meanwhile, even though I’m in business for myself (with a tyrant for a boss) I’m working for Ford, Isuzu, Dupont, Monsanto, BP, and god knows what corporations exploiting the politics and agriculture of god knows what third world country. And that’s better than just being a writer and artist? No, it’s hell, but it’s the way I’m set up, and it’s the way a lot of us are set up. We don’t all get patrons and grants, and all good work doesn’t get recognized or accepted. That was my job in the first place, to understand when good work was coming out of me and to value and save it. But it just wasn’t as obvious then, as it is now, how stupid people are, how everybody, including editors whose judgment I once trusted, is in the system that’s heading for the wall at 500 miles per hour He’s right, and I’m right. I really do need a new “vehicle”.

If even that would help. Why can’t we, why can’t I, think more clearly? Why would an intelligent nature create us with foggy brains and a language center blind as a bat to motive? But stupid as we are, dogs and cats still at least pretend to love us and birds can talk and apes can sign and gangs of dolphins can plan stunts together in five seconds that Congress and the Bolshoi Ballet couldn’t get done in five years.

It’s sunset. I’ve been working all day on a problem on the condensing unit for the walk-in at Yuki’s Sushi, a problem I can’t solve, so I can’t charge for it. I could charge for it if I was a doctor, but a serviceman can only charge for results. As I’m taking down my ladder. Mr. Kim, a Korean who rents this Japanese Sushi Restaurant, comes up. He says he hates his walk-in cooler. I say I hate it too. Every time I try to take a shower he calls up and the walk-in has another problem. I give him a printed estimate and offer him a list of other companies who might be able to put in a new coil cheaper than I can. I hold out the paper. I say these guys can beat my estimates sometimes because they get stuff in volume. He brushes the list aside. He says, no, you’re the man. Everything you touch here, you fixed, fix this. I don’t feel competent. The system makes some messes nobody can fix. I’m surprised he doesn’t want to farm the job out. Guess he’d rather bitch, and argue and jack me around.

I leave, and a day later he calls again, I reset the high side cutout. He’s scared and exasperated. It’s illogical I say. I’ve talked to other refrigeration people about it. They don’t know what to do either. I install several new controls and ports so I can more accurately read the pressures that are actually going to the controls and discover a drier is clogging up with crap from a previous compressor job. So it’s not my fault, but I spent more hours on this than I can charge. He will still need thirteen hundred dollars worth of work installing a new coil. He doesn’t know why this is taking so long and there’s no way to explain it even if there were no language barrier. His ignorance is his defense. Even if it wasn’t, there’s a limit to what he can afford. And there’s a limit to what I can do without compensation. We’re both locked into the industrial food chain. We both, and don’t we all, stand harried by contradictions on common ground that’s sinking.

The farmer’s against the wall, the seed companies are against the quarterly earnings report to the shareholders, the scientists have to develop where the money goes, the seeds they develop require fertilizer and pesticide, topsoil is being lost by inches every year from irrigation runoff, produce has to be refrigerated, injected with gas and trucked, the food has fewer nutrients and more residual poison so we need more of it and also need supplements. Freon creates a bigger ozone hole, CO2 from suns of centuries past raises the temperature, people turn on more Air conditioning which pumps out more CO2, creating its own feedback loop. All the feedback loops combined, according to some scientists, support and exacerbate each other to the point of irreversibility. And speaking of feedback loops what happened to communication feedback?

I get no answers from Congress or from NPR Science Friday and a lot of other media outlets. Why aren’t they even mentioning either the most dire data and predictions, or the latest technological developments? I don’t care what your conclusion is, I want to know why the debate itself is so ill informed and unstructured. Al Gore was writing a heavy book on the problem before he ran (and knew he won) in ’00, but he gets hammered ad hominem by jealous talk show hosts and even far left outlets like Adbusters. Using that thousand year old strategy of manipulating the poor to take their misery out on each other instead of the rich they say, Look at his lifestyle. He’s just trying to take away your SUVs. Petty jealousy wins, Global Warming is a myth and there’s nothing to worry about. Such nice bars of soap they give us as they lead us to the showers. But I’m screaming into the speaker of my radio again.

In 1990 I covered myself with newspapers about the first gulf war and set them on fire at the Federal Building. “Why?” The firemen asked and I said, “The hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter.” They laughed at me. Maybe I should try stand up. I’ve worked with ice and ice machines and closed circuit refrigeration systems enough that I look at the ice caps and say to myself, once the inertia of the thermal mass is in motion, they only seem to be half gone. They ‘re freakin gone. . Sometimes I allow myself to hope and dream that the hundredth monkey wakes up and solutions are invented and a mass mobilization occurs like in WW II where everybody works on the problem because everybody realizes Jimmy Carter was right in the 80s when he said “Energy conservation is the moral equivalent of war”. And the quarterly earnings report will be naked in its temporary perspective.

But I might as well face facts. Right now, in more ways than I can count, we’re all empty and starving because we have nothing left to eat except fear itself.

I stop at a park and sling a hammock from the rack of the truck. I have to go in to Sushi Garden and clean their condensers from 10:30 P.M to 2 A.M. so I need some sleep. Sushi used to seem so natural and exotic before I started making my own. And until I started seeing how hard it is to keep a restaurant clean, what the stuff we use to clean ice machines & kill slime mold does to the taste of the water, the food that accumulates under the counters, the gas that vegetables produce in refrigerated spaces that eats copper and aluminum & changes the taste of the food. And then there’s the monetary and physical cost of producing and shipping and trucking exotic ingredients thousands of miles. I think my sushi is as good or better than a lot of the dishes you get in restaurants, but I offered Mr. Kim some and he just laughed at me. I guess I’m still doing stand-up. Thanks, you’ve been a great audience tonight, and I really mean that, really.

When I come in, Chun the owner, is just leaving, and Greg, the in-house carpenter is taking over, putting wainscoting on the hall to the restroom. We work without talking for an hour or so, then we talk tools, how you buy one and then need another one, how cheap you can get them from China if you don’t count the cost of doing a lot of product testing for free, and we talk vehicles, what it takes to have adequate transportation whether you buy another one for backup or not. And we look at the food on the floor and the grease in the condensers and we laugh at how insane the whole game has to be. Then we give up trying to make sense of anything and go back to work.

driving home at 2:30 A.M., the absence of people is very powerful and mysterious. After all the lies, there aren’t many common terms left except to do the best job you can, charge a fair price for your work and just be here with other people, but sometimes I like people a whole lot better when they’re gone. Watching their faces in traffic during the day, they didn’t seem to be all that happy, anyhow. At least the potential that produced them, which feels like an intelligence to me, is definitely here, now, everywhere. Out of this emptiness I think most of our creativity, possibly all of creation came screaming

“Well, here goes nothing!”

And I’m OK with just driving into that darkness, sorry if it doesn’t work for you. It’s especially comforting this last hour before giving up on the adventure of consciousness---permanently---for all we know at the moment of letting go.