Bumblebees and Blackberries

It all begins - trees come down. Big trees. Garry swings on a rope from three to tree sawing off limbs.    What a shame. Such big trees. They've been landmarks at the southern end of the lake for years. Five ashes had died from emerald ash borer infestation and would have had to come down anyway. Eight had occupied the building site. The big maple four foot across is lying on the driveway. Two men and a truck come tomorrow to haul away the appliances. Then the power company to relocate the power lines. A week from tomorrow demolition will begin. Next spring it will all be different. Hell its all different now. The carefully maintained lawn is all a mess. The big trees and their shade are gone. They are late today. They come when they get around to it. They're not on a clock - these tree men. They work when their are bills need to get paid. Otherwise, well depends on how they feel.  Don't you wish you could live like that. You learn their life stories - how many divorces, how many times in jail. Several of them are in a band at a local bar. Doug started yelling, God Damn it, the boys where too anxious to start clearing away the brush and were in the middle of the fallen tree. Wait till I'm finished here, it might roll on top of you. Doug had watched his father die when a gust of wind blew a tree in the wrong direction. You can't blame him being concerned.  I won't be here for the demolition. It's back on the road for me. I headed south for the winter. This is the best camping season - September to mid-November. The children are in school and the show-birds haven't begun their migration yet. It's cool and breezy today, but yesterday it was 95 and humid. A miserable day and the cabin air-conditioning had already been disconnected.

A Fourth tradition – the big tractor parade - little tractors, big parade – fifty restored antique machines – pucta, pucta, pucta – pudder through the park – purpa, purpa, purspa. Squat little Fords, Minneopolis-Molines with long engine blocks, Olivers painted bright green, red Internationals and Farmalls, and Orange Allis-Chalmers.  All lovingly restored and freshly painted. Putta, putta, putta. The big farmers waves and we all wave back.  They look big on their little tractors. Dwarfed by the behemoths that actually work the field. Iowa – rows of corn to become cheep E-85. Make sure your vehicle can use flex-fuel. Warning - Not gasoline.

You can’t have cutthroat competition where there is no one stopping people from literally cutting one another’s thoats – David Graeber – Debt, 2001 p303

A big man with a fat cigar

Hand rolled in Guatemala, no Paroddie

Name brand whiskey, neat

What would be the harm

If  I took to smoking again

Except that now you have to do it outdoors

And it took years to get the reek

            Out of the clothes that hang in the closet

The Surgeon General’s warning

Only refers its affect upon fetuses

And as I get older, what’s the difference

I am going to die of cancer anyway

            Given the environment

Get some Swisher Sweets or some White Owls

            And light up

But everyone else is smoking hand rolled cigars

            From Santa Domingo or Cuba

I will just stink up the place

            And be chased away

Let the big men smoke their big cigars

            The rest of us will screw

                        Their pooches

Private acts in public spaces – put your eyelashes on, on the bus. You are late. It was a rush getting out of the house. Hold the compact mirror in one hand and affix your eyelashes with the other while carrying on a conversation. This is the age of multitasking. Put on your lipstick while driving. Hopefully you can do it at the stoplight. Honk! Honk! Stick your arms in the air and apply deodorant. Yes, its a type of stick up.  Oops forgot to shave and I’ve got a client meeting in thirty minutes. Buzz, buzz.  You can shave and talk on your cell phone at the same time while you ride the elevator up. Keep an eye open for your bus at the stop. You become absent minded as you wait in line. Your panties are wedged in your butt crack. Casually reach back and dislodge them. The world is your boudoir. Do you have a problem\, mister? No! No, problem at all. Well then, keep your eyes to yourself.

An altered state of consciousness that’s what the cinema is. You come out with a warped sense of reality. I came out wanting to write my great opus - that which has been struggling inside me trying to find a voice. And this is all that I wrote down.

In this business how could you be so stupid? Couldn't you lie, swear, forswear, promise, and then perform or fail to perform, like everyone else? Couldn't you crawl on hands and knees like the others?  Denis Diderot - Rameau's Nephew

I was nine-tenths on my way to infinity

I was a long long way away

Too far away to be seen or to see

Far faraway but not yet far enough

To score a touchdown

Or even have have a chance

            At a field-goal

“Beach Volleyball” is she queen of dumb sports if you exclude the X games and mud or Jell-O wrestling. There are in fact too many to enumerate like linebackers pulling trucks (celebrity strongmen competitions in the off seasons). I do have high regards for the Bicycle Messenger Olympics.

And the ‘Fog City Blues’ played on a melodeon down the block. Someone had been playing it over and over, all night. It was now three AM and I was about to go mad and attack the blind tiger from which the infernal racket was coming, but I also knew that that was ‘Chicken John’s’ place and that such an act while heroic would be a little foolhardy. Instead I joined the crowd and pumped the musicians with cheep wine until they pucked their guts out and promptly passed out. I was relieved to learn that it was not the “Frog Town Uptown” that Cab Callower had ridden. And no one could answer my question as to wether frogs would sight read. Someone explained that it was a well know fact that frogs had better eyesight than hearing. And why was I so interested in the musical abilities of frogs anyway? I wanted to know why they were so fascinated with pianos, I explained. He said that he didn’t know that they were. I assured him that it is true. I went home and slept for the two remaining hours before dawn when I had to be at the stockyards again. I barely made enough to pay for rent and keep the melodeon players dead drunk, but I had managed to eek by and now six years later I think back and laugh.

Mommies drop by with little kids

                        In tow

To pick out birthday cakes

Mommy I like this one here

She thumbs through a book

            With pictures of cakes

            Under plasticine covers

Mommy, mommy, I want some of this

Hold on. Hold on, she tells him

            And she orders a cake

            To be baked

And the lady in white gives them

            Each a sugar cookie

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.  Douglas Adams – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy p82

We are given to favor those who favor us

IT’S ABOUT TIME

The cottage is coming down. It's not falling in, they will be tearing it down. There is an explosion of one-ups-manship all around the lake. One big house begets two more. Condos rim the Gulf Coast. They are down to deciding on the color - grizzly gray or bronze. People with big houses don't want to pay for infrastructure. That's what drives the Red state agendas. It's all about differential accumulation. That there are so many poor is a good thing, it puts you higher up on the heap. Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation, it's all the same thing. Limbaugh says that only God creates, thus man cannot be responsible. Only atheists believe in global warming.  People are dying. A recent reports claims that violence increases with increasing heat. I believe it, but then I also believe in anthropocentric global warming. They are being shot in Egypt, blown up in Beirut and dropping dead from heat stroke in China and here I am complaining about condos obscuring my view of the ocean. I'm not even at the ocean.  I'm at the lake. Tomorrow we move the furniture. The new house will be ready by Memorial Day. I have to come back for a wedding just before then and another wedding in the fall. What's my biggest problem? Getting my prescriptions for high blood pressure renewed, I suppose, and that isn't much. I don't have to pay for the house. I don't have to pay for either wedding. I only have to pay for gas and food. So why should I be complaining. There are a lot of people who have a right to complain but they are spending all their time just surviving and many of them are dodging bullets from the security forces. The neighbor came out screaming, "I Love My Stuff, I Love My Stuff!" as the debris of aerial fireworks descended onto the covers over his boats docked at the lake's edge. Life along the lake goes on. Life along the beach will retreat as polar ice melts. The poor will smell and continue to drop their 'h's. If you live in a gated community it won't bother you. A condo on the beach would be nice.

To the Pork Store for a greasy cheeseburger and fries, then its on to the Magnolia for a Saison De Lily. Bob claims to be a hacker for the government. He says he has a double E degree. Ant algorithms are essential to many hacking operations, he says. The Chinese are hacking into our military computers. Bob claims that discipline is the raison d’etre of the state. I have my doubts but I sit and listen. It is all very interesting but why tell it to me? I have to endure a lot. Then it’s back to the coffee shop. Walter has a new love. It is E-bay. He is buying up examples of factory mistakes. He has a printout depicting a misprinted package of cheese crackers. But he is also interested in collecting toy cars, especially scale die-cast replicas. The Milk Bottles Collector’s Association is holding its convention. He has printed out a copy of their homepage, which he is showing me. Once there was only so many things that could be collected. There was a limited amount of print space to spread the knowledge. And there was a limited amount of shelf space on which to display a collection. Now we have supersized private space, more storage space and we have the Internet.  A whole four car garage full of nothing but Lionel trains. I want a virtual collection. Virtual realestate when bust with the dot-com collapse (remember that?) There were once only so many experts. Now everyone can be one.  There were stamp collectors and coin collectors and matchbook collectors. Now everyone can collect anything. There is a lot of junk about, but it is valuable junk. Junk itself does not form a collection. Accumulating  junk is called hoarding, unless you are Andy Warhol. A hoarding is a billboard.  You might collect hoardings like some collect gas station pumps and signage (which I believe can be classified as hordings).

Access is by raised walkway for the purpose of crowd control. The streets have been abandoned to chaos and gangsters. The rich are barricading themselves in and constructing free fire zones to protect their collections. What archaeologists and curators collect are known as artifacts. They are treasures rather than collectibles because they are not for sale. Not being for sale makes them invaluable. Treasures are stolen and not bought. It’s a real treasure. It was a real steal. Gangsters don’t collect, they dispose. So do sanitation workers. When everyone has collected everything then the thieves will steal what is worthwhile, garbage trucks will haul away what they can and what’s left will become the provenience of archaeologists and the curators – cultural corpolites. This will ensure that there is a future where it can all be repeated. War is another means of accomplishing this. And I think that the real raison d’etre of the state is to wage war. That and protect private properly, also known as collectibles. And somebody has to be responsible for disposing of all the trash of course. I make no attempt to explain any of this to Bob. I don’t have the time. Or more precisely, he  dosen’t have the time.

Delusion is the Key 

Eat the rich but they're hard to catch

            They’re better than the poor

But there are not enough of them

            To go around - the are the premiere
                         Brand
But maybe they are only better advertised

                                               

Efficiency and inefficiency have become

            Our good and our evil

Every conscious act is an an opportunity

                        To rationalize

Endless activity stills the mind.

            So does good wine

Everyone makes a living.

Everyone that lives does.

The living are one.

I am alive.

I am one

Everyone owes something,

            Even the unborn

Everyone starts out young

No one stays that way

The older one gets

            The more in debt

                        One becomes

When you’ve had

            All that you can stand

                        You die

But someone will 

            Still have to pay

            It's a law

Everyone knows someone

No one knows everyone

Everyone knows something

No one knows everything

Everybody becomes somebody else

Everybody is somewhere

Everybody is something,

Not everybody is somebody

Everything is the same, but a little at odds

            With itself

Everything is different form everything else

Nothing is constant

            Except for the speed limit

            At the red light

Fiction ends with death;

History begins with death

            The present is for the undead

Delusion is the key good mental health.

                        There is magic in numbers

We stopped by City Lights. I was looking for Bukowski. I searched fiction from A to Z. No Bukowski. Surely City Lights stocked Bukowski. Hadn’t they published a couple of his works? “I can’t find any Bukowski,” I said to the clerk. “We have a whole section,” and she pointed to her left. There was a whole wall of Bulkowski. But hey had only a single copy of “Post Office”. I bought it. We went to the Brewery. It was 3:59. “Can I get a half pint at happy hour prices,” I asked Josh? “For you my friend, anything.” I read my Bukowski as my friend reads the newspaper. I love musty smelling bookstores where its too crammed with books to sit quietly and read. The best books are down the creaky wooden stairs in the basement. Barry Gifford autographed my copy Perdita Durango. Bakeries and breweries and old book stores, these are a few of my favorite things.

Grandpa sits at the head of the table

So that I can see everyone, he says

He wears a plastic blue ball cap and a red plaid shirt

Grandma sits opposite him.

She says, the breakfast menu is on the back

They all study their menus

I go back to my reading

It chimes 9AM

There is a big grandfather clock in the  room

The bed is made of brass and the feather

            Mattress floats high off the floor

Its warm under the down comforter

Don’t wanna get up.

Verna opened the restaurant nine months ago.

She had run the corner ice creamery before

The gal who opened Aunt Sassy’s used to work for her.

She is crazy, Verna says. She won’t last.

Blueberry pancake breakfast.

All that you can eat

I ate five.

Sweet Fish ate twelve

Yesterday he had hiked forty miles

Today is his day off

In the country phone service comes and goes

            No particular reason.

Jessie is late. She was taking the kids to school.

The waitress was on the phone with her when it went dead

She finally. How dare you hang up on me, the waitress said

I didn’t hang up, it just went dead.

You could call in but you couldn’t call out.

My Visa transactions was the first that had gone through

                        All day

I take the first bite of my croissant

And a first sip of coffee

I’m awake.

Breakfast in bed

            Would have been nice

And the sun wouldn’t shine all day

            Rain – Rain – Rain

Black coffee please

            Hunker down until this rain lets up

            And keep the cup hot

He wants eggs and bacon

He drinks a cup of coffee

He tucks his newspaper under his left arm

They just have pastry, she says to his wife

            And they left..

Two suits, at the table to my right. It’s an interview. One is hiring. One wants to get hired. “Good questions. Let me say this. I’ve been on both sides. I have been in management. I’ve got a two year old son. Money is a good thing. Having a day off on the weekend is a good thing. This is a long answer to a short question”, he says squarely facing his interviewer. His eyes looking into the other guys eyes - assertive without being aggressive. His hands are making chopping motions in the air, His palms facing each other about three and a half feet apart. His arms are  perpendicular to his body. His elbows are bent at right angles, precisely.  “I’ll shot straight with you and tell you what is on my mind, whether you want it hear it or not."

“Good. I could use that.  I’m not going to make this an ego thing and make you think that this is my decision alone. What’s his name…Wayne Webster and his position is called ‘Director of Channels’, he will be part of this decision too.”

They have impressed each other or at least appear to have or at least one of them think he has. They exchange hardy handshakes. “Do your know your way home or out of the city,” the interviewer asks? “I’ll get a cab. I find that’s the best, they know their way around”, the interviewee replies. The dude goes home to Walnut Creek, says to his wife he had the guy by the balls. He says, “I nailed it,” and chopped the air with his hands. No doubt about it. Doubt don’t fly. Don’t fly anywhere tonight. Hurricanes and earthquakes are on the rise.

At this point I took up my pen. The spatial distortion had largely disappeared, except for my head which is still floating on my shoulders like a tethered hot air balloon. I have managed to confine the wormhole to my skull. Its escape had threatened the universe itself. I would not let that happen. I could not let that happen. That no one else is cognizant of my heroic effort is of no consequence. How many times as the universe been similarly rescued? There is no way to tell. The human brain is a marvelous thing but it has its limits. A wormhole erases its own history. It does not matter for there will be no evidence of its existence. By definition, therefore,  it is not really an event. A wormhole turns the real into the imagined. It is of no consequence and soon my head shrinks back to its normal size. Nothing remains but these notes and they seem to only  record some kind of delusion. I take a sip of tea. It has gotten cold. I pick up my book and resume reading at the place I was went everything went all-woozy. I have to backtrack a page or two to where I can pick up the thread of sense again. I will go on from here. Everything is under control. No, really, everything is OK!