Wonderoom

One of my favorite movies is Tombstone. I saw it in the theater not long after the death of my best friend.  It’s not that its a perfect movie, or that the performances are Oscar worthy.  It’s mainly because of Doc Holiday. Val Kilmer’s best performance.  Little things like spinning a cup in response to fancy gunplay or lines like “I’m your Huckleberry.”  But the moment that resonates most for me is this:

“Why you doing this Doc?”

“Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.”

“Friend? Hell, I got lot’s of friends.”

“I don’t.”

Doc’s all messed up but he knows the value of friendship.  All the best stories for me are the ones where friends stick by each other through thick and thin.  Simple humanity shining through the darkness that surrounds us.

And so I take a moment to mourn the loss of friends…living and dead.

“We are made of all the things we have lost.”  -Tom Waits

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.

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 enthusiast 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.

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.

Land of the Sequoias.  Home of the “largest living thing on Earth.”  That would be the Sherman tree, named after a fellow who burned many a plantation etc… at the end of the Civil War.  Somehow Sherman ended up being the biggest.  Not the Clara Barton tree, nor the Lincoln tree.  Whatever. It’s a BAT.  Big Ass Tree.  Sequoia’s are so big that when couple of enterprising gentlemen decided to cut one down and take part of it to the U.S. centennial celebration in 1876, they were laughed out of the exhibition as frauds.  And yet the Piltdown Man lasted for years.  Is there no justice in the land of credulity?

In the land of world records, the General Sherman tree is supposed to be the biggest living thing.  Not the tallest (a redwood), not the oldest (bristlecone), but the biggest.  Of course, then there are all these arguments about what is living (bark?, dead parts of tree?) and what about those quaking aspens who clone themselves and cover whole hillsides?  So never mind all that, it’s a Big Ass Tree.  I imagine myself building the world’s tallest tree house, feet dangling over the edge, drinking a precarious cup of coffee.

These trees have been around for a very long time in more ways than one.  They can live over 3000 years.  The trees that left their imprint in the Petrified Forest are believed to have been sequoias.  They belong in a world of dinosaurs, of megafauna-something left over from a bigger time, a grander time for our much beleaguered natural world.

This sign graces the steps ascending one of the pyramids of Chichen Itza. It is one of the many signs I have run across that stuck with me. A found poem mesmerizing in it’s simplicity. After all, it is indeed dangerous to go up. Read more »

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