Saturday, December 8, 2012

Bocce for Blood

"I have fought a good fight.  I have kept the faith."
—2 Timothy 4:7
as seen in a circle in a mosaic on 
the ceiling of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis

This book is not about bocce ball.  It is about a two-week trip that commemorated a two-week trip devoted to bocce ball.  There was a book about that first trip.  It was about bocce ball.  The second two-week trip was taken as its book tour.  However, there were no physical copies of the book by the time the tour started.  It was therefore not a book tour, in the traditional sense.

The first book functioned on the assumption that it could bypass plot, action, and conflict by recounting the scores of the dozen-odd games of bocce played.  Whether it functioned, I guess, is debatable.  Can a stream of encounters and diatribes be tied together by occasional columns of names and numbers?  A sports page gets away with it.

The second trip we did not keep score nor play bocce with the same purpose and regularity.  The last game played, at courts in a park just north of downtown Arcata, devolved into a two-set, 16-ball bocce-like improvised invention that veritably symbolized the devolution of the initial premise of Bocce Balling on the West Coast.  From Arcata, this year, I was to finish the journey north myself, and I was unable to find any way of going north.  All Greyhounds went back south to San Francisco.  Rideshares to Portland were imperceivable (though, having left a request at a co-op, I did receive a phone call a month later saying "I got your ride to Portland").  And the events of my life have not convinced me that hitch-hiking is a viable option, even though I know that is partly the role that writers are supposed to play, especially those who don't have, or aren't in the process of getting, an MFA.  My apologies.  So I found a cheap plane ticket to Seattle from SFO, drove back down to San Francisco with the friends I drove up with, and left my bocce set with them and flew to Seattle.   The second half of the trip, therefore, had nothing to do with bocce, it had nothing to do with the great highways of the west, it had nothing to do with deviating from those highways when the mood struck, it had nothing to do with pulling into the next town to find an old friend or a fabled bocce court, there was no camping, there was no epic camaraderie.  I flew on a plane by myself to visit my brother in Seattle like a normal person—not that there's anything unspectacular about that in its own right.  It was just an adventure in a different vein. 

The first trip my friend and I took the last leg of the trip alone, I drove his truck a few days early to get back to a job I was offered.  This was a symbol of sorts for the beginning of my personal exodus into the writing of the book—much began cooperatively between the two of us in its formulation, but ultimately it was I who was to complete the journey.  This time that was the general motif of the book-inspiring journey; that is, the journey that was to inspire the second book was wrapped up in the first book, its incompleteness and its suggestion of another.  Thoughts of writing, solipsistic inner dialogue, traveling alone, thinking about thinking, the process of leaving the world and entering my head became the subject matter of what was to be the subject matter, that is the failed book tour turned into a productive writing session, the action was analysis without the aid of even a tally sheet to hint at the non-cerebral.  Bocce fades away and all that is left is me, alone, trying to get something across that even before I express it is muddled, like a court on a rainy day full of puddles, passed over in favor of the shelter of coherence.

I apologize if none of that made any sense.  I was riffing for most of that paragraph, flying high this Saturday night on a Heath milkshake from the Steak & Shake drive-thru.

In describing what this book is about—other than saying that it is not about bocce—I should just say it is about trying to be a writer.  It is about the specific emotions involved in deciding not to pursue a reasonable career, the doubt, the shame, the self-pity, the feelings of irrationality, smallness—realizing that a writer is someone who has a post-graduate degree, failing to get into graduate school and deciding to be a writer anyway, knowing that a writer is someone who has a post-graduate degree.  It is about wanting to express a message so idiosyncratically that it could only be for me, and even if anybody else could be feasibly interested in it, he is awash already in torrents of media—free, brilliant, accessible, difficult, colorful, well-packaged media, more than he could want, literally more than he could consume.  This is impossible, in other words.  The odds are indescribable.  The path is no different than it has always been, the alphabet still has 26 letters, and only those willing to sacrifice every ounce of their being stand a chance.  This time it's for keeps—this time it's for blood.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Foraging for Truth

 
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In September a thought process that had developing since February reached a certain ripeness, so to speak.  I had moved out of my house in Monterey and was organizing my things back into my parents’ house and had come across a ‘zine written by my best friend ten years earlier when she was 17.  It began
(this stems from experience)
I need to document my experience because everything I do us made up of previous experience and all my art reflects my outlook on external experiences so it seems pretty important to write them down
—I saw a plane suspended in midair once
—we stole lemons
—Johnny Cash died in my arms
A hand-drawn picture accompanied the text on this first page, of my friend crying and sitting on the ground embracing a dead Johnny Cash. 

I had one week remaining before I was to take a trip to Oakland, then St. Louis, then Berlin, then Amsterdam, then Berlin (again) then Bremen, then Andorra (via Barcelona), then Tarragona (again via Barcelona), then Granada, then Alicante, then Bristol (again via Barcelona), then Worcestershire, then London, then Berlin (again, via Worcestershire and Bristol, again), then Prague, then Berlin (again), then St. Louis (again), where I am now.  That day I had to work my penultimate shift, and I picked, as I had been doing all week, a selection of apples from the backyard apple tree, and from another tree in a neighbor's backyard that offered dozens of ignored ripe apples across its fence into the park behind my parents’ house.   I was to go into town with my father, retrieve my bicycle, visit some friends for perhaps the last time with apple offerings, and go to work at four for nearly the last time at a restaurant in Pacific Grove.

The ripened thought process began after I returned from the second bocce journey, as fruit tends to begin to develop, in February.  I went to visit my beloved in Los Angeles for the weekend, and her Saturday involved facilitating an event at her school’s art museum.  It was for students, members of her student association, and, happily, me. 

I knew little of what to expect other than a vague notion of the artist collective’s credentials—they mapped out neighborhoods in Los Angeles and pinpointed spots in parks, between fences and sidewalks, even in medians, where fruit was “public,” where one could, at the right moment in the right season, saunter up and freely grab the definition of local fruit. 

Years before, the aforementioned best friend, another friend, and I envisioned a similar project for Monterey, a town with half a dozen historic gardens and a plethora of other ignored public mini orchards.  We never completed a map, but we did complete several reconnaissance missions.  We found mostly plums.  In one space between front yard and sidewalk we were yelled at for infringing upon a resident’s space.  In another we were amiably invited onto the patio to pre-emptively rid the resident of a sticky rotten mess of plums.  We made what we called a “People’s Plum Pie”—local, sustainable, delicious. 

Years before that, as noted above, “we stole lemons,” walking up Prescott and seeing the yellow jewels yearning toward the sidewalk, capsules of citric deliciousness begging to be consumed.  I don’t know if we crossed their property to reach them, or if they crossed into the city to reach us, but I believe it was youthful sheepishness that produced the word “stole” a decade before, not actual illegality.  Certainly, however, to teenagers, theft can be positive—thrillingly transgressive, and a representation of an incommunicable sense of entitlement.  It is just a question of inches, really.  And I doubt the lemons were missed.  When I moved, years later, into that same neighborhood years later, my 27-year-old roommate would drunkenly trespass into neighbors' backyards to grab lemons in the middle of the night.  That I did not so easily condone.

*          *          *

The collective was called Fallen Fruit, a group of three hip thirty-somethings.   They chatted amongst themselves preparing the presentation that would begin the workshop.   I sat with a coffee and pastry provided by the student association and sat with my beloved to hear and watch the background talk and slide show. 

The three narrated their years of foraging-centric projects, showing us the initial maps, videos of group fruit-picking expeditions through the streets of LA, public jam-making sessions, a fruit tree installation in Spain, and half a dozen related videos, events, shows, and pieces of writing. 

And then we took a break before the Fruit Meditation segment which is described on their website as
 
An array of meditations and visualizations designed for small groups in intimate settings.  Each sequence imagines fruit differently to raise consciousness about symbolic values, politics, social relations and fruit itself.  Working within individual consciousness as well as interpersonal relationships, the various parts reconfigure how we might think about fruit and use it as a personal and social tool.

We found, with or without a yoga mat, a place on the floor that spoke to us, a position in which we were comfortable, and we sat with or without our eyes closed, and were asked to visualize, with the help of an abstracted, mythologized description of the piece of fruit we were about to receive, the power of this piece of fruit we were preparing to consume—its sustenance, the place from which it came, its history—the essentially human, mythical task it was to eat the apple in front of us. 

I was incredibly open to the whole thing.  Thinking about what you eat is quite en vogue these days for a variety of great reasons—the health repercussions of people who don’t think about what they eat are readily apparent in this country, the environmental repercussions of pesticides, packaging, and 1,000-mile shipping are increasingly dire, and more philosophical—yet very real—disconnections between people and their food, and the people who produce their food are, at risk of sounding too new age-y (though in this context such a fear is absurd), fatal.   There is no respect for the tree that produces the fruit, nor for the land and people that produce the tree, in our industrialized food system.  Ask Michael Pollan.   The simplicity of an apple growing on a tree is a miracle, nothing less, and the bourgeois need to commodify and package and distance oneself from this natural fact is a tragedy.

It also so happened that I decided to stop drinking a week before.  This habit had become a crutch by which I could signal the end of a workday, celebrate the fact of a day off, drown the uncertainties of a bad mood, and distance myself from any real difficulties that may have been present in my life.  Also I had, because of drinking, starting smoking cigarettes again, which I had vowed to stop.  So I was also quitting cigarettes again.  For an untreated man in recovery the idea of meditating on a piece of fruit was vital.

The last fact of my infatuation with the whole thing was the socialness of their projects—people were brought outside together, to interact with their neighbors and to value the land they stood on, the place that a century of pavement, parking lots, television, and supermarkets had paved over and trained them to disconnect from.  And the objects in question were spheres.  An epiphany rolled through my toxin-free, antioxidant rich veins—I had found my soulmates in this trio, bocce was foraging for the mind, or, rather, foraging was bocce for the body, or parks were a free space for communities to eat, play, and connect with each other, the trees around, above, and beneath them, and the very dirt, grass, sand or decomposed granite on which they stood.

When the event drew to a close, and we all whispered an insecurity into a watermelon and participated in a Gallagher-esque destruction of said watermelon, I didn’t have the words to reach out to the trio.  What I wanted to say was not words.  It was a stone sphere I didn’t have.  It was the fruit that they had already given me.  I said thanks to the shorter of the three, and asked if I could send them a piece of writing that they had inspired in me—planted the seed, if you like—and I dumbly smiled at the other two.

Seven months later I was in the passenger seat of my father’s car explaining this ripened thought process, its beginnings with the pilfered lemons, the People’s Plum Pie, the events of the public fruit meditation, the apples from our and the neighbor’s backyard, and, of course, bocce.

“I have a story that has to do with all of that,” he said.

I have no idea what I said to that, but in my mind right now I am making myself say, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

He told me about French colleagues of his in Nigeria.  They brought in truckloads of sand to a spot on the river to create a sort of beach.  They went there to swim—with a rope to hang on to in the swift river—and to sunbathe and relax, and to play boules (the French relative to bocce) with coconuts foraged from the area.  The Nigerians found this most peculiar, that these white foreigners would, for pleasure, subject themselves to the unyielding sun at the hottest part of the day, to the deathly river for no good reason, and that they would, in this unbearable heat, toss coconuts in the sand and walk after them for hours at a time.

Peyote Thunderbird

Upon returning from the second bocce journey/no-book book tour I began playing music with my friend Jake.  This actually happened the year before after the first bocce journey—I came back and played music with Jake.  The difference is last year I started playing music with Jake and Bob—going down to Big Sur for the night to hang out at Bob's cabin and play a varying and diminishing amount of folky the-Band-style music.

This year I started playing Jake and Lindsey.  Lindsey played the drums and Jake and I would switch between acoustic and electric guitars, keyboard, singing, the thunder tube, a train whistle, a güira, a suitcase, a plethora of shakers, and Jake had a variety of flutes to choose from that I never learned to play.  I quite respect anybody who figured out how to make flutes and woodwinds effortlessly make pleasant sounds.

They had begun a certain krautrock/psychedelic/indigenous-rhythm style that I first heard and was invited to contribute to in February shortly after returning from the second bocce journey.  We played in the basement of a friend in Pacific Grove who was also of Bob's generation, that is to say, part of the most nostalgic people to have ever remained a community, those who lived their twenties in California, specifically Monterey County, in the late 1960s, and remained in the redwoods and oak groves untouched by the deflation of the esteem of Vietnam-era bohemianism in the aesthetics of the present cultures and counter-cultures of the modern world.  Anyone who doesn't ascribe to the Rolling Stone-subscribing utopia that America failed to uniformly celebrate and become is an ewe to be adopted into the flock of the promised land, though the stories, the music, the people are past, occasionally writing autobiographies and going on stadium tours.

Having said that, I did very much enjoy and appreciate playing music in a cabin atop a ridge above the Pacific Ocean and making dinner and listening to NPR and hearing outside a painter painting a house listening to an NPR of one second later on the ridge across the way where Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers supposedly lives; and it was an ideal expression of my existence to ride my bicycle from my house with my glockenspiel and güira in the milk crate affixed above my back tire to a cabin in Pacific Grove and play music in the basement that sonically described my conception of freedom.

However, the second time—I played once with just Jake—just the second time the three of us were to play together, I was coming off of work and heading over and I received a message from Jake that the practice was off: our host flipped out over nothing and we were no longer welcome.  Jake was already back in Big Sur and our sessions were postponed indefinitely.

Weeks passed and it seemed my house was the only option that made sense.  We met again, Jake driving from Big Sur and Lindsey coming from work with her drum set in her Jeep, and we began a series of Tuesday weekly sessions that would continue through August with a few exceptions—a band visit to a postman friend of Jake's who explained to us his moonshine whiskey operation and the English composer called Nurse With Wound, a visit to Hawaii by Lindsey, and, increasingly as the summer/tourist season wound on, my inability to get Tuesdays off at the restaurant.

On Wednesdays Jake would wake up on the sofa earlier than me and I would struggle to go with him to his friends' breakfast pizza/coffee victorian house in downtown Pacific Grove and then we would proceed to "bottom feed," in the parlance of a friend of Jake's, meaning go to the half dozen charity thrift stores off of Lighthouse Avenue.  In April my first article in the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin appeared.  It came out on the first and third Wednesday of the month and often I would hungoveredly search out my fame in the newspaper dispenser in front of Grove Market.  One Wednesday Jake found a book on backgammon, which he, recently having acquired a backgammon set, had meant to master.  Bruce Becker's Backgammon for Blood became a motif for our a no-holds-barred attack on rock and roll mediocrity. "Luck is for losers," the back cover reads.  I began to rethink the name of  the 2nd installment of Bocce Balling on the West Coast.  Instead of the working title:

Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce Harder

a better option presented itself:

Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce for Blood

Jake always wanted to form a band called the Peyote Thunderbirds.  As we developed our repertoire and further advanced what I earlier described as "music ... that sonically described my conception of freedom" in my living room, we began to consider ourselves as the Peyote Thunderbirds, and we considered the possibilities of this name on a spectrum of "the" and "s" inclusion:

Peyote Thunderbird
The Peyote Thunderbird
The Peyote Thunderbirds
Peyote Thunderbirds

Crushing Jake's dream of being of the Peyote Thunderbirds Lindsey and I decided Peyote Thunderbird sounded better.

One week we were able to practice twice: on Monday night and Tuesday night.   We practiced Monday night and tucked the drum set in a corner afterwards.  Jake and I did our routine Tuesday morning and it was decided the night before that Lindsey would pick us up from my house and we would carpool to the Tuesday farmer's market together, walk around, and go back to play at my house.

On the way there they saw a friend of theirs leaving work and we pulled over to say hello.  We said hello and explained we were on a band date, carpooling to the farmer's market before heading back to my house to practice.  We had not been very public about our project, so this was a bit of a first.  We hadn't considered how to describe ourselves to an outsider until she asked us what kind of band we were.  "Native American Trance Revival," Jake said.  We decided to meet downtown at a coffee shop off of the market and chat further.  We did, and, further along our visit downtown we, as on a band date, ran into more people we knew and had to explain we were a band.  "Lindsey plays the drums, we have one that starts with Jake on the thunder tube and Andrew comes in playing guitar through his karaoke machine..." We were Peyote Thunderbird: three people who sometimes played music and sometimes went to the farmer's market together.

During this time I had also decided I would move out of my house, quit my jobs, and leave the area indefinitely in September.   In May it seemed perfectly natural to me that both this could be true and that the flight of Peyote Thunderbird could occur.  We would play shows and record songs by August.  We were good, we knew everyone in the area, and I already had a dozen cassettes filled with recordings from my tape recorder.  However, after I mentioned my plan a pall was cast over the evening and I sabotaged the momentum that I thought I was galvanizing.  A week later I wrote Jake this email:
Jake,
I once was told by a friend of mine that life is cyclical, like the seasons and whatnot related to the patterns of our own lives.  Everything fades away in autumn leaving us with nothing in winter, regrowth in spring and fruition in summer.  Since this bit of wisdom was imparted to me five years ago I have recognized it every year.  And I believe in riding the wave, not fighting it and drowning.  And this wave crashes with fall, September 21st.
I am not a lunatic (though I am if you follow the metaphor, moon (luna)=tides, following tides, nature, etc.=lunatic), I realize I need to compromise with how civilization and all other factors have made reality, the waves of the short term.  But I take hints from the universe.  I attempt to be natural in an unnatural world. 
My plan, considering these interpretations I have made, is to leave my house in either September or October, quit my jobs and visit everyone I know with the money I have saved, perhaps ending up in LA in January to be with Alexandra, Portland to be with old friends, St. Louis to do something else, or back here.
If this wave is (The) Peyote Thunderbird(s), then that is what I will catch.   We can get our shit together by September, record, tour, and I can plan around that.  I could travel, we could let the bird burn and resurrect it in the spring. 
As August came we still did not have enough staff to give me my Tuesdays off, and I began the process of moving out.  The day I took the train from Salinas to Oakland to start my journey, September 29th, Tristan was arriving in Big Sur from a three day hike from Arroyo Seco and hitchhiking back to Monterey to catch the train with me to his house in Oakland.  He caught a ride to Carmel Valley, sat by the side of the road for awhile, and then saw Jake waiting across the street for him.  Jake drove him to Monterey and Tristan's mom brought him to my house which is the last time Peyote Thunderbird almost came back together.