Real Waves

Hello Everybody,

The Great Warrior slid his bishop all the way across the checkered board to take my queen. I didn’t see it coming. In fact, I thought I’d set a trap that would ultimately force The Great Warrior to give up either a rook or a knight, on the next move. I leaned back from the kitchen table, looked away as to hide my grin. But I turned back toward the board to see it all happen in slow motion. Then he disposed of my matriarch, laid her to rest with his collection of other dead pieces from kingdom. A few moves later, I knocked my king down in disgusted resignation – banged the table, cursed.

Plotting his destruction of my kingdom.

“Maybe we should play a game where we explain to each other our reasons behind each move,” said The Great Warrior.

“No.”

“It’s a way of learning, becoming better.”

“No.”

“Well, then why’d you make such a blunder as that?”

“Too many things were happening out there,” I answered, pointing to the board as if it were Waterloo. “One or two moves ahead, I can think that far. But after that, there’s too many factors. I can’t spread my brain out that far!” Bang, curse.

My exclamation came clearly from frustration and self-pity – The Great Warrior had beaten me several times this week – but there was truth to my statement. I’d had trouble concentrating all week. Morning, noon and night – day after day – was one giant mess of speedy thought. Pictures and sounds rushed in and out of my brain like ocean waves. I was aboard a helpless ship on those waters. Writing, reading, sitting through a movie were diffucult tasks. And my guitar playing was much like the chess – starting out concise and with purpose only to dissolve into manic disarray. Thought pummeled me from every direction as the minutes of each day raced by. I could only stand there at the ship’s helm – watching the wheel spin – in a state of nervios anxiety. Finally, I cut down the sails and let my mind go wherever the thoughtstorm took it. I did only what I had to do – eat, bathe, brush my teeth, fish for jobs in the internet sea.

But frustration kept mounting as the week progressed. I got desperate, I meditated – sat every morning with my legs crossed, breathed in and out, one hand in the palm of the other, stared at the wall. The morning air coming into the bungalow was cool, livened my skin. Breathe in, breathe out. I focused on the ambient sounds East Hollywood offered – a leaf blower, the glass collector, a siren, a Harley Davidson, a gate sliding open, a domestic fight somewhere down the street. The sounds faded into one dull hum growing quieter and quieter. I felt the tension ease out of my body, joints relaxed and stomach muscles settled. Breath in, breathe…damn! Every morning, as soon as I entered that formless place where meditation takes me, I’d get blindsided by frothy thoughtwaves so powerful I’d physically jerk back into this world of the labeled and named.

Full moon fever.

“I’ve been having a hard time, too,” said Luis. “There was a full moon on Monday night, that’s when it got me. But Mars isn’t in retrograde or anything like that, my girlfriend read up on it.”

The Great Warrior told me he’d been having trouble sleeping, and also had this creepy feeling that “time was running out.” I began to wonder if maybe some kind of non-astrological event was going down that made humanity drift a bit closer to the edge – perhaps a collective anxiety throughout LA. But in the many walks I took I didn’t notice anything beyond the standard edge-of-the-continent babbling madness. Besides, my fits of thought turned me inward – dunked me beneath the surface of the present where I struggled to keep my breath as the past and future circled me like sharks with dead black eyes and blood-stained fangs. I was ready to betray anyone and deny any belief for the next breath of peaceful, safe air. The thoughts would pull up to the surface just as the sharks opened there jaws wide. I thanked the thoguhts, vocally, for doing so. I dare say I may have been the crazy babbler on Sunset Blvd this week. It seems anyone can be, if they hang out on it long enough.

On Thursday, I headed to the beach at Santa Monica, with dim hope that it would slow my brain down. It was a hot day, the city was blurred by heat waves as I walked to the bus stop at Santa Monica and Western Blvds. The odor from all the grime on the sidewalk wafted upward, into the nostrils. The bus was 45 minutes late – everyone who waited for it seemed to be frowning, confusedly, and trying not to breathe to deep. People would look at each other, then look down, pressed against each other in the scarce shade – compressed isolation.

Except one man who stood straight and tall in a very nice, houndstooth suit and straw hat, wearing dark sunglasses, looking like a jazz player who’d long since come off the hard drugs and now played lucid and fearlessly, but played it slow even if he was playing fast. He was a nobleman in the sun as we pawns cringed in the shadows. He was sweating, but he was fine with it – nothing his handkerchief couldn’t handle. A few minutes later, a car stopped at the red light. The driver rolled down his window and shouted.

“Hey!”

“Hey there!” replied the nobleman.

“PT passed away, man. Tuesday.”

“Yeah,” replied the nobleman, “I know. Bakersfield?”

“Yeah…”

The nobleman mimicked shooting a pistol, then held up his hands, questioningly. The man in the car shook his head, affirming. The nobleman shook his head, looked down Santa Monica Blvd, then turned back to the man in the car.

“Well, alright, then. I’ll see you at the funeral.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” replied the driver. Then the light turned green and he drove off.

Howling mad streets.

As we were boarding the bus, a lady and a man – carrying duffle bags – approached the bus stop. They appeared to be arguing. Suddenly, the lady threw her bag in the street. Then she ran out in the middle of the street and – like a matador – waited for an oncoming pick-up truck. The driver swerved to miss her, but the lady ran to the truck and punched its mirror – breaking it -as the truck passed her. “F#$k you!” she shouted, then grabbed the duffle and jumped on the bus. The man boarded the bus, too.

“I tell you,” she shouted to everybody aboard – the man eyed her from the other end of the bus, “I ain’t mad at myself, well I’m always mad at myself but he don’t need to know that! I’m tired of him! Shit…he ain’t gonna know I’m gone ’til I am.”

The man came toward her. “I’m right here, you didn’t get rid’a me.”

The lady stood, pushed through the crowded bus, toward him. “Ah, yeah, then…well we gettin’ off now and it’s goin’ down!”

“You makin’ a damn fool of yourself,” said the man.

“I don’t give a f#$k!” The bus stopped at Vine St. “We gets off right here! Come on…it’s about to blow, right now.”

“Alright then.”

As soon as they got off the bus the woman threw down the suitcase and started wailing on the man, who tried to act cool at first, then started giving a little back. Several men in the bus looked out the window, egging the couple on, careening their necks to get a last look as the bus pulled away. By the next stop it was as if the couple never existed – erased off the record. The rest of us settled in for the 90 minute ride to the end of the country. Hollywood, then West Hollywood, then Beverly Hills, then…

“Listen,” a man said into his phone, as we passed through Century City, “I don’t wanna be with someone who doesn’t wanna be with me, you know. Yeah? Well here’s the irony, I thought I things were getting better…yeah, well I tried but you know that trying is what lead to my silence…whoah, whoah, whoah…let’s not confuse the two issues, here…she can be thankful, it’s money, afterall, you know…(long pause)…ok, well me too…as long as we can both be thankful for our gestures. Yeah…well…tell her money leaves a bad taste in my mouth, too.”

Time killin’…

I made it to the beach late – after four o’clock – so it wasn’t crowded. Bums lay, sprinkled about the sand, sleeping or staring into the seventh or eighth dimension – far away from the crowds on the shoreline, where people nuzzled together in the cooling early evening, read books, or wandered in ankle deep water – smiling, laughing. I set my towel and bag down on the sand ran into the water

Clouds had begun to roll in, dropping the tempurature on the beach by at least 10°. The air brought on chills, so I wandered out to shoulder deep water to shield myself from the wind. There, I lifted my feet and let myself rise and fall with the swells. Some pelicans convened on a cluster of rocks, several yards out. Wing to wing, they managed to stay on the rock. Every now and then – as if on shifts – one pelican would fly off and another would land in its place. The pelicans would fly straight up, stall in mid-air, then open their wings wide and dive straight down and stab at the water for food with such fearless and natural precision.

Where the real frontier begins…

The swells grew higher as the evening progressed. I paddled lazily to keep my head above water – all the while, facing the ocean, letting my fast thoughts go and go and go. When I turned around and faced the beach, I was surprised to find that I’d drifted quite some distance form the shore. My towel was only a little blue dot on the beach. Human beings were tiny figures in the sand. I could make out arm and leg movements, but no facial expressions. I couldn’t hear anything coming back from the shore, either. The beach – and LA, America, Western Civilization – shrunk smaller and smaller with each rising swell. It felt as if I could keep on floating as long as I wanted. More so, it felt like floating was the right idea – the natural state. And I wasn’t floating away from anything. No, I was floating to something, the big thing, with fearless precision….like the pelicans.

The first wave broke and rolled me over several times. I reached out – frantically – for the surface or the ocean floor. I finally found the surface and took a breath just before another wave pummeled me, extending my legs over my back. All my air went out and I sucked in saltwater, sand. I regained my ground, shook my head, opened my eyes just in time to see another wave breaking over me. I ended up on my knees, gagging, thirty feet closer to the shore. I looked at the people on the beach – saw their faces. Some noticed me, but most didn’t. But all carried on with what they were doing.

Real waves.

All sound came back – the human chatter, the pelican squawks, and the evening waves roared as they broke and dissolved into brutal frothy energy. I went back out again and again. For well over an hour I let the big waves knock me around. By the end, my eyes were burning, my throat was sore from salt, my legs and arms were jello. It was exhausting, taking on the relentless force of nature. But it felt good to be pummeled by something real.

Be well…

Freedom Beyond Words

Always lettin’ you know they’re around…

Hello Everybody,

Luis and I watched the three helicopters hover in the Hollywood night – their spotlights aimed down, on a location further west on Hollywood Blvd. Thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah echoed off the bungalows and apartment buildings along Carlton Way. To the right of us, Luis’ crazy drunk neighbor stood on his balcony and sang wet alcoholic syllables to the choppers, waving his hands in the air as if he was conducting a symphony.

“A group of about 40 protesters set up shop in the intersection of Hollywood and Highland,” said The Great Warrior – a friend and neighbor (who’d rather me not use his real name) – as he walked up to us. “They got ’em out of the intersection, already. But they’re not taking any chances, they’ll be flying around all night.”

The choppers had broken the thick, heavy quiet air that had draped the city for the last 28 hours, since the George Zimmerman Verdict came in from Florida. In truth, the thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah’s of the choppers eased my mind a little bit. The amoshperic thickness had sunk beneath my skin, and I’d begun to feel a bit anxious.

Flashback – 28 hours before, Saturday evening. I’d been writing all afternoon. Finishing around 7pm, I decided to hop on the old facebook to see what’s happening. As I aimlessly scrolled down my timeline – waiting for a friend to wow me with a meme or witty, ironic status – I began to notice words like “Justice!” and “Sickening!” in various statuses.

Slowly, my stomach sagged as if a lead bar had been placed in it. I left facebook, headed to the dreaded CNN. There it was – ZIMMERMAN NOT GUILTY. I tried to read through the whole article but I can’t read all the way through mainstream news articles anymore. But the font and size of ZIMMERMAN NOT GIULTY said it all. facebook urged me to come back to it, but I retreated to MLB.com and hid out behind the box scores of Saturday’s baseball games. But baseball’s a slow game and facebook cought me. It’d taken only minutes for the hot bed of opinions to break out into full-scale Vitual Civil War. Finally, I found the strength to pull the Internet’s barbs from my brain and went outside for a walk, into the thickening quiet air.

At first, East Hollywood appeared the same. Next door, old men talked on the sidewalk. The old mumbling lady across the street sat on her stoop, held out a can of food to me – like she always does. On the corner of Sunset and Serrano, drug dealers were being discreet and wino’s writhed in the pleasure-pain of brutal enlightenment. Women carried bags of groceries out of Food 4 Less, or wheeled large laundry carts filled with clothes. All night girls hung out by Bill’s Liquor. But LA faded away as I walked further into my own head. Thoughts about the possible rammifications of the Zimmerman verdict raced around my skull like roller derby girls – clawing, banging into each other and falling to the floor as other thoughts cheered them on from behind a chainlink fence, reveling in bestial lust. Before I knew it, I was several blocks down Sunset. I didn’t even notice sun go down. The sky hung in a confused hue between black and blue. The green and red lights along Sunset were a lit a runway leading to a dark whorish place, so I turned around and went back to the bungalow.

Once there, I robotically, obediently jumped onto facebook. Blood covered the battle field. Fearful, hate bullets shot back and forth. Even those threads where everybody was on the same side – either side – felt combative, friends bludgeoning each other with agreement. Witnessing anymore massacre would certainly lead me to drink, so I logged out of The War and played my guitar loud and hard against that thick, heavy quiet air.

But those choppers brought sound back to the city, on Sunday night. Choppers would continue to fly over the city the entire week. As soon as one flew away, another came on. Thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah…

Tuesday night, I was walking back to Hollywood from Silverlake when I noticed a woman talking to a chopper in the sky. She wore a pair of huge red and white sunglasses and spoke in the usual Hollywood transient babble. However, as I walked by, she turned and looked right at me – the streetlights bouncing off the big sunglasses – and said, so clearly, “What’chu connected to, crackerman?!” I had no answer for her. She kept her gaze upon me for a quick moment longer, then turned and continued her discourse with the chopper. But her question echoed in my mind as I walked on, making for a rather existential journey back to the bungalow.

Revolution Books

Wednesday, I found myself standing outside of Revolution Books, on Hollywood Blvd. On the sidewalk was an advertisement for a screening of a film called BA Speaks: Revolution, Nothing Less! I went inside for details.

“Hello,” said a baby-boomerish lady who’d approached me, immediately after entering. I told her I wanted to know more about the film. She handed me a postcard and pamphlet with the details.

“Tell me,” she said, smiling, gently, “how do you feel about what’s going on in the country since the verdict?”

“I think everybody’s scared shitless of each other,” I said.

“Mmm, hmm. Well, we think now is absolutely the right time for a Communist revolution in this country.”

Oh, I thought, it’s that kind of revolutionary bookstore. I looked around, on the shelves. Yep, there’s a picture of Mao, on the wall over there. And there’s one of Marx.

“Feel free to watch as much of the film as you wish,” said the lady. “But we’d love for you to come to the LA Central Library on Saturday. We’re going to screen the entire six hour film.”

I was able to preview the movie – which is a filmed lecture by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, Bob Avakian. In the 10 minutes I saw, he talked passionately about the systematic oppression throughout the world of the poor and of women, the criminalizing of  Blacks and Latino’s in the USA, the eltism of the rich, America as a world empire. I was interested to see how the lecture developed. I smiled at the baby-boomer lady and told her I would be there Saturday.

Sunset Blvd can be a Spacewalk.

Thursday was a paranoid blur. Choppers swooped overhead constantly. Thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah. I felt a kinetic negative energy on the sidewalk, which seemed to affect the homeless along Sunset Blvd more than anybody else, like they were Tesla coils relaying some dark knowledge across LA. A very tall, blonde dirty lady jerked up and down Sunset, screaming, “I MAY BE PARANOID BUT REMEMBER HE TOLD US SO!” over and over. It was a hot week, yet she wore three or four layers of clothing, carried three bags on her arm. She scribbled away in a yellowed notebook as she shouted and walked. Thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah. I came upon a toothless, 40ish male wearing a white stained jogging suit, pulling a laundry cart that contained all his belongings. The cart only had one wheel on it, would tip over everynow and then – clothes, shoes and other things would fall onto the sidewalk. “AHH! Man, can you believe it? I got a $800 wardrobe right there, RIGHT THERE!” He came up to me, pointed at the cart while grinning at me. “Hey man, lemme tell ya, when I start thinkin I start reactin…and I’mma bad reactor, man.” Thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah. A transgendered female – cuts and bruises all over her – sat on the curb of Sunset, eating peanuts from a dirty and crumpled Jamba Juice cup. “HA! I’mma what you call a San Francisco wide-ass muh-fuh. Colin Powell and the Holy Ghost done got up in t’me.” Thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah. Later in the day, I ran into the tall blonde dirty lady again with all the bags. “I AIN’T PRETENDIN NOTHIN…NOTHIN…NOTHIN.” Thwah, thwah, thwah, thwah…

Later, in front of the Church of the Blessed Sacrement on Sunset and Cherokee, elderly men and women waited in line to get free canned goods and clothes. I weaved through the slow, hunched bodies and tired eyes and came upon a storefront advertising, Eckankar: The Religion of the Light and Sound of God in the window. They met every Friday night at 7.

“What we will do tonight,” said the man who ran the Eckenkar service I attended on Friday, “is sing the prayer, HU, together for about 20 minutes. Now, we say prayer, but it’s just one syllable…hue. We don’t pray for things – this to happen or that to happen – because God knows what we need. And we say God, though we don’t believe in a god. But it’s as good any other term. Oh, and it says, worship the sign out there, but we don’t worship because well, there isn’t anything to worship. We just sing HU. That’s basically all we do.” He laughed. “The mind is a machine, kinda like a record player stuck in a groove. HU frees us, gets us off that one groove. It’s soul travel. HU frees our souls from our bodies, and we can travel any where in The Universe. Mars…even.” He laughed. “We sing HU to visit where we came from…to know God. Or, whatever you want to call it.”

Soul travel?

Only two other people showed up. The four of us sat in a circle, closed our eyes, took deep breathes and belted out HU, over and over. Everybody’s breath was different, so our HU’s were staggered – there weren’t any gaps of silence, our collective HU was constant. Each of us also began ours HUs in different keys, but we’d quickly, naturally slip into harmony. Now, if you go online and look up Eckankar, you will find it to be called anything from a legit new age religion to a scam thought up by a crackpot. But there’s something about making noise in a cirlcle with other people. Pretty soon, HUUUUUUUUU was Everything. The back of my eyelids were far from simple black. I was staring at something vast and unamable and soothing and motherly. Then we stopped HUING, sat quietly with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, we looked at each other for long periods of time with no urge to speek. Then it was over. The whole thing took 30 minutes. I walked onto Sunset with a loose gait, relaxed shoulders. I heard the choppers, but they sounded far away, meaningless.

On Saturday, I went to the film screening of BA Speaks: Revolution, Nothing Less! I didn’t stay for the whole six hours, only three. But it was three hours of Bob Avakian relentlessly, passionately speaking out against the abuses of power throughout history, zoning in on the capitalist-imperialist oppresive rule of the US government. But he spoke just below shouting level, and he used the same vocal inflection the whole way through. Soon, every sentence sounded the same. That monotony became this kind of dark mantra rooted in the horrors of Humankind. Over and over, era through era…the same oppression. The same hand motions, the same staccato rythm, the same loud voice…

I drifted away, deep in that third hour. All I remember about that time was the cool dark of the room. I heard clapping now and then. And I heard Bob Akavian speaking, but the words stopped defining his ideas. His voice was merely a blunt echo throughout the room, back and forth from all directions. When I snapped out of it, he’d moved on from Man’s atrocities and finally toward his Plan – arguing that a Socialist dictatorship would be needed to make sure the dictates of communism were upheld. But by this time, he looked tired, sweaty, spoke laborously – as if he was at the mercy of his words, enslaved by a language already spoken. I got up and left the library, certain that the language needed to articulate Humanity’s freedom from the fearful hatred of itself has yet to be created, and would have to be created outside of everything we know. That is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

A good view.. 

But I damn near made it to Mars with HU.

Be well…

 

Space Travel Will Save Us

Hello Everybody,

Just insert your own caption.

Last Monday, I was walking through Wino’s Alley on Serrano Street toward Sunset Boulevard. A couple of winos were laying on the the sidewalk ahead of me, their bodies curved to fit in whatever shade was available, on the sidewalk outside the Food 4 Less. Across the street, against the wall of Bill’s Liquor, three other winos – babbling, drinking, seeing things I couldn’t see – kept counsel on the other side.

“BLAH!” Exclaimed one.

“Blah, blah…blah,” Said the other consolingly.

“Bl…bl…bah, blah. Blah. Blah,” Conceded the first.

“Blah, blah,” said the second, shaking his head in affirmation.

“Blah?” asked the third, who’d been destracted by a sunray.

It was an unusually clear day. To the north, the beautiful Hollywood Hills could be seen in sharp detail. Mini-palaces with big shiny windows and large balconies teetered over the sharp drop-offs of the bushy green Hills. Palm trees popped up in clusters here and there. The Hills looked so close in the smogless sky – floating in the heat waves of the hot day. It was as if the visage was projected out of the brain of the sleeping wino just ahead of me – a good dream about The High Life in 3D. The wino lay there – a crumpled up pizza box for a pillow – covered in grime from his gray hair to his one dingy sock next to a spattering of unidentifyable, dry organic matter. At first, I thought he was dead. But just after I leaned in for a closer look, he twitched slightly, as if an angel nudged him, or a gnat flew in his nose.

…perchance to dream…

Across the street, one of the babbling winos crushed his empty 24oz. beer can and threw it in the gutter. His gin-blossomed face went blank as his fine day suddenly got hotter and longer. He sat in absolute disgust, listening to a slow clock ticking somewhere, pretending not to hear the howls of the dogs of despair that would be on him by evening. His two compadres babbled on. They still had some booze left. Their day was still Just Fine.

I found myself anxious, later that afternoon. My job in Los Angeles – building the set for Independent Shakespeare Company’s summer play festival in Griffith Park – all summer long folks, go to iscla.org for the schedule! – had finished up, for the most part. I’d been spent the last few days writing and trolling the internet for writing jobs, adding up to a lot of computer time. By Monday, I felt as if I’d just crawled out of one of those cryo-jelly pods like Keanu Reeves in the The Matrix, just after he took the Red Pill. Now that I was back in the carnal world, my body needed to move, so I decided to hike up to the Griffith Park Observatory – up in those Hills of that wino’s dream.

Just beyond the entrance of the park, people of all kinds lounged in the thick dark-green cool shade the park offered. Frizbees, picnics, books. A group of Buddhists meditated. A group of Muslims prayed towards Mecca. A steady flow of couples, joggers and dogs and their owners moved up and down the trail leading to the observatory. I joined the assembly line and headed up the switchback trail.

The idle time had taken it’s toll. I was sucking in air as I neared the observatory, sweating profusely. The sweat had a consistency of thin oil, and burned my eyes as I humped it up the hill. Everybody else looked fine. There were too giggly girls just ahead of me, talking about there dudes and what they ate for lunch. Behind me was a young couple, both wearing capris, skipping along, talking to each other like lovers do.

Halfway there…

“Well, that’s a bit of history that they don’t tell ya’ in school, isn’t it?” said the girl.

“I know, it’s crazy, right?” replied the dude.

“You’re so smart.”

“Ah, well, you know.”

About two-thirds of the way up, there was stony water run-off that served as a shortcut for the more adventruous pilgrims heading to the observatory. I ascended the steep incline – slipping now and then, catching myself on rocks to stay upright – and crawled up to the last stretch of the switchback. Sweat stuck to my hands like hamburger grease. My shirt and jeans were soaked and covered in dirt. There was a tree by the trail and I went under it – my wet clothes cooled me in the breezy shade. A few moments later, the young couple in capri’s walked by, nuzzling against each other. They looked un-alone, un-worried, as He directed She’s attention to various parts of the city.

“Oh, that’s it, way over there?”

“Yeah, way over there, isn’t that cool?”

“That is so cool!”

The bounced up the trail like Raggedy Ann and Andy. Renewed with vigor, I followed.

The observatory is closed on Mondays, but many people were there, laying about on the greens in front of the entrance, peering out from the observatory’s balcony. I shouldered my way into the crowd on the balcony and looked over the city. Los Angeles sprawles so far out it finally just disappears, like there’s only the city and there’s never been anything else. I could see East Hollywood from the balcony pretty clearly. I could even see the corner of Serrano and Sunset. I couldn’t see the wino’s. But they were there.

Next to me, a girl held her smartphone to her ear, smiling to herself over what she was hearing. On the other side of me, a woman subconsiously put her arm around her husband – or whoever he was – as they stared out to the west. Behind me, a happy man carried his happy little son on his shoulders. Behind him a guy was taking pictures of his reluctant girlfriend on the concrete walkway, where there is an ebedded, brass diagram of our solar system.

Its all just stuff, spinning around.

In the center of the diagram, is a little brass dot, representing the sun. Then you have a brass circle representing the orbit of Mercury around the Sun. Then you have one respresenting Venus’ orbit, Earth’s, Mars’. There’s nothing after Mars for a while – you have to walk several pace before you come to Jupitor’s orbit. Then there’s Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and then there’s poor, demoted Pluto. When I was little, Pluto was a planet, I thought. Suddenly, I was rocketted back to the first grade, learning the planets in a little small town classroom with my childhood friends. But I was back in LA almost instantly, sweaty, older, and a long way from that little classroom.  When I was little, Pluto was a planet…a planet…

I walked back to Earth’s orbit, stared at it. Looking down on it, it was an incredibibly simple place, planet Earth. Spins around while circling the sun, that’s all. I thought about what that astronaut said…

If somebody’d said before the flight, “Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?” I would have say, “No, no way.” But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried. — Alan Shepard, Apollo 14 astronaut, second human in space.

Well, that’s nice, but that’s not what I was thinking about…

Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there. — Mike Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut; interview for the 2007 movie In the Shadow of the Moon.

Close, but nope, wasn’t him, either…

This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It’s lonely. It’s small. It’s isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we’ve got. — Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut; speech at Millersville University, Pennslyvania. 15 October 1992.

Not quite, but we’re getting closer…

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. — Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 Astronaut, first man on the moon.

THUMB!!!! THUMB!!!! Thanks for the hint, Neil Armstrong! Now, this is what I thought about…

We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon you can put your thumb up and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself—all behind your thumb. And how insignificant we really all are, but then how fortunate we are to have this body and to be able to enjoy living here amongst the beauty of the Earth itself. — Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 & 13 astronaut;   In the Shadow of the Moon.

Simple…

By the time I descended the hill and got back to Hollywood, it was dark. I walked along from one dark pocket of shadow to the next along Hollywood Boulevard. The sidewalk was sprinkled with panhandlers, charged from the energy of the night into a near euphoric state. They almost looked happy they rattled about, their thin frames swinging inside their baggy clothes…say man, you got a dollar…bus fare…listen, I’m outta gas…I just need a fu#$ing quarter, man…ok, how about 20 cents? Man, what’s 20 cents?!

Sorry, buddy…sorry, buddy…sorry, buddy…

“Hey what’s up, man?” asked a different kind of voice coming out of a shadow.

I looked to my left and saw an old, black ashen hand sticking out of a shadow, holding a nearly full pint of gin. The bottle glowed in the streetlight, the shiny liquid sloshed around. I peered into the shadwow. The old man sat in a wheelchair, rubbing his abdomen as if to soothe the open wound caused by the jagged, sharp scales of the craving that crawled in and out him. But the craving seemed to be pacified for the time being, for he sported a large, gaping smile under his blooshot eyes. He held the pint higher, to me. He looked so happy.

“Say, wan’chu have a drink wimme?”

His smile was infectious, so I smiled back. But I didn’t answer. He leaned closer.

“Come on, man…drink wimme.”

The gin was strong. I lingered in its bouquet long enough for it to start smelling real good and perfect and absolute and the only thing I’ve ever wanted.

“No, thanks, buddy.”

As I left him, he reached out to grab me, just missing my arm.

“Hey, come on, man! HEY! HEY!”

“I’m sorry, buddy…”

Then his smile broke and on rushed the despair.

“GODAMMIT, MAN. JUST TALK TA’ ME!!!”

They’re still there…

There was a wounded brutality to his voice. But after he shouted, he looked down at the ground. Tick, tock, and the howls growing nearer. But he was laughing when I made it to the corner. I turned around. He laughed, took a long drink, then laughed some more. The dogs of despair had passed him by, and his night was back to being Just Fine.

Be well…

O’er The Ramparts We Are…

Hello Everybody…

Faith in Barrio Hollywood

It was well into the afternoon on July 4th. Two old Russian men jibbered away in their foreign toungue as they slammed dominos on a table, just outside our window. Spanish could be heard every now and then down the street. Andre – Luis’ roommate – was finishing up his plate of tacos. Luis and I were staring blankly into our empty plates. The impending food coma had set upon us like spider venom. Soon, we would succomb, spun tight in La Siesta’s web. Andre never rushed through his meal like Luis and I. He’s half French.

The tacos were from Luis and Andre’s neighbor, Edith. Earlier in the day, Luis and I built a ramp to the back door of her family’s bungalow, so her husband – Miguel – could get in and out of the house in his wheelchair.

“Broke his back,” Luis told me. “And an arm, a leg. He got messed up bad. And he’s undocumented. His boss’ insurance wouldn’t touch him. It’s bad, man.”

Andre had one, slow taco left. I leaned back in the chair – eyes still on my empty plate – and felt something closer to real content than I’d felt in a long time. I wish I could tell you that I wake up everyday looking for ways to help people, but I don’t. However, the only other option for me on Independence Day was to sit on the couch in my pajamas with my laptop, travel the whole wide virtual world for hours and drink, drink, drink coffee until the isolation hardened and I could no longer fend off the harbingers of self-loathing who would then whisk me away to the Real Dark Space. I’ve been to that space many times. It’s totally empty – always – until a drunk, pill-addled Tennessee Williams magically POOFS!!! in front of me and whispers his brilliant words over and over, Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person. I didn’t want to go to hell on The Fourth of July, so when Luis told me about Miguel’s situation, it was easy to say yes, let’s build a ramp. So Luis and I walked to Sunset Boulevard, passed the bums preparing for The Fourth outside Bill’s Liqour, through the packs of trajabaderos shooting dice and waiting for someone to point to them and say ¡andale! outside the Home Depot. Inside the Home Depot, we got some lumber. In no time we cut up the lumber and Whahlah! – ramp. When Andre got there, the three of us set it in place at Edith and Miguel’s door. It was all so very easy, and we got a free meal to boot.

Tennessee Williams, not angry…just disappointed.

The whole day had EASY written all over it. There were some plans – the beach, watch the big fireworks over the water, a bbq – but they just didn’t happen, and we didn’t mind. Moments later, I dozed in La Siesta’s web as the intermittent pops and whizzes of illegal fireworks echoed throughout East Hollywood.

I awoke in the early evening. The sun came into the bungalow sideways and dark yellow. The pops and whizzes had multiplied by a substantial factor. Andre texted that he and his girlfriend, Charity, were going to Barnsdall Park – just down Hollywood Boulevard – for a picnic. When Luis woke up, he and I, along with Luis’ other neighbor – who would rather me not use his real name, so I will refer to him as The Great Warrior – joined them just after sunset. As we got into The Great Warrior’s pick-up, a rocket whizzed down the street.

“It’s gonna get crazy in the neighborhood tonight,” said The Great Warrior, a longtime resident of East Hollywood. “I don’t know where they get the fireworks, but they get a lot of ’em, man.”

We found Andre and Charity at the park. Our friend Karen – plus an old friend of hers – joined us to complete the party. Barnsdall Park lay atop a hill, offered a great view of the city below. Other people were there – picnic-ing, frizzby-ing, dog-ing, or just laying around drinking. It was a cool mellow vibe. After the sun disappeared beyond the Hollywood sign, the sky burst into a brilliant apricot tone. The tips of the city’s palm trees just touched the sky. The Griffith Observatory glowed on top of one of the hills, like the head of a robot who’d been buried up to the neck.

Such a sweetly deceptive beauty…

“Todd, do you want some pate?” asked Andre, as he handed me a cracker covered in brown stuff. I’d never tried pate, so I took a chance. I wasn’t crazy about it. “It’s basically pork fat, salt, pepper, some other stuff,” said Andre. “I had to smuggle it back from France. It’s illegal here.” Despite my lack of zeal for the stuff, I pondered its aftertaste in hopes to form a question in which to ask Andre, in regards to the specifics of its illegality -it seemed like harmless goo. But when the question reached the tip of my tongue, fireworks began erupting all over town, and asking the question then seemed like a slight act of treason.

First, there were little bursts all over the city – Hollywood, Culver City, mid-city, downtown, way out at Marina Del Rey. The explosions would die down, then come back with more intensity. Concussion blasts echoed as if recorded on a loop, bouncing off the mountains surrounding Los Angeles. Smoke flowed over the city as the sky went from light blue to dark blue to black. Hollywood’s underground street-level fireworks show began to escalate, too. Roman candles zipped down streets, back and forth – rockets blasted off the roofs of apartment complexes. Sirens, flashing emergency lights. And more and more, the city’s legit firework displays grew larger and more elaborate. All atop Barnsdall Park ooh-ed and aah-ed, collectively.

“I feel like we’re the Gentry watching a Civil War battle,” said The Great Warrior.

I didn’t. I felt as if I was tuned into CNN on a giant holographic TV – watching footage of a pre-emptive strike somewhere, far removed from any danger, but able to watch it all unfold during prime time. Bombs and missles rained down – curiously missing their  “targets” yet always finding the peasants who aren’t even represented by their country although they literally break their backs to build it’s infrastructure in which the more fortunate and represented classes are free do their Stuff and Things. Then the whole scene turned further into an Orwellian direction, because it was clear to see – from so far away – the bombed country was, in fact, dropping the bombs. But instead of revolting at such madness, everybody was celebrating, bombers and bombed alike.

Interrupting your Reality to bring you another Reality…

“GOD BLESS AMERICA,” shouted a drunk man, bringing me back from this Dystopia. He’d stood up on his blanket to make the statement. His gangly swaying silhouette dangled like a marrionette in front of the exploding sky. “GOD BLESS THE USA AND GOD BLESS JESUS CHRIST!” Then the Almighty Puppet Master cut his strings and he fell to his blanket.

Dark clouds rolled in from the ocean. They were illuminated in eerie greens, blues, reds, yellows, pinks, purples as the fireworks exploded, like there was some kind of whacky lightening circus storm rolling in from Japan. But minutes later – around 9:30pm – the main fireworks died down and people began to leave the park. The Celebration was over, but as The Great Warrior walked back to his truck, it was easy to see The Bombing of Hollywood was really just getting started, with no end in sight. Whiz, band, pop! The neighborhood was at war. A short time later, The Great Warrior drove us slowly, carefully down Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood seemed dark and desolate on the surface – the explosions only happening on the periphery – like the eye of a stom. But when The Great Warrior almost hit two ladies crossing Serrano Street and we screeched to a halt, I was relieved, not only because we didn’t run them over but also because they proved Life did, indeed, go on as best it could despite the chaos of war. The women merely looked at us like we were idiots and continued walking.

A huge blast went off just above us as we got out of the truck, shaking the windows of the bungalows.

“It’s great, man,” said The Great Warrior, laughing. “They just don’t give a f$%k around here. And, there’s not enough cops to do a damn thing about it.”

This is not a dream.

Moments later, I lay in bed, enshrouded by a Symphony of Anarchy – explosions, echoes of exposions, sirens, car alarms, barking dogs, Spanish and laughter – until I floated away from the war ravaged land and to the Dreamscape.

I washed clothes at the laundromat the next day amidst a score of Mexican-American ladies. Each woman had an impossible mountain of clothes to wash. I dumped my one bag into a washer, turned around and saw Edith. She thanked me again, in the same slightly embarassed yet immensely grateful manner as she did the day before. I felt embarassed too, dumbly thanked her again for the tacos. The heat from the dryers wafted over us, dizzied me to the point that I left my body for a moment, and from that ephemeral position in the ether I was able to regard the scene clearly. There we were, both engaged in this weird dance of awkward bowing and hand motions and shuffling of the feet while she uttered gracias and I stuttered out thanks. I saw two people who’d done something for one another…and both felt grateful. Tacos for a ramp. Seems like a fair trade. But it wasn’t, not at all. All I did was put some wood together. Edith rescued me from Hell.

He wasn’t always so serious.

Tennessee POOFED!!! again. Floating in that laundromat like a drunk moss covered Southern Buddha, he took a big drag off his cigarette, smiled, then disappeared.

Be well…