The Nevada Single-Leaf Pinion Pine Nut as Plot

They are right there... those are those dark spots on the hills

The Nevada single-leaf pinion pine (pinus monophylla) produces a nut. If you’ve ever made pesto you will recall that most recipes call for the use of pine nuts. If you’ve ever gone to a grocery store to buy pine nuts you soon discover that they are expensive. Retail they sell for near thirty dollars a pound.

Pinion and juniper grow together. The trees back in the ‘50’s were considered a nuisance. They removed them by hooking a stout anchor chain between two dozers and then our barbaric forefathers cleared the land. The land was now more suited to grazing cattle. Ranchers somehow overlooked the fact that beef earned them peanuts compared to what a crop of pinion nuts could bring.

Now the Nevada single-leaf pinion nut is not just some run of the mill pine nut. It is in the opinion of those who are supposed to know regarded to be one of nature’s most delicious prizes. Nevada pinion nuts are nature’s highest achievement.

If those old cowboys are anything like me they probably sat on their saddles looking out over their herd watching the sunset and the whole time they didn’t realize that they were looking right at the biggest cash crop growing in the Great Basin of the American west.

Biologists put pencil to paper and the value of the pine nuts in Nevada are an estimated 100 million dollars per year. That’s not a gold mine that’s a renewable resource. The eye popping economic value of this crop is a revelation. Add the ecological, spiritual and cultural significance of this prized nut and the wealth of this harvest boggles the human mind.

Before we knew what the heck we had we’d already removed as much as 90% of the original old growth pinion forests. Some folk are thinking might be another kind of nut if we don’t get our heads on straight and put new trees back in where the old ones once grew.

What’s this have to do with the price of tea in China? Exactly what I thought you’d be thinking too. What it means is that there exists a spectacular means to help the people right in Nevada to become self sufficient, care for the land, provide a valuable product to the world, and earn a wage that can help support a worker, a family, a community, a state and ultimately the whole nation.

We built the Bonneville Dam and it is as if nobody gave it a second thought as to what might happen to the salmon. Until taxol was discovered to be of use fighting cancer the Pacific Yew tree was a garbage tree of minimal value and of limited practical uses.

My next novel is set in Nevada. It is a comedy. I’m learning about pine nuts. I’m finding out about geothermal water heated greenhouses, Basque sheepherding, turquoise mining and land speed world records. I’m busy trying to make things up (plotting the novel) and it turns out truth as always is stranger than fiction.

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The End of Innocence

Hot Spring Heaven or Work Place Hell....

Once I was innocent. I could be persuaded. I believed. I didn’t particularly go for conspiracy theories. I was more of a patriot than that.

I don’t know exactly when I started to feel as if the free press wasn’t so free. I’m rather dumbfounded that some billionaire is bankrolling some candidate and is soon to decide on his own whether or not to totally fund the candidates advertising campaign. He’s already kicked in about 10 million. This is a second 10 for Super Tuesday.

One big shot with big bucks tossing 10 million dollars into the ad campaign of one candidate who can’t seem to scratch up that kind of dough any other way somehow doesn’t sound like the kind of democracy I grew up in.

What it does sound like is the reality I now live in. It sounds like this new darker version of this experiment in governance unleashed by our founders.

I meet people everywhere and of every stripe and tribe and kind. None of us feel as if the thing is like what the thing used to be like. We find the three main over the air broadcasting networks don’t prefer progressive commentators on Sunday shows. Instead the shows are stacked with folk from some other universe.

We’ve turned denial into a high art. Tobacco ‘denialistas’ have turned into today’s climate change skeptics. We go from there being a consensus regarding women’s health issues to suddenly and out of nowhere questioning whether we should be spending any money on women’s reproductive health care services at all!

I’m a street act. I juggle fire. I tell a joke. I pass the hat. I’ve lived a faith based life. I have faith in people. I’ve gone without many ordinary forms of security because I believed and still believe that what I do is part of something that is necessary and important.

But, I want to be the wild guy. I want to be the nut job. I want to be the one making the jokes. I want to stick out in the foreground and in the background? I want sanity. I want banks to be boring. I want my neighbor to have a good opportunity to have a good job.

I want good schools for his children.

It doesn’t work when what I do pays better than what my neighbor his doing. It is better for my work as a variety entertainer to be marginally functional and for my neighbor’s job in the mainstream and his remuneration and benefits to provide a good living.

Teachers, police, firemen, auto workers, garbage collectors and on and on; these are important jobs and folk should have a little something to show for their efforts.

I kind of believe in that old John Lennon lyric, and do believe that these are our hero’s. A great teacher, a skilled fireman, a dedicated auto worker, they are vital roles in our society. How anyone could imagine a world without good people doing this good work for good pay is beyond me. Like I said, I used to be innocent.

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Slow Down You Move to Fast, You’ve Got to Make the Morning Last

1939 Chevy......almost exactly same engine as 1955...Oh yeah that's me

Running the mile in less than four minutes, we knew it could be done we just didn’t know what it might mean.

Now the rate of change seems to sweep whatever it is we are doing now into the dust bins of our present. So we sit with one foot in the present while we mock the latest release as almost but not quite right.

We are so drowning in fact that fiction is deemed quaint and irrelevant. Where and to what do we point? The modern man is an immigrant? Is he a banker? Is he toiling at a job that no longer exists or is soon to be outsourced?

To offer a perspective on what it is that is happening our audience needs to hold some collective grip; a shared experience. Since we have shattered, blue and red, Wall Street and Main Street, D’s and R’s, independents and libertarians, and these only describe a fraction of what has been shattered, the whole of what is being broken into pieces is even more sacred, more ancestral, more human and more at risk than any of that.

Here each individual offering, each solution is slapped down and stomped out. Some writers offer chaos theory, others comedy, still others give it a shot, but before the shot is given a chance to hit its mark the mark has moved; the rate of change is like that.

There is so much disappointment. I can barely find a movie I want to see. There is hardly a politician I want to vote for. There is not a tax I like, and not a birth control device I can put the whole of my faith in.

How do we explain this? I’m not a skeptic. I am not fatalistic. I’m not even pessimistic. But, if in foreground is my perky self and in the background is a world that is unable to manage itself, a world that is unable to control itself, its industries, its politics, its aim and future?

If you were going to write about the world you see and try to speak to all of us, not just some, but the whole of humanity, to help shape us, warn us, change us, evolve us, inform us, what and how in the world might you do that, now that you know that what you have to say falls upon a world imprisoned by the sheer rate of change.

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I Feel like a Natural Woman

Soul on Fire

Do you listen to your body? Do you overrule yourself and go against instinct? If you are in an odd situation how do you feel your way through things?

Moving from performing to writing and then back again I am reminded of this physical guidance system built into our nervous system.

I put a scene together in a chapter of one of my novels, building it piece by piece, brick by brick until it finally comes alive. The words and actions of the characters when carefully constructed can create the illusion of an experience. It rings true.

My men need women in my fiction and I have no choice but to get out my set of tools and construct them. I grew up in a family with three sisters.

I was always so at home with the women I danced with. I became one of them. They needed to forget about my gender, at least while we were dancing, we had work to do.

The women were in a competition with one another. It was their turf. In class once I had been accepted I was allowed to observe how they would jockey for advantage with one another.

There was nuance. They veiled their thoughts. Their eyes spoke nothing. Then, all at once I might note one of the dancers stealing a glance. They looked away. In their eyes you could see their thinking.

First and foremost I saw women with a fierce determination. They all seemed tough. They maintained a resolute confidence. Even the second or third or fourth best dancer among the women danced as if they were the best.

After class they would allow that another dancer might have an edge but while they were on the dance floor in a studio they moved with grit and confidence. I admired the women because their strength of character was colored with such a rich and textured vulnerability that you would seldom if ever find in the men.

In many ways I am very feminine, and I don’t mean in some silly insecure sense of the meaning, but each of us is in fact not just all male or all female. We all have some aspect, some fraction that consists of the other gender, and that other is located within us.

One of the privileges of fiction is that it allows us to channel these multitudes of people that inhabit our being. We have a duty to honor them and to speak as truthfully for them as our received wisdom allows.

A human being is in some odd sense a repository of experiences that transcends this one mortality. We know things that have come stored in our souls. There is a vast treasure of humanity capable of speaking through us. It is a mystery some days and as ordinary as old wallpaper on others.

 *A neighbor friend of mine who reads novels voraciously enjoyed your “Bankrupt Heart” immensely. He especially appreciated the atmosphere of the boatyard, a place and milieu imaginative literature had not yet taken him. He was also taken by the depth and authenticity of the characters. *

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Crying at Weddings

Bachelor Setup...

I cry at weddings. I don’t need to know the couple. I just find the whole thing so romantic. My mind begins to wander and I become overwhelmed.

You know the sociologists are fretting over the differential emerging between various income groups and their likelihood that they will marry. More money is predictive of taking the nuptials.

I’ve also cried when I look at my bank account. I’ve been overwhelmed now and again in my life. You know the cupboard is bare.

So, like the whole magic as misdirection thing goes, where we divert our audience’s attention from one thing to this other thing we want them to see why the other thing we don’t want them to see we keep hidden. Now free to manipulate the thing that is out of our audience’s eyes we can take advantage of the thing not on everyone’s mind.

This situation seems to have flushed the desperado’s out from beneath their rocks.

Shock of shocks: people who don’t have any money and don’t have a job do not marry. They do tend to have sex (hey, it is something to do while waiting for a job) as this tendency seems to dominate no matter the marital status and these conjugal improvisations tend to produce pregnancies.

I think the deal is this. You want good outcomes you need good inputs. You need jobs. You need good jobs that come with good benefits. They should pay well. You take that well paid worker and put some money in his pocket send him out on a date and nature will take its course.

Isn’t it amazing how far and wide a truly huge financial crisis can reach? The numbers of unemployed, the wealth destroyed, the length of time it takes to recover, its like going to a wedding.

I’ve learned that I not only cry at weddings, but I seem to be prone to crying during a financial crisis too. I know I’m such the romantic.

 

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What are you waiting for?

The Courage of the Not For Sale Big Mind

The Courage to Believe in a Bigger Soul

I am a student. I study things. I’ve been working my way through matters as diverse as Basque goat herding skills to what automobile company manufactured the most powerful in line 6 cylinder engine.

These are interesting if you are interested. The answer is 405 horsepower for the motor. It was a British sports car company- TVR- that concocted this record setter.

I also learned that there was an Australian Chrysler motor that never came toAmericathat made 365 southern hemispheric horsepower. This must have been a wicked fun motor to mash the throttle to if you get your fun from acceleration.

The thing you may or may not know is that the inline six cylinder motor is by its very design prone to running smoothly. It is anything but like our politics right now.

The Basque are great herders. I am particularly fond of their cheese making skills. Better still I can afford to eat their finely crafted goat cheeses.

The variety and breadth of man’s inventions are quite remarkable. What is more remarkable is when we hit on a good thing. Improvement is always possible.

I stumbled upon a razor sharp awakening today in my reading. From Norman Mailer and I quote, “One should not live with the given when it is vapid and vaguely immoral.”

This is about an artist’s duty. The animating notion in this sentence is to speak up and speak out. If something has become lifeless it is our duty to reignite our fires and reboot life. It is our ‘inner Zorba’ that must get off the sofa of boredom and dance.

I think the “vaguely immoral” part of this exhortation is hugely resonant with the events of this day and era. The wheels came flying off our collective economic bus and the streets of life are littered with the carnage.

Moneyed interests might be able to afford slick public relationships firms to get their message out about what good citizens they are. Lobbyists might hustle up to Capital Hill and leaven the politicians with timely contributions. And their sympathizers in the media can orchestrate a defense for the indefensible.

One thing they can’t do is stop creativity. Artists often visualize a better path, prescribing a more just and fair way forward. I’m not just concerned about the truly poor I am truly concerned about anyone who is not truly concerned about the truly poor.

You start hollowing out your soul at your own peril. Hiding your money in offshore bank accounts is a step in that direction. Kicking money up to the fat cats while you hollow out support for the weak won’t win you a pass through the pearly gates. It is explicit, graphic, and small. You can encourage a better self or you can cultivate a smaller self. So, we pick, we choose, we can only really be one kind of person, even though all of us can fall prey to this other beast within ourselves. The ultimate fact of a good decent human life is that we must finally reject the least parts of who we are because we can’t be both.

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Tender Mercies for Billionaires

The Asphalt Jungles Self Reflection

Now we Darwinian types do prefer our coffee black and we’ll take our capitalism as wild and predatory as nature itself. Social stabilizers, rules to the road, well regulated markets are for softies.

The era of abundance is over. I never got a crack at enjoying the thing while it was around.

So what we are left with after a really good party is clean up. Lights up, janitors enter, brooms sweep floor, windows cleaned, put everything out in the trash. If you were at the party hope you met someone and got their number.

I love fundamentals. I do like a good big overarching construct. I want a bucket I can put the whole thing into. I enjoy whiling away the afternoon at an outdoor café in animated discussions with friends while we whittle away at the coming next best system.

For circus stunts by bloated corporations that are too big for their own britches there is the failure of the marketplace to put them out of their misery. They can’t change. They pay their management too much. They’re service is second rate. I thought they were talking about me for a second. I do love a good thriller.

Little Guys working for the Big Guys

And then there is this nasty thing called governance. Those Northern European’s have the nerve to tax high, regulate with zeal, and produce heaps of what Stiglitz refers to as Gross Domestic Happiness! It is enough to make a free market ideologue puke. What a bunch of babies.

The Soviet Union collapses, Germany reunites and that is awesome! Capitalism takes steroids. The world levers up and synthetic derivatives are the worlds new playboy party dolls.

The Chinese look at this minestrone soup of freewheeling market driven chaos and see opportunity. “You want imports? We can do that.”

The world is in a deer in the headlights moment. To get anything done we have to thank globalization for requiring that we now have to do it all together. After watching Washington try to make sausage one can only begin to imagine what a really big world wide banquet might look like.

I love a good musical. I love it when there is that magical scene when some character at the top of their lungs yells STOP! And right on cue everybody freezes right where they are. It’s amazing, and it’s make believe, it’s a theatrical device, but it isn’t reality. The reality is that we have to keep going, whether it works out or not.

All I know is that food stamps are a paradoxical concession to the Darwinian capitalists search for perfect economic liberty.

And then for the closing scene this little guy grabs a mirror and holds it up to the face of the big shot.

The big shot running his fingers through his hair says, “I can’t afford to take a haircut.”

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