Diaries

December 27, 2011

Barbara will have surgery on the thirtieth.  Needs an artery in her neck unblocked of plaque.  She’s not being very brave about it.  We tend to try not to bring it up at all.

* * * *

December 26, 2011

An affluent Christmas.  Like everybody, we’re spending money we don’t have on stylish black boxes with demonic inner embers, with power-cords that will bring more of the audiovisual into our lives, and absorb time, and added expense in maintenance, their phantom-power pilot-lights marring the darkness of the midnight while we sleep, raising the energy bill and the global temperature.  The usual sexy delusions will now be announced by the persuasive BOOM (triumphant boom) of THX Dolby.  It’s all pollution.  We are pollution.  THX Dolby doesn’t make the cliché any more tolerable, it just makes the cliché loud, booming, swirling, bristling, inexorable.

* * * *

The absurdity of thinking about “god” at all.

Any Prime Mover must have been “caused”. . . . . Infinite regress.

(Also, acc. to Kant, the cosmological argument is just another ontological argument but in disguise.)

What we can know is that (a) things exist; and (b) that fact has a “positive” aspect.  [That second assertion is the theological part, and the anthropic part.]

* * * *

December 22, 2011

Hunter is home from college for ten days.  It’s good to hear the deep voice in the house, a pacific voice.  In rooms where I’m not present.  A deep voice.

* * * *

9:30 in the morning.

Brett makes an appearance outside the kitchen door in the cold morning light barefoot, with last night’s tablecloth on her forearm.  She gives it a big shake, the whole banner of it, and goes back inside.

Slam of screen door.

Soon to appear: the finches and sparrows.

* * * *

A Tuesday.  Few days till Christmas.

Spent another entire day not working.  Always a dizzy condition.

In the morning, finished a computer-recording of a version of “Shendandoah” (to be my homemade X-mas present).  Which after three days’ work disappoints me summarily, and I’m going to have to re-do it.

Then cleared the far deep-woods meadow of  Scotch broom, pulling seedlings up by their roots.  (Member of the pea family.  Cousin to the wild sweetpea I love to munch elsewhere here.  In italian “La Ginestra.”  Meaning “the broom.”  Invasive plant here.  The Plantagenets’ family crest bore an image of a sprig of this stuff, because “planta genesta” was its emblematic flower.)

Then the blackberry.  Back-breakingly on knees under the fig trees, dug and extirpated almost all blackberry vines, by their ancient roots – really venerable underground woody wrists, hard fists, witchy long dusty fingers.

Tilapia w/ chile-lime butter.  Asparagus.

Hard freeze expected tonight.  Went out and flushed irrigation to empty it and not freeze pipes.  The firehose explosion of muddy water thundering from the old rusty, seldom-opened hydrant into the ravine.

* * * *

December 11, 2011

Sunday morrning.

Barbara is in the corner of the kitchen, next to the heater, feasting on the entire Sunday paper, not saying much.  All around her, noisily, three 12-yr-old boys frolic and punch and quarrel, post-sleep-over, crowding around the “ipad,” Dash dominant, tapping and stroking the little pane.  Buttermilk pancakes are made, syrup poured, then the boys including all housepets are sent outside. I’m not writing today, I’m responding to interview questions on Internet, then fooling around with home-made music, recording a version of an old public-domain tune.  On Brett’s ipod down in the kitchen, while Barbara reads the paper, the “folk music” stack is playing Tim Buckley, Judy Collins Leo Kottke’s Tacoma album.  Later today, as it’s warm and sunny, Brett will be out with loppers and shears.

2:00 – afternoon – Dash, very grown up with $10 in his pocket and knowledge of a crepe place to spend it at, needs a ride to town, where (with my cell phone in pocket), he is to meet a certain “Ciara.”  I drop him off, but he insists on being let out three blocks too soon.  Then with wings on his fleet he runs at top speed, sweatshirt-hood flying, down Spring Street.  I linger in the intersection to watch him, flying down out of sight.

4:30– Give up my Sunday music-making and set out with two mousetraps (brand name VICTOR, printed on wood in red and blue ink dyes, the flat cedar wafer that is to be the mouse’s last touch of material Earth and spiritual threshing-floor.)

Brett is working on her huge quilt in the cottage.

Barbara with the newspaper by lamplight.  She complains that (according to the newspaper) the director of the San Francisco zoo outfits herself in clothing of wild-animal prints.  This is in poor taste.

Very dim at 4:30 in the woods’ edge, baiting my traps with peanut butter and oatmeal, in the potting shed where there’s a big woodrat nest, and in my trailer in the woods.

* * * *

December 5, 2011

12:16 midday.  The silence of the whole house, midday, weekday.

A creak in the 150-yr-old floorboards.

Brett: “Louis, I’m going for a walk with Toby.”

Me: “Oh.  Okay.”

The floorboard creaks travel away again.

* * * *

December 3, 2011

In the depth of the night, sparkling frost on grass.  How glamorous is death.

Dash is away at a friend’s house for a sleep-over.

Barbara and Brett are in the cottage watching, on television, “Anything With English Accents.”

Happiness of seeing the big Angel book come into perspective.

The merry clothesline all day, scalloped at the top rim, bouncing.  All afternoon, while the denim dried toasty, last night’s ice stayed intact on the shadowed bricks of the patio.

Dinner of polenta and pork loin with sauce of last year’s little plums from the freezer.

(This year, through my own negligent inattention, all the little Italian prune plums were purloined by The Bear before I could get to them.)

(This is a surmise I reach from having observed The Bear’s pie-sized shit in the woods beyond the chestnut trees, wherein are mostly the pits of my plums.)

Sour local wine.

* * * *

December 3, 2011

Up early.  Coffee brewed.  Heat started.  Softly on the radio: NPR’s well-regulated, easy ironies and poignancies (the valve of intervening segue music.)  Saturday morning.

Dash went to a party last night (at a girl’s house!) and was delivered here after my own bedtime, by some mom, or dad.  And this morning I can hear him singing to himself while he lies in bed.  He still has a girlish fluting voice.  And he is exploring this melody only by guesses, before he’s even lifted his head from the pillow.

* * * *

December 2, 2011

“Crazy pretty” —— Today is the kind of sunny, windy day that will, in the sensitive, bring on migraines or epileptic seizures.  The trees churn and shimmer, the grandstands in the Roman coliseum.  This American language: Our weekly cleaning “lady” – (really a girl, not a lady, herself a poet and blogger) – pauses with lunch-spoon halfway to mouth, standing and looking out the small pantry window, out to where the low winter sun makes tinsel of the grass, and she says, “I’n it crazy pretty out?”

* * * *

November 30, 2011

Big winds are predicted for tonight, and we’ve brought in or lashed down everything loose.  Consequence of atmospheric turbulence: I have spotty connection with the internet and can’t bring emails up to see what agreement my agent Joy in New York is reaching with my editor Jack in Berkeley.  I guess that’s exactly fitting, I in turbulence.

* * * *

A great novel I’m finally getting around to: John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.”  It has all the artless ineptitude of a great novel.  A clear surface through which to see deep.

Myself, I don’t do that.  For better or worse, I tend to let it be a hard glittering surface.

* * * *

Insomnia, I love it, I alone shimmering high up, hours of ultra-alertness,

and the inevitable nearness-of-god monkeyshines, always unfailingly interesting.

Thinking of my great good fortune in Brett beside me.

* * * *

 

November 27, 2011

Sales of Radiance are VERY disappointing.  The offers for Innocence will be humbling.

But a letter from New York is in the mail pile.  Sharon Olds is so crazy about Radiance she wrote a three-page, handwritten fan letter.  If one or two fond close readers are out there in the gloaming, that is reward enough.

Home now, for one full day, Sunday.  The weather tender and warm.

A soup of chestnuts from under the tree at the edge of the woods, plus Thanksgiving’s old roasted root vegetables.

* * * *

[It’s later that same night.  I’m making beef stock.  Brett, in putting Dashiell to bed, has fallen asleep, and all lites are low, and I’ve got our local small-town radio station on.  The Sunday-Nite literary show is broadcasting a “staged reading” of a conversation from the last (the posthumous! the thousand-page!) David Foster Wallace novel.  Three actor-voices bicker about consumerism, existentialism, American political parties, Romanticism, communism, post-modernism, late-stage capitalism.  These three voices braid so rapidly from –ism to –ism, the spine of the conversation is lost.  It’s a kalaedoscope of Wallace’s opinions and knowledge.  (Onion, bay leaf, bones of rib roast, some semi-slimy parsley, old shriveled carrots.)

Then, because I need a sprig of fresh thyme I have to desert the lucha libre of Mr. Wallace’s philosophical characters – (and right at the existentialism part!) – to go outside by the back mudroom door, and in starlight find the thyme.  It’s cold outside.  On my knees on the bricks: spongy moss presses dew into the denim.  Totally silent.  Neither the smell of my soup-pot nor the rattle of the radio is out here.

* * * *

Thanksgiving in Squaw Valley.  No snow.  Warm sun on decks.

On “Black Friday” I climb alone above all the waterfalls in canyon, where nothing moves, no animals, no sounds.  Cold air sinking along creek bed.

* * * *

Consequence of scientists’ new Multiverse* Theory:

(*that there isn’t just a single universe; that ours is one of a billion trillion possible universes that have existed, from a billion trillion Big Bangs foaming up through eternity, all generated randomly.)

Scientists suggest that the “miraculous” existence of our unique, improbable universe is explained by trial-and error in the Lawrence-Welk-bubble-machine Profusion of “Big Bangs” in eternity: an inexhastible variety of universes is always spewing forth into time-space; so eventually one of these random-trial universes would have contained, accidentally, a lucky bit of carbon and a few other ingredients (the right kind of gravity, the right proton mass, etc.) to come up with a livable planet, in what we feel to be a logical, geometric space, a stable space.  This idea is supposed to rule out the supernatural agency of a designing “god.”

The further, interesting possibility is of a RADICAL anthropic theory: that I alone, personally, am the existential focus, among billions of dismissed universes and merely heuristic universes.  I’m in the only possible universe: the one containing ME.  Call this “Anthropic Solipsism”:

It’s natural and inevitable that I should exist, because this is the universe “I”happen to exist in, and be conscious of.  All those billions of “possible” universes, no matter how outlandish, were also “INEVITABLE” universes.  (It’s an axiom of multiverse thinking that anything possible is inevitable, in the logarithm of infinite trial-and-error.)  In this particular universe, “I’ myself am, like God, the sine qua non.

Such an Anthropic Solipsism is a cousin to the “atman” of Hindu thinking, the Self who is the entire Web of Indra stretched glittering through eternity.  Also it’s cousin to Niezsche’s “Eternal Return.”  (Nietzsche: he was ahead of all this.)

Two difficulties of this Anthropic Solipsism are (1) the autonomy and the consequentiality of the sensed world, and (2) the stubborn, and fascinating, problem of the existence of others.  Are those pedestrians on Columbus Avenue just spear-cariiers in my own personal opera?  Figments of my imagination?  No, they evidently have autonomy.  And consequentiality.  In the summary above, the pronoun you, gentle reader, could be substituted for every I.

(This is assuming I have a reader out there, in the Internet’s cold starry spaces.  A you who is more than “me.”)  (I have a faith that there’s “Something Besides Myself,” which is the faith that leads to all others.)

* * * *

Nov. 20. McEvoy Ranch harvest party.  The day is blustery and cold in North Marin, and the long table is merry.  That every instant of life is woven of “Dissatisfaction” is the Buddhist principle of Dukkha.  It’s even here at the banquet table.

The Aryans who invented the word Dukkha were a nomadic people, arriving in history on ox-drawn carts, and their word -kha was the name for the axle-hole in their cart.  A good  (su-) axle-hole gave you a smooth ride; a badly shaped (du-) axle-hole gave you a bumpy ride.

[so: sukkha is contentment and a comfy ride, dukkha its opposite]

A “kha” was just an empty space, or socket or hole.  [The crucial thing, if you’re inventing a wheel.]  Later in Sanskrit, “kha” meant not just hole but the entire “sky,” “space,” “heavens,” this vast socket we’re vouchsafed.

All of life is “dukkha” because it’s a bumpy ride.  We don’t fit smoothly into this space.

* * * *

Driving home from the harvest party.

On Highway 49 is a sign of the season: the “DRIVE-THRU NATIVITY” placard (with arrow) at the roadside.

* * * *

Wed, November 16, 2011

11:07 AM – I’m working and Brett calls, “Louis?  It’s a gorgeous beautiful day out there.  And they’re predicting snow is coming, and I wonder if we shouldn’t spend a couple of hours in the garden, getting everything ready for winter.”

So it does turn out, and so the entire afternoon goes, with Barbara set up in the sun in a canvas chair outside our deer-fencing, the pick-up truck parked beside us with its dashboard radio keeping us informed of the Dow and the Nasdaq and the Middle East, I wearing the same thermal underwear I slept in last night, the cats capering, the shadows growing long over the meadow, both of us slipping and sliding on the slick of fallen tomatoes and rotten pumpkin guts in the mud, hacking at vines and stalks and dragging them to the compost heap, or to the edge of the woods if they’re weedy.  Tonight, now, the candles are blown out; all are in bed; I made calamari with capers and lemon for dinner, and the recycling is out on the road, and the animals are all in.

* * * *

November 15, 2011

Cavendish leaves a return message on phone machine, regarding Thanksgiving invitation:  Yes, he does have other invitations for that day, but he would gladly prefer ours, and to spend the day with us, because we are his “home team.”

* * * *

Dash and Mortality:

Dash in the past year has seen his dog die in an accident and be gently laid down on the grass outside the backdoor; his cat Scout vanish as coyote-snack; his other cat JuiceBag disappear as either coyote- or bobcat-snack; his Uncle Tad vanish while in the far-away state of New York, swept away by this thing called Heart Attack; his grandfather Oakley die in a long hushed process of degeneration offstage.

At the dinner table tonight, an anecdote from 1975 was being told, involving the death of a seven-year-old boy.  I was watching Dashiell’s eyes shine in the candlelight as he listened.

The speaker remembered the news of the death arriving, how she was playing with her friends in the alley when she heard the news, “But I was young and I didn’t know what death is.”

The only question Dash asked was, “How old were you then?”

Oh, eleven or something.

Kids of course encounter death right away, first thing, in their earliest stories and rhymes most colorfully. Anyway I wanted to interrupt, at the I-didn’t-know-what-death-is, to tell him, “Dash, everybody knows what death is, no matter how young they are.  But also, nobody knows what it is, no matter how old they are.”

* * * *

Death has been so much my study; so much my special friend; so much my specialty, my schtick, my medicine, my bailiwick, my sweaty pillow, my rehearsal.  It’s interesting that “the actual thing” can’t be anticipated, even by somebody who thinks he’s the most diligent philosopher.  It’s an absolute incalculable.

* * * *

November 11, 2011

Dash, class clown.

His new thing is to go around the playground “asking for sugar.”  He comes up to people with open arms, and pleads, “Gimmeh some sugah, Pawmpkin,” in a moaning whimper.

Some do give him a hug.  Most, he complains, squeal, “Ick. Get away from me.”

* * * *

November 6, 2011

The economy:

Cinder-block hut behind the Chevron station, the spot where the old video-rental place failed, a new “Oriental Health Massage” has opened and turned on its little magenta-neon OPEN sign.

In a town where Caucasian college-grad masseuses want eighty or ninety dollars for a massage, this place is offering – for $19.99 – an hour full-body massage with foot-soak and shiatsu “reflexology.”

This is not the naughty kind.  It’s legit.  They’ll drive out-of-business the locals. Redecoration of the video store has been minimal.  They’ve put in a black carpet and painted the room black, but it’s just an old video store, with perforated acoustic-tile ceiling.  Paper screens are the only partitions separating customers.  For atmosphere (since it is always necessary, constantly, to play Pachelbel’s Canon in G, as performed on a Mellotron synthesizer) they’ve set up a boombox on a black vinyl barstool.  I, as is routine, fell in love with the devoted masseuse.  No English is spoken.  Absolutely none.  You can tip enormously, you can bow in a slight reference to the “Namaste” of Asian custom, but nothing suffices to express gratitude.

* * * *

November 4, 2011

Bright sunshine after a rainy night.

The annual ring of chantarelles encircles the birch tree, and will take all week to expand in a ripple over the meadow.

The maple tree by the pump house is on fire.

Brett and I are to meet with a notary public in town this afternoon, where we will sign our “Last Will and Testament,” and our “Living Will and Living Trust,” with Cavendish and Liz as witnesses.

The house is overrun by 11-yr-old boys today.  They’ve been eating pizza, all four of them in the mud room; then they adjourned to Dash’s computer to Google things; now are back in the mudroom doing exercises.  The YouTube page up on Dash’s computer is:

“GET SIX-PACK ABS IN SIX MINUTES WHILE SITTING ON YOUR COUCH.  THIS WORKS.”

* * * *

October 31, 2011

Back in Nevada City.

Cold night.

Today, a county-dump trip:

Put up upstairs storm windows, light pilot in living-room stove, cover swamp-cooler with canvas, caulk leaks in tin porch-roof.

* * * *

October 30, 2011

In Squaw:

1 – Frame for second-bedroom bed;

2 – Floor-cleats to hold washing-machine in place, keep it from creeping in spin cycle;

3 – Bedstead for rock-room bed;

4 – Get clear caulk;

Push old mattress off the deck and watch it (all in slo-mo!) miraculously leap and leap downhill, on its corners, all the way to the lower road, like a gymnast’s handsprings and round-offs.

Visit Alpine, to consider it as site for writers conference.

* * * *

October 25, 2011

Sharp frost.  Taking screens out of upstairs windows, lowering sashes that have been up all summer.

In the garden, an abundance of tomatoes.

All four big golden pumpkins have had voles delving in them.  Total loss.

Eggplants, peppers, cucumbers are still producing.

And late handfuls of yellow summer-squash, small as ping-pong balls, which might be tender, or sweet (or both — or neither).

(Running a kitchen out of a garden turns out to ask a lot of flexibility and resourcefulness, in the plan of cooking.)

The Ag-Industrial complex — whose triumph my mother’s generation is guilty of acceding to, grateful for TV dinners and Tang — really did change our souls.  Today many lack the heritage to make a real meal. (As I do.  I’ll be cutting open those mystery squash while the oil is already sizzling in the pan, prepared for the possibility of disappointing my family once again.)

* * * *

October 25, 201I

Working indoors today.  Laptop on a desk, upstairs in the vacant east bedroom.

–Intensifying the little “oedipal” section in “Assistant,” perhaps overly.

–email from my agent: Farrar Strauss has passed on “Innocence” and I’m relieved, oddly

— flurry of emails regarding posthumous celebrity of Don Carpenter (Don would spit at it)

— Brett has been on a long, long phone conversation downstairs.

— She comes up, still talking on phone, and puts an envelope beside me, an automobile-insurance-bill envelope, with the following written vertically in ballpoint pen (and giving me a look, she leaves the room):

Eric

Is

Dead

(found by the

Truckee River)

in her beautiful handwriting. The message lies there beside my laptop.  How I cherish handwriting.  What do we have left, of each other – what do we leave behind on earth – besides our handwriting.  Yes, there’s the “content” of our messages, which perhaps might seem less perishable.  Content does seem to matter.  But there’s the lasting beauty of the medium itself, inscription.  The quick, informal, ballpoint pear-shapes and cherry-shapes, the efficient little stems and pistils and thorns, as a schoolgirl was trained in the California public school system in the late sixties.

* * * *

October 23, 2011

Four-thirty AM, in my trailer under the trees.  Moonless night.  The mountains all around are amazingly still suddenly.  They’ve always been, without my noticing.

No wind.  Laptop screen goes dim from inactivity, my hands floating in ready-to-seize poise, above plastic keyboard.  I sitting up straight on my squishy rubber beachball spine-saving seat.

Sometimes in my head the hectic roar of work ceases.  I’m at peace.  Moreover, it was always peace.  I realize that everything – including myself, and even including all the violence – is exactly where it ought to be, doing exactly what it should, from the Microwave Background on in.

(There are times when I’m in the very Cloud of Unknowing, but also, sometimes it’s just tinnitus.)

(It’s always just tinnitus.)

* * * *

San Francisco, October 20, 2011

$40/night.  North Beach Hotel, bathroom-down-the-hall, on Stockton above a massage parlor and a Mailboxes Etc.

Elaborate bedbug prophylaxis isn’t possible.  And I’m not going to try helpfully mentioning the water problem at the front desk, because it’s not the kind of place where you offer constructive criticism.  Those people at the front desk, they surely know all about it anyway.

They gave me a backside room, so it’s quiet.  By lamplight I’m in bed (there’s no other fixture besides a bed in the room) reading Malamud’s “The Assistant,” propped up against my pancake-stingy pillow.  This particular paperback edition is fifty years old (SIGNET Books, 50¢, “. . . Good Reading for the Millions!”), and its binding liberates each page I turn.  The binding-glue, fragile as the golden lacquer holding dead insects together, releases each page as I turn it.  So Malamud’s story of Jews and the old racism of old New York seems an experience I can only have once, and never go back and repeat.  Little harvest of loose pages on the bedside table.

* * * *

San Francisco

Another morning at Macondray Lane, hauling out very old construction debris, extracted from the eternally shady slot between the two buildings.  This rottenness smells great, smells like ancient SFO.

Packing the bed of Tad’s truck, building a tall rick of rotten wood, lashing it down when the pile is complete.  Lashing it fast for the gales of Interstate-80.

Soon, my salade a truite fumé for lunch at the corner patisserie, big double-capp for the road.

(Tour guide leads a gaggle of auslanders along Macondray Lane, dispensing literary misinformation.  “So this is the actual house.  Can’t you just imagine Miss Madrigal living here?”  I hold my tongue, haul my loads of garbage, say Excuse me as I pass.)

* * * *

The Round Table lunch.  What had once been a pageant at Trader Vic’s (in the opulent secret back room, a-glitter like a museum with trophies and weaponry and shrunken heads, with an actual “round table”) has now shrunk to a side table at Capp’s Corner.  The camaraderie of people who never did get into it for the glory.

* * * *

October 17, 2011

Kitchen.  Nevada City.

In late October there comes an afternoon when the cricket starts singing at midday, in the glade, because he has discovered a twilight and coolness.

But it’s still summer here on the knoll, only 50 yards away.

Screen door.

Brett. With laptop at the kitchen table.

I have shown up to help her write an email persuading the Squaw ski-corp people that (like those in Aspen, Sun Valley, Park City) our little art gang ought to be viewed as a cultural asset.  Like a precious mineral deposit there for exploitation.  Like natural-gas deposits they could frack.  Or like the wildflowers, a tourist attraction.

Phone rings.  It’s Kait Klaussen!  Brett gets out of her bad-posture writing slouch.  With phone on shoulder, pours herself some white wine, drops in an ice cube, and, with phone, goes to the living room.

The little white dog, who had been sleeping at her feet under the kitchen table, reckons up the change of afternoon venue, and he bestirs himself to follow her into the living room.  Drops down at her feet.

* * * *

Uganda now, too:

President Obama today [10-17-11] orders 100 special-ops troops into Uganda, to help quench the “Lord’s Resistance Army.”

(Who, until now, really cared about the outrages of the “Lord’s Resistance Army”?)

Well, you drivers of automobiles, think about this:

Geologists have discovered that 2.5 to 6 billion barrels of oil lie in Uganda under Lake Albert.  This is the biggest such discovery in two decades in sub-Saharan Africa.  It will not appear in your evening news show.

So it is.  We’re now committed to Uganda.  To “Uganda’s welfare.”  In June we also promised drone aircraft to Uganda, so that assassinations may happen in the hi-tech manner without the presence of a human being.  All as part of a new $45 million military aid package to this place Uganda with the oil.

Your casual driving – and your summertime roar of air conditioners and all the rest of it – are – also – why the ancient city of Baghdad and the Ogoni people of Nigeria have been humiliated and poisoned and decimated.  And the Ecuadoran jungle and the Gulf of Mexico and the coral reefs of the Pacific and the Caribbean and the polar ice caps.

If you’re cold in the evening, put on a sweater.  Don’t crank the heat and then go around in a T-shirt.  This is very basic.

Madison Avenue and the marketing-business exist to “create desire artificially,” desire where there had been no desire.  And they estimated you correctly.

* * * *

October 13, 2011

No work yesterday.  Rather spent day alone in Squaw Valley in winterizing chores.

Left Nevada City in the AM before light.

Came back by nightfall, unpacked myself from pick-up cab, taking pleasure in aches and pains well-earned.

Take-out Chinese food for dinner.

So, for breakfast this morning, mu-shu pork cold from a white carton, standing on dewy lawn.

Nice adjective:

Brett, in nightgown at the foot of the stairs, explaining why she, too, wants to go up to Squaw soon, “I just have all these little diggly projects I’m not handling,” while the tips of her fingers nibble each other.

October Sixth, 2011

Dark days of constant rain.  This is just about the season when the salmon will be thrashing uphill in the shallow fast Yuba, and I think of these days as salmon days, because even up here in the breathable troposphere, everything is wet and slimy and cold and churned-up turbid.  The females (the underwater ones) will be bashing their noses against the cobbles at the riverbottom making nests for their eggs.  I’ve watched this.  They succeed in making shallow trenches, at the cost of a lot of nose-skin shredding.

* * * *

October 3, 2011

Northern Pacific storm system approaches.  Today dawned clear, but with a saturating dew.  All is drenched.  Direct sunshine may never dry the dew.  Distances are misty.

Midday, serious dimness closes in.

Did my duty.  Walked the whole irrigation line in the silence of overcast afternoon inspecting for swampy patches, stopping to listen for air-leaks’ sucking underground.  All is quiet.

Came home with one little forest artifact.  A raccoon mandible (the rest of its old dry carcass lay at a distance).  Had been attacked and dined on by some coyote or bobcat.  The jewel-like tiny incisors and canines and molars, still set firm in bone, polished to purity by the cruelty and greed of the ecosystem.

* * * *

October 3, 2011

Another Hortatory Sermon (like the clothesline thing):

This is about “biodiesel” (i.e., actual vegetable oil) (not that Iowa “ethanol”):

A regular old Mercedes-Benz 240D or a Volkswagen diesel can burn 100% Biodiesel.  (Or, if you like, any admixture with gas-station fossil-diesel.)

Such an old car can be had for 2 thousand bucks on the Internet.  Look on CraigsList.

Go back to the days of no-airconditioning, when you sweated a little.

We’re the problem.  We’re it.  We’re the beast.  We think we’re not ’cause we voted for Obama.  Or we think we’re “recycling” our “Fiji Water” bottles.  We think we’re “green”

What good will be all your rueful, wise insights into the usual evening news report if those insights are to have no consequences?  Try something.  Do something.  One-by-one change our poisonous little lives.  Or our poisonous “magnificent” lives, if that’s how we prefer to see ourselves.  We think we’re not the problem maybe ‘cause we watch PBS.  But we are.

1. A) The old diesel engines don’t require conversion.  Just pour in the biodiesel.  Mix it in with the regular gas-station “fossil-diesel,” if you like.
2. B) Biodiesel is made from any old (otherwise discarded) vegetable matter, agricultural waste.  Soybean, sunflower, canola, non-food grade nuts or seeds, waste cooking oil.
3. C) Biodiesel is biodegradable. (If theExxon Valdezhad spilled biodiesel, there’d have never been any problem, on that day in Prince William Sound.)
4. D) We don’t have to use up important food-crops for its manufacture, like corn.  (In this way, it’s unlike so-called “ethanol,” whose production is causing starvation worldwide while profiting Iowa farmers.  And which causesadditionalenvironmental wreckage).
5. E) Burning vegetable oil, Americans won’t have to systematically kill people and squash beautiful ancient cultures in far-off countries, just for the wherewithal for an errand to the store. There might have been no need for “Shock and Awe” over the ancient city of Baghdad.
6. F) Vegetable oil burns 78% cleaner than regular fossil diesel (EPA figures).  The smoke that does come out of a diesel tailpipe is “attached carbon” (sequestered carbon).  It’s soot, not carbon monoxide, and it settles to earth.
7. G) Biodiesel has higher lubricity, making for longer engine life.  (Also, better gas-mileage, and competitve prices per-gallon.)
8. H) A Mercedes-Benz is a famously unkillable, dependable ride, and also a famously swanky ride.  Some models require ascot.

Cost of an old CraigsList Mercedes:                            $2400

Cost of cosmetic upholstery renovations:              $  320

Cost of minor bodywork:                                          $  160

Cost of complete brakes overhaul:                            $  500

Cost of complete wheelbase overhaul:              $1800

* * * *

October 2, 2011

(Where’s Cavendish?  Haven’t seen him all summer.  Haven’t had any lively conversation around here since “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” Maybe bad weather will bring him around.)

* * * *

October 1, 2011

The space heater is kicking in, for early AM hours, but I’m still working in the trailer in the woods.  Despite charnel-house smell of some dead mammal under the floor.

Bright cool quick days of October!  The temps are down, suddenly twenty degrees, shoals of scalloped clouds in the sunset are attacking the (fingernail-paring) moon over the big madrone tree.

Mudroom door is now so heavily shellacked with coats of “Man O’ War Marine Varnish,” it will look like a cinnamon-sticky-bun for years.  For dinner tonight, linguini with clams.  (One of Oakley’s old favorites and so we’re all soft-hearted about it.)  Seasoned with ground-up red peppercorns from Tracy’s Arizona bush.

Deep twilight.  Amy Goodman’s radio show in the kitchen.  The little white dog, Frightener of Bears, sits up in Sphinx position keeping an eye on the uneventful meadow outside in the gloaming.

* * * *

September 30, 2011

Next week, rain system coming in.

Temperatures to fall and stay there.

The tomatoes are looking great in this morning’s blazing warmth.

Nine-in-the-morning.  The hour when some things are just commencing.  And when other things have been hard at it for a long time already.  I come around the corner and the almost-empty clothesline is swaying, trembling, Brett disappearing into the backdoor, shoulder mounded with dry sheets.

(Question.  Don’t kittens get bee-stings?  Mornings in the clover, they pounce and bat.)

* * * *

September 24, 2011

Setback.  Sales of “Radiance” have been low.  So while “Innocence” will be published, it will have no hardcover edition.  Goes straight to paperback.  However, “Radiance” will have a paper edition of its own.  So I’ll get my wish: Uniform editions of that pair of metaphysical efforts, Radiance and Innocence, so consonant, assonant, in their innards.

A first autumn coldfront from the Gulf of Alaska makes Sierra weekend cool and sprinkly.  I pull in lawn furniture, decide to return 4X8 lattice to Ridge Feed for refund, pessimistic of the book business, harvest all the apples from that one veg-garden appletree, to keep them from tempting the bear.

(In moving firewood, I used my new tractor-cart with trailer hitch.  The right wheel fell off after fifty feet.  Literally fell off.  It’s new.  From Sears.  I transported the wood instead with Tad’s dependable truck.)

* * * *

September 23, 2011

Irrigation conduit repaired.  Two long afternoons of digging and tree-root-chopping in the woods across the road and uphill.  Big roots were the cause of the break.  In ninety-degree heat I’m wearing the tall sweaty boots because I’m afraid of rattlesnakes.

(Not without cause.  I see them sometimes.  Muscular-looking diamondbacks, in these mountains.  That they’re “just as afraid of me as I am of them” is a truism, and unhelpful.)

I had not been looking forward to the uphill hike, packing in the tools of excavation.  But with Tad’s truck I was able to come close via fire-road, by just barely squeezing under a fallen pine that lay over (above) the road.  Tad’s radio-antenna flexed backward under the tree trunk and sprung back up free.

Manzanita scratches the side-panels, but what’s a truck for?

* * *

September 22, 2011

No work this morning.  Or at all today.  Rather manual labor.

1) redwood lattice for the doors of the old Merrill woodshed;

2) irrigation line. (Deep in the woods, uphill toward ditch, the forest floor is making a gurgling soda-straw-sucking sound, about eight inches underfoot); for this I’ll have to pack tools in, as the fire road is half-mile distant;

3) sun-damaged mudroom door: quart Marine Teak Oil

4) Brett’s Toyota, to Foothill Small Car for oil and lube

* * * *

[RE: bearshit.  Again I’ll never be a Real Mountain Man, because a Real Mountain Man would have stuck his finger into the heap to see how warm it was.]

* * * *

September 20, 2011

Fine day.  Run through goat-escape chapter all morning, swim in river alone, play guitar (loud), pesto-and-butternut squash.

* * * *

My little dobro concerts in the evenings, which for me are just practice, or something to do while dinner cooks, are for Barbara hugely sentimental.  She loves that droopy sound.  Sits out on the brick verandah with moist eye, great sighs, cheered and talkative.

Her favorites:

“Battle Hymn of the Republic”

“Downtown” (a la Petula Clark but very droopy and slo-mo)

“Shendandoah”

“Stand By Your Man” (Miss Wynette)

* * * *

SORGE:

1. A) Long hot days in the foothills.  Mornings are cool.

I’m about two miles out from home and I come across a small bearshit in the middle of the road, very fresh, still wet, surely less than an hour old – which I realize I’d been smelling as I approached – and furthermore that it smelled sweet, like, say, a pie had been left out in the long heat of day.  Hot fruit-sugars in sun.  Half-digested seeds and pits, cherry-stones with red flesh, the little wet heap in my path would be frankly appetizing, if I were some creature much lower on the food chain.  It smells like breakfast.  But I walk on.  Not feeling experimental.

1. B) The older I get.  Greeting a stranger’s newborn baby (as in a Starbucks in San Rafael this week) is a topmost peak life experience, wherein boundaries of self dissolve – (under the pram sunshade the little grouchy Churchill-face wadded deep in the depths) – Greeting a baby is an experience that, for sheer purity of exaltation, is getting to be way up there among or above the top two or three, way above skiing the Prospector run as a fifteen-year-old in Park City in the sixties, or getting book notices, or playing covers in a bar-band to make the girls dance.  The inner storm of joy: Whence comes this fantastic “empathy”?  I am evidently a separate person from that baby in Starbucks; a separate bag-of-skin, with a different fate;  moreover, as a consistent, definable “person,” I am a separate political and legal entity and biological competitor here, so why am I so delighted with strangers’ babies, or the yumminess of bearshit?  Why take any interest, at all, in loss of “self”-boundaries?  The phenomenon “empathy” feels likenot onlyan evolutionary accident/strategy, but rather “empathy” feels central, dominant, originary.  It’s a huge learning tool, for one thing.  Empathy would evolve, in a species, with some survival-advantage pay-off in natural selection, socially.  But also, in the case of this “spiritual” creature “man” (i.e., evolved with the new ability to see itself seeing itself; and to see how it sees itself seeing itself), empathy opens a window back to ontology.  We envision “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”  It puts a spring in your step that you may feel you were meant to have.  For no particular reason.

* * * *

September 15, 2011

By a little Googling, I see I did lift the word “Sorge” from the Blockhead Meatphysician.  An unconscious theft.  A print was left in a student’s memory decades ago, now at last filled with mineral matter.

[However, I think I’m spreading the concept “Sorge” around in ways the Meatphysician never intended.]

* * * *

September 11, 2011

Visit to Mill Valley.  Ghosts of dead friends wherever I go these days.  I treat myself to opulent breakfast at the still-central bookstore The Depot.  Pretty moms accumulate at a table on the patio, parking their empty strollers outside as they’ve just dropped kids off at daycare.  Or their luxury cars at curb.  The talk, at their table, is of how Burning Man was this year.

* * * *

September 4, 2011

Hot days in the Sierra foothills.  A long string of days in the nineties.  People are staying inside in their dim back rooms.

Only the sound of Rainbird sprinklers in the meadows, insects in the hollyhock spires.  Brett, who during June and July sat at her computer under fluorescent lights in Squaw’s windowless rooms, is out in the vegetable garden barefoot in the last strike of afternoon sun.  I sent her out to get summer squash for soup, but she’s been out there for half an hour, plucking and pruning and watering and tying up messy vines.  Tomato plants rage around her as tall as her head.  Corn stalks way taller.  Slap of hose-water on dirt, and bare feet.

* * * *

Sept. 1

Artichokes fail.  They are inexplicably stunted and fruitless.

Asparagus, in raised beds, has a strong foothold and is at last flourishing.

Corn (from commercial nursery seedlings) has done well in raised beds, as if pests don’t think to look, up there.

Unhappy event: It turns out that the leaves of the butternut squash (big as dinnerplates, spiky with bristles) are suddenly delicious to the grazing deer at night.  Never again plant squash outside the fence.

* * * *

August 25, 2011

Back home in the foothills.  Again in the grip of wetter thicker air.  The woods – its paths – are tinseled thick with cobwebs.  The overgrown tall meadows are so busy with bees – the humble little brown European honeybee – it makes a roar in the morning.  If you stare at the grass and let your eyes glaze, the grass everywhere is glittering with bees.  Get the mower going.  Mow the meadows, murder the standing Queen Anne’s Lace and lupine and Shasta daisies and orchidaceous sweet-pea blossoms.  But refrain from mowing the west meadow, to leave something for the bees.

Going back into a rewrite of my end-of-the-world novel is such a scary prospect.  I’ve headed instead into “Cleaning My Studio” for a day.  An entire afternoon.  Clearing wood-rat nests out of drawers, etc.

Curious: the rodent and I have coexisted peacefully over the years (with the qualification that he keeps dying and being replaced by another, while I persist as, apparently, the same organism each day).  And in my sweeping and Chlorox-swabbing, I notice that, as in other years, he has worked hard, lovingly, to cache all the brite green pellets of poison.  The D-Con, from Ridge Feed and Supply, which has reliably brought about the death of generations of his family, has been carefully saved in various favorite niches and grooves of the studio.

Getting a NY Times review used to be such a big deal.  All the clippings needed to be archived.  Where they could turn yellow and brown under plasticene.  This summer I found it irksome just dragging myself out to the 7-Eleven at the highway to buy the Sunday Times where my own book was noticed.  Waste of automobile fuel.  Waste of my time.

* * * *

Free Will vs. Determinism:

This apparent dilemma is just the whorl you get stuck in when you’re asking a badly framed question.

Free will and determinism coexist.  But at different levels of nature’s organization.

Analogy: On a subatomic level there is no “time,” while larger-scale events do take place in entropic “time.”

* * * *

August 21, 2011

Alone by myself in Squaw.  I’m the last one to go.

The valley feels empty.  Living on fridge leftovers.  Taking a last pass at the sister-novel to “Radiance.”  Tomorrow I’ll convert it to a pdf, put it in an email, and click “send.”

Minor repairs and deck-staining.  Broken drawer.  Broken cabinet door.  The window-blinds mechanism remains unfixed, waiting for parts.  The “saddle-valve” has a slow-drip leak under the house.  The missing cover to swamp cooler finally turns up.  Me and one dobro, in the evenings.  Dinner alone at PlumpJack reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The Habit of Being.”

Under the Annex deck: Happy to see the same old jigsaw-puzzle piece as in other years.  It’s still down there where every September I store the old boards that have held down the summertime bamboo shade material.  It’s impossible to tell, anymore, what drama this puzzle piece completes.  The laminated cardboard has been swollen in the Sierra winters and the spring rains and thaws, and then during the summers popped unlaminated, so now in the flinty dust under the deck it stands like a little precariously-stacked petit four.  Since about 1998, a child’s jigsaw puzzle somewhere has lacked a piece.

* * * *

August 13, 2011

The Truckee River sparkles cruelly.  Cloudless sky all summer.  Go off alone and sit on a boulder.  It’s easy to be charitable toward the frail, in society, when they present themselves in the standard cliché form of the poor or the downtrodden.  It’s harder to empathize when human frailty manifests itself as Lady Gaga or Donald Trump, Narcissism Victorious, The Latest Thing.  This is the patience that is asked of a worker in the Culture Biz.  So I’m sitting on this boulder and a small bird, with his own worries and fears and hopes and his own particular anxieties, alights on a dry creosote bush, twenty feet away (possibly a mountain chickadee but with peculiar yellow markings).  As close as I come to saluting this bird is just to keep an eye on him.

* * * *

July 27, 2011

Two new kittens play on the carpet, yet unnamed, and too identically marked to tell apart.

Nobody is here, in this week of lull.  Just Brett and me.  Hunter and Zoey in Nevada City, Tonkovich/Alvarez in Point Reyes, Dash on a long sleep-over.

The bear somehow gained entrance and came into the kitchen last night.  While Brett and I slept, he got muffins, a bag of dry catfood, and a big can of wet dogfood (which, by the tooth-and-claw method, he popped and peeled, leaving the open steel scroll on the deck).

Overturned wicker chair.

It was the brave little white fluffy dog who became aware of him and chased him out of the living room, making the Ursine Mass leave so fast, his weight in getting traction displaced the wall-to-wall carpet.

* * * *

July 24 ——– My annual deep, three-day flu.  A day in bed.  Too dizzy even to read.  There’s a certain stage in a feverish illness where you get so low, you scrape with basic moral and spiritual deficiency: From the perspective of the damp pillow, all my life can look mistaken, futile, and short.  Which it is, of course.

Dash, in putting himself to bed at night, says he has piled all his “favorite things” in one big heap beside his pillow.  So when he wakes up, it will all be before him.  That was his expression: “It will all be before me.”

* * * *

July 20, 2011

Cavendish is up in Squaw to hang lights for poets’ performance space.

And Cavendish rescues me again.  Old Mercedes diesel has an aging starter-motor – engine won’t turn over – and Cavendish finds a particularly heavy wrench to bang on the metal cylinder bolted to the bottom of the engine.  This, the starter motor, is merely stuck at a point in its cycle and needs a clang.

(Remoinds me of how he showed me, on a day when I was earsplittingly using an electric saw to cut corrugated steel for my woodshed, how a true Mountain Man knows the secret of slicing steel, easy as butter and just as quiet, by drawing a wire through it.)

* * * *

July 20, 2011

For Theological and Ontological Questions obviously, basically, one needs a criterion of “truth.”

What is the essential “truthiness” of something that makes it “true”?

The most conventional theory of truth is the Correspondence Theory (that a true statement “corresponds to” a state of affairs in the world)

About this, Wittgenstein said something interesting.  He said it amounts to “a picture theory of meaning” – that is, statements can be judged true or false depending on whether they match a “picture” representing that reality.

Therefore, if we say that the statement “God exists” is true if and only if God exists, then we’re saying that we have a “picture” of a state of affairs in the world, to which we compare the statement. But in the case of things unpicturable – quarks, for example, and “me” for example – the Truth Criterion breaks down.

* * * *

July 18

Poets in the valley.  Galway couldn’t make it and I really fear we’ve had our last go-round with him.  David Lukas, shouldering his telescope on tripod.  Western Tanagers.  David (as if shamanistically) attracts fly-over of the golden eagle that lives remote in the crags of Granite Chief.  Big eight-foot wingspan circles over us with never a flap of wings, closer than anyone has ever seen him.

* * * *

July 5, 2011

Back in Squaw Valley.  Back on the novel.

Touring new premises of ski resort, trying to imagine workshop spaces, disliking the rumble of the building’s kitchen exhaust fans.

The same old welcome-letter for participants needs to be vetted.

Purchase lumber and hardware for repair of Annex cupboards.

* * * *

July 1, 2011

Today in a mall in the midwest, in Iowa.

I observe a red-haired girl, no doubt a co-ed here at big state school, a typical Iowa Artemis, personifying vitality and beauty and grace, as she crosses the air-conditioned enclosed “food court.”

Since, lately, I’ve been pondering those abortion criteria of Peter Singer’s, I find I’m asking myself why this girl’s life is valuable, or worth preserving, and why I might think so. Why mightn’t she have been efficiently aborted, leaving more resources for the rest of us. (These days, since I’ve published a novel involving abortion, it seems I need to have opinions in this impossible matter.)  I think that the first consideration is: I find I oddly “empathize” with this girl.

– At what moment a fetus becomes “human”

– At what moment a brain-dead old woman ceases to be “human”

– At what moment my paranoid-schizophrenic psychopath friend goes beyond the pale and no longer merits treatment as a “human”

Here is the moment: We enter into “humanity” at the moment we enter into “Care”.  Care is my banner concept, to enwrap also the “empathy” I feel for the girl.  A massing cloud of Care is humanity; humanity isn’t merely the citizenry of bodies, standing around at 98.6 degrees.  The phenomenon of consciousness is a largely social organism (bodies in communication), rather than an individual soitary flickering.  But, more preciesely, Care is the social organism.  This thing “Care” is what we take on, when we live in spirit – slip slowly into it as embryos, slip away from it as octagenarians, in our wheelchairs in the sun.

In response to Singer:

Humanness is not “consciousness” – nor is it or “autonomy”  or “rationality” or any of those desiderata Mr. Singer names.  Rather, Careis the distinction we humans have. And we have it together. We have it only in concert.  We participate in it.  Our bodies participate, via the media of language and society.  I mean this word Care in the tone-of-voice of those earnest theologians of the sixties.  (Tillich-Buber-Eliade fashion, with their Heideggerian mother-tongue.)

So I’m coming to abortion.  This human characteristic Care – membership in it – is a humanness that accrues over time, even long after birth.  Initially, in the years from our first diploid conception to the onset of the age of reason, we possess this capacity “Care” in solitude, almost in solipsism, rather than in community – it feels to us, at first, only that something matters, i.e., something must be cared about. Then in fuller maturity, Care becomes extended as a social phenomenon through language and custom.  I propose Care as a serviceable word for this spiritual humanness because, in its connotations, it combines “worry” (care), “giving a damn” (caring), “responsibility” (care for), a certain “fretfulness” (cares), and “love and desire.”  These are all what we have for each other.  They are the radiant nimbus around the red-haired girl striding center-stage on the mall, because she’s desirable and lovable while also of course troublesome.

In this abortion/antiabortion debate, the biggest stumbling block (the mistake enshrouding the whole debate in darkness and confusion) is the universal misconception that we are supposed to acquire a “self” when we’re born.  This is construed as a legal and political entity, this self.  And a metaphysical entity.  The self is the most popular, most conventional illusion.  As we gradually enter into “Care,” we in fact enter selflessness. We lose our isolate unhappy specious “self,” in Care, when we care.  Care is what I share with the red-haired girl, in the cumulate cloud.  It’s the reason she wasn’t aborted, for one thing.

* * * *

[In keeping with nineteen-sixties theology – I found myself crossing from the mall onto the Big State college campus with the old German word rattlling around in my head “Sorgfáltig.”  Derives from “Sorge.”  If you’re sorgfáltig you’re “careful.”)  (A good thing to be.]

Sounds like a Heidegger Noun.  And I guess, that’s precisely thew sloppiness with which I would mean it.

* * * *

In cosmology, too: before the beginning of time, before time-space, before the possibility of possiblity, Something seems to have “cared.”

* * * *

June 26, 2011

Little two-year-old bear, cinnamon-colored, haggard after winter, comes out of the uphill wilderness onto the road, and Tracy phones me down in the Annex to warn me.  Nico and Aleksandra chase it downhill past the Annex; then we all gather on the Annex deck, like a reviewing stand, to watch it as it rambles around below us on the hill, lifting swarms of scolding jays wherever it goes, sniffing at a garage doorway, then climbing back up the hill, to the east of the house.  Nico throws rocks, but bear is groggily imperturbable/nonchalant.  A neighbor down the road is warned, and he comes out to bellow at it, and it shies further up the mountainside, behind Kevin’s house, then behind the Sproehnles’.  Sproehnle, on his deck with garden hose, is glad to greet it, because he happens to have a gun, “loaded for quail,” and he goes inside for it.  He comes back out and shoots either the bear or the treetrunk beside it, sending it scampering galumphing up the slope.

* * * *

June 26, 2011

Dashiell’s entry into summer camp.

Tomorrow I fly to Iowa City, book-peddling.

Towel on the deck railing.  Jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table.  Wind in the pine mountains.

* * * *

June 25, 2011

The “essential characteristics of personhood”  (Princeton Philosopher Peter Singer’s criteria, for sorting which people society ought to euthanize, abort, execute, or eugenically cull) are Rationality, Autonomy, and Self-consciousness.

OK. So, if something is to be a “person,” it must be (a) rational, (b) autonomous, and 9 © conscious of “itself.”

Of Singer’s three human characteristics, the first two – “rationality” and “autonomy” – are skills that can sometimes seem to slip away from even the most alert of us.  (Or, as concepts, crumble completely under the pressure of a close look.)  “Rationality” and “autonomy,” after all, might be illusions, fomented by society, abetted by shared language-conventions (illusions with practical consequences and reasons for being).  Really, some of us are not rational, or autonomous, maybe not ever, not for an instant.  (I include my sovereign self in that aspersion.)

The third “human” quality – self-consciousness – is perhaps the one characteristic we might feel assured we possess unfailingly and fundamentally.  But under a long close examination, even “self”-consciousness can be, in fact, chimerical.

Tonight, on another of my long luminous sleepless nights, I can hear two things as I lie here: my own heartbeat and the waterfall in the canyon a half-mile away.

Of the two of us, the waterfall will have the greater longevity.  Long after I’m gone, it will be admirable just in the way it is today.  Likewise, in the beauty competition, a thoughtful primate loses out to a waterfall. I’m not as unfailingly wonderful. Well, I may be an unaesthetic and a more rickety thing, comparatively, but I am supposed to be a more subtle spectacle than a waterfall.  I have virtues less visible.  Than a waterfall’s.

Nevertheless sometimes one would rather be a waterfall, objectively.  If it were a clean trade.

(Not that one would want to hasten the day.  For, of course, that is what’s in store anyway.)

==================

February 5, 2011

Two more afternoons pruning.  Dash and his mother go to a movie.

Finally the old pruning-hook of George Merrill’s breaks and can’t be fixed.  Resort to the newer one.  But keep the old one for parts.

 

 

* * * *

 

 

Feb. 2.  Cold. Clear, dry days, perfect for fruit-tree pruning.  Low sun of winter flickering in the pine branches.

Pruned apples severely.  Maybe I’ll regret it but I remember the advice of the Anderson Valley apple man in the San Francisco Ferry-Building market: a real fruitgrower prunes with a chainsaw only.

All afternoon, on the truck-dashboard radio (parked beside me), all the news is from Egypt – of riots, euphoria, revolution.  The perpetual betrayal of the poor seems essential to the cosmic drama.  As if the poor themselves colluded, in their own vindictive satisfaction-by-betrayal.

I’m hacking at branches, not bothering to preserve nodes and buds providentially.  Let this tree have a whole new life in April.  Meanwhile the two housecats – really the same cat in two incarnations leading Schrodinger-parallel virtual lives, Bag-Juice and Aplomb – follow me with friendly vigilance.  Get underfoot.  Tangle in my ladder-footing.  Recline in the meadow exactly where branches will crash down.  Bag-Juice is the kind of obese housecat who, when he drapes himself over a sawbuck, engulfs the entire thing.

* * * *

Something essentially American: homemade engineering skills.

It’s a homesteader thing: I can set out on an afternoon construction project without any kind of plan or blueprint or even a specific thought or vision in my head, yet, and just start banging things together.

I begin by simply dragging the old scrap-metal sheets out from behind the shed.  So I learn as I go along — about materials’ tensile strength, load distribution, bending moments, stress points, etc.  This kind of luxury is available in the American economy.  The guy on his acre.

(and without a single trip into town for hardware!)

* * * *

“Position and momentum do not commute”:

This (the predicament of a subatomic particle) seems to sum up the predicament of Time Itself.

Position and momentum do not commute.

* * * *

January 29, 2011

No work on novel again today.

Fixed the stove’s clogged propane orifice.

Fixed Dashiell’s shorted-out bedside lamp.

Used oil-based primer to paint window-glazing putty (pantry south window).

Wrote sketch of novel for publicity.

Walked the length of the irrigation, checking for wintertime problems.

Watched another exciting episode of Quantum Mechanics.

Framework for raised garden bed.

* * * *

January 23, 2011

Barbara: It’s still going on, the process of her getting younger every day, at eighty-seven.

On her own, she walks across to our place from her cottage in the morning to get coffee.  She makes dry remarks about the television news.  She doesn’t lie in bed all morning any more but gets up earlier and earlier.  Eats big meals.  Yesterday she seriously wanted to plan a trip to Greece.

* * * *

January, 2011

More fine weather. Still trying not to write, not anything serious. Watched another classroom lecture of Susskind’s quantum mechanics. Worked further on raised planting beds.  Took a shot at proofreading the Squaw brochure for Brett.  Chelsea the beautiful au pair comes “back home” for dinner.  Her same old funky car w/bumperstickers.

* * * *

Jan. 23

TODAY:

First of all, didn’t write.

– 1) -The good coffee and empty stomach.  The dark before the dawn

– 2) -Watched ninety more minutes of Susskind’s YouTube explanations of quantum physics.  Wonderful.  He skates back and forth before the Stanford chalkboard, happy and scowling.

– 3) – Started Cheap Meat in the pantry slow-cooker thing.

– 4) – Went to church.  The guest sermon was delivered by the departing Junior Warden of the church, whose name is Rich.  (I think a Warden in a church is the fellow who patches the leaky roof, replaces the defective toilet-flushing mechanism, gets keys duped.)  His sermon was anecdotal, sentimental, and in the end hortatory.  As usual I sneaked out.

– 5) -Ran two miles.  (No twinge of angina during the entire run.  I’m fine.)

– 6) -At the top of the meadow, I did some more sawing of old corrugated iron’s rusty panels, for raised garden beds.  Miserable work.  A special metal-cutting blade is necessary for the Skilsaw.  Sparks fly.  Excruciating, ringing screech.

I don’t want to incur hearing damage, so I went looking for cotton to stuff my ears.

No cotton.  None to be found anywhere.  Shall I destroy 40 Q-Tips to harvest enough cotton?  No, I find Brett’s Tampax supply, of course, and disembowel one of its fluff.  Also headphones.  On my headphones as I work, I’ve got Joanna Newsom’s pixilated sing-songs, performed on her big harp.

* * * *

Jan. 12, 2011

Idaho-Maryland Road for fill-up of biodiesel refined in Reno.  Muddy Mercedes jalopy, with empty winebottles clinking in the trunk because the next stop is East Main St., where three tall metal vats are in a storefront.

* * * *

Extravagant trip.  Great dinner at Macondray Lane: Glen and Alice walked over from Pacific Heights; Jason and Patricia from Sausalito; and Andrew and Lisa had driven all the way up from LA, bringing Louis to play with Dash.  Andrew and Lisa and Brett and I shopped at the Ferry building for salmon beforehand.  Drinks on the roof, looking out at Alcatraz.  This is all good luck.

* * * *

Now that we’ve bought a generator, one thing I’ll miss about power-outages is the squalor.  Candlelight’s perils and pandaemonium.  People wearing the same pajamas for work or play or sleep, with different costumes pulled over.  The parka I’m cooking in might be the parka I slept in.  And sleep in again tonight.

Advantages of such an “upgrade”: the Community of Writers won’t come to a halt.  And I’ll be recharging my computer and working.  All this is good.  Electricity is good..  But I’ll miss the backwardness of those quiet days.  The sabbath.  The boredom and thwartedness.

* * * *

To buy a gas-powered electric generator is to join the country bourgeoisie.  This whole neighborhood under a snowfall., in an outage, used to be silent, dark-at-night, bright-in-the-day.  To leave your hectic polluted kitchen and step outside, into the cold, was to enter sacred space.

Nowadays, whenever PG&E fails, the canyons and meadows all around can sound like a Hollywood movie location with generators roaring at various distances. Well, now the Joneses, on their property, have joined the general din.  But still plenty of hold-outs are out there in the hills all around, and I’m oddly grateful to them.

* * * *

Jan. 4, 2011.

Chest pains continue.  Sharp sun of January morning.

Deciding I ought to stop ignoring chest pains and ask doctor about them.  It’s probably stupid to do otherwise.  I take the midday trip (without mentioning it to anyone) to the Miner’s Family Health Clinic.  Stethescope.  Tapping at breastbone and shoulderblades.  Then lie down on the table on the starchy paper, get pasted with electrodes for a little EKG.  It’s a little toy EKG, just for this rural hospital, wheeled in on a busboy’s cart.  Nurse tapes me up and makes me remove all metal, including my wedding band – which literally hasn’t been off my finger since June 25, 1987.  It’s not that I’m all that uxorious, it’s just that over the years my knucklebone has widened or something.

To get it off, soap and a little skin abrasion were necessary, and I set the golden band on the blue formica, with its suds.  The nurse smiled.

Then, “back up on the table,” I have to lie under the electric tentacles barechested, and I am asked to be totally still for a minute.  In the corner of the ceiling, the acoustic tiles have circles of brown stain from an old roof leak.  The news, in the end, is that my heartbeat is regular, triumphant, slower-beating than most, because I get so much cardiovascular exercise, so I am to be sent away into the world again.  But that moment of lying down barechested without a wedding ring, it was an interesting ceremony of betrothal.  On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store looking for some outlandish treat for myself, something really de luxe, but my imagination failed me and I got an Odwalla drink (Mango Tango) and a locally manufactured whole-wheat bagel called “Great Grains,” that has an elusive sweetness.  Also paper lunchbags for Dash’s lunches, waxed-paper sandwich envelopes, Barbara’s favorite bran muffins, the usual jug of Woodbridge, and and stopped next door where the local syrah is decanted from big vats.

* * * *

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fool is in the house of mirth.  A dinner of herbs and love therewith.  Than a stalled ox and strife therewith.

* * * *

June 21, 2011

Brett has gone back down to Nevada City for the day.

Here, Dash and I hike as high as the third waterfall.  Higher than this, deep snows would stop us.

We sit in the cataract-mist and share our candy bars, then go back down.

All night in the dark, the roar of the melt comes from the canyon, remarkable volume of snowmelt, a constant freight-train of water plunging over cliffs in that delicate meeting of slopes where bare aspens’ distorted knees and elbows are just beginning to stretch themselves after snow crush.

* * * *

First week in Squaw:

Three cords firewood ($800 from Bushwhackers, free delivery)

Shade-structures over both decks

Oakley’s front gate, with cowbells, can be repaired for another year (sagging toward parallelogram)

Steel doors on both bear-proof garbage houses must be bent back into shape, as they won’t close properly

Install Brett’s office in Olympic House

Summer’s provisions at the Truckee Safeway: two shopping-carts-full

Unproductive mornings, picking at Response-to-Hawking essay, unwilling to reenter the novel

(Bit of good news: Newsweek and the Times will notice “Radiance”)

* * * *

June 12, 2011

Arrive in Squaw.

Bear damage in the Annex:

1) Shattered double-pane in door to deck;

2) Cabinet-fronts torn off neatly.  Looks easy to nail back up;

3) The expensive flip-top trash can still works fine.  But he

seems to have sat on it, or stepped on it, while living here, as the cylinder is

flattened in the middle, but I’m able to pop it out fat again and tap it into its old shape, so the pedal-operated flip-top mechanism works again.

* * * *

June 11, 2011

From earliest youth, a love of the desolate, the insensate, the dilapidated, the dust.

Because intimacy always characterizes eternity.  So it can be seen right here, in gutter litter, rainbleached-dry cigarette butts and oakleaf veins, total asperity.  Or in some common thing like a lost gum wrapper in the dirt — this was at a becalmed Sunday-afternoon construction site — a sawed-off 2×4 leaving its print, in baked-white mud that no one, not anyone, has ever turned his regard to.  Nor ever will!  Such a sight is of course equal to a Himalyan peak.

Nor, even, am “I” present to regard such a 2-by-4.  Nobody is here to see it, such is the moonscape.

Thoreau it was who noticed the prefix “crab-” (in crabapple) (and I, too, in crabgrass, suburbanly) and who wished for such wildness in himself, crabbedness’s sturdy adaptive qualities.  To be crabbed.

Blackberries conquering a fence.

“Poverty” is the aesthetic.  Really “poverty” is an elegance, ecologically.  Leanness and brokenheartedness and good-humor.  A hut, but tidily swept.  (While not neglecting beauty.)

For instance garlic and rosemary are easy.  They thrive on neglect.

The word Simplicity would be the Marketing-Angle “branding” of such an asperity, supposing any Martha Stewarts of the future were to try to interest women (or other of our aesthetic arbiters such as women) in, say, flattening an old tin soupcan to nail over a hole in the floorboards.  Let people think of it as “zen” if they like.  It’s coming anyway: a general peace-and-quiet and maybe even crabbedness.

* * * *

June 10, 2011

1) More soil shoveling.  Another cubic yard is heaped in the pickup.

2) Dash helps spackle the woodbox fascia.  Does a good job.

3) Mesh (galvanized gopher-wire) floor of second raised bed, stapled down with bent-over nails.

4) Brett’s trip to Squaw, to do battle with the CEO of the ski corp.

5) Fettucini.  Canned tomatoes, basil (wilted and singed and holey), a head of the volunteer garlic.  And salad of wild sweet-pea tops?  (Abundant in west meadow.)

Barbara:

At dinner (w/ Sands and Tracy) we talk of Brett’s meeting with the ski corporation.  They’re so big-time now, at the ski corp, they’ve hired a high-powered New York PR firm, and they want us to meet with them, because we’re a cultural asset.  “These are the kind of people,” the CEO says, “who can get ‘Sixty Minutes’ here to do a story on us.’”  Barbara, pulling despondently at her artichoke’s leaf, says, “We’ll have to wash our hair then.”

* * * *

June 8, 2011

Finish Stephen Hawking essay

Attend Dashiell’s fifth-grade “graduation ceremony”

Fill corrugated-iron troughs with commercial soil

Brett’s Toyota is flushed and drained of transmission fluid.

More of filling troughs with soil

Plantings:

Tomatoes

Artichokes

Zucchini

Melon

Butternut squash

Peppers

Cucumbers

Hunter and Zoey are in SF.  And Barbara and Tracy are at Sands’s for dinner.  So it’s just me and Dash and Brett in the kitchen eating ground-tiurkey burgers and broccoli.  Dash is upset, and inconsolable, over the misplacement of a pair of black denim pants.

* * * *

June 6, 2011

Another wintry day in Nevada City.  Rain and wind.  Hunter and Zoey are stuck in Squaw Valley, on the eastern side, as the summit has snowed.  Tracy is to arrive tonight by car.  Her long journey through Nevada in Oakley’s old Subaru wagon.  I will make thin soup of soba noodles, yams, scallions, salmon, snow peas.

* * * *

June 5, 2011

Mt. Shasta.  Heel blister.  2500-foot climb in sun and rain.

Too cold to sleep, in high desert, at lava beds

Coffee recipe of Gerald: dump grounds into boiling water; then, exactly at the moment of return-to-boil, pour a cup of cold water on, and the grounds all magically sink to the bottom.  Coffee to be ladled.

High winds and petroglyphs.

* * * *

Back home.  It’s looking like actual fallowness might be in store for our gardens this year.

Weeds poke through the mesh floors of my fresh-built long corrugated troughs, as they haven’t been filled with soil.  (Rainy cold long spring.  Distractions of “Radiance” publication and travel.  Onset of Community-of-Writers difficulties.)

The row of onions from last year keeps thriving.

* * * *

“For heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up, and up as down; behind as before, before as behind, on one side as the other.  Insomuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly.  For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.”

— The Cloud of Unknowing

* * * *

“Nowhere bodily, is everywhere ghostly.”

— The Cloud of Unknowing

* * * *

May 30, 2011

Now comes summer, sunlight to look forward to, peaks still sunny at 9:30 PM, the visits of many friends, the perpetual fiesta at Squaw, guitars unpacked.

But I think when I’m “old and grey and nodding by the fire,” the deepest times will have been the wintertime kitchen dinners when it was “just us.”  Just Barbara and Dash and Brett and me, and not much to say.  Homework involving Egyptians or planets or long division.  Kitchen doors closed keeping the heat in.

* * * *

Great to have Hunter home.  His only evidence is the closed bedroom door and the occasional sound of his car.  But still.  (New graduate-school plans, comp lit.)

* * * *

May 28, 2011

This rainy cold wet spring is going on so long, the Famous Clothesline hasn’t been deployed once yet this season.  All morning, wasted BTUs of heat rise in clouds from the dryer vent.  I can’t find a dry period to prime-and-paint the mud room woodbox.

* * * *

May 28, 2011

Sartre’s big existential formula defining man: “there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and . . . . this being is man.”  So, in Sartre, the human entity is stung into “freedom” and “responsibility,” suddenly towering god-like and mushroom-cloud-like.

Conversely, the religionist turns Sartre’s assertion inside out: “god,” precisely, is the existence preceding essence.

That the two points of view are identical is, unfortunately, visible only to the invisible.

* * * *

May 28, 2011

To be on Mount Shasta again after all these years.  Thirty years ago, alone, it was where I went after New York, in disappointment, I would say in despair, in futility of love, in self-pity, and, too, in vocational certainty that the book business would have no interest in the things that mattered to me.

In those days you could fly coast-to-coast for $80.  I woke up sleeping on the warm dust, in full sun under the blue skies of the high Cascade Range, with a cow standing directly over me, chewing its cud.  String of drool.  Lucky not to have been stepped on.  I actually had a New York bagel in my pocket on those high pastures, one of the Canarsie bagels from along Flatbush Avenue, the old kind, very small, chewy, the kind that surely don’t exist any more, having been crowded out by the swollen puffy light bagels that have, in thirty years, filled up the open spaces between New York City and the Cascade Range.

* * * *

May 28, 2011

Sands is here for dinner.  Chicken soup, sweet potato, asparagus.

Dash’s friend Joe stays for a “sleep-over,” and they insist on erecting the pop-up tent in the far meadow to sleep outside.  The pantry-drawers’ supply of D batteries is plundered, so the boys can reproduce their form of civilization, out in that wilderness.  The older brother opines that they won’t last till ten o’clock, and by ten o’clock they’ve come shivering inside.  The following morning, when the sun is just coming up, they appear from the playroom in pajamas and go back outside, scamper in dawn light, down to resume the camp-out, yanking their pajama-legs up high to keep them out of the heavy sopping dew in the grass.

* * * *

[I used to pity people who ate together without conversing, at a corner restaurant table, say.

I supposed that an endless stream of wit and information was the desirable norm.  I resolved that I would never be that habituated, that senile, that destitute of entertainment, no matter how old or how married I might be.  I supposed that people eating together without talking were impoverished of the spirit.]

* * * *

May 24, 2011

Barbara:

Sitting at her place at the kitchen table, in the warm corner with wineglass and pills dabbing at (miniscule-or-imaginary) tabletop crumbs.  NPR is blathering along, and I’m stirring the pot on the stove, and Dash is dribbling a little rubber ball around the floor.  Brett has disappeared into the bathroom and Barbara pipes up convivially, “Any word from Brett?”

* * * * * * * *

May 21, San Francisco

The Purple Onion is in happy disarray.

After the MacDowell party, a girl with a new book coming out, the bartender keeps pumping fist and saying “You like-a pawnkin’?” and leering.  Which turns out to be pumpkin, with fettucini and eggplant.

* * * *

May 19, 2011

The entire day mowing meadows.

* * * *

Mother’s Day

Back from SF great radio appearance.  The mower is still broken.  The engine roars, but tractor won’t get in gear.  Nowadays Pearson Small Engine is charging $50 to send out a trailer for pickup-and-return.  So for the first time in many decades the equipment on this place will be disloyal to Pearson’s.  An enterprising guy named Don makes house calls — will drive out in his truck, spread his tools, work in the shade of the pear tree.

Dim cool day.  A sign of spring: the manila envelopes accumulating in heaps, submissions from ambitious writers.  All must be “processed” and sent on.

Will recommence work on mud-room woodbox.

Skipped church, kept home by Mother’s Day, the series of Mother’s Day Breakfasts (first here in the big house, then in the cottage) and by general accidie.  Melancholy, (post-publicity?) while I work outside, cloying remorse and futility/mortality intimations are the gifts of the day.

* * * *

Because it’s Mother’s Day and we have extra mothers here, we get a call from beloved village poet laureate, who lacks a mother to telephone.

She has had two occasions for getting in touch lately: to borrow Tad’s Truck (which will always be “Tad’s Truck”), a perpetual entitlement of hers because she and Tad were sweethearts once, and lived in a barn-red house on Nursery Lane, and they even planned on getting married, briefly, so whenever she needs to make a dump run or a greenhouse errand, she’ll always have use of the truck; and to talk to Barbara, to have a mom for a day.

* * * *

Guitar lesson with Dash.  A hendrix-like riff in major pentatonic scale.  Which he takes to.

* * * * * * * *

May 5.

Back from L.A. publicity trip.  A pleasure to have soluble problems, here on a few acres.  The meadows are all unmowed, the mud-room woodshed is only half-built, just as I left it, and the swamp-cooler is colonized by paper wasps.  The mower too is colonized by paper wasps.  Then, moreover, the mower’s transmission gives out altogether, halfway through the job; so there it stands tonight, tractor stuck in the front lawn in the dark.

I wasn’t liking mowing the meadows, slaughtering buoyant levitating choruses of blue daisies and soapwort and Johnnie Jump-up and meadow-bell.  Queen Anne’s lace under the dogwood.  I also wasn’t liking making the little furry bright-eyed creatures zig-zag in the path of my tractor, driven from their established homes where I was slicing away the grasses’ tallest forests.

Dragged the tractor up on slope, to examine its underside, and was eventually rewarded with confirmation of my own incompetence.  Went inside.  Phoned “Pearson Small Engine,” in Grass Valley, and made an appointment for trailer pick-up and mechanical overhaul, then gave up on all problem-solving pretensions and put on sneakers and (wearing an ipod that filled my ears with Alan Watts disquisition on Buddhism) went running through the roads of the doomed new subdivision in the old Erikson Lumber Company woods.

* * * *

Easter Sunday

Bears in the Annex. Two, this time.

It’s raining and I don’t want to make the trip up there, where snow will be falling at the summit.  A neighbor has chased them out and secured the doors, but of course, now they know where the food is and they may be back this very night.

* * * *

Barbara’s Progress

No more sleeping-in all morning (a tendency I understood as a sign of depression).

She gets up early, dresses herself, uses her walker to come over to the big house, enterprising and girlish looking for coffee.

She goes everywhere with us, to every social occasion and entertainment.

[If we’d had our canoe trip on the Little River in Mendocino (tho’ trip which in the end we couldn’t afford), she would have ridden in the canoe with us.  So would’ve the little white dog.

Morning pills, evening pills.  She’s reading the Jennifer Egan book.

* * * *

April 20, 2011

Brett is in San Francisco.

Intermittent rain.  I have to keep stopping work, tarping things over, building the woodshed between little rains.  Unplug drill and saw.  Till showers blow over.  Come inside and kill twenty minutes maybe playing a guitar, poorly, or bringing up email to check on my burgeoning celebrity.

With return of warmer weather, Cavendish ends his tenancy here in Dashiell’s playroom.

Return of warm weather also brings big ursines to Cavendish’s (as he calls it) Woodland Redoubt.  Starting in springtime, there, he has to keep a heavy chain belted around the fridge, as bear deterrent.  Also, starting in springtime, he has to plug it in.  (He has electricity, from dormant construction site over the hill.)

* * * *

April 17, 2011

Fine weather.

Built footing and floor of new woodbox outside mud room

(This particular piece of plywood, for floor, has served as lid for Hunter’s sandbox (in the nineties), then tabletop for writing workshop and a platform covering parking-place mud,

today perhaps reaching its final resting place)

(or who knows, this Recession may triumph, and 30 peaceful years from now, this shed will be disassembled, and its members have further uses)

pandora.com radio plays “The James McMurtry Station” all afternoon.  Alison Krauss sings “I need you at the dimming of the day,” and all the sunny afternoon I hammer and saw and I dwell on all the ways I’ve been inexcusably remiss, over the years.

Women lie out on the little lawn in the sun, on dragged-out couch cushions.

Liz and Jackson stay for dinner of sausage and polenta.

I notice that Brett directed the two hired hands to fill in the old Toaster Graveyard in west meadow.

I’m going to miss the glimpse of chrome in that hole, from the days of manufacture

when Chrome Was Still Chrome.

* * * *

April fourteenth.

The P.O. to get Barbara’s taxes off.  The bank.  School for Dashiell.

Sad errand: at the Wells Fargo Bank, I deposited a check for $93.90, royalties from amazon.com, made out to Oakley Hall III, deposited it into Tad’s “Special Needs Trust” account.

Tad must have spent forty years writing every morning, or pretending to.  At last this year we got a “novel” edited and published.  A month after his death I’m depositing the first remittance from amazon.com

He was alive to see the book itself, its glossy cover, its blurbs.  Dozens of boxes of them.  Now all stacked up in his NY apartment, in towers around the couch and kitchen, where now Hadiya is their only broker.

* * * *

April 12, 2011

Weather is fine but Cavendish is back anyway, sleeping on the couch in the playroom.  (He says he had to do his taxes — it’s tax-time — and so, needed a place to stay for a while.)

Dash solicits Uncle Cavendish for a commitment of fifty-cents-a-lap in his school’s fundraising jog-a-thon.

* * * *

April 2, 2011

Spring.  Overcast day without precipitation.

On the woodpile, a colander full of wooden clothespins.

Wasps in the mailbox, as in other Springtimes.

Taking down storm windows.

* * * *

April First, 2011

The thing to remember when I’m blue:

Dash and I were in the pick-up, pop music on the dashboard radio, on some errand, the truck-bed full behind us, and Dash said, “I know what let’s do.”

(The particular idea was getting a burrito at Alice’s)

* * * *

March 31, 2011

Found 150 old rusty iron balusters, cheap, in Black Bart’s rear wilderness of junk.  Most are plain posts with wrought-iron twist, a few with ornate foliate treble-clef added.  Will bring to SFO to create balustrade on roof of Macondray, where presently everyone drinks and cavorts with no railing.

* * * *

Everyone was sleepless last night. Brett in particular worries about the financial insolvency of Squaw Valley.

* * * *

March 30, 2011

A fifty-foot accumulation of snow above Donner Pass.

Surely, at 6200 ft. it won’t be so deep, but we are warned by email bulletin that roofs need shoveling, or older cabins will collapse.

Here at home in the foothills, I’m the Responsible party, but I’d rather be reading Roger Penrose by the stove’s warmth, and I’m betting on the coming thaw, to save me the trip up there.

* * * *

March 28, 2011

Peach blossoms in abundance.  And snow.

Ground-cover seeding.  The raked-off sweet-pea vines make a great kind of “straw” for hiding the seeds from the thrushes and robins who will peck the seeds up.

* * * *

March 27, 2011

Silly Sunday afternoon. I come inside and deplete what’s left of the day watching Susskind’s Qu-Phys lectures while drinking the sauvignon blanc left over from Tad’s memortial service, getting a bit smashed, in fact, trying to focus.  (Brett, all the while, is spending the Sunday in Barbara’s cottage planning in detail a visit to Spain we can’t possibly afford.)

* * * *

Thinking of Tad and his exit.  Makes me think of me.

The old expression There, but for the grace of God, go I doesn’t apply, as much as “There go I.”

Because I was almost of that generation.  And of those aspirations.  I look around and see how much suicide has been taking people, to the left and right of me.  Tad was three years younger than I in history.  Big difference, in 3 yrs.  He was given a particular epoch. ( I think of Jim Morrison and all those romantics.)  (Tad was very Jim Morrison-like in fact.)  I, younger in history, envying all that, just barely escaped the romanticism.  All my foolishness has gone unpunished, unstoried, my skating on precipices, my stupidity, it was just-plain-stupidity, it wasn’t in some way ennobled.  Also, there’s one blessing I’ve had.  I never was very interested in being myself.  “Being oneself,” “expressing oneself” — those things have always been for so many of my confreres an imperative, but I always found it uninteresting.  My own writing has nothing to do with creative self-expression.  These are probably my first foray into “self-expression,” these dead-end diary entries, in an Internet cul-de-sac.  Each its own little dud.  Just how I like ’em.  Me, I always wanted to be everything else.  Everybody else.  And still do.  And think it’s a bracing attitude.  I think it’s empathy.  Thus I perhaps — pretty ambitious here — had already started living in death, and without caring.  The decades of expecting-no-consequence.  Which most would think of as despair.  Every writer always knows, if only subconsciously, that writing is death.  I embraced it instinctively from the start, packaging up my personal little coffins for padded-mailer envelopes.  I can only hope (more pious sentiment!) to learn to love death the more, making the butter on my toast sweeter.

* * * *

March 24, 2011

It’s bitter cold at the time the wet sleet is driving sideways.  Then at last the storm-front low pressure arrives, and suddenly, when the fat snowflakes are falling straight down, it’s balmy, it’s warm, and you can open your jacket, it’s terrifically silent.

* * * *

March 20.

Tad’s memorial this weekend.  Plenty of family has arrived, plus the Old Guard of Squaw Valley, plus Bill is bringing up a DVD of amusing outtakes from the documentary.

This house is full like a hotel. Crepes have been promised to all, this morning.  (Last night until two in the AM, the old minivan sat in the driveway thumping with gangsta rap, three reunited friends inside the smoke-filled car.)

The whole weekend, a festive atmosphere. Wicked stories of Tad are unearthed, enormities and betrayals yet unguessed. This is what happens when we die, the worst gossip about us has been aching to come out. The weather is tempestuous and the windows this morning are jolly steamed up.

* * * *

March 13, 2011

Sunday morning, rain coming in, thrushes in the grass.

Rather than episcopal church, I’m staying in and watching more of Leonard Susskind’s many hours of quantum physics lectures at Stanford.  The YouTube display page has a “like/dislike” button below the video window, and invariably the dialogue captions have an entry: “37 christians don’t like this.”

* * * *

March 9, 2011

Snowshoeing over Donner Pass with Dash.  Leaving the sound of I-80 behind, after clearing just one ridge.  Going cross-country, the creeks lie at the bottom of twenty-foot-deep soft crevasses in the snow, with weirdly sculpted cornices, treacherous-looking: don’t get too close: at the bottom, twenty feet down, narrow cold black water flows calmly.

Up in a meadow, digging snow caves.

* * * *

Dash, at school, has been assigned to condense a scene from the “mystery novel” he has chosen as his reading.  Everybody is doing a mystery novel.  Conformity rules in all “creativity,” as in his age-group, everybody is still trying to be pretty much the same paper snowflake.  (True non-conformity or innovation or “individuality,” which people pretend they want, if it ever comes along later in life, is in fact something of a horror.)  He chose Agatha Christie, and now reads his transcription of her prose to us, by candlelight, proudly.  It’s painful, his own writing used to be so good as a littler child, deep and true in its insights and freely nightmarish in its plots and ideas.  Now, age 11, he treasures as sophisticated all Agatha Christie’s cliches.  It’s hard to see him reduce himself, so hopefully, so much in good faith to adopt the standards of mediocrity.

* * * *

March 1

Post-storm clean-up.  PG&E trucks and AT&T cherry-pickers all over town.  “Indian Billy,” Billy Kelly, was found dead of exposure under the Broad Street Bridge.  Grandson of Maidu chief.  Rumor was, the police had confiscated his sleeping bag and tarp.  The parson this Sunday will sermonize on the irony of Indian Billy’s dying a hundred feet from the church’s cornerstone and threshold where the porchlamp glows 24-hrs-day, lying down the little slope with the candybar litter and the Highway 49 noise.

Here outside town, two oaks lie across the road, trunks big-around as garbage cans, and in the sunny dirty thaw, unfamiliar cheap pick-ups appear at the roadside with chainsaws, people you never see in town (the social-class system of rural places is so mysterious), gleaners, sawing them up for firewood.  Often a woman (here’s a telling difference in domesticity) sits in the passenger seat while the man cuts and stows wood in the truck bed.  (Brett says, ‘Should we tell Anna, they’re her trees, after all’  But of course no.)

* * * *

February 27, 2011

Barbara tonight was about to throw away (!) the aluminum-foil swatches I keep re-using to bake potatoes in.  No more boasting about her frugal habits of the Depression-era ranch.  Like a pair of Flannery O-Conner characters, I and an octogenarian can compete in parsimony.  (Who will be the one to quench the candleflames at meal’s end?)

* * * *

February 25, 2011

Two feet of snow so far.  More coming tonight.  Electrical power is out far and wide, and it’s a lucky thing Cavendish is staying in the back room, as he is well experienced with electric generators.

On its maiden voyage the new generator, bearing the brand-name “Champion,” roars like a pedal-to-the-floor NASCAR engine but remains stationary, parked under the porch roof.

* * * *

Motor-oil stains on the front porch, beside the welcome mat: country people.

(The front door is of course the one nobody ever uses.)

* * * *

Feb. 23

Down in SFO, in North Beach.

Six AM, the only convenient “grand old” espresso place that’s open is Caffe Roma.

I’m the only customer.  At this hour they’re still laying out the heavy rubber floor-mat, moving sweet rolls from delivery-box to counter display.

I pay for my double-capp with a credit card, and the guy runs the card and comes back with a pen and VISA receipt saying, “You wouldn’t by any chance be Louis B Jones the author?  Who wrote Particles and Luck?”

That was fifteen years ago.  He says, “I loved that book.  I was just lately thinking I should read it again.  That part where the two guys are frying frozen hamburger over a campfire?”  A six-am coffee-shop baristo is exactly my ideal reader.  He tells his partner, “See, Tony?  All the celebs come in here.”  Then later, after I’m in my corner, “Hey, Tony.  Did you ever read a book?  Like a novel or whatever?”  I couldn’t be happier.

* * * *

February 17, 2011

Snow on the old 55-gal drum in the far west meadow.

Snow on the ladders under the pear tree.  Snow on the compost heap.

In the cottage, the old lady is sleeping late, this morning.  Her son is dead.  Probably in sleep she’s forgotten that.

Anyway, she will have mostly forgotten it when she’s awake, too – w/bran muffin and Odwalla OJ and the San Francisco Chronicle.

* * * *

How “the World” Works:

Cruelty is supremacy.  Pick somebody to piss on and you’ll be all right.  This rule holds everywhere.  Simply betray/ignore the guileless.

The easiest and most profitable to betray, and the closest-at-hand, are your children of course.  Then, defenseless innocence in general.  Biggest bang for your buck there, right at hand, right at home.  (And of course remotest impoverished.  Whom you’ll never have to meet up with.)

But that’s only the low-hanging fruit.  Move on to degrade culture, moral taste, the language, “the commons” wherever it remains intact.  (Those are all, simply, other forms of defenseless innocence.)  For exoneration, cite the demands of your talent, ambition.  Forgive yourself but ruefully.

(Most repugnant: I myself have done it, surely, on some scale, whether in the Central School playground or in some later bigger arena.  Winning power and comfort by arrogance, you don’t really realize you’re doing it at the time.  This is why “the world” is poison.  If you stand far from the abbatoir you’ll find yourself less esteemed.  Implicated as one is, in the American global politique, there’s no washing oneself clean at the river.)

* * * *

Tad’s interesting half-life.  It was lived out somehow in secret.  And with a Kabuki-theater-spectacle guardedness.  How generous he was, letting me replace him in the role of “son,” in a family fascinated with celebrity.  I the lower-class kid, the bad-luck kid, the survivor, the practical one, enemy of charisma or charm, cheapskate.  Well, I would have to do.  He once the crown prince.  (I think he really was escaping that responsibility, by taking several leaps, in the last one half-succeeding.) (They say he was found last week on the floor with a smile on his face.)

* * * *

February 16, 2011

The weather has turned bad.  Cavendish has moved back in again.

* * * *

Went around the west meadow this morning in the rain and pulled out dozens of little new cedar saplings.  They’re weeds, and in this wet weather they come out of the soaked earth easily, roots and all.  I’m catching them when they’re still less than hip-high.

(I want to keep that messy, isolated little meadow clear, as an open domain for the wild sweet-pea.)

* * * *

My trailer in the woods is far from the possibility of any wireless internet, and I can regularly go to great lakes of solitude and reading and thinking.  Back up at the cottage, the ding of emails’ arrival, the literal “tweet” sound of tweets homing in, the various phones with their various clangs and ring-tone marimbas and text-message beeps.  (My mind perhaps works in an outdated way, because I’m in a backward rural place.)

* * * *

February 14, 2011

Thinking of Tad.  The merciful coroner says it was a massive heart attack and “he was dead before he hit the floor.”  The other standard remark is that such a manner of death is “the Irishman’s Dream.”  Well, it’s reported, also, that he was found with a faint smile on his face.  That latter report I actually do believe.  A coroner, kindly old pro, is the less plausible while the finder of the body had neither the motive nor the readiness to make up a fib about a post-mortem smile.

I tend to think Tad wasn’t “dead when he hit the floor” but got some minutes or hours of consciousness.  Lying on the boards alone.  Ear to the hardwood boards, the old actor, felled.  Coffee spilled.  Hours or days till Hadiya is due to come back.  The sounds coming through the floor from the laundromat below, of pop songs on the radio, big dryers tumbling, voices in tones of the ethnicities of the neighborhood, maybe Hmong moms down there folding clothes, and children playing.  The doctrine of the Tibetan Buddhists would have the soul lingering for hours or even days, still to be spoken to, still listening inside the corpse.  After bodily death there must be some interval of mental activity – enough seratonin in the synapses, enough cellular respiration – so that brain-death doesn’t happen exactly at the moment a heart stops beating or a finger stops twitching.  Not at all.  Tad, there, would have had some moments of contemplation after he’d been betrayed finally by his body and become “disembodied,” the body a dependable but tired old asset (“Brother Ass,” a certain Franciscan monk called it), the body a medium of self-assertion that was with Tad always, even when he was an actor on bright-lit stages of his own set-design and carpentry and lighting, even in dreams – arms and legs and volition – even in the womb before birth, his “body” was the medium of his “existence.”  So in whatever nirvana there was for him, in that time lying on the floor after the departure of the sensible body, lacking that referential frame anymore, he must have had some summary thoughts.  And so the smile.  It’s the forgiveness part, surely.

Lazy bum, cholesterol-clogged.  Cigarettes and cheeseburgers, self-aggrandizing bullshit stories, botched paint-jobs and joinery, cold coffee in moldy cups, manuscripts on foolscap in heaps.  Selfless sometimes, unfailingly kind, handsome still despite everything, liar, laborer in others’ worlds, depender upon women.  Secret pilgrim in this congelation of love.  His bodily ashes will probably be scattered in Lexington, site of his old theater company, site of the legends about himself he kept inflating and enhancing and repeating, near the very bridge indeed, basically the place where he once tried to die.  Since 1978, the extra thirty years he got were pure gravy, and he knew it.

* * * *

February 13, 2011

A quiet day of sadness, as mixed news comes in from the world.

— Michelle’s wonderful book (at an obscure publishing house) will get the front pageof the Sunday Times book review next week.  So says my agent.  I phoned her and left a congrats message on her tape.

— I went down to the cottage to bring Brett these great tidings, and she said, “Bad news.  Oh, Honey.”  And she said, of her brother, “Tad just died.”  Barbara could be heard in the bedroom talking on the phone to Sands, learning of the death of her oldest child.

Me, I’m gathering stones here today.  It’s time to repair the potholes in the driveway.  They’ve been getting away from me.  The lore of fixing potholes in a gravel road prescribes laying in big two-inch broken rocks first, then filling in with half-inch roadbed gravel.  (Which I happen to have a, dwindling, supply of.)  On this day of muffled weather, the women staying indoors, I’m navigating these quiet acres with a wheelbarrow, looking for rocks, tossing them in.  Clanks of stone on wheelbarrow’s steel wall.  Tall pines on a windless day.  Brett, in the cottage, with her many phone calls.

* * * *

February 12, 2011

The Problem of Other “Selves”:

If mysticism leads to solilpsism, then what are these other apparent consciousnesses experiencing?  All these people on streetcars or sidewalks, people in the crosswalk as I wait at a red stoplight.  What is their ontological status.

Well, the problem is not a problem.  Such a paradox is not a problem in this (anthropic) universe, where the truth is, I don’t have a “self,” nor do they, either.  Selves are constructions of society and language, organs of biological evolution, with no other ontological status.

* * * *

February 8, 2011

At last:

Finally filled the car’s gas tank with vegetable-oil ($3.45/gal) from the big polystyrene vat, on Idaho-Maryland Road behind the alternative energy place.

I bought only half a tank.  Tank was already half-full with ordinary gas-station diesel.  Starting gradually on this.  Want to see how the engine behaves.

The experiment is: that’s vegetable oil.  So will these cold mornings make it congeal.  Nightly low temperatures of thirty degrees.  Will the fuel in the engine behave like olive oil in the fridge?

As of today, have set a jar on the roof of the old woodbox outside the kitchen window, containing a few ounces of this biodiesel (which I siphoned from my tank).  In the mornings I can check it to see if it’s congealing.

* * * *

The Big Bang started right here by my kitchen door 14B yrs ago – (though that’s something you can say wherever you are, even if you’re way out around Alpha Centauri; because everything is the center.  My back yard and Alpha Centauri were once the same place.  They’re both still the Navel.)

It was fourteen billion years ago but the Big Bang can still be observed in the sky.  It’s right up there.  It keeps expanding in a fiery outermost shell around the visible universe.  So the actual, ancient Bang, Itself, is still hanging out there, ablaze (having cooled, no longer 3000º), at a distance of fourteen billion light years in every direction, a background glow behind the stars.  The light it sends back is orange in color, but it gets stretched, as it takes the 14B-light-year journey back to the future (i.e., to us).  Therefore the light arrives here in the longer microwave range.  Astronomers say it’s about as dim as moonglow, everywhere behind the stars, evenly distributed.  If our eyes’ retinas were attuned to take in those wavelengths (rather than just the “visible range,” bracketed between infrared and ultraviolet), we would SEE the dawn moment of Creation glowing always in the night, an eternal present.  Not an image of it, but the immediate thing itself before our eyes, if seeing is believing.  We might cast shadows on our sidewalks and in our backyards, bathed in the ancient light of Creation.  In fact, we do cast such shadows.  But without seeing them.

* * * *

Mythological notion is that a “divinity” must come first: that somebody or something had to be there to pronounce a necessary shazzam!

Rather, the primordial idea of “Love” precedes the (perhaps latterly necessary) picture of a divinity.

“Love = Choice” (Divine will)

That is, an existential Choice must be a positive choice.  A negative choice is annihilating.  Even before some mythological “god” is conceived, there exists Love, an axiom.  Like the theorem side-squared + side-squared = hypotenuse-squared, or even 1+1=2, or even 1=1.  Love pre-exists its instantiation in matter.  Oddball idea rather than a coherent proposition, tho’ feels syllogistic.

* * * *

6mg of energy-tingles in 260 billion cubic miles of empty space.

This is the force that is driving the universe to spread, actually accelerating it, esp. at the outer edges.  So-called “dark energy.”  Impulse behind the Hubble-constant inflation.

One butterfly-wing’s worth of energy per Grand Canyon.

It isn’t much but it adds up, over the billions of light-years.

http://louisbjones.com/2011/12/29/all-new-all-new-all-new-adventures-2011/

12-29-10.

Went with the cordless phone out to the mud room, which is freezing cold, to sit in the old couch and talk by long-distance to the nice lady at “Iowa Cremation,” to make the arrangements beforehand for my mother.  This is advised by the nurses at Crestview.  The price, $1675, includes death certificate, medical examiner’s certification, complimentary disposable container, and pre-pays the USPS shipment of cremains to any address in the continental USA.  All around the mud room stove is litter of ribbons and wrappings, tissue and salutations from Santa.  Dog pee on the square stones of the floor.  I can hear laughter from the kitchen, where visiting cousins drink beer with Hunter.

* * * *

Christmas Night. Hush.  Old farmhouse sleeps a lot of people.  My favorite things on the table: Brett’s braided bread, spinach salad and goat cheese, and Aleksandra’s mushroom soup (with wild mushrooms that were gathered in her village and mailed by her mother).

Nights, my chest pain is present, and I lie awake on my back.  (Touring websites, all the prognoses in the world are discoverable by restless hypochondriac).  Calling a doctor would not only make a bore of people’s Christmastime, it would also, inevitably, involve expensive tests.  So I lie on my back thinking what message I would pass on to Hunter if.

I’d really only tell him that he already possesses all time and space.  And that he already has faith, whether he knows it or not, and yet will never know what faith is.  [Such thinking makes sense only at eschatological moments]

My preference is: chest pains are only indigestion and bad posture.  This particular heart attack is just a nerve-pinch of thoracic vertebrae.  (Plus, a Yuletide visit from the metaphysical, rattling its long chains).

It will vanish next week when I stop eating Stilton, and beef, and fudge under its round metal lid.

* * * *

Nice account from an email (names changed to protect the eminent):

“I just spoke to him. He asked what was possible. I said same arrangement

as last year. He said, I see. (Pause). And what was the money last year?

I don’t seem to recall. And I said, I’ll check with Alicia, but I think it

must have been $3500. And he said, $3500, I see. (Pause). And I said,

Maybe we can do better. I’ll have to check. And he said, That would be

helpful, and, let’s see, there is the matter of a car. And I said, Oh,

yes, a car. Well, you had a car last year, so I assume you would have one

this ear, but I’ll have to check. I could also drive you, if you’d prefer

that. And he said, A car would be nice. And the airfare, that would be

what class? And I said, Carl, we would love you to come. I’ll see how

much money we have and get back to you.

   So–this may be the last go. Is it possible to give him $5000, a car,

and business class or first class travel? I would yield $1000 of my

honorarium for that purpose. Would be a way of saying thanks.”

* * * *

Xmas is coming.  The shiver of K-Mart polyethylene in the back of the minivan.  The desk-calendar in the kitchen is illegibly crowded. The weather has halted all painting on the south wall.  At least all the priming is done.  The Community of Writers bank accounts are empty, and the printers didn’t get us our thousand begging-for-money postcards in good time, so the whole bulk mailing plan may have to be scrubbed, according to Brett.  The transfer of rescue money went awry in the bank.  The deep-freeze weather is “spalling” my brick patio, popping chips off the top surface as big as scabs or (once or twice) as big as cookies.  The chandelier is still on the coffee table.  The roll of duct tape – which this morning was useful in mending Dashiell’s sneakers for school, while his carpool-ride waited out at the road – has fallen into the remote cat-box diarrhea [and for an instant I actually contemplate whether to rescue it and frugally wash it, and then do nothing about it, and move on].  Then Brett has to go to the bank.  But she is in a panic because the necessary document (containing routing numbers, etc., to get us out of our financial tangle) can’t be found.  “Here it is,” she says.  “Under the tortilla.”

* * * *

Average Critical-Thinking Skills:

1. A) Folks who throw religion away, citing the Spanish Inquisition and Islamic terrorism.  Or citing scandals like the popes’ forbidding birth control or the Jewish settlers’ impoliteness about territorial rights.

(If you want to watch yourself erase a “god,” first chalk up on the blackboard an old bearded human male on a cloud peering down at earth watching out for forbidden sex-acts.)

1. B) Our Complacent Pacifism.  In San Francisco at the semi-regular “symposium” (where mostly the wine, not the philosophy, is featured), one old guy at the table raises his countenance and announces the old conclusive piety, “Well, the fact is, no war has ever accomplished any good.”  And around the table, all the guys hang their heads in assent.  I sit there thinking of a few wars: the American Civil War, which got a start in accomplishing one of the hardest improvements in the history of mankind; and of the Nazi concentration camps that were opened in WW II (a personal friend of mine, an elderly gent now, was a sergeant who walked up to the gate at Matthausen and lifted the hasp on that padlock while people watched from within in total silence); and the American Revoltionary War, which even the English seem to have oddly countenanced, and not fought with much ardor, maybe looking on with a certain kind of avuncular interest almost, ambivalently, at the ambitions of the new people.  A “war” is a paroxysm.

* * * *

[The wars I’ve seen in my own time do seem to have been ignoble; but they have brought megasoline and prosperity, and rattan furniture made by simpler people.  Here I sit, implicated in that.]

* * * *

Patience, patience.  Last week I ran into yet another agent who is chagrined by certain of her famous client’s writing.  Client has a huge reputation with young hip readers.  Voice of a Generation, etc.  Agent doesn’t even read the manuscripts in full when they come in, says she finds them boring and pretentious, and she just moves them on – as with a pitchfork – to a publishing-house editor; and presumably the editor in turn moves the manuscript on, pitchfork-style to the printers.  A number of the highest-reputed writers seem to be treated this way in NY.  Often traces of shoddy editing.  All this in turn perhaps invites a reader (a readership) that isn’t reading closely or lovingly.  This is a strange atmosphere to be working in, but I think it’s always been thus, in the book business, maybe since Gutenberg.  Always a strange atmosphere to work in.

* * * *

December 9, 2010

Back in Nevada City.  Back in my uncomfortable sweaty mucking boots.  Behind the house the light is failing fast, dark at 4:30pm, while I split kindling to replenish the mud room woodbox.  At such a time, the most luminous object in the universe is the garage wall, in the meadow beside me, old clapboard, painted last summer from a paint-bucket labeled “Brilliant White, Low Lustre.”  (White, at the moment, is blue.)

Last week I was at harvest party in Marin, and during a break I was talking to a, maybe, thirty-year-old hedge fund manager who perhaps didn’t belong at that party, standing all by himself in an Italian-looking suit, leaning on a guyline cable that supported a tent.  He had drunk too much wine and was feeling discursive.  His girlfriend was sitting with her friends at a table, and for a while he and I waxed philosophical in conversation, and waxed geopolitical, and waxed socioeconomic, all in about ten minutes.

From his vantage point as an investor, “Everything’s pretty much shit-fucked out there.”  He meant the economy and the global problematique, though at that moment he was looking out over Nan McEvoy’s pretty new groves of young olive trees multiplying over the hills of Marin.  He swirled the red wine in his glass.  “I’m about ninety percent in commodities, I’m in copper, oil futures, lithium and zinc and shit, and gold.  Gold, gold, gold,” he spoke with distaste for gold.  “Everything’s going shit-fucked.  We’re not facing the population thing, and we’re not facing the global-warming thing.  The food thing.  This is what I tell people in my letter, too.”  (He publishes a bulletin of investment advice, expensive to subscribe to.)  He again swirled his wine in his glass and almost took a sip, but an ankle buckled, so he got a better grip on his slanting tent-line in the sunset.  This is a guy who went to Harvard and Wharton and devised a certain kind of dream-life for himself in California – the German sports car, the bunker on Nob Hill from which to publish his financial letter, the girlfriend, the ski lease.  Now I here I am back home in the blue twilight at end of day, clatter of cedar kindling, and I wonder, was he only saying the kinds of things he thinks I’m used to hearing?  Or prefer to hear?  Because I live in the country? He can’t sincerely believe what he was saying, can he?  Is it possible he got back to Nob Hill from Marin with his girlfriend (car goes in underground garage) and went back to his routine telling people to invest in Duke Energy and Chinese Internet start-ups?  Yes.

* * * *

Dec 1st

Beautiful day.  Home from travels.  Tired.  Garbage and recycling are out at the road.  Dry firewood is in.  A warm storm will be coming up the slope, a weather system arising in a warm long South Pacific fetch (meteorologists’ term) rather than Gulf of Alaska .

Ignored work and, instead, answered misc old emails, wrote the begging-donations letter for Squaw, assembled the new elecrical generator out-of-the-box, raked the lane to keep sodden leaves from killing turf, wrote and sent four letters of recommendation.  Dinner of sausage and potatoes.  (This is the day the Lord made, exult the faithful and they’re right.)

* * * *

* * * *

Piety: If you count any event as unfortunate, or unpropitious, or a setback, you’re not “loving the Lord your God.”

(You could never have suggested to Nietzsche that his amor fati was the same flavor as Judeo-Xianity or Buddhism’s Third Noble Truth.)

* * * *

Amazing success in butternut squash this year, in a new-cultivated patch by Barbara’s cottage. Tough-stemmed vines roam the edges of the pavement and get a grip on Barbara’s old walker in the sun.

* * * *

The first harbinger: They adopt the British spelling “Neighbourhood” for their mall.

Second harbinger: At the valley entrance, the Olympic eternal-torch shrine from 1960 (sooty dirty-gold oil-flame flapping in the night beneath the statuary five-rings Olympic device) is now outshone by a towering white fluorescent-luminous rectangle, big enough to advertise a Wal-Mart, proclaiming “Celebrating Our Olympic Heritage!”

* * * *

November 26

Bought a generator at last.  $700. I’m ashamed of expenditure, but the power outages are irksome and make for inefficiency, and with Barbara here in delicate, declining health, we have to be responsible.

* * * *

First good storm of the season, 11-23-2010.  In two days, there’s four feet of powdery snow.  Then after a few hours’ break, two more feet are added on top.  We arrive and I have to swim through this to get to the shovels stowed under the deck.  And then use the shovel to make a channel to the woodpile.

I’m reminded of Paul Radin, the wild “Jewish Indian” who lived in these hills all his life, mistrustfully and shyly, wearing the same greasy brimmed hat in all seasons, a frail-looking figure, Bob Dylanesque in heeled boots, to be glimpsed sometimes walking on Highway 89.  Bear-claw and chamois pouch of “medicine” tied at his throat.  Paul in wintertime used to keep a rope strung between his house and his barn, so he could make his way out to feed his horse during blizzard conditions.  And not get lost in the forty-foot gap.  Out at Ramparts, where the cold came fast.

In summertime Paul used to ride that horse over the mountain to visit the Writers Conference.  And insist on reading his shamanistic poetry, hijacking the Follies stage, mistaking the audience’s derision for warm encouragement, going on and on, until beautiful Sands had the inspiration of coming onstage and embracing him to get him off.

Name of that horse: . . . ? . . .  Zumgali!

Horse died.  Died a couple of years before Paul himself died.  He buried it directly before his cabin, shallowly, amounting to a big mound there.  I was one of the few who ever went out there.  He used to sit before the mound smoking in the evenings. Ornamented the mound with rings of stones.  Eventually he took to sleeping beside the grave, nights.  Then a bear moved into his house and displaced him.  This went on for the last year of his life.  If ever he wanted to go into his house to get something – a poem or a book or a cooking pan – he first gave a blast of his loud air-horn to scare the bear.  The bear would pour out the back-side and go irritably up the slope (I was there to see this happen, once); and Paul , on the front side, would pry back the loose plywood and go in.

In his dying days, Andrew Tonkovich and I used to bring him marijuana that we could scare up from some friends, as a balm for his cancer.  He would sit by the horse-mound and smoke, his little air-horn alarm at his side, in all weathers.  Propane space-heaters in the outdoors.  Sitting between two propane space-heaters.  After he died, we explored the cabin and found that the bear over the months had pretty much leveled everything to knee-high rubble: Paul’s bedding and furniture and cookware, and loose sheaves of poetry and books, all tossing together to make a bear’s-nest.  Now his brother the Boston banker will be trying to develop Paul’s property.  Putting condos by the river.

* * * *

Thanksgiving.  In the tall snowbank outside the window, bottlenecks stick up in a row, Two-Buck-Chuck pinot grigiot, chilling there.  Henrik and Barbara are reportedly stranded on the summit, held back by a CHP road-closure in the blizzard, in their backseat twenty pounds of cracked crab from the North Beach wharves.  Cavendish does arrive, in a hazardous truck because it lacks heat.  Lacking heat is a privation which, ordinarily, he wouldn’t mind; after all, he’s got a scarf and gloves; but the problem is, moisture condenses on the inner windshield, then freezes to a glaze of opaque  ice.

Cavendish has brought Cassy, the Nevada City poet laureate.  She is the feckless attractive artist whose car broke down permanently, and who therefore began borrowing friends’ cars, eventually to take up sleeping in them, upon being evicted from the apartment she’d stopped making rent-payments on.  She arrives looking beautiful.

Various tables are lined up, and candles located.  The lace tablecloth must be withdrawn from archives and spread out.  The old oil painting of Brett, nude, must be stashed in a closet.  When the Bulls do arrive, they have a Norwegian method of cleaning the white flokati rug from before the fireplace: spread it face-down over a snowdrift, and whack at it with a broom handle: you really do leave a grey rectangle.

The table is at last seated, all the usuals, with no one excluded, always a few new faces, a couple of bluegrass musicians, one cancer-victim on short lease, still wearing hospital bracelet and hospital smock, one visiting software-designer’s family, Cavendish and Cassy and others, the several older folks with their prescription pill bottles amber-plastic and child-proof.  Outside, in the rest of the world, North Korea has begun shelling South Korea, Haitians are getting cholera post-earthquake, the Israeli Knesset has just voted never to give back any of their settlement areas in the West Bank, and Washington is gridlocked, and somewhere a glacier is shrinking.  How apocalyptic is every instant.

Clink glasses.  Nobody will “say grace,” as this crowd is too agnostic.  But Cassy has a fresh substitute: she will sing the Kiowa Death Song.  (The reasoning, of course, is that Thanksgiving commemorates the decimation of Native Americans.)  So, while all others’ eyes respectfully fall, Cassy lifts her face and belts it out in a very convincing Indian style, Hey-Yuh Hey-yay-yay-Yuh, with yips and shouts and sobs.  It goes on forever.  I catch Dashiell’s eye, and the merriment there is so contagious, I have to bow over my plate, taking deep slow breaths.

* * * *

Original meaning.  “Charisma” in Greek-language X-ian philsophy was simply a “talent.”  A charisma was a gift of God, to be put to use.

In contemporary usage “charisma” is a technique of seduction and self-aggrandizement.

 

November 23, 2010. In Squaw by myself, putting the cabin away for the winter. All alone here with the romance of the big fireplace, I miss my family’s alarms and melodrama and wit. An old paperback of  The Sickness Unto Death has been dislodged from a bookshelf, and I’m gladdened, to greet again that miserable old Dane.

So I’ve thought of rereading it tonight, with the “highly intellectual” project of, maybe, discovering likenesses between Buddhist dukkha doctrine and the Dane’s painstaking analysis of despair (which I recall to be as detailed as the dharma).
Stop with the red wine at eight. But then I discover that, because tonight I’m granting myself the rare medicine of a Unisom gel-tab, as I settle down with my book before the fire, I’m really looking forward most to the sleeping pill. Like I’m dropping acid: a sleeping pill is the big event of the evening. Not the whitewater rapids of Kierkegaard. Not at all.

* * * *

(November. Dumped-on by early snow, at 6000-foot elevation.)

Dash will be 10 yrs old soon, and today he went out alone carrying a few paper dollars he’d earned, to walk all the way, by himself, to the store to buy a toy with his own money. After two days of snow, the sky dawned clear and a summery sun has melted all the snow on the roads, which are now shining-wet in the warm air. He has been given his mother’s cell phone, lodged deep in his jeans pocket, and been instructed to call home when he arrives at the store. He has been warned to stay far to the side of the road “if a car comes.” And he’s dressed warmly. All around him, as he walks alone by himself, the world will be shining as it only does in mornings of fast snowmelt and blue sky. Pine boughs will be dropping their ladlefuls of white.

* * * *

Clear sky all night. Stars are pebbles at the floor of the stream. Before sunrise, on the high old-snow places (Squaw Peak, Granite Chief, KT-22) snowcaps come up as violet first. Then peach.

* * * *

November 17, 2010
Tracy arrives in Nevada City with elk in her luggage, frozen hunk.
(epicurious.com counsels disguising it with sauces; fatiguing it by many hours in slow-cooker.)
The misery of the hunter. Tracy says the guy who shot it and, miles from his truck, knelt before the carcass with his knife for the winter afternoon’s work, got himself a hernia in the long process of dressing it.

* * * *

[I’m getting the sense there’s a white-trash aristocracy in this: ALL of my male friends up here seem to have had at least one hernia operation.]

* * * *

Fantasy: The entire American population adds woolly socks and dumpy sweatshirts to their bedtime costume. The immediate result: 11,000 hectares of rainforest per year are saved.

* * * *

…For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.
–The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th C.

* * * *

Far out Newtown Road, there’s always been a big hand-lettered sign:

For Sale, 32-plus Acres
Three Buildings On Four Separate Parcels
Well and Creek
OLD MAN READY TO DEAL

It stands illegibly deep in bluebells, lupine, Scotch broom, wild lilac.

* * * *

Winter nights.

Don’t enjoy movies just now. Can’t sit through them. My boys over the years got accustomed to being disappointed with their dad, in this way.

A longed-for movie is rented, the mud room stove is stoked up, maybe even popcorn is popped – all settle in – and soon (this usually happens around the first plot point, where what’s-at-stake is being declared) – soon Dad is climbing out of his prized comfy chair. Slipping away. To go read a book. (I could sit through an entire movie if I were to drink red wine steadily the whole time and kill off a whole half-bottle.)

Well, dad just likes the establishing shots.
I take it as a general principle that, as an organism, I’m like an apple on a tree, fulfilling my appleness in good order without my own having to fret about it too much. So when I find I’m too impatient even to sit through a movie, and take no interest in any of the inside-industry or outside-industry products – or even pictures my own friends have somehow gotten made, even artistic small celebrated pictures – I assume that it’s in my nature at present. I’m seeing everything as beside-the-point. So who knows. Maybe it is.

* * * *

Nov.  14 –

A joke from a sermon: “The sin of ‘evil speech’ is the one sin you could do all the live-long day and never get tired.”

(As a novelist well knows.)

For a novelist, the delight of evil speech is vocation.  Practiced indeed all the live-long day.

* * * *

Nov. 12

“Advice,” for a writer, is abundant.  Especially from those closest to you.  Urging success.

I’d rather drink muddy water / And sleep in a hollow log.

* * * *

Nov. 7

Week-end.  After way too many hot, dry days, a winter-style rain is coming.  Brett has been up in Squaw alone – hemming curtains, re-covering couch cushions – stays in touch by phone to get my interpretations of the NOAA weather predictions for snow up there.  On my prompting, she makes the trip back down here just in time, before the storm arrives and they close the pass.  As she comes over the summit, the Highway Patrol at Truckee is beginning to set up the orange cones, to start turning people back.

Here, Barbara and I have  been making sure we take our pills, watching British-produced situation comedies on TV, getting the laundry in before the onset of rain.

* * * *

You can write to advance a notion, you can write to be admitted to a “canon” of “literature,” you can write to revenge yourself against your parents or schoolmasters, you can write to please the judges of big prizes, you can write for the critics’ approval, or for academics’.

But can your work withstand the scrutiny of a reader’s love.  I don’t mean adulation.  (Which does not look so closely.)  Or even respect.  I mean the reader’s love.

* * * *

Our friend the piano teacher, whom I see around town, has emotion welling in her eyes at all times.  I run into her by the dairy case (the yogurt, the cottage cheese, the artificial creamer).  She’s a pretty woman of about 65 or 70.  Freckles.  Grey hair in braids.  In a two-minute chat, I make her tear up sentimentally in various ways.  “How’s Barbara?” she says, “I’ve been meaning to visit.”

I tell her Barbara keeps getting younger – (not kidding: it’s not exactly untrue) – that because of her diet or just her natural recovery from stroke, she’s getting younger every day.

This makes happy damp shine in her eyes, under IGA’s fluorescent dispensation.  (It’s as if everybody is this woman’s own personal family and she’s getting news of them posthumously in the Afterlife.)  “How’s Hunter?”

Oh, he’s great.  He’s so busy with his studies, we don’t hear much from him.  He’s living right in the middle of Amherst (her husband’s alma mater is Amherst) – got a girlfriend – studying Greek playwrights, physics – and all the maples on the quad are changing color.

That last detail especially makes her eyes brim.  As I half-knew it would!  So I think I ought to let up on her, change the subject.  Do a little healthy griping.  About the abandoned septic tank I had to unearth and nobody would help.  Easy thing to gripe about.  Nothing poignant about it.

* * * *

In fact, though, Barbara isn’t that simple. She’is still speaking very little.  At meals only very quietly.

Tonight, post-Halloween, Dash brings his entire pillowcase of candy to the table after dinner and dumps it out in candlelight — to sort it, to spread it out, to fondle.  I kid him (“The Life of Buddha” used to be a bedtime story), telling him while he gloats over his candy, “Remember what the Buddha said: Desire causes Suffering.  Suffering can be overcome by overcoming desire.”  Barbara perks up, grins in relief and hoists her glass to mine and says, “I’ll drink to that.”

* * * *

(Mu-shu-pork lunch special at Fred’s on Broad Street)

I tell my friend the Episcopal minister that, it seems to me, anyone who takes an ‘inordinate’ interest in religion has ‘something pretty basically, deeply wrong with him.’  It’s surely an imprecise and misstated idea, regrettable to blurt out in vague half-baked condition.

But in pleasure he puts down his chopsticks: “Exactly!”  (This from a graduate of the seminary.)  In his wink, leering fraternity: I’d just veered near, yes indeed, the nice, awful, little secret.

* * * *

Nov. 2.  Voted.  Got Roto-Tiller going.  Restrung the good guitar.  Went to grocery store.

On the meadow are heaped tomato vines.  Brett has cleared and raked the enclosed garden.  Scoured of stubble and stalks, the soil is bare, a sight which always pained me.  Those and blackberry cuttings must all be carted off into the woods somewhere.

* * * *

Oct. 30.  Saturday.  Quiet and Sunny.  Dash will instruct Aleksandra this afternoon in the art and method of pumpkin carving, so tonight (out on this road where no one will see them anyway) we’ll have three Jack-O’-Lanterns flickering tonight, one for Nico, one for Aleksandra, and one for Dash.

* * * *

October 27, 2010

Started sunny.  Got colder and darker all day.

Put up all storm windows.

Dug leaf-detritus out of all gutters and downspouts.

Covered and drained swamp-coolers at our house and at Barbara’s.

Cavendish is still sleeping here, living in the playroom, peeing into a strainer, expecting crystals to come forth in his pee.  (Boasting post-operation that he will produce a small dune of crystals.)  Tonight is the first game of the World Series, and because the SFO Giants are to compete, the event is important around here.  Cavendish’s laptop, while I cook, is on the kitchen table competing with candlelight, bringing in the pictures of the game, and he exults over base hits.  Giants are taking the lead and holding it.  Chili is on the stove.  Barbara stays away from loud baseball, in her own cottage with the PBS “NewsHour” and her stemmed glass of non-alcoholic white wine.

* * * *

Re: The “God’ whose existence is affirmed below:

It’s not much of an affirmation.  To affirm the existence of any divinity that might be visible to the rational faculty involves subtracting, from it, all its qualities.  The thing exists only in its unknowability, and is affirmable only to the extent that it stays invisible.  As a proof, it’s like saying “Existence implies existence.”  Or, “Look! Zero equals zero!  And one equals one!”  Such a diviinity is like an algebraic placeholder.

Subtracting “God” thus (as an unnecessary unknowable), the only left-over quantity is that odd emotional addition, the “love” motive of Creation.  The rational part self-cancels.  And the only remainder is the irrational afterthought.  The anthropomorphism.  The mythological.  The “caring.”

In the metaphysician’s lab, after the explosive poof, the retorts and beakers are suddenly empty and sparkling-dry.  But there’s a scent in the air.

* * * *

October 27, 2010

Sharp october sunlight. It’s 9:55 AM.  I’m waiting for the morning frost to thaw on the slopes of shingles, so I can climb up there with heavy storm windows.

The most interesting news recently, meanwhile, is that a galaxy from 13.4 billion years ago has been photographed by Hubble.  13.4 billion was almost the “beginning of time.”  The blurred pinpoint-fleck of orange light, as reproduced in the NY Times, is a signal from the early period when light itself hadn’t existed long.  Those photons started their journey 0.5 B after “big bang,” so they’re bringing an eschatological minute right back here for our inspection.  In the photograph it appears as faint, red-shifted, and it’s upstaged by newer closer stars, but it’s still out there, hanging out where the Big Bang continues as a present-time event.

This universe’s Big Bang of course wasn’t necessarily the first thing.  So say cosmologists.  A singular, unique “Big Bang” is a suggestion we favor, as “our” special origin story (particularly we in the West, far from the Upanishads).  The scientific likelihood is that before our own little “Big Bang” there were bazillions of Big Bangs over trillions of Kalpas.

I do continue to be interested in “Rational Proofs” of God’s Existence (cherishing particularly St. Anselm’s so-called ontological proof, for its clever gimcrack fake-out abracadabra.)  There’s one obvious logical problem in positing a “God” as an ultimate First Cause.  It’s a problem of “infinite regress”: What preceded Him, or created Him?  What were the prior sufficient conditions for the existence of a “divinity”?

Nevertheless, a kind of ultimate theism seems necessary, because, from all I see of cause-and-effect in the world, I infer that something initiated this endless cosmic inhalation and exhalation of fireworks.  Something outside chronological time and causation.  Surely it was a “something” never to be limned by myth nor by science nor even in the liveliest hallucination.

Yet, let me suggest furthermore that if something “caused” existence, then something “cared.”  That additional bit of anthropomorphism seems inevitable.  Something had to care.  That’s how we must imagine events’ teleology.  Oddly, this emotional (!) premise of “caring” seems even more axiomatic, more deeply, logically originary, than the cause-effect nexus.  So it is that we are inclined, helplessly, to capitalize this Something.  At the beginning of the “temporality” that provides the matrix of all subseqent epochs, a certain Something must have “cared,” “cared” to do something.  Or had a “motive,” or an “impulse.”

On my five acres life, meanwhile, seems comprehensible.  That a nutritional material is formed in chloroplasts from sunlight and soil; that it enters my mouth; that it sustains this trance I think of as objectivity, before exiting “my” body (me being, in this case, the 165-lb collation of cells that, during a period of a few decades, has foamed up temporarily and mostly held its shape), all these principles are treated routinely around here, with no special astonishment.  My coffee in the morning.  My red wine at the end of a day.  My eyes’ thirst for color and distance.  My absorption in lust/gluttony/envy/wrath/pride.  My endless dissatisfaction.  I see that “I” am an illusion, yes.  But one thing seems clear.  It seems clear that “I” wasn’t the thing doing the necessary caring back at the “beginning” of “time.”

* * * *

Beef stew: a bay leaf, shitake mushrooms, soy sauce, port, black pepper.  Cavendish arrives, on the eve his big “lithotripsy” operation, to spend the night here.  We have agreed to give him a six-am ride to the “Surgery Center,” a storefront in a mall.  And pick him up afterward at ten-thirty groggy.  As for the scab on forehead, he has no explanation.

“Oh, hey.  Would you pick up my antibiotics prescription?  Sorry.  I spaced it.”

* * * *

Rewards of cultural exchange.  Aleksandra (her family in Krakow made regular mushrooming expeditions, etc., smoked their own hams) informs us, helpfully, that our lavender, out back by the garage, can be brought indoors and scattered in the cupboards to deter the moths that infest the flour.

Reciprocally, she enters the kitchen this morning proclaiming, “Brett!  I googled your shoes!”  In fresh English of European speaker, the syntax pops

Your shoes got googled.  Something that happened to your shoes was googling.

* * * *

Saturday Night. Oct. 23

My worries are over, everyone got home safe to me.  Brett and Barbara and Dash and the dog, all in a car arrive in heavy rainstorm, driving down from Squaw Valley on winding two-lane mountain highways in the wet dark, and I’ve got pesto and bockwurst and cauliflower, the windows all steamed up, and my anxiety over their routine imperilment (apron, ladle) housewifely.  Only a few flakes of snow attacked their windshield coming over the summit.  Dash with flashlight flickers in the meadow and woods, looking for the missing cat, the color high in his cheeks.  Barbara by candlelight stalks the kitchen, looking for glass of wine, disgusted as usual by Garrison Keillor’s mellow “Prairie Home Companion” on the radio, a cane in each hand these days to support her.

* * * *

For subsequent use: A Jewish feminist agitates in favor of genital mutilation, clitoridal excision for herself and her entire sisterhood, as sign of covenant equivalent to (privileged males’) circumcision.

[With reprise of Texas psychopath who kidnaps, etherizes, and circumcises-and-releases folk, to save their souls.]

* * * *

Oct. 20.

Dry, sunny days are back for a while.

Aleksandra is living here, while Nico returns to SFO for construction labor.

All the furniture in the living room has been pushed up against the walls to make room for quilt manufacture.  Muslin backing, then batting, then the quilt-face, are to be laid out in a large loose (term of art) “sandwich.”  Then poke-stitching is to begin in the middle.

However, the batting material – the single great rectangular pad of it – was first fed into the washer, with the thought that it should be shrunken before being enclosed between two panels of cloth.  Of course it broke up into a slurry, which in the spin cycle was pasted evenly in a cylinder against the inner walls of the washer tub, to be dug off by fingernails in scoops.  Brett asked in despondency, “Do you still love me?”

* * * *

Sunday afternoon, arriving home, as I came around into the driveway, a red-tailed hawk flew low across my windshield danglilng in its talons a loopy snake.  A weird sight.

Cavendish shows up around dinner time.  He has some frozen “chicken pot pies” of his own and insists he’s only stopping by to pick up a package that arrived for him at this address and is driving out to his forest blind to heat his pies.  (To power a microwave out there, I think extension cords run from old dormant building-site hookup.  His trailer is just over the ridge from it).

But he is easy to persuade that my soup is preferable.  Falls asleep at the table.  Goes to bed in cottage.

* * * *

Nico and Aleksandra are back.  Success in the Big City has eluded them, at least temporarily.  Finding work and living-quarters is hard, in that (no longer so inclusive or forgiving) town.  She will stay here in the playroom for a week or so, while Nico will drive back to SFO to work as a hod carrier in the construction of a strip-mall, sleeping nights in the Dodge van, subsisting on 7-Eleven provender.  Both wear simple gold wedding rings.

* * * *

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Up at four.  Work well.

By dawn, the first drops of rain.

Bring in patio furniture.  Plug in the car (this old diesel business).  Bring in summer-dry kindling from cedar split 2 or 3 yrs ago.  Cover firewood with tarps.  Clean up tools and materials of summer projects (the façade for Barbara’s porch overhang).  Set up Barbara with coffee and Sunday paper.  Dash is awake, watching TV in the mud room, with his hands clapped over his eyes, because the hero is about to kiss a girl: the two of them onscreen linger brushing slack lips, breathing into each other’s mouths.  I offer Dash a wedge of pear, which cheerfully (“Sure, yeah!”) he accepts with his one free hand while keeping his eyes covered.

* * * *

October 16, 2010

Saturday.  Rain is predicted for tomorrow.

Lit the pilot lights in wall heaters for winter

Refrained, yet, from putting up storm windows

Window-screens go into the garage

Tarped over the stacked wooden garden furniture

Tennis with Dashiell

* * * * * * * * * * * *

First thing this morning, I stepped on – and broke – the hourglass that has been rolling around the bathroom floor.  These things come into Dashiell’s hands at school as gifts from oral-hygiene demonstrations (they set a child’s two-minute standard for how long you’re supposed to brush).  It’s been rolling around underfoot for some days, and now the capsule is broken, and the dose of pink sand, two minutes’ worth, will be sifting into recesses in the bathroom floor, as I didn’t sweep it up.

The other epochal event today.  I noticed that my temporary paper driver’s license calls my hair “gray.”  It wasn’t me that changed the hair color record, I would have only reapplied routinely as “BRN, BRN, 5’10”, 165 lbs,” and in fact it still is mostly brown.  The very friendly girl at the DMV counter must have changed it to gray, and without mentioning.  She must accomplish this little kindness often, many times a day, because I’m sure most people, not out of vanity but just negligence or indifference, let their hair-color alone on official records.  Also, the girl must make a custom of not mentioning it, as she makes the little change, there at the counter she occupies in the world, moving people on through the system.

* * * *

Sunday afternoon occupation.  The big bookshelf culling here.

Three card tables in the garage support small towers of hardcovers and paperbacks –The Color Purple, Lattimore’s dog-eared Iliad.  Light in August.  Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.  Field Geology.  One small stack, on the right, is the keepers.  The rest will go to the Eric’s bookstore in the coffee shop.  The garage radio plays NPR.

* * * *

The man from the county comes for the periodic, routine test of the groundwater in the well.  He’s only interested in the gallons-per-minute productivity, not e-coli or trace minerals like mercury or lead.

His equipment:

Tin cup.  Short length of garden-hose.  Stopwatch.  Graduated beakers and plastic tubs with calibrations.  Aluminum clipboard.

He kneels at the well-head in the pumphouse.  He’s patient.  Chats about the fish in Hirschman Pond.  I see he’s got a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, but refrains from lighting one up to kill time.  Anyway, the well tests out all right.  Five gallons per minute.  It’s fine.  And he tastes from the tin cup.  “Granite,” he says.

“Granite?”

“I don’t taste soil.  Just granite.”  And he explains.

This water is melted snow which has seeped through fissures in underground stone.  This cupful melted about 500 years ago – long before radioactive fallout, or even soot – up around Big Bend, where the “Rainbow Lodge” exit now is, off I-80, at the five- or six-thousand-foot elevation, and then it spent some centuries seeping toward us.

And my first, reprehensible, craven thought is, how can we keep this water supply out of the hands of the coming hordes?

The opening sentence of the Dhammapada: “Mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. To speak or act with a defiled mind is to draw pain after oneself, like a wheel behind the feet of the animal drawing it.”

* * * *

October 11 –

Spray for blackberries with heavy-duty OrthoMax solution.  Only the north and east property lines, experimentally.

* * * *

October 10 –

Sunday.  Apples.  The crop is skimpy, but enough.  Dash wearing old shoulder-strap bag of woven grass likes to climb high in the limbs and flouts all warnings from the ground.  In the kitchen, the juicer makes its dynamo hum.  Carafes of cider stand around, with grey sudsy foam.

* * * *

Oct. 7 –

Spread “MOLEMAX” pellets (castor oil) w/rotary broadcaster.

Broken garden chair: brass screwplate, clamp, epoxy.

Oven door: purchase cable, springs, cable ties.

* * * *

Oct. 7.

The apples this year are the best ever.  Largely worm-free.  So I realized something.  This was the year I neglected to put out the pheromonal traps for coddling moths.

Of course.  Those traps attract moths to the trees.  They’re enticed by the sexy pheromone, then discover apples, for their eggs to dwell in.

* * * *

The Nature/Culture thing:

Seems like every time I pass thru the cottage, in the flickering blue light of a TV set, a crime drama is playing: a bad guy is being tracked down.  And at the murder scene the camera is obsessively lingering over the corpse, relishing the little lake of blood.  Or by flashing jump-cuts (thigh, throat, temple), the sense of a “forbidden glance” is provided upon corpse.  Or the moment of the slaughter itself revolves in sick dreamy slo-mo.  Or we’re in the morgue and the coroner is standing by a gurney with a cop (usually it’s a young woman cop; on these TV soundstages the lighting gaffers use the actress’s nipples as a reference to set the depth-of-focus on the cameras, which must be evidence of what matters centrally in this medium), and the coroner is lifting the naked corpse’s sheet and he winces, saying, “Sorry.  Some things you just never get used to.”

I’m only the guy passing through the room, on my errands.  These are channels aimed at a demographic called “women,” the ones who, if Atticus brings in the trophy of a dead vole, send me out to dispose of the little soft body.

* * * *

Cavendish shows up for dinner.  He says a fine-looking furred mammal has been living with him in his trailer.  It’s shy.  Seldom seen.  He has identified it as a ferret, by Internet research.

His news is, he will need an operation.  His kidney stones, he says, are as big as olives.  He’d always known he was kidney-stone-prone, and has passed several in his life so far.  But these are too huge to pass.  He says, “I’d always thought of myself as a crystal maker, now it turns out I’m giving birth to moons.”

* * * *

War on moles and gophers:

1. A) Castor-oil.  They hate it.  It repels them.
2. B) A product called “The Giant Destroyer.”  It looks like a small stick of dynamite.  You light the fuse, drop it in the burrow, and cover over the entrance.  It releases a noxious gas.

* * * *

The oven door last night, revealing the roast, flopped down heavily with a clang.

A spring had snapped, and now the whole thing must be wired shut at the door-handle, to stay closed.  Today, a new spring must be bought at the hardware store.  This is a great old O’Keefe & Merritt, everything fixable, by any average-intelligence amateur who simply uses his powers of observation and a little fortitude.  One side of the range is a skillet you can burn kindling in.  We’ve never used it but it’s there to play its role in our Total-Environmental-Collapse schtick one day.

* * * *

6:30 AM, working in the basement of Barbara’s house in Squaw Valley, I can hear Tad’s voice droning overhead in Barbara’s bedroom. It sounds almost as if he’s reading aloud to her, at this hour of the morning.
Later I see Tad on the road and ask him what was happening. He says his mother had had a sleepless night – (her daughters are all out on highways driving to far places; she is alone at home with Tad) – and she asked him to come and tell her a story. So Tad pulled up a chair by her bed and launched into an hour-long redaction of the Wyatt Earp gang’s story, with Doc Holliday, the Clanton gang, the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral – and Wyatt Earp’s “incredibly dysfunctional family, the Earps” – and Wyatt Earp’s subsequent career in the West Coast movie business, where he became so wealthy he bought the entire town of Hollywood.

 

September 20, 2010.
At this time of year I can tell fall is coming by a new sound in the trees. I remember it from other winters. It’s a big ocean overhead, coming from the big slopes all around, a steady surf. It’s a sound you don’t get in the summertime here. Meteorologically, it’s probably the announcement of “the arctic low” dropping into the Gulf of Alaska. The paint on the southeast side of the house is peeling. Out back behind my trailer, in the upended pollen-dusted Sony cassette-player, wasps have built their nests, wealthy papery mound of hexagonal nurseries, inside the open jaw of the player deck. The tomatoes this year are ripening too slowly: it’s September and they’re still shiny-green.
Have replaced the old Volvo with a (even older) diesel-engine car, to be converted to biodiesel as non-corn fuel starts coming along: there’s a fellow out on the Ridge who is starting a business distributing vegetable fuel. He plans to offer a $3/gallon contract, to home-deliver fuel in drums, to be mounted on an angle-iron trestle here, so maybe I’ll have my own filling station beside the garage. A diesel vehicle turns out to be an inconvenient, tractor-like thing, which will take some getting used to. Different pace of life, even slower than ever.

August 18, 2010.
Back home in Nevada City, end of summer. The air is heavier down here than at the high elevations, more humid, and a mulch dogshit smell permeates the extremely cobwebby woods. The garden is late: tomatoes all unripe. Another “zilch” year for pears. Rodents have eaten through the line providing electricity to my trailer. (It’s just an orange 100-ft extension cord on the forest floor, originating in the pumphouse, which is the nearest juice.)

* * * *

The trailer under the oaks. The windows crank open against the strands of summer-spiders’ architecture. Those spiders now grown and gone. The heavy-metal space heater still works, making its strange (inexplicable!) elephant-trumpeting noise in waking up and electrocuting its toaster coils. The usual rodent pellets all over the desk and the trailer’s sink and the three-burner stovetop. Each birch-veneered drawer (I slide each open) is filled up with a mouse nest, so it’s like an apartment building. Which I just leave alone. I slide each drawer back in place. The little plastic tray of D-Con bait, heaped levelly with minty-green pellets, is at my elbow, as always. My fingertips are so calloused from handling my ten thousand old bricks, their touch won’t stimulate my laptop’s trackpad, which doesn’t recognize the electrostatic touch of my skin.

* * * *

September: Mowing largest meadow, I feel fat raindrops on my forearms, but I keep on mowing. The wind picks up. On hood of tractor, wet freckles evaporate fast, having appeared.

* * * *

Fall, 2010. Good to be back from Squaw, back in my trench. Hunter will be leaving soon for sophomore year, and Dash is back in school: fifth grade. I’m in my fifties now.
A month ago in July, Dash and I played miniature golf – at the same old place as ever, along a shabby Tahoe tourist-strip by the lake. Most cherished and dorkiest of mini-golf courses, the old green felt shrinking away from the cement channels, the girl dispensing scorecards and pencil stubs across her window-sill with open boxes of Baby Ruths and Butterfingers, its course’s plywood obstacles (Indian chiefs, clown-mouths, eightballs) hand-carpentered and hand-painted, or -varnished, by an old man in the 1950’s, unrenovated over a half-century.

An increasingly interesting reward of having had children: During this our brief hallucinatory witness among clouds of apparent particles endowed with “mass” and “energy,” in the midst of the ongoing, rumored Big Bang, if we have fostered biological children, then we have actually taken a dip into “matter.” We haven’t just groped spectrally through the particle-swarm for a few decades. We seem to have augmented the whole thing by a few pounds. It’s a sort of metaphysical event. Apparently, there will be consequences to our apparent existence, in the form of the continuity of the mystical thing flesh.

What made me think of this: the scorecard from eighteen holes of mini-golf (actually 36 holes; we went around twice) is still riding in my car’s door-pocket with suntan lotion and candy bar wrappers and a little replacement bulb for the dashboard display. The rainy snowy cold season will come, and there will be many pick-ups and drop-offs at school, and that paper scorecard will go on riding along indefinitely, the record of 36 holes outlasting me.

* * * *

Zen saying:

“Between the basin and the basin, I utter a lot of nonsense.”

[the two basins being: the basin the newborn infant is washed in, and the one the corpse of the very same being will be washed in]

* * * *

August 7, 2010.
Today’s the day. The 150 writers are due to arrive for the annual week of ambition, tuition, disappointment, romance, festivity. It’s dawn here in Calif. butmy people’s planes will already be in the air, and cars on the roads.
Woke up with the vibrant sensation of time’s sand-grains dwelling in my bones. How much of bullshit, I wonder, is in my feeling that everybody is already a “saint or at least mystic,” though unbeknownst. – [The Mormons do that thing of theirs: they make you be a “saint” right away, right when you join up, no kidding around.] [Like it comes with your certificate and your secret decoder ring and your T-shirt.  You’re a saint, stop pretending you’re not.]
Coffee has already been brewed. In the Annex living room Brett and Lisa, the Executive Directors, are in long white nightgowns in dawn light. The scissoring hum, rising and falling, of the sewing machine on the dining room table. They are up early hemming broad swaths, to serve as tablecloths in workshops.

* * * *

 

 

 

2-8-10
Whatever all this is, none of us will ever have the slightest “understanding” of it, though we are in constant uninterrupted contact with all its voltage every instant. Fascinating predicament. Absolutely fascinating.
Coming up from the mailbox in the cold February sun. Lots of heavy, glossy magazines for Barbara. (Or for Barbara’s demographic):

LifeExtension Magazine: Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10 – Now with Shilajit!

On a telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker (perhaps an intruding species) taps with a rapid rhythm accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.

* * * *
2-14-10
My anti-film-festivals crack. It’s not the festivals themselves, nor the movies. Movies are great. So are movie-makers. The problem is: what happens to the towns over subsequent years: Park City and Mill Valley were both once quiet lovable places. H’wood injects its virus. Twenty years later you’ve got the actual panthers and cheetahs of Rodeo Drive slinking in the very streets, or rather their imitators. People think that can’t happen here.

* * * *

Fruit of late-night conversation in the cottage, as endless boring luge competitions flicker on televised Olympics:
Everybody is willing to perk up and say, “Well, yes, ‘love’ as a Prime Mover, sure, I’ll go along with that. That’s my religion: God is love.”
Anybody is willing to say it. The god-is-love thing could even be considered “true,” if semantically risk-free. I.e., meaningless, in the sense of being non-referential. But how radical are the implications of the remark. Upward theological implications (suddenly you’re a mystic!) and downward practical (suddenly you’re a saint!).

* * * *

The town’s movie theatre.

It’s a storefront. Flat non-sloping floor. Armchairs. Charles has only one projector, so the reel-change requires a long intermission, including reel-rewind. Charles bakes brownies, something to serve to his patrons during the unavoidable break. We can all smell Charles’s brownies baking during Reel One. Then comes intermission. All stand around out front and eat his hot brownies, while Charles, behind his velvet curtain, rewinds the first reel and threads the leader of Reel Two into the sprockets.
Charles’s big interest, personally, is in short subjects. He is a connoisseur and archivist of cartoons, public-service spots, newsreels. So the audience must be patient with his opening lecture about the provenance and significance of the Loony Tune were about to see, before the feature. He stands in front of the screen as he lectures, in his characteristic twilight wringing his hands with ardor for his subject.

* * * *

End of day. Out on our road, as I drove by in dusk coming home, two vultures were taking turns, pecking in the now-famous little carcass at the roadside. Early dark of winter days. Cold. I use old Squaw submissions as tinder for the stove.
(Something like a “rush hour” is audible these days, from the direction of Highway 49, now that Erikson Lumber has been selling off parcels on its tracts for development.)
On the deck railing, a plate holds rainwater and one bloated pizza crust: Brett’s yeasty homemade pizza dough. Dew on the wheelchair, even this late in the day. Brett reports she thinks Barbara may have had yet another mini-stroke in the art gallery today after I left them: an awkward moment of listlessness. However, she smiles symmetrically. Lifts her two arms symmetrically. Knows who the President is. She’s fine. At 87, as charismatic as ever, if still inconsolably sad.
As I came up the driveway, Cavendish’s truck stood parked in the grass. Cavendish has gone in hospital today for a routine colonoscopy involving anaesthesia. But he is still living primitively out in the river canyon, so has asked if he may convalesce here at our house for one night. It’s a privilege: to serve as a lamp by the side of the road. He arrives, post-colonoscopy, looking debonair as ever, looking as usual like Andrew Jackson on the Twenty. At dinner he is very knowledgeable and informative about polyps, villi and microvilli, lipid metabolism, bile. For Dash’s entertainment, Cavendish has a joke:

“Why don’t wild animals eat clowns?” he asks Dash, and immediately tells him, “Because they taste funny!” causing delight in Dash.

Barbara across from him in candlelight, digging her way through her polenta, chuckles grimly to herself and remarks, “Hm. We should’ve thought of that.”

* * * *

In comparison to my solar panels, my clothesline uses photons with maximum efficiency. And with the lowest-tech implements: string and clothespins.
[I continue to indulge these clothesline remarks because the clothesline is such a happy emblem of everything we’re in for. As we’ve, quite justly, exported our so-called “middle class” overseas, we will import a straitened wise frugality from the peasant villages of Mexico and China and Nigeria. This is all for the good. This is all wonderful.]

* * * *

Another sweetheart: Dead salmon lay on its side under two feet of swift clear water, thick-as-my-calf, long-as-my-arm, on the underwater cobbles, its black parchment fishskin fluttering in the current, lifting away in squares, its eye sockets filled with white sauce, its whole surface shivering in the current, fragile from putrefaction

* * * *

Big epiphany: I don’t need, anymore, to practice my fond old superstitions. (penny discoveries; the recurrence of 11:17 on clock faces; my lucky coffee mug; etc.)

Here is why superstitious practices are fallacious: they are premissed on the notion that I have any desires.  Or that is, desires whose consequences I can intend and prefer.
Therein lies the traditional “error” of the astrological chart, the rabbit’s foot, the horseshoe, the burnt offering, the found clover-leaf. The problem is not that superstitions are an “idolatry.” (Such is the childish objection: that one seems to be “worshipping another or false god” – the god of pennies – or the leprechauns.) Rather the good-luck ritual involves the mistake that I might, wisely, want anything at all.

* * * *

ON SUPERSTITION: The Father of the Uncertainty Principle

The physicist Niels Bohr, as an old man, had retired to his cabin on a fjord. But he was sought out by an interviewer. The interviewer asked about the lucky horseshoe nailed over the cabin door. “You’re a scientist. Surely you don’t believe in that stuff.”
Bohr’s actual response. “Oh, no, I don’t believe in it, but that’s the kind of thing that works whether you believe in it or not.”

* * * *

March, 2010.
Got unstuck with my L.A. 1946 novel. Featureless characters finally showed themselves.
The arbitrariness of the process: All I needed to do was be brave and sketch on an eyebrow. Then the one little creature started provoking the others. The eyebrow was what started it.

* * * *

March. Two feet of snow in a single night. Up at 8000 feet they’ll have more than three feet.
Cavendish showed up, in his tall battered truck, and we added to the spaghetti.

* * * *

When, as a young man in the 1960’s, Cavendish left school and “came back West,” it was to come to Relief Hill, a remote inaccessible spot on the Ridge, once a mining encampment, where his family had owned, but at some point sold off, a tract of land with some empty cabins. He and a gang of friends rented those cabins back from the new owners – this is after Woodstock, after the protests, after VISTA in Philadelphia, after Chicago, after cab-driving in NYC. The particular virtue of the Relief Hill place, the thing he’d come back for, was the spring under the live-oak, whose water was sweet and abundant and dependable. Tonight here, by candlelight, taking refuge here from his unheated, snowbound trailer in the unfenced canyon, he boasted that the watercress around that spring was so lush, it was a great bog of watercress as big as this room (swinging an arm). He says some day when the roads are clear he’ll show me Relief Hill.

* * * *

March 23,24. Snow continues.
Buckets of muddy water, to refill the toilet tank. (The electricity at the pumphouse is out.) Nobody’s been to Trader Joe’s lately, so we’ll be getting into the better-than-usual wine. Silently the flakes, big-as-moths, seek earth and stay. Everywhere else, the Dow and the Nasdaq will take care of themselves.

* * * *

Spring, 2010 (SAN FRANCISCO) –
Driving the pickup truck out Lombard toward the GG Bridge and out of town, I’m carrying funereally the last dust of Oakley’s small empire, plaster-chunks, painting debris, rotten splintery lath, carpet tacks, the carpetpad-sponge’s stale toasty-orange dust-crumbs, the whole heap under a lashed-down remnant of carpet. It’s been two years since his death; and Brett and I spent this week working, clearing out his old office in Macondray Lane. Today that little room has two fresh coats of paint, of a shade commercially called linen. Freshly assembled furniture that was purchased by clicking on an “Add-To-My-Cart” button.
The room feels bigger now. One thing you miss about a man when he’s gone for good: everything he knew. (That he knew what a “shibboleth” is; or a decent restaurant in Reno; or Bob Dylan’s real name; that he knew Henry James’s invidious remark about the size of Wharton’s advances; that he knew what an “objective correlative” is; that he knew the point-of-view tricks in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” and Miriam Makeba, and Keith Richards’s solo albums, and the treacherous coast road to Hana; that he knew the clever left-turn strategy off Newport Boulevard; that he knew how to be patient and forgiving.) All of it is gone, gone with him. “Everything he knows” is an element essential to a man, more essential than the heartbeat, or the 98.6 F degrees, or the characteristic smell, or the misshapen old chair, or the Subaru that went to Tracy and lives now in Arizona. Everything a man knows is a quantity hard to enclose. It’s a vanished, immense, galactic genome. Twenty-five boxes of books came out of that cramped room, freckled with mold, histories of San Francisco and the West, accounts of the Mormon migration, cowboy tales, biographies of eminent Californians, the Iliad and Parsifal, John Wesley Powell, “Men to Match My Mountains,” Wallace Stegner, Ambrose Bierce, “Champagne Days of San Francisco,” “Resumés of the Great Operas,” maps of European and Mexican towns, books by his old friends whom nobody would find collectible anymore, gold-rush anecdotes and accounts of the Dakota range-wars, all the scholarship of a serious writer of historicals and westerns. On Lombard Street, afternoon traffic is fast and orderly, and my heavy-laden pickup truck fits into the flow. Near the GG Bridge ramp-up, among motels and tourist-seafood dens, a towering billboard displays a photograph of a baby, a gigantic beautiful infant girl, rosy and alert and warm, with the message (the work of a pro-life group): “HEARTBEAT: THREE WEEKS AFTER CONCEPTION.”

* * * *

April 15, 2:30 am: A late spring frost. The temperature has been sinking all night, while outside, the pear and apple and peach blossoms are at their most vulnerable. This year I pruned and composted them and hung out pheromonal traps for coddling moths with particular care. Now that we have a heavy-duty centrifugal juicer, I’d planned on actually trying to have a big harvest of cider this year.
4:00 am: Found a website at a Michigan State ag school with a chart showing “critical minimum” temperatures for fruit trees at various stages of bud or blossom at risk of frost damage. The lowest among the various categories is 27 degrees. Now already tonight, the temperature has hit 24, and still sinking.

* * * *

In my fifties.
How I’m a hobo. How I practice my so-called “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, bringing in only occasional trophies, but mostly depend on my wife, her good will in the world, her steady work. Old story: poor boy marries classy girl. Brett’s father was always a good breadwinner (and as for good will in the world, he had a vast network of it). He always had a great-paying job. Barbara never did work. So Brett has no experience of improvident males but yet is patient and forbearing and quite non-judgmental and also (here’s the thing) unfailingly joyful.

* * * *

Have located a hand-crank coffee grinder ($4.50, at a Goodwill in China Basin). Little wooden drawer below with dovetailed joinery. An S-curve in the wrought iron crank handle, with porcelain knob. Not only for power outages, but for the practice of ever-more-perfect Environmentalist Kashrut/Sharia. (In case I ever get serious about that.)  (It’s extremely slow in creating its black powder in the drawer.)

* * * *

May 10, 2010

Winter’s gone. Balmy days. Nico and Aleksandra are living in Dash’s old playroom, trying to get a foothold and green-card legitimacy. They’ve displaced Cavendish, who has gone back to his blind. But he’s obliged to come out of the woods every day, dressed and groomed, because he is providing his technical help to an amateur Sondheim production in Grass Valley.
So. Displaced from his bedroom here, what does Cavendish do for his dinners? A Grass Valley supermarket has a “Deli Café” which offers, among the buffalo wings and macaroni salad, two soups du jour, plus chili, in lidded stainless-steel dispensaries. The place also provides wireless internet, so he can labor over his magnificent emails in the evenings. And his appraisal of the chili is: “It’s dependable.” He was sighted this week at one of those Fiberglas-resin picnic-table benches out in front of the place, working at his muddy old Apple Powerbook in the twilight, beside an untouched paper bowl of chili – but dozing over his laptop – his forehead coming to rest at last in the keyboard. At this point Cavendish is approaching seventy, though wiry and tireless, and is pretty-much famous in this town.
Then, yesterday we were having a party here, and he showed up. He carried a supermarket bouquet (awarded to Brett as hostess), and a potted supermarket orchid (for the Mother Superior, Barbara, as it was Mother’s Day) and took sovereignty of his end of the table, full of happy boasting about Sondheim, interviewing his table-mate neighbors in his usual way, condemning as crap the wine we serve here chez Jones and recommending highly, instead, the bottle Sands had brought, making observations about Sondheim’s use of the story structures of fairy tales, even the grisly, gory old chestnuts. The fairy tale, Cavendish says, is all the education we need, as preparation for life. Call kids home from their colleges, retire the liberal arts and sciences, put away the Torah and the catechism and the 3 R’s, and just study fairy tales, squeeze those little turnips for their drops of blood.

* * * *

With Aleksandra here from Krakow, we get a break from my cuisine. Beets and potatoes and cabbage. Bitter rye bread. Mysterious tall ceramic jars with fermenting, souring processes going on. She puts on an apron, ties back her hair.
She immediately took to the garden, too, having arrived at the right moment of spring. On the window sills stand old egg-cartons, each carton containing a dozen dollops of black soil, with sprouts expected, destined to be cucumbers, expected in turn to become pickles.

* * * *

June 6, 2010

A few little teleological observations (occasioned by the wedding, here at home, of Nico and Aleksandra):
We mortals believe that our deeds have (A) discernible origins and (B) discernible consequences. That is, our actions have “causes” in the past and “results” in the future. It’s how we feel anyway. We feel that we are enmeshed in a teleological (cause-effect) net.
But truly, moment-to-moment, our “consciousness” – our intentionality – is in fact a chip tossing in choppy currents, deep oceans, our consciousness just a sequin of reflected light on the surface. Our so-called “reasons” swell and press from outside ourselves. Likewise, the inward “intentions” of our actions are flooded and swamped by creative accident. Many “ad”-ventitious “ac”-cidents were actually born inside ourselves. And grew inside ourselves. We have only a deluded grasp on the causing reasons and caused results of all our deeds. And so we ought to relax. Each of us is an apple hanging on a tree. It’s easy to fulfill one’s appleness.

* * * *

The veg. garden’s elaborate Maginot Line to defend against gophers: galvanized mesh is buried three feet underground, ringing the vegetable garden. However, I seem to have walled in at least one gopher, who now lives there, in gopher heaven, dining on the most succulent roots, fresh ones continually transplanted there for his delectation. Brett takes comic pleasure in this fiasco, while I begin to see real insolvency in all my operations.

* * * *

Couplings for 1” poly-pipe
Hose clips
Patch copper feeder tube: evaporative cooler
Insect repellent

* * * *

Now a plague of drowned mice in the irrigation system. They pop out slick and bloated at the lower gate in system-flush. Or they meet their end as paté grotesque, squashed into sprinkler head, or hose-bib valve.
So I hiked up to the weir and found somebody had left the springbox’s iron lid up. I closed it over and weighted it down with a big stone.

* * * *

Yesterday: a great day. The mysterious irrigation clog has been cleared.
For all the winter months, seeing summer coming, I’d lain awake nights, with Job-like considerations of what would happen to this place without irrigation-district water. (We’ve still got our pumphouse, for drinking and bathing. The irrigation is what’s been broken.)
It was the fire department that unclogged it. Guys from the Coyote Street stationhouse actually came out here, as if they didn’t have anything better to do on a Saturday afternoon [station captain’s response in phone call: “Well, sure, we can be there in ten minutes or so, barring an emergency”], in their big truck, hopping down and setting tire-blocks routinely under the wheels, and they unrolled their 130-psi hose, of grey fabric folded-flat, extending a quarter-mile up the hill, and they blasted the clog uphill along a quarter-mile stretch of pipe, firing brown water out the top end. Then we all stood around and watched while, in the old dry hole in the dirt downhill, clear water welled, and spilled over, and started running downhill in the dust.

* * * *

June 1st
Gutter repair. Replant ruined tomatoes. New tires for Hunter’s car. Spray all buildings’ foundations with Diazinon solution. Start up irrigation to see what leaks. Sort among my kindling-pile like Croesus, restacking it.
Diazinon has been long-since taken off the market by the EPA, but I’m using up this old brown-glass bottle, bequeathed by George and Ginny, from the cabinet in the potting shed. (I just have to keep it nowhere near meadows or gardens.)
(Regret not having sprayed pears and peaches with dormant solution, as now leaf-curl and canker are attacking leaves.)

* * * *

Sands is back from her teaching job, so Cavendish has moved to her place for his pied a terre, in her spare room among stacks of fileboxes. Staying in town saves him the long trip on dirt roads at night, to his deep forest fastness. (At least you’re not sleeping under the Pine Street Bridge, we josh him. Pine Street Bridge is where the orphaned, feral hippie kids from the Ridge sleep.)

Night before last, Sands called from the emergency-room to say she couldn’t come to our little dinner get-together, because Cavendish had showed up at her door in convulsive pain after a closing-show cast party. Had to be driven in there, vomiting, worrying. She had already spent some hours in the waiting room – no doubt editing some client’s novel, manuscript on her knee, cell phone at her side.
Kidney stones were suspected, but he was sent away with a handful of antibiotics and painkillers. Has no insurance, of course. Hasn’t had insurance since he dropped out of Yale forty years ago and went to Woodstock. Was put to bed among Sands’s cardboard fileboxes. Maybe it’s just a urinary-tract infection.
So yesterday I emailed Sands to ask after him.  Received this response from her:

He arrived at 6 this morning saying he was almost out of gas (he meant the truck) and didn’t think he’d get home. He’d been striking the “Fantasticks” set all day/night. He’s currently asleep in the guest room. I was awake when he rolled in—he seemed in good spirits.

* * * *

June 13, annual Meadow Party, the music fizzles early, but the food is plentiful, the summer air warm, the little kids rage in the dark woods all night unsupervised, far from the bonfire, with their glowsticks, like goblins. Amy Tan has brought an ipod containing reproductions of birdcalls, and the following morning she has set it up behind the cottage, driving local birds to confusion, sending amplified calls into the trees. David Lukas arrived with large pail full of morels he found around the North Fork of the Yuba. One day later, linguini for twelve, ON MY NEW BRICK FLOOR.

* * * *

June 16, 2010, move to Squaw for the summer.
Snow still in hard drifts at elev 6200ft on mountains’ north slopes. The creek thunders all night long. The paths up the creek are strewn with snowload-felled trees.

* * * *

June 22, 2010

Structure repairs at elev 6200ft. It’s been an unusually stormy Sierra winter. Wrought-iron raillings have been bent under the creep of glacial snow load. Bears, during the depths of winter, have been unseen and unheard-of. A sheet of blown-away plywood lies on our hillside. In the valley meadow: the chickadee’s chirrrrr.
On the house, structural wood after sixty-one years has been shrinking. It starts losing its grip on the old hardware. However, during the same sixty-one years (esp. on the south- and west-facing exterior walls), the beauty of unpainted redwood’s grain intensifies, a red-golden toasty corduroy, a woodgrain big-as-matchsticks, scorched in the grooves, radiant-blushing from the many sunsets it has faced down.
So the good-as-new old brass screws lose their grip in the wood – on, say shutter hinges and door hinges. And I think of Oakley on these summer afternoons as I work, slot-head screwdriver in hand, brown paper bag of shiny new brass screws by my knee. Oakley used to say with a chuckle wherein all mortality and futility are foreseen, “You just keep putting in longer screws.”

* * * *

6-21-10 – My agent calls with good news. Counterpoint Press, hardcover, lead title on spring list. This agent, of lo these twenty years, her patience and forgiveness make me think of some “Higher Power,” or is that just her?

* * * *

Barbara. Her pacemaker operation and her stroke are falling behind her into history, and she shows all the old wit at dinner with old friends. Even a new aloneness in the world is a stole one can wear with a noble bearing.

* * * *

End of June, 2010. Hunter and Nico tear down the old shed on the south side of the upper house. Little pre-fab cedar barn, a kit, purchased no doubt from some hardware store’s parking lot. Crappy two-by-two construction, staple-fastened, the whole structure goes down in a single morning under their blows. Suddenly the view of Granite Chief returns, and Squaw Peak returns, because of course they’ve been there the whole time.

* * * *

That “Just keep putting in longer screws” joke was, on the irony scale, exactly like Oakley’s similar remark about a novelist sustaining his career over the years: “Just lower your standards and keep on going,” he liked to say. (But the irony there isn’t quite as darkly acquainted with the deep full, liberating ocean of futility and mortality. Because I really think he half meant it! So it would have been a kind of despair.)

* * * *

On the topic of the big anti-abortion billboard in SFO proclaiming the heartbeats of embryos. (Which has been on my mind.)  ——–  It guess it’s an irrelevant consideration (but an interesting fact) that the embryonic heartbeat is, strictly speaking, a half-heartbeat. In utero, only two heart chambers pump blood, not the full complement of four chambers. Until it’s born and takes its first gasp, a fetus’s lungs are collapsed, as is half of the heart. So that little heart is a prototype engine.

(Something pro-life billboard makers perhaps ought to be told, in case it influences their view.)
[Liberal tho’ I am, I find it hard to be entirely unsympathetic to “pro-lifers.” If you really believed that our louche society casually murders unborn babies en masse, then it makes sense that you might be alarmed as we think the average German citizen ought to have been, during the days when people were being removed to death camps systematically, rationally, deliberately, discreetly, hygienically.]

* * * *

Suppose you want to suggest that a fetus isn’t “alive” yet — because it isn’t really human until it’s conscious. Or aware.  You want to say that “conscious awareness” is what’s lacking in a fetus. The thing will continue to be only like a sort of unconscious kidney, or abscess, or loaf, until it is “breathed-into” by enlightenment, filled with ideas and perceptions.

Well, if you define the beginning of life as “consciousness” or “awareness,” then the larger question, is: Did Life Ever Begin?

Has It Begun Yet?

* * * *

Who among us (whether born or about-to-be-born) is worthy of preservation, if we accept that “un-consciousness is characteristic of sub-humanity?”
I, for example, personally, travel around inside a blinding, deafening, numbing storm of delusion-solipsism-lust-gluttony-sloth-envy-pride (et cetera). Immediate “Actuality” is something I’m seldom (or, of course, never) in touch with. The Buddhists would say I am in ignorance The old Christians would say I am in sin, as a measure of my distance from Truth.

In any case, I’m not sure I exactly possess “awareness.”

(Human “awareness” and “cognition”  might be a merely social phenomenon that accrues, and a semiotic phenomenon, a constant burble, compounded of inward language-rules and outward social conventions.)

* * * *

June in Squaw. The book biz.
Pulled out an old novel from the Annex bookshelves, and wow. The first chapter, at least, announces a great writer: Sara Vogan: her 1981 novel “In Shelley’s Leg.”
According to the jacket copy she was (in 1981) teaching creative writing in Milwaukee.
Only a few pages in, I want to send her a note of admiration – if the rest of the book can carry on like this, there’s another really good novelist in my generation. Or send a note to her agent, to be forwarded.
So I Googled her name. The first two “hits” on Google were, of course, younger, newer Sara Vogans on Facebook, but the third one read: “Sara Vogan, 43, Dies – Novelist and Teacher – Obituary – NyTimes.com”
The dateline on the story was 1991, ten years after In Shelley’s Leg was published. She “was found dead, at her home in San Francisco. There were no immediate survivors.” Cause of death had not been released pending coroner’s toxicology report.

* * * *

Sleepless night. Awake at 3 am, orbiting the lower rooms in my stocking feet, not orbiting near the scotch bottle, which never has been much of a temptation anyway, and doesn’t allay sleeplessness — I bring up on my computer the 24-hr webcam in NYC at 43rd and Broadway. I love this thing, this NYC webcam, and visit it often, mostly at ungodly hours. Watching New Yorkers.  In pewter streetlamp glow, they walk past a USA Today dispenser box (some striding, some ambling: it’s six am there).

Ding: in my email stack is another MyLife Search Alert arrives: “I’m looking for Louis Jones,” reads the subject line.
One keeps getting these things, tho’ one belongs to no social networking site. The person searching for Louis Jones, intended to tantalize me, is described in the email as a 28-yr-old female in Flushing, Minnesota.

* * * *

June, 2010.
For Barbara, at her age now, just to get up out of a chair and cross a room is an adventure requiring courage and strategy and resolve, as well as a clear prevision of wreck. I compare her tribulations – pains, embarrassments and inconveniences and darkest perplexity, and the prospect of good-old death always ahead – with ten-year-old Dashiell’s tribulations (we tend to forget the miseries and anguishes of children, for whom the prospect of life looms ahead; which, too, is a “room” to be crossed at peril). And I’m frankly not entirely sure which form of tribulations I’d pick for myself, if I had a choice.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

* * * *

July 18, 2010. Squaw Valley.
Poets are in the valley. Hunter and Zoey, as poetry elves, must wake at 7:15 for Xeroxing. It’s fine to see them, way before their usual rising time, a pair of 19-yr-olds sleepily trudging with coffee-cups to the car.
I’ve ordered two cords of firewood (at inflated mountaintop prices; but they’re full, unstinted cords), which yesterday were dumped off the bed of a truck.

In the afternoon Tad and Andrew and I set up the usual bucket-brigade-style system of transporting it all, by tosses, to the shelter of the deck to be stacked. If you’re the man on the catching end, you have to look lively or you’ll get a log in the belly, or in the back. After an hour of repetitious work, conversation takes on a different pace and protocol. Longer uninterrupted speeches. Longer intervening silences.

* * * *

7-23-2010.
The usual annual party tonight for eighty visiting poetry devotees. Right now it’s two o’clock on a hot afternoon (I am in the cold shade of the basement), and party preparations are stopped till five, by Sands’s decree

In the high Sierra, one may lay out outdoor place settings only partway. During the afternoon, wax candles will slump, and stemmed glasses might possibly set tableclothes on fire by focusing sunlight, burning holes. I saw it happen once. A smoldering at my elbow.

* * * *

The book business transmits Gossip with orgasmic immediacy. For some reason I particularly am entrusted with all such reports whispered with level Schadenfreude, so I find I’ve become, in my 170-lb frame, a treasury of atrocious information about famous or beloved people. I don’t even tell my wife. All the most appalling news of the celebrities, I’m a graveyard for it. The Talmudic tradition: Gossip is murder.

* * * *

2-8-10
Whatever all this is, none of us will ever have the slightest “understanding” of it, though we are in constant uninterrupted contact with all its voltage every instant. Fascinating predicament. Absolutely fascinating.
Coming up from the mailbox in the cold February sun. Lots of heavy, glossy magazines for Barbara. (Or for Barbara’s demographic):

LifeExtension Magazine: Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10 – Now with Shilajit!

On a telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker (perhaps an intruding species) taps with a rapid rhythm accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.

* * * *

February 1, 2010

Found some bricks! On the Ridge across the river, the gold-mining enterprises left behind a brick mansion which today is in ruin. Vigorous cedars stand in its center. Bricks can be dug out of the forest soil, to come here and pave a footpath I’m building. Irregular, manufactured on-site in 19th C., fired in Chinese-built kilns at the riverside.  Now 100 yrs later, they’re eroded in little loaves, muffin-textured, they’ll be tender under bare feet.
The forgetful, unlettered West. Memory persists in mute artifacts. I built the bookshelves in the mud room out of old three-by-eight timbers from the falling-down barn at the end of Cement Hill Road where the legendary Antonio used to sit and drink red wine, contemplating his one beloved cow, dreaming of Jalisco and Sinaloa. (Whence finally he vanished again.)

* * * *
This week at A.P.P.L.E. (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) Neighborhood Readiness workshops are being offered, teaching “easy low-cost ways to package bulk foods in nitrogen at home,” so that when the peak-oil apocalypse arrives, we in the mountains will still eat.

* * * *

Tad’s Stocking-Cap Takes Shape
Brett has been knitting a stocking-cap for Tad. He’s living in Albany, where it’s cold, under the care of his new woman, no doubt chain-smoking, talking brilliantly, happily, at leisure all day every day. (Tho’ his old translation of a Jarry play will be performed! By a puppet theatre-troupe in Albany!)
It turns out the stocking-cap Brett has been knitting was emerging as a Möbius strip. (This can happen easily to an amateur knitter. It happens through an error in the first row.) So she’s going to pull out all her stitches.
But I wish she’d send it to him as it is. Because Tad would get it, and he’d love a Möbius-strip hat, possibly somehow wear it.

* * * *
From the novel:
“Fundamentally everybody always knows everything: it’s a basic working principle of society: everybody knows literally everything and instead there are just layers of self-deception.”

* * * *

 

January 24, 2010.

With bad weather now upon us, Cavendish seems to be taking up permanent residence. (The plaid fold-out couch in Dash’s playroom, on the NE corner first floor.)
Beside his bed, his scarred muddy laptop and his boxed “household gods”: books and magazines, vegetable oil, flashlight, pancake mix, potato chips, old rusty chrome ratchet-and-socket set, whole-wheat Fig Newtons, duffelbag – all are stacked up before the drawers of Legos, Tinker Toys.

His large, long shoes by the kitchen door, with their associated puddle. His health drink in the fridge. His different (better!) brand of coffee beans. His question at the cupboard Where does this go? His dependable yeomanly contributions of cottage cheese, wine. He makes a trip out for potable water in this power-outage emergency.

I ran into him tonight in town. Before the little David Lindley concert, I’d stopped at a café on Broad Street where Luke and Maggie have a regular dinner-music gig – and there was Cavendish at the counter, wearing heavily swagged scarf and tam-o’-shanter beret. Picture Andrew Jackson in tam-o’-shanter. (Or Samuel Beckett, more like.) He took the stage for a while. It seems to be the season of Robert Burns’s birthday, and Cavendish “Can Sometimes Be Prevailed Upon” to recite Burns’s poems. Which he’s committed to memory and delivers in an astringent Scottish burr.

The “wee sleekit tim’rous cow’rin” mousie made his appearance, and also a fine poem – “An’ a’ that” – about the dignity of the lowly common fellow compared with the transparent tinsel vanity of the superior folk. People, to applaud, put down their knives and forks. He lifts his arms in a harp-shape at the end of a poem, presses one heel into the other foot’s instep.

Much later that night I’m home from the David Lindley show and Cavendish is still up. He says he’s had “a transcendent evening.” Around the corner from the café, they’d all gone to Friar Tucks, he and the musicians. There, he was again prevailed upon to recite (this time the entire long one about the Cutty-sark, which he’s got by heart), and the very old scotch whiskey was brought down and passed around in salute to the great soul Robbie Burns.

(It’s true. There aren’t many great souls that pass among us. Burns was one. Cavendish another.)
Time for bed. Time for Cavendish to go to work on his laptop all nite composing emails. Time for me to join Brett in the cottage, where she’s keeping her mother company. Cavendish says goodnight, but he has to pee first, and heads out the backdoor into the storm. I tell him, “Wait, the power is on. The pump is working. You can use the toilet.” But he says no, he prefers peeing outside. Always has. More environmental.

* * * *

 

 

http://louisbjones.com/2010/11/10/more-of-the-same/

September project.

Needing a studio to work in, I was planning to choose a spot in the woods to put up a “pole barn” (two-by-fours, 4×8 plywood, a dozen bags of cement mix, rolls of tar paper, a space heater – all available at B&C Lumber). All one needs is a little place far from the hilarity of family life. With a window.

However, Brett ran across a small ad: “Shasta Trailer, 1953, $100.” One hundred dollars is about one tenth of the cost of the lumberyard materials listed above. So the fellow who was selling it, down near Auburn, was happy to haul it here himself (having pumped up the empty tires). Over the years he’d been using it only as a hunting blind, dragging it to places on back roads. Its last DMV registration was “1969,” a year when a great many things went unminded. My writing studio, now, is teardrop-shaped in profile, two-wheeled, turquoise on the bottom half, silvery on the top half, quilted aluminum, with birch-paneled interior and cabinets. It lives now under the drippy oaks off the edge of a somewhat lost meadow on the property. You have to look, if you want to see it. If you look straight at it, it tends to vanish.
John Cavendish, who knows how to do everything, came out of the woods to help me get it up level on cinderblocks. He not only knows how to do everything, he is, also, infinitely generous. Cavendish is another thing that in 1969 went unminded. (He was born here in this Western town, son of a mining engineer, and he had started at Yale. But then went to the Woodstock festival, joined VISTA, etc., never looked back.) Cavendish arrived in the morning overequipped wearing his workgloves, bearing huge rusty iron housejacks, car jacks, a block-and-tackle, his own supply of cinderblocks. He has leveled many a trailer. I’d picked out some sloping ground, and my trailer’s back end might need a small tower of cinderblocks. We backed it down the slope into place using Cavendish’s four-wheel-drive with trailer hitch.

It’s dry inside. I tore out the rickety formica breakfast table (something more like a fold-away ironing board) and installed a solid table at the window, all of old, true two-by boards. Mouse shit. Open cardboard tray of D-Con’s fluorescent pellets in the corner. I remember when I lived in Mill Valley and had received a small “forty pieces of silver” from a movie deal, I built a more opulent little studio, high on a hill, with a view above sequoia treetops, thru leaded-glass windows. Writer “A” visited and noted that other famous writer “B” would be building his studio in Berkeley with a full bath – and that yet another writer friend, “C” in Orange County, has a backyard studio that is soundproofed and feng shui-adjusted, and adobe! “A” suggested “studio envy” would come to plague a circle of writers. If they could see me now! Mine has a license plate. And a license plate frame, too, on the back end, with a witty joke for tailgaters “Stay Clear – My Rear Is Near” announcing itself to anyone or anything in the depths of the forest behind who might think of following too close.

* * * *

 

 

Hemp Is Stronger Than Iron.
It was time to cut down a stand of cedars. In so doing, I exposed some forest ground where my son discovered the frayed end of a buried length of rope, sticking up from the earth. (This is near where a barn is rumored to have once stood, as there is a squarish old foundation of stacked granite in those woods.) By pulling the rope’s protruding end, he was able to unzip the soil in a long meandering path, from its burial-horizon about two inches under the modern surface, lifting dirt-clods wherever he went. Sixty feet later, at the ultimate end of the rope, a now-rusty nail (not a square nail; not that old) had been driven through the braids, once long ago, to fasten it against a tree or a post now long-gone. The nail had corroded, it was nothing but a flexible twig of black rust, while the hemp fibers were still strong and hard and resilient. I dried the whole sixty-foot length on the garden-fence for a day or two, and put it away in the garage with other ropes, for future use.

 

 

* * * *

 

 

February 23.

Last month Dash lost his first tooth and was awarded a silver dollar by the Tooth Fairy. Then, this week, another tooth came loose – (these things are smaller than the kernels at a corncob’s tapering end) – so another coin appeared under his pillow. The two shiny coins have since been prodigally lost, somewhere among hoards of plastic toys. But the two discarded baby-teeth, they have been archived, by my wife, in a Zip-Loc Baggie with a torn-off paper identifying them and dating them. This morning I was reading in bed while Dash (as a seven-year-old will) wandered around the bedroom silently exploring drawers and cabinets and dresser-tops, the mysteries of cufflinks and theatre-ticket stubs, suspenders and big old boots. I was aware of him picking through the drawer of the little writing-desk behind the bedroom door. Then he wandered away, toward other parts, wafting around the room, finally drifting down the corridor. It was about five minutes later that he drifted back to that drawer and said, with hesitation, softly but pointedly, “Dad? Why are my teeth in here?”
During that five minutes, only silence had come from his bedroom. During that five minutes, he in his sovereign loneliness was taking responsibility for the whole mysterious world. On the one hand, he had seen with his own eyes the gift of the Tooth Fairy, solid evidence of what a deserving boy he is and how ample the world is. On the other hand, there were the very teeth. I wasn’t paying attention during that five minutes while he was totally quiet. He bore that weight because it’s something children know they have to do, even in their darkest innocence. I think of it now in regard to my father-in-law’s cheery anecdote — that his cardiologist in a jocular mood told him as he went off toward the oncologist, “Beware of oncologists, Oakley, they just want to make you feel good.”

* * * * * * * *

March 3rd.
The oldest peartree on the east side of the house has, or rather did have, three main branches. Last summer, one of the three branches produced no fruit at all, and but little foliage. This winter, all that side’s wood and twigs were clearly dead: the spurs were putting out no incipient buds. So during the February cold-snap, I sawed off that whole branch, at its base, releasing a gallon of muddy rainwater that had been steeping like coffee in its hollow core.

Now April is coming, it’s blossom time, and one of the two remaining branches is behaving just similarly.

* * * *

March 20th.
The neighborhood lion – a solitary female described as long-bodied and not so tall as a deer – has been spotted this spriing on the road, and Hunter (who has loved the pre-dawn hike alone to the highway schoolbus-stop every morning, lighting his way on moonless winter mornings by the glow of his cell phone) now tends to stay in bed later, do some extra history reading, and let his mom fire up the minivan and scrape the windshield frost, to drive him out to the road.

* * * *

Cut down hundred-foot cedar with swift fine effective new Husqvarna 350 saw. Saved out two eight-foot lengths of the trunk for splitting into fenceposts. Rolled them up to the meadow and, with two iron wedges, split them lengthwise into posts, 6’x6’x8”. Enlarged the garden enclosure by establishing new posts on the south side, sinking them three feet underground, leaving five feet of vertical cedar standing aboveground, and stapled up ten-gauge wire against the depredations of deer. Hung old gate from new gatepost, using the same old doorhinges. Began tilling the new-enclosed earth and, at this point, Dash appeared. His videotaped cartoon-shows must have ended. He turned on the irrigation-spigot’s rusty gush, to make mud in the new-tilled earth, while I fenced him in. Eventually he was flopping and tumbling in it, sitting in it and squashing it into little castles. By dinnertime he could claim, rightly, that he looked like an orc, and had to be hosed off on the threshold before tiptoeing through the house to the bathtub, and I told him at dinner that today had been a good day because, ninety years from now, when he’s old and grey and nodding by the fire and can’t recall much about his life’s ups and downs – and doesn’t even recognize anyone in the room with him anymore – he might yet remember with crystal clarity, as if it were right before his eyes, the great day when he was seven and played in the mud in the sun.

* * * *

March 21: started tomatoes indoors, Brandywine and cherry. And planted one row of bok choy outdoors as experiment. Lettuce, cabbage, onions, chard will go in tomorrow outdoors. Broccoli and cauliflower still to come. Potatoes and corn when frost is no longer a danger.

* * * *

March 24. Today I parked behind the bookstore/cafe on the main street, to walk around to the front for my double-cappuccino to go. On the parking pavement out back, all three waitress-barista-girls were on their hands and knees — circled in a huddle — all wearing their ripped-denim skirts and other pretty gear, bare-shouldered or silk-shirted. They were following the dopey adventures of a small, dusty, brown thing that tumbled slowly there, a honeybee who had fallen into the cannister of powdered chocolate. The entire wait-staff was outside. Work at the “Wisdom Cafe” had come to a halt while they discussed whether to let him be, or “dump a glass of water on him,” or find a little brush somewhere and poke at him, as meanwhile he blindly revolved.

* * * *

Religions make preposterous claims, but they are oddly practical claims.
Plenty of human institutions – art, for example, or poetry – are impractical-looking. A number of successful, smart people go from cradle to grave without setting foot in a museum to look at a painting. Some care little about “cuisine,” some are not meant for sensuality, or reading a poem. They get along fine.  Same with religion.  Some people just never look up.  And they seem fine.
In the case of a tried-and-true religion, if it’s the real thing and not merely a pretext for racism or sexism or war, its practical result is (let’s face it) to transform you into a saint and mystic. That’s the inevitable point: sainthood and mysticism.
Since, in every full life, it is finally necessary to be a saint-and-mystic – yes, for every one of us; it’s the sieve we’re all inescapably ground through (most of us with the dignity of our privacy) – then a “religious” attitude of some sort becomes an inevitable necessity, whether homemade or off-the-rack.
There is a lot of talk these days – especially post-9-11 – about the obvious deludedness of religion; how ridiculous religion is; as if one day we could all be rational! And overcome it! And everything would make sense! Such writers as Sam Harris and the author of The God Delusion are perhaps – I don’t know – too young, or too wilfully pretending an innocence. They would say they don’t believe a day will come when they’ll have to be saints and mystics. They pretend, publicly, that they have no idea what such a bizarre warning could possibly mean.
Well, the fact is, maybe they will succeed in leading a life entirely on that level. Maybe some people do. Like those who live without art, without reading a book, without sex in some cases, without cuisine, and are perfectly happy and self-sufficient. Maybe they’re übermenschen, those Christopher Hitchens types. Christopher Hitchins is a marvelous rhetorician, always a pleasure to read, and a lively entertainment-personality. But one with an interest in “truth” or “verity,” of some kind, ought not to go to an entertainment personality for it. Mr. Hitchins has some unexamined assumptions, and a useful way of defining God is: “a necessary logical assumption.” “A first logical assumption.” Most theologians would insist on its being an unexaminable assumption indeed.

* * * *
Few of my favorite things, Seven in number :
Lust Gluttony Envy Anger Greed Sloth Pride

* * * *

April 12, 2007: Zucchini planted, in pots indoors, to be moved outside on May 1.
This year in the fruit trees I’ll try something new. Traps for coddling moths. Last year their worms came to live in at least half of our apples, so that every bite was an investigative exercise and we couldn’t, without admonitions, give them away to people. These commercial moth traps are designed like cardboard-origami boxes, which you hang from a branch. They announce their brand-name in stylish letters on their side-panels, “Tanglefoot.” Pheromones seduce the moths inside, where, with their libido, they presumably die of impatience, hung up in the perfect breezes of May and June.
Personally, I’ve never minded eating an apple where a worm has lived. It only takes a little paying attention.

Plus, the worm isn’t there anymore. It’s just the tunnel he left behind in escaping. And I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those caterpillars, born innocent inside an apple, is cleaner and more bacteria-free than a human mouth.
The weather this spring was perfect throughout blossom time. Every petal and pistil has stayed intact, during a loud bee time. Already the pears are starting to look abundant. Knobs as big as marbles have appeared overnight, two or three for every foot of branch. I suppose culling will be in order. One particular stupendous old tree seems to produce a full unculled crop of pears as big as softballs. When the August nights come, the sound of branches’ snapping will come over the meadow. A real farmer, I know, would fashion crutches for the branches. It’s wasteful not to. (I’ve also seen slings, of torn bedsheets knotted.)

* * * *

The Power/Love Trade-Off.
In the journey of forking paths (Is not Life a Garden of Forking Paths?), at every fork, Love lies on one side, Power on the other. When you choose the one, you are forsaking the other. Also in choosing the one, you veer permanently farther from the other, as you go along.
(I notice this to be a constant theme in my fiction.)

* * * *

May 17. Hot days are here, and laundry is drying on the line. The rumble of the dryer, its jets of hot propane, will be idle for the summer mostly. Advocacy of clotheslines.  I’d like to supply the kit (twenty wooden pins and a thirty-foot length of twine) in every mailbox, free of charge, to all americans.  Rough-nap stiff bathtowels, folded on linen-shelves, can be the pride of every clever household. Let them be a status symbol. Along with organic gardens, on the lawns of Winnetka, the redwood decks of Sausalito. Let Michelle Obama establish, beside her First organic garden on the White House lawn, the First clothesline, where the First boxer shorts may wave in the breeze.

The sight of laundry on a line today has caught me unawares in a sentimentality. We’re educated to see really magnificent or summary beauty in certain conventional places – the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s B-minor Mass, Proust’s big book, the Grand Canyon, even a close look at a wildflower. I was conventionally educated and I’ve been, of course, made aware of all the usual ways we’re supposed to get access to “the sublime.”

But the sublime can sneak up from unexpected directions, and laundry on a line in the spring wind – the big bedsheets in various colors bellying out – comes at me now. There was a children’s-book we used to read to Hunter, called “All the Secrets of the World,” and it contained, spread out over two pages, a particularly moving illustration of a lawnful of laundry hanging out to dry, as seen through the eyes of a child. In a wind that was palpable from the artist’s pastel-strokes, on a slope of lawn that tilted with a moody passion and a predestined ineluctability, the great flying badges of laundry were framed to represent a scene a child would remember forever, a simple spring day, to one side a granny figure, slouched in her metal garden-chair. Today on the meadow behind our mudroom, filtered through my memory of that artist’s illustration, our laundry stretching from a pear-tree’s branch to the corner of the house above a cord of firewood – more than taking another crack at Proust, more than a day at the Louvre – exactly captures the thing I might come back for, if there were such a thing as “reincarnation.” I would leave the Louvre, for this: I would walk right out of the rooms of Dutch masters and down the staircase, and get on a plane straight back here on this meadow. The pure and austere “sublime,” according to my conventional education, is contaminated by such corny ingredients as a particular sentimentality, and in this case, the taint of nostalgia, too. But an education isn’t always-and-unfailingly a useful preparation for life. The whole organism is constituted for the perception of the elusive “truth-and-beauty” revelation.

********

I’m Elmer Fudd now. I’m Mr. MacGregor. A rabbit is my nemesis. He has dined systematically on my rows of broccoli, eschewing the lettuce and onions and the new asparagus-mist above the ground and Swiss chard. (The Swiss chard is, instead, food for green finches, and is a total loss.) So today I fortified the enclosure with finer-mesh wire, and I put a second latch on the garden gate at ankle-height, because a greedy rabbit can flow through the gap there. Will I soon be waiting at a rabbit-hole with a big mallet up-raised?

********

Interesting. Fencing wire at Ridge Feed and Supply is gauged according to the size of the varmint it forfends: “gopher-wire,” “rabbit-wire,” “hogwire,” etc.

********

June 10, 2007.
Broccoli has been mostly lost to the rabbit: two whole rows were nibbled down to nothing, in as many weeks. Now I’ve put finer-mesh wire all around, and all raids of the rabbit have come to an end.
Then this week, a quick hail storm put bulletholes in all the broad, soft leaves – pumpkin, zucchini, pepper, tomato. We were inside drinking with Oakley and Barbara. Had to run out in the dark, to (inspiration of the moment) pull molded-plastic chairs off their stacks and set them over the sprouts. The survivors are the corn, the onions, the cabbage, some of the lettuce that hasn’t bolted, and about half the tomatoes.

* * * *

Good Meadow Party this year. Three fiddle players, with all the courtesy of the eminent, were here among the usual mix of dobros and guitars at the campfire. Also a great mandolin player.

* * * *v

June 12, 2007. I’ve been making a practice, for some years now, of sitting in the rear pews Sunday mornings at a very traditional Episcopalian church. It’s fascinating, it’s informative, it makes me think, and when I can manage it, it’s an hour in the week well spent. Now I’m asked whether I “believe” in “all that.”

It’s an ineffectively framed question – the usual purely semantic trap – because “belief” is a word nobody has a handle on. The truth is, people don’t know what they “believe.” Rather, refer not to “beliefs” but refer to “things we say.”
Of the “things we say,” a few might be “beliefs” but the rest are just “announcements.” And they’re announcements for our own hearing, our own ears, our own enchantment. Especially when we talk of higher things – guardian angels, quarks – our one most-enchanted listener is ourselves.
An example of something we seem to believe, freely, is that this table here is solid and will go on supporting an elbow. Or, we believe that the light pouring into our eyes begins somewhere, and represents an object. Or, we believe that, at the lapse of one moment, another moment will rush in, consecutively, to sustain the “flow” of “time.” Those are things we believe. Call that theology.

* * * *

Flannery O’Connor, when asked whether she “believed in all that,” said something like, Well, if it were all just a lot of symbolism, then the hell with it.

* * * *

The logic of Western religion: If you paint a slash of lamb’s-blood on your doorpost, the bully will pass by your house. The message is: “Pass me over. This house has been ruined. The one thing most precious here has already been slaughtered. Pass on by.” Then X-ianity came along and did accomplish the slaughter of the son, quite publicly. [So purportedly “the game is up.”]

* * * *

I was in L.A. on Saturday at ten o’clock in the morning giving a commencement speech to graduating students who had won awards for Creative Writing (I spent much of the time warning them basically not to be writers if they can possibly help it). Meanwhile Brett and Hunter were home on the meadow, in canvas chairs, watching baby birds learn to fly. According to Brett, they would zip out from the appletree about fifteen feet, do a U-turn, and zip back into the tree.

* * * *

Other evidence of the season. Hunter on June 22 will get on a plane for New Hampshire. It’s something I find myself boasting about. On the strength of a couple of string quartets, he has been accepted at a summer composers’ school and been given a scholarship, so for six weeks he’ll be gone from home, for the first extended time. At the airport, he will enter that telescoping tube connecting airport to plane. He’s sixteen. His parents will be shrinking at one end behind him waving ‘bye, and he’ll go through the plane hatch alone, carrying his ticket in hand, and start looking for his seat alone. What a great pleasure that moment is, for him.
* * *

June 5th.

Don Knotts.  He was “Barney Fife” in the television show about the sleepy small-town sheriff. The protrusion of adams-apple and eyeballs, the barfy mouth. He has been on my mind lately. When I was young, Don Knotts was, to me, an instance of pitiable show-biz mistakenness. He was a man who had built a life upon his own ridiculousness, his scrawniness and foolishness, all to make people laugh. Compare him with Mick Jagger, who was incarnated in the exact same physical form as Don Knotts (fact: they were twins separated at birth) but Mick Jagger parlayed it into a form of power and glamor. When I was young Mick Jaggers’s seemed a life much better spent.

* * * * * * * *

It’s been a big year for wildlife. Big animal populations. As in no other summer, squirrels keep invading the Annex, taking bites from the apples in the fruitbowl. Neat black defecation-pellets by the phone and message machine. So we set a Have-A-Heart trap and release them by the Truckee River. Then as more squirrels appear, to be trapped and released, we begin to suspect that, Heffalump-like, it’s the same squirrel over and over again, and not a multitude. It’s suggested that, for identification purposes, we should spray-paint this squirrel before releasing him again, and see if he turns up again (as there happens to be a Krylon spray-can of “Champagne Gold” in the basement); but this idea is discarded because the other squirrels around the Truckee River might “gang up on” a new squirrel who showed up with too dangerous a fashion sense, wearing Champagne Gold.
And the bears. At lower elevations, this year, they’re raiding my pear and apple trees. They leave huge piles of wet shit directly under the trees where they stand while sweeping lower branches of all their fruit.
At higher elevations in Squaw, they provide an instance of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Here is that chain-of-events: For years the local bears learned to dine on people’s garbage. Then, in order not to train up “Bad Bears,” the new local law was that all garbage must be housed in bear-proof steel containers. Everybody invested in those, including poured-concrete footings. The result is that now bears, disappointed with garbage-forage, are entering houses and browsing around, hankering, gross, mystical. They need to be chased out by a featherless biped waving his arms and hooting.

* * * *

An unusually cold December. The compost heap outside in the mornings (last night’s asparagas stem, banana peel, coffee grounds) is frozen sparkling. But still a little bit of summer hangs around: beside the kitchen sink every time I lift the lid on the sloppy compost bucket, one little fruitfly appears.

(It isn’t the same fruitfly of course, it’s a descendent and heir of the fruitfly I saw the day before. September’s fruitfly seems to have reached a reproduction rate of exactly “replacement level” in there, months after his tribe’s proper season.)

* * * *

The form “Total Environmental Collapse” will take: It won’t be a dramatic crisis; simply an economic pinch will educate us. The price of an apple. The necessity to learn a new trade. An Ohio U-Haul on I-80, driven by a hopeful fellow with his family. (Or of course perhaps a disappointed fellow). That’s the “recession” for you. That’s ecology.

And the art of making things last; which provides a pleasurable kind of creativity and a constant education. All I learned in grad-school is irrelevant. Our streets and roads could one day look like Havana’s, with old cars nicely maintained.
My ergonomic “BalanceBall” chair (a pilates ball on a pedestal with no backrest) has a puncture in the inflated sphere, so now it’s patched with a bike inner-tube patch. Years ago I’d have ordered a new ball and spent forty dollars. This is how Total Environmental Collapse will look.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Cynic” in literature: one who sustains a display of eternal innocent wonderment at the portion of “evil” in the world which he is so uninquely sharp-eyed and high-principled as to discern. It’s a manner of evading looking within oneself to discover one’s own portion. So, as literature, it’s not really, anymore, for grown-ups. Good for kids. Samuel Clemens (twain) would be an American instance. It’s why so many of Twain’s books are, in the end, tiresome (*), his always holding his own “Having-Never-Grown-Up” before himself as a lamp to light the world. The world doesn’t measure up, for him.
Sorry, but Mr. Vonnegut is probably an example too. Very Twain-like. When I was young, his books got me interested in the moral power of fiction. A fond goodbye to Mr. Vonnegut. In heaven now with Barney Fife.
[* exception: “Huck” – who does contain and embody racism]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jan. 4. Hurricane-force winds are coming to the foothills. The National Weather Service radar shows a fantastic low-pressure zone offshore swirling, wandering our way. Have garaged both cars, set stones around the skirts of all my woodpile tarps, roped the loose-swinging gate, latched the screen doors by hook-and-eye from within, filled the bathtub with cold water (as the tub is our only cistern when the power goes out and the pump doesn’t work).

* * * * * * * *

Winter: chainsaw won’t start and needs servicing; the lettuce has stopped growing and its leaves are hard and bitter; the woodpile is shrinking faster than I’d planned; Hunter is doing home-schooling this year and drinks coffee continually; all of us in pajamas at noon; no word from my agent.

* * * * * * * *

Poor old San Francisco. Now, there, one feels as if trapped inside a J. Peterman catalogue. (“Here’s a devastating trench coat, as laconic as Bogie in Casablanca, as wounded as James Dean in Rebel. Oh and here’s a little café straight out of the Summer of Love. And in this little coffee shop for an afternoon, you can go back and be a beatnik again. Here’s Buddhism, complete with black cloth shoes, here’s Suffering Art, here’s epicureanism, here’s alienated mutilated subculture.”) It’s inevitable in pop culture, that the soul be trivialized, but SF used to be a small town and a provincial place, more isolated from the Great Marketplace of the Self. (Its reputation notwithstanding!) Indeed wasn’t every place, once, more provincial?

(Kierkegaard, yes: The only real religion is solitude. [Implying that, where “any two are gathered in my name,” it’s already poppycock.])
Even much of the literature of our time has turned to a form of paraphrase and sly quotedness, J. Peterman-catalogue-style, where, under the guise of post-modernism, it succeeds as a series of clipped-together cliché attitudes. The Reign of Irony. Sometimes I think the appeal of irony, for the practitioner, is that it can sustain the feeling that he’s immortal and never grows old, and stays beautiful, by never committing to any sincerity. Sincerity is death. When my son’s pop music employs a “banjo” sound, it’s only the idea of “a banjo,” it’s merely a quoted banjo, an ironic banjo, not the actual thing. An actual banjo, that would be a horror.
All I can suggest, at least for an artist, is, in the end, you have to love something.

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[Possibly even a sampled banjo.] [A banjo all made of diode oscillations.]

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June. The mower’s “blade deck” whacked against a fencepost and is off-kilter. And all the belts need replacing. Fixing it is beyond my powers. I’ve been lying under it in the grass all morning. “Pearson Small Engine,” in Grass Valley, asks a fifty-dollar pick-up and drop-off fee, to send out a trailer for it.

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May 1 — Have delayed all plantings, especially of corn, in order to make fruit last longer into the fall. At this point, in the small garden patch, all I’ve done is turn over the soil.

http://louisbjones.com/2007/11/07/2007-diaries/