Four Days, Three Dogs, Me & The Cascades

August 21st, 18:56, the mountains

I’m living amid stories. I mean, we all are. But I’m living amid fictional stories. On my Iphone is TC Boyle, churning out an epic about Kinsey’s inner circle in my ear (pause). On the table is Lehane’s The Given Day, a tome that hurls me into the 1910s with fictionalized version of Babe Ruth and WEB Dubois, sussing out who America will belong to. I’m reading—when I have occasion to pull it from my bag—How to Sell Your Script in 60 Seconds or some such title, which is very useful, bold and also full of a million anecdotes from a million stories, well-known and made up by the author, which buckshots mini-characters at me. In the Writer’s Chronicle that I dutifully plod through (ok, that’s a lie, but I try to read at least one article), the academic furors pour snippets of classic books to elucidate points that I don’t grasp, but the disparate figure and their needs and desires I do. This is all, of course, not to mention my own work where Jackson and Rosario and fucking Lafayette are still trying to learn their cues, where Rigoberto might just get the chopping block if a certain kind of editor likes it otherwise, and Ezekiel might get a promotion that he will be loathe to handle. Or the un-written tales of the vampire-summoning suburban teen and his schizophrenic best friend from Ethiopia, who I’ve never quite imagined but nonetheless suggests himself in fleeting moments of daydream. And much, much more—including the deluge of personas and their wild trajectories that one listen to the American news in any form will hit you with.

I keep waiting for Prock to walk out of the woods and approach the Rebellious House. I keep expecting—half, anyway—for Babe Ruth to become a vampire slayer on some sliding tangent of stoned daydream. I keep kind of wishing that Michael Hague (author of the marketing book) was suddenly fluid and familiar enough that I could plug him to a scene and have him give a down and out writer a talking-to about tenacity. Perhaps these things will happen in dreams or not at all, but there is some small, twisted part of me that wants overlap, meld. I think—absurdly, perhaps—of the psychics who work with police departments and cover their desktops with a hodgepodge of crime scene, victim, and suspect photos, scramble the glossy images to a rhythm no one can fathom, close their eyes, open them, and see the case laid out. The plot. The secret.

August 23rd, 2009, 18:07, the mtns

Another June 23rd for the books: Alfred E. Kinsey, sexologist.

The dogs have gone wild with the way the strong winds cross scents in their brains. And strange it is out there, really, with spanked-red headed carrion birds perching like people in costume up on Spirit Rock, no doubt scanning for the flash of a dead King Salmon in the sun, on the banks far below. The Aspens, also, are growing up through the slats between the tilted porch’s old boards. The banister is bowing in the general direction of the new house, which stands like a half-birthed space creature on the far slope. Soon I will hear a frantic flurry of yapping and the thunder of a dozen paws on the deck, a commotion that seems it could take it down. I have yet to see a single thing that they believe they do, though maybe it’s only a scent and they angle their dumb rage in the direction of the smell, which may have nothing to do with the direction of the source. But who am I to criticize them? They’d all last longer than me up here with nothing but wits and instinct to keep the lovely fatalities from falling.


Out with the Dogs, the Train, the Wind and the Trees

Whisper, howl, moan
Bark, yip, snarl
Chime
Chug and blow
Sigh, creak, and fall


August 24th, 2009, 18:32, the mtns

I’m feeling every bit as alive as I always have up here, alone or with reasonable people, in the dying summer. Right now I feel like I possess all the faculties I need to wade into the grit and sludge of the NW winter and father a child in the midst of it. Of course, twenty minutes ago, I got all ataxic from my cigarette and damn near fell on my ass on the rocks at the swimming hole. But a little marijuana and exercise in the middle of wilderness will do that to you. Give you a mainline snort of wildness and power. It’s absurd, of course, and illusory in a million easy ways, but I’m here to tell you that hiking with a pack of dogs and a pistol on your hip in the north Cascades in August is enough to also allow you to carry a murse with a novel in it.

Everyday the light gets luxurious a tiny bit earlier, but in four days you can watch its slide, the way that the season is trying to spend itself out, get rid of its budget before it’s wasted. And the autumn is measuring publicity-sized gusts out, too, inserting them in the warm sheet of a late afternoon breeze. I like these borders, but I gotta say I like summer more than anything else. And it can get frantic when I think about it going—the only consolation is the increasing RPMs that life’s record spins as the years get bigger.

The transcription is dulling me. I’m not going to be histrionic and say it’s “killing me,” but it is a bitch, without an iota of creativity going into it. God send me to an epoch in which I can hire someone—hire someone!—to do this part for me and focus on the very complex weave of a story like this. Not that there’s any story like this, and I really hope that someone else agrees. Someone with power. Been thinking a lot about power, especially how it relates to the arts and therefore the emotional wellbeing of myself and many people I are about. I just finished Micheal Hague’s book, Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds, and I appreciated it and I learned a lot and I was inspired by how he signed off: it’s all about the story. The quality of it and the fact that you’re willing to be beaten down and humiliated for it. He speaks of artists going into a cocoon of believing that it’s impossible that the world, stacked as it is, will ever “get their art.” But Hague points out that that’s easy and the hard path, as is customary, is the right one: wade back in, bleeding hard from your head. But how many people can do that? How many people have time and energy and blood to spare after a day in the streets of their lives? I like to pat myself on the back for, more or less, being the kind leather-headed marketer of my work that Hague praises, but how much of that is because I have the flexibility in my privilege to spend the time, the blood and the energy to keep on hammering at doors/walls? And here I am, flagging at times, even with the advantage I have of time. I know one thing for sure: I don’t have any excuse. Hague is right, as far as I go, but I won’t be casting any aspersions on anyone for their realism.