cheap buys, guys!

here's a poem about the three hours of free time between the time you wake up and when it's time to go to work:

needs to write

needs to exercise

needs to write, read, eat, fight

right now

needs money like a blue sky -

cheap buys, guys!

dollar thrill bills on friday nights

monday wednesday doomsday

will there be work on the worn horizon?

work for the weary?

work for the ready-bodied?

the fiery eyed and the ocean gazers?

the pony-tailed pontificators?

the bearded, the bedraggled,

the me's and the you's (but who's counting?)

still, the squirrel outside my window 

keeps busy, peanuts and pay-corns

sunday afternoon and

outside the blinding window

"howl, howl" says the dwindling wind

"who?" says the azure void, "says who?"

"please" I says

say us how to bloom and spare us your truth

last thing this generation needs is a name

's a tired old game

used to have a dream

then I went sane

here's the solution

says I, to me, softly:

uproot away from it all

start over simple-handed

learn the flowers, learn

heart is hidden 'neath the uncut sky...

"hasn't worked yet," says the optimist

"hasn't ever worked," says the yawning dusk

"hurry up!" says the due bill

"All-A-Buzz!" does the conductor

("grumble, grumble, grumble")

maybe we are

nothing but smarty-ants

bee-lining towards workaday

till one day

queen bee goes missing

takes her money to the bank and

leaves us constellation fishing,

"be back in 10 to 15"

in the alright evenings

So if anyone should ask, tell them I’ve been lickin’ coconut skins, and we’ve been hangin’ out, tell them God just dropped by to forgive our sins, and relieve us our doubt.  La la la la la lie, la la la la la la lie.

On the backporch of America, where noisy night light bugs fly and bright the dark blue yawning sky, we sing songs into the sound, crouched into our chairs concentrated.  On the tail-end of the hottest southern summer day, the after-humid rain, the magical dusk calm that follows.  Where once we were all strangers, and still are, but sharing something unsaid in the ever-evening.  Like seeing that everyman has his instrument, and every woman has her own, and that it all comes from the same place eventually.

Knowing that every workaday heart has it's doubts, thoughts that maybe the perfect life has flown coop.  That what happened to the dreaming tree, to the life ideal imagined, before your nose?  For certain there is a proper respect, a necessary grievance, for what's already been sung... but out of which seeds the maturity, the lesson learned, to recognize the moment while the light bug flashing lasts.

So if at all we are considered, consider us this lesson learned.  And it's why we’re still here, late,  laughing awake, and smoking chimney’s:  to put some fire up your ass.  Heard you were living normal life is when somebody's got to ask have you been kicking coconut skins?  And have you been hangin’ out?  Because God just dropped by to forgive our sins, and turn us inside out.  With youth anthems, and at-home hymns, and getting-younger-till-it-ends songs. Give your mother apple pie, and the father cloudless sky.  And know that it all returns to the same place eventually songs.

Underneath the Hickory trees where the antelope roam, underneath the milky galaxy where the ant hill home, underneath our fire faces gladly be, underneath strong meals and constellation-wheels - this is where you simply find me.  And so if anyone should ask (and especially the girl from the north country), tell them I’ve been fixing everything we did wrong.  Because I know you human tried, know we ordained to say goodbye, but I forgive your pretty face for to love you like a child.  

the illinois river

“for everyday I work on the Illinois River get half a day off with pay, all day long I’m makin’ up barges, on a long, hot, summer day” – Sara Watkins

It came to me today, returned like a forgotten friend.  We drove west into the hill country, backwards in time and scope.  Parked on the gravel stretch beside the highway, cars zooming round the curve at 60 mph’s plus some, zooming by in big whoosh whooshes.  Hiked a narrow trail through a corridor of trees parallel to the highway.  Headbands loose t-shirts swim-shorts and water sandals.  Weary.  Rejuvenated by a sudden afternoon off, afternoon to explore, afternoon to finally put hard hard money at work, afternoon to free.  And amid the sweltering heat were a-brewing storms, like premonitory things; and perhaps not so coincidentally.  The hazy sky cast sun-shadows on rock and river.  Could’ve been dusk, could’ve been dawn. Waded knee-deep through the low draught-ridden creek.  There for an hour or four, and all the while the feeling setting in – like sun sets into skin slowly darkening reddening hardening. Waded out to mid-stream empty-handed as the day I arrived.  Waded out to mid-stream stood grounded on slippery underwater wet-smooth rocks; stood there in the rushing, amid the dash wooshing and river washing.  And then, myriad rain-drops in a chaos pattern of returning home in quiet splashes.  And only the sound of what is.  And then, slightly bending knees and torso, deliberately dipped cupped hands half into water, and paused motionless, entrenched as a stock-still tree-trunk, and watched the river change it’s course to accommodate calloused, creative, potentially great only commonplace, above all owned, above all borrowed, hands.  Saw the immense potential of the natural standing order of things; saw you in his natural habitat, and land in hers; saw the ocean of the sea and the ocean of the sky, the two combined; saw the great cycle of water life gone and lost rush, and finally, saw myself, citizen of only the earth, a creek toward a stream toward a river leading upwards to higher sources, and so on – saw brilliant impermanence, free rushing saved away timeless now.  And smiled, realizing it had been a good while.

like a little lake, for instance

For instance,

's a mysterious lake that the morning mist makes in the clean waking hour of dawn

geese flying overhead ducks heads in their shoulders as men mow the lawn down

and I sit apart from it all

the pin oak the red oak, the drying up dead oak, been here through impossible times

but the lake as new as the morning dew, and men, just a blip in the books

and I find it hard to believe

the young girl the strong girl, the drying up old man, passing each other in stride

red neck-striped turtle just floats in the surface, all dressed up with nothing to know

and the sun stronger shines through the steam

round and round the heat is hot, fine gravel crunch beneath jogging feet shoes

a pocket of wild in parking lot country, and closing in quick, they say

- the world isn't over - just the world that you knew

and it hasn't a name you can fight

and it isn't much wrong or much right.

Quotent Quotables

Paul said to Peter, 'You gotta rock yourself a little harder.  Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire.' - Josh Ritter

How could one ever be bored with so many good things to see and feel!  This unity with our joyous surroundings, this ultra-penetrating perception gave us a feeling of contentment that we had not had for years. - Yvon Chuinard

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life. - Jack Kerouac

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair [...] You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names.  You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.  Come to it any way but lightly. - Stephen King

"Oh dear Jesus, Oh dear Jesus" - 10 year old girl on my tour yesterday (with a thick southern accent) every time she went across a zipline

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins most?  I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you?  You'd be wrong though.  It's Hambone.  - jack handy

Today was a good day.  It was better than most.  Didn't see me no demons, didn't fight with no ghosts. - Joe Purdy

"to hell with facts, we need stories!" - ken kesey

You know what else gets a bad rap?  Fiction. When I was young, I was taught that in order to distinguish “fiction” from “non-fiction,” all I had to do was think “fake” and “non-fake.”  The trick was helpful, but you can see how fiction was pre-disposed to fight the uphill battle.  I mean, what’s good about being fake?  We’d rather have cold hard facts right?  We’d take the truth over the un-truth any day.  (This is a lengthy blog entry, so if you’re strapped for time, I’d suggest just moving on, maybe come back later.)

You might remember a book by James Frey called A Million Little Pieces (2003), the captivating memoir of a drug/alcohol addict who nearly died, but through a series of incredible events learned through relationships and rehab to like himself again, and eventually, to attain sobriety.  In 2005, Frey’s book had topped the charts as a New York Times bestseller for 15 weeks straight; Oprah Winfrey chose Frey’s memoir for her book club.  Then, in a classic case of media vs. celebrity, a series of investigations revealed that Frey had fabricated a number of the events in his memoir.  Oprah brought Frey back on her show  (the episode was called “the James Frey controversy”) and tore his reputation to shreds on national T.V.  The media jumped all over the story, publishing articles like A Million Little Lies; even “South Park” did an episode about the debacle.   Frey’s publisher, Random House Publishing, was eventually forced to offer a full refund to any reader who claimed they had been “misinformed” (nearly 2,000 readers have since been refunded in full).

If anybody understands our culture’s cravings, it’s the big wigs in the entertainment industry.  This is why you see horror flicks that are “based on actual events,” or love movies that are “based on a true story.”  The question I always hear about Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is: “well did he really do those things or is he just making it up?”  I guess there is a place for these questions, but it’s a tragedy when they distract us from what is truly important: the story itself, and the lessons therein.  For me, Frey’s book was one of the most powerful discourses on “addiction” I have ever been exposed to, extending far beyond the realm of chemical addiction.  I just can’t understand throwing his story into the fireplace, even if, heaven forbid, he was only actually in jail for two months instead of the supposed four.

Besides, “fact” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Remember how it rocked your world when you found out that your history textbooks might not be 100% factual?  That they might be a “little” bit biased since they were indeed written by the winner?  You would think that, if anything, we could trust a textbook to tell us the truth.  Or how about those discrepancies you found in the Bible, like in the various gospel accounts?  

Here’s the truth, and yes, I mean the cold hard truth.  You ready?  Any time a “story” gets told – the very second that a human being takes charge issuing a narrative, whether it be a novel, a movie, or a simple account of what he or she ate for breakfast that morning – any time a person tells a story, “fact” goes out the window.

Just imagine every member of your family trying to recount the events of a certain Christmas, or two different sports teams giving an account of a game they played against one another.  No matter how hard you try to stick to what “actually happened,” you will never get it perfect.  James Frey is not a liar, neither was Kerouac, neither were Matthew Mark Luke or John (not by any means to compose some list of comparable authors).  They are all beautiful storytellers, and I hope we spend more time appreciating those stories than trying to figure out if they were “real” or not.  If I was a walking video camera, and you were a walking video camera, then maybe we’d give the world a true story or two; it’d be a lame and boring world, but hey, at least we’d have ourselves some facts.

Right now I’m reading a fictional story by Thomas Wolfe.  Wolfe grew up in Asheville; the town in his fictional story is called Altamont.  Now Wolfe called his book fiction, likely to avoid falling into a James Frey-esque controversy, but his novel is undoubtedly based on his young impressions of this area.  When the novel describes springtime, or the nature of the local people, or the patterns of the sky – well let’s just say, it has taught me a lot more truth about my backyard than any National Audubon society field book ever could.

So for anyone who reads “non-fiction,” and refuses to see a movie unless it was “based on real events,” I hate to break it to you, but I doubt that your sought-after stories contain any more “truth” than J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings.  -This may sound like a heresy, and I hope it does – but even if you can’t quite stretch that far with me, I hope you can justify a place for fiction in your mind, and I hope that when it comes to certain “facts,” you can expose the man behind the curtain.

welcome to the show

Often-times, “entertainment” gets a bad rap.  The word carries a lot of baggage into the conversation.  Likely, upon hearing the word “entertainment,” you picture someone in a movie theater, face a-glow from the busy screen, cheeks full of popcorn.  The problem with entertainment is that it connotes being passive, even lazy, being distracted from real life.

I think there is a sense in which entertainment needs to be loosed from its bond, relieved of some of this baggage.  The beautiful thing about entertainment, and I think what needs to be emphasized more, is this:  in the process of being “entertained,” an interaction is taking place, and what’s more, that something valuable is happening in the midst of this interaction. 

All writing is entertainment.  Right now, I am entertaining you.  I am offering you something – ideas, visuals, some sort of stimulation.  You aren’t just sitting there lazily, letting everything I say drift into your mind.  It’s much the opposite.  You are actively engaging yourself in my words, you are processing for yourself what they are worth, and in this way, we are conversing.  Your mind is working on this idea, just as my mind worked on this idea, and so we come together on a certain plane of thought, and both of us are changed, in some small way, because of this interaction – isn’t that sweet?  Humans need entertainment, we crave it, we seek it out; we can’t live without it.  We need something outside of ourselves to come into our heads and stir things up; it’s how we learn.  Without entertainment, we would never learn to speak, to read, or to develop any complex ideas.

(And so now comes the admonishment).  Depending on what you believe is valuable in life, I hope you steep yourself with movies, books, conversations, etc… that actually have something worthwhile to offer you.  

Because the idea is this:  if I don’t watch movies about religion, and I never read any works on religion, and I don’t spend much time thinking about religion – then I shouldn’t expect to have anything smart to say about religion, or at least I shouldn’t expect to know anything more than what I learned when I was a kid, or whenever I last took a class on religion.  In other words, you are what you eat.  My favorite thing to eat are books, but there are a million and one ways to entertain yourself.  A lot of beautiful people out there have a lot of beautiful ideas; the best thing we can do is seek them out, in order to learn, and in order that we, in turn, become better entertainers.