Fools Aflame

There’s a coolness and a sinking silence to the fire and I miss you. It banks down low and hardens itself into a few lightened embers while the heat retreats back into the charred wood. It’s in the way pinyon burns, hard and heavy and dense and a little bit like forever.

There’s always a life and death glow in the eyes around a fire and a beauty that has launched ships and invented writing and moved armies with its motivation to embrace what we can never have; that last boundary gone between our thoughts and dreams and love and those of another. We are adrift in a world of failure and shoaled imperfection because we are creatures defined by our like brothers and sisters, but forever unable to communicate with those silent judges.

It’s the fear of The Other, maybe. It’s the way robots only get more terrifying as they look progressively more human and the dying gasp of art in the face of tech run amok.

The jungled up hobos a mile away from here along the river understand it all maybe. And maybe that is why they are so definitely reviled by the suited rulers of civic worlds.

They are the proof that we’re getting it all wrong. Student loans are a waste and laying up savings just leaves us vulnerable to the immolation of markets and the consumption of forces we don’t understand. All I can do is sit watching the stars and try to tell you.

But I fail and the words I don’t have and don’t know and the truth thicker and heavier than the patina of those words rests down on us like a blanket on the coals. We choke out in the dank steam of dousing and stirring and we are scattered all to the winds eventually, but we sit here and try.

And for you I don’t mind failing miserably.

New Friends

We sat on our side of the fire, illuminated in the soft strobes of gold and yellow shooting up to the sky.  The stones containing and constraining the fire were warm on my bare feet and embers blew up and away into some great god while I listened to what turned out to be a mostly acoustic jam session.

I have been isolated now for months.  With one exception, the few friends I had left town or just moved on to something else.  I try to make new friends, but I am not good at it.  I’ve always been socially awkward and backward and any other sort of prefixed ward that could possibly mean I don’t belong.

I have a hard time meeting one or two strangers, but a ring of them is panic inducing.  But I had my guitar with me, balanced on my lap.  And so I watched the fire kick around the cooling humid air and listened to people sing songs and pick on their acoustic guitars.  I would lead in with fills and back off during the verses and build something like texture into what is normally just strumming.  I can’t even play with a pick.  I was ruining their songs. But they played it off by saying I sounded good and shot me some fake smiles.

And then we went around the male guitar players, the girls asking for a ’show-off’ song.  One guy hit up Blackbird, and a few hammer heavy ringing beauties.  Then they all looked at me.  And worse: started talking to me.  The cheap Fender that was light years behind and thousands of dollars cheaper than what anyone else brought was too small to hide me totally.  They asked for my show off song and I was lost.

That’s when I made a startling discovery:

If I played, they didn’t ask me anything and I didn’t have to look at them or put on my confident face and joke and laugh.  I could just bury myself in beer and in the fretboard and be gone forever.  And so I did.  I tuned the Strat down to Drop-D tuning, and imagined the groaning eye rolling around the circle that they kept hidden behind their friendly words and encouragement.  The kid with the cheap  electric just showed his true colors.  It was time for power chords and young kid horse shit. That’s what I imagined I heard them thinking behind that friendliness.

But I wasn’t playing anything angry.  I wrote a song one time, sitting on a forward sponson of the USS Constellation watching the sun set over the South China Sea.  I noted that if I jammed the guitar hard enough into my thigh, in the classical Andres style, I could keep my hands or knees from giving away my terror.

And so I played it.  Modulato, legato.  A few places with some minimal major/minor ambiguity.  And when I got to the end of it, I reached out in dread panic for beer.  And they asked me to play it again.  So I did.  And they asked to hear my play some more, so I played them a droning and self-absorbed arrangement of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

And they said nice things that I ignored.  And I drank two more beers and we broke into loose jams.  I played a little more, a little louder.

Toward the end of the night, one of the guys came up and peered in the firelight at the headstock of my guitar.  I knew what he was looking for, and I was something like embarrassed when I told him, “It’s a Mexican, just a cheap one.”

I had seen his spaceship guitar packed away and his NASA pedalboard.  I just had this import guitar — no active pickups, no fancy pedals — strung into an old, dusty Fender combo amp with the reverb dimed out plugged into the outside outlet of their trailer house.

“Really. It has an amazing sound. It’s beautiful.”

Hardcore (You Are Not)

This is the list of crap ‘Wired’ magazine says you need to be a hardcore adventurer:

1. Black Diamond Ion

Blinding, tiny, and tough, this headlamp is impervious to almost any abuse and cheap enough that you won’t care if you lose it (until you need it).

$20, blackdiamondequipment.com

2. Leica Ultravid 8 x 20 BR

The best compact binoculars we’ve ever used: water-resistant and burly, with a bright, clear image.

$700, leica-camera.com

3. Keen Powerline

These kicks handle hours of foot pounding on tough trails and urban streets. But flashy styling screams, “I am a rich tourist. You should rob me.”

$100, keenfootwear.com

4. Osprey Atmos 35

Well-designed pack lets you comfortably carry more crap than you probably should. Too bad the front pocket’s stretchy skin tears easily.

$160, ospreypacks.com

5. SteriPEN Adventurer

This purifier uses UV light to make even polio-infested water Evian-safe in 48 seconds. The optional solar-paneled case, however, takes up to five days to charge the batteries.

$180, steripen.com

6. ExOfficio Clothing With Insect Shield

The bug-proofing built into apparel from socks to shirts keeps mosquitoes away, but the retirement-chic aesthetic repels people under 50.

$36, exofficio.com

7. Spot Satellite GPS Messenger

Uploads your location to an online map every 10 minutes, letting friends (or rescue teams) follow your moves. Warning: The 911 button is easy to hit by mistake.

$170, findmespot.com

8. Iridium 9555

This sat-phone always gets a signal (outside), but the grayscale screen, belabored SMS (no T9!), and lack of Web access make a local SIM a better option.

$1,595, iridium9555.com

9. Canon Powershot D10

This dunkable and droppable digicam falls down when faced with indoor shots. Unpocketable shape was the real deal-breaker for us.

$330, canon.com

10. Timex Expedition WS4

What’s worse than not having a compass? Having a compass that is consistently wrong. Like the one on this otherwise very cool watch. Thanks for getting us lost, Timex.

$200, timex.com

I hate people who think you need to drop thousands of dollars to get outside.  i don’t know if it’s the REI/Sport’s Authority take on the universe or what, but I have yet to take anything manufactured by The Northface camping.  I’m not saying it wouldn’t work, just that it is unnecessary.  Do you need triple alloy titanium cookware? No.  You need a rock next to a damn fire.  Do you need some special folding handled NASA designed multi-tool? You sure don’t.  I take an Estwing hatchet I invested in a while back, a Gerber, a cheap magnesium block, and a folding cutlery contraption I got at the goddamn Wal-Mart.  Pair that with a canvas tarp and some military surplus parachute cord and I can stay out for weeks, or maybe months.  It would be my own comfort that eventually drove me back to the mallow, sagging, sweat soaked bosom of civilization.  Give me a .22 on top of that kit, and I’ll see you in a few years.

Really, what do you gain by all that space age horseshit?  If you can’t carry an extra .7 pounds of cookware, then your problems are greater than what level of REI Rewards card you choose.

Because you are a bitch.

You need to stay home and cry your little weepy girl parts to sleep at night in a feather bed because you do not deserve to see the back country.  Besides, if you’re really concerned about weight, what do you do about booze? You sort of have to have it in a heavy glass bottle. They have yet to make consumer carbon fiber vessels full of Wild Turkey which, I submit, is more necessary to camping that some achy ovary horeshit like a tent.

This is why yuppies should stay the hell out of the woods.

All that crap on the list above is most definitely NOT hardcore.  It is consumerist tripe hammered down your throats by the forces of society and capitalism that drive me into the damn woods in the first place.

Apparently you got to be rolling around the back woods with three grand in your pocket to be hardcore.  I find this insulting.  Having spent extensive amounts of time in the field, I assembled a list of items only the truly hardcore need to survive indefintely:

1. Big rocks.

To hack things down or split a sternum.

Free

2. Little rocks.

To make things.

Free

3. Fire making stuff.

To make fires.

Free

4. One or two women of suitable hardiness and of reproductive age.

To continue your tribe.

War spoils or traded for goats.

You are welcome.

Factotum

Fact: The police cannot find you if you have handy camouflage in our backpack.

Fact: You should be a little nicer.

Fact: that second shot was a bad idea.

Fact: somewhere, someone would appreciate this ridiculousness.

Fact: searchlights are at the wrong angle to illuminate the right sorts of canal banks when you’re under the tamarisk.

Fact: I should be a better person.

Fact: Some day I may be.

Fact: I hate police.

fact: Lazy, fat,  fucking pieces of crew cutted shit.

Fact: Used to be one.

Fact: Got home with minor bruising covered in mud.

Fact: The moon was beautiful.

But you know this.

Monica

You know, she said, reliability is its own sort of sexy.

I would not have normally agreed, but she was laying there, nothing but flanks and legs, on my couch. We spent the night, the day, and half another together. In the swelter of the living room with the hard summer sun we had gotten reacquainted. Which is to say, she never really leaves. She’s not always available, but I can count on her to return.

She asks about my writing and about my working and a million other questions I would answer for all eternity if it just meant she would keep that voice coming. That pop and sparkle and fade like an overwound single coil in a Cenozoic Stratocaster. She talks like Andres Segovia plays, like Picasso painted, like garlic roasts.

And she’s dark.

So dark.

It isn’t just her Latin skin. She’s not the sort of dark you get from Chihuahua, Mexico, where she was born. She’s the dark that boils out of the center of the earth where gravity and iron and solidus meet and meld and fall out of time. It’s in those eyes, dark enough to see myself and the world behind me reflected back. I can watch myself watch her move in those obsidian eyes. It’s her hair, like somebody spilled moonless night onto floor. It’s so dark, it’s blue in the shining of the sun.

And she lays there, wearing nothing, rolling her R’s and lapping up her soft vowels. She knows she’s killing me as she rolls onto her back, exposed. I do not know where her shape comes from, outside a trip across the Styx. It’s narrow, but over the top shapely. Thick hips, sculpted arms from whatever it is she does. Besides me.

She smokes down that cigarette and we talk a few hours about how the grass grows and the water flows and she shows me a song she wrote. It’s organic and wooden, rosewood maybe, or ebony.

She knew me when I was a cold killer. She was around when I tried to be a man of peace. She’s here now, with whatever in between I have found. It’s a sort of love, I guess. She’s not always in my arms. She’s not always on call. But she is reliable. She is no metaphor, she is all flesh and bone and very real.

And she’s right. That’s fucking sexy as hell.

Will this end up on your blog, she asked between the slow solenoid pulses of her breathing.

You’re always on that damn thing, I told her.

Liar. You never write about me.

It’s the only way I’m safe from you.

And she dug into me and tried to reach past my skin and ribs and flesh and told me in the language of all Hell and beautiful, you think you’re safe?

742

<Are they ever, really?>
<Ever what?>
<Love songs.>

How far is it today? How long will I have to sacrifice this passive lack of pain?

When I get to the school house, will the sun set on me and will I be able to put my thoughts, such as they are, to bed?  Maybe I’ll make it around that half-mile concrete track with the lightning going up my heel and hitting me in the gut enough  times it stops. Maybe if I go on to the football  field and run twenty yard suicides, maybe it would pound you back into blackness and death.

Should I lean into the wind and climb up the river bluffs and follow the languid lowliness to the bridge?  I could run up and down that one killer hill, sprint up it like a goat until my quads ignite.  I could make it a whole night. Me, the hill, the stars, and after a while, not you.  I could run up to Spyglass and look down over the world and know that I won today.

Could I make it up to my brother’s house? Six miles of uphill.  Seven if I take the long way.  Ten if I make up a longer way.  I could run into the night, with the falling black to comfort me and the rain that’s coming out of the desert south to cool me.  When my wet clothes form a noose and my joints turn to rust, I could lay down alone. Finally alone.

What if none of it works?  How far will I run? How long will it take? Will my knees survive it, or my ankles abide it? You’d be the trees along the field and the water in the river and the rain falling.

I could give all that I have and all that I am to you.  Is that what it will take? I could offer myself, or whatever passes for it, in the rain and sun and in exertion and upon the alter of the burning desert rocks and the crucible of these goddamn runs for you and sometimes to you.  When I walk down the streets where we’ve been and drive the cards you once rode in, is it sacrifice enough that I can think of you?

Should I dream of you?  Should I tell you when I do? There is no escape, it seems, but that we both disappear from everywhere and all time at once.  Is that what it would take? That I would disappear.

All we have is all that we are and no other life is allowed us but this.

How far will I have to run for you today?

…From the floor up.

Bitches:

I will be gone for a while.  OMG at will, text friends, update Facebook accordingly.

But don’t cry for me.  I will return.  I have no doubt that this legendary hangover will result in me sullying a pristine canyon full of pictographs, petroglyphs, and Anasazi/Ute/Navajo ruins with my own foul hangover vomit about a mile into this backpacking trip.  Why?

Going away party. I am sad. : (

That is my face.  It frowns.  Bitches! Bring me my sympathy!

Anyway.  This concludes this ramble.  I may return with pictures. I may return with scurvy.  I may come back picking at the ribs of my camping compadre.  Depends on how much shit she talks.

So, drink for me, Bitches. Drink for me.

When I come back, I’ll tell the story of the tamales, the Modelo, the ex-husband, and the axe. Maybe.

Like a Ray Wylie Hubbard Song (Again)

It’s hard to explain sometimes, how life is a constant battle.  It’s hard to explain how you may be there and you may be engaged, but your mind is fighting another war, one farther away and more present than any fight here.  And when you break into the mode of fighting and killing, that it isn’t really you.

But it’s always been this way. Once long ago, I was the youngest of four kids.  I learned, more than anything, how to fight.  I can’t lie for shit, I can’t negotiate, I can’t turn myself into anything but me.  All I can do is fight.  It’s all I know.

Some days, I try to fight back against the blood clawed aggression I have in me.  I win that skirmish most days, but when I am weakened against it or when the fight is turned by circumstance, I lose the battle again.

When I see a fray, I want to be cast into it.  When I see a war, I want to enlist.  When there is no war, I want to make my own.

For now, my wars are all gone.  I can only pretend at humanity until the next one comes along.  If you ever want to find me, look in the wrong crowd.  Find the guy who looks about to break.

And when I finally meet my match, I will thank God. Probably because it would be him.  I can’t imagine too much else taking me down.

I can see her cry in the arms of her friend, but she doesn’t know it.  I came back in to flirt with the bartender a little and peddle a smile and a nice word for a little interaction.  She can hide crying like no other.  She has always had that ability, short of extreme circumstance and unyielding unction.  She knows I found a fight.  She knows I found a fight deadly enough to keep me occupied until the darkness fades from me forever.

It’s not for sure, but it’s getting more likely everyday.  I always tell people not to get attached and somewhere in my deepest recess of soul, I heed my own advice.  But I always fail. You know that.

Losing/Leaving

One and the same, friend.

Trekkies Are The Problem

So, I have one friend who I consider my nerding out free pass.  He’s the guy who will not only indulge my intermittent desire to discuss Star Trek, but will also do me one better by somehow making connections to dragons and what may be Tolkien references.

I am a very exclusive nerd.  If it does not blow something up, I probably don’t care.  If it is not the product of some orogenic belt, I probably do not care.  If it does not involve music (not to say band trivia), I probably do not care.  If it does, however, include a story that lends itself to day-dreaming, I find myself drawn in.

Star Trek is bad about that.  I hate 80% of the franchise and pretty much all its self-defined ‘real’ fans.  I can’t discuss Star Trek miscellanea with them because they are frighteningly passionate and extremely over informed.  It’s like arguing with anyone who has a clear moral stance on something like abortion or gun ownership.

He has a blog that I really, really want to read.  For one thing, I have a feeling he would, at times, mention his Philistine friend who thinks The Mormons in Space era (The Next Generation, as it is so-called by purists), is why Star Trek has sucked huge donkey balls for the last twenty years.  Then all the Rick Berman fans would tell him he shouldn’t be associating with someone who does not understand that Star Trek (or ‘Trek’) is not simply an interesting sub-genre of ship-based SciFi but a GENUINE FUTURE PHILOSOPHY AND THE HOPE FOR MANKIND!!!!!!*

One discussion we had recently veered nerdily between the fields of Original Series stuff, the future fate of Star Trek as a TV show, and World War Two naval strategy (I know!).  Somehow, it went from there to old movies.  Then I had an interesting thought.

The whole reason the Original Series Star Trek was even interesting was because it allowed deep immersion in the stories.  The effects were shitty, the acting was that super-cheesy Shakespearean thing 60’s TV loved, and the show didn’t have the budget to really wow an audience with stupid shit.  It was basically Das Boot.

So, if you were to make a new Star Trek with the intention of introducing new fans, it would stand to reason to go back to the original drawing board.

They sort of approached this with the show Enterprise, but then abandoned it to the same bull shit hand wringing sermonizing of the Next Generation writers.  I call bullshit.  You have a ship full of people who want to see new places and fill their life with new experiences.  They want to leave home for as long as possible on these arduous voyages.  I can tell you from experience why people do that:

Strange Ass.

That’s just about the whole reason anyone joins a Navy.

Now, this is in space, so the typical WWII Navy movie format would not work.  No one out on deck, etc.  But, the stripped down and gritty battles against nature and other ships of something like Run Silent, Run Deep or Das Boot with the occasional aln ass-getting in port would be goddamn awesome.

He recommended we collaberate on some fan fiction.  Seriously.

So, anyone think they can out-nerd me now?

*Actual comment I lifted from a message board he was reading.