What We Celebrate

Fall Comes to the Alleghenies

I got lost twice in Athens, Ohio. Wandered around the University campus, through dorm parking lots with students scurrying about late for their class as I pulled a travel trailer behind me. It was a mess. I missed my turn. The street became a one way. Do Not Enter. The only way to turn was into the campus. If delivery trucks can do this so can I. And finally I did emerge. Got onto the highway at last. But it was the wrong one. I was headed south instead of southeast. I was traveling downstream along the Ohio River. I shouldn’t be traveling along the river. I pulled over and looked at the map. Yep, took the wrong road. Oh well, I crossed the bridge at Gallipolis (Napoleon almost immigrated here but his mother would not allow  – mama’s boy -  it and instead he became Emperor). Next stop Kanawha. Goodbye Ohio.

In the forties this morning. Maples are turning red. Flowers are going to seed. Puff balls balloon. Temperature expected to reach the lower eighties today. Birds are chirping

The sun is sitting

Its yellow orb is caught in bare tree branches

Clouds flow by low and dark out of the North

The light dims, the sun frees itself and sinks

A distant specter

I went to see the documentary film on Bukowski. It was almost two hours long. I decide to read some Bukowski. What should I read. I had seen Barfly with Mickey Rorake, how about Barfly.  Bukowski wrote the screenplay but not a book of that title, but he did write Hollywood which was about writing Barfly. I’ll read that. I head on down to the Brewery. They are out of Alcatraz so I have a Gripman’s. All is quite. Tom is back from Spain. He says he did a tour of all the Irish bars there. Tom wants to know what the difference is between a porter and stout. I myself have asked that question many times and never gotten a satisfactory answer. Someone says if it has oatmeal in it it’s a stout. But then not all stouts have oatmeal. The best answer I have yet heard is that if it’s called a porter it’s a porter and if its called a stout it’s a stout. But that's not answering my question, Tom complains. That’s the problem, I tell him, I don’t think there is a distinguishing difference. Oh, he replies. It’s quiet in here for a Friday afternoon. The guy to my left switches from the Albatross Larger to the porter. Is there anything happening in the world that needs my attention. I suppose not. They need me here at the bar as much as they do anywhere else. Tom sees me writing. Writing a book, he asks? No, just writing. Everyone assumes that writing means publishing as they assume reading means teaching, except of course, for fellow writers and readers. They want to know if your are somebody. Of course I’m somebody. Anyone that I would know. Someone whose name I would recognoize? No, nobody that you would recognize.

An oncoming vehicle

            Bright head lights

Swerve to meet

            An onrushing car

            So little effort

Just a quick jerk

            On the wheel

A truck would be best

            No chance in hell

A car might be evasive

Swerve on to the shoulder

            Or into the opposite lane

And besides there maybe

            Kids in a car

Also a truck driver

            Might just survive

A bridge abutment

            Would be best

But that must be planed

I knew someone

            Who took that route

It only takes

            A split second

On rushing head lights

            In your eyes

I let this one pass

God, I hate driving

            At night

There is always a new flavor of potato chips: ketchup or tomato and basil. My latest addiction is Cheddar and Horseradish. It would make an god awful jelly-bean but it makes for a damn fine crisp. Lays is having a contest for a new potato chip flavor -  one million dollars for the best suggestion. I bet they have it ready for production. Just waiting to declare the contest winer as soon as they find the right marketing spokesperson (the advertising equilant of reality TV). It’s usually the small companies that come out with the new flaovrs. I saw “Hot Dog” flavored chips at Wal-Mart yesterday. Some off-brand that I’d never heard of.

With a little rain the fall colors emerge. Fall foliage season is just a couple of weeks away. I hope to be long gone by then. Fall colors in the Appalachians.

I Have Found God – Henry Miller

A great hulk of a man

Like a liner that’s been battered by a typhoon

Again, as if the brain were a uterus,

The walls of the world gave way

Age comes, the body withers –

But hernia can be cured

At bottom, they’re angels

Pissing poison from the sky

And while it’s all nice to know

That a woman has a mind,

Literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore

Is the last thing to be served in bed.

As long as that spark of passion is missing

There is no human significance in the performance.

The machine is better to watch.

And those two are like a machine

Which had slipped its cogs.

It needed the touch of a human hand to set it right.

It needed a mechanic

Anything is a poem

If it has time in it

At the extreme limits of his spiritual being

Man finds himself again naked as a savage.

When he finds God, as it were,

He has been picked clean;

He is a skeleton.

One must burrow into life again

To put on flesh.

The word must become flesh;

The soul thirsts...

I have found God,

But he is insufficient

Am I to walk forever

Along this endless pasteboard street,

This pasteboard which

I can blow down with my breath,

Which I can set fire to with a match?

The world has become a mystic maze

Erected by a gang of carpenters during the night.

Everything’s is a lie, a fake. Pasteboard

Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrements – W B Yeats

What we celebrate are the anomalies that we wish would prove the rule, but alas they do not.

In 1859 only 3,000 American slaves were manumitted

The rituals of the day are not as concise in a camper has they are in a tent. Everything comes so much easier. The dog’s demands are the same – his stretching and yawning. I let out a yawn and he’s on top of me licking my face. Now he flips on his back and wants his belly scratched. If you stop he waves his front paws in the air. Everyone calls me his daddy. Your daddy's looking out for you? You’re the cutest little thing. Yes, you’re precious. Yes you are. Waving your paws in the air until I do his  bidding again. I get up and make the bed. He finds his way out from under the bedspread. We go for a walk. Then he gets a slice of baloney. I tear it up into bite sized chunks otherwise he’d devour the entire slice. He has no way of chewing his food. He can only tear off chunks. Meat on the bone is what dogs are designed for. I take my pills. I brush my teeth. I make coffee. I won’t make breakfast for another couple of hours. It’s now 8:15

The world’s notorious indifference – Virginia Woolf

And she would not say of him,

She would not say of herself,

I am this, I am that

As the current answers won’t do,

One has to grope for answers;

And the process of discarding the old,

When one is by no means certain

What to put in their place, is a sad one

And the supreme mystery…

Was simply this:

Here was one room,

There an another.

Did religion solve that,

Or love?

Already he no longer cried with conviction.

Chaos; details return.

She was no longer amazed

By names written over shop windows.

She did not feel: why human?

Why catch trains?

The sequence returns;

One thing leads to another –

The usual order

All is merged in one turning wheel

Of single sound.

All separate sounds –

Wheels, bells, the cries of drunkards, of merry makers –

Are churned into one sound,

Steel blue, circular

Anyone moderately familiar

With the rigors of composition

Will not need to be told the story in detail:

How she wrote and it seemed good;

Read and it seemed vile;

Correct and tore up; cut out; put in;

Was in ecstasy’ in despair;

Had her good nights and bad mornings;

Snatched at ideas and lost them;

Saw her boat plain before her

And saw it vanish;

Acted her people’s parts as she ate;

Mouthed them as she walked;

Now cried; now laughed;

Vacillated between this style and that;

Now preferred the heroic and pompous;

Next the plain and simple;

And could not decide whether

She was the divinest genius

Or the greatest fool in the world

And these long histories in many volumes –

Surely someone was now beginning

At the beginning in order to understand

The Holy Roman Empire, as one must

And moving to the table

Where her husband sat reading

She lent her chin in her hands

And thought of the peasants,

Of suffering,

Of her own beauty,

Of the inevitable compromise,

And how she would write it down

Accentuating all these difficulties

And making them harder to bare

Is the world’s notorious indifference.

It does not ask people to write

Poems and novels and histories;

It does not need them...

Naturally it will not pay for,

What it does not want

It’s fine to say all ducks quack, but why is ‘this’ duck quacking? – Errol Morris – Believing is Seeing, 2011 p99

Arsene Lupin – French detectives joint their host in  asumptuous lunch and drink wine with the aristocracy. This is something that a British inspector would never do. They honor their class distinctions.

It is not so cold that I need to don my long sleeve shirt. The fall takes on more and more color. The greatest variety of campers that I’ve seen in a long while – Oregon, Florida, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Generally I’m the only out-of-stater. Coffee is brewing. Gotta go make coffee, Jim says. I’ve gotta brew a pot myself, I said. I don’t think I’d want to talk politics with Jim. There's a USDA guy camped near the entrance. A rabies eradication program. Fresh out of college, Jim says. One of the few good things the government does, he adds. Later we get to talking about the Swamp Fox. The Francis Marion National Forest in South Carolina was the connection. I talked about watching the Disney version as a kid. Everyone’s gotta have heroes, he says. Yeah, I add, but now days he’s what we would label a terrorist. I ain’t going there Jim, replies. He also let pass my comment about the Durrecto out of Illinois in late June. Yeah, I had said, we can expect more and more of that kind of freakish weather.