And now for something completely different: this is Callie the Wonder Cat. She’s from San Luis, Colorado, which ought to tell you something, except it won’t unless you live here. For well over a year, she was my wife’s “studio cat” next door, a role she undertook quite willingly after having been enticed half-starved from out in the cold. So Callie’s been places and seen a thing or two.

When we first found her, or was it the other way around, our neighbor at the time thought the name was spelled “Kali” instead of the more obvious appellation for a calico cat. (Ah, Taos.) She’s an independent animal and almost never meows, employing a ridiculously endearing “prrrrt” sound instead. Maybe that goes with the breed, whatever it is. She doesn’t much like to be picked up, but loves to be scratched. Accordingly, we developed a trick.

My dresser in the bedroom is an old chest-high model that belonged to my grandmother. One day I saw Callie sitting on the floor beside it looking up. “UP, SIMBA!” I commanded, in the manner of the old lion-tamers in the circus, snapping my fingers over the dresser — and right away she leaped, WHOOSH, all the way to the top! That deserved recognition, so I performed a little ritual I invented when we first brought her over to the house and she was scared and frightened. It consists of my scratching her along her back from her head to her tail while she walks back and forth, this repeating over and over until I’ve finished this song:

“Callie-Wallie*, Callie-Wallie
Callie-Wallie, Callie-O
Callie-Wallie, Callie-Wallie
Callie-Wallie, here we go!

Callie-Wallie, Callie-Wallie
Callie-Wallie has big fur
Callie-Wallie, Callie-Wallie
Callie-Wallie, we like her!”

Which drives her nuts. (I know. By now it’s probably driving you crazy too, but in a different way. Sorry.) But this is how you train a lion. She got very, very good at this, too. I could snap my fingers and get her to jump up on chairs, to the top of a bar stool, back down to the coffee table, and then up to the bar stool again. Each time I had to give her an abbreviated version of the routine, of course. And the dresser thing with full ritual went down every night.

I’ve lost control, however, and it isn’t pretty. She doesn’t respond to finger-snaps any more. Instead, she positions herself on the floor beside the dresser and waits for me to walk past. If I hesitate for a millisecond in mid-stride, she makes that “prrrrt” noise and jumps up on the dresser, whereupon I have to sing the stupid song and scratch her until it’s over. How can I not?

Damn cat’s got me and won’t let go!

* Pronounced with hard “a,” as in “Sally.”

Post from: FarrFeed

Up, Simba!

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It doesn’t look like they’re going to, but I sure wish they would.

Just a short one this morning, and overtly political for a change, because I can’t shut up about the way the Democrats and “progressive” blogs are getting all misty-eyed over health care “reform.” Just as I suspected, a glance at the House bill shows a planned $400 billion cut in “Medicare expenses,” which can’t be good. The bill does nothing to hold down the cost of private insurance, and the weak public option is a joke that could end up costing more than private insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

I call it the Insurance Company Enrichment Act. True, they won’t be able to deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions, but there’s nothing to keep premiums from skyrocketing in response. The added layers of complexity the bill envisions will only add more overhead to the already ridiculous pricing Americans have to pay. In short, the bill is a fraud and a sham. And I haven’t even mentioned the step backwards in abortion rights.

The problem is that this entrenches a failed system of health care delivery and does nothing to reduce expenses for American families. The insurance companies themselves are the problem, as no other developed nation in the world has a for-profit health insurance industry. Without the courage to put the insurers out of business with a true single-payer system, the effort is wasted. And to top it all off, they may well wreck Medicare in the process. That mandate is going to be a vote-killer, too. It’s like the Democrats have a death wish…

Finally, for anyone raising the “perfect being the enemy of the good” argument, I say that the time for incrementalism is passed. We know what’s wrong and how to fix it, so we don’t have any excuse. Why in heaven’s name do we give money to insurance companies at all?

Why not just pay the doctors?!?

UPDATE: Here’s a lady doctor and lecturer at Harvard Medical School who makes great sense: “Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?” I think you know the answer.

Post from: FarrFeed

Kill the Bill! [Updated]

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Slow learners take more hits. And here I thought I was smart!

Perhaps a simple “no!” is all that’s needed:

No, I will not take that path.

No, I don’t believe that.

No, I will not demean myself a moment more.

And then move on. That’s the hard part, moving on without looking back over my shoulder. But an emergency is now at hand.

For a week and a half, I’ve had what might be a form of neurological infection. Shingles, perhaps, without a rash but like a band of pain around my torso. No, not cardiovascular-related, just sensitive skin that’s painful to the touch. It tracks my daily mood swings like a curse. As soon as I feel lighter, the sensation vanishes, but take on the mantle of a victim, and it comes rushing back. They’re inextricably connected. Pull on a thread, it tugs immediately in another place. I have generated the perfect self-monitoring condition, and it will not let me be or fake my way to happiness. It’s like an invisible dog that rips me with its fangs whenever I go off the path. And this is physical, mind you, as obvious as anything can get. Who knows what else is in on the action?

It seems I can no longer function as a cynical emotional orphan. My body won’t allow it!

Post from: FarrFeed

Art Guilt IV: One World, One Heart, Make Art

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Oh, it was a struggle today. The urge to strike back at virtually everything was at full roar. Amazingly, I mostly didn’t, but the strain is palpable and weighs me down like a blanket of bricks. This too shall pass, of course, and I wish it would hurry the hell up.

Just a few days ago I was all sweetness and light — no, really — laughing at the foibles of others, but today I wanted to commit mayhem over social media updates, of all things. Can you believe that? I follow some of the nicest people in the world, but when they tweet about things like their daily horoscope and whether their plane just landed, I want to bludgeon them senseless. I almost did, too, sitting here composing the most deadly, acidic, satirical put-downs the world has ever known. I sat and sat, revising and refining. They were absolutely brilliant. In the end, though, I just deleted everything and moved on, sating my blood lust by commenting darkly on a couple of blogs where nobody knows me.

Ooorg. Such a waste of time and energy…

Heck, I almost blew up at clients today. For that matter, I did half-way blow up at a couple of folks. (They’re all out to get me, it’s a frigging conspiracy.) Our landlord died a couple years ago, you know. That’s not a non-sequitur, but I wish it were. In that regard and others, I feel a dozen stories coming on that are better left untold because of what they do to me if I’m not drunk. They’re good ones, though, and most of you would think they were hilarious or at least find the spectacle of me foaming at the mouth amusing. I’m not going to tell them, however, not now. Maybe after we move away somewhere. TAOS stories! In a place as dark as this, they build up.

November has been nice and warm so far. It’s like a dare: “You’re not snowed in yet! Whatcha gonna DO, then?”

I’ll just have to find a way to write about it all. I’m so tired of holding back.

Post from: FarrFeed

Dangerous John

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Today was just plain forgettable. When my fellow countrymen are moved to equate health care with pictures of piled-up bodies of concentration camp inmates, it gets me thinking of relocating to within a week’s kayak or sailboat journey of our northern border. (Something small, to hide from helicopters…) But maybe I just miss the water, eh?

Sometime around noon, I had about half an hour to kill. For reasons known only to little baby Jesus, I chose to spend it in the WalMart parking lot. I’d actually intended to go score some legal pads and microfiber car cleaning towels, efficient and manly person that I am, but a sudden strange fatigue came over me, and I couldn’t bear the thought of standing in line or breathing that indoor air. It was an unseasonably warm day, and I rolled down the window. A few feet away, this is what I saw:

About a year ago (?), the local WalMart completed a fancy makeover. Some hotshot consultant or landscaping contractor must have convinced them to “green” up the joint by planting trees in the middle of the asphalt parking lot. Many of them, however, look just like this now. Note the expensive drip irrigation system hose. Note the curbing around the tree that takes up parking space. And note where overhanging bumpers have bashed and girdled the poor tree, now crispy dead and nevermore to bloom or shade a goddamned thing. I thought this was fascinating and dredged up the stamina to walk around the building with my camera. Yes, I got stared at but no one called the cops, and I managed to avoid going inside. Who needs legal pads, anyway?

When they first “planted” these trees, I shook my head. What kind of highly-paid colossal ignorance is responsible for thinking that all a tree needs is a hole to poke its head out of? And what kind of idiots would think good of WalMart for this silliness? It’s not just WalMart, though. You see this kind of thing everywhere:

“You want plants? Fine, here you go!”

“But they’ll just die there…”

“Shut the hell up, you ungrateful commie bastard!”

Oh well. At least I can take a hot bath now and see if Friday turns out any better.

Post from: FarrFeed

American Metaphor

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The plumber put in a new water heater yesterday. It took almost forever.

I know it sounds impossible, but the rusty gas-fired unit that stood next to the sink in our kitchen [left] may have been 30 years old. Every fitting was corroded, caked with mineral deposits, and fearsome to behold. Some things broke. The hardest chore was emptying the tank so he could move it. He tried everything from pressure to pumping and back again. Finally he removed the drain fitting and found that the bottom of the tank was filled with “rocks.” When he punched through with a screwdriver, a torrent of gorp came spitting out. The symbolism was as heavy as the mess.

After he’d hauled the thing out of the way, I had to clean up the now-exposed corner. Matted ribbons of cobwebs hung everywhere. I could see concrete blocks that had never been painted (too hard to reach behind the heater). Where another plumber had punched a hole through the old adobe wall to run the pipes many years ago, a large pile of adobe dirt was left. Mixed with the water already spilled, it had turned into a pile of soupy mud. It’s always about mud here, isn’t it?

We went outside and unboxed the new water heater in the sun. It was gleaming white and beautiful.

“¡Que bonita!” I exclaimed.

“Que linda,” he said, correcting my diction. “Cosa nueva muy linda.”

“Cosa nueva muy linda,” I repeated. “¡Sí!”

Eventually he new water heater was in place, if not yet hooked up. There was much cutting and glueing, replacing of valves, wrapping with plumber’s tape, and then taking it all apart again. There were leaks when we turned the water on, so these processes repeated. A gas man came over to fire it up. The two of them were old friends. The new water heater was taller than the old one, and the chimney pipe coming down from the ceiling was too long. The gas man had fancy cutting tools in his truck and cut the double-walled pile down to fit, drilled holes, and screwed everything together tight, better than I ever would have done. The two gentlemen then spent considerable time instructing me in Spanglish on everything about the installation that was now illegal. Old Taos, all the way.

It had been quite a day. I’d been standing by the whole time and more than once was needed. I hadn’t actually done much, but my back was aching, probably as a result of tensing up over barely-missed disasters. This is such an outlaw arrangement (most old adobes are) that anything could happen. My problem was, I knew too much. In the end, though, it worked, thank God!

It took me about an hour to clean up afterwards and put the kitchen back together, and then I took my first hot bath in four and a half days. I remembered that I’d told the plumber that washing in the sink with water heated on the stove was getting old, although I knew a lot people our age grew up that way.

“I did,” he said. Which led to:

“One of my first jobs, I was a sheepherder in Colorado. They asked me, what did I need, I said a horse, a dog, and a gun. I went up there with 2,000 sheep. The dog did all the work. A horse, a dog, and a gun. I went there with 2,000 sheep and came back with 4,000. They gave me a $50 bonus.”

It’s good to be young, isn’t it? (The universe will provide.)

Post from: FarrFeed

November Spring

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Living in Taos is like being keelhauled through a dip tank. In the end, however, there are no garrapatas.* That’s what I always say, anyway. Since last week, at least. But I have discovered a wonderful thing.

My tuner came today. A Boss TU-2. I thought I wouldn’t like it, seeing as the old Fender T-10 I murdered was nice and curvy, whereas the TU-2 is like a little metal brick. Ah, but functionally speaking, a metal brick is a good thing to employ. This thing looks like it would be hard to break. The pedal is mechanically satisfying. Fortunately, I also like the way it tunes. I’m a sucker for flashing lights.

It was so easy to tune my 12-string. I have a musician friend who says tuners are a highly irrational personal choice, with some models working for you and others, equally accurate, just impossible to use. He may be right. I got on fine with the T-10, but the new one is easier for me somehow. Isn’t that weird? The sensitivity of the device, the dynamics of the indicator lights, and the motor coordination in my fingertips on the tuning keys equal faster tuning. The guitar has never sounded so good, either, almost certainly due to more accurate tuning, duh.

As you players know, when a good instrument hits a certain point of happy tuning in a warmed-up state, the sound swells somehow. It resonates more. The thing you’re holding suddenly has a voice. When that happens, you just want to play it, so you can hit those strings and hear that sound again, shape it with all the tricks you know, and taste all the flavors. Musicians know this, but it works a lot like sex. Sometimes on a big electric 12-string, it even LOOKS like sex. A glorious loud progression came to me today that had me hitting a C chord way up on the neck, over and over and over. I just couldn’t get enough of that C chord, and hitting it cleanly was a visceral thrill. To stretch things out, I’d wander a way from that part of it for a while until I just couldn’t stand it, and then come whamming back…

Heh.

Me, I jammed and practiced for almost two hours. My own spontaneous inventions plus “Pipeline,” “Surfing the Net,” and “Wipeout.” (Gotta keep up with the surf music for Los Changos del Mar.) And the guitar stayed in tune. It usually does, mostly, but this has to do with that zone I talked about earlier. Get mamma goin’, she stays in a good mood.

I’m completely exhausted, too. Every ten minutes I say to myself, man, I’m really looking forward to a hot bath tonight. And then I remember that the water heater is broken, and I’ll have to boil water in the kitchen for the bathroom sink. Oh boy, me and my washcloth.

Now then, what were you saying?

* ticks

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More Room at the Taos Naval Yard

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Ravens circling overhead…

The best plumber in the world just dropped by to eyeball the dead water heater in the kitchen. I’d trust him with my life. He’s only a few years older than I am (”I’m surprised that I’m still here!”), but this is like having an uncle or an older cousin fix the plumbing. [Plugging in the family juice...] He radiates compassion and responsibility. I wish I had more work for him to do, besides the heater and the bathtub pipes. He was driving a new Dodge pickup this morning, but you can see his actual work truck here.

Today he showed up an hour earlier than pre-arranged, after calling first. My wife was just about to wash her hair in the sink with water heated in a kettle on the stove, so she got dressed quickly and put a bandanna on her head. It’s been years since I’ve seen her like that. The plumber came in and greeted her like a long-lost friend. She looked so pure and strong.

I thought my wife would be embarrassed by a previous post, but instead last night she suggested a couple of edits that made sense and told me, “It’s your turn now.” This morning she also said to cross a certain realtor/rental agent off our list because of how the lady talked to me yesterday on the phone. Good! (GOD, it’s nice to have some backup.)

I notice every laid-on hand, every morsel of support, and have a place to put these things. The fire in the woodstove is plenty hot. When I walked out to the woodpile in the sunny frosty air, I knew I was in charge and picked out exactly what I wanted.

It’s the second of November, but this feels like spring.

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I am So Lucky

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[I have to go there to let the tiger out. Keelhauling through the unconscious follows:]

Perfect teeth: that’s always the giveaway, perfect teeth. In older people especially, shiny white teeth equal money and complacency, freedom from want. The ability to pay without reservations, second thoughts, or worrying about the bills. I watched the PBS American Masters show about Joan Baez at PBS.org last night, but all I could think of was her teeth. Her ex-husband, David Harris, had perfect teeth as well. Dylan I don’t know about, because he didn’t smile, but David Crosby did, and his teeth were just great, too.

I’ve been sick for about a week. Nothing major, but still enough to stop me in my tracks: sore and tender underarms, general aches and pains around my chest, feeling chilled, a scratchy throat, exhausted. Every day I’ve had at least a two-hour nap. I’ve done no work, no writing. I can’t kiss my wife — might infect her, if there’s anything infectious — can’t send either one of us to a doctor or the hospital, who could possibly pay?

The illness, if that’s what it is, is like depression turned into a physical condition. After watching two consecutive movies on the Internet one afternoon and muting the inner dialogue by focusing on something else, I suddenly felt fine. But by the evening, I was sick again. A vortex of self-flagellation that I have to kill. I really, really do, but that’s not easy. Last night I went to bed quite early because my whole body felt like ice, and everything I read online or saw in print just made me feel worse. There was simply nothing to do, nothing to warm my carcass or my soul. Those perfect teeth. Those perfect goddamn teeth.

The water heater died on Friday. Our landlady lives in Pennsylvania or in a ski resort condo somewhere in America and just got back to me today. (I’d already decided to have a new water heater installed next week, anyway.) Meanwhile, my brother called about his check, the one I send him on my mother’s bank account in Tucson. He lives on $500 a month, with VA health care, in a rent-free trailer owned by her in the most depressing environment I can imagine, a so-called retirement community south of town filled with bitter Anglo refugees from colder climes who think everything that’s wrong with Arizona equals “Mexicans.” When my mother dies, the money stops, and what in God’s name is he going to do?

My mother has become the crazy old lady no one likes. Every time I see someone’s older mom with twinkling eyes filled with love and gratitude, I feel like a member of another species. I have an aunt in Maine who must be 99 by now, wealthy once but drained now by circumstance and greedy people she adores. We haven’t talked in six or seven years. My family is a larger version of the same vortex of abuse that sucked me in all week and constitutes a major reason why I had to flee from Maryland. (Family tombstones lie unswept under layers of bird shit in a cemetery on the Eastern Shore…) There’s little in my heritage to look back on with love or pride or even sense of origin. There’s hardly any heritage at all, to tell the truth. Stolen by dysfunction.

I was born a little Michelangelo, da Vinci, Edison, Daniel Boone or Lindbergh, and all anyone tried to do was kill me. (That’s not hyperbole. I had a dream once about my father standing by the shore beside a pile of sand with a little boy buried underneath.) No one ever put an arm around my shoulder and told me, “You can do it!” No one ever made it plain that even if I failed at something, I would still be loved. Exactly the opposite, in fact: whatever happened to me was my fault, and if I didn’t measure up, too bad.

None of this makes sense, none of it.

My father died at 67 from lung cancer, though I’m surprised he lived that long. He hated everything, it seemed, especially himself, and had the darkest possible outlook on humanity and the world. It’s plain as day to me that he ordered up his own demise, much in the same way that I’ve ordered up whatever is bothering me now. These things don’t “just happen,” we imagine them deep down inside.

God knows what’s happening to America, then. The country seems so much like a reflection of my own family these days. No compassion, love, or sense of being able to make things better. It’s like a national terminal illness is the next thing coming down the pike.

But here’s the key, I think: my own attitudes reflect the injuries I received, so all of the preceding is suspect! I don’t trust the negativity at all, even as it sends me shivering to bed.

I saw the old home movies from Joan Baez’s childhood. Like my family, hers moved every four years or so. But for them, those were happy times, encouraging years, with a sense of adventure and abandon. The road trip scenes were very telling: instead of crying children in the back seat getting smacked, there were laughing sisters singing songs. One clip showed her father dancing for the camera at a rest stop somewhere in the desert. No wonder something precious bloomed. No wonder she had the strength and spirit to prevail. No wonder creativity and talent thrived. No wonder at all.

I want to strip out everything. Every last scrap of family corruption, every piece of painful lore and bloody memory. They tried to kill me, and they’re killing me still. I want to clean out every cubby, every shit-fouled stable stall, all the stinking vomit in old wastebaskets. IT’S JUST NOT TRUE, I KNOW IT’S NOT, IT DOESN’T APPLY TO ME! It may have made me what I am today, but that’s as far as it goes, and I’m not dead yet.

You think this is easy? You don’t know. You don’t know the half of it. I have to live like I’m a visitor from another planet, like I fell out of a UFO and look like everybody else but have no history. I have to build my own mother and father on the inside. I have to heal and be the one I truly am underneath the baggage. I have one more chance, and this is it. This is why I’m on the planet, this and this alone. Not to be rich and famous, necessarily, but free. To show that I can do it, that anyone can do it. To be whatever I am without blame or resentment, to be as close to spirit in a shaking human body as I can get, and I have to do it all right now, in this lifetime, before I fade away, or else there isn’t any point.

Not for only ME, you understand, but for the whole damn world.

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American Death Song

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