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I found it in what is often the way for very tiny things – I simply glanced down at the ground and there it was. The day was a little on the windy side but this did not prevent the black asphalt from nearly shimmering in the heat. The tiny brown nymph couldn’t have been more than a few hours out of the ootheca; all of the adult features were there, the curve of the back and distinctive folded forelimbs, but the head was disproportionately large in the way of neonates and the tiny eyes already shone with the light of an alien intelligence.

I wasn’t worried that it might not survive without my assistance but I wanted to keep it close to me and watch it grow larger. With this in mind I gingerly transferred it into the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes before stepping into Sandy’s Cafe to ask for a small white styrofoam coffee cup and lid. The next order of business was to look for other insects small enough for it to prey on. Ideally I should have made a trap to collect fruit flies, it even would have been easy as I lived in an RV, but I didn’t have mobile data at the time so I just made a mental note to keep my eyes peeled for any critters I could catch of the requisite size.

Well, it was next small order of business anyway, I had bigger reasons for being where I was than the oblique possibility of finding a newborn mantis nymph on the ground.

The parking lot also held a Denny’s but my destination was in the undeveloped arroyo out back through a broken gap in the chainlink fence. If they didn’t have some kind of vehicle, most of the homeless druggies in Thousand Palms lived in a small cluster of willows and cottonwoods back there. It kept both the direct sunlight and the gazes of blight concerned citizens off of their tents and clutter.

Everybody knew they were back there but, like a slightly less sore thumb, they didn’t stick out so much.

I was looking for the beer-bellied blonde kid that went by Truckstop because he usually had the dope that month. No matter who you got it from, all of the tar in Thousand Palms came from this guy Carlos who lived in a trailer out in Indio. For whatever reason his business model was built around cutting his shit to about one fifth of the usual potency then selling it at one fifth of the usual price.

None of us junkies were especially fond of this unique system but it wasn’t like Carlos dropped off customer satisfaction surveys when he met us in a parking lot or on the side of the Del Taco drive through. Occasionally I would run into another member of our select club at the penny slots in the casino and they would rave about how they’d gotten ahold of something that “wasn’t Carlos’s shit” so we’d conduct a small trade. It was always Carlos’s shit.

Anyway I didn’t know Carlos personally yet so I was looking for Truckstop and Truckstop was around and had what I was looking for. He’d been spending large chunks of time alone in the camp and told me about some recent unexpected interactions he’d been having. The roots of the shade trees formed a system of tunnels under the tents and Truckstop said some kind of elves, small, naked people with brown skin and enlarged heads, had been calling to him from these tunnels and occasionally appearing above ground to allow him to catch furtive glimpses.

Now except for us all the homeless druggies of Thousand Palms supplemented their heroin with copious amounts of meth, and being homeless in the desert invariably involves a constant level of minor sun fatigue, so I didn’t immediately put a lot of stock in Truckstop’s account. With that said, I wouldn’t want to entirely dismiss it out of hand either, which is why I’m trying to remember exactly what kind of trees grew around the camp in case any particular desert species has a reputation for housing tiny earth elementals.

I wasn’t as into trees back then so I’m retroactively going with willows and cottonwoods to be on the safe side. Unsurprisingly, willow trees are known for housing elves in European folk lore and the Cottonwood is a spiritually significant tree to Native Americans, with their wood being the preferred carving material for Hopi kachinas. Peruvian Red Pepper is another strong contender for what might have been growing back there.

If I’m ever back in Thousand Palms, I’ll be sure to run back there and get a positive ID. I also wish I’d asked Truckstop a little more about what kind of things the elves had been saying to him, but there’s a lot of things I would have done differently if my primary reason for being there was to conduct an ethnography on elf encounters and not to purchase a small quantity of black tar heroin.

While we were talking I noticed some black ants crawling on the floor of Truckstop’s tent and quickly plucked one up to toss into the cup for my mantis. Truckstop was less happy to see them:

“Fucking ants!”, he grabbed a can of Raid and started indiscriminately spraying the floor, a fact that would soon become significant. The weather was warming up in Thousand Palms and ants were getting to be a problem for everyone, although they somehow never appeared in our RV. I’d been back at the RV with LaPorsha for a minute when the guy everybody called Rico showed up.

Rico appeared in a car from somewhere around the Gulf of Mexico one day and never left. I forget what his actual name was but he was Black and Native American with no Latin American heritage to speak of. Truckstop nicknamed him Rico as a kind of caricature of an overeager Latin paramour, the name fit his personality so it wasn’t going to be going anywhere. Everybody met Rico the morning he arrived because he announced himself by stealing everybody’s phones from the various unsecured outlets we used for charging behind water and ice machines in a meth fueled streak of kleptomania.

Fortunately somebody had seen him do it and he gave all the phones back without any trouble so he was tolerated after that. The standards for belonging to our particular social organization were not especially stringent at that time. By the time of this story he’d lost his car, broken his foot and had no permanent camp that I knew of, all of which contributed to him being in a constant state of sunstroke and heat exhaustion, as he was when he came to our RV’s door.

Rico said he just needed to get out of the sun and off of his foot for a minute so we let him in and gave him some water but there was clearly something more serious going on. He kept having little tics and spasms, punctuated by short screams, as he lay on our floor but any attempt at questioning him as to the nature of this trouble led to the same empty reassurances that he just needed rest and would be fine and on his way any moment here.

Eventually we called the paramedics and they knew what was going on the moment they laid eyes on him. Rico had accidentally injected a trace, but medically significant, amount of bug spray directly into his veins. It hadn’t necessarily been in Truckstop’s tent. People were leaving used cookers and cottons on the ground, then spraying that same ground for ants, all around the homeless camps of Thousand Palms. Scrounging around for discarded equipment in the hopes of extracting traces of water soluble drugs carried this new risk of cross contamination, and Rico clearly wasn’t the first person it had happened to.

I can’t imagine the First Responders were able to do much for him. Not long after they picked up someone else for the same reason, then dropped him back off, still twitching and screaming, a few hours later. They don’t usually give rides in both directions like that but I can see why they would have been hesitant to discharge this particular patient right outside the hospital.

A week or two later the police had a stretch of desert outside the casino taped off and the word was that they’d found a body. Nobody got official confirmation that it was Rico but as he hadn’t been around and no-one else we knew was missing it seemed like a good bet. He was probably limping around out there and lay down in a spot where he wouldn’t have been visible from the road before succumbing to dehydration. Being a homeless drug addict in the desert sucks but it didn’t suck for anybody else nearly as much as it sucked for him.

It almost takes a special effort.

After the paramedics took Rico from our RV I peeked into my cup to see how the mantis was doing with the ant and got a nasty surprise. I’d badly misjudged their relative sizes and the ant was not only nearly double the infant mantid’s size, but apparently some kind of soldier caste with formidable mandibles as well. It had ripped the baby mantis in half – the head, thorax and forelimbs sat in one spot with the abdomen and rear legs in another. All light was gone from the tiny eyes.

The ant had apparently lost all interest in its opponent and was trying to climb up the inside of the far edge of the cup. I walked off of the RV and deposited it gently onto the ground. We were a long way from where I’d found it and, unless they can be somehow absorbed into an alien colony, it probably starved to death out there.

Or in other words San Diego, California in the Spring of the year 2000. Chicken Burrito Madness was Badger and Ben Jovi’s thing but I think it was Kevin Von Mutant’s idea to dye the fountain red. The big fountain in Balboa Park is one of San Diego’s signature tourist attractions and we all thought it would be a good idea to make the water a different color. We picked red for its resemblance to blood, obviously, but there was no political cause or foreign policy decision that we were trying to draw attention to.

We just wanted to bum out all the families and picnickers and it felt like red would definitely do that. Somebody had a car, probably Kevin, and we went out to City Heights to get a couple of plastic bottles of cheap concentrated red food coloring from one of the Asian Grocery Cash and Carries. The Bea Evenson fountain dominates what is called the Prado with a powerful central plume of water, but about twenty feet away a pair of streams tumble down the sides of a short flight of stairs and collect in mirroring pools.

I don’t know how it got into my head that it all had to be the same water but, once there, the idea made itself comfortable and, using me a vector, began hungrily eyeing the heads of my co-conspirators.

“Look”, I began my entreaty, “these fountains and that fountain are right next to each other, wouldn’t it make more sense for all three features to be on a single water cycle where these pools connect back to that plume, than for each one to be isolated with a separate water supply?”

The fountain isn’t explicitly guarded, or wasn’t back then anyway, but my companions did want our tampering to be as inconspicuous as possible so they shrugged and dispatched to each of the pools to casually dump a bottle of food dye in. Maybe they went along with my idea because having somebody try to convince you of something can be annoying and compliance is a sure fire way to make them stop.

We all expectantly turned our eyes to the towering column of water and waited for it to begin running red. It never did. Instead the dye cycled back up to the tops of the two streams and soon they were like twin rivers of blood.

This would have made for a conspicuous, and no doubt disturbing, sight if it were not so utterly dwarfed by our original object: the majestic fountain roaring above. All of the children were splashing and playing in the main attraction, oblivious to any changes in the color of diminutive nearby water features, and while the odd park-goer noticed our small scale changes, nobody seemed particularly bummed out by it.

The only people we’d succeeded in bumming out were ourselves. We’d expended significant effort and minor expense for what was intended to be a chilling spectacle and mass Memento Mori, but had only managed to pull off a minor nuisance for whichever Park maintenance workers might have to change out the water once a person in authority took notice, or an especially bored patron bothered to complain.

I’ve taken the liberty of adding red marks over the streams in question on my accompanying photograph, in the interest that this picture might do the standard thousand words worth of heavy lifting in terms of placing the three water features on a continuum of scale in regards to one another.

The thing that inspired me to write this story was, oddly enough, the celebrated 1954 teleplay Twelve Angry Men, which I somehow never saw any version of until a recent idyll through the classic black & white selections available on Tubi to accompany my daily hula hoop workouts. The piece is something of a paean to the power of logical and well reasoned arguments to influence human behavior so I thought I would offer my personal anecdote as a cautionary counterpoint.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things it could actually be a point on the side of truth, beauty and goodness that me and my fellow ne’er-do-wells were stymied in our idle mischief and the waters did not run red beneath the feet of babes but that’s hardly the point. For one thing we wanted them to, and for another it would be a little bit of a shame if I didn’t turn out to be the primary antagonist in my own recollection.

Anyway there are greater perils than failing to temporarily dye a popular fountain red to be found in going along with something just because it sounds reasonably logical and well reasoned. The world is full of any number of bad actors who might try to harness the power of persuasive speech for sinister purposes and these days it seems like even the newfangled AI language models are arguing folks onto the ledge of psychosis, albeit in the more innocent pursuit of sounding obsequious.

In my own case I think I fell prey to a bit of pareidolia and perhaps early onset Dunning-Kruger whereby I assumed that the basic understanding that fountains function by moving water through invisible pumps might render some other hypotheses I had about particular fountains correct. Outside of niche applications involving logic puzzles, I’ll be sure to dump any future colorants directly into the water feature I’m aiming to alter the color of.

A little Chicken Burrito Madness can be chicken soup for the soul, and even regular madness can be a fine bird to have perched on your windowsill from time to time, but it seems prudent to avoid building it any nesting boxes…

I think one of the things they say in AA and NA is that you shouldn’t worry about things you can’t change, the past for example, and probably accept things with grace and the help of a higher power or similar organizing principle. I don’t really know because I only went to NA meetings a couple of times when one of my methadone clinics tried to force me and I made sure not to pay attention. I most likely disagree with AA and NA on every relevant point but the main one is that I don’t think addiction is a disease. In fact I don’t think it exists at all and the myth of its existence is the most harmful aspect of humanity’s troubled relationship with drugs and alcohol.

I should clarify that I do believe that physical dependence to various substances exists – as I’m fond of saying I’m not going to sit here and argue with the evidence of my own senses. I also believe that, in the words of Minor Threat, substances can be a “crutch” but I don’t see how using a crutch is a bad thing. It’s certainly better than just walking on a broken ankle if you ever intend to stop having a broken ankle. If mental illness is a “broken ankle” then I absolutely believe that self-medicating with various substances is a useful and often necessary step on the path to healing or at least leading a fuller and more functional life.

The main thing I disagree with concerning the concept of “drug addiction” is the idea that addicts are powerless to make rational choices to improve their lives. Research by Dr. Carl Hart at Columbia University showed that crack smokers nearly universally will choose deferred rewards, either in the form of future drugs or money, when offered a choice between this option and smoking a relatively small dose of crack. At the most extreme example there isn’t a single drug addict on earth who would jump after their preferred substance into a live volcano like Gollum does at the end of Lord of the Rings.

On a more practical level I don’t think that either being fond of using, or even physically dependent on, any particular substance is sufficient to cause a person to compromise their values. Retaining one’s values in such a state is merely a question of placing those values above personal discomfort in a hierarchy. This is a question of courage and I don’t believe that the users of any particular substance are either more or less courageous than the population at large. People who don’t use psychoactive substances are just as likely to put their personal comfort above their supposed values in my experience.

However my biggest issue with the addiction narrative is that I find the idea that it’s rooted in empathy and compassion to be an egregious lie. It mostly serves to dehumanize people because you don’t agree with their choices while telling yourself that you’re a better person than they are. Anyway this piece isn’t even about drugs, it’s about memories and the past, but I do tend to get onto my soapbox. What I’m actually supposed to be talking about is how I worry about the past.

When I say I worry about the past I don’t mean that I have regrets or anything – I think it’s more like when a person knits lots of different cozies for various inanimate objects. I read an account about Kaspar Hauser, a famous German feral foundling, that said he would carefully deconstruct the objects in his room before going to sleep each night because he worried they could not safely persist in the state in which he’d arranged them in the absence of his consciousness. Perhaps that is how I view the past – I may well be a very specific kind of animist who believes that the past has a soul.

I might as well also mention that I both believe the past to be perfect and not to exist at all. These details aren’t super relevant to what I’m talking about but I do enjoy the sharp juxtapositions created by simultaneously holding contradictory ideas – kind of like how I’m getting back into Catholicism but strictly through the lens of atheism. Anyway as much as I believe the past to be perfect and not to exist at all, I also fundamentally want it to be okay and the only thing I can do toward that end is care for it.

I want to set a place at the table for all the things that don’t exist and aren’t real: death, the past, probably God… I imagine non-existence has made them all quite hungry. I take a certain perverse pleasure in starving myself to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday but things that don’t exist are not me and I think they deserve at least the option to eat. If it suits them they can always starve themselves too – a full plate for every hunger artist.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the past, in and of itself, is absolutely delectable. A fine repast as it were and an everlasting gobstopper for an eternally famished nervous system.

It occurs to me that I left one entity out in my banquet for nonexistent Noumena – addiction. Oh well. It can starve for all I care.

Anyway if you’ve read this far I’ve both established that I love the past and created more of it by taking up five to ten minutes of your reading time you’ll never get back – let’s go ahead and get on with the actual thing. I have a complex relationship with object permanence because I used to keep paper archives going back to my earliest childhood at my parent’s house but a combination of my siblings forcing me to remove everything for no good reason and my own life of homelessness being chaotic caused all of that to be lost.

I don’t necessarily trust the internet to keep and take care of things, I’ve been burned in this regard several times, but against all logic I trust it more than myself. This makes no sense at all as my wife and I are now home and land owners, but it’s hard to put your foot on solid ground when your brain is telling you it’s only empty air. Peek-a-boo is an emotionally charged game for parents and children alike – you may know the other human face persists behind the hands but knowing and seeing are two different things.

I think I’ve always lived in kingdoms of memory inside my head but living in cities with the bright lights of culture, society and civilization made them more difficult to see in detail. It’s like the stars – they’re always there but only us country mice get to see them burning as brightly as William Blake’s Tyger. Living out here has made my memory dioramas much more lurid as well and the quiet life allows me to give the past about as much attention as Henry Darger devoted to his “Realms of the Unreal”.

Sometimes in my perambulations of prior primrose paths my mind’s feet come bumping against artifacts that may yet live in the world of things. While you’re not likely to find a bigger proponent than myself of the value of inaccessibility I do also yearn, at times, for a subset of these things, if they’re media, to take their rightful place in the ethereal Asgard called the internet of things. Unfortunately none of the dullard inventors of the twentieth century quite perfected the crystal ball so occasionally these media are crystallized in mediums that would require that most priceless of resources, human effort, if ever such a transition were to be made.

The modern archaeologist must not just dig, but also digitize. If we are to parley with ghosts first we must make them Boolean, with hearty helpings of ones and zeros, for forms captured only in unnumbered light, vibration and, that most mysterious of mistresses, electromagnetism. As this labor can be Herculean, not everybody is always up to it, at least not right now – the infant demigods of the world have their own snakes to strangle after all, and strangle they should as venoms are cruel and pressing and life is always worth living.

Anyway I’m rambling. Some of these artifacts were Super 8 films my friend Tim made with me in 1998 for his Filmmaking 280 class at USC. I’m a big fan of clines and his cohort was the last ever to work in this medium – leading to some amusing and illegal hijinks involving his housemates not long afterward. Tim and I talk and his life has been less chaotic than mine but it is also currently busier as he’s a Hollywood power player and I’m a weird beard stylite. The reels are real and in his basement. I’ve been to the house he shares with his wife, and my friend, Brandi, as well as their son Orson, a few times – once he helped me make a large scale bismuth crystal as a gift for my estranged younger sister’s wedding and once me and my now wife LaPorsha got lost trying to go there for his and Brandi’s.

Sorry for all the details. The devil is in them and will have his due, and my sympathy, until they pry my cold, dead fingers from the tiller. Full speed ahead, shipmates! The point is I’m a long way from Los Angeles now and, while transferring the films would probably make for a lovely adult friendship afternoon activity if I were there to offer material and moral support, as a thing I only needled Tim about remotely their position on his prospectus was more open ended.

And so things sat, until I decided to ask my buddy Gabe Saucedo about a ballad by Mexican ska band Inspector that had been stuck in my head since it got a lot of radio play while I was in Belize in the Summer of 2002. He didn’t know but passed the question along to his brother and my friend Gerry who is more versed in this brand of Rock en Español and helped me figure out it was Amargo Ádios. The singer in the video bears an uncanny resemblance to Gerry and hearing it again brought back vivid memories of rude boys stoically skanking to it outside a banana bread bakery in the Caribbean environs of Caye Caulker after somewhat more threateningly dancing around my sister to that Summer’s hot jam: Sean Paul’s Get Busy.

Gerry also introduced me to a wonderful song with a near identical rhythm called Lamento Boliviano by Argentina’s Enanitos Verdes. However the true skullduggery began when I offhandedly mentioned the Super 8 films, in which Gerry also acted, and he revealed that he was still holding on to a VHS transfer and could catapult them into the cloud somewhere on the sooner side of forever. In fact he has already done just that and the light of 1998 shines again as a finely aged Summer Wine.

Tim wants to convert them from 16:9 to 4:3 before uploading to YouTube or somewhere similar. I explained he could simply take the square root of both sides but apparently the prospect of returning -4:-3 makes this option unpalatable. Regardless patience is a virtue, like all others, I prefer to live without so I’ve simply served up the contents in a meaty hyperlink to a public DropBox that I have no idea as to whether or not it might expire at some point.

Once when I was riding a freight train with some people on acid we joked about the prospect of snatching an oversized submarine sandwich from the hands of a family movie style fat kid should the train pass such a child with such a sandwich at high velocity. The imaginary payoff to this imaginary joke was the mental image of this fat kid then attempting to take a hearty bite only to have his teeth come crashing together on empty air. If Gerry’s DropBox link expires that will happen to you, and if you tell me it happened to you I will laugh at your misfortune.

Let’s talk about the movies. I’ve never had a long term art boyfriend, probably because I’m too much of a control freak to make a good collaborator, but my first short term one was a kid named Anthony I made up a bunch of superheroes with in Third Grade. I was a little jealous of the stable art boyfriends I started to meet around High School, like Paul and Ben for a second, but it wasn’t in the cards for me. Anyway me and Tim got to be art boyfriends for a good chunk of 1998.

We had our band, that was nominally supposed to include Brandi, called The Singles, and bought matching bellhop jackets that we unsuccessfully tried to sneak into my prom with Little Four in before we went and played a couple Ramones covers at Union and Beech. We eventually wrote and recorded a couple of songs together, which Tim apparently does still have a tape of and will hopefully reach the internet of things in due time.

I helped him roof a house that Summer and we zipped all over town in his sporty white Datsun convertible. The two of us were striking enough in this vehicle that one day a pair of prototypical “California Beach Babes” lifted their shirts to flash us on the 94 Freeway. I think Tim even attempted to teach me how to drive a manual transmission this year but I’m a slow learner – I’ve just about figured out driving an automatic well enough to hopefully take a driving test in 2026.

Our greatest collaborations were in Super 8 celluloid however. I don’t want to take too much credit as Tim wrote, shot, directed, edited and scored the shorts while I merely spitballed ideas and acted, poorly, but I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say I was his muse. Gerry’s VHS contained two narrative shorts: Cherchez Les Femmes and Two Plus Two Minus. We also made a more experimental short called Changes, and possibly one more film neither of us can remember, before he ended the semester with a full color claymation I only made a fire hydrant for called A Special Pizza.

Cherchez Les Femmes is our love letter to the French New Wave – we both had a bit of a Godard-on at this point. I play a hard boiled detective with my hair in an uncharacteristically short shag that resulted from my brother duping me with a ringer of a barber for his first wedding earlier that year. You can’t exactly tell in the footage but my necktie is a beautiful silk Emilio Pucci number with a squared tip featuring simple geometric forms in a range of earth tones against a black background.

The shifting seasons of our lives! I don’t think I own a single necktie now but to teenage me they held up the very firmament. I have an amusing memory of a white girl in my Senior IB English class telling me I looked like I was “being lynched” the day after our entire class read that very turn of phrase regarding neckties in The Color Purple, and silently judging her. I still love judging people but now I try to be loud about it and hopefully me being a paragon of garbage softens the blow.

Anyway the movie: it’s a convoluted double cross thing featuring Jonas, Tim’s prior art boyfriend, as a priest turned pimp, our Peter Pan-ish teacher friend Señor Suave as Fidel Castro, Tim as a mysterious Mormon-like antagonist and finally Nina and Kendall – two girls who went to SCPA and were much cooler than us. I was smitten with Kendall at the time though I can’t remember the chain of events that led to this fixation. I have a troubling premonition that it could be because my friend Gabe Saucedo told me that she’d told him she liked him and he reacted by punching her in the stomach.

In those days Gabe was doing a bad impression of a piece Vincent Gallo wrote for the Beastie Boys short lived Grand Royal magazine where he interviewed himself. Vincent, and Gabe in imitation, called people, in the general sense, “creeps” and claimed to be above romance by virtue of this creepiness. Gabe ascribed the same attitude to Morrissey – who coincidentally wasn’t that bad of a role model in 1998. Anyway the Saucedo clan is comprised of proud Mexican-American mama’s boys who have stayed true to the Raza in all of their adult romantic endeavors so the question may be largely academic.

[Important note: I grievously misunderstood a statement Gabe said about not being in the “white boy party scene” and he is currently the proud father of a child where the mestizo “original recipe” has been heavily slanted toward the “tercera europea”. Mea culpa.]

I mostly remember having long telephone conversations with Kendall under a dying apricot tree where she confessed to some degree of reciprocal fascination but told me she’d be “washing her hair” when I asked her what her plans for prom were. That was pretty classy of her. Less classy was the thing I apparently ended up saying to her – that it was a good thing she wouldn’t be coming to my prom because everybody at my school hated her.

I’m pretty bitchy but there must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere and I wonder what it was. Maybe Anne Gregory, my previous obsessive crush and the person who introduced me to Little Four, didn’t like Kendall or something. I’d sure like to find Anne Gregory. She told me that her mom had sex with Peter Frampton so every time I saw the I’m in You record digging through Thrift Store bins I thought about Anne Gregory’s mom who I only met once or twice. I don’t think he was supposed to be her dad or anything.

Anyway I wouldn’t have remembered saying that at all if I hadn’t reached through time and space to find Kendall and pass along the movies. That’s the nice thing about being a past obsessed weirdo – sometimes it causes me to talk to real live, flesh and blood people. When we were chatting I could only picture her as the melancholy maiden of my memories but I’ve since peeked over the wall of Zuckerberg’s garden and seen pictures where she’s smiling.

I don’t know how soon it was since we lost touch around 1998 but just like the Urge Overkill cover of the Neil Diamond song in Pulp Fiction she became a woman. I’ve been having an interesting experience over the past year or so and I’m just going to come out and say it. I think that intensely loving my wife for the past thirteen years has made me especially susceptible to the beauty of women – kind of like how rubbing a balloon on your hair can cause it to stand up from static electricity.

I know it sounds bad but whatever, I’m a pretty feminine dude. When I was younger I mostly noticed the beauty of men. First guys like Harry Dean Stanton and Gene Wilder but more recently Shah Rukh Khan and Dev Patel. To be fair I haven’t seen it but I wish they hadn’t let him make that Monkey Man movie last year. I think he really had A-list potential if they’d let his career slowly simmer but instead they let him make a big budget ego project and I doubt we’ll be hearing much more from him. It’s a shame because I really don’t care for the Austin Butlers and Timothée Chalamet’s of the world.

Finn Wolfhard has a beautiful nose but where has it gotten him? Anyway I should save all this for when they start letting me edit Tiger Beat and get back to some semblance of a narrative. As much as I appreciate male beauty, I’ve only ever loved women and now when I think about any woman I’ve ever known in my life their beauty hits me like a fist in the stomach. I can see how the fact that it’s every woman might make it seem less special but it’s not like that at all. Think about every cat you’ve ever seen – all cats are beautiful right?

Regardless I don’t think Kendall and I ever had much chemistry off the phone, what I call “skinside”. We share a brief kiss in the movie and let me tell you, Super 8 is a really evergreen medium, we all look stunning, but there is nothing there – no sparks, no William Blake’s Tyger, the forests of the night are dark. Nothing really distinguishes it from my kiss with Nina, or my kiss with Tim for that matter. I mean, I was shy and inexperienced but you’d expect something, it’s the movies after all.

Anyway let’s get back to the bromance. I used to tease Tim that in his omnipotence as scriptwriter it was telling that the film featured two flowers of exquisite teenage beauty but he chose to write himself a kiss with me. It was an empty jest though, I know his true mistress was the narrative though you’d have to ask him what that narrative was – Chekov’s gun only makes an appearance in the final frames of the closing credits.

As long as we’re talking about Russians I’d like to mention that a rough, high contrast portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov aka Lenin pops up several times throughout the story. I was obsessed with Shepard Fairey’s constructivist inspired Obey Giant! stickers around this time and had made the picture, derived from literal clip art picture files stored in Manila envelopes in the old downtown library, into a stencil for spray painting t-shirts and carving Jack o’Lanterns. I used to have pictures of all this stuff but I’ll save the tired refrain for the time being.

Cherchez Les Femmes is shot in Vertiscope, achieved by using widescreen stock and holding the camera sideways. Tim invented the technique and, as he noted recently, was rather prescient in doing so now that so much video is recorded on cell phones in portrait mode. If Tim ever does get around to tweaking aspect ratios for the big upload it would be nice to see Cherchez Les Femmes expanding from the pittance of my phone screen the current format grants it.

I’ve written a bit about the second uploaded film, Two Plus Two Minus, in a rambling essay that touches on the fortunes of my costar Spencer. The film’s title is a reference to it containing two good characters and two bad characters, and the monochromatic morality is fairly humorous by modern standards. The good guys are Tim and Spencer, both clean cut white guys who look comfortably middle class, while the heels are me and Gerry as a Dickensian evil homeless man and Latino greaser house burglar respectively.

My casting proved prophetic as I’ve spent years homeless and lived exclusively off the proceeds of panhandling but it might just be a role I was born for. I used to get offered food a lot as a teenager while waiting at bus stops and in my brief time as an extra I portrayed a homeless man in the airport scene of Elvis & Nixon (2016) convincingly enough that set security attempted to eject me under the assumption that I was a random vagrant and not featured talent.

In regards to Spencer and Gerry the casting is less clairvoyant. Gerry seems like an upstanding do-gooder to me but Spencer went through a bit of a rake’s progress and did some hard time for counterfeiting. I’ve done a fair amount of counterfeiting myself but never of legal tender, not that I think the crime is especially onerous. If anything, Spencer’s unforgivable sin was getting caught. I might dry snitch like a raspy voiced canary in these narratives but what’s anybody going to do about it? I’m not a hard man to find.

I titled the piece the way I did because when Kendall thanked me for dredging up the past and giving sleeping dogs firm kicks I replied that I was a regular Victor Frankenstein. I thoroughly enjoyed Guillermo Del Toro’s recent adaptation of Mary Shelley’s angsty teenage novel – especially when it preserved references to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Thirteen years ago I portrayed an amalgam of Milton’s Lucifer and Prometheus in a short lived lounge jazz presentation called Diving God.

The image I chose, from Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein, was used on the cover art of a Bleak End at Bernie’s live CD-R I no longer possess entitled Nothing Happened : Live in a Ghost Town. Until I watched Del Toro’s, Edison’s was my favorite adaptation of this classic tale and I still consider it to be the scariest with its uniquely alchemical take on the monster’s creation. I reached out to somebody who played a track from the CD on a radio show once in 2010 hoping he might still have it and could photograph the cover but I have yet to hear back.

The cover was a simple amalgamation of this poster art, the title and a quote from Louise Glück’s Gretel in Darkness:

“Now far from women’s arms

and memories of women, in our father’s hut

we sleep, are never hungry.

Why do I not forget?”

Glück was 28 when she wrote the poem, which is young to me now, but considerably older than Shelley’s eighteen years when she first drafted Frankenstein – coincidentally the age that I was in both of the above films and close to the age for nearly everyone in the casts and crews but Señor Suave. Edison was an august 63 when he made his Frankenstein but the film certainly represents an adolescence for cinema as an art form.

I’m a big champion of juvenilia, even if I also appreciate the work of old weirdos, and craftsmanship just seems like any other element in artistry to me that can be used to good effect but is by no means necessary. Now that I’ve seen photographic evidence that Kendall is a fully adult woman I feel a little bit of guilt for talking to her as if we were both still moody teenagers but I don’t know how to prevent myself. While my beard has become long and white I still often feel like three children stacked up in a trench coat and at this point it seems unlikely I’ll ever stop.

I must confess that for a long time I resented Kendall, or perhaps a better word would be that I felt betrayed by her, because she claimed to be experiencing a similar attracting force yet made a different decision. In my whirlwind life of whirlwind romances I only experienced this one other time and dealt with similar feelings. I think I’ve experienced most everything else though – I’ve played the roles of both “needy” and “distant” in the unpleasant game I call Brokeback Mountain.

I do think I’ve matured enough to reach a point where I no longer feel this resentment. Just because it’s always my tendency to go head over heels and be careless with my heart doesn’t mean that anybody else is beholden to do the same. I do think there was wisdom in her decision – we both seem to be in the lives and relationships where we belong whether the roads to get there were rocky or otherwise.

I wrote in my recent piece on my friend Steve Lawrence that I sometimes worry that my romance with the past makes me a subpar friend to the people who need me in the here and now. My greatest misgiving is that I might make my friends feel like a person who is only contacted to get another person’s phone number but that other person would be either their past selves or the past in general. I’m bad when it comes to telling my friends I love them – the ones I say it to seem uncomfortable like I shouldn’t have said it and likely some of those I don’t say it to would prefer if I did.

I’m trying to get better about these things but time is running out. I know that for much of my life I’ve seemed incredibly aloof, and I am, but I also love most people. For the small handful I hate I hope that intensity makes it equally exciting and for the hordes who earn only my ambivalence, my only excuse is that I have weird taste. I deeply appreciate Gerry for uploading these movies, Tim for making them and everybody who has taken the time to talk to me and share their current lives throughout this process.

I don’t know if everybody fantasizes about their own funerals but I know I do. One of my favorite ideas is to have fancy invitations printed up that say “Don’t worry. Ossian can’t hurt you anymore.” For anybody who needs me to be something I am not and never will be I can only offer the cold consolation that, as long as it exceeds mine, that day will be coming within your lifetime. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get anybody to print the invitations.

“The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead–he glanced at Bruce, the empty shape beside him–should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living.” – Philip K. Dick

“Yes, yes, I know you’re hungry
Ah, and here comes dinner

Feed my Frankenstein

Well, I ain’t evil, I’m just good lookin‘” – Alice Cooper

We’ve been here before.

One day in the Summer of 1999, in the city of San Francisco, I was standing on the escalator to leave the Castro Street MUNI station when the toe of my shoe became wedged between two of the mechanical steps. As emergencies go it unfolded slowly but the shock and unfamiliarity prevented me from responding decisively and effectively. I would have had more than enough time to untie the shoe and extract my foot but instead I tried in futility to pull the foot, shoe and all, from its metal prison and called down the empty street and empty stairs for help.

They say nobody is coming to save you. They are usually correct.

I call what happened next luck but it would probably be just as accurate to say that the contours of the situation were shaped and decided the moment the jaws of fate bit into my toe. My shoes were an old pair of Adidas Sambas worn pliant and flexible as a second skin, my socks were the thick white kind made from cotton with a dash of nylon for elasticity and my feet were subject to the standard frailties of flesh and parked precariously on the precipice of peril. After a brief tug-of-war the first and second were ripped violently from the third and before long pulled whole cloth into a subterranean chamber of mystery and invisibility.

While the danger had passed I felt marked by both its proximity and the absence of the articles it had stripped me of. While the street remained empty of witnesses I took stock and realized that the outward signs imprinted by my ordeal were insufficient to prove that such improbable events had truly transpired. My single shoe neither substantiated the existence of its absent twin nor documented the agency by which the two had been separated.

“A man walks down the street with only one shoe. ‘Did you lose a shoe?’ they ask him. ‘No’, he answers, ‘I found one.’”

Years earlier, in what felt like a prophetic dream, I had severed my left leg from my body and thus unlocked unlimited physical potential. Now in the waking world that selfsame limb had brushed against potential amputation only to emerge unscathed upon the solid ground of the ordinary. In another reality I could have been an Ahab hunting the Castro Street MUNI station escalator like a white whale to the ends of the earth – here the very strangeness of my bare toes upon the metal landing reinforced the pedestrian outcome. Nothing of consequence had taken place.

I could have stepped out of the station onto the street and into the city but with no witness to what had transpired my experience felt fragile and tenuous. To walk away now would have been to step decisively into the universe where the other shoe had never existed at all – where I would have definitively become the raving lunatic I must have later appeared as to my fellow passengers. Ranting about an escalator that only existed in my fevered imagination.

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent.” [Cormac McCarthy]

The only way to preserve both the strangeness and banality of this current moment and to reconcile the two was to descend back into the belly of the beast and seek out a representative of the San Francisco Municipal Railway – the body that governed over the mechanical stairway and could retrieve the remains of my shoe from its bowels as proof and testament. I sought out the agent within the glass and metal booth for authority, responsibility and a decisive answer as to what would come next.

In Kafkaesque fashion it took the form of an official looking paper document. In legal parlance a “small claim”. The city of San Francisco’s liability superseded that of the Municipal Railway as independent entity and as such they would be footing the bill for my missing footwear. I was expected to make a value proposition – to proffer a sum that we might barter, trade the imperfections of the past for money.

So pass the days of our lives. Besides slightly enriching me, the intended consequence of this restitution was to obliterate my claim, and obliterate it did. It’s entirely possible that I have outstanding debts to the city of San Francisco but they have none to me. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespass as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Would this story be more valuable to you, the reader, if I told you the specific sum? Recently a friend tried to interest me with anecdotes of hundred dollar wagers but the amount felt meaningless without intricate details of what the hundred dollars were being wagered on. His storytelling faculties diverge from my own but, near as I could gather, the bet was on which direction bills of that denomination might travel with a subsequent breeze.

In the particulars of this story it was forty two dollars. Forty for the shoes and two for the socks. Only one of each was lost but, in proper fashion, payment was made for both. The eventual check found me in a different city but the same year. Insignificantly, but perceptibly, bolstered by this legal tender on the taxpayer’s dime I put my best foot forward and marched into the future.

In our case, our past.

This writing project mostly takes the form of a memoir so it is unsurprising that memory itself has become a consistent theme. Most of the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive – encouraging remarks about both accuracy and level of detail in my recollections of an event from other people who were also there. Small cracks have occasionally appeared in the form of obvious transposition errors or conflicting details impossible to reconcile but otherwise the structure has seemed sound enough.

However to put too much faith in one’s own memories is also a pitfall, after all the memory of a thing is not the same thing as the thing itself and no matter how much we view ourselves as impartial observers nothing is regarded without emotion. Emotion colors memory – subtly shifting details even as it blacks out the evidence it ever acted at all. Nowhere is this blind spot more deceptive than in our memories of our own behavior and motivations.

The past may as well not exist. In the absence of a recorded document it is splintered into individual recollections and the marks it has left upon the present world that is. It is unlikely, if not impossible, for any one account to represent the whole, objective truth but in groping together toward this unattainable ideal one may cleave closer to it than another. I will begin with my own account largely untouched from how I first remembered it so the contrast might be more striking when the curtain of fond nostalgia is ripped away:

*******************************************

When I went back to living with my roommate after the rafts there was this guy Stefan who lived down the street in Pilsen I sometimes got cocaine from. He was a lot younger than me and had a sleazy mustache and mostly hung out with Art Institute kids and had sex with Art Institute girls. I don’t know if he went there himself but it is the sort of thing he would have tried to downplay as he presented himself as very working class in that self conscious Bukowski annoying young person way.

When I went over to his apartment to get cocaine he’d always proudly play me this voicemail that the mother of the girl he’d most recently been sleeping with left on his phone. I only remember the ending part:

“…and I just found out you’ve been fucking my daughter without a condom, PISS OFF YOU LITTLE PUNK!”

I didn’t really like Stefan and I really didn’t like the people he got the cocaine from I was getting from him but it was a funny voicemail. Anyway having just gotten back from the rafts I had just brought the kitten Night Beaver and she was tiny. She might not have even been eight weeks yet. She’d been abandoned by the freeway in St. Louis and had been feral when I started keeping her in my sweater and feeding her out of my hand so she was used to me, the other raft people and my roommate but not much else.

She was in a weird liminal state between feral and not feral. You know the part in the 1984 Dune where they’re fighting with those boxy shield things and fast attacks get deflected but slow attacks get through?

“The slow blade penetrates the shield.”

With Night Beaver it was the opposite. If somebody tried to pet her or pick her up with the slightest hesitation she would hiss and growl and bite their hand without an ounce of playfulness. The only thing that worked was to quickly snatch her by the scruff of the neck, like you see people grabbing snakes in YouTube videos, and then she’d instantly turn domesticated until you set her back down again.

I used to do a little routine with her where I’d set her on the floor or a table and quickly pick her up and set her back down multiple times so the growls would abruptly start and stop. There was a similar but different situation one time with a kitten called Theremin because this kitten would growl/whine if you put your hand near it and then the sound would increase in pitch and volume if you brought the hand closer or these things would decrease if you brought it further away.

If I had both kittens now, frozen at these exact ages and levels of socialization I could probably use both hands at the same time to do a cool and very kitten specific noise set. I would need to either have two tables on opposite sides of my body that were insulated from each other in terms of sight and sound or the two kittens would need to somehow not react to each other though. This brings us to this next part: Stefan also had a kitten.

Kittens that aren’t well socialized usually react to other kittens they aren’t familiar with.

I’ve already mentioned that I didn’t really like Stefan; to the best of my knowledge he didn’t really like me. I do remember one occasion when he attempted a “burn”:

“You look like The Crow if he really let himself go!”

Maybe it was that he was a tall, lanky guy with a sleazy mustache and I was a tall, lanky guy who had a sleazy mustache when I was his age or maybe it had something to do with the kind of interpersonal bonds that are forged by cocaine but there was an antagonistic, competitive streak between us. It wasn’t enough of a thing where we’d ever fight each other but a different flavor of the kind of antipathy where two little kids argue about whose dad could beat up the other person’s dad.

Instead we were two grown men with two very young kittens so naturally the arguments became about whose kitten could beat up the other person’s kitten. If it was just one or two offhand remarks most likely nothing would have come of it but instead it was a steady stream of invective that built in intensity until it reached the logical conclusion: Stefan and I became the impresarios of an underground kitten fight.

Looking back on it now I probably should have been thinking a little harder about the choice of venue. Rather than hosting the fight in either Stefan’s apartment or the one I shared with my roommate, the most fair thing would have been to find some third venue where neither kitten would be on “home turf”. Maybe the South Side of Chicago already had an underground kitten fighting ring where we could have gained the temporary use of an arena and even made some serious cash.

I wasn’t thinking of any of that in the moment though and we held the fight in Stefan’s apartment. My line of thinking was that I didn’t particularly want Stefan in me and my roommate’s apartment nor did I particularly want the kind of people who would want to come to an underground kitten fight. As you can probably imagine, once word got out that turned out to be a decent sized chunk of people.

Night Beaver was not a party cat. On the raft she was free to explore the banks of the Mississippi River at her leisure but since we’d ridden the Megabus to Chicago together this night was her first time leaving me and Stephany’s apartment. This may sound like a useless qualifier but I have had cats that were party cats and think the outcome of an underground kitten fight where one or both kittens were party cats might have gone a little differently.

Anyway that’s neither here nor there. Stefan’s kitten wasn’t a party cat either but the party was going down in the apartment that she already lived in. Try to imagine you are a small and under-socialized kitten: coming face to face with another unfamiliar kitten probably already sounds pretty scary but now imagine a tightly packed circle of shouting spectators waving cash and clutching bottles of alcohol. Yeah, me and Stefan were total assholes.

Let me set the stage for you a little more: his apartment was on a ground floor facing south on 18th Street near Damen. Hardwood floors and not much of anything in it – his bed, some furniture and some books in milk crates. We didn’t go out of our way to turn the lights down for the fight but Stefan was something of a coke head already – it was sparsely lit. We held the fight in the first room with the street facing windows.

We didn’t kick things off the moment I walked in the door but Night Beaver was still at the stage where she hung out inside whatever sweater I was wearing so it’s not like she had any time to get the lay of the land. Night Beaver is a tabby in that generic, not-quite-grey-or-brown tabby color and a white stomach. Stefan’s kitten was an all black shorthair named Anna.

We’ve given the energy time to build and every one of the thirty-or-so people in Stefan’s apartment is there for one reason and one reason alone – they came to see the kitten fight. Bets have been made, drinks have been drunk and as Stefan and I bring our kittens to the center of the circle people are shouting for their favorite: “Night Beaver!” “Anna!”

Of course every single person is also acutely aware of the absurdity of the entire situation so everything is played up for the invisible camera that isn’t there. Nobody is going to place a bet and then leave the money in a pocket or wallet – bills are fanned out and people are moving like the animated background characters in a Street Fighter II level. Fists in the air, bottles gripped by the neck – everything just a little bit extra like it’s for TV.

Both kittens have to be somewhere from eight to ten weeks old. Pocket sized. We place them both in the circle and ears go back, backs and tails puff up, their eyes are instantly on each other and that high pitched kitten growl begins to build up. The same one a kitten that has just started eating solid food makes when they can smell food but it isn’t in their mouth yet. Night Beaver turns and runs out of the circle.

I instantly get an overwhelming feeling of shame. Not because Night Beaver lost after I’d talked so much shit about how she’d kick Witten’s ass – just shame for the entire sorry situation. I look into Stefan’s eyes and they look the same, not even a flicker of triumph. Of course I can’t say with certainty but I’m pretty sure that if things had gone the other way and Anna had fled while Night Beaver remained in the ring this feeling of shame that I can still look inside myself and detect traces of would be exactly the same.

I forget which one of us said it:

“Man, we are jerks!”

I’d bet some negligible quantity of cash with somebody, probably Stefan, and I handed it over without even a trace of resentment.

*******************************************

Or that was how I remembered things, with some exaggeration, when I first typed this up. I’ve since spoken to my roommate at the time and gotten her recollection of the evening which I have no doubt is more accurate in every salient detail. For one thing she would have been completely sober but more importantly she saw the affair for what it was – a juvenile act of animal cruelty without a shred of romanticization.

First the basic facts: the “fight” was held in our apartment as opposed to Stephan’s, a fact she was particularly pissed about. The audience of thirty is pure fantasy – to be honest when I was first writing it I remembered something more like eight to ten people and spun the number upward for effect.

Thankfully we don’t have to rely on my recollections at all. There were exactly four spectators: myself, Stephan, my roommate’s asshole boyfriend at the time and a particularly unsavory character named Josh Tiger. A small circle of sad drunks laughing at frightened kittens for their own amusement and the last two likely to have been merely present for the opportunity to appease their alcoholism in any venue where they might be tolerated rather than attraction or interest in the event itself.

My assessment of my own impartiality to Night Beaver’s “loss” has also proven to be misattributed. My roommate arrived home just after Night Beaver had fled from the confrontation and expressed immediate concern for her safety and whereabouts. My callous and boorish reply was:

“Night Beaver’s a little bitch!”

Clearly, I had taken the conclusion of the proceedings as a blow to my ego and was being neglectful, and worse as the evening progressed, in consequence. I feel reasonably confident that the “Man, we are jerks!” line was actually uttered, in fact I think it was Stefan, but whatever contrite self awareness those words might have contained was eclipsed by an underlying and all encompassing sense of smugness.

Any shame that we might have felt in the moment was but a drop in the ocean of our self satisfaction because we thought we were being clever and funny and cute. I’d like to think I’ve become a better person in the last eighteen years but it is humbling to hold my own self mythologizing account of this evening against an unembellished outside perspective. I now realize that my memories stem almost entirely from the idealized version of this event I’d constructed in my head before it even happened rather than the event itself.

We didn’t necessarily expect the kittens to attack or hurt each other, the term “fight” notwithstanding, but we put them into a situation where they certainly could have for no other reason than our own drunken amusement. That is far from the worst of it. The night ended with me putting Night Beaver inside the microwave and closing the door – not with any intention of turning it on but absolutely to trap, enclose and isolate her.

I don’t have any recollection of this part of the night at all so I can’t say if I was punishing her for losing the “fight” or had simply progressed into a meaner stage of drunkenness but I do remember doing the same thing on other occasions. I also used to place Night Beaver into the glass bowl of a hanging ceiling lamp that was too high for her to jump down from for the same reasons which caused her undue distress.

I was far from an ideal caretaker and it wasn’t too long after the events of this evening that I abandoned Night Beaver entirely and my roommate picked up the slack and fully adopted her. Her life has been much happier and more peaceful in the intervening years and she is now eighteen years old and facing some of the health problems that are typical in cats of her advanced age. Of the six cats my wife and I take care of now the oldest, Nepthys, just turned six so similar concerns are likely still far on the horizon but sobering to think about.

Besides being unimpressed with the smarmy tone of my original piece and correcting nearly every detail for veracity, my former roommate questioned why I would even write about such an event in the first place. It seems like a fair question. When I first sat down to begin writing my intention was only to briefly outline the kitten “fight” on the path to describing an oral literary event Stephan had introduced me to: the Windy City Story Slam.

I’d remembered Stephan as one of the organizers but a moment of research shows it to be the brainchild of a Chicago personality and former boxer called Bill “The Butcher” Hillmann. While open to all types of stories, the handful of iterations I participated in had the “two fisted crime verité” vibe of Tom Hanks’ Cloud Atlas character Duster Hoggins and the works of frequent guest and celebrity judge Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame.

While I still want to take full responsibility it is undeniable that an undercurrent of both lionizing and exaggerating bad behavior in this type of fiction played a role in how I remembered and chose to describe the kitten “fight”. Now that I’ve thrown both my memory and character into question I will address the story slam, my recollections of it and a reworking of the least successful story I presented there in a second part.

Tijuana hadn’t worked out but being full time Americans meant we were getting better use out of our first car together – the diesel Mercedes. As Summer segued into Fall we headed North for the trim season. Catrick had been a traveling cat when he was younger, hiding in my bag for endless train trips and sometimes even coming to parties on his harness, but with the stability of our Tijuana apartment and long interludes at my mom’s house he’d lost whatever tolerance he’d had for the lifestyle.

He could feel when moving day arrived and made every effort not to come, running across the culdesac and hiding on the overgrown side of a neighbor’s house so I had to go catch him. I’m sure he could have evaded me entirely if that had been his true intent but it was a symbolic act of protest, a dissenting vote. Chouser was there for some reason, a show I’d set up or something, and weighed in on the matter in the sagacious voice of a Kung Fu teacher:

“A rite of passage for every cat is to learn to outsmart his master.”

In the Mercedes Catrick continued to register his displeasure, yelling loudly in a way he never had before. When I held him in my lap to comfort him I could feel heat radiating from his paws, a clear sign of stress. Mostly he preferred hiding at the floorboards behind my seat. In the past we’d maintained skin to fur contact whenever we engaged in long distance travel but a rift was starting to form between us.

We roll into Oakland and park outside of a house some friends are squatting in the Lower Bottoms. I carry Catrick inside and find a place for his litter box. He likes it here – an upstairs window opens onto the roof and he can come and go to explore the neighborhood at his leisure. We’re just hanging around for a little bit waiting for word on a weed job we can go to.

Logan lives in the basement. He spends most of his time sitting at a desktop computer playing an emulated version of Castlevania : Symphony of the Night. I’d first seen the game way back in 2001 when a friend took me to the house of his witchy older meth dealer, named Glinda of all things. I only saw her play it for a brief moment and never got the name but I instantly know I’m looking at the same game again. Alucard’s white skin, noble bearing and the colored traces he leaves behind while running are unmistakable.

Logan has reached the overpowered late stages of the game and proudly shows me all his different familiars – a tiny bat flits behind Alucard’s shoulder, a pitchfork wielding devil, a giant floating sword. Logan had gotten into dope since the last time I saw him and it isn’t too long before we’re doing it together. He gets the cheap bags of gunpowder, black tar mixed with crushed Benadryl to make an unpleasant powder, tied up in bright neon water balloons.

It’s my first time doing the stuff and I’m not impressed with how much of it you need to inhale or the way it lingers in the sinuses. LaPorsha doesn’t want to mess with it at all so Logan always has to call around to find small handfuls of pain pills – white, peach or speckled ovals. Logan has a trimming job right in town, inside a Black owned warehouse in Downtown Oakland, and tries to get us an in but it never works out.

Eventually I hear through the grapevine that my old friend Erin from Garbaj Kaetz has a job lined up outside of Arcata and can bring a couple of friends in exchange for a ride. LaPorsha arranges for Catrick to stay with her grandfather in Sacramento so we make a detour to drop him off. Catrick instantly likes it less than any house he’s ever been in and goes to hide behind the washing machine. LaPorsha’s weird cousin is cooking chicken feet in the kitchen and tries to offer one to the cat but he isn’t interested.

We go back to the Bay to pick up Erin and make our way up the 101. The Mercedes starts to struggle and lose power when we are going uphill. I don’t know enough to figure out what’s wrong with it. We meet Erin’s work connection at the CostCo just South of Eureka and start to follow him North. Suddenly LaPorsha gets a phone call from her grandfather. Somebody left a door open and Catrick got out. It couldn’t have been more than a couple days since we dropped him off.

This is only our second time trimming and this job is clearly going to be a lot different from our experience the year before. The connect leads us up a mountain off of the Blue Lake exit and after a couple of miles we have to leave the Mercedes behind because it isn’t making it up the steep inclines. We grab our stuff and climb into the connect’s truck and then it’s another twenty to thirty minutes and multiple locked gates. We’re going to be really isolated.

It’s already dark by now so we’re not supposed to start working until the morning. We get shown around and introduced to some other workers – it’s a pretty big farm and there’s maybe thirty people altogether. It doesn’t look like there’s any permanent structures, just different white canopies for a kitchen, trimming area and that kind of thing. Instead of pitching our own tent, we are shown into a large ten person tent with extra space where we can stay along with Erin.

There wasn’t really any particular thing that stuck out as “weird” or “bad vibes” but me and LaPorsha were both feeling freaked out by the entire scene – the extreme isolation, the size of the grow and number of people, a sense of “passive aggressive” hippy vibes and, of course, extreme distress about what was going on with Catrick and worry that we wouldn’t be able to find him again. He had a history of getting out of friends’ apartments in Los Angeles and wandering away from our place in Tijuana where I always found him and got him back but the place in Sacramento, where he’d clearly never been comfortable, seemed like less of a sure thing.

I had grabbed a case of beer on the last minute supply run outside of Eureka and started drinking as soon as we got to the farm. I can’t remember what triggered the argument me and LaPorsha got into, or even what it was nominally about, but in retrospect it feels like we were both trying, albeit subconsciously, to get kicked off the mountain. Things turned physical, other trimmers could hear it through the thin fabric of the tent and the people in charge decided pretty quickly that it was time for us to grab our shit and go.

We were separated for the ride back off the mountain, LaPorsha in the cab of the pickup truck and me in the bed. One of the hippy grower bros is back there too to keep an eye on me. As far as he knows I’m a violent alcoholic oogle and I do what I can to play the part. I finish my beer and fling the empty can off into the trees. He clucks his tongue in disapproval and chides me that it will now be there forever.

“Whatever. It’ll make a nice home for a spider.”

His tone turns philosophical and he muses that the only thing he hates about growing weed is dealing with assholes like me. He’d find a lot more to hate over the next couple of years as the price of cannabis would go into free fall. I doubt he’s still growing, probably fucked the land up and sold it off for next to nothing. They drop LaPorsha at our Mercedes and take me all the way down to the rural highway – the 299.

I pick up my bags and start walking without even bothering to check what direction I’m going in, probably the wrong one. After an interminable amount of time I hear the distinctive roar of our diesel motor creeping up behind me. The thing made a noise like an overclocked lawnmower but the odometer had been stuck just over 300k for three owners and the better part of a decade – it would probably run forever. Without a word I got in and LaPorscha turned around and headed toward Arcata.

We knew from experience that attempting to sleep in the four door sedan would be futile – I’m 6’4” and LaPorsha is 5’8”, both too tall to stretch out anywhere. We cruise the streets of Arcata then Eureka aimlessly looking for a spot secluded enough to get away with pitching our tent and drive across the bridge into Samoa. We park outside of some kind of naval base. As we carry our tent into the marshy undergrowth, we can hear tweakers screaming at each other from the bushes across the road but we’re too tired to think of the obvious implications.

It’s still dark out when the voices of cops calling into the tent wake us up. They ask what kind of car we came out of and we tell them it’s a blue diesel Mercedes.

“The one with the broken window?”

Shit. We were so dead to the world even the sound of shattering glass a few feet away didn’t wake us. We quickly break down the tent and follow the cops back to the car. The thieves broke in through the passenger side window and smeared a trail of blood across the dashboard. LaPorsha’s cobalt blue chantilly lace wedding veil is missing from the steering wheel – probably grabbed indiscriminately to staunch the bleeding.

One of the cops pulls out a notepad and begins to catalogue everything that’s missing into a report. Between the darkness and sleep deprivation it’s hard to remember what used to be in the car. The veil, a block of Trader Joe’s Unexpected Cheddar, some Venetian style porcelain clowns, maybe some clothing. Miraculously the registration and insurance papers are still in the glove compartment. All of the serious valuables, LaPorsha’s computer and an assortment of effects pedals, were in the trunk and they didn’t get in but not for lack of trying.

The tip of a flathead screwdriver is broken off inside the lock so we won’t be getting into the trunk for a while either. The police take down our phone number and caution us to find better places to sleep. However many hours we got in the tent weren’t enough so we drive back up toward Blue Lake and just pull off in the shade somewhere. Now we’re tired enough to fall asleep in the seats.

I’m woken up by a wild eyed red-haired tweaker leaning into my now-broken window. He wants to know where we came from, how long we’ve been here, how our window got broken, what we plan to do. He states the obvious: we picked a bad place to try to sleep for a second time. Clearly, you’re here aren’t you? He informs us that our fortunes have rallied because we’ve got him to look after us now.

LaPorsha spots a sign for Mad River Beach so that becomes our destination and pretext to leave. No such luck:

“You’re going to the beach? Then I’m going to the beach too!”

I attempt to explain diplomatically that we’re not trying to turn it into a group expedition and his bicycle wouldn’t fit into our vehicle anyway. It does not have the desired effect:

“How you gonna show up in a place where you don’t know anybody and just disrespect somebody like that?”

At this point there was nothing to do but start driving, unfortunately our new companion wasn’t taking the hint. He hooked one hand into my window frame and steadied his handlebars with the other as he pedaled alongside us. LaPorsha floored the throttle until his hand slipped and we left him weaving on his bicycle and cursing after us. On the drive to the beach we passed painted signs for a local pumpkin patch and wrote down the phone number to ask about jobs – it seemed like a good time to get out of cannabis.

The beach was nice but something made us feel like we wouldn’t be able to sleep there – a sign saying we couldn’t camp or police car or maybe just how far we’d have to be from our car with a busted window. Driving back through the farmland, we just pulled off next to some crops and laid the collapsed tent down like a tarp in the shadow of the car. We finally drifted off for an hour or two until the sun got too high in the sky and took away our shade. On the drive back to Arcata we passed a young Black college student walking along the farm roads and gave him a ride.

He’d ended up out there riding with a girl to a party the night before. I think it might have been the same house me and Barkev played a show at on our tour two years previously. An old farmhouse next to a dairy farm with a pit full of rotting dead cows and children’s toys. I don’t know because I didn’t ask. The college guy had gone out there with the girl thinking they were together but her behavior at the party made him question this assumption:

“She started talking to all these other dudes and then I didn’t feel like playing ‘last dude standing’. Sometimes you just have to know your own worth.”

He found a spot to sleep and when he woke up the party house was nearly empty and nobody was driving back to town. He felt pretty out of place and exposed walking the dirt roads and was happy we’d come along when we did. It was his first semester at Cal State Humboldt and he seemed like he was beginning to question his choice in universities. We dropped him off in town and went to a bigger grocery store for coffee, probably Safeway.

The cops were there because a squirrely dreadlocked troubadour dressed in a kilt was playing acoustic guitar and shouting through a megaphone in the parking lot and Safeway wanted him to leave. In the process of escorting him out of the parking lot, his guitar had accidentally gotten knocked onto the ground so he was screaming at the cops and calling them pigs and fascists. It seemed like a lot to deal with. Now that we’d finally gotten a little bit of sleep the best course of action seemed to be to go back to Sacramento and look for Catrick.

LaPorsha’s grandma lived in Rancho Cordoba. Her backyard adjoined an overgrown empty lot that seemed popular with the neighborhood cats but hopping over the fence and calling him with his food, both during the day and at night, never yielded any results. In Tijuana he’d always hung out under the same white Cadillac in the center of our block when he refused to come home but the pace of life was different in Rancho Cordoba and he didn’t appear to have found a spot as comfortable.

I printed up flyers with his picture and posted them all around the neighborhood. For my trouble I got mocking calls from teenagers claiming they’d seen him dead in the street but they never came to meet me and the directions they gave didn’t lead to any bodies. Just bored kids looking for somebody to mess with. After that I got a call from a group of children who were pretty certain they’d found him and had eyes on him under a parked RV at that very moment.

I walked a couple of blocks to where they said he was and they were all excitedly standing around the vehicle so he wouldn’t run back out. I really expected it to be Catrick which made things all the more shocking when I peered underneath and found an entirely different white cat staring back at me. The strange white cat seemed just as surprised to see me as I was to see it and its wide eyed expression is forever burned into my memory. The children didn’t seem to fully understand the concept of a lost pet reward and were pretty disappointed not to get one.

At that point we threw in the towel and headed back north to look for more work. We never did find Catrick or see him again although we were back at LaPorsha’s grandma’s house several times over the next few years. Our only consolation was the thought that somebody had probably taken him home as he really was a beautiful cat – a long haired flame point Siamese with apricot markings on his tail and face. Without any specific leads we just went back to Eureka.

We got into a routine of hanging out at a McDonald’s in the mornings, going to a homeless outreach that offered meals and things like socks in the afternoons and then sleeping in a secluded park full of redwoods in Arcata with a small handful of other vehicular homeless. The people from the pumpkin patch called me back. While they didn’t need anybody for the pumpkin side of things they were in need of workers for their potato harvest but it was hard work and only paid nine dollars an hour.

We still would have happily taken it if it wasn’t for the fact that we wouldn’t be able to camp on the property. I was a little incredulous that they’d find anybody under those conditions but the next year I was working demolition in New Orleans and one of my coworkers had done that exact job. It was all college kids without a lot of options who preferred the outdoor work and relaxed environment to retail culture. We’d been putting out feelers for any kind of job opportunity and heard from some friends who were picking grapes at a vineyard in Myers Flat.

Myers Flat is a tiny town off the 101 – basically just a bar, the winery and a drive through tree attraction. The first two appear to be closed now. Our friends were all staying in an old trailer on the vineyard property with a TV and VCR and a large factor in them inviting us down seemed to be that I’d found some interesting videos in an Arcata thrift store – an old animation festival and some obscure sci-fi I forget the name of. I forget if normal people could stream movies on their phones in 2014 but none of us could.

In those days Myers Flat did have a tiny boutique style thrift store but the lady who ran it charged too much for her mediocre selection of VHS tapes. I think she wanted something like six dollars each for them, which we should have just paid on account of working in a cash industry, but on principle paying that kind of money for Apollo 13 or Circle of Friends didn’t feel emotionally feasible. Our friend Andrew fruitlessly attempted to haggle and got into arguments with the lady nearly every day:

“That’s the price! What do you care? You’re getting two hundred dollars a pound to trim weed!”

“I don’t trim weed!”

“Then I don’t know, go shovel some shit or something!”

There definitely was a weed farm around but we were never let in on it. Every morning when we went to drink coffee in the winery’s big kitchen a group of cannabis bro looking dudes would be in there drinking coffee too but they were very hush-hush about what kind of work they were doing and where. I made a bad impression one of the first mornings when I spotted a bottle of Benedictine on a shelf and took a big swallow. The lead cannabro was visibly uncomfortable so in standard hippy fashion he made too much of an effort to seem unbothered:

“Just don’t let Thomas catch you doing that!”

Thomas was the son of the Saloon owner and the owner of Riverbend Cellars. He was in what appeared to be a lavender marriage to a severe German woman and, while making wine clearly did interest him, his true passion seemed to be cooking elaborate meals for his staff. Twice a day, at breakfast and dinner, we all sat at a worker’s table and ate while Thomas and his wife magnanimously looked down from their patron’s table. Picking grapes paid twelve dollars an hour but Thomas’s cooking more than made up for the drop in wages from cannabis work.

I’m not a wine guy but I’m glad I got the opportunity to do it at least once. You hang a tiny knife with a crescent shaped blade from your wrist and even though the handles are bright orange plastic the overall design of the tool makes you feel like you are communing with the ancient world. We started early in the morning while the grapes were still wet with dew but soon enough the days heated up and hordes of easily offended bees descended into the rows of fruit. Between the stinging insects and overgrown thorny blackberries at the foot of every arbor I had to be pretty careful not to let things stab into my hands.

Grapes are a little too delicate to pick with gloves on, even if they’re getting smashed for wine soon. We were picking a very dark kind, much smaller than what you’d call a table grape. I learned about this stuff called root stock which is a native grape grafted to the tops of the vines to help them resist certain diseases. You’re not supposed to pick that part. We never got to step on the grapes like that Simpsons episode where Bart goes to France – Thomas had some kind of machine for that.

I would have preferred to keep picking grapes for the rest of the season but LaPorsha didn’t really take to it. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, I’m a very slow marijuana trimmer. I tried to take up the slack by picking grapes as fast as possible but it wasn’t enough. We needed to leave at the end of a week. Myers Flat was a nice place to live, at the end of work days we’d go hang out inside the giant arch of the drive through redwood tree and explore a little children’s area with statues of elves and gnomes carved out of wood.

Thomas’s father’s bar sold bumper stickers that said “Myers Flat is where it’s at!” Nobody ever bought one but on the boring nights without new videos to watch we’d pass the time making up alternate slogans for imaginary stickers. “I got a flat in Myers Flat and that was that!” On our last night LaPorsha had a dream that she got into our trunk using a magnet so she tried it the next morning and the broken tip of the screwdriver came out of the lock. Our friends Ryan and Luja showed up to take our spots.

We were back to drifting up and down the 101 and hanging around homeless services in Eureka. I called everyone we knew that was working but nobody was at a spot that would take us. Somehow I found the number of the farmer we’d worked for the year before by Mad River, I call him Gemini, and he said he had some stuff ready to trim and could use us for a little while. On the drive out there the Mercedes started to lose power again like it had en route to the first farm.

Thankfully Gemini had owned one a few years back and, like all diesel Mercedes owners, fallen in love with the cars and their various eccentricities. We already had the problem where the vacuum pump was out so we had to pop the hood and press a big button on the engine to make it stop after switching off the ignition. I always worried this would lead to a tense encounter with the police but it thankfully never happened.

Anyway Gemini figured out that our issue was obstruction in a secondary fuel filter, the caustic nature of diesel leads to a lot of crud in the lines, and even had a spare one lying around and showed me how to suck on the lines to prime it because the hand pump was broken. If you ever run out of a fuel with a diesel engine or change a filter without priming it the motor won’t start. Like I said they’re super fun cars and I don’t even like cars. I wish we had one now but they’re not practical for the mountain we live on – we’re Subaru people now.

We had also starting leaking massive amounts of filthy black oil so Gemini had us keep our car at the bottom of his hill and change our camping spot there. Things were pleasant enough for a little while. Gemini’s kids were around this year and I got into playing a game with them where we kicked and punched empty cans hanging from tree branches. Me and LaPorsha hadn’t done any drugs since we were in Oakland but I had been talking to one of her uncles about buying a bottle of Norcos when his prescription came in.

I talked to him the day before and explained that once we left the WiFi spot we wouldn’t have cell signal for almost three hours but we were definitely coming. We told Gemini that there was a family emergency in Sacramento, he could pretty much tell we were lying but it was a decent time for us to take off for a couple days. Once we were back in range I had a bunch of missed calls from the uncle and sure enough he’d disregarded what I’d told him and sold off the bottle as soon as he couldn’t reach me. It was so on-brand for him I couldn’t even be pissed.

At that point we were almost to Sacramento so we decided to just roll in and see what we could scare up. LaPorsha bent the truth a little by telling her father, who used to be in the game, that we had a connect to sell off pain pills at a big profit and did he know anybody. He gave us the number for an old associate of his who lived in the North suburbs near Marconi. We felt very conspicuous parking on his residential street and sure enough for future meetings he just had us wait at a gas station.

Him and his house gave very specific suburban drug dealer vibes – open floor plan with lots of leather couches and big abstract paintings and some Afrocentric statues. He was an older balding guy in a bathrobe and had a much younger girlfriend also in a bathrobe sprawled out on one of the couches and high enough she kept itching her nose. We were getting a bunch of white 10 mg hydros, less desirable than the yellows Tom had promised us, for $3.50 a pill – the most I would have paid then but doubtlessly a lot more expensive now as legit scripts have become almost nonexistent.

I quickly counted them up which was evidently a serious breach in etiquette:

“You don’t have to count those [then to LaPorsha in an almost pleading tone] tell him he doesn’t have to count them!”

I wasn’t going to be deterred, either of us could have made a small mistake and I’d rather catch it now, but at least I counted them quickly. Somehow I had also found a guy in South Sac to meet at the McDonald’s off Florin and sell me some 15 and 20 mg Oxys. Either through a now defunct Reddit message board or we’d just seen each other in the Mickey D’s and, recognizing a brother of the cloth, struck up a conversation.

My radar for other people into pain pills got pretty impressive at that time and I always found improbable connects in unlikely places like the next seat over on intercity buses.

We headed back to weed land with an impressive and colorful candy bag. Gemini was starting to warm up to us by this second year but he always complained about not knowing what kind of drugs we were into. We didn’t like weed and never expressed interest when he talked about how much Molly and Acid he had. The year before he’d tried to imply we were alcoholics and LaPorsha’s headache was likely withdrawal because he’d seen us drink a tall can each our first night on the mountain.

That quickly turned out not to be the case when we didn’t drink again for the remainder of that season. Anyway it drove him crazy that we always just said we were “high on life” when he tried to probe us on the matter and he knew there had to be something but he could never put his finger on it. We started taking daily doses that energized us for trimming but never enough to nod out or get super itchy. If Gemini ever figured out what chemicals were behind this changed demeanor he kept it to himself – a thing I can’t really see him doing.

I did discretely ask around to sell some off when we’d go to the bar down the hill or the Dinsmore store but the only thing I remember working out was at the Journey’s End Halloween party. A couple of big time growers had gotten a room in the back and dressed up in the powder blue and neon orange ‘70s tuxedos from Dumb and Dumber. Sure enough they were interested and in a bit of disbelief that my wares had materialized in such a relative backwater:

“You gotta be kidding me! Nobody has what you have!”

I was unloading the last of the Oxys at a decent markup but I‘d left them back in our tent so I had to quickly run up and down the mountain. When I met them back in the now nearly empty parking lot they wanted to know if I had syringes so they could really make a night of it and shoot the pills. If it isn’t already painfully obvious I have a bit of a superiority complex where cannabis growers are concerned but another sure way to be judged by me is to express interest in injecting oxycodone – the oral bioavailability means you get the same effective dose with a lot less trouble by simply swallowing it.

I silently judged them and made the handoff and left them to their hotel party.

Halloween marked the end of our work season and we were heading up to Portland to play at Funhog at the Million Brazilians house. We took that long climbing road that connects the coastal 101 with Grant’s Pass and pulled off to the side to sleep – easier done in the car with our new drug diet. I must have taken a much bigger dose the next morning now that we were away from Gemini’s prying eyes. I stepped outside of the Grant’s Pass McDonald’s to smoke a cigarette and the first drag pushed me over the edge and I puked into the bushes.

We were staying in a little basement room with Dalton Carter, the antique flipper, at the FunHog house. He was excitedly telling me about recently coming across a green jadeite Olmec werejaguar figurine he believed to be genuine. I talked to a person I’ve come to like less over time (at this point it was mostly ambivalent disinterest) about selling him some pills but when I went down and counted our stash I saw we were down to just a dose or two each and decided I’d rather take them than make the money. He was mildly disappointed.

We threw together a quick performance to do from the inside of our tent in the backyard by the fire pit. We hung a witch piñata by the tent we’d been carrying around since we found it on a walk to Lemon Grove to buy lead fishing weights for a Saturn-based performance in a swimming pool. We made a noise track on LaPorsha’s computer that was built around a sample of Blix, the Mortiis looking character from Legend, chanting:

“Black as midnight, black as pitch, blacker than the foulest witch!”

We spun our headlamps around from inside the tent and made some noise with effects pedals and microphones. LaPorsha had been really into making Rice Krispie treats that trim season, there was a minor incident when Gemini’s kids wanted to eat some but their mother forbid it as the marshmallows weren’t vegan, so she emerged from the tent and started mixing marshmallows and butter in a pot on the fire. We strung the gooey mixture all around the tent and yard and witch piñata like spiderwebs – it probably would have been cool to them light the piñata on fire but I forget if we thought of it.

I ended the performance by throwing a handful of some powdered sulfur I’d found onto the fire and instantly clearing out the backyard. A bit of a party foul really as apart from the horrible smell, sulfur dioxide is a very unsafe thing for people to be breathing. Grant and Suzanne were both pretty into it though – sometimes a little bit of a “Lord of Misrule” can be nice as a palate cleanser and this may even have been the final FunHog.

We headed back South with no real destination in mind. We didn’t know where to live next but a phone call with a friend in New Orleans turned up a December vacancy so we headed there. 2014 was the year all the small time weed growers started making extracts – also known as shatter, wax or oil from their sugar trim. Gemini had all these empty cans of butane laying around his property and was super excited about it.

He’d been talking up all these oddball ideas that wouldn’t pan out, like how he would mold grams of it into the shape of Hindu Gods and sell it as an artisanal product. What he didn’t predict was how it would collapse the price and push him out of his industry. It seems like California is all mega farms that grow for extracts, vapes and edibles now while growing for flower just isn’t economically viable. In a simple analogy you have to be a lot less careful about bruising the oranges if you’re growing them for juice.

Anyway he’d somehow talked me into taking a portion of payment in wax instead of cash with pie in the sky tales of how in demand it was and what a profit I could make. I didn’t know the first thing about selling weed and it had been burning a hole in my pocket ever since. I made a Facebook post for the Los Angeles area:

“No blood for oil but I’ve got some priced to move”

Either too cryptic or nobody really wanted the shit. Our last night in town some kids we knew were having a small show at their new apartment in Chinatown with Hurricanes of Love and I forget who else. After Frank Hurricane’s set I asked him to let me jump on the “people’s microphone” and he was accommodating enough. I addressed the entire gathering:

“Hey freaks, we just worked a trim job and got saddled with a few grams of hash oil. We’re about to drive through Texas where they really don’t like this shit so it would be groovy if somebody wanted to trade me some cash for it now instead of the Texans trading me imprisonment and consequences down the road…”

Something along those lines. This kid I didn’t know approached me and bought it off for close to the same rate I’d traded labor for it in the first place but even at five grams or less it was a sizable weight of my shoulders. I never know the kids who approach me after these kinds of announcements – a few years later it was when I offered to give away some fentanyl test strips at one of Tracey’s Halloween parties. I’m a big believer in bringing this kind of trade in out of the shadows – when it’s feasible at least.

We pointed the Mercedes eastward and drove into the night.

[Image: My father and grandfather at a Geranium Society sale]

Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen – “even dwarves have small beginnings”. Cancers also start small. A cancer might not be a living thing in the usual sense but a quality they share with every organism on earth is that they begin “life” as a single cell. I don’t know when my father’s cancer first came into existence but I do remember the exact moment it became manifest to me as a physical reality. In my personal universe then, this would be its cell-of-origin.

It was 1998 and I had just moved up to the Bay Area to attend SFSU when my parents drove up to visit. This must have been before me, Francois and Jonas moved into the shoji screen house because we wouldn’t have been able to bring them to the single shared basement room in Berkeley and I only remember seeing my parents on the San Francisco side. Perhaps they were undertaking the entire round trip from San Diego to San Francisco in a single day as my sister was still in High School.

We met up to walk around the Civic Center Farmer’s Market and my father overshot the block and made a huge illegal U-Turn in the middle of Market Street in his brown conversion van with orange shag carpeting and diamond shaped rear windows. My housemates and I had taken the BART and from the edge of the sidewalk it was a thing to behold.

My father was an excellent, but perpetually angry, driver. He kept a constant monologue going as if the operators of any vehicle that irked him were simply sitting within audible range and there would be no point in honking the horn or shouting out the window. The most common phrase came every time somebody unexpectedly braked, or even slowed down, in front of him:

“You found a real nice parking spot, didn’t you asshole? Right in the middle of the goddamn street!”

When I say angry I want to be clear that the anger was in the content of these utterances rather than the voice and body language in which they were delivered – perhaps better described as irony. My father was subject to fits of wrath but they did not, as a rule, translate into the gas powered vehicles that became extensions of his will and consciousness. I want to explain all this because this complex character could be clearly read in the arc of the van as his avatar: intellectual rage, a certain chafing at the rules of the world but, above all else, precise and total control.

To reiterate the overall effect in moments such as this was formidable. Around the same time our entire family went to New York for my brother’s first wedding and there were comparable flashes. Quickly going against the grain on one way streets or otherwise correcting course with well measured leaps outside the boundaries of prevailing traffic laws. This was not a thing I ever saw in my father in our San Diego home but the added stress of larger, more congested cities seemed to bring it out of him.

This happened to be on a school day so after the farmer’s market my parents drove me to the SFSU campus and we quickly ate in the student union. This was where it happened: he asked me to bring him a cup of water that wasn’t cold, a thing I took to mean that it shouldn’t contain ice but would have been better explained as water that was warm. The moment he took a drink my father’s face contorted in a type of pain I had never seen there before – a pain that seemed to come from the center of his being and spoke unequivocally of calamitous illness.

I said goodbye and my father discretely handed me a folded hundred dollar bill. I walked to my Calculus class in a daze and, despite all attempts to retain my composure, began to weep. I had taken it as a matter of course for years to know that my parents were sick but it was another thing entirely to see that they were dying. My mother’s multiple sclerosis had also become more pronounced on the visit but it wasn’t until my next trip home, when I noticed pamphlets on our refrigerator, that I learned this was why she was losing the ability to walk.

Nobody had thought to call me with the news.

In my father’s case it would be seven more years before anyone knew it was a cancer. One reason for this, beyond my father’s general reluctance to go to doctors, was an earlier injury where he had climbed into our massive fir tree to trim branches but fallen out and clipped his back on the edge of a charcoal camping grill. When the lung cancer began to announce itself with more constant back pains that were not brought on by the temperature of drinking water his assumption was that the source was this same mishap.

It seems appropriate that the fatal delay in diagnosis should stem in some part from this tree as the roots of this same tree had been creeping under my parent’s house – cracking the cement foundation and disrupting the plumbing. It’s important to acknowledge the destructive power of growing things – both the living fir growing in sunlight and my father’s not-quite-living cancer growing within the darkness of his body. There is one last thing I want to say about the tree but I need to explain something else to get there.

Long before my father’s cancer became manifest, possibly before it had come into existence at all, it was a thing I dreamed about. Not cancer specifically but a debilitating malady that ate away at my father and shrunk his body. This dream came when I was still in High School and in it the concept of my father was intertwined with two animals – a frog, the creature I have come to understand to be my totem, and an unlucky cat we had named Orlando.

Orlando was a ginger shorthair with a kink in his tail named for a series of books my mother had read as a child. Earlier in his life he had fallen asleep in the cul-de-sac and a truck ran over one of his hind legs. The veterinarian said the bones were shattered beyond any hope of healing and suggested we amputate. We chose to wait and see how Orlando would heal and cats are resilient creatures – while he never regained full use of the leg, in short time it became a thing that neither pained nor burdened him.

Orlando’s real problems began when abscesses started to form in his mouth. We took him to regular vet visits and gave him a liquid medicine and pills hidden in wet food but things never got any better. The sight and smell of yellow pus became constant features of his face and even the softest foods seemed to bring him pain. He remains the only cat I’ve ever heard clearly speaking the English language. One day I was setting out food and he shouted out:

“Mmrrr-I don’t want any!”

There were other complications I don’t fully remember and eventually life seemed to contain more pain than it did of anything else for Orlando. My father put him in a cat carrier with a blanket on top and ran a hose from the exhaust of his idling van. This may seem barbaric but I know covered carriers to be calming to cats and understand death by carbon monoxide inhalation to be relatively painless. It’s far from ideal but so is the stress of being brought into a veterinarian’s office and receiving injections.

My mother, morbid woman that she was, began to talk about how she and my father would do the same when they became old and sick although this time the hose would go into the window of the vehicle itself as they were much too large for cat carriers.

In the dream a figure that constantly morphed between being my father, a frog and Orlando was riddled with yellow pus and shrank and wasted away to nothing. It may well be the first time in my life I ever conceptualized my father’s mortality and inevitable death – albeit unconsciously. The connection to the tree is this: Orlando was the son of our cat matriarch Samantha who we found stiff one morning at the base of that same tree.

The assumption was that she’d fallen from the branches above.

Even if it’s only a vague impression I want to give a sense of how all of these different threads overlap and weave together – the great fir as world tree with its destructive roots and perilous upper branches, pulling in opposite directions to strive toward the heavens and underworld. My family as dynasty and our dynasty of cats, the frog as my ancestral totem. The waking world and the subliminal world of dreams constantly informing and casting shadows onto one another like life and death must always exist side by side – one’s light the other’s shadow.

Finally in 2005 my father’s pain became pronounced enough for him to pursue medical attention. In one of his strange, separate lives from before our family, my father had spent fourteen years in the US Navy. One year short of earning a pension but enough to get full VA Medical Benefits. We learned both that we were dealing with Lung Cancer and that it had already progressed to Stage Four. He’d been a chain smoking desk jockey in his enlisted days – laying the foundation for both his future ailment and future treatment.

Prognosis was two years – after four relatively healthy ones things started to turn for the worse.

We had decided early on that we would be drawing a line in the sand when it came to treatments: my father did radiation therapy for the four years but chemo seemed like the narrow chance at full remission was not worth the guaranteed devastation to his health and quality of life. Toward the end the doctors began to recommend blood transfusions. It was striking to see how quickly he would go from looking pale and washed out to full of color and vitality. After two rounds of this he compared himself to Lestat from the Anne Rice novels he’d voraciously read but also decided he’d prefer not to live with the vampire’s curse.

Another decision was that he would never have a feeding tube. I had moved back in to help my parents and his eclipsing appetite was one of the hardest things for my mother and I to come to terms with. I would bake entire pies in the hope he might let a crumb of buttery crust dissolve in his mouth, she would make a thin broth called “beef tea” and urge him to sip it with his usual beverage of microwaved water and flat ginger ale.

It is a very natural and human thing to want to sustain the lives of the people you love by feeding them. It can take a long time to fully appreciate that these expectations cause more discomfort and pain than anything else but it is also something of a final hurdle in terms of acceptance. Even with regular visits from a hospice nurse it was not until this final bitter pill was swallowed that I began to viscerally understand the true meaning of palliative care.

Like most terminal cancer patients my father was heavily medicated with morphine and this brought along significant changes. He’d been a life long low stakes alcoholic who passed each afternoon in a hazy sequence of beer cans but immediately lost his taste for the stuff the day he started pain management. He was also a habitual marijuana smoker and as these were still the early days of medical for the first time in his life he could cultivate this beloved plant without fear of legal repercussions.

By the time we were ready to harvest the destruction in his lungs made smoking an impossibility and he stuck with bolstering his appetite through spherical gel caps of a strange synthetic THC called dronabinol. When we went to trim anyway we found that each flowering bud was being devoured from the inside by tiny coiled green caterpillars.

He also became a lot sleepier and would nod out on the couch most afternoons before settling in for an early bedtime. Nonetheless he and I sat up and talked into the evening of what would prove to be the final night of his life.

Even with the dying, death can feel like a taboo thing to talk about and despite hovering over every aspect of this conversation I don’t think it was ever mentioned by name. I thought it was important to get him to see certain ways that I felt he had treated my brother, who has a different biological father, unfairly. He didn’t see things the same way. Perhaps it wasn’t important at all – he was no less of a father to my brother than he was to me in all the ways that mattered.

Flaws are an integral part of all father-son relationships and I certainly don’t know everything – nor did I then.

It was hard to find a way to say the thing I needed to – that I knew it was time and it was okay, that a certain calculus of time and pain pointed to this moment as the one for release, an invisible grip on an invisible string. It came out as a question:

“Are you scared?”

He was not. He was happy with his life and his role within it, he could move toward the unknown in peace. My father’s love language had always been acts of service and in this spirit he had already made the arrangements for his own cremation. They weren’t the last words he ever said to me but they remain fresh in my memory:

“I’m all paid up for a bed burning.”

I helped my father to bed and not long after escorting him back to the couch the following morning he was not well. I helped him with some small issues, returned him to his bed and called my siblings and the hospice nurse. Only my younger sister, always his favorite, was close enough to make it in time and he crossed over with the two of us and my mother. September 9th, 2009 – 9/9/9 – three final and completed digits on the threshold of returning back to zero.

I had learned from an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology that it was an old European custom to tell the bees upon a death in the family. While we did not keep hives, my father was a diligent gardener and I knew of a certain flowering shrub that would be electric with the insects at this mid morning hour. A group of our neighbors noticed that something seemed different in my expression and bearing, perhaps I looked like somebody whose father had just died, and without thinking I passed along the news.

This turned out to be a mistake.

An hour later a representative from this group arrived at the front door and asked how to spell our last name. Given the circumstances I can perhaps be forgiven for assuming this detail would accompany some form of floral arrangement. It would have been impossible for me to even conceptualize, much less predict, the pending neighborly gesture. They had evidently found it odd, concerning in fact, that any person might pass from life without the chaos and confusion of emergency sirens and frantic paramedics so they generously rectified this oversight on our parts by calling them for us.

Perhaps in some small measure it was therapeutic, in this moment of grief, to be stricken with such adversarial purpose in the form of a bright red fire truck and a small battalion of muscular men who intended to do a thing I could by no means allow. While I don’t necessarily believe in getting precious about things like flesh and blood, the act of jolting current with a defibrillator through the form of one who had just passed so peacefully could only be called a desecration. The hospice nurse had quietly left and in her absence an official paper of some sort needed finding to stay the hands of these civil servants.

It was found, their hands were stayed, the offending engine dissipated but left behind a miasma of mistrust and adversity between myself, if not my entire family, and the citizens who cast penetrating gazes toward the home that contained my father and in this were united with one another in fellowship.

There seemed to be a comfort in old customs and as my brother was flying from the other side of the country anyway a vigil, or wake, of twenty four hours felt appropriate. I wasn’t back outside too much in this window but I did overhear the same group of neighbors expressing bewilderment that anybody could be comfortable in the same house as a deceased loved one. This strange attitude that death, in and of itself, represents a contagion, an uncleanliness, a thing that must be insulated against.

I don’t think they were bad people, anymore than I think I was a bad person. While they were farther from it we were all faced with an intractable force of the universe and we all only have one choice in how we will reckon with it: the only way we can. My own attitudes were molded by an experience years earlier when an acquaintance asked me to dig a hole in which she deposited, without my knowledge, the mortal remains of her unborn child. To become a gravedigger, even against one’s will, is to become intimately acquainted with the mercy that lives within dirt.

Who’s to say what is or isn’t healthy? The dead leave behind a world and we must live in it.

I realize that to many readers my own attitudes will seem strange and unnatural – like I am focusing on my father’s death and cancer as much, if not more, than the man himself. I’m not sure I see these as separate things. My father’s cancer was as much a part of him as any other part of his body and his death, and attitude toward it, an integral part of who he was as a person. I do not think death is something we should bar the door against but instead a thing that should be welcomed and lived alongside of.

Give death, and not just the dead, a seat at the table. Not that we should go toward it eagerly or in a hurry but not to go kicking or screaming either. It is the last thing every single one of us will do in our lives and a major part of how we will be remembered. Like all things it is worth doing well and with a certain grace. Not the negation of life but the completion and culmination of it. Only the dead can become immortal.

Looking at myself in this matter I recognize some of the raw material of the people who gave me life and helped shape me. I’ve inherited my mother’s perverse morbidity along with my father’s easygoing practicality and synthesized them into something that is purely my own.

In the first year after my father’s death he used to come to me in dreams. Never anything too elaborate – just the two of us sitting and talking somewhere. Suddenly my father would stop:

“I can’t see you anymore and I’m sure you remember why…”

In those moments, often as my mind fought its way to the surface of the sea of sleep, this memory was sharp and painful. The dreams ended long ago but, more importantly, remembrance and memories have lost all traces of pain. Instead they have become its remedy.

Around the year of this story it was getting increasingly common for kids in our extended social network and art/music scene to head up to rural Northern California for the trim season. The price of cannabis hadn’t crashed yet from the transition from medical to recreational and the going rate for trimming was still $200 a pound. Things were still in that grey area regarding legality and secrecy where it was a lot better to have a solid “in” but it wasn’t unheard of to just show up in a small town and try to find something.

That’s what me and LaPorsha did. We caught a ride with a friend who was driving there but couldn’t bring us to her “trim scene” and then hung around Dinsmore and Mad River trying to make something happen. We camped for the first couple of nights with a small handful of other unemployed leftovers next to the river across the street from the Mad River Bar. There was an abandoned tent down there but nobody ever looked inside because none of us wanted to find a dead body.

After a couple of fruitless days some friends gave us a description of the guy they’d worked for a couple of weeks earlier and said we’d probably find him in a bar by Ruth Lake called Journey’s End and he’d probably hire us. It was a long way to hitchhike from the main drag between the Dinsmore store and Mad River but it seemed like it was worth a shot. This guy was pretty old school in terms of approaching his chosen industry from a don’t ask/don’t tell outlaw perspective so I’ll just call him Gemini for his sun sign.

Gemini was a good foot shorter than me, an endless source of future conflict, and had a shaggy beard that he’d twist and pull in a circular motion when speaking like a stereotypical covetous merchant. He carried himself with palpable social unease and ordered a beer in much the manner we had, as a necessary pretext for sitting inside the bar without looking like he didn’t belong there, and took a table by himself. He wasn’t happy about the fact that we already knew who he was and what he looked like but he still hired us and we followed him back to his nearby property.

In those last days of medical there was some kind of special permit you needed to grow one hundred plants or more so, like many small farmers, he kept a garden with exactly ninety-nine. It was early November and he wasn’t quite to the trimming stage yet so we’d be helping with assorted garden work which still paid twenty dollars an hour back then. He did tell us he’d only be paying fifteen but soon upped it to the normal amount once we’d “proven” ourselves by actually working.

We pitched our tent on a small ledge toward the back of the garden – located at the crest of a hill for maximum sunlight. We were poorly prepared and had to share the light of a single flashlight when we climbed up the driveway to go to bed that night. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to explore the woods on the opposite side of the path and LaPorsha reluctantly followed me until I thought I saw the legs and tail of a fleeing canine form in our feeble beam.

She never saw it and I made the mistake of mentioning that it looked grey. I thought it must have been a coyote, if I didn’t just imagine it altogether, but LaPorsha fixated on the grey part and was convinced it had to have been a wolf. Wolves were, and still are, unknown in that part of California and flashlights don’t exactly throw things into vivid technicolor, everything looks grey, but once the idea took root it wasn’t going anywhere. She lay awake in our tent that night:

“Could the wolf bite me?”

Whatever it was it must have had teeth and therefore could have theoretically bitten anyone but I spent the rest of the night trying to reassure her. No, it couldn’t have possibly been a wolf and coyotes are shy and tend to avoid human contact. It didn’t exactly point to unbridled aggression that the unknown creature immediately ran away from us but in LaPorsha’s mind the wolf was merely crafty and no doubt biding its time until we fell asleep so it could stealthily undo the tent zipper and start biting.

Early the next morning she was pooping just inside the tree line when she looked down and found a lizard by her feet. It was freezing cold and the tiny animal was in a kind of torpor, waiting under the leaves for the day to become warm enough for those of us without endothermic metabolisms to start doing stuff. Even for mammals like us it was still too cold to start working and we spent a little while holding the lizard and warming it up in the tent with us.

Once the little guy was moving with some vigor I stepped out the front of the tent and let him go. LaPorsha had bought us both a pair of thick grey wool socks for the trip and was pulling hers on just over my shoulder when I saw one come sailing into the lizard and knock it into the ground. From my perspective she had suddenly decided to throw one of her socks at the escaping lizard as hard as humanly possible and I was in the process of asking her why when the “sock” picked up the lizard and carried it off into the air.

Evidently a small owl had been watching with interest from a nearby tree ever since LaPorsha first picked the reptile up, no doubt patiently waiting for us to either eat it ourselves or put it down so somebody else could. The question about the sock must have struck LaPorsha as just another case of me failing to properly identify a grey animal – something that, from her perspective, I’d been doing since we got there.

We stuck around for a few days – plucking dead leaves from cannabis plants in the daylight hours and bucking down stuff that still wasn’t dry enough to trim in Gemini’s small cabin at night. One morning LaPorsha looked down from her work to find a crisp twenty dollar bill among the fallen leaves. Gemini was working alongside us and it took a fraction of a second to sniff out the obvious ruse.

“Hey, we found a twenty. Did you accidentally drop one by any chance?”

Fake surprise as he pats his pockets:

“Oh! You know what? I think I did have a twenty, thank you!”

It felt like the meaning behind the gesture had been clear enough but that night he thoroughly beat any remaining ambiguity into the ground.

“Actually I know for a fact that was my twenty because I put it there myself to test you guys!”

We nodded along awkwardly that we had figured as much but he wasn’t finished:

“Yeah, you don’t know how many kids found themselves cold, scared and kicked off the mountain in the middle of the night because they didn’t give back the twenty! You’re lucky you decided to do the right thing and give it back!”

This seemed like a good cue to go to bed for the night but it was hard to fall right asleep. Gemini still apparently had a bit of manic energy to burn off and plugged in his electric guitar with some effects for some angsty noodling. In the relative quiet of the woods he might as well have been playing in the tent next to us. The next morning there were forecasts of big storms on the horizon and it seemed like a great time to keep moving.

[Image created with Oregon Trail Tombstone Generator]

Butterflies pulled through the playground on the hot breeze like swarms of locusts, resting their bright orange wings on the shimmering black asphalt and the chain link backstops of the softball diamonds. The “upper field”. I’ve lived my entire life, with brief exceptions, in California and never seen another one. Perhaps I simply haven’t been in the right place at the right time or it could be that the butterflies are dying – disappearing from the world.

Two things can both be true at the same time.

Our classroom was in one of the raised bungalows adjoining the blacktop. As a teacher, many years later, the only students I ever saw relegated to bungalows were some flavor of Special Education, behavioral problems if not learning disabilities, but as a child it was the GATE program. “Gifted and talented.” Another flavor of “special” – different from the other kids and isolated at the peripheries as if the peculiarities in our brains and characters were somehow contagious.

One April Fool’s Day our teacher told us that she had become unexpectedly pregnant and would be taking a leave of absence, leaving us to be splintered up and shuffled between the other GATE classes like leftovers. I’m sure all primary school students form strong attachments to their teachers and classrooms but with our lower student-to-teacher ratio and relative freedom to wander the classroom at will and work away from our desks it felt especially poignant. For all of our diagnostic tests branding us as “smart kids” nobody thought of the date and caught onto her ruse until she gloatingly laid it out before us.

Much has been said about the innocence of children, “from the mouths of babes” etc., but I’ve always found the primal drive toward revenge to be equally, if not more so, impressive. Once one of my students broke his wrist falling from a swing because another child carelessly walked behind him and before he’d even registered the pain he was at the side of his fallen comrade, delivering three sharp kicks to the ribs. The other child never so much as protested but instead yelled “I’m sorry!” with each successive blow.

An eye for an eye isn’t just in the Bible, it is a sacred doctrine universally revered by the young.

It was in this spirit that I asked to go to the restroom on that same April Fool’s Day and instead stole away to the front office. My request was reasonable enough – I wanted some adult in a position of authority to get onto the intercom and announce that my teacher’s husband had died. She was married to an architect, consistently rated in women’s magazines as the sexiest profession, and had even gotten her husband to agree to her hyphenating her married name to retain her Irish heritage – though it must be said that he did not take on this compound appellation himself.

Still it was the 1980’s and few women outside the Spanish speaking world could claim the same. She really had it all and even if my plan wasn’t especially well thought out I knew I had to take it all away and leave the ashes of her perfect life, even momentarily, smoldering at her feet. Needless to say this necessity was not appreciated by any of the grownups with access to the intercom. I waited around the office for nearly an hour in the hope of finding at least one champion of truth and justice but eventually trudged back to my distant bungalow classroom in defeat.

The abnormal length of my absence had been noted and the perfectly reasonable explanation laid out in the previous paragraph seemed less so to my teacher at the time. I had been granted somewhat more than the customary latitude where restrooms were concerned due to my weak bladder and several previous “accidents” and she no doubt felt that I had violated this trust. Still she attempted a breezy tone as she chided me with:

“You can’t fool Mother Nature…”

I must confess that I never quite saw her as the “earth mother” type despite her habit of playing Celestial Soda Pop from Ray Lynch’s New Age opus Deep Breakfast when we were engaged in particularly meditative assignments. No, she was like me – a Saturnine creature of cold hard intellect, a monster of reason. The fact that the birthdate on her obituary pins her as a Pisces to my Virgo will not be shifting my opinion on this particular point.

Zamorano was a year round school and the particular dovetailing of different groups of students on different “tracks” meant we sometimes had to shift classrooms. After one break we were shuttled over to a different bungalow on the other side of the school – this one usually belonged to the “Seminar” class, one notch smarter than the GATE program. Everything about it was nicer than our old room. A cluster of computers and a pet tarantula and a bigger study nook with several beanbags while we’d only had one in a corner.

Oregon Trail became the favored computer game for one very simple reason: gravestones. We discovered that tomb markers from previous playthroughs could be viewed and read when my sister, who was in the Seminar class that used the room while we were on break, named one of her party Buttercup. She was obsessed with the movie The Princess Bride. Everybody instantly knew it was her and she became an object of ridicule but then somebody realized the true potential.

From that point on nobody even tried to reach the Oregon Territory. It was a mad dash to starve your people and soak their only sets of clothing in failed river fordings so that they all might get cholera and dysentery and die. We all were bankers from Boston, not for the increased spending power but rather the additional geography to be populated with trail side memorials. The magic was this: you could name your settlers after other kids in the class and write rude things about them on their virtual graves.

In the guise of education a group of fifth and sixth graders had been granted an anonymous slam book.

“You found a gravestone, will you stop to check? (Y/N):”

Y, always Y. And because we were GATE kids, and consequently had the run of the classroom, whoever made the serendipitous discovery could summon the whole class to see what was on the screen. “Here lies Jeff. He sucks” or “Here lies Adrian. ha ha he died.” None of the epitaphs were particularly clever but this was irrelevant in the face of the humorous power of specificity – made all the sweeter because the randomized nature of the grave system meant the culprit could never be caught.

The tarantula lived in a small terrarium on top of one of the bookshelves that outlined the study nook. It wasn’t really our tarantula, we didn’t name it and we weren’t the ones who got to feed it but that didn’t make what happened any less tragic. Whoever did feed it after school hours must have failed to secure the lid of its tiny prison and it made its way out and under one of the beanbags. Any person sitting there would have likely had the same effect but fate decided it was the fat kid, Rod, and instead of merely sitting he’d thrown himself onto the oversized cushion with a running start.

He instantly heard and felt the sickening crunch then lifted his seat to see the unlucky spider twitching in agony. Somebody ran and got the janitor and, as children often place unreasonable faith in grownups, we all entreated him to somehow help the creature and make it better. A single glance told him that this was hopeless and he forcefully brought down his foot, finishing the job. Perhaps this was intended as an act of mercy or maybe he really didn’t like spiders and hadn’t quite grasped the arachnid’s status as a pet.

Either way the result was the same.

My time at Zamorano came to an end but my younger sister still had three years to go before her own Sixth Grade promotion. My Junior High School, Bell, was just up the hill and a slightly earlier dismissal time meant I was often with one of my parents when they went to pick her up. It had been those full three years, or close enough to it, when I finally saw Mrs. Murphy-Singer again.

Despite our brief differences I knew she cherished me as one of her brighter pupils and so inspiration struck when she asked me how I’d been doing. I’d remained in advanced placement classes and achieved reasonably good grades, with the exception of a D in Biology I’d be making up that Summer at a Community College, but that wasn’t what I told her. Instead I said that I was failing everything, mostly on account of all the drugs I was on, and would probably be dropping out entirely.

This was about as far as I could have gotten from the truth. I had made one attempt at smoking a small portion of marijuana I’d pilfered from my father but it failed because my friend’s mother had taken away her rolling papers as punishment for not cleaning her room. My decision thereafter to abstain entirely from drugs and alcohol would last until years after I’d completed my primary education.

Mrs. Murphy-Singer didn’t know any of this, however, and the aloof nonchalance in which I’d delivered the news was convincing enough that her face sunk in disappointment. It was several years late, and on a considerably smaller scale than I’d first envisioned, but I’d finally gotten my revenge. I’m almost certain it wasn’t April Fool’s Day.

I was living with the New England pedigree girl in the part of San Diego called City Heights. We were on a street called Swift that you could follow through a back part of North Park past a small leather bar, perhaps an Eagle, and then behind a Post Office to eventually pass over the 805 and end up in an entirely different neighborhood: ours. Bud Bong was over and it was his birthday. His twenty-first to be precise.

The year was perhaps 2004.

With the name his forebears had bestowed upon him it was little wonder that Bud Bong was inducted into the cult of marijuana where all references to either the drug or methods of its ingestion are elevated to Gospels. Perhaps if you’ve ever travelled from Chicago to Milwaukee you may already know that one of the waypoints is called the Bong Recreation Area and if your vehicle is full of the young or acolytes of the aforementioned faith a laugh, or more, will be shared.

My own fascination was reserved for the Mars Cheese Castle, also on this stretch of interstate, and the strange incongruity of its name when tradition dictates that our moon is the celestial body that should be associated with the foodstuff. Still, Bud Bong’s origins were tied to this place and he was excited that I knew of it. He informed me of two details on which I had hitherto been ignorant: First that the Bongs were a family of celebrated war heroes in that bit of Southern Wisconsin and secondly that the name also graces a River accessible from that same Recreation Area. This was all setup to explain his life’s ambition:

Bud Bong wished to travel with bud and bong to the Bong Recreation Area then fill said bong with water from the Bong River so that, reposing on a bench, he could become Bud Bong smoking bud from a bong filled with water from the Bong River in the Bong Recreation Area. Assuming he was born in the vicinity, a detail I forget, he could have fulfilled this dream on his very first day of life with his parents’ cooperation or even with the first breath of his birth with some creative midwifery.

As it was he either was not or had left before taking up the cloth, as it were, so that on this day of his twenty-first birthday it remained an unrealized goal. While this would clearly qualify as recreation in the traditional sense I did not know enough about the number of Buds in the Bong lineage or their diverse habits to divine whether this would be an act of re-creation or rather a pure and first creation that would unleash something truly novel upon the world. If I had to guess, without a tragic early death or drastic shift in orientation, he‘s probably crossed this one off the bucket list by now and has possibly blazed with Korean director Bong Joon-Ho and who knows who else.

As much as I love alliteration I couldn’t help but feel a small internal sneer of superiority. After all I was close to Bud’s age when I discovered my favorite drug but had never set out to make a harrowing journey to either Ghana’s Heroes Inn or Vermont’s North Hero House Inn to shoot heroin with a tragic heroine. [Note: I searched extensively and it seems no hotel in the world simply bears the name Hero Inn] Still my Oakland friends who drove into the Mission to cop always made sure to fix on Shotwell Street for obvious reasons.

Also I was born near neither place and my name is Ossian Wynne Winningham as opposed to something like N. Travenous or Somnus Papaver. Bud Bong’s name was Bud Bong as he proudly held out his government ID to verify and on this special day that ID held significance in a far more mainstream American drug ritual: It was time for us to take Bud to a bar for a beer. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be a Budweiser. We were going to the closest bar in walking distance and one we had never gone into before: El Uno Bar.

Everyone we knew, including the New England pedigree girl herself, generally referred to this place as El Bar erroneously but a student of history like myself knew, where taverns are concerned, a picture on a sign is intended as a portion of the proper name. This wasn’t one of the swinging heraldic charges of Medieval Europe but a solid yellow pool ball bearing the number one sat between the two words on the illuminated sign box and, as the article had been in Spanish, the name thus became El Uno Bar.

Besides The One Bar would sound strange in English as if Sauron would constantly be trying to relocate it to Mordor, drinking there would drive the patrons mad and rather than fire it would need to be insured against falling into a specific volcano.

Beneath this sat the words “COLD BEER POOL TABLES GAMES” and all of these things would eventually turn out to be true. Anyway there’s a picture up there of the exterior so I might as well tell you what Bud Bong looked like. Besides his large, white t-shirt he was dressed from head to toe in the sky blue of a specific Sports team in the standard fitted cap, Starter jacket, over-the-knee basketball shorts and oversized basketball shoes configuration. I should slightly amend things with the fact that his socks were white as well and worn high enough, or nearly so, to meet the shorts.

He had blonde hair just long enough to extend past his chin and a thin but respectable beard of the same color. From what I remember his eyes matched his livery and twinkled nicely enough in a face that was strong but easygoing and wore a near perpetual smile. Basically he looked young and harmless and never gave me reason to consider him otherwise. Of course this was twenty years ago and both of us have likely changed and the three years separating our ages which seemed like an ocean then would be scarcely a trickle now.

The bar was only about a three block walk from our apartment up on University Avenue behind an odd triangle of trees and grass too small to be called a park – kind of like a tiny nick where the process of urbanization had cut itself while shaving and drawn blood in the form of unpaved nature. It sat next door to a Mexican produce store we sometimes visited for canned goods and beverages but the fruits and vegetables were generally too far along the ripe-overripe continuum for us to consider. From the little I saw most customers bought phone cards.

Even in a border city like San Diego unspoken cultural borders can be rigorously observed and we had never heard of a single person in our extended social network setting foot within El Uno Bar. It was still early afternoon when we pushed through a pair of dusty, vinyl curtains in the open doorway to regard the interior. Bars are always dark inside but this one seemed darker than most. The patrons were mostly older men in cowboy hats and clustered toward the far end of the bar and its wraparound corner for a clear view of the door – both of the pool tables sat unused.

There was nothing approaching actual hostility but we were regarded with the appropriate skepticism accorded to people entering a place where they did not strictly belong – a thing we certainly were. We took the three seats closest to the door and I ordered us a round of Dos Equis in my stilted, University Spanish. If all of this had been a decade later I might have attempted to put on something like Jose Jose from the jukebox as an icebreaker but at this time I was less familiar with Mexico’s popular music, less fluent in Spanish and had two companions I would have needed to translate for anyway.

Bud Bong looked young enough for the bartender to scan over his ID but beyond the silent acknowledgement that he was legally allowed to drink and be there no reaction was made to the day’s significance. I would have announced it to the room if I were more comfortable conjugating the verb cumplir años but even now it feels unwieldy. Perhaps Bud was excited enough to make the announcement himself in English and probably would have been understood but I warrant the reaction would have been about the same if he said nothing at all.

We stayed for at least a couple beers. With my weak bladder I was first into the Men’s Room and the first half of a mystery: the wall mounted vending machine for condoms advertised its second selection with a simple block printed sticker bearing the English words “FULL COLOR PUSSY PICTURES”. Based on the description I expected the machine to dispense a close up photograph of the organ itself but after breaking a dollar to allay my curiosity I wound up with what looked like a soft core pornographic playing card stripped of suit and face value.

A little while later Bud Bong went to the bathroom and upon emerging quietly announced that he’d been propositioned by a transgender prostitute and was ready to go. It was immediately obvious to all three of us that this occurrence was not random and the drinking establishment was a known hub for this highly specific sex trade. Perhaps some of these ladies of the night were drinking at the bar when we first entered but it is my curse to only commit to details I can clearly remember and from a purely professional angle my arriving with a woman who was clearly my partner would make me unlikely to be approached.

It’s only now that I’ve thought more deeply on the vending machine and sex trade in relation to one another and reached my current conclusions. As the great woman Barbara Kruger one printed on canvas “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” I never talked to any of the working girls to discover if they considered themselves to be men in any way but evidently their Johns did and, while going through trouble to seek them out, sometimes employed the small, printed pictures as a kind of psychological prophylactic.

In short, while I might have missed a dart board or trivia machine, this peculiar twist on the familiar dance of “no homo” seemed to be the primary game on offer. Perhaps I am reaching or over analyzing things but I can’t think of another compelling reason to dedicate half the vending machine to disposable photographs of nude women. Simple use as a masturbatory aid would not make sense in a house of prostitution so I’ve inferred that they were there to allow the sex buyers to reassure themselves of their own heterosexuality.

I was curious if any other chance visitors had come to similar conclusions and found a 2012 piece in The San Diego Reader entitled Behind the vinyl curtain at El Uno Bar. Author Chad Deal refers to the clientele as “a grim assortment of vaqueros and transvestites” and advises: “There are things you will see that you can not unsee. Seriously, just go to TJ.” The only thing he mentions about the bathroom is ice cubes in the urinals but perhaps the vending machine had changed by that time or he was not as observant as I was.

He does mention a Yelp review where somebody claimed their cell phone was stolen by the bartender.

El Uno Bar has since come under new management and is now known as The Avenue Sports Bar and seems unlikely to continue to host the trade I saw some twenty years ago. It also appears to have maintained an Instagram account with a few photos before this change so the shadowy reputation might have been a thing the establishment was attempting to move away from. I can only speak definitively on my impressions the day I saw it: Bud Bong’s twenty-first birthday some time around 2004.

After my two semesters at SFSU a young 924 Gilman style punk teacher’s aide from my Physics Lab named Nelly invited me to come housesit for a month in the Summer. Even though my school was in the city I had only lived in a basement in the Berkeley hills and then a former Japanese shoji screen studio near the current site of Berkeley Bowl West. I was excited to see what it felt like to live in San Francisco proper.

Nelly’s apartment was in the Mission at 24th and Capp. She always wore the same navy blue canvas jacket and J Church shirt at school and I didn’t notice a smell there but her apartment had an oppressive odor of dust and stale cooking oil and probably other things I don’t know the words for. She’d left in a hurry with a sink full of dirty dishes but washing them didn’t do a thing to dent the odor. It might have been in the walls of the building itself as opposed to just her apartment.

She had two cats I was feeding but, while a layer of their hair worked into the dust was definitely a contributing factor, I don’t think it smelled like cat piss at all. I can’t seem to remember if they had litter boxes I cleaned or if a window was just left open for them and they went outside. They were older, overweight females, extremely territorial and hated me from the moment I walked in the door. I usually get along great with every cat I meet but this was a phenomenon I’d already experienced with my sister’s cat Gmork when she lived in Culver City – something about cats living in single female “despair” apartments causes them to detest me.

Nelly’s cats preferred method of demonstrating their antipathy for me was bloodletting. I learned to give them a wide berth after getting my legs slashed up the first time I fed them but they were devious. They pretended to be friendly so that they could strike again the moment I let my guard down and came to pet them. The trick only worked on me once but they made it count – instead of a quick slash they carefully rotated their claws under my skin and then ripped them back out for maximum damage.

On top of being my first, and only, time living in San Francisco this month was also my first experience living alone. I spent very little time in the apartment and instead knocked out all of the night time exploring I’d been wanting to do in the city without having to worry about the last BART across the water. I’d been noticing that there was an abandoned MUNI station full of elaborate graffiti just before Castro so I figured out how to walk into the tunnels behind the Safeway and explore it at my leisure after the trains stopped for the night.

Maybe it was the Duboce Tunnel? It’s the only one I could find with graffiti pictures and, while they look quite different from how I remember, 1999 was a very long time ago. The next item on my checklist was climbing onto the roof of a bank on Mission Street around 22nd or so. I forget the name but it was wrapped in decorative metal in the shape of repeating eagle outlines. For the urban explorer this made for an obvious ladder you could easily use to climb all the way up.

I first stepped off into a kind of outdoor garden area on the roof with a few trees in planters. Fortunately somebody had left the doors to one of the stairwells ajar. Mysteriously somebody had abandoned a small pink and purple plastic children’s vanity table in there. Whenever I told friends about sneaking into a bank they’d invariably ask if I found any money. On the bottom floor I did see heavy glass doors leading to the bank lobby but attempting to open them seemed like a surefire way to set off alarms and bring less than understanding folks who’d shut down my adventure.

I’m sure I found another handful of sneaky spots to creep into but my entertainment soon switched to following pamphlets from the tourist office near Powell. This led me to some far flung museums I hadn’t seen yet like the Exploatorium but something possessed me to try to get the Herman Goelitz candy factory where they make Jelly Belly jelly beans. The journey required taking the BART to the Pittsburg/Bay Point station then catching at least three or four separate regional transit buses.

The first thing I saw when starting the factory tour was a gigantic portrait of Ronald Reagan made out of Jelly Bellys in honor of the former president’s love of the candy. I also enjoyed watching an artisanal worker form a long cylinder of taffy with pictures of Christmas Trees in the center using a technique similar to the method for creating the Fimo beads of ‘90s hippy jewelry. It was a also a big deal that I could buy a two pound bag of “belly flops” or mixed flavor factory irregular beans – nowadays they are sold at every 99 cents store in the nation but back in 1999 Jelly Bellys were still considered pretty “fancy” and the reject ones could only be bought in the factory itself.

I forget where I was going the day I narrowly avoided a life threatening accident but it happened leaving the Castro Street MUNI station. I was nearing the top of the escalator when the very tip of my shoe, I was wearing an old blue pair of Adidas Sambas, suddenly became pinched between two steps as they moved closer together. Escalators are fairly slow and if I’d been thinking straight I easily could have undone the laces and pulled my foot out but in the moment I panicked. Desperately swiveling my head in all directions I screamed for help but besides me the station, escalators and street above it were deserted.

When I got to the top the toe of my shoe disappeared into the jagged crevice and then the entire thing was violently ripped from my foot along with the sock I’d been wearing inside it. Uninjured, I gingerly stepped onto the small metal plate at sidewalk level and watched as the sock and shoe first advanced slowly with each disappearing step and then quickly were pulled inside and disappeared with a sickening tearing sound. The escalator hummed along unperturbed and save for my single, asymmetrical bare foot there was no evidence anything had transpired at all.

I’ve been in my fair share of near death experiences since this one but none have affected me in the same way – my entire body was quaking in terror and I had not yet gotten into the habit of using alcohol, or anything else for that matter, to calm my nerves. I’m not sure how long I simply stood and stared at the tiny gap my footwear had disappeared into but eventually, being careful to use simple concrete stairs this time, I descended back into the station to seek out a human avatar of authority.

The woman inside the booth was a prototypical civil servant: older, Black and with a perpetually bored expression that seemed incapable of exhibiting strong emotions. When I explained in an unsteady voice that the upward escalator had just violently ripped the shoe from my foot and eaten it she pulled a paper from behind her shoulder without even looking and mechanically droned out the office number and hours of the room in City Hall where I might submit a small claim. Her practiced demeanor made me wonder exactly how common this sort of mishap was and whether the escalator ever supplemented its appetite for footwear with actual human flesh.

Maybe there was an entirely different paper form for that. After several seconds of awkward silence I asked if there might be an opportunity to retrieve the shoe. The noise it made while passing through an aperture barely wider than a stack of two quarters made it seem unlikely it would ever fulfill its prescribed function again but the Adidas Sambas were the only pair I’d brought to San Francisco and held a certain emotional attachment to me. She drawled out that the escalator technicians would be dismantling it in two days and I could get what was left of it then – I then quickly returned to being invisible and she redirected her attention to flawlessly projecting the reality that nobody was standing in front of her at all.

My ride back to the Mission was not my first time being a crazy person on public transit. While I was still in High School my friend Sean, or Eliot Alen Walnut on Social Media, had given me a stack of printed papers compiling everything he could find on the subject of trepanation. For the uninitiated the word refers to the practice of removing a small portion of one’s skull in order to improve blood flow to the brain and supposedly unlock a whole suite of metaphysical powers. The reading didn’t become an issue for me until I reached the section graphically describing a home VHS recording of somebody performing this procedure on themselves with a power drill.

It’s one of life’s little ironies – I ended up being an IV drug user for just over two decades but reading or thinking about blood, especially in poorly ventilated spaces, can cause me to become so lightheaded that I almost pass out. When I read the trepanation description on the bus huge black spots began swimming into my field of vision, I broke out into a sweat and I could barely keep my head upright. They sounded muffled and far away but I could hear the concerned voices of other passengers and eventually figured out that if I held my head between my knees and took slow measured breaths my vision would return and I could remain conscious.

This was years before I touched any drugs but I’m sure the other passengers must have thought I was overdosing on something. It seemed a little pointless to disabuse them of the notion by explaining that I’d merely had an acute physiological reaction to a written account of people drilling holes in their own heads. Anyway on the MUNI and BART rides back to the Mission I must have come off as more of a paranoid schizophrenic. As I’ve already mentioned my entire body was violently shaking and every time a fellow passenger failed to shift their gaze from my own quickly enough I lifted my bare foot into the air and yelled out:

“An escalator just ate my shoe!”

Nobody acknowledged this or said anything back. While the Sambas were the only shoes I’d brought along I did have a pair of roller skates with me which coincidentally looked like blue Adidas with three yellow stripes but had no brand marks to speak of. I’d only just learned to ride a bike the year before and besides briefly following the inline trend in the early ‘90s these things were my major mode of transportation. I never really learned to use the front stoppers which could be perilous in a city as vertically oriented as San Francisco but I made do by grappling onto signposts and occasionally, to their great dismay, especially heavyset pedestrians.

In my printmaking class at SDSU I had created a drypoint, an etching where one scratches directly into the metal plate without the use of acid, of a single one of these skates. While I’ve never had the opportunity to work in this medium since I was fascinated by all the intaglio methods including the aforementioned acid bitten etchings and a technique where you sprinkle resin over the plate then add a paint-like resist to different areas after growing intervals of acid immersion to create a gradation of white to dark shading called an aquatint.

I didn’t think much of the wood and linoleum cutting methods referred to as reliefs. All of this is to preface an even more irrelevant aside – I occasionally make rudimentary jokes in my dreams. I had heard once that the artist Chuck Close worked with a Japanese ukiyo-e print master to convert several of his large scale pointillist portraits into woodblock prints and each required over one hundred plates or separate slabs of wood for the various colors.

I dreamt once that I was attending a solo exhibition by this artist – who I now know to be named Yasu Shibata. He was not exhibiting prints but instead had created a series of installations where different species of monkeys were sitting at the bottom of aquarium tanks wearing oxygen masks attached to hoses to the surface. I presumed that this was intended as a statement of some kind on climate change but upon meeting the artist I chose to talk about the Chuck Close collaboration instead.

He wore a suit and glasses and looked like black and white photos I’ve seen of various Japanese politicians of the 1940’s. I queried him as to whether he had cut the extraordinary number of required plates both himself and by hand and he assented to both of these points. I then delivered this underwhelming punchline:

“I bet when you were finished you said ‘that’s a relief!’”

While we had been conversing unaided up to this point he took on a slightly puzzled expression and a tall, smiling translator in a bow tie who had been standing at his side bent down to briefly whisper in his ear. Shibata politely chuckled at the weak pun or double-entendre. Anyway I roller-skated down Mission Street to get to Civic Center and quickly removed my roller skates to attempt to walk through the metal detectors.

When the security attendant saw that I was wearing only socks, I had brought more than just the one pair in this case, she informed me that I would not be able to enter the building without shoes of some kind. I tried to press the case that one of the city’s escalators had eaten my shoe and without submitting my claim and receiving reimbursement I would be unable to acquire another pair but she was not to be moved. Rightfully so I suppose – I was already there to collect on one liability and the tacit approval to roam the halls in either socks or skates might have easily presented another one.

Still I was young, obstinate and unreasonable so I mounted a minor protest in the model of a character I knew only as the “I want my two dollars kid”. My friend Steve Lawrence, an oil painter I will soon be writing about at greater length, had created a canvas bordered with depictions of various persons or entities he considered worthy of salutation. This included things like “anyone on PCP”, depicted as a shirtless man lifting a Volkswagen Beetle, and of course the kid I just mentioned yelling his catchphrase from a bicycle.

Whether this was a reference from a movie or a person Steve had known personally I never learned but it did so happen that the shoes had cost me exactly two dollars in a San Diego Thrift Store. Returning the skates to my feet I circled the building several times shouting “I want my two dollars!” at the windows. Without a detailed floor plan I could only surmise that the small claims office was on the second floor and while I directed my yells to that height nobody appeared at any windows and after the third circuit I returned to my housesit.

This all transpired the day after the initial misadventure so early the next morning I skated back to the Castro station and sure enough a pair of technicians in coveralls had disassembled my would be mechanical murderer. For the first time in my life I saw the system of rollers and powerful chain and motor that lie hidden beneath every escalator in the world. I just Googled videos of similar situations where victims less lucky than myself lost either life or limb but I couldn’t bring myself to click on any. They all seemed to take place in Asia.

I told the technicians I was there for my shoe and they handed me the tattered object. I remember it smelling especially bad. At this phase of my life I would do things like walk through fountains or the ocean in my socks and shoes then continue onward without removing the articles and allowing them to dry. Two years later I did this in a pair of leather wingtips in the shallows of Lake Michigan while visiting Holland, Michigan. Not long after I removed them in the very back row of a Greyhound bus and the driver’s voice instantly came over the loudspeaker:

“Whoever just took off your shoes for God’s sake put them back on!”

Still a shoe is usually enclosed in a manner that contains the odor rising from the sole but this one has been rendered into a flat object like the shapes traced out on heavy paper to be folded and pasted into boxes. It’s entirely possible that the rubber sole itself was also cut into several pieces – releasing more of the embedded and unsavory humors. I just remember it smelling worse than any other shoe in an era of my life where my podalic hygiene was especially poor.

A friend of mine once described valerian root as smelling like a “hundred footed homeless man” – perhaps that would do it justice. Neither my shoes or my feet smell especially terrible these days but the latter remain oddly shaped in a condition often referred to as hammertoe. It’s congenital and has only affected my life insofar as it seemed to make balancing in certain standing poses more difficult during the brief era I attended Bikram Yoga classes.

By the time of my return to City Hall I had already gone to a Thrift Store and bought other shoes, perhaps even the wingtips I later waded through Lake Michigan in, but in a symbolic act of pettiness that would mean nothing to any person besides myself I was determined to wear the Sambas. I bought a roll of duct tape and returned the ruined right specimen to its proper shape – for all the carnage it had been through it was still complete and in a single piece to boot. Once finished it looked like more tape than shoe but it would get me through the metal detectors and up the stairs to the second floor.

Once again I roller-skated the whole way to Civic Center but this time the Sambas hung around my neck, knotted together by the laces. As predicted removing the skates at the vestibule and placing the Sambas on my feet granted me admittance without argument. While the shoes had only cost me two dollars I contrived to think of the maximum amount a similar pair might command at a vintage store and marked the form with forty dollars for the shoes and two dollars for the socks – a total of $42.

I realize now that I could have easily learned the maximum amount for small claims, probably $400 or so at that time, and demanded that with little scrutiny but I had only ever had but little money at that point in my life and my schemes were small. As it was my claim was accepted without question and I was informed that I would receive a check by mail. Perhaps the station agent had blessed the form with some official stamp or signature.

I don’t recall ever wearing the Sambas again.

The rest of my housesit concluded without notable incident or at least the two incidents that seem notable could have actually occurred during my time at college instead. The first was passing through that same Castro station aboard the M Ocean train and looking toward the stairs and platform to see only a single individual flawlessly costumed as a member of the Borg from Star Trek The Next Generation. The station was dark and everywhere he turned his head the small electric light attached around his eye traced faint beams through this darkness but stopped short of illuminating either floor or wall.

The second was being pulled across the entire length of Golden Gate Park on my roller skates by holding a bungee cord on the back of a friend’s bicycle. His name was Mikey and he played in a punk band called The Cost and worked as a bike messenger. It might be an exaggeration to call him a friend as I was feral and ignorant in the manner of making them but he was kind to me and the closest thing I had to one that didn’t come up from San Diego with me. Honestly I think both these things occurred during the academic school year but I wanted to write about them somewhere.

I’ve written on this elsewhere but there was a minor incident where some friends I allowed to stay over took out some possessions of a personal nature and left them in an obviously disturbed state. Nelly was quite angry about this at first but after a brief discussion and apology by e-mail she relented, professed to harbor no ill will and even offered to have me housesit again in the future. Nonetheless this was our final correspondence.

Still the world is strangely small and perhaps these words will find their ways to her eyes. If so I wish her well and recognize now that admitting an unknown third party to, not just her apartment, but her most private sanctum was a serious lapse in my duties as caretaker owing solely to youth and inexperience. I wonder if she wears a J Church shirt still – so long after singer Lance Hahn’s death and the band’s dissolution. In 1999 it really seemed to mean something, a mark of a community I didn’t entirely understand.

The check for forty-two dollars from the city of San Francisco found me in Chicago – no doubt forwarded by my parents as I had no idea I’d be moving there at the time the claim was filed. This came either just before or after I collected around $24 in consignment from Quimby’s and Chicago Comics for some tiny booklets in vending machine bubbles I’d left there in 1998. When I lived with Brandi, Tim and Richard Swain that Summer one of our downstairs neighbors stuffed these plastic capsules for some small income and had left a large box of empty ones by the trash cans.

I drew and printed two tiny booklets. The first was called The Crying Robot and depicted a robot with human-like stubble dressed in a torn up shirt, tie and slacks and wordlessly going through a day of office drudgery while constantly weeping. I just read Alan Moore’s Promethea for the first time and as it was first published in 1999 I wondered if this tiny book had somehow reached his hands and inspired the Crying Gorilla character.

As I’ve said before the world is strangely small but at the same time a character that constantly cries is hardly a novel creation. I forget the name of the second booklet but it had words and was about the Judeo-Christian God harboring an irrational hatred for the biston betularia or Peppered Moth. He would walk the Earth and attempt to purge the insects from existence but they would hide from him by camouflaging against the trunks of trees.

Like Prometheus, God inspired mankind to begin the Industrial Revolution in order to darken the trees with factory smoke and render the moths easy prey. As anyone who paid a modicum of attention in even the most elementary Biology class would know the moths had a darker colored variant due to random mutation that came to dominate the species due to the environmental pressures created by the soot darkened trees and increased visibility of the hitherto dominant light colored variant. The short comic ends with God angrily crushing a darker moth between his thumb and forefinger.

Writing this all out now it reads as an allegory for the intellectual conflict between Creationism and Darwinism but I don’t think that’s how I meant it. I just thought the image of a stereotypically robed and white bearded God allaying his rage on a tiny insect was funny. Even remembering my crude drawing now passes a tiny smile of mirth across my inner mind like a cloud before the sun. Perhaps the title was God Vs The Pepper Moth.

I just looked the species back up to confirm the simple details I already knew to be true and learned both that environmental regulation has brought about the reascendance of the lighter colored variant and that the micro evolutionary phenomenon has been dubbed “industrial melanism”. As I felt personally enriched by these two points of knowledge it seemed the magnanimous thing to pass them along.

The booklet stuffed bubbles were placed in a small bowl at Quimby’s but the guy at Chicago Comics excitedly told me they had an empty vending machine they’d be placed inside – in each location the price was fifty cents. I wonder now if sales had been helped along at this second location by the well known gacha mechanism wherein patrons desiring both volumes received duplicates in pursuit of this object. Regardless everything had sold by my return to Chicago in 1999 and I collected my paltry consignment money.

I had worked in Berkeley for either minimum wage or slightly less due to it being under the table but my hours were severely curtailed by my academic schedule and it took me a while in Chicago to find my furniture store job. I thought for sure I’d get hired at Kinko’s on North Avenue due to my friend and neighbor Shana already working there and my prior copy shop experience but the manager took umbrage with me appearing at the interview in a half sleeve baseball tee and that was the end of it. Getting the sixty something dollars all at once from the shoe and comics felt like a lot of money.

It seems almost absurd to say it now but at nineteen years old I had never before had sixty something dollars to spend at a record store and after years of digging through dusty thrift store crates and used record store discount bins that kind of concentrated buying power was viscerally exciting. I can’t remember everything I got but I did get Blonde Redhead’s “Fake Can Be Just As Good”. Vern Rumsey plays bass on that one.

My enjoyment of underground music is usually wrapped up in some level of parasocial cult of personality but I only saw Unwound once in a larger venue and I never met Vern personally. I’ve heard various anecdotes from friends: his ambivalent role as recording engineer on someone’s album, a girl named Caryl drinking some outmoded vintage of Olympia Beer in his refrigerator he intended as a keepsake and to his chagrin. None of this really makes a mark on what he means to me as a musician.

I can’t think of a single instrumentalist of any kind, not just bassist, who has had a comparable effect on me emotionally. The bass was my first instrument but I was never especially good at it and the only music I’ve ever made that I’d consider worthwhile was composed on a damaged drum machine in the brief window before it died altogether. What I’m trying to say is that his bass playing isn’t an inspiration or a model – I don’t have a word for what it means to me.

I just close my eyes and know it’s there.

In this story I made oblique and brief references to one friend who has died and another who has been out of his mind on the streets for so long he might as well have twenty years ago. It’s not usually a thing that bothers me – people dying. There’s already too many asides in this piece to go into detail concerning what I believe led to this condition in me but it involves becoming the unwitting excavator for interring human remains at an impressionable age.

Still. I really wish Vern wasn’t dead.

It’s pleasantly reassuring that no matter how many mistakes Meta makes Facebook seems too big to fail. It could be that they know us better than we know ourselves – when the new feature of AI comment thread synopses rolled out my first conscious reaction was that I hated it but after an internal vibe check I must begrudgingly admit that it’s rather useful. It’s the same thing we do with our fellow humans – when my wife and I lay in bed on separate screens we constantly give each other short gists of whatever controversy or comment thread is amusing us in any given moment.

Sure, sometimes you need to go down the rabbit hole and watch every reaction video and read every comment but sometimes you just want the rabbit. A quick chunk of gamy protein that is easily skinned and digested no matter how long its burrows wind. A vibe check – just like the reactions feature and every other change Facebook makes that we all complain about and pretend to hate. In the end we just have to hunker down and use the stuff because they were right and we were wrong.

Anyway I’m old enough that I had a Friendster even before I had a MySpace and it’s a tired tune but I’ll never get over all the pictures and music entrusted to those platforms just being gone. It’s probably because I don’t have any photos or stuff from my childhood – I fell out with my siblings and was unable to get any of my photo albums from our family home after my mom passed. I guess that I just thought that things stuck on the internet are supposed to be sacrosanct but they aren’t – nothing is. Devil take.

Anyway it’s nice that Facebook abides and people like my friend Rusty Burke are kind enough to take photos, post them and even tag me. I was never much one for taking photos and now it’s become too accessible for me to do it. I was into disposable cameras for a minute because at least only having 24 chances and having to wait to see them attached importance to the photograph as an object. I’ve never been able to be creative without constraints. While I despise authority in my fellow human beings I crave it from nature.

I realized something for the first time when Facebook reminded me of these photos this year. The look of oblivion on my face in this photo is something I desperately crave but will most likely never have again. Anything can be healthy in moderation and oblivion is the superior of sleep. The kind of rest you can feel in your bones – maybe that’s what sleep is already like for most people. I don’t sleep much.

I know I talk about heroin too much and it’s never my intention to glamorize it but the word is mostly a placeholder anyway – like mana or chi or the word hardcore in the Sam McPheeters book Mutations I just read. An organizing principle. An Axis Mundi. A brown reason to live. Even if it’s the same generic chemical for every person who takes it the real deal is the endogenous cocktail of neurotransmitters your brain serves up for either ingesting it or creating the reasonable certainty that you will soon ingest it. If you’re gonna spend a lot of time hanging out inside your own skull you might as well decorate it how you like.

Anyway the only reason I bring it up is that there are plenty of photographs and videos of me high out of my mind on this particular drug and I’ve never once looked at one and thought “I wish I could feel like this again”. This might actually be the first time a photograph of myself has made me nostalgic for a particular feeling that happens to be painted across my face. I usually only get this way from memories: drifting off to sleep in the back of my mother’s car to Willy Nelson’s Across the Borderline, the one time in Seventh Grade I cleaned my room then said the word “cool” as I fell backwards on my bed and actually meant it…

Anyway if I’ve reasonably established that the look on my face I am pining for is oblivion, the question becomes where did it come from? This Voices of the Valley festival marked the end of my fourteen months of Catholicism where I abstained from all opiate receptor agonists. I had also just discovered in 2011 that I had Hepatitis C so I was generally abstaining from alcohol but I did impulsively buy a pint of Ginger Brandy at the Pentress, WV gas station and drink it toward the end of one evening so it’s not entirely impossible for me to be drunk in the picture.

Regardless it turns out that Ginger Brandy is impossible to buy if you aren’t in West Virginia and even with the logistical nightmare around buying alcohol on the internet I can’t find a website that sells it. Anyway alcohol only really interests me in the pursuit of rare flavors like the one I just mentioned and I highly doubt that I’m going to suddenly become an alcoholic after forty-four years of not being one so let’s just assume this isn’t it. Alcohol can be a lovely portal to oblivion but I’ve never figured out how to make it a reliable one.

The next possibility I want to gently push aside is that I was simply tired. I certainly could have been tired, I’m quite tired right now, but the sleep of a drifter is not the sleep of a landowner. It’s what I interpret the word odradek to mean in Franz Kafka’s The Cares of a Family Man. I certainly still sleep but I’ve got my house, my wife, six cats and a dog here and I’m trying to transition into parent material. While I’m dependent on nature for authority I don’t want to put my theoretical future child’s safety contingent on nature simply flipping a switch for me the moment this person is born when I can make disciplined efforts to flip that switch for myself.

The theory I’m going with is that the source of the oblivion was the rosary around my neck, and my temporary Catholicism, which feels interesting to me because I never saw the faith in this way while I was practicing it but it does seem to make the most sense. I should probably clarify a couple of things although there are other pieces that go into greater length about this. The first is that the word faith may be something of a misnomer. A thing I read in Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen allowed me to sidestep the faith question which had previously prevented me from attending religious services as an active member of a congregation.

The short version is that serving deities and participating in rituals can be beneficial whether you believe in the metaphysical principles behind them or not. Perhaps a simpler way of stating it is that the question of faith is secondary to the reality of service. This wasn’t “fake it ‘til you make it” – it was what I was going with. Another important factor was that Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge inspired me to bake an expiration date into my conversion. It was another sidestep for another gatekeeper in the form of permanence – my first pledge was for a year and although I pledged another year on my anniversary I ended up just stopping two months later for a total of fourteen months.

I had been observing Lent and practicing bits of Catholic syncretic folk magic before all this started but these things were not the same as self identifying as a Catholic. Another thing I need to clarify was that my Catholicism was not strictly “on the level” – every time I attended Mass I committed the mortal sin of receiving the Eucharist without being a “Catholic in good standing”. It wasn’t that I was opposed to going through the process of Confirmation, First Communion and regular Confession – it was just that Catholicism was a means to an end to me, mostly a way to stop using heroin for a large period of time, and I wanted to get things going as soon as possible.

On the subject of the Eucharist my insomnia internet rabbit hole recently escorted me to the concept of Stercoranism: a pissing contest within the Catholic Church about whether or not the divine elements of the Eucharist become feces. It appears that nobody actually thinks this but instead accused their opponents of thinking it to win points in petty arguments over the fine points of transsubstantiation, the nature of Christ and the Eucharist etc.

It reminds me of the issue of Hypostatic Union that the Roman Catholic and Eastern/Ethiopian Orthodox churches broke up over except this one is more feces themed. You might think that one would be feces themed because it took place at a thing called the Diet of Worms and worms eat feces but it is not. Only the Stercoranism one is feces themed. Hypostatic Union is about two completely different natures existing in one body at the same time – basically that Christ was both “all God” and “all man” in a single vessel. It is why you will see icons in Orthodox churches where Christ’s face is split down the middle and one side looks more sinister to represent mortality and sin.

[Note: I was incorrect on a couple points here. First the East/West Schism was not at the Diet of Worms but nearly 500 years earlier in 1054 AD and secondly it was mostly over Ecclesiastical differences concerning authority structure within the Church]

Anyway I’m not bringing this up to be sacrilegious or shocking – I just thought it was an interesting bit of trivia. To return to the question on my attitude of oblivion I do not think that receiving the Eucharist was the source of this oblivion. Receiving the Eucharist was a practical matter to me as it renewed and reinforced my vows toward abstaining from opiates. I must have believed in transubstantiation to some degree as I understood the Eucharist to be a divine foodstuff that I was able to metabolize into resolve and spiritual strength.

To return to the question of my oblivion, my best guess to the exact mechanism of accessing it is the Nicene Creed I repeated with the other congregants at the beginning of every Mass. It is when the priest says “Let us profess our faith” and everyone recites these lines:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten not made, one in being with the Father. Through Him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day He rose again, in fulfillment of the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son He is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Every time I repeated these lines I was quite literally professing my faith. I realize this will sound contradictory, as I’ve already expressed that faith was a thing I did not have, but the simple answer is that a Divine Hand can smooth down the edges of even the thorniest paradox. Through Him all things are possible. Another sticky wicket was that to the best of my knowledge I’ve never been baptized although John the Baptist is a fascinating figure to me and I’ve read everything I can find on his life starting with Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

My best answers to these questions come from Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians. I read most of the Old Testament in High School, which helped me feel connection with my Jewish heritage, but did not move me religiously in any way. As a Catholic, with the exception of portions of scripture that were read at the weekly Masses I attended, I’ve only read Corinthians 15. Much of it deals with the concept of resurrection, which I definitely don’t literally believe in, but the important parts to me are where Paul repeatedly contrasts the perishable with the imperishable.

The imperishable is the Divine which is both infinite and perfect and also infinitely divisible – like every piece of this thing contains all of this thing. You’ll see something similar if you read some of the dialogue around transubstantiation and whether or not the Eucharist gets “watered down” if spread too thin across too many crackers and little wine cups. The general consensus is that it doesn’t and the Eucharist is the Eucharist is the Eucharist whether it be divided into two pieces or one thousand. I felt the same about Mass and communion – while there could have been great positives for me in baptism, confirmation and confession, Mass and communion were complete and perfect in themselves just like every other fragment or particle of the imperishable.

Anyway I imagine most of my readers are even less familiar with Catholicism than I was, unless raised in it which I wasn’t, so I should probably look for a way to explain this to people with no Catholic background at all. I’m trying to think of an analogue in the sciences and the best thing I found was the concept of “biological immortality”. Certain unicellular organisms, like symmetrically dividing bacteria, can split into identical “daughter” versions of themselves an infinite number of times without any degradation of the genetic material over time. Apparently some jellyfish and cnidarians are also thought to be able to do this.

I probably should do a better job of explaining why I think professing my faith would have been a reliable portal to oblivion in the first place. To answer this question I need to explain how I was able to be a Catholic without technically believing in God. This can also be answered in a short passage of Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians – or in my interpretation of it anyway.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

For sin is the sting of death; and the power of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

I probably lied when I said I went more into this in other places and gave a link, not that I don’t think that link is worth following and reading, but I will likely get into a more detailed explanation here than I ever have before. Let’s take things line by line: first we have “death where is thy sting?” I know that I will die and while this knowledge isn’t particularly painful to me it can be for many people. Basically death can have a “sting”, or a painful awareness of its inevitably, and the grave can have a victory – meaning that people can feel conquered by their future grave.

Paul is asking where these things are which I take to mean that there is the possibility of living without being subject to this “sting” or “victory” and persisting in such a state after one’s death for eternity. Going on to the next line we have “for sin is the sting of death”. This establishes exactly what the sting is – it’s sin. Once again I will divert considerably from mainstream Catholic opinion here – while sin is generally thought of as a specific crime or trespass from a long list of such things that either harm your fellow man or displease God, I think of it as a state of being. In a single word – mortality.

In my version “Original Sin” is not the taking of the fruit of wisdom from the tree of knowledge, in other words self awareness, but simply the fact of existing as a finite, mortal being. I guess the two interpretations aren’t actually incompatible because without awareness of this mortal state and our inevitable death, death could not have a “sting”. To reiterate sin is the sting of death. For the next bit, “and the power of sin is the law”, I don’t have a great interpretation. The best I’ve got is that the sting of death is a powerful thing and this power is a law of nature.

It sure sounds bad-ass though.

Now we’ve come to the end, “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ”. I believe in neither a literal resurrection of Christ or a literal resurrection to come, as stated in the Nicene Creed, so what is this “victory” to me? Once again it is a state of being, to live without sin by renouncing the perishable within one’s self in order to inherit the imperishable. Christ to me is a role model as he was able to cast off mortality and live in a state of Grace. When I explain it all like this it all sounds a bit New Age and woo-woo and maybe even Buddhist, I haven’t really studied Buddhism, but that’s why I like the original wording Paul uses in Corinthians – or the translations I’ve read of it anyway.

One thing that should immediately jump out is that if the only thing Christ has to offer in my version is a state of being, or state of mind, that can be emulated we wouldn’t really need the Catholic Church – and that’s correct. I don’t think we need it. Also if I don’t really believe in God, resurrection or an afterlife why did I even go? What did I believe in? I believed in ritual and I believed in magic and mostly I believed in the evidence of my own senses that, for a period of time, attending Mass and taking communion made everything in my life better.

So why do I think it had anything to do with a facial expression I’m referring to as oblivion? The thing I’m describing with my ideas behind Catholicism might be closer to beatitude or enlightenment but I think these things are nearly identical to oblivion in a neurochemical sense. It’s possible that I was lightly drunk or tired in the moment of the photo but I think that I was in a state of Grace and feeling oblivious to the sting of death. In that case why don’t I just start going to Mass again?

For whatever reason it simply stopped working for me. If the photo is from Sunday night I had hitchhiked to a small Lutheran church early that morning but if it’s from Friday or Saturday I may have attended my last Mass in either Baltimore or Washington DC. While Roman Catholic was my favorite flavor I wasn’t totally brand loyal and often substituted in Eastern Orthodox or, as in the case of the Lutheran church in West Virginia, whatever I could get to. Not long after this in Princeton, NJ I attended a Mass and didn’t feel anything except that I was going through the motions and wasting both my own and God’s time.

Maybe I shouldn’t have let a single bad week get me down but I felt reasonably certain that whatever had been happening for the last fourteen months was over and I took some codeine pills from the 1970’s that had crumbled into a crystalline powder I found in my grandparents’ medicine cabinet. Another thing I know with certainty about the photo is that my opiate receptors were entirely free of agonists that did not originate in my brain. I could try going to some kind of Church again but besides feeling reasonably certain it wouldn’t work my wife has expressed that she wouldn’t be able to handle it.

I wouldn’t want to sully whatever I had in those fourteen months by experimenting with religious services without the total conviction I had when I attended them religiously.

My opiate receptors are not entirely clear of outside influence right now. I’ve been taking Suboxone, a partial agonist with high enough binding affinity to repel most other agonists, for something like five years. I don’t notice anything from this daily ritual but I’ve been telling myself it’s a prophylactic measure to prevent me from pursuing the currently available synthetic opiates that have replaced heroin as a street drug. I don’t think that’s a thing I actually have to worry about.

In the last five years I’ve tried both fentanyl powder and some pressed pills I found on the streets of Albuquerque, NM exactly one time each and found nothing appealing in either experience. I stopped attending Mass when I felt my reasons for it dissolve so maybe I should stop taking Suboxone for the same reason. It’s worth trying just to see what my brain can cook up without big bad buprenorphine squatting any potential binding sites.

Besides the Suboxone I take either Ambien or benzodiazepines for insomnia and I’m struggling with those too – my tolerance is getting out of control but at least I don’t experience any form of withdrawal when I run out of either. Anyway I was either completely sober or drunk from drinking for the first time in forever when the photo was taken and those both sound like good ideas. Being completely sober or only messing with stuff like alcohol once in a blue moon.

I’ve been exercising a lot again like I was doing in those fourteen months and I’ve seen positive effects from that. Maybe I still look like this all the time but don’t see it because I’m not going to parties and having photos taken of me all the time. Maybe I should just grow up and move on – being 44 isn’t the same thing as being 32. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to simply accept all of this for what it is – a nice picture of me and some mysterious thing I felt a long time ago…

I may have written about some of this stuff in passing in other parts but this will be my first piece that goes into detail on this entire Oceania trip, taken in the company of my two sisters, and the 28th Birthday I spent on Manta Ray Island in Fiji. Jenny would have been the main planner of this group and as she abhors spontaneity in the same way that nature abhors a vacuum everything was scheduled to the extent of separate plans for each day’s morning and afternoon.

This was probably the trip where I learned that I despised a strict schedule in near equal measure, the last trip of this nature we took was me visiting her and her husband Tom at their housesit in Panama. While we did do many scheduled activities together I also left for church each Sunday and had large cushions of time to explore Bocas del Toro and Panama City on my own. Back to the Oceania trip we flew with Qantas who were offering a creatively named multi-hop “kangaroo tour” where we were allowed to land in Brisbane, fly out of Cairns to Auckland, NZ and end our trip flying in and out of Nadi – Fiji’s main transportation hub on the big island.

This is a birthday themed entry and my birthday happened in Fiji but I’ll give some decent details for all three nations. The big things about Australia were that we had an Aunt and Uncle to stay with and I played my first ever solo concerts as Bleak End at Bernie’s in the country. I had just grabbed my used DR-202 Dr. Groove drum machine from Carpet of Sexy’s Rand Sevilla as the Living Hell tour ground to a halt outside Chicago. I did a few shows on the West Coast, touring by counterfeit Greyhound, as a three piece with Bekah from Chew on This and Cole Miller of Toxic Loincloth, Deep Jew, Men who can’t Love, etc. Our sets were a mix of Chew on This rap songs, with me and Bekah on vocals, and early sketches of some of the first darker, industrial Bleak End songs with only me on vocals. Cole improvised on keyboard throughout.

Instruments were my new drum machine and both Cole and Bekah on keyboards. I was walking outside Santa Monica’s art-rave GLOW Festival carrying a keyboard and wearing a baby’s bow headband (seen in the upcoming Sydney pic) when someone yelled “Bob Marley” at me out of a passing car window. Outgroup Homogeneity, the idea that as both me and Marley wear headbands and have instruments we are the same, as far as stiflingly normal people are concerned. We somehow made every show with our illegal mode of travel and other complications, and then I was flying across the world.

I had only two or three Bleak End songs before getting on the plane but my drum machine had full batteries and a headphone jack, I always made my best art while traveling and by the time we landed I had a five song set. I had gotten onto one of the noise message boards, maybe Troniks, and by the time I landed in Brisbane I was already booked on an upcoming Brisbane show. The overall noise scene was smaller back then and, if noise messageboards even still exist, I wonder if I would have the same instant success today. The scene’s gotten larger but I do have a drop or two of stretchy cred.

Ross and Nancy, the uncle and aunt we were visiting, have always been kind, giving and encouraging but never quite “got us”. At an early Christmas they got me an Andreas Vollenweider CD when I was on more of a Cage, Stockhausen and Brecht kick and gave a Color Me Badd CD to my twelve year old sister with the cringe line “we wanna sex you up!”. Ross, may he rest in peace, was just a bit of a fuckwit. Nancy clearly loved him but they got together when she was his attractive young secretary. He always displayed her boudoir photos around the home to show her off and constantly made awkward comments about her getting surgeries to look younger “for him” – all while looking like the chinless nerd archetype of any ‘80s movie.

The day of my Brisbane show there was a classic car and rockabilly themed day fair in a Brisbane park called Greazefest. They had a tricked out “Combi”, or Conversion Van, that they’d fixed up for such events with leopard print and tie-dye custom upholstery, tiki lights, and a variety of fold out beds and hidden iceboxes. This party was nobody’s, except for Ross and Nancy’s of course, cup of tea but it did have the added advantage of allowing me to be dropped off in Brisbane for my show as long as I promised to return via train the following day. While Ross and Nancy’s camping days were well behind them I’m sure they enjoyed a wild night in the combi, and a sound insulated garage, once my sisters were in bed.

Nobody had expressed any interest in coming to the show themselves. It was in a small bar and while there must have been three acts I only remember Toxic Lipstick playing – two local girls in hand sewn full body Popple costumes who sang and rapped with high energy over a set of glitchy electronic backing tracks. The trains back up to Surfer’s Paradise where I was staying did not run all night and I doubt the rellies would have been keen on a late night pickup after an afternoon of day drinking anyway so I searched around for a place to crash.

Toxic Lipstick’s spot was probably awesome but I got too shy and only asked some punk kids on the street who either missed the show or stayed outside drinking the whole time. Their house was a bog standard punk house – everyone hung around a kitchen with cardboard boxes of dumpstered food on the counters and tables and there may have been a fire pit outside. The big thing was that the international crowd had taught me about cheap 1.5L bottles of cider I sadly forget the name of (maybe Strongbow) – I was a habitual drinker and Australian beer taxes were killing me. It’s the only country I’ve been to where beer was cheaper in a bar than a liquor or “package store”.

The other big thing was that a group of punks was driving out to Alice Springs in the outback the next morning to do a bit of freight riding and I was invited to come along. These kids were certainly trustworthy but I was worried about how my family would feel about me disappearing long term and, more concerningly, if the train could get sidelined deep in the bush and we wouldn’t have had access to water or food for weeks. It was likely a lovely trip, I was lame for skipping it and still feel shame for failing to scratch “Australian Freight Riding” off my list when an opportunity presented itself.

My train home in the morning was mostly deserted except for what I took to be the Aussie version of a Nazi Skinhead. We nearly got into a small altercation when I complained about local beer prices and he took my statement about VB, or Victoria Bitter, being the only affordable option as a denigration of the brand:

“What’s wrong with VB then, ay?”

Before things could escalate to blows he shifted his ire to a departing Asian businessman and muttered something about “bleeding slapheads”. It was at this moment that he fully realized I was an American and could therefore answer America-themed questions:

“Do the skinheads in America beat up on Asian cunts then?”

I’ve never been so happy to shatter a foreigner’s idealized fantasy of my homeland:

“No, never. They beat up on Blacks, Jews like me and maybe a Mexican on a slow day. Asians are viewed as a “model minority” and are the pride and joy of White Supremacists from coast to coast!”

Thankfully my stop came up at that moment so I never learned what effect my Jewish heritage or his new knowledge about the American social status of his least favorite ethnic group might have had on him.

Sadly I didn’t remember the location of the punk house and subsequent Brisbane trips, without the rockabilly ick, were spent tasting the wares of as many savory pie shops as possible. Definitely a page we could take out of our antipodean neighbor’s book. I did notice blue lights in park restrooms, but barely anyone seemed to be doing heroin and the parks boasted innovative playground climbing structures like saddleback graphs of elastic cords.

A trip got set up for us and Kyle – Ross’s elder son, and our cousin by marriage, to tag along on a Jeep Expedition to K’gari, then known as Fraser Island. The island is not a true island but rather a gigantic sandbar where one end is constantly being washed into the ocean and the other adds more sand from the waves off Australia’s Coast. On top of the sand thing the island is famous for its three colored ponds – a green one filled with algae and turtles, a red one colored by tea trees and their falling leaves and finally one with sapphire blue water filtered by the sands.

As Fraser’s isn’t a proper island, and these bodies of fresh water are more like moving cysts than actual ponds, I always though of it as an analogue for a RBG TV where, viewed from far enough, the red, blue and green specks of water would reveal an image. I’d like to imagine that from space it combines with thousands of other RGB dots to look like Richard Nixon smelling a pan of soft baked chocolate chip cookies but who can say. The night before we left we all dropped some tabs of acid the aunt and uncle had given us and I chose to sleep outside the walled camp where we were expected to sleep within chain link fences to keep wild dingoes at bay.

My decision to sleep outside was a combination of being told not to, the lingering effects of the acid and the knowledge that dingoes pose no threat to an adult human. I’d like to say that I truly communed with them and slept in a fuzzy warm pile but the farthest things got was having my face sniffed and lightly nuzzled a few times throughout the night. The trip ended and we said goodbye to our cousin Kyle – probably for the best as Ross had spent years creepily attempting to hook him up with Jenny and Kyle seemed to harbor fantasies that this awkwardly incestuous scenario would somehow pan out.

The Toxic Lipstick girls had been able to add me to a show in Sydney and my sisters wanted to see it too so we got in a very long rideshare. Besides our driver telling us childhood stories of frilled lizards chasing him on his bike and biting his ankle, and also going into a self pitying soliloquy about loneliness and girl trouble, the trip was eventless. We watched every passed eucalyptus but never saw a koala or even the aforementioned lizards. The most entertaining thing was a series of Billboard PSAs intended to embarrass men out of speeding:

“Speeding? No one thinks big of you”, delivered by a photo of an attractive girl with a mod revival haircut was one. Hopefully it worked – at the very least we didn’t see any wrecks. Our ride dropped us in Sydney and we found our hostel. I’ve heard much worse Sydney stories since but this place reminded me of the illegal grape farm when Bart goes to France in an early episode of The Simpson’s.

They didn’t put us to work but they had freezing cold rooms, thin metal bunks, ratty thread bare blankets we practically had to fight over and a gruel centered menu although the breakfast crumpet was religiously revered as in all of Oceania. While most “youth hostels” enforce both an age cutoff and time limit this place had a crew of shitbirds pushing 40 who had obviously showed up and never left. They lurked the common areas and retold stories of glory days like when they made a local variant of “drug soup” called “ookey gookey”.

Within this vein of humor the bald guy with side burns did an impression of his brain’s internal monologue around the time vodka and red bull’s got his ass kicked each consecutive night:

“‘round about three am the vodka says ‘right, I’m off to bed’ but the Red Bull says <evil voice> “Right, well I’m staying up!”

Anyway enough about the hostel. Sydney is a truly beautiful city. By day the skies are filled with Sulphur Crested Cockatoos and at Sunset a horde of flying foxes from the Botanic Gardens take their place. The two flying creatures perfectly complement each other, even having roughly the same size and wingspan, instantly transforming Sydney to a goth paradise Austin’s little bat bridge can’t hold a black candle to.

On our final night in Sydney I discretely took a much stronger hit of acid I’d taped behind a sketchbook collage as an overkill way to get through customs. We had decided to see an opera, Don Giovanni, at Sydney’s iconic Opera House and it seemed like the best opportunity. I hadn’t told my sisters so they wouldn’t worry and therefore I had only myself to blame when we went to Sydney’s Fish Market and ended up with several overstuffed takeout containers due to the generous seafood portions of closing time. I did my best to stomach what I could as the different orange patterns on the shelled king crab legs were essentially morphing into each other.

I still ate more than either sister and shared a LOT with street cats. Don Giovanni turned out to be a contemporary production design and while I tend to be open minded in this regard I was not feeling it. Brat pack style outfits, piles of cocaine, playboy style bunny dancers and the simulated fellatio in a frosted shower stall all felt like shock for shock’s shake. I’ve only been going to operas since the mid-90s and this Elk Neidhardt production is still the worst I’ve seen. Call me traditional but if you’re spending money anyway go to a Hockney or even a Robert Lepage Wagner.

Now let’s talk about the drugs. While onstage antics barely raised my eyebrow I could feel that the building had been built for strong singers and when a tenor took a solo the entire space seemed to vibrate with the sound – even shifting colors. This was enjoyable albeit unplanned. I forget when, as They Might be Giants phrased it, the statue “got him high” but it did feel like an exciting spectacle. The more exciting part was leaving the Opera House as I no longer had to pretend to be normal.

A girl called Leg I was in cahoots with at the time had encouraged me to read Dhalgen, causing me to fall in love with the book as well, and requested a perfect Sulphur Crested Cockatoo flight feather. My sisters were tired and went off to bed but I was on a mission. I walked the Botanic Gardens with no flashlight until my prize revealed itself at the crack of dawn. The Flying Foxes were filling their social trees and engaged in the petty bickering that preceded a full day’s rest. My Cockatoo donor was long gone of course, rarely seen in the park they prefer harassing tourists from telephone lines and preparing to dig through trash like the once noble Ibis.

My Sydney show was in the basement of a Spanish Restaurant and a monthly event by Dual Plover called “Consolador de dos Caras” – or in plain English “double sided dildo”. I shared the bill with Toxic Lipstick again and an artist called Toecutter who does noisy hardcore gabber. My sisters must have come to this show based on the photo below. I played my debut United States performance within 24 hours of my return to the country and likely added a song or two on the long flight home with only my drum machine and headphones to distract me.

I must have invited a Scandinavian girl from the hostel because later on the roof she told me in dreamy tones that my set reminded her of The Icarus Line – an artist I still haven’t listened to and doubt my music bears even a passing resemblance to. Nonetheless by her twinkling eyes and sultry voice she was probably trying to invite me back to her room but my superpower was being oblivious to even the most obvious flirtation. Life goes on.

After a few more days around Mudgeeraba, the town my aunt and uncle lived in that apparently translates to “the place where people tell lies”, we continued on to Cairns. The only wildlife we’d seen so far, outside of reserves, was cane toads, magpies and the oddly threatening kookaburras but we did see a gigantic Wedge-tailed eagle on the bus to the Daintree Rainforest eco-resort.

There are a lot of exciting things about this chunk of Australia. Captain Cook had just crashed through the Great Barrier Reef and feeling certain that he’d be dying any day he filled the map with colorful names – Cape Tribulation, Mount Disappointment and Mount Sorrow. Cook lived and the names remain. The next exciting part is all of the cautionary signage. We Americans expect statements of danger like “FALLING ROCKS!” and perhaps a few danger rock blobs but Northern Australia makes all of this more personal:

An Australian sign is not content to simply warn of danger, it must scream: “You! You’re a human shaped silhouette! Stay the fuck away from these things or they’ll tear you apart just like the picture!” I much prefer it to the American version where even warnings of severe bodily harm often look safe and sterilized. One of my main reasons for visiting Camp Tribulation was to seek out a living dinosaur called the Cassowary – a bird that can kill with a single kick. In a strange twist on tradition however most signs were warnings for the bird’s safety rather than depictions of it disemboweling a full grown man.

Local lovers, and erstwhile protectors, of these birds added black marker to speed bump signs to visually convey the danger of careless driving. Some other signs said “a fed bird is a dead bird” to convey that being fed, thus losing fear of humans, would almost certainly put these creatures in unsafe situations. The Daintree Rainforest is unique in that most of the trees produce large fruit that must pass through a Cassowary’s digestive tract to properly germinate. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if the species went extinct the forest would disappear in one or two centuries.

While Cassowaries are aggressive and dangerous, their large spurs allow them to eviscerate an adult human with one flying kick, I desperately wanted to see one. Interestingly enough the region is also home to the orange footed megapode – a bird that is roughly the size and appearance of a brown chicken but boasts giant orange feet the same size as those on the much larger Cassowary. Males of the species use their tootsies to build giant piles of compost that warm their mate’s eggs with the heat given off by decomposition.

Daintree is a thick forest so rather than expecting to glimpse a Cassowary at long range I listened for heavy avian footsteps. You can likely guess where this is going – every time I thought I heard a Cassowary’s footsteps approaching this goofy fowl with oversized loafers would come strutting into the clearing and look confused as to why I was intently staring at it. I left without a single Cassowary sighting but fell for the “Bigfoot chicken” thing a good half dozen times. You can’t win ‘em all.

The Daintree was not the only endangered forest around as Cairns is also known for the coral formations of the Great Barrier Reef. I wasn’t SCUBA certified but snorkeling is more than sufficient for such opportunities and I saw a vivid kaleidoscope of sea life. The main thing I remember is spending way too long swimming behind a Hawksbill Sea Turtle and how irritated it looked every time it glanced back over its shoulder and I still wasn’t gone. From Cairns our next port of call was Auckland in New Zealand.

If you’ve never experienced it first hand the bizarre rivalry and constant dick measuring between the two former colonies can come as something of a surprise. The joke I remember was told by a Kiwi – a Kiwi and Aussie both rub hands on a genie lamp at the same moment. The only compromise is that both will receive a single wish. The Australian immediately asks for a giant wall to be erected around his nation’s perimeter so that no immigrants can make it inside. The Kiwi cleverly suggests that the genie then fills it with water. No love lost from what I saw.

I would have liked to spend a night exploring Auckland’s nightlife and music scene, possibly even jumping a show, but Jenny’s stringent time table demanded we went straight to a long distance bus. Our destination was a guest hostel called Manakitanga Whangārei with the second half being the name of the town. The weather was bad and after hours of dark, wet and windy driving the operator feebly suggested a stop for “tea and crumpets” over the intercom. The passengers were in a hurry and this entreaty fell on deaf ears: “Push on driver, push on!”

The bus dropped us off a ways from the hostel so I tried my hand at hitchhiking. A friendly older woman quickly picked us up and gave us an early glimpse of the inscrutable Kiwi accent. Pointing to her moistened back seat she declared:

“Sorry, it’s a bit wheat!”

By the time we left the country I don’t think I’d heard the same vowel pronounced the same way twice. The hostel seemed nice enough, crumpets were available at breakfast (for ignorant Americans this is the same porous breakfast bread we call English Muffins), but once the other guest began unloading his life story to me this picture changed. He was on the run from a spot called Whanganui, and its sizable meth scene, after – in his own words:

“My Misses was shot in the face execution style two days ago!”

I started noticing him constantly peeking out the windows, in case anybody was looking for him, but Whanganui was a long way off and the local scenery was beautiful. If you’ve watched Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies you know how picturesque rural New Zealand can be. We took day trips to see gigantic kauri trees with boardwalks and small caves where blue glow worms simulated a night sky. We took a photo in one of these caves using flash and only noticed the spider the size of an outspread hand just above our heads when the photos finally got developed.

On our off days we explored the shops for specific candies like The Lion and Aero Bar that were not yet sold in the states. Despite a lifelong obsession I didn’t have the academic clearance to visit the Stephen’s Island tuataras, an ancient lizard-like reptile, and I didn’t have any authentic experiences with local Māori. That type of anthropological tourism would have to wait for Fiji.

Our final flight before homecoming took us there to Nadi, the biggest town on the biggest island, but as the boats to our resort only left in the morning we had a full night and afternoon there. Nadi was built of crumbling cinder blocks, stucco, exposed rebar and corrugated tin roofs. With the jungle slowly growing over everything it was my favorite kind of tropical town. Walking around only led to constant invitations to kava rituals followed by sales pitches for recently carved war clubs celebrating the nation’s cannibal past.

Fiji can seem super conservative in some ways while thrillingly progressive in others. The one restaurant we sat down in had several signs warning against excessive public displays of affection – even holding hands or kissing was a bit too heavy for the natives. On the other hand most adult men wore flowers in their hair and a kind of wrap skirt called a Sulu.

The bigger thing was that precolonial Fiji had a third gender and from my experience these people received total acceptance and dignity from their peers. We took our vacation to a small destination in the Yasawa Group called Manta Ray Island – as the large creatures frequented the local waters as a breeding ground. I immediately sensed that Titi, a trans woman employed by the resort, was completely accepted and validated by her peers and the “guest ambassadors” seemed to sense that I was someone they could trust.

The employees of the resort were indentured servants and barred from purchasing alcohol so I was recruited to purchase beer for nightly get togethers on a dark beach.

The crew became Ari – the acoustic guitar playing MC and leader of welcome songs, Eli – a talented dive instructor forced to work for peanuts due to the predatory resort ecosystem, Titi – the two-spirit or trans woman who sometimes danced as entertainment and finally myself. Considering Titi’s gender expression and bubbly personality I automatically assumed that American style frat-bro bullying would soon come into play.

I need not have worried. While Titi was lightly teased it was for being born in a village so backward that they didn’t understand imported food commodities that had only recently arrived. Most local starchy crops, like cassava and yucca, had only needed to be cut into pieces and buried for a fresh crop to come sprouting from the earth. Titi’s village attempted this with tinned biscuits and would never live it down.

On our late night drinking sessions Ari or Eli would often comment on this blunder to Titi’s chagrin:

“They bury the biscuit and the worms are having a feast!”

Living on isolated islands with limited access to foodstuffs, especially imported and professionally packaged foodstuffs, led to a combination joke and instructive fable that would not be disappearing anytime soon. Titi grumbled in exasperation but what could she say? – her village had been isolated and had attempted to plant biscuits of flour, sugar and water. The mistake had been real and only when another village made an even greater gaffe would the popular mythology move on. Regardless it was much better than being mocked for immutable parts of who she was as a person and obliterates the Right Wing lie that transphobia is at all “natural” or “instinctual”.

A word on our secret late night club. Eli became my SCUBA teacher on a last minute birthday class. While I quickly grasped the essentials we were unable to move as a group due to a girl whose nervousness around the oxygen mask caused her to giggle uncontrollably for the entire hour. Rather than explore underwater I had to spend the whole class watching a large sea cucumber’s anus rhythmically open and close with the current. As the class was on the expensive side I asked Eli about his cut and learned he was an indentured servant who made no wage and was kept constantly in debt by being forced to buy overpriced foodstuffs from the resort company.

On the topic of Manta Ray Island and the resort that “owned” it – technically only a native Fijian could own such an island but a system of “99 year leases” rendered this rule into a toothless formality. Besides not getting paid, not being allowed to call family and only being permitted to visit the mainland if a request went in weeks before; the employees, or more appropriately “slaves”, were not even allowed to buy or drink alcohol. I forget if the idea was initially Ari’s or Eli’s but every night as the bar closed I bought the unsold beers at a discount, using my own and my friends’ money, and we’d meet an hour later on a stretch of beach guaranteed privacy.

None of us could probably afford what the beer was costing but this opportunity for free and open cross-cultural communication was too exciting to pass up. I learned a tragic story on one of our first drinking nights. Ari and Eli had dreamt of reaching the United States and bribed a cargo tanker employee for passage. They had to sit silently in an unlocked container for months, living on backpacks full of power bars and depending on the paid off crewman to bring them fresh drinking water and throw their buckets of waste overboard. Once they reached Australia immigration officials came and pulled them off – their contact had sold them out, probably for a cash award.

Along with the joy of just drinking beer and talking I brought my drum machine down to the beach each night. We only had headphones but everybody got to take turns making beats and passing headphones around for everyone else to listen. Ari was a musician, he played acoustic guitar to greet each new boatload of guests, and dreamed of getting his hands on BOSS electronic gear but Fijian imports were unheard of. I might have sold or even given him mine but it had songs I needed programmed into it and I had an upcoming show in the United States.

I heard a lot of stories about growing up in Boy’s Schools. My visit was in 2008 and a 2006 coup created major instability but I couldn’t find another event that would create such large numbers of orphans. I’m guessing that poor families just couldn’t feed their kids and sending them to boarding schools seemed like the best chance to set them up for a better life. Children at these schools had to pay for books, uniforms, school supplies and grow their own food.

Occasionally an uncle would donate small amounts of cash but most expenses were covered through more clandestine means. The children already woke early each morning to work their food gardens so, using hidden paths, they would go deeper into the jungle to plant small patches of cannabis. A kind of financial hazing took place where older students would pay the younger ones only about 50 USD for their entire crop, then sell it to tourists for three to four times as much, and these same children would similarly exploit the new cohort of young students when they became upper class men.

Ari had a few sloppy looking tattoos on his hand and I asked if it was a gang thing:

“No, no gangs in Fiji. Just a little memento of my school days.”

I wasn’t convinced:

“Do the boys who farm cannabis together all get matching tattoos? Do they fight other groups of boys for good farming spots or steal each other’s crops? If anyone reveals the crop location to the headmaster will the other boys beat them or worse? Are there penalties for leaving the group once you get the tattoo?”

He answered yes to all of these but still insisted Fiji had no gangs. I put things down to either a language gap or exaggerated versions of what gangs were from US television. If all they’d seen from shows and movies was drive-bys with Glocks and AK-47s it makes sense that they’d think simple machete attacks wouldn’t count. Everyone was very curious about American crime culture and asked me tons of questions about all the different drugs when we were alone in a boat. In 2008 Fiji only had cannabis – I’d imagine meth has showed up by now and made lots of things even worse.

Although Fijians dress traditionally in the Sulu the animist religions of its past, including ritual cannibalism, are long forgotten and nearly everybody is Christian. On Sunday morning the guy I took as “native boss” said he was going to church and asked if anyone wanted to come in his boat. This wasn’t my Catholic year but I was curious to see the service but ultimately demurred to avoid being alone in a boat with the stern faced man. I’d already nearly messed up by discussing our nightly beer parties in front of him but my friend said employees were not permitted to drink with a straight face and he thankfully never caught on.

We also weren’t permitted to hike around the island, maybe a mile in perimeter altogether, but I never let that stop me. On one of my hikes I saw a beautiful striped eel on the rocks and a small bird of prey. I brought my sisters along for another circumnavigation but Sarah was in poor physical shape and kept complaining about tripping on vines and lianas. This theme would repeat itself when we went out to swim with Manta Rays on my birthday.

The photo at the top shows me with a special drink the resort made me for my 28th birthday but the main event was going out to see the sea creatures the island was named for. Manta Rays are gentle giants but the tour guide told everybody they were violent to prevent them from touching, and potentially scratching, the creatures. Once again Sarah had a horrible time – our individual kayaks used a kind of shoulder straps and Sarah’s weight caused her to sink too low in the water and not be able to effectively steer. Me and Jenny had a great time and a Manta Ray even breached the water next to her – effectively giving her a high five with its flipper.

Back on shore Sarah turned into a bit of a Karen and constantly looked for little things to complain about. We haven’t spoken in years but I hope she’s gotten better and learned to enjoy things instead of always nitpicking them to death. Some of it is Jewish culture – we enjoy things by being critical of and complaining about them – but she took this to an extreme that didn’t look enjoyable from the outside.

I finished my time on the island attempting to climb a coconut tree (I only got halfway) and having one last late night drink session with my friends. They did certain things that seemed extreme to me – like burning garbage and leaving the plastic bags of glass bottles on the beach so the tide would take them. Still they lived with a poverty I can barely imagine and the discovery of the bottles could have led to them becoming fired and homeless in one fell swoop.

Many tourist industries, especially cruise ships, still operate with business models based on indentured servitude, debt peonage or, to call a spade a spade, straight up slavery. I urge anyone visiting resorts or taking cruises to spend some time looking under the hood and apply your financial and political power to demand that workers be treated more equitably. At the very least get to know the invisible people working behind the scenes and cleaning up after you – you’ll certainly learn some interesting stories.

Our final flight to take us home had a twelve hour layover in New Zealand and we were going to be forced to go back and forth through immigration for this short window. My passport was falling apart, something my sisters had been complaining at me about for the entire trip, but this time it worked in our favor as New Zealand wouldn’t let us back in and we got to spend the night in the cushier and less crowded international terminal.

I bought a bottle of duty free Seagram’s Gin and my sisters and I found a working soda fountain with a local Lemon & Paeroa drink that paired perfectly and launched into a Scrabble drinking game. We have a cousin named GI Joel Sherman who is a Scrabble world champion but, while this inspired Sarah to get competitive, me and Jenny remain casuals. The rule was everyone else had to take a drink for every five points a player scored – Sarah won by a wide margin and me and Jenny got supremely wasted.

We started pushing each other around in luggage carts, digging around for blankets and getting into assorted other bits of mischief. At one point Jenny accidentally broke a potted plant and we turned to see a female flight attendant striding purposefully toward us. We assumed we were busted:

“Have you guysh sheen a guy in a pilot’sh hat come walking through here?”

We mutely shook our heads. “Shit!”, she mumbled and speed walked away. We breathed a huge sigh of relief at the discovery that she was just as drunk as we were, if not more so. I also felt a small twinge of sympathy for her regarding whatever the pilot had promised to get in her pants before slinking off. The twelve hours finally ran out and we boarded our plane back to the United States.

I often think of Ari and Eli and wonder if they ever made it to America. Considering the charges they would have gotten when Australia deported them it seems unlikely. I think they gave me e-mail addresses but they’d be long lost unless the copies of my diary at the time have resurfaced.

Hello readers, decided not to do a long expository essay this time. Occasionally I write long FaceSpace updates that toe the line on being mini essays. I decided to post them all here so more people might see them.

This starts in 2019. I was homeless and shooting cocaine. My intense political rants from this era slowly give way to fun stories about my pets, wild animals, and what I enjoy watching on ad supported streamer Tubi. You may enjoy watching the process where these pieces move organically from crackpot political stuff to more fun and entertaining pet and movie anecdotes.

I did toss in a couple ads for a rural/off grid zine I’m trying to manifest called AXIS MUNDI. Deadline is open for now but please send any pieces on nature, homesteading tech and local politics to zerstyrschonheit@gmail.com

Thank you and thanks for reading!

June 24, 2019

Ok finally saw Avengers : Endgame in the theater and everything and saw much more than a movie about climate crisis denial. As a movie with quantum physics at its core to observe it is to change it, so here it is:

Endgame: the military industrial complex, the myth of an embattled white minority, and the passing of torches.

Endgame is primarily about two white male heroes: military man and capitalism man. To make things painfully obvious military man is the eugenics created blond blue eyed ubermensch who was created in the 40s, has been on ice for a bit, and “pretends” to be a nazi in an elevator. Capitalism man uses money and technology to prevent anything from ever touching his heart, to turn off his tech is to kill him.

He mentions his brilliant idea to protect the world by making a shell around it 🤔 like “good one capitalism, you did that already, that’s the problem”. He also solves the central problem of time travel, which is marketing higher dimensional physics to lay folk. “Can’t do a tesseract. Used that one. How about a Möbius strip?” It worked, I’m sure many of the nerds in the audience twisted a piece of paper and passed it to their irritated partners. I did.

So the story is basically about these 2 blowing up Thanos’s spot at “the chillest air Bnb ever” to reinstate baseball, apple pie and cheeseburgers aka white supremacy and American economic and military domination of the world. But neither of them chops off his head in impotent rage. That job is for Asatru/alt right white supremacy man.

He is basically the spirit animal of posting memes about “Irish slavery”, getting runes tattooed in a racist prison gang, or basically “all lives matter” man. It is important that it is revealed that military man is worthy of bearing his hammer, as this basically co-signs the use of Asatru/Nordic imagery by all white supremacy groups. Sorry Iceland. Carry on black metal dudes/skinheads.

Of course perceptions are important too, so this film features a scene of two white SJWs, faux hawk and redhead girl, battling for the privilege of making a performative sacrifice. Obvi the girl wins, keeps her dead at the end while the dudes still hang out as holograms, old guys, or go to space. Also, white people figure out how to save the world by going back in time and talking to their parents.

Like, you guys obviously fucked up the world, how do we keep running with that? It is quite significant that the Cavalry charge is led by Wakanda. Like “Africa, please save the day with clean, renewable power even though we know DRC could probably generate the hydroelectric power to light the entire continent, but no one (white) would get rich and the US has been squashing that since it helped kill Lumumba” but yeah the baddies get dusted, America wins and a few mantles of power are passed to people of color, as long as they don’t change anything.

I didn’t see black iron man in this scene tho. It was on Tony’s daughter and cheeseburgers. Let’s go get a cheeseburger.

What movie did you see?

July 4, 2019

Posting about how fireworks are traumatizing to animals is a big tool of covert liberal racism and the gentrifying colonial agenda this year. Every aspect of living in communities of poverty is traumatising, this needs to be addressed by dismantling white supremacy and income gaps, not by criticizing the culture of working class poverty and putting animal lives above human lives.

July 12, 2019

Well that devolved quickly: millennials make Facebook groups to make fun of boomers, every clickbait site writes up groups, membership explodes. “Liberal hipsters” quickly use “pretending to be old” as an excuse to make tons of racist jokes.

Like /b but not even anonymous. Look at us we are edgelord Sarah Silvermans. Sad state of where the left is, feeling like they have a free space young whites who are not comfortable addressing the racism of their own communities “go off” alienating and othering the POC in the group.

This is really where we’re at? What will it take to devalue whiteness and end the dynamic of “ironic racism” dominating every space where whites feel free to air their filthy ids like dick pics in the sun? Not surprised but thoroughly disappointed. The empathy gap is real af. We have to do better

July 28, 2019

This urbane Parisian Walmart optometrist just dripped 3 things in my eyes to numb and dilate them. It was like “is that cocaine?” “Haha no it snairfblahblahphenylcaine”. “0h, is this one cocaine?” “Haha no, no cocaine, it’s blahsomethingelseboring” “do you even have cocaine, are you even an ophthalmologist?” “Haha no, I have 3 degrees but I don’t do surgery on the eye, I study binocular and do another boring thing”. Now the sun hurts and this phone looks like idk if it autocorrected me. 😎🧐🤩👽

July 29, 2019

July 10, 2019

February 5, 2020

April 23, 2020

April 25, 2020

Caught sight of some kind of black slender salamander today but it wriggled away before I could get a pic. Halfway through my amphibians checklist early in the spring. I’d say I’ll certainly see a toad but I’m not holding my breath for a newt, would be cool though. If any caecilians or reticulated sirens want to come by i’ll Look at you

[editor’s note: I discovered a vernal pool up the cut a bit, full of newts year long]

May 28, 2020

The three little scorpions. Once upon a time there were three little scorpions under a wet, soggy piece of plywood. They all went back under it. “I’m gonna build my house out of saturated, rotten plywood” said the first scorpion. “Me too” said the second, “Bet” said the third. They all did, it rotted, a wolf came and blew on it and they all pinched his bottom.

July 14, 2020

Late Christmas Decorations: We started noticing migratory ladybugs drifting down the mountain for the first time this last Summer. They appeared to be moving from higher to lower altitudes and we were in the middle. LaPorsha discovered these clusters of them on young saplings just down elevation from us while walking Hesher yesterday. I theorized that the younger trees were covered with aphids because the absence of thick bark would allow these true bugs to feed. Having seen it firsthand I’m not so sure now. These ladybugs appear to be in some form of torpor if not outright dead.

LIFE UPDATE/CALL FOR HELP: Me and LaPorscha and Nephthys the cat moved to a cabin in the mountains/pine forest in the Mt Shasta area with decent acres and a year round fresh water Spring. This situation has been more or less completely ideal but is currently complicated by a car accident that has left us without transportation and left LaPorscha mobility impaired in what will be a long healing process. She is currently in a neckbrace, has limited movement of one arm, and is recovering from severe fractures in both legs and still has a heavy ankle brace/boot on one. She has only recently gotten home from a long stay in the hospital and needs to continue physical therapy and mobility training. We are in need of a friend who would be interesting in staying up here for a while, there is plenty of space in the cabin plus endless camping potential, and could help with transportation to medical appointments, supply and garbage runs, housework and physical therapy. We are off the 5 but close to the 36 and 299 to connect to 101 so it would be a great spot for someone waiting on agricultural work if that’s still a thing. Compensation can be discussed. Message us if interested.

July 29, 2021

AXIS MUNDI is an upcoming print zine focusing on Rural / Off Grid lifestyle, local politics, homesteading tech, herbalism & nature. Open Call for Submissions text and/or visual color/b&w folded 8 1/2 X 11 Booklet Format. At this time Submissions are open to rural/off grid residents, seeking international & POC voices. Send digital submissions or e-mail LaPorscha & Ossian for mailing address berniebleak@gmail.com Submission Deadline September 11, 2021

October 12, 2022

October 19, 2022

November 9, 2022

It’s our lucky day! We found two bucks driving down the mountain!

December 10, 2022

The picture of Catrick in his nino de atocha shirt seems to have disappeared but this is a good one of him

December 14, 2022

Ok, I can’t believe this happened but I’m a first time dog person at 42. We figured the property should have one and we seem to get along. He’s a total stoner he always wants that bong.

December 14, 2022

New Auskie Dog means cats have been spending a lot of time in the attic means this little guy started screaming like a sprinkler. Brought it outside with a net right after shooting this, I catch them flying in the house every month or two but this was a first.

December 18, 2022

Neighborhood pond froze over, Hesh decided to run on it, almost broke the ice and fell in.

December 22, 2022

I’m gonna start posting my Tubi picks in case people are looking for stuff to watch: Just finished Wayne Wang’s “Center of the World” from 2001 – even better than I remembered and almost prescient seeming. A suddenly rich young techie (Bill Skarsgard) pays a stripper (looks like Saoirse Ronan but isn’t) to spend a weekend in Vegas with him. Fantasy collides with reality.

Now I’m playing a ‘80s teenage gang flick called “Cat Murkil and the Silks”

December 24, 2022

Forgot to do the Tubi post last night but I put on Hideaway from 1995 with Jeff Goldblum. I don’t know anything about it I fell asleep instantly. I only picked it because I was listening to Miranda Sex Garden who I HIGHLY recommend to any fans of ‘90s Goth, girl’s vocal groups and Purcell/Medieval music. Apparently their song is in the movie, I’ll try again tonight

December 24, 2022

This tree has a condition called “witches broom” caused by a small species of mistletoe that can be seen in the third photo. I’m not going to type it out now but mistletoe and the death of Baldur is my favorite Christmas story. Maybe I’ll find a link…

December 15, 2022

I came in from a long phone call. LaPorsha is halfway through a 2015 Rory Culkin movie called Gabriel. I’m into it. This is Tubi btw

December 25, 2022

I was watching this movie called “The Uninvited” last night where a big orange cat escapes from a lab and sometimes it opens its mouth and a smaller wet cat comes out and then blood splashes on the wall meaning it kills everybody. I guess I don’t quite understand the threat of an even smaller cat exactly. I’m picturing Goldilocks picking it up and saying “this cat is too big!” and then a smaller one comes out and kills her. I fell asleep when the cat was on a yacht so I never saw if eventually a third tiny cat comes out of the second wet cat’s mouth.

I guess our most violent cat, to humans at least, is a medium sized one name Fagin. He wouldn’t fit in another cat’s mouth though. He gets into these moods where he is just looking super high strung perched on the back of our mid century office chair he destroyed and is down to claw me at full strength. I bleed profusely.

The other day we had to take three cats to get fixed at once so Hesher couldn’t come in the car. The first trip out we just left him untied but he tried to chase us the whole way off the mountain and a neighbor was upset because he got him on camera near his livestock. We tied him up for the second leg of the trip but came home to him having chewed through the leash. He is never aggressive to other animals but we were worried because we couldn’t find Fagin or Gawain (we pronounce it Gar-win)

There is this box full of plastic bags and some kind of textile that the cats like to sit on in the garage that’s on this piece of drywall resting across the ceiling beams. Sometimes the only way to tell if a cat is in there is by barely glimpsing an ear above the boxes edge. I was looking for the boys when I saw someone’s ear and texted LaPorsha. She got scared because she thought I meant a severed ear, like Hesh had torn apart a cat.

We don’t celebrate Christmas so we didn’t get anything for each other, or the cats or for Hesher. A bat fell in a sink last night and I took it from the cats so technically they had a “negative Christmas” although the bat received the gift of life. Hesher waited for us to fall asleep then ate the cat’s food out of the bucket. He got sent outside with no breakfast to hopefully learn the error of his ways so a “negative Christmas” for him as well. We don’t play Hallmark movies in the house or anything so the animals have no expectations.

Maybe this “negative Christmas” could catch on. I want everyone to reflect on what you could take from your pets, friends, family or other loved ones – either because you are dissapointed in their behavior or you just don’t want them getting rabies. The possibilities are endless.

December 25, 2022

This song embraces the spirit of “negative Christmas” but goes a little overboard in the actual practice. In this story the cat is deprived of shelter and dies. The song doesn’t explain if the cat usually lives in the house but if that is the case then this is an example of how not to celebrate “negative Christmas”

December 29, 2022

She’s watching this one called “Little Birds” about teenagers in LA cutting up. There was another one the other day called “Maxie” about tweaker kids in Washington. So many movies in streaming rights limbo.

December 27, 2022

Tubi Report: We started “Everything Beautiful is Far Away” with Julia Garner from 2017. About 22 minutes in it felt like a play but not a very good one. Turned it off and put on “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. Might let the first one play out while playing video games some time later.

December 29, 2022

December 31, 2022

January 2, 2023

Every year I tell myself that I will be able to stock up on eggnog (the flavored milk product not the liqueur) as long as I make it to the store by New Year’s and of course it’s long gone by then. I need to accept the reality that no matter how many new artisanal types come out each year the rest of the world hates eggnog. It’s only kept around as a formality, out of a sense of tradition and duty, because the world loves Christmas. Come Christmas morning the charade is over and it all gets stripped from the shelves and sent into an incinerator or launched into the sun as the rest of the world heaves a massive sigh of relief that they no longer have to pretend. Meanwhile I hate Christmas but love eggnog…. It’s truly a conundrum. I guess I gotta learn how to make my own.

January 2, 2023

Tubi Report: I came in halfway through Tulip Fever, it seemed really good. Just watched Old Enough from 1984 with Rainbow Harvest and now I put on a 1991 Horror movie she was in called Mirror Mirror

January 6, 2023

I just started watching Tank Girl and it got me thinking about the sub genre of post apocalyptic sci-fi I’d call Dry-Fi. So we got Solarbabies, Waterworld, Mad Max series, The Dune movies kinda. What else goes on the dry-fi playlist?

January 14, 2023

Ok I haven’t been posting Tubi picks nearly enough. I watched the Pusher trilogy, a bunch of stuff I’m not remembering right now but the main thing is I finally put Hideaway on without falling asleep because LaPorsha keeps blasting Miranda Sex Garden. It’s pretty rad – crazy ‘90s CGI of hell/afterlife, good goth/industrial soundtrack and I’m kind of obsessed with Rae Dawn Chong. Solid background movie to play while doing other stuff.

January 16, 2023

Update: He’s home!

One of the cats has treed themselves again. We’ve been through this a million times but it never gets easier. They run up in a moment of fear and adrenaline and if that same fear prevents them from climbing back down immediately it takes two whole nights for the hunger to overwhelm the fear. It used to happen from either the neighbor’s dogs or possibly random predators but now it happens from the dog they have lived with for nearly a month but are still afraid of.

He doesn’t even chase them.

At this point I know the timeline but it doesn’t make it any easier. It’s dark now and I can hear Bart crying out periodically but there’s nothing I can do to help him and I need to stay away so he can figure out how to climb down without focusing his energy on crying out to me in the hope that I can somehow save him. Bart fell out of this same tree when he was a little younger and LaPorsha caught him. I don’t know if he would have survived the fall if she hadn’t. He’s just as high.

I’m sick with worry. I keep hearing him cry and imagining him falling and thinking about how scared and hungry and alone he must feel. I want to cry but he’s already doing that and it’s a total waste of energy. This is going to keep happening for as long as we live in the woods with a bunch of indoor/outdoor cats. It’s his second night.

January 18, 2023

Hesher was Home Alone all day and decided to get into the Scarface Double VHS Box Set. This and his bong toy, he’s like a super basic edgy teenager!

January 21, 2023

I never knew that the points on a Siamese get larger and darker as they age, is he going to just be a black cat in a year or two?

January 21, 2023

Sorry this one is a link, it’s public on Facebook at least. It’s a video of Bart the Siamese cat being very careful not to wake the dog. It looks like slow motion but it isn’t.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid036py28HQKB3rLcsmESsWcXr4p3xNE8QJYu6A9jn4MTSZPLx2dJ2FvWzdGUf2bEbrRl&id=100001515336710&mibextid=gtsPdC

January 25, 2023

Tubi pick: five minutes in Warlock is so much better than I remembered. I forgot Julian Sands is in this. I hope they either find him or he doesn’t want them to.

February 4, 2023

Me and Fagin feelin’ it.

February 12, 2023

Remember how Hesher was really into Scarface? Yeah, things have escalated…

February 15, 2023

February 21, 2023

This is my method of catching and releasing bats with no risk of rabies – the shirt prevents it from flying out of the net before I get outside.

February 25, 2023

I don’t know about the Aussie half but Hesher’s Husky half really likes being snowed in like this.

March 5, 2023

Been off Tubi for a bit since I discovered the pirate sites. Boulevard from 2015 with Robin Williams is the kind of crap you can only find on here. It’s about him picking up male prostitutes. The “pimp” scene is hilarious.

September 20, 2023

Liz just came home after being gone a month! She beat Nepthys’ 3 week record!

October 6, 2023

Despite the neon color this is a very witchy net. I bought it for newts but I almost exclusively use it for bats.

November 17, 2023

I was looking for skunks doing handstands and found this truly bonkers BBC video of a spotted skunk taking on b-boys in two of the four elements: breaking and spraying. You’ll have to watch it yourself to see who comes out on top.

The really bizarre part was that the whole reason I was searching in the first place was because I had been in a similar struggle with many of the same tropes being employed in slightly different ways. When I first went to Chicago me and my friend Tim urinated on the side of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. It was Tim’s idea – he said that it would render Wright’s ghost powerless if it ever tried to fuck with us.

I’d been a Wright fanboy since grade school and now that I was reaching an age where I could start traveling and visiting his seminal works piss became my paintbrush in an exercise that was otherwise visual tag collecting. I got a few more around Chicagoland and got the Guggenheim the next time I was in New York. Unfortunately I only got the exterior in a discrete alley spot as I had not yet watched Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 to be inspired by Richard Serra’s descending Vaseline and the far riskier proposition of the central ramp.

I’d always planned to visit Falling Water and make this the jewel of my collection for obvious reasons. Maybe some day.

In 2005 I got to go to Arthur Fest in Barnsdall Art Park to see a bunch of freak folk, doom metal and my recent favorite Beatle Yoko Ono. I wanted to take the opportunity to mark the Hollyhock House but with the crowded festival setting my best chance was to slip behind some of the prodigious landscaping. I’d already started my stream when I realized it had awoken a young spotted skunk who was taking advantage of the same cover vegetation.

I’d seen the handstand display in a taxidermy diorama in a Natural History Museum somewhere so I immediately understood the threat but had already gone too far to curtail my flow and beat a hasty retreat. As the skunk inched toward me in aggression I defended myself the only way I could by advancing my stream into its path as a warning.

We were in a classic “Mexican Standoff” or, in the jargon of the Cold War, a mutually assured destruction scenario. The skunk backed away – I never pissed on it and it never sprayed me but we effectively held each other at bay. As my bladder began to empty I was able to slowly back away then shake off and sheathe my offensive instrument before stepping back into public view.

November 19, 2023

Haven’t done a Tubi write up in a minute. I wanted to watch Ritual of CHUD for some reason but they only had the sequel – Bud the chud. More of a comedy with talking zombies. The whole time I couldn’t shake the feeling that the titular Bud was the same actor as Beef from Phantom of the Paradise. Indeed it was. Not much to say about it beyond that.

November 21, 2023

Hesher is very difficult for me to take pictures of. I don’t really know why but the moment I point my phone at him he always becomes intensely interested in something invisible directly to the left or right of me. Maybe because I’m no longer looking directly at him but at my phone instead he is trying to coyly avoid the phone’s gaze so it can’t see the revenge he is plotting against it

I quite literally don’t know. I’ve never had a dog before.

He likes to pretend to be a car by running very fast on the dirt roads of our mountain. He also tries to chase our car off of it every time we leave but also hates being in it and jumps out the window. I haven’t figured out how to make him not chase it so we have to put him in places where he can’t. Theoretically we could just let him do it but he chases us all the way to the cell phone tower (about a mile) and then takes a shortcut home that goes right by my neighbor’s chickens.

I don’t think he’d kill a chicken but I can’t say for sure. He definitely wouldn’t do anything to the cats but a year and a half later they’re still doing the mean girls thing where they don’t let him sit with them. He kills a lot of moles just like the cats do – nobody eats them. I read that the wild ancestor of the house cat, felis sylvestris, also tends not to eat the moles it kills.

No clue what that’s about.

Anyway it’s almost winter so the power company is up here cutting down trees because they always fall on the power lines. Hesher just started doing this thing where he runs after the power company truck when he hears it in the distance. He did it the other day and I had to walk all the way up to the newt hole before he started pretending to be a car and zooming down the road to me. I walked him home and told him off but he evidently didn’t think much of it.

Not long after that the power company drove back down the mountain and he chased them all the way to the cell phone tower. They also didn’t know how to make him stop chasing them so they put him in their truck and drove to my neighbor’s house to ask who he was. My neighbor sent me this picture – he looked straight at the camera and took a very good picture for him. He looks really proud that he figured out how to make all the truck people and neighbor people he hasn’t met pay a lot of attention to him.

January 15, 2024

Ok, it’s been a really long time since I did a Tubi report but this movie definitely needs to be talked about. Look at the picture – that’s the lead singer of an Australian “metal” band called Black Alice and the star of the flick. If you don’t think you’ll enjoy watching the antics of a hyperactive roided out Bene Gesserit caveman with an Aussie accent for the length of a feature this one’s probably not for you. The plot is a forgettable anti nuclear time travel thingy with a few elaborate sets that look like they were made for metal videos but the music sounds more like synthpop new wave. The goomba is center stage for all of this as it’s a bit of a rock opera and he’s got five or six numbers throughout. Other appealing things are a heavy dose of ‘80s new wave fashion, some early CGI graphics of an animated face and a Rocky horror style drag queen villain/antihero who coordinates outfit changes with his midget sidekick three or four times.

Oh yeah I should add the name – Sons of Steel 1988.

June 23, 2024

If I put a ❤️ or don’t put a ❤️ on your message it’s not that I love you or the message or don’t love you or the message. I mean we talk to eachother with cellphones, what’s not to love? It just means the thing in my hands in an alien and a stranger that I do not know the efficient ways of touching. It is an iPhone X from when I was homeless – older than every cat in my house.

But I know how to touch the cats. Some things make them irritable and they bite me. Sometimes the bite is what they already wanted so I do the “wrong touch” and they can bite “emotional labor”. Sometimes they want a soft Pat where their tail meets their back – a kind of release. my hand on a paw or a paw on my hand. A flat hand in the “paper” position a cat may headbutt.

Anyway I know all about touching the cats. The phone not so much. If we are talking and a heart appears then suddenly goes away it doesn’t mean I hate you. It only means I hate my phone, want to put it down and go check on my cats.

Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

June 23, 2024

Oops trying to find an old picture of my old cat in a cute shirt today. Instead I’m reading old rants from when politics still stabbed me in the heart and I’m crying. It’s like I’m covered in chitin now, what’s it even good for?

June 27, 2024

Another day that I am absolutely thankful for the utter lack of inquisitiveness in the mind of the common Yellowjacket. I could be wrong but my guess is that if I used a stick the length of my arm to hit a honeybee hive they would probably know I had something to do with that and sacrifice some of their lives to sting me in retaliation. A Yellowjacket can sting multiple times and not die but they can’t wrap their heads around the arm length stick.

I feel like they are staring at me with their compound eyes and thinking:

“Ok, this guy’s cool but why does this stick hate us and our children so much?”

July 3, 2024

There is a heatwave in California right now. We are on the upper edge of a weather pattern they are calling a “dome” and also at higher elevation – these two things will make it hotter for us. We are also in the middle of 20 acres of virgin forest and have a spring running through the property – these things help mitigate the heat. Today is going to hit 109 so for the first time this Summer we are using the house AC and not just a free standing swamp cooler unit.

Some folks might remember a video of a hissing bat from when the cats started spending a lot of time in the attic. We had to start keeping them out for a few reasons. First off it gets really hot in there so we need to keep the door closed and don’t want anybody getting trapped in there. Olive Noodle, the Russian Blue girl, likes to sleep deep in the pink fiberglass insulation in there is another one. Her fur seems to be thick enough that it wasn’t harming her but we didn’t want her transferring it to us when she jumps in the bed.

Most importantly the cat jerks tore down an insulated tube for our central air and I needed to fix it and make sure they didn’t tear it down again. Fagin is most obsessed with going in there. Fagin is, for want of a better word, maladjusted. I think it started when his mother, a tweaker motel room cat, stopped feeding him because of the aggressive way he tore at her nipples. I bottle fed him, getting my hands torn up in the process, but he’s not attached to me at all – he’s attached to LaPorsha. He used to spend a lot of time as a kitten either laying in her pants while she used the toilet or suckling on her sweaters: probably surrogate mom stuff.

Demanding LaPorsha’s attention doesn’t go well for anybody and it’s mostly the same with Fagin. He is the most status obsessed cat in the house, there’s other reasons for this but this is already long, and attacks the other cats if he sees them getting attention. The attic became his “Emo teenage bedroom” this Winter and he became very vocal about asking me to open it and close it behind him. His request calls began to resemble English sentences and I thought he might soon break through and learn to parrot speech but then I noticed the torn down HVAC tube – this is why we can’t have nice things like talking cats and teenage bedrooms.

I woke up early today to fix the tube. LaPorsha was certain Fagin was on the back porch but as soon as I opened the attic door he appeared at my side and poised to jump. To clarify the door to the attic is in a wall but elevated about four feet off the floor. I quickly closed the door but he was already jumping and got caught in the edge and knocked to the floor – nothing that could hurt him beyond humiliation. I then had to pick him up, another thing he views as humiliation, to send him out the back door so I could fix the tube.

He will likely be in a very bad mood today.

July 19, 2024

Even though the kittens live a few miles away it’s been a bit difficult to see them for two years. It’s hard to tell LaPorsha to make the extra stop after a full day of errands Northward. When they got around eight weeks old we rehomed them as park ambassadors for a nearby Railroad themed Glamping Park where guests sleep in old cabooses and box cars.

I suggested Burlington for the grey girl and Santa Fe for the orange boy but they went more populist and picked Bonnie and Clyde respectively. The names did seem to fit them.

We actually did visit them a few weeks after dropping them off – at which point they were happily living on shelves in a rear office linen closet, sheets and towels respectively. At this time LaPorsha suggested we might bring Nepthys, their mother, to see how they were faring but I reminded her that Nepthys had reached a life stage where she was neither fond of car rides nor her own offspring once they had aged into relative self sufficiency.

I know our decision to leave Nepthys fertile for a single round of queening was a controversial one but after the city born foundling (her mother abandoned and I bottle fed her) proved to be almost ideally suited to the rural forest indoor/outdoor life we felt like a litter’s worth of her prime genetics would be a boon to both our home and the surrounding community. Two of her children: Bart (Siamese male) and Olive Noodle (Russian Blue female) are still happy, albeit altered, members of our household. The one with the pattern reminiscent of the new, and morally disturbing, wild hybrids sadly disappeared when they first started venturing outside – most likely to a predatory bird.

Back to Bonnie and Clyde: this was our first attempt to check on them in two years. We pulled into the parking lot and saw a “Closed” sign in the Office door where we’d brought and visited the kittens in the past. I got out of the car and walked carefully and awkwardly around the area. An older woman sat on a bench facing away from me and looking at a smart phone screen. I was on the verge of engaging her in conversation when the Office Door opened and a person stepped outside.

She was a young woman with long, straight dirty blonde hair and the style of designer jeans that look like they were attacked by a pack of horizontally oriented tigers that despise denim but stop just short of being bloodthirsty. I asked her about the cats that lived in the park. She said cats had been living in the park until recently but guests had taken them and they now lived in houses. I asked if they had been catnapped and she reassured me that all human parties had been on the same page regarding this rehoming. As is often my style I now offered a piece of information I should have led with: that we had brought cats to live in the park two years ago.

“Oh, you mean Bonnie and Clyde?”

I affirmed I did. Sadly I learned that after two very happy years Clyde had passed away quite recently while Bonnie had wandered off the property some time in the first year. Neither cat had been altered and the general consensus was that Bonnie had been pregnant – probably by her brother although the possibility of a guest traveling with a fertile male cat can not totally be eliminated. It is a common phenomenon for a queening female to range outward in search of a human household amenable to establishing a new colony.

In fact Bonnie’s mother, Nepthys, had attempted to do exactly that early in her own pregnancy. We did not know at that point that Nepthys was pregnant but she had often gone ranging and reappeared after periods as long as three weeks to a month. Nepthys has a strong bond with me as I bottle fed her but I disappear on her too and cats can’t keep track of days after three or so – ultimately we are both outdoor cats.

This is where the emotional throttle gets pushed to what I understand to be the maximum: after a couple of anxious weeks LaPorsha yelled for me to come outside one morning and from the front porch I saw Nepthys slowly limping up the driveway. Her legs were clearly undamaged but due to hunger, thirst, pain and exhaustion she was moving extremely slowly. The most striking thing was the odd angle she held her head at while staring at the forest floor – clearly she could not freely move her neck.

I gathered Nepthys in my arms and ran her into the house. I spent the day feeding her water, milk and tuna cupped in the palm of my hand – more or less the way I fed her when she outgrew the bottle but wasn’t ready for cat cereal. Once she was purring, hydrated and nourished I started cleaning her wounds and realized that deeper ones on each side of her neck were weeping pus. We took her to the vet the next day where her wounds were cleaned and irrigated and they shared the theory that most likely an owl had tried to snatch her – she had scratches down the length of her body but nothing nearly as deep as the ones on her neck.

It’s a miracle she survived. She was completely healed by the time the kittens were born and has stayed closer to home base since this ordeal although she loves her outdoor time. LaPorsha calls her my “security guard” because when I go outside without her she cries at the window until she is let outside to follow me. Now that Hesher, our Healer-Husky dog, lives in the yard she silently creeps up then suddenly appears by my side. She is the color of the forest and the most cautious cat I’ve ever known – while most will boldly step or even leap onto my sleeping body she gently nudges me with her forepaws as if attempting to gently rouse me from sleep, each foot testing a surface several times before committing her weight, negligible as it is, to any potential perch.

Nepthys was a good mother. Long time readers will know that my favorite energy drink was called “Nature is One Bad Mother” and several queens I’ve hosted have also been. The one thing she could not do was move her kittens by picking them up in her mouth. LaPorsha tried to model it for her, gently mewing with the scruff of a tiny kitten’s nape held in her human lips but Nepthys never even tried. She is a very small cat – even 75% passes a test as far as school is concerned and with human aid nature can be even more forgiving. I think Bonnie is alive out there and Nepthys has grandchildren if not great grandchildren. There are several houses and a trailer park quite close to the Railroad Park.

I hope her new people had her altered.

I was silently praying throughout the conversation that the friendly employee would not tell me how Clyde had died but I think he meant too much to her to keep that secret. After a happy life as a homebody he had wandered out to the freeway and died the death of countless hordes of his anonymous feline brethren since the dawn of the automobile age. He was an orange cat, which rarely tracks with being risk adverse, and besides that unaltered. In his first Summer a fertile sister had allowed him to answer nature’s call within the safety of the park but in his second, the year in which tomcats generally become either wise or dead, he went out ranging:

“It’s a tough decision because they’re better mousers if you don’t have them altered”,

I lied. It sprang to my lips as naturally as breath even though I’ve never heard it and to the best of my knowledge it wasn’t true. I couldn’t say that I wished someone had cared enough about him to have him altered so that he’d still be alive after she’d been so kind to me and generous with information. I was in no place to judge – we could have just as well came to pick him up and do it ourselves or had it done before dropping the siblings off but we didn’t know if they needed two mousers or a dynasty. She pulled up the last videos of him eating scraps of string cheese – just like LaPorsha had given him when he was a baby. He had become heavy and round faced, so unlike Nepthys and his gentle father Gawain.

I wished… so many things, that I had pushed harder to drop in sooner and gotten to know him as a mature cat, that we had considered vicinity to the freeway when selecting what seemed like a perfect home, that we had demanded a promise that the cats would be altered, after kittens if necessary, but eventually, that life was not cruel or death was not, ultimately, a thing I am comfortable with. That the Universe had not required this of me and turned me into this monster, this human shovel, this psychopomp. That grief could be a thing I could have the way I imagine other people have it and not just feel like a tiny aspect of my job, my mission, my reason for being born in the first place.

On the drive home LaPorsha saw what she described as a tweaker with a monstrous face the moment she turned onto our mountain. For this reason we drove toward the vacant home of our nearest neighbor uphill in case it might look like someone was squatting it. For the second time since moving to this mountain we saw two bear cubs run across the road. I looked back into the woods and yelled for LaPorsha to stop the car. She was afraid but I assured her we were safe, took her hand and walked back the way we’d came. Quite unlike myself I got both a picture and a video – one cub watching from the tree line and the other dropping from a tree. Our dog was howling in the distance, the mother bear was nowhere to be seen.

All of this made LaPorsha extremely anxious – that we might be attacked, that Hesher already had been. I was preternaturally calm – I know black bears and that only my fellow men are threats. They had gotten my Reddit account of ten years banned for explaining this to them, among other things, “promoting hate” is what they called explaining facts and debunking misogynist lies. Paradoxically they had used stochastic violence to demand that others, women mostly, pretend to feel safe around them.

I knew we were safe – less than a mile as the crow flies from the very thoroughfare that had ended Clyde’s life but somehow here, at that axis mundi, the one true center of the wilderness…

Epilogue: Things have been quite quiet. Hesher has a new bed but does not sleep on it yet. We had to clean the kitchen due to ants and found two honey jars and one apricot jelly the social troopers had made their way inside of.

We decided to leave them for the bears far out in the woods, towards the part of the mountain no one lives on. Presumably Cinnamon, a frequent visitor before we secured our trash, and her cubs. When we checked last night one jar was taken. A mouth to carry and two hands to walk. We’ll check again soon.

Fagin’s behavior is still a problem and we are working on not making me the only disciplinarian. Hesher seems disinterested in his bed, maybe I should move it. The nearby fires have been contained and all is well. It’s been a minute since I watched Tubi. Always happy for recommendations.