I think of Dean Moriarty

I nearly finished On the Road on the bus from San Luis Obispo to Salinas, but I misjudged the time or overestimated my reading speed, which is quite slow.  That was nearly a week ago.  I read the last four pages just now and took the refrain of the closing paragraph as this essay's title.  I put off the final pages because I knew I would have to write this upon the book's completion, and that was scary for a number of reasons.

I put the book in my suitcase in January, thinking it would be meaningful to reread in the context of travel.  The book belongs to Señor de los Ríos, my 12th-grade Spanish teacher, who lent it to me and my friend Jaymee in 2004 so we could translate sections of it for our final project, Sobre el Camino.    Yesterday I found a piece of writing in an old notebook from 2005 about an incident in the Monterey Public Library—"'the people's university,' to Melville Dewey," I wrote, working at the John Steinbeck Library in Salinas at the time—that I facetiously referred to as a thwarted realization of "the best moment of my life."  I was "enjoying the fine day on [the library's] patio translating On the Road in to Spanish."

Jaymee, who was my partner in this project, was downstairs looking at poetry.  On this patio, amongst the tables and chairs—and on this day balloons—was a small kiosk outfitted with the components of a fully capable coffee bar.  Talk had circulated for the last month or so that the library was going to be given a functioning café and the buzz shifted from the new Nicholas Sparks novel to this new possibility [I was a bit of a cynical snob at the time.  Apologies].  It was definitely an exciting time [here I am not being at all sarcastic, I legitimately felt this was a profoundly meaningful event].  Anyways [I considered using this word as a transition was the trademark charm of my writing style.  Seriously], I sat out there with my notebook, Kerouac, and a Spanish/English dictionary, and people in fancy clothes—middle-aged ladies in their best pant suits, and tweed covering the sparse arrangement of men—began to congregate at the entrance to the patio where the kiosk stood [I wrote "sat," but I am deciding now that a kiosk stands].  I realized something important was happening and, perhaps, I was to be a part of history.  I knew it was true when a lady in a red business suit walked outside with a gigantic pair of scissors.  The formerly inconspicuous ribbon across the front of the coffee bar suddenly revealed itself as very significant as I suddenly realized I was in the midst of a ribbon-cutting ceremony.  A glass was clnked and a series of awkward speeches commenced.  It struck me as rather surreal the way these stumbling introverts paused after obvious jokes and got courtesy chuckles, and someone started talking about "the dream of one day having a café on the patio" and that "today that dream is a reality," or something like that [I wasn't very committed to what I considered trumped up details].  Right then I realized, with the proper execution, I could be the first customer to buy something at the Monterey Public Library's patio café.  I needed it.  Slowly, I got up from my table on the periphery of the ceremony, and I sidled up to the edge of the crowd, timing the perfect swoop at the ordering counter.  The ribbon cutting was prepared.  The lady in the red suit picked up the [oversized (It seems a waste not refer back to the comedy of a massive stage prop in the midst of the scene)] scissors and walked up to the ribbon held up by two men.  She brought the handles down together and the blades came together over the ribbon; and nothing happened; the scissors were dull.  It was just for show.  People clapped anyways [see!], the coffee bar was open.  My place in history unveiled itself in front of me.  I cooly walked into it, seeing it envelope me like rising bath water [I'm not sure of this metaphor.  How can you walk into rising bath water?  Maybe you could walk into one of those machines that blows money that you try to grab?] when this wretched old lady shoved her way in front of me and ordered a latte.  Fucking shit [Another self-consciously colloquial attempt to thwart pretentiousness and an actual climax].  The idea of buying a coffee was suddenly quite odious [wow! "odious" seems a little over the top...].  I left the patio and went downstairs to find Jaymee.  I tapped her on the shoulder and all I could do was stand there, speechless.

I also came across a piece of dialogue, unattached from anything else: "'But what I'm getting at is this.  When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?'"  I just googled it and it is from page 69 of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  In 2005 I failed to start a book club with that book as the first reading.  Justin and I met at a coffee shop in Monterey to talk about it.  Jaymee came as well, though she didn't read the book.  I asked them to start calling me by a nickname from the book, Spareribs.  They refused.

I never returned the book to Señor de los Ríos, and it sat on my bookshelf for nearly ten years, a testament to promises broken, before it sat in my suitcase for over two months, and then a week more in my tote bag and, alternately, my hands.

During this time the On the Road movie was slowly being unveiled to the United States.  It premiered at Cannes in May as I was planning my move out of Monterey and debuted in North America at the Toronto Film Festival in September as I began what would become a sixth-month journey.   It premiered in New York, December 21st, just I was returning to California, to stay with my folks for Christmas [I just encountered a special issue of the Paris-based monthly periodical named Trois Couleurs, an issue entirely dedicated to Sur la route, "d'aprés Jack Kerouac—un homme, un livre, un film, l'odysée d'un mythe."  And Kristen Stewart is in it, and Lana del Rey released "Ride"—it's not hard to convince me that my experience is in that moment a reflection of a worldwide zeitgeist.  "The odyssey of a myth."

If you ask me, the kitsch of Lana del Rey is as good as that of Kerouac, because she is just writing a pop song—he is contributing to literature.

I once had a dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. But I didn't really mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know what true freedom is. When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I'd been living, they asked me why—but there's no use in talking to people who have home.

To reiterate: this is not good literature, but this is interesting pop music, at the least.  If the bohemianism of Kerouac is aesthetically able to be retold in a glitzy music video, if the logic of Rebecca Black's "Friday" can contain it, then it is not everlasting, it is kitsch, interesting, important in its time, as any work is that popularizes an underground phenomenon, but kitsch.  I wanted to mark every time the adjectives "American" or "mad" or the like were used to have an objective representation of the poverty of the book's vocabulary, but I ultimately decided that would be a dull way to read a book, and unrealistic considering the transient nature of my existence as I was reading it. "I believe in the country America used to be...."]

Eight years ago, after I saw the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the library, after I graduated from high school, and before I returned to Monterey, worked at the library, and wrote about the ribbon-cutting, The Motorcycle Diaries came out.  I saw the movie at the Bijou Theater in Eugene twice while on the road from Monterey to Seattle.  I liked it a lot, which is why I agreed to see it a second time with someone who hadn't seen it, and was flattered by its portrayal of a young man enlisting in adventure in lieu of responsibility and thereby encountering a higher truth than what is possible by adhering to the bourgeois straight and narrow.  Perhaps I would become a latin american hill-residing marxist revolutionary one day, too!  I joke, but it's ludicrous to take seriously how seriously I took the world at the time.  Since I have come back, instead of finishing the last four pages of On the Road, I have been watching hours of Dawson's Creek, thinking about how silly I must have acted at the ages of 18 and 19, the whole time trying to avoid the very self-righteous, self-involved teenage qualities that I probably embodied.  I made myself privilege to an ironic detachment from the superficialities of life, at least those that Dawson's Creek revolves around, and I had access to this privilege and expressed it by the very thing that tied me to Ernesto Guevara, Jack Kerouac, and all the other greats who never got tied down by responsibility, dullness and fretting about superficial social drama: I was on the road, indefinitely in transit.

I swore I read my dad's copy of On the Road when I was sixteen, but I couldn't find it when I was 18 and was instead loaned a copy by my Spanish teacher in order to translate sections of it.  Perhaps I ruined it, carrying it in my tote bag to 10th grade along with all of my required reading, perhaps even stuffing it in my back pocket as I hiked hills to oak groves where I lounged in the knee-high grass to read it. Who knows.  I don't really remember the experience other than that I had never read anything like it before, and that I then read five more Kerouac books, that I had not realized that a counterculture preceded the Beatles, and I remember my life becoming a faux bohemian cliché afterward with stacks of books taken from my dad's upstairs bookshelves in my bedroom, Burroughs then Brautigan then Bukowski and then everybody, and formative expeditions into cigarette-smoking and pot-smoking and beer-drinking and wine-drinking and five hour visits to the coffee shop, reading and 50-cent refilling my mug until my dad picked me up and drove me home to the Pastures of Heaven where I retreated into my room, putting down D.T. Suzuki so I could pick Sartre back up, or Hemingway or Fitzgerald, because even thought they weren't Beats and had probably never been to San Francisco or even California (I know now that Fitzgerald sold out to Hollywood) they still saw beneath the facade of American life and tapped into the sad and meaningless drunken currents underneath.

I soon realized they weren't stuffy and restrained compared to Kerouac—they just actively wrote literature.  In the words of Truman Capote, they didn't just type.  Like everybody else who one day turns a certain age older than 16 I abandoned JK, dismissed him as an alcoholic hack that sold out his life story as accessible, however sprawling, counterculture narrative that gives suburban white society access to jazz, sex, madness, drugs, adventure, immorality, fieldworkeing, trains, hitchhiking, without having to experience it themselves.

When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?  

You learn wordlessly an endless internal catalogue of lessons by traveling without a schedule or agenda.  You betray these lessons with words—life is transitory...some people are great where as others are great but stuck, with repressed and unfulfilled desires, "hung up"...life is adventure, movement, change...life is not stability so success, fortune, possessions are unnatural hypocrisies—and it becomes silliness when you do.  It sounds like a teenager.  It becomes a cartoon version of itself.  Turning to a random page, it happens to be 125 in Señor de los Ríos' 1976 Penguin edition—

Dean was having his kicks; he put on a jazz record, grabbed Marylou, held her tight, and bounced against her with the beat of the music.  She bounced right back.  It was a real love dance.  Ian MacArthur came in with a huge gang.  The New Year's weekend began and lasted three days and three nights.  Great gangs got in the Hudson and swerved in the snowy New York streets from party to party.  I brought Lucille and her sister to the biggest party.  When Lucille saw me with Dean and Marylou her face darkened—she sensed the madness they put in me.
"I don't like it when you're with them."
"Ah, it's all right, it's just kicks.  We only live once.  We're having a good time."
"No it's sad and I don't like it."

The book is a constant replication of paragraphs like these, catalogues of drunken herd-like movement punctuated by arbitrary bits of dialogue.  This reading, though dubiously, is aided by the random selection of this passage.  "It was a real love dance," sounds like a good line of self-consciously hyper-naïve Brautigan writing, but has none of the sense of humor.  If you consider how seriously its benzedrine-filled author knocked the line out you can't take it very seriously, unless you see Kerouac as aware of the compromise he has made with methamphetamine, that he is self-consciously losing himself to a delusion, self-destructively acting as a medium of his moment, adventuring and continuing the spirit of that adventure in an avant-garde performance piece that is more interesting than the actual clichéd repetitive attempt at narrative that cascades across the fabled 120 feet of taped together scroll, the text is irrelevant compared to the text that he constructs of his own life.

I was at my parents' house at Christmas working at a restaurant in Pacific Grove that I used to work for.  My friend Dean, we'll call him, was driving a bus in the San Francisco Bay area, but was laid off for January and wanted to see a friend in Arcata before this friend—why not Old Bull Lee?—left California for Georgia, that we should drive his truck one last time up 101 through the Sonoma oaks and the Mendocino redwoods to Humboldt County and back.  I agreed because I wanted to be on the road still, I wasn't ready to let the OaklandtoSt.LouistoBerlintoAmsterdamtoAndorratoSpaintoBristol
toLondontoasmuchEnglandaswaspossiblebacktoBerlintoPraguebacktoBerlinbacktoSt.LouistoSaltLakeCitytoDavisbacktoMonterey snowball end and melt with the spring.   I wanted it to keep rolling.  And I wanted to go north to Portland to Seattle to Whidbey Island and south to Los Angeles for the birthday of my Marylou.  Why not start out on the tried and true road that starts out of San Francisco as the Golden Gate Bridge and takes you to the lost redwood-lined coasts at the end of California.  I packed my suitcase full of clothes and books and brought my ukelele and tape recorder leant to me in Salt Lake City.

I started out reading John Barth's book of essays that he wrote exclusively on Fridays, as he exhaustively explains, beginning in Santa Cruz while waiting for, let's say, Carlo Marx and his buddy who we played bocce with on the front lawn of a downtown church, and another friend whose name was Yes who drove us to the shooting range where we hired four different guns and bought four boxes of ammunition and shot bullets at human silhouette shooting posters, trading magnums for lugers, wearing ear protection because it was so loud.  I recorded the shooting range on the tape recorder.  Afterwards the bullet shots sounded like oblivion exploded upon the tape of the cassette.  I lost my camera and my sunglasses that night as the three of them discussed Ghost Face Moon, a screenplay they had been writing for a week before I got there set in the Old West.  The plot hovered on the air in their words like a disembodied ayahuasca vision.

I read mostly that and an information pamphlet for Saint Peter and Paul Church in North Beach where I bought a postcard and a card with an angel on it for Dean and crossed myself with holy water and then tape recorded the sounds of the park before walking up Telegraph Hill to dig the Coit Tower murals and views.  [Did using the word "dig" there go too far?  I am not aiming to impersonate Jack Kerouac, but it seemed like a fitting usage.  What am I going to say? "Partake"—"Enjoy"?  I went to a songwriting club a couple days ago and an old timer kept saying "dig" for "appreciate" without any self-consciousness, why can't I do the same?  I have successfully introduced "far out" into my vocabulary, which I initially had trouble with.  Perhaps it is a dead usage.  Maybe I can't take it seriously because I have read On the Road twice now.]

I literally had no money, ID or credit cards when I walked around San Francisco that day because I had left my wallet on a piano bench in Livermore, California, a cookie-cutter bedroom community in the far east bay, the morning after an all-night six-person Parcheesi game for my friend's birthday, we'll just call him Neal Cassady.  Carlo Marx came up for the party and we went with him and his friends to a brand-new suburb park in Dublin for a game of bocce on the brand-new courts before Dean drove me back to his place in Oakland where I realized I had no wallet.  My french-canadian aunt happened to be at a hotel in San Francisco and invited me to stay the night so I got fare for the BART and took it over and met her at the place just by Union Square, took a bath and read Travels With Charley (Steinbeck was also in San Francisco), and slept in the big comfy bed, waking up to the Today show.  We had room-service breakfast before she left and I hit the streets with one dollar in my pocket waiting for Neal and his lady to come into town to look for work, like they said they would, with my wallet in tow.  It was an interesting several hour experiment to remember most of my life when I had no money (once I bought the postcard and the card with the angel on it), ID or credit cards, and to experience vicariously the way most people live and they way people always lived, and the way Sal Paradise hit the San Francisco streets (sorry, reader, I will not say "Frisco" no matter how nice the double iamb "the Frisco streets" may be) fifty years before.  But then I met Neal and his girl at the Civic Center Library, got my wallet back and bought a coffee and a snack outside immediately (I had 30 dollars in my wallet!).  Then we went inside and I photocopied and they looked for work on the internet.  Neal would eventually get a job operating a zamboni.

I am so easily carried away.  The story of my months on the road is certainly relevant, but not really the point.  Kerouac and I share more than I care to admit.  I recall another notebook that I possessed my first year of college, the year after I saw The Motorcycle Diaries twice, after the book club, and then after that a trip to Mexico where I read Desolation Angels, the last Kerouac book I would read for seven years.  It was blue and had detachable graph-paper pages.  I recall a rambling piece written in the second person to Kerouac.  I don't know where that notebook is, but I shall certainly reproduce that writing once I do find it somewhere in the boxes that occupy a couple corners my parents garage, the garage where my desk presently rests, along with myself, and my computer.  It is now three weeks since I almost finished On the Road for the second time, two weeks since I wrote most of this, and one week since I came back again and struggled to continue with this piece of writing, to narrate myself to the present.

I have inherited a laptop with a broken battery.  It is not designed to be forever plugged in but now it has to be—if it becomes unplugged it’s over, like a 20th-century desktop computer, TV, etc.  This part that you are reading now was four paragraphs about an internet-based writing movement called alt lit, Alternative Literature abbreviated with no capitals, because it is an internet-based writing movement.  I wrote it in the moments before I fell asleep in bed in this blog and I felt like I was typing and not writing, but I felt satisfied all the same for I was getting it down, and that’s what matters.  Right now there is an internet issue and I am composing this in Pages and saving as I go.

The computer slipped from my lap, pulled on its cord, and disconnected itself, instantly shutting down before the blog entry was updated and that is why you are reading this and not that.  Perhaps that is for the best.  I got down what I wanted to say and found what I needed to say in the process. The writing was lost, I travelled back south to finish building a bocce court, it turned out the On the Road movie didn't come out for another week anyway.  So when I came back I saw it nearly immediately

The Jack Kerouac character in the movie looks a lot like traveling poet/performer/internet media mogul Steve Roggenbuck.  The former refers to himself as Sal Paradise in his work and the latter as steve roggenbuck.   They both intentionally misspell, the former because of drug-fueled, life-loving, jazz-inspired urgency, the latter does not take drugs but loves life and...I’m not sure...and I don’t want to say simply the internet...I have trouble categorizing his work, partly because it purposely defies categorization, partly because I don't find it pleasurable nor rewarding to stare at my inherited computer screen and scroll through his gifs, videos, etc. and so I have trouble doing my homework, as it were.

I feel alienated by them both, and my academic background has trained me to feel superior to them, to tend toward traditionally brilliant work, toward Proust, but I only got as far through Swann’s Way when I was 19 as Dean Moriarty did in the On the Road movie, and I wrote a beat-ish story about it called “Portrait of the Artist reading Remembrance of Things Past.”  Also I decided not to go back to school; I rejected academia, as roggenbuck did, deciding to “LIVE [HIS] LIEF” and travel and write on his own terms, knowing that he has been privileged enough and doesn’t need anymore white, bourgeois propping before he can create, just as Kerouac decided, just as Sal Paradise decided, just as I decided.  I describe it in stuffy academic language, that I have conceived my destiny to depend upon a separation from bourgeois morality and an embrace of freedom.  "We only live once, " Sal Paradise explains in the page I randomly turned to.  WOLO.  

When I typed about steve roggenbuck I hit several points important to what I am trying to say here.

On that same train ride from Los Angeles I remember him, I remembered my friend Jaymee sending me a link to him, that there were other people in the world giving up on the system, writing on there on terms, living on their own terms, and succeeding, thanks to the internet, I could reach out to them and make it happen.  It was around this same time I was staying in Carlo Marx's apartment in Berlin and was google hanging out with Jaymee and our friend who has the same name as me and I thought I invented YOLO.  "You only live once," I typed as we looked at each other (the sound didn't work)—"YOLO!"  (You laugh out loud would be "YLOL," if anyone was wondering).  When I came back into the country I realized YOLO was a massive internet meme that had nothing to do with me, and was the corner stone of steve roggenbuck's credo.  I tried to get into roggenbuck's videos a few months later in St. Louis, so I could reach out to him and make it happen, but realized it was sunny outside and that I hadn't finished a Hermann Hesse essay that I had been enjoying, so I went outside and finished reading it.

When I got back to California and was staying with my Marylou in Santa Cruz I showed her the young man's videos and she told me to stop them as they were freaking her out.  He walks through the woods looking down at his handheld camera intensely ranting about YOLO and other things as increasingly dramatic music ascends in a never-ending crescendo in the background.  It's really not my kind of thing. But I believe in the internet as a means of bypassing the corrupt publishing power structures that create a false hierarchy of "genius" and "talent" and leave certain works and voices behind.

But that's not really what this is about because I am not successful, and even if this did reach peoples' eyes they would ask well what is this about, get to the point, find the fucking blue notebook, etc.  

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 when I shared this idea.

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 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 no 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 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, as we discussed before, until the coast runs out and its 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 out 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 intersecting 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 its, 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 that 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 I 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 in that moment is happening and mind-blowing and that, although there is a recording of, 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 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 beautiful.  

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 and look over the novel before hand, so I loaned him a book that isn'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.

Bocce for Blood Instructions

In October I was visiting a friend who was teaching English at a high school in Andorra.  I wrote this poem on the bus from Barcelona to Andorra and wrote it on a postcard I bought upon arrival.

She wanted me to come to her classes the next day, but not the first one, she didn’t want to put me through that.  She suggested I wait in Viena, which I did, where I wrote a poem on this postcard.

Then I read Death in the Afternoon until it was time for me to go to her next class.  I read this passage and decided I would photocopy it and replace “see a bullfight” with “play bocce.”

I bought the book in a very multilingual book store in Amsterdam and thought it would be an interesting preparation for my trip to Spain, following my trip to Andorra.  I had no ambitions to see a bullfight—and I learned by October the season was already over—but I liked the idea of being able to read Hemingway as a travel guide.   And when I read the beginning of CHAPTER 7 I realized that a similar necessity exists in describing bocce, it become necessary that the reader, to have any real participation in making meaning of the text, plays bocce.  But one can’t expect the reader to participate in the very event that the book is supposed to simulate.  

In January, in Portland, after I had already made five of the eight ‘zines, I bought a book about hiking in the Olympics and read that it was intended as both a guide to exploring the National Park and Forest and a way to transport yourself to the trails from the comfort of your living room.  When we went there the week after I referred to it as “The Fireside Imagination Tool.”  The bocce book should also work that way.

In February I took the train down from Washington to Los Angeles, and I made the 7th and 8th books.  I considered how I could bind all of the installments together into one book.  I asked Alexandra how I should finish it, as I was now finishing the journey and I had used just about all of the writing I had intended to include.  She said it should come in a box with eight installments, like an eight-ball bocce set.  Of course, how had I not thought of that from the start!  This was a brilliant idea, I told her.  People could toss the books toward a golf ball or a pog and play a round of indoor, low-impact bocce with the books!  No, she said, that is not what I meant. You shouldn’t be encouraging people to throw your books.

So I made the 7th at her mom’s house and photocopied a poem I had written the year before after taking the same train ride in two installments for the 8th.  I really can’t stop you from throwing the books if that’s what you want, but I suppose I shouldn’t encourage it.

While in LA I went with Alexandra and her mom to Eagle Rock, the neighborhood where Steinbeck lived briefly with his wife in the house of his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, who taught at Occidental College, the small liberal arts school in Eagle Rock.  It is a lovely part of the city, as though a quiet section of Altadena were dropped between downtown and Glendale.  I didn’t make it in time to see the Eagle Rock Historical Society’s archives.  A well-intended master’s class/concert was just about to return from a break when I went into the Center for the Arts where the society keeps its headquarters.  I was allowed to take the elevator to the basement to make sure the man in charge had in fact left.  He had.

On the way back we stopped for seafood—crab, oysters and mussels—in Glendale, which we prepared and ate back at Alexandra’s mom’s house in Burbank.  I mentioned that bocce courts are topped with crushed oyster shells, and Alexandra’s mom insisted that I make one in the back yard, which I did for the rest of my stay there, another few days.  It was a good start, but the court sits unfinished.  I am back in Salinas, finishing something else.

This is intended as a brief set of instructions, like those that came with the bocce set that we took to Seattle and brought back two years ago.  And I don’t mean to explain the rules of bocce and how to toss the books with a friend as a diversion.  I simply intend to give some context, though not too much.  I intend to present these things with a minimum of manipulation.   Whatever makes something more accessible or recognizable generally makes it, obviously, formulaic, and boring, or worse.   I’ve been told I shouldn’t use the word fascist in reference to media too much, so I won’

Bocce for Blood, Part 1

Who wouldn't rather read a straight-on story-story, involving colorful characters doing interesting things in a 'dramatic' situation, instead of yet another peekaboo story-about-storying?

—John Barth, Where 3 Roads Meet

"Strange how I keep the tone of Salinas in my head like a remembered symphony."

—John Steinbeck

"That the central theme of _Cannery Row_ is actually a rejection of this type of mindless materialism [that of Cannery Row now], and instead a celebration of the spiritual and the marginal in society, must be one of the most ironic, if not tragic, footnotes in American literary history." 

—Eric Enno Tamm,

Beyond the Outer Shores

I woke up this morning at 4 AM and listened to an hour of Morning Edition in bed before deciding I was not going to be able to fall back asleep.  I heard on repeat stories of Mitt Romney's wife, republican governors, and Hurricane Isaac blowing hot, moist air over the gulf.   Horrific visions of a storm-ravaged United States governed by President Mitt Romney taunted me, and at a quarter past five I got up and fried some leftovers and filled my grumbling stomach.  I made coffee and loaded my dad's car with things to move out of the house, deciding I would type something up when I got to their house, my computer already there.  I realized I forgot my notebook halfway through the trip.

I would have to write something new.

The 24th of this past December I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and could not fall back asleep.  I similarly laid in bed listening to Morning Edition until it repeated itself, and then began looking through a book I had just received as an early Christmas present—A Journey into Steinbeck's California—always eager to gain new perspectives on the symbiosis between the place I lived and the author it produced, the place he lived and the works he produced.  

My friend Bill worked at Steinbeck's Spirit of Monterey Wax Museum on Cannery Row (formerly Ocean View Avenue, renamed for the early '80s tourist rebranding of the abandoned strip of of former canneries) in the summer of 2006.  The great insight made that year involved Steinbeck's youth, the adrift post-graduate years, the era of a writer's life that I presently still inhabit.  He moved to Los Angeles with his wife Carol and became engrossed in what the book refers to as a “zany venture” with his old college roommate Carlton Sheffield: using a new Swiss-manufactured impression material called Negacol to create life-like busts of people.   Carlton thought the “vague but optimistic undertaking” would find “a good market for personalized masks of individuals, made and finished to order like portraits or photographs...” In spite of great enthusiasm the project, as all primary, youthful endeavors tend to fail, the heady Negacol years ended merely with creepy lifelike impressions of the seven entrepeneurs and no great effect on the legacy of California.   Steinbeck went on instead to write great books and win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But what did this untold tale mean, and why were we discovering it in the moment that Bill worked at a wax museum narrated by a wax John Steinbeck (an actor from Carmel did the recording)?  Was the museum—found in the basement of an old cannery whose upper layers were converted to candy shops and kitsch restaurants—some kind of wormhole to truth?  The pieces of the puzzle remain the same: Monterey then, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, Monterey now, me and my friend—but how did they fit together?  For Bill it seemed obvious, and he devoted a year to a film about Negacol that destroyed his academic present and future, a film whose footage still remains in the hands of his academic adviser at California State University Monterey Bay.   My destiny remains outside the visual arts, seemingly, like Steinbeck's—but I digress.  When one wakes up in the middle of the night and is compelled to encounter certain pieces of information he is easily convinced he has stumbled upon the guilded path of truth.

Steinbeck's California describes the Negacol years in LA well (I have it to thank for Carlton’s quote) and it pays tribute to their importance, although it does not mention the Spirit of Monterey Wax Museum, and certainly avoids any theories about an important connection between the Negacol mania and the museum. Of course it would be preposterous to propose at this stage any deep significance to the museum, or really read into Steinbeck’s plastered years in LA.  I began to respect the book for even mentioning it and even having a picture of some of the masks they made, and I pressed on as the sun began to rise on the day before Christmas.  

Steinbeck returned to Monterey after LA and lived on the Peninsula 15 miles from his hometown of Salinas, and that is where I learned something I did not know. 

As a segue to Steinbeck’s return to Monterey in the next stage of his biography the next chapter, “Monterey Peninsula: Circle of Enchantment,” describes the place and where it intersects with Steinbeck’s work.  I should make the point that I am an enthusiastic amateur historian of Monterey, California, and so this next section was quite enjoyable to read, the way a tour guide might enjoy taking his own tour given by someone more knowledgable than him.  Included was an article Steinbeck wrote about the Feast of Lanterns celebration for the Monterey Peninsula Herald, a piece of writing I didn’t know existed.  Over the previous sixth months I had become fixated on an unfortunate event that occurred at the border of Pacific Grove and Monterey, the destruction (supposedly accidental razing probable arson) of the Point Alones Chinese fishing village, and the still held  festival composed entirely of east-Asian stereotypes.   The event is euphemised or ign0red in most tourist-friendly accounts of Monterey, but I began to find clues to the truth and was inspired to take similar bleary-eyed expeditions to the libraries, sites and historical authorities on the Peninsula, ultimately ending a disappointing Da Vinci Code-style piece of fiction by Steinbeck’s son that struck me as a poorly-written parody of my own situation.  This is all another story.

I should here return to the point I made earlier of stumbling upon the aforementioned “guilded path of truth,” bleary-eyed and, half-awake, flying to revelatory conclusions on the still floating clouds of  my dreams—I had just finished a book about a trip to Seattle and back that I considered to be a successful abstraction of one of the great myths, of the hero’s journey, a sort of Joseph Campbell-style avant-garde deconstruction of the difference between everything from The Odyssey to The Log from the Sea of Cortez to, of course, my own voyage.  The central metaphor for this abstraction was the sport of bocce: people stopping religiously from their individual pursuits to pick up and hurl spheres with a momentary tangiable sense of purpose.  I had finished this book and planned, two weeks from Christmas eve, to retake the trip, the same dates in the same places a year later, to promote the book.  

Having said all that I feel that the revelation may be slightly more comprehensible when I learned the something I did no know in the chapter that followed Pacific Grove and described Steinbeck’s relationship with the part of Monterey where I lived, that is New Monterey: Joseph Campbell came to Monterey in 1932 as a 28-year-old “footloose” young mythologist. He spent months hanging out with Ricketts and Steinbeck.  He fell in love with Steinbeck’s wife.  He referred to this visit as “those days of the great intuitions.” As Steinbeck went with Ricketts south to the Sea of Cortez, Campbell went north to British Columbia on a collecting expedition with Ricketts.   The three “glimpsed” the “great synthesizing middle-point.”  He wrote to Ricketts, “You and your life-way stand close to the source of my enlightenment.”  

When I typed Steinbeck’s words that came from Ricketts’ ideas—“It is advisable to look from the tide pools to the stars and then back to the tide pools again”—as the epigraph for one chapter of the book I meant it in the way that Joseph Campbell means that every story tells the same story, that, though he may be described with a thousand faces, there is only one hero. And Joseph Campbell clarified this thinking simultaneously as Steinbeck and Ricketts did—he discussed these things with them.  They all influenced each other symbiotically, like creatures in a tide pool.

I finished the chapter and it was eight.  I left the house and rode my bike to the hill and continued reading in coffee shops, telling everyone I saw.  You know Joseph Campbell?  He hung out with Ricketts and Steinbeck.  The most amiable café owner of Monterey bought me my coffee and bagel because the next day was Christmas, and I tried to finish my library book because it was due before returning home.  It was John Barth’s triple novella Where Three Roads Meet, a self-consciously written deconstruction of a plain incident made to tell the universal story.  It is about the brief and glorious union of three great intellects trying collaboratively and individually to get at something profound.  

At a certain point in a day that birthed itself unexpectedly out of three hours of sleep, one realizes that the euphoria is diminishing, and the realities of exhaustion take over.  He goes to sleep and lets the dream end.

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.

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.

July, 2012

At work on Saturday Ramiro invited me to La Farandula the next day, now yesterday.  I said I was interested but that I had never been to La Farandula.  In the ensuing Saturday night pinballing between the front of the restaurant and the kitchen I asked others if they knew La Farandula.  I misunderstood it was in Seaside.  People said that there was no place in Seaside where they did shows, much less one named "La Farandula."  It turns out a farandula is, as Victor explained to me, the venue where all the big stars perform, the performance.  On Sunday it was to be in Gilroy.   I gave Ramiro, henceforth known as a Choco, my phone number when I left the restaurant as he was plastic-sealing fish for sous vide preparation.  I would be in Seaside where I host an open mic on Sundays, ready about ten.  He would pick me up and then we'd get José, henceforth known as Chepe, and then we'd go to el show in Gilroy.  I was excited.

I had also planned to play bocce with Kyle on Sunday, in the afternoon, before the open mic.  We worked out the logistics on Saturday when Kyle was working as a food runner.  I gave him my phone number on the other half of the paper that I gave to Choco.  Kyle would come to the open mic as well, taking advantage of his night off.  We met at 4 and played to 12 points, with Kyle winning.  Then we decided to go to 15, and I won.  We called it a tie.  

During the game I was anticipating a phone call from Victor who would be getting off from his other dishwasher job at a family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes.  I gave him my phone number on a scrap of paper weeks before on a similar Saturday at the restaurant so he could start some English lessons with me.   It has been hella busy on Sundays at the family establishment downtown that is generally known as the place with really big cakes, and he has not been able to call me before six when I have to be at the café to set up the open mic.  I stopped by the place with really big cakes and luckily a server was out the side employee entrance finishing a cigarette.  I caught her before she went back in and asked if Victor was still working.  She said she didn't know all their names as there are so many (that work in the kitchen).  She went down the stairs to inquire and I heard "a guero is outside looking for Victor," and a nice man came out who I addressed in Spanish and who informed me that Victor left at 3 and was coming back again at 6.  He gave a bemused smile when I said something like "but this is impossible!"  Of the two nights he doesn't work at his other job he has to come back to work again on the same day for his day job? OK, thank you, I said, and got on my bicycle to go to Seaside to host the open mic.

Halfway there, at the bottleneck created by the Naval Postgraduate School where only Del Monte Avenue, the bike path and the beach run between the ocean and the barbed-wire fenced military academic institution, I recognized Victor coming the other way in his FOX hat (yellow and white double spotlight logo, black material) and I flagged him down, turned my bike around and rode with him a little bit.  He did not look happy.  Did you get to take a nap at least? I tried to ask.  Just enough time to clean up and turn back around, I am presently paraphrasing and translating.  It sucks because I want to learn English, I am flagrantly translating emotion and my perception of it into the very colloquial speech that is the thwarted goal in question.  We calculated a future moment to host a future lesson.  I said goodbye and turned around.

I brought a bottle of rosé from Grocery Outlet to the bocce game, along with two mugs.  When I got to the lake on the other side of the freeway I poured another mugful and paused to watch a few dozen small black birds dive at the surface of the water and fly back up into the air over and over with the 6 lanes of freeway merging traffic on the other side.   There was sour apple on the nose, unripe strawberry on the front and a lemonade tartness lingering at the back of the taste.  Really it just tasted like unsweet lemonade.  It was 4 dollars.  Whatever.

Though I don't really want to get into it right now, an open mic could be a fantastic vehicle for a story.  Diverse contingents coming together sincerely expressing themselves, making friends, hurting each other's feelings, etc.  I once wrote a story that centered on a night of karaoke at  Chopsticks 2: the How Can Be Lounge, a place I would go to all the time in Portland.  It was called "Singing the Song of Someone Else."  It sounds like a joke title for a New Yorker story.  Perhaps I am giving myself too much credit.  It sounds like a headline for a small town newspaper profile on the local karaoke bar.  Whatever.

Seaside has a resident francophonic socialist rambler that mumbles loudly, always has a cane and a scarf, and attends the open mic with impeccable regularity.  I appreciate his enthusiasm and respect his politics, and I even let him speechify for five minutes or so when he asks me nicely beforehand.  His politics are much in line with the occupy movement and he calls our present political climate a "Mickey Mouse democracy."  Is that a cliché already?  I will google that at the next possible internet situation (I now have the internet and “Mickey Mouse Democracy” is not a cliché).  Point is that Claude did not come to the open mic this week. 

I got a phone call from Choco at 10:05 and said goodnight to the show, which by the end was everyone left following Tiffany, who began a "Goodbye, Andrew" song as I took my bike out the back door, to lock it across the street in front of La Tortuga where Ramiro was to pick me up.  I left one mug and the empty bottle of rosé in my basket, not worried about either.  I sent my friend Jaymee a text message referring to an art project she did 5 years ago where she agreed to be taken anywhere an acquaintance decided would be meaningful.  The only person who took her up on the project was our friend Bill who made her climb a water tower.  I asked her what the philosophical implications are of such a project. 

Choco's 4 Runner pulled up and I got in the back—his tía was up front—coming with us to la farandula.  We picked up Chepe, who I'd never seen out of his busser uniform, and we went to a gas station to get something to drink.  I got a coffee in the mug I kept.  Chepe bought it for me, another for himself, and 2 red bulls for Choco and tia.  When we got back out to the car Choco gave me the keys and told me I was driving.  Alright, I said in Spanish.  Tía held my coffee.

This was the first time I had a particular mix of feelings since I was in the Dominican Republic, those of an outsider who, with a sense of irony, is being accepted.  This irony is palpable in my speech, the stuffiness and awkwardness of my Spanish.  The patience and respect showed to me and my bumbling along in Spanish is a special kind of love for which I am eternally grateful.  To the people of the Dominican Republic: thank you for your kindness.   This is not to say that the way that people treated me was not the patronizing maternal supervision that an adult would bestow upon a wayward child.  I was respected, but also I was a cute foreigner with the vocabulary of a 7 year old.   In other words, I frequently did not know exactly what was happening because I did not understand everything, but also because, out of pragmatism, I was not informed of everything, and I never knew exactly which it was—if I misunderstood, nodded to something I did not agree to, or if I was not consulted, figuring it would be best simply to show me what was happening as opposed to trying to explain it.   Any independent action I took was always the subject of scrutiny, and not without good reason.

My point is, I don't know if I agreed unwittingly to being the designated driver for the evening, or if that was why I was enlisted in the journey, or how to say "designated driver" or if that's even in the lexicon.  These were my thoughts, not "I drank a beer watching the European Championship final game with my folks this afternoon, then I had the greater half of a bottle of wine between 4 and 6 while playing bocce and commuting to Seaside, and then I had a beer while hosting the open mic.  Honestly I had two, as is my compensation for hosting the thing, an allowance of 2 beers.  It was now 11 PM.

I was merging on that same section of freeway when they were asking me about my job, and explained I got paid in beers and only then, when Chepe asked if I had a beer earlier, did I think, "shit! I have been drinking all day and now I am driving someone else's 4 Runner to Gilroy."   ¿Estás bien? Chepe asked.  I said I just had one.  That I was fine, which I did believe, which anybody believes, which is another story.  The point here has to do with the need to be accepted, to pretend like communicating in Spanish is easy, natural, not a constructed identity, a painful, embarrassing process of pretending. 

Jaymee texted back to me at 10:30, I think the appeal is Surrender, Reliquishing control (& the freedom that can be paradoxically found by doing so).  Gilroy!

I safely guided us across the Salinas River, through Castroville, over to Prunedale and onto the 101.  I established with Choco that the steering wheel shaking was normal.  I said it was like a massage for my hands.  Chepe said that's good after the guitar playing.  Agreed. 

Passing San Juan Bautista the highway gets dark.  I slowed down and pulled the stick that I turned on the lights with, thinking it was the brights.  The music flickered and the car started acting funny.   We crossed the Pajaro river and ended up in the Santa Clara Valley a few miles out of town, not yet the cherry stands that mark Gilroy's periphery.  The pedal was responding strangely and I said so as best as I could.  I was understood and Choco told me to pull over, so I did.  He popped the hood and messed with some things with Chepe.  I realized that the battery he said he had installed that day was in this car.  I asked tía, still sitting next to me, where he learned about cars.   He taught himself.  The engine cut out and Choco and Chepe pushed us to a better spot further on.  

Tía and I sat up front while Chepe and Choco called and texted people already at the show and others back in Monterey. 

Jaymee had sent me another text, Our culture mandates that we always be on top of everything/have our shit together all the time.  Letting go of that responsibility & giving it over to someone else could very well be considered a subversive act.

The humor in the situation was apparent.  We talked to el viejo from work, a lovely and strange man always happy to riff with me at the restaurant, usually in English.  He calls me Andrecito, the diminutive that the kitchen uses for the most part.  I said to Choco to say hello for me.  ¡¿Andrés está con ustedes?! he asked incredulously, like it was a joke. 

Choco starting joking that this farandula, this event that he kept telling me he was going to take me to, was this.  This was el show—the four of us parked next to the highway that divides the rolling dark hills between us and the ocean from the unseen fields of what is known as the Silicon Valley.

Andrés va a escribir en su diario...Choco began imagining, ¿Andrés tienes un diario?  I said that I did in fact have a notebook that I had in my bag from the day before when I was getting ready to cover an event for the local paper that it turns out is not for another 3 weeks.  Andrés va a escribir en su diario "este día yo fuí al show."  This was hilarious to me, of course, because I try to write every day, generally about my own perceptions, and I vaguely had decided I would write about whatever happened this night, on this adventure to Gilroy, a town I only knew because you had to get through it to get to Morgan Hill which you have to get through to get to San Jose which you have to get to to get on a plane or go through to get to San Francisco or Oakland or anywhere really, a town that Joan Didion described as an agricultural town now "vanished...having reinvented itself as a sprawl of commuter subdivisions for San Jose and the tech industry.”  Last 4th of July I drove there with friends to see fireworks.

Andrew is going to write in his diary, this day I went to the show. 

Chepe got through to a friend who agreed to pick us up.  He would be there in half an hour.  It was already getting on midnight.  The show would go to 1, maybe 1:30.  As it turned out he had been working all day so we just piled into his car and went back.  Choco would be back tomorrow with a new battery or transmission or whatever to pick up his 4 Runner.  Chepe sat up front and chatted with his friend, and Choco and tía napped next to me in the back.  They got dropped off first, then me at my bike in front of La Tortuga.  I had to insist that I would be alright riding my bike alone late at night in the cold.  It's like a car to me.  I didn't want to leave it overnight, but was touched at their preoccupation for my wellbeing.  Chepe gave me his sweatervest to wear for extra warmth.  I would give it back Wednesday at work.

They watched me unlock my bike and put on the sweatervest and my helmet.  They drove off, I got on my bike, and noticed that the mug was gone.  Why would someone take a mug from my bike basket?  The empty bottle of rosé was still there.  I rode down the street and noticed a man walking with a cane and scarf.  He sat down on a red bus stop bench.  I stopped and said hello to Claude, asked why he didn't go to the open mic.  He asked if I wanted a mug, looking guilty. 

You took my mug, Claude! Right out of my bike basket?

This is America!  You can't just leave something and expect somebody not to take it!

I know, I don't really need it.  Do you want the mug, Claude?  You can have it if you want it, no hard feelings.

I want the mug.

Alright, it's yours, Claude.  Enjoy. 

The mug has lots of animals anthropomorphized as young children at school, crawling over desks like the classroom is a jungle gym.  The joys of teaching are without number, the mug says.  Looked at cynically (kids=misbehavior=headache), it is a stupid mug.  When one decides, however, that to really learn is to let yourself go entirely into the world of your teacher, and create a new one together, it is rather the opposite.