Yet Another Short Story from the City

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , , , , ,

Tattooed love boys and girls fiddle on their phones and deign to converse with one another.

Stevie Wonder plays—the double and triple album era. He once recorded a triple album called The Secret Life of Plants. That needs to be playing in here. I’ll alert the management. I know someone who works here who loves plants. In fact, the cafe has plants.

A barista cleans the windows without purposeful intent. DH Lawrence once wrote that if you’re going to make a stool or make pudding, make it well.

I don’t understand why people reappear in my life and then turn around and disappear.

Great high ceilings in here.

“When you can’t get in traction,” wrote Henry Miller, “Reverse and get unstuck.” That seems to be good advice for writing and life.

I interviewed with the Chinese for an English teaching position. I’m not sanguine about my chances. Will anyone hire me? I need a dog as a boss.

Who are these people in the cafe and their work? Do they use their hands besides touching screens? Are they handless jobs?

I see some cultural magazines from The City on a counter. I used to read them. I’d rather read a user agreement these days. More relevance.

Not far from here I once paid $40 a month in rent to live in a house with four other people while attending grad school. That City is long gone.

This cafe needs a micro lending library. Get some literature cross-pollination going in and around here.

I always do a double take when I see someone reading in public anymore. No one is reading in the cafe.

My great collaborator arrives soon. A strategy of rapprochement succeeded. We’ll hash out ideas to reinvent micro publishing. I relish these moments of hashing between us.

What is the meaning of the verb “to hash?” I don’t know. I’m not going to look it up.

I’ve spent more on coffee in the last six hours than a can of Yuban costs.

Strawberries are out of season but a strawberry mind is on my mind.

I wrote a sonnet channeling Rilke and Prince. I write a sonnet about every decade.

Where are dogs taking me in my writing?

I met sincere kindness in this cafe a couple of months ago. It is changing my life.

Does one have to become a dog to write more authentically about humans? There is an extensive literature in this approach that indicates the best dog books are books written by dogs and they are about humans.

I’ve prepared several versions of my “blasting-to-smithereens” statement that I’m considering sending to someone who needs to hear it and start over. But how do you know if you should send such a statement? You don’t. By not sending it, am I taking the high road? It doesn’t feel like it. But sometimes when contemplating an action or inaction, the high road can’t be seen. You can always see the gutter.

My father quoted Emily Dickinson the other day: “The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door.” Is that soul sick? Many experts on therapy think so. I don’t. I think that soul thrives. The shut door doesn’t mean it’s permanently shut. It can be opened by the shutter at any time, and someone can also knock. It might even be an unsolicited knock. I’ve recently discovered that can still happen.

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Thoughts on James Cain and Smiles

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A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back. James Cain

James Cain, author of Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce, also wrote that a writer with real ambition, has to swim out to the pelagic region—deep water.

What does that mean? Have I ever really gone pelagic with my books? The bridge and rain books felt that way. I was exploring new territory with a new writing style. I was looking at traditional subjects in a decidedly nontraditional way. The new book I am writing about the dog sanctuary also feels that way. I am writing on pure instinct, mixing genres, drawing on everything I have ever read and lived about rivers, clearcuts, dogs, the human condition and the lack of humanity. Something very interesting is cohering to me, but is it pelagic?

A smile as nature’s freeway the way Cain describes it seems entirely true to me. I’ve seen a few smiles like that in my lifetime. Sometimes you try to find the off ramp and make your way back round, but it never works. Sometimes you try to see the smile again—that can happen. Sometimes you get a little nod or wave.

The last such freeway smile I saw wasn’t too long ago. It came at the most unexpected time and place. There is no going back from it. I’m not.

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Charles Bukowski On Writing

NSP Meditations, Writing , ,

 

What interests me is non-dullness.

There’s music in everything, even defeat.

(Paraphrased) Some poets can’t stand the smell of life.

I could and can get more knowledge of life by talking to a garbage man than I could talking to T.S. Eliot.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose at a typewriter.

The only thing intelligent about a good art is if it shakes you alive.

This writing the poem often brings strange ladies to the door, knocking…

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I wrote short machine-gun style chapters in hope of giving verve and pace.

Very successful writers are like presidents: they get the vote because the madding crowd recognizes something in them.

There aren’t any rules (for writing).

When you’re hanging out with writers you’re not hearing or seeing anything but that.

Poetry can be entertaining, it can be written with astonishing clarity.

Writing is only the result of what we have become day by day over the years.

The only writers who write well are those who must write in order to not go mad.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 39

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Bonnie and Clyde were in fine felonious form as we took the path along the river and wound our way through willows, shrubs and trees, dodging elk scat here and there. Rain fell and the river carried wood down the current with considerable pace. I thought about something I’d read by Thoreau recently: “Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything.”

That was true on this river with these dogs. I have despaired, after the probation meetings or treatment sessions, the expense, the degradation, the bland carpets, the farce and anti-life of them all, but not utterly. I have seen men go to utterly and they seemed utterly aware or oblivious it was happening to them.

There are no real rapids on the river where I commune with it. Still, in my imagination, I’ve got to run the rapids of stasis in my life. How does one do that? I’ve got to run the cataracts of quicksand? How does one do that?

Our path paralleled the river for a couple hundred yards and then we found deep mud. I noticed a stick shoved upright into the mud. Odd. Someone had done that. I pulled the stick free and hoisted it into the sky. It was beaverwood the size of a fencing foil, of good green willow and gnawed to perfection at both ends by some beaver’s tooth (never teeth, they only use one to eat.)

I slashed the sword from side to side. It made a whipping sound that delighted me. I fished out a treat, from my pocket, tossed it into the air, and then struck it in half. Bonnie and Clyde raced over to gobble up the treat. Something out of an Alexander Dumas novel or Errol Flynn movie was happening to me. I was the only swordsman in the world with a beaverwood sword! I slid the sword into the belt loop of my corduroys and it hung at a 45-degree angle. A perfect fit. We were the Three Musketeers and I had never divined the meaning of musketeer until now. Quite naturally, my other two were dogs and not humans. In fact, we were three dogs!

Bonnie took the point for home and Clyde fanned out to my left. Several yards into our return to the sanctuary, I noticed a thin blackberry stalk standing weakly at attention. I drew my sword and slashed it in half with one swift stroke. Then I found another another blackberry and did the same. I looked down the trail and saw all manner of blackberry invaders.

Months ago, I had considered blackberries on a romp with Bonnie and Clyde and felt I should think about them more deeply. The time was now, but not to think, but to kill, kill the way I had killed armies of blackberries during my tenure as caretaker of a national wildlife refuge. There, I had I cut more blackberries by hand than any other living Oregonian of my generation and got my mind and body fit like never before. I had dragooned students, adults, seniors, sex offenders, friends, family members, , my then-wife, girlfriends, transients, even my dogs (!) to remove acres and acres of blackberries and then plant 10,000 trees and shrubs so this insidious and relentless plant wouldn’t reoccupy the land. I had led a small victory for a coastal watershed and it was perhaps the crowning victory of my life. It will outlast anything I write by 10,000 years.

Then I forgot about all about that victory and lost something important as a result.

I kept moving down the trail hacking, slaying, swashbuckling, mocking my enemy. Bonnie and Clyde seemed puzzled at first but then caught my madness and chewed up a severed stalk here and there.

Some twenty minutes later we reached the yard of the sanctuary and the skirmish ended. I was sweating and needed water or a Rainier in the rain (just like on the refuge!). I had slain at least 25 invaders and knew where the rest of the enemy lay rooted.

Next time, I would bring along a sharper weapon…and fire. The war had begun.

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The Old Seal

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches, Oregon Coast_History , , , , , , ,

I had a dog leashed to my left hand and a dog leashed to my right hand and they were mushing me through the dunes on the trail above the South Jetty. The tide rolled in high and white and sun lit up the green waves. Driftwood was everywhere, catapulted in by the King Tide.

A strange sound caught my ears. It was a moan and groan. The dogs somehow didn’t hear it and kept moving straight ahead. I glanced to my left around a detour in the trail and beheld a harbor seal resting on the sand, 10 feet away. He looked right at me, cocked his head, and roared. (Not the one pictured here.)

Somehow the seal had crawled up and and over the jetty, some 30 feet, and landed here. Perhaps the King Tide had floated him ashore. Perhaps he surfed in. I’ve seen lots of seals and sea lions resting on Oregon Coast jetties, but this was something different. It unnerved me.

I stopped and held the leashes tight. The dogs came to me and saw the seal. They began to advance toward it, cautiously. I reined them in and looked at the seal’s face.

He was old, mottled, gray around the eyes and muzzle. His whiskers were bent in multiple directions. He had nicks everywhere on his body. It occurred to me that the seal had come ashore to die and he was nearing the end. It occurred to me that he should be left alone.

I got the dogs moving away from the seal and we headed north down the trail. A few seconds later, I heard a kind of growl behind me. The last rattle?

Metaphors raced through my mind. Was I that seal now or was that seal my future self?

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Dogs Raining (Reigning) in My Mind Part 6

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Temple of the Dog was a decent rock super group and released a power ballad titled “Call Me a Dog” on their 1991 album. It has some good Chris Cornell wailing and a savage guitar solo, but the dog in the song is a pejorative term for a jilted man. That doesn’t work for me, even though I’m a jilted man, jilted by society, and I’ve seen men treated worse than dogs. In Big Jake, an utterly forgettable late career John Wayne movie, his character has a dog named Dog. In one scene, really the only interesting one, Dog stops a lynching and easily manages to out act Wayne. One of my favorite dog scenes in movies occurs in Shane when Jack Palance’s evil gunfighter character, clad in black, walks into the saloon, and the dog gets up and walks out. What’s wrong with writing doggerel? Give me more doggerel over preciousness any day of the week! Charles Bukowski once worked in a dog biscuit factory and wrote a collection of poems titled Love is a Dog From Hell. I’ve read the book and fell in love with a cat woman while reading it, and I can assure, a love like ours was not a dog from hell. J.M. Coetzee wrote a snarling short story masterpiece titled The Dog that perfectly encapsulates why most humans suck. And Coetzee only needed one page, which is all you really need. Chekhov presented dogs in many of his stories, most famously “The Lady and the Dog,” but his dogs were never front and center, never human-like (the essential ingredient to writing a great dog story or book), and therefore none of them are indelible. In Goethe’s Faust, a stray poodle follows Faust home and turns into the demon Mephistopheles, an emissary from the devil. Faust and Mephistopheles strike their famous black bargain. I have never seen the play. Do any productions use a real dog? I bet not. They’d need a human (politician) to act the part of a devil dog more believably. In fact, most humans wouldn’t even have to feign Satan-like properties in the performance. They exude them constantly in everyday life in person, on television and the Internet. Karen Blixen, writing as Isak Dinesen, wrote memorable passages about her dogs in Out of Africa. They were clearly her best friends. How could deerhounds be anything but? Dammit, I want a deer hound that would never chase Rilke’s luminous deer through the forest. No, I want a coonhound! They have the best bark of any dog I’ve ever heard. I would name mine Ernie. I’ve often wondered about those human beings who experimented on dogs to prolong human life. Have I ever intersected with them and sensed their disease? My life once intersected with a primate researcher and she was beautiful and deeply sick. Farley Mowat’s memoir of his childhood dog, Mutt, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, is an obscure classic of the dog book genre and once again, features a dog that wants to become human and becomes the human humans want to become. He also wore goggles when riding in the rumble seat of a Model T Ford! Bonnie and Clyde have never evinced any desire to me to become human-like. On the other hand, I have begun to evince a desire to become more Bonnie and Clyde-like. The Heart of a Dog, written by Mikhail Bulgukov, and published in the Soviet Union in 1925, is a comic proletarian novel narrated by a dog named Sharik. It doesn’t hold up particularly well now that the Soviet Union is dead. One wonders if Stalin read it since he once said, “Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.” The book can boast of one immortal line about dogs, one well worth remembering: “A dog’s spirit dies hard.” It is true that Hitler loved his German shepherds more than he loved human beings. Loving dogs more than humans doesn’t always work out for humanity. Dylan Thomas wrote a collection of short stories titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Its cover features Thomas and a dog smoking cigarettes. It does not contain a dog story although one the stories is named “Just Like Little Dogs.” Every bookseller I’ve ever talked to said the same thing: “Put a dog on the cover and the book will sell.” One wonders what writers who write dog books containing vast amounts of empathy are really like in the flesh with humans or even other dogs. Writers who write about empathy in stories and poems and essays are the least empathetic people I’ve ever known. It’s easy on the page. Not so easy in real life. Practicing real empathy requires a face to it. No real face on the pages. I sense many writers of empathy fake it in the real world. I used to be that kind of fake writer of empathy. I extended vast amounts of empathy to dogs but very limited empathy to people around me. Not anymore after Bonnie and Clyde and becoming a dog myself; I can go vast on both fronts.

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