IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ACCOUNTS FOR JANUARY 15THS

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IN WHICH THE AUTHOR CALLS A FRIEND TO BETTER REMEMBER A PAST EVENT

I wanted to write about an event that occurred seven years previous. I wanted to include dialogue from a conversation that transpired between my friend B— and myself so I called him with some notes on what I had approximated from my end of the exchange so he could tell me what he remembered saying, or what he would have said, or what he agreed would be a reasonable representation of what he would have said.

We both lived in one of dormitories at our school in the first months of our first year. It was the night of a weekday and we saw each other at the cafeteria and sat by a window overlooking the bronze statue of Sacagawea and the tree-lined walk to the academic buildings. Really you couldn't see the statue, the only objects visible in the dark were the emergency call posts and their blue illuminations, but I see it now. One of the benefits of memory is the ability to see in the dark, what you remember from the day remains in sight after darkness shrouds it.

You wouldn't look outside anyway—there's too much activity in the buffet-style expanse, eyeing the food lines to time the opportune moment to wait on a slab of sustainable lasagna or a bowl of ice cream, when a fresh pot of coffee is brought out, where that kid is you don't want to talk to, which tables you'd feel obligated to stop and chat with, sizing up a quarter student body in a continued process that began the day you began occupying a child's bed four feet from a stranger, the stories you begin to associate with these studying bodies. Really you just want to eat as much as possible and drink as much coffee as reasonable as fast as you can. You see Sacagawea now in hindsight, but really she wasn't there.

I had been talking to B— about what we had been calling The HBO Show. We had set up phone meetings that played as mock work sessions to get down some ideas. Ever since I fell down the concrete stairs in January I became enamored with this idea. I could fit together all of ideas up to that point, the book about Seinfeld, the collaborative autobiography with Ed, the bocce book, my musical endeavors, all the scenes I had incited or otherwise participated in. It would make a perfect HBO show: self-referential, vaguely intellectual, but it would be our generation's show in the way Girls could never be and decidedly is not. "On January 20th, 2013 Andrew Shaw-Kitch began to go back in time...but as himself."

On this night it so happened that I had some pot and so we conspired to smoke it after dinner and talk up an enthusiasm about whatever studies we intended to accomplish. However, on this night, as was wont to happen, our sojourn along the edge of the ravine a hundred paces off the road into the the redwoods inspired a dialogue that ultimately led to a cataclysmic rethinking of western civilization that spoiled the early evening's supposedly committed library excursion. It probably involved the Muppets, but such specifics are precisely why this phone call was necessary.

On this night it also so happened that Brendan had some beer in his room so we tiptoed up the stairs in our dormitory crossing our fingers that we wouldn't run into someone. It could be an authority figure or simply a friendly hall mate who wanted to say "Hello." Either way the stakes were high, though only because we were. So much is revealed in hindsight, and nothing is more clear than how silly this was. All the same, we felt a great triumph arriving at Brendan's room, looking out the peephole knowing we were in the clear. Everyone deserves the feeling of triumph on a daily basis, even if it's found in simply walking from outside into a dormitory. We sat down and an opened phonebook on the ground started the conversation.

"So, B—, I noticed the phonebook and you noticed me noticing it and I asked, 'where'd you get a phone book?' It was an undergraduate college dorm in 2005, after all, it would seem a little out of place."

"Wouldn't you have said that then, like 'What the hell is a phonebook doing on your floor? Why is there even a phonebook in this building?'"

"I guess so, let me write that down...'in this building.' So what did you say."

"I have no idea what I said. The phonebook was in your room. We were in your room, you had a bottle of wine or something and you probably wanted to listen to Pavement or something."

This was true, but I simply wanted to clarify something before we proceeded. This night had been running circles in my head for weeks now due to certain temporal incongruities turned its events into a paradox that made might heart race when I got lost in it: 1. I didn't remember waking up with a phonebook opened on my chest that autumn morning in 2005. 2. I revisited that evening several weeks prior to this conversation, December 2013. 3. After that, now January 2014, I came across some notes taken from a meeting dated February 25, 2013 in which I had written down two of B—'s ideas gleaned from the conversation: a. In the present I could be sober, however I end up at a party in the past that is technically prior to my sobriety date. And b. I wake up with a phonebook on my chest inexplicably.

I wanted B— to corroborate this detail for me because otherwise my sanity would be entirely in question. I would fear every word out of my mouth to be non sequitur, contextless, rambling and coded. I would seek help, put myself away. But no the phonebook was in my room.

"That's right, of course! So you asked me about the phonebook."

"'Spareribs, why is there a phonebook on your floor? Where can you even find a phonebook around here?'"

"'That's exactly what I've been wondering all day. I've checked all the buildings on campus and checked them all for payphones. There are six, and only four of them have phonebooks.'"

"'So you don't know how it got in your room?'"

"'I woke up this morning with the phonebook opened on my chest.'"

"'Which page was it opened to?'"

"I have no idea which page it was opened to. Do you remember?"

"Wasn't it like Patio Furnishings and Pizza or something?"

"Couldn't we just make up a maximally absurd page? That seems fair."

"We can do a little research for that one." "'Which two payphones were missing phonebooks?'"

"'The library basement, and the phone outside the cafeteria.'"

"'Were you there last night?'"

As I said: I have no memory of this night, much less the one that preceded it. It felt much like a night I would have had at the time, but all of its specifics escaped me. My first cognizance of it was a month before when I reexperienced it, though differently than my other travels into my past, it was as though I were experiencing it for the first time.

"Now this is where the conversation gets weird, B—."

"The conversation wasn't just weird, buddy. You started looking at me as though in that moment you lost your mind. Your eyes doubled in size, your mouth slowly opened as far as it would go and your hands went in the air, fingers opened, swatting at the air in total, physical disbelief. Isn't that why we're having this conversation? This is the scene when you tell me. This is how it starts."

"So...you remember. This really happened. I haven't made this up in my mind."

"Oh my god. It's January 2014! That's where you were on that night, now I see why you're freaking out. It's OK. Let's just finish the dialogue, Spare. The universe is a loving one."

"'I don't remember where I was last night!'"

"And then you just stared at me still looking totally insane, but I just figured you were really stoned and worked up about the phonebook thing, so I laughed, which seemed to cause you to smile, making your face look a different kind of crazy, occasionally squinting, standing up and sitting down, biting your lip and staring at space as though you were figuring out an intensely satisfying puzzle. Then you sat down right next to me smiling hugely and started to whisper."

"'B—...'"

"'What's going on, little buddy?' I said kind of anxiously, as I can recall."

"I wasn't drinking wine yet, but you were sipping it out of a coffee cup."

"It was the spider cider mug. I remember because it broke that night."

"'B—, I have something to tell you that might sound crazy, but I want to assure you that I'm not fucking with you.'"

"Whatever I said there had to be kind of cliche or else it would sound out of place. 'Are you alright?' or 'You're freaking me out, Spare.'"

"'In January 2013 I was visiting Emily, or, I mean, I visit Emily. She lives in Northeast Portland at the time. I am at her house alone one night and I go to get a towel from the basement and fall down the stairs as I try to find them. The next thing I am perceiving is the house I live in in Monterey in 2012. I then get up and live eight hours of that day before returning to the moment at the bottom of the basement stairs in Northeast Portland.'"

"'Like in Home Alone when Daniel Stern falls down the stairs and the movie leaves him there awhile before coming back.'"

"I can't believe you said that, of all the things you could have said."

"Whatever, it's what came into my head, your revelation actually made me make more sense of you. You were so damn worried I'd think you were crazy."

"'Yeah...like in Home Alone, the camera of my consciousness left that scene and revisited a prior one, eventually returning to where it left off....'"

"'So where are you now? I mean, where did you leave? And where am I in the future?'"

"'I am in January 2014, that's all I can tell you. I don't think I should tell you anything else.'"

"'I guess that makes sense.'"

'''Except for two things. One: I found a note recently about two story ideas suggested by you that both come from tonight, the phonebook being one. The second is that my present self becomes sober then goes back in time to relive a night in which he drinks, but it's okay because it is prior to his sobriety date. Now, I do not become sober, as far as I know, but, on the first day of the year I decided not to drink for a month, yet here I am with a glass of wine not sure how to proceed.'"

"'So you're telling me that you are experiencing this moment right now for the first time as yourself from a decade in the future and that, due to some time loop I have memory of this conversation and night while you do not until you experience it as your future self? And that I gave clues to you in the ensuing time so that one day you would figure out this was so and realize that for the entire time that we knew each other I knew that you traveled through time and you didn't?'"

"'That's what I'm saying.'"

"But what if this was a mistake, what if you just misread coincidences and I was never supposed to know? What if you ruptured fate by not keeping your mouth shut and going along with evening as it was supposed to?"

"That's not what you said."

"I'm saying this now."

"That can't be. No. That can't be."

"How should we end it?"

"..."

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR IS LENT A WALKMAN

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IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ADVOCATES SHOPPING AT GROCERY OUTLET

Three years ago today Tristan and I drove out of Arcata,  late in the afternoon of a day that would grow dark by five. We played one more round of bocce at the Christian courts and I lost my sixth game in as many days.  A friend of mine mentioned to this me after reading the book, “Andrew, for someone who wrote a book on the sport you sure did lose a lot of games of bocce.” In a sense the book catalogued its author failing horribly at the thing he was documenting. To me, however, it would seem more ludicrous if I dedicated myself to traveling the coast and destroying all of my friends in a rite to which only I knew the silent encoded protocols.  [The smell of the beets infiltrated the air of the kitchen. The beets were golden and their insides were a shocking and alien color.  The arhythmic chopping of root vegetable flesh on wood and the steady brittle clicking of the wall clock fell in time. - KF]  If you’d driven north from Arcata, you’d know the splendor of the scenery, you’d see the elk crossing in Elk, california and the orange highway signs proclaiming “Tune into RADIO ??? AM FOR ELK NEWS,” you’d feel a peculiarly shelled creature on the forest floor scurrying along an asphalt bed beneath the canopy of wizened redwood.  You’d break through to the coast at the mouth of the Klamath.  And if you’d left when we did, you would see the sun kaleidoscope from the horizon, pink swirling skyward, cold colors speckling the pacific.  And you might worry as it got dark and you arrive at the southern outskirts of Crescent City, thinking of the cold, and Pelican Bay, but the city street lights guide you through town and reveal a few blocks away the Crescent City Grocery Outlet.  

At this point in my life, I did not believe in Grocery Outlet in the way a Catholic believes in the Eucharist.  I had visited and purchased fine products at greatly reduced prices, but I had never joined the congregation’s solemn and blissful cascade toward the carpeted aisles to wait for the blood and the sacred wafer, I had been as a tourist, for whatever reason in Marina, California that day, with a believer. It happened to be Tristan. We found a space in the strip-mall parking lot easily, one close to both entrances; which we chose became arbitrary. And now, here we were again together, in a similar parking lot, his same truck, and he was ushering me into the fold of this distinct store that remained recognizably a Grocery Outlet. Perhaps faith always develops in the process of experiencing something familiar in foreign setting, in the midst of a journey that begins to feel like a pilgrimage. The communion you took at home as a child means nothing until you experience the ritual in a different context, only then do you understand the value of what was taken for granted, enjoyed out of habit.

A little over a year later I found myself in a postman’s kitchen, which doubled as a homespun moonshine lab in Seaside, California.  It was large enough of an operation that an explosion was a possibility, but small enough that it would not be catastrophic.  The first 120-proof sample had us intent on understanding the process, the jugs, the contraptions, the stovetop volatility. After the second sample, further distilled, an even more intense shock to the senses—all of the senses—had me talking about Grocery Outlet. I had been going on a near weekly basis for kombucha varieties sold at Whole Foods at three times the price, high quality juices that needed to be sold on that day at half the price, bulk commodities and artisan treats, stacked and otherwise arranged, and wine, don’t get me started on the wine.

I believe I argued that Grocery Outlet allowed the consumer to circumvent the usual bullshit involved with shopping, the manipulations of marketing, the subjugations of supply and demand, the visible hand of the middle man telling us what we want, what’s good, concealing a similar supply of product that would skew the presently advantageous  demand situation on his end. I told the story of what had developed into a parable in my Grocery Outlet narrative.

A few months back after I had begun habitually frequenting the GO I was beginning my weave through the aisles at the left entrance, hoping to find, I believe, an environmentally sound toothpaste (Tom’s and Burt’s Bees, along with a wide variety of other sustainable bath products, are always on hand), when an announcement began on the sporadically used PA system: an entire shipment of Ben Jerry’s literally “missed the boat to Europe” and GO customers were there to reap the rewards. I turned immediately to the nearest freezer display where I knew to find artisan pints, sometimes coconut-based, usually an unexpected Haägen-Dazs flavor, and indeed there were three not bizarre varieties of Ben and Jerry’s.

“Hold on a minute,” the postman interrupted, loudly, adamant that I had gone too far. “You had me in your story until you said there were three kinds. I go to Grocery Outlet and there may be one kind of Ben and Jerry’s, I’ll give you two under such exceptional circumstances as you are describing, which, themselves sound like bullshit. Missing a boat to Europe? Do we really ship Ben and Jerry’s by the boatload to Europe? And why couldn’t the boat have just waited for the ice cream?”

I had to admit it sounded a bit mythological, the kind of story a GO consumer would hear and think, I’m really lucky to be here in this store, encountering these miraculous deals. Really I’m lucky to be such a savvy customer. The world is lucky to have someone as savvy as myself. I objected, “even if there were only two varieties—and I swear to you that I remember three, however implausible that may seem—aren’t I allowed in my story to say three due to the passage of time and conventions of storytelling? And isn’t two sufficient? These pints were two dollars. Is that not proof enough? This company does not make any flavor that is not mind-blowingly delicious.”

The postman was not buying any of this. In spite of this, I came to the conclusion out loud that I would write about my devotion to Grocery Outlet in relation to the unexpected Crescent City pilgrimage, it would find it’s way into the book, there was a relationship after all—supplanting the unseen forces of capitalist America in our day-to-day life with the unexpected fruits of chance, following instincts and abstract truths over convention, expectation, the mainstream media. You can imagine the breadth of news I had to catch up with January 21st when I returned home almost three years ago, what had passed in Tahrir Square, a big box store parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, the ripples that passed through all the little worlds of which ours is composed. My trip and Grocery Outlet had nothing to do with this, it is a marketplace as devoid of newspapers as our journey. The store is a game outside of the rules of traditional grocery shopping. Your cashier and your receipt tell you how much you saved and, by my account, you win when that number is greater than that which you spent. On a mythic day a decade ago wine.com went out of business, and the suited affluent of Piedmont descended to meet the low-income denizens of Oakland to partake of an indescribable selection of region, variety and vintage, appearing as if by magic at the price of high-end water at Whole Foods. On the occasion of the opening of a store in San Diego part of the story is told:

Some items on shelves are approaching their suggested sell-by date. Other foods end up at the store because of packaging changes. For example, some cereal brands had a special pink box for breast-cancer awareness month last October. In other cases, unpopular items are discontinued, such as mint-chocolate flavored soy milk that was briefly available at the National City store. That’s part of the fun of shopping at Grocery Outlet, Porter said.

Could these stores, “independently operated by locally-based married couples,” to quote another telling of the story, solve the problem of distribution? Could I partner with Grocery Outlet, Inc. in the creation of a GO-distributed publishing company, one with local authors who follow its maverick, no-bullshit ethos. Cut out the middle man. Just listen to this origin story, the trope repeated, how can this coast be tied together, under what pretense can the western states be whole?

Thirty years ago, California grocer Jim Read, on a trip to Central Oregon, cut a deal with new-found fishing buddy Leonard Downs. The terms--jotted down on a napkin—called for Read to consign discounted canned goods to Downs, who would sell them to the public from his Redmond storefront. The deal proved profitable for both men, and Read gradually exited his Bay area grocery store interests, favoring the consignment strategy he had struck with Downs. Read's new business, originally called Canned Foods Inc., has since evolved into Grocery Outlet, Inc. a 118-store discount grocery company headquartered in Berkeley, Calif. Now generating annual revenue of $500 million, GOI continues to rely on the consignment model, procuring inventory on the cheap from manufacturers and shipping it to independent operators who run their own stores.

If your book were a Grocery Outlet, which Grocery Outlet would it be? 

It would be the as of yet unopened Oakhurst, a scheduled renovation of a bowling alley “built for youngsters of the community to have a safe place to go and for the seniors for much needed exercise and fellowship.” 

According to Steve Kuljis, president of Sierra Lanes, Inc., current plans are to close the bowling alley immediately after Yosemite High School's June 7 Sober Grad party. Renovation will begin soon after the closing and Kuljis plans to have the new bowling alley open by the fall of 2014. The opening will be dependent on current negotiations for the site and finding an operator for the bowling alley.

"This move will enable us to relocate the bowling alley and bring it up to the standards our bowlers deserve," Kuljis said. "The bowling alley is the heartbeat of the community and the community deserves a better facility with better scoring equipment and a nice restaurant."

But this is not the first bowling alley to become a Grocery Outlet. A similar conversion was done in Renton outside of Seattle two years ago. Could your book not be this Grocery Outlet?

No because the book is not finished. We wait for Yosemite High School’s June 7 Sober Grad party. We wait for that perfect day when the sun shines—not even necessarily—and we play bocce and we shop at Grocery Outlet. Let the postman think what he will. As of January 12, 2014 THEIR SHOPPERS HAVE SAVED $87,739,263.67. 

Last year today and the year before I was in Arcata, California, six miles from the Commercial Street Grocery Outlet in Eureka. 

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR FALLS DOWN A FLIGHT OF CONCRETE STAIRS AND BEGINS TO GO BACK IN TIME

The thing that contextualizes all this and makes it a story and not just a travel diary is what happened in Portland. We’ll just call my friend Emily Emily to avoid any confusion about whether I am referring to a book or my life.  I was staying on her vintage clawfoot sofa in the living room of her cottage in someone’s backyard in Northeast Portland and she had an improv class session at six o’clock that night so I anticipated a restful evening at her house.  I requested some of her pot and a towel so I could smoke a spliff and take a bath, envisioning an ideal, cozy evening.  She drove off and I started a bath and broke up some pot and rolled it into a cigarette with some tobacco.  And then I went outside to find the entrance to the basement to get a towel she told me was drying. It was cold outside and completely dark between the side door of the cottage and the fence behind it and I walked along the weedy lawn toward it and turned in full stride toward the basement stairs which I suddenly realized were already beneath me.  I fell not just down but forward, my weight feeling like it was already above the bottom landing and I just ricocheted against the concrete steps as I fell.  I managed to grab what turned out to be a blackberry vine whose thorns tore out of the plant’s flesh and into mine as I shredded the bundle of vines of its thorns and epidermis as I rapidly descended head over feet, not seeing anything but feeling the world swirling around me as my head flew down the steps before me and I landed and felt like I was very slowly waking up and falling asleep at the same time.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR LISTENS TO AN EPISODE OF SCIENCE FRIDAY AND THEN WRITES AN ESSAY, BOTH FOR THE SECOND TIME

I recognized what was now a familiar sensation I had grown so accustomed to by falling asleep listening to NPR for the previous 5 years and waking up to it every morning, often several times. You hear the radio faintly and you sometimes think, “why is the radio so far turned down,” but then you realize as it gets louder that you were still asleep so the world and its radio were just tuned out.  I recognized Ira Flatow’s voice as I came to: “To me what's very fascinating I know of all the things that go on in your brain, but just knowing where you are in time and space, right? You know—you're sitting, you're standing, keeping your balance, knowing where you are, knowing the spacial relationships, how you can reach out and touch something and not miss it.”

I was in my old bed in my house in Monterey during that year long period I had it right next to the window. It was 11:20 and it was obviously Friday because Science Friday was on, with Ira Flatow.  His guest responded as I ran my hand along my head instinctually feeling for bumps, “That's right but this leads to an interesting point, which is that: you buy, you believe everything your brain serves up to you.  And the example you just gave, knowing where you are in time and space, we're not always so accurate.  So when you are asleep and dreaming you believe, you have all kinds of of time and space that are not true. SO it turns out whatever your neuro circuits are feeding up whatever your neural circuits visual illusions is you buy that and take it to be reality.  But it's not always necessarily the case.  And things like visual illusions are very interesting to neuroscientists, the same reason they're also interesting to third graders and everyone forgets about them  The reason they are so interesting to neuroscience is we think we open our eyes and then are seeing the world, but in fact what visual illusions demonstrate is there's a lot of computation going on under the hood to construct this illusion of vision and it's only when we can find these little cracks in the system we can say "wow it ain't what you think it is that's going on out there." Instead what's happening is your brain is doing massive computations and deciding what the best story is for what's out therein then you believe that, the conscious of you.”

My surprise and confusion should be evident in the perplexing situation I was in.  I continued to lay there baffled as Ira Flatow broadcast of perceptual riddles. “Can you change people's perception of time, make them think something is happening in a certain sequence when it's not, when time is slowing down, things like that.”

His guest responded, “So this the work my lab has been doing for the last decade or so. It turns out that not only is vision is a construction of the brain that's manipulable, but that so is time—there are temporal illusions, just like visual illusions, and it turns out it's quite easy to manipulate these things and what that demonstrates is that time is not just flowing past like a river, that's the way Newton thought about it, or most people do think about it, but it turns out it is something that the brain is actively constructing; and, in answer to your question, yes, in the laboratory, we can make you believe that something happened before something else, even if it's the other way around!”

I turned my clock radio off and sat up in bed, realizing that, while I did not have the symptoms of someone who had just fallen down a flight of concrete stairs, I was insufferably hungover.  An empty beer bottle by the bed confirmed this as did my open copy of [Dostoyevsky?], who I only read when I was drinking, on the floor.  I thought about what my life was like when my room was arranged like this.  I worked at the restaurant, and I usually worked at the restaurant on Fridays at 4, which seemed far too soon to be going to work at a busy restaurant on a Friday night, getting ready to be out of the house in four hours.  I looked through the clothes on the floor for my phone finding my wallet instead, which might prove to be useful.  I looked on the window sill next to the clock radio and saw my phone next to the mason and its dead and moldy lavender.  It was August, the last month I lived at this house.  I scrolled to find my colleague’s number and dialed it, hoping I was not fated to work this evening.

“Hello, Carrie! How are you?” I said.

And she responded as though she were expecting me to call and I couldn’t have been happier to hear her ask, “Did you decide if you want me to work for you tonight?”

And I said, ecstatic, “Yes, I think I would like to take you up on that.  I could really use the night off.” 

And she was happy to do it.  And we said goodbye and this all suddenly began to seem very familiar and I checked my text messages to see if my hunch was correct, and, yes it was. I was to meet my friend Chad’s class downtown and talk to groups of them about sustainability. “One o’clock,” his message said.  I turned Science Friday back on and Ira Flatow was talking about Neil Armstrong who just died.  He and his guest talked about how science, with Armstrong as its symbol, became exceptionally popular for a brief period in America, and, as the program often discusses, we need something to make science accessible, and as interesting as it is to them, for everyone else. Neil DeGrasse Tyson always makes for the most impassioned guest.  The segment ends with John Stewart’s song “Armstrong” as the segue.  I went out to the kitchen turning the show on in the living room on the way and filled up the kettle and turned on the back left coil on the stove, placing steel kettle, greasy from all the frying done next to it, on the orange coil. My other two roommates didn’t seem to be home, and I don’t think they usually were at that time.  There was an empty whiskey bottle in the recycling tub next to the trash can. I suppose it was quite possible my roommate persuaded me into some late-night whiskey. I looked in my bike basket and saw a small box of used tea candles that I collected from the restaurant.  I must have worked the night before.  The kettle sang out before I had even begun to grind coffee and I lunged at the stove and moved the kettle, turning off the electric coil. 

I thought about what I should talk about with Chad’s Japanese students.  I would be riding my bike there, that makes for a good prop, good for English learning.  I could bring my copy of Walden, etc.

The whole day came back to me at that point.  I knew it well because I wrote an essay about it that night.  That was the most difficult part of the day.  The bike ride down and back up the hill with a hangover that would not relent and speaking to a group of youngsters whose command of English was not where I was expecting it to be, all that was fine if not a little surreal.  What I worried about was the essay I had intended to write.  The existence of a piece of writing I had grown attached to was suddenly at risk. Granted I was not aware of the rules of whatever experiment in perception was occurring, it still struck me that, if for some reason I came to back in the future, the essay that I had written would be that which I would have to write now, and that was a daunting premise.

I remember smoking pot that day to relieve my hangover.  And before that I remember eating a quesadilla at the downtown taqueria and chatting with an old acquaintance who I played soccer with in middle school.  His dad owned the place and we chatted briefly.  This day we chatted longer because my filter ruptured with my head when I was hungover and we talked about still being in Monterey, what we were doing, where we wanted to go.  I was happy not to work that evening.  It was a special day.

And when I got home I found the pot and some tobacco and papers and also the new roommate, who was moving into the room next to mine just as I was preparing to leave myself.  I said hello and introduced myself and smoked pot outside while drinking a big glass of water and then I came inside and put on side A of California Bloodlines and opened up my notebook and began the essay as best as I remembered it.

If you google “John Stewart” to find out more about the recording artist after you purchase one of his records secondhand for 89 cents because it’s called “California Bloodlines” and you are Californian, google will give you results relating to the host of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, assuming that you were misspelling his name and meaning to look him up, and that you did not care about the prolific folk singer-songwriter.  I did google "John Stewart" which showed results instead for "Jon Stewart."  I did not ask to search instead, as I had initially intended, for "John Stewart," so I have grown acquainted with the recording artist exclusively through record stores.

I am moving out of my house a week from tomorrow and one of my projects has been to listen to all of the John Stewart records I have acquired and decide which I want to keep.

I certainly shall keep California Bloodlines for I find it to be a generally listenable record with moments of originality and excellence.  For this reason I bought The Phoenix Concerts (1974), a double live LP, when I saw it for $1.89 at the same record store, and why I bought respective 1970, ’72, and ’73 recordings Willard, Sunstorm, and Cannons in the Rain, all of which I have listened to in passing no more than once.

Looking through my other records, deciding which ones to keep, I noticed that John Stewart was the third that made the Kingston Trio one more than a duo.  He was the one without a cleft chin.

and, because this was the logic of the essay I was to write that day, I flipped over the record and began the second of sixteen entries in the piece

California Bloodlines Side B

The lyrics and ambience of the songs on California Bloodlines describe a rich connection between the history of western settlement and the present (or at least then present) American reality.  The eponymous first song on the record tells of a state’s identity as the veins and arteries of the singer, a history literally pulsing through his flesh.  “Mother Country” is a spoken storytold song about a newspaper article in the San Francisco Chronicle and the reanimation through Stewart’s imagination of turn of the 20th century life—”Why, they were just a lot of people doing the best they could,” he put it simply.

What interests me about this mode of research, and accessing of media in general, is that it is unmediated by present-day modes of either media or commerce—all five of my LPs, all six records, cost less than a beer at the bar, either in the local record store bargain bin or from the not-for-profit thrift store; and I listed to them without the internet, cable, subscribing only to electricity.  

When I googled “John Stewart” I did not clarify that I had meant John Stewart, that I did not misspell the name of my intended search result. If I did clarify I don’t remember, because all I know—or at least consciously remember—I just know from these records, and at a certain point I decided I would leave it at that, I would comprehend him exclusively through the mode of his early ‘70s hey-day—I would set them on the turn table, plop a needle on them, and tap my toe while reading the inserts.  And, as you may have guessed, catalogue the experience as it happened in a vaguely avant-garde personal essay about the privilege and power of certain modes of media over others.

and then I ascertained that the next in the chronology of John Stewart was Willard and I put on side A and continued the piece.

“And this song is a lie.”

—John Stewart, “Never Goin’ Back”

I started with California Bloodlines because I could not find a date on it, and I bought it first, so I assumed this coincidence to mean enough that I should listen to it first.  At least the familiarity I had with it would lend to an accessible introduction, perhaps.  Perhaps the sentimentality that I hold for my state and all croons directed towards it would shine through the opening words.  

In the insert to Willard John Stewart looks like a bohemian boyscott, his hair 1965 Beatles length, neckerchiefed, in the studio, in one photo contemplating, in another laughing, then mugging, next boyishly smiling, strumming, a talent plucked from the glow of the campfire, or perhaps the festival at harvest, entertaining the dust bowl era farmers seen in the old photograph on the back of the record.

A degree of theatricality—perhaps even schtick—is in the music and performances of the Kingston Trio and their era (not as bad as their contemporary Lawrence Welk and his kitschfest variety show), an artificiality that Christopher Guest and company made great light of in A Mighty Wind.  John Stewart does not put on voices or play characters in his songs; instead he is an era-less, eternal troubadour, passing through the world of the West and its railroad tracks and highways, through its fields and mountains, and telling its story as though it could be either 1972 or 1892.

“The Dakota sky made me feel like the river / runnin’ free, runnin’ free,” and he has a “belly full of Tennessee” just two songs before, and before the side is over he is “back in Pomona,” a song dedicated to the iconography of blacksmithing and the county fair—the LA County Fair, as it turns out.  We also learn in an astericks that “Ginny us slang for racehorse groom.”

and my new roommate passed through the living room and asked me what I was doing and I explained and she explained she was moving here to teach composition at the community college and I told her I would love to send it to her when I was done so she could look over her first essay written in Monterey under her supervision, and then I continued writing

Willard B

Just as California Bloodlines starts its first side with “California Bloodlines,” Willard starts side B with “Willard,” a song that—while not bad—tries way too hard.  PErhaps it is impossible write a good song that begins, “Willard, he’s a loner / living by the railroad track.”  However, there lies a great virtue in singing a ballad with complete sincerity, and indeed I quite enjoy the schmaltz of the chorus because it is so unpretentious with none of the self-satisfaction with which you can hear Paul McCartney sing his 3rd person ballads.

And his mamma knows that he was once a child.

Mamma she was the first one to hear us cry.

And my mamma knows that I was once a child.

Could it be we’re all just Willard in disguise?

I was struggling to imprint ink into my notebook while sitting on the sofa, listening to Side 1, so I grabbed John Stewart’s double live album to write on, thus solving the problem.

“All American Girl,” Side 2, track 3, hints at the potentially fascist message of John Stewart’s music—the “All American Girl” is “a blue-eyed blonde,” queen of our country’s history, a white history narrated by Stewart and populated by his ancestors—a simpler, old-fashioned, bucolic world that seems to resemble the vision of Thomas Kinkade more than my own.  The song that just finished declared “that across the hill from Placerville the wind sure can set you free.” Thomas Kinkade is from Placerville; those same winds that bore him into this world and set him free.

The song playing now is called “Great White Cathedrals” and begins, “Was it you all along, good Jesus?”  Has pop culture justly blacklisted a retrograde songwriter who ignored the revolutions of the ‘60s and instead embodied a conservative persona based on Woody Guthrie, the great troubadour leftist of the 20th Century?  His songs don’t have outright political messages like Guthrie’s or an actual conservative songwriter like George Jones (whose record Good Ol’ Bible I did decide to get rid of).  The resolution of “All American Girl” is “she knows she has changed from the dreams that haunt her in her bed.”  That is unsettling in a timeless way, and interesting beyond most of whatever dated anachronism pop culture considers to be the great ouvre of American music.

“Marshall Wind” brings me all the way back.  It speaks to me directly and personally, he shouts out “‘Get back, JoJo,’ that’s what Paul said,” in a climax self-consciously evoking that of “Hey, Jude,” for the geography is mine—Paul knows nothing about Tucson, much less California grass—the song is mine; it is not New York’s, not England’s, not Nashville’s.  Highway 1 runs through my hometown, and “Til the day was done on highway one / Dancing off the bottle was the Sunday sun.”

I knew I was trying to capture themes of pride in the land of one’s youth and the history of that land and media fickleness, the fads of art, the arbitrariness of popular taste and the relationship of that to technology, and some phrases that I written before came back to me verbatim, obviously those that were quotes from songs came easier.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ESTABLISHES AN OFFICE IN HIS PARENTS' GARAGE

This desk stood in my primary childhood bedroom, that is the one I lived in from ages 7 to 13. I’m not sure where it was before then, but it ended up in the garage of the house we moved into the summer I turned 14, where it has since resided, against the eastern wall on top of the concrete floor that becomes the driveway and then the side and the street and then everything else that is the world beyond my parents’ house.

After the third bocce trip and what developed from the trip, what I began to refer to—only to myself at this point—as the condition, I found myself once again at my parents’ house, just as I had after I spent all of my money traveling the fall after high school and again the spring after high school and the summer after my first year of college, summers and springs after college, the summer before when I quit my jobs and moved out of my house, preparing to spend all of my money on a big trip, and now, 7 months later, after spending all of my money on that trip. I tidied up the desk at which I wrote my first stories and crafted my first projects—creating quills from hawk feathers found in the neighborhood that I would dip in ink wells, making Christmas cards, etc.—decades before, the polished wood setting, a desk that I could once have fit into and hidden beneath a roll-top shell if the appropriate situation ever arose, like a turtle in, what was explained to us children, its traveling home. 

That is, in a sense, what it is to work at this desk, in this desk, from this desk, hunching ever forward into a space I push further into its recesses, adding to and subtracting from its varied drawers, collecting nicknacks and old scotch tape dispensers in the petite éta·gères and credenzas of the corners. This desk has always housed my writerly fantasies and I have now returned to it, it contains this laptop and more and more as I come to sit in front of it, my fingers and the words that create are drawn into its vacuum. 

When my father outgrew his typewriter, with the rest of the professional world in the early ‘90s, I took it and placed it in this desk. I typed for the sake of typing, marveling at the instantaneous incarnation of the letters on the page, darker, bolder and faster than the grey and primitive ribbon ink that came from the Macintosh Classic via the printer when we weren’t playing a greenish pixilated ball and paddle brick-busting game. My father had the other desk in his office downstairs, the other roll-top desk next to me now,  where I learned key commands and everything about the world of macintosh, where as a 9 year old I told my 40-something aunt it was a shortcut to drag the icon of her disk into the trash to eject it. But it wasn’t worth it to her to trust me. The contents of that floppy disk were too important to willy-nilly place it in the trash no matter how hypothetical that action may have been.

I see me and my father at these parallel desks, somewhere unfixed in time like some surreal film, slowly being consumed by the desks, increasingly slumped over, our feet leaving the ground, moving paramecium-like, the roll-top slowly descending and engulfing us, as though we could replace this reality with that of books, trade these uncertainties for those of the fixed word, on the pages of the books closed and shelved though still easily accessible, the documents on floppy disks somewhere in the house if not lost in the move long ago, long after the technology was already irrelevant. 

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR TINKERS WITH PUZZLES OF VARIOUS CHARACTER

Three years ago today I was in Oakland and the three of us began leg two, west to Highway One. As the smallest, I sat in the middle of the truck cab, adjusting at every shift into fourth. We stopped for supplies at a CVS in San Rafael. I bought a disposable camera and got another for free. We rolled further westward through windy redwood-lined asphalt. It was Sunday and we noticed a garage sale, managing to park the truck between the shoulder and the erosion-exposed dirt wall ascending above the road. My companions were looking for a good pot for camping. Tristan instead found bicycle maintenance tools and I found what I thought would be a helpful and appropriate book for travelers through the cosmos, as the book advertises itself, introduced by Ram Daas. There’s no sense in deciding one is wrong about such choices. They are simply made, hardly even chosen by us, and we must live with their outcomes. And so, Emmanuel’s Book lies in the court where this all takes place, somewhere between another rough contour in the plane to a full-fledged player in the game. Hell, maybe it’s the sunlight by which any of this visible, though I would maintain that sunlight remains itself and we should keep metaphors away; in an important way it symbolizes the day onto which it falls while remaining eternally the light of the sun, and that’s already plenty.

Two years ago today I was in Oakland. We might have gone to a recently opened bar that featured two bocce courts named Make Westing, after a Jack London story. If it was that night it was one that represented the commodification, the static private side of everything we were experiencing, from bocce itself, to the role of West Coast literature in contemporary life, to fun, to drinking, to the occupation of space. It also might have been the day we played bocce with a mom and her son who was more interested in sharing with us his secret hideout at the shrub-lined edge of the park. I asked him if he was part of the occupy movement, he said he was not. Perhaps that was the same day. It was Live Oak Park in Berkeley and I declared it one of the best parks I’d ever passed an hour.

A year ago today I was still in Monterey County, taking my time to make sure I had all the pieces in place for the next few months. I was to release a book’s worth of material one stop at a time and I needed all of the text and the supplies to allow me to put them together and photocopy handmade copies as I went. I also needed clothes and things. I was also bringing my ukulele and my bocce set and a half dozen books that I would need for research, and I would have to walk certain distances with all this. Such is the puzzle with which I was tinkering a year ago today.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR INHABITS A PREVIOUSLY EXPERIENCED CONSCIOUSNESS

I didn’t count how many times I had hit the start button on the dishwasher, but I imagine it was the thirtysixth initiation of the 90-second cycle. When I bent over the button and pushed it in with my thumb the sensation had the uncanny feeling that I’ve come to know and fear, combined with the head rush of standing straight up again, spinning around to grab the empty rack behind me, and continuing in a full 360 to place it in the absence of the rack now in the machine, all accomplished by the muscle memory I had developed by enacting the same ritual hundreds of times before.

My clothes were different and the sun was higher and my hair was shorter. I was within a consciousness that was at that point historic to me, but one that was significantly more recent than previous similar into-body experiences. The scene felt identical, the same co-workers surrounded me, the same dishes surrounded me in various stages of cleanliness, I wore the same shoes, “She’s A Bad Mama Jama” by Carl Carlton was playing as it does eventually on the Motown, ‘70s funk, Michael Jackson and Hall & Oates stations, among others. I stacked the clean bowls behind me, replaced them by the line cook’s station, then grabbed a handful of silverware to unload by the bus tub area to make sure it wasn’t overflowing with haphazardly stacked dirty dishes. There was a load in there so I consolidated them into one of the tubs and came back into the narrowing kitchen announcing proudly, “coming back with a bus tub,” and I was able to fall into the four-hour closing routine without missing a step.

At a certain point, an hour or so later, after nearly catching up on all the dishes sent to me by the prep and line cooks, the customers and the juice station, I went to get my phone and check a few things. No messages or phone calls, but it was in fact two weeks earlier. It was the day before I was to take a two-day trip into the mountains. I bought four episodes on VHS of the Twilight Zone at a thrift store on the way to work. I rode my bike home and wanted to watch the Twilight Zone, but didn’t—I got ready for the trip and went to sleep early-ish.

Closing the place was the same kind of misery that culminates in the same kind of victorious feeling that feels simultaneously like a kind of failure—I just washed a shit ton of dishes, but really I just continually rewashed the same dishes, some sullied accidentally or dropped before they were even utilized, a feeling of dread and meaninglessness Dishwasher Pete saw symbolized in The Blue-Rimmed Plate, an unexplained black sheep in the stacks of white dishes, a singular plate that, one day counting, he washed 27 times in a shift. “As Blue-Rimmed went round and round, he pointed out I had it all wrong. Really I was just moving in circles: washing things that only got dirty again within minutes. The next town, the next job, the story would always be the same: the dishes would never remain clean.”

The worst was that not only had I washed these dishes over and over again already, but that I had already done them on this night in this order in these clothes at this pace so that déjà vu couldn’t even describe the vibrations of reoccurrence and synchronicity were pulsing from the dishwasher through the sink to my hips and from the faucet through the pressure washer through my fingertips onto the plates and over my other hand. Traces of my movements lingered in the air, the noises of the kitchen and the seating beyond echoed and only made sense as nonlinguistic sounds, I moved swiftly through a slow-motion world which included myself. And then I said goodnight and went home and insisted that we watch the Twilight Zone VHS because, having since watched it, I now knew that, in the first featured episode, “Walking Distance,” the protagonist experiences a situation that would have been pretty far out to experience. I couldn’t have insisted on this and explained that I was myself present in what I consider to be the past—I would have been thought crazy. And the two-day trip to the mountains would have to be postponed. 

When I did end up watching the episode for the first time in what remains of my linear perception of time, I rewound the VHS and transcribed a particularly poignant Rod Serling transition:

A man can think a lot of thoughts and walk a lot of pavements between afternoon and night. And to a man like Martin Sloane to whom memories suddenly become reality, a resolve can come as clearly and as inexorably as stars on a summer night. Martin Sloane is now back in time and his resolve is to put in a claim to the past.

Everyone knows it’s dangerous to apply a free will not indigenous to its moment, realities not meant to exist open up irrationally and permanently, nostalgia destroys that which it worships, and so I didn’t watch “Walking Distance,” I redid everything as exactly as possible as it was already done and went to bed at precisely the time I vaguely recall doing so before.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR SEES THE ON THE ROAD MOVIE

I had a notion I would acquire some speed and turn this into a novel in a period of several weeks, but received negative reactions from friends when I shared this plan.

I saw the movie on Tuesday.  I woke up at seven and made it to elementary school at eight to substitute teach 1st grade.  I went to the farmer's market in Monterey.  I talked to an artist who gives away books every Tuesday and shared a vision with him that I had in February while in an outdoor soaking pool at Doe Bay on Orcas Island, that I would write his biography that would double as a retrospective on his works, and that I would write it at Hawk's Shadow, his cabin on top of a ridge down toward Big Sur. He was into the idea, but, since I had left town in January, someone had began renting the cabin and moved in. But he was himself in the process of creating his own retrospective. Then I went to the movie theater where I used to work, was bought a coffee by the proprietor of the café, and watched On the Road.  I hadn't eaten dinner and I hadn't had enough sleep the night before, but a "second wind" pulsed through me, and the drugs that inspired the sequences of the film were captured in the scenes and entered me like placebos and I left the theater high, knowing that I was not ready to stop moving, that I needed to write as much as I could in my parents' garage, I mean my french-canadian aunt's spare room, knock it all out so I could be ready to go the next time Dean or Neal or Carlo or Marylou came to get me or called for me.  I would type and stare at the maps on the walls and postcards of far away places, but I wouldn't smoke cigarettes and sip whiskey as I pounded at my typewriter.  My typewriter is broken and, besides that, outmoded, to say the least. I have a stack of books and a thousand dollar vocabulary and clear and meaningful things to say, but no publisher beyond kinko's and google.  

*  *  *

I have been hammering out the words and am happy to be here no matter much I would prefer to be back in transit.  And I owe much to Kerouac for getting out what he did so I could know what lay at the end of that road. Days have passed and I have done everything from spontaneous prose fueled by blaring music on the stereo in front of me to piecing together patiently a bibliography while listening to All Things Considered turn into Marketplace turn into The World turn into Fresh Air.   And the road has sat on me as I sat on it as my feet literally touch the cement of the garage floor that becomes the cement of the driveway and the street and the greater street and the California local highway 68 to the 101, the great 101 that once took one to Mexico before the interstate introduced the great behemoth named FIVE that tapped out US 101 in LA long ago, but it still holds strong north along that royal road—el camino real—which sounds like the real path, through Salinas, over the Golden Gate, as we discussed before, until the coast runs out and is forced to curb itself east and outline the grand Olympic Peninsula and then become US 101 south, that which was north and became east until it gets eaten up by what else but that great behemoth name FIVE.  My feet touch the real path but I stay still, for this, for this...

The first time I took the great trip north I was 14 years old and we had a volkswagon vanagon that my mom drove all by herself with myself, our black labrador, and a furry white mutt intended for my aunt in Seattle as cargo. We aimed to stay as far west as possible, a noble aim, an impractical one, a beautiful one, and my mother insisted I keep a journal, that I catalogue this epic journey.  What a quixotic notion I was introduced to at such an impressionable age.  When we arrived at our northernmost destination, the bottoming out of our hero's journey, my uncle explained to me the interstate system, that odd roads changed your latitude and the evens took you east west, like a graph, x and y.   The evens, the xs, began above the zero southern border, with the EIGHT, taking you out of San Diego, through the desert off and on, off into the unknown, on the road, the TEN that I knew so well, the epic LA-traffic nightmare that mirrors the origins of 66 in the beaches of Santa Monica and goes like that Hudson that famously jumped on it, and the FORTY that is now that 66, that gives you the historical perspective on the phenomena of that story of a highway, you look down on those grounded cadillacs instead of up, you look down on all of it, like irony the FORTY pulls you away from the earth and lets you look at it on the other side of the passage of time, and the EIGHTY, I knew the EIGHTY, it was the bay bridge that took you from the bay to the capital out of the state on and on until Wyoming where I once found it as a younger child where I realized where it corresponded with the maps I studied so hard, and the EIGHTY-FOUR, further north that I met years later when I lived in Portland and would go east to the mountains on whims or the time I took the Greyhound from Lincoln, Nebraska to Portland—but it was called something else out there—and the EIGHTY took me to Salt Lake where we found the EIGHTY-FOUR and I found an America previously unknown to me, and then I knew there was a NINETY somewhere up there...and the ys, it was a beautiful coincidence that the California ONE road the great western periphery of our continent for much of its land's end drama, but the truly furthest west interstate, that took one from state to state, was the FIVE, that which ate up the 101 which ate up that camino real which ate up those native trailways that I can't claim to know anything about for the names don't linger on the signs of this coast's great thruways, the FIVE that followed the California aqueduct through the central valley and intersected with those lateral lines that we just mentioned,  the definition of quixotic, the intertwining duo of modernity that is the most boring thing to drive, torture in the summer, a potential tragedy in the fog, boring, straight and consistent, all the way through the manmade Shasta Lakes to the semi-passing excitement of the cascading Oregon border, and on, and on, the most dramatic view of Portland, high above the Willamette, where the EIGHTY-FOUR ends and begins, depending on how you look at it, and then the Columbia, that flooded glacial carving, and on along the green and watery contours of Washington until Canada, and the FIFTEEN just east of that, that I met in San Diego county where my mom's family's from, that broke from the five heading east as it carved its path north, it ate the 395, my mom told me, the 66 of the north-south (that gets no reputation because it don't go east where reputations are made), the old 395 that my other uncle, the brother of the one who explained to me about the interstates, told me we would be on, the modern road that inherited that comparatively ancient trajectory, the day that I started Jack Kerouac's On the Road for the second time, are you ready for it, Andrew, there's a sign around here, look out for it, do you see it...there it is, history: US 395! We saw it, 7 in the morning on the way to Mexico at the end of a journey that at moments felt could never end, FIFTEEN that took Los Angelinos to Las Vegas, that held the dead body of a character in a Brett Easton Ellis short story, a dead body picked of its joints, this is what I remember, these are the basics of these roads that are the canvases of life and movement in America and my uncle explained to me the logic of them when I was 14 and my mom drove me and our dog north as far west as we could go while still remaining on the continent that we take for granted, that rests beneath the concrete my feet touch that leads to my driveway and those roads that lead to every other road.

Like I said, I have been experimenting with spontaneous prose for the first time since I first read Kerouac in high school and realized you don't have to be a degenerate to smoke marijuana, that, on the contrary, you could be smarter than most people that you met, and maybe that's part of the reason you smoked, but then the joys of analytical deconstruction of the words that describe our reality took precedence, and thought, and pre-ordained structures comma and self-conscious writing.  How can someone write something without deciding beforehand exactly what is to be written?  How can one let words escape and let them exist, apart from awareness, what is so special about the moment that creates the words that one can't do it again with a bit more of an idea of what it is that should be put across?  This is why Kerouac faded out of favor and is why I ignored him altogether in the end—he wasn't afraid to sound dated or even silly, he let inspiration and the moment create his writing, not periods of contemplation and the passage of time and the awareness that goes along—spontaneous prose.  This is the importance of jazz, of performance, of the ability for a moment to shine through in his art.

Unfortunately books hold things forever, they don't care about the aesthetics that produced them, the beauty of the moment.  It sits on a bookshelf next to James Joyce and Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein and if you pull On the Road it doesn't stand the test of time. A Jackson Pollack painting is there, but seems like a tombstone to a moment you could never appreciate unless you were there. If you listen to a jazz recording it is a bit more reserved and put together—timeless—than a live performance, but if it is a live performance you have an audience hollering and celebrating and letting you know this is a moment, that this moment is happening and mind-blowing and that, although there is a recording of it, it can never be reproduced, it can never exist again, and the fast-living, drug-fueled lifestyles of its artists assured that.  

And this is why the movie On the Road works so well.

The life that created the material for the novel, the dialogues that led to the ideas of the novel, and the writing of the novel itself, everything that led to the existence of these words on those pages was a performance, a series of artful actions and improvisations and experiments and philosophies and the movie gives this infamous performance a stage, and it is a beautiful stage.  The passage of time since it was written makes its story a period piece and a certain self-awareness comes from just the costuming and the antiquity of the cars, the natural ironic distance that comes with time makes it all a performance and it is not just palatable, it is good.  

When I found my father after the film I raved about it with the sentence patterns of a manic episode and he said he wanted to see it and look over the novel before hand, so I loaned him a book that wasn't mine to begin with and tomorrow we see the movie, me for the second time. I said I would be happy to see it again, the first time as an emotional experience, the second as a more critical summation of the film.  Eight and a half years after I traveled four months straight and watched a Walter Salles movie twice about voyaging I have finished six-odd months of travel and prepare to watch a Walter Salles movie for a second time.  And this riff is done as my dad turns 65.