Here, try this:

[audio:John-John.mp3]

Well, that was a night, all right. That’s “John-John” by the original Zoo Pilots at our one and only paid gig — funded by a Kent County, MD Arts Council grant, if you can believe that — at Washington College in, uh… [ponder] 1984? ‘85?? It says right here at my audio page that this is from “the early Eighties,” but don’t take that for granted. It was two sets of originals by me. I even had a crazy lady recite her poetry in between! There were about a dozen of my friends in the audience and a few curious students. Not a big crowd, but we were in a big room in the basement with tables and a bar. At least I think it was a bar. Maybe it was a snack bar. But I had a good time, and I still have the recording.

Hang on.

As for John-John, he did it again on Sunday night, and I woke up at 4:00 a.m. this morning from a dream in which I beat him bloody. I mean that literally, and he deserved it. Then I had to get away so he and his hoodlum buddies wouldn’t kill us in revenge! Nightmare city, boys and girls, except this one is a gift, offering up about as clear a vision of the shadow as anyone is going to get. I’d been wearing him like a suit and couldn’t see, you see. That’s what dreams are for, especially when things are down to the bone when you drift off to sleep.

You may call this bi-polar. You can call me Ray. What blows my mind is that all those years ago, I instinctively pulled this out of my own psycho-drama and nailed it without having any inkling of what it meant. The song itself is a transmutation of something like a breakdown into a rock song, with just one verse and chorus, repeated over and over. I remember that the lyrics and the chords just fell out of my head, especially on the chorus. Over 20 years ago, and there it was, right in front of me. Who knew this stuff would take so goddamn long?

There’s something here I have to own up to. I even tried to, in the dream (as in the song). I went up to him while he still looked like hell, all sullen and battered, and said, “We gotta get straight with each other.” Trying to defuse the situation, you understand, effecting mutual acceptance and respect.

When I reluctantly got up at 4:00 a.m. to write down the dream while the pictures and emotions were still fresh — if I do this, I keep my eyes half-closed and don’t turn on anything bright — that’s when things got really weird. There was the light and the dark at the same time, and I was neither, nor anything else I’ve ever been. It didn’t feel exactly human, or maybe that’s the thing that needs expession in a whole new way. It also scared the shit out of me, but I think that’s all right. I mean, it just wasn’t anything familiar, and I felt a panic to return. Even feeling awful can be cozy.

(See, this is what I do instead of watching talking heads on Sunday morning or working in a hardware store.)

Tonight was different, though. I have no idea why, because all day long I was ready to snap. Instead, I washed the car before the sun set and stood outside swatting mosquitoes (which we don’t have here in New Mexico) in the dusk, admiring the gleam of clean white fenders. When I came in, I got out my instrument and played rockabilly bouzouki standing up beside the kiva fireplace to amplify the sound. And ohh, what a noise. Beats that mp3 up there all the hell, it does. Just you wait a little bit.

Tomorrow it’s off to Sandy Feet (Santa Fe) to take the stitches out of my gum. No, really. The dental implant thing. Have a greatl day, don’t worry about the election, and I’ll be right back.

Things like this never happen when I have my camera with me.

Yesterday my wife and I took our exercise walk up the mesa. On the way back we saw two baby horned toads! These were two separate incidents, amazingly. And when I say “baby,” I mean tiny, about the size of my thumbnail. I took this relative abundance to be a good sign. After all, how many folks have ever seen a baby horned toad?

A couple of years ago I saw two babies riding on their mother’s back, one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever witnessed. She froze in the middle of the dusty trail, giving me a good long look as I stood right over them. This was extraordinary enough, to see the three of them, but then one of the little ones crawled off and walked a few inches away, onto a patch of sand that was much lighter in color than his (?) mother’s back. And then he changed color to match! I mean, in no more than a second or two. I didn’t even know they did that, but this one sure as hell did.

So today I walked up there by myself, and of course I took my camera. Hah. Nary a horned toad to be seen, naturally.

Run away, run away

But I did run across a piñacate beetle, otherwise known colloquially as a “stinkbug.” I’ve run into these before, and they deserve the nickname. It was the only animal I saw on this walk, but I had a good time anyway. I think I would rather just “be” out in the wilderness than do almost anything else in this world, even if all I see is a stinkbug. It has to do with the universal quality of consciousness arising from no thought.

I worry less and less these days. I know that’s odd, considering my history of apocalyptic rants. And by the way, did you know the Germans are preparing for a huge crowd in Berlin for Obama’s speech?

It rained all Friday evening, which was novel.

I forget what happened the next morning, but we took off in the afternoon to drive down to a restaurant north of Santa Fe to meet my wife’s cousins. Very smart people. (One of them asks the most amazing questions.) On the way home we saw flooding in the arroyos, and later it rained all night again.

Today it didn’t rain, and we went to the Taos Pueblo powwow. There’s nothing like hearing the drumming and singing up close. For lunch I had a Navajo taco (the usual taco ingredients with beans & chile on fry bread). I had to have a Navajo taco because a), that stuff on fry bread is really, really good, and b) I’d just finished the last of Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides. The description of Kit Carson’s men driving the Navajos out of their mountain homeland and marching them off to exile at Bosque Redondo was fresh on my mind. The Army gave the refugees flour, but the wretched, hungry people had never seen wheat flour before and stuffed it in their mouths uncooked, making many of them sick. They must have learned to cook with it shortly, though the irony of the Navajos’ first learning to make fry bread at the Bosque is a powerful, fearsome thing — more than 3,000 of them died there from starvation and disease. The bread is mighty tasty, but you know there’s more than that at work, way down deep.

After we got home, I took a little nap and woke up crazy, like a panic attack, where all your options are bad. Suddenly, every endeavor was doomed. I was too old, too stupid, too fat, and too late. Where the hell had this come from? Trying to shake it off, I fired up the brushwhacker and cleared a path outside. Afterwards, my wife and I walked up the mesa and back, about a 2.3 mile roundtrip. I still wasn’t wholly reliable, though, not even after a double shot of tequila.

Then I had a brilliant insight: none of the things I’d woken up worrying about actually existed, or if they did, they hadn’t happened yet. (See, usually I miss that part, but this time I didn’t.) I tried this out on my wife, who mostly agreed, though I think she’d just as soon I take at least a few threats seriously, by way of motivation, so long as they don’t make me frown at dinner.

Sitting outside looking at the leaves shaking in the wind: suddenly, that was all that mattered.

Retreat, a strike, or practice?

For the last few days I’ve felt I wouldn’t mind if the Internet completely disappeared, if I never sent or received another email, never visited another Web site. I have no idea where this comes from, but it’s been very satisfying to let it flow to the ends of my extremities and fill me completely. I still don’t want to update anything. I may not even publish this post.

I have the strongest intuition that none of this has done us any good. We speak of how the world is more connected now, but I have my doubts: seems to me it’s all on the surface, a flood of digital spittle. For all the so-called organizing and communication, the world still tumbles toward an inevitable reckoning with with the Nature we refuse to be a part of — as if we could! Humans are, basically, eating the world, and the Internet is just another utensil. A huge one, too.

That’s the view from this morning, anyway. I spent yesterday (and will spend most of today) reading an actual book for a change, Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder, which anyone seriously interested in this part of the world should read. The author mentions how families in the East had to wait a year or two to learn the fate of loved ones who fell along the trail out West, sometimes even longer. Today, of course, you might know in minutes, but is this really progress? What does it matter that “facts” are transmitted at the speed of light, when all the while we’ve lost the ability to sense and feel, to look out for ourselves?

This isn’t intended to be a reasoned argument, so relax. I’m just reporting from the other side, as it were, where for the moment it feels fine.

(This has to continue…)

So there I am, sitting outside in one of the dead landlord’s aluminum lawn chairs with the cushions we bought at Wal-Mart. The chairs are fine, the cushions suck. You can still buy basic outdoor chairs this nice, but you have to hunt for them, and they won’t be at Wal-Mart. Anyway, there I am, just now. It’s cloudy-bright with occasional sun but mostly overcast, thundering in the distance, about 75 degrees. Humid, too, at 28 percent. The so-called “monsoons,” a stretch of dependable afternoon thunderstorms produced by air from Mexico, aren’t supposed to start until late July, but what the hell is normal any more.

There I am, looking at the plum tree a bear broke down to the ground in ‘03. I never saw it happen, but I saw the devastation. Fixed it, too. I pulled the broken trunks together — hanging only by a strip of bark and fiber — tied them up securely with rope, and bound it all up neatly with duct tape. (Some of the branches required additional bracing.) The tree lived. After a year I took the rope off and wrapped the trunks with fresh duct tape. A year after that, I took the tape off, and it’s been doing well ever since.

We always water this tree along with the apricots, you may be sure. This year the plums are just everywhere. You never saw so many plumbs on one branch, it’s almost ridiculous. And then just now I got up and took a closer look: almost every plum is damaged, some with sap oozing out, probably from hatching larvae of something I never heard of. They may turn out to be okay, but maybe not. I’m not counting on it.

So that’s too bad. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, but that’s too bad. You’d normally anticipate some loss from insects and the like (bears too!), but this is out of whack. That’s it! — it’s out of whack. It isn’t natural. Do you follow? It isn’t balanced. Either there’s something pushing in a certain way out of ignorance, or the bear was supposed to kill the freaking tree. I go back to my chair, the nice one that you can’t buy anymore with the cushion that sucks, and look out at the clouds and mountains: what an amazing and complicated interactive THING. I’m sitting there and realizing that it all just “is” and works fine by itself, unless we mess it up.

But it’s deeper than that. We don’t “mess” anything up, we’re just part of a system so vast we can’t even imagine, and we’re inseparable from the whole. We don’t manage, conquer, rule, or masticate a goddamned thing except inside our puny little egos, because all the while we’re tumbling in a roaring wind we never even hear.

This is what thrills and comforts me. I want to bow down to it and let it rip me open.

Well, crank up the worry machine. (Or not! read on…)

What I find most interesting about using the Internet for finding news is how much of what the rest of the world sees never makes it into American media consciousness. For example, all but a rear guard of 800 Australian troops just came home from Iraq to a joyous welcome in Brisbane, and I’ve only found mention of this at UK sites. (Folks are happy the troops are coming home? No news here, move along.) On the financial front, at least three European banks have issued dire warnings about the U.S. economy over the last few weeks, and that’s also been ignored — one authority flatly predicts a complete collapse of our financial system over the next few days or weeks, and I’ll bet you haven’t read that anywhere in these United States. In fact, the level of “serious” discourse on just about any heavy topic you’d care to name is so craven and bereft of elementary reasoning, you’d have to be some sort of chemically-reinforced Pollyanna to believe we’ve actually evolved at all over the last few hundred years. (And watch out what you put in your garden!)

My wife and I have this conversation frequently. The bottom line is that while some people have definitely experienced a growing peace, maturity and spiritual expansion, life in general has become more difficult and anxiety-ridden in our lifetimes. When I first joined the workforce after graduating from the University of Texas, incomes and expenses were much more closely matched, so much so that one simply didn’t have to worry if one had a job. In 1968 my first wife and I rented a wonderful home for $75/mo. (that was considered expensive), my car payments were $36/mo., and a visit to the doctor cost $5. I took home less than $500/mo. in salary from my college teaching job, we bought everything we wanted, and the money just piled up in my checking account, month after month. There wasn’t any need to save, because it happened automatically.

Late afternoon sun illuminating aquatic plants in mountain stream

The way things are today just isn’t going to fly. It won’t be “fixed” either, none of it, not until we start all over at the bottom, treat everyone as brothers and sisters, look each other squarely in the eye, and say something like, “Okay, what CAN you give me for these eggs my hens just laid? How much for this house, this car, my services? What do you need from me, and how can we help each other? How can we help those people in the next town who have no food or water? Can you give this teacher (doctor, policeman, farmer) a place to live so he or she can stay in the community?”

That kind of trust and self-reliance may produce miracles, but first one has to have an honest sense of “self.” That’s where inner work comes in. When you know you’re part of everything and simultaneously whole, you don’t need a guide for acting properly. It just happens automatically, like when my paychecks piled up in the bank. It’s like the Golden Rule and “all you need is love,” all rolled into one.

I don’t know what they are, but there they are.

Meanwhile, would we really be worse off without high-definition TV, the Internet, computers, air-conditioned cars, and microwaves? Would it really hurt to talk to ancestors in our dreams and fly to distant lands by willing it so? Do you really believe the energy that fuels your thoughts just vanishes with your body? Is there some reason our bodies “have to” deteriorate? — why can’t we just live until we die? After all, SOME FOLKS ALREADY DO!

And on and on and on…

We’ve been sucking up the patriarchal bullshit and imbalance for the last few thousand years — doing the best we could, you understand — and now it looks like something’s gonna blow, only maybe not all at once. I hope not. Frankly, I think it must have started years ago, because I’ve felt this way since I was in my teens. I never wanted the brick house in the suburbs anyway, much less the station wagon in the drive. Not only was it silly (to me), it was also built on sand.

That’s one reason why I wanted to move to northern New Mexico, where things have always been “blown up.” Not that far to fall if things go bad, in other words. Fewer people, too, just 14 per square mile on the average in Taos County, which by the way is just a little smaller than Connecticut. But I mainly wanted to live the last half of my life in a place where Nature dominates man, and not the other way around. That’s why I go walking in the mountains when I get the chance: something happens to me in the high country that never even registers amidst the mini-marts and parking lots. I sense things one can’t put into words without diminishing the experience, although I give it my best shot because I want to share this stuff. I don’t know what’s happening, either, but a hit of what’s above 8,000 feet makes me want to go back for more, and I think this is related to the bigger question.

It could be that everything will be just fine, after all, only…um… different.

Ya know??

That’s what she called him, “Lumpy.”

For the two or three people in the whole world who might understand what I’m talking about, that’s what yet another Maryland friend emailed me when I told her who had died on Wednesday. I didn’t even know he had a nickname, but then she might have gone to high school with him, and of course I didn’t, having moved there back in ‘75. Lumpy? I knew him as Jay.

The news is part of a larger medicine show. It’s strange, the effect it’s all having on me… as if I’m actually a member of the human race. A long time coming too, because growing up an Air Force brat with over 40 changes of residence when I was a kid is like being cast in iron. During my school years, I never had a friend for more than a few months at a time, so I guess I never really knew what other folks considered normal. I always had to just let everybody go.

For the last nine years in Taos, I’ve had to look at every unpatched hole and all the scary monsters. It’s taken me all this time to stop walking around with the old landscapes in my head, too. It was as if the past might grab me if I weren’t careful, pull me back and mangle my soul. I haven’t exactly been pining for old scenes of late, but there was always this self-doubting incompleteness that made me wonder. Guilt, actually, I realize.

Hearing about Lumpy is part of what makes me feel connected today, and yet that also frees me. I didn’t expect that! It’s as if acknowledging my past also means I don’t “have” to go back. I feel a circle’s been completed, like everything’s OK, like I just gave myself permission to truly get on with living where I am.

Can you believe it took nine years?

I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, or was it nine?

There was some nervousness on my part at first, having to do with simply meeting someone from our old life. It wasn’t me or her I was concerned with, however, but my wife. At least I thought it had to do with her. As is most often the case, the issues are much closer to home.

There’s always been this sadness in me that what I love will surely be taken from me, even love itself. I know where this comes from now and grow my own, so to speak, but it’s been a long, hard slog through the valley of man-I-sure-fucked-up-my-life-again to reach this relative equanimity and finally-expanding joy. Most days “joyous” doesn’t fairly describe me [cough], but I’m getting there, in millimeters. Today I felt a bigger jump, as if something empowering had come to light.

My wife has had her issues with New Mexico that in my occasional terrors grow to be the things that send her back where we came from. Tonight at dinner, for example, when our old friend said she loved New Mexico and envied us for living here, my sweetie muttered, “Don’t!” Just the kind of thing to push my buttons in the past, though probably more revealing of anxiety over temporary circumstances than anything else. So even though I’ve left this all behind me, hohoho, I must have wondered if what we’d hear from back East would give my sweetie fits. Or me, for that matter.

But what useless nonsense! It was wonderful to see our friend, whom my wife immediately implored to tell her “what’s happened to everybody.” Not surprisingly, what’s happened is simply life. Most everyone is doing fine, and some are hurting. A fellow I knew in Chestertown — younger than I am, incidentally — died yesterday, in fact. It wasn’t hard to listen to at all, either, this human saga that we’d had a role in. It made me feel validated in a whole new way. I also think I needed to hear all this to see that once and for all, I wasn’t threatened, and that I had done the right thing by following my heart, as if anything else had ever been possible anyway.

This probably isn’t very clear. But I saw our old friend as closer to me as a person, somehow. More related, human-to-human. I like that. How very odd to feel all right. We could all use more of this.

So thank you, M., for all of this and more, and have a safe flight home. (You’re also the only one who might understand the title of this post, so I’ll be sending all the questions off to you.)

And now, we MARCH!!!

The red-naped sapsucker rat-a-tat-tats away on the kiva chimney’s metal cap. If it isn’t the chimney, he (?) goes after the transformer on the telephone pole. How long do you suppose the bird will do this before realizing that no sap is coming out?

I could build this into a socio-political metaphor if I had the gumption, but I’ll let you do that. Suffice it to say that after unsubscribing from Obama’s email list over the FISA idiocy and then re-subscribing, I’m pretty much back to my own transcendental self. I’m delighted to see Obama doing so well, of course. It’s just that my own life and those most directly affected by its course are back on center stage, whatever that means.

I’m turning down relatively big money to build an online store for a Hindu ashram and temple, for example. That’s just not what this life is all about, at least for me. We’re walking every day again. I want to hike up in the high country and have to teach my lungs to grab more oxygen. I’m not worrying about my 86-year-old mother and her trailer park dreams. My next Mac will be one for video editing. I want a motorcycle (trail bike) for exploring the thousands of miles of forest roads more easily than in my pickup. We’re going to find another house. I’ll do everything I can to see more of my woman’s smiles and reflect them back. I have to stop eating (!) or be surgically reconstructed. More abdominal exercises! My best buddies are forming a crazy instrumental surfer band (Los Changos del Mar), and I’ll design the website. Things could be worse.

The weather in New Mexico is wonderful, now that the spring gale has subsided. The mornings are cool and crisp, and every afternoon the clouds build up and send a line of thundershowers marching across the plain to crash into the mountains. No, it is NOT “hot.” It’s almost never hot, not up here in the north. In fact, it already feels like early fall again — too soon!

Tomorrow we’ll go visit an old friend from Maryland who’s come to Santa Fe to take a workshop. Whatever will we talk about? Rat-a-tat-tat, ese. And on and on it goes.

UPDATE: For the record, our visit was delightful. See next post (above).

The previous post has a comment by someone I didn’t recognize. He lives in the Cascade foothills and writes at a blog you need to visit, The Farmer de Ville Chronicles. Outstanding writing, as usual a wake-up call to me to stick to what’s real and all around me. He must have a regular writing gig, and I’m ashamed that I don’t know about it.

His lifestyle reminds me of where I’m always heading in my own life, aside from lengthy detours through what most of you would call the “real world,” except of course that it isn’t — not the one God gave us, at any rate. I always arouse a kind of snarly, defensive sensibility when I make that point, that 90 percent of what we think is proper living is actually a kind of killing joke. Not surprisingly, most of us take umbrage at assertions that we live on top of a house of cards of printed lies and misconceptions. Well, too bad. It’s true, however. As true as true can be. This isn’t what you think it is and won’t turn out to be what you expect.

Spend some time reading what the Farmer has to say. Smell the herbs and feel the sweat dripping off the end of your nose.