Children at the Brink

I was running with the wind again. Headed north with Lacey riding shotgun. We had dinner in Ashland Saturday night. Sunday stopped in Eugene for breakfast. I’d been the producer of the street performing program at the Eugene Celebration for a bunch of years. Downtown Eugene has gone from bad to worse in the last few years.

After breakfast north to Portland and stopped to have a visit with one of my oldest friends. He’s holed up on the Northeast side just off Sandy. My friend likes to think outside the box, he prefers to live outside the box, and working from this scaffolding makes a curiosity, a kind of unbridled romp far from the familiar fields.

Evening shared more time with a husband, wife and their two teen daughters. On my way to see our youngest now at Seattle University it was like a taste of warm ups for what was about to come.

The progressive teen of the Pacific Northwest is a roving Burning Man Festival. They are playful souls. They bet with imagination. They read books, good reads.

They recycle. They eat good food. They like to juggle. They draw. They hook up and get tight with their sweethearts. They know that authenticity is the coin of the realm.

These are the souls we are handing our world off to. They are good loving people. They love the world they’ve been born into. The same as you and the same as me, and they want to do, to do whatever it takes, to turn the world around.

The obstructive class of status quo types that have the world by the throat… they will always want just one more bite of the apple, make one more close, one more deal, one more day before they let go.

My bet is with these feisty types up in this corner of the country. Come high tide, black ice, or snow storm they’re going to try to steer away from the catastrophe.

If you hadn’t noticed, Scientific America published a story this week. The article was unequivocal. Climate change is irreversible. The world is going to get much hotter. An extinction event could be baked into the cake.

We apparently can’t help ourselves. We can’t fix every problem. We can’t win every war. There are things beyond our reach. So, when was it we gave up and became fashionable not to try?

 

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Eternity Ringing in my Ears

My 1967 Ford pickup truck was home. It took some practice to get the kinks out. Simplicity was the key. When I got the truck it had a V-8 and when I finished it had an inline 6 cylinder 240 cubic inch motor.

Matched weighted forged pistons, steel timing gears, special camshaft profile, roller rockers, balanced the rods, and tweaked the one barrel carburetor. I got 20 miles to the gallon. Smoothest engine I ever made.

Much of what I did to the motor comes standard now. I didn’t get roller lifters. Instead I opted for special hydraulic lifters matched to perform with the roller rockers. I might well have seen 22 miles per gallon with the roller lifters had I installed them.

Got rid of the points and added an electronic ignition system. I bought the rig in 1976. When I was done I donated the engine to a Ford Bronco restoration shop. The 240 was a prize.

 

I’d swapped out the 8 for the 6 and ran it around for a few months prior to rebuilding it. Ran fair enough, but I knew I could do better. I’d had the truck now for some years. It was about 1983. I had put about 300,000 miles on the rig touring as I had across the United States.

After jerking the engine and tearing her down, sending her out to the machine shop, ordering all the trick parts, getting her back and then painstakingly reassembling the engine back together I was ready to start the motor for her first try.

It was like an out of body experience. The motor purred. Gone were the rumbles and shakes. The motor had come to me speaking in broken English whereas now it was fluent, in fact perhaps mellifluous: to my ear Shakespearean.

I ran north to south. The Ford took me as far as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and as far south as Bahia de Los Angeles in Baja, California, Mexico. She’d taken me east to Key West three times, New York twice, and Boston once.

I’ve slept around as they say. Finest neighborhoods I could find, or sometimes not, sometimes I’d just sleep where I was, wherever that was, however that looked.

Never put much stock in wanting my rig to draw attention. Curtains sealed out any light my reading lamp might make. Once I was in back on my bunk nobody gave the rig a second thought. You want to be invisible.

On my way to 500,000 miles I’d put something like ten coast to coast tours on this old truck. I spent the better part of a decade living in her, half those years non-stop, twenty-four-seven-sixty-months-straight-during one stretch.

 

I went over Rabbit Ears Pass on my way to Durango, Colorado in 30 below zero one night; had to chain up for that one. Not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but was a nominee.

Life was all about the show. I played dates town to town. Between dates was whatever I wanted it to be. I’d usually stock up the rig with food and then the real art was to know what dirt track to turn down.

If I had a few days I could write, read and workout. It wasn’t anything special. Many of my performing friends did much the same. It was good and still is.

Have a home now, but I still own a pickup truck, still get out on the road, and still pull off and take a dirt track now and then out fifty miles to nowhere pull over and spend a few days with eternity ringing in my ears.

 

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Yes, I’m the Great Pretender

Who are you kidding?

Delusion abounds in this the age of information. We are deluded and misdirected in this ever increasingly complex civilization we have been born into.

I try to understand economics. I read about the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. I listen to commentary on the radio. One friend is angry at labor unions. Another friend blames bankers for his problems, another affirmative action, women’s liberation and Greenpeace.

Changing the subject is a popular devise to bury a subject you’d rather not discuss. I thought we were in the midst of a Great Recession, that there were millions upon millions of people without work and needed a job?

A group of men advertising themselves as celibate go get their nickers in a knot over a topic most of us thought settled five decades ago! Not only does birth control as a burden fall disproportionally upon women, it turns out the attack on this burden is executed disproportionally by a group of men vowing to have nothing to do with the very thing women alone are burdened with.

In the age of delusion we don’t fix problems. We have problems and when we begin to feel as if one problem is beginning to be fixed we raise new problems. Don’t let the (expletive deleted) get you down.

 

There is this profound sense that we can’t change. There is this slow motion train wreck quality to our times. More delusion probably, all too many people think that everything is just great.

It is literally a miracle to me that somehow we have managed to make jetliners as safe as we have given our propensity to delude ourselves. Maybe we’re kidding ourselves. Maybe it is far more dangerous than we know?

Facts- they say are stubborn things, but it is looking like delusion is too. I don’t think we get up in the morning go into the bathroom and wash our face and look into the mirror and say, “who are you kidding?”

Even if we did start the day off with the admonition to play it straight with ourselves it seems we are all in our own separate realities. Life is not a series of distinct, autonomous events. Life is more a flow, one event pushing the previous event out of our mind only to find that event being pushed by the next and the next.

Of course living in a ‘fact free of consequences world’ allows us to simply all go our own deluded way. Since nothing bad has happened nothing bad will happen. That’s delusions greatest threat; what might be bad for you might well be good for me!

Delusion doesn’t require a mental deficiency of any kind. Perfectly healthy well educated people can be utterly and completely deluded. We don’t need any help.

But, when you wake up, when you make an observation, and it is apparently confirmed and verified to be true and then you don’t react, don’t do what you can to right the situation and you pretend that you can’t do anything about it, that’s the bait to the trap.

The modern world we live in might simply be too complicated for us. That’s the biggest delusion, or perhaps it is a stubborn fact yet to be reckoned with.

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Testosterone is King… King of Dreams

Don Juan meets George Bernard Shaw

Testosterone gathered for coffee at an outdoor café. There were four of us. One married, another cohabitating, another just back from the frontlines of new love, and a fourth sidelined for the moment.

It was a good afternoon for testosterone. Each carrier of this potent point of view gave their individualized perspective of how they see things.

The passing phantoms walked on by. Yoga students in spandex tights are not much interest to men, but it is of paramount importance to testosterone. Testosterone is like the notion of an ego trip, you don’t actually go anywhere but it is a vivid state of mind.

Testosterone burdens man. You do not negotiate with testosterone so much as you are hijacked by testosterone. I think any number of spectacular failures by famous womanizers always leads to the question: “what were they thinking?”

Thinking is part of testosterone, but testosterone is in fact larger than thinking, or more precisely it is the container that all thinking is put into when testosterone’s abundance floods the playing fields of a man’s being.

Of the four yesterday I was the one married. I am also the oldest at sixty. Married and sixty and lets add, how shall I say this, married, sixty and no longer believe, even for one second that a fling might best a lifetime of happiness with my beloved wife.

I know this, it is my truth, it is my vow, and it is how I live my life. Most amusing is that testosterone doesn’t believe a thing I say. It goes its own way and I must go mine.

I was no match for testosterone when I was twenty, but twenty is sublime in the sense that men have already peaked and as we begin to make our descent back from the perilous heights the view from this stratospheric perch etches into our minds an unwavering awe into the nature of desire. How is it that the gods were able to make so much out of so little?

A good education can help a man who is seized with a frightful bout of testosterone. There is the outside chance that our stupidity can be hidden behind the seeming appearance of intelligence. Unfortunately they made women who can see right through us.

The two players in our group yesterday were busily negotiating with testosterone. They were getting their particulars in order before the next hormonal seizure took hold. They wanted someone this tall, with this color hair, and that age, nothing too sticky, too clingy, too volatile, or too unfaithful.

Testosterone is above all a great dream maker. There exists a theory that the difference between a married man and one that is single is fussiness. Another theory suggests that testosterone so wears on a man that he just finally quits, gives up, and packs it in.

The main point is if you have testosterone in your life to appreciate its power, to use it wisely, but most of all, for everyone’s sake, whether married or single, man or woman, when you find yourself around this stuff you would do well to remember that when used as directed in a mutually truthful and honest way that testosterone can be everything you ever hoped it could be, and sometimes even more. “Mrs. Smith- it’s a girl!”

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Really Loving You Now

Where gods and love soars, above the highest peaks

Into the breech of our life comes the sight of the other we might chance to love. It comes out of the blue. They enter the room and you look and it’s decided right then.

Not for all of us. Some of us sneak up on it. We go to school with them, work with them; see them out at the grocery store, dancing.

I was made to love. Comes right out of me, it is spontaneous, voluntary, willful. I’ve never hesitated. Might have been a hole in my game, if you call love a game, it is rather more like fateful choices we make or undo with our life.

I’m interested in the people who I call my friends that find it difficult not so much to love but difficult to form a lasting bond with the new partner. It is as if my heart came with an instruction manual and there hearts manual was indecipherable.

Some people are discouraged by how the nature of this love literally changes chemically over time. They are confused by the feelings that come with a lasting mature relationship. Loves onset is pyrotechnic… incendiary… passionate… where the long game is played upon a field of tender gauze.

Not only can hot new relationships become an end in themselves, they can be just what the doctor ordered for the long term relationship that you are trying to get over.

Expectations, patterns, habits, they become engrained in us and after a few death rattles as your life long love turns into something much less life long well you know, easy come easy go, soon you don’t even love, you simply visit it, tour its region, take a few memories, and like a holiday return home and back to your solitude.

Freedom is available to all of us. We are free to have or not have whatever we want. So we might invoke the courage in our souls to actually take the opportunity to create the love that our hearts whisper into our beings and encourage us to create

I hear the instructions, I know what to do. My heart has convinced me that I can love with all my heart across the whole of eternity. Fool that I am, I am convinced it’s true.

We can explore the mystery of life long commitment like an astronaut or mountain climber, and we can rise to this daring challenge by loving as if the whole of our happiness and fateful life depends upon it.

A fall can prove fatal and the courage to explore the magnificence of what we tease out our hearts can over a lifetime leave the world that much more saturated in the gleaming splendor of a choiceless freely given love that thrives in the garden of our brave souls.

It is why we begin with a casual date… nothing too fateful at first. Then, the gods laugh and sprinkle the magic fairy dust over us, and like that it begins anew, again and again….

BANKRUPT HEART

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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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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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A Day at the Beach

Not here, but like here

Madness it seems is not always confined to a mere individual. The whole lot of us can be convinced to run right off a cliff. We seem to be capable of collective irrationality.

If I didn’t have an understanding of yoga, the game of paintball, or solitaire I might look with virgin like eyes and think I was looking at madness incarnate

I used to frequent a resort in Arizona that specialized in welcoming recreational vehicle enthusiasts who preferred nudity. It turned out to not be my cup of tea. People who live in recreational vehicles would be well served by utilizing some textiles in strategically located portions of their anatomy.

But, that isn’t the point. Once they arrive, once they get sited, they by way of doing what everyone else are doing fit into the scene. How much literature is built upon a character that seems to awaken and then arouse everyone else to take a contrary action.

I arise every morning and compared to the guests at the RV park I am revolutionary. By the time I go out the door my madness is disguised. If I really groom and dress up I can put across a very convincing likeness of an adult.

A group of fetching waitresses I knew had decided they wanted to spend the day at a nude beach. Off they went for a day of unclothed fun in the sun. I worked near the restaurant and knew the women.

Hanging out at a nude beach is an excellent activity with total strangers. For whatever reason my fate took me to the same beach, it wasn’t my idea of fun particularly, but I went along. This group of fetching waitresses just about died when they spotted me trotting down the beach.

I tried to be adult about our accidental meeting under such circumstances. I had yet to have disrobed. I had yet to have joined in the collective madness that is getting naked at a nude beach which is not a madness whatsoever, it is what it is, nudity.

I thought their nudity quite rewarding. I think they found their unveiled offerings to a man they recognized from where they worked rather embarrassing. Perhaps that isn’t the right word, but there was a good deal of blushing.

One thing about nudity is that with two arms and hands and a pair of knees it takes a good deal of contorting to strategically solve the issue of how to seem like you are not covering up while you attempt to place knee or hand or elbow across various parts and places you’d rather not share. When done well it is almost a modern dance.

I try to contain my impulses to be swept away by the moment. We trotted away from my friends. We found a spot down the beach where we could play Frisbee.

I had a friend going broke. She took her massage table down to the nude beach. She set up her table, she took off her clothes, and she’s never lacked for work since. This is innovation.

 

 

Forces to Reckon With

The Ego's Cage

I think I am civilized. Finally I have crossed some threshold and arrived. I never much enjoyed being barbaric. My brutish phase has ended.

In my twenties I had a temper. I could get so excited I couldn’t remember what I had become so excited about. Regardless I could stay mad for hours even if I couldn’t really put my finger on what triggered the whole thing.

I look in at the gladiators now working inSouth   Carolina and I am quite impressed. My worst days remain unremarkable. It would be hard to make them headline grabbing. I haven’t got any offshore accounts in the Caribbean, but to be honest I had a checking account inCanadafor a spell.

Hypocrisy is a mirror into the soul. It suggests all manner of convoluted exceptionalism. Where temperament truly glows is where one is absolved from the same requirements of another person. You happen to be so much better a person. That isn’t opinion it is an absolute truth. You don’t just take that to the bank you’ll find it at the scene of the crime and repeat it while undergoing an interrogation.

Following rules is for other suckers. You are obviously not an ‘other,’ you are you. You look in the mirror and there you are that complete obviously exceptional package. There is nothing wrong or you would have notice by now. You see a man free enough to be man enough to be leader enough of the free world.

You can’t be the leader of the free world and be expected to follow the same rules as everyone else. How would that look? Why in the world would you bother to even want that job? Truly exceptional men know this. You want to be free to be free to do as you damn well freely choose.

Approximate facsimile of what it looks like just before the end

The rain ends and the clouds part and the beams of light crack through this mist where revelation of these foundational principles fill the man with a confidence that doesn’t just intoxicate but ends in a roadside breath analyzer test. You are not just drunk with power it seems you are just drunk. Finally we have arrived. You are there. Please come with me!

Hey for the handsome price of $1.00 you can own your very own………..come on, you know you like a bargain

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Bury Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction at Yucca Mountain

The hills are aglow with the sound of bankers.......

I’ve been reading up on Caliente,Nevada. Sagebrush is located there. TheGreat Basin Highway runs through town. It seems to have some relationship with geothermal waters that are common to this region. There are ranches and mines in this area. It was downwind of the Atomic Test Site. If Yucca Mountain ever came to pass it would be downwind of this now scientifically confirmed bad idea.

It is a disheartening to read about the radiation their citizens absorbed back in the atmospheric testing days. I think I don’t like bad news. I think I knew all this. I think I’ve heard these things before.

We submitted our citizens in Nevada and Utah to lethal dosages of radiation in the name of hoping to gain some edge in our cold war weaponry. This is legacy. In the name of saving ourselves from the Russians we sacrificed a population of rural Americans.

These things happen while authorities approach a podium and in a matter of fact tone of voice explain the inconvenient facts in banal tonalities suggesting there is nothing to be alarmed about.

It is a constant feature of our culture now.Fukushima is a tragedy. Radiation from the Japanese nuclear disaster is measurable and present in Caliente! There is no allowably safe radiation exposure level. Nuclear power outside of a containment vessel is uncontained and our mortal enemy.

Try the “carried interest deduction” we’ve allowed to remain on our tax code. This artifact of finance razzle dazzle creates instability, debt, and tax dodgers. Yet perfectly sensible sounding very important people will come to the podium and insist that this scam is an indispensible feature of capitalism. I can promise you that it is not indispensible and in fact it has much to do with the financially engineered catastrophe we have been living through.

Now if you want to bury something in Yucca Mountain try burying the carried interest deduction there. We’ll make it a national monument. We will create a memorial to warn future generations that there is more than one way to blow up the world.

 

Bankrupt Heart is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble…for yes the handsome price of $1.00

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