On a Nativity Scene

NSP Meditations

Walking one afternoon, I thought I had discovered the most forlorn nativity scene in Christendom. It was an ancient model of old school plastic, situated on a dead end road, and displayed in front of a manufactured home gone to seed, near three vehicles with expired tags. The home’s decking and children’s play structure was wrapped in yellow caution tape. A couple windows were boarded. Bikes, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, toys, dolls, bottles, cans lay strewn about the yard. One of the Three Wisemen was knocked over, as was a sheep. A strange and undulating Baby Jesus looked uncomfortable in the manger, almost as if he was being tortured. I did notice an extension cord running from the home and plugged into the scene and I decided to return in the evening to see it lit up. I imagined nothing short of grim and ghastly, a real unintentional exterminator of Christmas spirit. Interestingly enough, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Three Wisemen all had a ten million dollar ocean view. Such extreme contrasts like this one intrigue me as a person and writer. Friction between these contrasts leads to good stories.

I set out at the stroke of 7. A sliver of moon hung in the clear sky and a decent amount of stars appeared to remind me of human insignificance. I absolutely relished the idea of seeing the most forlorn nativity scene in Christendom become even more forlorn. As I approached the display, I saw falling snowflakes being projected onto the home by some hidden device. A few seconds later, I stood in front of the display, all lit up, no burnouts. The Wiseman and sheep were still flat on the ground. I could hear the ocean caroling in the distance and a couple of gulls flew overhead. I began to look harder. I begin to ask questions. I renounced all previous definitions of forlorn as they pertained to nativity scenes. It occurred to me that someone had exerted some effort to haul this scene out of storage, set it up, run the extension cord and rig the projector for the snowflake show. Yes, no effort was exerted to tidy up the grounds, but therein was the contrast. It was somehow beautifully disheveled and brimming with a gritty holiday spirit. It was a tiny speck of merry order in chaos. Probably a dozen people will see this nativity scene before it gets put back in storage in May.

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Random December Thoughts

NSP Meditations

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 empathy requires a face to it. No face on the pages. Is writing about empathy practicing empathy? Perhaps. It could lead to acts of empathy. We need models for positive behavior. Writers can provide them. They often do. However, 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 empathy to dogs but very limited empathy to people around me. Not anymore. I can go vast on both fronts.

I am sitting in a waiting room. A fan blows. It’s 40 degrees outside. Doors open and close. I hear alarms toot.

I’m forever trapped in an algorithm that generates profits for colossal tech and media companies through clicks and targeted advertising. Think of that as the most dystopian aspect in current American life and it’s not fictional and wasn’t invented by a writer of science fiction. It was invented by corporations with youthful progressive CEOs and cool employees and we willing entered into the arrangement. So did the government at every governmental level. It is a scenario of lucrative and permanent enslavement that Orwell or Kafka never imagined. We did it to ourselves! It was cool! That’s more Huxley.

I feel so fatigued. Why is that? I’m in the best physical condition since 2008. I suppose I am metaphysically fatigued.

Whenever I begin to rally, then I somehow began to rubber band, and I don’t even know what that means.

I met someone who wants to be a poet. We talked of that. How does one become a poet in 2017? I sense poetry could be more important than ever. It has become more important to me than ever. I am seeing things around me that I can only comprehend through poetry, mine or others. Rilke is changing my life. Throwaway lines from Rilke are reeling me in.

The Alphasmart word processor initiated another unexpected and fascinating conversation about the nature of technology. Some people pine for the simplicity the Alphasmart provides. They want off the digital teat, but they don’t know how or can’t take the first step. Is it that hard?

I am reading a biography of Jack Johnson, the prizefighter, not the lite rocker, and his story is blowing my mind. He was a boxer, a spy, a matador, an activist, an actor, an exile, a prisoner, a flaunter of every racial and social convention of his era. He hung out with Rasputin! He is the wild forerunner to Ali, Tommy Carlos, Colin K. It is hard to believe his life hasn’t been turned into a new serialized show. His life is very much relevant today.

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Oregon Tavern Age: Waiting to Craft

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The Dirty Dozen played on television. The greatest macho cast in the history of movies, Lee Marvin, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes and Jim Brown (!), were kicking Wehrmacht ass.

I sat at the bar near Terry, drinking a local porter with my coat pockets stuffed with keyhole limpets, sand dollars, hairy tritons and a beaver stick. I was waiting to craft with them, Christmas crafting.

The Sea Star Lounge was about to host what surely would be the only crafting event in the history of world crafting where alcohol was served and The Dirty Dozen played. Who knew what kind of jingoistic holiday crafts that combination might produce? A macrame Three Wise Men carrying assault weapons?

A few weeks earlier, I had overhead a conversation in the lounge about an impeding sea-themed crafting afternoon scheduled for there. The idea had been to craft ornaments while drinking and give them away to drinking customers. I thought it about the best non-commercial idea at Christmastime I had ever heard of. Lacquer, yarn, beads, driftwood, glue guns, glitter, the works. I asked Linda if I could join the fun. I had never crafted before, let alone in Oregon Tavern Age country. I simply had to craft.

At 1:15, Linda and Gary walked through the door carrying several totes of crafting supplies. They passed a Christmas tree in the corner that didn’t have a single ornament on it. The holiday spirit was running somewhat slack among the staff, but perhaps crafting would provide the necessary motivation.

Motivation in OTA country is a nefarious word. It must be danced around and insinuated.

I walked over to see contents of the totes. There was even a drill! “I don’t mess around,” said Linda, as she organized her supplies near the tree.

The appointed crafting hour was 1:30 or 2:00. No one seemed to know for sure. Someone named Diane was loosely in charge of the event and was supposed to arrive at the appointed time bringing additional crafting tools and materials, quite possibly even a tiny spot welder.

Miranda, an off duty bartender, came in with beads and yarn and ordered a Bailey’s and coffee.

One thirty rolled around and no Diane. We waited to craft. I ordered a second porter. I asked Linda what would happen if Diane didn’t show.

“Then we’ll drink,” she said.

While we waited, Linda gave me glittered and lacquered sand dollar ornament she had made at a previous Sea Star crafting event. It was one of my most precious non-edible mementos collected in over 20 years of traveling through OTA country. Canned deer was up there, too.

Two came and went and still no Diane. The Dirty Dozen kept going and going. Jim Brown got machine-gunned to death and I teared up a bit.

Terry finished his beer and got up to leave.

“Aren’t you going to craft?” I said.

“Crafting is for morons,” he said and walked out the door carrying his O2 tank.

A few minutes later, The Dirty Dozen ended. I sat there, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting…to craft.

Ten minutes later I left.

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Elk and Christmas Cookies

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Rain fell hard. A river ran fast behind me. A creek swelled parallel to me. Fields began to flood. I parked my car in a lot, turned off the engine and crucified the Jesus radio. I was the only one around. I opened a can of Christmas cookies baked by my mother and waited for elk to arrive because this was a magical place where they always grazed, dozed and rutted.

I tasted the tree-shape cookie with green frosting and sprinkles and thanked the ocean for my mother. I finished the cookie and waited.

Rain picked up and was undulating across the fields. Another cookie. No elk. I cast a spell to invite their appearance. I wanted elk with Christmas cookies.

A few minutes later, the elk arrived. Or did they? I couldn’t see a damn thing out the window because of the steam.

I ate another cookie and emptied the box. I lifted the box and guzzled the crumbs. Five more minutes elapsed. I might have fallen asleep.

Dark forms appeared outside the car. Elk? Sure, why not? I had cast my spell and doubtless the cookies had a role in the conjuring. Merry Christmas elk.

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Faces Coming Out Of the Rain

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Ray Bradbury wrote a book called The Day it Rained Forever. How come it took me this long to discover that? Rain means misery for dogs in animal shelters; volunteers to walk them won’t show up. I do. Rain worsens clearcuts, but that’s not rain’s fault. Rain splits; the sun cracks. A woman standing in brilliant sunshine outside a grocery store screamed terrible hateful words into her phone. Her face was pinched and red. Had it been raining, no such screaming would have occurred. Think of all the terrible hateful conversations rain aborts for screamers into their phones. The world is so much better without these words screamed in public for everyone to hear. A therapist asked me about loneliness and implied that willful cultivation of solitude makes someone emotionally sick. I said I wasn’t lonely, I have rain. It did not go over well. It rained right past him. A country song called “Rocking to the Rhythm of the Rain” played on country radio. It was sung by a female artist unknown to me and it sounded phony. Now “Rainin’” by Rosanne Cash, that’s real rain country song with real tasty rain guitar licks. It occurs to me that I am currently writing about dogs in precisely the same manner I write about rain. So I guess my dog book will be a rain book too. Rain has a ramshackle quality to it and I love the word “ramshackle.” Another word I love is “raiment.” It has nothing to do with rain but I have provided raiment to homeless men in need of staying dry in rain. I miss several people with “rain” in their names, literally or almost anagram. I wonder if anyone in the world is named Drizzle? I know there many Mistys out there although Misty is an old name and nearly extinct. I am reading a Brazilian detective novel called The Silence of the Rain, and the author is perfunctory with his rain in Rio. I have lost so many of the great rain people in my life. Will new ones emerge? I met an old man walking down a road. He told me, “I can hear the trees howling for rain.”

Jim Morrison wrote and sang: When you’re strange/ Faces come out of the rain

I recently heard this line, in the car, on the radio, in mono, in the middle of strange nowhere, while it was raining, hard, lamented faces were coming at me, and the line was so incredible that I nearly had to pull over and contemplate it. I cannot believe I never considered this line for the rain book or my faces-themed writing workshop! What are the strange faces that come out of the rain? What a writing prompt. Write on it! See what transpires listening to AM radio?

Jim, I apologize for disparaging you in my rain book. You were a rare, almost unprecedented man of the sun…and rain. That is a rare thing indeed. And of course, it probably killed you.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 36

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Treats stuffed in the front pocket of my corduroys; a paperback Siddhartha stuffed in back. I was heading to the river with Bonnie and Clyde and Herman Hesse’s classic Buddhist novel that I had taught to high school students for so many years but never would again.

Funny how the Christian kids always got the most out of the experience.

I had read the book a dozen times, in three continents, but never beside a river. It was high time because Siddhartha is the greatest river novel in the history of world literature and I wanted to read my favorite passages aloud to my canine sages and see where the words conveyed me. When you read something aloud, the material takes on special meaning and purpose. Articulation sluices nuggets of clarity that would have never otherwise appeared by reading the same passage in golden silence. Try it sometime.

For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, it unfolds the story of a privileged young man named Siddhartha who renounces his family’s wealth and prestige and spends his entire life trying to find answers to life’s eternal vexing questions. In his quest for truth, Siddhartha follows several paths, poverty and asceticism, then pleasure and materialism. He learns that desire is the root of all human suffering, the importance of letting go, and the value of seeking answers not from books, teachers, creeds and traditions, but rather through direct experience, self introspection and intuition. At the end of his life, after suffering and losing everything, he settles near a river with a wise old ferryman and begins to listen to the river.

And here I was, standing near a river with two old wise ferrymen, knowing I must listen to a river because I had lost everything and was still seeking to answer the eternal question posed in the novel: what must a person let go of to end suffering?

There is a subtle art to letting go and I intuited that I had done it badly the past 18 months and perhaps injured people along the way. But as Siddhartha shows us, it is never too late to learn and here I was a student in a river classroom trying to learn.

I opened the book to my favorite passage, near the end ,where Siddhartha is listening to the river, the one I used to read aloud in my classroom to conclude the study of the novel. I read the passage aloud to Bonnie and Clyde and my voice resounded up and down the river and perhaps into the clearcuts, the latter which certainly needed to hear Hesse’s healing words on the eternal function of the water cycle—the one true science and religion on the planet.

Siddhartha tried to listen better. The picture of his father, his own picture, and the picture of his son all flowed into each other…They all became part of the river. It was the goal of all of them, yearning, desiring, suffering; and the river’s voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire. The river flowed on towards its goal. Siddhartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he had ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and the goals were reached and each one succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew.

Bonnie and Clyde looked at me as I read. They were present at the river and nowhere else. They had let everything go. Well, except Clyde and his insatiable desire for treats! I fed them both, scratched their backs, and went back to read a few more passages aloud. I heard the words and kept asking: what remains to let go?

Siddhartha figured it out beside his river and attained Nirvana.

My answer didn’t come.

But I will keep trying, perhaps for the rest of my life. Dogs will doubtless assist me.

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