First chapter of my novel, "Out in the Neon Night"

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Still all jazzed from the San Francisco Writing Conference, I thought it might be fun to post a sample chapter of my novel that I’m currently seeking an agent for, “Out in the Neon night” here. To give you the quick lowdown:

The novel is set in California, Japan and Hong Kong during a fifteen year period from the late 80s through the early 2000s and tells the story of Carl, a young man who descends into a life of romantic and sexual obsession in his teens and twenties, and then has a painful spiritual emergence from it in his thirties. It’s made up of five story arcs that take place at discrete points during the fifteen year period, and interweave with each other as they unfold. It’s also surprisingly funny in places despite the subject matter, and informed throughout by the rock music of the era.

This is the first chapter, in which Carl is just starting out on the downward spiral…

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1. Shot Right Through With a Bolt of Blue

Coming to the Welcome Dance was a mistake.

Carl felt sure of that even before the guy knocked over the table behind him and hit him in the back.

To begin with, wasn’t it a mistake to come out at all? Out into the night where the air waited like a hungry ghost to suck out his breath and suspend it in an icy cloud before him. A cloud that pointed out into the bright and hollow sky, under which he searched, yearned, churned, for…

What? Carl didn’t know. When had the search ever worked for him? What made him think it would work tonight? What explosion would finally happen at the end of the fuse lit by this night if it didn’t fizzle out?

He ran a hand through his long blonde hair, pulled it together behind his head, and surveyed the dance. Nothing but a fizzle seemed likely here in this big box of a room. What could happen among the guys with short haircuts in sweats and shirts bearing names of sports teams, and lean and blonde girls likely straight out of Southern California? He stood there among them in a torn punk-rock t-shirt, baggy pants, and black leather shoes with buckles and shiny steel tips.

This was just as bad as the minimum-security prison masquerading as a high school that he came from. My God, the room even looked like a gym converted into the site of a high school dance! Berkeley should not be like this. Here in the land of the Free Speech Movement, People’s Park and the Third World Strike there should be freedom from the syndicate of jocks, politburo of the popular and oligarchy of rich kids who bought all the right clothes.

Carl shifted his weight from foot to foot. He found it hard to stand up straight so long with no support. But maybe he didn’t look manly enough with his hip out to one side. He shifted, back and forth, back and forth. Should he try to talk to people? Ask someone to dance despite the awful boom-boom-boom of the vapid dance music? All ew baby baby without a single real feeling in any of the songs. Without a person in the whole room who loved the rainyday music of English moors and pale windswept Northumberland towns. Or at least knew the words to a few Depeche Mode songs. Come on already!

If only there were people here he could relate to, then he could move out into the room. Instead he backed away from the crowd and further into the stricture inside his chest. His thoughts twisted tighter and tighter, wrapping him away from the world. A wallflower indeed and he would actually be up against the wall in a moment, with just another step or two backwards—

Which is when the small square brown table tumbled over and hit his back with a glancing blow.

“Fuck this shit!”

As shock staggered Carl forward, the guy who’d knocked over the table continued to curse and wave his arms around in inarticulate rage.

It was hard to see in the dim light, but the guy didn’t look that big. It was a lean frame that poked through his sweatshirt. He was intimidating nonetheless, as he shook his head and seethed disapproval of something. Carl stood rooted to the spot. Maybe he should get out of there; the guy could still be dangerous. Two friends tried to drag the irate table-tosser back, but he jerked his shoulders around and threw them off.

One friend stood in front of him and talked softly with a hand on his chest. Seeing the whole group was black, the thought flashed through Carl’s mind— did the guy throw the table at him because he was white? The group succeeded at last in calming their friend down enough that they could lead him away toward the glow of the exit sign.

Carl stood there for some time afterward. An image of himself flashed through his mind— long hair, dressed funny, and standing with his hip out to one side. Did the guy think he was gay because of the long hair? His bruised back throbbed in time to the music. Boom-boom-boom. Why did this shit always happen to him? Same old high school bully crap— he tried to be okay around people and what did he get for it? Whacked in the back with a table. Fuck this shit indeed.

He wandered back out into the main body of the dance, away from the table-flipping corner of danger. Some movement in the corner of his field of vision caught his eye. A girl.

Not just any girl.

She dressed differently now. A thin white blouse highlighted with green, yellow and orange flowers. A shiny black short skirt. Combat boots. A ghostly gossamer scarf around her neck. Her hair in a bob, buzzed short in the back and long in front, angled downwards to a point on each side of her face. But the round cherubic face framed by her rich dark hair was the same.

Gina Onizuka. Gina, who Carl had a crush on since freshman year of high school. Gina, who, resplendent in long braided pigtails and thick horn-rimmed glasses, sat in the seat in front of him for the duration of the English honor students’ bus trip to the Ashland Shakespeare festival. Fueled by the Vivarin he took in high school to be able speak to people without freezing up, he talked with her non-stop for 17 hours on the way to Oregon. Gina had— that’s right, she had! — come to Berkeley for college. And she was here now, a few feet away. It was perfect, because—

Crap! No, it was not perfect. At least he didn’t think Keisha, the girlfriend mired in junior year of high school back in his hometown at this very moment, would think it was perfect. Keisha, dumbshit, remember? The one he wrote the eighteen-page letter to earlier today? The one he was going to call tomorrow, as soon as the phone was hooked up. Probably before he even called his parents. No, definitely before he called his parents.

Yes, he remembered.

But. But the letter to Keisha was comfortable homesickness. Keisha herself represented pent up pages of love built up over years of never having a girl like him as more than a friend. It had to go to somebody, anybody, and Keisha was the anybody who finally said yes. His feelings for her had grown, by and by, into the hearts and flowers of wholesome first love and awkward innocent sex.

Gina, though, was last year’s Homecoming Dance. He went to every high school dance, just in case the thing that was supposed to happen finally happened that night. She went for reasons unknown to him, perhaps simply because freshman in college are supposed to go back to their high school Homecoming Dance.

Carl remembered the shock when she asked him to dance. This college woman, a whole year older than him, asked him to dance. She, the angel all dressed in black, the very essence of antidote to the obvious unattainable cheerful blondes he didn’t even dare to yearn for. She was not a sweet training-wheel girlfriend like Keisha. No, she was the real thing.

At the end of their dance he grabbed her hand, her perfectly soft hand, impelled by what, he didn’t even know, and squeezed it.

As the throb in his back returned him to the current dance, he could almost feel the warmth of her hand from a year ago. He glanced around the room and saw Gina headed for the exit. Dwarfed against the aircraft hanger ceilings, she was a tiny figure, almost at the door and moving fast. Too fast for him to take time with thoughts of Keisha, shyness or pain from recent airborne table injury. Too fast for anything but the electric impulse that launched him across the room after her.

He dodged near collisions with legions of bright young revelers on the way to the door and out into the dark, cold clarity of night. He found her leaning on the metal railing and staring out in the direction of the elephantine marble pillars of Sproul Hall. With a stealth borne of years of escaping the notice of bullies, he stood beside her without her even realizing.

“Excuse me, miss?”

She turned, her face set with a hard plastic ‘Who is this jerk?’ preparation for dismissal. Then her demeanor shifted and her girlish cheeks dimpled into a smile. She threw herself on him for a hug. As they parted, the softness of her nicely rounded body and the flower-sweet yet sweat-sharp tang of her scent clung to him in cottony ribbons.

“Carl! Hey! You’re at Berkeley now too?”

“I am! I’m glad I ran into you. I heard you were going here.”

“Yeah! Were you at the dance just now?”

“Yeah. Pretty lame music, huh?”

“Yeah.” Her nose wrinkled up and her full coral lips narrowed. He’d seen the same face once on a cat that had eaten a moth.

“So what are you up to?” He stared at her as he asked. Even the breath that shimmered into cold white clouds in front of her seemed beautiful.

“Oh, I don’t know. Hanging out, waiting for classes to start. Going to a lot of shows. Hey, have you been to Gilman Street?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.” What the hell was Gilman Street?

“It’s this club; all these local punk bands play there. I’ve gone a lot this summer.”

“Oh cool. Hey, do you still read comics?” That should bring him onto firmer ground. Their common love of comics had animated the discussion on the Oregon bus trip, after all.

“Yeah I do, but not so much Marvel stuff anymore. I tried to keep reading New Mutants, but it sucks dick now. I’m really into Love and Rockets. How about you?”

Man, Love and Rockets. That was one of those alternative, underground comics, wasn’t it? He felt off-balance, even more so because it was the first time he had ever heard a girl use the phrase “sucks dick”. On top of that, here he still read the X-Men and Spider-man. Kids stuff. It took him a second to compose his answer, and he thought it still sounded far too lame.

“Oh, you know, different things, I read different things.”

From inside the dance, an orchestral flourish followed by a regular mechanical computer simulation of an empty tin can beat signaled the start of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle.

“They’re finally playing something decent!”

“Yeah. Hey, want to dance?” He flashed back to high school as she looked at him for his answer, and then nodded.

Back through the double doors they found a space in the midst of the dance floor. Which wasn’t too hard, the music had sent much of the crowd off to the sidelines. This was no song for bland perfect people. This was a song that Top 40 radio would never play. This was their song.

Every time I think of you
I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue

Shot he was. He let the sway into his body, unsure of how to catch the dit-de-duh-dit-duh-duh-dit of the beat. Utterly unlike Gina, a perfection of motion to the music, with none of the sweet young shallow sexuality that Keisha wore like an old pair of leggings. Gina’s curved hips and small round breasts, snug in her floral print blouse, rolled and flowed like water. This shocked first awareness of sinuous womanhood that seemed to course with the very power of the Universe stuck in Carl’s mind for years to come.

The lights of the dance swirled across her face. It seemed set and impassive now, a formal beauty made even more insistent and present by its distance. The stillness in her face seemed to hint at a whole world of feeling underneath, a direct electric connection to the tragedy of life. His tragedy, and she knew it too. She must know it too. But he felt a faint tickle of unease.

I’m not sure what this could mean
I don’t think you’re what you seem
I do admit to myself
That if I hurt someone else
Then I’ll never see just what we’re meant to be

Carl mouthed the words, but missed the point entirely.

As the Buddhists that he had just begun to read said, by your thoughts you make the world. That night he forged the first link in a chain of co-dependent origination. The wheel of dharma began to spin.

All he knew is that this was surely it, the moment he had waited for through years of being unloved, unlovable. All to be recouped in one fell stroke by Gina, who was punk rock, cool comics, a dangerous roll and tumble of curves. She could inhabit the space inside, the empty space that had been there for as long as he knew. She could fill it.

As the song reached its crescendo through the peaks and troughs of synthesizer waves, he wondered, doubted, felt sure:

She was the reason he came out into the night.

I’m in Decompression from the San Francisco Writer’s Conference!

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I just spent two and a half days at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel perilously high atop California Street. For those of you not familiar, it’s an annual event started by local literary agents Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada to allow writers, often as-yet unpublished, to meet and hear from agents, editors and publishers. This is the first time I’ve been, and it was huge! While currently exhausted and in a bit of postpartum withdrawal, I found it to be really inspiring. I have tons of leads about various journals and contests and editorias and publishers to follow up on, I met some really cool writers from all around the country, and I’ve become encouraged about continuing to pitch my novel and working more on my new novel. Most of all it’s just really nice to be around so many people excited about writing, and to hear that publishing remains alive and well and will continue to look for good new authors despite much dire industry news of late. Carry on writing!

February 2009 Writing News

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It seems I haven’t sent one of these out since September- Egad! Was I caught up in a pre-election tizzy? Knocked for a loop by the holidays? In one of those periodic funks about what my writing efforts were adding up to that we all get from time to time? All of the above! But now I’m back, full of New Year’s fervor, to unleash the latest updates about my creative efforts on you, my hapless victims:

Film- I’ve been low activity in the last two rounds of Scary Cow, the independent film-making co-op that I’m part of. But I was script supervisor and production assistant on a video for a song by local musician Tony Maddox, “The Waiting Game”, which will air at their screening this Saturday (February 7th) at the Castro Theatre. It’s always worth checking out, you can get tickets here: http://scarycow.com/news_pages/2008-12-round7Screening.html . I am approaching 90% likelihood of writing and producing my own short film in their upcoming round, I’ll keep you posted.

Publication- Through the second half of last year I made a pledge to myself to submit something somewhere on a weekly basis, which I kept to pretty well. I am hereby extending that into 2009! For those of you interested in statistics, the 2008 effort has so far led to a 14% acceptance rate, 25% rejection rate and 61% eerie whistling silence rate. 2009 is still in its infancy, but has already yielded one might-become semi-regular outing blogging on music for the ‘around the web” section of the new online culture magazine The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/sections/music/ . And I’m continuing to write for LEGENDmag, an online and offline publication covering the progressive urban independent lifestyle, where I’ve just become a regular Thursday contributor. You can read my January 9th grouchy musical New Year’s resolution column for them here: http://legendmag.net/thelegendonline/2009/01/09/musical-years-resolutions-san-francisco-09

Performance- I’m making a commitment to read in public at least once a month this year. My first outing was an open mic at the Bazaar Café this past Thursday. My February installment will likely be at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference (for more about which, see below). I’ll update you on where I’ll be in March and going forward. If anybody has some good venue suggestions, let me know!

Novel- After a year of working together, things with my agent seem to be winding down. So, despite the fact that the publishing industry is collapsing along with the rest of the economy, I’ll be trying various new means to find a publisher for my novel Out In The Neon Night this coming year. The first of these is attending the San Francisco Writer’s Conference this month (http://www.sfwriters.org/ ), which includes “speed dating” events with agents and publishers. If nothing else, it should make for a fun story…

Blog- Forty one blog entires in 2008, and two so far in 2009, for better or for worse. You can read them in any or all of the following three locations: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/, http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/, http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf

That’s it for now, see you in March!

Three Intentions for 2009

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For New Year’s 2007, I was on a retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains which had a New Year’s Eve ritual inviting us to form and share three general intentions for the year. I went to the same retreat again this New Year’s for several days, but I was back in the city for New Year’s Eve itself, so I didn’t do the ritual this time. I can’t be more specific about the reason, except that it involved my girlfriend, some close friends, and Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit. In any case, the ritual was such a valuable thing for me in 2008, not to mention which my intentions also largely came to pass, that even though I didn’t do it there, I’d like to do it again for this year, and share it with you. Here are my intentions for 2009:

1. To invest more in myself physically- I’ve always done gangbusters investing in my mental life, and the last few years I’ve been getting much better with doing the same emotionally and spiritually. My physical life has always been the least developed- sometimes I’ve even thought fondly about being a brain in a jar hooked up to a supercomputer. So, I think this is a year to work on that. What does that mean? Beats me, it’s just a general intention! Seriously, I imagine it will mean all kinds of things about diet, about exercise, about consciously investing in clothes and wardrobe, and about trying new physical activities. Maybe yoga wind surfing?

2. To reconnect with my Muse- While I’ve done a lot of writing in the last two years, and even started and completed some brand new stories, I haven’t really felt the fire (as one example, I haven’t written any new poetry) since going in to rehab at the end of 2006. I think that’s a pretty natural result of having to focus on recovery first these last two years, and I mostly have patience with it as part of a natural ebb and flow. But I do think this is my year to get back in touch with it, while staying safe and sober. So, I’m re-reading old journals to see what’s there that I can connect with, starting to learn music, reading new poetry, creating more time for writing in my weekly schedule and just generally inviting the Muse to alight. Tell her if you see her!

3. To be a little less self-obsessed and a little more connected to other people- Recovery literature regularly talks about most of our problems coming back to self-obsessed suffering, and for me this is definitely true. My external life has really gotten to be pretty darn good these last two years, and the only things I really suffer from these days are old patterns of thinking and feeling that still unspool in my head. So the solution, I have heard, is to spend a little less time there and a little more focusing on other people. Not to mention I might do something nice for others in the process. So tell me, what’s going on with you? Maybe I can take you out to lunch soon…

Those are my intentions for 2009. How about you?

Eight From 2008

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While it’s not standard for year-end countdowns, I’ve decided that a top eight albums is the best approach to take for 2008. What can I say? I’m a sucker for numbers and symmetry. Here, in alphabetical order, are my top picks:

1. Get Awkward (Be Your Own Pet)- They’re punk and garage with a dash of metal. Their songs are simultaneously tongue-in cheek and brash, slapping you to the mat from the start and keeping you there throughout. They’re fronted by a brash blonde girl. They’re from Nashville. What on Earth is not to like?

2. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (Drive-By Truckers)- This album has it all. Male lead vocals. Female lead vocals. Straight-up country. Rock that reminds one of the Seventies in a good way. Music that sounds like storm clouds brooding. And as good as it is musically, it’s even better lyrically. The 19 tracks herein include heartfelt paeans to family, subtle evocations of domestic discontent, a soldier musing on the unknown life of the unnamed foe he’s just killed, and a song from the viewpoint of someone who has had it with a friend’s (family member’s? spouses?) crystal meth addiction.

3. Lust, Lust, Lust (the Raveonettes) There was a good case to be made with their previous album, Pretty in Black, that the Raveonettes had lost their mind. On this album they find it again and the lust, menace, and shimmering clouds of guitar feedback are ours to enjoy.

4. Narrow Stairs (Death Cab for Cutie)- I’ve been a late convert to Death Cab, but like many an infatuation acquired in later life, I’ve made up for it by falling hard. A song like “I Will Posses Your Heart” that starts with a four minute drum intro shouldn’t hold your attention, but in their hands it keeps you rapt, and brings a shiver when the lyrics finally kicks in with their mixture of romanticism and dark obsession. And really, at the end of the day, anybody who writes a bleak, piercing song about searching for Kerouac’s ghost can call me their bitch.

5. & 6. Nouns (No Age), Rip It Off (Times New Viking)- These two bands are probably tired of being mentioned in the same breath, but they really are two peas in one wonderful lo-fi pod. Of the two, No Age brings more melody and traditional pop structure in their navigations of ragged walls of sonic distortion. This makes Nouns more consistently listenable, but Rip It Off more exciting and challenging.

7. Stop Drop and Roll! (the Foxboro Hot Tubs)- Yes, okay, it’s really Greenday in musical drag buying time while they try to figure out how to follow American Idiot. But what glorious drag it is! Their roaring, rocking success at producing rock in the Kinks/Who/Hollies et al vein makes me wonder why rock ever stopped sounding like that.

8. We Started Nothing (the Ting Tings)- Dance music with the form and attitude of rock, this album is just good clean fun from start to finish.

Those are my picks, but in the interest of full disclosure, Bruce Springsteen’s Magic only made honorable mention on my 2007 list, and it’s turned out to be one of the few albums from that year that I still regularly listen to. I reserve the right to listen further… And so should you!

Project Dylan: Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964)

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For a long time I thought Bringing it All Back Home was the next album after The Times They Are A-Changin’. I knew the title of Another Side, but I thought it was from somewhere in the uneven early 70s stretch of Dylan output and so avoided it.

When I finally got it sorted out, not only did I repent of my earlier avoidance, it answered many questions I had about classic songs that I knew were from Dylan’s prime but that I couldn’t place on any of the albums I knew about. “My Back Pages” would be chief among these. That song, and this whole album in general, seems like a repudiation of the topical political tone of the album that preceded it: Good and bad, I define these terms/Quite clear, no doubt, somehow./Ah, but I was so much older then,/I’m younger than that now. Dylan isn’t disavowing his positions here, but instead signaling a turn into a realm of inner exploration.

And indeed, political commentary does show up in the songs here, but shot through with humor and satire. In fact, there are three tracks on the album that would qualify for my fantasy “Dylan cracks up” play list, songs in which he can’t quite deliver a line straight and ends up laughing.

Overall, the sense the album conveys is one of restless rambling through his range, from an “I Shall be Free No. 10” that could have fit on Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to the surreal “Motorpsycho Nitemare” that’s like a preview of the next three albums. Along the way, we get the poetic blues of “Black Crow Blues”, the folk ballad “Ramona”, one of the classic bitter breakup songs (and is he breaking up with just Joan Baez here, or the folk scene in general?) “It Ain’t Me Babe” and one of my all-time favorites, the aching romantic searching of the “Spanish Harlem Incident”: I am homeless, come and take me/Into reach of your rattling drums./Let me know, babe, about my fortune/Down along my restless palms.

It’s almost like Dylan is surveying the ground he built up in his first three albums, and trying to spy the direction for a bold new breakout. Which will bring us to our next review…

Project Dylan: The Time They Are A-Changin’ (1964)

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This was my favorite Dylan album when I was 20. It’s easy now for me to see why- the album is full of anthems, stirring statements about the issues of the day, with good and evil clearly drawn in black and white. Granted the day was more than twenty-five years old by the time I got to it, but in the era of Rodney King and the first Gulf War it rang just as true. You never doubt who’s side you’re supposed to be on in “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, “With God On Our Side” or “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and I needed that conviction, along with the certainty that right will eventually prevail that the title track conveys.

Listening to it now, I’m stuck by the poignancy of that song. The times had changed after he wrote it, and then changed back by the time I first listened to it. And since then they changed and changed back and may now be changing back again. The song itself hints at the humility that comes form a long historical view: “don’t speak too soon/ For the wheel’s still in spin/ And there’s no tellin’ who/That it’s namin’/ For the loser now/ Will be later to win” And then win and lose again.

Which is not to say, even now, that I’m immune to the prophetic notion that the time is at hand and the order is about to be fundamentally recast. And anyone who has ever burned with the sense that their time will come can’t help but respond to the bitter defiance of “When the Ship Comes In” (which Dylan himself wrote after being snubbed by a hotel clerk while touring with the then much more famous Joan Baez). But it’s the more personal moments of this album that endure for me now.

Whereas the relationship songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan have a kind of pro-forma quality, the real feeling behind “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “One Too Many Mornings” is obvious and moving. As is the sound of the man beginning to struggle against the constrictions of his own public image in “Restless Farewell”. On “North Country Blues” the politics is still there, but subsumed by the personal in the story of the bleak lives of those left behind in a small mining town when the business moves south of the border. And then there’s the “Ballad of Hollis Brown”. The spareness, poetry and driving power of the song that ends with seven shots ringing out “like the ocean’s pounding roar” wowed me when I was twenty and continues to do so today.

San Francisco Daze: September

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Here’s the next installment of San Francisco Daze, a series of (aspirationaly, at least) daily sketches of life in our fair city that I wrote in 2005. This one is actually sets off in Salinas, since I was there for my brother’s funeral. Hard to believe that was three years ago. It both seems like a numb million years ago and a piercing just yesterday. *************************************************

September 1

Mortuary in Salinas. Wood panels. Felt. Old furniture. Subdued lighting. Everything designed to keep hysterical people controlled and calmed. It’s both comforting and stifling. I depart in the backseat of my dad’s truck with a golden plastic casket on my lap. Inside are my brother’s ashes, which they transferred into the box, along with an inscribed Bible from dad and a note from me, before they sealed it. This is all such strange business.

September 2

We buried Josh
this liquid gray foggy morning
at the small cemetery in Moss Landing.
The minister from my Mom’s church
sang Amazing Grace
as a striped seabird squawked and alighted nearby.
A small black and white cat
watched
from the weeds of the windswept field
just one dune down
from the ocean.

September 3-5

Nothing but foggy day naps with cats.

September 6

Clement Street, between 11th & 12th
Police motorcycle, lights flashing blue-white-red
Parked next to Linen Outlet
12th Avenue, between Clement & Geary
Motorcycle cop, big and tough in black leather
Pulls over little gray Japanese car
Geary Avenue, corner with 12th
Two police bikes have pulled over two cars
Another hums up the street past me
Policeman suspiciously eyeing the green Perrier bottle
I drink from a brown paper bag
11th Avenue, just before it crosses Geary
Three police motorcycles pull up to the corner
Geary, on the bus now, passing 10th Avenue
Police bike, lights blazing, roars past us
Why do I fear this symmetry?

September 7

The square green park
between Jackson & Front Streets
was full of birds
Unseen squawks, chirps, twitters
all seethed from the dark green spaces
in the trees
A sea of sound
washed out
my thoughts of my brother
and brought me back to life
Which insists on going on
Brazenly
Urgently
Loudly
No matter how unwelcome it is

September 8

Whoever did the clouds today really outdid themselves. There were layers on liquid gray layers. Big puffy white cauliflower. Brooding gray that seemed ready to let loose with some serious rain. Yellow orange highlights on fast moving cumulus as the sun set. Well done, mystery cloud maker. Well done.

September 9

On the Way to My Brother’s Memorial

Cal Train slides past
Twisted scrap heap of junked cars
Rusted loading cranes
Graffitied warehouses and squat buildings
With chimneys smoking
Wooden piers rotting
In brackish waterways
Water in the distance
The color of steel
Weird scenes
On the leeward side of the Bay

September 10-11

Saturday was Memorial Day for Josh. Rain clouds scuttled across the underbelly of the vault of heaven, thick, gray and fast. The bright sunny day above and beyond the clouds drove shafts of sunlight down like the voice of God, intermittently lighting up the floor of the Salinas Valley.

September 12

At first glance, nothing seemed off. She wore jeans, and a fuzzy sweat-jacket, zipped all the way up. Her hair, black flecked with gray, was pulled back from her face, and neatly kept. It was the glare in her eyes that gave it away. By the time I spotted that, it was too late. I was sitting in the seat one over from hers.

“Don’t look over here bitch! Keep your damn eyes to yourself. Don’t look at me! It’s your own damn fault, living the life you been livin’. Don’t look at me, bitch! You won’t be laughing when he puts the rag around the barrel of the gun. I gotta get outta here. I can’t stand she keeps looking at me.”

I and two cute brown haired girls in jeans and brown jackets kept our eyes focused rigidly forward. But she didn’t seem to be addressing any of us. Her rant was directed deep into the distance of the bus, or even out the window. And then she was gone. “Did you record all that for posterity?” asked the tall blond guy in the white work shirt opposite me.

September 13

Written in my notebook, not in my handwriting:

Christy White Productions limelight products

Did it happen when I was out with my writing group at Trader Sam’s? If so, who wrote it? Someone in the bar? Someone from my writing group? Admittedly, my memory of the evening is somewhat fragmentary, as they were showering me in Zombies as a form of grief therapy. So it certainly is possible. But what does it mean?

September 14

I sat on the rocky outcropping at the northwest corner of Baker Beach. The waves advanced in rolls of green and gray and blue and billowing brown flung out into white foam that crept a little further forward with each surge. I shared the waves with three birds. One some kind of little sandpiper that ran forward as each wave retreated, and dabbed his long bill into the wet bubbling sand. Then a big gray and brown seagull would occasionally charge the sandpiper away from what must have been some particularly tasty morsels. Finally, in the surf itself, a black bird with slick wet feathers, splayed legs ending in big webbed feet, and a bright orange beak bobbed up, over, and down each wave crest, except when he would turn over and dive straight down, popping up again a few feet away from his previous location. I loved all three, but him best of all.

September 15-18

Sierra County Weekend Hot Springs Vacation Observations:

A silver rental Honda. Good brakes! A CD player!
Double Cheeseburger at Jack in the Box on the way there (for shame, budding vegetarian, for shame).
The Sierra Valley, a big flat plain, fifteen or twenty miles on a side, surrounded by wooded mountains.
Pine trees like fingers, pointed straight up against the impossible steel blue of the sky.
The pleasantly drinkable surprise of Ginseng Cola at the main lodge.
The check-in man’s deadpan delivering about there being a quicksand pit in our room.
Giant acrylic folding screen adorned with peacocks in our sweet small room in the Globe Hotel.
Sitting in the Temple Pool, moonlight glittering through pentagon-shaped windows in the domed roof.
The fat wooden Buddha with one hand broken off.
Old friendly self-described redneck telling us about the rebirthers who used to run the place, and could also sometimes be found running around downtown in diapers with pacifiers.
The tantric couple practicing breathing, and possibly coupling, in the pool.
The female half of that couple, lean, with long curly black hair, floating.
The man equally dark curly haired, blowing bubbles while exhaling underwater.
Pale beauty of a girl with long curly golden hair floating in moonlight.
Her older companion (Mother? Lover?) doing the same.
All women, when floating, display round breast and thick bushy pubic mounds, beautiful and natural.
Comparing myself to every guy. Therefore I liked the chubby ones with small dicks the best.
Talking in the main pool naked with a Spanish girl who lived in Oakland, her visiting friend from Spain, and a gentle bald computer programmer from Berkeley.
The Spanish girl was nicknamed La Facista because of how radically anti-smoking she became after she quit.
Being shushed and asked to whisper by the groundskeeper’s long curly black and white beard.
Dos Hermanos for dinner the best Mexican food found 500 miles from the border.
The Roundup for breakfast, evenly divided by old ranchers with their silver hair, and out-of-towners in long hair and tie-dye.
Tuttenstein a cartoon about a friendly reanimated mummified pharaoh, and other weird weekend morning TV at the Roundup.
The coy gray and white cat at the Phoenix Baths.
The brown striped frog perched in a little notch next to the meditation pool.
Nearby, I played with Jen in the tents they’d set up to house the green vinyl massage tables. She played with me too.
A couple in the pool, consisting of a bald man, a thin and muscular 45 or so, and a brown-haired nubile woman who could not have been as old as 30. That fucker.
The smell, always the fat rotten egg smell, of the water.
Last night in the main pool, bodybuilder with the blonde with fake breasts talking about seeing satellites in the pristine night sky.
Three other girls shared the pool that night:
– a one legged amputee with a perfect butt
– a girl too shy to ease into the smaller pool, belly and breasts blazing with pregnancy
– sweet brown haired girl, body soft and curved with real womanhood
Their friend arrived later, lithe and bald with cancer treatment.
Jen meditating on the pool deck in absolute stillness and silence for 45 minutes.
A mother deer and faun, delicately picking out steps through the brush, seen from the deck of the pool.
The tree frog in the shower room two nights in a row.
Searching for dinner later, we found that in Truckee, no restaurant is open after 9:00 PM.
You can, however, eat chicken tenders and Fritos in the Safeway parking lot no matter what hour it is.
Grim little hotel in Loyalton on the second night, single beds in an L-shaped room keeping Jen and I apart.
The sweet Calico rubbing against my leg while being petted on the last morning there.
On that last morning, the big hairy mustachioed guy in the Meditation Pool reading Dune radiated subtle menace.
Approaching San Francisco from the East Bay on the way back, only Sutro tower visible above a bank of fog.
Midnight wine and pizza with Jen upon returning.

September 19

Morning:
Fog and rising sun
Renders
The towers of downtown
Silhouettes
Seen through a milky sky

Evening:
Perfectly clear sky’s blue
fades to pink and white,
up on the hill
clustered around the spires of USF
huddled evergreens
lit in orange

September 20

Spiritual patterns of icy haze shown through the rippled gray and white sky today.

September 21

“He’s young, totally good, and sexy.”- overheard in the Front Room, corner of California and Larkin. Overhead from a gal who has that little bit too high, little bit too heliumed kind of voice. Short blond hair, professionally dressed in something cream or gray or taupe or something. Twirling the wine in her glass as she talks to a dude. Do I feel superior or am I green with envy? I see the chain of co-dependent origination rearing its ugly head. Thank Buddha I am sometimes in conscious contact with the process these days. Let Siddhartha be praised!

September 22

The clouds
skid across the city sky
this afternoon
like a solid sheet
of scalloped white

September 23

Never been so close to Sutro Tower.
All the homes stacked on each other, layer upon layer marching up the hill. Concentric circles of red, blue, yellow brown and white with windows glinty in the afternoon sun.
And at night they glow like clusters of sleeping fireflies. (Do fireflies glow when they sleep?) Atop them all, the tower, black outline sketched by moonlight, blinks its spires in regular patterns of red and white.

September 24

There’s something about the Love Parade.

The Love Parade is techno, techno, techno, a 90s that never ended.
The Love Parade is a woman in a giant vagina costume.
The Love Parade is cleavage showing midriff bearing girls, inscrutable in sunglasses.

The Love Parade walks on stilts.
The Love Parade wears leather.
The Love Parade dresses as a gladiator.

The Love Parade goes nude as a girl on a soundstage painted in silver.
The Love Parade goes nude by having its bountiful breasts visible under a fishnet top while playing drums.
The Love Parade goes nude as four old men stark naked in the hot sun.

Civic Center, swamped by the Love Parade this sunny Saturday, can no longer maintain its chastity.

September 25

Today, on the way there, I gazed at a telephone pole as I stood at the bus stop. It was thick from staples and pins from old flyers, rusted and painted over in light brown. On top of which were staples and pins from flyers, on which another layer of dark brown was painted. And then again. Layer on layer, month by month, year after year. Eras of rallies, bands, underground clubs, lost cats and art show openings leaving their sediment behind. What a beautiful city this is.

September 26

“I am a psychiatrist, and you both need serious medication!”- young woman exiting the 38BX this morning, after having chewed out a hapless young man who tried to keep her backpack from hitting him repeatedly in the face, and arguing with another woman until the word “bitch” erupted multiple times.

September 27-30
Four days vanished into the maw of overwork. Even though my birthday is one of them, there is no trace of the wonders they might have contained. On that day, I merely worked until 10:00 PM, came home and collapsed on the couch, and got up again for work the next morning.

Project Dylan: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)

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The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan occupies roughly the same place in my development as a music fan that the first nervous teenage toke of a joint does in the life of a future heroin addict. Every day after grade school I’d be alone all afternoon until my parents got home from work. My companions, in reverse order of influence, were cats, television, and mom and dad’s dusty old records. Over many an afternoon, my musical teeth were cut on repeated playing of the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Janis Joplin, CSNY, Simon & Garfunkle, and Bob Dylan. In particular this album by Dylan. Years later, when I finally forayed into the world of CDs, this was one of the first CDs I got as well, carting it off to college with me.

One of the chief problems with having put in more than a quarter century of listening to it is that I can hardly hear it anymore. I mean really hear it, beyond all the accretions of its place in my life, and history and indeed music history in general. Having tried to do that just now, I observe mostly how young an album it is. It’s the first one where Dylan is Dylan- in exact reverse of his debut Bob Dylan, it’s almost all originals, with only two covers. He’s stretching out and finding his voice here, and as a result his voice is all over the place- both literally and lyrically.

In traveling from the rough-hewn and timeless “Blowin in the Wind”, to the out and out absurd horsing around of “I Shall Be Free”, the overall sense I get is of a powerful car being taken for a test drive by a kid who doesn’t quite know how to drive it yet. So, for example, on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” we find him in the emotional territory of the bitterness of failed relationship that he’ll mine extensively later, but he plays it too consciously jokey to really turn the knife. Or hear him having fun with the mythology of the Western plains on “Bob Dylan’s Blues” (Well, the Lone Ranger and Tonto/ They are ridin’ down the line/ Fixin’ ev’rybody’s troubles/ Ev’rybody’s ‘cept mine/ Somebody musta tol’ ’em/ That I was doin’ fine) but not yet able to tap its genuine power as he later will with the Band.

On the tight corners that really matter though, he pulls out the bitter, poetic and razor-sharp focused “Masters of War”, the surging symbolic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and the Swiftian satire of “Talking World War III Blues”. If he’d never recorded anything beyond these three songs, he’d already have surpassed the lifetime achievement of many another songwriter.

Introducing Project Dylan: Bob Dylan (1962)

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For some time I’ve toyed with the notion of doing a thorough sequential review of all my Bob Dylan albums. I initially pictured it as a day-long project, possibly on my birthday, and definitely involving several cases of beer. That vision lost its luster when I stopped drinking (21 months last week, by the by!), but it never quite went away. It’s occurred to me recently that I don’t have to do it all in one day, and instead of involving drinking maybe it can involve the compulsive activity I still merrily engage in, writing. I could listen to all the albums sequentially, record my ruminations, and post them here. And instead of all in one day, maybe over a month or two. Why? I’m not sure exactly. Maybe reengaging with one of my four muses (the other three being Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cobain) will kick-start my poetic voice, which has been stalled of late. At the very least, it will exorcise the years-long idea from my head. So here, without further ado, launches Project Dylan…

For a long time, I didn’t consider his first album, the eponymous Bob Dylan, to even be in the canon, properly speaking. After all, it’s mostly interpretations of traditional songs, with only two originals. Over the years though, I got older, which means that I got less snooty, more appreciative of the influence of blues, folk and country on rock, and more hip in particular to their influence on the development of Dylan’s vision. The real final straw though, was when the Sci-Fi Channel’s multi-generational alien abduction miniseries, Taken, made excellent use of a Dylan song I’d never heard before being played in the background on a record player in a scene in which some nasty shit was going down.

Said song turned out to be Dylan’s haunting version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” from this album. On this song and many others here you’ll hear Dylan’s voice come across with a rawness and power that he rarely matches later. I think he was just too young to know any better- this is the sound of a young musician in his first recording laying it all on the line for the music that he loves. So, while his compositions here are interesting glimpses into proto-Dylan, it is definitely the covers that he pours his heart into. He got to a great “In My Time of Dyin'” thirteen years before Led Zeppelin, and “Man of Constant Sorrow” 38 years before the Cohen Brothers and George Clooney resurrected it. Another particular standout is “House of the Risin’ Sun”, which is made all the more arresting by the fact that Dylan sings it from the point of view of the young female prostitute who works there, rather than the dissolute young man who frequents it that Eric Burdon came at it from in the Animals’ version.

All in all, if you’re in the mood for a powerful, spare tour of Americana a la Dylan, Bob Dylan is a ride worth taking.