August 5, 2009 - Coffee Break - 54th & Troost - Kansas City Missouri

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The stray black cat has found a friend. It had been slinking across the back yard in the evenings. This is not a cat friendly neighborhood. Dogs run in packs and Katlin and Baby Boy’s cat Blackie had gotten mauled. Maybe it was just as well – they  have had such a disastrous record with pets anyhow - and now the have twin  baby brothers. I startled it on its trek to the woods for its nightly hunt, it looked up and froze – most creatures are unaware of other animals unless the move – I had been sitting at my garden table (with parasol) reading. Then last night I looked down and it was sitting beside my chair. It sniffed my fingers and meowed – I scratched its head – It jumped up top of the table and meowed for more. Then it headed off into the woods. I went back to reading Soseki’s I Am A Cat.

Paris under the occupation… becomes the twentieth century's premier study in which to reach the depressing conclusion that even the most liberal convictions buckle very easily under totalitarian pressure, unless there are extraordinary reserves of character to sustain them – Clive James – Cultural Amnesia, 2007 p36

I check to see if Raymond Carver was living on the Olympic Peninsula at the same time that I was in Port Townsend, but no, I had proceeded him and had left before he and Tess showed up together (saving me the trouble of asking what if our paths had crossed). It was that poem about the young man reading his book at a table by the window in the restaurant – “reading among the coming and going of dishes and voices.” That could have been me, I thought, but now I know that that was impossible.

There’s no point in even trying to be a businessman unless your love of money is so absolute that you’re ready to accompany it on the walk to a double suicide. For money, believe you me, is a hard mistress and none of her lovers are left off lightly – Soseki Natsume – I Am a Cat II, 1979 p43

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After Reading Raymond Carver’s THE CAR – All for Us, 1996 p151-152
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This car, that car, the car

My car, her car, our car

Old car, new car, used car

Broken down car on blocks, rusty car falling apart

           Car Beside the road with a pink tag
Car in the shop, reposed car, car
            That smoked
Family car, sports and white with a cherry on top
             Any color you want as long as its black
Car insurance, car title registration, car payment due
Autobiography by car, suicide by car
             See America by car
My mother the car, not your father’s car
The car left on the moon
Take a ride in the car car – rumph rumph rumph

Nothing / was happenings. Everything was happening. Life / was a stone, grinding and sharpening – Raymond Carver – All of US, 1996 p150

Poetic language is always a foreign language – Svetlana Boym (The Future of Nostalgia 2001 p290

From the Journals (#1 – January 17, 2007 – The Royal Ground, San Francisco – Fillmore and California)

They were discussing a business venture that involved graft, corruption and exploitation in a third world country. It sounded sleazy to me. It sounded like they thought it was sleazy too. But a business opportunity is a business opportunity and they talked of admiration of the beauty of the scheme. They talked how a wise entrepreneur could get his equity out along with a promised profit in a very short time. They talked of how this promoter was really sharp - a real role model. Sleazyness is rarely a hindrance in money making. There was more talk about junior trustees, IPOs, overseeing first deals and how they were going to do some good deeds with their business degrees. They were now discussing nonprofits, CEOs and doing good in the world - “I want to care about someone. For that scale in the world some compromise is necessary. I just don’t like that he needs this platform…”

When he was going for his MBA he had a roommate in Law school. They are discussing jobs and firms of which they had a common knowledge. They talked of friends that are now attorneys. Talking are about taking on the ‘skin’ of a role and becoming comfortable with it. They are talking about getting some ‘real’ responsibility , right out of college - going with the Justice Department perhaps. They were talking about how ‘real” responsibility helped you mature and become ‘comfortable’ in the professional world. “I did a deal by my second year, a relativity small deal. I had a senior partner form Simpson and a senior associate on the team. The Associated was a girl in her second year out of law school. She had probably just passed the bar. By this time I had done enough deals to know in thirty minutes what it was that we needed to discuss. She was not in a position to advise us. She was in a position to go to a database. To be worth anything you have to be trained. I have learned enough in business to know all the law I need to know to do a transaction. You’ve got to identify issues. I wouldn’t benefit from law school. It doesn’t get you a job. Doesn’t prepare you. It doesn’t get you the job.

Having once written something down it is always available for an act of bricollage. It is then real. It has a life. It becomes a thing. It can be grasped. It can be exploited (you are its owner). It can be messaged and reworked. It can be transformed into a new context. It is a building block that once the old building has been torn down can be reused; it’s a brick from a burned out building that can be salvaged and made to function again. Or maybe not.

Linda says that the red headed lady pounding the table was praying. She must have been a ‘Holly Roller’ , I replied

Café Fiore - Market St in the Castro – Having breakfast - Sitting in a sunny corner – lots of couples – all kinds – some singles like me – only one child - “Good morning - How are you? - Good - That’s what we like to hear - Larger than life, Charlie - Hello - How you doing - Good morning - Thank you - Good morning, How are you?” Later at the Library I advise a man, newly homeless, looking for Orwell’s Down and Out (which happens to be checked out) to try Road to Wiggen Pier instead - Its about poverty and the smell of the poor. Its similar to ‘Down and Out’” and he tells me his story.