bugs, nectarines and george the prick.

the bugs are about. mornings these days, are spent on the porch drinking tea and reading, quietly swatting the mosquitos. hearing the birds and watching the bees, the giant ones, dump themselves into the open flowers. they tumble into tunnels like drops of heavy water, and back out like small spaceships. i wish that in all the futuristic films, they would at least design some of the flying machines to look like birds and bugs. instead of modelling them after cars, since they fly, shouldn't they look more like flying creatures. or at least airplanes? or do these imaginative minds think that we will overcome the laws of physics? this could easily become a philosophical debate. with myself.

and so the summer is here. upon us like the snow was. heavy and thick and wet with the hot damp air. the trees around the house, full and lush, looking something like a south american forest. though i confess, sadly, to never having seen a south american forest in person. only photos. and as i sit here typing, thinking of so many grand things to celebrate, like my beautiful wife's birthday last weekend, and the conversations i've been having with ron via email about music, and the fact that keri and i have decided to move to california instead of spain, and how this decision fills me with both great joy and great sorrow {letting go the idea of moving to spain is a difficult thing, and one doesn't want to spend the rest of their life saying, "we ALMOST moved to spain for a year} and how excited i am to begin playing live again, and especially with christian, and lunch with my parents, and so on...i cannot stop thinking about george w. bush and how nearly every time i see a photo of him {not by choice, online} or hear his name or his voice, i can hardly refrain from saying, "what a prick."

i try, but i have such an unbearably difficult time trying to love him, and accept that his presidency and all of the attrocious things he has brought to life is precisely what is supposed to be happening at this point in history. there is a thin and fine line between acceptance and apathy. it is so difficult for me to understand why anyone would want this war, and why anyone would feel the need to drill for oil in alaska, thusly destroying such a stunning place, and why anyone would give a shit about men having sex with other men, and why anyone would think they should be able to decide what other women do with their bodies, and.....but as deeply as i fail to understand any of this, i try to accept that this is simply what has come to pass. george and his army of fools. his sick and selfish and bloated army. why don't we all just start riding bikes george? why?

perhaps i should just sit and read all day, turning the wine stained pages and drifting back to the late 1800's when the west was a place i would have understood better. one of the characters in the book has just invented cement if that might shed some light. yes, wallace stegner, steal me from this modernity for a while. from george and iraq and strip malls. cement. i daydream of a california long ago. a california that i would likely have loved, even more than i do now.

"For example, my grandfather might take a bunch of us down the mine...he might let us help him in the orchard where he fooled with burbank hybrids and developed hybrids of his own, and when fruits were ripe he was not stingy with them. many a taste bud in Grass Valley and Nevada City, blunted by sixty years of greasy french fries, ketchup, and bourbon, must remember as mine do the taste of sun-warmed nectarines and Satsuma plums up there in the end of the orchard....."
~wallace stegner

the dust that gathers

dragonflies, too numerous to count. my favorites are the ones with the irredescent blue bodies, and the black fabric wings. opaque. running home through the woods today, i carried a dead one for some time, intent on placing it somewhere in the windowsill, or at the base of a plant, but grew depressed imagining its weightless dry body, lying there amidst the dust that gathers. placing the creature gently upon a bed of wild grasses, i wondered what might consume these dried out fairies. ants i suppose.

yesterday, one landed on my finger and stayed there for an amazingly long time, a fact that never ceases to fascinate me. are they not overwhelmed by my size? have they not learned the human capacity for unnecessary violence? i stood in the sun and watched its body pulling in and pushing out, the movement of air. and then the tent last night. i lay there wide awake in the yard, 3am, feeling the cool air come in waves, watching the bats. the other birds quiet, the bats were the kings of the night as they always are. i believe it is their mystery that i love most. the fact that i can never really look at them. i can see them sure, but can never really look. they are the pirate ships of the sky, the living ghosts that remind us that there are so many things we hardly ever see.

i believe in a way, that politicians are like bats. they are there, and i can see them, but i can't really look at them, i can't ever really have any idea of what they're doing. i suppose it would do the world good to sleep in tents more often, just watching the bats. or even on the lawn at the whitehouse, watching the politicians flutter and zip about. of course i say that, and as i type think about the fact that there are so many people that HAVE to sleep in tents. or simply on the ground. such abundance and such poverty in this world. i grow depressed if i think on it too long, perhaps because i never really do as much about it as i feel i should.

and i complain of not being able to buy the les paul. how many guitars does one need jefferson? {don't get me wrong, that sentence does NOT eradicate my desire for the guitar}

Moving Into The Closet

“The Doppler Effect: The sound of anything coming at you~ a train say, or the future~ has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds” ~Wallace Stegner.

For some reason, I have noticed a great number of small birds chasing after large birds, in the endless sky. One in particular, flying west over I-5 , a hawk with a long and limp snake hanging from its violent beak, with two small birds in pursuit. It seems that each time I leave the house I see this chase played out again and again, something I have noticed so rarely in the past. Have I really become that much more observant?

A broken bird’s egg I found in the woods today, was the best color of blue in the world. A blue that only nature could own. A blue with infinite soul. This I believe, this specimen of color, is why we make art on some level.

As I have not played my Rickenbacker for some time, as I did so today for several hours, it is an amazing guitar, one that I should offer more love.

Speaking of guitars, last week, while working on fence repair with my father, the neighbor who shares said fence came out into his yard to see “what the hell was going on?!?!?!?” Namely, why the entire fence seemed to have disappeared. After explaining, Bob and I began to speak of music. It turns out that he played flamenco for many years. Anyway, to shorten a long story as the saying goes, this Bob mentioned casually that he had a Les Paul {one of the guitars I covet most, and do not own} from 1981 that has NEVER been played. NEVER? {about an hour it turns out}

I of course proceed to ask him if he would like to sell said guitar. He says “sure, why not. Come take a look.” It is perfect. Fucking brilliant. It is black and brilliant and perfect. I tell him regretfully that I don’t have enough money to offer him what it’s worth, but that I’ll love it and play it and make much music on it, and so on. I offer him $1000. He says that he needs to find out the current market value. I tell him it will certainly be more than $1000.

We speak later, at which point he informs me that the current market value is about $3000. He laughs. He then proceeds to ask me If I can pay it. “No,” I say, watching as my daydreams of playing this on various songs, and various live settings and candlelit nights go tumbling through my hands.

He then says, “Well, I guess I’ll put her back in the closet.” Bob is 84 years old. Why anyone would feel compelled to keep a guitar in their closet for twenty five years is beyond me. It find it so utterly depressing that this beautiful instrument is sitting there in that closet, where it may sit another two decades instead of having someone play it. Guitars are not made to sit in closets. Anyway, I’m out. Perhaps I’ll have more money in a year or so, and look him up again. Who knows? I even had places that it would fit on a new project I’ve just begun, all worked out in my head. A new project that I am too tired to write about. Bedtime. And dreams of black guitars in closets. They are like children, needing the warmth of hands. They cry out and beg for love. For what are guitars without hands? Or feet at least. Something. Anything. Anything but the closet. I wonder what the sound of a guitar moving into the closet sounds like. Is it different from the sound it makes coming out?

Grass Valley and Santa Cruz

Toronto. You step from the plane, from the airport, from the baggage claim and the terminal and customs, with your heavy bags, laden with books, and your new passport that doesn’t expire until 2015, and you stumble and careen under the weight, out into the damp and humid air. I am instantly transported back to New York last August, sleeping in that red-lit room of Reid’s, and losing myself in that monolith of lights, that endless city. We spend the night in Toronto, and off to breakfast in the morning. Then to the twelfth fret where I retrieve my guitar, only to find it sounding and playing better than ever. With a new pick-up installed, a loose brace re-glued, and little adjustments made, I am as ready as ever to tumble back into performing live, which I have missed more than I will ever let on.

And while standing there, waiting with claim check in hand, there stands a man before me. White beard, and tight yellow t-shirt. He has had a guitar converted from a right handed guitar, to a left handed guitar, which seemed an odd thing to me, until he explained that cut several fingers in half on a table saw, neglecting to use the guard. His left hand in the air, he smiled as he told of the need to begin again after thirty years. He easily we take it all for granted. What struck me most, was the complete absence if remorse. It was simply what had occurred. He would simply start over. This moment, this small piece of grace, made all that I do, all of the challenges with music seem so small and fragile. Things I could crush so easily.

And so we drove. We ate chips and salsa and cheese and tomatoes by a lake on the way home. We arrived to purring cats, rolling on their backs and a forest of green. It seems that Ontario and California swap colors this time of year. I am stunned, as I was upon my first arrival here by the endless lushness of the trees and the wildflowers. It seems at first glance, that our house will be devoured by these green things. And so we unpack and make dinner. Drink good, {really fucking good} wine. Sit on the porch and watch the rain pound the earth. Listen to the thunder. The power goes on and off. The dinner, cooks and then stops and then cooks and then stops. We light candles. We toss on the bed, the heat damp on our skin. No covers.

I think back to that perfect moment I had, my second night in California, drinking yet another glass of great wine, with my feet swimming in the pool at my parent’s house. The sun falling slowly over the hills just west of Mount Shasta, the snow on top of the volcano bright in the last of the gold. There were several of these moments, and each time, having watched “Swimming To Cambodia” in the last month or so, I couldn’t help but think of Spalding Grey. How he severed parts of his soul in a car accident, and never leaned how to play left-handed, his body falling apart on the banks of a river. So today I putter around the house, putting things back where I keep them. Playing guitar. Reading. “Angle Of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner. Grass Valley and Santa Cruz. My beloved California. I miss you already.

the foothills and the ocean

never have i believed that a writer learns how to write by attending school. if anything, the experiences, or the lack thereof, would in my opinion silence the words that attempt escape. writing is, after all, about experience. the more varied and courageous our experiences are, the more we will have to tell. one can only observe so much from within the walls of a classroom. this seems painfully obvious to me. i'm not sure why my words are so often misconstrued here, but they are. i felt that i was clear in telling that my reasons for applying to an mfa program had nothing to do with the idea that i would be learning to write. and perhaps i would have become a better writer by the sheer fact that i would have been writing more than i do presently, but in the end, {if completely honest with myself} it was simply a lazy way to find a job in two years. but enough of that.

as for the music, that too is simple. i have never, and most likely will never consider the cessation of creating music. quite frankly, i'm not sure if that's possible. it has though, been rather difficult, if not nearly impossible, to make any money at this. while this is not the goal in any way, it would certainly make it much easier to devote my entire life to this if i didn't have to have a day job of some sort. quite frankly, $12k a year has grown quite tiresome. $24 has become the goal. but perhaps that is just the problem. easy. few things are easy. perhaps i simply need to give it more of myself. how often we search for the easy things in life. i have begun to coonsider a graduate program in music, which would be far from easy. i would have to learn how to read music. learn transcription. learn orchestration. learn theory. wow. at this point though, it is the only way that i can imagine giving my entire life to music, which has become the goal.

but enough of that too for the moment. for the moment it is california. it is the memory of a plane ride on a big plane over a big expanse of land. the big planes are better for sure, as they rise up and float differently. i can feel their substantial mass beneatrh me, carrying me with such fortitude. it was the searh for, and the finding of a perfect moment {thoughts of spalding grey moving in the brain} as i sat dangling my feet in the pool at my parents house while drinking tghe best glass of wine i've had in 5 months or so. watching the ocean meet the land at muir beach. walking through the heat of davis. lying about with the flu. and so many other things. oh the unspoken things of life. watching christian kiefer play a song i wrote, yet another perfect moment.

and now, there is work to be done. the fence repaired, i continue with the painting. brown on brown. the dogs brushing past, the trilling wings of a hummingbird. i stand about, scouring the bushes with my eyes, hoping for a praying mantis, drifting through the leaves. the hot sun of california. the rolling hills. the long stretch of it all. i even read of it now. angle of repose by wallace stengner. an old man, in an old home, in a wheelchair, searching through the entrails of his family history. grass valley and santa cruz. the foothills and the ocean. the places i will always know. wild and delicate. seductive beyond imagination. california. she holds me gently, as always.