Diary

Jan 28, 2021

Global pandemic, midwinter. My woodpile, berm-shaped, is longer than the house. Cold nights I’m working my way along through it, a very hungry caterpillar. It’s been a year now, of everybody’s solitude. After all these unsociable dull months, there accumulates a physical yeast sensation. An unfitness for society anymore.

It’s one yearlong “sabbath,” so of course I wonder if pandemic isolation is putting everybody in mind of eschatological matters, that is, “last things,” whether personal death, species extinction, the evanescence of all organisms, the fragility of the planet. There seem to be more environmentalists in popular media lately and it can’t be explained by the new liberal administration alone. In the pandemic isolation, people look in the mirror and see themselves aging fast in a year. On Facebook, see their friends’ self-representations looking (while happy enough) blearier. Well, so death is friend to the philosopher. Maybe everybody will be acquiring some of the philosopher’s virtues, patience, analysis, attentiveness, which didn’t seem so helpful in a time when we were all careening around the freeways under the compulsions of vanity.

* * * *

Jan 29

You mostly see coyotes in motion. Dodging out of sight. Trotting somewhere. The new, lone coyote from the south woods, again today was sitting watching, at the far foot of the meadow, front paws planted together, a house-pet attitude, the ordinarily sarcastic little face looking now reasonable and even expectant. Having sat for a while, it flipped and drained to the background. Depredations of bears, coyotes, bobcats are way less common lately: I think all local predators, including any bears, may have gotten an electric shock over at the little zone of livestock fencing – even just one single memorable zap. So maybe they think the whole acreage is hexed.

* * * *

Eight to ten feet of snow last night over the passes. Here a half-foot, then heavy rain. The winter’s first big storm.

If this backup battery works out (a free, PG&E-subsidized installation; which I’m still skeptical of), maybe I’ll be able to get a little electric car, sell the old greasy vegetable-oil car, because, emergency backup aside, it will take in enough sunshine during the average day to recharge a car every night.

* * * *

February 2, 2021

It’s 1973. The San Francisco airport in the days when it was small and simple. It’s the old, small United terminal. I’m a kid, getting off a plane from hometown Chicago. Matt, my 55-year-old pal, picks me up in the old beige Chevy.

Duffel in trunk.

We’re going back to Sausalito. While we’re pulling away from the curb, this is the first thing he says to me, “So – Louis – what do you know about trigonometry?”

He’s got some kind of project. He has gotten the idea I’m well educated, a misconception I haven’t tried to correct, and somehow I’ll have to shrug out of this. Highschool trigonometry (two furtive semesters) was a season of shame and conclusive evidence that I shouldn’t be invested in. (Among a lot of evidence that was accumulating around that time.) But Matt’s tone is happy, peremptory, and obviously this is the opening fanfare for one of his big ideas.

Swinging out into traffic, he glances to see how I’m taking this. He says, “Clocksprings.”

That’s supposed to explain the need for trigonometry. He eyes me for my reaction, as if he’d just told a joke.

“I’ve been thinking about clocksprings. They’re energy storage. They’re energy storage way better than batteries – really enormous clocksprings – and when you’re talking about winding up a clockspring, you can either speak in trig functions or in radians of arc. I’m pretty rusty with trig.”

Both of us this year have read, and been alarmed by, a new environmental prediction (“Limits to Growth,” Potomac Associates, 1972) authored by an international coalition (dozens) of biologists, computer scientists, statisticians, geologists, etc., Italian, Chinese, German, Swedish, calling themselves the Club of Rome. In all their predictive charts of the next century (charting copper or iron or coal deposits, water-table health, oil reserves, pollution, malnutrition, overpopulation, arable land), the graphs come up right around the unimaginable year 2020 and the lines start swerving in steep curves. Exponential curves. No matter how they tweaked the data, this kept happening, everything seems to go crazy right around 2020 – all the curves aggravating each other, a fiasco.

During the days I’d been reading “Liimits to Growth” in the humid Chicago afternoons (teenage male on unmade bed, choked-full ashtray beside), I started reckoning I might survive to see all this. I’d be “old” by 2020 – but if I could be lucky, and wise, and if I don’t smoke so much, I could be a witness of a global tumult and maybe an active, helpful citizen. I figured either I’ll be safe somewhere, or I’ll be swept up in some general bad luck.

Solar and wind and hydro are what Matt and I talked about all summer sitting around his big octagonal table, Django Reinhardt and Benny Goodman and Janis Joplin, drinking coffee you couldn’t get in the Midwest, scorched-tasting, fog outside on Sausalito waterfront. Those were days when California’s hillsides hadn’t been covered with homes and malls; Interstate 80 was mostly a lonely, lonely road; all roads, come to think of it, were lonely; I had access to a motorcycle; I was probably wearing bell-bottoms.

Well, so what would the clocksprings put in motion?

Cars. Cars would be wind-up toys. A single huge clockspring under the hood, taking up the entire engine compartment. With so much torque packed into it, if this clockspring ever sprung open, it would kill people whipping out slithering all over.

But what would be the energy source, to wind them up?

Pulleys atop tall towers. Along the freeways, every few miles like gas stations, would be tall gantries with pullies at the top. You’d back your car in and hook up the string. An immense weight could be lifted to that height, and when it was dropped, the pulley would yank the car’s clockspring, like the big windup toy it is.

And how would you get the energy to lift the big weight to such a height?

Oxen! Pacing on a treadmill, on the ground beside the gantry, oxen (via pulleys) would gradually lift the stone after each drop. Big peaceable beasts. (And grass-fed! Which meant the oxen themselves would be solar-powered!) After the weight had dropped and wound up a car, the oxen could begin again pacing in their circle, again to lift the weight up by pulley to the top of the gantry, for the next drop. Once wound up, the car would unhitch and go zipping down the road with, maybe, well, who-knows-what miles of range before it might need another wind-up. The travel-range: that would be our job. Calculating it would require trigonometry.

Matt and I (Matt Krim was his name, dead now, unpublished novelist) never did build such a clockspring. We had other projects. We made fuel by distilling a backyard crop of sugar beets, in the kitchen a coil of copper tubing releasing clear ethanol, drip-drip-drip, into a Mason jar on a stool before the kitchen stove. Matt’s girlfriend complained about it. It was hard to cook a meal with the distillery in the middle of everything.

In writing of my new backup battery, now, I think of Matt (lung cancer, 1981) and his clocksprings. My battery here in the 21st century is called a Tesla PowerWall, and its manufacture needed a lot of lithium, from out of Chile’s Atacama. Cobalt from the Congo. At the cost of what human misery or environmental atrocity?

All our clever technological innovations may effect only to relocate the damage. I.e., not stop it or heal it. It’s very possible that battery manufacture creates a bigger carbon footprint than old-fashioned petroleum extraction would’ve. I personally got this for free, as part of an experimental subsidy program – but somewhere, the environment paid dearly. I still wonder if Matt’s gantries (dotting the open land by the freeway, oxen grazing in the meadows beside) wouldn’t have been better than Elon Musk’s white plastic caissons of volatile chemicals?


* * * *

February 5, 2021

9:00 am: Ingested one medium-sized (maybe 1500 mg?) psilocybin mushroom. We shall not cease from exploration.

No hallucinations. So, maybe one mushroom isn’t enough. A pleasant disinclination to concentrate will be the only story of these five sunny hours. Five hours is the predicted arc of a psil. trip. Loss of a workday, basically. However, this happened:

I’m walking down the road, keeping a sharp lookout for hallucinations among the tall pines, the oakleaves that flip in the breeze, the sunny/shady road. A figure at the roadside ahead turns out to be a young woman, kneeling, wearing short, pink pajamas, strappy shoes. She’s French, as I will learn by her accent, and she’s poking and scratching in the roadside bank of soil. This is a country road deep in the woods with zero traffic, and she’s out here high-heeled in some kind of negligee.

Factor in the possibility she might be crazy. I say, “Hi, what’s your project there?” launching my greeting from what feels the correct distance as I approach – (20 feet?) – a distance that precisely signifies a man’s cordial harmlessness. The figure I cut: shabby teacherly cardigan, hands clasped behind, unshaven. (One payoff of growing a beard (grey!) and looking elderly is that, finally, humor and the risk of intelligence can enter right away into random conversations with strangers, especially women, who must be a wary gender.)

She explains, in her French accent, “I am making compost.”

As perhaps that doesn’t seem like enough info, she adds, “Do you know compost?”

Clearly, she finds this situation amusing, too, and she sits back on her haunches, wanting to maybe dwell on it with me. This is Gordon and Malaika’s house, so she might be a friend or, more likely, an intern in their nonprofit.

“You know.” Hair-toss, smile. “‘Compost.’”

“Ah. Compost. Yes indeed.” I’m not sure I know how to – or feel the license to – carry this topic further.

I’m traveling by. Opposite side of road.

She offers, as if it might be a basis for rapport, “Do you have compost?”

“Beaucoup,” is my debonair response. I’m now getting past her, making it clear I’m not a conversation risk.

Of my boast of compost, she says in adieu, “Nice!”

I’m deciding, as I go further down the road, that that actually did happen and doesn’t qualify as a hallucination.


* * * *

February 7, 2021

Sunday. Brought in week’s firewood. The last dribbles of email correspondence involving a novel I’d critiqued.

For days now, walking around under the spell of this idea “conservatorship” and the theme of “inauthenticity” (or, implicitly, “tolerance of inauthenticity”). I.e., mauvais foi inauthenticity.

Then, starting at 1:00 pm, another shot at a psilocybin mushroom trip. This time I’ve talked Brett into trying it, too, for a Sunday Afternoon Idyll, and I’m taking a larger dose.

* * * *

Rain on the backstreet. Sitting in Three Forks, cappuccino and cornmeal cookie, reading Wallace-Wells:

“In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died. In the past twenty-five years, the flying insect population has declined by three-quarters.”

“The mining of Bitcoin alone (excluding other cryptocurrencies) is on track to eat up more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined.”

“The United Nations report: 200 million climate refugees by 2050.”

Around me as I read, at two different tables, where beer kept being ordered, lively, even rollicking conversations I couldn’t close my ears to:

“All the offers were fifty over asking. At least fifty.”

“Escrows are getting faster, you know. You want a fast escrow. It’s in everybody’s interest.”

“If I call it an LLC I can expense everything and flip it in one tax year.”


* * * *

For some reason, lately the first artichoke ever I had is on my mind. Boiled for an hour, on a winter’s night, it steamed up my face in that basement apartment, and steamed up the windows. Rain had gone on for days – Northern California isn’t paradise, its beaches not white-sandy but black, rocky, windy, all cliffs and bluffs. When you’re truly at risk of despair, you can’t consciously think so. (Mistrust anybody who tells you he’s at the end of his rope.) If ever you are at the actual end of your rope, it’s unthinkable and you don’t think of it, it’s the farthest thing from your mind. Certain things, you can only realize years much later, and in safety.

Realize it when you’re – now – a whole different person. My girlfriend at the time was a Californian, who therefore knew all about artichokes. Older than I. She’d been a heroin addict for many years (New York), and heroin had been hard on her, obviously, hollowed her out, but also made a fragile angel of her. I got her after. For some reason this whole thing makes me think of a Dostoyevski parable (in Karamazov) about an onion, an act of kindness that hoisted an otherwise wicked sinner out of the fires of hell: he clung to an onion that he’d once, in life, given a beggar, and that onion was his rescue in hell – (or almost was) – until, selfishly, he kicked off the other sinners who were trying to cling and hitchhike on his lucky onion. So he and his freeloaders fell back to the lake of fire.

This was Fairfax, California. I was living in a garage, end of a road, where forest began. She in a basement apartment in town. I could really scarcely move. Rain for days. Concrete floor. Something else I’d never seen before: a “potato bug.” Big as a thumb, so ugly it looked like two bugs awkwardly spliced, and doomed forever to struggle in that condition.

I was from the Midwest and she taught me to eat an artichoke. A large cooked artichoke is a surprisingly heavy massive thing. Its core remembers 212 °F for a long time. Eating my way down down to the middle of it, raised body temp, sweat on my face, flesh under my sweater sweating, and the windowpanes were steamed up. She administered it along with advice about pulling the leaves off, one by one, dragging them over my clenched teeth to scour the flesh from the fibers. Didn’t want any herself. In the sauna that was that apartment in the endless monsoon, by the time I’d eaten that whole thermally heavy artichoke, I could relax and sleep.


* * * *



Feb 12

This quiet sentence appears without fanfare this morning in the New York Times.:

“Royal Dutch Shell predicted that its oil production had peaked and would never again reach its 2019 level.”

People have been waiting decades years for that. Why is it folded deep in a newspaper untrumpeted? Let their stockholders now all flee. Tell the news to the Ogoni people in Nigeria whose river fisheries were long ago swamped in crude oil and whose people are every day killed and sickened, whose anti-oil dissidents were publicly hanged by Royal Dutch Shell’s people. Or try to bring the good news to the civilians in Baghdad, who actually can never hear about it because they’re dead, tens of thousands of them, women and children and grandmothers in their kitchens.

The real villain is us. The oil companies and the presidents like Bush are our employees, they work for us. It’s by living in affluence that you voted for George Bush. (Car, food, travel, house, heat.) Me: Years go on, and I still have the idea I’ll someday see the Acropolis in person, and I no doubt will. My generation has this last chance at affluence, and in the end, I might as well add my little passenger-weight, plus baggage weight, to the sinking earth. Before I die I ought to have walked around the Parthenon. And also walked in the Forum.

* * * *

That the Parthenon on the Acropolis – and the speech Pericles gave there, and the remarks Socrates made below it – have been the guiding monuments in my life seems almost to make the Acropolis more impossible of ever standing in the midst of. They’re “idealized” indeed! Over the years, travel money has never worked out, mostly due to my other non-productive dedications. So I wonder, since I did receive this ideal I can cherish, do I need to lay eyes on the actual old building? The Erechtheum’s Caryatids’ noses eroding leprously down to nothing from the sulfur dioxide of modern-day Athens. The sounds of traffic and car horns from below. Instead I will always have the holographic projection.

Another house for my ideals, like the Parthenon, is Thoreau’s cabin in the woods. Which I did see. Its replica. Sited where the real cabin once stood. Seeing “the real” cabin hasn’t damaged my intimacy with the one I imagined when I read Walden. Hasn’t improved/enhanced it either. I’ve still got that cabin in my mind. My imaginary one is situated a little more out in a clearing than the replica, in a sunnier spot. Its chinking between boards is a bit sloppier, and whiter, contrasting with the boards. Inside, the cot is in a far corner, not alongside a wall. My version isn’t so window-lit: it’s dimmer. And in my version, there’s clutter, cooking tools and ingredients, condiments, some kind of shelves, lamp accessories, necessary gadgets of nineteenth-century living. Clothes are discarded moiling on the floor, exactly as I myself might have left them, pants with muddy knees, or boots. I can use my own picture of Thoreau’s cabin. It’s always had practical, consequential uses in my scheme of my moral life – just as I have always put to use the Periclean Acropolis of my imagination. Which is, in a sense, the real Acropolis. That’s no figure of speech: my imaginary Acropolis is the real one. That last predication is something Plato taught me.

* * * *

This is maybe my fifth or sixth day creating a trailhead into this book I’m calling, for now, Whit and Canly. So far it’s felt like I’m doing competent storytelling and as if something might be taking shape underfoot. But I haven’t, yet, been surprised by anything. Scared by anything.


* * * *


February 17, 2021

Morning working on this thing whose file name is Whit and Canly. Then apply dormant spray to all fruit trees, takes forever, sour-looking stuff sloshing in the leaky old tank, suited up like an astronaut against the fumes.

* * * *

March 9, 2021

Mourning the death of conversation. Everybody, including me, is texting rather than phoning, and email has become a medium so brisk. So brusque.

“Conversation” used to be a performative candid space in which a lightness ruled, nothing was so grave, and nothing was graven, all remarks blew away on the breeze – so a natural conversation was an idea-incubator, a creative arena in which different selves and different beliefs could be tried on. A nice, fun etiquette of interruption – but collaborative interruption – made misrule the rule. Risks were taken. Ideas were born.

* * * *

April 28, 2021

Reading Edith Wharton’s “Custom of the Country” – an early-ish and more ‘apprentice’ novel, but yet showing the raw native strength of human-nature-understanding, which in fiction truly is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” – (Cust of Country is the predecessor to “Age of Innocence”) – I’m finding it’s weighed down everywhere by a scene-vs-summary defect. She maunders along exploring/explaining chains of consequences, evolutions of character. However elegantly phrased.

* * * *

April 29, 2021

First birdsong of the day, suddenly at 4:22 am, clear and clarion, like when Miles Davis, after the quintet’s (endless, quiet, plodding, 8-bar) intro, blares frankly into the open ninth measure.

(From mulberry outside the mud room.)

* * * *

April 30, 2021

Reading E. Wharton’s “Custom of the Country” wherein the girls she’s so disapproving of – the rich, uncouth American daughters who come to Europe trying to find and marry a duke – are pasted up as buccaneers. One of these spoiled, beautiful heiresses, in the novel, is given the name Looty Arlington. I’m so delighted, I actually laughed for some while, all by myself at a café corner table.

In these marriages, the ostensible dukes brought class but no money; the American girls brought all their gaucherie but also the loot. That Edith descends to a slightly vulgar pun, it’s so amiable. It’s girlfriendy. It’s like Jane Austen’s calling one of her marriageable women “Fanny Price” when surely the word fanny had long since taken hold in British slang for an important part of the female anatomy, which in society, even in Jane’s society, does get priced. Or when Shakespeare gets puns out of even worse lowlife peasant obscenities. That these highbrows weren’t prigs helps bolster the seriousness of literature.

* * * *

July 19, 2021

Thoreau. – Certain people in my set display some disappointment with him because after two years in his famous cabin, he just came home and, for the rest of his life, took over the family manufacturing business. Supported his wife and kids. Lived in a house the rest of his life. This is seen as some kind of flagrant, ruinous hypocrisy. I think they want him to have gone out barefoot into the West, perpetual American “Huck Finn,” immune to growing up as if by a freak hormone deficiency, lighting out barefoot for the Lemonade Springs on the Big Rock Candy Mountain that is the American West?

And/or taken up a literary “career,” the way people do these days. Writing more of the same kinds of things. Getting book contracts, expanding a fan base. Or do they want him to have stayed in his little cabin, living all his life only a couple of miles from all his friends and family? No marriage for Henry? No kids?

No, the thing Thoreau did do was write the book. He wrote the book.

* * * *

July 23, 2021

Packing out of Sq. Valley. Alone in the house. Haze in the whole canyon from wildfires to the north. The car has sprung a fast oil leak, so I’ll be driving the already-anachronistic jalopy over the pass (a stretch of I-80, and then mountain roads), leaving a dribble in the center of the lane. My mechanic back home is an Englishman who has a yardful of variously dilapidated Mercedes Benzes. He also maintains a big website for collectors and restorers and fanatics. (I’m not sure he entirely approves of my burning only biodiesel in it.) So before taking it to him I’ll have to clean it thoroughly inside and out, so I won’t seem to have been taking too irreligious an attitude toward it, when I ease it down into his meadow. For the trip over the pass, alongside me in the passenger seat I’ll have two spare quarts of oil, one eye on the dashboard gauge, the car packed to the ceiling with guitars and dobros, looking like a typical feckless musician in the right-hand lane.

* * * *

July 28, 2021

Hot spell in the foothills.

Heat keeps people indoors during middle-of-day, but I just keep moving through it. Lots of irrigation repair. First thing, a dump run, in the cool of the morning. I drive the pickup around the place, particularly behind the potting shed, where junk accumulates, and down by the studio in the woods (construction debris). At the dump, properly called transfer station, I back my tailgate into a slot at the old shallow precipice, beyond which Oblivion is the whole point.

Alongside me, in his slot, a tough-looking rancher has backed in a single-stall horse trailer (antique, classy, banged-up), which he’d used for ferrying trash. I make this joke as I pull in, because encounters in the rural mountains require some bonhomie: “You’re not throwing away your horse, are you?”

The old guy looks dismayed, then gets it, and shrugs, smiles. A minute later tells me, “You had me going there for a minute. We just had a horse die yesterday.”

So it isn’t funny. Not at all. A certain amount of apologizing pretty much mends my mistake. After he’s gone I get into throwing my own trash over the cliff, and in the truck bed at the bottom of my trove, among the last bits, a small mouse materializes and runs off the tailgate in terror, hops the cliff, into the path of the scraping bulldozer.

* * * *

We congratulate ourselves when we hear that “emerging” nations are developing a larger middle class. But we should be careful what we wish for. Should New Delhi or Guadalajara have nice new subdivisions? Well, fine. Capitalism is supposed to be a most egalitarian natural system. Let there be suburbs of Mexico City, too, and green, neat gated communities of Lagos and Mumbai, where homes shall have small lawns out front, Spanish tile roofs, satellite TV dishes, wi-fi, Weber barbecues and meat for the barbecues. All this is actually happening in our decade. Let wheeled, lidded bins for trash (and so-called “recycling”) be set out each week at the curb, one pair for each house, each week another two or three cubic yards to be taken away by a big noisy truck.


* * * *


Sears is no longer supporting customers with certain replacement parts. It used to be an assurance. This is the Sears publisher of catalogues that once-upon-a-century furnished much of “manifest destiny.” The Sears, Roebuck catalogue was called “the dream book” by my great-grandparents on the prairie, studied closely by children everywhere, especially as Christmastime was coming along. It provided not only luxuries but also necessities and the spare parts. Bootlaces and washboards. A new pane of mica for the door of your Franklin Stove. A choke valve for your kitchen range’s stovepipe.

Now, disappearance of replacement parts. This 21st-century betrayal of the customer’s trust happens at exactly the wrong time in cosmic history (or, at least, geological history). Always, men like me trying to care for some old machine were able to find the gadget’s exploded diagram (bolts and washers and sprockets drifting apart gravity-free, each identified by catalog number) and phone in a request. Some days later, a small padded envelope would arrive.

So, an essential part for my evaporative cooler will never again be available – though the well-made thing itself has many years of useful life left. “I’m sorry, sir,” says the voice with the South-Asian accent. He is actually deeply sympathetic. He has dealt with grieving remote husbandmen before.


* * * *

August 9, 2021

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change today issues big Global Warming report admitting officially that the planet is in “overshoot.” Meaning that even if we all reformed suddenly, and suddenly halted all industrial activity and instantly reverted to a neolithic economy all over the Earth (eating a plant diet, abandoning cars and walking everywhere), still the climate would worsen, the glaciers keep melting away exposing warm rocks, the mountainsides evolving from deep forest to open chaparral, the oceans becoming tepid and biologically simpler, the Arctic tundra releasing digestive stink. This widely reported announcement, I want to hope, is causing a lot of epiphanies and penitence. I have an idea, though, that people will still feel they have to support their lifestyle. Provide for their family. Be practical. – Here in SF, alone for the week, I am a big consumer. I have no choice but to oversee a roof replacement. The installation of a new dishwasher. The purchase of some fresh furniture because these are considered shabby/rickety/threadbare. This is all the coercion of being a family man.

* * * *

North Beach. In George’s market, buying carton of milk. Above me in the ceiling, from a perforated disk, quietly pulses an old tune from the seventies’ radio playlist, an instrumental. It’s the same pop song that underwrote my stride on New York sidewalks when, in my twenties, I thought I had to live in NYC to write. Whenever it plays now in latter years, I’m back standing alone on a curb, Flatbush Ave. Brooklyn, total endowment $800, cheap 3-piece suit for job-hunting, at a big complicated six-way intersection of Flatbush Ave, or maybe Rockaway Parkway, I was living in Canarsie. Defeat and discouragement (“if you can’t make it in this town, you can’t make it anywhere”) were inevitable, but somehow I was buoyed by this tune. It was a jazz-pop summer melody, mellow, comfortably gaited, a saxophone easily writing its script above happy chords, my anthem that summer, everybody’s anthem, the anthem of optimism. How could I have known I’d eventually do so well? Then, too, I could never have pictured myself yet further on, knowing now not to hope for hope. I’m back on the pavement again. Sidewalks are the same wherever you go. The saxophone is the one perpetual element.

So, I carry my carton of milk up Union Street. Having reaffirmed that despair is the bedrock condition, happiness is licensed again, as usual. It’s in my stride.

* * * *

August 10, 2021

Dwayne and Gia, Patrick and Sheila, all for drinks on the roof. I go to Molinari’s for carpaccio aged in Sorrento. The boy [he’s new on this job; somebody’s son or nephew] in the white smock, honored to fulfill this order, pulls out the black heel of beef and tenderly slices by hand. (For certain cuts, Molinari’s won’t use the slicing machine). He’s proud to be applying his training. When he tosses a bit behind him somewhere – like a rind, maybe? – I ask, What was that? Are you actually throwing away some of that? (Because whatever it was, I might take it.)

Oh, no no no. He looks about. “Never. If I am ever doing that, I will have to go across the street and talk with Father Vincent.”
[St. Francis cathedral, across Columbus]

* * * *

August 16, 2021

Home from a week in SF. Wildfires to the north send a smoky haze. In the nights, all California’s mass of smoke goes downhill along canyons heading for the sea. Then in the afternoons, it’s pushed back up into Nevada’s high desert by the onshore breeze, only to flood back in during the night, as California daily breathes, out and in, as it has done for millions of years.

I remind myself of – though it’s nothing like – the typical sentences of Cormac McCarthy, whom I’ve been rereading. McCarthy’s redeeming virtue – but it’s a supreme virtue – is the occasional great sentence. One of that generation’s great sentence-spinners; and spinning beautiful sentences is not a trivial – it’s a supremely important – reason for any literature. Sometimes style is substance. (In the superheated plasma state, truth IS beauty, and beauty truth.) This is the case with McCarthy, whose best subjects are geology, history, race. Not the violence he thinks he’s so enchanted with.

Mostly I’m getting dis-enchanted with him. Not just his itch for violence. Which might be tolerable if violence were seen just as necessary plot furniture. No, the violence is central with him. It’s ethical. It’s metaphysical. (I’ve always gone around saying that “violence is to Cormac McCarthy what sex is to Updike.”) However, I’m getting the feeling it’s an affectation. The whole ethos of it. As if it’s boots-and-hat, almost.

Along with the spectacular violence, in the fiction, comes the attendant nihilism, which is always an affectation. “Cynicism” and “despair” are the fake swoons of people who haven’t really truly been down, and it’s annoying. Annoying, also, is the picture of the Old West Cowboy’s code of gallantry always menaced by Bad Guys. Once you enter upon a “genre,” you’re stuck with its limitations – especially the limitations upon human nature, i.e., characterization. (In this case the Western. I’m reading Cities of the Plain.) So, however brilliant McCarthy may be as a describer of events, human nature comes down to Black Hats and White Hats and then racism fattens up the picture of the Black Hats south of the border. No doubt some of that is “accurate.” We’ve all seen it. It’s life. But in a novel, an artifact superior to “life,” it oversimplifies.

Great sentences, though, in McCarthy. Sentences about the land especially, and the history of the land. And sometimes a paroxysm of mysticism that seems for-real, because when it happens it’s gratuitous, serves no plot-or-character necessity.

But in the end, once I’m free of the printed page, and once I’m at large again in the real world, I can’t use Cormac McCarthy. People need literature they can use.


* * * *

August 23, 2021

The cobwebs on my rearview mirror are still intact after my errands around town (hardware, coffee, feed store, library). Back in the cool garage. Will spiders find it and get back to work.

Despite this pandemic, some of my townsmen won’t wear a sanitary mask, feeling it an insult to their dignity. In the bank lobby, there’s a line waiting for a teller: a young woman (masked) tells the older woman in front of her (unmasked) that the county is now requiring masks in indoor public spaces.

All of us in the queue have to listen to this quarrel. The young woman begins a Socratic-style interrogation. “Tell me, do you think there is a disease going around? Well, do you think it’s contagious? Do you think it sometimes ends where people die? Or do you think that’s a rumor?”

The older lady’s response to all these questions is: “It’s my right and my preference.”

“Well, is it your preference that people around you might get sick? Simply because you’re selfish?”

Then, from inside her sweatpants pocket, the younger woman’s phone commands in a cheerful female voice, “IN 500 FEET… TURN LEFT ONTO OLD TUNNEL ROAD.” All of us listeners have to laugh. Except for the young interrogator, who is embarrassed and gets out her phone to strangle it. One who does think it’s amusing – smiles – is the older unmasked lady. Ends the discussion turning away in disgust.


* * * *

September 1, 2021

Afternoons brush-clearing.
Under the cherry grove, maybe almost a quarter-acre of old blackberries. (From which, over the years, we’ve made pies and snacks.) Loppers, clippers. I have to wade in. My T-shirt fabric. My wrists and forearms. I’m not outfitted for this. Every inch of the green whips us studded with little woody horns, all in a very old, large, well-established fiasco that’s taller than me, fresh green on top and dry grey basketwork below. My son has been telling me I need a heavy-duty trimming device, but I won’t abide the noise and the fuel, so I carry on with my piecemeal work, loppers and clippers and rake, creating heaps behind me on the meadow. Those heaps, like huge bird’s nests, will wilt over the weeks, and in the wintertime be fed to a bonfire. Andrew by phone advises me “machete, of course.” But blackberry vines are sneaky and the blow of a machete would too often make a tendril swing around from behind. First the loppers, then hacking with a rake. Chainsaw only every couple of hours. (Because a dozen new cherries are standing in the bramble).

I’m also advised I would be smart to rent a little tractor, which could finish the job in a single afternoon. But I prefer my Neolithic technology. The worse expense of a tractor is the “externalized” cost to the environment. With loppers and rake I’ll be doing the same job more elegantly in only slightly more total hours (if you figure in the additional bother of dealing with the rental place in the next town, the trailer and hitch, gassing it all up, etc.).

* * * *

Bear destroyed the lone pear tree near house. Branches pulled down, all fruit gone. Not a single pear left.

* * * *

September 3, 2021

In this time of year – September, when the meadow glitters, and rat droppings turn up on the shed shelves, and the apples are near ripe, and the spider spins above the straw bales – I’m spending afternoons hacking at the sea of blackberries. Mammal oddly making habitat. Possibly a century’s growth. George and Ginny would have fed on these same blackberries back when they were young and in love, cooking on Coleman stove here, showering in cold snowmelt ditchwater from an elevated cistern, rescuing this old farmhouse from complete ruin, while they lived out under the oaks in the time the place was uninhabitable. Now, all these blackberries’ dead understory is where, given a wildfire, a thrown ember might nestle. In my earbuds, I’ve got Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, hours and hours of it, while I hack and snip. Caesar certainly did mow down a lot of Gauls.

In the old thicket, as I go, not much of archaeological interest. Galvanized pipe, lengths of gutter and PVC, grey tennis balls and disintegrating plastic Frisbees. (The only valuable resource, some sheets of corrugated roofing metal.) However, a couple pieces of toy weaponry are here, of recent manufacture: a plastic shield with an embossed dragon, little-boy-sized, and a pistol that looks like it must have fired pellets of foam, part of a gift-box set. Evidently, some child threw this pistol into the thorns.

What was the story there? Why toss a toy where it can’t be rescued? When it got thrown, was another boy present? Most likely. A little boy all by himself probably wouldn’t throw his toy away. I can’t picture that. So maybe it was some birthday party or some game, and either one child or more than one was present. Was it an act of bullying? Spite? It probably wasn’t a resolve of pacifism. So, it may well have been snatched and thrown simply in wanton cruelty. It would have to have been a birthday party because a toy gun gift would have been exotic to us.

* * * *

September 5, 2021

New dimmer switches, patch for wheelbarrow tire, poultry hydrator, Simpson plates to reinforce old dropleaf table.

On the kitchen doormat this September day, a wooly caterpillar. Its coat deep as a beaver-pelt. It’s motions, like peristalsis, little throbs, are a mode of ambulation somehow intimidating to the observer who stands by, tall biped with neocortex and opposable thumbs. What is so intimidating about this little thing? That it’s so methodical, going over the bristles of the doormat? That it has such aplomb? That it will soon knit a cocoon, turn itself into an undifferentiated slurry inside that cocoon, and condense again into a folded butterfly.

This particular wooly’s coat was banded narrowly in orange. Broadly in brown. (Which predicts a severe winter, according to every almanac online.)


* * * *

September 6, 2021

Psilocybin mushrooms again. This time two, which is roughly double the last dose. I’m such an antidrug straight-arrow, and will always be, this seems an ungainly pursuit of insight. Still, “we shall not cease from exploration.” And in any case, this Labor Day Monday is a lost interval – writing stalled with no urgency, salvage stores closed, the heat too intense to work wisely outdoors. So it’s at 3:30 in the afternoon that I impetuously nibble down more than is required, of the gamy ropy twists, flavorful, muskily, something you might sauté to put on fettuccini.

* * * *

September 10, 2021

Rain in the night, a little remedy for drought. Many dry lightning bolts to the south as far away as the Interstate. Then, about 2:00 AM, the thunder ceases. Faint veils of what the NWS calls “showers” began brushing over. Things have been well saturated by morning, my irrigation Rainbird nozzles throwing their big rooster tails out over the tall grass the whole time in the dark.

Corner-cutting compromise: it turns out I can get an attachment for my ordinary string-trimmer device for twenty dollars: it replaces the plastic whips with stiff blades. It’s a spinning propeller. So I’ll attack ancient obstinate blackberry bramble more efficiently without having to resort to heavy machinery.

At the saw shop in town, I’m able to buy this attachment and, on the same trip, drop off the mower in their backyard infirmary among other mowers, to have its blade deck repaired. In order to get the mower up on the truck bed, again it must be driven up the Spencers’ hill and then, across a bridge of heavy old doors, off the little roadside bluff and onto the bed of the truck.

Cappuccino at Three Forks in town, getting a start on Richard Wright’s Native Son, having finished with Jean Rhys’s Quartet.

Asking for money again from foundations.

* * * *

September 12, 2021

Trip to Oakland and back, to pick up Dash.

Viewed his habitat on 14th Street. Dead backyard w/dismantled motorcycles and cars.

At Banh Mi, pork/cilantro/pickle sandwich.

Little tour of the entrenched homeless encampments. Their lifestyle fascinates me – as pioneering, as exemplary – though they themselves sure wouldn’t see it that way. It’s the American middle-class’s future – pop-up nylon tents, and a commute to work by bicycle – and it deserves a look.


* * * *

September 17, 2021

The summer wanes and, in cooler days now, the wildfire danger seems to subside. The half-acre of blackberries is being defeated yard by yard. Mostly I ignore it for other problems, letting days and days go by. Dash is in the cottage recuperating from his knee operation, groggy with Vicodin. Kat keeps him company in the nights.

The old car’s oil leak is stanched by John Wright.

* * * *

I’m done, extirpated all the old blackberries under the cherries. The area, a new glade, is now an open floor of dried brown blackberry canes lying broken, but now it’s a shady grove, cherry-tree trunks oddly dancing. They “dance” because, during the decades of blackberry dominance, new saplings had to poke their way through (writhe their way through) the five-foot-thick layer of dense thorns, then at the five-foot point, could begin seeking the sun in their own ways. Each tree now has grown thick and strong, in that permanent shape. So every tree trunk is shimmying, Matisse’s five frolicking women,

A truckload to the dump. The environmental crisis is choking that maw, too. I spent an hour in line with other heavy-loaded trucks and trailers, extending all the way out to McCourtney Road, waiting to pay my fee at the gate shack. Then in the dump itself, where there’s a small cliff to push your trash off, the unattended, unmoved heap of refuse had piled up so high that it spilled over the railings, over the curb. You were basically pushing your trash off your tailgate onto your own parking place. No bulldozer in sight.

Stopped for coffee in Grass Valley. Read paperback at a sidewalk table again, more like old pre-COVID times.

* * * *

September 24, 2021

Work on empty cottage goes on. Disconnect plumbing to repaint top surface of sink counter. Many, many coats of enamel – six or seven altogether – are supposed to be the way to make a wooden countertop rot-proof.

Rewire faulty dimmer switches.

Pull up agricultural fenceposts from meadow and dismantle shade structure.

Got a couple free hours, put in a round of pear-picking. Pear-picking always ends up being a euphoric pastime. (On the ladder, dizziness of craning all over reaching for pears among leaves that are radiant exactly like pears in shape and color, backlit and diffusing sunshine. Smell of ripe pears.)
Now, no longer the cardboard wine boxes, we’ve got a stack of regulation bushel baskets.

* * * *

September 25, 2021

When I say affluence, I’m not talking about money. It’s a much more widely inclusive, but also more strict use of the word affluence.

We’re an affluent species in the sense that (extravagant cost to the ecosystem) we heat our habitats. We heat as much as 20,000 cubic feet. We heat it when we’re not even at home. No other species does that, in this fragile planet. Also, when we want to travel more than a few feet, we like to sit down, and be carried by some device. This kind of thing is unusual among all the species that have sustained some relationship with earth over the long haul.

In an economic sense, you’re “affluent” if you’re a woman in, say, the Mexican high deserts who owns an old toaster but who, when it stops working, tosses it. She’s affluent (ad + fluere) in the sense that excess resources have been “flowing toward” her; but are now “flowing away” from her (ex + fluere): she’s generating an effluent, that’s the result: this old toaster is going to landfill. This ecological category of “affluence” includes a family whose monthly income is a few thousand pesos.

You’re affluent if you’re a Bangladeshi tenant farmer who has brought this year’s crop to the big covered market and you allow the local children (the very lowest-caste ones who scoot around squatting all day, all day underfoot and under the tables) to sweep together any few grains of rice or millet that may fall from your measuring table. Those children, hopping incessantly like sparrows, each at end of day can bring home to their mothers a pocketful big enough to make a porridge. In this way, the careless/generous farmer is part of an ecosystem.

“Affluence” is an ecological flow. You’re affluent if you decide to click ADD TO CART because it’s easy to get **free** next-day delivery,with Amazon Prime, and because, even better, you can always change your mind and send anything back by free (“free”) return-shipping. Or even, as it turns out, toss it in the Dumpster outside when it arrives, if you don’t happen to like it, along with its bubble-wrap and its cardboard, because the seller doesn’t want it back anyway, it’s not worth the cost of shipping it back, it’s so cheap for the seller to get new ones from Asian or Mexican distribution streams. It’s easier for everybody. Just throw everything away. (“The Great American Away” my Vietnamese-refugee friend used to call it, way back in 1975, remarking on how we throw things away.) That Mexican woman – I can see her in the big Super Gigante or the Walmart on the carretera, only a ten-minute walk from home, standing at the tall display shelves choosing a new toaster, turning it over and looking at the underside, a little bit dissatisfied with the chintzy standards of new manufacture – thinking she should have paused at home to unscrew the old toaster’s chassis, to see if there’s a shorted wire that could easily have been fixed. She’s not optimistic about how long this new one will last. It’s held together not with screws but with plastic flange-rivets, so it won’t be repairable if it does start acting up.

People are smart. They’re smarter than the economy will let them be. A woman in Los Angeles who has been buying shoes on Amazon may well know that, the fact is, none of the shoes in her freshly submitted order will be exactly what she was hoping for, she’s pretty sure of it. The futility of this cycle might almost give a conscientious woman a heartache, because this woman does think of herself as an ardent environmentalist. She may even drive a Tesla. She may even use recyclable shopping bags, she’s such an environmentalist. At the lip of the condo-complex Dumpster next week: there is her forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is redemption. And the clang of the Dumpster’s lid.

Those Bangladeshi gleaner kids are able (with children’s amazing stamina) to spend all day almost never rising from the squat position, as they scramble around competing. They do compete. But they’re friends, too. They’re the littlest members of their families, but they’ve got jobs, they’ve got work, and it makes them proud. There’s a technique: find a small scrap of cardboard to keep with you all day, and set it flat on the market’s concrete floor, where, with your free hand, you can swish the concrete to brush a few fallen grains of rice or millet onto it. Then, dustpan-like, tilt it into your pocket. On the way home (I’m not making this up; this is footage I saw in a PBS documentary long ago), at end of day they go back to their slum together, in the slant of gold sunset in the alley, silhouettes, still playing, knocking around, not tired from a day of scrambling all over the market floor.

* * * *

September 25, 2021

A day of minor fixes I’d deferred. Repair the old Adirondack chairs. (It’s about time.) County chipper arrives for roadside slash: $150. Cut hawthorns everywhere, especially north end of garden, and among figs. Lots of new little hawthorns in the roadside ivy beds. Kitchen drawer (whose false bottom we’ve all tolerated for years) needed only a screw. Swamp cooler’s duct tape had gone stale and my cardboard had fallen, making it less effective.

Under Gro-Lights indoors, Brett is starting onions, lettuce, arugula, beets. In general, this year’s summer crops were a disappointment. Everyone in the area complains of the same thing. Things are ripening wrong. Or not at all. Pears, however, are abundant, big, and sweet. Apples OK. Chestnuts a no-show this year. Same with plums.

* * * *

This house was inhabited, historically, before there was such a thing as trash pickup. In the 19th century nothing ever left the property. I think everybody lived basically (and in principle), in their own personal trash-heaps. But they would have been well-ordered trash heaps: recycling, composting, stacking-behind-barn, hardware sorted into drawers, animal fodder, and of course frequent, regular incinerating. There’s a midden of scorched glass/crockery/bricks/iron, in the woods where the old barn-foundation lies. It’s located right in front of where the barn door seems to have been.


* * * *

Dinner guests Jim and Lydia, Michael and Emily. African chickpea soup, and sausages from SPD. A very old local Grenache, better than my usual red. Candles in glass chimneys, outside on the brick paving in the dark. New foxes are in the neighborhood: the characteristic ghoulish bark in the nearby forest. For diners in the circle of candlelight, it’s spinetingling.

* * * *

September 27, 2021

Man comes today to look at swamp cooler. It’s inevitable that I replace it altogether now, at some cost. I can afford to be a cagey customer because, just as it is, it might get along fine indefinitely, bandaged with cardboard.

* * * *

Regrets. How obtuse/impolite/thoughtless I’ve always been. Permanently coarsened (I think, maybe) by my years among rough people, which were my entire twenties. In publishing and academe, everybody is considerate, tactful. They were born to it. And stayed in it. It’s how their liberalism is vulnerable: their inexperience in American society. My time in the genuine lowest working class was eternal. It was existential. I wasn’t merely visiting, I had no exit plan and I liked it there. My friends, those people are rough, and spontaneity/sincerity are the coin of the realm, w/risk of hurt feelings and unregenerate bigotry. Admittedly I didn’t fit there either, I was an oddball, always scribbling, but still they were my friends (and in the afterlife, still are).

* * * *

How the dead are on my mind a lot lately. You survive long enough. This is a stage as adventurous as the teens or the twenties. The adventures of remorse are all inward, but they’re more consequential. (More consequential than, say, earthquakes or politics or wildfires). What happens, in life, isn’t as important as what you make of what happens.

* * * *

The bad influence of this new thing the Internet, in society and in personality:

The Internet is causing of course “loneliness,” “distractedness,” “narcissism” – those are all common complaints – but also cynicism. I’m thinking of the risk to my two sons, who grew up looking at the trillion-ring circus that is the internet, the internet so swirling with deceit that’s open and full-frontal. As well as delusion. Of course it’s true that young people might learn some useful “critical thinking skills,” and some “healthy skepticism.” But cynicism. Healthy skepticism’s withered, toxic end-stage. Cynicism is the beginning of despair, actually. And despair, when it’s the real thing, is something few live to tell of. Despair could be the social epidemic that’s a bigger threat than the coronavirus epidemic. Especially these days. Beware the Jabberwock, my son, you’re going to need your imagination, you’re going to need your vorpal sword. The toy weaponry I was unearthing lately in my brush-clearing. The knight’s shield of vacuum-molded plastic. The padded bat that once slew a piñata.

* * * *

Coming outside by the back door into the dark, from the usual noisiness of the kitchen.

In the real world, outside a kitchen, it’s quieter. But in all directions, the wind’s new sound is seething, on Cement Hill, and in the old Erikson Lumber property on the south and west, on faraway Sugar Loaf above town, distant Banner Mountain. This particular distinctive quiet surf in the sky is the familiar prelude to rain, as the Nisenan people, too, would have known. (500 yrs ago, 1000 yrs ago?)

I prefer living in old badly insulated places where, indoors, you can hear a little of the outdoors. Most modern human habitations are intended to cut you off from nature, nature’s sounds, nature’s smells, temperatures, fresh air: those are what people don’t want. In a new-built home, you’re supposed to feel you’re inside a Contac capsule. (in old TV ads Contac was a drug in a clear plastic shell)

The house we lived in new-married in Mill Valley was so flimsy you could see cracks of daylight through the walls. The floor’s foundation joists, at the back end, rested directly on mud. To pick blackberries, you could climb up on the roof. It was beautiful. We wore sweaters, and the propane wall heater was fierce and the place was small enough, so we were never uncomfortable; but yet, the outdoors was always appreciable. – In this drafty farmhouse now in the foothills, whenever rain does arrive, the various tin roofs make the world very audible. And the place is drafty enough. (Whereas, in Barbara’s new cottage, built to county code, everything is so insulated that you’re deaf. You’re inside that Contac and you literally might never know it’s raining outdoors.)

In the dark outside the kitchen is the breath of promise. The Nisenan here lived in bark lodges. My species is an organism that feels good when it’s getting constant information from the environment. Smell the rain coming. Maybe smell the far-off village woodsmoke. Past the shed, the smell of horse manure sometimes from the McClellans’. Hear the creak of the faraway oaks, their thrashing when the wind is up.

Deep in a still night, my neighbor the cricket. The cricket is aware of passing beasts, and sometimes it stops its song, waits, listens, then begins again.

* * * *

The new “off-grid” hand-laundry gadget is a folly. Crap from the Internet. Too small. Plastic manufacture from Amazon.com always disappoints. I need something bigger. Most of all, I’ll require a wringer. Lacking a wringer, whenever I hang up dripping clothes on a line, they’re amazingly heavy. Overloads the clothesline near breaking. Triples inefficiency/drudgery.

* * * *

September 28, 2021

To Truckee with Dash, for surgeon’s check of his work. All is good. The knee is healing as it should. Lively drive and conversation, to and from, the sun flashing through trees. The analysis he wrote of Neil Postman is an essay of penetrating insight and rhetorical flourish. He asked for my grammar/punctuation grooming – so after dinner I removed myself, and it, to wing chair in glaring lamplight, with uplifted ready-to-stab pencil. But, turns out, mostly I left it alone. Mostly just admire it.

I’ll never get tired of Highway 20, the long stretch between Nevada City and the Blue Canyon interstate ramp. Hairpin turns, uphill, always wedging higher. Getting a glimpse sometimes of Matterhorn-like prospects ahead. Thirty miles, it’s like an old song I go through over and over with certain favorite sections. That it was the path of the Conestoga wagons gives it a certain wealth, and secret importance. In places, you can see the old dirt roadway permanently deep-rutted by wagon wheels, in the woods alongside.

Everybody here for spaghetti.

* * * *

September 29, 2021

At 7:30 this morning, Hunter’s old non-operational 30-yr-old BMW was set upon a truck bed for transport. One tire was so flat, on the ground it seems to pool, making the old “pancake” metaphor inevitable. Rats had gnawed all its wiring and built nests in its engine compartment, troves of acorns around the exhaust manifold. Still it starts up, the race-car rumble of the engine, and on its own power it climbs the slant of the truck bed. Seeing it go, I’m damp-eyed-sentimental about it, the release from that old headache and liability. Because what, after all, is parenthood? I’ve got an empty driveway now, which is what I wished for.

* * * *

September 30, 2021

All pears are in. Bushel baskets in the living room.
Dash gone back to Oakland in passenger seat, Kat at the wheel. His aluminum crutches.
My new laundry system (janitor’s commercial-size bucket on casters, with mop wringer that can express water from my clothes): semi-successful!
Painting in cottage.
Repair spalled brick paving at last.
Dinner w/Amanda and Greg.

Narrative Technique. Almost all real writers ignore or never even notice the various dogmata of “creative writing” teachers (for instance show-don’t-tell, or keep-POV-pure), and Richard Wright (Native Son) is another triumphant instance. I’ve never read anything like this. As reader you join together with the author in the project, you sit beside him, the author himself, while he explains his character at length, thinking things about his character you wouldn’t dare to, sustaining an objective psychologist’s analytic rude stare at the behavior of his young criminal. It’s amazing. Richard Wright is a real discovery, cold-hearted analyst, a heart of ice.

* * * *

Lately I’m so fascinated by the word cynicism – and I remember from my “education” that the Cynics were a school that made an ostentatious show of their abstemious poverty. Which happens to be an unflattering sketch of my very self. Poverty being my gospel.

* * * *

All over the property heaps of dead blackberry canes like hay ricks. I’m not looking forward to this burn pile, when I do get it together. Ordinarily a kind of pleasure – the whole Saturday leaning on my rake, country music on the radio, ideally a faint drizzle or snowflakes. That quality of peace and silence wherever snowflakes govern, dragging old slash, poking with rake, the column of smoke, it’s like a kind of harvest, but a harvest like Judgment Day: it’s the dry grass that goeth in the oven.

But this time, it’s entirely blackberry. Many cubic yards of dried-out thorny canes all tangled, and it won’t be such a pleasant afternoon. Then, too, there’ll be the tendency of tinder-dry canes to flare up hot, then vanish fast in ash. So keeping a decent flame going won’t be a leisurely pastime.

* * * *

October 3, 2021

In the open air behind Wild Eye Pub. Went to hear Randy’s quartet, stayed for both sets. Sands and Lindsey, Luke and Maggie, fish and chips. An unaccustomed delight. The music was delicate, intricate, logical paths discoverable only by working your way back in time. Improvising on reeds and horns very soft. I haven’t been in such a floaty trance since Immanuel Ax’s Brahms at the Grass Valley church.

Then the usual fate of art befell. After the first set, people started slipping away who had a music-profession reason for being there (about half). Collegial fist-bumps. Then, the remaining crowd dwindled at the steady half-life rate of radioactivity. As the mass grew cooler, and dark came on, many of those who’d stayed were chatting. Or pecking in their phones without shame, faces fallen over the glowing panel. Still the band played with passion. Playing for each other really, as musicians must do.

A band (this is a law of nature) always improves through the night. The last songs are generally where towering genius might make its (shy! shy!) appearance. By the time when all four men in that music-machine were working together with intuition and inspiration, nobody was listening.

So in the end, most people had stayed only for the less-than-excellent parts, then gone home. Now they think they’ve heard that band. This is how the very best in art (in books, in music, in painting, in movies) can come to seem like an elitist game only for the cranky few “tastemakers.” (Whom, then, everybody resents.)

* * * *

Sunday morning I’m on one knee in the gravel behind the Subaru, putting the new DMV registration sticker on the license plate. A little 2022 label (green) now covers last year’s red one (2021). I looked around. The pickup and the old MBZ, both had the up-to-date green sticker. Quiet Sunday morning. Not much birdsong in this month.

Surviving, as I have, so far into this century – as far as 2022, according to this DMV sticker here – surviving wasn’t something I had specific thoughts or plans for. Just vague assumptions about. The future dwells in our unexamined vague assumptions. (Fattening in the dark as they do.) When I was just out of college and a new pilgrim in the world, we all pictured the 2020 decade as a perilous, unpredictable space. Around 2020 was where “Total Environmental Collapse” had been prophesied by a small but persuasive (hard-to-rule-out) minority of scientists. In these apocalyptic dystopian times, at least bureaucracy seems to be persisting/thriving: we’ve still got the DMV.

* * * *

October 7, 2021

Morning rain arrives. Looks like the typical Pacific-coast precipitation which is really just heavy fog. It’s only mist exploring, can’t be felt, and then soon everything will be sopping. I’ve been pulling tools in, getting things into the shed, and I stop and eat an orange, standing in the shed. As usual a fresh rain is luring odors out – soil, wet granite gravel of the drive, the split-cedar fenceposts. Odors, in turn, provoke olfactory storms which are motions. Somehow, this smells exactly like Brooklyn, summer of 1978. How brave I was, at that age.

My belief that being a saint, and being a mystic, are not a pair of ambitions far out of reach of the ordinary person. Rather, that everybody is always already a saint. Everybody always already a mystic. It’s just that, day-to-day, the organism must be practical. The “reticular formation” (metaphor) won’t let the organism be distracted. Anyway, it’s an old idea of mine, never relevant or useful, never consulted.

Dinner at Three Forks.

* * * *

October 9, 2021

Drain all evaporative coolers for winter.
Hike up to weir and clear it.
Dinner of big heap of odd, bright-orange chanterelles, chicken sausage.
Drought conditions persist. Temps drop average 20 degrees.

* * * *

October 7, 2021

Most of afternoon getting in firewood, the first restocking of the season – in the mudroom and in the woodbox, and also behind the woodbox.

And then, too, a good hour or two of chopping the old oak of two years ago.

Benefit reading for Santa Monica Review.

* * * *

October 12, 2021

Controversy keeps flaring up. Our supposedly plagiaristic alumna. These are quarrels I have notions about, but no place in. They’re quarrels I stay as far from as I can. This woman (according to me) was one of the better writers in the program; and that alone (being a good writer) can pardon some sins, and this particular disagreement is so nuanced. All writers are such thieves and scoundrels, their ethics are in their books if they’re good, not necessarily in their lives.

Excellent removal of an entire section from “Immanence.” (Excursion off-road on a dark footpath, priest hugging the twelve-pack of Budweiser to his chest.) The one important trace worth preserving can be planted, ultra-quietly, in a latter section.

Repair of Bob’s “course description” for Brett.

Removal of money from savings to prop up the Macondray Lane house again, which we really can’t afford.

Must again hike up to clear the weir. It won’t be an unsuspenseful trip. On my last trip I noticed that water had gathered on the forest floor, about a half mile uphill, deep in the woods. A swampy patch, then a standing puddle in an old fire-road rut. The only conduit in that whole territory is my own underground irrigation line. So if it’s a leak, I may have to spend some time tracking it down.
———- Just returned from clearing the weir, and the same-size swampy area is still there. It hasn’t changed shape or size during the dry windy week since I last saw it. So it’s being constantly replenished. (Talmudic expression is living water.) It’s still and clear, so replenishment is slow, seeping. However, I may have found the source, a very small new freshet – which might be a breach in the ditch elsewhere on the Cooley property or the Robertsons’.

The ditchwater itself, when I got there, was (this is snowmelt already) icy cold, where I have to plunge my arm in up to my shoulder. Also it’s in high flood, which might have something to do with the little escape of water on the slope.

* * * *

October 13, 2021

Annual removal of Scotch broom, not much, only takes a couple of hours.

The “Letter from the Valley” (for Omnium Gatherum) suddenly needs radical revision.

Reframing grant-application language to comply with new rules of prose style requiring mediocrity because mediocrity is not elitist. I’m living on into an epoch of fresh culture where all my values are quaint. Must be a typical climacteric experienced by every generation. Like, I wonder if John Cheever watched a new generation of writers far exceed any popularity he’d ever dreamed of (Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins) and finally had to resign himself, sanguinely, to the vagaries of literary fashion. Hoping that, in the end, any fine sentences will always get their reading.

[When an aspiring anchoress (in England 1300) took vows and had herself “enclosed,” the ceremony ended with locking her in her cell, where she was to climb into a pre-dug grave in the floor. She was never to come out of that room (except for certain spiritual or hygienic occasons). North side of abbey, the cold sunless side. Three apertures: (1) a small window that gave a view of the outside world; (2) a so-called “squint” (slot) so she could view adjoining-chapel services and have communion wafer slipped to her; (3) and the little drawer where her gruel would be slid to her every day. Never to emerge, she was dead to the world and had to lie in the deep grave in the floor. But death to the world was construed as “birth.” This is from the handbook of advice The Ancrene Wisse: “Admiring their own white hands is bad for many anchoresses who keep them too beautiful, such as those who have too little to do; they should scrape up the earth every day from the grave in which they will rot.” Julian of Norwich applied to be enclosed in a cell after she’d had a girlhood mystic vision, a vision she hoped to subsist on for the rest of her life. Wanted nothing but the solitude to contemplate it.]

Dinner with Hunter and Lindsey at their house. Sands and Kat. Roast Chicken. A dessert made, by Kat, from our pears.

* * * *

October 16, 2021

Saturday. Gold October light at noon on the meadow. Work on “Thai Pirates” short story, for some reason. Then there’ll be more woodchopping. Kait to visit for the weekend, stay the night here.

* * * *

Conversation at the neighboring restaurant-table (on the subject of wine lovers’ trick of bringing a corkscrew to Trader Joe’s, buying a few different bottles to take outside in the parking lot to uncork and sample, then going back in to buy a few crates of the favorite):

“I could never do that. I’m not able to take one sip-and-swish, and decide right then. Actually, I think I only know whether I like a wine when I’m halfway down through a bottle. – However, I’m talking about reds. Whites I can get an instant opinion. Whites are fun and they’re not complicated, and you can know instantly, with one taste. Reds you can’t make a judgment right away. A red is like art, like that – like novels. You only realize much later. Not on the first page. Not even when you’re just finishing the last page. It takes a while just to know what it was.”

* * * *

October 17, 2021

Winter rains at last, and there’s a rush to bring in certain crops. So much basil, we get out the food-processor and make so much pesto, now in deep-freeze, we’ve got thirty meals for the winter. Also, butternut squash. Disappointingly small, but solid, resonant-when-tapped.


* * * *

San Francisco’s Victorian houses.

In their time (i.e., when they were built), they were not fancy mansions. Post-earthquake in “subdivisions,” they were miniature imitations of a back-east aristocracy’s grandeur, a kind of fad out here – you might say “McMansions” but they were wittier than that: little houses facetiously “quoting” a bypassed era. Bannisters and spindles and spokes and finials, mass-produced by jigsaw and lathe, they were something people (“common people”) could aspire to live in, in some kind of spirit of unashamed simulation, with a wink of honestly spoofing, which is typically west-coast, typically Frisco, a declassee exaggeration of the hoity-toity people. You drive along Pine Street today and they’re crammed together on their narrow lots, all made out of wooden boards, substantiated by two-by-fours, lath, overly ornamented and painted-up purely in a spirit of play, you might say “camp.”

The absence of any “class system” has always been SF’s special sneaky privilege. Rather, out here, you’re supposed to get class anomie – disorienting to the snob, carte blanche for the greenhorn/arriviste/complete nobody. The entire American West was always the territory where misfits could come to “live their dreams,” or more like, escape their mistakes and deficiencies. This is what the (truly authentically classy!) Eastern establishment finds offensive in California, and even insolent in California. California will pretty much always be in poor taste.

But it’s liberating – I’ve found it to be, personally. I came here in flight from my own unfixable mistakes and deficiencies and a predestination never to have any “advantages.” However – the downside of all this is: social class is an important ethical fabric: It isn’t only a pageant of intimidation and power-plays: “society” really does sort the good folks from the non-good, the reputable from the disreputable. Still, California is also where phonies can thrive. Phonies do well here, perhaps sometimes consistently outperform the authentic folk. You have to do some sorting, among the people you meet, which is what society is for.

[Of course, the generalization isn’t perfect. Wherever you go, there’ll always be people with genuine money or class, and people one-upping each other. That’s human nature.]

Anyway, I watch those little Victorians flash past the car window, each traffic light turning green ahead in sequence, going west on Pine Street where, for miles around, you can’t find a parking place for love or money, and you can’t buy a house for under two million, and I worry about San Francisco. I don’t exactly live here anymore. But I would always be willing to come right back, and move lock-stock-and-barrel into the city of my dreams, even if maybe it would be only that: a city of my dreams. Which is maybe what it always was anyway.

* * * *

October 20, 2021

San Francisco. Dinner last night at Diana Fuller’s. Picked up adoptee’s memoir.

At 91, she’s still the sharp-tongued peremptory maven. Living alone in her tiny citadel.

Every night of the week, including when she’s entertaining guests, she cooks by emptying a bag of frozen Trader Joe’s prepared-meal into a pan and sauteeing it. Tonight: fettuccini Alfredo. Barefoot in her kitchen, at her age she’s still Holly Golightly.

* * * *

Today at Molinari’s on Columbus, bought Xmas-present stuff of a misc. sort. The same kid who sold me carpaccio a couple months ago now has been entrusted with the whole counter, for an afternoon – and the service is pretty slow. People are being patient. Small crowd waiting. You have to take a number. At long last, he’ll take my money for the olive oil, etc. But the Amaretto di Saronno cookies I want aren’t available. (Big red cubical cookie-tin.)

“We’ve got lotta other amaretti,” he says, and he leads me to shelves of little cookies.

“No, I’ll tell you why I need Amaretto di Saronno. I want to set the wrappers on fire. It’s a trick. It only works with this one brand of amaretti.”

He wants me to buy a similar-looking thing called Amaretti “di Chiostro.” I have to explain that our family has always practiced this clever parlor trick, especially Christmastimes, setting a match to a paper wrapper carefully curled into a standing cylinder (and then set fire only to the tippy-top of the standing cylinder), then watching it lift aflame from a tabletop, carried by its heat-updraft, float up and turn to ash and gently bump the ceiling, then fall ashen back to the table. You can set these afire on a fine mahogany tabletop. The heat never nears the wood. This grocer clerk so delighted, I have to start getting specific with this explanation – because he obviously plans to go home and try it himself – he’d grown up in this store, but yet he’d never heard you can do this with amaretto wrappers. We end up annoying a big backed-up crowd, behind us, of unhelped customers, because he needs to get the complete instructions for launching flaming wrappers at the ceiling.

* * * *

October 21, 2021

Lunch with Oscar Villalon at Ferry Building.
More of the endless sadness of the book business. All the wrong values have pooled in this historical low-spot, precisely vulnerable because this business is where good values are supposed to rule.

Brett and me: dinner at the fancy white-tablecloth place on the corner we’ve never dared enter.

* * * *

October 22, 2021

The #17 house is ship-shape. The wall-heater has a new thermocouple and new thermostat, the six rickety dining room chairs have been replaced by six less-rickety chairs, and the short in the bathroom wall lamp is fixed.

Drive back up through Marin. Lunch at a so-called Asian Street Food place in MV.

* * * *

October 23, 2021

Home in NevCit. Another especially sad morning. Brett is the blessing in my life.

* * * *

October 24, 2021

Big rain to come (fomented in faraway Pacific waters and worsened by the waters’ warmth). Eleven inches of water in a 24-hr period is predicted. Plus high winds.

* * * *

Richard Wright’s “Native Son” has its one great defect at the end: peroration of lawyer. However, this defect is the sign by which you know a sincere human being (author) is gazing through the page at you. Great books are allowed to be defective.

Holden Caulfield’s criterion, that you can know a great book by the impulse to call up the author when you’re done, has never been an element in my reading life. I really don’t need/want to have met Henry James, or John Updike, or Virginia Woolf. Or Emily Dickinson or Jane Austen. I’ve got the best of them already. But Richard Wright is a first. I wish I’d been his friend.

On second thought, maybe it would better to leave him alone.

Dash and Kat arrive from Oakland, having driven through the worst of the storm. We feed them pesto.

* * * *

October 25, 2021

Huge deluge has passed overnight, sunrise, steaming roof, rhinestones tremble on barbed-wire strands and poultry fencing and clothesline. Judging by how buckets and wheelbarrows have filed, it was more like 16 inches that fell in a single long, loud downpour. Minimal damage on this property: trailer in the woods is OK, garden is tousled but thriving, a fresh leak in the cottage roof. And the loss of a few lbs of chicken feed wetted by sideways-blown rain.

* * * *

Invasive trees – “ailanthus”? – have begun establishing colonies near roadside. Must be either hand-pulled as seedlings or cut and poisoned.

Prune back grapevines to bare stocks.

Jano calls with news of David Tucker’s death.

Everybody here for my borscht, Brett’s pear cobbler with just a soupcon of ginger.

* * * *

October 27, 2021

Justin and all Baileys stop by, lunchtime. Lisa Alvarez’s short story, wonderful protagonist in juvenile-delinquent girl in rehab. The memoir of Beth Haas.

* * * *

October 28, 2021

Burn Day today, a day of saturation and calm winds post-rain. Burn pile below the chicken coop started at 9 am with a single kitchen match, even so dank, I’m such a Boy Scout. Kept it going all day, till dusk, quite smokeless, and still only about half the slash on the property is burned. The rest for another day, remaining piles under the cherry grove, heaps once as big as Volkswagen Beetles, since dried-out and sunken.

* * * *

October 29, 2021

Heartache all day. Spent some time reading Beth Haas memoir. Drinks after dinner at the National Hotel, Ben and Josh and spouses. But then I beg off, claiming unwellness.

* * * *

November 2, 2021

Second day burning cuttings. Thorny old blackberry canes, all cut into straws. Burn pile lasts all day.

Leaky flashing on cottage evap cooler: Henry’s Roof Patch all around flashing and vent boot.

Dinner at Hunter and Lindsey’s.

* * * *

November 4, 2021

Wild mushrooms, from the ridge. (So-called “pig ear” mushrooms, dank and sharp.) Made risotto.

* * * *

November 5, 2021

An idle day. Read Diana’s friend’s ms, spent some time obeying Brett’s various instructions re: primping up the cottage for rental. Played dobro a good deal. Afternoon, went up on all the tin roofs to caulk holes and leaks, and put up all upstairs storm windows, fixed the several old broken cleats that fasten the storm windows.

* * * *

November 7, 2021

All tomatoes are pulled from beds, and string beans and winter squash torn down. Lettuce is thriving already. Spread compost over two fallow beds (the two nearest the tall one).

(COMPOST: Churned up compost in stalls #2 and #3. Stall #1 is almost over-rich-looking and probably should have been first to be dug up; stall #4 for a year or more has been all cellulose, with chicken manure. Those two stalls (#1 and #4) I left undisturbed.)

Music at the Ruttens’. Large assembly, including Amy’s violin and Elyssa’s mandolin. Very happy with my own playing. Drank a lot, stayed late.

* * * *

In the time of a lull, one’s mind is at peace and naturally defaults to scanning for anything unthought-of that might be going wrong. (Leaks and erosions, imminent structure-failures, promises unkept, subscriptions unpaid, calls unreturned.) Everything in fact seems in good order, and the mind is dimly conscious, too, of the kinds of long-term background enterprises that tend to take care of themselves: prudently invested IRA is still meandering upward, unwatched; the hens are laying and nobody in the coop has Mareks disease. Even teeth never go long unflossed, everything being a sort of investment.

In such a review/tally tonight (glass of bourbon here), it’s meanwhile raining again. Loud clattering on tin roofs. NOAA has forecast 1 to 2 inches in this one. And on the checklist, this feels like the best investment of all: another good long rain: it’s an investment I don’t myself pay into, but yet an economic foundation for all other hopes and dreams and responsibilities. Thanks for the rain.

* * * *

These pandemic years are aging me fast. – Video of myself (I’m up on the roof, in the background of Brett’s cellphone footage of cute cat trying to climb stepladder) – I’m walking along on the slope with an old man’s pawky hesitancy. How did those old trousers get so baggy?

* * * *

November 10, 2021

Firewood into mud room.

DISCONNECTED FROM ELECTRICAL GRID
Partly sunny day: storage-battery hits lowest-point 48% at 8:40am, then tops out at only 80% charge (2:45pm).
[32% recovery in six hours]

* * * *

In café, sentiment surprises. Only in youth do a man’s eyes stay dry and clear. In my cellphone newsfeed I see that the int’l. climate conference has announced (a) that China and the U.S. have reached an agreement to collaborate devising an emissions-reduction plan; and (b) everybody at the conference says they’ll stop subsidizing the oil companies. All these announced good intentions are coming too late, and in fact, it’s likely they’re all talking through their hat. Still, my race’s mix of high hopes and corruption will always have been charming.

* * * *

November 11, 2021

DISCONNECTED FROM ELECTRICAL GRID
Storage-battery hits 10% bottom in middle-night (3:40am).
Sunny day: Back to independence of grid: 10:20am. (3.4 kWh total)
[shifted settings to THREE PERCENT reserve in battery]
Battery maxes at 83% at 3:00pm. Begins then to power house.
[73% recovery in 4hrs,40min]

* * * *

Visit estate lawyer, to determine, basically, what we’d already determined in our last will and testament. But all this is for Brett’s assurance.

Out to a movie at storefront theatre in town.

* * * *

November 12, 2021

To Auburn, for dobro lesson from pedal-steel player.

DISCONNECTED FROM ELECTRICAL GRID
Storage-battery hits bottom (3%) at 8:30 am, only minutes before solar starts coming in.
Sunny day: Battery maxes at 82% at 3:20pm. Begins then to power house for nightfall.
[79% recovery in 5hrs,50min]

* * * *

November 13, 2021

Board meeting, 10 am to noon, convened remotely. Sixteen smart, generous people onscreen, confined each to a little square in the grid, each in the gloom, or the sunny glare, of a separate habitat. I miss seeing all those people in person. I miss the Millers’ house, on a Saturday morning when, on Sacramento’s lawns, the leaves are gold or withering vermillion. After the meeting Mimi brings out her casserole.

Out to horsey country, McCourtney Road, to pick up a used bedstead, $100, “sleigh”-style. It will need lots of ingenious modification, to be suitable. Electrical work in the cottage rewiring ceiling lamps. Dig first exploratory hole for installation of irrigation filter, by the road.

Brett goes out to pick up Thai food in town. In a heartsick mood, I open the best bottle of red.

DISCONNECTED FROM ELECTRICAL GRID
Storage-battery bottoms out at 3% at 8:00 am.
Partly sunny day: Battery maxes at 69% at 3:00pm. Begins then to power house in nighttime mode.
[66% recovery in 7hrs]

* * * *

November 14, 2021

DISCONNECTED FROM ELECTRICAL GRID
Storage-battery hits 3% at 3:00 am.
(Solar starts restoring battery at 10:15am)
Partly sunny day: Battery maxes at 58% at 2:30pm. Begins then to power house.
[55% recovery in 4hrs, 15min]

[From Wallace-Wells book: The worldwide mining of Bitcoin, it alone, uses as much electricity as what’s generated by all the solar panels of the earth.]

More digging for locations of irrigation line. In the process I think I’ve damaged the main shut-off valve.


* * * *

November 15, 2021

DISCONNECTED FROM ELECTRICAL GRID
Storage-battery hits 3% at 12:30 am.
(Solar starts restoring battery at 9:55am)
Cloudy day: Battery maxes at 15% at 2:00pm. Begins then to power house.
[12% recovery in 4hrs, 5min]

* * * *

(The other news, today, is that Royal Dutch Shell is dropping the name “Dutch” and moving out of Holland. Moving to England.)

How this happened: Royal Dutch Shell today was simply “ordered” by their home country (Holland) to cut emissions by 30% in eight years. So they left.

(Royal Dutch Shell are the people who poisoned the Niger River and who hanged the Nigerian journalist Ken Saro-Wiwa by the neck, 1995.)


* * * *

November 24, 2021

Trip to San Diego. In the local paper is the old-fashioned page of fine-print legal notices – doing-business-as declarations called “Fictitious Business Names” – people announcing their ambitions for the world:

Cruiser’s Gourmet Subs
Patio Productions
Advanced Hair Aesthetics
Zenfire Guitar Picks
San Diego Magic Maids

What will happen to all these hopeful people in Malthusian times in the prosperous San Diego economy? People are so wonderful, wanting to be useful/needed/creative. Over the years to come, will the San Diego middle class need so many housemaids? Or guitar picks?

(Somehow – (and I don’t think this is my personal bias) – I think the market for guitar picks will go on pretty steady. Housemaids being a more “elastic” economic good, sacrificable in hard times. Not guitar picks, though.)

* * * *

December 28, 2021

At last, true, prolonged power outage, and the battery performs.

This is luxury. The land outside is dead white, mounded high, and inside here, unconnected from anything, we’ve got lamps and music. It’s a sin.

* * * *

December 29, 2021

James Webb observatory is launched and behaving beautifully. It has to unfold itself from a couple of suitcases, alone in space, to become huge delicate structure of foil panels and sails, and precision mirrors, so it will be able to watch the beginning of time, or nearly. Its home planet is in political and biological endgame crisis, but it did put this up there. We still want to see the beginning of time. Still think that’s important.

(Canadian gov’t’s expense to fix indigenous-child-welfare system: 30 billion. Cost of James Webb project: 10 billion. Those seem like pretty fair values.)

Blizzard still rules this town. Lacking ATT&T, PG&E, internet. I’m sitting in town in café waiting for my to-go order, guys in cannibal tattoos, kohl-and-henna marijuana trimmer girls, Woookies rangy and sunburned, dagger in sheath strapped to hip, all the Calif. counterculture nowadays.


* * * *

December 30, 2021

Unprecedented sustained blizzard of heavy wet snow has broken thousands of trees and taken out power lines and phone lines. Just about every road in the west County, somewhere along its length, has a bramble of power-line cable lying across it. Gas stations not selling gas, grocery stores unable to open. On a very small scale of commerce, people are accepting cash, only cash. But as ATMs don’t work, nobody has cash. This will go on for a long time; repair crews will be overwhelmed.

Sagging roofs under white saddles. Birch fallen across power line (freed by “walking up” its trunk with crosscut-saw undercuts).

Here, so far, the battery is coming through. It got us through three blizzardy overcast days of zero sunshine (while, in our kitchen, we lived on a very stingy flow of (homemade) watts, plus using candles, etc., stretching the battery’s life). Now the clouds have gone and full sun, snow-reflected, is recharging the battery. Sunny days are promised.

* * * *

Last diary entry in this drib-and-drab diary for this year. I see I can be unfaithful to it for, almost, months at a time. A year’s end is an arbitrary point to end a chapter, but I’ll send it up, as is.

Nov. 18, 2018

No wind. Sunny silence in mountains all around. Getting out of a chore, I tell Brett I’ve got to go back  in my trailer and “make tracks.” Unproductive morning so far, I got roped into helping remove hardware from mobile office for Brett, and having got thoroughly sidetracked, I told her I’ve got a two-o’clock appointment and, before then, I want to go back to work and “make tracks.”

Make tracks is exactly what happens. By the end of a good morning you’ve got a few pages. You generated them trancelike by pressing forward. And looking forward is only one half of the experience. The other half is looking back to see what tracks you’ve made.

* * * *

November 9, 2018

Vis a vis the world’s environmental plight, I think my sons’ generation — Hunter’s and Dashiell’s — will just have to take an interest in the project of hardship. They’ll need to be ethically equipped — and I think they are — to live in a world of slim chances and disappointed plans, possibly grotesque unfairness. Being smart and wise, win the prize Voltaire recommends at the end of Candide, “cultivating their own gardens.”

Fires again in the west today. Near here, whole towns in conflagration. This antique ranch of ours is not long for this world, tinder, all made of boards. The real disease the West has is a phenomenon called “evapotranspiration.” Which is this: the Sierra Nevada bristles with tall fir and cedar and pine, all over its slopes, and each tree is a straw: ground moisture goes up its trunk, and the leaves breathe. “Evaporation” happens in plants’ respiration. Now, for every degree of global warming, the soil bank dries up faster, exponentially. This is how the desert will be made here, as the soils’ perennial water deposit dries. The process will be climaxed in various places by wildfires that finish off the old tall dark lively forests. What then takes over is chaparral.

Hypocrite that I am, I myself thought it up, that the one Golden Rule of virtue for an environmentalist is to live as much as possible as if in abject, subsistence-level poverty, holes in elbows, unwashed old car, beans for dinner. I and all my liberal friends seem almost as problematic as the truculent climate deniers. Nobody’s changing. Everybody likes his job, his house, his shopping routine, his car, even his commute, hopping on a plane, air conditioning, keeping up with the standard that is considered normal. People don’t like to perspire apparently. Nor ever want a sweater to wreck the ensemble they’ve decided on. If people wanted to think about the future, they might try staying home, not going anywhere, and beginning rudely to experiment with what they can provide for themselves. Our supply chains are going to have to shorten. The really absurd thing is, true misery is the adaptation that will befall. This adaptation will possibly mostly be gradual. Or, in some places, come with a whump.

In general, my sons will live on in the direction of the 21st century. I won’t be here. They’ll get through it, even with happiness, if they can practice a vigorous optimism and take a creative interest in the problems of privation, even catastrophe, or at least hard knocks, and also justice in a competitive world where maybe all bets will be off.

* * * *

Oct 14 – Everyone has gone to Santa Cruz for a “strategizing retreat” and I can, in three days of solitude, read through the whole ms of “Strategic Metals” (presently so-called).

* * * *

Before she commits suicide by diving under train, Anna Karenina throws her handbag aside, and V. Nabokov wants to know, “What was in that handbag?”

* * * *

Tremendous fruiting of chestnuts. While pears have been a no-show this year, chestnuts are abundant and will become the new staple food for a while. I’ve never preserved chestnuts but there must be a way.

* * * *

Oct. 12, 2018

This diary has dwindled to dribs and drabs. I suppose I’m busy and distracted, or just finding the topic of myself unworthy or maybe the more convinced of my own inconsequentiality. So. Here is another resolve to be more faithful

* * * *

Happy, dinnertime listening to the radio as I cook, because the world seems to be taking an interest in the environment. Human beings are perhaps redeemable.

Some years ago I realized that my assumptions about life are bleak: (A) this planet, if we’re honest and serious about this, hosts the only place for intelligent life in the knowable universe; we’re not going anywhere; (B) here, various extinctions and holocausts are coming on so fast, they could start to hit even in my children’s lifetime; and (C) the existence of God (for me, anyway, living as I do in the open jaws of Pascal’s Wager)… Let’s just say “God” would be an entity with no inclination to intervene. (If these were the steps in a syllogism, the last would be: unpopulated earth.)

But this week the panicky – panicky! – report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has sounded the correct note. Smart people are being allowed on the radio, and on tv infotainment shows, to talk about it, and to speak plainly. It’s very lonely here for many years being the only worried one. I should say in fact, it’s been lonely being the only one in despair. When you’re actually in despair, you don’t know it, or say it. It’s serious, and not a matter for conversation. Even less a matter for “literature.” True despair is only for the canceled.

I have to give a reading in SF next week and will, again, read my “clothesline” piece.

* * * *

Interesting factoid: Mayans invented “zero,” too, independently, all on their own. (Just like the Arabs, who maybe got it from India?).

I realize “zero” is a tool and an artificial contrivance. Somehow the cardinal numbers were already there as preexistent facts discovered by us. But zero is different; it’s man-made. It’s a gadget, human-fashioned, with uses — like any pry-bar or wheel. Zero’s nothingness isn’t something we see. Or experience. We had to invent a certain “nothingness” – or invent, at least, a little oval to hermetically contain a safe dose of nothingness, to serve as a tool in our thinking. In our thinking about the unthinkable. (But then, come to think of it, everything is unthinkable.)

* * * *

Sept. 2018

Again today, the chance to stop and be patient behind a halted school bus: the flipped-out “STOP” shingle, the many blinking taillights. Always a privilege. Kids (of every age, here in rural districts) will swarm out (or trickle out). Sit back, put it in neutral, put your rush aside, as if you happened to be present for the Northern Lights, the opportunity to be patient with schoolchildren, it almost somehow absolves/saves me. The good effects a writer has in the world (if any) are going to be remote. At least this is a happy chance to do a certain specific job, just sit here, and do the job well, while the children get conducted off the bus and across the road (in middle of road stands the phlegmatic pear-shaped guy with his red STOP lollipop) and get themselves across the street and into the safe channels.

* * * *

May 10

Hunter and Lindsey arrive from Wash DC. Take up residence in cottage.

* * * *

It seems to me I wasn’t hearing the rumble of bees this spring – not in the cherries, not in the pears or apples, not out in the meadows’ clover. Lots of blossoms, but no bee-hum. Now it’s beginning to look – at least in the case of the pears – that there are no fruit. The wild plums are fruiting, but so far, on pear branches, no little green peas sprout.

* * * *

April 28, 2018

In SF, on errands, I’m on Polk Street, where two really tormented-looking, tired, butchered old trees, planted in sidewalk, are condemned by the city. Botched haircuts, dead stumps, lopsidedly groping, ending in failed sprigs, both are tacked with posters: “TREE TO BE REMOVED.” The fine print on the poster: the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Forestry has checked every box in the long list of potential reasons for removal. (“Poor Structure,” “Species Vulnerability,” “Superannuation,” “Detritus Litter.” Every box is checked.) Some inspector really must have disliked this tree, and, in the blank space for additional comments, has has taken the trouble to hand-write: “Wrong Tree, Wrong Place.”

So I walk off thinking about the logic of wrong-plus-wrong. And of the possibility of two wrongs’ adding up to a right.

Surely the “right-tree/wrong-place” situation calls for a tree’s death; surely the “wrong-tree/right-place” combination calls for death; but shouldn’t there be a vast wonderful forest for the “wrong trees” to be in “wrong places” and live in harmony? That particular forest sounds like a polyculture, and fertile, and genetically diverse. If there ever did exist such a forest, it’s where I personally would want to move in. Build my cabin there. (That forest sounds a little like San Francisco, where I did build my cabin.)

* * * *

BIODIESEL IS BACK, locally.

This means a lot. This is a local occasion for global jubilation. I again have a backdoor connection to 100% biodiesel from agricultural waste. $4.21/gal. What a bargain. I have so many reasons to be wringing the old rag that is my heart. Now I’ve got one less.

* * * *

Note to Bob and Brenda:

You folks are aware, we’re building a Tiny House on wheels. (Are you aware of the Tiny House gambit? For our Squaw bookstore?)

So I thought you’d like this. We need to insure the thing, once it’s built. First thing I thought of, I called the old local State Farm guy who insures our house here. Described this thing (it’s on wheels, will be towed, etc.) and was put on hold, to be passed along to the in-house Authority on unusual insurance questions.

This woman turned out to be a Not-Good-Listener (one of those people perhaps neurologically predisposed to impatience). I described it but she wouldn’t let me get very far. “Well,” she said, “would members of the public enter? Other than writers and poets?”

Well, yes. Possibly, yes, we’d want to attract people. It’ll be the office and bookstore. It’s supposed to look “gypsy-caravan,” while creating work space for us. The ski resort has been less hospitable to us in recent years, than it used to be, and doesn’t want to rent us so much space. . .

“And this is just three weeks in the summer?”

Yes, the rest of the time it would be here on our property in Nevada City. Where, again, it would be our office.

“Well, if people are just going to write poems in there, I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing we can underwrite. If you were a legitimate business . . .”

I decided I hadn’t been clear (or she’d grown impatient enough to be deaf) so I tried to sound business-like. “Oh, it’s a business. We’ve got a board of directors — and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar budget (I think I may have exaggerated, because I was starting to feel insulted/belittled). We’ve been doing this for decades. People come from far and wide, from all over the world. And pay tuition. It’s more like a ‘school’ business model.”

She pondered for a while.

“Well, will you sit inside this? And write poetry?”

I thought. “Possibly. That happens. It’s an office,” and I said so. “Though I personally probably wouldn’t. But yes, that happens.”

She was finished with me now and put the conversation away, “I’m sorry. If there’s poetry involved, we can’t insure it.”

 

* * * *

Wonderful remark of John Paul II: That in the Genesis Creation story, there’s a line implying a certain metaphysic — (he’s talking about the “and-He-saw-that-it-was-good” line. It certainly was a strange and wonderful interesting idea to have popped up ex nihilo: that anything was QUOTE “good” UNQUOTE.)

Pope’s words (https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/jp2tb2.htm):

 “ens et bonum convertuntur” [being and the good are convertible]. Undoubtedly, all this also has a significance for theology, and especially for the theology of the body.”

 

* * * *

Hard times now: saying goodbye to Barbara Hall, who was such a good light in my life personally. In everybody’s life everywhere.

All the warmth and sparkle were gone long ago, but still they’re what lasts.

* * * *

Crossing the border at Nogales. I know I’m back getting back near the USA, because when I search my phone for something beginning with “f,r,a,…,” one of the first auto-fill options is this urgency: “FRAPPUCCINOS NEAR ME.”

* * * *

Sitting on beach, San Carlos, bare feet in sand, beer, in shade of palapa, [this American diversion is not my style, but it’s a patient father’s job] eating great Veracruz snapper in unwrapped foil. I’m reminded of Oakley, who in his latter days, 80-some years old, sat in precisely such a situation saying happily, “My blood pressure is going through the sand.”

It’s got echoes because Oakley was of that generation that saw in bullfighting a literary value, and valor, and because in Mexico, arenas and sangre have always been so mixed.

* * * *

November 22, 2017

Short stories in a bundle have gone to Joy. Now I’m returning to “Immanence” making asked-for changes, and I’m put in mind of William Maxwell’s dictum: that a New Yorker-magazine sort of story employs “the sentence as the unit for advancing narrative. Rather than the paragraph.” I’ve been reading so much old stuff – Ivo Andric – which requires extraordinary patience of the modern reader, for the modern reader is spoiled by prose’s richer density.

* * * *

November 10, 2017

Good-hearted Gov. Brown is in Europe campaigning for carbon-reduction commitments, climate-change mitigations. He says, in his exhorting tones, “This is real, it’s coming, it’s catastrophic, it’s going to alter civilization, and it’s happening faster than you think.” Which is good. Jerry is a stalwart.

But hearing him say so made me think, what if new generations’ expectations and senses are so degraded, they won’t care anymore that the tapwater smells bad, because that’s just how the water is; they won’t really remark anymore that you can’t get certain kinds of seafood, because that’s how things are. (\And who, anyway, ever did go see a coral reef?) – and don’t care anymore if you can’t freely lie down in a meadow. Or care that you can’t go outdoors between noon and 3:00.

Don’t we already live in a compromised degraded world, which, if it were portrayed thirty years ago in a sci-fi movie, would have looked like preposterous toxic filth and competitive meanness and unthinkable dystopia. – The climate-refugee migrations, the multitudes drowning as their boats capsize in the Mediterranean, the well-water you can’t drink because it’s full of fracking chemicals (Pennsylvania) or agricultural shit (Nebraska and Iowa). People are living in this. People think this is how it is. Nobody thinks it’s wrong. Farming families think it’s ordinary to bring in 5-gal jugs of drinking water. Because anybody’d be a fool to drink the regular water the Good Lord gave you.

The new POTUS is what makes me think this way. His vulgarity and dishonesty are getting routinized. People get used to such things. He’s changing the discourse permanently. People will think that gangsterish banana-republic politics and open bigotry are the real world. A world of integrity will be treated as mythic or legendary or naive. Same with a natural world that was once benign.

* * * *

October 28, 2017

Morning in the Annex working on “All Things.” Afternoon in hard labor excavating, with shovel and pike, old retaining wall. The moralistic pleasure, the Protestant or “deist” pleasure, of exhaustion/dedication. Then glass wine reading Joyce Carol Oates’s essay in NYRB while eating pork sandwich in PlumpJack corner table, Squaw Valley’s little parlor-den.

(Lucky me: I was sizing up that unlovely old aspen – which now really did have to go, because my digging would be exposing its roots. But my chainsaw is down in Nev. City. I might have actually felled it with a tiny pruning saw plus elbow grease, but then I would’ve had this big tree lying across the road, not to be dressed with a pruning saw. And Kevin happened to come across the street with his chainsaw. Got the whole thing sawed-up and disposed in a half-hour. Now in the moonlight, ribbony woodchips are strewn in the driveway and across the road.

* * * *

October 27, 2017

Joy calls, early AM. Talking with New York (actually she’s in Rhinebeck, but) – I hear occasional incessant background “ding”: She’s got her laptop open and it’s the sound of emails’ constant impact. (The comparable thing here, on my un-busy meadow, is the Perseid meteor showers in August.)

The sheer number of needy people who are constantly assailing a New York agent! I think, “Well, I guess she loves that turbulence. Might feel a bit lonely if it ever stopped.” And then I think a little further, and I thank Providence for her. Those are (possibly) some of the most wonderful, difficult people in the world who are importuning her by email. And there she is, at her laptop in New York, their catcher in the rye.

* * * *

October 24, 2017

“All Things”! Awake early.

Afternoon on grant-request folderol.

Angelo comes by to look at huge pine with dangerous spar over cottage – wants too much money to take it down.

Dinner: lamb shanks are ecologically sinful (frozen in vacuum-seal plastic, yet!) but delicious.

* * * *

October 22, 2017

Auden, on the itinerant life of the writer who must be a public peddler of his own literature at universities and writers conferences (which Frost called “barding around”):

Since Merit but a dunghill is,

I mount the rostrum unafraid…

* * * *

October 21, 2017

Still on that inchoate story about “poverty” ethic.

Strenuous afternoon, cutting up downed cedar and sorting its slash. To roadside.

Letter for “Stern” grant.

The crop of winter squash was brought in last night (pre-freeze), and Brett is out there today stripping the garden of all its summer festivity. Bare poles. Cadaverous heaps. The nightfall adventure (always dicey) of cooking out of our own garden is becoming routine in Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov. The pears in a gallette, the trompetta squash in rice. Roma tomatoes heaped in every available vessel.

Frugality is one of the elegances (a little-discussed but essential elegance) of the kitchen, the cocina, the cuisine. Frugality the “beauty” element, as in mathematics.

* * * *

October 20, 2017

Home again in Nevada City. Get down traces of new Poverty story but intend to bring up “All Things” again, when I feel I’ve got a stance back. Still no word from Joy about “Immanence.” I think she’s considering how (whether!) it can be put into the world.

Fell the smaller of the two firewood cedars, and do a bit of limbing. Dash is staying home recovering from the removal of all his wisdom teeth. When I bring down these big trees, Brett and Dash bring chairs (wrought-iron, like in an ice-cream shop) and set them up at a distance in the meadow like a Victorian audience of spectators at a set battle between Indians and townsfolk. Little dog on leash.

* * * *

Squaw, three days:

• Monday eve: Pick up a bit of lumber at Mtn. Hardware.
• Tuesday: truckload last month’s so-called greenwaste to the Placer County dump; materials at Mtn. Hardware; groceries at Safeway. Fashion two post-and-pier supports for deck and install, as well as a chuck to clog the house-corner weakness. Clean old ceramic tiles for annex stovetop repair.
• Wednesday: Glue stove tiles in place; soil for upper-house posts, forestall erosion; put away swamp cooler for winter; bamboo shades off both decks; fallen hood replaced on annex gas meter. (PlumpJack dinner solo)
• Thursday: awake 5am, worried over Squaw properties’ insolvency; by flashlight I hunt up the right thin little wafer of wood to shim up the Annex’s wiggly butcher block; quadruple-shot cappuccino, hardware store; rodent barrier behind fireplace stones (insultation foam and steel wool); build retaining wall below annex swamp cooler as the sky is clouding over. Then cleaning up and packing truck while squalls come in.

Dividend of my solitude: notion of a story describing a new marriage and its invasion by the Prophet of Poverty in all his righteousness.

* * * *

October 16, 2017

Squaw Valley alone. As I get above the 5000-ft elev. the air starts to sparkle (October), and the little mountain maples are popping up golden. Then at 6000ft, the aspens popping up with different gold. Dry and stony now are the gullies that, last spring, were bouncing with wide snowmelt water.

Stop at Mountain Hardware, Truckee, for 3 doug-fir studs and the proper work gloves for this weather. In the truck, can of soup, loaf of bread.

On the drive, I’m thinking about what a vexing writer I am. I’m not much of a people-pleaser – (which risks being vexing to all, from my agent on down the whole chain of readership) – because of course “pleasing people” is the supreme desideratum of any commercial product. And writing is a commercial product. Maybe any human artifact’s one main desideratum, and reason for existence, is “to be pleasant.” I certainly do know all the “craft” secrets of making publishable writing and I’m a sometime part of the Literary-Industrial complex that retails those “secrets,” but yet – this is my hypocrisy – I’m unwilling to deploy them at my own work table, not under the sight of my own highly esteemed reader. Whom I respect above all. Who recognizes poppycock and turns from it.

* * * *

Happy day: two neutron stars collide (or rather, collided 100 million years ago), and their blip is detected here both by LIGO and by telescope – i.e., both gravity waves and electromagnetism registered the thump. So the universe is getting knitted together intelligibly by “science.”

* * * *

October 15, 2017

Back from San Francisco, where I always do well. Andrew and I walked all over town. Good food everywhere, good “Lit” celebration in the Mission.

The train ride, back up into the mountains, I’m starting to think, is a bigger pleasure than the drive, and not just an environmentalist’s obligation. San Francisco isn’t a small provincial town anymore. And parking: that alone is uncivilized.

However, from the train, the view is of the Union Pacific right-of-way and the California suburbs’ backside (not the old industrial districts’ backsides, which were wrought beautifully by working men, by necessity, by entropy, rust and other oxidation, lovely neglect). In the suburbs, I see the California that is more of a disappointment, comfortable, ignorant, maybe even exclusive, self-aggrandizing. Reading “Bridge on the Drina,” by Andric.

Then, home again, I find the bears did get into the pears while I’ve been gone. Whole branches pulled off. Lost only 2 or 3 boxes pears, but the offense stings. (At least a dozen mounds of scat around the property. Could this be one bear only? Probably a mother and cubs.)

So I get a piece of meat marinating and I go outside in emergency mode to spend the afternoon saving a few banker-boxes’ full of pears. This occupies the rest of the day. Soon I’m (this is a new experience) actually slipping-and-sliding in stepped-on pears and abundant bear shit underfoot while I work – because the bears, otiose as the upper-class Romans, shit while they eat, where they eat.

* * * *

October 12, 2017

Luke and Maggie and their livestock still here. Last night, they brought salmon and spanakopita. Today: I alone to SF, for LitCrawl reading, but also to meet up with Andrew, visit SFMOMA for highly anticipated show, and to be in the city I love, in its time of worry, during Northern California fires.

Brett gives me ride to Colfax for train to SF.

* * * *

October 10, 2017

Fires on Kentucky Ridge climbing up from Deer Creek. (High winds last night.) CalFire updates have been saying the same thing for the last few hours: “900 acres and rapidly spreading, 0% contained.”

The only people we know out there at risk are Luke and Maggie, who in afternoon come up the gravel drive in two vans, packed with framed artwork, file boxes, their two cats and three oddball rescue dogs, and about two dozen guitars and dobros and banjos. (A couple of these still in pieces, partly-built or half-repaired.) This is the best employment of a kitchen table. Cheese and fruit and tea, and corn chips and eventually beer. On kitchen laptop computer we’ve got the police-scanner all afternoon – its steady hum, its occasional rapid-fire burst of protocol and digits, and sometimes interpretable info. We make a big roast, get out the better wine. In van they’ve brought, along with their chattel, their bottle of old scotch, and we get out tiny cracked demitasse cups and toast the vagaries of fate.

* * * *

This morning I’m working on somebody’s critique while all over the house, all refugee folk and their animals sleep. At dawn the sound of helicopters starts up again, and CDF spotter planes, followed by retardant-dropping bombers with the sloping red bar on the fuselage like the heraldic bend sinister, flying low and heavy over the meadow.

* * * *

October 8, 2017

Sunday.

Short story again. Resist editing work, as I could use a day or two’s “distance” on it.

Then get a start on pears. Bring in just four boxes, with plenty still out there. They’re not ripening correctly, variously precocious after this hot-and-dry summer. Some hard-green, while many lie mushy gold on the ground.

Dash and his friends are in the mud room, and while I climb in pear branches, I can hear plenty of laughter. There’s a kind of an unchained, delighted laugh Dash has when he’s with his friends. Never heard except when he’s with his friends, it bounces off a new place somewhere in his chest, and it’s good he’s getting practice with that laugh. That will come in handy for him, in his outward life, and in his inner life. That’s what friends are for, I guess, partly.

By being judicious and patient, I can pick all the exactly ready-for-independence pears, which, green, will ripen together in their boxes on garage floor. Pears do better when they can mellow in proximity to other pears. There’s a pheromone they share as they soften and get complicated – (I think maybe “sweetness” is how the human nostril accepts the airborne chemical). Thus the ripeness gets turned on as a social thing.

* * * *

Evap. coolers all shut down and drained and covered.

* * * *

October 7, 2017

To Marin for board meeting.

In the mailbox, little padded envelope: Sands sends twist-tied Baggie of hard-to-get spice sumac, necessary in Israeli cooking, a powder so vermillion it looks more like an indelible dye.

4am, I see my neighbor’s lamp lit, and I think, everybody’s got woes.

* * * *

October 6, 2017

More chainsaw troubles, more delays, another trip to SPD saw shop. Since I sharpen the chain on my own workbench, must have filed one side’s teeth sharper than the other side’s. So now as I buck logs into rounds, every cut tries to yaw off in a fancy French curve.

The saw shop: two customer-guys come booming in. Heavy flannel shirts. Fella wants a saw. This one here on the wall will do, whyn’t you sell me this one here?

He’s a small, late-middle-aged, cowboy-handsome guy, his sidekick larger and quieter. He’s already got his checkbook out, but the two oil-stained saw technicians, joined by another customer (clean-cut bystander kid), all get together and talk him into a bigger saw. That little one he’d chosen is for weekend warriors. He ought to have a twenty-four-inch blade, at the very least, and he won’t regret it. If he bought that little one, it would be in the repair shop all the time.

So he buys the big one. What the hell. Extra hundred bucks. The kid tells him he made the right decision, and the man behind the counter says again, that little one is for weekend warriors, as if he’d just thought of that expression. And the kid says again, ‘You’re gonna be happy with that saw.” (Yeah, gimme a quart of bar-and-chain oil, too. And a 5/32-inch file. Well, shit, I got the wrong checkbook.) He goes out to his car to get the right checkbook, and comes back and starts filling out a check, meanwhile complaining, grumbling as if to himself, “Take my advice, don’t get cancer. I already had fuckin’ chemo this morning. Fuckin’ awful. Don’t get cancer.” General silence. He finishes making out his check, signing it with a flourish, and the kid says at last, “Well…, you’re gonna be happy with that saw.”

Farewells, they get into their pickup. A few politically conservative bumper stickers. The truck is from the Highboy Mine, up in Allegheny, the savage boondocks (so they’ve made the long trip for chemo this morning to the hospital here in town), and the counterman turns to me, “Now what can I do for you?”

* * * *

October 5, 2017

Int. Monetary Fund yesterday: The recovery from the 2007 recession is complete, global economic “prosperity” has returned, and everywhere the human species is repainting/repaving/reengineering the earth surface. World economic growth is at 3.6% per year (says IMF). This is, of course, “good news,” and it’s being treated as such. Taking any other view of it seems perverse, cranky, merely picturesque.

The bear is back in the neighborhood. It’s the season when big hibernators have to do a lot of eating. Last night we had a forager here, evidently, and now I’ll have to be getting all the pears in, maybe on the too-early side, because they’ll be a temptation, and there’s so many, their depredation would be an economic loss. The prospect of early harvest screws up my week, slightly.

* * * *

October 3, 2017

Back to woodcutting today. Restoration of email makes for a tiresome pre-dawn morning, sorting, endless sorting, and in fact I give up and decide all this old bygone email is a waste of my time. Afternoon with Dash, a beautiful drive, Highway 49 to Auburn, Dash at the wheel, Bon Hiver on the stereo, for replacement of lost passport at the Placer County Clerk’s large, efficient, briskly-staffed new offices. (“How much do you think working in this place is like working at Dunder-Mifflin?”)

* * * *

October 3, 2017

Awake early, the “music-critic” story, working indoors in mud room, the season’s first woodstove-fire. Happy: a story isn’t made only of big things, it’s got plenty of details, too, plenty of small pleasures, which the writer in his habitual enforced austerity can tend to forget, and this morning the right details came fluttering in.

No work outside, this day: yesterday the chainsaw came apart in my hands – somehow every screw in the thing (muffler; cover housing) was vibrating loose. Unable to thread muffler bolt, where gasket has been heat-fused to the engine block. I brought it to saw shop under SPD Market and – typical small-town stuff – the gnarly guy down there wouldn’t let me just drop it off and leave it, he hauled it up on his low scuffed steel counter and got interested in the problem, so after about five minutes, I was able to bring it back home in one trip, eight dollars.

* * * *

October 1, 2017

Sunday morning, tinkered with music-critic story pre-dawn, but today will be mostly working outside. Yesterday I took down the bigger cedar (felling wedges did prove crucial: the felling cut approached the notch at a too-oblique angle and the resulting triangular hinge of wood wouldn’t flop: so it was tapping in the felling wedges that tipped it) and there’s maybe two days’ work there in the butchering. Beached whale almost the length of the meadow, to be taken apart with diligence, parsimony: My ambition this time is to have almost nothing go out to the roadside for the chipper.

Brett has been fooling around with the staffing for Squaw, and she’s happy. She’s like her father, a strategist, a convivial strategist – and a creative-writing conference is similar to throwing a party, a kind of large-scale convivial strategizing. Sometimes discouraged about it all, this morning she’s been phoning Michelle and Lisa et alia and getting some hoped-for email responses, and she’s saying, “I’m so excited!” Her father always pretended to dread it, but she loves it openly. She disappears into the bathroom, drawing the pocket door, saying (about staff who’ve committed), “I’m so excited.” On radio, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, keep kidding each other around and I’m suiting up to work outside. At kitchen table, she comes back, sits back down before laptop and she says again, “I’m so excited.”

* * * *

September 29, 2017

Friday afternoon, to Auburn to view small offices on wheels.

Ingredients of a tagine, as Heather and Troy left us this choice lamb – cinnamon-cardamum-coriander. Turkish apricots.

* * * *

September 26, 2017

Greater self-sufficiency these months (from maybe July to October): dinners provided entirely from within fifty yards of where I stand at hearth cooking – (with, most nights, one exception; tonight the exception of thawed smoked-chicken sausages from SPD). Season of candles is coming back, as at this hour, beyond the pines, amber and salmon vie, also a curious bruise lavender. Dash has been somehow demoted from all his sophisticated Bach/Villa-Lobos, and he’s been assigned the Canon in G. Guitar notes arrive from the next room. – It’s an overused piece of music, but it gets its poignancy 100% back when it’s explored, haltingly, suspensefully, by a new cherub. We listen from the kitchen. Measure by measure, the Canon in G keeps emerging OK. The dog, tired from play, has been sleeping in a corner chair, and now his eyes aren’t closed: they’re half-open. – I think he’s not sleeping but “listening to the music.” That’s how it looks. The older I get the more I wonder about my fellow creatures’ states of consciousness and how they compare to my own rumored consciousness. (Dog has no verbal language, but he is informed by other kinds of actionable data far surpassing my own sources. I know a dog has got knowledge. Got it in spades.) What’s inestimable would be his “wisdom.” He’s getting to be a middle-aged, life-experienced dog now. And he may not know about Donald Trump or traffic-stoplights or the SATs or quantum physics. He doesn’t know that Pachelbel just went from the tonic to the relative minor, which, in G, would be E-minor. I do know about that kind of stuff. But I’m thinking such extra information doesn’t necessarily much influence my actual moment-to-moment experience of the world.

I’m not sure any “wisdom” I’ve acquired over decades is any better-founded or more useful than the dog’s. Literally I think our accomplishments are, in many ways, equal there. He knows it’s his boy playing that guitar in the next room. He must have some sense that those are ordered tones – so maybe there’s “aesthetic pleasure” for him in that. His belly is full, and he has some justified expectations that, soon, he’ll pile into bed with everybody. He knows all his people are here and everybody’s safe.

* * * *

More of the feeling-my-age department this morning, this dewy morning. Need to take down two cedars at meadow’s edge, one big and one medium, for 2018-2020’s firewood. For the first time ever, I may call upon (and pay) a “youngster,” that ubiquitous local creature – just because the one’s diameter is bigger than my saw blade’s length, and while I know how to fell such a biggie, I’d have to invest in some felling wedges. Most of all, though, I think a man’s mid-sixties can signal (be realistic) the age of clumsiness and incompetence and bad luck. (Or the onset, anyway). The thing is, the “youngster” has gotta make a living, and, it turns out, wants a tremendous amount of $, just to fell it. He would be asked only to make two cuts and watch it fall down and leave. I’d  do the limbing and bucking. Still.

* * * *

September 24, 2017

Sunday. The story of the music critic and the quadriplegic is done: at least a solid first draft to sit and develop a rind and declare its fine sourness.

More repairs to weir: I hike up to the irrigation ditch while listening (via earbuds) to podcast (three delightful brits in a Chelsea pub discussing Lowry’s “Volcano” novel), and I tack a finer-mesh screen over the face of the box. Dig deep in the metal box, arm’s-length deep, to scoop up the accumulated mud at the bottom, as fine and silky as what potters call “slip.”

Back home, with old pork roast, I’m making posole, getting exactly the taste, homey and dishwater-sour, of hominy and chilies and cumin. (The secret of a lot of Mexican cooking sometimes seems to be: stick to canned, store-bought ingredients.)

Dash has done enough raking today, in the perpetual, unfinishable project of “defensible-space” firebreak, and has gone skateboarding.

* * * *

September 23, 2017

I come into Barbara’s cottage and Brett’s domain there, after much work in the woods brush-clearing, thinking of myself as “hankering, mystical, gross.”

Brett has been interviewing Barbara, as she often does, about her childhood memories. Which are always the same few – but this time there’s an embellishment. Barbara thinks we all really ought to go back to her childhood home by the Sac river. All of us. Why? Because of the big lawn, where “you could run and scream and play all you want.”

* * * *

September 14, 2017

First cool day of the season.

* * * *

September 10, 2017

China this week reversed an old policy, sharply and without warning: Their ports have stopped accepting boatloads of our garbage, the stuff we like to refer to as “recycling.” They’re actually intercepting the boats in their ports, turning them around and sending them back to us. This will suddenly make an important American business unprofitable. I.e., the garbage/recycling business.

The story of the packaging industry, presently unwritten, is one of the great American scandals. Its booming growth in the 20^thcentury. There was once a time when every general store in every town had bins, with scoops. Nowadays the attractive stylish “can” or “box” or “carton” is really the commodity Americans are laying out their money for. Reaching for on store shelves. Tearing open with their fingernails, or by the leverage of a pop-top ring. (“Container Corporation of America” was one of my dad’s commercial PR film clients, in the sixties.) What’s inside the container (beer? cereal? Los Angeles tapwater? sugar?) is less an interest or a care.

Years ago, when I was a bartender in Midwest, I remember Pabst Blue Ribbon drinkers scorning Budweiser drinkers. And heaping contempt on Coors. Meanwhile, some were undyingly loyal to Coors and thought Budweiser horse piss. Or were gourmets and appreciated Michelob, looking down upon the guzzlers of Coors. Each of these people – everybody at life’s barbecue – was holding an aluminum cylinder containing pretty much the same stuff, possibly identical stuff, whose unique label design they identified with.

After this China decision on garbage, we American environmentalist liberals, with our “recycling” bins out at the curb heaped up in affluence, we’re about to discover ourselves hip-deep in our own effluent – effluent of the paper kind and the plastic kind, pizza boxes, Amazon Prime cartons. – The old days of our great-grandparents’ filling their own jars or sacks at the store will be hard for the average person to envision, or ever bring back.

* Affluent is Latin for “flowing away.” You’re “affluent” when your wealth is flowing unchecked away from you. Those natural resources in the “recycling” bin at the curb: they are our wealth.

* * * *

“Basurero” – Latin American term for one whose métier is “basura.” They who live in the gully where the avalanche of trash spills, eking a living there. Similar construction to “caballero,” “vaquero,” “marinero.” The point is, we’re all always getting closer to being basureros, if we plan on collectively surviving (with, e.g., compost bucket soup stock, and with salvage lumber pile and recycling archive).

* * * *

September 7, 2017

How to iron out your short story:

Take out any “telling.” Substitute “showing.”

No unlikable protagonists. Ideally, readers must “identify” with a character, which would mean creating a mix of only the proudest aspects of the reader’s personality.

Kill a few darlings, of course.

Above all, sustain the fictive dream. This means that the reader should be able to fall into (and remain in) the swoon of believing that these are actual events transpiring: the reader is supposed to believe that he doesn’t think about an author who is inventing this story, and actually to remain on that level of innocent credulity, throughout.

Such regularization, evidently, can make for a very acceptable and publishable story.

* * * *

September 3, 2017

Squaw Valley. Alone without Brett. The dilapidated risers in the stairs that climb from the Annex to the upper road. The Miller party and the McClatchy party.

To accomplish the annual brush clearing on the hillside, for the first time ever I’ve hired an apparently “undocumented worker,” name of Placido (averted of eye, florid of complexion, bravo of demeanor, disconcertingly middle-aged for this hard work all day on steep slopes under sun). This kind of hiring is, on my scale, extravagant and elitist, but this year necessary/unavoidable. So today I have to bring Placido his packet of cash.

The note Placido left on the doormat, weighted down by a stone:

“PLEASE CALL MI” (followed by given name and matronymic and patronymic, and cell phone number).

This note was jotted on the back of a page that had obviously been rolling around in his car for a long time. On the reverse side was the following information:

General Instructions

Tahoe Forest Hospital District

Emergency Department

 

Thank you for visiting the Tahoe Forest Hospital District-Emergency Department. You have been evaluated today by Brestens, Charles H., MD for the following condition(s):

 

SUBSTANCE ABUSE: ABUSE OF ALCOHOL

ALCOHOL USE DISORDER WITH ALCOHOL ABUSE. ANXIETY REACTION WITH TOTAL BODY NUMBNESS NOW RESOLVED WITH LOW-DOSE BENZODIAZEPRINE.

 

INSTRUCTIONS:

Drink plenty of fluids. No alcohol.

 

PRESCRIPTION MEDICATIONS:

Diazepam 5mg: Take orally every 8 hours as needed for anxiety. Dispense fifteen (15) as needed. No refills.

Understanding of the discharge instructions verbalized by patient.

When Placido showed up to get his money, I of course didn’t mention the note. He accepted the cash in sealed envelope and pocketed it without counting it: I had to urge him to count it, to make sure it’s right. He stayed for an hour, solamente para platicar. (Of Trump and immigration troubles, etc, Y sus hijos que no tienen papeles.) He may sometimes drink himself into oblivion, but – at age forty or so – did a much more thorough and scrupulous job clearing weeds than I ever do.

* * * *

“Spencer the Rover,” as sung by Chris on Idyllwild deck:

And his children come around him with their prattle-prattling stories,
With their prattle-prattling stories to drive care away.
And he’s as happy as those
As have thousands of riches.
Contented he’ll remain and not ramble away

* * * *

August 30, 2017

Flooding in Houston.

This Doomsaying Environmentalist might almost get a little schadenfreude pleasure out of this, nature’s revenge on Oil City, but this isn’t funny anymore.

* * * *

August 29, 2017

Back from Lucy’s wedding (wonderful). Back in the saddle.

* * * *

The Vatican has to devise a new, 21^st-century policy. What shall they do about the gluten-intolerant supplicant, hands cupped for the wafer of bread? The Holy See issues the following bulletin:

“Low-gluten hosts (partially gluten-free) are valid matter, provided they contain a sufficient amount of gluten to obtain the confection of bread.”

* * * *

June 21, 2017

William Maxwell, who edited fiction at The New Yorker during certain great decades (from Fitzgerald through Nabokov and Cheever and Updike, Salinger and Townsend-Warner and Gallant) was asked whether anything distinguished the magazine’s style. Response: “Something that is characteristic of writers who appear The New Yorker is that the sentence is the unit by which the story advances, not the paragraph.” I find that fascinating. My own work, too, puts a bigger burden on the sentence, in that way.

Lately I’m reading Dreiser, seeing how that now superannuated generation did make paragraphs the unit of narration. Turgid. Philip Roth claims Dreiser as his earliest influence, and one definitely sees that pacing, all that exposition. Even fellow Midwesterner Jonathan Franzen has a bit of the Dreiser-style exposition.

* * * *

In long email from John Clark, re: the Diebenkorn/Matisse show:

“Picasso: ‘To copy others is necessary. To copy oneself is abject.”

* * * *

May 22, 2017

Sands’s house. All around the dinner table, lots of laughter. Maggie and Luke, Nancy Carlin and Howard and everybody. Barbara meanwhile, in her disorientation and constant panic-stricken distress, has been excused from the table, and from where I sit, I’m the only one at the party who has a steady view of her. She’s in a wing chair in the dim far corner, the fixed look on her face. She makes me think of the Auden poem: “About suffering they were never wrong, the old Masters… They never forgot that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

* * * *

March 16, 2017

Noticing how disloyal I’m being to this diary. Letting months go by without entering anything. I suppose I get tired of the self-regarding aspect of it. Not knowing really anymore what are my motives for keeping it.

* * * *

March 16, 2017

Not to have the battery replaced in Barbara’s pacemaker was a decision made two years ago among the sisters. It seems that, at that time, they were told that the battery would have about two-and-a-half years left. This medical technicians can know with some accuracy.

That was a February afternoon. The implication is, if it comes on schedule, the 2-and-half-year point comes this summer in August. It’s the month of being up in the mountains, the time of tennis in the afternoons, and gin-and-tonic, the time of sleeping outside under the dependable late-summer meteor showers.

* * * *

March 14, 2017

Stars are far outshone by full moon. Jupiter is the only lamp visible, because moon’s light is diffused all over the sky, the pair of them, moon and Jupiter looking resplendent together these mornings.

Paradox, counterintuitive: The elderly are tender and impressionable, the young jaded and tough. Long ago, I used to find it a bore that wildflowers are considered to be so cute. Now that I’ve done a lot of thinking about death, not just death as a fantastic inconvenience or threat of misery, but death as a condition of life – I come up the road this morning and see the wildflowers lifting their small trumpets among roadside rocks, and I see, what a heartbreak, what a gift, is their ordinary ambition.

* * * *

On the radio are the Nisenan tribe members Wanda and Shelley. When they were here at our house, I didn’t really fully feel the fact that this was their meadow, literally in history, and in the present moment existentially. All my sins are on my head. My brand-new solar inverter is an Israeli product, which, I learn, is manufactured in an occupied West Bank village. So then I go Google-Earth searching for the factory. According to my internet researches, Ein al-Beida is an Arab village traditionally dominated by two old coexisting Palestinian families. The factory land claimed by Israel, adjacent, is shaped like a guitar pick. Or like a Ouija board planchette. Get down on Google-Earth ground-level, on a Palestinian desert highway, there’s a bus stop shelter where two women in hijab wait, their faces blurred by Google’s pixelator algorithm. Can’t find out much more about the situation, so I give up, let my solar panels go on drinking the wealth of the California sun.

* * * *

March 9, 2017

Sprayed all fruit trees against fire blight, but I fear through my inaction I may have already lost a couple of apples.

* * * *

March 7, 2017

My car is parked by a creek, the freeway rumble audible but – (this is odd) – a hectic perpetual freeway tumult is peaceful. I’m watching a gray bird hop and peck by himself – identifying with him a little bit: the notion of empathy-across-species is still on my mind.

For I think that that small brown bird and I share many assumptions, and are more cousins than not. Sufficient sheer data-storage space for “Assumptions” is about equal, between birdbrain and my own. The assumptions about the world I share with a bird are only slightly less than the assumptions about the world I share with, say, a local car salesman or a brain-damaged homeless man, or our president, Donald Trump:

This bird and I both know what the sun is, for example. That is, maybe I have an extra 0.005% more experience of a certain kind of data about the sun; but he knows richly what most of my experience of – and daily use for – the sun is.

Same goes for gravity. We share knowledge of it.

What a “tree” is. Its uses. A tree’s threats or nuisances. A tree’s beneficence.

He probably knows I’m an “organism,” over here fifteen feet away. Which means he probably assigns me characteristics similar to those I assign to him: activity (motility), unpredictability, some kind of inner mystery, agency, this quality called “life.”

We both know about appetite, and a full belly. And (if only because I’m a potential predator who might lunge and grab him) it’s possible he ascribes “appetites” to me. This even though I’m flightless, featherless, dependent on a two-ton steel carapace for much of my motility. I may deploy other superpowers. So he’ll keep his distance.

He and I, in this sense, share a “contract.” I guess it’s a kind of “social” contract. He probably knows I’m not malicious. But might be hungry. We get along. We can share this patch of greensward. We’ve been sharing it for a million years.

All this knowledge is jointly owned by us not just intellectually, but sensually, too. This knowledge is in our shared biome. It’s in our smell-glands and on our epidermis, and it’s in our brainstems and spines and (bible phrase) our bowels of mercy. By this time, my two-ton steel carapace has carried me on rubber wheels to a different place, where there’s coffee and a newspaper, and I’m still thinking about this bird and the sensuousness of our shared knowledge, when, looking down at a page of the local small-town newspaper, my eye is attracted by an interesting headline, and without thinking, I tap the paper page right there, as if the text of the story, hyperlink-wise, would spring open under my finger.

* * * *

March 3, 2017

A writer ought to wonder why people read – why books are written, bought, lingered over at length, then either forgotten or cherished. Today, here, I offer a physiological theory of reading (or maybe or evolutionary theory of reading):

Reading is a slightly unnatural activity. What the organism wants is to be moving about, moving physically, finding food and love and beauty and knowledge. That’s what organisms do.

So reading, as an activity, is then only for the sick one? The one who is too old, or too immature or inutile, for life’s real activities? The one not out foraging or flirting?

Well, there are two motives for the typical human adult organism’s sitting alone reading.

1. One is the desire for helpless distraction: By the tricks of narration, a writer can simulate life-or-death situations, amorous situations, situations that stimulate fight-or-flight or reproductive compulsions. Thus a reader can be drawn into wasting time in entertainment only.
2. The other is reading to enlarge your viewpoint usefully, to become wise, to change your life. In reading, you can learn about the world, make helpful revisions to your view of human nature, enlarge your own hopes for yourself, learn empathy, devise a sturdier attitude, etc. (This would make reading yet another kind of foraging, searching for resources.)

I suppose the cleverest kind of writer combines the two. But the latter is the more admirable. I guess I’m an elitist: the latter is just superior.

 

* * * *

February 21, 2017

Went alone to see O’Keefe’s play “Times Like These,” in dramatic reading at the Foundry, with an audience talk-back afterward – because author himself had come to town for it. The first question in the talk-back was directed to the author by a middle-aged woman in the front row, “You’re not Jewish! So how can you think about or write about the Jewish experience in the 30s?”

My heart sinks, of course. I complain of this to Eric the Bookseller afterward in lobby. How come people are (supposedly; in these times) only allowed to write about themselves? What would Tolstoy have done under this constraint? What would Eliot or Woolf or Franzen or Chabon or Brophy or Shakespeare or Flaubert or Hilary Mantel have done?  Eric’s response is, he happens to be reading two James Baldwin novels presently, both mostly with mostly or entirely white characters. Thou Constabulary of political correctness, where did “empathy” go?

* * * *

Thinking about the race-and-ethnicity conversation in this land, as, now in the days of Trump, that conversation has been made more dangerously, hurtfully impolite and, at the same time, maybe more frank and thus more important:

How class– way, way more than race – is a determinant: I’ve had working-class friends who might regularly spout common racist language but then have black pals they drink with in the pub and work alongside, and would attend each other’s weddings and funerals; also, I’ve known finer people who would die before uttering a racial slur, nor ever entertain a politically incorrect thought. But yet would be (quietly, implicitly) just as happy not to have African-Americans around the office too much.

* * * *

The standing joke is, how many book titles, these days, follow the formula “The Professional’s Female Relation” – (The Sea Captain’s Wife, The Hangman’s Daughter, etc.) So everyone at the dinner table goes riffing:

The Insurance Adjuster’s Mother-in-Law

The Arby’s Franchise Owner’s Ex-Wife.

Mildly amusing joke but, also, it’s weirdly fundamental or axiomatic with me: how little I’m interested in the sea-captain situation, or the hangman situation. I’m interested in the home and family of the insurance adjuster and the fast-food franchise owner.

* * * *

February 18, 2017

Big storm. Lots of flooding around town.

* * * *

How, early on, I saw that the writing I liked wasn’t written by adventurers and charismatic celebrities.

A writing mentor of mine told me once – (this was back when I was starting out: I twenty, he fifty-something, he and I in a place on Second Street in Sausalito) – that he didn’t like “closeted scribblers,” rather he favored the writing of people who have had experience in the real world, unique, important experience. In corralling together “closeted scribblers,” I think he was alluding to the stylists publishing then in The New Yorker.  I kind of assented, as a young protégé will. But I started thinking. And I started adding them up and decided I must prefer closeted scribblers. To have fought in a war, to have been lost in a jungle, to have hitchhiked across Asia and loved many exotic women, etc., those experiences didn’t necessarily (tho’ they might!) give an author something useful to say about human nature or our particular lives. The people who astonished me, and changed my mind about some things or helped me live, were writers who had, in some important sense, stayed home. They’d written about the village, about their families, their neighbors, themselves. Or, in the rare instances of those who’d gone out abroad, those exotic places, too, were limned as “their village.” The ordinariness and the limitedness of most great writers’ experience can be, paradoxically, a boost. Maybe the soldiers and explorers can be somehow distracted by their life experience, from what matters.

I suppose this is a little bit of an apologia pro vita sua, which maybe I’m allowed at this point – because long ago I did make the active decision, and have continued to intervene this way in my own fate: not to go Paris or join the Merchant Marine or hitchhike cross-country. I was at my post (in my trench, in the saddle) when I was writing at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter, or the IHOP’s vinyl-upholstered booth, Home of the Bottomless Coffee Pot.

* * * *

Niccolo Machiavelli, on the subject of reading:

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.

I happen to be holed up with “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin – which I’d never looked into, and which Steve sends as a gift, and which well answers Niccolo’s description.

 

* * * *

January 26, 2017

New solar panels go up on garage roof today.

We’ve been without solar energy for five months.

Cost to me, after BPSolar’s warranty-refund and fed tax reduction, is $6,000.

* * * *

January 24, 2017

Funny hillbilly moment. Luke and Maggie and Sands and I are playing in the cottage, lamplight mellow, dinner plates still on the table, drams of Scotch glistening, all musical instruments unsheathed and resounding – And in a lull, between songs, it is observed by our guests that that must be chicken shit on the wheel of granny’s walker. Yes. Looks like it. But nobody is going to get up and do anything about it, we’re all laden-down with, for instance, Luke’s great-sounding tenor-guitar, Maggie’s flashing accordion, dobro, etc.

* * * *

January 14, 2017

Asparagus goes in, 15 bare-root crowns in central raised bed.

(First sunny day in two weeks. During this week, we in foothills got 18 in. rain total, while local Sierra ski areas got 25 ft. snow)

* * * *

Useful new word: “Mbuki-myuki.” It’s Bantu, and it means: “to shed one’s clothing and dance naked in celebration.”

* * * *

January 3, 2017

Snow.

Carburetor of the generator: dismantled, cleaned, rebuilt. (All while lying on cement floor of garage, in this weather, without gloves.) All my life, I think I demeaned or else just pitied men who could clean a carburetor.

Derek Parfit died two days ago on Saturday. A man dedicated to clarity. He’s gone now –  I never met him, of course. Didn’t need to of course. What will always remain is the cool, clear, amiable thinking.

* * * *

December 20, 2016

Back on short story – girl in Marin juvie.

Thermocouple replacement for old stove.

(Bottle wine and signed book – delivered all the way out the Rough-&-Ready Highway – for my pal Dan, who counsels me on appliance repair.)

* * * *

December 19, 2016

Marin, for Hootenanny at Chris’s house, spend night. Then in the morning alone, luxury of an hour w/coffee in Fairfax – and there in the window, on tall stool at bar, is Sam Lamott with his little son.

Biodiesel station in San Anselmo. Almost $5/gallon, but we might create a co-op in Nevada City for delivery.

* * * *

Christmas spirit, traffic jams, in downtown Grass Valley. In this season of commercialism and acquisitiveness, while whipping out credit card over and over, “There’s a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.”

* * * *

December 10, 2016

Waimea’s bequest to the Community of Writers arrives, long-posthumous (after a number of lawyers have monkeyed with it). The bequest, and the particular amount of it, makes me sadder than her death did. The amount is exactly right for life of solitary devotion, exclusive of any family. She did finally kinda-publish a novel – at least she held in her hands a printed book. I think we were her family.

December 31, 2015

The accidental-pregnancy scene in “Assistant” improves, via indirection and via removal of late-added rank schmaltz.

The rest of the felled oak at bottom of woods.

Couldn’t face mixing fuel, gassing up saw. But at least I went down and, via lever-and-fulcrum, lifted the sections of trunk and rolled them on forest floor, So keeping them from turning to punk too fast. (Been lying around for a year or two.)

Limbed the thriving mulberry that has started shading out the solar panels.

To Sands’s tonight for New Years party.

* * * *

Last night I’m making stir fry. On the radio is news-story of a certain village in Germany: it has always loved its Neu-Jahr fireworks. Firecrackers and sparklers and rockets are this village’s favorite thing. But this year all are called off, in order to be considerate of the new sizable population of Syrian refugees, who would doubtless be upset by battlefield sounds. No Roman candles this year in the old medieval lanes.

My response to this (oddly emotional) news, here in a faraway foothill solitary house where I can be no material help to anybody: I find myself setting aside a plastic produce bag – on the drainboard for rinsing/drying/reuse, rather than throwing it in trash. (I’ve never yet been a Baggie rinse-and-reuser. First time for everything.)

* * * *

January 3, 2016

Sunday morning.

To bookseller Eric’s house, his famous weekly Brunch. Eric is explaining the predicted (to arrive in 2020) union between consciousness (human) and artificial intelligence (robots’). Such a union is called, by the author he’s reading, The Singularity. Across the kitchen, Julie is talking about her elderly friend with dementia who wants to die so she’ll be reunited with her husband, and who frequently recruits friends to come to the closet and help her pick out an ensemble, to wear in death, so she’ll meet her husband looking good. Her friends humor her in this. They pick out some really smashing outfits. I tell Eric maybe the Singularity isn’t to be dreaded, maybe it will be just wonderful. It’ll be a kind of bliss, a universally shared hard-drive, a community of omniscience.

* * * *

Liz here for drinks.

* * * *

January 4, 2016

Sleepless night, disorganized day.

Assistant: Simply “ironing” on the chapters of Isaac’s revelation and Abimelech’s accusations.

Passport photo for Dash, in a strip-mall place.

Another good rain supposedly coming tonight.

* * * *

John Donne: “Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.”

* * * *

January 5, 2016

Cheating forward some sympathetic views of character in the latter scenes. Also, importantly, putting enough flashes of “theme” in there to restore the story’s bone-structure. While the writer is allergic to “theme” and all coy announcements of theme, nevertheless on a subliminal level, theme is the raison d’etre. It’s the motive subterranean for a reader to read a book; the motive for its having been written. Since, in this version, I’ve chopped out all openly discursive parts, what’s left is at risk of shapelessness. Which goes to pointlessness.

Work out at club

A long deep rain all day. The meadows’ marshy shine.

* * * *

January 6, 2016

Finished with (rough) edition of Assistant with removed authorial presence. Don’t feel great about it, but will try to look at it freshly on run-through.

This downpour continues, it’s continual – it’s continually continual – and, lacking initiative to go out in it for supplies, I make stew (with, lacking beef stock, Marmite spoonful, little jar left by a houseguest of long ago).

* * * *

January 8, 2016

I can like to think I’m ever more unsentimental – it’s one of a man’s accomplishments: that a person can expect to be as disinterested (as cold-blooded) as a Zen roshi or an ER surgeon. Then the sight of some stranger’s infant can open door to swoon.

On Grass Valley street corner, in custody of his (tatted-and-pierced) hippie-kid parents, this particular baby was so new he was still shorter than his father’s forearm, the rosiness glimpsable in cheek-complexion an indication that the organism was vigorous, ambitious, not-to-be-worried-about.

Objectively, why the emotion, seeing any little babe? Maybe because the entry of a new human – someone who is distinctly not me, but yet might behold the Universe just as I have – would seem to thwart “solipsism” problem. Which is a problem that’s fundamental and legitimate. The so-called Problem of Other Minds is, certainly, not an everyday menace to my thoughts (or is never) – (because actually it seems beyond comprehension or, even, contemplation) – but it’s a problem that must exert a constant low-level pain, in any sentient being.

* * * *

January 9, 2016

After break in rain, a couple days of drizzle. Leah and Linda Connor for dinner.

Leah (her reconnaissance as newspaper columnist) reports that the city of SF really is – it’s no joke – losing its character to the vapid rich.

* * * *

January 10, 2016

Party for B’s B-day on Cedro Road. Beautiful sunny day is sacrificed to staying indoors drinking alcohol, eating sweets.

(Bit of solid work in the early morning, on “Tenderloin Girls” story.)

* * * *

January 11, 2016

Critique of Greg’s novel, mélange of stories about luthier families.

Open “Unpublished Writers” essay, because it’s time to polish it up for keynote-speech promise.

Lunch of squash soup w/old chicken stock.

I face the fallen oaks I’d neglected, at bottom of woods, mossy, but at the heartwood hard-and-dry. Leftover fuel/oil mix from fall cutting is still just fine. I get a little bit into it, mostly setting up the big trunk on the slope with pike as lever, using little log as fulcrum (it’s a pretty afternoon, working in a warm patch of sun on south-facing slope in cold woods), make some progress with saw, then I have to get Dash: Brett calling thru the trees.

After which, he and I go to Grass Valley and – because what he really wants for his birthday is a loveseat – we find the perfect one at Salvation Army.

The fun of getting the bulky heavy thing up the narrow stairwell, a kind of reverse obstetric process, requiring lots of strategy, lots of geometry. In which Dash takes charge. Makes good decisions.

* * * *

January 12, 2016

More of woodcutting.

* * * *

January 13, 2016

Dashiell’s birthday.

Heavy rains all day, nice ponding in the meadow must be evidence of California water table getting recharged. Carted the cut oak from lower woods to the cottage-woodpile, but in the process I’m reminded this is the kind of endeavor – peculiar to the self-sufficiency life – that brings on stupid accidents; in rural emergency-rooms grisly arrivals of embarrassed men with freak injuries. The wood-laden cart gets stuck on the west fork, path up from the woods – (my wheels spinning in mud) – so I have to pull the linchpin hitch and free ponderous cart to wheel it around in the other direction, on slope, then do a little bit of off-roading to maneuver around headed for the east-fork path. All for a half-cord. All works out, but I’m thinking all the while, it’s the unforeseen/unforeseeable bad luck that hurts even the most circumspect.

* * * *

January 15, 2016

Yesterday: The day knocked off-course by Random Unanticipated Little Crises – the contract with ski corp needs to be revised suddenly. Then news arrives that C.D. has died in Petaluma her sleep. Too young, and still too full of good work.

Wherever love is undischarged, that is a defect in Creation.

* * * *

What makes “mourning” simply a mistake in perspective:

Resentment of death is an error of “figure-ground reversal.” That this concentrated blaze of “consciousness” should exist at all is a pure gift unalloyed.

* * * *

Finally passport submission. So much trouble for what used to be an easy document. As the federal gov’t thins, it’s necessary now to drive to the next county to submit passport app. Post office there. Brisk opinionated “gal” in the blue USPS blouse stamps our forms and gives us plenty of advice.

Crossing back over the Bear River, the view is of winter’s four-o’clock golden light on live-oaks: these are not the Pacific NW colors anymore; everything is Mexican-looking. I always thought of my neighborhood as the “southernmost rainforest” (of mossy fallen logs, ferns, etc.), but no – in places, it’s a Mexican and (not Oregonian) Californian goldenness and stingy impoverishment. A John Constable palette and brushstroke, in the shaggy trees, the rambling, littered little homesteads. Somebody down in the Rio Oso gully keeps a skinny cow.

A warming climate globally. More and more, this California smells Mexican. Indefinable, but subjectively distinct. What is that? Like mesquite smoke, trash fire, sweaty cornmeal masa. Algo a comer! The entire economy, during my lifetime, is changing.

* * * *

Saturday. Country music on the radio, DJ’d by our local tongueless radio host – a tobacco addict, survivor of tongue cancer and radical surgery, who has had this radio show for thirty years and – (so doth he love this music) – has carried on broadcasting even after the operation of removal. He becomes intelligible to anybody who tries listening for thirty seconds. He has no consonants but plenty of vowels. His wonderful wife helps him, responding brightly, repeating his remarks sometimes, so the broadcast has an aspect of a sock-puppet show. A scholar of country music,  he is treasured by the town. I’m handling emails at the kitchen table, while the song they’re playing an old song I’ve never heard called, “Let’s Get Drunk and Fight.”

* * * *

The hen that went missing yesterday at “bed check” (out there all night during the hard rains, presumed victim of predators) turns up in the morning drizzle, ambling around as usual. The blue egg layer.

* * * *

Buddhists list six sense faculties – the usual five (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) plus “mind and mental objects.” Mind is one of the senses.

This seems a crucial difference, a doorway to Asian/Buddhist thinking. In the West, the thing that I consider to be “myself” is my mind – the existential ruling faculty that receives data from the five peripheral sources. But in Buddhism the mind is just another peripheral datum among five others, all convening on an empty center. There’s no hard silicon chip in there doing the processing. Makes “nirvana” more plausible. All thoughts are just another spectacle. Thoughts abide among the breezes and waterfalls, the birdsong, the lawn’s morning smell, the solitary cloud’s dissolution. Where, too, “I myself” abide.

* * * *

January 16, 2016

Steve S. visits. Brings two crabs so we have seafood gumbo while, outside the kitchen, the tin roof roars under endless downpour.

* * * *

January 20, 2016

5:00 am – In the extreme dark (moonless and cloudy), the rainclouds somewhat part.

A string of planets – Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter – spread across the sky from azimuths low-in-the-east to high-in-the-south.

“Assistant”: I’m mistrustful of characterization-logic of the story, now that the framework of the Biblical legend has been removed. Why are these people behaving so badly, so weirdly, if not coerced by “fate”?

* * * *

January 21, 2016

Sleepless.

The accidental-pregnancy chapter I took so much trouble in adding to the Assistant has now been deleted. It’s back to its natural shape.

Adding complexity to the Bends’ characters. (For, with recession of theme, character shines forth: It’s as true in life as in literature.)

* * * *

Short-term thinking. The stock market faints in fear, whenever petroleum price-per-barrel twitches.

Me, I can almost actually (if quietly) rejoice, as the signs of “hard times” encroach. And rejoice with a certain amount of rational justification. It was forty yrs ago, people were warning: This civilization is so petroleum-dependent (everything plastic, everything transportation, everything grown from fertilizers), when the shit hits the fan it will be an impossibly steep adaptation. So I’m a Grinch almost glad to see people’s investments come to nothing – investments in faux-marble hot tubs, five-bedroom house an hour’s drive from work, supported by a double-income marriage – some of those people will be soon literally in colorful REI tents by the railroad siding, shopping-cart parked at the zippered door-flap.

* * * *

January 22, 2016

On the East Coast they’re expecting 2ft of snow. When I inquire by text, Hunter answers by text sounding (tho’ he’s in Maryland suburbs) like a “mountain man”:

Got the day off today. Very excited to get snowed in. Stocked up on beer and good food. Making meat loaf tonight.

* * * *

January 23, 2016

Saturday. No work today. Won’t be any tomorrow either. Today my speech at the college, then building shelves in the cottage attic.

Then tomorrow it’s high society. “Tea” in the morning at Kent and Cindy’s, dinner at Josh and Jen’s.

* * * *

January 25, 2016

Down the Old Downieville Road, the little hut has been expanding into a rich, rambling cabin. The elect pleasure of being a guest – and staying long at the table in flickering dimness, while the mom of the 6-month-old (quiet clever boy) is standing at the sink bathing the baby. A radiant steamy kitchen-light in that direction, all others at the table with their whisky or tea. It’s a cold night outside, and a long way up out of this canyon on a dirt road.

* * * *

January 26, 2016

Consecutive days of dry sunny weather.

Workday morning cut short by necessary lawyer-talk, document-hunt.

Clear gutters.

Clean stove chimney, clinging to steep roof, plunging porcupine-bristled pole in stovepipe. Again, as in other years, zero creosote.

Replace front porch’s fallen tin shingle (after weeks’ procrastination).

Mud room stovewood supply replenishment: lots of trips up the slope with armloads, at end of day.

Discover Alan Guth lectures on MIT site, downloadable.

* * * *

January 27, 2016

Nevada section of “Assistant”: shading off the one remaining big hint of biblical theme. I think I’m happy with it.

Afternoon pulling Scotch broom, an especially vigorous aggressive invasion of it this year, all colonizing deep in the half-acre of blackberries (tho’ the deeper forest clearing is uncharacteristically clear of it this year). So it’s a sticky afternoon wading in prickly whips, revolving away from their thorny complicated embraces. Pick up Dash in town. (Delight of sitting in café, discovering on my phone a Nader editorial from TIME, republished on some aggregator site, that Hunter himself had edited and, basically, written. Then, by text, going back and forth with H. about it.)

Dinner is a beef stew from electric slow-cooker.

* * * *

January 29, 2016

Assistant: the latter “Lake Tahoe” section.

In the afternoon, rain keeps me in.

* * * *

January 30, 2016

Fine performance of Dashiell’s piano-&-voice setting of Amiri Baraka poem.

* * * *

My mother, dead these two years now, would celebrate her birthday today, an anniversary that, around here, will cause pretty-much-useless, pointless sad woolgathering and metaphysics. Which maybe is just the tip of the immense mostly submerged iceberg “gratitude.” Gratitude being a more useful result to be walking around with, than metaphysics.

Today also: the Iowa Caucuses. Rob is texting pictures from Iowa City: On a wide, glossy-varnished board floor with painted lines (free-throw circle, mid-court toss-up line), citizens have set up folding metal chairs in opposing corners.

I’m supposing Iowans will be glad to see this day behind them, because political talk (esp. political ads) will cease. Political conversation is almost always frustrating. Political conversation is just a heartache. A kind of brute rhetoric even in the best-intentioned. Such talk is never up to the job it purports to do, or even thinks it’s doing. Political conversation, whether on TV or around an office water cooler, necessarily tends to veer from care or precision. It really makes the crucial difference what radio station you choose to bring in. (I guess this is because most people have led only one life, not two or three, and their experience is limited. One group will lack the frame-of-reference to absorb George F. Will. Others the frame-of-reference to absorb Jon Stewart. You have to have led more than one life – and almost nobody has – to get a glimpse of impartiality.)

So it is, it’s extremely rare to have any kind of political talk with the necessary tenderness and specificity to make a civil discourse. That is, you want to be having a discourse where people might learn something. Whenever I listen to political talk, I almost always have the heartbreak sense that this person is playing a very insightful game of “checkers” with life, while all around us, the actual economy is playing chess, a game of complicated, powerful, sweeping laws totally invisible to the speaker and to me.

Iowa Caucus day happens also to be Groundhog Day. On these California meadows (winter sunshine) we’ll have sharp shadows. Sun not up yet, I’m wasting good work-time with long chatty emails. And this kind of pasa tiempo. My Facebook-contaminated email IN-box (“delete, delete, delete”) is overflowing with banner headlines like this: “Maryellen Gelman Hadder invited you to like Maryellen Gelman Hadder.”

Which has a certain absolute perfection inviting delete — sealed exquisitely by the fact that I’ve never heard of Maryellen Gelman Hadder. But maybe therefore, on principle, I ought to endorse her. (“Like” her.), directed by a categorical imperative.

* * * *

February 3, 2016

Making a decided effort not to work, but 3AM I’m wide awake and on the qui vive as usual.

So, resolved against working, I kindled the stove in mud room and read old Harpers and New Yorkers. The stale news turns out to be more interesting than any late-breaking. Will try to set up musical equipment and get a little carefree recreation this morning, then a day of quotidian errands.

Talk with Michelle by phone, with Joy by email.

* * * *

February 4, 2016

Warm sunny.

Another day of not writing. (Not Writing feels like loitering in an airport lounge.)

Tonight will be the big reading in Sacramento.

* * * *

Feb 5, 2016

Had to come outside and get some parsley in the garden for garlic penne. Dark moonless night. Alone outside the backdoor, I always rediscover how silent is the world outside an ordinary kitchen’s hectic sit-com. Balmy for February. (At a foothill elevation, where we get snow but the ground doesn’t hard-freeze, little crops like parsley will thrive midwinter.)

By the light of my cell phone I find parsley clump and I clip stems with thumbnail, then coming out the garden gate, I see Mars above east pines, the actual planet itself, and I think of the climate up there: on Mars’s North Pole, flurries of carbon-dioxide snow are piling up. (It has to be 193 below zero to make carbon dioxide snow.) How precisely damp and warm Earth’s climate is! Here I am in my garden with dewy parsley, but from where I stand, I can lay my eyes on that other landscape literally. Literally that land is in view, those rocks and dirt, looking reddish.

* * * *

(Then Venus, too. If I waited a few hours Venus would shine behind pines, and that planet the reverse situation: an instance of runaway greenhouse effect. It once did have water, but it all cooked off. Not even any steam left.)

* * * *

February 6, 2016

Couldn’t work today. To Sacramento with kids, to see Dürer show (plus a couple of little Holbeins). Nothing very good.

Then in the evening, a wonderful concert by Luke and Maggie & Co in Nevada Theater. A packed house.

After concert, at Chevron station: resolve to prepare “assistant” for Joy. (this after Penguin passed on “Immanence,” the usual rejection with high praise.)

[Interesting how “rejection” doesn’t get any easier with the years or after triumphs. It’s always important. It’s never unimportant. Nonchalance never comes along. (Moby-Dick’s Starbuck says, “I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale.”]

* * * *

First chapter of Assistant: brightening up the view of Brenda Bend (good will, wisdom, acumen).

Raking off old, deep pine duff on the front “lawn”: smothered. I so neglect this place. Where there’d been a meadow, I expose mostly wet dirt, grasses’ weak pale hairs.

* * * *

Brett sleeps deep, after last night’s fundraiser. Dog and two cats, al crimped hard in sleep, lodge around the edges of her.

In the kitchen at 4am while coffee brews, I open Brett’s iPad:

“Failed!” it informs her, in girly pink script.

And below: “You didn’t clear all the jelly.”

* * * *

February 8, 2016

Another warm sunny day. Begin pome pruning, afternoon.

Morning. Doubts about the perceived “moral” fabric of the Bend characters. The devil is in that word “perceived.” Who is my reader, and how wise/forgiving/worldly is that reader?

* * * *

February 9, 2016

Second day pruning pears, afternoon, warm sun.

* * * *

February 10, 2016

Finish pears, lots of efficiency.

One ray comes from outside these acres: the news that gravity waves have been confirmed, from two detector arrays in the U.S.

The news is doubly jubilating: that existence does have a fabric is one kind of exhilaration; just as wonderful is that the fabric of existence was discernible to a human mind’s thought processes (A. Einstein’s, a century ago), discernible a priori. It’s a pair of happy revelations. Really, the happiest-possible.

* * * *

February 16, 2016

Good rain.

Clean chicken premises.

Assistant to Joy.

* * * *

Primary Election night in South Carolina and Nevada. The “center” candidates (reasoned, civil, wise) are dropping out.

The USA likes to regard with condescension the world’s “failed states,” their anarchy. But as I look at this year’s primaries, it does seem (e.g., Donald Trump) as if The Establishment is losing its central, inertial, steady control. Trump is on the radio, celebrating his win, and these are his exultant words from the podium: “Politics is tough, nasty, vicious, mean, beautiful.”

Late night, at the kitchen table the Old Monk is playing with his iPhone: He opens up the “Uber” app just to discover cost of a ride from Heathrow to Chelsea. Suddenly the phone rings in my hand, showing it’s the UK calling “44+ 32423 234322.” It’s my driver. His name is Pablo. He is now circling the Heathrow airport in his blue Toyota Camry, looking for me.

* * * *

February 17, 2016

Rain picks up, AM. I’m working on abbreviating (or honestly hiding) any theological rationale of All Things.

Brett battles gallantly with dunderheaded cheap lawyer over the phone, “on hold” all afternoon, trying to make a simple change to Last Will and Testament.

Visit to an alternative school in Grass Valley.

Tomato-basil fettuccini at home in kitchen, while uproarious winds tear at the house. The NOAA wind advisory will be over at midnight.

* * * *

March 12, 2016

Back from London. Jet lag.

Start up new schedule of barley-fodder trays on shelves. (The last trays throve in our absence without regular watering.)

The brand-new apple is already showing a blossom on a twig which I guess means it’s ready for its first sexual experiences.

All the pear trees, hardly so virginal, are flourishing with blossoms.

* * * *

March 16, 2016

Last night in the cottage, in an interval when Barbara isn’t sleepy and needs a little after-dinner distraction (i.e., a soporific), we watch television. What’s on? A PBS documentary about the microbes in human intestines. Intestinal bacteria form a community that keeps individuals healthy. A particular tribe in Africa, living on a strict hunter-gatherer diet, happens to have the happiest community of bowel-germs in the world, and as a result they’re models of health and contentment. Pale unhealthy-looking scientists are there in the jungle collecting samples of these people’s stools, perhaps to bring them back to Berkeley, where daubs of that excrement may colonize the bowels of Californians, for their improvement. Barbara finds all of this confusing and a little alarming. It’s not going to make good bedtime viewing (she gets dreams and nightmares from just-watched TV shows).

We change channels. On CNN – (because today is “Super Tuesday” and five states are holding their primary elections) – the most hectic possible reports of the close races. Hoarse politicians in littered ballrooms. And, in TV studios, analysts that talk too fast and too loud. Barbara and I can stand about five minutes of this, and we switch back to the scientists peacefully collecting the stool of African tribesmen, caching it carefully in vials, sealing the vials, sending them our way.

* * * *

March 18, 2016

Errands in town. Pick up taxes at the accountant, retrieve refinished Macondray table from the restorer, note cards from the stationer, bank deposit, wine, biodiesel.

On the road into town there’s an old cemetery. It’s of the antiquated, 19^th-century sort, crowded with little plinths and pillar-monuments so it’s, visually, a chess game. This is at the quiet end of town where the main street peters out. As I drive by, a very old man is at the closed gate – long white beard, elegantly dressed, with cane, no parked car in sight. He lifts the gate latch and enters, turning and closing the gate then after himself – as if to keep something in, or keep something out, or just to please his sense of order. Then turns to go further in, alone in the afternoon sun.

* * * *

Groceries at SPD. I ask the deli woman in hairnet for a pound, please, of the Virginia ham that’s on sale. Then there’s Gary Snyder, age 86, on his own grocery errands as he often is, five-foot-five, tramping on by, in military fatigue jacket frayed w/many pleated pockets and epaulets.

Talk of the writer’s “quest for novelty” and the deludedness of the novelty quest – “novelty” being a chimera – since in practice, each man all his life is always working out his one main idea. Talk of my Ginsberg review. Which I think he disapproves of, but diplomatically, saying “You undertake something there that I would not have undertaken.” (However, then he pronounces his own summary verdict on Allen Ginsberg that is precisely, word for word, from my review.) Also he disapproves of The Threepenny. The kind of poetry they publish (and of course he’s right about this) is lyrical and literary: it’s not the gospel truth. Speaking of which: He has a new book out! “The Great Clod” it’s titled, after an expression of Chuang Tzu. I always end up devoting a half-hour (or as long as possible, and whenever possible) to his offhand instruction and anecdote in the supermarket aisle. (For example, his publisher Jack, in the nineties, brought out the big miscellany “The Gary Snyder Reader” because at the time, he was expected to die of prostate cancer, and they thought there should be a monument.) He has changed his views on China. Not so idealistic any more. “No! I’ve gone way to the other extreme.” He almost gloats over this. “For instance,” says the twentieth century’s most influential sinologist, translator of Chinese poetry since the 1950s, principal roshi of popular Buddhism in America. “I think they should stop using characters.” He grins it’s so mischievous. “Completely. The whole civilization. Move to phonetic writing.”

“Gary, that’s saying a lot.” (This in a scandalized tone.)– (By now I’m edging away, drifting to checkout line.)

“I know,” he says smiling huge in glee, 86 yrs old.

“That’s saying a lot.” The reprise of the same remark expands it exponentially.

“I know!” Grin, joyous, ready-to-burst.

* * * *

March 20, 2016

Rain is predicted to come in again today after a short sunny spell.

Before the first drops fall, I’ve frisked up the entire chicken premises – fresh straw, fresh cedar shavings, water and food, and feed buckets stowed. Then back to “Immanence,” recently rejected, for a look at its possible improvement. Tho’ at this point, I’m not optimistic for its getting published. I think maybe I know what a good novel is, and know when I’ve written one – and the book business’s dismissal of it is just going to have to be a matter of my own historic bad luck. Fantastical good luck has been a long streak and I don’t complain.

Joy reports back on Kim’s novel, unhappily.

Rain increases in intensity all afternoon. I’m out in my trailer, Brett in her office in the cottage on the phone all day trying to tamp down the fires of a sad little scandal in the poetry program: a poet seems to be notorious for his sexual high jinks, and now this will be a problem for the Administration.

* * * *

March 21, 2016

On my mind today: “a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together.”

Rain goes on.

* * * *

March 22, 2016

Sun after rain. Cold steaming woods, brassy light.

Cavendish to borrow the truck for theater load-in.

Kerfluffle over Squaw’s ill-reputed poet will not be soon resolved. Painful for all. It simply gets worse, and bigger, people relish it.

Revive inquiries into NEA money.

* * * *

Typical instance of elegance in the diction of a Cavendish communication, by text message (about a bit of damage to the truck’s rear bumper):

After I get current

Show open 4/7 I got

a tip for good body

shop at best cost to

fix the bumper. Let’s

discuss.

Great. Although the

bumper ain’t that

bad. . . Could they

just give it a whack

and charge us $50?

A little unprofessionally?

May I borrow

the truck for set load

in today, in exchange

for comps for your team

and program credit? I

need to tow the trailer

with reasonable loads,

other trucks to share,

and promise no more

damage. . . About that,

bumper Needs more

than a whack. I looked

under, it has steel angle

box construction,

needs removal I can

do and probly a

hydraulic press to

straighten it. I’m told

Hughes auto body is

good at such work for

restored function short

of pretty at reasonable

price, I would get a

quote. . .

* * * *

March 23, 2016

The climate outlook at 4am on my cell phone –

The Northern Sierra snowpack is now at 101% average. The Southern and Central still below.

New report from Jeff Hansen’s research team about acceleration of ice-cap melt; the northern ocean’s resultant cold freshwater layer will damp the deep ocean current transfer.

I squander a certain amount of prime worktime pre-dawn, because I’m playing around on a new NOAA website page: an interactive map of the USA coastal terrain showing zones of inundating tides – with street-by-street resolution – zooming in on places I’ve loved, on friends’ addresses, seeing what is predicted to be underwater.

Remodeling the finish of Immanence.

* * * *

Kale that was picked two weeks ago: in the back of the fridge it’s still as crisp as ever. In soup tonight (thawed turkey stock of Thanksgiving).

* * * *

March 27, 2016

Easter morning, the Bunny has been here. In the morning, deep-voiced 16-yr-old Dash has to pick (dutifully, sleepily) through the basket he’s been awarded (jelly beans, pencils in a 20-pack, 5-Hour Energy Drink in little 6-0z. plastic bottle, a pack of pencil-eraser caps, one big Chocolate Bunny, a Loofah back scrubber, beef jerky, a tube of ointment called “Blackhead Eraser,” a computer flashdrive – this is what the Easter Bunny wants him to have).

We’re supposed to be at Sands’s for a breakfast. Brett is delayed in getting her so-called challah in the oven in the cottage. The dough won’t rise fast enough. Meanwhile Barbara must be wakened and hustled through the pajamas-to-huipil transition. Meanwhile the sesame seeds that spilled on the oven floor smolder and the odor excites the four (4) smoke alarms in the cottage. Which can’t be tranquilized. Barbara’s pajama top won’t come over her head and she panics, arms pinned up in the blindfolding and the full-nelson . The alarms keep on blaring. Brett doesn’t think this is the slightest bit funny, this is the story of her life. The “challah,” in being rescued from the oven, falls in the sink, where a bowl that had spent a week in the chicken coop has been soaking. Is there chicken shit on it? Possibly on one end of the loaf. So just pat it dry with a dish towel, we’ll see, we’ll just cut off that end. Outside, one can get away from the smoke-alarm blasts.

Outside on cottage doorstep. All the while, a sound sweetened by arriving from around the north side of the house, arises the serene clatter-and-bang of the skateboard, failing and failing and failing to make its little jump.

* * * *

At Sands’s, Luke and Maggie, George and Diane. Mimosas and frittata. Much of the talk is theological, the difference between the basically Judaic three (Synoptic) Gospels and the Pauline version of “Christianity.” It’s interesting news to everybody, that Jesus was supposed to have “risen” in the flesh. All 133 pounds of him, levitating, anti-gravity fashion, up through the morning haze, disappearing in the blue distance. Folks are slightly appalled to learn the doctrine, that it was flesh, skin-and-bones-and-gall-bladder-and-sebaceous-glands-and-the-little-farter-and-everything, that floated out of sight, just like one of those tragic helium party-balloons, whose string a child loses his grip on, but keeps his eye on.

George, at the stove presiding over bacon and asparagus, narrates his heart attack of last week – myocardial infarction – burning sensation, then the attempt to nap while worrying about it, trip to Yuba-Doc’s, then emergency room, then on to Sac, in the valley, for the tiny camera via arterial catheterization. Today he’s as elegant as usual, same complexion, same deep adroit voice-modulation (great reciter of Robt Burns poems), one week post-heart-attack, melting an entire stick of butter in a pan, pouring himself more champagne.

* * * *

March 29, 2016

Sunshine returns, but cold. Spring is definitely here: I’m in the deep rut now of Squaw-preparation work in this season when the three-AM rulership of Arcturus announces that Scorpio will someday-soon rise. Sing Lhude, sing cuckoo.

Cancel flight reservation: I get out of AWP conference, rather stay here, for Dashiell’s comfort and discipline (during homework siege).

* * * *

Chard has been volunteering, so it’s chopped up to go into the chili, plus big white beans.

Hens are getting back to laying at top speed.

(There’s an old joke about the sloppiness of government work: “Just empty your six-shooter into the side of the barn – then draw nice targets around your bullet holes.” Such interesting technique has its moments of being useful – not just to a gov’t worker, but to any maker: a maker of soup on a stove, a maker of narrative fictions. Don’t identify your targets until after you’ve discharged.)

* * * *

March 31, 2016

Brett’s in LA for 4 days for the writing-program convention. Dash and I are bachelors here, and like a fire-station crew or any other such fraternities, console ourselves with epicureanism.

On our meadow, a string of hot sunny days commences, while far from this meadow, the Antarctic ice mass will be (according to new climate models) collapsing way faster than planned. Two-meter sea rise by century’s end. Other news, for this eutrophic planet: the world’s population of obese persons has today surpassed the world’s population of underweight persons for the first time in biological history: another ecosystem milestone. (British researchers in The Lancet)

Bruce here to install ventilation slots in cottage roof.

* * * *

Walking up Spring Street in town.

Up ahead, along the sidewalk, there’s a tree hugger – actually a person literally hugging a tree. The tree is the big far-from-home coastal redwood (sempervirens) that’s founded beside the doorway of the old radio station offices – and this person is hugging it full-frontally. When I go past, it turns out to be the zombie meth-head from Bonanza Market parking lot, he of the mildewed dreadlocks, and he murmurs to me specially, fixing me with his eye, softly as I pass, “I used to be such a good guy.”

Our small isolated town can be patient with a goblin’s public slow oxidizing death on a Bonanza Market tire-stop, however long it’s gonna take. Everybody takes care of him. But ours is a risk-averse society, too, and at the other end of town, as I pass Broad-and-Pine corner (headed for coffee), sirens are converging on the area from all directions. Plenty of them. One ambulance and two fire trucks (big red ones, shoebox-shaped, with shiny chrome faucets and hydrants and cabinets). They park up the entire area around the corner store there, and almost a dozen men deploy, first-responders all blue-shirted – but unhurried, sauntering – all pulling on disposable latex gloves (with a squeak and a snap), milling into the little corner-store doorway. I make for my coffee, but a while later, when I come out to feed the parking meter, the entire uniformed band of blue-shirted angels is escorting to the ambulance’s open rear doors a full-figured fellow who walks under his own power, rubbing his own elbow irritably.

* * * *

April 2, 2016

To Berkeley for Michael’s Abe’s bar mitzvah, having dropped off Dashiell at the simulcast opera (Puccini) in Grass Valley.

Berkeley: Telegraph Ave: this town is always the same old unlaundered sock. I’m always confortable in Berkeley. Forty dollars for a night in a broken-plaster room off a kitchen, with mattress. The odd civility of boarding-house alienation: some stranger’s cups and bowls are drying in a dish rack.

Michael and Ayelet, and Sophie and Zeke, the shining boy himself Abe. An opulent meal for two hundred. The sun going down on the terrace. The lawns beyond. Berkeley’s misty willows and eucalyptus (pre-Raphaelite) on the far slope in amber and brass.

* * * *

April 3, 2016

Bad night. Sore throat and intimations of futility. Midnight stockingfooted in the Berkeley communal boarding-house kitchen: city-streetlamp-light falls on that same dish rack. In the morning, the overcast hasn’t burned off and I’m one of the first customers in the Caffe Med. Later, famous counterculture People’s Park looks like the morning-after battlefield of Borodino, the maimed and the disoriented beginning to stir.

Slow drive across the valley and up into the mountains. Stop for achiote paste and raw annatto, Mex market off University Ave, to mail to London. Stop in Davis for coffee and meditation by railroad tracks. Up in the foothills, I’m coming up Highway 49, and the motorcyclist who passed me back in Auburn is lying on his back on the center double-yellow line, in T-shirt and jeans, his bike on its side at a distance, while a paramedic kneels over him working like a masseur.

Home: it’s the same eternal sunshine as always, here at The Grinding Rocks. I set all the flock free, and I get the mower going and my cutting is limited only to the tall early tufts, leaving general mowing for some other day. Brett has tales of the Los Angeles party and convention, while I concoct something of kale, mushrooms, feta (sun-dried tomatoes courtesy of the Ruttens down the road).

*Vomer attritus sulco splendescere.

– Virgil

* * * *

April 4, 2016

Sunny. Unseasonable warmth is here.

Try brining pork chops.

Set traps in my trailer.

Fresh shelves of barley-fodder.

Fire blight seems to have attacked the pears, so – maybe too late – I will begin spraying with anti-fungal sulfur.

“The Drake Equation” about extraplanetary life.

In town for bank, groceries, feed store, nursery.

* * * *

April 5, 2016

Hot day.

All storm windows come down.

Brett’s concerns over scarcity of poetry-program applicants.

* * * *

April 6, 2016

Thinking about how the mind works today, I find myself thinking of: “Where the ox treads, the cart’s wheel will follow.”

Oxen! Carts! – It’s a verse from the Dhammapada, which makes it ancient, but I find myself sentimental about the whole idea of an old agricultural cliché’s persistent usefulness in this day and age. I’ve seen oxen, in Mexico. Been around them. Still – here I am in the 21^st century, and I guess I’m just grateful that our planet, its improbable fragile biosphere, has survived long enough that I still know about oxen and that the metaphor is still lively. That there is still soil – not toxic or sterile, as on most or all other planets – and that I know about those gentle cooperative big beasts – is all a piece of ecological luck that our species takes for granted. The metaphor is still applicable in this brief biome: Where the ox treads, the wheel will follow.

* * * *

April 7, 2016

Today I’m keeper of the peace and distributor of justice on the place.

1) A certain hen — bottom-of-the-pecking-order Ameraucana — (this is our first instance of cannibalism in years of poultry) this morning was pecking her own fresh-laid blue egg and enjoying the innards. Removed the whole flock. Pulled out laying boxes to hose clean. Will need to police more frequently for fresh eggs.

2) The little black spaniel, who visits from across the road, sees chickens as sex objects. (There’s at least one hen across the road who actually seems to like him back). Here, too, he’s looking for a casual encounter, and needs to be called away from chickens.

3) Last night a large cecropia moth (wingspan big as playing cards) beat itself against the windows, with thuds, all during dinner. Today it’s been resting on the cat perch — where the blackhearted cat of course has started poking at it, patting at it. So the cat must be brought in.

4) Juvenile wood rat, in my vicious trap in the studio, looking eternally surprised.

* * * *

I’m thinking, post-Berkeley-trip, that surely I’m acquainted only with a liberal Judaism, but it seems to me that, all over the country on any given day, thousands of thirteen-year-olds, in their bar and bat mitzvoth, have to stand at a podium and deliver an interpretation that is mostly about resisting Judaism or repudiating Judaism, or reinterpreting their Torah portion somehow, or actually (in one case I remember) deploring it openly.

* * * *

April 9, 2016

Saturday. Long period of misty light sunny rains over all these mountains. It will go on all week.

Board meeting today. Pleasure of morning drive to Sacramento with Brett. Pleasure of the colloquy of the fifteen, around a long table, then wine and Trader Joe’s victuals.

Back home in NC, Sheila and Patrick from Berkeley will spend the night. Risotto.

* * * *

April 10, 2016

Rain.

Drank too much wine last night, wake with headache.

Long breakfast, Patrick and Sheila, before they leave.

Little bit of Squaw work and no writing.

Sabbath activity, took many-miles walk alone in rain with hat and coat and good boots, through old Erikson woods, the long way.

(Today tried applying left-hand fingers to guitar frets. Nope. I haven’t played in the forty days since I banged my finger in departure-for-England hustle. The result was not good. The pain isn’t much, but the lack of dexterity. Still a little swelling-pressure, the one finger behaving like a toe.

* * * *

April 11, 2016

Monday. Dash has come home from school midday, feeling unwell.

Morning remodeling front end of Immanence. Looking to raise “thematic” expectations to prominence, repress plottiness and plot expectations.

Grass Valley: bank, accountant, market. (Smoke two trout. Always a bit of a project. The clatter of paraphernalia.)

Lots more Squaw work, all afternoon.

* * * *

New shelf barley fodder.

* * * *

Now Stephen Hawking is actively promoting the project of sending probes to Alpha Centauri, looking for habitable exo-planets.

He thinks it could be a thirty-year trip (making very optimistic assumptions about tech advancements that would make one-fifth-lightspeed travel possible) – and he thinks it behooves us to get off this planet, because we’ll want to dodge the asteroid strike or supernova blast that would inevitably wipe us out.

This all forces me to realize I have, over time, been firming up in my tentative (reluctant) conviction that colonizing other planets isn’t possible. And, like, what if we’re stuck here? Fated to this dirt. It reframes everything with fresh ethics, to propose nobody will ever leave this planet, ever. I tend to believe that Earth’s biome is infinitely mysterious, infinitely complicated, never to be artificially replicated in other solar systems (or to be luckily discovered either, out there). The community of enzymes in the soil, the community of bugs in our intestines, the community of bacteria that halo every doorknob, every bear in the Canadian north woods, every objet d’art in the Metropolitan Museum, every apple in the fruit bowl in my kitchen, every mushroom that appears as the fruit of the vast underground micorrhizal megalopolis. The mountainous statistical unlikeliness of a Goldilocks planet, the Fermi calculation forbidding intelligent life in the known universe, the Drake Equation narrowing habitable exo-planets to basically zero, the mysterious declining health of late-in-life Apollo-Program astronauts – everything seems to indicate the fabric of this our home is too delicate, too iridescent, too much of a rainbow, to be recreated in the sterile and toxic expanses outside our atmosphere.

The hopefulness of Hawkings’ idea makes me turn to consider my own broader existential assumptions – the working, rational ones. Probably sum up as follows: that we’re the only consciousness in the knowable universe (in this idea, astrobiology concurs), and that we’re not getting off this planet in any organized permanent way. And so, furthermore, that (as things are now going) the only existing intelligence is mortally endangered by tipping-point environmental problems. Rather alarming set of assumptions. But I think that’s what I go to bed with each night and rise up with every morning.

* * * *

Corollary of above thinking: all popular easy talk about space colonization (a la Elon Musk) risks being counterproductive to the environmental emergency work we need to do on this little blue sphere. It’s quite possible that a complacency, there, is secretly unconsciously prepared for us: we’re gonna be leaving this planet anyway someday, so poisoning it wouldn’t be the End of the World.

* * * *

April 21, 2016

New shelves barley fodder.

* * * *

April 23, 2016

Long week dominated by Squaw work. Zero work of my own.

Reading Denis Johnson, “Tree of Smoke,” admiring his use of abundant details, obviously research-garnered but all deployed with huge discretion in intricate web of quiet density, efficacy.

Saturday morning. A cool sunny day between rains. First spring soil preparation Brett and I together in garden. The old  clock-radio from garage workbench, long extension cord, sits on a terra cotta irrigation tile of yesteryear. It’s broadcasting “RadioLab,” an episode about memory, memory’s decay, seeming to worry that, if experience is erased, what point is there to having any experience at all? The turner of the soil, with spade, keeps stepping with the sole of the same foot, mounting up upon that same step of spade blade, a kind of stairclimbing activity which leaves me, yet, still on the ground where I’ve always been. All the while, abundant hawthorn petals snow down on us, and on the turned clods.

* * * *

For soil chemistry tests, collect seven samples, now drying on garage windowsill in an old plastic icecube-tray’s little cups, numbered by Sharpie pen corresponding to garden map locations.

Sands here to rehearse for Sunday show at winery requiring dobro.

* * * *

Paris Agreement on climate change is signed today in NY. 170-some countries. It’s a good agreement, but it’s too late. Should have happened thirty years ago. The question is, will anybody stick to its promises? A lot of pandemonium is already lining up in the future – for us all – not just for the poor. (But mostly the poor).

* * * *

Dash has gone to The Junior Prom, Saturday night, country highschool (preparations entailed an emergency trip to J.C. Penney for a genuine bowtie), and we old folks are at home. Winter-garden vegetables for sausage of smoked chicken: kale and onions from old planting. “Prairie Home Companion” above the stove. Then “At the Opera” follows, and the radio announcer summarizes the plot of La Traviata: “It’s about a tenor, who wants to flirt with a soprano, but is opposed by a baritone.” Which, he admits, was pretty much the plot of last week’s opera “La Giaconda,” except that this week, the baritone is the tenor’s father. This week it’s the soprano’s father, enemy of any soprano-tenor congress.

Well, it’s the plot of plenty of “literature,” the plot, supposedly, for the entire great Anecdote that is sexual civilization, baritones forbidding tenor-plus-soprano combinations. Dash, presently in the tenor role at a Junior Prom, is not going to experience a lot of opposition from the baritone, in fact. I think the Opposition of the Baritone is partly a merely legendary necessity. Most of the Baritones I have ever known (I flip back thru old girlfriends’ fathers, etc.) have been lenient, empathic, tentative, fond, reticent, backgrounding themselves against the scenery. To be the old baritone, really it’s the time in life for magnanimity.

* * * *

April 25, 2016

Philosophical thought last night during sleeplessness’s unredeemable hours: that some might want their cremated ashes scattered in a sunny glade, some their embalmed or else additive-free corpse in a pine coffin, some others a polished-granite mausoleum and a brass-band cortege to parade their caisson all around North Beach; some would prefer to be quietly unplugged in the hospital enblissed by medicines; others a simple surprise heart attack. The Philosopher would ask that, when the time comes and is inevitable, the six-foot hole be dug, and he be brought to it, so that he may undress and be laid naked at the floor of it where the clay is cold, the dirt fresh – (this to be even if it’s raining or sleeting) – and there be efficiently pistol-shot, face-down. After which, the shovelfuls of dirt.

* * * *

Advice via 800-number tech-support guy: Fix generator by just simply disabling (yanking out the yellow wire of) the circuit for automatic low-oil shut-down. It’s a safety feature but it malfunctions.

Car to remote Grass Valley for electrical-system diagnosis by clever home-mechanic Englishman who loves Benz jalopies, has a yard full.

More Squaw work. This time, for variety, setting up in a coffee house in town.

Find a suitable story for Chico reading. (The one about the Tenderloin prostitutes.) It’s too long, spend the morning cutting.

* * * *

April 26, 2016

Timed the Chico reading piece.

On “Immanence,” moved the cosmological revelation forward, to release contrived suspense in latter half. (Forfend the disappointment of that reader who expects sensationalism.)

Tractor mower repaired, thanks to the Internet “discussion sites,” that vast colloquy of all the bewildered guys in the world trying to fix what’s broken. (The solution: It wasn’t a carburetor issue. It was a mud wasp’s having clogged up, with her mud, a pinhole in the gas-cap, necessary for gas tank to breathe.)

To Grass Valley, where I must pick up the old car as revitalized by English mechanic.

* * * *

April 27, 2016

More of “prostitutes” story.

At sunup, mowing down entire south meadow, which is very tall now – destroying an ecosystem, destroying whole worlds, as my tractor keeps circling, pushing that tall wall a little further up the slope with each pass. Takes all morning.

Test of soil pH on garage workbench, using barium sulfate solution, yields:

Commercial soil: pH 7.5

Indian Flat Soil: pH 5.0

Amended Indian Flat soil: pH 5.5

More Squaw work, this time sitting in café of “Calif Organics.”

* * * *

April 28, 2016

To Chico.

* * * *

April 29, 2016

Home from Chico campus. (Breakfast with Troy and Heather. Great walk in Chico’s central wooded park.)

Back roads of Northern Calif with Brett. Almonds and rice are the crops. Tumbledown homes at roadside where human accommodation is shabby but the domesticated plants live royally taking precedence – (esp beautiful at this moment in spring).

Home. Pickup to Loma Rica. Salvaged boards at twenty cents a foot, for raised beds.

* * * *

April 30, 2016

Nevada Theater, David Henry Huang play.

* * * *

May 1, 2016

At last, return to “All Things” for assessment of last round of cuts.

So then it’s Sunday afternoon.

Building box for little greenhouse’s raised bed. Working in driveway – the garage radio, Nashville country music these days is produced like rock and it’s all about the girl in cutoff jeans, small-town chauvinism, pickup truck, always over-luscious studio production.

Maxima Khan comes by to discuss her nuptials. Tour the meadow. The table of snacks and drinks will go under the cherry trees. Where to put the chuppah. They’re bringing their own chuppah. The men will enter by the cherry lane, drumming as they come; the women from the other direction, accompanied by celtic music (of Luke, Maggie, Murray, Randy). Cars to park in the west meadow. Bride and bridesmaids to dress in the mud room, with maybe blankets covering the windows.

The last bit of Squaw prep work is over with, as of this afternoon.

Fatty pork roast cooks all day and gets drained of grease (crust of fennel seeds).

* * * *

May 2, 2016

Hitting the same mushy spot in “Things”: the end-of-world theme.

Long workday, then the usual weekly run to town – feed store, bank, groceries, wine, plus the luxury of a visit to gym where I stay for a longer stair-climbing-machine ordeal, of the sort that should be routine. Try again to buy fuel at the backroad barn that sells Nevada biodiesel – vagaries of the black market: lately my biodiesel providers are never there: I call first and get no answer; I drive by, and the lights are on, the door’s not locked, the office radio is softly playing, and the Mister Coffee is still warming its carafe – nobody seems to be in back rooms – so I slip away again. Sign on the door: “BITCOIN ACCEPTED HERE.”

* * * *

May 3, 2016

Last day of sunshine before a predicted long spate of drizzle.

Loving “Things” so far (page 189). But I still haven’t hit the truly deep theological fens.

In Brett’s office in the cottage, today is the “Big Day of Giving,” when she and Amy will stay in their control center watching charitable gifts’ totals as they tower higher all day.

Working on the “Things” manuscript tends to put me in an awed (metaphysical, ontological) condition. Pausing mid-morning in west meadow at leaky spout, I made an iPhone movie. (A five-minute fixed stare on a leaky irrigation faucet’s steady drip, like a metronome, close-up, with birdsong in the distance, sparkling ripples where the drop lands.) Ended up texting it to Hunter in his urban east-coast existence. The interesting thing about having kids – the rewarding thing, the ontological thing – is that you’re giving them the world. Here, it’s yours. Totally yours. I’ll be vacating it, you take it. But I mean really take it. Here’s the spiral nebula and everything you’ll never understand and Shakespeare’s sonnets and here’s all the Goethe you’ll never get around to reading, the smell of hot clothes in a sad laundromat, Bach’s solo cello compositions, warmth of copper penny deep in pocket, glimpse of meteor. It’s all yours. The (rumored) pyramids of Egypt, the mountains and beaches, drunkenness in some bar, the meadow in morning, a little stone church, the Pacific, insomnia’s anguish, the pressure-release in your ears when you step outside the train-station alone into the acoustics of the world, it’s all entirely in your possession.

(Which is redeeming because, actually, you are me.)

* * * *

May 4, 2016

At a little Beckett play in town. Intermission, in lobby I’m talking with a woman, a serious painter, fifty-ish, single, new-arrived in this town, an “economic refugee” of SF where she’d lived alone and painted for 25 years.

We’re talking about zeitgeists, about the decades of the seventies and eighties we endured, and how we both knew full well, even while they were transpiring, that those epochs’ “pop” culture, extending into higher-brow culture, had a huge waste-of-time aspect (70s = sexiness, cocaine; etc.), requiring patience of any people trying to live through them. Speaking about her arrival in the San Francisco scene, she cries, “Mondale/Ferraro!” in a kind of pining dismay.

I’ve been answering that North Beach of the 50s might have been a fruitful place to land. Meanwhile, we’re standing on the lobby carpet and a very tiny spider (small as a breadcrumb), is hanging from her projecting hair flip, and it has begun to lower herself on a thread, hanging beside her temple. I refrain from mentioning it. I guess not wanting to embarrass her.

* * * *

May 7, 2016

Dinner, Eliza and Carlos. The same South Pine Street house where Tom Gilson and Jann Bantiner once lived; still has wonderful big old miners’ fireplace with firebox big enough to, if not stand inside of, at least crouch inside of.

So that house has the curse of Divorce on it: The symptom of Tom’s and Jann’s marriage starting to go off was this: The mail would arrive, with bills, and it would collect on the kitchen counter for a week or a month; then, when it was time to entertain, it would be stuffed into a paper shopping bag, which would be put in the basement. At last, by the time of their divorce and the house sale, there was a long row of paper bags of unpaid bills on the basement floor.

* * * *

May 9, 2016

More of rendering the supernal chapters purely mechanical, plot-functional, less lyrical or fanciful. I happen to be reading Ralph Ellison; finding his more mechanical stripped-down narration (very Dostoevsky-influenced, as Ellison himself would avow) a good model at this moment.

* * * *

May 10, 2016

Spray all perimeter blackberries. Get the weed-cutting device going with last fall’s chainsaw fuel mix, which still keeps on working fine. Take out tall grasses in misc. spots — this is purely a cosmetic chore. One cu. yard compost to amend new-enclosed ground, move from truck bed by the wheelbarrow-load. Whole afternoon hard work in the sun turning clods throughout entire new-enclosed garden, mixing in compost, creating berm for squash plantings that includes, too, our own home-brewed compost.

* * * *

May 13, 2016

Indulging (and putting to practical use) all my doubts about “Things”: e.g., explicit theologizing parody in long last footnote.

Afternoon: summer irrigation is going, starting with west just-mowed meadow.

Completely un-winterize the chickens’ zone – removing all storm-protective stuff.

Fill big-house evap. cooler and un-tarp it, discomfiting and dislocating the many wasps in their winter sleep, who then hover, loiter at the scene of their annoyance, while I work.

* * * *

May 14, 2016

New shelf barley fodder.

* * * *

May 15, 2016

No work today.

Amend soil in smallest raised bed. Bring in quarter-yard soil from compost area.

Mount and connect the timers and splitters for veg garden irrigation.

Mow east meadow including front “lawn.” Spent maybe an hour reconditioning George Merrill’s ancient Rainbird” sprinkler, brass – like a model-T Ford – soak out the mud cemented in, bend tapper into proper place – and it works all right.

Rake harrowing of the big long bed, then soil-plus-compost to add volume.

Sow buckwheat as cover-crop, asparagus bed. It will be ready in winter when crowns go in.

Dash is doing his first unit of the BYU Internet-geometry course.

Sands is in the cottage with Barbara.

End of day, happily tired, it’s bedtime and I’m putting a screen in the upstairs window – and the screen swings around and knocks off the windowsill (where it’s been standing all winter) one of my favorite guitar slides, heavy glass in the Coricidin-D style but with a concave “radius” for Regal dobro.

I hear it hit the porch roof below the window and glide, rattling loud on the tin, either down to the gutter or out into the shrubs. Tomorrow morning there will be a search.

* * * *

May 17, 2016

To SF for Arion benefit.

Stop in Mill Valley, good old Sloat Nursery, for rooftop garden plants. At the Depot, the usual ham-and-gruyere sandwich – but nowadays put together with not much tenderness. In this town I’m really a disconsolate ghost standing on that same-old downtown square.

In North Beach then, on Russian Hill, a sweaty hour, many trips up the lane, loading in heavy bags of potting soil and mulch, plus potted star jasmine and hardy ferns. Then dress for Arion.

Diana Fuller, Whitney Chadwick and Bob Bechtle, Charlie Haas and BK Moran, the Garchiks, R.M. Anderson – the beauty of the Presidio premises, the old letterpress machines and the long corridors of flat wooden drawers labeled “Bodoni 14 ital,” etc. There’s even a drawer labeled “inkunabulus.” Inside the drawer, compartments of indistinguishable tiny lead slugs. What can an inkunabulus be?

* * * *

May 18, 2016

Coffee at Roma, then (20-minute walk) I’m at the new SFMOMA, promptly at opening time, ten am, and I spend the whole day in that new five-storey museum alone, like it’s a job I’ve undertaken. San Francisco now has a real museum, not just the pretentiousness that goes along with a museum, yet it still lacks the possessions. The Fisher collection, which dominates two floors, is pop-op sixties investments. Diana, who over the years has owned a couple of downtown galleries, complains at last, “San Francisco is a podunk town.” At the age of 80 admitting this. Then poking her face in further, she repeats with emphasis, “It’s a podunk town.”

Terrible traffic getting out of town, home to foothills.

Nostalgic longing for the industrial South-of-Market neighborhood of long ago, when (big live-rent spaces, infinite free parking, peace-and-quiet, maybe the clang of some metalworker or popple of pneumatic wrench, open skies, pavement weeds) it was like a sunny working neighborhood in some Midwestern town but adjacent to San Francisco. You’re in sunny quiet Omaha but if you go around the corner, there will be all of SFO.

* * * *

May 21, 2016

Getting Squaw acceptances into the mail is an emergency in the farmhouse displacing all the rest of life, dishes don’t get washed and people live on belated mac-&-cheese. Dashiell’s late-at-night-arriving friend is grossed out: in the dark, he has stepped on a rectangle of slippery salmon skin and his heel slid widely out from under him, on the kitchen floor. In the dawn’s steady drizzle, a Bic pen lies in the grass beside the Adirondack chair.

Pleasure of granting aid to applicants. And of having plenty of money for them. Maybe for a minute, in my life of selfish piracy, I am entitled briefly to the Right Livelihood commendation, because this money is the real thing, it isn’t a toy that will break within a week, it isn’t welfare payments that might get spent on beer, it isn’t delusional religious promises – it’s the real thing, genuine good work in the world. On Brett’s Squaw computer the emails all go flying out – fwissshh, fwissshh, fwissshh, fwissshh, fwissshh – winged monkeys leaping off castle parapets, but for good deeds and not mischief, flying out over the map of the real world as I have seen it from here in Google’s satellite views.

* * * *

May 22, 2016

The much enlarged garden: all drip irrigation is in, thanks to Brett. Now three tripods for string beans. Long bed cover-cropped till winter. Lettuce and leeks in the back bed; double the haricots verts; double the tomatoes, double the summer squash and the winter, triple the basil. Big square grid of red onions in front bed is a complete success, just coming ripe now.

* * * *

May 25, 2016

Mow meadows for Max Kahn’s wedding. Fine-tune irrigation in veg. garden.

To Davis for debut of Andrew Nichols’s operetta. But then inexplicable California Traffic Apocalypse turns us back. Nothing to do but stop at Mexican place for a drink while Northern California clears up.

* * * *

May 28, 2016

Saturday, the day of Max’s wedding. Port-a-Potties by the garage. In the early-AM meadow the empty white chairs are arranged chapel-like under the two oaks, focused on the chuppah. At dawn the streamers and bunting aren’t stirred by any breeze. By noon accordion and fiddle and reeds will be tuning up, the sound-system tweaking and bonking, the many drummers with djembe and conga succumbing to the contagious urge to jam a little bit, just for the hell of it.

* * * *

Wonderful British philosophy (this is Derek Parfit):

“It is sometimes claimed that God, or the Universe, make themselves exist. But this cannot be true, since these entities cannot do anything unless they exist.”

* * * *

June 1, 2016

New hydrator system for the hens. I was skeptical of it – mostly the expense – but it’s great. Less work, more sanitary, water directly sourced from the pump house nearby.

* * * *

What to do with Barbara E. Hall’s vote-by-mail ballot?

1. vote it according to our own preferences
2. vote it according to our guess about her preference if she were younger or alert
3. dispose of it, because she’s non compos mentis

We have to choose the last. Still it’s going to hang out by the fruit bowl for weeks.

* * * *

June 11, 2016

To Squaw Valley. The happy annual vertical migration: like the Piute, the Washoe. I believe the Nisenan of Indian Flat Rancheria stuck around here, this elevation all summer. They had the river, didn’t need to go anywhere. We interlopers, these days, travel in our comfort-bubble. My jalopy loaded with guitars, cooking condiments, basketsful of laptops and keyboards and charging cords and other iCrap, my ergonomic beachball-style workchair sphere undeflated.

* * * *

Kenneth Rexroth (1966, Sierra Nevada):

Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late,

The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone.

The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring:

Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs

* * * *

June 14, 2016

Still getting over this:

That the cosmos’s spacetime “fabric” is a gelatin-tympani. And that it trembles with “gravity waves,” was confirmed by an Earthly device rather like a tuning-fork (its one prong in Louisiana, its other prong 3000 kilometers away in Washington state, each “prong” a cylinder about two meters long). These two “interferometer” tines were set up to chime with the passage of any ripple in space-time that might happen to come through.

The particular remote plash that caused the ripple was a collision of two far-away-long-ago “black holes” (big ones, of 36 and 29 solar masses, respectively), which once upon a time slammed together to make a single “black hole” of 62 solar masses (the leftover 3 solar masses having been converted to energy, constituting the waves that charged outward in space). When the two colliding black holes were only 350 kilometers apart, on the brink of slamming together, they were traveling at a fantastic relative velocity of 60% the speed of light. This collision has been “by far the most powerful explosion ever detected, except for the Big Bang.” So said the device designer (making the interesting implication, too, that the Big Bang has been “detected.”) (I guess, obviously, the Big Bang has been detected. On the other hand, maybe it hasn’t.)

When our tuning fork apparatus felt the resulting wave here on Earth, the little shrug in space was a very slight movement: Our two Earthly fork-tines detected (I see a fisherman’s bobber hiccupping over the passage of a pebble-toss ripple) a motion of 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of a meter.

* * * *

June 18, 2016

The poets arrive today. Strong rain before dawn, then clearing, sunny.

* * * *

June 20, 2016

A pet is remedy for despair. If I were alone I surely wouldn’t own a dog. (Being too busy and frankly too self-absorbed to, fairly, take care of such a creature.) It’s only over my mild objections that Brett goes out and buys these things.

Still, on a night like last night, when sometimes realistic futility is inescapable, just to put a hand on the dog’s flank (he sleeps at my feet, or in the crook of my knee) and to feel the rise and fall of a fellow mammal’s breath, it’s the only light in Creation.

Sometimes this dog – (a lapdog, but one who spent his puppy years as a dog-pound prisoner, and as a snarling fugitive on the streets of Salinas, California) – releases a sigh in his sleep: it’s exactly a child’s post-sobbing sigh, kind of a combination shiver-and-exhale, when the time of grief is over. This sigh, I’m sure, is the PTSD realization the creature regularly has: that he lives nowadays in a world surrounded by love he can depend on.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “It is a great mitzvah to be happy always.”

Open microwave door. Moth flies out of microwave before I turn it on. Then I put coffeecup in and turn it on.

Lou Reed on TV, in an old concert, looking young and still-rebellious, still slouching, still swaggering, but reading the song’s lyrics off a teleprompter’s tilted glass panes. He has to be reminded of his own song lyrics.

* * * *

4^th-of-July Weekend

Dashiell off to music school, far away in New Hampshire. Farewell at the Reno airport‘s TSA barrier. So he’s in care of his Guardian Angels now, going alone through security line, patiently, shoes in hand, good citizen, tall.

* * * *

After early airport run to Reno, I drive back up into the mountains and visit the Safeway at five in the morning: the busiest, highest-volume Safeway in Calif (as the checkout employees will proudly boast), on Donner Pass Road by Interstate 80’s Atlantic-to-Pacific artery. I’d never really experienced it at this pre-dawn hour. It’s customerless, but thronged with delivery folk, aisles too congested to move freely in, the dozens of wheeled dollies, the tall, ceiling-high, spilling towers of boxes (onions, cheese, eggs, Pampers, coffee beans, bacon, wine), the sheer cubic volume of reshelved consumables that keep California nourished and active for another day, here on almost the exact same ground where the family of pioneers (Donners, Reeds) starved in their bewilderment.

* * * *

July 8, 2016

Funny sub-headline “tease” in the NY Times. Ordinarily, the death of a lake and all such climate-change news are deeply grave, and I have no sense of humor about any of it, but my immaturity sometimes prevails:

“An indigenous group that survived Spanish and Inca conquest cannot handle the abrupt upheaval of global warming. Lake Poopó was more than their livelihood: It was their identity.”

I’m only thinking, But wouldn’t they kind of be slightly OK with it, being free of that lake?

* * * *

Phone for cord-and-a-half firewood.

Repair downstairs shower in Annex – (where the floor-pan is sinking and parting from the vertical walls) – by caulking lengths of rubber baseboard trim in a skirt all around the widening slot. This house gets more makeshift by the year.

Deal with manufacturers of defective bamboo blinds. All ten can be shipped back, at their expense.

String-trimming of the slopes around both houses to begin.

Michelle’s fine book of short stories!

* * * *

July 11, 2016

Cutting weeds on Squaw slopes. This’ll be 3 or 4 afternoons’ work. With string-trimming device commercially called a Weed Whacker, at noon come out from the Annex’s cold-as-a-basement air. And the sunny Sierra day outside smells like a fresh-opened box of Cheerios. Soon to be perfumed with all weed-cutting’s damp spices. We’ve got sparser grasses this year despite the wetter winter.

I’ve been out for less than an hour when Brett comes outside, stands on stairs with two handfuls of differently sliced potatoes – for a potato salad, because today a party of us will go up to the waterfall picnicking. This must be (no exaggeration) a 45-degree slope I have to scramble over, in my deeply chlorophyll-spattered-stained Nikes.

Brett has been complaining lately that her applicants to the Fiction program don’t seem to “read the materials” and so they phone with redundant questions. She’s always telling them, schoolmarmish, “If you’d read the material.” These people need only to pass their eyes over a few well-crafted grammatically coherent sentences that explain what they’re wondering about. Brett’s theory is, people see everything on their phones these days. A sentence doesn’t fit on the small screen.

But she went back inside, thinking she favors dice-sized potato chunks, and as I got back to “Whacking” the weeds – (this voracious wand is powered by electricity, and when I’ve been doing it for a while, when both the live tool and I are deep in the weedwhacking trance together, the voice of its slashing long burr-and-bristle starts to sound like Jimmy Cagney. Jimmy Cagney used to sometimes play a movie gangster and he would snarl You Dirty Rat and emphasize contempt with a taunting “Mnyeah, mnyeah.” It’s exactly what my weed-ripper does when I’m deep in the tall grasses and destroying them, making them lie down, jabbing at them, it says, “Mnyeah. . . Mnyeahh.”)

Anyway – as I went back into my work I started thinking about people’s comprehension of prose. Whether on an iPhone screen or a printed page. And about skimming in general. In general “skipping over stuff.” And I started thinking, Maybe people don’t exactly “read” anymore.

I’m thinking this pertains to readers of popular fiction, who are a vast market (and kind of a new market, too, last 30 yrs). People think they’re interested in “page turners,” – and yes, these people definitely do turn a lot of pages, consuming them at a high rate – but I wonder if they’re ever stopped in thought? Or if they even wanna be? If they think it’s bad to be? Maybe the kind of writing that’s out there these days warrants only a skim. Maybe a lot of these people pick a book that they know will be the kind of thing they like, and they run through it mostly confirming that, yes, it lived up to their expectations, while they never got outside their expectations into anything disorienting or worrisome or life-altering. It used to be, when you read, say, Ralph Ellison or Jane Austen, you were taking your life in your hands. No joke.

The same could be said, too, and just as much, of Salinger, Cheever, Hemingway, that to read them is to take your life into your hands. One wishes to go back to the days of small advances, the days of bookstores’ remoteness and cramped dark inaccessibility. Today they’re all out there on the mall sipping lattes while reading, and they expect reading to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

* * * *

July 12, 2016

To Independence Lake. Kayak. Strong winds on shore. Sparkling blue with little barking waves.

* * * *

July 14, 2016

Wendy emails with offer of Jane Austen review. I jump on it.

Dashiell’s letter arrives from music school in faraway New Hampshire — it’s pencil-written, folded eight ways in a lump, then confided to a standard business-size envelope. He says everybody there is more talented than he, but he promises to impress everybody. Those were his words. The pathos of that assessment is too big to look at directly.

However, more recent news from him (coming thru’ longer conversations, via the telephone hanging on the dorm-corridor wall) is that he’s doing much better, loving his classes, making friends.

* * * *

The Squaw Valley post office – where I’ve come on foot this early morn – is an empty linoleum space: the glassed-in community bulletin board, the columbarium of small numbered metal doors, mausoleum-style. From behind that wall of compartments – as on every early morning in history (excepting Sundays and government holidays) – the sounds of the postmaster and co-workers can be heard. They’re sorting mail while the  radio plays pop and rock, loud, from Reno, it’s their agreed-upon station. Those three guys and one woman have been faithfully doing this every dawn for the past couple of decades, now getting up into middle-age w/job security – today hearing Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young,” a melody surprisingly upbeat (not a dirge, not an anthem, not a requiem, considering it’s such a tragic sentiment!) actually very bouncy. One USPS worker back there is singing along, the youngest of the four on the team.

* * * *

No work on any sort of writing today. The afternoon will be clearing brush on the slope again.

* * * *

August 3, 2016

Conferences are over. Summer’s end premature. All are gone from the Valley, only Lisa and Andrew to remain. Afternoon as “roustabout” breaking down the flimsy sets that were the thunderous writers’ conference, trucking it all to Public Storage. Then tour Granlibakken to consider it as conference site; then, annual “expensive” dinner for just us Top Brass.

* * * *

August 4, 2016

Last night at Wolfdale’s, I got the halibut and I watched Brett enjoying her scallops. Made me think of the sweetest scallops I ever ate, when, on Aptos beach 10 yrs ago, with wife-&-kids, I’d gotten a very bad diagnosis, by phone call. Didn’t mention it to anybody, but at seaside dinner, could observe the really delectable, delicious seafood on my plate with high-res photographic clarity. Did scallops ever taste any better than that?

* * * *

August 6, 2016

Getting wood in at the Annex. Big golden eagle who lives on the rock face and seldom comes this low, passes close, in among the Annex pines, at this level, checking me out.

General Annex repairs. Ordering 4’-by-1/4’ redwood slats for tub enclosure. Happy accommodating miller at Tahoe Lumber.

How surprising, how savage and riot-grrrl, is Jane Austen’s youthful writing, her so-called juvenilia. Making notes on it for review.

Alone in Squaw. To PlumpJack alone, to splurge big-time on a bowl of fish soup, glass Tempranillo. The guy next to me in the neighboring banquette (sixty-ish, head shaved shiny-bald, collarless knit shirt and heavy gold necklace, lots of fussing over pricey bottle of wine and what to name his new boat) is interesting and has a story. A doctor, he was summoned by a Qatari prince for a diagnosis. First-class flight on British Airways to Heathrow, then, on airport gangway, sudden interception by armed posse in keffiyeh, diversion onto tarmac in the night, to landing-strip shed, where they are interrogated, then put on a Quatar Airways plane – the stewardesses are described by this guy as fuckable: do you want caviar? do you want vodka? – all the while, the running joke is, when will their heads will get lopped off. The doctor has identified himself on travel documents as “Catholic.” They get to Doha. Are swept by limousine to hotel. On arrival in hotel room, they get a phone call: come now, right this minute, the car’s out front, even though it’s 4:30 am, even tho’ they’re jet-lagged. – Mercedes entourage to palace. Palace is many rooms, basketball-court-sized, the rooms all enfilade, a thousand couches, everything gold, chandeliers, all couches against walls with open floors. Finally in the palace’s inmost, centermost little closet, they meet the ailing prince. He’s about thirty, lying on an ordinary, unkempt bed (not a golden-silk bed), watching a black-and-white television where black-and-white clips of lesbian midget mudwrestling are playing. (Diagnosis: sciatica.)

Doctor makes me sample his $170-bottle wine, extorts approbation from all, and I go home alone to my pleasure of my own well-earned fatigue in firewood-carrying, my uncomplicated Woodbridge “cabernet,” my Penguin Classic paperback of Jane Austen, which I’m savoring to its last footnote.

* * * *

August 9, 2016

Back home.

These meadows are so quiet. Evening-time in Nevada City. I’ve got a new pleasure, now in years when straw bales are such a staple furnishing of our lives: the pure color of straw bales. The toasty warmth of them when the last light of day is on them. A bale is sitting right now on the open tailgate. (The delight to the eye is a little like the bone-deep satisfaction in seeing firewood’s goldenness, fresh-cut and stacked. Color of a crop storing calories.)

 

* * * *

August 26, 2016

Resolve to get back to more regular reports in this diary.

Temperatures are trending cooler – in the seventies by next week.

Brett’s acquisitions: some pullets from Ridge Feed; for Barbara an armchair that will dump her forward when she wishes to stand up; from the Internet some old tough kilim fabric to be made into pillows for Squaw.

Diagnosis of solar-energy weakness: the panels in the array are defective. I’ll have to get the manufacturer, BP, to honor their guarantee.

* * * *

August 28, 2016

Sunday. Beautiful day, I’m inside all morning with a short story, sick of it. Then I go outside at noon and, in the heat, there’s a small butterfly (common California Sister: wings of burled tortoiseshell with tips of orange Kandy-Korn) fluttering among the tall spires of iris. Whose pods of last spring look dead but are probably remembering some of the logic of life. And I can see, the most beautiful or best things happen without the slightest effort at all on my part. I don’t even have to be around.

“Cloverleaf” story to Oscar.

Mow front lawn, which has been knee-high all summer.

Tennis with Dash, then burritos at some new place.

* * * *

August 29, 2016

British Petroleum, who manufactured them, will honor their warranty for the solar panels that have grown weaker after 10-12 years. But I must bear the cost of removing. So will personally remove.

Lots of evidence of thriving coyote population, plenty of lusty chorusing in the nights, all around the old Ericson woods and beyond horse paddocks. Today, climbing Cement Hill to clear the irrigation weir, I came across more-than-usual of their droppings in the woods. One coyote seems to have ingested a songbird whole – undigested feather-and-bone compaction in the tar.

This morning early, Brett looked out into the south meadow and saw two large coyotes flanking a balking deer. The deer charged one of them. Then third coyote appeared, and Brett went running outdoors in the dew, barefoot, in nightgown, and took a stand and shouted and windmilled her arms. The deer went bounding away boink, boink, boink, boink into the east woods. The three coyotes looked at Brett pissed-off and turned and cantered into the south woods, into the blackberry paths that lead down to ravines.

Late afternoon, I go alone, rocky road, lifting dust, in pickup down to the river. My favorite beach is unchanged by rough winters, and I spend a couple of hours in favorite old repetitious activity, climbing upstream wrestling the current, then letting go and flowing down over smooth rocks. Over and over again.

* * * *

August 31, 2016

Threepenny Review takes the Jane Austen essay happily.

For some days now, I’ve been back on “Immanence” trying to disestablish any “suspense” structure – especially in the front end, taking care to reduce readers’ expectations of intrigue – and replacing it with the promises of metaphysics solely.

I have to pick up Dash early at school, so he can come home and take the online BYU test, and I’m parked outside the rural-highschool attendance office. Three student-age kids – not truant but for some reason at large in the parking lot, nonchalantly – are headed somewhere: a boy and two girls. They notice something in the lawn and, using a stick because it’s icky, they snag it and pick it up. Whip it around. Flip it off into the hedgerow. They move on, but the boy takes out his iPhone and leans over for a close-up of it where it stuck – then he catches up with the shambling-away girls. I can tell from here what it is, it’s underwear, a lacy black thong with about as much fabric as a slingshot.

* * * *

September 1, 2016

More on “Immanence,” hitting no bumps.

September First, and the Italian prunes behind the winter woodpile are exactly right. The bear who used to steal them all has apparently moved on or died. In a couple of hours I get unbelievably heaped heavy basketfuls, for winter’s sauces.

Expecting (today) delivery by FedEx. So my trip to Squaw this weekend will be productive.

Beef short ribs braise 3 hrs in prune juice. Meanwhile I, during the hour of Dashiell’s math tutor appointment, cool my heels sitting at a curbside table in a mall, drinking p. grigio and reading Nabokov’s essay on Mansfield Park. Nabokov is a bit of an ass.

Because life will very soon get grittier again, I’m making the most of this well-managed hour.

* * * *

September 2, 2016

To Squaw, for Labor Day weekend, the pickup loaded with French-draw table, pillows, reconditioned blinds. The wood for deck-enclosure repairs will be at lumber yard today only.

* * * *

September 5, 2016

Labor Day. Burnett’s birthday party first, then Susan’s lakeshore party. These are all great people. At a table full of Republicans, I have to explain how it is that folks aren’t “required” to get solar electricity, because they’ve got a right, as Americans in a free-market economy, to get their power from coal if that’s how they prefer it. Keep those Kentucky men underground if they like. Keep the skies dirty, the coral reefs dying. It’s a free country. And why Floridians opposing “radical climate-change agenda” will, some day soon, feel themselves entitled to sue for government financial disaster-relief aid.

On a brighter note: Burnett, at his 93^rd birthday party, brings out the old mayor-of-Sacramento personality and gives a long birthday speech about everything we owe to the labor movement (it being Labor Day), and his friend (88 yrs old) starts singing “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night/Alive as you and me.”

Tonight, now, all are gone. Quiet. I’m the last of the tribe in Squaw, alone in the Annex with my vices. I’ve finished the windows in the Annex – and today and yesterday reframed the privacy wall around the west deck of the upper house, a flimsy wall that has gone all wonky from wintertime glacial movement of snow-load: all the posts are listing about six degrees off-vertical. So tomorrow I’ll get some rope and, anchoring to a big pine with a come-along ratchet, pull the whole structure back up to plumb, then put some two-by-six diagonals in the structure that Oakley never thought to provide. I frequently think of Oakley in these autumn days when I’m patching up these houses, his slapdash patch-up carpentry.

Also, stain the new wood. Misc. other things.

* * * *

September 6, 2016

Squaw. Woke early and, avoiding laptop, starting with coffee,went to work, total cleanup, replacing faulty light switch in stairwell, shutting down and draining Annex swamp cooler, binding up the unraveling ends of the Annex blinds (which required unaccustomed distaff patience and dexterity), then going up in the sun and starting work on the upper-house Wedding Deck. Found some stout rope and rigged up two guys (anchoring them to pine by the road); improvised turnbuckles with broomsticks; and it took many tightenings over the day (I’m reminded of an orthodontist, periodically wringing braces tighter) to suck the whole heavy structure up plumb. Which it is, now. Tomorrow, lag screws in the 2-by-6 diagonal brace I’ve fitted into place. Locking it plumb. (This deck is all Oakley’s old carpentry, and – even 25 yrs after – I sense myself to be in an ongoing conversation with him. – He drove in the nail I’m now pulling. That is a conversation.)

Cabinet latch in upper-house pantry.

(Evening. Listened to the CD of Dash’s concert piece, piano-cello-bells, based on Jerald’s painting in the Crocker, and it’s just wonderful. More stirring than I’d remembered.)

* * * *

Little “ineffability” moment this afternoon.

Sitting in chair in the upper-house doorway, taking a break, looking out over the valley and across to far peaks, big forested bowls of air, between here and Squaw Peak, between here and Granite Chief, ample distances in these mountains, I think somehow, I am the only thing in this entire scene that isn’t present.

Does this mean “Everything else is present. Only the conscious being is absent”?

I haven’t any idea what it means – neither semantically nor referentially – but it’s a distinct enough sensation to seem worth recording.

* * * *

September 7, 2016

Up at four. In Annex, while the dishwasher quietly grinds, I read Nabokov on Dickens’s Bleak House. Wonderful. The critic’s perpetually innocent delight/wonder, seeing a fellow-enthusiast take his “genius” turns, swingin’ on a star. Then, at daylight, unbind the Wedding Deck from its taut harness to the pine tree: My diagonal brace is staunch. The whole structure doesn’t plunge back downhill, doesn’t even creak, doesn’t even tick. (Eight big six-inch lag screws secure the ends.) Finish trim over vertical panels. Hammer in last nail. Close up both houses.

Home to Nevada City, truck piled high.

* * * *

September 11, 2016

Sunday morning. Out in the meadows’ dark, the pulse of Rainbird sprinklers’ tireless ejaculations obviously must have persisted crazily all the while I slept, as evidenced by the drenched condition of sod in the moonlight.

A colonizing new species of grass this year, when unmowed, grows hip-high by end of summer.

Today at last, after delays, to begin removing solar panels from garage roof and testing voltage. Dash and his friend Finn to help. The pickup is parked alongside under the eave, ladders founded in its bed.

Prompting note to Paris Review.

These few days going over “Immanence.”

Tonight, the last of the Nico’s left-behind chorizo flavored cod with Panko; then last night Brussels sprouts; a tortilla broth.

* * * *

Entire operation of solar panel removal goes beautifully. The two 16-yr-old boys get a pay raise they’re so competent, behaving like men, up against the sky at roof-peak – agile, courteous, careful, above all competent. It’s all done within a few hours, 24 heavy panels stacked ’thwart the garden gate. The plan for a stingy tortilla broth is dismissed and instead smoke two trout; pasta of fresh tomatoes. Then reading more of Nabokov (on Flaubert). A happy Sunday altogether including even music. (If lacking in any of my own work.)

* * * *

On the creative writing business:

To admire the labors of the saints is good; to emulate them wins salvation; but to wish suddenly to imitate their life in every point is unreasonable and impossible.

– St. John Climachus, 6^th C.

(The “You-Have-To-Be-Crazy” part.)

* * * *

September 13, 2016

Nice first stab at winter. A little light, steady rain last night on tin roof, outside open screened window. NOAA has snow on the high elevations above the passes. Today’s max temperature here will be in the sixties.

Measuring voltage and amperage on the solar panels. Of 24 panels, seven have failed. My believe is, this entitles me to a total-replacement refund from BP, as the product has a forty-year warranty.

* * * *

During Dashiell’s hour at the tutor, I kill time again (same as last week) at the curbside table of a strip-mall restaurant with glass of white wine and book. Behind me along the sidewalk, a 5-yr-old girl is crouching behind a trash can, hiding, folding herself very small against its foot. At last, of the two women who have been loading a minivan, the young pretty one comes to find the girl, and soon there’s lots of secret weeping going on. The woman kneeling. The girl won’t come out of her crouch, won’t come away from the cylindrical pebbled-cement wall of the garbage receptacle, won’t be consoled. For many minutes, while quietly talking to her, the woman lets her hand stroke and stroke the upper arm of the little girl. Whatever has gone wrong, it won’t ever be fixed, it’s something that can’t be fixed, it’s not the usual thing.

After they’ve all gone, I turn more fully and I can see the storefront there is the “Foster Family Center of Nevada County” – with, inside, lots of plush Teddy bears sitting up in nursery-sized rocking chairs, all different sizes. The office is closed, it’s past five, nobody is in there where, after hours, bears with out-of-touch-with-reality smiles preside. When the little girl was loaded into the car seat of the minivan, she was still crying. The young woman stayed on the sidewalk watching the closed car travel through the parking lot and get out on the street. The thing that little girl knows – which she’s certain of – is that what’s wrong can’t be fixed, and that moreover, it’s something wrong with herself. That’s the problem. It’s always the heart of the problem.

* * * *

September 14, 2016

No writing today. Have to wrap up the Carlotta plot-thread better, and have to prepare a prior justification for the John/Thalia resolution.

So I get up early and, like a bum, play slide guitar in the kitchen during the dawn hours.

Lots of email I’ve been putting off.

Threepenny sends proofs of Jane Austen essay. They’re fine. I’m delighted with it.

Shoemaker sends news Counterpoint is merging with a New York outfit.

Zyzzyva buys the “Cloverleaf” story for Spring issue.

* * * *

September 15, 2016

Another day no writing.

More fully sever root of big fir beside house. A good bit of digging necessary.

First contact with BP, inquiring how to fill out claim form. This will be interesting.

Oil change for Brett’s car.

Reading at Grass Valley bookstore, drinks after at McGee’s.

(Topic: my increasing disrespect for Flaubert. Reading Nabokov’s praise of him, his conformity to the Flaubert cult, I get the more ticked off. Not only is the vaunted prose not that great; the characterization merely mean. In this way it is, as claimed, “the first modern novel.”)

* * * *

September 16, 2016

Afternoon: unexpected visit from solar technician, who is very generous with his own time. Has brought a meter to measure the “irradiance” of incident sunlight, which measurement is a requirement of BP. It turns out, when the panels are all retested, there seem to be 16 failures, out of a total of 24. Which is a high failure rate.

Brett goes alone to Squaw to sew couch cushions. For two nights I’m alone here.

* * * *

September 21, 2016

The town is full of migrant marijuana trimmers.

Good coffee at the little hole-in-the-wall by the National Hotel.

Much of the morning was lost to entering data about my failed solar panels (voltage, amperage, irradiance, temperature, corresponding #s of documentary photographs), all on the cramped little grid of a “spreadsheet.”

Park the truck in town on Broad Street, the pickup bed piled high with excellent oak logs. Needing coins for parking meter, I buy a fancy probiotic drink in storefront (lime, coconut, aloe), and a beautiful golden-haired woman wearing a sleeveless cavewoman dress made out of thinnest chamois-leather slides up alongside me on the sidewalk, saying, “That’s only the best-tasting drink the world. What day is your birthday?”

After I tell her, I’m informed that I’m a water sign, as well a snake sign. Also a wizard. It turns out I share this distinction of nativity with Oprah Winfrey and a living Hindu saint named Ammachi. Whom I’d never heard of. – We actually chat for a while, she and I, in front of the coffee shop I intend to enter. Suddenly she looks over my shoulder seeing into coffee shop window, with delight, “Hey, it’s my son. That’s my son.” A skinny teenager is in there, playing on his phone, aware of his mother, but unlikely to look up and acknowledge her. She boasts a little about him, how he was raised without any contamination by formal education. She’ll go in and join him at his table, her effusive warmth to be met with his total nonchalant indifference. She has sat down at his table, but he never even lifts his eyes from his computer screen. Meanwhile I’m across the room in armchair with cappuccino, googling “Ammachi” on my own iPhone. Ammachi does exist, a lovely plump charismatic woman with wonderful smile, a vermillion bindi dot between her eyebrows.

* * * *

September 22, 2016

Short coldish snap. Temps will top out in the low 60s. More dusting of snow on the high passes.

Feeling unwell, kinda paralyzed on my left side with sharp cartilage pain in shoulder, hip-joint and knee, I soak myself every day in contemplation of a river-canyon book, or a retirement-home book, or some recombinant mash-up. (Recombinant mash-ups: “A salad of marshmallows and mushrooms”: that was my old metaphor for such easy silliness.) With cult of clitoridectomy and twenty-something slackers’ pessimistic fatalism, “comic-grotesque” seems to be the congealing tone.

* * * *

Rain. My intention was to go out and turn under the cover crop in the long bed – prep for asparagus to come. But first thunder over northern ridges, then rain. So I’m indoors philosophizing here on this luminous screen-page instead. About the following:

That I live on Indians’ land is achingly clear to me every day. The granite slabs in my woods and at the foot of my sunny meadow (these boulders surface from antiquity like breaching whales) have anciently been shallow-ground to make mortars, bored by Nisenan squaws to pound a mash of acorn meal. Maybe two hundred years ago? Maybe even four hundred? This very meadow, I like to think, was where the Nisenan partied annually, and where, as party prep, the girls and women spent mornings or afternoons moliendo, trabajando, platicando in the oak shade.

Now I’m long aware of the motto “Ownership is Theft.” And I know that the motto, popularly, applies just about perfectly to the relations between Native Americans and arriving Europeans. Whenever I walk here, I think of it. I think of who walked here before me. But today when the first drops were starting to make pattering on the madrone leaves, I found myself, devil’s-advocate-fashion, admitting a kinder view, also, of the arriving colonists.

First of all, the European arrivistes were encountering vast tracts of land that were governed differently. Or governed mysteriously. Tribes were mostly unconfederated, with constantly shifting boundaries (…I’m talking about the land “ownership” concept here). It might be considered a kind of “crime” — or theft — if a European man took a stand on a piece of dirt saying he had the exclusive use of it, and drawing a line at some middle-distance in the dirt (how absurd, too!), pointing at the line and saying that the Native would be just fine so long as he stayed on the other side of the line.

But at its heart, the institution of “ownership” of land isn’t about grandiosity or even, necessarily, aggression. At its heart it’s about responsibility. In practice, it’s about stewardship. Here on these acres I myself happen to be doing not much. As an asset to society, it’s kind of a waste. I’ve been only raising two boys, the writing/editing pastime, cultivating some food for my own use, taking care of a very old helpless lady. Those are creative uses, I suppose. Plus, as a creative use, we do provide premises for the Community of Writers office. Others could put the land to some fuller use, and when the time comes that I alienate myself from the place (“sell” it), some other owner might put it into potatoes or vineyards or do some more serious truck farming, or who knows, maybe build a motel. Land has its creative uses. Land allows work.

And to get creative work done – or getting anything done – some “stability” is required. Continuity of possession is a good basis. The owner can’t be constantly at risk of having a neighbor come through the woods to announce that, now, the place is gonna be a go-cart racetrack or a mink farm or a Buddhist monastery. (Or whatever he happens to want.) Or of having a trespasser build a house for himself in this meadow. If some trespasser would like to do that, he of course can, but only after a long, conventional process of negotiation and mutual settlement.

In other words, the “ownership” institution, at its heart, is about the bourgeois stability that supports creative work. It’s about Peace, Love, and Understanding, like everything else in bourgeois conventional society, ideally. The Peace-Love-and-Understanding trinity is the foundation of much more than the hippies liked to pretend. Suburbia is the apotheosis of Peace, Love, and Understanding. (They wouldn’t have said so at Woodstock.)

None of this is supposed to suggest that the Natives haven’t been displaced unfairly. It’s only to hope, rather, that it isn’t fully “evil” to create a line and observe it, where once people crossed freely to and fro.

* * * *

September 25, 2016

Sunday. Have been working happily in the forest trailer all this month.

After work, with chainsaw cut entire load of oak into lengths for firewood, working below cottage on the tailgate of pickup, east meadow.

Dash has his drivers license now, and takes the Toyota out in shy, short trips: to coffee shop and back.

* * * *

October 1, 2016

No writing today. Slept in surprisingly late, slept maybe ten hrs total, which I take as a good sign (i.e., of the repose in my bosom of the freshly redacted “Immanence”).

Sunny, cool. Rains to come in tomorrow.

It’s Saturday, Brett barefoot in nightgown brings in baskets of winter squash. Also some summer squash is still producing. A big yellow spherical pumpkin, looking right now more like a melon, is showing its first blush of orange, a pumpkin-color aureole around the button on its butt.

First early-pears harvest. The truck bed serves as my ladder.

Repair oven-door spring, another trip to B&C for aviation cable and pinch-clips.

Brett to Celtic Festival with her friends.

* * * *

And the garden gate! After all these years at last it’s broken. An old familiar Zen metaphor turns up as the real thing, in a man’s life in a literal garden.

* * * *

October 2, 2016

Rain is promised. Satellite imagery, animated, shows a big guillotine-blade (of overcast) arriving from Pacific Northwest, due here by noon, though now the sky is summer-blue.

Snow-on-passes accumulation to be just two inches, which would mean twice that on summits and snow fields.

Chop oak for stove, stack all within.

Storm windows, mud room and playroom.

Woodpile tarped. Summer’s over: lit the pilot light in the kitchen wall furnace. Both swamp coolers drained. Big-house cooler tarped. (Up there on that ladder, I find wind-damage to west verandah roof. Nothing urgent, but something to be handled.)

Still, for a second day, no thinking about “Immanence.”

Lunch with Burnett and Mimi in town.

I’d purchased all the food for dinner here with Josh Weil and family, but it must be canceled as their baby has an irritable cold.

* * * *

October 3, 2016

Spent much of the day actually physically aching in a nationwide kind of way, here pacing my own meadows, I’ve actually got “the blues” – about the low quality of public discourse, which has come along with this year’s awful presidential campaign, it’s all over the media, resurgence of racist assumptions, a new license for the lid to be lifted on all the gremlins and Orcs who ordinarily don’t disport themselves in public, anti-Islam speech, insults to the people who make our beds and bend over all day picking our lettuce, even anti-Semitic hints, all as if, whenever truculence and impoliteness come out of their little holding pen, they “go on a spree” – thuggish talk from exalted podiums and the Mussolini frown and strut of one of the presidential candidates. And how this contaminates even me up here in my isolation where I’d liked to think animals’ manure is the most dangerous contact.

* * * *

Blessings-Counting: Every now and then over the years, Brett has told me I ought to get work as a voice in radio or TV. She’s not kidding. An announcer or something. She thinks my speaking voice is great.

This is absurd, of course. But how lucky can you be? I have a life where Brett thinks such a thing.

It’s not the only example. If I’d been given this street-address thirty years ago, and been told, “Go there. Go see a place where, some day, people will be prejudiced in your favor,” I certainly wouldn’t have believed it, the place’s peace and tranquility and liberty.

* * * *

October 6, 2016

Bad development. My supplier of biodiesel has been shut down. So I’ll be filling up at the Chevron station guiltily.

This while my solar-power array is disabled on account of its manufacturing defects.

So altogether, for an indefinite period, I won’t be able to, like King Canute, keep the tide from rising personally and single-handedly. (In Florida now, where salt water is rising up through limestone underfoot into people’s gardens, the situation is this: the state Governor forbids the words “climate change” to be spoken in the hallway or offices, or to be written on any paper; while the mayor of Miami has the official policy of recommending migration: “Get out of Miami before it floods. If you’re young and have your life ahead of you, start someplace else. Head for high ground. If you’re older, well, maybe you could enter into a thirty-year mortgage. Whatever you do, consider your time frame.”

* * * *

October 8, 2016

Jen and Josh for dinner, corn chowder and smoked trout. Their luminous two-year-old boy, polite gentle explorer of rooms.

Barbara at 93, mostly chair-bound. How resilient is the organism, tired-o’-livin’, ‘fraid-o-dyin’, at this point the main erosion, the biggest weight for her to carry, isn’t pain or sickness, it’s despair. Pain and sickness are almost bracing, by comparison. They’re a nice distraction from the despair. Despair alone (I’ve experienced this) is tiring as if it were physical labor, bodily, it drains calories. Yet she keeps on surviving the heaviest-possible, most crushing-possible hopelessness. Patience, suspense. Tightrope-walk.

* * * *

October 11, 2016

One o’clock in the afternoon. I see through the kitchen French doors, Pabby is crossing the lawn headed for the little iron gate to Barbara’s domain. (Her regular stint, a bit of reading-aloud, and maybe TV-watching, on Tuesdays a so-called “spa” including a blow-dry, nap-time.) Carrying supplies, she stops under the mulberry and looks out at the meadow – pauses for a good half-minute! a full minute! – then moves on, her head down, where nowadays a path is being worn in the grass, through that gate.

She’s a country woman and, looking out over the meadow, could have been making a sort of practical appraisal, seeing something that needs doing; or she might have just been admiring. October light on the meadow, pines glittering. Whatever, the ability to pause for a minute, to stand still, is distinguishing to not-just-everybody. You have to be either tired or wise.

* * * *

After “Immanence,” pick pears, a third day of it.

Offer comes from BPSolar, compensation for defective panels.

Clean garage, then cruise the Goodwill stores of the county looking for somebody who will accept the gift of an Exer-Cycle.

* * * *

October 12, 2016

Done with another pass. I keep working to restore conventional plot-and-character music to the story. Which goes against the grain of the book, because this shuffled-episode manner of narration depends on a sidelining of plot.

Plan is: tomorrow to take another vacation from work.

Have to get ready for the SF reading, find a suitable text.

Big rain coming in. Outdoor kindling box cleaned up.

(More talk with lawyers, about BP Solar settlement.)

A summer’s worth of littered-around agricultural paraphernalia.

Poultry premises roofed with fresh-purchased corrugated metal. The chickens’ summer roof (the rather tropical bamboo) has been rolled up and stowed in potting shed.

Hearing unaccustomed northerly ridges’ trees rustle, seeing the mists starting to blanch the blue southwest (all the cubic miles of atmosphere above the Sacramento Valley), I always think of my ranger friend who (we were hiking up the Yuba canyon and it was November, and I’d only lived here a few months then) took such pleasure in looking downriver, where the notch opens up to the great valley, and seeing the air between here and the Pacific thickening and whitening, took such satisfaction in the sight. “Now that’s the typical Alaska system coming in. Looks nice.”

* * * *

October 14, 2016

Rain comes in in the night. Early morning, the new corrugated-metal roof over chicken quarters requires lots of leak remediation, early in AM.

Brett observes there’s a particular hen – a Barred Plymouth Rock – who gets pecked a lot by the other girls (presently the Identified Victim), and her method of saving herself is just to drop off the roost and into the manure-hammock below. It’s another instance of poultry society/psychology providing a correlative of human. Her gambit is to convey: “Don’t peck at me, I’m down here in the manure. I’m not a competitor.”

In SF, I’ll be walking past degraded homeless folk.

“Proposition Q” on this season’s SF election ballot would have all the tents of homeless folk hosed off the sidewalks. I come across a remark of Abraham Heschel’s:

“Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.”

* * * *

To SF, in the pickup, not the jalopy. Heavy rain.

Northern California seems, increasingly, to be a traffic jam. There’s really been an epochal development in the overpopulation of the state, and a clever traveler has to weave around its web at all hours.

Dinner at “Curry Leaf” on Columbus with Jason Roberts, then we go to a place he knows called Sweetie’s Art Bar and drink Stormy Nights – ginger beer and rum – we the two in the place who lift a glass to E Bulwer Lytton.

* * * *

October 15, 2016

Wake in SF alone. Via telecommute, work on grant application (deadline is today). Trip up through Chinatown, for the purchase of a toothbrush (I’d forgotten to pack one) and a year’s supply of sturdy clothes, annual bottle of fish sauce.

Andrew arrives from Oakland airport and takes BART to town, walks up hill. Lunch at “The House” on Grant, which is excellent. Then visit to the shivah at Specs bar, vigil for Specs himself. Wonderful food laid out, the best smoked salmon I’ve ever had: so, typically, it’s food to make everybody think, “He would have loved this.”

Reading at five o’clock, in some fashionable Mission saloon.

* * * *

October 16, 2016

Reading went well, in an upstairs bar – too much racket from restaurant below. Then dinner at a long table at Puerto Allegre. Followed by a chase up and down the streets of the Mission with Andrew Tonkovich and Jason Roberts, looking for the oil painting that was the trophy awarded as Barbary Coast prize. We connect with the painting itself at The Vestry (big dark loud party), and with my posse, we carry it off in the light rain.

* * * *

A day alone in North Beach, idle and sad. City Lights basement.

Specs Simmons’s shivah is still going on, so I stop by there. In the rug store next to Live Worms, a tabla player and a harmonium player are whiling away the afternoon playing excellent (excellent!) qawwali music. These are two brothers, middle-aged, virtuosi, from Islamabad, been playing together all their lives. The park bench in Washington Square. A very young amputee in a wheelchair goes past with great scornful dignity. Later he’s sitting alone talking to himself.

Dinner with Nico and Ola.

* * * *

October 18, 2016

What can I be so unhappy about? Well, as I get older, I spend more and more time outside my own skin (as on the whole youngsters do live pretty happily inside their own skin). And when you get outside your own skin, what is there? There’s air (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide), there’s light and sound, all those vibes. And when you start being specific, there’s love and beauty. But also there’s lots more, and it catches your eye, there’s overpopulation of the planet, there’s irreversible climate change, social injustice that is axiomatic to the whole economy, the murderous history, racism, suspicion, how doomed are the ocean’s colorful coral reefs. Et cetera. All this outside my immediate concerns.

Along Divisidero, where I used to frolic in pre-marriage days with any amount of pocket money, the sidewalks now host rows of homeless folks’ tents, North Face, or Coleman pop-ups, semi-permanently installed, with shopping carts parked outside. Exponential resource depletion amounts to a relentless vise. (Which everybody saw coming, way back in ’72, including corporate strategists.)

Abraham Heschel: “The opposite of ‘good’ isn’t ‘evil’; the opposite of good is indifference.”

* * * *

A day for getting results. Wrote an Op-Ed piece and sent it to the Times. Signed off on a commitment to receiving a few thousand bucks’ compensation from BP Solar.

Dash and his friends want to go to Squaw tonight, so I’ll go with them and handle some things up there.

* * * *

October 20, 2016

Back up in Squaw, turn right at 7-Eleven. Snow on granite: it’s the “timelessness” metaphor. It heaves up in my windshield as usual above my steering wheel, and I actually get a tear in the eye for something that is truly near to unchanging. For even in extreme cases (e.g., even without forests, without vertebrate life, etc.), Granite Chief and Squaw Peak will be there still, just as I see them now, just as will Orion and Scorpio and the Big Dipper and the Pleiades, all my faves.

* * * *

Reading Paul Harding early in the morning. I think I catch a fleeting glimpse of “the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.”

Wasted day yesterday, having invested “all-in” in my own incompetence. I had a plan to shore up the wedding-deck foundation – purchased some pressure-treated fir, some construction stakes, a half-yard of crushed rock – and then discovered the hill is solid granite. No soil. The construction stakes, with help from sledge hammer, won’t penetrate more than a half-inch (into what had looked like dirt). Any “soil-retention” I might attempt would wash away in a single winter.

For a while then, with an ill-fated plan of making a dry-stack wall instead, I’m (Ecclesiastically) dragging together heavy stones. On the NPR radio while I work deeper into my incompetence, the story is about the prison system, explaining it’s as expensive to keep a prisoner on Death Row for a year as it would have been to send him to an Ivy League school for a year. I’m thinking, “Yup.” empathizing with that guy who’s such a bad investment all-round

* * * *

October 21, 2016

This dog we have here in this house. His name is Felix. “Rescue dog,” every night from his position in the corner, he’s watchful for the levitation of dinner plates from the table. He has learned that, for his good manners, he deserves to lap up the gravy, or the crumbs, when the plates are set down on the floor for him. When he first got here, he flinched and snarled at anyone who would reach out to pet him – having spent his puppy year on the streets of Salinas, California, dining on garbage, evading the dogcatcher. Nowadays he doesn’t flinch anymore. His tail now is mostly always set straight-up like a plume. I have a mental habit of comparing my lot in life to beasts’ – all the other beasts in Creation – I guess it’s a habit of “empathy” but also a form of moral assessment. Thinking of beasts’ highly evolved ethics, courtesy, sociality, predation, etc. And I feel better about things generally when I contemplate this dog Felix’s conversion, over two years. Now he has expectations. And he has entitlements. Now he’s a good dog and he knows it. He even thinks he has a certain few justified expectations. He once didn’t think he was a good dog. Back in Salinas, he must have been assured he was a very bad dog, on the evidence. How does he now know he’s s good dog? The after-dinner treats keep coming. He must be an instance of goodness.

* * * *

October 22, 2016

Rigmarole. Recording serial numbers for all 24 BP Solar pv panels. Packaging up all the data for their claims dept and emailing it off.

Better patching on the roof of the hens’ enclosure, where the 12-foot lengths of corrugated won’t extend over the 12-foot-6-inch surface.

Reading R. Bausch’s workmanlike short stories. It’s almost formulaic, his recipe: a story needs two superimposed plot arcs: a quicker one and a longer-term deeper one. (Like “Winning the Lottery” plus “Chronically Unhappy Marriage.” Or, “A Cancer Scare” plus “Racial Prejudice.” Or, “A Car Accident” plus “Deep-Seated Resentment of a Relative.”)

* * * *

October 24, 2016

Day dawns cold. Work by mudroom stove from early hours.

Trip to town for shopping.

Proofread Squaw contracts with legalistic care.

It’s time to get storm windows on upper house, but sharp wind comes up, along with rain – (in a blast of sudden wind, a fellow doesn’t want to be caught hoisting a 3’x5’ heavy rectangle, standing on a ladder rung) – So I’ve only gotten one up before I have to come back down ladder.

* * * *

October 26, 2016

On a bad day, it’s announced that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has exceeded 400 parts per million. “350.org” was what Bill McKibben optimistically named his climate-crusading organization. 350ppm seemed, then, a “line in the sand” that could be confidently drawn, never to be exceeded.

(There’s one particular medium-sized glacier in Greenland whose liquefaction will, alone, raise ocean levels by three feet.

In our little insignificant household here, I actually imagine such a dinner-table scene. It would be aimed at embarrassing those who leave lamps or heaters running (tho’ it’s too comical, too cruel):

DASH

Dad, you’ve left the water running at the kitchen sink.

ME

Oh, well, I’ll just leave it. Let it run. Somebody else will want a drink of water soon enough.

All the while, I know how futile — how eccentric — is my house in the remote west parts of America. I know most normal people live with the lights opulently burning all over the house, the HVAC always blasting, winter and summer – the point being to sever themselves from their natural environment. I remember as a child in Chicago sitting down at a dining room table, a winter’s eve, while every light was blazing on every empty floor of the house. The odd thing about the memory is, I bring it back as a sad cold feeling, having all that empty brightness at my back.

* * * *

October 27, 2016

Commencing a long week of heavy rain. Clear gutters. Upstairs storm windows.

Insomnia: reading Sharon’s wonderful new book of “Odes.” Her best ever, so I feel. And I’ve gone back to Henry Greene, one I’d never read, “Blindness.”

Tonight, Dashiell’s choral concert.

*

— Choral concert was great.

* * * *

October 28, 2016

Yesterday sitting behind the Chevron station on a retaining wall I put the following twos together, making a four:

I’ve believed (or anyway I’ve announced) for years that “consciousness” is a congregant phenomenon. That is, neurologists and metaphysicians will look in vain for “the ghost in the machine” if they’re contemplating a single brain, watching for thoughts and feelings in the tissues (the electrochemical pulses) of just one human organism. This because “consciousness” exists not inside a single bag of skin, my consciousness exists only exterior to myself, in the languages of the world, in every murmur of my mother when I was an infant (and by extension in her mothers’ and great-great-grandmothers’ utterances), in all culture, in every magazine article I ever read (and in every magazine article my acquaintances, too, read and then mentioned to me), in all the libraries of the world. That’s where my own mind abides: outside myself. (Also there abides the grammar which is the circuitry of logic. By which I evaluate and relate objects of knowledge.) Consciousness (my own mind) is not something I own personally. My mind it’s something I borrow – participate in – swim through.

So, behind the Chevron station sitting in the rain, I make the following conflation of neuroscience with the dharma: that this congregant “consciousness” is the medium of the so-called “reincarnation” that has so often troubled me in Asian doctrine. (The principle is called “dependent arising” in Indian philosophy.) And when the deep-meditating arhat sits very still and hushes the nattering swarm of “language” and “ideas,” bringing on the silence, he’s putting to rest that linguistic, social, congregant phenomenon that is consciousness.

* * * *

This pastime of editing folks’ unpublished fiction is a pleasure. Lucrative enough. But also, other people’s problems are soo much easier to think about than my own. I seem to get a little “objectivity.”

 

* * * *

October 30, 2016

Rain. Sunday AM

Done with work in trailer by ten AM, an early quitting time for me.

Our pears are popular. B. & E. Preston (plus kids) pick up a bag; then J. Weil (plus kid) stops by to pick up a bag.

Board meeting in Sacramento, followed by a matinee Kill Mockingbird. Dash comes along.

It’s sunny in the Sacramento Valley. Sunny in the sleepy small town that is California’s capital. But over Donner Pass and Tioga Pass, heavy snow closes traffic in both directions. As we drive back up into the Sierra, the wall of black churning on the slope is like a movie special-effect.

* * * *

November 1, 2016

Afternoon, to Marysville to visit Western Farm Worker’s Alliance. Low sun on fallow fields. While I’m in their offices: Buenas dias senorita Erika. Tenemos una familia. Necessitan comida. (Led by “the new priest” from down the street Father Brown, the mom and dad are under twenty, movie-star-beautiful, with nina of about four – all three dressed in the very newest best cheap clothes. Si. Tienen hambre. The only one who isn’t shy is the little girl, who makes their way for them in North America.)

Stop by Sierra Solar, to try to quicken their response.

* * * *

November 2, 2016

Rotted gatepost in the garden gate.

Pulling out all summer’s garden – (this has been going on all week, mostly under Brett’s muddy-gloved hand).

It’s just Dash and I for dinner, as Brett has gone to an arty event in Sac and Barbara is with her hired friend.

(Late, I’m alone reading Edith Pearlman, all her intractable race issues – the unredeemability of the unredeemed – I have to use Google to remind myself exactly what Purim commemorates, and on the tiny screen of my phone, I’m lost in the lengthy Wikipedia article: I’d always considered Purim a fun little raucous commemoration of Esther’s outsmarting the king and saving the Jews from Haman; I hadn’t really registered that Haman’s plan was, Goering-like, to exterminate all the Jews in the entire empire (to which all Jews’ response is to enter into penitence, prayer, fasting), and then in the end, that the Jews’ victory’s reward is in their killing 75,000 of their enemies throughout Persia. And then my phone utters a klink-klonk sound and a panel drops down informing me: “The 108-yr curse is broken. The lovable loser Cubs beat Cleveland by 1 run in Tenth Inning.” Never, since boyhood, followed baseball much. But still, just as I’ve read it, the panel that interrupted me slides offscreen again and tears have come stand freely in my eyes, as if I hadn’t had a reason for happiness myself for 108 years, or as if I cared about baseball.)

* * * *

November 4, 2016

No work.

Trip to town: bank, wine, groceries, doctor appointment.

Trying to think about something on the topic of “Plato” that has been asked for.

Troy and Heather are to drive down for dinner, bringing pot of curry.

Smoke two trout w/sage and make raita.

Get a little progress on the broken gatepost, cutting post to size but lacking copper preservative.

Grocery Outlet was always the lowest-class place in town to shop, and it’s where I have always shopped. (Liz: “I may like to think I’m grubby because I get to town only every few days; some of the people who turn up in Grocery Outlet haven’t been to town in generations”) – but the place seems to be evolving. I’m picking bargains off the wine shelves, and the woman near me has been asking the wine stocker about reds – she particularly likes a Tempranillo – and she accepts a recommendation on a different one, a Spanish Rioja. Then the Wine Guy points out a Carmenere she’ll like. Good, she’s been looking for a Carmenere. He adds, “It’s a great bargain, and it’s a pretty accurate Carmenere.”

The woman goes off puzzled but impressed. Me too, I guess.

“…an ‘accurate’ Carmenere” — in Grocery Outlet!

* * * *

November 5, 2016

Another warm day.

First draft of Plato piece. Quick, also perfectly satisfactory.

Amend soil in big rectangular bed.

Barbara went wandering yesterday and took a spill. Seems to have been a gentle, slo-mo spill. But today she’s experiencing the same back pain that was hard on her last month.

* * * *

November 6, 2016

The election is two days away, and it’s painful to listen to the discourse. Toqueville’s worst predictions may be fulfilled. Brett and I are out in the garden all day. I’m re-amending the already-amended soil, then we plant (commercial starts) arugula, lettuce, kale, chard, cabbage, parsley. All day sunny and misty and mild. Il faut cultiver son jardin.

* * * *

November 7, 2016

Dim, warmish, windless, quiet. No bird sound or insect sound. Or Highway 49 sound. Silence in every mountainside.

Morning, I actually get back to “All Things,” which I love. Then a better draft of the Squaw fundraising letter. Then finish the garden gatepost: old heavy four-by-six from the Haights’ old barn, which yesterday I painted with copper naphthenate, sunk three feet in ground. Then, very cleverly, capped with old tin, as rain-protection.

Curry with yams.

* * * *

November 9, 2016

In a strange election, an unwise man is put in the presidency. Famously unwise, famously violent. At all hours of the night, I’m out watching the stars, which are particularly clear and close and beautiful tonight. Set up wicker chair in meadow, coffee, sky-map app on phone. A few shooting stars streak by, but there’s nothing to wish for. The following (from 7^th C. Japan) is in my mind:

 

The moon is in a high place, all levels are quiet.

The heart holds half a Buddhist verse, ten thousand destinies are empty.

 

 

* * * *

Middle of night, email Joy to ask that “The Assistant” be withdrawn from consideration anywhere. Great novel. Won’t see the light of day.

* * * *

November 12, 2016

Party last night w/ Malsams & Seelys, Billheimer, et alia.

Today, Saturday, winter gardening. A full yard commercial soil for the long bed. Elsewhere, soil amendment, much more frugal and elegant.

Very happy with new scraped-clean “All Things.” From all depictions of Heaven, I’m taking out complexity and gingerbread-curlicues – simplifying Heaven – rendering Heaven as ruthless as, in fact, it is.

The only way to get a full yard of soil from the truck bed into the garden is via repetitious wheelbarrow loads.

Evening, Dash and his friends to Sacramento for Jerald Silva’s opening reception. So he misses out on the big greasy aromatic pork roast.

* * * *

This nice thing from William Blake, quoted in R’s post-election-politics article in The Guardian: “He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars … General good is the plea of the scoundrel.”

* * * *

November 13, 2016

Sunday.

So-called supermoon large in the sky, at perigee 29,000 miles closer to earth than usual. Lights up the meadow blue. Silence in woods all ’round, as if all creatures stunned/mesmerized breathing shallow.

Transplant all the old asparagus, unsure I haven’t done violence to the roots.

* * * *

November 14, 2016

Dash’s fender-bender: he rear-ends somebody at a parking-lot entrance.

Another visit from a solar engineer, for I’m taking bids to have these failed panels replaced.

* * * *

November 15, 2016

Small good rain. One marks these things because it looks like the far West might be coming out of its drought.

Work on “All Things” reaches the midpoint, the Old Dispensation, where sketching Heaven more mechanically paint-by-numbers in its cruelty, all seems to go well. The New Dispensation is a whole other thing, where tone-clash problems may persist.

Also, what’s at stake in the story changes there, from adultery to eschatology: reader puts book down.

Good final draft of a fundraising letter for Squaw, after way too much batting back and forth in revisions.

* * * *

November 16, 2016

Awake at three am. Rip-torn white clouds are motionless in black sky. Sirius is up there, as always, always close. Only 8ly away, that one star is such an intense glimmerer, it almost seems to have something on its mind, some intentions for us. Now with the new administration coming in, my worries are circling back again, about that tragi-comic, cartoonish event “Total Environmental Collapse.” Sirius will still be watching steadily (no rescue at all to us) while this muggy planet clouds up and smudges over fast, and sours. An instance: La Paz, Bolivia, pristine ancient city at ultra-high elevations (like 14,000 ft?), has always thrived on a brook of water from the ancient glacier above it. Now the glacier is gone. As of 2009. A sere meadow of scree is where the glacier used to be. What will all those Incan, sexy, sparkly-eyed, high-cheekbone people do? And their berry-brown kids? And high-breasted maidens wearing brimmed Derby hats and huipils? I guess they’ll buy water. They’ll probably buy it from an international cartel, maybe in plastic bottles, probably Nestlé.

* * * *

November 17, 2016

Finish newly (more cruelly) gutted “Things” draft.

“Plato” essay goes off in mail.

Maggie falls by, to invite to party, while I’m kneeling at ditch-spigot washing barley-seeds.

Storm windows going up around the ground floor.

Another engineer comes to bid on project of replacing defunct solar panels.

Candlelit little birthday celebration.

* * * *

November 18, 2016

Clear mild sunny. I incorporate changes to the Plato essay and send it back; and I write Joy asking, definitely now, that the “Assistant” manuscript be withdrawn from consideration anywhere, no ambiguity.

* * * *

November 20, 2016

Rain.

Last night sushi in town with Seelys and Malsams.

Ever since I met my composer friend at MacDowell who advocated regular Sabbaths (in his case, a cigar and the Sunday Times and an adirondack chair), I’ve made half-hearted efforts to emulate him. Today, stayed indoors for an entire day. Solid rain Sunday.

Help with the programming of Squaw’s on-line pay page.

* * * *

November 21, 2016

Brett’s birithday.

Smell of roast duck in the house, elaborate fat-rendering. Fine penetrating silky oil on all things.

* * * *

Cold-snap frosty morning, groggy man emerging from the back end of our woods by the highway, wearing a blanket, around the time the kids are congregating for their yellow school bus. The guy with the dreadlocks from the river. Little-known fact: Dreadlocks, if not kept clean, are the home of different life forms, mold mildew, a long-lost engulfed roach clip.

 

* * * *

November 25, 2016

Thanksgiving in Squaw. Fresh snow, and its bracing gladdening headache in full sun.

Dash and I get a good look at a Northern Flicker who poses for us at length on the Annex deck.

Smoked trout and pate de volaille.

All Baileys and Halls, too, and Holzapfel and Cavendish.

It’s agreed, small turkeys are much better.

Others, late into the night playing elaborate dominoes game.

Morning after, stay in bed and read Michael’s story in eTimes. In Annex living room Brett and Dash trying to reprogram his new phone. All visitors from other time zones are sleeping in.

* * * *

Newtown road twenty yrs ago, Justin and friends. Kill squirrels with pellet gun, “gut” them by first beheading them and then swinging headless carcass overhead gripped by tail: centrifugal force pulls offal out, spattering. Peel pelt. Spit-roast with salt and pepper. Yeah, sure.

* * * *

November 26, 2016

Difficult trip home, over summit in blizzard, small car packed with Brett, Dash, Sands, grandmother, and me. Plus dog. To left and right along the way, spun-out sedans. A big-rig is stranded jackknifed, center-road at Emigrant Gap’s long ascent, with cars moving carefully around it to left and right, a couple of other unlucky losers spin their wheels as their cars slowly rotate on tilted road surface. Dash is importantly helpful installing chains at the roadside at around 7000 ft. elev. Descending into Blue Canyon at about 4000 ft. the snowflakes turn to rain, and the chains come off at the Washington-Road turnoff. Lie down once again in roadside slush, embrace tire to start pinching at the rusty chain clasp behind there in the wheel well, while reminded of adolescence and unhooking of girl’s brassiere, a dissonant notion here. At home, at last, Barbara needs to be installed in her armchair, so all is well. Then there’s Luke and Maggie’s merry hearth, their low house deep under the storming cedars at the end of their washing-out road. Maggie’s accordion, Randy and Murray on reeds and strings, Luke’s big, popping tenor-guitar sound. I, uncharacteristically, sing a song – with an advantageous hoarseness from the day’s work in the cold. (Jimmie Rodgers)

* * * *

November 27, 2016

Day of convalescence. Day of no ambition. (It’s days like this I’m grateful for accomplishable tasks: and the perfect instance is trundling a big standard-issue garbage container out to the roadside, its plastic wheels on gravel rumbling loud in the twilight stillness.)

Coming up on the knoll from putting the hens away, the last light of day is rusty and obscure. Ahead of me, in that kitchen, is potatoes and onions and chicken sausage. November dusk sometimes, the old color “brown” is capable of radiating from deep inside things with the force of embers – with the penetration of blast-furnace. But yet, in the cold, keep its somber shroud, dousing everything.

* * * *

Propane in Squaw:

Apache: 489 cu. ft. — (on 11-29-16)

Annex: 354 cu. ft. — (on 11-29-16)

Maybe an anthology:

Robert Frost

Henry James

Thomas Nagel

Jane Austen

Allen Ginsberg

(Varney’s Hardware)

* * * *

Before hard freeze, must bring in fancy “hydrator.”

* * * *

Half-constructed notion involving “anthropic” cosmology

— (this isn’t any cogent idea or a mystic insight, it’s just a sort of sloppy fantasy leading nowhere clear, which came to me half-asleep last night):

1. Given the necessarily “congregant” nature of all consciousness (congregant in its social and semiotic origins, and in its social and semiotic sustenance);
2. and given the necessity of consciousness in this universe (the “anthropic” principle) —

Well then, consider two planets: ours, which senses itself to be at the “center” of the universe; and another planet way out in the recently photographed galaxy EGS-zs8-1 (there really is such a one), which exists 13B light years away in what we like to think of as the “furthest edge” or the universe. (The fact is, EGS-zs8-1 feels itself to be at the center; it sees us as the dim remote outlier; it sees us hovering just at the curtain of darkness which marks “the beginning of time.”)

Furthermore, it is a fact of astronomy that we’re seeing the galaxy EGS-zs8-1 in past-time. We’re seeing it 13B years ago — because it took the light of its spectacle 13B yrs to reach us, across the 13B ly of space. Similarly, anybody on EGS-zs8-1 would be seeing our quaint little planet “Earth” at a time when it was scarcely an inchoate wisp, 13B yrs ago, on a forlorn rim of the universe, indeed not yet aborning, still swirling in stardust and gas.

Now, neither planet’s consciousness precedes the other, neither in “Time” nor in cognitive priority. The question would be, if consciousness is a “congregant” phenomenon, AND consciousness is a teleological basis of the cosmos, how does our consciousness already interact with that which has evolved separately on EGS-zs8-1? Is there any “entanglement” phenomenon? When EGS-zs8-1 and we both look at the same star, for example?

Definitely only a half-thought interesting to record but more of a dream than an idea.

* * * *

December 1, 2016

Afternoon clearing brush: a few years’ accumulation of blackberries (they’re teeming up as high as the roof) all around cold north side of potting shed, sites of old compost heaps.

* * * *

December 4, 2016

Afternoons of clearing brush, then axe-splitting hardwood rounds and bringing it, with cedar, into the house for the winter. On kitchen door, twinkle-eye Pabby knocks (a K-Mart shopping bag under arm, stuffed). She confesses she got carried away bringing in chard. So tonight chard sauce is on the brined chick-breasts with old dried porcini that have been on the shelf forever.

http://louisbjones.com/2016/12/05/try-again/

December 27, 2015

Hunter to airport. Three am. Back to Washington. (Ralph, as he is known around here, has him detecting deceptive language in consumer contracts. He’s the right man for the job.)

Nap back at home. Send out the last batch of Xmas carols.

Reading Greg’s novel. Interesting problem of paired but disparate story lines. Is that really a “problem”?

* * * *

December 26, 2015

The day after Christmas. Wake in the night, all practical anxieties. Spend the morning sending off emails of Xmas carol. Then the afternoon snowshoeing with Brett and the boys in the deep woods over the spine of Washington Ridge, about 5000 ft. Amber sun keeps striking us thru trees wherever we go; blue are the holes poked in the snow: so amber-and-blue are the colors in snow. Picnic of cheese, bread, candy, apples, a single tall bottle of beer to pass around.

In the cottage with leftovers of Xmas dinner: Tracy, Emma, Sands, Hunter.

Barbara keeps reflexively hoisting her full wineglass out toward people, smiling: people clink it with their own glasses and she sets it down. Repetitious convivial glass-clinking is going to become the theme of the evening. At last Barbara, lifting it out again, says, “Why won’t someone take this from me?”

* * * *

December 23, 2015

The night is cold, sparkling. Only a few shrunken stars, grains of lost salt.

Water-crystals on the meadow. A foot of snow will have fallen by tomorrow evening, but right now the sky is clear. Covering all the irrigation heads and spigots with straw, or whatever comes to hand. An old dog-bed’s fleece-upholstered oval

* * * *

December 20, 2015

Christmas shopping.

To Pearson Small Engine to pick up generator.

* * * *

December 18, 2015

A better roof for the poultry run: corrugated tin would cost $27.50 per 24ft of coverage.

Instead, I poke a row of holes in the (useless anyway) tarp and suspend an old length of rain-gutter to conduct the dribbles away.

Xmas spirit: I get an email from the usual congress-district politician: “HAPPY HOLIDAYS, JONES”

* * * *

December 19, 2015

Thanksgiving feels recent but now everyone is here again. All the front rooms of the house to be heated, and serving platters again to be pulled down.

Tracy in the cottage. Salmon (sriracha/honey/ginger/soy).

That wonderful midday meteorological phenomenon: You can be working outside in the sleet and it’s miserably cold. Then the rain turns to snowflakes, and suddenly the air is warm, it’s tropical, you want to take off your scarf.

Thinking of the im-possibility of combining a novelist’s practices with the “right speech” commandment of the dharma: (G. Snyder comes to mind. A poet with a fidelity to the right-speech rule. His “think like a mountain” thing is the result. A novelist mustn’t think like a mountain.)

* * * *

December 16, 2015

New shelf barley-fodder sprouts.

Two rat traps in the broccoli.

* * * *

December 10, 2015

Good Nor-Cal-sized rain at last, as if the biosphere were doing fine. Last night it was oyster chowder for dinner. I continue to worry that Hunter and Dash, fifty years from now, might not be getting the seafood anymore, especially the mud-dwelling creatures, or the big top-of-food-chain fish. Or much else, of the fruit of the earth. Will they have the abundant salmon and trout and big sweet scallops and decent cuts of beef? Will they have the good cabernet $5/bottle and really meaty nuts, artichokes, tomatoes, etc? Or be able to lie down in an unmown meadow? The sensuousness of contact everywhere with the biome I, as an organism, evolved in, gustatory, tactile, wind-in-hair, wind-in-mouth, wind-in-ears, feet on dirt, etc. For the infinitely adaptive human race, one pictures far-future life on this Earth as it were a colony on some other star’s exoplanet: alkali wastes with habitations that look like the old Kodak flashcubes, or like bubble-wrap. This year there’s no crab harvest because the hot ocean waters have induced a neurotoxin in all the coastal Dungeness. (A tradition elided: Thanksgiving without cracked crab this year.) One worries that by century’s end people will be reminiscing, improbably, about how sweet and easy was life when there was still a Gulf Coast, when there was still a Florida. Before people lived on tofu only, and various frankenfoods. When you could go outside without sun protection. When New Jersey had a view of the ocean unblocked by dikes. Before all the refugees from Calif-Nev-Ariz came to the Midwest to live in migrant squats in fields and yards and alleys (BMWs and Saabs and SUVs, all with Calif. plates, encircled in a camp. Former “artists” and “writers” looking for work of any sort).

Heavy rain comes and goes this morning. It’s been raining long enough now, this morning the forests’ soil breathes the fishy smell as if we were at the coast in low tide. The milk we’re buying these days, in an old-fashioned glass bottle, isn’t homogenized, so clots of cream fall into your coffee, and then, stirred, the coffee surface carries a sheen of golden beads like butter.

 

 

* * * *

 

 

December 9, 2015

Power outage last night. Generator failed: apparently because gasoline has been sitting in it for a year, so the carburetor is “lacquered.”

So we ate pasta by flickering light. During the couple of hours when it was just Barbara and me stranded together, I found the Dobro and delighted her with all the old songs. She faintly yodels guessing at melodies.

(A favorite, but irrecoverable to memory, something Depression-Era: “We are tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old campground.”)

Bigger storm systems coming. This morning: drag heavy generator onto pickup bed, using old Squaw doors as a ramp, bring to Pearson Small Engine, arrive just as the windshield is starting to collect aerosol rain.

The workday is lost to this small emergency, so:

Get going on TTCF reports

Write and send novel summary for Joy

Test-drive Brett’s new Squaw apps

Spend an hour on the “dependent arising” lecture of Bikkhu Bodhi

Must decline the invitation to bluegrass jam at the brewery for, instead, the family scene here.

Oyster chowder. A bit inefficient extra time in preparation – gathering/chopping thyme endlessly.

* * * *

Sitting with capp in front window of café, reading Price’s police-investigative novel (about how bad it is in the New Jersey ghettos, where love is born only to be insulted/disappointed) – the author’s gratuitous tour through the county morgue’s gurneys of atrocities – I’m about to give up on Richard Price – and I look out the window, and a girl at that perfect age is passing, with all the regalia of that perfect age, she’s stylin’, having a great afternoon just taking power in the street.

And after she’s passed, above the storefront façades across the street, in the overcast pre-storm sky, a great black handkerchief of black birds is flipping and flipping, a “meme,” all enjoying a single mind, slashing this way and that, and obviously it’s exultation, a condition of bliss, far above New Jersey’s misery and even far above the pretty girl’s.

* * * *

December 7, 2015

Yesterday’s pleasure: Riding in the passenger seat while Dash drives. All along Ridge Road. Around the new development there. Down College Drive. At the stoplight, turn left onto East main, with turn signal flashing correctly. Intermittent rain/sun. Random conversation.

Talk with Joy. She likes “Immanence” and will try to sell it in NY.

Review (again) to Gary and Jack.

Have declined to go to SF for Nion’s party, and it’s surprising how much the decision is burdened by the expenditure of fuel. This even though it be vegetable-oil fuel. Vegetable-oil fuel, too, has its carbon footprint. The old vague moralistic twinge is now a full-blown debility.

(The only ones doing anything helpful, during death knell of this habitable planet, are those doing absolutely nothing. Not getting on airplanes, not going to destination parties, not launching businesses.

* * * *

December 6, 2015

Sunday morning. Northern California is still getting rained on.

I can hardly separate my own darkness from the darkness of the world’s future. The heedless way we’ve treated the earth’s delicate health, and the cruel way we’ve treated the earth’s peoples. Refugees driven hither by desertification, and terrorists by poverty. Just this week in Paris, the nations’ diplomats are failing to reach an agreement in the “climate talks,” for the simple reason that we here on Indian Flat Road feel like driving into town for a pint of ice cream.

In the midnight, lull between rain showers: I’m outside in a Canadian cold-front’s stillness, windlessness, silence, the only sound (coming from the enclosed garden) is the tinnitus of the electronic varmint-repulsion gadget.

I come inside the house, and all is warm, all sleep. In the kitchen a chart has been posted for some while now, which I’ve never stopped to look at. It’s a grid, with the days of the week stretching out horizontally. The following daily devoirs are listed vertically:

Biology Homework

Spanish Homework

English Homework

History Homework

Psychology Homework

Geometry Homework

Young Composers

Exercise

Guitar

Reading

15 min per class studying

Chores

The first day – a Monday – is answered by a column of firm checkmarks, one checkmark for each of these accomplishments, including even “Chores.” But the next weeks are an empty grid. I have no idea how long it’s been up there. The page is held by fridge magnet to an out-of-the-way cupboard surface where no one will have to consult it or notice it.

One of my favorite things: that as I come to bed, or as I get out of bed, all sleep, all snore, everybody, even the dog and the two cats, solidly.

* * * *

December 4, 2015

Rain. Head cold persists, just as bad, and it does impair my working. Still adding new pregnancy/abortion scenes to Assistant.

Head cold or no, I join with hootenanny at Ruttens’ down the road. Knock-knock-knock: Dobro and wine bottle and Pyrex tray covered in foil (potatoes au gratin). A beautiful evening, all reading out of the “Rise Up Singing” songbook.

 

* * * *

 

 

December 2, 2015

Rain coming in tomorrow, and it feels like rain today. I’ve got a cold but made a good morning’s work. Entire new scene in Assistant.

Teeth cleaned at dentist 1:30; reading-plus-soup at a restaurant; pick up Dash and, during his guitar lesson, reading-plus-coffee in main street café. (Reading Richard Price’s “Freedomland,” doing my best to admire it. Succeeding in admiring it. Had never yet read any Price.)

After this, I ride in the passenger seat of my own car, while Dash steers it in the deepening twilight around the car-free roads of the valley. Twenty minutes.

* * * *

My dental hygienist wants to give her son a puppy for Christmas. Her needle prods in my gumline and finds no recession since my last checkup. ’Bout the same. When I’m all done with her, standing at the tall counter I’m given a business card with the agreed-upon moment of my next checkup inked onto the blank line: “June 7, 2016, 1:30PM.” Six months out, I’ll still be alive then, and I’ll be showing up on time. Out in the parking lot, the sky overhead is overcast.

* * * *

December 1, 2015

I’ve been finding myself thinking about the Noble Eightfold Path’s eight ordinances more specifically, and more individually, one-by-one, and have hit upon an unhappy thought: about “Right Speech” if I were a Buddhist. (You don’t have to be a Buddhist to think “right speech” is an excellent idea.) A vocational novelist is going to be especially unfit ever to conform to the Right Speech requirement with any perfection. His whole métier is devoted to so much incautious speech, experimental speech, enthusiastic speech, groping speech, ebullient/exuberant speech. Which gets ironed out of final drafts, but is the madness that, up until the uttermost final draft, swamps the workbench.

(Right speech: “Seeing nothing that isn’t there, and the nothing that is.”)

* * * *

Dash, with DMV permit, receives his first driving lesson after school, then on coming home drives his mother and me around these quiet mountain roads, through woods, openly enjoying triumph, for a half-hour before dinner. Turns on his favorite radio station and hangs elbow out window.

* * * *

November 28, 2015

Day trip to Squaw. Dash and two of his friends ride along. Sunny day with fresh snow, windless, each cedar bough along the road a white ladle. The boys go sledding below the Annex while I work.

Check all traps (one bushy-tailed woodrat)

Disconnect fan switch upstairs

Replace non-rock-room curtains

Read gas meters (Annex: “002”) (Upper house: “017”)

Baseboard in Annex basement

Annex furnace “plenum” mystery solved.

* * * *

November 25, 2015

Day before Thanksgiving. Snowflakes are fast-falling, fluffy.

I always think of this (very old) farmhouse as a musical instrument, which over the years we play, wheezily. Starting today, and for the Thanksgiving weekend, all the parts that are usually cold will get opened and warmed, and inhabited. Most evenings of the year, Brett and I, for our civilized entertainments, can warm up in the back mudroom with just the stove.

* * * *

Add this to the list of “goldilocks” circumstances that make life on planet possible: the surrounding magnetic field.

There happens to be a still-molten iron core in the planet, which happens to be churning in a pattern (convection currents in there as it cools, plus Coriolis-force from planet-spinning) that creates an immense electric dynamo: iron electrons in revolving inner currents. The resulting magnetic field around the planet protects against deadly cosmic sunburn rays. It allows plants to live. Without the magnetic field the earth would be killed by solar wind in one season.

* * * *

November 24, 2015

Four AM, with coffee in driveway, thinking for certain that one thing we moderns will have had in common with the Indians who used to live here is gratitude. Not much else in common, unfortunately. But gratitude. Cold storm from Gulf of Alaska is coming in – early snow will pile on trees that are still leafed out, so branches will snap and power failures are predictable – and already now, in the humid warm dark pre-dawn, the mountains all around are generating the seashore surf sound of pre-storm turbulence. The Nisenan Indians who lived here will have known the same sound. Since there does exist such a thing as “gratitude,” it implies the existence of something to be grateful to, a theistic problem as impenetrable to the Nisenan, then, as to us now.

 

* * * *

 

November 21, 2015

Brett’s birthday: dinner-and-movie for all.

Dinner, Dashiell’s choice, is at Big A Drive-In, where Brett and I both have the ancho chili burgers with avocado and Dash has the Barbecue Bacon Cheese, and the soundtrack is Steely Dan, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin. The movie, afterward, is about a stranded astronaut, with lots of special effects, white spacecraft wheeling in sterile interstellar space, Martian red-dust storms. In our cushioned seats we pass around ice cream Dibs and Sour Patch Kids.

* * * *

November 20, 2015

Nice reading last night at bookstore. Read from “The Stone.” Drinks after.

 

* * * *

 

November 19, 2015

String of sunny days. Shorter-and-shorter days.

Hens won’t lay, barley won’t sprout, Allen Ginsberg won’t get off my desk. Curse on the place.

Afternoon: finished up turning soil in fenced-in area.

All the while, news of Paris terrorism is on the radio, and while the spade keeps plunging and chopping I’m thinking of sad things like the inevitable departure of Dash for life elsewhere, the shortness of a book’s existence. But the day is warm, the sun low in the sky – so all the afternoon keeps looking like end-of-day, a brilliant bronze twilight even in the noon: a gold skimming light makes the meadow grass tinsel. Hens peck in that heavenly place.

* * * *

Who works harder than the bum? Nobody.

* * * *

At last a few tears for Paris. I’m driving to town and, on National Public Radio, a not-so-young Parisian woman is being interviewed: she gave blood at a clinic yesterday. Squeaky tremulous little voix Parisienne. The day after the terrorist attacks – where a hundred-some flirting boys and girls were killed, never to be revived, their blood flowing out on the dance floor, or on the café terrace to be mopped up – hundreds of Parisians who had no ability to fight terrorists or bring back the dead went to clinics and gave blood. It’s not gonna help those kids, or fix any of that, they just wanted to give something up. That old fluid in their veins, du sang, is a common currency and the only investable asset.

 

 

* * * *

November 15, 2015

Hard rain all day. The whole day nipping things out of the Ginsberg review after storm of self-doubt. I’ve gotten so I hate having “opinions.” Especially my own. Should stop writing reviews, except of books I admire in a purely unmixed way.

 

 

* * * *

November 14, 2015

Amy my niece comes visiting from Sacramento. Her novel has gone to an agent.

Lunch at Three Forks.

A beautiful warm Saturday all day, clear skies, no hint of the predicted rain.

Then Brett and I working together leveling new-enclosed ground. Got halfway through it. She talking of lots of ideas for raised beds, enclosed greenhouse shelves. Afternoon dims. Smell of other people’s fireplace smoke. November dark is early, cold here soon after shadow of oak falls, and while I do what the Sioux were appalled to find the Mennonites doing in the prairie (turn sod), it’s a pleasure to be discovering by spade all the old, eternally fresh, white mycorrhizal fungus along wort roots like confectioner’s sugar, the sod’s underground civilization, as the air gets darker the stuff seems to (if not literally) phosphoresce, the glowing thing in the gloaming, source of light in the soil.

 

* * * *

November 13, 2015

Done with fence stapling. I’ve gotten back the technique (hold the staple with needle-nosed pliers while striking with hammer). The work goes fast.

The question will be: where to get salvaged materials for the walls of raised beds. (I can’t, anymore, picture lumberyard fir’s hard bright new-grown, planed flesh. Not on this property anymore.)

* * * *

Paris terrorism (100 killed in nightclub) conflated with my own local broken-heartedness.

Sleepless, I go in the garage to find heavy-duty rat trap, because those scritchy noises are in the walls again. Brilliant stars up there, same as ever.

Coming out of garage, I bump into Pabby in the dark. She has put Barbara to bed and is leaving for home. (Barbara is being watched closely today, as last night was a bad night.)

Pabby remarks on my weird equipage, because I happen to be holding the makeshift chicken-killing gear, and must explain. An old sock to serve as pacifying hood for a doomed hen. And an open-at-both-ends Contadina tomato-paste can that, nailed down on the cedar stump, would provide the pillory to immobilize her when I lift the axe.

 

 

* * * *

 

November 12, 2015

Spent afternoon getting a start on fence stapling.

Toyota to the shop for oil change. (Cappuccino in California Organics for an hour reading Galway’s novel.)

* * * *

November 9, 2015

Good long rain. Bit of snow here, up on San Juan Ridge, and first chain controls over the passes.

* * * *

November 8, 2015

Little rain coming in. Yesterday afternoon tilling the new ground I’ve enclosed.

* * * *

Two recurrent mind-crickets:

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”

“Heaven and earth are ruthless. The 10,000 things are ruthless.”

 

* * * *

November 6, 2015

At last getting to work on “Haram Halal” story. Beautiful warm fall day. I spent the whole day in bed like an invalid, with laptop, except that I got up once to go outside and dispatch an irremediably sick hen.

 

* * * *

 

 

November 5, 2015

Fundraising letter goes out.

Starting up the barley-sprouting operation again on shelves.

 

* * * *

November 4, 2015

Good long deep slow rain. Two days of it. Good for the water table.

 

 

* * * *

October 31, 2015

Configuration of the Venus-Mars-Jupiter syzygy keeps changing. Observed over the month before each dawn, it seems evident, oddly, the outermost planets travel faster than the inner planets.And overtake them. Which is not intuitive. Laws of motion would have the inner planets on speedier tracks. Still, every day I see Mars gain on Venus. And Jupiter surpass them both.

(Possibly this is just perspectival? Jupiter is in fact going slow but, in its remoteness, somehow seems, from Earth’s shifting perspective, to exceed the others.

Last day of October. Drain both evaporative coolers, put all storm windows up. Get up ladder and tarp the main evap. cooler.

Hitch cart to bring up the oak rounds from the lower woods. Dump them in east meadow to weather for a year before splitting.

Now, with promise of the good storm to arrive in early morn (NOAA: “the first major snow event for the Sierra”), I’m tucked up with firewood supply, cupboards and cellar sufficient, and I think of my two sons: one is on the East Coast, mornings rising early, optimistically, for a commute to a job he seems secure in, and happily effective in; the other is out tonight trick-or-treating in the balmy streets of town, popular among friends. Each alone has to travel the long road, each his own griefs and errors. And not resting when the moon isn’t yet up and the road is dark.

The ditchwater spigot in the veg. gardens is leaking steadily, but I like it, and will leave it.

 

* * *

 

October 30, 2015

First draft of short story Haram Halal. Also, rediscovered old story about prostitute encounter in the Tenderloin.

Afternoon, cut up the large oak that for months has lain at the bottom of the far woods. Its lying and curing may have softened it a bit, or may have hardened it the more. Because the grain was iron.

Nevertheless, fresh-sharpened chain went through the whole thing in three hours.

Evening, lots of confusion in getting Dash and friends to “Comedy Club” night at high school. His girlfriend’s car needed a jump, stuck in driveway.

 

* * * *

 

 

Oct. 28, 2015

Sudden trip to Squaw, as my presence is necessary for installation of propane tank.

Check rodent traps and find nothing.

It’s good I’ve driven up here because some carpentry (outside purview of Ferrellgas installers) is necessary for access to front gas meter. A light mist rain anoints all three of us, FerrellGas workers and I, as we struggle to put in new meters, north side of house. Steely sunshine through rain.

Later, at PlumpJack alone, I make lunch of an appetizer at the bar.

Storm over the summit. This little Japanese pickup wouldn’t do well if the rain turned to snow. But it doesn’t.

* * * *

A big noisy rat (it’s actually Templeton; it’s Templeton himself, sovereign glutton of our compost heap) has fallen into the lidded garbage bin (the lid was up) and now he can’t climb the sheer inner wall. I’ve clapped the lid shut. Rather than finding a way of murdering him where he is, I’m going to leave him in there, with the lid on tight, and tomorrow the whole can, set out at the roadside, will be, by a robotic arm, tossed into the big green “Waste Management” truck, and he’ll be transported on a cruise to rat heaven. The county dump has a view of the Desolation Wilderness peaks, snow-capped even in summer. He can have a life, an afterlife, far from this place of hunger and fear and competition.

* * * *

October 27, 2015

Cold snap coming, and rain presaged typically by a warm, increasingly overcast, still day. It’s a quiet day far and wide.

Some autumn prep, then. Bring in all wooden furniture, all tools of fence and garden. Light pilot in summer-dormant kitchen heater. Double-tarp the magnificent woodpile. Thorough cleaning of all hens’ premises, raking out straw. Spreading plastic sheeting over chicken-run roof, weighting it down with old fence posts. Brett dusts everybody (at least everybody galline, but herself too) with diatomaceous earth.

One hen is crippled by (apparently) a sprained or broken leg. But I’m keeping an eye on her, thinking of remedies, before resorting to euthanasia. The fact is, maybe it’s nothing.

Expedition to town: Doctor appointment, case wine, a fill-up with (bio)diesel behind the Grass Valley barn, Dash at music lesson.

* * * *

 

October 26, 2015

Posts are up, and I’ve got enough fencing old rusty rolls of yesteryear, from the woods), though not yet stapled. The area of arable ground is now increased by about 70%.

 

* * * *

October 24, 2015

Nion’s party in Marin. A wonderful day.

 

 

* * * *

October 23, 2015

With leftover copper naphthalate, stain the bases of old split-cedar posts.

Get a start digging post holes.

Tennis with Michael and Emily.

 

* * * *

 

Oct. 22, 2015

Filling in the trenches where old fencing has come out, but only desultorily, inefficiently, as I’m taking care of my hurt back. (Dragging to below-the-outhouse woods: big rolls of good galvanized gopher-wire for reuse.) A few minutes practicing the set for the weekend party.

 

* * * *

October 21, 2015

Most of the day tearing out old fencing, untrenching the gopher-wire, backbreaking because it unavoidably involves bending over and pulling.

Dinner in Barbara’s cottage. Pesto and roasted winter squash. Much discussion of Dash’s accession to the status of driver’s-license holder. And how shall he finance his driving.

All the while Barbara, at the table, looks worried and lost. At last she says something generally dismissive, the kind of remark that has always made her feel better.

Anyway, Dash has gone off to homework, and Brett goes outside to call in her cats. Barb and I are alone at the table. We used to love platicando (when she was younger and had all her wits, abundant, wit to burn, for there is a time to cast away stones, but this isn’t it), now she’s always disoriented, and always on the brink of panic, worried that she doesn’t know where she is or who’s at the table, at heart worried that she might be behaving inappropriately.

 

* * * *

October 21, 2015

Yesterday: a day eaten up by pleasures and duties. Harvest all the basil before frost and make blenders-full of pesto. Freeze it. Learn set list for Nion’s party. Travel in pickup to Auburn, with Brett, to get the jump on everybody else in the world and buy a super-cheap leather chair advertised on Craigslist. Which turned out to be ugly. About which I’m relieved. Because all purchases in an affluent economy are for inward reasons, not for any necessity.

[Affluence on an ecological scale.]

Again, a day of no work of my own.

This morning early, at dawn, the Mars-Jupiter-Venus array is more wonderful than ever. A couple of falling stars. And two sightings of space junk (one of them a satellite SEASAT, which has been defunct since 1978, having worked for only two months before an electrical short circuit killed it.)

 

* * * *

October 19, 2015

Doing extra credit reading of Ginsberg and other so-called Beats. I’m working too hard on this for the little money I make, but Ginsberg seems worth the effort. Or rather, not so much Ginsberg as the friends he was flacking for.

Barbara is feeling poorly and Brett is worried. “Hydration” is the answer. Always the answer.

Got another wood rat, in trap in studio.

Prawns are cheap, SPD, and the same adobo-chile continues to work well, with white beans and tomatoes.

 

* * * *

 

 

October 18, 2015

Train home, from SF to NC. Traintracks level with the polluted waters of the Carquinez. The homeless campers, looking suburbanites in origin, with their REI gear, all along railroad sidings.

 

* * * *

 

 

October 17, 2015

The apartment needs olive oil, so I’m in Molinari’s on Columbus. The man behind the counter is being good to the tourists, who insist they’re “100% Italian and love wine.” The man behind the counter says he hasn’t had a drink in 25 yrs.

Where’re you from?

Well, the tourists are from San Luis Obispo, Las Cruces, Lompoc. The man behind the counter says “Yeah, I know Lompoc. It’s pretty around there.” Then he turns to me, talks me into buying two bottles: one bottle is extra virgin, the other that’s just puro, only for sautéing. The old folks’ll kill for this.

The tourists are gone. He’s ringing me up, and his friend behind the counter says, “Lompoc, huh.” (Level smirk, but sympathetic.)

He hands across my bottles and assures me the puro oil makes no burning smell, cooks at high temperatures. Then, as I’m gone, he turns back to his friend, “Yeah, I go down there. Guido and John are still doing time, and I go down every once in a while.”

* * * *

San Francisco is such a small town. I see at two in the morning all apartments’ lights are out. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. I remember New York in the seventies: at two in the morning a crossword-puzzle pattern of unlit and lit windows.

* * * *

Reading to the assembled masses (my essay in Threepenny) on Valencia Street. Dinner afterward at a bar with Charlie and BK.

* * * *

 

October 16, 2015

Writing in the morning.

Post Office in North Beach.

City Lights – spent a long time upstairs in poetry. At a new fish place at the foot of Union, ceviche and white wine at happy-hour prices.

 

* * * *

October 13, 2015

I’m working in Macondray Lane upper room, and the church bells down in the square start tolling – but there must be some occasion: it’s 11:24 am, not the hour – so of course, these are the bells that toll for me. One fine day, a writer will finally be wholly “published.”

So what I do now is, I go on working.

 

 

* * * *

October 15, 2015

Day alone in SF. All are gone but me. I scarcely leave house, snack on stale stuff, work. Spend the day spider-like on that filament-strand connecting.

 

 

* * * *

 

October 14, 2015

City thrift-shop browsing with wife and adolescent boys. Sidewalk enjoyment of just being around these two grown panthers, bored and powerful, no longer kittens, Dash and his friend Lliam.

Barbary Coast Award. The old Theatre Artaud. Music is great (Los Train Wreck), until I get up and, unrehearsed, bellow my song into mic without vocal monitor.

Then home and, till after midnight, wine on the roof with Sands and Brett, exulting in our laureate condition.

 

* * * *

October 13, 2015

In San Francisco for award. Dinner at a crummy Thai place on Polk. (Dash and his friend Lliam, Brett, Sands)

 

* * * *

October 11, 2015

Two days in Squaw to shut down house.

Alone, not writing. So I’ve got hammers and nails.

Dobro.

Dinner alone at PlumpJack bar, a stir-fry topped by fried egg. On the TV above the bar a football game. The NY Giants just barely beat the SF 49ers.

 

 

* * * *

October 9, 2015

Another day no work.

6am: haul everybody out into the driveway, pajamas, barefoot, to see the near-syzygy of Jupiter, Mars, Venus, moon. Moon is crescent, but with full-round, secret fullness lit by Venus’s reflected light.

 

* * * *

Thurs, Oct 8

No work today.

Christian mysticism lecture.

Conversation with Lannon: “Sorry, but no.”

Salvaged boards for 6×6 raised bed in garden.

Nev. Co. Farm Supply for gopher wire, irrigation.

Tilapia in adobo-lime butter, and the sad (October) string beans of the end of the season, which everybody is oddly patient with, uncomplaining eating them blossom-end to stem-end, pulling the tough non-biodegradable strings like dental floss.

* * * *

October 7, 2015

Just before sunrise today again, a line-up of Moon-Venus-Mars-Jupiter. Brighter and closer-clustered than yesterday.

The star Betelgeuse in Orion: a supergiant star which is as big-around as the entire orbit of Jupiter. It’s very distant (570 light years) but still visible (being so big), moving away at a high rate of speed. Very little makes me actually laugh anymore, but this sheer unlikeliness/implausibility does it. These are all sparks in explosive flight. Yet there’s sufficient time in the midst of the Big-Bang explosion for a life form (here on this one cooled cinder) to evolve and look up.

“Auspicious” is the word for today: letter sent to Baker; Revised ms sent to Joy; notion hatched of front-end fix to “The Assistant”; finished with first-draft Ginsberg piece. Heads-up coins lay in my path everywhere today.

 

* * * *

October 5, 2015

Reading done, did the first draft Ginsberg.

Dash is home sick from school.

(Very pretty display, around dawn, Venus-Jupiter-Mars, all visible in a clump, beside the crescent moon.)

Lannon research for Squaw.

Soil amendment for new starts: broccoli, cauliflower, arugula.

Electronic device for driving rodents from garden perimeter: $48.

* * * *

October 4, 2015

Letter for Baker Street.

Dinner with Josh and Jen.

* * * *

October 3, 2015

Saturday dawns clear and sunny, but a short rain is coming in.

That spider who so systematically dismantled her web has, overnight, put up a new one spanning the same clearing. The web isn’t as big, but it must be the same spider, my  fellow, because it’s basically the same design as the web she just took down. (She herself is not in evidence, a nocturnal.)

* * * *

October 2, 2015

Morning, earliest meadow fuming in sun, I’m pinning clothes on the line, and drops of dew on the string are, of course, “diamonds.” They drip into the humid, steaming shirts and skirts and pillowcases. These kinds of idyllic situations actually make me worry about the ecosystem. These improbable, but yet persistent harmonies in the local biome – the sun on schedule clearing the treetops, the climate still not gone haywire, the bees getting a start in the clover and the one hummingbird poking in the tall rosemary spires as they just begin to release their perfume, the October soil a little colder than it was yesterday at this same hour, causing trees’ and shrubs’ root-juices to flow a little slower than they did yesterday. Things still work. Here I am at the pinnacle of evolution. There’s so much human migration going on globally now – especially from arid regions to colder, wetter regions – I wonder how much of it is climate-driven, that is, economy-driven (rather than politics, which is its ostensible driver). Because it’s all looking like the sci-fi movie of “dysfunctional” economy “post-apocalypse.” On this-here meadow, I can still pin laundry on the line at evolution-pinnacle, and the dew point during the morning will sink dependably, for evaporation.

Ran into Gary in the market yesterday, and since I’m reading about Ginsberg, I asked and got a long appraisal of the whole Ginsberg/Kerouac/Corso/Burroughs embranglement. We must have stayed in the produce section for 45 minutes. He’s justifiably proud of what was accomplished back then by him and by his friends.

Doubles w/Michael and Emily.

* * * *

October 1, 2015

Rain overnight is quiet, steady.

Outside my trailer in the 4am dark, the big spider who has pitched her deathtrap all this past week has now decided to take it down. I first noticed the big doorway-sized web — magnificent spiral — a week ago, its portal to eternity spanning an open area beyond trailer. But the spider wasn’t home. Then the next night, deep in the middle-night, there she was, in the beam of my flashlight, she’s the size of a peso, eight-legged emblem in mid-air suspended.

Now it’s a few days later, and she was this morning at 4am taking down her elaborate house – spinnerets gathering and chewing the silk, quickly pulling down the whole thing, strategically demolishing only the sections she wasn’t clinging to. Her abdomen was swollen almost the size of an acorn.

 

* * * *

 

 

September 30, 2015

Overcast. Cooler.

The air is so still. Each leaf looks enameled against the sky. When it’s an overcast damp day, the eye stops wincing and starts absorbing more.

If we get a decent rain, as promised, maybe I’ll afterward go down to do the chainsaw work in the woods.

 

 

* * * *

September 27, 2015

One self-congratulatory minute, kitchen, standing up before French doors eating old pasta out of plastic Tupperware.

Sunday-afternoon tennis, and, except writing, no labor of any kind here today on the latifundium.

Total eclipse of moon.

All night coyote song widespread in the valley.

* * * *

September 26, 2015

The last few pears, stragglers, amounting to one final big carton.

As of now, the Do-Not-Resuscitate Order is posted (as required) permanently on the refrigerator in the cottage, even as Barbara shuffles around complaining happily and miscellaneously. She never lifts her eyes to see it, nor could focus to read it if she did lift her eyes.

Today, the unavoidable dip into the economy: case wine at cheap grocery, ingredients for a soup at SPD, fuel additive at auto-parts place, then biodiesel.

A sad day. The pessimists are right, the human population has been in “overshoot” for some while now. A die-off is nature’s usual (swift or gradual) riposte. It’s a sci-fi idea, and too lurid for rational consideration. I don’t picture “humanity’s extinction.” Rather, the general discomfort will (from an economic point of view) feel like “Total Environmental Collapse” only locally, only in human subjectivity. People will experience the death of nature as what they call “inflation.” Hamburger per pound will cost more. And then, so will pinto beans and drinkable water, etc. It will entail lots of changes in diet, migrations of even the comfortable folk, lots of unfair reductions/concentrations of wealth. A significant cultural loss. And eventually a significant population reduction. It’s already doing both those things.

This corn soup tonight: the good cod will go into it, because there’s cod in the Pacific, and the Strauss cream. The most jubilant occasions of my life, actually, are the dinners when my fifteen-yr-old is home eating well. Same when with Hunter. Nothing so enjoyable as watching your offspring feed, like its bloody-muzzled face plunged into the loin of the fallen impala.

* * * *

September 25, 2015

Four more cartons pears today.

* * * *

September 24, 2015

Up early. In the living room with isolated brass lamp reading Ginsberg.

Today it’s picking pears and catching up with Squaw business and no work of my own. And same plan for tomorrow, too. Keeping away from my own writing, in spurts.

The Pope this morning is telling both houses of Congress, “Don’t think of the poor and the migrants as statistical numbers, but look in their faces,” his querulous, mewing voice (Italian accent) on the radio of the garage workbench, while I apply “J.B. Weld” cement to a cracked sprinkler-head (its harp bitten by the dog, snapped-off). Wrappings of rubber bands to secure for glue-hardening.

Says the Pope: “The people of this continent are not afraid of newcomers.” This gets applause the whole assembly even though they all know it’s evilly untrue. Both sides — Dems and Reps — will want to keep the border exclusive and protect our wealth.

Then all midday picking pears. Seven cartons.

Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation.

A quiche can be made out of what’s lying around.

At 7:00 is a reading: Molly and Christian in Grass Valley. Drinks after.

* * * *

September 23, 2015

Happy with “Immanence.”

Another few minutes with A. Ginsberg in the new “Fox&Hound” place on Spring Street. I’m going to be at a loss to review this book fairly. He seems a congeries of affectations – but unaffected about his affectations!

Another mere hour picking pears.

This is the biggest year in memory for pears. I’m going to have to get serious and devote afternoons to bringing them in. Apples, by contrast, are basically nil.

Dinner: that inexpensive cut of pork goes on and on, under various sauces: great success with canned chipotles in adobo. (And, ab orgine, dumping herbs on the surface of a cast-iron pan to scorch before adding vegetables.)

 

 

* * * *

September 22, 2015

Around equinox, late September eight o’clock in the morning. This is the enchanted season and the right hour of the day – when warm air flows in with pools of cool air. In choppy terrain of knolls and deep ravines and long forested slopes, the promise of winter gets churned right in with remembrance of summer. This on the slope of the west meadow along the corridor of figs, past cherries, leading down to work trailer.

Noon, done working. This heat wave is evidently never going to quit – I’d been waiting for a seasonable coolness to get into pear harvest – but at this point I just begin picking in the ninety-degree sun.

 

* * * *

September 20, 2015

Winter plantings. Large new raised beds, complete with wire mesh floor and weedcloth and chicken-manure mix: eight rows onions, three rows garlic. Four rows cabbage and beets. Twelve sugar-snap pea vines with Brett’s Japanese-looking trellises.

 

 

* * * *

September 19, 2015

Saturday. Drive to board meeting.

Great to be in Marin, Santa Venetia, it used to be the low-rent zone, now look at it, wonderful Marin mud-pungency of the tidal flats, Gallinas Creek.

And the drive with Brett. Down I-80 with espresso in paper cups. Seldom do we have a chance to talk.

 

 

* * * *

September 17, 2015

One good thing: all the new plantings are flourishing in the soil mix. (Includes dirt from the abandoned compost heap plus year-old chicken shit)

Evidence of big rodent in trailer: Whatever it is, it’s something with enough heft to knock the little painting (20-by-30-inch stretched-canvas) off my work desk, onto the floor. A bushy-tailed wood rat could do that.

Also, fee-fi-fo-fum, it seems to have knocked over my ceramic pen-holder cup.

Sure enough, there it is, in the heavy-jawed trap in the cupboard. This particular trap’s old zigzag jaws have been scratched and scored, and actually beveled in places, by the sharp teeth of animals who in their last agony were trying anything they could.

Bill Frisell solo concert at Center. I go alone, sit in front row (of folding chairs), a couple of meters from his working hands, and it’s not a raised stage.The secret truth is, he isn’t doing anything fancy, he’s just paying attention. Pretty ballsy, tho’, doing a solo concert tour. An excellent economy, for a musician, if he can depend on his competence.

 

* * * *

September 16, 2015

Nice little cold snap sharpens. Drizzle will be arriving afternoon.

Pinching off latter episodes and rounding off an ending. Moving certain other sections up toward the beginning. Feeling very happy with the strange-shaped whole object.

Afternoon some necessary noodling with finances. An open hour (as seldom opens) for my exercise “routine.”

Pick up Dash in town, to take him to guitar lesson. He’d gotten off the school bus and, carrying skateboard, walked all the way to Pioneer Park to spend an unscheduled hour alone practicing a trick. Thin tall boy at fifteen, practicing something all by himself, over and over. It’s an ancient situation. You can see it in any small town.

His news, getting in the passenger side happily, is that he can do a front-side kickflip off two stairs.

Kugel, since we have a leek and potatoes.

Barbara’s cottage: Fernando Sor’s long “Prelude,” beautifully done, Dashiell’s close attention to nuance and sentiment.

Drizzle does arrive. Lasts a while. Good rain smell of wet verdure, plus (it’s been a long time) the stovewood smoke-smell comes through the woods. It’s the smell of the forest deadfall that people up here burn frugally.

 

* * * *

 

 

September 14, 2015

All this talk about a trip to London in the spring.

Apart from the personal extravagance, there’s the environmental kind of splurge that gives me a pain. In the past few years I’ve very seldom gotten on an airplane. No amount of using the clothesline instead of the dryer, or reducing car trips and limiting fill-ups strictly to local veg-oil, no amount of off-the-grid scrimping, will make up for the foot-pounds of energy it takes for a plane to lift us three average Joneses, plus their baggage, up to cruising altitude and keeping us there over the polar route. A holistic accounting of the cost to total ecosystem would price that spectacle at a billion dollars. I’ll be able to say I’ve seen the Elgin marbles in person.

The Toaster Graveyard (below cherry grove) disgorges another toaster. I’d have thought we’d harvested every old kitchen appliance from that dump. Now the gleam of immortal chrome again, half-unburied, from the days when things were indestructible the shine was deep and permanent, a gadget looking weightier than a Sunday pot-roast. In fact, I bet it’s actually the case that you could pull this out of the ground and dig the earth out of its toast slots and hose it off – and set it on the workbench and get it in working order again via a little rewiring.

(Old-fashioned soldering gun. Old-fashioned screwdriver. It would be an operation that would take place on a “workbench” — the workbench of a “repairman.”)

* * * *

September 13, 2015

Every 45 minutes or so, you’re supposed to stretch your legs, and I’m outside in the garden picking pocketfuls of beans for dinner. Forty feet away from me – already at ten am – the empty gas can on the shed wall says loudly “TINK,” as the heat of the day has made its metal floor pop. Which usually wouldn’t happen till about noon. Our blighted land: Heat wave goes on, so the morning is tired already at dawn. String beans are tough, no matter how young you pick ’em. Tomatoes aren’t ripening correctly, apples are stunted, precocious fruit trees will need early harvesting. Smoke from the Butte wildfire makes a grove of cedars, right across the road, look like a photograph, titled “Grove of Cedars,” that’s been lying out on a shelf for a year getting evenly housedusted.

* * * *

Brett is amused: A few hens were scratching and pecking in the dirt under the pear tree. And then one heavy pear dropped. From a six- or eight-foot height, big as a softball, it might have hurt a bird. It landed on the ground among them. Came down with a thud.

The nearby hens gave it the eye — tilted their heads and eyed it from a fresh angle — then went back to scratching and pecking. This is what amuses Brett.

 

 

* * * *

September 12, 2015

Saturday. Slow getting to work.

Sun comes up whiskey-colored in the east: smoke from Butte fire.

Got lettuce/kale/chard/leeks in the ground at last yesterday.

Actually played guitar for an hour yesterday, ineptly.

 

* * * *

September 9, 2015

Heat wave coming on.

Finally got to apple-tree repair.

Joan and Kaitlin come down to have lunch with (respectively, and separately) Barbara and Brett.

Back to work. Proud of what I’ve been writing, this novel “Immanence” narrates a seldom-visited phenomenon: two grown-up men who are intelligent responsible human beings with integrity and wit and their own dedications, and also their own weaknesses, coming in conflict over matters of importance, portrayed without gimmick, without exaggeration or caricature.

 

* * * *

September 8, 2015

Short story, to take a break.

Amending soil in low planting bed: soil from the abandoned compost, plus chicken manure.

Cutting back blackberries.

Bandaging broken apple trees.

Ted Beedy’s bird lecture, Sierra College.

On the patio in the sun (the teacup that has been out so long, on the inner bone-china surface, evaporation-horizons define the hot noons of at least a seven-day week), there’s a rectangle of corrugated cardboard where the ballpoint pen signature is rehearsed, shakily – Barbara E. Hall, Barbara E. Hall, Barbara E. Hall – in preparation for signing the Do-Not-Resuscitate Order that would be set before her.

 

* * * *

September 6, 2015

Sunday.

Post-work, work in garden: winter vegetables: for a change I bought some little flats of starts at Briarpatch.

Odd sight: in downtown Nevada City a wild turkey hen, solitary, pecking nonchalantly at crabgrass in sidewalk cracks.

Set up hoses and sprinklers all over, for serious irrigation of the tinder-dry meadows, as yesterday I hiked up to clear the weir, get our water pressure back.

Spent last bit of afternoon gentleman-like, reading poetry in shade, with wine, in Adirondack chair whose level arm supports a wineglass. Ginsberg’s anthology, his poetry plus the Mishnah that is the second half of the book, consisting mostly of letters and self-aggrandizement even meretricious.

There are two kinds of comedians, the kind who “tell jokes” (Bob Hope) and the kind who tell the truth. Whose humor depends on the nuanced life they’ve observed. Among poets, Ginsberg is in the first category, strings of his gags (many tried-and-true and surefire, from earlier poems), with but little relation to our lived lives, little usefulness, sometimes unwise.

His W.C. Williams-influenced poetry is a shining exception, and when he’s writing about his family.

 

* * * *

September 3, 201

The bear has taken out a misc. small apple tree I’ve been babying along. The seven red, first-sex-experience apples on the one bandaged branch were gone this morning (the only apples of that tree’s blighted lifespan), and for some reason he snapped off the whole thing at the trunk. Looks like he sat on it.

This has been a Zero year for the Italian prune plums, but I’ve got plenty preserved from previous year’s overabundance. Last night they were a sauce for a small roast.

My neighbors in this Global Warming era are all dealing with so-called precocity of their fruiting trees by just picking early.

* * * *

September 1, 2015

“Back-to-School Night” was tonight. I went alone, the only interested party. The big rural high school, six earnest teachers. The green-stick beauty of the girls and boys. The moms and dads variously life-damaged shambling around looking half uncomfortable, half broken-hearted envious.

All public high school buildings, inside, feel a little bit like storm-sewers.

Dash is taking a full schedule of hard courses, no light electives.

Cooler night. It’s September and Alaska is sending its first low-pressure system into these latitudes. But no precipitation here, just a few days of lower temps.

 

* * * *

August 31, 2015

Sometimes I think of people I’ll never be able to see again – Henry Carlisle, Bill Sheatsley now, Oakley, my own mother (and of course my father), Don Carpenter – and I think how my relationship with these ghosts is comparable to my relationship with those still here in the flesh. I.e., Brett, my boys, Barbara in her near-ghostliness now, my brother, my book agent Joy, faraway friends I get news of, even this town’s bank tellers and checkout clerks and grocery baggers. My relationship with the living differs, yes, from my relationship with ghosts, but what’s interesting is the ways in which the two relationships don’t differ. Not in their effective essence.

I think we live effectively in the light of our own death. For a few “decades” we loom in each other’s presence. Then we cease to. It’s the ceasing-to that emboldens the “life” episode.

We’re crucially absent, precisely all the time we’re present. That’s what’s sweet about our being here, that every moment we live through is already archived. It’s brought out of archives for its glint in the “specious present,” then returned forever.

Every time I stood in the sunshine talking with Bill Sheatsley – six-foot-six, white-bearded, saggy-jeaned, squinting like Popeye – while we talked about what grade of shiplap siding should cover the cottage or what nefarious corporate plot destroyed the Rudolph Diesel engine design, or how miraculous his spiritual healer’s ministrations were in curing his cancer – all the while he was radiant with death. And I suppose so am I, to the discerning.

 

* * * *

August 30, 2015

No writing today either.

Varney’s-Hardware essay arrives, pre-publication, looks great.

And I spend an idle morning reading two Threepenny issues, consecutive issues I hadn’t gotten to, with the fortunate sense of being in really sparkling company. Read them cover-to-cover. In bed, yet, with coffee.

Reweaving of chair seat with rush that came mail-order.

Dug out and severed principal root of the big fir tree on east side of house. Will now be watching treetop in suspense.

* * * *

Been home a month, and now for the first time this summer I made the two-mile run. So I’m back.

Out running, I pass within sight again the The Willo, its little neon beer sign at the country crossroads. And I think again of the moral taint of every “crossroads.” – This is an ancient, rural thing. A forest thing. The Devil presides at the crossroads. In the days when people limited themselves to the simple life at home and never left their acre – what is kashrut to the orthodox, halal to Muslim, Ordnung to Amish – then “going to the crossroads” is the encounter with all the forces of darkness and hilarity. Truly, they’re there, all of them in full force, the Seven Deadlies, right there in The Willo, with attached saloon. And I begin in my new late-in-life self-pity indulgences thinking, Well right now I’m fortunate; right now there may be, certainly, privations and missed chances but mostly I’m in the Great Good Luck Department – but for years I was “no stranger to the rain,” and I have been one acquainted with the crossroads. Exactly Robt Johnson’s confession: fell down on my knee. I really did make my bargain at that crossroads in Wisconsin. And now I wonder, how come more people who knew me didn’t worry about me? During my wilderness years, how come nobody thought it was a waste or a danger? Well, because I reassured everybody: this is the path.

In fact, I ate all that up and in the end throve on it, all the bad times the perfect thing for me, it’s what I sought ab origine. But now I find, I worry about others’ construction.)

 

* * * *

August 29, 2015

Saturday. Neighborhood get-together here today. Half political, half social. Kilims on the meadow under the big oaks. Tables of pot-luck salads.

Wonderful moment: Guests of honor today are two descendants of Nisenans (enrolled!), whose people actually were penned in right here on our hillside, 1930s (the last Campoodie, the last Rancheria, much of it on Jim Spencer’s land across the road. And on my own property are some grinding-mortars for pulverizing the acorns making bread of these same ancient oaks’ fruit). And the real elder arrives at the party (the grandmother, Ginger) and is presented to me as I am host, she comes escorted over the meadow by her daughter and a dignitary, where I am under the big oaks (I’m actually wearing a brimmed hat, mistakenly), and her first words to me are not Pleased-to-meet-you, or any such thing. She says, taking my hand in both of hers, worriedly, “How are your acorns this year?”

 

* * * *

August 28, 2015

Hot. The sky is a bright white haze all over.

No writing today.

Package up and send critique of Penelope Pier novel.

Blurb for Max Byrd’s friend.

Favor to Brett proofing a questionnaire about poets’ ethnicities.

Mow just the tall grass on N. and E. sides of house.

Tennis.

The one little retarded apple tree out front alone, planted long ago by George and Ginny, is this year bearing its first fruit – seven or eight red apples, on the one branch that last year got sprained. Then got splint-strengthened by me, with also lengths of stiff garden-hose segments. As if its injury brought on its maturity. Its first fruit have an unusual caramel taste.

* * * *

August 27, 2015

Now it’s seven pm. I ought to be downstairs minding the polenta. On the radio, Amy Goodman’s band will be striking up.

A hot sunny day in which I got a lot done.

Wrote deeper into a new short story about larcenous houseguests, a thorough periodic cleaning of chicken premises, framed up the finished remarks for a book I’ve been editing, (all the while heavily watered meadows, in this heat, crawdads clogging sprinkler nozzles), actually read most of an entire novel to fulfill a blurbing commitment, conversed for a whole hour with my agent by phone while standing in the driveway, squatting in driveway, sitting on gravel of driveway, shopped for food and supplies in town and picked up Dash and got polenta started.

But the walk to the mailbox just now, down gravel, to the paved road – the sudden acoustic serenity that prevails outside my hectic kitchen – (I seem to make a habit of carrying a fresh-poured glass of evening wine when I’m getting mail, which slows my gait, which is a good thing) – it’s been a long day, and it seems forever ago (3:30 am, it was) when, in the dark by the garage, I was gripping a new, spilling cup of coffee, dragging a four-wheel walker of Barbara’s out into the open to use it as a throne, bringing up my astronomy app on phone. Stars overhead, the absolute silence of that old violence in the sky – which seems a frozen-solid event, in our little timeframe – sparkled all over the entire sky, and I got to know Capella really for the first time – one of the stars that, along with Vega and Arcturus and Aldebaran, (I can tell) will become one of the great Ushers of the seasons, on these acres. That hour was a totally different world.

* * * *

August 25, 2015

The endless string of sunny days in drought.

Our tomatoes and squash for some reason are accursed. But it’s not the heat, it’s something about soil or irrigation. Beans do well.

B. purchases a soil-chemistry test kit.

No writing. Just last pass at Penelope Pier book.

Afternoon: a couple of small fixes are knocked squarely off the to-do list: rehabilitation of Hunter’s BMW (battery-charge and tire-fill), and construction of knife-storage slot behind stove, two oak slats separated by rubber washers.

Out walking in the heat of the afternoon (on my iPhone earbuds is the tocsin of bad news about climate change), I pass the spot where my little road meets the highway, I see that “The Willo,” is, now at 4:45 pm, beginning to accumulate its quorum of quitting-time drinkers. Old pickups, fancy pickups, and one Corvette Stingray. Den of Iniquity, the social purpose of every Crossroads establishment, incl. the juke joints of Robt. Johnson. Drink/eat to excess, flirt with horny neighbor, fight with newcomer, etc. All this isn’t far from me, down at the corner of Newtown Road and Highway 49. (The “New Town” advertised by the name of Newtown road doesn’t exist anymore and never really did, though early last century it made an effort. It exists now as a quiet crossroads of its own, five miles along.) Meanwhile I’m actually thinking with wonder and gratitude of the Jew (Philo of Alexandria) who in the Diaspora was a Platonist and a Talmudist. Both! You want to fall on your knees sometimes in being made aware of the humaneness that is basic to humans and mostly wins out.

The Willo.

Always a full parking lot. It is the restaurant of oldest provenance in the county. Windowless. Cinderblock one-room casket, the walls inside furnished with dozens of Varathane-slick redwood-burl clocks (decoupage of Amer flag, Amer eagle, Elvis), made by the chef, who is a hobbyist. The kitchen specializes in (is limited to!) three kinds of steak, or else pork ribs, plus choice of cole slaw or fries. Plus beans. That’s the whole menu. Attached bar does have one window (high in the wall, gummed opaque). Outside, smoking lounge consists of broken office furniture on cement pad, enclosed on two sides by ripped-fluttering Visqueen-plastic sheets.

* * * *

Inexpensive cod comes into SPD: chowder with corn and thyme.

 

* * * *

August 23, 2015

Eileen and Paul here early to do yardwork preliminary to party.

Bob sends Galway essay.

Off-the-grid eating. Soup of gingered pork and mustard greens tastes only tolerable and is muddy-looking. Everybody around this table is a good sport. Nobody ever puts down his spoon and asks can we just get out a frozen pizza.

It’s just always an adventure, and sometimes a failed one, cooking out of a seasonal kitchen garden, and they go along with that.

 

 

* * * *

August 21, 2015

I’m done with another run-through of “All Things.” Increasing confidence in it.

Yet another dump trip today with accumulated junk from behind the garage. This is Affluence: the human privilege of throwing things into The Great American Away.

(phrase courtesy of my Vietnamese refugee friend of long ago. She was somewhat amazed by our Dispose-All. Maybe amazed/appalled).

We’re free of Dash and Barbara tonight and may go out for dinner. Movie.

* * * *

Billy on his deathbed yesterday: “I love you,” with great smile of wisdom/delight/morphine/chlorpromazine.

When a Hindu says I love you at death’s door, I suppose there are three words in the sentence, one a well-known transitive verb. The other two pronouns are mysterious.

That transitive verb love ought to function more like an intransitive, a nimbus, or even a grammarian’s copula. The two pronouns, the “I” and the “you,” are conflated to identity. It’s what Bill would have been escaping. No?

* * * *

The merriment here:

The hen outside the screen door makes a distressed little squawk/croak sound.

Brett: “Why did the chicken croak?”

Me: “To get to the Other Side.”

Brett: “Oh. That’s a joke. That’s funny. That’s a pretty good joke.”

* * * *

And Barbara’s groggy remark about Lawrence Welk’s accordion/banjo orchestra on TV: “I’m glad I’m not at that party.”

* * * *

(Me, frankly I’d go to that party.

Now, this is a non sequitur, but I’ve always imagined that the Lawrence Welk performers – in their merengue-colored tuxes and swirly dresses, with the look of almost horrified jubilation in their eyes as they sing – must be (when backstage, or off-duty) a typical lewd cynical degraded bunch of musicians/performers. Everything I know about musicians, and everything I know about actual show-biz mores (those shows were shot in the sixties, when musicians, tuned in to popular culture, led very different lives from Lawrence Welk’s), makes me picture them lighting up cigarettes, etc., having illicit meetings in prop closets with the swirly-dressed, making wisecracks about Mr. Welk behind his back. Men’s and women’s perfectly shellacked hair onstage and their tireless grins seem like a certain kind of hell which they would come to resent.)

* * * *

August 20, 2015

Work this morning (and for past few days) on expunging any accidental “Christian” tones from All Things – (in the sudden, belated realization that 90% of readers out there are literalistic.)

Brett in Sacramento; Dash at school

Agree to write review of Ginsberg anthology – a glad prospect. Ginsberg is, above all, barrel-of-monkeys fun.

(International coalition of Islamic scholars endorses restriction of greenhouse gas emissions, on spiritual grounds. And – typically, this is wonderfully Islamic – they ask for decentralized, local sourcing of renewable energy. This is Islam’s devotion to all the economic classes.

What people lack is “Negative Capability” = the “sic et non” philosophy of medieval philosophers (“thus and yet not thus”)

* * * *

It would be a reason why Good Writing (a term I employ without irony) is not popular:

I think people want “answers.” Simple ones. Few are able to hold two contradictory beliefs in mind at the same moment. (In other words, few “think.”)

It was Coleridge who named this mental knack (or else maybe Keats), calling it “negative capability”: the ability of a mind to recede into undecidedness, and just watch for a while.

Maybe, rather, call this negative capability “cold objective love.” Or call it “passionate detachment.” It’s really a mystical capability, if perfected, this lack of immediate insight. It’s at base mystical. It has faith.

(Physics explainers seem have success urging “negative capability” upon people: They say It’s both a wave and a particle. That makes no sense but it will be mortals’ only way to face in the direction of truth.)

This novel (All Things) I’ve been bringing up for more than ten years has broken into frank mysticism. My big achievement, all these years on these acres in the foothills where living is cheap, is to have become this most useless thing, an anchorite. Especially regarding “religion” people have difficulty extending a little cold love. Or negative capability. Religion’s “answers,” for almost everybody, must be absolute. The report from an actual mystic (Cloud of Unknowing) is that absolute knowledge is the descent to absolute disorientation.

 

 

* * * *

August 19, 2015

The high school’s first day of classes.

Eileen from down the road visits to plan neighborhood party.

Commercial fodder from Ridge Feed, because, in this weather, we’re certainly not producing any.

 

 

 

* * * *

August 16, 2015

Mid-August the newspapers get skinnier because everybody’s on vacation. Wasps are bumbling in the sheds. At the Iowa State Fair, politicians roam, shown in photographs gamely eating stuff. At our local county fair Dash has lost his cell phone (which is a special kind of ignominy, and a special kind of blightedness, for a teenager). Record heat all week. Faint smell of horseshit sometimes from down the road, smell I’ve always loved. Traffic on a country road thins to one-car-per-hour (or one-car-per-afternoon!).

I’m not writing – “The bucket’s empty,” Richard likes to say when asked (almost a boast! or a gloat).

Sunday morning a proper salade nicoise, as Bob and Brenda stop by for lunch.

(Bob is working on a long biographical essay on Galway: a voyage of discovery: stories of Galway’s assignations and seductions, e.g., on Paris-Marseille train, when in the 60s, he had the perfect, the sexiest trench coat. Absolutely none of which, presumably, will go in the essay.)

* * * *

August 14, 2015

Home from Squaw.

Off-loaded furniture, in the dooryard around the truck.

Dash has to be at the highschool at eight in the morning for (A) locker assignments; (B) class schedule confirmation; (C) textbook distribution.

 

 

* * * *

August 13, 2015

They’re not called “dumps” anymore, they’re called “Transfer Stations” – It creates a new metaphysical category replacing the damned-to-perdition category that was a dump. Nowadays our trash on earth floats: it’s being “transferred,” never landing permanently in a spot to molder and sink. A local Dump was a kind of hole, whereas a transfer station is a square of smooth cement, where everything you’re dismissing is, by a bulldozer’s blade, squeegeed to left and right, choosing where it shall be forwarded. It’s an arena where there are no losers, only winners and the deathless.

Dumps are always located, also, in some beautiful part of the remote county. I’ve been getting to know “Transfer Stations” and dumps, now that I’ve been living outside cities, and more and more, I find them heavenly, clean and breezy (“Distance makes clean” is the old Mexican saying), these places where permanent goodbyes happen.

That is, if it’s not a high-wind day (so that dust-grit attacks the eye), or too hot (brewing the stench) – they can be serene, elegiac, zones of shriven justification, as one is sweeping the last dust off the pickup bed, removing the work gloves, kicking off the clinging Lego whose plastic recesses are packed with garden dirt from ten or fifteen years ago. “Numinous” places (Mircea Eleade) are places where other-dimensional worlds intersect with this world.  Nevada County’s transfer station, on its slope, is located where it will always have a view of the (snow-capped in August) Desolation Wilderness a hundred miles away. Farther up at the 6000-ft elevation, Placer County’s similar hilltop transfer station looks across at a ski area’s runs, in summer making paths down through the dense pines. No skiers there now. Those are all just avenues of tall grass.

Driving home from Squaw, I know I’m coming back into my home place when the local radio (from, this week, a broadcast booth at the county fair) starts winning through the static and they’re plugging a local restaurant in the following terms: on a bicycle-powered blender, kids can provide the energy to make smoothies for all; and on Sunday evening the town’s poet laureate will be presiding at poetry-food pairings (the scheme is, she’ll be declaiming a poem while you, say, spoon up a compatible sherbet). O, my heart, more and more, is out at the transfer station. An insomniac man might use it as a technique for kidding himself to sleep: by just thinking of the transfer station at night, picturing it, gates closed, earth cooling by radiating, staff gone home, wind presiding.

 

 

 

* * * *

August 12, 2015

To Squaw for fall maintenance.

Confer with roofer about replacement of cedar shingles with composition.

Get all the aspen slash off the property. Two dump-trips, with branches piled hayrick-high and lashed down.

More sightings of mountain grouse. Fearless, insouciant, crossing path to the Annex without a ruffle or a scamper, as if tame around humans. Personally I want wild animals. I want shy animals. I’m not sure these cottontail bunnies and garden-deer and garbage-bears should be treating us trustingly, casually, meanwhile going off their natural feed.

Moral assumption: we (humans, skiers, tourists and athletes, poets and novelists, etc) are the “invasive species” par excellence. And when at last we’ve brought on our own extinction – our comeuppance – we want bears and hares to go on thriving independently as ever, freely.

* * * *

August 11, 2015

Silence of heat. Even the bees.

Very unproductive interval.

 

* * * *

August 11, 2015

Man stands in garden, morning. First sunlight hitting tops of tomato plants. The daily thunder of honeybees hasn’t yet begun. Coffee cup in one hand, with his free hand he harvests beans Blue Lake and haricots verts: pendant long commas, to be pinched off by thumbnail, one-handed, and slipped in jacket pocket. All the hens but one – (the broody stay-in-the-box girl never shows up for anything) – are milling around his ankles, done with celebrating their morning jailbreak and already settling down gouging dust-baths for themselves. They will have to be kicked out of the garden before they can wreck anything.

 

 

* * * *

August 8, 2015

Spray new sprouts of blackberries with herbicide, perimeter of property, perimeter of house.

Six o’clock in the afternoon: the shade of the oaks has come over the vegetables. Brett and Dash and I are out there weeding, the truck parked beside the fence, its radio broadcasting a “This American Life” episode.

The biome, the biome, and its “invasive” species. From the precise pH of my saliva to the salinity of the soil underfoot as it travels through worms’ guts. From the extinction of arctic polar bears to my own intestine’s bacteria flourishing in the dark a very cosmopolitan micro-civilization. From the prosperity of California eucalyptus trees in this century to the body-temperature regulation of the cottontail rabbits who are newly populating the (warmer now) upper elevations. Brett, pulling up clumps of wild mint, says, “By the way, somebody cashed Alan’s honorarium check.” She’s pulling up the mint that has flourished so well in the accidental fertility of the raised beds. She adds, “It would have been riding in the car with him.”

* * * *

August 8, 2015

This is a peculiar millstone for me to be wearing these days (an invisible millstone and a not-too-heavy one): existential responsibility of having been the last of our tribe to say ’bye to Alan. After the post-conference board meeting, he’s tired and rumpled and happy, standing out at the curb on the shore of our vast empty parking lot, saying he’s looking forward to a long summer in the West, about to take the familiar drive to the beaches where his wife and friends wait. He was seventy-five, perpetually an unruly kid, perpetually of the New Yorky, contentious, rowdy school of literary criticism – and surely he was depending on his youthful ability, like any other summer, to make the drive from Squaw to Santa Cruz in a single shot without stopping. The board meeting ended at noon and it was maybe eight or ten hours later he went off 17 going over the Coast Range.

 

* * * *

August 4, 2015

Up early. Silence for miles around.

Till light, working on Penelope Pier novel.

Hike to ditch to clear weir. Good-sized bushy-tailed coyote trots across the path ahead.

Groceries and banking in town.

Craig and Sylvie to visit tonight to watch DVD of Diana’s movie. Stupidly I actually fall asleep during movie, probably snored.

 

 

* * * *

August 3, 2015

No writing work today, nor for a the next couple of days. Rather, after summer’s absence, attention to everything broken and neglected around the acres; and editing.

 

* * * *

August 1, 2015

Trying to write something for Alan, to send to general Squaw population.

Our houseguests go to N. San Juan for wedding ceremony.

* * * *

Cleaned out studio trailer after summer absence. Rodents, caught by heavy traps’ zigzag jaws early in the summer, have sunk to pools of fluffy fur, the smell long-dissipated, as in the pharaohs’ sterile tombs.

 

 

* * * *

July 31, 2015

Peckinpah wedding is in town. Kristin stays in the cottage, Sam and his new wife Elisa in the playroom. Great evening at Genevieve’s bistro with Beaucoups Chapeaux, both sets fabulous.

 

* * * *

 

 

July 30, 2015

The sky over Squaw Valley at first light, many flights of wildfire-fighting aircraft. (I guess their policy is not to fly till dawn, then get started in earnest) – lake-scooping planes, helicopters with pendulous buckets, C-130s, the kind referred to as VLAs, for “Very Large Aircraft.” All loading up in Lake Tahoe and flying NW – odd flight pattern – to fly away and douse the (now two) big fires in the foothills. I’m working upstairs, on couch, rather than at basement workbench, as I’m alone and the whole house is open to my slovenly rule.

Then – last day, I the last human to leave the house – I pull in outdoor furniture and all the summer’s tools and playthings. Lock the doors and arm the anti-bear electricity. Over the summit, the drive home to the foothills is through smoky territory, and I see wildfire-precipitated rain falling over the hills, about four-thousand-foot elev.. It’s falling as veils of virga that are curled sharply by wind shear. Then when I get there, it’s not virga, suddenly it’s a heavy rain. All cars are slowed to a crawl. In a hectic bright silver cloud, all windshield wipers are whacking at top speed.

Arriving at Nevada City elevation, I’m back in a cloudless, hot, still summer day. Brett is at a street fair in Grass Valley with Dash. Sands here makes eggplant confections for us all.

 

 

* * * *

July 29, 2015

Chores and fixes in Squaw. Fine day alone. Big spaces of silence around everything. On a hardware errand, I walk the length of Tahoe City among tourists, a ghost of my former self.

Meet with Tamara at the boundary line again.

Evening alone again, gluttonizing on fried sausages and a Netflix movie.

 

 

* * * *

July 28, 2015

Cubic yard roadbed soil for annex path. Rental of heavy tamping device.

In the back of my mind always: How to resolve (or better, how to use) the central tone-discrepancy in “Things.” Meanwhile continuing to soak through “Immanence” bringing up characterization.

(That Yeats dictum about choosing “perfection of the life or of the art.” I guess I’m definitely earning my “art” – and plenty of the people I love are pitching in.)

Smoke in the valley. It’s from the canyon fires down by Dutch Flat. When a mountain grouse alights on the deck and stays a few minutes, big as a barnyard hen (an unusual sight in this sparse ecosystem) Brett suggests maybe the anomaly is a result of wildlife’s displacement by fires.

With Dash’s help, the dirt path gets tamped down (wrestling an ornery stamping machine by its horns). And, likewise with Dash’s indispensible bravery, the one remaining big old aspen that stands tall between two power lines is correctly felled – with some drama, because the directional cut bites down on the blade of my little electric chainsaw, and I have to make the felling cut with a pruning saw. Dash pulls distant guy, and the thing falls nicely without taking out any electrical wires. Then Brett and he, plus all pets, depart for Nevada City. I’m here with leftovers, episode of loud music, work on a draft.

* * * *

Another afternoon taking out aspens by the road, heaping the slash up along the pavement for the county chipper.

* * * *

July 26, 2015

Barbara is gone now. Down in Nevada City in the care of daughters. Barbara despondent in the center of the party, and panicky, where did 1938 go? Hauled from party to party, Barbara, thou bookend now, thou paperweight, I can see that you alone know perfectly well that this airplane is over the ocean and all four engines are failing. You’re the only one in the room realizing it.

* * * *

July 25, 2015

Morning: On “Things,” emphasizing Heaven’s maleficence. My unreliable narrators.

(It’s been useful reading Ford Madox Ford’s “Good Soldier” this summer, whose unreliable narrator is annoying in places, especially in long woolgathering about character analysis. Such narrators are only interesting when they’re wrong/mistaken/deluded. Or else revelatory, or even plot-sparking.)

Afternoon, got a start taking out aspens all along the road. There are dozens of dozens, from little sprouts to vigorous young trees. Working without any power tools, just the paleolothic-era pruning saw, curved and rip-toothed.

Dash is home from summer camp, taller, tawnier, tired. The sounds of his acoustic guitar inventions in the annex.

 

 

* * * *

July 24, 2015

The end of racism, on this lucky planet. On the radio, news of Obama’s visit to his home country, Kenya. All the while I’m loading firewood into annex woodbox. The historical fact of Obama’s presidency always makes me rejoice dependably no matter any other disappointments personal or global: that in my lifetime we got a president with some patent African blood is a bigger achievement, for my generation, than the moonshot or the personal computer. Because the human heart is a more intractable wilderness (than either of those two surfaces, lunar or silicon).

 

* * * *

 

 

July 22, 2015

Squaw valley is deserted at last. After many days’ absence, I’m back in my bunker in the basement, leaving “Things” alone post-cuts, to try to look into “Immanence.”

All are gone now, the last two rolled down the hill while we stood and waved. Now it’s Brett and me and tranquility.

A Sisyphean afternoon on the steep slope, moving most of a cord of oak/pine mix from upper road to the Annex. My love of hard labor: it’s really an addiction, an escapism, a mysticism, a stupor.

After which, in great fatigue and aches, I go drinking with Eddy and Oswaldo at PlumpJack: the rattle of ice in the shaker: Pisco sours.

 

* * * *

 

 

 

July 21, 2015

Pacing up and down Columbus, and also Union, with cell phone to ear as if I were one of those people with Big Plans always forming – talking to lackadaisical staffer at investment house, about trusts. As Barbara’s cardiologist has begun to warn of mortality, Barbara may be getting sleepier and sleepier, unto death. So I have to inquire about her money, the little that’s left, whether it should be more liquid, for distribution, or less liquid, for investment. While I pace (Union, Stockton, Columbus: the streets form a triangle), I find underfoot (typical North Beach furnishing) a purple Crayola crayon, it’s lying on the sidewalk in front of the former Flor D’Italia place. Pick it up, of course: It’s the Purple Crayon from my nursery-book copy of Harold and the.

The Crayola however, I see, is identified on its paper skin as “BLUE,” not “PURPLE.” Still, in my world it will be the purple one, because I decree it.

 

 

 

* * * *

July 20, 2015

Hunter and Lindsay in SF. To the DeYoung for a show of remarkably Turner oils, and minor collection of early Diebenkorn prints. Then drive across GG bridge, up Lucas Valley Road, stop at Rancho Nicasio, then out to Marshall on the coast for barbecued oysters. Jan Buscho’s show of paintings, all landscapes, happens to be opening, across the road from Tony’s Oysters. The coast road home is nauseating, dizzying.

Next morning, while Lindsay takes a job-interview call, Brett and Hunter and I go out for breakfast at Roma, then climb up to Coit Tower to view WPA murals.

 

 

* * * *

July 18, 2015

Learn of Alan’s car accident. The word is, they’d thought he was fine and were about to release him after a routine night’s observation in hospital. Then coma. Talk to Kris by cel phone while riding on I-80 across the Sacramento valley. Trip to sf.

 

 

* * * *

July 16, 2015

Tennis, two sets with Andrew on Ancinas court.

Yet another tour of the Alpine premises. Trying to envision it as a Squaw venue.

Annual Dinner Out, with Lisa, Andrew, Kait.

 

 

* * * *

July 8, 2015

An evening reading: celebrities all brightly lit and amplified. Anne Lamott gives her well-worn monologue about jealousy, always hilarious. At finish, I slip out exit and drive home, stop in the depths of the big parking lot among dismantled ski-lifts. The sky: The last light of the earth-atmosphere above Sierra is a pure violet of a Caribbean intensity, intense especially just above the western ridges of mountains.

“Red Dog Cantina”: The little saloon on the backside of the old A-frame is pumping out music, and for the first time I realize that that bar has been there forever, through all this place’s vicissitudes, surviving all of the revolutions in ownership, back here where no one notices it. It’s been unchanged for thirty years. Probably also the people inside: unchanged. The neon beer signs’ lights artificial-flavorings (ruby, emerald, topaz) bleed into night air. Figures visible thru window: probably a game of pool: they have that shambling protocol. The same songs as ever:

Lonely days are gone, I’m a-goin’ home. My baby, she wrote me a letter.

Hey hey mama when I see you move, Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.

But I never saw the good side of the city, Till I hitched a ride on a river boat queen.

Outside a few pickup trucks are parked. Folks inside probably know each other well, all too well, and they have an agreement never to wake up again. Here I am outside.

 

 

 

* * * *

July 6, 2015

Fiction program to begin today. Morning dawns clear. A week of cool, drizzly weather is predicted.

First today, the hunt for some galvanized pipe at Squaw “Vehicle Maintenance,” necessary for hanging stage lights. I love soluble problems. I eat ’em up. Wish I had more of ’em.

 

 

* * * *

July 5, 2015

Fourth of July, one is glad for this year’s absence of fireworks. Rain much of the day. Still, much of the day on Annex deck repair.

The usuals: the Millers and their macaroni salad; Nico and Ola; the Ancinases; a few Squaw interns. Much of the evening at our end of the table, the Old Folks discuss the future of Squaw, pessimistically.

Sleepless night, almost literally. So that I’m lightheaded in the morning. Worries about everything, from Barbara to Dash, from our own going broke to Literature’s being bankrupt and tawdry. (Of course literature’s always been.)

 

 

* * * *

July 3, 2015

A whole-house mass excursion to little Independence Lake, north of Truckee – but Brett and I won’t go, feeling the pressure of work here. An editor cancels on account of death-in-family. The Squaw maintenance facility is all shut down (in observance of the Third of July), and so the Community of Writers has no resources for dressing performance spaces.

Good rains keep dousing the upper elevations, though down in Nevada City, rain doesn’t visit and the wildfire danger grows.

Then, later in day, we do knock off work and follow everybody up to the higher mountains. Little lake is totally unvisited by anybody, reachable by five miles of very rough rocky road. The Nature Conservancy has left kayaks out on the shore, for the use, gratis, of anybody who would like to borrow them. I suppose it’s nice to be in a big fresh place, but one’s worries don’t stay back home in the familiar place, they come right along in the car.

 

 

* * * *

June 30, 2015

Again, dinner on the deck with all at the long table. And again, the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. Tonight at last, the two planets occupy the exact same point in the sky, Venus upstaging Jupiter (and a bright little star “8 Leo” joining them).

During the very dark hour when the whole display is setting behind the western mountain, Barbara is beside me in a deck chair wrapped in blankets. Saying little, she wants to hold hands! She’s so confused, she hasn’t said anything all night. After a while remarks, in perplexed tone, as of a school science lesson she can’t recall, “There’s some connection between the heart and those stars.” For a long while the only sound is Andrew telling of the great days of driving out to the Nevada Test Site protests in the eighties.

 

 

* * * *

June 29, 2015

Afternoon clearing brush below the house in great puffs of midday heat. Smells come back from the other years of cutting down high-elevation grass, juicy fat-stemmed shrubs, the woody thorn bushes, fine purple cheatgrass – smells of tea, of vitamins, of tobacco, aftershave, Moroccan-restaurant smells, birch smells of the school nurse’s office in 1961, of Lyman-Sargent’s drugstore downtown – all the while the weed-eater’s whipping strings making a repetitious snarl, in auditory hallucination. My peculiar pleasure in working almost at the edge of heat stroke for hours.

Dinner of leftover curry at the upper house.

Off the deck, the beautiful display of Jupiter and Venus, a romantic pair above the mountain after sunset. They’ve been getting closer all month – and now look like a binary system, joined, too, by the mist we see them through, in this valley.

 

* * * *

 

One worries about the flood all these years of aspiring writers who say they started writing because they’d had a creative writing class (it’s still an expression laughable if beheld objectively) as if maybe this is all a huge ponzi scheme, the Cr. Wr. Business as it has boomed. Rather than being personally driven to pencil and paper by something inside themselves alone, in the clueless loneliness of creating something, rather than any social atmosphere, and the devotion to reading. This Comm of Wr: we’ve been one of the earliest and biggest perpetrators.

 

* * * *

June 28, 2015

Quiet Sunday in the valley, aftermath of first conference.

Last night’s little rain has dampened the dusty.

The Tonkoviches will make their annual day trip – to Sierraville for spa.

The upper house, where I’m writing, is quiet. Barbara snoozes, and everybody but me has gone out somewhere. Last night’s pots and pans, post-merriment, are stacked high in the sink. Ping pong table dominates the living room. Cloth napkins lie on the rocky slope below the deck, rained-on. In a soup-pot, an ice cream scoop is thrust deep into ice-cream-tinted water, where floats also an orange ping pong ball, wounded from maybe being stepped-on. Barbara, in the next room, the only other life in the house, will go on sleeping till noon, at least.

Later in the day, soft rain settles in. Debilitating melancholy. Friends are gone, and there’s nothing very interesting to do.

 

* * * *

June 25, 2015

Morning, spent a short hour sealing over the big gash I took out of Book Three yesterday.

Then, at exactly “10:05 AM” (county government time), a public hearing in faraway King’s Beach, where the County “planning board” is to hear complaints about the ski-corp development in the valley, everybody getting his three minutes at the mic, some cogent, some sentimental or cranky. Beside me, the frowzy-looking guy in the “Keep Squaw True” T-shirt was scrolling through his iPhone screen (some Upward/Green arrows, some Downward/Red arrows) checking his stocks’ prices via the live feed.

Evening, poetry reading (Bob, Brenda, Sharon, J. Michael, Evie, Forrest Gander) is wonderful.

 

 

* * * *

June 24, 2015

The same pair of golden eagles still nests in the rock face below Granite Chief. They seem larger this year (is that possible?), anyway of course older. Two days in a row I’ve been seeing them circling high. Not hunting, just spiraling higher. I suppose raptors’ shoulders have a lock-hinge, so they can hang on air-flow without tension, without effort. Ecologist would say without energy expenditure.

Chopped out some Heaven from Book Three of “things” text – real damage, working on the book with sledgehammer and Saws-All – but then, having wrecked the last chapter, I have to stop, to play softball by the lake.

Dinner with Brett at PlumpJack, just her and me in the bar in the corner in a lull.

 

 

* * * *

June 22, 2015

Done now with a draft of “Things” – all the more free of supernal scenes. Will let it rest unmolested for a while.

As an experiment, I’ve eliminated all supernal story entirely from Book Three, so its absence might hurt with an interesting ache.

 

 

* * * *

June 20, 2015

Day of poets’ arrival. Worked on my own all day, except for a visit to the center to secure the stage lights with heavy twine.

* * * *

St. John of the Cross, his wonderful (almost puerile? almost psychotic?) radicalism: the man was constantly holding up his empty cup:

“One human thought alone is worth more than the entire world, hence God alone is worthy of it.”

* * * *

June 18, 2015

Dark-eyed junco on the precise apex of roof-peak every sunset, singing a few minutes, then departing, that’s the routine, summer of 2015.

Jupiter and Venus in conjunction all this month, moving ever closer together, Jupiter fainter tho’ it’s reputed to be huge, Venus brighter because she’s so much nearer. But they really look paired.

At last I catch a glimpse of the International Space Station. From horizon to horizon, it moves as fast as a clock’s second-hand, and it’s as bright as any star. The impression is of a UFO, except that it’s ours.

 

 

* * * *

June 17, 2015

Andrew and Lisa are delayed.

But Hunter and Lindsay arrive. Just as they arrive, Joan Klaussen in thin floral frock (freckled, chapped, solid calves) turns up at our house, remembering it to be hers, and she is moving in – supplied with a paperback novel and some groceries and some junk mail, all in a SaveMart bag, and also a potted plant and today’s San Francisco Chronicle for her leisurely perusal. That she herself built this house fifty-some years ago does kind of give her an inalienable right. Then Barbara appears, from her perpetual nap, and the two old friends share intelligences – Barbara’s about certain mysterious, audible people in the basement, Joan’s about the mistaken “renters” who have occupied “her” house – and they can agree the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. Wine is offered, but instead coffee is poured — then never sipped, by either lady. Eventually Barbara waves, going back to bed, “Well, I hope they catch him.”

 

* * * *

June 16, 2015

Today, another car trip to N.C., this time for Dashiell’s concert.

All this week of our installation in Squaw quarters I’m debilitated by a backache. Which is a kind of sneaky pleasure not only because it guarantees me a 4F exemption from some of the labor of moving in, I also am evicted from my body, its trusty responses, and everything seems to involve more care and consideration and even sentiment.

 

* * * *

June 15, 2015

Preparations for conference. Forced hiatus from writing.

Yesterday: woke up at four and worked out the entire participant portion of workshop schedule, then went down to the offices and built the entire bookstore enclosure, then came home and elaborately cooked ribs for arrival of Tracy and Jim.

This morning, with backache straitjacket, must drive to Nevada City for Dashiell’s concert rehearsals.

One thing here always makes me pause on the path in (the thing that’s always good for you) gratitude: spring-water’s gurgle below the roadside on the path down to the annex, faintly audible behind the steel garbage house and the willows. No matter the season, that stream always gives water at the same quiet rate.

 

* * * *

June 11, 2015

Back at work. Space heater beside me. Rat-shit smell of the ages.

I realize, all the more, that this lustrous book “All Things” is frankly mystical. Of course “enlightenment” doesn’t come to a rational mind, but maybe sometimes a fake hologram of it can be constructed in the artificial medium of prose.

 

 

* * * *

June 11, 2015

In Squaw now for summer.

Clear out basement. Set up workshops schedule.

* * * *

Unsettling thought:

All these years I’ve liked to think of myself as in the “truth-and-beauty” business, at least ideally. That’s what I’ve liked saying. Wanting to make my Grecian urn an aspiration far above the entertainment marketplace.

Today, during a passage in the upper-tier narrative of “angels,” I found myself writing the following evaluation of mortal, earthly ethics:
“But beauty is not Justice. Nor is beauty truth.”

Obviously the language, if it’s a circuitry for logic, is a network with a few short-circuits. Maybe if there’s a truth-beauty mash-up, it will always be a compromise, not a union. Truth be compromised, beauty be compromised.

(except in the case of mathematics, where T and B go together always)

ACTUALLY, it’s a category error: I’m conflating two kinds of “truth”

* * * *

June 10, 2015

Sands and I: dinner in the cottage with Barbara.

* * * *

Home alone on the farm these days, doing last cleanup and wandering discovering endless unaddressed problems.

Where Mateo’s weedwhacker exposed the midden that was once an old sandbox, a few rusty metal toy trucks and dismembered action figures are embedded.

Dash is mostly away this summer, on a string of sleep-overs and summer-camp visits; Hunter is in Baltimore but will be visiting to work at Squaw, and to get his ancient car running and out of here, out from under the pear tree. Remember to set up a “starter” IRA account for him while he’s here.

In the smallest of the three bedrooms here, where in the mornings I’ve been writing, there’s a small soft-rubber disk on the shelf: it’s like the plug from the underside hole of a salt-shaker. I realize it’s what’s left of a piggy bank. There were two different piggy banks in this house that I can remember – one a garish kitschy ceramic Elvis-chimpanzee on a surfboard, the other a conventional pink pig. I of course haven’t seen them for years, haven’t thought of them, their broken bits are long since swept together, their treasure distributed in the world, but here still is the plug.

* * * *

Return to Nevada City for house shut-down and a bit of alone time. Repair the mowing deck myself, lying out in the meadow on my back under those scary blades. Satisfaction in acquiring skills outside my repertoire.

* * * *

Apparently now at last here’s cognitive decline. At Squaw Annex, the swamp cooler feed-tube under the deck is spraying a feather of water from a pinhole. But that tube shouldn’t even be getting any water pressure because I routinely shut it down in November. Now it’s June, the grass is tall and tender, and the water pressure has somehow obviously been on for some while. A hard freeze in the winter might, it have been catastrophic. It’s just an insoluble mystery. The years do blend together, so the old monk has no specific memory of turning off that water; but still, it’s an infallible axiom that he would never skip anything so important in the autumn shut-down. So it’s just a mystery.

 

* * * *

June 7, 2015

To Squaw delivering office-equipment crap and installing the family there.

Now the Indian Flat house, over the last week, has had a real “haircut” and looks younger. On the advice of the Nevada County Fire Safe Council. It’s been weeks of afternoons’ work.

It has “curb appeal” as we drive away. Which I dislike.

 

* * * *

June 6, 2015

Saturday. Slept in, with no intention of working. Mowed all of south and east meadows. Chopped out little stumps, consolidated firewood. Mateo today, clearing weeds around entire henhouse-pumphouse area. For the first time in a decade, all that field of thriving wild sweet pea is leveled. (I prefer “sweetpea” but my SpellCheck won’t allow it. It seems to be correct. So be it. “Wild” and “sweet” are two important experiences in life, separable adjectives, where the noun sweetpea is its own particular experience.)

At this point in the season, mowing meadows is epic they’re so tall. A true wall of grass (Red Sea parting) stands beside me while I’m laying down swaths, destroying ecosystems where I pass. Inhabitants scatter before me. Weirdly exhausting to the driver, the man mowing. A half gallon of lemonade goes down. All the work today is probably not a good prelude to the dinner show tonight with Randy and Sands, where I’ll be instanced as an old tired guitarist, brokeback from sitting in the throes of the mower’s tossing saddle.

* * * *

The French as natural-born epigrammatists. Genevieve is at the show, and asks about my writing. I tell her, well, in her native country it actually means something to be a writer. As a way of oversimplifying the remark, ESL-style, I tell her, “It’s hard to be a writer in France!” (the point being, it’s so all-too-easy here in the New World – and the point being, too, that the French have reasons to actually revere/respect their writers). Genevieve’s riposte: “It’s hard to be anything in France.”

* * * *

Repaired mysterious clank in swamp cooler (simply by removing, then replacing, the side panels). Completely cleaned chicken premises. Brett does all planting of summer crops.

 

* * * *

June 4, 2015

Hired man Mateo does defensible-space clearing around house all day raking and pruning. I can only go so long, evading Brett’s insistence that I hire somebody for the manual labor.

Myself, I had a prodigiously efficient day, usually a matter of luck more than my own good care. Lots of work on “Things.” Half the garden’s main beds got turned over and fertilized with chicken manure. Leak-repairs to trailer.

 

* * * *

June 3, 2015

Breaking ground in section of new garden. A late start on, maybe, a few of the usual summer crops.

Music in the cottage.

 

* * * *

June 2, 2015

Dentist. Two dilapidated bicycles to bike shop for reconditioning. Afternoon in the fallow end of garden, where my enemies are blackberry, mint, wort, and flourishing roses.

 

* * * *

June 1, 2015

Morning dusk the birds are singing in the cedars, the dogwood, the mulberry, the tall box hedges. Galvanized pail clank. Barley fodder dripping but silently, irrigation in hedge hissing. In all the days after somebody dies, the birds go on with their morning songs, everything carries on as usual, and Gill is one more example. Me too. After I die, there will come a morning when the birds are singing in my absence. I won’t be there to see what my own total forgottenness is like. You’ll be there for it.

* * * *

My own car to mechanic for oil-and-filter.

Molly the house sitter comes by for the proprietary tour. Hike up to the weir, walk along the ditch in shady sun, water flowing along beside is brass in the shade.

Set up an IRA for Hunter.

Jam with Randy at Sands’s.

 

* * * *

May 31, 2015

Sunday. I think today is the first in a long time when I haven’t put in some good time in physical labor. It a principle worth bearing in mind, how healthy it can be not to get exercise.

Music, rehearsing in mud room while Barbara dozes in the wing chair, cold Ovaltine at her side. More of guitar than Dobro.

Our summer house-sitters arrive to stow their chattel in the garage. “U-Haul” truck in driveway: the peace and quiet of this place is shattered by how colorful is the advertising on a U-Haul truck’s side panels.

The broccoli is coming in, in abundance, so tonight it’s stir-fry, and a slug from a bottle of sugary “Panda Express” stir-fry sauce that came our way. Meanwhile, my phone tells me the International Space Station is about to be visible flying overhead, in five minutes.

Remotest astronomical laws are cognizable to the human brain. The laws that governed stars’ first swirlings 14 billion years ago (or similarly, the laws that make “solid matter” a tangible substance, at my alien fingertip) can be conceived by a neuronal mass at the top of a recently evolved brain stem that is ruled, also, by compulsions of sex-and-violence. Infallible universal rules have been written down by the same mind that forgets where the coffee cup was last set down.

We can’t even understand what we ourselves are saying, when we speak of “dark matter” or “quantum entanglement” or even the “gravity” we think we’re “experiencing” when our soles press the ground. There is absolutely no warrant for this coincidence that objective reality keeps answering our conceptions. One needn’t conclude there are religious implications, only that it’s wonderful, which is religion enough.

 

 

* * * *

May 30, 2015

At this house today arrives really glamorous “Washer-Dryer Combination.” I’ve resisted this manfully and lost. The old heavy-gauge-steel washer and dryer went out the door on a hand truck, trailing lint – and I know that the metals get “recycled,” and I know that the new models are supposed to be “green” in the sense that they use less water and power – but still I can’t help but think those are only minor mitigations in the total carbon-footprint environmental damage you do when you manufacture something freshly. Making the old jalopies last a few extra years seems smaller-carbon-footprint.

Work out at club.

Evening dinner-show, where a friend of Dashiell’s has the mic, singer-songwriter.

 

* * * *

May 25, 2015

Begin again on review of “Things” with its new (more unmistakable and concise) theme signposts.

Memorial Day holiday.

Spent much of the afternoon with irrigation mending old hoses, investigating inefficiencies. (In bad fire-season to come, repairs I have ignored for years take on a little urgency.)

Salmon with miso and ginger is not much of a success.

* * * *

A basic pleasure. After 25 years of marriage (it occurs to me) I have a happy wife.

She’s in the living room, having set up her printer to reproduce a wide-format photo of hers (sleeping dog on kitchen rug, as reflected in the chromy bulge of a Dobro’s nickel plating). Her cat is sleeping on the arm of the couch, dog is at her feet, her writers conference isn’t headed for disaster financial or logistical, her husband is poking at the salmon as it roasts, her second son somewhere in the house. It’s something of an achievement, having a contented woman. I guess it has to happen by accident, but it’s a happy accident.

 

* * * *

May 24, 2015

Wake up and go over Wendy’s edits, which are great.

Refrain, yet, from going back into any serious work on fiction.

Then: yet more brush clearing. A crazy amount of time is required just in keeping a country place habitable and safe. There are things I’ve been putting off for years. Plus, I’ll be gone all summer.

 

* * * *

May 23, 2015

A little light rain this morning. Done by dawn.

The Threepenny Review will buy my thousand-word complaint about consumerism.

Uniformed Calfire cop visits again, with clipboard, to police our wildfire preparedness, and I think she’s pleased.

Movie tonight with Brett in town, about the photographer Salgado.

 

* * * *

Misc. reflection as I’ve survived long enough to have some some regrets: Those who have found a way to forgive me my mistakes may have done so easily and lightly or may have worked their way around to it, but none will have had such work as I will have in self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness is the real row to hoe.

 

 

* * * *

May 22, 2015

Grey skies are bulging. Rain is promised, then withheld.

Will devote myself to all inevitable springtime chores, waiting for the courage or impatience, whatever-it-is, to come back.

* * * *

For days now I’ve been clearing brush in a particular area that happens to include a high-traffic beehive. They and I are coexisting well. Where I’ve been parking the truck for slash transport, their hive is beside the front tire – and the crowd at its doorway is always like a Bloomingdale’s entrance. During these days of work, I’ve loomed in their sight (in the sight of their convex, goggly, ultraviolet-sensitive, compound eyes; and in the shared, collective evaluation of their entire swarm’s ethical consciousness), where I’ve existed as a pixilated ghostly shape – I’m not a flower, nor am I a tree; I’m more like a deer, or swaying hawthorn, or a coyote. Lacking pollen, lacking nectar, I’m as useless as a cloud, and as negligible.

* * * *

Reading Flaubert again. His mastery of the perfect nailing detail, to display how pathetic and vulgar/ignorant are the shitty little people he created. I’m finding all Flaubert’s authorial contempt instantly distasteful, as if somebody around me started making racist remarks. (For some reason now, it’s become more protrusive in the sight of the attentive reader and more damaging to the narration.)

 

* * * *

May 21, 2015

Chamber Choir performs “Red Pickup” lyrics.

Beer afterward, mutually congratulatory, with composer Mark.

 

* * * *

May 17, 2015

Sunday. Brett and I will drive up to Squaw to meet with Tamara to agree, by pointing literally at a spot on the ground, where her property shall end, and ours begin.

Dash will be in San Francisco all day at a “Maker’s Faire,” presumably watching bots solve Rubik’s Cubes, and welded-together fire-breathing junk heaps do battle. Midmorning, I’m in kitchen taking a break, scraping very old, hard brie onto bread while the kitchen radio (perpetual NPR) broadcasts an interview with a woman who has written an autobiography: her memory had always failed her, then at last an MRI scan revealed she’d always had a hole in her brain, an empty void the size of a lemon. When she’s in the supermarket, she can never remember where the peanut butter is shelved. My coffee is replenished, and it’s time for me to go back behind my closed door, to my morning’s work with these grammatical sentences’ technology, setting subjects before verbs, squeezing in clauses, deleting others. Suddenly, across the kitchen, with a soft ding, an electronic female voice says cheerfully, equably, “I can’t help you with that.”

It’s my cell phone. It was the voice of Siri – who seems to have been left on, listening, and she was responding, apparently, to some remark on the radio. I put her back to sleep before going to work.

* * * *

Squaw. We agree that the McKinney property meets ours at a particular clump of cattails by the roadside. Those cattails are the border marker. For a better monument, I hammer a stick of iron rebar there, using a rock.

Nice, late lunch at PlumpJack – split a cheeseburger, plus zinfandel – after a short walk under overcast sky up to the first waterfall.

 

* * * *

May 15, 2015

Sands’s concert at Nevada Theatre. Working with good musicians is a great ride.

* * * *

FRAGMENTS:

• A man in a city goes into a building for some assignation — he’s having an affair or something. Three hours later he emerges, heads for his parked car, and on approach realizes his car keys aren’t in his pocket. Then, as panic is just rising, he realizes his car’s engine is running. He left it like that, keys in ignition, unlocked, and all the while on a city street, it was untouched.
• A minor but “gatekeeper” figure in a story is working a paperback puzzle book, distracting himself. It’s called Amazing Mazes. His pencil travels carefully.
• A “mistress” or a “kept woman” is going to have many advantages, and among them is the fact that she’s not going to respect the man she’s got. She’s not even going to want him.

 

* * * *

May 14, 2015

Work on Assistant, limiting discursiveness — always a risk with ultra-close 3rd-person.

Defensible-space cutting around house and below the cottage in the woods.

“Visiting Composers” concert at Besemer House.

* * * *

News that Gill has died. (Of a stroke or heart attack at home watching the ball game, sitting in his armchair.)

 

* * * *

May 13, 2015

Wake early on San Francisco couch. Coffee at Peets.

Then drive to Mill Valley for proper roll-and-coffee on the square. Sleepy bourgeois suburb now. My own photo has fallen off the wall in the bookstore, as have all the other luminaries’ photos. By the shady creek behind Mill Valley Market: a big snowy egret is roosting on a post, takes off towards Mt. Tam.

Nice party for Counterpoint authors. Editors at the party: I used to think (in the days when I couldn’t get published) that editors were powerful people. Now I know they’re the most vulnerable, the most risk-taking. Who here is “the snowball in hell”?

Nice long drive home, burning local-manufacture vegetable oil, rate of consumption seems to be 30mpg. I stop in Colfax to pick up train schedule, for my next trip into town. (News: during the entire month of March, world ppm of CO2 was 400. This is a milestone. Also, other news, rate of ocean acidification is 5% increase per decade.)

 

* * * *

May 12, 2015

To SF, for Bar Agricola for Counterpoint Press.

* * * *

Billy on his deathbed yesterday, speaking of a wildfire presently burning on ranch property of his, in Mooney Flat.

 

 

* * * *

May 10, 2015

Mothers Day will go uncelebrated here. Too busy with drama of Squaw acceptance/rejection. One day a year, this has to happen.

Last night, lots of restlessness in the cottage. In the night Barbara had risen up and collected all her necklaces, hidden them under her pillow, then set out to walk to Squaw Valley.

Tonight, more music with Sands and the Luke/Maggie ensemble, at Sands’s house, then dinner.

* * * *

Happy to have gone back to rereading Flaubert. Somebody who writes as if something matters.

But this second time around, I see I’ve grown a new moral sense, a sense of how the world works, and something I hadn’t seen in Flaubert bothers me: that he has perfected the “Amusement at the Foibles of the Stupid” enjoyment. It’s a kind of readerly pleasure, I guess, that can be licensed especially since the Stupid aren’t here to sense my superiority. But it’s not a kind of writing I could do anymore. I have to keep the mark higher, and in the end, I hate to say it of Flaubert but it’s a cheap trick and he largely depends on it, and I think maybe his reputation is way too inflated. His style, even, yes, Flaubert’s style, is undistinguished and marred by, no kidding, inattention. Only another super-scrupulous author (me) could detect this.

 

 

* * * *

May 9, 2015

We’ve all the pages of applicants’ names fanned out on the big table covering it like shingles.

To Amy and Luke’s, with Gordon on banjo. This time pedal-steel.

* * * *

May 8, 2015

More clearing “defensible space.”

* * * *

May 7, 2015

At last, two years’ firewood supply (softwood anyway) is collected in a solid stack, size of a VW bus, below the cottage, a loaf there.

Morning: eliminated one discursive section from “Assistant.” (The Geyser Motel passage.)

* * * *

May 6, 2015

Pickup is parked in the grass below the cottage where all the cedar stovewood is collecting in a big three-cord stack, heat for the winter of 2017. Certain split logs’ woodgrain, in the sun, is impossibly silk-faceted where the cleavage was flat and pure.

Spent first half of day on “Assistant.”

Missed the rehearsal up the hill at Sol Rayo studio.

Dinner of pesto. Mushroom/spinach/onion sauté. Feta cheese.

Dinner is delayed for thirty minutes while Brett makes an emergency trip to the “wildlife rescue lady” on Willow Valley Road, carrying a fledgling red-capped finch in a Kleen-Ex box. The housecats had mauled the bird but he was still breathing.

The report on the radio, meanwhile, is about Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. In one ear I was hearing of the lop-tail squirrel recuperating, and the orphaned baby robins, and the woman in charge of them all, on Willow Valley Road, who, in her garage establishment, holds wriggling mealworms out over baby robins with tweezers, the woman’s “patient” husband who was cooking dinner all the while, the way the baby birds open wide their big mouth-hole origami and demand to be the first fed; and in the other ear I was hearing the detailed reports of IDF soldiers who’d been told to open fire with automatic weaponry and armor-piercing tank missiles on all Palestinian civilians, no matter the age or gender, in any neighborhood. (Especially anybody standing indoors near a window. Especially fire on them. Because if they were innocent they wouldn’t be standing near a window.)

 

 

* * * *

May 5, 2015

Up very early again, working again on “Assistant” (the extremely discursive version with authorial intrusions).

Been back to regular meditation, too, for some while.

A very happy productive day. Limbed a lot of trees around house as per instructions of Cal Fire inspectors, then at nightfall played dobro while, in the ticking oven beside me, a cheap pork roast, in crust of fennel seeds, cooked real slow.

 

 

* * * *

May 3, 2015

Sunday.

Finish with quick assessment of Immanence.

Revisions to Squaw schedule.

Another load firewood, from meadow to house.

With loppers and commercial poison and pruning saw, removing hawthorn and sweet pea and blackberry all over the property.

 

 

* * * *

May 2, 2015

Move firewood up from lower meadow, with Dashiell’s help.

Nice two-hour performance with Randy and Sands in the evening. Well attended.

 

 

* * * *

April 30, 2015

Immanence.

Visit from Cal Fire: Lots of defensible-space requirements.

At last, the final coat of white paint on the garage door’s bear-damaged frame.

A trip in the pickup, all over hell and gone (Dog Bar Road), to buy a “lift” armchair for Billy. It rises and then dumps forward – as Billy can walk but has been unable to get up out of a chair.

 

 

* * * *

April 29, 2015

(Even before dawn the trill of grosbeaks. They seem to be answering each other from separate trees – the mulberry by the gate and the hawthorn by the potting shed.)

Immanence.

Again, Sands for music.

 

 

* * * *

April 28, 2015

To take a break from the newly scored “Things” I’m going back to Immanence. Peculiar narrative.

Sands here for music in the afternoon.

Doctor appointment.

 

* * * *

April 27, 2015

Working on “Things,” its “angelic mischief” areas, and also adding a strictly explanatory passage about the quid-pro-quo of apocatastasis. Which seems necessary. A bore, as fiction, but necessary.

Squaw deskwork. Then more Squaw deskwork. Then the result of my work goes to the post office branch in the grocery store. So a day is spent in busywork. Drink a small, sour, dark beer at brewery, reading Junot Diaz.

 

* * * *

April 26, 2015

Breakfast at Tofanelli’s with the author of the novel the local play was based on.

Then, stranded in Grass Valley with an hour to kill, I get capp and read Junot Diaz.

Nice long, wide-ranging sidewalk conversation with Cavendish. (“What does the Deadhead say when he comes down off acid?”)

Walking across Grass Valley Main Street at a red light, I notice the hood of the Toyota I’m passing. On a decal above the grill is inscribed Euler’s Equation:

e^iπ + 1 = 0

The driver’s window is open, and I blurt out, “That’s Euler’s Theorem!” getting it wrong, and I correct myself, “That’s Euler’s Equation.” He fairly shouts with joy, “It is! Yes! It’s Euler’s Equation!” He’s got a carful of people, with him. I tell him, “It rules the Universe!”

He says, “It does, it does. I can’t believe it. You’ve made my day,” as light changes to green and he has to move.

Get most of the big meadow mowed.

Then afternoon, house concert, Paul Kamm and Eleanor MacDonald’s electrifying vocal harmonies.

Dinner after: Jennie Michaels, Paul Emery, Cavendish: they represent a good quorum of the town’s angels.

 

 

* * * *

April 25, 2015

We went and visited Billy down the road, bodhisattva of Indian Flat, he is in a bad way. Tumors are everywhere, and he isn’t getting out of his armchair anymore. Hinduism and lots of marijuana, that’s what he’s got. Without Billy around, a lot of us will feel more vulnerable to the myriad snafus of life.

Back home, big pot of gumbo, and Josh and Jen came over, with new baby Cody.

 

 

* * * *

April 24, 2015

Steve Susoyev to arrive for discussion of “Things.” Will spend the night in the cottage.

 

 

* * * *

April 22, 2015

Happiness of being alone in San Francisco. Cappuccino and pastry at Roma. Bump into Ola on the Macondray steps. Work in the morning. Lunch with Jason in Sausalito.

Stay on after lunch, then. Alone in Sausalito – on little warm sunny Caledonia – for 4:00 showing of a documentary at the Marin. I’m the only person in the black-box screening.

(“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.” Wm. Hazlitt.)

* * * *

The quiet end of Sausalito. I’ve always loved how the streets slope down to reach their end at saltwater-level. Pine Street, Turney Street. An unguarded stony margin there, the stillness of Richardson Bay.

Crossing the GG Bridge for the zillionth time in my life:

“”Nirvana” and “samsara” are the same state” – it does get at the heart of something.

 

 

* * * *

April 21, 2015

To San Francisco for Nan’s memorial at the DeYoung. Saw everybody. Dave Perlman.

 

* * * *

April 20, 2015

Darkness falls and we reach the allowable time of day for wine, Grocery Outlet cabernet. Garlic and shallots in pan. Big pot of water for noodles isn’t boiling yet.

The immanence of “sin” in the world, quite indispensable: I’m looking out at the meadow in a last, dim, declining hour when all creatures are getting shelter – (except, maybe, for the opportunists of night, who have their own kind of happiness) – while on the kitchen radio is report after report about the deaths of human multitudes this week. Refugees everywhere try, by land and by sea, to make the trip from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern, all around the rim of the world dying in the effort, drowning off the shores of Europe as they get out of Africa, thirsting in the Arizona desert. Of the 800 today who drowned in the Mediterranean, most were locked into the lower decks of the little ship.

The geopolitical web is impossible to untangle – and in my own case existentially, the mixture of happenstance and skill/cunning that landed me where I am – it is all too imponderable – but I’ve got a feeling that the bad luck of North Africans and Nicaraguans has some (if remote) cause-effect relationship with my comfort in this quiet place. More specifically, I get the feeling that one point-of-contact between me and those refugees is the portfolio of stocks in my little SEP-IRA, which is balanced, balanced according to a low-risk algorithm among growth stocks and value stocks, bonds and cash, domestic markets, foreign markets, emerging markets, multinationals. All for a one-percent fee. Meanwhile I look out over the deepening peaceful meadows.

 

 

* * * *

April 19, 2015

Nevada Irrigation District opens my weir this week.

Springtime Sunday.

Clean-up of winter-cluttered garage. The removal of all storm windows, upstairs and down, the unshrouding of swamp cooler, the reawakening of both evap-cooler systems – all this is catastrophic to peaceful colonies of wasps, who’d just been getting a start.

Caulk bear-damaged garage door.

 

 

* * * *

April 18, 2015

Saturday. To Sacramento for board meeting.

 

* * * *

April 15, 2015

Still lots of Squaw work and none of my own.

Reframing and priming garage door that was torn up by bear.

(I’d procrastinated in this, reasonably. Before restoring it, I wanted to wait to see if he’d be back soon to wreak the same damage all over again.)

First mowing of especially tall patches of meadows – not yet entirety.

Lamb stew (coriander-cinnamon-paprika, Luke-and-Maggie’s preserved figs).

The peculiarity of cooking from live gardens is that recipes are unrepeatable and accidental. This stew will never be reprised.

 

 

* * * *

April 13, 2015

Fall/winter plantings worked well. Already we’re living on onions and lettuce. Reinstate routine of barley-fodder. Pullets are grown-up and laying.

Inevitable flood of Squaw work. All this week, my time is not my own. Brett picking over balance sheets with a highlighter pen.

 

 

* * * *

April 9, 2015

Back home. The usual grief (over not living in San Francisco) burns off like morning dew.

So in my home place I’m settling in again with the more chronic griefs.

Pear crop seems to have been slightly damaged by frost – (just about exactly decimated (i.e., one-tenth-reduced) seems would be the word). But the exception is the new Bartletts, which are coming on strong.

Good little rain, for two days.

Finished with “Varney’s” editorial.

 

 

* * * *

April 6, 2015

Drive out to West Marin, Brit food at the Pelican Inn, then Muir Woods. Bump into Yoel Kahn.

 

 

* * * *

April 4, 2015

To George Khouri’s house in Fairfax, to see oud. I don’t make an offer. I’ll never play the oud.

To Chris’s, deeper in Fairfax, to record dobro part for “Rodeo Girl.” Dash comes along and, meanwhile, spends four hours in Fairfax alone as boulevardier, with novel to read and pocketful of coffee money.

 

 

* * * *

April 3, 2015

Morning trip along Polk Street for hardware and charcuterie.

Lunch with LitQuake people.

Dinner, just the three of us, at Aux Delices on Polk. Then an oddball indie movie with Dash at home on DVD.

 

 

* * * *

April 2, 2015

Family time. Going down the steep slope of Union Street before light. Caffe Trieste.

Later: the drab, dreamy, sunny neighborhoods of the Richmond District, looking for a card shop in which Dash can make a purchase, just any purchase. Failure.

Baker Beach, with dog.

The DeYoung Museum: Scottish show including Vermeer’s big picture of Christ adjudicating btw Martha and Mary, Botticelli’s lovely baby Jesus at Virgin’s knee, a sweet Corot of a shady road into the forest.

 

 

* * * *

March 31, 2015

Miscellaneous writing and deskwork.

Establish real system for chicken-manure composting, which up till now I’ve been treating in a half-assed way.

Two bales straw at Ridge Feed.

Chicken sausages and kale and polenta.

(While I shoveled chicken manure today, I happened to be listening on my iPhone ear buds to a BBC podcast, part of a series about “the elements.” This one focused on phosphorus. The world supply is being quick-depleted; in a decade the price has quintupled. And I felt very clever to be shoveling chicken shit on my own acres.)

* * * *

Brett’s little plant-nursery – actually extensive nursery – in this frosty season moves in and out of the mudroom daily, nightly.

Tomatoes, squash, cucumber, lots of varieties of beans, all little pale curls in separate dollops of soil.

Poetry keeps arriving here from all over the country, this is the season, and Brett sorts it, tags it, moves it on.

Spring break from school, Dashiell is home, always in pajamas, preferring darkened rooms with shades drawn, face aglow in light of his Kindle or his iPad.

Pullets still aren’t laying.

Brett rises to stand up over her drip-irrigation work, fists on hips, calling across the meadow to me: “Is it just a world full of unhappy people trying to work with Chinese-made crap?”

 

* * * *

 

 

March 30, 2015

Done with my little screed about consumerism, happy with it.

A doctor’s appointment for Dash, to have his smooshed toe checked on.

The same day, my own doctor’s apptmnt: chronic throat pain.

On the radio, an anthropologist is talking about how “play” consists in a wonderful tolerance of uncertainty/ambiguity that, other times, would be intolerable. Well, so even Cancer could be a kind of game.

On the novel All Things I’ve been amping up “the Lord’s work,” i.e., the Lord’s mischief.

Great peaceful afternoon. Dash writing piano-cello piece on mudroom piano. Both cats doze on shed roof. On our quiet road, a guy drives by with his window open, alone in the car shouting, “Help me, you fucks!” Keeps on going, around the bend, headed north.

 

 

* * * *

 

March 29, 2015

Start broccoli and Brussels sprouts, raised beds.

Soil prepared under hogwire arch.

All St. John’s wort attacked with Ortho product 8% triclopyr.

Sands’s good set at the winery with Randy, followed by Sol and Elena Rayo, their tight collaboration.

Then Sands for dinner, pesto in Barbara’s cottage.

 

 

* * * *

 

March 28, 2015

More of these unrealistic sunny days.

Soil prep in garden.

More playing with “editorial” (about consumerism and environment).

My heavy-duty rat trap, in the trailer, seems to have caught a wood rat several days ago, big fellow, but by the tail somehow. So he dragged the trap after himself and plunged behind the defunct fridge, the trap itself snagging above, so eventually he got hanged for a few days by his tail, dying. I open the outer-wall access door to find him today, still hanging, now ripe, so I use garden loppers to disconnect him from his tail and let him drop.

The pears, meanwhile, have germinated well in these weirdly ideal fruit-growing conditions, and we may have an abundance in the fall, every blossom-stem now swelling with an incipient pear – no, an actual pear, already big-as-a-pea standing up erect.

Dinner of pork with sauce (a dozen of our own 2014 plums), Pabby’s garlic, Jackie’s kale.

End of day, where’s Brett? I find her in the darkened living room dozing solidly at ten pm, her round face lit by iPad screen, deep asleep over the podcast of a BBC radio show, about end-of-life “palliative” care for the elderly and the hard choices there, which plays on and on as she sleeps.

 

* * * *

 

 

 

March 27, 2015

Nights of alert, elated wakefulness.Lamp in trailer.  The excitement of being the only spark of consciousness in all these North American woods in the dark. Coffee and meditation.

How “the hard problem” (of neuroscience) is just a fizz.

The insomniac radio shows from Europe.

Novel is at its standstill, so I play around with an editorial that equates stinginess with environmental probity. (Where to publish?) The clanging silence all night alone.

 

 

* * * *

March 21, 201

Dashiell’s having badly banged his toe – (under a heavy recycling bin in the garage) – has set the tone around here for recent days. Doctor visits, X-rays, administration of painkillers and invalid lunches. He’s lurching around here in pain and discomfort.

Brett to Sacramento, for accountant visit.

Sands in the cottage with her mother, I cutting deadfall oak by the potting shed: the old shrewd convenience of using a pickup’s tailgate as a sawbuck.

 

 

* * * *

March 18, 2015

Today begins another slog through “Things.” Unmarketable book that it is, I love it and insist on it. A few ideas for making the supernal plot into a more gettable joke for the reader. But in all honesty I don’t want to do much more to it. I think it’s what I want it to be.

 

 

* * * *

March 17, 2015

Another day of cooling my heels, i.e., staying away from work.

Sent off critique to Kim, sketched a sentence or two for Elizabeth blurb, drove Dash to school and then sat on Hospital Hilltop contemplating Things, thinking I like it as it is. How essential it is to be unprofessional, as an author.

The trout got smoked, and leeks-and-parsnips roasted. While everything cooked, from a fat dowel of maple I found, I honed two wooden cork shapes (a little bit of a taper), to bung the holes in the floor behind the stove.

Garden: soil amendment. But we lack organic fertilizer, and I haven’t composted the chicken manure correctly.

 

 

 

* * * *

March 15, 2015

Saw to SPD saw shop.

 

 

* * * *

March 14, 2015

Overcast Saturday. Another day of no writing, I’ve been living instead like a country gentleman: cutting out cedar stumps in the morning, reading Elizabeth’s really good galleys in the noontime sun lawn chair, cutting oak cordwood, bringing up all the old websites about McTaggart’s Unreality-of-Time essay and the relativistic “block” theories. I keep going back, keep drinking the same water.

Pulled gorse in clearing.

Wore the chainsaw out on the big oak taken down last spring by PG&E in the woods. (All the while, close beside me, the old mare in the glade went on grazing unperturbed by chainsaw. Could she be deaf?)

Today Brett will get her mind off the chronic woes of Squaw Valley logistics by working outside. Plantings in enclosed garden, with the iPod playing “On the Media” episodes. Me, I feel great because the loan-refinance on the Macondray Lane house will close – (notary public to arrive here on Monday with papers) – and I feel I’ve accomplished something prudent and difficult and — not least — cunning. (We really can’t afford that house.)

Dash and the whole rock band have gone to friend’s house. Keeping their boys out of downtown is a mildly diverting activity for parents, only faintly strategic. All the ragamuffins from the Ridge, whose parents are home stoned, are out on the town stoned, on the sidewalks before Mekka and Pete’s Pizza. Nevada City will never outlive its reputation for allowing open alcohol containers, countenancing R-rated bacchanalia in the streets. Dash’s sophomore drummer friend, Mike, has the good luck to live with his family in an old Victorian directly on the main street, within walking distance of everything. The only circumstance requiring patience, sometimes, is that Mike’s house is where kids go when they need to lie down.

(For this reason, those parents are planning a sale of the house and a move to the country.)

 

 

* * * *

 

 

March 12, 2015

Up before light, watering the hens, Saturn and the half-moon are side by side, a smile and a dimple. Those two are the only visible objects in the whole expanse, when dawn does get a start.

Squaw Valley work tends to predominate. Get the stove going in the front of the house, for a change. My own work is stalled and amounts to moping. I can’t seem to reconcile the two stories of “Things,” the comedy of metaphysical sections with empathy for its earth narrative. Lots of sitting outside the trailer.

Long hike through the old Erikson Lumber property. There’s a groomed trail now, but when there were no trails it used to be much more dramatic and intimate, sweaty, itchy, bamboozling, you had to respect it, great-smelling, a home to animals.

 

 

* * * *

March 11, 2015

Car freed from mechanic. Silent aerosol rain goes on all day and everything shines.

Taxes to the accountant, an errand for such a cloudy damp day.

 

 

* * * *

March 10, 2015

 

Hunter’s car rehabilitated at Plaza Tire and Auto.

Little rain is coming in. The day got greyer and quieter, and vaguer, till the only thing that was specific was two crows, cawing, flying over my head where I read in a chair in the meadow.

 

 

* * * *

March 7, 2015

A day of lostness following editor’s dismissal of “All Things.”

Hardware store (for floorboard fasteners, etc).

California parking lots: they’re still my fascination. The California shopping-center. What a salvation is the common human sodality among benign strangers, just to have rights of citizenship, rights of anonymity, rights of pedestrian in a mall (the Safeway supermarket, the laundromat, the storefront Cheaper Cigarettes, the pretty girl sitting on a curb in her ugly “Safeway” cap-and-smock outfit with her cigarette and her iPhone bowed over texting, all the loiterers and discontents and hopefuls) – my own beatific condition is that I’m nobody here, invisible here, so in the depths of the social contract I’m beloved, innocent-till-proven-guilty.

Evening down the road, a small hootenanny at Luke and Amy’s. We should do this more often.

The general thwarted sensation all day. The feeling that every activity – making purchases in town, watching television with others, getting a dobro part right – is something I’m “doing instead of having a life.” I’ve never had this feeling before. The feeling I’m onstage trying my best to be a background extra. And I wonder if many people live chronically with that? Always burying their faces in a fresh distraction because “their actual lives” hadn’t worked out. Seems like plenty of people are like that. Like a state of bereavement, lifelong.

Late in the day: belated news that Rob had gone into, and come out of, hospitalization for influenza/pneumonia.

 

 

* * * *

March 6, 2015

More of pruning.

 

 

* * * *

March 5 2015

Pruning pear trees. I’m getting to it late in the season, so working in a blizzard of falling petals.

Finished with a draft of “Immanence.”

 

* * * *

March 3, 2015

Rob’s birthday. I always look forward to the long long-distance call. Put my feet up, as at no other time of the year. But he’s not answering.

More sifting of “Immanence” in the morning.

Both Elizabeth and Michelle are publishing short story collections. Which goes to show, all is not lost.

Lunch at New Moon with Mark Vance to finalize lyrics for choral song.

Romain is here for after-school music in the mud room.

Dinner meatloaf but Frenchified and rude, incl. pistachios. And a modern miracle befalls: I am able to text Michael in Berkeley and get immediate response: the Rosh Hashanah brisket was ketchup-mustard-seasoned, and let the mustard be the cheap Toyota-yellow kind, not the fancy.

 

* * * *

March 1, 2015

Sunday. Damp sunshine. Brett to return today from Monterey.

I’m keeping and even intensifying the “Fatuous Self-Regard” passages from “Immanence,” for I’m worrying that the old Unreliable Narrator trick is getting to be ineffectual in a world of increasingly lowbrow readers. It’s possible many readers in today’s enlarged market simply don’t want to read about somebody who strikes them as peculiar (weird, icky, head-up-ass). People want to read about somebody they “like.”

 

 

* * * *

February 27, 2015

Berkeley last night (for Brahms, Heggie, Ravel). At Noodle House on Telegraph, I’m all by myself for a bowl of pho, table for one by the wall, reading paperback: just me and my chopsticks and the napkin dispenser.

Afterwards, capp at Café Med.

Brett leaves today for weekend in Monterey, to plan Squaw with Lisa ostensibly but also to have fun, sack the thrift stores.

Here tonight: music with Luke & Co.

Little rain coming in.

* * * *

Every once in a while I say the right thing. A friend of mine had his novel selling in towering stacks in big-box stores and airports, and he was ashamed. I told him, “Ah, we’re all straws in the wind.” Turns out that was exactly right.

* * * *

February 24, 2015

Morning. Sunny day. Meadow steams. I wake late. A kind of shine knits together in my core, while I sit at kitchen table looking out window.

Sci fi movies have created the archetype of the extraterrestrial beings who arrive from a civilization that is infinitely superior to ours, as well as benevolent. When they arrive they’ll be gifted with powers like telepathy or instantaneous travel or telekinesis that, however, will be deployed for benign purposes only; creatures perhaps tall, radiant, awkward, moving like giraffes on the savannahs; their voices mellow and resonant and intimate.

I’m thinking of this at the kitchen table after a sleepless night, now eating my gory egg-and-toast at the kitchen table, while watching the two women and three dogs, far out in the distances of the meadow, where they’re making sure the dogs get a good romp, while themselves, they gossip and commune (before they are to set out on their own separate days’ hard work, boring to the dogs, who just sleep under their desks). And I have to think, We are those incalculable beings at least mostly, on this planet, exercising our telepathy and superpowers. Three dogs’ tails are visible, where the meadow’s slight knoll makes a horizon, tails whipping around.

* * * *

Mantra for the lucky, to put themselves to sleep at night (from the Bible, Job): “My root is spread out to the waters, and the dew lies all night on my branch”

* * * *

February 23, 2015

Deepest, last twilight outside the kitchen: the garage is the last pale iceberg.

Pour glass wine, stand at kitchen door. One of the cats is still out, and really ought to be brought in, he’s in ecstasy, tossing a rodent over and over in the dark, something so big it makes an audible plump sound when it lands.

He’s at risk of coyote/bobcat predation at this hour, and I go out for him, but I’m sock-footed and can’t follow far. Come back inside, toss shrimp in lime and chili. On the radio I’ve got a podcast “Poetry: Off the Shelf”: the featured poet, being interviewed, has written a lot about the miseries and injustices of motherhood. She is saying her profound realization, thinking of her new relationship with her infant, was this: What’s good for the child might not be good for the mother!

Outside, the house cat in his savagery is so delirious, he’s an easy victim for the bobcat who has been raiding, so I go back out, shod, and he lets me murmuring approach him, and lets me separate him from his victim, and rises docilely into my arms, dazed, and possibly even relieved to be freed from his fever, already forgetting it as I carry him inside.

 

 

* * * *

February 19, 2015

In the night sky, Jupiter remains a big distraction. But already Antares, shoulder of the scorpion, promises next summer’s sky.

I think I observe this every year at this time. But forgetfulness/repetition doesn’t diminish the satisfaction, maybe precisely it increases the satisfaction.

 

 

* * * *

February 15, 2015

The carpet in Barbara’s cottage living-room:

It’s divided into squarish vignettes, each about eight-by-ten inches (a lamb, a bouquet, a milkmaid, etc.). Today she has been happier than usual, better-oriented than usual, and at “cocktail hour” I came in to find her sitting in the couch, leaning over her knees, scratching at the carpet design saying she had been trying for days to pick up that magazine fallen there.

Last week it was a small band of hens. They’d left the flock and invaded Barbara’s home thru the open door, mid-afternoon. This went on unsupervised for some while, and while she ate her eternal breakfast Barbara watched, with the satisfaction of a hostess, the hens pecking hungrily in the carpet pattern.

* * * *

 

February 14, 2015

Big day of sun and peace. Me: I am with paintbrush in kitchen on canvas tarps, open paint can, bedroom-slippered and pajamaed. Light caramel-butternut color.

Got the house refinanced. Brett and I traveled into town to the bank yesterday, and while the notary, before us, accomplished her ceremony of redundancy, I watched (this was happening behind everybody’s back, visible through the picture-window’s vast, perfectly clean glass) a very slow parking-lot collision. A plumber’s toolbox pickup vs. a gold Lexus, all in total silence while inside the bank, we cleverly shored up our assets and I didn’t point it out to anybody.

Today is a new day, and this morning we’ve been like newlyweds in this house, wielding paintbrushes in our emptied-out kitchen. Brett is wearing the exact same spattered sweatpants as when we painted our indoors on a rainy night in Mill Valley in 1989 by harsh bare-bulb light.

Today, in the sun, in a country far from Mill Valley, the dog sleeps on the doormat. All the hens have been freed, and in the gardens and hedges they dig dustbaths for themselves and they pool down in. From the mud room, the shout “Shut the fuck up!” arises every ten seconds or so. This is the chorus to a song: Dashiell has his three-man “punk” band in there, and they’re making a recording, trying to get it right.

 

 

* * * *

February 11, 2015

Now there are a total of three different hired “sometime friends” for Barbara – Viki, Pabby, and Jackie – and I think of these women in terms of the “boundless states” in Buddhist doctrine (brahmaviharas): Loving Kindness, Compassion, Equanimity. They’re full of advice – (advice is a principle form of socializing, especially in rural places) – what kind of oil to use for butcher blocks, when to harvest winter squash, when to plant winter onions, how to befriend a skittish dog. My own brush with a proper brahmavihara: I remember astonishing – (or maybe alarming!) – a writer friend of mine at Squaw when I told her I wasn’t “ambitious” anymore, at least particularly for any book-biz success.

(Unfortunately, probably it wasn’t true, surely I was talking through my hat. But one can aspire, and at least rehearse it.)

 

 

* * * *

February 8, 2015

Sunday. Heavy rain for a third day.

Up early, finding documents for a fax to a loan processor.

At first light, I mix the oil and start work, oiling the entire exposed floor.

Done by early afternoon.

Dobro accompaniment for Sands at the winery, with Randy. (In the audience are Cavendish and Paul Emery, as if incognito, two of the town’s royalty, the people who make the town what it is.)

Dinner out with Dash and Brett, at Friar Tuck’s, where the clever guitarist covers pop standards, accompanying self with foot-pedal loop, winking to his appreciators.

 

 

* * * *

 

February 7, 2015

Brett has twice seen a small bobcat trying to get at the chickens. She “Roars Her Terrible Roar” whenever she catches it.

Since these things are guilty of killing her beloved pets, she so hates them, now she’s been going out with canned cat food, smearing it on the protective electrical wires, they turning the power back on.

 

* * * *

February 6, 2015

Pretty good rain coming. At six AM the strong pre-front winds lift and resettle everything on the property. Warm air! It’s disturbing: how the air is so hot in February, in the morning like a woman’s hairdryer blast.

Kitchen floor, during this rain, remains open and unfinished.

Reading Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams,” and it’s gladdening to come across something well done.

 

 

* * * *

February 1, 2015

My mother’s birthday, the first she’s not here to celebrate.

 

* * * *

January 31, 2015

Finished with a quick pass through “Immanence.” I find lots of ineptitudes.

I think I was so jazzed in the discovery of this “reminiscent” form of narration, the novelty and the wonderful effectiveness of it distracted me from certain actual effects I was creating.

* * * *

Red shoes. Who wears ’em? – Rock stars and the Pope.

 

 

* * * *

January 30, 2015

The bottommost and surest consolation lies in this: how little, at all, we ever understand.

We feel, most of the time, personally secure, and personally effective, because we have developed a few knacks we think of as “knowledge and understanding” (going for green and stopping for red; tying a shoelace; predicting a sunrise, etc.), while in fact, we stand on soil we don’t understand, and we breathe atmosphere we couldn’t analyze.

* * * *

How wise to be “diversified” —

For the last six months, our hens haven’t been laying much – we’ve been providing feed and scratch and fodder and getting not much benefit – yet all that while our joint IRA, in the stock market, was climbing and we’d been growing “rich.” Now, this month, the markets have been crashing and we’re poor again, but the hens are laying and we’re shamelessly affluent on a very local scale.

 

 

* * * *

January 29, 2015

The refrigerator, for a few days, is out on the grass shrouded by a blue tarp, belted with an old climbing rope of Tad’s.

In center of kitchen, the enormous range, half-on a dolly, is tilted like an ocean-liner run aground, the only furnishing in a room radiant with emptiness.

Repeatedly this week, the little fox has been caught upsetting the hens. Defeated by my wonderful fortifications, he shows up in the dusk to pace up and down outside the henhouse, looking for a way in, causing hysteria inside.

 

 

* * * *

January 26, 2015

Overly warm summery days go on. Writing is on the back burner, while I throw house into disarray, refinishing pine floor. Kind of happy, not writing. Lately thinking of Eric, after a few rehab adventures, last year, found floating naked in the Truckee, his bottle of 7-Eleven vodka not far off, his bike in the riverside willows. I understand how he went down that path. He got out of Harvard and started a thirty-year career of carpentry, by day working hard, in traditional skills and techniques, and by night drinking quietly. That is a certain kind of happiness and a certain kind of fulfillment of man. I see the temptation.

Buddhist scripture, quoted in the NY Times: “Above, below, everywhere set free, not considering ‘this I am.’” Tonight, here, the women are watching a BBC melodrama in the cottage. Then Barb will be put to bed, to waken tomorrow morning to espy the erasable whiteboard on her bedroom wall. Which used to display her each day’s Fresh Exciting Agenda, as inscribed by daughter Brett. But which for a year now has had the same stale message every day: “This is your cottage. You are at home. Brett and Louis live right next door in the big house. THIS IS YOUR HOME.”

 

 

 

* * * *

January 25, 2015

Didn’t write. Instead, a pleasant, inefficient day – merely moved the heavy stove and repaired the old floor damage, ran errands in town, played guitar at length.

 

 

* * * *

 

January 24, 2015

A hot day in January.

I’m disappointed with “Immanence” as it stands.

It’s in their Middles that narratives (prose or drama) stand or fall. Nifty Endings and cute Beginnings are easy. All too. The Small Literary Magazines of the world are stuffed with perishable stories in which a nifty ending is tacked onto a cute beginning. Solid Middles depend on characterization, and one’s understanding of “human nature” (this strange social institution we’ve got). Which is always up for debate/grabs.

Afternoon, a concert: an assembly of “young composers,” and Dash is objectively a stand-out.

It’s been a day devoted to the vagaries and demands of dependent people, particularly kids.

 

* * * *

January 23, 2015

“Immanence” in the morning.

Afternoon stripping the kitchen floor.

Tennis with Emily and Michael after dusk, and as the overhead lights come on, three sets, plus shared-around beer.

 

 

* * * *

January 22, 2015

Dry warm winter days go on.

Dash has taken to rising early and walking in the dark the mile to the bus. Just like his brother.

Refinishing kitchen floor. A black sticky tar can be pulled off the boards by, first, dribbling hot teakettle water upon it.

New eyeglasses for me, calisthenics at club, pick up Dash.

 

* * * *

 

January 19, 2015

Having worked in the morning, I begin about lunchtime without an instant’s forethought to tear up the venerable old linoleum of the kitchen floor. There was a flaw at one edge, which I enlarged to a tear, which then Brett enlarged further. And then we started ripping up long sheets, having to move furniture as we traveled. I think this hand-painted-pattern linoleum has been there since the thirties. Got Dash to join in, and soon we were hauling stove and refrigerator into the yard, disclosing the old boards. Tongue-and-groove fir, curly-grained. To be tung-oiled as soon as we get the old glue scraped up off a clean expanse.

In the meantime, the kitchen in Barbara’s cottage will do, to produce coffee, pancakes, etc.

 

 

* * * *

January 18, 2015

Breakfast here with all of Diana’s people, the entire crew again.

See their movie, screened for a good crowd in Odd Fellows’ Hall on Spring Street.

I walk home alone from town.

Firewood splitting.

 

 

* * * *

January 17, 2015

No work today.

Breakfast in town (Ancinases, Millers, Naifys, plus film crowd).

Split firewood the rest of the morning.

Brett buys more pullets.

All the movie people here for spaghetti, tables pushed together.

 

 

* * * *

January 16, 2015

Diana to arrive. Staying here, because her film is getting a screening in town.

 

 

* * * *

January 14, 2015

Home again from SF. The old jalopy is dependable.

On the drive all the way, thinking of that novel “Immanence.” It’s an open sore. Thinking about John Gegenuber’s fear of Mark Perdue.

Dashiell’s party went all right, according to all reports, but Dash says he didn’t like it.

 

 

* * * *

January 13, 2015

To Berkeley. Car holds up fine.

College Avenue scene. Reading old J.P. Marquand hardcover at a café table while the world swirls past.

Michael and Ayelet (and Abe! and Rosy! and Zeke these days!)

Futuristic irony: to hear my old pal Michael lean on doorframe, in the bedroom of a son who is taller than himself, and say, in a grim quiet tone, “What’s the homework situation.”

Then bookstore performance on College Ave. Then dinner with Wendy, sweet wobbly-table Italian place on College.

More with Michael like old times.

 

 

* * * *

January 12, 2015

No writing.

Winter quarters: I’ve set up the more permanent desk in mud room by stove.

Sent “Things” to Joy in Rhinebeck. Fwisshhh.

Axed a hen, in the cool of the pines.

Errands in town: bank, drug store, grocery.

In the sun on a bench, outside the entrance to a market, a luxurious fifteen minutes eating Thai noodles from a lidded clear-plastic casket.

Then the optometrist, for new eyeglasses. I’m happy to be told I show no sign of glaucoma, macular degeneration, cataracts.

Roast leg of lamb for Dash’s B-day.

* * * *

I have to admit I didn’t want to leave SF 20 yrs ago, but whatever fate led me up into the mountains was providential, risk of unwarranted theology in that word, because it brought me to the stars. I hadn’t known about the stars. Nowhere are they quite like this.

Coming up from the hens’ department tonight, while the lamb has plenty of time to cook, I saw again the wonderful two forms of combustion (nuclear fusion in the stars; sooty oxidation in the kitchen’s candlelight), the two different colors of radiation (colorless immortal silver above; gold in carbon here on earth).

In, say, 1978 I could have been (at three am) alone in a restaurant with a name like “The Copper Penny” eating their fried rice ($3.50). Or any restaurant whose only raison d’etre is that it’s open at all hours. Or I might have been on a Van Ness streetcorner waiting for the late (only-every-hour) bus. I can picture that now, seeing backwards in time. And I suppose in 1978, I pictured myself here.

For in fact I have invented that figure in 1978 sitting at an orange Formica restaurant table as a fictional character.

My motto “Everybody already always knows everything” applies. Applied then, applies now.

 

* * * *

January 11, 2015

Barbara’s birthday party. The Millers, the Ancinases, the Tuckers.

 

* * * *

January 9, 2015

Final chapter of “Things.” And the first draft of an email suggesting to Joy that she might try selling it again.

Then Joy happens to call, with a happy anecdote of a lunch conversation: I’ve got a fan left in the book business.

Fueled-up chainsaw and got a start on the clean-up of that big cedar removal project. Severing fat stumps near the forest floor. After which: I should attack the oaks in SW boundary, felled by PG&E.

Sushi with Mike Melas and Emily.

 

 

* * * *

January 8, 2015

Singing Guantanamera with Sands in the cottage.

(“Con los pobres del tierra, quiero echar mi suerte / Yo prefiero los arroyos de la sierra / mas que la mar.”)

I sometimes worry about Brett and her disappointment, posted here as she is, to be the manager of a house with a declining old mom and an inconsolable bachelor-like contemplative. But then I see she’s really happy, really effective (synonyms there) in old holey sweatpants here in the meadows, freshly dusted with lime powder from chicken fumigation, or in the garden grubby-handed as when she was six.

Squaw prospers: upon website launch, dozens of applications arrive immediately, and extra donations have come this year, from the likes of the Galway bequest.

 

* * * *

 

January 6, 2015

Comb once more, redundantly, over goat-invasion scene.

Apply for home loan.

Overly warm dry days persist.

* * * *

 

January 5, 2015

Moving from bank to bank, looking for a refinance loan.

The key to Hunter’s car gets duped. But they botch it.

The hardware store provides a square screw-drive bit.

Two egg rolls at SPD.

Case wine at Grocery Outlet.

Dash gets picked up from his music-composition class.

 

 

* * * *

 

January 4, 2015

By daylight I got a look at the damage from attempted break-in to chicken coop. Easy repair. Seems to have been a coyote, as a lot of digging was tried at the base of the fence. Also, a few hairs had been shed that were short and stiff and grayish, coarse bristles, not feline.

Took down Xmas tree. (Brett rolls individual ornaments in paper and plants each down firmly, one-by-one in a big hatbox.) (A tense unhappy time, putting away Xmas ornaments, odd time of recrimination and complaint and heartache.)

Enclosed one of the barley-fodder racks inside gopher-wire mesh, to foil the mice.

Sausage and potatoes for dinner. Watching TV comedies with Dash in the mud room.

 

 

* * * *

January 3, 2015

Fix bathroom pocket door. Exactly as Cavendish long ago instructed.

Jordan’s party.

Late night: the chickens’ enclosure was evidently besieged by some animal who was repelled by electric fencing. Found a wire stretched and shorting-out (snap…snap…snap…), the heavy insulator brackets broken.

 

* * * *

 

* * * *

 

January 1, 2015

New Year’s morning. I’m up early checking the irrigation everywhere for pipes that may be prone to burst in the cold snap. All the lights are on in Barbara’s cottage (3AM), and she’s awake, lost in time and space. She’s not frightened or despairing, but just softly befuddled, sorting among objects on tabletops. Needed to be conducted back to bed. The world needs a steady man, sometimes in a place. Which you can’t do without paying attention.

Later in the day, Brett finds a few pink Post-It notes fallen to the floor, where, with Bic pen, a shaky scrawl had been practicing writing the word “HELP.”

http://louisbjones.com/2015/12/29/thou-bookend-now-thou-paperweight-2015/

December 30, 2014

Pre-dawn airport run.

A well-learned Life Rule: After dropping off somebody you love at an airport, a shapeless formless dim day will ensue.

Wonderful how the NY Times is so skimpy today and all this week.

(Everything the skimpiness means about where people’s attention is, during the darkest, shortest days. Everybody’s on sabbatical, and this is the thing about a Sabbath: a true “Sabbath” — in its loneliness/boringness, its excruciating unproductiveness — a Sabbath brings you back down to your worst, and least elements.)

Cold and windy and sunny all afternoon. Hard freeze tonight. Have covered all freshwater spigots, have altogether drained the irrigation system, brought in all remaining cauliflower and broccoli.

Driving home from airport, my sentimentality:

At the cross where two great freeways meet (I-5 running Canada-to-Mexico, I-80 crossing east-west btw NYC and SF), I take the exit, and then pass under the big green sign: it indicates that the rightward ramp will set me on the road to “San Francisco,” the leftward ramp will point me up into the mountains. I’d just been talking (I felt unpersuasively) to Hunter about how wonderful is city life, its density, in a place like DC, where for example just the view out the bus window is full of variety, complexity. Driving back alone, on the radio: the mayor of Casselton, North Dakota (pop. 2300), is saying he doesn’t want his town to be famous for last year’s disastrous train wreck. He wants his town to be known for “a great school system and fertile soil.” I think about that — fertile soil and good schools — and actually get a tear in my eye.

* * * *

 

What a “sabbath” accomplishes: it imparts a bit of the wisdom that (Simone Weil says) you get when you’re truly “afflicted”:

“I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself.”

You’re always at risk of losing not only your nice gadgets or your excellent guitar: any minute you could lose the ability to play the guitar, your eyesight, your sanity, your personable good looks, your motility, your capacity to communicate what you want. A total orthodox-style sabbath gives an instructive glimpse, of these subtractions. Weil would say it’s the beginning of compassion.

 

 

* * * *

December 28, 2014

Sizing up painting of buildings here. Always a big messy undertaking, but I’ve always liked the work, makes me tired like no other work.

Dinner of lamb stew with lemon rinds and Maggie’s dried figs.

Letter from Bobbie thanking me for the comfort my “letter of condolence” furnished, and it’s interesting: I find the widow’s gratitude to be a comfort. Hadn’t realized I’d needed comfort.

Long, long late-night kitchen-table conversation with Hunter. Mostly about how atrocious yet inevitable The Capitalist System is. (Hunter sees only the atrocities and is not at all mellow about the “inevitability” part.)

 

 

* * * *

December 26, 2014

Write “In Memoriam” piece for the Omnium Gatherum.

Exertion-free sedentary day.

Music down the road at Luke and Amy’s – banjo, mandolin, dobro, Fargo accordion.

Cold snap arrives.

 

* * * *

December 25, 2014

Now on Christmas morning it’s “the kids” who are the last out of bed; the parents and aunts who’ve had to be patient (coffee, NPR, email, pajamas). At last awake, the groggy ones sidetracked by coffee while we prod them, herd them, nag them.

A not-very-extravagant Christmas, practical inexpensive gifts. A kind of logical outcome is that, minus the spectacle of shiny treasure, the rest of the day doesn’t wind up melancholy and obscurely sore. (as in some years)

Brett’s gift from the boys is a performance of (her favorite) The Pixies’ tune “Here Comes Your Man.” Hunter on piano, Nico drums, Dash on glockenspiel doing the spritely riff. Song (short because only one half-verse is familiar) is performed several times consecutively. Over and over, getting it a little better each time.

This is a day of bright sun, cut short by the south-of-meadow pines.

All others take a long walk through the woods to Hirschman Pond, while I stay home and split firewood in the sun, also minding the napping Barbara.

Roast leg of lamb, then lots of song in the mudroom.

(How musical is the mathematical structure of nature. All afternoon a firewood-splitting man sees it, in how the cedar grain breaks into its combs and harps. Also, the pitch of each marimba-clank of every bar of firewood landing on the pile.)

 

* * * *

December 23, 2014

Nice storm coming in, promises to be blustery and dark and wet and short-lived.

Not cold enough for snow.

Sweater-vest for Brett. Stomp-box guitar effect for Dash. Boots for Hunter. Teacup for Barbara.

I’m cute: I was walking up Broad Street this morning carrying the sort of bag that is identifiably from a boutique (brown paper string-handled, odd-dimensioned and awarded a decorative sticker). And Gretchen Weaver happens to go by in her wifely minivan car, which has slowed – the better to appreciate the uxorious magnanimous sight of me. With obviously that appraisal, Gretchen grinning fondly from behind fogged-up side-window.

 

 

* * * *

December 22, 2014

Cut Christmas tree with Dash and Hunter.

Risotto at Sands’s.

Insomnia.

Jupiter lights the sky, brighter than Sirius or than any other star, magnificent. Coyote howls on the ridge.

 

 

* * * *

December 21, 2014

Dec 21 is supposedly the darkest, longest night of the year. Some want a Saturnalia, or fantastic or even lewd party. Some expect a mysterious astrological transit between epochs. Women I know complain if they’re spending the long cold night abed alone. Me: Dull with my own repletion, I’ve come home after winey dinner at Sands’s with all the sisters and both my boys and the fireside, and the stars have come out, and I have to put all the hens to bed. One dying hen tonight (she’s been on the way out for a while) couldn’t climb to the roost, and lies with labored breathing, in the cedar shavings on the floor under the ramp. Slow heave of the feathers, which she may once have been vain of. (Hens of course have vanity, it’s most of what they’ve got in their worldly estate: vanity.) All the rest of her sisters above on racks. This longest, darkest night, it’s her job to die, which she might accomplish this night. I used to (and certain farm-folk would insist it’s the better thing to do) execute a sick hen. The point is, my heart is really with her tonight rather than any others, rather than the revelers in town seeking Saturnalia, or even the lonely women, because I’ve spent that night in the same expectation as hers. And then, moreover, finally have my expectation rewarded. In a way, it’s mortals’ greatest night, the last. It’s something I have in common with lowly barnyard animals. In fact, precisely this is the night’s great redressal: that even the simplest animal has her ruling claim to this night.

 

* * * *

December 20, 2014

Nice car-ride with Hunter, to Sacramento. We’re going to Dashiell’s “gig,” in a real club, roomful of black T-shirts advertising fiendish-looking bands.

After the show: a Dairy Queen on Saturday night, 11:00, in Sacramento, California, crowded, a scene of neighborhood amity.

Two Bacon Cheeseburgers.

* * * *

 

December 19, 2014

Hunter to arrive today.

Dosed all hens with Sulmet.

Rain goes on.

Sands and Hunter for chili in Barbara’s cottage.

 

 

* * * *

December 18, 2014

I can see that for forty years I’ve been doing the same things and holding the same beliefs, and probably even repeating the same things, all these years. (Environmentalism, ontology, taking fiction to be the more accurate truth, music), I observe my life to be a long straight line, no swerves, and I wonder if this is a virtue. I have to make it so, because it’s in my nature, fidelity. Or more basic than fidelity, constancy, because somebody has to make the world a warmer place, not a more capricious place. Or so I may justify my own nature.

* * * *

Another hour in the sun between rains I split more cedar and let the chickens roam around and peck. The whole dirt lane under cherries is moss. Variety of mushrooms.

Under my feet is the first, the original civilization (and still the fundamental civilization): Rhizomes, bacteria, fungus’s communicative powders and yeasts, all in mycorrhizal mat, symbiotic (mutualistic) collaborations of white intelligent threads with lacy-woven cake of ultra-fine tickling mycelia, doing plant-roots the favor of protecting them from pathogens, seeking their own food for themselves, the whole network of chemical information, an underground civilization that communicates over distances and sends up weird-looking trees and mushrooms recruiting above-ground its cattle, or slaves, large-scale importers of foodstuff to the underground mycorrhizae. Maybe we mammals above-ground, too, are providing for this below. (Always chanterelles by the birches, always morels in the vicinity of madrones, dung bells around anyplace an animal has crapped.) When dark had come completely, I stowed my axe and came inside and opened up my computer. It’s been a big day in the stock market: Google stock has upticked, and this is the Dow Jones Newswire headline: “Google is Now Bigger than Russia’s Entire Market.”

Partly a fluke of the ruble’s being temporarily depressed. But still, I think of those dark onion-dome villages, oxcarts in snow, cities, vast daffodil-yellow cathedrals, potatoes, birch forests, steppes. “Google,” which exists only in pixils, is bigger than Mother Russia.

 

 

* * * *

December 16, 2014

Sunshine and wind.

NASA avers that the presence of a little trace methane on Mars indicates “there might once have been” life.

Well, there’s a lot of hopeful thinking about this. There are a million motives for thinking/hoping that we’re not the only ones in the universe. (There are very serious motives. It gets eschataological, if you follow it down.) I continue to believe that the nearest intelligence (which is what we’re really wishing for, not just a colony of slimes, or some viruses) will have existed only in entire other Hubble spaces from ours. Uncontactable, and effectively non-existent. It’s just statistically too improbable.

These hopes for “other lives” don’t change our existential mystery. The existential mystery is of course the gut motive for space exploration, for the rover “Curiosity” and for “Mariner.” The motive isn’t capitalism, out there. That’s not the real motive. They’ll say it is . . . We’re at base a bunch of curious adventurous kids. Still, finding and even fraternizing with an extra-planetary race won’t answer the big questions. (The motto “Everybody already knows everything” applies.)

* * * *

Late afternoon mid-December (5 o’clock?). I’ve accomplished some winter-garden work during this break in the drenching rains. Tender saturation has overtaken everything (tree-bark and swampy soil, mossy stone wall, emerald scum on the lost badminton shuttlecock, the suck of turf on the lifting boot heel), and at the bottom of the meadow in the depths of the forest-edge I’m swinging an axe for an hour over cedar rounds. Never the need for a wedge with these. An axe alone will part the thickest cedar. An hour or so of this will be enough (while the fact is, I’m posted here only as chicken-guardian, against bobcats), and there will be other hours, over time, to create 2016’s firewood supply. Come the cold weeks, this big supply will dwindle fast to nothing. Also it feels great. The exercise, after a sedentary week indoors, is like Olympic swimming for the shoulders, arm sockets, as, in the axe-swing cycle I grow very tall, trapeze-catching tall, before bringing down the axe. Opening the standing log. I could do this all night. The world in a December five-o’clock grows so dim – I can still see my targets, the circular bright log-ends I set up on the chopping block as victims – but soon the only light in the whole world is the littered rectangles of gold, spilt all around the chopping block. Somehow the exposed woodgrain has absorbed the lost light of sky in order to reradiate it. The earth under my feet is vanishing, the whole great sky has vanished. But I can orient myself on the ground by the glowing flags of woodgrain scattered like manuscript pages all around, the only light sources.

* * * *

December 13, 2014

Saturday. Started clear, sunny, then turned cold and overcast.

Broccoli is coming in strong. Also broccolini and cauliflower.

Topped a few broccolini for dinner tonight, stems vulnerable and soft.

* * * *

Interesting, maybe it’s a fortunate “male psychology” quirk. I have found in a moment of “extremis” – when everything looks like despair and failure and lovelessness – if I grope for some mental image to try to remind myself life can be desirable and sweet again, it’s the woodpile outside at the foot of the meadow I see. That’s what saved me. It’s all the rounds of cedar needing splitting. That woodpile seemed like a reason for living, an island of light. Something I can do. * * * * Back from San Francisco.

In such a trip, I hate the expense of gasoline: 13 gal. of the fragrant essence. (I had to take the truck rather than the vegetable-burner.)

The city is beautiful, it always was, still is, but it’s good to drive back uphill through the light rain, come back to this life we’ve needed some years to relearn, like Ewoks on this improbable planet in a forest environment rooted in carboniferous loam, beneath the big wooden dendrite shapes (hundred-feet-tall and taller), where we actually eat things we walk out the backdoor and break from their stems. Bring inside and sauté.

There’s been great news this week – the International Energy Agency forecasts that, next year, world demand for oil will fall by 900,000 barrels a day.

So the foolish stock market is crashing. Panic and despair. Combined drop of 500 points in three days.

Those guys (who really think they want a 30-room Connecticut house; there really are such people) have refused for forty years to see the solar panels and windmills they could have gotten rich on. It’s a cultural divide. They want to live big, and you can’t exactly blame them, they’ve never seen/loved anything.

* * * * December 10, 2014

Barometric gradients are tight across the great valley and 60-mph winds are expected. 110-mph gusts over passes. Marvelous monster-storm is coming. It’s everybody’s favorite small-talk topic. NOAA radar shows whirling spiked beast in the Pacific grinding in this direction, and I’ve been cleaning gutters (up on the roof there standing up getting a nice view of the bleak sky) as winds are kicking up, and I’m pulling stuff inside sheds, getting out the generator and testing it.

Much of the afternoon: total battening-down of poultry quarters, in consultation with Brett. The practical pleasures of just consulting. Out there in the bluster.

Satisfaction of closing hook-and-eye latches on outbuildings.

Meager dinner of frail cauliflower from the garden, leftover pork-roast’s desiccated splinters, a squash, sautéed with adobo, all tucked into tortilla. The beginnings of squalls on the roofs. Outside, the characteristic ocean sound from the tall pines on high ridges. I really might not go to SF tomorrow.

After dinner, I ‘check out” Dash and Brett on the operations of the generator, just in case:

• fuel supply “ON”
• power switch “ON”
• choke “on,” then (having pulled the starter cord) “off”

All this in the dodgy light of an iPhone sequin, (somehow the pantry flashlight has gone missing)

* * * *

December 9, 2014

My new motto: “Arise and Perish” – good thing to christen a novel, a rock band’s mid-career album, a sailboat, country estate, pennant on the family crest, thoroughbred racehorse, etc.

News arrives via BBC that, in south amer somewhere today, the “oldest tree in the world” was cut down, accidentally. There, that tree hath arisen and perished, here at the peak of our Kali Yuga aeon.

* * * *

Barbara has been experiencing very itchy hives, and I handed across to her the tube of Benadryl cream and left the room. (Hoping only that she wouldn’t get it mixed up with the cortisone cream in a similar tube.) Later in the day, Brett says she’s finds the lady has been applying her Sensodyne toothpaste generously all over.

When the allergist’s apptmt is made, Jolena the nurse contributes the following, “Oh, toothpaste, of course. My parents were Hungarian immigrants. They used to do the exact same thing.”

* * * * December 8, 2014

Tag-line of an editorial in the NY Times this morning cites the following. It is apparently (I didn’t click through to read the editorial itself) – an illustration of modern philosophy’s absurdity:

Most people think that philosophy tries to answer the Big Questions.

“How do you know you believe you are wearing socks?” doesn’t sound like one of them.

God-help-me, though, I think it’s an urgent, wonderful question. I think it goes straight to the crucial hanging-by-a-thread suspensefulness of minute-by-minute life. Of course it’s a question for neuropsychologists. But the reasonneuropsychologists or anybody might care about it is the root philosophical issue. And the rather dire metaphysical issue, How do we live in the world? What is this tiny pilot behind my eyes at a control-panel? What are these weird goggles the pilot seems to be looking through — and are the shapes appearing in those goggles representations of anything? (Physiologists’ word “proprioception” doesn’t explain how you know you’re wearing socks. It’s just a word. Inventing a new word doesn’t dispel a mystery.)

Because obviously, what if the old unlettered Buddhists were right? They might (tho’ lacking tomography, lacking EKGs; unskilled in brain surgery, phrenology; unhelped by Freud or B.F. Skinner) have been waiting at the finish line all along:

“Conscious thoughts simply arise and perish with no thinker behind them.”

The complete Dharma would add: Not only does this supposed consciousness have no “self,” but the objects of consciousness (tables and chairs and trees and clouds) have no “selves” either.

I’m afraid such a summary makes a point so obvious as to be empty, to be irrelevant, i.e., irrelevant to the fraught scientific controversy. (The scientific controversy has its own sure path to negotiate, beyond any help from alien scriptures’ old platitudes.)

* * * *

(No, the Times editorial is by Qassim Cassam, philosopher at English university. Good of the NYTimes editors, occasionally to be serious and adventuresome.)

* * * *

December 7, 2014

These crucial “few decades” in climate evolution – (this period when the carbon-balance will go past equilibrium and doom the Earth) – JUST HAPPEN to be the same few decades the fossil-fuel folks and their stockholders are counting on. To eke out of the diminishing resource the last (the exponentially leveraged) profit. Sad situation. Sad for them as well as us. That they’ll never get their thirty-room house in Connecticut will be the least of their worries.

* * * *

December 6, 2014

That same pair of thrushes has come back, and they’re pecking in the same section of the meadow as in other winters. The whole expanse of wilderness, from here to the Northwest Territories, has a kind of small-town quality.  These two birds have been up in the forests of (I imagine) British Columbia, and a couple of weeks ago they agreed (nonverbally) to head for that same California meadow they’d foraged on in other years, the one with the two easy-to-avoid housecats and the dog and the two big oaks, quails in the blackberries, the skinny hare that crosses diagonally at twilight.

Wonderful overcast all day, gloomy churchyard light. Slept late, worked only a couple of hours.

Improving bird-netting on barley-fodder, to stop theft of sprouts by every sparrow and wren around here, as if this were becoming a famous bird-feeding station in the county. Enclosed all sprouting shelves in my own handmade box of gopherwire mesh.

Late afternoon. In the steady rain picking up oak deadfall.

* * * *

December 4, 2014

Drab wintry day.

Hammered at last chapter of “Things,” acc. to the usual procedure of simplifying, then discovering complexities, then beating complexities back to simplicity.

A day of suspense watching the markets, as this is when the portfolio fills, upon transfer, and one hopes for a down market.

Finished reading Andrew’s novel. Will move on to Richard’s.

Soup of leeks and potatoes, but added tough chard from the garden (chopped) and ham (diced) leftover from thanksgiving.

Last chapter of ‘things” will continue to bother me.

* * * *

December 2, 2014

Last night was Dashiell’s punk concert at the Stonehouse. His was the opening band. Half the audience was Moms and Dads, standing far from the mosh pit. It was just a 2-person mosh pit. Guitarist (slight, undersized boy paralyzed with stagefright) had a jacket with BLACK FLAG emblazoned. I wanted to tell him that his own band tonight, of 14-yr-old three-chorders, is much better than legendary Black Flag was, in performance. The next band’s drummer, setting up his kit, wore a rotten T-shirt with FUCK chalked onto the front, DESTROY chalked onto the back, while Dash (who had homework yet to do, and this was a school night, so it was a lucky thing his was the opening band) packed his gear away in a basket, along with (at bottom of basket) his large, spilling collection of old “Magic: the Gathering” cards – for example “Vulshok Sorcerer,” pictured as a kind of voluptuous S&M dominatrix but Celtic, outfitted in leather halters-and-cups-and straps. Her legend: “Vulshok Sorcerers train by leaping into electrified stormclouds. Dead or alive, they come back down with smiles on their faces.” * * * *

New photographs in the astrophysics world, published in the NY Times:

The Planck Satellite telescope (launched by European Space Agency) has been focusing on a distant spot in space, far back in Time.

It’s looking at an area 14B light-years distant – (edge of visible universe, birth of visible timespace) – where it has photographed the swirls of ionized dust at a rather primordial time of Univ. infancy, a time when all of space was about the temperature of the sun. (The universe was a bud, then, 380,000 yrs old. Which isn’t much.) (That timespan on earth goes back to one of our “ice ages.” So 380,000 yrs isn’t much.)

It’s a wonderful image, from Planck. It’s the universe at its moment of clearing up and becoming visible, the moment when space became “transparent” to electromagnetic radiation (light). All twirling ripples. The colors that the scientists have chosen to define that time’s characteristics are warm and coral-like – ultramarine and tropical turquoise (in the “cool” color zone), and (in the “warm” color zone) strands of yellow-orange and saffron intensifying to threads of deep iodine. These are the balmiest-possible colors they could possible have chosen (colors from snorkeling in Caribbean bays), to create a picture of that abstract kiln back in a time when hyper-heated plasma constituted the entire world. The colors aren’t necessarily such a fantasy, though. In fact, if your “eyes” had been there to “see,” they might indeed have seen such beauty (presuming such “eyes” were attuned to detect radiation like that).

(“Why is anything here” — easy and unavoidable answer to that question is the “anthropic” answer: Everything’s here because “WE” are here).

But the really super-duper mystery isn’t merely that we exist, or that the universe exists: the kicker is that we understand the universe. The universe is intelligible. That was a totally uncalled-for addition: that the little human mass of gray matter we’ve evolved (brain, gooey) can, for instance, write Euclid’s geometry and then apply it to the swing of comets. We on this little planet can look back in time and measure “wavelengths” and “temperatures” that we ourselvesdefined and calibrated. We ourselves wrote out the rules of arithmetic for manipulating those measurements. It’s an intelligible universe. Who decreed that? (Was it us?) Well, it’s an interesting notion. The unasked-for intelligibility of reality goes to the anthropic story of genesis: this universe of ours exists because it’s cognizable. And, necessarily, thisuniverse exists because we evolved to recognize it.

This reverses the cause-result nexus, as if in a kind of time-reversal : (NOT “we are here because the universe was here for us to evolve in,” BUT “the universe has evolved here because we’re here understanding it.”) Especially when you consider that the little “edge-of-universe” event, which we focus our telescopes on, is transpiring at the Beginning of Time. At the same moment, anybody out there at the edge who may have evolved, if they focus on this galaxy of ours, will be seeing not us, but the inchoate dust and congealing stellar matter that would someday be “us.”

(The “cause-result nexus” itself is less necessary than it was in earlier, more limited views of the universe.) * * * * In the same newspaper is this editorial observation, about our planet’s climate change: If we don’t pass peak carbon emissions within fifteen years Earth will become “uncomfortable.” And if we don’t get past peak emissions within fifty years Earth will become “uninhabitable.”

The mark of progress here is that the New York Times thinks it’s “news,” and fit to print. It’s nice to see the slowest (i.e., “most practical,” and you might say “most venal”) institutions of our society at last wake up, and you might say, grow up.

* * * *

December 1, 2014

Rainy day, and acc. to the NWS, many rainy days are stacked up ahead.

Today:

Settle Barb’s finances. (Decision: to put her shrinking nest egg into the care of money manager, pay the management fee, rather than run it myself. It’s all very interesting and in a few weeks of study I’ve won and lost a fortune in imaginary money, but it’s just inefficient, for me to be running it.)

In Squaw, call plumber, exterminator, Pomin’s, gas inspection.

My new motto:

“EVERYBODY KNOWS EVERYTHING.”

It’s merely necessary to pretend otherwise (for one’s own deception/beguilement. And for others’).

(The motto effects as a remedy against indecision or any hesitancy. An enjoinment to self-reliance.)

It’s a rainy Monday morning, Dash and Brett have left for school-bus deposit, and the two cats are settling in for the long haul – one sleeping tight, on a fallen bath towel, the other watching through a window – and I’m beside the mud room stove again, for long morning of work.

* * * *

November 28, 2014

Up late last night, playing guitar and drinking with Chris.

Early return to NC, as the snowstorm coming in will shut down the pass. * * * * November 26, 2014

Arrived in Squaw alone, early. Others to come.

Everything is in good order. No tinder for a fire. Not anywhere in the house, no old newspaper, nor even cardboard box. (I always think of burning torn-out pages from novels off the shelf. The question would be: which?) But the new-year’s phonebooks are there, lying on the doormat. Phonebook pages go up in a flash and a poof, but suffice.

Chris and Claudia for salmon soup, night before Thanksgiving.

The turkey is brined (my own clumps of sage and thyme. And for juniper-berries, Dash is sent up onto the roof, with flashlight, to harvest only the black ones, never the green ones – Claudia’s instructions).

Three dogs are friends here. Romp around. Sleep separately, in separate corners. Dogs really love being dogs, the responsibilities they have, as well as the diversions.

* * * *

November 26, 2014

To Squaw today, for Thanksgiving.

Bit of epistemological thinking:

That we live in a rainbow made of “particles-and-forces” is conventional. But it may be more strictly accurate to say we live in a rainbow made of language.

To attempt even the most basic, clear characterization of “time” involves a metaphor. We say it’s “a flow,” or “it passes.” These are only metaphors. Metaphor alone is the thing making Time intelligible, or even sensible. This though we stand always in Time’s midst, and can’t have presence without it. We live inside a metaphor – inside our conception of time – as if time essentially consists in “our conception” of it.

Extend this subjective-center view to other categories of experience (“space” is a metaphor, the “cause-result nexus” is a metaphor).

However, “the number system” seems perhaps not to be a metaphor in the same sense. The number system doesn’t “stand in place of” some other “thing.” Numbers have a different ontological status, of some sort. They are something. Something rather autonomous. They exist free of perception. * * * * November 22, 2014

Nice hard rain this morning. Slow start getting to work.

(Pleasant distraction: I’ve agreed to write words for Mark Vance’s choral work a capella for twenty voices, male and female: must be about a red pickup.)

Dash and friends, this AM, must be driven (by Brett) thru rain to the downtown Grass Valley movie house, for another “simulcast” of an opera from the Met. They have to get there at ten AM (because matinee curtain in NYC is 1:00).

I check on Barbara in her cottage midmorning, and she’s already awake and panicky and disoriented, but like a mare easily gentled. Even quickly ashamed of having been scared. Repentant, guilty-feeling. I promise her a poached egg and turn on the lights, and I’m able to produce a cheery anecdote she’ll recognize familiar ingredients in: her grandson Dash has been taken to the opera, it’s Bizet’s Carmen, remember how Oakley liked Carmen, and all morning Dash and his sleepover friend have been going around in anticipation humming that sexy “Habanera” aria tune.

This actually makes Barb laugh. Rare event. Then, sitting in nightgown, waiting for her poached egg to appear before her, hairbrush on her knee, she’s looking out the window quietly humming that sinuous, lascivious melody for a prima donna. * * * *

November 20, 2014

Long phone call with my brother, Iowa City neurologist:

“I tell my students: here’s a patient who can write but he can’t read. And they’re not awed! For them, it’s ‘Oh, that’s interesting, will this be on the test?’ Like they’re getting it down in their notes, ‘Can write but can’t read,” without thinking what that’s like.

“I try to tell them they have to stop and be dumbfounded. This patient is a person who can write something perfectly well, and then he can’t read what he’s just written. You have to imagine that! I tell them, ‘I want you to go home now and think about that and come back tomorrow completely awed by it.’ I mean what’s it like in there?”

What’s it like in here is a question for all, not just one neurologically damaged patient. We’ve all got the same apparatus – same as that guy whose apparatus happens to malfunction. * * * * Thinking of the ill-fatedness of my endeavors in life: How is it that I can mix “highest-ambitions-unremitting-work” (starting at 3am every morning for decades) with a happy indifference to the failure of my plans (not to mention the practical penalties and privations thereof)?

I remember being ten or twelve years old, walking with my mother in Evanston being taken to some appointment, and my mother’s telling me, “Louis, you know you’re extremely intelligent, you’ll always be intelligent, but you’ll never be ‘smart.’” This with a little fond satisfaction.

She didn’t know the half of it. Of course I’ve always known it about myself. I even knew then, at that age, exactly what she meant, and I admired her for seeing it. (It was always a lucky circumstance in my growing up, having a perspicacious, sly mom.) But it’s not as if I’d ever want to change my disposition. Watching “the wicked prosper” never provokes actual envy (not in me, nor really in anybody frankly). And in my own case, I grew up seeing plenty of unhappy prosperity. And in Calif have lived with plenty of it. * * * *

The Four Characteristics, a jest of mine that definitely did not amuse anybody at the Spirit Rock Zen Center:

Dukkha

Anicca

Anatta

Bling

* * * * November 18, 2014

Good long rain is promised by the NWS. Snow over the passes rules out a trip to Reno for their literary confab.

An afternoon built partly around laundry, of all things. Keeping perfectly halal practices of Environmentalism around here. Had to resort to the propane-powered dryer in the end, if only for a few minutes, because a clothesline on a gloomy, cold day is so slow.

Tad’s pickup has been stuck at the foot of the meadow. Today it was towed away to Plaza Tire and Automotive.

Rise in temperature in advance of the front: the midnight air feels almost steamy. Tomorrow will be the cold plunge. * * * * November 17, 2014

Truckee-Tahoe Foundation comes through with a little money.

Whole afternoon cleaning up yesterday’s slash from cedars, but the rounds are still lying in the forest, too heavy to deal with. Maybe – in fact definitely – I’ll split them down there. Use tractor cart for their transport.

For my birthday: a shirt, a pair of socks, a pocket stargazer’s guide. The three of us around the candle.

* * * *

November 15, 2014

’Bye, Dana. Rental car, down the road, turn left at the highway, then right on 49.

Work today: A rather routine day effortlessly burbling up a scene (Episcopal church evacuation) in “Things.” Effortlessness makes a man think he must be stupidly missing something.

Saturday afternoon project: bringing down the two biggest cedars of the whole grove I’ve been pulling down. (Having taken the trouble to sharpen the chain on the workbench with proper file – so my efficiency goes way up.) They’re lying out there now in the starlight and the damp, felled and cut-up but not cleaned up.

Late-afternoon Saturday study: I’m starting to think this project of valuing stocks for day trading is just too esoteric. Waste of time? I really don’t want anything to be a waste of time. I’m sure that’s one outcome to avoid.

Sauteed lentils-&-kale on pasta.

Brett and Dash have gone out to a movie (animated feature), leaving me here with my contemplations

* * * *

November 14, 2014

Dana visits from CO.

Brings negatives of great baby pictures of Brett.

Back to clearing cedars from south meadow. I’m going to have way too much firewood next year. But the cords have been going fast lately, and the clearing has to be done, as the cedars are poking into the 150-foot canopy of oaks. I’m taking out a whole habitat.

* * * *

November 13, 2014

Spent the entire day hardly getting out of the creased big leather chair in the mud room. Work, work, work, all the nest-egg-preservation, learning about financial crap, writing a summary of Squaw Future for Brett and the Board, plus the fundraising email letter, and a mostly damaging (afternoon-consuming!) stab at “Things” (cutting out an entire scene), one thing after another, until deep in the dusk, the stove had gone cold, colder, and I’m still in the same chair. Pesto for dinner. Outside, drizzle all day long. * * * *

November 12, 2014

Faint but warm sunshine.

Rake out all chicken premises.

At work, another morning removing the most amazing incompetences and misdirections embedded in “Things.” Only a manuscript that had spent so much time mutating into entirely new shapes could end up with so many glaring vestigial problems the author couldn’t see.

Dinner of black cod packed six days in miso, sugar, mirin.

* * * *

November 11, 2014

Thinking of my mother (mentioned “dozing in her wheelchair”) and the impossibility of ever again seeing her.

The sad thing about even the closest such relationship is: what strangers all people always remain, to each other.

What a closed book, to me, my mother always was.

Starting in Iowa in 1923, a girl on a farm, and traveling for ninety-one years on the Midwestern map in loose scribble-pattern (Milwaukee, Chicago, Madison, Iowa City, Evanston, Burlington), she had a life: the full story; the entire five-act opera with a cast of thousands and Dolby SurroundSound, a story so deep and dark and rich, she herself could never get below the surface of it. (Try though she might.) * * * * November 10, 2014

Turning summer garden under.

Strewn out on the meadow, carnage of tomato vines. And cucumber and zucchini vines.

Will plant cabbage, kale, garlic, onions. * * * * November 9, 2014

Sunday. Brett to SF for the day, for Squaw meeting. * * * *

November 8, 2014

All our worries:

• Brett is worried about the future of Squaw, her own waste-of-life caretaking of mom
• Me, I’m worried about the book business and my own fate in it
• The dog is worried about the cats’ wanton frolicking

Dashiell is worried about Ebola coming here

* * * *

The red sweater Galway wore under his jacket, in the rich gloom of the Century Club. That color was from Caravaggio. It welcomed the whole world.

* * * *

November 7, 2014

Restart barley fodder operation with improved larger trays. Move entire, enlarged operation out of garage. * * * * November 6, 2014

Strange how I’m not extraordinarily aggrieved about Galway’s death. It occurs to me maybe it’s because a real poet’s whole life is all about his death; and his presence is all about his absence; a poet has already, always been a tombstone which anyway is how we got to know him in the first place. Such is his ministry, if he’s really a poet. That’s what writing is: absence. And a poet is a “writer” par excellence.

More cutting back the old cedar grove beyond the oaks. Near mishap today: a small (sixteen-inch?) tree falls wrong: the felling cut bites my saw to clamp down on it, and then the whole tall mass starts tipping toward me, fast.

(The problem was: as I was making the felling cut, on the far side my blade was, unbeknownst, nibbling into the directional notch.)

Having a hard time writing a letter of condolence to Bobbie Kinnell, whom I do grieve for, whom I remember as a most sparkling girl. (In her long-billed cap.)

Brett brings home nursery starts for cabbage, kale.

Every morning, I’m ironing out “Things.” Discovering my stupidities. Wherever a narrative is not working it’s because I was inattentive to character. Always character.

* * * * November 2, 2014, Sunday

After good long rain: Sunny day.

All tomatoes have been stunned by two days’ cold and will stay small and green and never mature. The little maple over the path to the chicken coop is red/yellow/peachy. Tad’s truck is still parked down by the woods. Halloween colors: umber, persimmon, shit, sparrow.

This afternoon, driving down Highway 20 to Rough&Ready, it’s all beautiful. The curve in the road ahead of me is the same curve that’s always been ahead of me, all my life – on the way to summer camp in Wisconsin with dad at the wheel, on the way out to the Pacific via Lucas Valley Road, escaping down the coast highway with Hobbs and Birnbaum in Birnbaum’s convertible, rounding the bend toward Squaw Valley in a VW Squareback, in a borrowed car going up Monadnock’s curving road, or over the Alleghenies toward Canarsie. It’s all, always, the same road. And  beauty is always the same pain.

In ‘beauty,” though, these days, this is a sensation rather new: I find that “Pleasure” hasn’t been on the menu for a long time. This stage of life seems to have set in prematurely with me. “Pleasure” is unappetizing, candy, indigestible. North of Rough&Ready, there’s a little open pasture where a calf is suckling, burrowing under the arch of its mother. In this, there’s “beauty,” but no pleasure in the sense I once understood it. Now I see pain in it all; the pain pokes through more and more visibly as the beauty sharpens; so there’s, instead, a kind of larger architectonic pleasure in participating in the general grief. Or say not pleasure but “satisfaction.” There’s a satisfaction just in being at my post now, insomniac, keeping the vigil, from here on out. I can see, clearly, the zero-sum game ahead of us all, and I have to kind of like and admire the elegance of the whole lay-out. Knowing we have nothing to lose makes me brave and somewhat imperturbable. The deluded greedy calf. The sign on the Rough&Ready feed store: “PIGS $120 EA.” The boy practicing his lay-ups on a hoop nailed to a driveway oak. Poor guy. * * * *

November 1, 2014

Interesting contemplation of a very simple Fundamental, which persists all around us:

One phenomenon I’ve seen firsthand – (that is, I’ve been literally in the room for it) – is that a child’s flesh is the mother’s flesh, which then separates, physically and a bit messily. Plenty of us have been in the room for that.

Now my own mother died earlier this year. For six months now, my own flesh has been getting along all right. I’ve been surviving freely alone, on a luckily still-habitable planet, without a glimpse of my physical fleshly origin (back there in the Iowa convalescent home, dozing in a wheelchair in hot sunshine on linoleum, her oil-crayons scattered out before her on the Strathmore pad). Nor is there any possibility of such a glimpse of her, ever again, time being irreversible.

I’ve fathered two boys, though – which does admit me into the chain of human physicality, in this cold cosmos. But it admits me in only partially, because only as a spectator: a male. This is the palpable condition: Women remain a part of the vine. Their flesh, literally, physically, is continuous. Men are spurs taking off from that vine – with maybe an fair chance of culminating in a berry or fruit of some sort; or else (as with many guys) just ending in thin air. A male doesn’t “bear fruit,” in the sense of physically swelling up with a new, separate (separable) human.

So maybe it’s an existentially determining condition. It’s a condition like “being two-legged,” or “being three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional,” or “having ocular light-sensitive tissue that discerns remote objects through reflected/absorbed electromagnetic energy.” (I guess Kantian philosophy might loosely call these determiners categories, ontologically.)

It is definitely an existential, palpable background feeling: the yeast that is life, it dies with a man. So, man “looks upon” woman. Always has. (Indeed the “male gaze,” according to recent feminist doctrine, is the basic obnoxiousness.) The whole setup makes maleness a spiritual and (I have to wonder) forlorn condition.

* * * *

October 30, 2014

Up early, tho’ little accomplishment. By eight am I’d quit and come in the house, to spend the rest of the day wrangling with financial folk at 800 numbers. (I’ve had to move old Barbara’s nest egg to a new place.) Hunting up old records. Faxing things. Inventing “User IDs” and “Passwords.” Discovering dates of birth (1923), and mothers’ maiden names (Johnson). So, getting and spending, we lay waste our days. (courtesy W. Wordsworth) Well, getting and spending are necessary, and even kind of fun – that is how I would advise a Romantic poet.

(But I must admit, an entire day of this scheming is a poor investment.)

3:00 to 4:00, Dash and I play tennis. Lackadaisically, distractedly. Agree to quit early. Corn dog and root beer at the IGA.

The dark, short days are definitely here, and tomorrow we’ll be attacked by the first decent Pacific storm of the season (8-10 inches over the summit). Prevailing east wind has this evening swung around to the south (storm recipe). My love of inclemency is mammalian-deep, and I seem to have spent the last few days garnering wealth – starting a heap of unsplit cedar rounds in the far meadow for future firewood, mixing and mastering the homemade song that will be my Xmas card, investing Barbara’s small hoard. Got the Crock Pot going (Swiss steak), woodpiles tarped against strong winds, all the Adirondack chairs withdrawn, stowed away, and to top it off, tonight I’ve got a sure sense of the onset of a cold: rheum, ache. Here I sit. Ten pm. Mud room. Scarred leather armchair by stove. No sound yet of rain on roof. * * * * October 29, 2014

Return to serious grant-writing efforts.

Brett in Sacramento today, to strategize Squaw financing with Jim and Carlin.

News of Galway’s death does arrive.

The day is lost somewhat to sadness. To disorientation.

Taking over Barbara’s nest egg, time on the phone with brokers. Online “entering data into fields.”

Finished with brief “Downtown” recording, and liking it – but not a whole lot. * * * * October 27, 2014

More days of clearing woods. Brett helps dragging slash out to meadow. The dog follows her back and forth, every trip, with inexhaustible curiosity and optimism, tail up.

(For some reason I think of the local Indian people here, the Maidu. They would have had dogs, and those dogs would have behaved in exactly the same way, cheerily.)

Sunday night, a movie by myself in town.

In the theatre on the main street, the projection-screen, because it’s draped like a bedsheet, has a wrinkle. So every camera-pan puts a wave in the landscape. And the Texas horizon (skimming in a windshield) flows through a warp.

(But the movie is great, Linklater’s “Boyhood.”)

* * * *

October 25, 2014

Long work-morning again.

Decent bit of rain.

Pabby is in the cottage another day.

Brett returns from Squaw, and dinner is pesto and medallion squash.

After dinner, a little concert in town, Jamie Bellizzi (solo) plays Bach, Fernando Sor, Francisco Tarrega. After concert, outside, rain has stopped and streets shine. * * * * October 24, 2014

Brett to Truckee for grant proposal, then she’ll stay in Squaw overnight.

Tree cutting afternoon.

My efficiency: In ninety minutes I am able to take down one big cedar, entirely limbed and bucked (half-cord yield of unsplit firewood).

Glad to have Pabby on the premises. Somebody on the property when chain-sawing

Because it’s not the big felling “crash” itself that’s so tricky, it’s after. Working on a down tree, delimbing it, the log may roll either direction, the chainsaw held up high at face-level – because sometimes the whole tree trunk is levitating, cushioned bouncily on its branches; heavy limbs squashed under pressure can spring out with the force of a beartrap, a decapitating force – so I really have to pick where to stand, where to dodge, whether to undercut, which direction I’ll ditch.

(I always think of Cavendish in these exploits. He’s my “Iron John,” the mountain man who was my first model of comportment in these generous mountains.)

Dash and I here alone tonight: watching a movie, sausage/onions, polenta, then devising a dessert together: old ginger cake (Claudia’s) with fresh cream-cheese frosting. * * * * October 23, 2014

It’s been a week of hauling all the garbage and recycling into the mud room during the nights, to bamboozle the bear (or at least disappoint him).

Watching mortgage rates fluctuate, because I’ve been putting off the refinancing. I’m such a high roller.

A small rain coming in today.

I spend only a couple of hours outside hauling accumulated slash from tree cutting.

The “violins” midi on that “Downtown” rendition.

* * * *

October 22, 2014

Re-sketched “Things” sex scene. Remembered the infant sleeping in the corner. Somehow I can get through many drafts, perfecting a scene’s characterization, tightening plot pins, answering or deepening questions – all the while forgetting I’d put a baby in the room. Turns out the baby was the fix, for the scene.

After work: a few revisions to Irvine Foundation letter, then more of cutting cedars beyond the oaks, then into town, groceries, bank. * * * *

October 21, 2014

Slept in late.

Still on “Things.” I admit to myself I’m dissatisfied with the sex scene. Sex scenes are by nature minefields of cliché and misconstruction and shallow spectacle. Oops, maybe that’s what sex is.

Always, I rejoice at any discovery of my own flaws, I rejoice and am fortified.

Anyway, left the situation alone till tomorrow.

Another afternoon cutting cedars, edge of s. meadow.

Again then, the invaluable hour, before dinner, of the cappuccino-plus-required-reading.

Mushrooms everywhere. A great year for mushrooms. The truffles in the front yard turn out to be true “truffles,” but a non-valuable kind, and also a non-tasty kind. According to local mycologist.

Today, two pieces of news arrived from Vermont, in this sequence:

• Galway is giving a sizable gift of $$ to Squaw;

Galway is on Hospice.

* * * * October 21, 201

Saw the bear. 10:15 pm.

Happened to be idly internet-cruising in the mud room at this late hour – heard a bang in the garage.

He (she?) is cinnamon-colored, really immense, maybe the biggest I’ve seen, and timorous. He went scrambling away when I shouted at him “Begone!” (Squaw Valley bears are more blasé than these.) (Squaw Valley bears don’t scramble.)

Interesting: the silence: A bear can get his whole quarter-ton (?) bulk moving at top speed in an instant, yet stay totally soundless.

(Even a puppy’s paws on the meadow make a thump. Even the feet of a sprinting hen land with a pitty-pat. Not a bear. No sound from a 400-lb bear.)

(I can hope that tonight I gave him a bad experience and he won’t be back.) * * * * October 20, 2014, Monday

Chainsaw to SPD saw shop.

Burnett and Mimi visit. Long winey lunch in town at Lefty’s.

At the saw shop, rather than pay for resharpening I bought a 12-dollar file and resolved to learn how to do it myself.

Got it all sharpened nicely, then the rain really hit.

Fettuccine.

* * * *

October 19, 2014

Bear broke into the garage last night, got the chicken feed.

Considerable splintering-damage to doorframe and door panels.

No writing today, Sunday. Instead, autumn chores: Draining and covering evap. coolers, gearing up to fell the whole grove of thriving cedars off the south meadow, raking vetch off west meadow, misc. deskwork revising grant-seeking letter to Baker Street Foundation, writing overdue recommendation letters, book-blurbs. And, now, some post-bear repairs.

(It may be time to call Fish-&-Wildlife. It would mean curtains for the bear. The contract trapper from Auburn is the bear’s Grim Reaper.)

Stupid costly inattention of mine: chainsaw strikes rock, while taking out cedar stump, and all my plans are foiled. The chain will have to go to the saw shop.

Tamara McKinney visits. Talk of Squaw real-estate machinat

Dinner in the cottage. Pinto beans and rice, and the tortilla-borne “Last Zucchinis Of The Season.”

* * * *

October 18

Still back on “All Things.”

Cleaned chimney pipe, mud room. (Negligible creosote buildup. Just as in previous years.)

Cavendish’s gift of kindling has lasted a long time: nicely milled quarter-round fir, kiln-dried and matchstick-explosive, 3am in the holy obscurity of the woodstove’s womb.

End of this Saturday: tennis court, hit for an hour with Dash. We’re both pretty good!

For dinner, Pabby is with Barbara in her cottage.

Here in the Big House we have cheap pork and potatoes, Pabby’s chard.

* * * *

October 17, 2014

Temperatures, in this fall-equinox season: Midnight it’s weirdly summery-damp, balmy. Then around dawn, the pressure of hard frost will have come down.

So, working in the mudroom I haven’t started the stove yet at 3 am. Then as the hours go along and the room gets colder, it gets to be time to start a fire but I haven’t done it yet, stuck in my chair, where just staying motionless conserves my envelope of heat, and at some point in the silence, a loud BONG comes from the two-ton upright piano beside me.

Goes on resonating forever. All 88 piano-strings clanging together, such a wall of sound is a very black sound.

* * * *

October 16, 2014

Home again, having visited Chris and Claudia and Matt and Mireya in Fairfax.

Also the wonderful new Exploratorium. * * * * October 14, 2014 San Francisco. Rain is expected, but the day dawns clear.

Coffee at Trieste. The same old Board of Directors is there, occupying the long row of center tables. (Their groggy warm, intermittent badinage. Pushing around the NY Times and the SF Chronicle. The slightly shamefaced way they, one by one, get up and push their chair in and begin their day elsewhere.)

Out on Columbus.

Pound of coffee beans at Roma. And a latte to bring home to Brett.

In the freshening air, direct sun is coming down the street. The city bus goes by (it’s the dread 30 Stockton), stuffed with morning-commute people, it’s all elbows and shoulders inside, thru plate-glass windows, it’s definitely not “fresh air” in there, standing-room-only – it looks hectic as Picasso’s Guernica inside. But a very dull Guernica, in bus-fluorescent dim twilight, so it’s really a whole different world: very slow: it’s the aquarium of restaurant lobsters sleepily bumping each other. Me, I’m the guy they glimpse outside looking unkempt in leather jacket. They’re glad they’re not me. They wouldn’t trade places with me for a million bucks. I don’t feel any special privilege, being out here in the fresh air. What they get, today, is what they love: the carrel, or cubicle, or cash-register, the gossip, the power they wield, as well as the justice they dispense, and their own justification, the wisdom they can exercise, all their siblings in the office with them (while the door to the corner office, “Dad’s,” stays shut). * * * * October 13, 2014

Leave for SF.

Arrive North Beach. Night. A mediocre “noodle house” has been installed in the premises of the old Amante on Green Street. It’s “trendy.”

We bear off our carry-out dinner, in foil containers bring it home. It’s warm out. Fine chaotic streets at night, Grant-and-Green, Columbus-and-Union, the trick-or-treat feeling of a crowded glamorous city.

* * * *

October 12, 2014

Sunday morning in this small town. Clear and very quiet.

A rock band will be rehearsing in the garage today. Parents have dropped off all the musicians (it’s a power-trio), and when I come up from work in the trailer, I find an empty paper sack on the kitchen table, with this receipt from the IGA grocer in town lying at the bottom of the sack: SPD MARKET   10/12/14   8:59am     CINDY

RASPBERRY CHIA                        $3.29                               F

SINGLE CRV                               $0.05                               TF

BAKERY                                             $1.89                               F

BAKERY                                             $0.89                               F

BAKERY                                             $0.99                               F

CREAM CHEESE                           $0.49                               F

CREAM CHEESE                           $0.49                               F

CREAM CHEESE                           $0.49                               F

BAKERY                                             $1.09                               F

BAKERY                                             $1.09                               F

BAKERY                                             $1.09                               F

KOMBUCHA                                   $3.39                               TF

SINGLE CRV                               $0.05                               F

ORGAIN PROTEIN                        $3.19                               F

SUBTOTAL                  $18.48

8.5% TAX   $  0.29

TOTAL        $18.77

VISA                                $18.77 Pleasure in inspecting this, every detail, including the “Cindy.” Back to work in the trailer. October sun is thin but very warm.

Later:

Gretchen Bond’s daughter wants to get married in our meadow next June under the two big oak trees. They all come to scope the place out, fiance and fiancee and mom. Stand around in the very center of the meadow, under open sky, talking of the great sacramental day.

Real culinary triumph which nobody remarks on: pork tenderloin with sauce of our pears in brandy. The medallion squash from the garden, sautéed, thyme and sage. Things don’t get better than this.

* * * *

October 11, 2014

Huge wood rat, in my studio, is making thrashing sounds in the cabinet, where it’s caught in a heavy-duty trap I set, but not dying.

Question of ethics and personal fortitude: whether to somehow get the fellow outside on the open ground and put a stop to its misery.

(In the end, I do. Actually tearful and vaguely prayerful, talking to the little cutie the whole time. Bright little eyes.)

* * * *

October 11, 2014

Miscellaneous reflection about women. How it is they can descend so easily to humble and even saintly service, chores, compassion, unlike males who are often paralyzed by the hang-up of staying cool and keeping status (“status” being practical “uselessness”).

It would be because women will already have tasted complete and absolute power in ways a male never will. A girl or woman will have seen herself accede effortlessly to rulership over a man’s soul (for thus are men constituted). So, for a woman, who’s been there – (been there in spades) – the mirage of keeping status/being cool has not so much mysterious fascination.

* * * *

October 9, 2014

Horticulturist from the Ridge comes visiting. We’ve got these unidentifiable tough heirloom wild-ish pears, so the local Institute is looking into them. Along for the ride in his battered Subaru: his seven-week-old daughter and his wife (“brought along my lady”).

He says the pear tree is perfect for grafting scions, as they’re called.

He’ll be back in January. Gave him a cardboard file-box of ripe ones. The box had typing-paper taped to the side marked “BOB POEMS.” * * * *

October 8, 2014

3:55 am. Near-total eclipse of the moon. I’m of course awake for it.

I ordinarily only see the phenomenon of “shadows” in my own immediate neighborhood: the swing of a bird’s wingspan on the meadow, the mailbox and its post lying slain on the road pavement, the pool under the pickup truck where the dog likes to lie. The shadow of my own home-planet tonight, out there, is merely predictably round – doesn’t show much character at first – (not in the way I can glimpse my personal shadow on the road and detect my own doom in a typical slouch, or in a typical optimistic goof, the hunchback cunning dwarf down there I never pay any mind to) – until, near climax, around the epoch where the moon is shadowed totally, turning brown-red, it starts showing some human emotion. It’s aboriginal —total eclipse is such a menstrual filth color, it’s the unmistakable sunset of mortal “sin” cast by the typical smog of this damp, young planet, the planet where soil evolved. The only planet we know of where “moral responsibility” has evolved, in all the galaxies, all else glittering with sterility. * * * * October 4, 2014

Cat sleeping on my lap. 3 am. Tinkering with synth strings on Downtown rather than getting to work.

People I conversed happily with at great length, on days when the sun shone, now they’re up in Valhalla – Matt Krim (on vinyl swivel-chairs at Formica countertop in 1971, beside the sliding iron-framed door where California’s improbably warm air sighed), Don Carpenter in The Depot, my father of course, who had all the time in the world, Paul Davis, Oakley on the deck, Mitch Faber swinging his brilliant Stratocaster Wed nights at The Nevada Club then ordering up the double-bourbon, Kathi Goldmark.

“The dead” – and “death” – it used to be gruesome, imagined in Halloween shadows. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out / The worms play pinochle in your snout.” Now, as I get the privilege of going deeper, farther, getting the entire E-Ticket ride, death is looking more like Valhalla: a perpetual existence in an extra-temporal summary, death a summary that is present to me at every moment of my apparent “living” “consciousness.” Morally, I already exist outside time. But just not yet in a literal sense.

Clean entire chicken premises.

Hook up the midi keyboard to get the strings right on “Downtown.”

Of all things: Planning the afternoon of this Saturday around a storewide 20%-off one-day sale at B&C Hardware. * * * * October 3, 2014

October now: there’ll be no more working in the trailer, where an electric space heater will be necessary after this point (1500 watts). In the mud room I get the woodstove going, four AM.

Have laid aside both versions of “Assistant” – to revisit instead “All Things.”

Recorded, in morning hours, a very gloomy version of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” draggy tempo heroin-slow. Solo dobro, primitive.

Big salad success with local stuff: sliced pears (perfect) and beet greens. * * * * October 2, 2014

Another string of sunny hot days. Tomatoes keep producing.

Afternoon: I’m on a 2-mile run, and three different Department-of-Forestry planes pass overhead, heading out over the river toward the San Juan Ridge. (Two are the CDF bombers, engines making the laboring roar of being laden with a ton of flame retardant.)

(Those planes are 1962 manufacture. Half-century old! I think of my 35-yr-old car as a peculiar inconvenience. Imagine how those pilots must feel.)

Then nothing comes of it. No smoke to the north, when I reach a promontory along the road to Katrina’s house. No “fire news” on the local internet.

* * * * October 1, 2014

What we are looking at, when we meet a human being face-to-face (bank teller, cheery FedEx courier, suave bartender, cool efficient secretary):

• We’re looking at the radiant inevitability of Self, or Brahman(acc. Webster’s 3^rd, Brahman is “the ultimate reality underlying all phenomena”);
• An immediate economic threat in the form of a competitor for resources; also, sexual possibility, and economic opportunity: an associate in the age-old social contract, a partner in the evolutionary project, with whom moral hopes are shared. I suppose many of the most important elements of the association go back as far as when we were running in the same pack, or abiding in the same pod.

It was the Hindu saint Sri Ramana Maharshi who, when asked by supplicants Who will I be in my next life, and who was I in my past life? would respond:

“Well, who are you? First tell me that. Who am I talking to?”

This is a universe that (starting with rocks, carbon, silica, etc.) naturally and inevitably fruits, like a pear or apple tree, with “consciousness.”

* * * *

September 26, 2014

Brett to go so SF today for “Booktoberfest.” Just Barbara and me here.

More good rain showers. * * * *

September 25, 2014

Good solid rain, then clearing.

No more of El Dorado County’s wildfire smoke.

Stew.

* * * *

September 24, 2014

Limited work in morningtime.

Grant writing.

First pass at pears. Three boxes.

Pears are less abundant than last year but large. There’s some borer that has colonized, leaving a syrupy pinhole, so about a quarter of these pears won’t ripen correctly. Possible climate-change knock-on here: The higher average daily heat may favor this grub, and it’s a sign: the delicacy of climate equilibrium. Nature is so full of opportunists – (the plant and animal kingdoms are made up entirely of opportunists, all the super-successful competitors, from pinetree sprouts to e. coli, from crabgrass to Lady Gaga) – and local organisms adapt to a half-degree rise in average temperature with an instant migration – and in a single season could throw a whole ecosystem into some fresh arrangement.

Cease with the little barley-fodder operation, waiting for cooler days.

Smoked salmon (green peas sautéed w/shallots) on fettuccine. * * * * September 23, 2014

Squaw continues with this grant-writing effort. All Laura Cerrutti’s hard work. “Uploading” budgets. “Statements of Intention.”

It seems to me that foundations – (going through their annual cycle of giving, like great oak trees leafing out, then turning golden, dropping their leaves, waiting then for next spring’s bud-popping event) – will already have already pretty much settled on how their money will be spent. If you have to knock on a door and ask and explain yourself at length, you’re already a latecomer. If there’s anybody out there who does want to support what you’re up to, they’ve already, long ago, noticed you, or even already written a check.

* * * *

September 22, 2014

“Tough beans”: that used to be an expression that meant ‘a dose of bad luck sometimes is inevitable.’ It was something of a rebuke when I was young. Tough bananas seemed like my generation’s clever, newer version of it, beans the more archaic version (and kind of mysterious!); I never wondered specifically about the expression’s origin. It seemed so ill-logical I just supposed it was meant to beabsurd: Tough Beans.

But so much of colloquialism originates in the agricultural life, and in ten-thousand-year-old familiarity. Now that beans grown in our own fenced-in soil are a regular basis for our diet – and now that, as chef de la cuisine, I often have to watch as plates of beans are set before the choosy 14-yr-old and the easily wounded 92-yr-old when the candles are lit and napkins unfolded – I see it’s a hard home-truth: nature sometimes serves up what we find hard to like. Sometimes there comes a handful of beans (these colder nights, the stalks thinning and paling) that no manner of boiling or braising or soaking will fix. But they’re what we’ve got. Brett and I have been spending the week unsuccessfully figuring ways to keep the Squaw Valley workshops solvent, and unsuccessfully applying for a second mortgage for this place, and this evening, tonight, we’re the two at the table who are happy to pick through our beans gratefully and shrewdly, masticating for the sweet pith, discarding husks, coming across a really great one now and then.

* * * *

September 20, 2014

Warm, cloudy Saturday.

Brett establishes sugar snap peas, cauliflower, onions, kale, chard, Brussels sprouts, ever more asparagus, broccoli, lettuce.

I’m extracting all digression from The Assistant.

Money-begging letter for the Osher Foundation gets its final grooming, and Tahoe-Truckee Foundation application gets started.

Fretting over refinancing the mortgage. We’re going to be entering “negative cash flow” here chez nous.

Anyway, pears are ready for harvest – (seems early?) – and tomatoes and squash produce in excess.

Dash is such a socially forward new freshman, he goes to a “Homecoming Dance,” weird native custom. Though he’ll be acquainted with nobody there. Ticket twenty dollars. In the harsh-lit-gym. There’ll be a DJ. Gamely, he chooses his clothes, accedes to his mother’s advice about dressing more formally. Together they Google images of Homecoming Dance outfits, and at last she drives over, drops him off at curb.

Later, mid-dance, Brett and I are here at home watching TV, and Brett texts Dash: How is it?

Response: “There are 8 people here.”

* * * *

September 18, 2014

A little light rain.

* * * *

September 17, 2014

Dash rises early alone, showers fast, makes a breakfast of granola and milk, and insists on walking, in the dark, the mile to the bus pick-up. It’s what his brother used to do. He says he wants to see the sun come up on Hirschman Pond. Age 14. * * * * September 15, 2014

A couple of yards of soil in truck for raised beds.

Smoky air all morning, from wildfire south of Grass Valley.

* * * *

September 3, 2014

Douse barley fodder on racks.

Rank smell of germination (maybe whiskey smells so? fermenting barley-mash?) in the garage under the solar-power inverters.

* * * *

September 3, 2014

This “diary” as thin-spread as intergalactic dust in the Internet – sometimes trivial, banal, inconsequential, sometimes hoping to be veritable eclogues – Such a literary form seems, in the new Internet civilization, as temporary as smoke signals but, also, permanent as a petroglyph. From now on, everybody gets his own petroglyph, his own roadside stele for any wayfarer a billion hears hence to pause and make out the inscription on.

Actually, I think it is a happy, utopian outcome. Though I grew up in a world where the only form of immortality was a hardcover sewn-binding deckle-edge hardcover book, attainable by only a very few, now anybody with a “device” can add his personal wisp to the cosmic mist of opinions. Which is fine!

It also implies a code of individual responsibility, an integrity, because every remark will be so infinitely consequential, rippling out in the polity of the shared future. I actually think of Teilhard de Chardin.

* * * *

Thinking of that farmer I met in Iowa, Clem, age 96, who was talking about commodities markets. The farmers in the 30s and 40s and 50s (his day) didn’t need the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, they made their own market in grain futures on Fridays, standing around in the shade of the big elevators, laying bets on September wheat or spring hog. It’s how old Clem made some of his considerable fortune.

* * * *

August 28, 2014

Done with another run-through of Immanence, emphasizing more unmistakably the narrator’s fatuousness, embedding the gold metaphor.

Finished with one editing job; take a first stab at another.

Eva here for Squaw work.

Sliced up the felled oak from cleared Erikson property: it amounts to one cartload.

Orzo and summer squash.

* * * *

August 27, 2014

Dinner is cooking. I’m standing in the old gate under the mulberry. At far end of meadow in the tall weeds, a coyote trots into view and stops. Between him and me, a handful of chickens are pecking in the meadow. They’re at a distance from me of about twenty yards. The coyote sees me on my far side, his prey between us – and for while he gauges his chances: he’s thinking about it – we’re both aware of each other, and oddly respect each other, though at this moment I’m sure he despises me a whole lot more, even, than I him. (Possibly whole lot more.) He turns and melts away.

* * * *

Thinking of that coyote and whether he “despises” me, as I said.

It’s possible that he kind of likes me too. Admires me. I’m sure that I, for my part, admire him. While he’s my enemy, on this acre of ground, I can see that he’s beautiful and valorous; and he might have his own grudging grants of admiration.

The field mouse that lives in fear of me in my trailer in the woods: he must see me as interesting, possibly admirable, at least godlike (while of course terrifying and horrible and regrettable).

Whether animals have “consciousness” or “emotions” is an open question among neuroscientists, philosophers, animal ethologists. Whether animals have “spiritual” elements in their makeup is an even farther-out consideration. But I believe it’s, at least, possible that the caritas of all created beings might extend even to the predator-prey gaze, or the competitor-across-the-open-meadow gaze. Caritas being fundamental to every grain and tremor.

(That is, the bear “kind of likes” the sparrow who pecks in the turf at a distance. The grazing old buck is “kind of happy to see” the squirrel hopping up a treetrunk.)

* * * *

“Caritas” = “Sorge” – They both mean love with connotations of worry. “Care” is a good translation.

* * * *

August 26, 2014

Little reverie about physics bumps into the funny notion that “location” is an illusion:

In standard geometry, one “point” seems to exist at a distance from another “point.” That is, space seems to intervene, stably, between the two points.

But for a photon departing Remotest Galaxy and arriving Here, the journey happens timelessly, instantly, so “departure” and “arrival” for that photon are the same instant, the same event. (Photons, at lightspeed, travel without time-passage.)

In this sense, Remotest Galaxy and Here are immediately adjacent. (At least for the lightbeam.)

Therefore, the lightbeam distorts geometry (makes space a kind of lens, shortening distances), and the Remotest Galaxy kisses Here. Or the lightbeam establishes a hyphen between “Remotest There” and “Here”.

So. Suppose you set it up as an axiom: that at the speed of light, there’s no “distance” between any “here” and any“there.” How, then, does one imagine real space? How does one map such a spacetime’s geometry? Or pull its drawstrings together, to make these hyphens?

Maybe, for a lightbeam, somehow all “locations” are simultaneous and co-incident.

In any case, evidently it’s not possible for us to imagine “real space.” Nevertheless, when we lift our eyes and look at a star (exposing retina to that twinkle), we’re seeing directly into that actual kaleidoscopic fiasco. We’re having the immediate experience, whatever it is.

* * * *

August 15, 2014

Jordan and Kara come for dinner. Like old times, as if we weren’t drawn in all directions by duties.

Bowls of chili outside, then we drag over the old terra cotta Mexican chimenea, to try actually lighting a fire in it. It’s fine – a bit of a rocket engine with three pieces of oak blazing inside – but then one learns that, maybe, it really should have just a few hot coals shoveled in, because the back side has developed a crevice, top-to-bottom vertically – and the belly (lower portion) is also crumbling, with lava radiance beaming orange thru the cracks, and we hose the thing down, as it falls apart.

* * * * June 25, 2014

Interesting: my inability (when, say, visiting a church) to cross myself.

Simply to touch forehead, breastbone, shoulder, shoulder. It should be easy.

Why isn’t it meaningless? And light, and easy, and no-problem?

Because if I did it, I would be desecrating something I hold sacred.

It isn’t “myself” that is sovereign, as if this were a matter of stiff-necked pride. (In fact I’m embarrassed, not proud, of this unsociable inability.) Instead, it’s a sovereignty of reason I must protect. Of which I’m a humble part.

* * * *

June 19, 2014

How ethics may be ascribed, in their origins, to the Anthropic Principle:

That the ethical imperatives arose from natural selection in evolution. Thus, “the unique witness of Existence” is one that evolved values. * * * *

June 17, 2014

Letter of Hope, to Hunter:

The world seems unfair and mysteriously locked-up. But:

• Put your shoulder to the wheel, and you’ll end up with responsibilities/rewards.

Be a champion. Not in the sense of a gloating guy brandishing his trophy. Rather the “champion” who is simply a hard-working defender. Like that sprinkler-head in the bottom of the meadow. Other sprinkler-heads clog and get weak. This one sprinkler-head keeps on crazily not stopping, bang-bang-bang-bang. Be like that.

* * * *

June 8, 2014

Two kinds of “Sorge,” of two very different orders of magnitude:

• the solicitude that is shared naturally among all creatures;
• the ostensible “cosmological Original Motive” of a sole creator god.

Those two forms of love ought to be reconcilable (or even the one be subsumed into the other). But there’s no clear reasoning in such a reconciliation.

The first kind of “love” is in all likelihood an accident/artifact of biological evolution. Unrelated to any supposed creator god.

So these seem to be two very different kinds of “love,” and to suggest that they are related is to hope for a teleological – and anthropic – basis for all things.

* * * *

June 8, 2014

Squaw Valley.

Me, up here alone. On a quick trip in pickup.

The Truckee “self-storage” facility’s long alleys are vacantly sunlit.

Rows of roll-up doors.

The pleasure of acquainting myself with Andre and Kasha, visiting Poles. Learning of Poles’ universal penchant for home-curing their own meats, and historical deep mistrust of Russians.

With Aleksandra’s and Nico’s help, empty storage box.

Build bookstore premises, alone in Olympic House building, a Sunday Morning. Security-guard Jose still works there, on some “emeritus” basis, and it’s a pleasure to greet him. Each sizing up how much the other has aged, clasping handshake.

* * * *

June 7, 2014

“The Assistant” now exists in two complete forms: one with the historical framework, the other just a simple tale.

Happy to see my Henry James essay appear in The Threepenny.

* * * * Tad’s truck is being smogged and I’m waiting out the hour in Eric’s used book store, a cappuccino, reading.

Old disheveled man (long white beard, white hair worn long in ponytail, grimy athletic shoes, slept-in khakis) shambles in and searches bookshelves in the far corner, talking to himself, fists on hips: “Don’t tell me someone bought it!” Then he finds what he’s looking for, it’s tucked in sideways on a shelf, Mein Kampf, in a newish-looking paperback edition. Carries it to his armchair to curl up with it for a little while. Soon, his tea in paper cup is all sipped down to nothing, and he replaces the book on the shelf, screwing it into place just as he’d found it, and wanders away again, out the door into the sun. * * * *

May 25, 2014

The puppy is parading around with his rubber bone in his teeth, brandishing it at everyone in sheer pride. Brett has been observing that he can’t take a drink from his water dish: he tries, but the bone is in the way. It’s been going on all this afternoon. At last she confiscates the bone, and he drinks deeply for a long time, finally getting what he needed (deprived of what he’d wanted). * * * *

May 13, 2014

“The Assistant” all morning.

Toyota’s smog certification.

* * * *

paralyzing sadness. Can hardly move

* * * *

May 11, 2014

Mother’s Day – and B. and I go for little lunch on Bistro patio, then coffee down the street, and a tour of town’s sidewalks, dog on leash.

(She’s done with the marathon of Squaw admissions, deserves a vacation, gets herself a massage.)

In all AM hours, I’m back into The Assistant. Treating it again as straight narration.

* * * * Interesting, and kind of scary, what inestimable presences “human persons” are: Back home in Nevada City, in supermarket, I see them pushing grocery carts and avoiding crashes, evaluating artichokes, hefting melons, evading each other’s direct glance. (They’re shy, for profound reasons.) Human beings’ learning-and-adaptive skills are mysteries: these mysteries blaze more deeply than the sun. The unidentifiable thing “consciousness” extends into the whole ecosystem, wherever humans are.

Biologists, using laser tomography, have analyzed and modeled the simple flatworm brain. They have identified the 26 neurons in the worm and have actually built a complete working model of the worm’s nervous system, all its connections, but they just can’t get the model to “behave” like a worm. Let alone, to “learn.”

Whereas, if you lash a tool to an amputee’s stump, he learns to use it, even with finesse. Or put a “sonar echo-location” interface on a blind man: he learns to “see” with it.

It’s our assumptions that are the best thing about us, and the wisest thing.

* * * *

May 8, 2014

San Francisco. Day dawns clear, w/sun beaming along Union St. –  then fogs over fast and turns cold. Coffee at the Trieste again. Again, all those middle-aged and elderly regulars are as familiar to me as if we’d all been in kindergarten together and we’d learned each other’s foibles there decades ago – and tics and sorenesses and foolish abundances and impetuous warmths. They, anyway, all seem to know each other like that. Reading newspapers side by side

Rest of the morning back at Macondray. Lots of cellphone negotiation over Squaw. An hour on the phone with Lisa horse-trading.

Party for Zyzzyva. Sam Barry harmonica, go out to noodle house with Glen D Gold, walk home alone in aerosol rain: it’s the cinematic noir San Francisco, Chinatown is deserted, cages pulled over storefronts, and I’m the Caucasian guy alone on the street, including brimmed hat and shiny pave. Foghorns.

* * * *

May 7, 2014

North Beach morning. Six in the morning, at the Trieste. Paul has glasses lined up on the counter. Slamming out the lattes and capps. He was a kid doing this exactsame thing thirty years ago. Still does it with élan. Fresh croissants haven’t arrived. So I take a stale-yesterday’s. Then the guy arrives with his flat cartons of flimsy pink cardboard string-tied. The juke box begins the day with Perry Como (“You’ll Never Walk Alone”), then Franco Corelli singing an aria from an Italian opera, then “I Did It My Way.” Tying his apron over his tummy is Tony, thirty-something but still a child – at home no doubt he’s still one of the putti in his large tumultuous family, even with blue beard-stubble. Using tongs he is moving fresh croissants up to the display, carefully, not dropping any, getting it right.

Move to Roma. The owner throws aside rag, comes out from behind the counter, settles down with his large, sleek young pal who owns all the parking lots in North Beach, and who says the strip-tease and porn clubs on Broadway are trying to make the neighborhood more family-friendly, buying up real estate to somehow accomplish that mixed-up goal.

Every human being I pass on Grant and Columbus and Union seems to have a bright inner warmth they’re muffling. The country-singer on the radio interview yesterday said, “You know what death is? Death is just ‘Howdy, Everybody!’”

* * * *

Polk Street in San Francisco: All the young wife/girlfriend beauties, at late-morning when they don’t have to be at work anywhere. Their yoga-pants hinds, their dogs on leashes. Do women (as is often said) really dress for each other, rather than for men? So the message to their sisters is, “I have more power than you”?

Well, I might like to think I’m above all that – that out in the country, I lead a life aloof from this carnival of envy/avarice/insult/temptation/competition. But then I see the wren at the curb hopping. And think of the finches and grosbeaks in my own meadow back home. Hopping and pecking, flipping away when another bird arrives. They’re just as deeply stuck in the envy/avarice/temptation/insult/competition. Sin seems to be the very center of the divine plan. Sin not just a necessary element, it’s the Whole Entire Enchilada.

* * * *

May 6, 2014

To SF.

Don Carpenter celebration. All the great and the good, the bright-eyed, the tired, the wise, the fond. Stackable chairs in rows, at the Book Club of California downtown.

Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe:

As a little tow-headed child on Haight Street (1967: the Summer of Love), she had been given a tall ice cream cone. And on the sidewalk, a stoned raggedy hippie said, “Hey, little girl, can I have your ice cream cone?” And she handed it across whole.

It’s 45 years later, and the woman still remembers that. She feels a little ripped-off, and actually she feels increasingly angry at that hippie, as the years go on, that asshole.

* * * *

May 5, 2014

Tomorrow to SF.

Today, no work. Slept in.

Mowing meadows and starting irrigation.

Last pass at the elegy for Don.

* * * *

May 1, 2014

To Berkeley, Zellerbach Hall for Salonen concert. (Also Beethoven’s Fifth.)

Taking Dash and his two friends on a tour of the campus.

I think they were impressed with the look of a liberal education, lawns and stoas.

We spend a fine sunny day on the streets of Berkeley, merry as a Monkees TV-show-montage frolic, as if my mother hadn’t just died.

Led my three boys to People’s Park, trying to explain the history, the idealism. How once a generation believed that war could stop, and money needn’t rule; and so those hippies seceded from the Union.

A shirtless groundskeeper in People’s Park was hanging his head mournfully, using a rake that had about three prongs left, where once there had been fifty prongs, in the task of very slowly knocking bits of leaf-and-twig into a long-handled dustpan.

Telegraph Ave is the same as it ever was. Café Med is still there, still exactly unchanged, the exact same dead flies on the window sills, napkins in the chrome dispenser, all preserved intact under the pyroclastic ash blast (i.e., the sixties). The coffee is still great. Best in the world. The pleasure of sitting with my 14-yr-old son at the same window-table where Carol, the old African sage of the Avenue, once predicted my future.

* * * *

April 30, 2014

Mother died this morning. Rob calls to provide the bedside story, and to speak of the cremation arrangements; asks me to write the obituary. Which I proceed to do a bad useless job of.

Mowed big south meadow. Drove mower deep into the rough, trying to win back ground from blackberries and wild sweet peas. Over the years I realize, we’ve lost six or eight feet at every margin of that meadow.

Email: Handled the cremation authorization: print out, sign, scan, and return-email.

Six pm is the hour of long shadows on the meadow: roast in oven – I can look out the rear window and see the Rainbird irrigation spurting and spurting, turning and turning, and look out the front window, to see Dash is standing out on the roadside where the cell reception is good, having an endless, exciting phone conversation. It is undoubtedly with a girl. He’s smiling broadly, as he never does. Shrugging and gesturing, none of the usual dark reserve. Doors of his soul are being opened

Moreover the Dow today reached a new record, 16,580. So long, mom.

* * * *

April 29, 2014

A pass at Don Carpenter’s’s elegy, rather than my own work.

Meet Swedish journalist in town at his hotel. Turns out I’m not to be part of his California book, it’s just that he read me and wanted to “Meet the Author.” Which is nice. We had beer at Cooper’s. Traveling with his publisher, who is quiet.

Rob phones, with news of mother’s fast decline.

* * * *

April 28, 2014

Back to Assistant, the dilemma there again: two books, one better and more difficult, the other more purely fun.

Clog in irrigation run-off is averted after hours and days of screwing around with it. Still it’s miraculous. In the hole-in-the-ground at roadside, the PVC outlet-pipe sings, “Bloop-bloop.” Water sparkles in its arc.

Re-master “Noel” removing bassiness.

All the while, the horse in the pasture behind me is galloping hard in long ellipses. Something’s got into him.

Fluttering in the turf under the picnic table: an old-fashioned Rolodex card, bleached by plenty of weather: it’s for “Ethan Canin” when he was in SF.

* * * *

April 26, 2014

First draft of Don Carpenter elegy.

Manure for all fruit trees.

Done with Squaw reading.

Move to trailer to begin siege of The Assistant, version I’m calling “eviscerated.”

Sausage and potato-leek for tonight. Beef stew for tomorrow.

* * * *

April 24, 2014

Hike to weir. Nevada Irrigation District has installed new metal box.

Clog persists in run-off line.

* * * *

April 23, 2014

Skies fair, breezy, getting unseasonably summery-hot.

As literature is futile, I find myself looking at lush tuft of new April bluestem tallgrass, broad-bladed and soft and green, and I think: A tuft of grass is something that is really an unmitigated success. That’s something you can get right. Just being a tuft of grass would be a proper devotion if actual life were arranged so that “not failing” were always the desirable outcome.

Loading pickup for trip to county dump – old office chair, disintegrating plastic, rotten boards. Fairport Convention on the radio.

Indoors, the kitchen phone rings, and Brett answers.

“Hello Mrs. Jones, you might remember me, this is Sean, and last fall I sold you some magnets and pendants.”

“You did?”

“They had the Squaw Valley logo printed on them.”

“I don’t remember any such purchase. I’m sure I’m not a customer. This is a home you’ve called.”

“No, you’re the customer. Remember all the merchandise said ‘Squaw Valley Cemetery.’ Printed in gold embossed.”

“There’s no “Squaw Valley Cemetery.’”

“Shit, I read this all fuckin’ wrong,” Sean says and hangs up fast. * * * * April 22, 2014

Home again in little mountains. No writing work. Dash stays home from school with a virus.

Rob calls from Iowa, with news of mother’s health bump. Reported to be minor. To be treated with an antacid.

Bring all old slash to roadside chipping heap.

Along east woods behind cottage, fell small cedars, buck and clean up. Half-cord firewood.

Limb dead branches.

Hauling wood: The wheel falls off the cart again. This time it’s the other wheel.

Chicken manure.

* * * *

April 21, 2014

Long talk with Joy. Crossroads for book. I could go to smaller-house publications, either with conventional narrative (all narrative intrusions excised) or with the more complicated version.

Once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of a walk with Dash: down Jones Street to Bay, out Bay to Embarcadero, visit to Exploratorium for an hour and a half, then up Broadway (sleazy as ever). Toward the end of the walk, Dash’s cough is coming back, and he’ll really have to rest. Brett, all the while, is gardening on the roof with Nico.

* * * *

April 20, 2014

Sunday. Easter in SF. Lots of breakfasts, involving various smoked meats.

Walk on Baker Beach in sun and wind, with Nico and Ola.

The dog orbits and capers and digs.

Picnicking, more breakfast.

Being by the ocean. All these years. My lifespan. The ocean always cancels all accounts. Arraigns all intentions. I’ve been here a lot – Big Sur, Newport Beach, Stinson, Inverness, Bolinas – over the years. Still, a hands-in-pockets guy. As in that photo of me at seixteen, Big Sur, setting out for Alaska.

For dinner, on rooftop Nico roasts over coals some kind of Armenian confection of ground-lamb packed around little swords.

* * * *

April 19, 2014

Leave for sf. Galvanized drinking-trough lashed to top of little car.

* * * *

April 18, 2014

The two re-sharpened “narrative intrusion” chapters go to Joy.

Morning drive to Pearsons Small Engine, for mower parts. I’m so competent! The mower works! And the bad tufts can be mown down before SF trip.

Visit of Saharan Tuareg band to town, with J. Weil and C. Kiefer.

Tomorrow to San Francisco, with not a care in the world.

* * * *

April 16, 2014

The notion that “It doesn’t much matter whether you only witness a December moon from the back stoop, or travel to Athens to see the Parthenon in person. What matters is how you take it.”

Does this imply “It doesn’t much matter whether, in your lifespan, you see only the chute for aborted fetuses” — ?

* * * *

April 12, 2014

Finish all window reglazing.

In midst of quick improvement of “Assistant,” post rejection. Retrenchment strategy: more specificity in the theological playing-around.

Drop off one of the two galvanized drinking troughs at Luke-‘n’-Maggie’s, for transport to Macondray.

Pesto and roast asparagus, and I smoked a couple trout.

After dinner, outside it’s silent, a bandage to the soul. Under nearly full moon, the dust-gravel driveway is milky.

Arcturus coming up, thru eastern pines. Arcturus is 37 lightyears away. So I’m seeing it as it was 37 years ago.

Thirty-seven years ago (while Arcturus kept burning faithfully) here on Earth, it was 1977, and I was 23 years old, deeply disappointed, lost and alone in California.

That star is still shining. Here I am to see it.

* * * *

April 9, 2014

More Squaw work, none of my own.

Diesel to garage for valve adjustment.

My mechanic’s description of my car: “That is a piece of shit.”

* * * *

April 8, 2014

No work today.

Tad’s truck gets two new tires (rear).

At Ridge Feed: two galvanized feed troughs; 60 lb. chicken feed, fodder, bale straw.

Back home, more reglazing cracked windows. Took down storm windows from upper story.

Spent unwonted hour at “the dog park” standing around. Good stories from Kent Crockett about what a jerk Brautigan was.

Very heartening letter from Joy.

* * * *

The different pleasures:

After their café gig, Luke parts ways from Maggie.

She wanted to go after-partying with a bunch of people at Matteo’s Pub, where there was another band playing; she would have walked in there with her entourage, loaded with instrument cases, and a general toast would welcome her.

Luke, gloating: “I went home and had a single-malt Scotch with the dogs.”

* * * *

In Condon Park with Brett:

Out from the direction of the deeper woods, a 20-something guy, dusty, carrying his bedroll/sleeping-bag, coasting on his skateboard – he has obviously just wakened up, in the dust.

Skateboard underfoot, bedroll on shoulder.

I remark, with facetious admiration: “There ya go. Livin’ the dream.”

Brett agrees, “Nobody’s going to get him to modify his view of things,”

The arrested-development theme (the Heroic Baby Theme) is a little close-to-home, for a writer who (Don’s favorite Hollywood expression) “can’t get arrested.”

* * * *

April 6, 2014

Sunny Sunday. Warm dry spell setting in again.

(something I saw in Asian Art Museum, SF): —–

“The moon is in a high place, all levels are quiet

The monk’s heart holds half a Buddhist verse

Ten thousand destinies are empty”

* * * *

April 5, 2014

In wee hours of night: long email to Dan and Joy about the status of “The Assistant.”

Nine AM to Grass Valley, to the Del Oro theater for simulcast of NY Met’s “La Boheme.”

Party at McKeans’. Fine piano/sax/trombone of Ludi Hinrichs and Randy, all evening. A privilege to be in the midst of.

It’s only nine o’clock pm, but already in the sky above the east pines is Arcturus, precursor to Scorpio and the summer sky, entry to all those summers on the Annex deck.

* * * *

April 3, 2014

Finished up Immanence draft.

Taxes to accountant: in the accountant’s conference room annually, always a quiet, valedictory 20 minutes, always a bowl of hard candies in center of her shining conference table.

Manuscript of “Immanence” to Joy, by email.

Carried the hen on a shovel and buried her under the pines.

The news from Joy is that “The Assistant” is now being rejected all over New York.

Paused by frontage road, for a meditative minute behind the windshield, quiet with engine killed, across the road is an old freeway-side cemetery.

And I see the big cement monolith of drawers they call a columbarium. But why is that word such a sweet word: because the Latin root columba (for dove) rustles a little bit with the beat of wings, ah, wings. And, too, a dovecote’s implied sodality. * * * * April 2, 2014

I’ve been reading Don’s posthumous novel, and it’s full of life. San Francisco and Portland bohemians in the late fifties and early sixties. It’s pressurized by Don’s ambition and jealousy and resentment, all forms of passionate love.

I still have a typescript of this same novel in my trunk, now 20 or 25 years later. I did nothing to help him with it at the time.

I’m reminded of how generous he was, and what a model. Don was an arhat. The austerity of his life was a dedication. In the years since, I find I’ve come to inhabit that same skinny carcass, somewhat. The simplicity of the apartment above the Depot in Mill Valley. The dish rack, the teaspoon, the tight-made-up bed (cot), Korean-War-army-style. The nickel-plated Glock 9-mm in the desk drawer, located precisely under the plane of his morning’s work. Which he said he was going to use “when the time comes.” That made perfect sense at that moment, and still does.

What we had in common. The two of us a pair of ill-raised, lucky boys, who however loved something.

* * * *

April 2, 2014

Disorganized day.

Badly-slept, skated through last section of Immanence, making superficial (and regrettable) changes, (to be rescinded tomorrow before sending to NY). Napped. Read a bit for Squaw.

Got out axe and shovel and gloves and began half-hour-long ordeal of merely circling around the project of killing the ailing buff cochin I’m fond of. Got as far as looping the thong around her neck on the block, then lost heart, a sudden cloud passes over the sun on an April morning, I loosen the noose. So instead, I’m going to let her sufferfor another day.

My guitar student. The school pickup. The bank-and-grocery trip.

* * * *

April 1, 2014

Stalks of asparagus poke thru the snow. This year we’re such half-assed inattentive homesteaders, we actually hadn’t watched the asparagus and some of it has already bolted.

Must next year enlarge asparagus beds, even five- or tenfold. And keep a better eye on it.

* * * *

March 31, 2014

Heavy snow.

Already now, some oaks have put out leaves, and the snow is fat and wet – therefore one expects downed PG&E lines and power failures.

Dinner in the cottage.

* * * *

News from NOAA: During this last week of March, the levels of carbon in atmosphere exceded 400 ppm. Moreover, this happened two months earlier than last year.

It’s all too easy for me to complain about others’ luxurious waste of resources, spreading of environmental death. It’s easy for me to be kosher, I’m here on these acres, where all my joy is. It isn’t necessary for me to get in a car and go somewhere, to have what I love. (Some people need to go to New York or Los Angeles to get to what they love.) This obscure place is like my bride. Not many people have this. I sit here and decree “The New Shabbiness.”

Is it possible for a greater number of people to devise a life somehow for themselves that doesn’t involve so much expenditure? That’s what a working economy ought to do. Our economy presently is set up to encourage expenditure. The new economic model will be different.

FUNCTION OF AN ECONOMY:

The function of an economy is to provide “happiness” (the greatest for the greatest number, acc. John Stuart Mill). An economy’s proper function is not to foment a widespread unhappiness that will generate economic activity. Commercial economy at present makes a project of arousing unthought-of desires and envy. If we lived in a world where people trusted their own hearts, maybe there would be less flying to Vegas. I only suggest this because “Vegas” can’t be supported anymore by the water table, or by the whole ecosystem, or (a stretch, here) by our plundering third-world societies for their resources.

(That is: Somewhere there’s a young woman dressed in modest, becoming chadhor driving an ox-cart filled with organic food that was grown to travel no more than twenty miles to be consumed. She can’t anymore support a Las Vegas.)

* * * *

The radio news (this news is at least a year old, actually) is that a certain flatworm seems to be immortal. It regenerates tissue with the DNA intact. Head regenerates. Tail regenerates. Whatever. So the same flatworm has existed for millennia.  If there were such a thing as an immortal worm, what wisdom could it win by its perpetual consciousness? Well, these are flatworms under discussion, and their supreme wisdom might involve warmth and moisture. That would be the culmination of their wisdom. Of course homo sapiens, if he were immortal, would have far higher insights, nobler insights, wouldn’t he?

* * * *

March 30, 2014

Sunshine after an excellent rain.

Don’s novel comes in the mail, published twenty years posthumously.

I see from Wikipedia that he was born in 1931, so if he were alive for its publication today, he would be in his eighties. He was always so bedazzled by celebrity, subscribing to Variety and reading every issue closely – I don’t think the publication of this novel would have satisfied him.

* * * *

March 29, 2014

To Marin for board meeting.

Good big rain.

Upon return, Cavendish and Sands for dinner in the cottage. Tomato-basil pasta. * * * *

George Eliot: “Chance has an empire which reduces choice to a fool’s illusion.”

* * * *

March 27, 2014

Another sabbath from writing.

Record acoustic guitar part for Know-Well, with fine old parlor guitar of Barbara’s.

Fish (“Orange Roughy”) braised in leeks.

* * * *

With pieces of the dishwasher mechanism spread out around me, I spend another rainy afternoon on the kitchen floor, in position of the prone-with-rifle marksman from my old miniature army-guy set.

This goes on all afternoon, because the dishwasher’s food chopper mechanism must be disassembled/reassembled. And I think of my father, an excellent specimen of a man of his period, who in the 1940s and 50s wore an ascot, smoked a pipe, immigrant/businessman in Chicago, stood erect, always hired others to repair things, or else just bought new. Old Buddhist doctrine lists (not five) six “senses” keeping us in touch with the real world:

Vision

Touch

Smell

Taste

Hearing

Mind

* * * *

George Eliot: She’s so great with the eternal male-female fiasco:

“He held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man’s pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.”

That sentence is an awfully tidy knot.

(I wade through her pages annoyed by her “too-much-explanation” kind of narration, then she starts hitting her pace, throwing out things like that.)

* * * *

March 24, 2014

8:53 am. Monday. School day. Two puppies played in the meadow in great scrambling orbits.

About the most banal, close-focus things, I’m thrilled-and-glad all the time (raindrop of Northern California rain landing in a mug of coffee-with-milk; hook latch of shed dropping into eye-screw; cigarette smell in saloon doorway on Broad Street; pothole in gravel driveway filled with oatmeal-water reflecting canvas sky): sometimes it’s really, every minute, as if I’d just gotten off a plane that had nearly crashed, or I’d survived intergalactic time travel or a near-fatal illness, or come off the gangplank of an oceangoing ship. That everything is pretty much ok is an unbelievably lucky outcome.

* * * *

March 23, 2014

No writing. A typical sleepless night. All my doubts.

Watched an old Susskind video supposedly explaining the Higgs.

Went to church, first time in months.

Ran mile.

On kitchen table: this year’s school phone list, with a very old spot of pancake syrup: that sticky freckle collects the finest lone fibers in the household. The butter stands out all day, and the cats lick it into dwindling pyramidal shapes.

* * * *

March 21, 2014

Doctor visit: clean bill of health.

Chorizo soup. Put in lots of kale.

* * * *

March 20, 2014

The singularity of a lifespan – all the missed chances – I think those must be griefs and sorrows for everybody. Even the most envied, adulated person in the world, a topmost movie-actor or a Supreme Court justice or a wealthy inventor or a mother of good children. They ALL lie awake thinking: “I should have done grad-school differently, I should have gone to India, I should have proposed marriage. I should have moved to NYC, I never did spend winters harvesting sap and making maple syrup, I ought to have been an aquatic ecologist, a surgeon, a seminary student, I shouldn’t have declined a certain invitation.”

* * * *

March 18, 2014

Gravity waves detected. Front-page story in NY Times: read the pretty-good article closely, slowly, and with great pleasure, sitting in Mendocino Café in the sun, with the dog at my feet, immediate Pacific breeze flipping newspaper pages. Happy day on a happy day.

* * * *

March 16, 2014

Sunday.

Stay away from Immanence. Tomorrow to Mendocino.

Muck out chicken run.

Second treatment of antibiotics for all chickens.

Spend most of afternoon recording harmonica and dobro parts.

* * * *

March 15, 2014

This oddly structured Immanence keeps inviting changes in texture. It’s a quilt.

Lacking conventional anecdotal setup-and-payoff structure, it could keep evolving endlessly.

Afternoon: fix kitchen-range burner, then continue clearing brush in the east woods below cottage.

Neighbors have rented a big chipper. And I have been building a pile of slash by the road now as big as a small ranch-house. So Luke going by on his motorcycle U-turns and comes back, to suggest chipper sharing.

March 14, 2014

Antibiotics for all chickens. (sulfadimethoxone)

More pushing-back of east woods, limbing and felling cedars.

* * * *

March 13, 2014

Six o’clock in the morning, it’s still dark, and Scorpio is above the south pines! Apparently summer is coming.

* * * *

March 9, 2014

Sunday. Will recommence work on Immanence.

Rain coming in again. The Northern Sierra and Cascades are getting it (which need it).

A troubling internet-glitch: I keep trying to open something called Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to get to a page called “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds.” But every time I try, I get the blocking notice saying “That Page is Inaccessible.”

* * * *

Sometimes (in her moments of better lucidity) we can provoke Barbara to reminiscences. Recent recoveries:

• When she was a girl on a Sacramento ranch, she had a pony of her own, a small gelding; this would have been the mid-1930s; the pony’s name was Bummer;
• In high school she was a yell leader. “Yell leading” was what cheerleading was called then in California; and she was really good at it; she was the captain of the yell team;
• Under the influence of a racy, sophisticated friend, she learned to remodel an ordinary brassiere by sewing fabric over the cups – and the same fabric over the straps to form “spaghetti straps” – and thus to fashion bikini tops to wear to parties (this in the fifties, when she was a grad-student wife in Iowa) (no doubt she and her friend were distracting as they wished to be, bringing St. Tropez to Iowa City.)

* * * *

March 8, 2014

Sunny Saturday morning.

At 8:30 am, I’m the only car coming down Broad Street – to take Dash to his river-trip drop-off – also, then, I’ll stop at drug store, and go to hospital lab for routine “panel” of blood indicators (for this, I’m fasting; not even allowed coffee. so I’m very pure).

I’m never in town at this hour. It certainly looks like Saturday morning. The town’s main street has one couple afoot, touristy-looking. Not a single parking meter is at work, all curbs empty. An awning is being unfurled by the National Hotel. The other sign of life is at Java John’s where the girl in the denim apron is hoicking folding chairs out onto the sidewalk in the sun and a little café table too. Long shadows. Edward Hopper of course. Damp air makes sunshine gauzy, ginger ale. Swing up Pine Street. Cross bridge. I’m filled with sadness for all the Saturdays I’ll never get back — reminded of riding in my father’s car to Boy Scout obligations; or seeking my friends when dew was still on lawns; or later in life, driving to the hardware store first thing, list in pocket. Plenty of Saturdays.

* * * *

Appreciation: Cavendish’s last visit here for dinner, he showed up with a bottle of wine and two cardboard boxes of choice kindling (narrow hardwood mill-ends from cabinetry), which lagniappe he treated like a compensation for his visit, though he’s always welcome. (The old excuse was needing to use our printer. Now, it turns out that the printer in his trailer, which the bear stepped on, has a crushed paper-feeder assembly but still works.)

I hadn’t realized at the time what an appreciable gift is good kindling. In all these cold weeks, I don’t go out to split uncooperative cedar with an axe, I stay indoors and very slowly deplete these two boxes.

* * * *

March 7, 2014

No rain for the next two days.

Sulfur-spray all pears in blossom.

Suit up (gas-mask-and-all) for thorough spray of diazinon: foundations of all buildings. I’m using up the last few historical ounces in this old bottle of a banned poison, which we inherited with the place — bottles of heavy opaque amber-brown glass, the paper labels’ glue so stale they’re flagging off.

Fresh feed and scratch and fodder.

Dash has stayed home from school today feeling punk – under a blanket in mud room binge-watching cute TV comedies.

* * * *

March 5, 2014

Depressing day. Useless.

Read Max Tegmark, and can’t understand his “time” notions. Keep re-reading it.

“Infinities” are made out to be such a threat (to infinite-expansion model of cosmos), but I don’t understand: aren’t infinite and infinitesimal quantities exactly what integral and differential calculus address? And handle nicely? (Leibniz and Gauss and Newton have long since been here before us.) His whole discussion seems staged for drama and self-dramatization.

Recorded electric guitar part for “Noel.” Don’t like it. Will scratch it.

* * * *

Nobody among these popular physicists/philosophers knows of their antecedents, or can acknowledge who long ago already had these “new” ideas: Nietzsche, for the Eternal Return that, now, they’re calling “the multiverse.”

(Of course, said Nietzsche, if there is such a thing as the infinite, and if we’re to take it for its literal meaning, then there have already been an infinite number of iterations of this very moment, and this earth. And I will infinitely recur. And infinitely have already recurred. That was in the 1880s).

Or Max Tegmark’s apparent innocence of Parmenides’ doctrine. M. Tegmark thinks he invented the idea that the logos, if perfect as premised, must be eternal and unchanging, and that change and motion are illusions: enchantments only upon us creatures who live in “time and space.” This is Parmenides verbatim. And a modern philosopher ought to at least tip his hat, once. It’s an academic courtesy.

* * * *

March 3, 1014

Hunter writes (uses email, actually) to say that, for the first time ever, he’s starting to feel financially secure, so he’s going to make pasta.

****

(Wants my recipe for a smoked-salmon-and-peas pasta.)

* * * *

February 26, 2014

No work today. Steady, quiet rain.

Got up early and spent the morning putting really high-flown guitar tracks on “Noel,” as well as lengthening the whole recording by 64 bars. Then the program crashes and I lost all the work. Noon, and nothing to show. On a day I’d only meant to fritter doing pleasurable things.

* * * *

February 25, 2014

No writing. Up at five helping Dash with math and doing Squaw work.

Worked on “Noel.” Guitar track and harmonica track. Both satisfactory.

A bit of Squaw work; then all the afternoon clearing forest to the north by the road.

Taking out cedars I freed up a very old apple tree of George Merrill’s. The conifer forest had engulfed it, but now it will start producing.

Good big rain coming in. Brett accomplished a lot of housekeeping for the chickens, and I’ve saved, in the mining car, a good cubic yard of manure.

(Dinner of pork tenderloin with a sauce made from Maggie’n’Luke’s plums, preserved.)

* * * *

I’m forcing myself not to think about “Immanence,” but the of-course-crucial first line keeps bobbing up.

The first lines of a novel – how arbitrant and determinant! –

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make the world.

Speak or act with an impure mind

And trouble will follow you:

As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

(the Dhammapada (its first lines!)

A novel (its first line) does have the job of introducing an impurity,

and the whole swaying creaking dung-loaded oxcart follows.

* * * *

February 24, 2014

Up very early. Read Max Tegmark. Listened with great pleasure a a long piece of Georg Friederich Haas’s in the mud room.

More pear pruning. More Squaw work on the Kindle.

Finished major pear pruning.

Pleasure of the afternoon is a familiar experience: in the shady kitchen my eyes are blinded by the outside sun, and I eat canned soup, peruse a Harper’s magazine.

* * *

February 23, 2014

No writing.

Laid down backing tracks for “Noel.”

Lots of Squaw work (on a Kindle).

Began pear pruning.

Party at old Indian Flat house.

‘S war schwer Deutsch zu sprechen.

* * * *

February 20, 2014

Get to end of “scouring draft” of Immanence.

Agree to film option for Ordinary Money, extremely small bucks but nice folks.

Laura Cerutti here for confab. Sandwiches on bricks.

Searle:

An experiment proving the existence of “subconscious motives” is thru post-hypnotic suggestion. Tell a subject that, when he wakes up, he’ll have a compulsion to give away money, open a window. Upon waking, he accomplishes these things, BUT he will have rational explanations: that man over there looks needy; it’s stuffy in this room; etc.

* * * *

February 19, 2014

Joy calls. Will start selling Assistant more widely in NY. (Having spoken to Jack. Who is very flexible and forgiving of a writer’s vagaries.)

Dinner of trout I’ve smoked here, garlic/olio spaghetti, kale/ginger.

* * * *

February 14, 2014

Sunshine, thin and damp.

Split oak and cleared brush.

(A school holiday, Dash and his friend spent the afternoon making a go-cart, using the old hand-cart for a chassis, dismantling skateboards for trucks.)

* * * *

February 16, 2014

Sunshine and warmth.

Immanence most the day.

Split oak.

* * * *

February 13, 2014

Rain.

Dinner at Sands’s with Dianne Federly.

A dozen wild turkeys, walking at the roadside on Ridge Road.

* * * *

February 11, 2014

Very difficult staying away from Immanence. Forced hiatus.

Frittering the mornings.

Afternoon, I mixed the 2-stroke fuel and went down through the woods (carrying also the Mason jar of precisely the refill I’d need) and got into carving up the big oak trunk sections, left by PG&E last year: easement below south woods. Spent a backbreaking great afternoon, figuring it out, levering the big cylinders with a galv.-iron pipe, taking some (unavoidable) chances with how the heavy log might sag when cut – ending up with oak rounds too big to move: will bring the wagon down there somehow, maybe tomorrow if it doesn’t rain. I cut them thinnish, tho’, for easier splitting, as this oak is like granite.

So, later, when we have to go to the regional high school for a “presentation,” I’m so desolated by the Authority of Mediocrity which I remember as high school, I sit there during the Welcome Video thinking for consolation of the great hours of my morning in that backbreaking work, with chainsaw screaming, a métier wherein I’m an artist, and that’s something they can’t take away from me, those principals and assistant principals and teachers, the whole world of competitive cliche: we’re in for four years of watching Dash ride that carwash tractor-belt. I’ll sleep soundly tonight, and sleep with moral comfort, because I got a start on creating a good oak cord today.\

Rain coming in. Will have to get the wagon hooked up and the oak moved in a good hurry.

* * * *

February 10, 2014

My short education in my septic tank’s secret routine work (this morning) makes me think of all the “culture” I live in, and profit by. The word culture, it turns out, comprises all my favorite things, the biota in my bowel, Bach-Plato-art, etc., music, mathematics, God, Parthenon, etc, the dirt underfoot, of course, and its bacterial recipe, the cheese in the fridge, the wine in the rack behind the stove, the bread in the breadbox, all culture.

(Reviewing that list. It’s possible God and math have to be excluded from the culture category. An exclusion controversial. If culture consists in “raw” elements untainted by metabolic processes.)

One could very well live on only seeds and grapejuice and milk. But life is kinder with bread/wine/cheese.

* * * *

February 10, 2014

Morning sun. Mist on meadows. A day of no work.

Septic tank is to be pumped, 9am.

Two septic pumper guys are friendly, informative and even avid on subjects like a tank’s sludge-scum ratio.

NASA:

Another young “edge-of-universe” galaxy has been found (by Hubble/Spitzer telescopes): it’s only 650 million years post-Big Bang. Red shift of 5. At that age, infancy, the typical galaxy (this newfound speck) is still miniscule and a prolific fountain of fresh stars. (It’s ten times smaller than this old Milky Way, and thirty times more productive of stars. “Ah, youth.”)

Last night late, after movie at Nevada Theater, the center of town is quiet, raining hard, looks deserted. The plush, dingy bar of the National Hotel was empty, lonely bartender greets us on springy toes.

The rain is loud outside. The back-bar possessed an open, okay wine, and I sat with pal while he complained of book business. His audiobook had been released – they didn’t recruit him to be the reader for it, or even contact him about it – and he dug it up on his iPhone, tapping at iTunes, to play it for me, wanting my definite judgment that the professional reader did sound gay.

* * * *

If the outer edges of visible universe, in all directions, exist at T=ZERO on the universe’s timeline; and if, the closer in you come to central-observer Earth, the further-along events in time are, (until you get to OURcentral old fossil, here, shabby, wet, homey, dirty, even stinky); then the universe from our POV is time-structured in the shape of a trampoline, soft in the middle, taut and new near the rim. Untried near the rim. Full-of-possibility near the rim.

Determinism: The picture does argue for a deterministic view of the timeflow from past to future: the future exists right here in the form of “us,” us here, having evolved consciousness from these rocks. (Esp. because that remote edge-of-universe sees us as in our fresh debut, looking small and hard; and sees itself as the aging soft center.)

* * * *

February 9, 2014

Rain unstopping.

Movie in town, Italian, Fellini-like.

George comes by with cookies for Barbara. Recites Robbie Burns’s lament for a deceased lamb.

* * * *

February 7, 2014

Rain: six inches in a weekend.

* * * *

February 5, 2014

Slow, quiet, sad day.

Snow looking to come in all day, but not arriving. Everything outside is the grey-dusted color of winter-interstate-highway asphalt. The cold really locks down hard in late afternoon, in town.

At home, run all the space heaters at top setting, snack on toast spread w/jam of last summer’s pears.

* * * *

February 4. 2014

The septic tank that isn’t working is the new one, not the old one.

The old one (the ancient one) faithfully as ever is doing its thankless job.

Baited mousetrap in chicken run.

Brett in Squaw all day to look at Sierra College campus, lunch with Joanne.

All morning on “Immanence,” most  importantly taking out deflating explanations.

But the workday was cut short (or shot-holes-in) by care of the unhappy new dog.

* * * *

February 3, 2014

Sunshine is back.

Tunneling rodents are getting the chicken feed, and the older septic tank appears to be leaking.

Finished “The Assistant” for Joy’s sales efforts in NY. Sent it off. Fwshhh.

Long conversation with Herb Gold in SF, so deaf and opinionated and impervious, in his nineties sharp-witted, sitting at home on Broadway, answering the phone. He taught in Iowa in ’57, and I got all his great gossip (gossip whose freshness expiration-date is fifty-seven years past, but is all perfectly intact) corroborating my “Assistant” narration.

Tad’s pick-up to the garage, for oil-and-lube. I next door, for hour in bookstore.

Pork roast braised Azerbaijani is a disappointment.

* * * *

February 2, 2014

Seeing the new-rescued dog get accustomed to the idea that it isn’t a betraying dream to live in a house where love fails not. (Gradually ceasing to flinch when petted. Coming to sleep in deeper repose.) Seeing that’s the adaptation I made twenty-five years ago.

* * * *

February 1, 2014

Saturday cold and clear, morning.

Dashiell’s concert today: song for soprano and piano.

(renewed delight in rediscovery of Middlemarch. Sometimes she does take risks, if gentle ones, surprising sexual subtext, explicitly anatomical, she’s such a racy dame, it’s really almost like potty-humor she’s having such fun with it.)

* * * *

January 29, 2014

Rain comes in, not with the sudden breeze-churning or then fat drops. Rather the classic Pacific storm-system, a heavy mist during the morning condenses to aerosol sweeping, all soundless, and at last the sound of the eaves’ drip on the tin porchroof begins, and by noon it will be raging. Right now, a plain grey bird perches on bare twig of mulberry, just looking around himself, looking left, looking right, not going anywhere.

Facing some central, foundational wonkiness now suddenly, in the Immanence ms. Which until this point had been breezy.

I almost congratulate myself on reaching the perspective that, on such a morning, I might just as tolerably be in Sierra Nevada Hospital in pain staring at ceiling, as here staring at these pixels. Of course, not true.But a bracing thought.

* * * *

At last, a little rain is predicted.

In all my reading, I’m unreasonably implacable. Having thrown Cheever book across the room, and picked up Eliot for relief, I find now can’t take her either. It’s her intrusive author-judgments and little homilies, quaint and of course “acerbic.” Nothing wrong with acerbic. I could take them if they were acerbic, but they’re not. They’re cookie-cutter acerbic, all about silly females and fatuous provincial types.

* * * *

January 28, 2014

Must open all four lids on septic tanks, as I’m suspecting leaks.

Cavendish to borrow truck.

Chipotle soup. Then meeting at co-op housing about highschool choices for Dash.

* * * *

January 27, 2014

Discovery that Hunter and all his grad-school-bound friends, last summer, burned up much of the good oak firewood I felled and split, at such cost of effort, so they could have picturesque summer bonfires here.

Tonight, I actually despair of reading the last ten pages of a fellow-writer’s novel (it’s almost never that I don’t dutifully finish) – Cheever’s Wapshot thing – as so meretricious and bad-values-infused, so damaging of human nature, so flippant and superficial, that since an old copy of “Middlemarch” has turned up in Hunter’s bookshelf, I’ll go back to rereading that lady’s sharp pick-offs.

* * * *

January 27, 2014

A small rain is predicted for later this week.

(Local fields that had produced avg. 500 pounds of fodder per acre have this year produced 40 pounds per acre. Typical of the kinds of very consequential damage a drought will do, to everybody’s economy down the line.)

* * * *

January 25, 2014

Drought goes on.

“Immanence” all day.

Clearing blackberries.

Dinner of a chicken that was old, tough, fat, led a life of idleness, a life over-prolonged in the barnyard.

Then, watching a “Masterpiece Theatre” in Barbara’s cottage. How strictly efficient is dramatic narrative. (You have to be a habitual TV-watcher in order to, habitually, forgive it its stylized limitations.) (But of course the same is true of the novel, opera, oil painting.) Every scene is  maybe eighteen seconds (moving among all the subplots), and that 18-second bit churns through dire life-changing events, among 2-D characters, narrative like a handjob. Even British storytelling: infected by the Hollywood “on-the-nose” economy of scene.

Outside, in the meadow, the stars are advancing toward their spring display, Sirius well above the horizon.

* * * *

Wittgenstein (his translator’s weird punctuation intact):

5.6  The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.61  Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.

We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, and that there is not.  For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.

What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

5.62  This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth.  In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of the world.

* * * *

January 20, 2014

Hot dry weather continues.

School holiday (MLK day).

Dashiell’s friends are making music in the mud room.

The irrigation system, which I hiked today, is non-functional in three places:

• At the ditch, steel screen filter of the weir has finally rusted to loose scabs and swatches, letting all things flow through.
• At the Y-split uphill on Spencers’ easement, the run-off still has no screen.
• Below there, the run-off pipe is still clogged.

Got the second of the three remedied today. Also repaired broken wire on hen-house gate electricity.

New Sequoia book: I realize old Edgar has an inveterate selfishness: self-aggrandizement.

(Seems I can construct malicious/mischievous characters best by recourse to personal experience. I have to think of uncharitable and unfair analyses I once made, of actual acquaintances in my life. Putting “bad motives” into action (which is obligation of storyteller) runs athwart a regular habitual benignity in human nature.)

* * * *

January 18, 2014

Brett brings home an unfortunate puppy from Elk Grove.

Me: working all morning nicely on the new Sequoia book.

After that, it’s me and Barbara and the dobro, all afternoon.

* * * *

January 17, 2014

Joy is emailing in the middle of the night, and then phoning at six AM, with lots of praise for The Assistant.

* * * *

January 17, 2014

Pleasures of having animals.

On a very tiny scale, I’ve got livestock here, and last night, coming up from putting the hens away safe from coyotes, I got a sense of what farmers have always enjoyed:

In a world of atrocities (race wars, class exploitation, genteel rape and other kinds, even insults on the gradeschool playgrounds), I’ve created a space where justice and peace rule. At this point, I’m an experienced little chicken-rancher, and things don’t go wrong. I’ve got it down. “Peace” and “justice” are so rare (so non-existent) they seem like mythological concepts sometimes.

But here I’ve got some happy animals, and I can see that every farmer for thousands of years – old guy in Iowa, or an old guy in Bavaria, or in the Roman provinces or in some Russian shtetl – has had this satisfaction, even if unconscious, a slightly but distinctly moral pleasure.

* * * *

Certainly plenty of religious meditations are for the superstitious and the credulous. Such folk get their thrills and consolations. However, some few want to explore such notions (eschatological notions, soteriological notions) who are not interested in those thrills and consolations. Such a more rational seeker needs (besides plenty of stamina) two important knacks: the “negative capability” praised by Keats – that is, the ability to entertain in the mind two opposed ideas simultaneously without flipping an “on/off” switch on one or on the other (i.e., an ability to keep holding that toggle firmly in the middle position). And secondly, similarly, a tremendous tolerance of uncertainty, tolerance of undecidability, equal to an Einstein’s.

Such strengths of mind – (really tensile strengths: adaptability and humor and empathy) – can look like weaknesses; they can look like equivocation and wishy-washyness. So the conversation about fundamental matters is always at risk of a kind of anomie. Of limp, affable anomie. What inquirer, out there, can be both tender and incisive?

* * * *

January 14, 2014

The NY Times mentions today (re: climate change):

Anybody buying a home along the Virginia shore these days will have to bear in mind that sea level will have risen one foot by the time their 30-yr mortgages are getting paid off.

So here it is, the long-predicted wave. Those improvident, those indulgent, those “non-smart” people back there, the only way to communicate with them is to grab them by the Economic Considerations. The metaphor, there, to be explicit, is to “gonads,” what get grabbed. Some people have only economic considerations for gonads.

I continue to feel that there’s a regional East-Coast/West-Coast opposition going on. I’ve been out here for years wearing layered-up sweaters in my own living room (as have plenty of my fellow citizens), installing me-sufficient solar panels, etc, while in “The East” people have been scoffing as if such measures are sissy.

Could it be true – as “back east” culture is portrayed in movies – that they all think they want to be Captains of Industry back there? Blazing penthouses and fuel-wasteful cars and a private jet are what people WANT? Foreign wars of Insult and puppet dictators, to pay for it all? Such delusions – delusions of the non-smart – are something the wiser will be paying for.

* * * *

January 12, 2014

Bit of work on “Tamalpais/Sequoia Novel”

Barbara’s birthday party.

Dash starts out his afternoon at a “band rehearsal” at a friend’s house, but concludes it in cross-county hike bushwhacking with his keyboard friend and his bass-playing friend, high-spirited, going on after dark, and after dinnertime, getting far out of cellphone range, until coalition of parents have to intercept the adventurers at a highway crossing, sore and rosy and hungry in the dark.

* * * *

January 11, 2014

Small rain.

Not enough.

* * * *

January 9, 2014

Timewasting.

Torturous depression of inactivity.

Fiddling with ”Immanence.”

Idea for Tamalpais novel. But don’t want to touch it.

Clear duff thatch under pines out front.

Hens roam and peck all afternoon.

Brett rids herself of little white dog –a friend will take it. It is cold in old house.

Smoke four big trout (burning applewood chips I happen to have, because I took out the tree by the garden).

(reading old minor Cheever. He was really such a tawdry writer. No values. All display. All aiming-to-charm. Occasional brilliance.)

* * * *

January 8, 2014

Up with fiction that risks showing the heart of hope, but unsentimentally.

Up with fiction that esteems the reader and doesn’t engage in tricks.

* * * *

January 8, 2014

Dead stop after work on “Immanence.”

Nothing to say. The cupboard is empty.

My car continues to make ominous noise. Today: the trip to the mechanic in his desolate gulch by the cement plant.

The irrigation is still entirely dry, due to maintenance work in tributary canals at upper elevations. But even if it were flowing, the mystery clog of last fall remains a problem unsolved.

* * * *

January 4, 2014

Wake late.

“Immanence.”

Approved Threepenny’s proofs of the short “magic” piece.

Brett goes dog-hunting.

Split the rest of the cedar.

Topped up the transmission fluid in the Benz at last. Not such a big ordeal.

* * * *

January 3, 2014

Awake at three.

“Immanence.”

Threepenny at last sends copyedited draft of James review.

Hood up on Benz: Proper German transmission fluid, but I have no proper funnel.

Dash to guitar lesson.

Old Wolf stove is lowered by block-and-tackle from pickup bed to the turf before the potting-shed bay. Mounted on Oakley’s old red bricks. One day it will warm a cottage.

I get the revised James review in the mail.

Barbecued Ribs! (The lure to keep Dash home, sociable, and nourished.) Butternut squash. Kale.

Another Netflix movie, of the Noah Baumbach school of NYC cinema.

* * * *

January 1, 2014

New Years Day.

Up early, write briefly (Immanence).

Drive to Squaw, 8am, carrying new kitchen range, Italian, of steely brushed-chrome, swaddled in endlessly-wound bandages of stretchy Saran Wrap. (Sun in my eyes, uphill and eastward.)

Complain to anyone who will listen, about wastefulness of this purchase. Our grandparents would have fixed the old stove. They wouldn’t have bought something shiny-and-(predictably)-shoddy. The old restaurant-grade Wolf stove is indestructible.

Install the shiny new one in a single afternoon, with help from Dirk.

The take-out sushi/sashimi from Truckee Safeway is better – better by far! – than most sushi bars’ over-complicated sloppy victuals.

Drive back downhill, with the sooty old Wolf stove on the pickup bed. Which is so great, I will build a cottage around it someday.

(Sun in my eyes, downhill, westward.)

http://louisbjones.com/2014/12/31/good-kindling-2014/