Wonderoom

I did a couple of things that I haven’t done in a while today.  Things which used to be a common occurrence for me.  One, I took a walk.  A ramble.  A stroll around the neighborhood.  Another, I started a reading a book.  Not just any book, but a book of essays.  Not something off a website.  Not a story to lose myself in, but the kind of book that really get me thinking.  In this case it is Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit.  A book about walking.

I definitely need to get out into the world.  I’m not exactly agoraphobic.  I don’t break out in a sweat or anything at the prospect of walking out the door.  More like agoravoidic.  Agorapathy.  I don’t get out enough.  The walls of my tiny apartment close in on me sometimes in a most unpleasant way.  It’s just that I can’t think of anywhere to go.  Everything seems so product oriented.

This paucity of destinations brings the word discombobulated to mind.  I’ve always assumed that discombomulate was a perfectly respectable, ancient, learned word.  But this is not the case.  Discombobulate originated in the early 1800’s in America.  Something along the lines of discomfit or discompose thrown into the frontier verbal meat-grinder of young America.  Discombobulate sounds like what it is.  It is also what I am.  Discombobulated, confused, lost, detached, reassembled from places disparate.  When one is feeling like this one wants roots, feelers to stick into the ground and soak up nutrients.  Some ground of being.

Which brings me back to walking.  I’ve always thought about my mind as a series of inner landscapes…mountains and oceansides that I visit in memories and dreams.  Solnit reasons that the “mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.”  So walking is a way to visit your mind.  A way to ground yourself by literally moving over the ground.  My mind and my sense of self is not separate from my surroundings.

Chicken and dumplings, if done correctly, is not only a comfort food, not only meant to be savored, but it is something meant to be wallowed in, like you were suddenly an inch tall and swimming in warmish soup. The broth is everything. Fresh chicken allowed to burble with celery, carrot, onion. An indolent chicken. A lazy chicken. Boiled at medium low heat for a long, long time until the flavor is sucked even from the bones.

The flavors in chicken and dumplings come from all over the world. Developed by many different people. Anonymous people from cultures distant in both time and place. Chickens originally came from Malaysia, domesticated in India. The Romans were known to divine the future by observing chicken pecking patterns. I’m sure with a little research I could get a more complete picture of this. Guys in togas watching a chicken peck at food. No more bizarre I suppose than observing entrails or tea leaves or lines on a palm. What did it mean when the chickens pecked each other. Or your hand?

When I get my chicken it’s already dead. Packaged. I don’t have to wring it’s neck or pluck it’s feathers. I needn’t concern myself with pecking. The pecking order was set long before the chickens or I were born. The lives of chickens, by and large, have been subsumed under human necessity and desire. We want to taste chicken. We want things that taste like chicken, so we control every aspect of chicken lives to feed our protein needs. I don’t want to know what it’s life was like before I put it in the pot.

The color of chicken flesh and the color of my fingers is not so very different. Once, I prepared food for a catering function involving roughly forty stuffed cornish hens where I had to cut them just so, shove things inside their empty carcasses, and tie their little legs together with string. After a while my fingers were quite numb. There was a very real danger of slicing my cold, numb fingers with the sharp catering knives. It started to freak me out that I couldn’t feel my fingers, that chicken flesh and fingers had begun to blend.

Anyway, you cut the chicken into pieces, separating at the joint. Put the pieces in a large pot, and add enough water to cover. Next come the onions. One or two. A friend of mine once compared a girl she was in love with (or at least lust) to an onion. You peel away the layers, one after another, until there is nothing left. All facade, no heart. The ancient Egyptians, on the other hand, admired the onion for it’s combination of layers and spherical shape. A reflection of the structure of the universe.

Prepare the garlic at the same time as the onion. I learned in my twenties to lay a wide knife on top of a garlic clove and smack it to release it’s outer layers. Unfortunately, using the same technique on people is somewhat problematic. You have to find other ways to see if they have a heart, or are empty inside. Chop the garlic into small pieces. Cut the onion into large chunks. Add.

Slice a few stalks of celery and toss them in. Not too much, because celery can overwhelm the flavor. Two or three carrots in large pieces. Some basil. Salt. Bay leaves. Mom used to tell me that getting the bay leaf in your bowl was lucky, make a wish and all that. Was it lucky because you noticed it was there before you choked on it? Did she get this knowledge of luck from the misty mists of time, mom to mom over the ages back to England, to Rome? Or did she read it in Betty Crocker? She doesn’t remember.

After you boil, you allow it to cool and pick the meat off the bones. Remove all the unwanted carcass parts. I also remove the carrot and celery. They have fulfilled their role and deserve a dignified burial in the trash. Otherwise they just get in the way. You can’t allow them to get in the way of proper texture. It’s just that kind of world.

The next job is to make the dumplings. Two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking soda, a few smidgens of salt, and some ground clove. Not too much clove, not too little. Cloves are powerful, enticing. A man named Albuquerque, successor to Vasco de Gama, discovered that cloves came from the Spice Islands (the Molaccas). One of Albuquerque’s officers, named Magellan, set off on a voyage around the world to find a new route to this seductive siren of a spice. He never returned. Be careful with the cloves. I don’t think grandmom would approve of my fiddling around with cloves in the dumplings.

Anyway, you take this mixture of dry things and add in one third cup vegetable shortening. Good old fashioned artery clogging fun. You thoroughly mix it in. I like to just mash it together with my hands, but you can use a biscuit cutter or a fork. Start adding milk until you’ve got a nice doughy thing, roll it thinner than you want to bother with and cut it into squares. Dump the dumplings into the boiling chicken broth. Let the broth boil over the dumplings, let it evelope the dumplings in it’s bubbly embrace. They will soak up the chickeny goodness in less than fifteen minutes.

After a respectful amount of bubbling and cooling time, you are ready to sit down to a bowl of my childhood. Not only that, but you are ready to have a bowl of something that I like to cook for friends, a bowl of comfort, a bowl of memory.

Three billion years ago. The Earth turned faster, and the moon hung larger in the sky. A month was not a month, and a day was not a day. A breath was no breath at all. Not for my kind, the oxygen breathers. The world wasn’t ready for us yet, not primed for our greedy inhalations. In meditation, some say first and foremost is the breath. Breathe in and breathe out. Everything found in that simple action. Life itself in the breath. And for this breath we must thank the many blue-green algae that first released oxygen into the atmosphere as a waste product. We depend on the waste product of other living things. Volatile oxygen, reacting with everything in sight, making us possible.

And so I contemplate a hunk of banded iron formation. Glimpsing a world before conscious thought, before much of anything. A too large moon and a mass of algae. Pre-Eden. A world full of so much possibility that it is empty of almost everything. Recorded in bands of alternating hematite and chert. Red and black, formed because the oxygen released by these primeval algae was bonding with iron dissolved in the oceans and forming layers of hematite all over the world. Oscillations of rock, billions of years old.

I’ve had the same digital clock for maybe twenty years. I wake up in the middle of the night and see this red blur, numbers indiscernible without my glasses. When there’s an electrical glitch, a black out of some kind, it starts blinking on and off, like any respectable clock. On and off, letting me know that something is not quite right. I obsess sometimes when setting the alarm, worried that I put it on pm instead of am, or that I forgot to set it at all.

Of course I don’t really seem to need the clock. I wake up right before the alarm goes off and wait for it to ring. Sometimes I wonder if I could do away with it altogether like I did with watches. Just trust myself to wake at the right time. I’ve had it so long I think it’s bloody red numbers are permanently part of my psyche. My inner digital readout.

We’ve come a long way since Stonehenge and sundials. Wearing amazing devices strapped to our wrists, accurate to the micromillisecond. We study oscillations at the atomic level to ensure that the tick tock is pure.

So many ways to measure time. The turning of the heavens. Fluctuations in the atoms. The Egyptians measured time by poking a hole in a bowl of water and watching as the water flowed out. Drip, drip, drip. And once I measured time by the breaths my best friend had left as I looked into his eyes, and held his hand, and the leukemia took him. Breathe in. Breathe out. Times up.

I grew up in a tourist town, so I had a early fascination with display.  Gatlinburg exists to distract.  To pull you this way and that, to relieve you of your money.  The older attractions drew on Appalachian cliches: bears in cages, rocking chairs of rough wood, grannie in her bonnet.  As time went on, however, there came the Space Needle, the House of Wax, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.  As a local, I could get into the Ripley’s museum for free.  Bring a textbook, show it to the bored teenager in the front, and wonder around the exhibits to my heart’s content.  Past the faucet hanging from the ceiling by a wire which poured forth a seemingly endless supply of water.  Past the stuffed goat with two heads and the minature log cabin made of 50,000 pennies.  The beginning of this mystery tour was bright and cheery, but it was the dark interior that drew me onwards.  On to the medieval torture instruments, and the insanely cruel.  And so an eight or nine year old kid stands in front of a narrow, female shaped coffin with spikes on the inside and tries to understand the nature of an iron maiden.  Trying to imagine how you could survive…how you could avoid the spikes.  And Vlad the impaler.  Where exactly did he impale?  What part of the body?

At the end of the dark and scary hallway of wax figure death was one of those revolving gates with interlacing bars.  I was more afraid of the gate than of the displays that preceeded them.  What if my foot got caught and then Vincent Price turned on a machine and bluntly mangled me to pieces?  It happens.

I always went through the gate quickly, emerging unharmed from my encounter with mortality and the darkest impulses of mankind into the omnipresent gift shop filled with small plastic bears, everlasting dipping birds and pet rocks.

What did Vlad do to distract himself?  I can’t imagine it was always impaling and screaming…he must have had something in lieu of Monday Night Football.  Hunting, eating, storytelling.  Would he have enjoyed Monday Night Football?  Would it have been too tame, too incomprehensible?  Could the right enthusiaist have talked him into touchdowns instead of carnage?

The original Gatlinburg Ripley’s museum burned down in 1992.  Vlad, the maiden, the two headed goat…all destroyed.  Fire was probably hot enough to melt even the 50,000 pennies.  I was sad when I read that.  It was my original wonderoom.  My original cabinet of curiosities, filled with objects, real or not, that existed right on the edge of belief and reason.

Water.

Clear, theoretically tasteless substance that pours so freely from our taps. Or not so freely from our favorite bottled water company. A simple compound that the corporate mind has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry. Humble car cleaner and toliet flusher. A little over a week without it and we’re dead.

Woke up this morning feeling fuzzy headed. Tired. Out of it. This annoyed me to no end because I’d been especially healthy the day before: no scotch, minimal chocolate, exercise, blah blah. My mistake? Not enough water. Here’s a chart:

I found it in a park ranger bathroom. Park rangers are always having to remind people to bring enough water on their excursions, so it makes sense that they would have some sort of water monitoring system. A little tricky in the woods, I think. Bring a jar?

In our solar system, Earth alone has surface water. Astronomers seem to always be looking for it, however. Mars apparently had it at one point. Europa might have it somewhere in it’s depths. Here on Earth we have it brazenly out in the open…dissolving everything in sight. Theory has it that much of our water came from comet collisions in the early days. Days when our planet was still so hot that H2O existed only in vapor form. A hot, cloudless, and yet very humid Earth.

One day, a few billion years ago, the Earth cooled to the point where clouds began to condense in the sky. Next thing you know…oceans, rivers, lakes. And in the murky depths life began. In the bible God created a firmament type thing that separated the waters. As far as I can tell the firmament was a sort of upside-down crystal bowl with water above, water below, and an air pocket in between. What the hell were they thinking …building a Tower of Babel! You poke a hole in the sky and let all the water out…bad idea.

Anyway, not long ago I sat on the edge of the Pacific thinking…there she is…the mother of us all. The Ocean…separate only because we have names for the different sections but essentially all one thing. During the time of Pangaea, it was even more one thing. I can go anytime I like, turn on the faucet and drink the origin of us all.

I have to admit. There’s hair on the wall of my shower, and I’m the one that put it there. The secret’s out now. I don’t have to hide it anymore. My hair is long, longer than I would like it to be because my last hairdresser pissed me off and it’s like trying to find a good mechanic. Like a quest for the Holy Grail. Who do you trust to handle and shape those long strands of dead cells extruding out of the top of your head?

So there’s a collection of hair clinging to the walls of my shower. I saw this art exhibit years back where the artist took massive amounts of branches and vines, stripped of all leaves, and wove them into mazes, giant nests and meandering walls. You wandered around inside this monster gerbil’s wet dream, and it was art. And I thought, yes, this is more meaningful to me than another painting of some chick with a big forehead from 500 years ago, so I will go along and call it art. You’re in the woods and vines are hanging off the trees anyway so nature does a good imitation of art, and it’s got a blue sky and bird soundtrack to boot with no fee. Yeah baby, it’s like that…that’s how we are supposed to feel. Art puts a frame around things so we pay attention. The urinal is art just like the toliet only since women have to sit down it’s much harder to see the Fountain. It’s an aural effect.

So there’s wads of hair in my shower.  Little mini-nests of artistic awareness.  A tiny museum with one patron. Yes, I could just clean the shower. I know this.  Actually, I bleached the living hell out of it not long ago.  But the hair made a reappearance. It keeps reappearing. We lose 100 hairs a day on average, even if we have no iron deficiency and extra stress. We also grow 5 cm of finger and toe nail a year so with all the digits together that’s a meter of nail extruding from our bodies annually. And the skin cells, dear god the skin cells! We lose 30,000 to 40,000 skin cells every minute. Nine pounds a year. 70% of household dust is skin cells. The next time you’re dusting that grey stuff off your favorite knicknack…remember it’s mostly dead matter thrust out of your epidermis. We are surrounded by pieces of ourselves. Like zombies, parts of our bodies fall off as we go about our business. We don’t even notice. I am literally not the same person I was last year. Even the breath coming out of my mouth is not the same air that went in. And, no, I will not get started on the bodily fluids.

How can I keep myself together? I’m falling to pieces. Pasty Cline was right all this time.

This is site number 12 at Mesa Verde. One of my favorites, along with Double House. It’s a small site, but when you’re there you feel like you are walking along a minature avenue. A sort of Tinytown. Like every ruin at Mesa Verde, it has been emptied of virtually every artifact aside from small potsherds and the ubiquitous mini-corncobs. It’s like walking around a three dimensional mystery novel. One you are never going to be able to finish. Pages are gone, somebody spilled coffee on the rest.

You’ve got this time period when a whole extended culture decided to build villages on the sides of cliffs, and then later just abandon the entire region.

It’s fascinating, and people have some amusing theories. I had someone tell me with perfect conviction that the Anasazi were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Walking on water all the way across the Atlantic. Or maybe Moses did some extra credit water parting. Others are sold on the “aliens sucked the Anasazi up in a spaceship” idea. When in doubt, send in the aliens, your all purpose mystery deus ex machina. Alien ex machina. Or…God=aliens. Something like that.

One night while laying down on a rock next to another ruin, I had a revelation. This revelation might have been fueled by what I had been smoking earlier, but it seems obvious to me even now…Mesa Verde was indeed invaded by aliens.

We are the aliens. We stare at screens and boxes, carry little boxes around that we attach to our heads. Most of us tend to lose track of day and night, the change of seasons. We are scarcely residents in our own world.

Maybe the Anasazi will walk out of a vortex in the Bermuda Triangle holding hands with Sasquatch and a big bag of Elvis, but we’re still the aliens.

Once upon a time, I totaled my car. Rolled it. It was a slow roll, which was probably a good thing since I didn’t have my seatbelt on. I destroyed my Cutlass Supreme, which had once reached 110 miles per hour on an empty stretch of Texas highway, because of a tuna fish sandwich I was eating for breakfast. I dropped it in the floor and was trying to retrieve it, swerved, drove up on a bank and bam. Canned tuna, Miracle Whip, pickle relish and celery seed. That’s what it takes to kill a car.

I got this job in a restaurant on the Blue Ridge Parkway so I could save enough to get another vehicle. When you don’t have much money, a lot of your time is spent worrying about transportation, at least in the U.S. Other countries, even some places in the States have this crazy thing called reliable mass transit, but where I was it was more like a myth, a legend, a vague hope in some damn liberal’s head. So I got this crappy job.

I lived in the old inn, which had been condemned but they let workers live there if they wanted. Every morning, way before dawn, I was up and cracking eggs into large containers, mixing pancake batter, prepping huge sheets of bacon. I discovered that if you baked enough bacon there will always be a few perfect pieces. The melt in your mouth kind-not burnt, not floppy…flavorful enough to send shivers into your nether regions. Granted, I wasn’t getting any, and maybe that had something to do with it, but perfect bacon can be a reasonable substitute for an orgasm.

Old Aunt Bee sat in the corner making biscuits and cobbler in the morning. Her favorite thing to do was to catch people doing something wrong…taking a smoke break without permission, eating food on the line, having too much fun…and then she would report it to the manager. She had one glass eye, and absolutely no sense of humor, sitting like some ancient crone queen surveying her dominion, muttering to herself. Her biscuits were good, though.

There was also the old man who was the morning dishwasher. He came in every day with a six pack of beer, and hid it in the ice machine. By noon he’d be singing country love songs and slurring his words. The manager knew all about it but didn’t care as long as the dishes got clean. He fell in love with one of the cashiers in the gift shop, but she wanted nothing to do with him. Not long after that he was found dead of a self-inflicted gun shot wound, sitting in his truck at one of the overlooks. Love’s a bitch.

This other guy I had to work with sometimes would start sprinklng cocaine into folded papers and snorting it during his shift. The more cocaine he had, the more useless he became, until by the end of the morning I would be doing his job and mine. There were lots of people like that. The desperate. The deluded. It seeps into you after a while.

I was cooking hundreds of eggs a day. Over easy, over hard, soft-boiled, poached, omelets, scrambled, no yolk, on and on. Thousands and thousands of chicken ova with pig muscle and pig fat and Aunt Bee’s goddamn biscuits. Egg white slithered into my dreams.

Every now and then I would take a smoke break. Smoking and being a short order cook really do go together-a convenient excuse to get away from the pressure and the smell. No one argues with a smoke break. I would go out back and stand as far away from the garbage dumpsters as I could, getting my little nicotine release, trying to forget chickens even existed. One morning on my break the air was so swollen with moisture that the sun stayed red as it rose, and the sky was sherbert orange. In this bizarre light the Appalachians were stretched out for a hundred miles of olive green, poking up through the rising fog. There was a double rainbow, mostly red because of the sun. I was so lost in it I forgot to go back in for a long while, watching colors change and clouds form, like everything before had led to this.

Jim and I were friends. One night, while he was washing dishes and I was cooking on the line at this restaurant, we started talking about art and life. About how we would start a secret club that anyone could join. We put on a little percussion show, made the kitchen into a stage for the late night staff. Talked about how Paradise, Jerusalem, Hell were just outside the back door. Whatever you want. We talked for hours. One night I rode with him on a pile of canvas in the back of this truck, laughing at the world way over the speed limit. I took pictures of him, of his world. We weren’t going out. We just connected. He had too many girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, angry women, crazy women. I knew I couldn’t play that game and win.

He lived in a schoolbus on a farm. I went to go see him this one time, and he had a book about vampires. He was into vampires at that particular moment, thought the idea of draining a human life was o.k. as long as the person didn’t have anything to give to the world. No talent, no beauty, whatever. This was a disturbing visit. For years I had more or less searched for the wellsprings of compassion in myself, the world, and here I was hanging out with, drawn to, the opposite. Might makes right, and only the worthy deserve to live. I shouldn’t be surprised…it’s the unstated philosophy of our nation.

One night, though, we sat on the stoop of some old house with a bottle of wine, and somewhere near the bottom of the bottle he kissed me. I was a fool with enough wine. Later that night I woke up and he had lit several candles around my bed. He had a candle in one hand, looking at my face. Really looking. He had another hand around my neck. I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me, even though for some reason there was also a knife in the bed. I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me, but I knew he had been thinking about it. About what it would be like to kill someone. We slept together for a few days, but I knew nothing would come of it. I was angry at him for spoiling a perfectly adequate friendship. I yelled at him and threw him out of my car one night, because earlier in the day he called me a chump. I enjoyed yelling at him almost as much as I enjoyed being friends

The last time I saw him he had just finished playing a gig. He was tripping on acid. I was wearing my favorite suede jacket. He was walking through the crowd, and so was I. He looked very surprised to see me, and kind of scared, like I was going to try and strangle him. Without saying a word I guided him through a secret handshake, then I asked him how he was doing. Still looking very much afraid, he said “fine.” I patted him on the back and said “good” as I walked on.

Strangling is not my game.

Yesterday a stunt woman from “Hollywood” came by our dojo to get a feel for Japanese swordwork. I didn’t really have a chance to talk to her; Sensei just told me she was from Hollywood and wanted to know how to handle a sword. It’s cool that she wants to be more authentic. Of course, the other side of it is that it takes hours and hours of training just to know how to make a basic cut, how to hold the weapon, relax the shoulders. There are so many little details. It’s the land of make-believe, however, the realm of the dramatic. God forbid anyone learns how to fight from the movies. Read more »

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