Prelude to an Argument for Literary Authenticity via Natural Winemaking

It seems natural—to me at least—that I should start a piece of writing away from a computer in a setting that I would describe with basically meaningless words like "authentic" and (one I have already used) "natural."  This piece of writing (by which I mean this introduction) is already once removed from "authentic" experience (by which I mean the previous moment of writing in a notebook), so it seems natural—so to speak—that I should be composing it on a computer directly into a blog (by which I mean this blog).  And indeed I am writing it right now, as opposed to later when I actually would have more free time, because I have joined a facebook group that challenges me to write every day for 40 days.  This is the 3rd day and, for unrelated reasons (non-literary, nothing to do with technology, facebook, etc.), I did not have the time to sit down and write something else I have been meaning to write; but I have been meaning to type up things already written in the more authentic—if you like—setting of a notebook.

This piece of writing occurs at the end of the notebook. It is very aware that in concluding this notebook it is finishing what is decided to be a necessary stage in the writing of a book (the notebook began before and encompassed a period of time that was the basis for the book that this writing is to be).  It is the transition point between nothing and something.  And for something to be something—in this case writing—it must be groomed, it must be tailored to fit the mold of things that it is supposed to be like. And so the notebook phase was ending, in the notebook, and the computer phase begins, on the computer.

The previous piece in the notebook was an argument for a (post-post-)feminist, hyper-compassionate (David Foster Wall-esque?) critical study of pop culture, specifically Courtney Love and an ultimately dissatisfying Chuck Klosterman essay.

The title of the writing in question that followed was THOUGHT FROM WALK HOME ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO DO IN ANALOGY:

and it reads as follows:

I guess the thought began when I thought about wine-making—something I do not pretend to understand—and the notion of traditional natural methods that ideally take the vintner's (and technology's) hand out of the process, expressing the truth of the grape and where it comes from.

So—how do I express the terroir of experience with the grapes of words, and in what barrels of what material does the truth juice develop and ultimately please and intoxicate the conossieur?! (In the notebook it reads "develop and get the conosieur [sic] drunk," in the interest of transparency).

An illustration of this analogy follows:

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I believe something important is happening here—so important that I am going to change the now-silent record and empty my now-full bladder in order to commit full concentration to its transcription.

[I had let the record player fall silent and ignored my need to urinate for 15 odd minutes while enwrapped in my drawing]

Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2—Bocce for Blood has begun.

12/29/11 initiated a decision that I would keep a journal.  And so I did.  And therefore I had one—and I resolved to fill it—while en route to and in return from Seattle, thus making the trip all the more about re-visiting and writing, returning to something with words as a mediator.

Between January 6th and 21st—the time frame of Bocce Balling on the West Coast—there are three brief entries.  This was a week after I had resolved to—and days after I had managed to successfully—write every day.  There was no reason to write—I was doing, I was playing bocce, I was traveling, I was also playing frisbee golf and wall ball and Apples to Apples, I was walking in snow, I was prioritizing post cards, I was drinking, I was being driven, I was on an airplane, I was on trains, I was on buses, I was in zip cars, I was at a grocery store wine tasting, I was moving a dining room table shipped decades ago from Pennsylvania up three narrow flights of stairs with my brother, I was watching a hockey game, I was comparing pixillated penises on screens in a bar in Seattle, I was meeting a mother and son in Live Oak Park in Berkeley, the name of which I remembered because I deemed it one of the top five parks I had ever visited, and I was playing with them their first game of bocce (there are no bocce courts at the park, just to clarify), I was composing a spontaneous poetry cycle aboard and about the Coast Starlight train south from Seattle, I was watching kitsch cinema at a theater in Arcata, and then I was, awake first, making coffee when the doctor who has the same name as my friend who was hosting us, the doctor who was the landlord who lived in Alaska and was exercising the agreed upon term that he stay at the house for a week of fly-fishing, the doctor was declining to have any coffee before it was entirely brewed because coffee is about the balance between the rich flavors of the initial drip and the bitter hints that come at the end.  The doctor told me he was out in a foreign country medically intervening for humanitarian purposes.  He had been awake without more than two hours of sleep for two days.  He had a moment to make coffee and was seriously anticipating it.  Jamie came and hurriedly grabbed the pot and poured himself a cup before it had finished brewing.  The doctor declared the pot ruined, was pissed off about the whole thing for the reasons mentioned earlier, and dumped the pot, spilling coffee onto and ruining the pants he was wearing, pants of which he was quite fond.  The next day, he continued, Jamie was dead.  A motorcycle accident.  I never got to redo the last thing I said to him and I ruined my pants.  There's a double lesson here.  The doctor left the room and two others corroborated the truth of the account, that it had happened, they were on the floor, awaking to the value of patience.

What I mean to say is that the story has fermented into mythology in this notebook, and the self-conscious drive to fill it has bestowed its meaning;  now, as I did a year ago, I will begin to write about the two-week span of adventure in January that defined itself with the idea of rolling balls toward an ever-expanding cluster of other balls.  And then turning around and doing it in the other direction.

*  *  *

And with that the journal is over.  I began to write bocce stories on my computer, bypassing pens, notebooks and handwriting.  A few days ago I was desperately looking through all of my files, emails, blog posts for an account that I am sure that I had typed up about Doctor Bill and his story of coffee and patience.  I checked all the computers I had used, all email accounts, all blogging accounts.  Then I remembered I had yet to type it. It was written in the transition to technology, not yet able to be shared with millions with the click of the mouse.

Bocce Balling on the West Coast Reviewed!

Xavier K. Maruyama, publisher of the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin, reviews BBOTWC for the April 18th, 2012 issue

Monday, January 9, 2012

I woke up earlier than I would have liked, less prepared than I would have liked to have been with a 2 liter bottle of generic CVS Orange Soda with which the night before I had made a glass of orange vodka soda before going to bed and to which I then added a glass of vodka, thinking it would be a good thing to take on the trip: a 2 liter bottle of Orange Soda mixed with vodka.  I saw the bottle, gave it a look of disapproval, finalized my packing, which did not include the CVS cocktail, while making some coffee, drank the coffee, and walked to the bus stop two blocks away with my suitcase, tote bag and bocce set.  Part way I decided to walk with just the suitcase and tote bag, leave them at the curb and run back and get the balls.   I don't entirely believe this to be a valuable detail, however a dubious instinct insists upon it.

I doubted that I had the right bus time.  I called a friend of mine who I figured to have internet access at that moment.  I had done this a few weeks before to learn I had the schedule backwards and that I had missed my bus.  But this time it should have arrived in the 10-minute period I had stood there.  I considered taking a taxi downtown to catch the San Jose bus.  The taxi passed and on the horizon I saw the bus approach.  It was not so much my patience that paid off as much as it was my indecision.

I stepped up with my suitcase, tote bag and bocce set and paid and sat down.  I inhaled and exhaled purposefully and a dozen blocks later decided it would be appropriate to take in the bus scene around and behind me.  And there was Chad involved in his mobile device at the back of the bus.  "Chad!" I shout whispered perhaps twice before he came up to see me or I went back to see him.  He was playing a game on his android that I assume relieved his mind from his omnipotent studies of applied linguistics.

He asked me what I was doing and I said I was re-taking the bocce journey.  Right now, you are doing this, he said.  I can see you have your suitcase and your bocce set.

I have to catch a bus to San Jose at the transit station, I explained, then I will take a train to Oakland where I am staying for the evening.

We revisited a previous discussion of black holes or concluded the interaction in some other believable yet uneventful way and he went to the Monterey Institute of International Studies and I got on the 55 bus to San Jose and got out Zadie Smith's book of non-fiction occasional essays, Changing My Mind.

I was beginning an essay that was based in a lecture she gave about writing novels.  I liked much of it but did not relate to certain rigorous revision processes.  It's not that I have anything against revision and making writing better, I just hold a certain esteem for prose that owes subtle debt to the moment in time and space that gave rise to it, and reworking something that initially falls flat seems pointless to me.  I had just finished and published a book, and while I had yet to hold a copy of it, I still had stakes in the matter.

I bought a coffee and donut at the train station in San Jose and sat at a counter affixed to a newsstand.  I went to the bathroom doing something clever with my suitcase and then bought a train ticket and crossed under six tracks before emerging at my designated platform.  When we passed the marshes north of San Jose I remember reading Smith's brilliant discussion of Barack Obama's pluralist vision being reflected through his ability to transform his mode of speech—or as the right calls it his duplicity. Polyphony we want from art; in politics we call this flip-flopping and we don't want this from politicians.  Shakespeare, Obama, train tracks, north San Jose suburbs, San Francisco Bay marshes, all happening at once.

Arriving in the concrete of the east bay I looked at the graffitied walls between us and the city and the roofs that rose above them and I wrote a poem, the only writing I did, other than postcards, for a ten-day span.

On a train one sees

so many roofs and powerlines

and telephone lines.

It's as though the houses are televisions 

that do not work.

I am not sure how well this metaphor comes across—that I, by riding the train and looking at the houses out the window, am channel surfing between television sets (I guess it would then be television set surfing), boxes with cords coming out of them, whose screens (roofs) are black blankness—or if the metaphor comes across at all.  I suppose this is where writer's workshops come in, and MFAs and book clubs and other forms of bourgeois-mediated literary creation.  Chalk another good idea up for the status quo.

I got off at the Oakland Coliseum, a train stop that included a parking lot, industrial train-related bric-a-brac, and a chainlinked-fence-enclosed stairway to a chainlinked-fence-enclosed skyway that connected the coliseum to the BART station.  A man asked me if I could spare some money to assist him in a desperate situation.  I apologized and ascended the stairs with my suitcase, tote bag and bocce set.  I was in the middle of the desolate chain-link-enclosed skyway when I received a phone call from a loved one.  I had to set down at least one item to field it and I stood there for a few minutes discussing how the two of us were, what the two of us were up to, and, eventually, that I was paralyzed in a key transportation moment and was so sorry to have to say goodbye.

At the other end of the skyway two stairways went back down in different directions to ground level and the same man was now there, probably wondering what took me so damn long to get there and asking if he could help me carry anything.  I was fine and asked which was the better route to the BART station. Both options were fine, he said.

I got off the Bay Area Rapid sky train at the station Tristan advised me to get to.  I got outside and set my suitcase and bocce set down, and called him.  He said he would be 15 minutes or so.  But I was anxious to be on my way and asked if there was a nearby coffee shop, and there was, a few blocks away.

As I walked down the sidewalk along the street, witness to so much activity and noise, I thought about myself in relation to it all.  Why was I walking down the street with a suitcase and a bocce set?  It is such a ludicrous combination.  Perhaps a suitcase and a guitar, or typewriter, or portfolio, or skateboard—but what self-respecting bohemian on the road brings a bocce set?  The analogy would be Dr. Dad on a golfing trip, checking his clubs and carrying-on a small roll away.  But these are just 9 different-colored spheres that are designed to be as heavy as possible.  It is perhaps the most impractical thing imaginable to bring, especially for someone taking public transportation and walking.  Five long blocks later I arrived at what I calculated to be the designated coffee shop and it struck me that the central mythical meaning to bocce had completely escaped me but was as obvious as a stone sphere's interaction with gravity: Sisyphus.

"Tristan!" I said in a way that included many more words, accepted social customs, nods to strangers pushing past us, hugging, "I have just brought this massive cube filled with eight large spherical rocks and one smaller one from Monterey, and I will continue all the way to Seattle just to follow them back to Monterey exactly as we did once before and I have done with less literal bocce sets for years.  Bocce Balling on the West Coast is the Myth of Sisyphus ."  I think I actually just mentioned this in passing after we had our expensive cups of coffee, when we got up and got into his truck, putting my suitcase and bocce set in the back.

When I got back into Monterey I got off the bus at the stop by the movie theater that had my W2 for the last paycheck I got the year before.  I saw Chad in the adjacent café and we said hello.  He asked how I was doing, I said I didn't really know I just got back into town.  He asked how long and I said five minutes and he saw my suitcase (I had become separated from my bocce set, though I was soon once again reunited).  Oh, you just got back into town.  This was particularly striking, we realized, because it was moments before my bus brought me in from Salinas—at the very bus stop—that Chad got off the same bus on which we both last saw each other, at the same bus stop where Chad and I had dismounted 10 days before.  It was like he picked me up and dropped me off at the airport without intending to or even owning a car.

Bocce Balling on the West Coast Variorum

My college did not require a thesis.  Instead I took a senior seminar class with six other students and wrote a 25-page paper on a subject explored in the seminar.  My class was called "Authors and Scribblers of the 18th Century" and I wrote about Pope's annotated reissue of his classic critique on the founding of London's publishing industry The Dunciad.  In the 21st Century the "authors" would be an upper crust of letters from literary scholars to Jonathan Franzen to NPR contributors.   People who write blogs or books, or both, about cooking, pop culture, travel, bocce, etc. would be scribblers, contributors to an expanding mass of questionably publishable rabble that separate and distract us from worthwhile, meaningful prose.  The Variorum edition of The Dunciad satirizes the attacks on the first work, dismissing them as poorly worded voicings of frustration, beneath meaningful discourse; Bocce Balling on the West Coast Variorum describes the failed book tour/second trip that occurred exactly one year after the first trip in approximated re-enactments of the previous years events.  I am more tempted to title the reworked second edition Bocce Balling on the West Coast 2: Bocce Harder as the book purposely tries to dismiss authorship, and to embrace its scribbled nature—it is a travel/sports memoir composed in a blog with more than one contributor.  

Should the second version include footnotes and prologues and editor's notes; or should all new writing just be placed at the end?  The initial organization principle was, naturally, a game of bocce.  Texts are bocce balls that come barrelling into the middle of a formally-conceived-to-be complete narrative, settles near it, in it, or knocks another out of it, replacing it.  So why couldn't a new text, still part of the same game, roll into the frame, sit next to or unsettle the previously published, static result?  The events of January 7, 2012 drop in on 1/7/11 and "January 7" reaches a different result, takes on a different character, like a story with a new detail, a fortune told with a different casting of yarrow stick, a horoscope with a new astrological alignment, a game of bocce with a game-changing roll.  How this is going to happen is still up in the air.  Thoughts?

April Fool's Bocce

On Sunday I went to the Pacific Grove Art Center's 3rd Annual Bocce Tournament and had a blast.  I got to meet Pacific Grove Mayor Carmelita Garcia, Johnny Aliotti—with whom I had been communicating for a few weeks about donating copies of Bocce Balling on the West Coast for the winners of the tournament—and, most exciting of all, the owners and publishers of the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin, Edie and Xavier, aka Professor X.  I had been planning on taking notes on the event and submitting a story to them, not figuring that they would be there.  But they were, I asked if they had it covered, and they said I could take the story.  Our team was to be my dad, my friends Sarah and Kevin, and myself. Nic Coury from the Weekly came by and ended up playing on our team in place of my father who had to attend to non-bocce matters.   An amiable rivalry developed between Xavier and Nic as representatives of free semi-weekly and weekly local periodicals.  I took Xavier's side, naturally, now in his paper's employ; but then our team took on Xavier's and I, naturally, switched sides.  We lost, however.  My assignment went on hours after that initial loss, and our one win, and the final loss an hour later.  I finally had to leave at 6, 7 hours after sign up, before the last match—between Xavier's PGHB team and one of the two Deboccery squads—missing the end result.  I wrote this the next day and submitted it to Xavier:

When I talked to Johnny Aliotti about the Pacific Grove Art Center's 3rd annual benefit Bocce Tournament, the plan was that it would be played on courts brought into the PGAC's building downtown as it was the last two years.  Only two teams had signed up, however, and with the cost of putting the courts in being $900, Johnny considered moving the event to the Custom House courts in downtown Monterey, and I concurred.  It rained on and off the day before, continuing as I went to sleep, leaving me to doubt whether we'd be playing at all.

Perhaps it was an early cosmic April Fools joke to make us all wake up with dreams of playing Bocce in puddles, because April began with a glorious sunny morning, and when I got there for the 11 o'clock sign up the courts were already drying up with the help of a team of rakers, rollers and brushers.  One anonymous joker suggested the politicians make some speeches by the courts to dry them up.  I signed up my team alongside the 10 others which included two PG Hometown Bulletin teams, Mayor Carmelita Garcia's City Council team, called Removed from Consent, and the reigning champions of the first two tournaments, Aliotti's Victorian Corner, representing the Pacific Grove Restaurant.

Johnny announced the proceedings to the crowd of volunteers, passers-by, state park rangers and bocce ballers on a vintage-looking mic, like those used by boxing announcers.  Mayor Garcia and Ron Chesshire threw out the first balls, and the tournament commenced with the first two matches. Victorian Corner was upset on Court 1 and Removed from Consent were victorious on Court 2 in simultaneous matches.  Etiquette and rules were explained around the courts, and certain phrases were bandied about like "You gotta fix your divots,"  explained when a ball would displace enough decomposed granite to make the surface of the court uneven.  

A few dozen matches, and as many generous pourings of wine later, our team—Bocce Balls of Wrath—was knocked out, along with the reigning champions and most of the other teams. By the time I left, seven hours after sign-in [began-BGM], the sun was going down, the wind was picking up and two teams were left, including Xavier Maruyama's Hometown Bulletin team. Mayor Garcia, who threw the first ball at the first tournament and played in the second, decreed the event a "great new tradition," and, when asked how it compared at the new location, she said she preferred it outdoors at the California State Park run courts.

It was a beautiful day with great bocce played by everyone from first-time rollers to seasoned veterans, and a great benefit for PG's Arts Center.

Xavier replied back with an account of the last game of the tournament:


[Update with Bragging Rights: The Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin had fielded two teams, the women's team had to bring to everyone's mind that the food columnist, Roberta Brown was there, and they chose the name, “Hot, Sexy and Spicey.” This team managed to eliminate the City Council team, but came up short in the losers' bracket. The second team evoked thoughts of our paper with the the name, “Read and Right.” Read our editorials and you'll get the connection. PGHB beat the professionals “Deboccery” and had to stand around doing nothing for quite a while. That gave us a chance to imbibe and we lost our sober demeanor. In the championship match, “Deboccery” beat us twice and they took first place. PGHB however came in second – not bad for a team without an Italian in the bunch? XKM] 

I asked Nic Coury from the Weekly for pictures from the event for this post, also if he wanted to profile Bocce Balling on the West Coast in the paper.  I recieved no reply, but Sarah gave me the pictures he took from facebook.

Sarah with her opponents from one of the PG Hometown Bulletin's teams behind her.

Note here the green ball captured in mid air right below Kevin's belt buckle.

The dust is visibly kicked up.

The Article ultimately came out in the Wednesday April 18th edition.

The Coast Starlight from Seattle, Washington to Salinas, CA, January 18-19th, 2012

A Poetry Cycle Composed en route from Salinas to Los Angeles California, February 23, 2012

Late for the Train

I was late for the train,
though I was ten minutes early,
that I one point thought
I would never catch.

A foot of snow
covered all of Seattle
and I waited for half an hour
on Broadway for a bus to come.

The bus driver acted as though
she were a savior
and we were falling losers
she nobly could catch.

She drove in a beret
and behaved as one
who'd once experienced the end of the world
and could be our guide.

She connected me to the 2
that I was able to take
to the train station
in the nick of time.

The woman at the counter
advised that I hurry
but that in the station
I was not to run.

I speedwalked to Door 1
And offered my driver's licence.
The tickettaker joked that
it was not I who was to drive the train.

As advised I went to car 15
and there found the notebook of my seat
where I would rest
the pen of my consciousness.

from the Coast Starlight Route Guide:

American pop culture refers to its western seaboard as the left coast.  Seen from the right train, the Coast Starlight, we experience 1,377 mi. of sheer magnificence, both left and right, from Seattle, Washington, to Los Angeles, California.  


Along the route, we traverse steep mountain ranges, explore rolling, gentle valleys and skirt along the dynamically beautiful shady shores of the Pacific Ocean.  The scenery is breathtaking, the cities are unique, and the history is fascinating.


[The name Coast Starlight is derived from the former Southern Pacific Coast Daylight, the premier daytime train; the Starlight was an overnight all-coach train between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Before Amtrak assumed passenger service in 1971, one had to travel on trains operated by two railroads between Los Angeles and Seattle.  Southern Pacific operated numerous trains between Los Angeles and Portland, but a change of trains at San Francisco/Oakland was necessary.  Between Portland and Seattle, one chose the trains of the Union Pacific, Great Northern or Northern Pacific.  With Amtrak's creation and startup on May 1, 1971, through train service between Los Angeles and Seattle was initiated.]


So sit back and relax to enjoy this most entertaining and enjoyable of railroad routes in the world on the Coast Starlight.

Revenge of the Lawn

for RB

Richard brought, again,
an experience of tying
a literary consciousness
with the appreciation
of window views.

Richard brought, again,
the narrative of
a Tacoma childhood,
with the window view understanding
of the town by the train.

Richard brought, again,
the understanding of our
commonly grasped sensibility,
our shared lack of pretension.

Richard brought, again,
the deconstruction
of state boundary between
California (northern), Oregon
and Washington.

Richard brought, again,
a nostalgia for the Old West,
the shadows of cowboys,
railroads, fishing.

I bought, again, Revenge of the Lawn
short stories of Richard Brautigan,
and Richard-broughted them
on the train.
It all felt like it had happened before.

Heading South from Tacoma

In the hazy snow-flurry atmosphere
I can only see a short distance off
and mostly all I can see
is white
with snow

as though everything put on a sweater to fight the cold.

As we leave Tacoma,
the "City of Destiny" according to the Coast Starlight Route Guide,
the water appears oil black in the dim light
in contrast to the perfect white of the snow
against which it laps.
Really it is more of a dark emerald green, when considered independently.
Benches line the waterfront
beckoning the crazy to shiver and contemplate the void.
A large boat is anchored
and reminds me of a Soviet battleship in a black and white famous film,
another floats further, off the coast,
barely visible,
its crew's location unknown, its cargo a mystery.
Further on, past the behemoth twins of early Soviet cinema,
a massive bridge,
the pride of industrial empire,
crosses the sound, still in black and white,
hundreds of feet in the air.

What beyond the snow-covered trees is on the other side?
I have been on this train in rain
and I have taken it in sunshine;
but this train I have never been on.

The proprietor of the Sightseer lounge Café
has invited us all to a snack, hot coffee,
or, if feeling adventurous this summer [sic] morning,
an Absolut vodka cranberry or wine or beer,
or conversation under the sole condition
that it not be about the weather.

On the observation deck of the Sightseer Lounge car


On the observation deck of the lounge car
I sat and read with a certain difficulty.
A few seats over
a self-described libertarian
sat like a backward fly trap
whose goal was not to undo annoyance
but to perpetuate it.

One gets stuck in the trap that is him!

He is going to San Jose because
he is a philosophy major at San Jose State, he says.
How can people be so stupid, he queries.
Liberals simply desire to expand a wasteful government,
as though it were an involuntary action.
In this analogy (mine) they think more about breathing.
He gets so fucking angry sometimes!
He elaborates on physical violence
he desires to inflict on those
who don't think about things, like he does.
The fly states that he is an interesting young man.

I walk two cars back to my seat.
Though, in this moment and moments like it,
I feel I am walking in a certain direction
when in reality I am moving much faster
in the other direction
and the spot on the tracks
that is directly below
the self-described libertarian
is moments later below me.
Again!

And so on.

A haiku

The Coast Starlight is
italicized as it is
a great work of art.


Untitled poem composed just north of San Luis Obispo


I wake up to fine, green hills
rolling with oak trees
pushing the memory of redwoods
into the more dreamlike past.

Is this the same mug I took to Seattle at my feet?
This the same notebook?
Above my head the same suitcase?
And me, the same unity
of comprehension and consumption?

Yes and no.


Transitions


In Santa Barbara I got off
the Amtrak bus
and on
the Amtrak train:
the Surfliner.
A transition not unlike
the crossing of the Columbia river into Portland.
The train station is the river,
the nexus of comings of going,
the different means of travel.

I alerted a close friend
with whom I once lived in Portland
that I was passing through
with a text message.

I stepped out of the train at Portland
just as I would have when I smoked cigarettes,
except that I did not smoke a cigarette,
and, instead, I inspected my memories
inhaled and exhaled them,
examined their contours.

I reboarded and further, more objectively,
looked at my memories through
the lens of the window—the buildings,
bridges and people—
and it began to rain as we passed through my old neighborhood.

Why did not you stop
was the reply of my literarily-inclined friend.
Are you in a hurry?


Why did not I stop? Was I in such a hurry?
It would have been 20 dollars more
for a day over
in my old favorite city, with my old best friend.

Why did not I stop?  Why was I in such a hurry?

The track of my heart clicked over and sent my emotions
rushing down a parallel track.
I composed two capacity text messages
the rain pouring now onto the observation car
myself fully exposed by window
my watering eyes mirrors to the massive wet convex lens surrounding me.
It is OK. She texted back.
The oppressive straight track
of the railroad operates in
exactly the opposite manner
as both time and love.


The Dining Car

I have an 8 o'clock dinner reservation
in the Dining Car.
I get there on time and am sat at
a booth for four
by myself.
A mother and her son join me.
The son sits across from me by the window—
        nothing is visible outside but darkness—
and she sits across from the empty space next to me.

They are going to Chico to visit family.
They have come from Corvalis—
        college town to college town.
He is missing school for
what she considers a more enriching experience:
visiting the grandparents.

(As I write this I am passing by Avila Beach
where once, at about the same age as this young man,
my mother took me out of school
for what she considered a more enriching experience.)

We all order pasta with winter vegetables.
I offer the young man the other half
of my plastic packet of balsamic vinaigrette
as it was more than both of us wanted.

A young Australian lawyer joins us,
coming from the other direction.
The dining car joins
the sleeper cars toward the engine,
where he came from,
with the coach cars toward the back,
where we came from.
He is business handsome
wearing one of those shirts
that is not white yet has a white collar.

He has come from Vancouver, British Columbia
and Seattle, Washington
and is going to Yosemite.
He was disappointed that
while in San Francisco
he could not find
one of those happening beat jazz clubs
that the place is known for.

He used both his fork and knife to eat
in, what I imagine to be, the proper manner.

When I awoke just Southwest of Sacramento

When I awoke just Southwest of Sacramento
the sky to the Southeast
was like a freeze frame fireworks show
a dream flurry of cloud whisps
orange streaks
pink reflections
change at its most dramatic
its most quintessential,
yet static.

I quickly went back to sleep
satisfied by my waking dream
witness to something
to be comprehended by nobody.

When I awoke
in Oakland
everything seemed
much more rational
and I got up
to get the day's
first cup of coffee.

Those Cascadian slopes

O, how far I am from those Cascadian slopes
and their evergreens rebelling against gravity,
those coats and sweaters and heavy pants
and clouds and weather and flannel,
here among the palms, in the palms
where the sun always shines
and blondes, europeans, wear shorts that redefine "short,"
participating in a reality found on TV
and the waves of the ocean only attempt
what those trees achieve before crashing down on the beach
providing the rhythm to the movement outside my window.
Should I have worn sunscreen? In February?
So many unattractive shirtless men in public:
are they wearing sunscreen?
How far I am from those Cascadian slopes,
O, how far a train may take one.

Publication

Bocce Balling on the West Coast is now a book!  Its form here at bocceballing.blogspot.com was a sort of narrative incubator, but BBOTWC is now liberated, active, and not dependent on a power outlet.  It may be found here:

Also, an event will take place on the anniversary of Bocce Balling on the West Coast's inaugural bocce game at the Custom House Plaza courts in Monterey, California: on January 7, 2012, at 1 in the afternoon a bocce reading/tournament/celebration will occur and kick off a BBOTWC reunion tour.  All are welcome!