That Vague Cabbage At The Frontier Of The Soul

When new moments of pleasure arise that might otherwise be summarily dismissed as something thin and linear, place a wax mailbox in the center of an aromatic peccadillo and wait to see what happens. The imagery of life is preponderantly indelicate. Guns, penetration, and hardheaded subtleties too stubborn to shout Madeira. Power has a cosmetic effect by the pool. It helps mask inner frailties. If you can imagine the heat of the sun in a Hollywood bungalow, you can imagine electrolysis. And if you can do at least one credible push-up you can distinguish a membrane from a bone. So I ask you: why are you here? Don’t answer that. I’m just glad you’re here. Don’t let that monstrosity in the corner intimidate you; it’s an inflatable Picasso. Somebody needs to blow it up. Someone with a lot of breath, and artistic instincts, like bug-eyed Jack Elam in Once Upon A Time In The West. Dueling a fly. That vague cabbage at the frontier of the soul is really just a section of time folded in half. Or maybe the Sunday Times with another boomer exposé. What will become of that generation of youth who knew how to set a needle down in the vinyl groove of Like A Rolling Stone, or Layla, or A Whiter Shade of Pale? What, exactly, was their legacy? They reinvented pleasure. They dug graves and filled mausoleums with the ashes of war. And a lot of other stuff I’ve long forgotten, but feels like something underground making newspapers and manifestos. Can you hear it? It’s a herd of metallic clouds stumbling over a line of poetry. There are things in this life that cannot be put into words but must lifted to the gates of heaven like the musk of a voluptuous afternoon. I'm tempted to say something about overflowing panacea wheels and how to deflate an ego with the prick of a desperado, but I’ll leave that for another time. A time less leaden than what passes for time on this plane and all of its self-destructing machinery waltzing around the language in a black negligee and a stovepipe hat. If I ever get to Tulsa I must thank my lucky stars. Because the highways at night get weirder each passing year. If I had more time I could deepen the vision and come out the other side holding an old lampshade and the frantic sugar of a failed laxity, but for that I would need a magnolia and an archaic southern theme to set the stage for more knickknacks and fluffy rhetorical hardware. Stencils deepen the secrets of abstraction. It’s one of the reasons I don’t own a horse. I listened to the engine turn red. Everything twists inside and stops holding on. This isn’t the first time I've plunged into Baudelaire feet first. I enjoy chattering streams of myriad sugar just to arouse some bacteria. I say yes to the advent of pomegranate I will never allow it to seem hollow or misunderstood. Go now and tell the conductor there’s a fire in my brain. Get yourself a banana split. Let the moment be distressed by something visceral and hungry. Catch yourself under the fireworks as various feelings emerge. Upon arrival I’ll want to ask some questions. We all do. Life moves too fast to figure it all out. Listen to the rain smash against the hectic undertones. The sound of greed as it slithers among those alert to its sorcery, and the elegance of its dismissal.

Some Thoths On The Book Of Thongs

They say that if you follow an unpredictable thought you’ll eventually discover temptation. Nothing in life is certain. Not even certainty. Certainty is a ruse invented by roses. The fragrance is exquisitely ironic. Or you could say something different entirely. Words are decisions wrapped in nomenclature. A rose by any other name might consist of more than three dimensions. That there is mystery in the universe is a coefficient proven repeatedly by slurps of chicken noodle soup. If you’re going to include it in your description, it should cause cubes in addition to fuses. It all depends on how comfortable you are with the current décor. It’s ok to like everything and rub against things and all that. But if you’re looking for escape, you’ll want to go into the hills to find the right medicines. Culture is either Marie Laurencin or it's a garden: you decide. There will always be a certain amount of aluminum around to boost your confidence in abstraction.

The tongue isn’t the strongest muscle in the body. It’s not as strong as some of the other muscles, such as the quadriceps, gluteus maximus, and masseter. It’s still pretty strong. Strong enough to lift words like death, Dharma, and floccinaucinihilipilification. Before the larynx, there was the Vortex, from which, through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing. The tongue, in its early days, sewed images of lamp black diphthong. That’s how it found a berth in the mouth. When the mind is on a journey, the tongue remains silent. But it’s a restless animal. It can’t stay still for long. It transforms the air into discrete energetic events of sound and meaning, things like dumbbells, crash test dummies, and clumsy philosophies. And it starts conversations. And divides things into portents, predications, which often weigh more in the mind than in the air.

I stumbled around the operating theater looking for my glasses. I found an umbrella and a sewing machine but not my glasses. I found my glasses later, which were on my face. These things cease to embarrass me. You can’t embarrass an old man. Not when he’s seen the things I’ve seen. Heard the things I’ve heard. Felt the things I’ve felt. Been slapped a hundred times by the sober truth. Fucked by voluptuous deceits. Fooled by mesmerizing solicitations. It’s been quite an education. Here’s what I learned: beacons are the bacon of the backpack cafeteria. Belief is the harness of our prayers. I am furthermost from myself when I rotate. Jodhpurs are good for ping pong, but bad for credulity. Avoid altercations. Intuitions work best where the current is swift.

One of the greatest women of the last century, who was largely responsible for sewing a hurricane to a consonant, was said to have a magnificent faculty of silence in ten languages. No, it wasn't Cher. She had less formality in getting to meet her. One felt elect to feel bliss around her. A feeling of reassurance to the exclusion of everything else. It’s how I lost my shyness. I found I could go up banging and talking about mahogany to just about anyone. Bookcases are made with mahogany, I’d say. If you gaze at it long enough you can see an idea sleeping in the grain, surrounded by wonderful hallucinations. It’s how writing was invented. And lingerie.

Is something art because I say it's art? I remember thinking that once. I still do. A little. A little wistfully. A little pretentiously. I never thought of art as a magic trick, a deception, although in many ways it is. Especially self-deception. I knew the empire was decaying. I just didn’t expect it so soon. Hence, the need for trickery, and mirage. The persistence of values. The persistence of science, and hot dogs and condiments. Credible goals. Plausible vignettes. And the aurochs and bulls of Lascaux. Books in bookstores. A good conversation. And light in everyone’s eyes.

Why are the leaders of collapsing empires always so strange? Is it because they embody all the vile corruptions of the oligarchs and aristocrats? Take Elagabalus, Roman emperor from 218 to 222. He developed a reputation for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry and sexual promiscuity. Edward Gibbon wrote that Elagabalus "abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” The Rolling Stones pale by comparison. George the III of England would sometimes speak for hours at a time without pause. He would foam at the mouth as his voice became a dark vibrato of bones and gargoyles and his vocabulary grow increasingly complex and colorful, creating stratospheric chimeras and intricate polyglottal cathedrals. Now look at our emperors. Let them stride through your mind with their struts and giggles, solemn oaths and shrill proclamations. That mean nothing. But are inflated with the stuff of dreams and euphoria.

The answer is blowing in the wind. Creaking in the mattress. Curdling in the counterpane. Reaching into my soul via YouTube. Tossed to me via algorithm. Indexed at the back of the book. The Book of Everything. The Book of Maladjustment. The Book of Tongues. The Book of Thongs. Which is a coffee table book. I will leave it your imagination. Last night I had the answer to everything but it slipped away. The mind gets slippery at night. It becomes a place of excess. And imbroglios and monotheists. One person’s answer is another person’s problem. Answers are sectarian. Utilitarian. Seminarian aquariums. Once it is firmly established that 2 + 2 is 5, you’re well on your way to introspection. And confetti. I’m sorry. What was the question? 

Dressed In The Algebra Of Travel

Within the domain of the subject, the ink crossed beyond the drapery to a place where grace distresses knowledge. The subject loosened its hold, and the room expanded into a mess of pasta and clouds of steam. The banging of pots. The chopping of knives. How long would this capharnaum last before it exploded into arias? There was a story someone tried to crush in a cave, but it resurrected itself as a novel and swallowed the person whole. They became images. A gust of wind under the wings of a falcon. Two window panels clacking shut. A bright yellow flower in a ball of glass. Lipstick awakening on a mouth of bronze. Wreaths of mist in the Black Forest. Sometimes what is inside is outside and what is outside is inside, and in between are flocks of Godwit and cherub. Grant a whisper into the ship at midnight. Walk around in the sky. Deepen your understanding of feudalism, and how to destroy it with a bloodcurdling candor. Every philosophy wants to free itself from its own philosophy and inject itself into art, a green wind quivering in moiré. Art explodes from a state of pure immanence and sows museums. It sends a message of gallantry during muscles. I would not exempt this flavor for a wind below my wings unless I had something very chic and glamorous to wear to the Angel Baby Aphrodite Ball. There are things accessible to consciousness only through a cheerfully employable negation of everything irascible and reverberating. It is when the repressive violence of form lets itself go that a ghostly emergence of pulse brings blood to the eyes, and the gates to the city open, and out walks a giant oboe dressed in the algebra of travel. All the levers opening and closing, opening and closing, opening and closing. To welcome us. To bring us into the light of understanding. Which turned out to be something altogether different from what anyone expected. We dreamed of certificates and validation, and although not entirely disappointed, were provided with chocolate, and durable khaki pants, and told to pound the air with our petitions, until it turned black and blue, and released all the hostages of heaven, and all the hostages of hell, and everyone danced until sunlight creased the sullen hills, and the call of tropical birds dusted our audition.

Instructions On How To Look At A Flower

Remove your head. You won’t need it. It’ll only get in the way. Reach into your history and empty yourself of everything you’ve been taught to believe. You live in a universe. No one needs a chronology. Intentions crowd prospect. Therefore, be open to selling oysters, anything that might call you into focus, without blinding you with beauty. Be focused. But not so narrowly focused that everything looks asleep. If you think you see a rose, glue yourself to a goldfish and break through the glass of your skull. If you smell a honeysuckle, press yourself against the fragrance, and suck. But not with your mouth. Use your eyes. The eyes eat the world with their silence. Ideas at work in the garden scatter until they turn raspberry. Ideas aren’t flowers. They’re fantasies. Fuchsias. Petunias. Lords & Ladies. Love in a mist. You get the picture. If you want to look at a flower, I mean really look, plant a poppy in your pupil, & an iris in your fist.  

The Mouth

The mouth, braced beside its letters, entertains an aesthetic torment. What do you do with a language inflated beyond its capacity to scurry across the ocean floor? One should inflate the wheel affectionately to comb a coma. Bend it like an intonation. Despair stirs the paper like music. It's like a bowl of cabbage soup painted against a background of nothingness. The soup is dipped with a spoon because the cabbage resembles the human brain. The orange is sliced below on umber where it chills the mind with solemnity. You must scratch the air to elicit chocolate. Hold the scratch towards ghostly deliberation before flapping away. Beyond maturity, everything sticks out of the veins. Eyebrows, mustache, lentigo. Little histories that get drizzled into skin. 

Clarity trembles around the monstrosities found below. Alan Watts said life is wiggly. This is but one example of life on the verge of crackers. If you knew Susie, like I knew Susie, you would probably bring a different suitcase. We have entered a new era. I don’t like it much, but here we are. Self-checking groceries at the behest of giants. I like to disappear like a crab until it gets disturbing. I back into corners on all ten legs and brood in quiet indignation. As do we all one time or another. All it takes is a little dyspepsia to discover the divine in a stem of effervescence. The mistrustful constraint in the communicability of thoughts is just plain silly. Once the interaction of magnets occurs, life gets appreciably wigglier, and transcendentally lavish.

The mouth softens under everything is a frame. It's easier than you think to slip into obscurity. It’s a plane of being whose silence is graced by an immediate eloquence. The social element is injected into art by an act of sabotage. Don’t look at me. I’ve got an alibi. I was at home increasing the depth of counterpoint. Art explodes its insoluble solutions into balls of dense, puffy delirium. The river grabs a taxi and fiddles with a tableau of demons. The whole time we stood outside it looked like the building was on fire. I swear this is the last time I attend a gala event barefoot. The question remains: how shall you fill the void? Fill it with fog, and violins.

Adjectives form details that trickle into plump usurpations before sunrise. It is silly reductionism, of course, to claim that you and I are just bags of molecules. Which is why the adjectives are here to save us. A red barn is not the same as an exuberant or duodenal barn. Nouns embedded in adjectives lend themselves to the alchemical hijinks of acrobatic poets. There is a constant interplay between what is replicated and upended - an image - and what is actually happening in the blackberries. You can feel the compression of it circulate among the veins, hear it creak among secrecies aged in wormwood. The baldness of such intensities are too steep to pull into words. This is where the adjectives come in. They jingle against the night, testing consequences.

It’s mostly my mouth that gets me into trouble. There seems to be a disconnect between my frontal cortex and mouth. I have no impulse control. Therefore, indiscretions are rapidly forged into a malleable algebra. If x equals y than I don’t see why the universe shouldn’t go on expanding forever. The same principle applies to the manufacture of half-truths, metamorphic pyrites and alloys of shameless mythomania. Events move much more swiftly at first, which is why the mouth gets dry and the words tumble out like dice from a leather cup in a Montana bar. Thoughts are born in the mouth, and dark absorption lines shaped by conversations occurring shortly after midnight, when the moon is in the waxing gibbous phase of its lunar cycle, and the sting of time has been annealed by the general drift of language, and rivers of iridescent reverie.

 

Passing A Kidney Stone In The Twilight Zone

A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk when I began feeling a sharp pain in the area of ​​my back just above the hip. I got down on the floor and lied on my side to alleviate the pain however I could. It lasted about ten minutes and slowly dissipated. Is this a kidney stone, I wondered. It was. But it would take weeks of misery and an MRI before I received a conclusive diagnosis. Several weeks later, I experienced another sharp pain in my groin which seemed to be centered just above the pubis bone. The pain was so intense was I writhing on the floor. It dissipated, but a milder version of that stinging pain did not go away at all. I ended up living with it on a daily basis for about a week or so. And then the attacks became unmanageable. I’d get down on the floor groaning, grabbing at my groin, writhing back and forth, while our cat hid under the bed.

I tried to get into see my doctor. He wasn’t available, he was on triage or something, but another doctor was available, a younger, cheerful and sociable man. I provided a urine sample shortly before the doctor arrived. By the time he entered the exam room, he already had an analysis. There was blood in my urine but no crystals or high pH level that would indicate a kidney stone. He suggested it might be a urinary tract infection and gave me a prescription for an antibiotic.

I hated the antibiotic; it gave me diarrhea and headaches. The pain continued. I stopped the antibiotics.

Several days later I got another excruciating attack. I was resisting a trip to the emergency room. I’d been down that road before. Emergency room bills are astronomical, and the wait to see a doctor can take hours. We’d heard horror stories from friends. I also tend to think of emergency rooms as places for gunshot wounds and serious car accidents and heart attacks. We tried finding a nearby urgent care facility. We live in Seattle. The closest urgent care facility was north, in Edmonds, about a 15-mile drive. I got on the back seat where I could lie on my side. R drove. Each traffic light was a tortuous, endless interval in the cruel mechanics of time.

This was a Saturday. The urgent care clinic closed at 4:00 p.m. We arrived at 3:50 p.m. The door was locked. R called the reception desk. The receptionist answered that they closed the door because it was too late to receive more patients. R explained that her husband was in excruciating pain. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to budge. “So what you’re saying,” I shouted into the phone, “you just let people crawl off to die rather than open your door?” I didn’t wait for an answer. Another car drove up, a married couple, with an emergency of their own. We explained the situation. They left for another urgent care facility. My pain reduced to a more manageable level and we returned home. I now know the real meaning of ‘urgent’ in the urgent care system: it’s urgent the medical staff go home on time.

The following Monday came another attack. I tried contacting my regular doctor again. A staff member phoned back to say he recommended I go to the emergency room. There was no getting around it. This was the third time a doctor had sent me to the emergency room rather than treat me in their own office, the way doctors used to do. They used to treat people in well-staffed, well-equipped clinics. Now they send them to the emergency room.

R and sat in the waiting room. It was crowded. Everyone watched a flat screen TV on which a cartoon played. It helped distract people from their pain. The man who’d taken my name and information when we first arrived, a guy with a goatee and a few tats that weren’t particularly fresh, pushed an old woman into the waiting room slouched in a wheelchair and without saying anything flipped the channel to another station, a corporate news show. Nobody said anything until the old woman left the room again. As soon as she was gone, we all decided to change the station again. We chose a courtroom drama.

The door to the one of the emergency rooms opened and a middle-aged black woman in a hospital dressing gown poked her head out as if she were looking for someone. She looked pissed. Minutes later she stormed out of the room with a younger woman, maybe her daughter, and had changed back into her own clothes. It appeared she’d run out of patience waiting for help. Not a good sign.

Several hours went by before I was called into the room. I was asked to remove my clothes and put on a hospital gown and get on the bed. R helped fasten the gown behind my back. The bed mattress felt warm. I noticed several spots of blood on it and made sure to shift my body to the left as far as I could without falling off. A young woman took my blood pressure, asked for a urine sample and left us waiting for the next phase of the treatment cycle.

About 45 minutes later another woman entered, a registered nurse, and after I told her my systems, wrapped a flexible band around my arm and inserted a needle into my vein to draw blood. I was impressed with how skillfully she handled the maneuver. When she finished, she took the urine sample and left. I was left with an implanted port in my right arm.

An hour or so went by and the registered nurse entered accompanied by a doctor and a silent young man who appeared to be monitoring the event. I explained my symptoms and the doctor said he would examine the urine and blood samples and see what the problem was. He left the room and we waited for another hour or so. The registered nurse entered and had brought with her an ultrasound device. She slathered some cold gel on the area of my groin and ran the ultrasound device over it, staring at the image on a screen. She found no urinary retention, which was a big relief. After she left, we went back to waiting. And waiting. By now, we were feeling very fatigued and thirsty. No one had offered us any water.

When several more hours had transpired, I persuaded R to go down to the desk in the hallway to see if  she could get some information about what was happening and what the approximate wait might be. There was a sliding glass door that opened on the hallway. Hospital staff kept going back and forth in flurries of routine hospital business. It always felt like something might be on the verge of finally coming to our aid again, a diagnosis that would explain my medical dilemma and thereby offer a solution, allowing us to return home without that dreaded pain in my groin. But one hour followed another, and another, and another. It had been around five hours since we’d been admitted into the room, the same room that that angry woman had exited so indignantly.

R returned from her mission to the woman seated at the desk in the hallway upset. It had not gone well. The woman was showing a friend some pictures on her smartphone and did not take kindly to R interrupting her. She was quite rude, and did not give out any information. R responded by suggesting that we just leave, and the woman answered fine. She could give a shit.

We were feeling disconsolate now, frustrated about the interminable wait and lack of information, and hungry and thirsty. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

I imagined Rod Serling entering into the room, seemingly invisible to us but fully apparent to the TV viewers, with an introductory speech: “Here we have Mr. J.D. Smith, an amiable but somewhat salty septuagenarian with an acute pain in his groin, the result of a kidney stone stubbornly lodged near the internal urethral orifice, and his caring and increasingly bewildered wife Marylin waiting patiently for the wonders of modern science to relieve Mr. Smith of his pain and return them to the modest sanctity of their home and calico cat. But there is no rationale in these corridors, no logic, no reassuring analysis or healing tone of medical expertise promising remedy and comfort, only the rustle of medical staff bustling through cheerless corridors giving the illusion of care but not its substance. For this is no normal hospital staffed with sage efficiency and insightful solutions, but another dimension entirely where time is a matter of indifference and the only cure is the bleak immovability of oblivion. For this is a hospital located not in the district of a modern city, but in the uncertain precincts of the Twilight Zone.”

In the final, seventh hour the doctor made his appearance. He had a solemn, bewildered air. He examined all the data and could not come up with a viable explanation. He suggested that if the pain continues, that we consider getting an MRI. And then he left.

The next day I got a call from the substitute doctor. Crystals had been detected in the urine sample. It did, indeed, appear to be a kidney stone. He set me up with an appointment for an MRI. The MRI was a breeze. It wasn’t a tube, but an open, doughnut-shaped apparatus through which I slid back and forth on a padded table. It took about five minutes. The results came in a few hours later: it was not one, but two kidney stones, a large one and a small one. The doctor advised that I drink lots and lots of water to flush them out. Which I did, adding a lemon concentrate to help dissolve the stones. This was a process that went on for some days and included a trip to the shores of Oregon and a family memorial. It seemed to be getting better, there were times when I felt no pain at all, but if I went for a light jog the pain would return. Some days later I felt the odd sensation of crumbly material slide through my urethra, and that was that. The pain disappeared. Meanwhile, I got slammed by the worse flu of my life. Could this be Covid, I wondered. We tested for Covid, but the result was negative. It was definitely the flu. I wondered where I got it. No one at the memorial had shown any signs whatever of illness. And then it came to me: the emergency room. Someone had been so ravaged by the flu that they’d felt the need to go to the emergency room, and left behind some viral particles. It was nothing I could prove. But these are not normal times, and anything can happen in the precincts of the twilight zone.

 

Rockaway

In remembrance of William Elkins Johnson (1956 – 2023)

 

8:00 a.m., July 28^th, 2024, sitting in the car waiting for R, who stoops momentarily to fuss with a fern on the porch. The Subaru is packed, including bottles of water and a small plastic urinal I bought at CVS for emergency relief after days of struggle with two kidney stones, one small, one large, stubbornly resisting the gallons of water I’ve been drinking to make them dissolve and pass.

And no, didn’t use the urinal.

We decide to postpone breakfast till Tenino, little diner called Scotty B’s at a truck stop, ample parking for big rigs, clean showers and rest rooms, gas pumps full of diesel. Big traffic jam 10 miles out from the Nisqually bridge, traffic at a crawl, no reason why, people going as far as they can in the free lane, kind souls letting them in when they can go no further. Faint with hunger, we regret our decision, should’ve had breakfast in Tacoma. We get close to the source of the problem, expecting to see a car accident, paramedics, crushed metal, or maybe bulldozers red flags & the tumult of construction, but all we see is a group of men collecting traffic cones.

Exit to Tenino. Scotty B’s is gone, a victim of Covid. We enter Tenino, quiet bedroom community with a franchise featuring tacos. I gotta piss like crazy. We check the internet on a mobile phone, head further south to Centralia, stop at the Country Cousin, sizable breakfast place packed with people. Big plates of pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, glass of orange juice, coffee, gaze out the window at some blue petunias, homeless guy in the parking lot talking animatedly with his demons. Strange little birds in the parking lot I’ve never seen before, a weird mixture of crow, dove and starling. R has a conversation with a woman in the rest room who’d gone to the Willie Nelson and Chris Stapleton concert in Seattle. Fans of both, we fill with envy.  

We take highway 30 to Astoria, and to connect with the southward vistas of highway 101. Narrow lanes, up and down, maniac in a white Dodge Charger passing a lane of cars headed 80 mph toward oncoming traffic, R driving, she avoids a near collision. Stop at a gas station in Clatskanie for gas and rest room. Sign over the toilet reads “Men: don’t be shy, stay close, it’s shorter than you think. Women: remain seated for the entire performance.”

Seoul Food, Korean restaurant way off the beaten path, all by itself, surrounded by woods, closed, boarded up.

Mountain of sawdust in Wauna.

Collection of white propane tanks, like a cemetery for gas.

Eagle Sanctuary.

We reach Seaside, stop to stretch in the Coastal Craft Cannabis parking lot, Kool Shitshop across the street, skeleton in a rocking chair.

Go down 101 Oregon coast, hilly, lots of curves, but smooth, neatly marked with plenty of places to pull aside. Haystack Rock spotted through thick forest.

Spot the occasional hawk, eagle, winging its way east or west, north or south, over dense forests of Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, Oregon ash, Ponderosa pine. I tell R a blue rock-thrush was sighted in Rockaway last April, first time the bird had been sighted in the U.S.

Stop at the Community Center in Nehalem to avail ourselves of the rest rooms. Big sequoia nearby. I take a picture of R with her smartphone standing by the sequoia for scale. The trunk is gigantic. Must be hundreds of years old. And to think it came from a seed the size of a pinhead.

Check in to our motel room, which is huge, big table, refrigerator, stove, we could live here. Little packets on the bathroom counter: Makeup Remover Wipes, Lingette Démaquillante, all skin types, gentle cleansing, alcohol free, moisturizing, conditioning. Soap with little bumps on one side to keep it from sliding, but doesn’t work, soap keeps sliding wherever I put it. I feel like Stan Laurel trying to domesticate it, awaken its responsibilities as an object, and train it to remain on the counter without sliding into the sink, grabbing at it, juggling it, coaxing it into a stationary position.

White towels on a rack folded to form a cup for another smaller towel.

July 29^th, 2024. Gloom. Drizzle. We go have breakfast at Grumpy’s, small restaurant with twinkly lights in the windows, kites on the ceiling, dragons and butterflies. I watch a lonely soul in a black raincoat, hunched, walking the rails south, where the goofy Candy Cane Express travels between Garibaldi and Rockaway. I wonder what the decibels are in Grumpy’s, there are so many people, so many voices, so many kids, shouting, talking robustly.

We go down to see the Pacific, but it’s cold. I remembered to bring an umbrella but forgot a jacket. We go back to our room. I watch Jimmy Dore and Due Dissidence on my smartphone, a short lecture in French about Albert Camus, Le Paradoxe de L’Existence.

We meet up with R’s older sister and nephew and wife from Texas and their two rescue Chihuahuas, rescue dachshund, & a very skittish rescue mutt, step-niece, also from Texas, a warm, calming presence, constantly vigilant over the hijinks, curiosities and explorations of her two kids, 3 yr old girl and 1 ½ boy, cute as can be, sociable, good-natured, hilarious. Pizza and conversation. D, now middle-aged, an archivist, regales us with bizarre histories and nougats of anecdotal piquancy. Billy the Kid’s gravesite encaged, ironically, in bars because people keep stealing the headstone. Travels to Budapest and Romania. The medical ordeals of each dog. An explanation as to why Whitman supported the Mexican-American War. Currencies. Surgeries. Dental odysseys. Weird toilets of the world.  

Went for a run down Miller Road, paved road parallel to 101 which has hardly any traffic, down to the beach, felt good running on packed sand, sand gives a little, unlike the unforgiving asphalt.

Shower. Relax. Lie on the bed watching some podcasts on YouTube. Go for a walk down Miller Road to a small touristy business section where I’m assaulted by a horde of bubbles emanating from a sinister Bubbletron perched outdoors on a wall. We visit a small cannabis dispensary, which is empty when we walk in. A short, middle-aged woman appears from the back with the sourest disposition I’ve ever witnessed in a human being. I wondered if she might be the reincarnation of Arthur Schopenhauer. We ask questions about the products, to which she provides scant answers. We each buy a packet of 1:1 ratio gummies. Northwest Berry and Dragonfruit. 10 bucks each. 24 dollars cheaper than Seattle, which puts a 37% tax on it.

We walk back down Miller Road. Small white house with pretty white curtains. Call of a Eurasian dove. House with a lush shrub of pelargonium sidoides.

We enjoy three days of vigorous conversation with relatives convened from hundreds of miles for the memorial of R’s brother, who passed away unexpectedly last November. The mood is upbeat with a tinge of sadness, given the underlying circumstance of everyone’s being there.

Spritely conversations shift and migrate, changing partners, mingling connections, memories, affiliations. Eruptions of laughter. Sparkly counter, granite & quartz. Pop of cans.

We talk about the complexities and joys of raising bonsai with B, who has a collection of bonsai. How to train the branches, sculpt the plant into graceful sweeps and arching curves; the delicacy of root pruning, wiring, the fulfillment derived from patience and ingenuity.

Day of the ceremony is warmer than the gloom and chill of the previous day. We all enjoy a catered dinner, a veritable banquet from the pages of Rabelais, so beautifully arranged and sliced and presented R takes a picture on her smartphone.

The family walk down to the ocean, several holding bouquets of blue balloons, wibbly-wobbling in a gentle breeze. D, with his dashing handlebar mustache, standing in front of the Pacific holding nine blue twitchy balloons. It looked like a scene from Fellini.

A prayer was given and R and her brother’s grieving widow and sister and the three children he brought into this world, now adults with kids of their own, poured the ashes into the ocean. Someone played Amazing Grace. The sand felt fresh and good under my feet. It was rippled and grooved with the tiny holes of razor clams. That sharp division between heaven and earth was blurred, as if the beyond had been rendered weirdly attainable during a moment of charmed transformations, the border of the infinite opened by wave and surf. The two colossal shapes of Twin Rocks went in and out of focus, contingent on the random shifting of ocean mist, imbued with muted, afternoon light, creating a wistful sfumato. Champagne was poured. Kids played in the surf. A flock of birds flew west, into the setting sun.