Wonderoom

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 »

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 »

Like any other interp ranger at Mesa Verde, I led many tours of Cliff Palace. The big one. The site that everyone wants to see. It is impressive, lovely even. It’s also the Disneyland of ancient southwest ruins-heavily stabilized, cleaned up, rubble cleared away, nary a potsherd or corncob to be seen. Even the back has been cleared out. When you are leading tours you have to make a big deal about not standing on the walls or otherwise messing with the masonry, but everything the public gets anywhere near has been heavily stabilized with concrete. It has to be, tens of thousands of people file through there every year. Read more »

It seems almost inevitable that a day will come when books will go the way of vinyl or the horse drawn carriage-existing only as nostalgia items, collector’s keepsakes.  Instead, we will have the Internet, sound recordings-whatever the latest fad of discreet units of data.  No books. No libraries as such. No book stores.  I think this bookless reality on the horizon,  more than anything else, makes me feel the passing of time.  A world where books are quaint, charming, passe.

I love the smell of old books, old libraries.  Oddly enough, they make me feel alive, like something exciting but hidden is somewhere near my grasp.  I used to spend hours at libraries, walking the stacks, not bothering with card catalogs (remember those?) or computers…just looking book by book for something new.  In ancient times books were revered by some as magical, sacred, almost absolute.  Now we have the Internet, among other electronic wonders, which is practically Borges’ library of Babel leaking into reality complete with Google searches which can run to seemingly endless lists of disconnected words.  So many of us spend countless hours searching it’s vast corridors.  Tlon isn’t just Wikipedia, or other clever mock-ups, it’s the Internet itself which can become our world, if we let it.

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